Bastard Freedom: Chapter 7

"You nasty bitch, I'm falling in love with you," Joseph rasped, on the throes of an orgasm that evening after the bar. He is not a jealous man; if anything, attention on Marie would give him a hard-on for an hour, before ravaging her in ways she never imagined and then immediately going to his desk to write his novel. Tonight, however, their sex was gentle, until the inevitably savage crescendo where thought no longer mattered and penises were in love. 

One final Neanderthal thrust, and, "I love you, Marie."

"Come home, baby," she whispered, reeling at what she heard. They both came, their lovemaking leaking out if the sheets into the floorboards of his flat. The wet was mostly hers; he had spilled his seed into her. She was on the pill, and she hoped to high heavens it was strong enough to take his prodigious load. Not time to worry yet, her mind said. Not time to worry yet.

Not time to worry yet. About to be claimed by the tendrils of sleep, her thoughts shifted, with his words still ringing in her ears. "Come home, baby," she had said. It was strange, how she, a person with BPD, would be a home for someone. 

She once explained what borderline personality was to him, when they were still getting to know each other, right before the interview. Knowing that she only had five minutes before the formal talk, and irritated that this man had the temerity to ask, so early and in such short notice, she summed: "It's essentially fueled by the double prongs of fear of abandonment and absence of object permanence. You have no idea of self, and therefore borrow from anything, knowing full well you will dissociate the very moment you are borrowing." She stared at his face, not knowing what his smile was for. Was he being polite? Did he understand? Did he - she shuddered - think he was clever?

"All animals are born autists," he merely replied, his face now smooth marble. She opened her mouth and saw that time was up, she had to talk about Derrida and metaphysics instead. She did for the next hour, and, when the time was up, excused herself. She had to go to class that afternoon. She breathed a sigh of relief: the Neanderthal didn't have time to ask her for her number, much less for a coffee.

It was only four days later that she was able to piece together (he got her number from Barry eventually) from what he wrote and what he said, what he thought about mental illnesses and neurodivergence. 

"Jung," he pronounced, "was the last and best rational man among all of us. He embraced his schizophrenia without a proper diagnosis, and reveled in it. He even illustrated how all this makes psychoanalytic sense. Psychoanalysis is the only discipline I would not sweep a la Lyotard as a grand narrative, if only because it knows only one thing, and that is it." 

"Now, Foucault, on the other hand," he continued - to Marie's slightly sharpened face - "is his polar opposite. The man is a homosexual, traded his Marxism for unlimited passes to bathhouses, and died of AIDS." 

What the fuck?, she thought. She was amazed and speechless once again, at the fundamental wrongness of his worldview, at the way he did everything sideways, and how true everything he says is. The true and the wrong, after all, are not antithetical: one merely wore the garb of an emperor, while the other jumped straight into a cold river on Saturdays. 

"If you're going to be wrong, baby," he said, "know that you're beautiful."