Training Max: Chapter 8

 

Going full Foucault is like going full Björk Guðmundsdóttir, only in the opposite direction. Chris has always viewed the infamous singer warily, not asking but knowing full well that Björk might as well be one of Max's exes, although with one exception: he might actually love her. She wasn’t jealous: the past had nothing to do with her, and she can do nothing about it. Indeed, her equanimity with the past drove Kadafi, her seventh friend-turned-boyfriend of hers, to request, “Can we fight, please, Chris? You never seem to get jealous; I feel undervalued.”

Anyway, Björk. With lyrics like these, almost pretentious for their straightforwardness, she indeed was wary:

I'm a fountain of blood
In the shape of a girl
You're the bird on the brim
Hypnotised by the whirl
Drink me, make me feel real
Wet your beak in the stream
Game we're playing is life
Love's a two-way dream

Leave me now, return tonight
Tide will show you the way
If you forget my name
You will go astray
Like a killer whale
Trapped in a bay

I'm a path of cinders
Burning under your feet
You're the one who walks me
I'm your one-way street

I'm a whisper in the water
Secret for you to hear
You're the one who grows distant
When I beckon you near

Leave me now, return tonight
Tide will show you the way
If you forget my name
You will go astray
Like a killer whale
Trapped in a bay

I'm a tree that grows hearts
One for each that you take
You're the intruder's hand
I'm the branch that you break

She had wanted to sing that song to him in karaoke, although justifiably doubting that she could pull it off. Björk's voice, after all, was a siren’s compared to hers. 

Both Max and Chris had been both members of bands – hers lasting all of two grand tours of two gigs, covering Live, Bush, and Radiohead. Her voice had gone since then, no doubt due to all her smoking.

It was this affinity that led him to ask, with a hint of self-deprecation, “Do you think we are similar?” 

“In some ways. In the ways that count, I’m not sure yet, since that question is a bastard.”

He extrapolated, “I mean, how you turn traumatic events into flippant acts of self-deprecating comedy. And you know how to play to the strengths and weaknesses of your sex, as I do. But most importantly – and I feel stupid for saying this – it was the mention of your band.”

She hesitated to state that fact from her high school: it was so long ago and so brief that it might have as well not existed in her personal history. She instead, while they were still courting, sent him links to songs with guitar riffs that remind her of his writing. 

“I have never been described as music before. Listening to Maksim’s Croatian Rhapsody now.”

“Your story March of the Pawns is amazing. It reminds me of the video from Arena by Lindsey Stirling,” carefully choosing songs with no words in them, only the pure melody of the piano, and then the violin. Sometimes words get in the way of the purity of sound. After seven days, she decided to change the wallpaper of her phone screen to his picture, singing, eyes half-open. She found the picture in one of his stories, and rendered it grayscale. She had damned him to be of fixed inspiring identity: not as a writer, nor a soldier, but a musician.

Going full pedant and hating herself for fangirling so ostentatiously, continued, “The mention of the Orourboros in the story as the girl’s bracelet is a commentary on how after all the cycle continues as a self-feeding loop, this time in history within capitalism, of how we use and have used each other in utilitarian terms, culminating in the black market organ trade.”

Quite overwhelmed, first with the praise and then with the subsequent Marxist critique, he settled for, “Lady, I just write things. It’s my unique way of fighting the true battle, as only Don Quixote managed to do.”

She did not know how to respond to that. She had not read Don Quixote, although she familiar enough to know that he was referring to battles with the absurd (as all ultimately glorious battles are), she instead diverted the topic. “Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I had a girlfriend?” 

“You had a girlfriend?”

“Yeah, and it’s because of my school. It was an exclusive girls’ school, and, to add insult to injury, it was run by nuns. Therefore the estrogen running wild had no proper object to which to turn, and turn to one another we did.”

He agreed with that, and waited patiently for what he knows will be an interesting, not to mention hot, story.

“Anyway,” she continued, “her name is Khristine, and her skin, not to mention her face, and the goddamned way she moves, were so sensational that it was unbelievable. Her stomach, though, was sublime: I always watched her practice her blocks in volleyball during lunchtime, making her shirt raise just a bit for me to take a peek. I was in love.”

She went on, “We were drinking one night, and she wanted to come home with me. Refusing me to sleep on the upper bunk, she asked me to sleep beside her instead. She faced me, and I, not knowing where to put my arms, left them to my side. Like a goddamned damsel full of hormones, she was ready to be kissed, like a goddamned damsel, with her beautiful hair framing her face and falling in tendrils around her shoulders,” she said, slowly, getting ready for the narration of the denouement of that unfateful night, “and I, being honorable and being almost a man, turned her around and spooned her, my fingers finding her hair and stroking it. She fell asleep to the sound of the milliseconds my watch were counting.”

He laughed, a full-throated, delighted laugh. “No sixty-nine then, for either of you?”

She merely said, “No. I don’t think I can do that to a woman.”

He then interjected with a story of his own, describing his mate Eddy, who was his friend, and, if he were to gender-bend, would be his chosen lover. Not going there, however, he decided to retain his sex. “I should be allowed to have my dick sucked by a man,” he declared.

She was not done with her stories, though. “Oh, and about that time when my then-best friends kissed me in the bathroom.We were all goths then,” she added, as though this explained the entire thing.

Can this girl be any hotter?, he thought. Mesmerized, and never wanting her stories to end, he waited.

“Andrea, Jane, and I were inseparable then, for two years in college. Imagine it: three black-clad females wandering the campus in search of who knows what. Chris had shifted to Philosophy from Mass Communications, Jane had been studying Political Science, Andrea, Chemical Engineering.

“We went to a bar one night, and they were both drunk. We were hit on by equally drunk men from all sides, and we pretended to be married to one another.”

Again, that denouement. “Jane kissed me first, and then Andrea. Not knowing which direction to turn, I stopped both of them, asking that they kiss each other instead. They refused, adding, “No, just you.” (That incident was forgotten, however, when, decades later, they all took a trip to Singapore, then Malaysia: all of them having rather problematic relationships of their own.) Since then she also has kissed Janice, if only for a dare that her then-boyfriend-now-husband Armand made them go through.

Their conversation then turned to where in the world they have been, his outnumbering hers by orders of magnitude. He had been to Norway, to England, and he didn’t mention the rest, content to fight, if it comes down to a proxy war yet again, for his now-motherland Czechia, always however wondering why he was repeatedly going back to training until he was overtrained.

I wonder if student visas to Czechia are easier obtained than those in France, she silently mused, not daring to wrap and warp her thoughts by using words. She cannot ask this of him, and she never did once, in the entire course of their brief affair. despite him saying that the both of them have the perfection of Japanese wood joinery.