Guests sitting in small groups. The remnants of disposable barbecues. Bags of kettle crisps. Empty bottles. Spread blankets, and a portable MP3 player playing apocalyptic Canadian pop. Everyone begins to leave, taxis drawing up in the night, until W. and I are the only ones left, the last drinkers, the most drunk.
We have to libate the palm trees!, W. says. I didn't know there were palm trees on campus, but W. assures me they exist. And there they are – palm trees in a grove, which we libate with a half-bottle of Mara Schino, a liqueur from old Yugoslavia that is too disgusting even for us to drink.
Dawn. The air is moist. We talk of Beckett and Avigdor Arhika, drunk in Paris. We talk of Gombrowicz in Argentia, Flusser in Brazil … were they drinkers? They were exiles, of course, but drinkers?
The exile is a man of a coming future world …: Flusser wrote that. Nothing in my background could have prepared me for the huge role alcohol played in these people's lives: so Arhika's wife in her memoir. And Gombrowicz, what did Gombrowicz write? We have nothing of relevance in our notebooks.
I tell W. an anecdote from the life of Debord: Alcohol kills slowly, read the government information poster near Chez Moineau. We don't give a fuck. We've got the time, the comrades sent out by Debord scrawled over it …
We've got the time. Life is long, not short, W. and I agree. Life is terribly long … It's too long! … To live without a lifetime. To die forsaken by death … What should we do? What's left to us?
God gives the sky the dimensions of His absence, I say, paraphrasing Jabes. God … he doesn't know what God means, says W. But God has something to do with the distance between us. With our nearness, with our distance. Speech. That's what brings that distance to life. Speech between friends.
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