Blackouts

by Justin Torres

You never bothered to learn, did you?” “Well, I mean, my father…” “Your father what?” “He spoke the language, but at us, not with us. You know?” “I see. Blame the old man. The old man blames you. No one has to teach, or learn.”

She’s even found for me a sketchbook, left behind by another patient, she claims, though it’s never been used, no pages filled or missing, and I choose to believe she bought the sketchbook for me herself, with her own money. No idea what makes me think that—narcissism, I suppose, or my desperation to be looked after—” “But who can tell the difference.” “But who can tell the difference.

“The release of the want of the want of release. Though, as it turns out, libido was the last defense I had.” “I’m still not sure I understand. Defense against what?” “Well, your nothingness, I suppose.”

The book was published in 1932, and the film was seemingly pieced together from stock footage of nudist colonies in France and Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. With the power of hindsight, Juan saw glimpses of the nascent fascism everywhere in the nudist camps: the cult of fitness, the perfection of the body as an aesthetic form, the emphasis on folk traditions and sport, the youth clubs.

Anyway, in the story, the woman is very much alone, and, just as I was doing then, she compulsively reads everything she can get her hands on. Though she reads more methodically than I, moving from genre to genre. Like Goldilocks with the porridges, although nothing satiates; nothing breaches the seclusion. Just when she feels she’s reached the nadir of her loneliness, she turns to reading memoirs. It was one of my finer moments when I discovered that no human life escapes the tribulation of solitude, she says. Other souls had suffered such extremes of separation and abandon, and in their wit and irony and quaint homiletic posturing I momentarily lifted myself out of myself and onto a plane of spiritual lamentation. And I knew then, what I’d been searching for; I wanted to feel that. Outside myself. Lifted.”

If I’m nostalgic, it’s not because I was happy in those precarious years. But I was deeply moved by our resourcefulness. No rich parents lurked in the background; we kept one another afloat.

As for his attitude toward lesbians in general, she’s found what she hoped for—not empathy, nor pity, but curiosity.

Lost time is never found again.”