Quite what Bernard of Clairvaux is doing here is anyone’s guess. But Lacan seems to think it’s a good idea.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Bernard says, apropos of nothing really.
“WTF,” the Boy says. “Who dat?”
Lacan is lecturing again before the question is answered. Bernard takes the brown envelope stuffed with ancient francs and lopes off back to the monastery.
“The loop is not especially inventive, it does not need to produce anything new to continue; it simply adjusts the surface and borrows a different set of images,” Lacan says.
Lacan puts the embossed plastic card with these words printed on it back into his pocket. Job done, for now, he thinks, looking around to see if there is any of that French cola left.
The Man, the Boy and the Editor yawn. It’s uncanny, as if they are the same person.
“Who’s the performer now,” the Editor whispers to the Man as Lacan resumes his interjection. “Oh, he’s back. And so soon?”
“From lover to country, from country to work, from work to ideology. The objects change, sometimes quite dramatically. The structure does not: something outside me will hold me together.”
The Man stands up again. The Editor reaches for the whiskey bottle again.
For a while, she spoke about a man without naming him, the Man says, as if Lacan’s hand had been quietly inserted up his backside.
“This in itself should have been enough,” the Man says, unusually candidly. “The red flags and exit doors were there.”
“He kept her suspended — not close enough to hold, not distant enough to dismiss. And that kept me suspended,” the Man says. He is talking about them, not him, but listeners could have been forgiven for not knowing that.
“And she teased him too probably,” the Boy says, sensing a pattern he has no right to make. Not yet anyway.
But the Man listened well. Listening had always functioned for him as a skill, a method, and, less obviously, a substance – something that produced a mild but reliable dose of usefulness, of being in the right place. In the loop. Someone else’s.
In the margins the Editor notes: Beware the pleasure of being the good listener.
The Boy ignores the note. He is watching the Man’s face instead – the slight, involuntary brightening when she leans closer, the tightening when she begins to cry, the small adjustments that indicate the body has already taken a position.
One evening, her restraint dissolves, the Man explains in his Serious Voice.
“Not theatrically. It simply gave way,” he says.
The Editor and Lacan confer for a moment at the scene’s edge.
“When you can feign sincerity…” Lacan says behind his hand. A raised eyebrow follows as do Knowing Looks.
There were tears – sudden, uncontained, without the preparatory gestures that would frame them as communication, the Man continues.
“I didn’t think, in that moment, about taking advantage. I wanted this to stop. And that I could stop it.”
That is, he says, how he knew something had shifted. It was something older, and therefore more difficult to refuse: I can fix this. I can be the one who stays.
He promises to help, the Man says. “As a friend.” They meet. They walk. They talk. Even chew gum at the same time.
Each time, he has the impression – which he does not test – that the other man, whom she calls “The Prince,” will fade.
He does not.
He was a man of the cloth.
“Yes, of course,” Lacan says, not loudly, but with a kind of weary recognition. “There is always a man-of-the-cloth at this point. It saves everyone a great deal of time.”
The Man already knew this, but the confirmation does not simplify anything.
The clothman is present, trusted, integrated – impossible to have, impossible to dismiss. Their intimacy depends on that impossibility.
Part of the Man resents this, though he would not say so. Part of him understands it.
“It isn’t only the clothman who has taken vows,” Lacan adds, almost idly. “She has too, though she will not describe them in those terms.”
The Man says nothing.
“A triangle,” Lacan says. “A very efficient structure.”
“It’s not a structure,” the Man replies, more quickly than intended.
“You say that,” Lacan says, with a faint smile, “because you are inside it, and inside it everything appears singular.”
There is something undeniably human here. Her pain is real. It is not performed, or at least not in a way that invalidates it, he notes.
The Man begins to sense his own position, though not immediately in a form he can use.
Not rescuer.
Not lover.
Something less stable. A function, perhaps.
He does not like the idea, but maybe he is the substitute confessor, the one who can hear what cannot be said elsewhere, precisely because he has no authority to respond.
The Boy, somewhere inside him, goes still. The Boy does not care about clothmen. He cares about the feeling. And ice.
The Editor has seen the same logic elsewhere, in border fences, villages, television studios. Positions assigned in advance. Roles entered. A structure that actively discourages resolution in order to continue.
“It’s Poland, again, isn’t it,” the Boy says.
“Well, yes and no,” Lacan starts, but no one is listening.
Blaming Poland is easier, at this stage, than thinking about why the Man came here in the first place and what silent movie scenes he had brought with him.
The Man tells himself he can hold the line, police his own border. The adult in a room full of teenagers.
Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein enter the thought but thankfully exit pronto.
The Editor clears his throat, not loudly.
“You’re lying,” he says.
“About what?”
“That you’re helping her,” the Editor replies. “You’re helping yourself feel necessary, which is not the same thing.”
The Man does not respond immediately.
He hates the sentence because it is accurate, and because accuracy, in this case, produces a kind of ordinariness he would prefer to avoid. The loop does not like ordinary, as we know. Ordinary is where the anaesthetic stops working.
And yet there are other configurations available to him, ones in which nothing needs to be held together, in which he is neither required nor refused.
He does not choose them.
Still, something else presses through, less defensible.
He loves her.
Or thinks he does.
Or has decided, provisionally, that love is the only available word that can carry the intensity without collapsing under it.
But what if – and this arrives more slowly – what if the only stable element between them is the pain itself?
To stay begins to feel dishonest. To leave feels, for reasons he cannot justify, like betrayal.
“Oh God, not Hamlet again,” the Editor remarks.
“If I stop carrying her pain, do I lose her? Or worse – do I lose the evidence that I was, at some point, required?”
“To be or not to fucking be fuckable? Fuck me, is that the question again, or still,” the Boy says, surprising all with his erudition and his swearing in one so young.
The Editor wonders if splitting infinitives is still frowned upon.
“To fuck off or not to fuck off, maybe that’s the question,” the Boy giggles.
“Stop saying fuck all the time, and stand up straight,” the Editor tells the Boy.
Lacan’s voice, when it comes, is almost gentle, which is unusual enough to be suspicious.
“Love,” he says, “is not the same as refusing to leave, though the two are very often confused, especially when leaving would reveal that nothing was holding you in place.”
The Man says nothing.
He would like a rule or even just a sentence that can be occupied without adjustment.
The Boy wants something else. He wants the Man to notice the moment his body is recruited again – positioned, without consultation, as a supporting element in someone else’s narrative.
But now, at least intermittently, he can see it.
The clothman is the engine of impossibility. Her longing is sustained by that impossibility. And in turn his listening is sustained by her longing.
No one, under these conditions, has to choose. No one has to change.
And then, not dramatically but with a certain inevitability, the recognition: he has mistaken usefulness for love.
The Boy looks at him.
“Okay, okay” the Man says, quietly enough that it could be mistaken for thought.
“I see it.”
Lacan nods, already losing interest.
“Good,” he says. “Now we can begin the more interesting part.”
“Which is?”
“What you do next,” Lacan replies. “Seeing is never the problem. It is what comes immediately after that tends to repeat.”
He does not leave.
He is not, at this point, capable of exits.
Not real ones. Not clean ones.
They keep walking.
The lake remains as it was.
And the loop – not offended, but mildly irritated at having been noticed – begins, without haste, to prepare its next offer.
Leave a Reply