The Tsar of Love and Techno

by Anthony Marra

You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else’s.

“We have art in order not to die of the truth,” wrote Nietzsche in a quote I kept pinned to my workbench. Even as a student I knew we die of art as easily as of any instrument of coercion.

For art to be the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer.

History is the error we are forever correcting.

Like ice cubes melting in a glass, the furniture loses its edges, and I nestle into the cushions, and sip plum brandy as the notes creak through the gramophone,

“You think you narrate your own story, but you’re only the blank page.”

Because the future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.

Whatever pleasures or punishments that await in the afterlife, if there is one, must feel fainter than those that fill any given day here on earth.

All throughout childhood her father told her that only a mousetrap offers free cheese,

Kolya has grown fond of Chechen Julys with the languid green color scale, the birds without Russian names, the humidity heavy enough to drown you if you breathe too deep.

I mean, why read a book when you can sum up the point in a pithy little line? I like sayings, fortune cookies, single-serving packets of wisdom.

“What do you mean?” He rolled over and pulled the sheet over their heads so they lay in semi-darkness with the freckles on their noses nearly touching. If they could just stay like this, sealed from the world beneath a pink cotton bedsheet. If they could just hit pause and cocoon themselves in this moment. They passed back and forth a single breath that grew heavier with each exhalation.

She’d been born in this house sixty-three years earlier and intended to die here: It was one of her few life goals that she still had time to achieve. There was coherence in exiting by the same door through which you entered, bookending with order this senselessly churning existence.

“The world will give you pig shit,” her mother had once told her. “The secret to a happy life is learning to accept it as pork sausage.”

There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion.

To say he felt guilty would ascribe to him ethical borders that were lines on a map of a country that no longer existed.

To be here, at this late hour in your life, and to recognize your father, to find him, it makes the whole world you’ve wandered through feel as narrow as a blade of grass.

What divine imagination could conjure something so imperfect as life?

If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours. The calcium in the collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long, dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are. In what dream does the empty edge of the universe hold this echo of vitality? In what prayer does the last human not die alone? Who would have imagined you would be with me, here, so far from life on Earth, so filled with its grace? One more time through. From the beginning. Just give me that. Please.