He had loved me in that self-flattering, deceptive way, almost as if he preferred the idea of being in love and what it said about him to actually being in love – although he was, more than he realised, as I could tell from his eyes when he took off his glasses that day in the cafe on Marienplatz, putting on another pair (this time with thick round frames; a Hipsterbrille, if you will) and asking me which looked best. Of course I told him his usual ones. I can still see his face now, ten years on, still smell the cinnamon sprinkled on top of the hot chocolate foam and hear the chatter of the metropolitan elite (which neither of us quite belonged to) all around us, trendy blond German girls mainlining one cigarette after another on the tables outside, vestigial plumes of smoke floating back inside through the open door. He’d had an eye test and, in addition to having new lenses put in his existing frames, had been upsold the spare pair of spectacles by the dispensing optician who’d told him they were “on trend”.
I was immediately comforted when he put the original pair back on. The unsettling second glasses made me realise how much his entire persona depended on him dressing and looking exactly the way he did – all it took was a different jacket, the wrong eyewear or an absent scarf for his carefully nurtured identity to come crashing down. Suddenly he wasn’t someone anymore, he was anyone. I took a sip of the hot chocolate.
I’d only just got back from Hungary. Or was it Luxembourg? It’s so long ago now. In any case, whether plane or train, I’d had a long journey behind me. I was glad to see him again – mein Lebensmensch, mein Anhaltspunkt. Magányos csónak voltam, ő volt a tengerem. He’d missed me too in his own way. He’d called me twice while I was away, obviously lonely, asking if I was around and wanting to meet up. I should have known by the second call, when he‘d forgotten our last conversation and thus didn’t realise I was in Luxembourg (or Hungary) that something was wrong. Whichever pair of spectacles he had on, I’m not sure he ever truly saw me. I was too much of a mirror then, bouncing back what he wanted to see.
In retrospect, the scariest thing was how many times I bumped into him after it all fell apart. Considering we lived in a big city, I seemed to have the strangest ability to manifest him - I’d be thinking about him, or talking to someone about him, and then he’d appear right around the next corner. I go into Starbucks and there he is at the counter. I’m at the Christmas market, telling my friend John how long it took to get all my stuff back from him, and he walks right past us in the crowd. The next week, I’m dragging my suitcase to the airport in the snow and he emerges from the escalator ahead with his own case, returning from a work trip. A year later, I’m walking back from a street party and look through a restaurant window, and there he is dining with his parents - visiting from California - and his new wife.
Because there is something uncanny at the heart of you, a semantic void where there should be a spark, I have to do a deep dive into these memories, send a probe down through the scar tissue that kept me tethered to reality when you cut me adrift. I’d never met one of your type at the time, though each time I have since it has been much easier. We went to an avant-garde theatre performance where the actors threw meat at each other and simulated sex with saxophones while a counter-tenor careened about the stage in a giant funeral dress like a human bowling ball. I said it was inscrutable the same way Inland Empire was, and you told me that’s where you’re from.
You were the road-map to navigating a world where people have been abstracted from their souls. Maybe it was Hungary that I was in, not Luxembourg. Maybe you were there with me. Maybe we got on the Budapest-Kyiv train together and at the Chop-Záhony border crossing, the guards stamped your passport and let your body in but your spirit remained behind, bouncing futilely against an impermeable barrier that prevented it from leaving. We walked back from Chop station through the scrub by the rails, and stood at the edge of the river bridge peering back across into Hungary, trying to catch a glimpse of your anima floating in the summer air.
From then on, everything was all for show. The thing I didn’t understand until much later is that narcissists don’t know they’re narcissists. They just carry on. I don’t know who’s watching the spectacle now, but it isn’t me. And my rose-tinted glasses fell off that year for good. But part of me wishes we were still back in that cafe on Marienplatz, shooting the shit, me basking in your charisma. Sometimes a simulacrum can be more seductive than the real thing, but one glitch and the illusion’s over. I will never get my answers, but I don’t think I need to.