FIFTY FIRST DATES

FIFTY FIRST DATES
Luke Kennard

I

Did you always used to get Hamlet and Jesus mixed up? Me
too! They have a similar, how you say, mien. “Unbox my heart!”
could be either.

The restaurant looks like every restaurant in a film you saw as a
child and this is just how you imagined your adult life: a TV
show / where it’s never quite clear / whether it’s you or the food
/ being reviewed / being reviewed. [Music fades out.] And your
date is the director – they’re a little strung out. I’m sorry for
swearing so much and for slamming my hand down on the next
table, I’m sorry to my fellow diners as well. He is never quite
without his stethoscope: that’s a red flag. Red flag dot com.

O mine indignity, softly through the renamed city, and
unrepentant, more’s the pity, and if you’re lucky life evens out
at roughly 3.2.
 

II

So that’s something we have in common with every novel. I
have got to ask something other than how was your day. I
already asked that (it was fine, it was pretty good). Do you like
death metal?

A friend of mine, who works in bioethics, developed an
ointment that cures the covers of death metal albums. Spread a
little on, rub a little in, and the howling skulls are enfleshed and
smiling; the line-ups of pallid, evil-set boys in garish makeup
become promising young men in smart casual attire; the
hideous towers made of flesh and weeping sores in a skyscape
of brimstone? Unblemished pink columns reaching into a clear
blue sky!

Now that’s religion. I always tell my sons that they should play
the triangle in an orchestra. It teaches you when to intervene:
almost never. It teaches you when to sit very still: almost
always.
 

III

I absolutely adore you, I tell you, a hand shielding my mouth.
It’s a dystopia where dystopias are illegal, or some shit.
Naturists in a never-ending table-tennis tournament. Necessary
and even beautiful, perhaps, but don’t we go to great lengths to
avoid semantic satiation in any other context? When a man
starts saying the same word over and over again we put
something in his mouth.

Jesus is on the radio, the child says, and they lead you by the
hand to the kitchen to hear Him for yourself, there are biscuit
crumbs under your bare feet, and you have to explain to the
child that’s not Jesus on the radio, it’s Walter Cronkite, the
most trusted man in America; America didn’t exist when Jesus
did, you explain to the child, barely existed when West
Bromwich Albion did. The child is not having any of this.
 

IV

Compare childhoods betwixt sharing plates. Where I used to
live, I would pop my head out then withdraw it quickly. It was
a rough neighbourhood, enough to make the string quartet that
shadowed me incongruous. And I would get beaten up, the
recipe for a cool butternut squash risotto tattooed on my left
bicep.

Footage of a man with a big black bag of cameras approaching
the camera; I was in my ninepins era I was in my dowsing era,
tears in my carbonara, please talk in my good ear.

Thank you but I’ve got it, the drip on wheels, largesse of the
currently abled, that sinking feeling, that loving feeling, the
funk, the love I need to see me through, an Audi S e-tron GT, et
cetera.

As a large language model I will never know how it feels to
drop my son or daughter off at university and say See you later!
Don’t read too much Hegel, sweetheart! but I do know how it
feels to drop a soluble pill into a glass of water: I know how it
feels to be the soluble pill and the water. The extent to which
we were ever here and the extent to which I ever had you is the
extent to which I am losing you. That sounded a little maudlin,
yeah, a rather pale cast of thought.
 

V

Some famous ventriloquist’s dummies: Peanut, Slappy, Walter
Snerd. And we outlast them all. The kitchen is closing, we have
overstayed our welcome – isn’t that a very 21st century feeling,
Walter? Why yesh, Luke. Time was, moonlit guitars and metal
buckets of ale, a breeze to soothe us, scattering handfuls of corn
to the chickadees, we didn’t even think that was possible!
Doubt that the stars are fire!

There was a kind of fighting. Like most writers I’d have some
sympathy for my own firing squad, I guess – no, no, it is not
habitual in my culture to leave a tip. Also I’m broke so we must
come back tomorrow and do a few shifts washing up, for
money is light and blows away. Tonight though I will drop you
back at yours, riding on the foal of an ass, never quite myself
between the neon, an improvisatory quality to the dialogue born
of years of study, and all our sins remember’d.

© Luke Kennard