Ortiz’s party was successful only as art. Friends had flown in from Chicago, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires. He knew it had all been about orientation.
A tall man, bald, with a gray right eye and the words en unión y libertad tattooed on his wrist, stood with a glass of white wine in the kitchen and said, “I’m going to cut you. A poem on a black steel surface.”
Ortiz smiled with embarrassment and went into the living room with a tray. He felt like something cold, something that lives in caves, deep under and cold, sightless.
They preferred the couches and the television. He’d forgotten about the strife between the states. His girl friend had to yet to arrive. Who’d know what to do.
When Morrell saw Giselle with a large orange shrimp in her fingers, he sat at the farthest left, and Giselle offered Ortiz a look the Saracens must have observed on yore battle fields.
“Lines, it will be lines. I use surgeons’ instruments, acids for dissolving through the hard surface–parallel, perpendicular, and a caretaker’s circles,” the bald man said. With his wine and his cheese and his height and that strange gray eye.
Ortiz felt like someone had taken a razor to the skin between his fingers. He’d arranged the rooms of his loft from memory. White paint for Glen the Celt, black leather for Morrell. He didn’t ask who’d brought the bald man.
Morrell at the far left, Joseph beside him, Mary nearby, Glen’s whereabouts at the moment unknown. One of them had tuned the television onto a distortion that appeared on and off the frame and with very little volume. He’d prepared the display table with his new designs watched over by Mary’s photographs, carefully arranged and summarily ignored. He’d considered orientation but had forgotten the histories. Morrell’s disparagement, Giselle’s syntactical emphases on the phone.
In the darkened hallway he remembered what she’d said: “I never want to see him again.” And then there was Joseph who would never forget the sound of his grandmother’s agony before the gas, an agony expressed at dinner tables by a father who coughed blood into the toilet, so said Joseph.
An erected puzzle lamp cast concentric dot arcs on the wall, and while he picked up empty cups, Ortiz marked the bald man’s head that interrupted the pattern and reformed it into a peaceful halo. The bald man said, ” . . . turn you into plates, lines, a euclidean experiment. Acids, silver edges. The broken skin of metal.”
A voice echoed. Glen’s voice saying, “If Joseph is from Chicago, then Chicago can bake to death in the heat.” But Ortiz couldn’t remember why these words approached him now. Law suits or divorce or ancient war? Yes, did that explain the slam of the front door moments ago?
Surreptitiously, he arranged the spent cups in the sink. His girl friend had yet to come. Who’d know what to do, what to say. The quiet behind him was like a room full of amputees. He heard footsteps approach. A familiar voice said, “Acids, lines . . . ”
“Very well then,” Ortiz said, “call it A Collection of Hatreds and be done with it.”
