ORKIDEH AND PRESIDENT INVECTIVE

Two figures walking through a mall, a fancy mall, the kind that has a Crate and Barrel and an Apple store. Cyrus recognized the woman immediately as Orkideh, who appeared in this dream bald and warm as she did in the Brooklyn Museum, though here in the dream she also had big bushy eyebrows that sat on her forehead like storm clouds. Beneath those, a pair of large-framed fashionable sunglasses that seemed almost out of place on her head, like a child trying out random pieces of her mother’s clothes. Walking a step behind Orkideh, breathing heavily inside his strangely large body, was President Invective, wearing one of his signature blue blocky ill-fitting suits.

Cyrus didn’t typically cast characters who so repelled him in these dreams, but sometimes it just happened, unbidden. For a time in his teens he dreamed almost obsessively, unwillingly, of the bully who tortured him. Once, he dreamt he was eavesdropping at a dinner table between Hannibal Lecter and Jeffrey Dahmer. Another time he was on a plane with Dick Cheney. Here in this dream, President Invective was panting through the mall as if lugging a heavy load, though he carried nothing, and Orkideh’s face glinted mischievously, seemingly relishing her companion’s struggle.

“Keep up,” she urged, waving toward herself.

The mall was neither crowded nor empty. The density of fluorescent lighting and mercenary corporate energy in such spaces usually felt suffocating to Cyrus, but Orkideh looked totally at ease, amused even. It was President Invective who seemed to be struggling.

“Why are we here?” he said, looking embarrassed to be asking a question. It was not something he did often.

“Here in this mall, or here in this dream?” Orkideh asked, playfully. Her face looked old and young at once, like an antique doll. It was nice to see her moving around without an oxygen tank. Despite her bald head she looked healthy, spry even, and familiar in a warm way, more like the pictures Cyrus had seen of her face in his internet searches.

President Invective didn’t answer Orkideh’s question, as if out of protest. They walked forward past fancy clothing and jewelry stores. As they passed a tea store, he popped in for a quick sample in a little Dixie Cup, which he shot like cheap tequila, then grimaced.

“In Farsi,” Orkideh said, “the word for tea is ‘chai,’ which I’m sure you know.”

“Of course,” President Invective lied, making his face pulse with a low green light. Orkideh smiled.

“But the word for cardamom, which we add to our tea, is ‘hell.’ When I first came to America, I spent all my time in this cheap little diner on the Lower East Side. There was a Persian waitress there, a young girl, maybe nineteen, twenty, who spoke almost as little English as I did. Every day I would sit at the table in the morning before going to look for work and she would come over and say ‘hell chai’ and we would giggle. I knew enough English to know ‘hell’ was a bad word, we giggled there with the naughty zeal of a child saying ‘the beaver’s damn dam,’ something like this. It was my first English joke, my first American friend.”

President Invective snorted, unimpressed. He was staring at his reflection in a children’s toy store glass window. He’d only been half listening, popping back into the conversation when he heard “American.” Secretly he was confused. He hadn’t realized Orkideh had ever lived in New York. But it was his habit to ignore such dissonances. Usually they resolved themselves without him needing to expend energy. Studying his reflection, it looked like his face was beginning to sprout tiny black worms.

Orkideh and President Invective pressed on, past stores hawking kitchenware, basketball cards, fossils, comics, plague masks, electron microscopes, until they arrived at a store that seemed to be selling original works of classic art. In the store window was the Mona Lisa, and President Invective lit up.

“I’ve seen this one! I know this one,” he said. “Fantastic painting. Beautiful painting, beautiful woman.” He had a coffee mug with the Mona Lisa on it, an old Father’s Day gift from one of his children, he couldn’t remember which.

“You know why it’s so famous?” asked Orkideh.

“Because it’s perfect! Look at her. Look at that smile! The best painting. The very best.”

Orkideh ignored him.

“It’s famous because it hung in Napoleon’s bedroom. It is not so remarkable a portrait. It’s not even on canvas, it’s painted on a poplar plank. Scrap wood. Da Vinci would have been horrified to know that five hundred years later it would become his most famous piece.”

“Napoleon’s bedroom?” President Invective was enthralled. His jowls were flapping open and shut like happy gills. He had to have it.

They walked into the store, past the Venus of Willendorf, past tile from the Blue Mosque and lions from Persepolis, past Hokusai’s Great Wave and Géricault’s Raft of Medusa. Right before the counter, where a goth cashier was texting into her phone, was another massive original painting, a seaside landscape bustling with life.

“Do you know this one?” Orkideh asked President Invective, pointing to the canvas.

“Sure,” he lied, “but I don’t want it. Come on, I need to pay for the Lisa before someone else does.” He felt particularly suave calling it that, “the Lisa,” like he and the painting were already intimates.

Orkideh continued as if she hadn’t heard him.

“Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” she said. “Icarus flew too close to the sun and his wings melted. Other artists painted it by focusing on his father Daedalus’s grief, or Icarus’s joyful hubris in the moments before his descent. ‘His waxen wings did mount above his reach, and melting, heavens conspired his overthrow.’ You know?”

President Invective shuffled from foot to foot. He didn’t like this talk of “overthrow.” But he did like the painting well enough. Good people working hard. Lovely water, sturdy ships, a horizon. Mostly he wanted her to stop talking so he could pay for his da Vinci.

“But Bruegel paints Icarus way out in the margin of the painting. Just pair of legs drowning in the water. Everyone else is going about their work. The mule plows, the sheep graze. ‘White legs disappearing into the green water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

President Invective hated this. Bruegel had ruined his perfectly lovely landscape with that pair of legs. He hated being condescended to, hated people who thought they could teach him. He hated Orkideh and Bruegel both. Ignoring them, he walked up to the counter. The cashier looked up from her phone.

“Can I help you?”

“I want to buy the Mona Lisa. How much?”

“Hm, let me check.” The girl shuffled through a notebook.

Orkideh walked up to the counter too, said: “I’d like to know the price on the Bruegel, the Icarus, too, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay, hold on.” The girl flipped through her notebook, a big binder full of tiny print, though there were only a dozen or so pieces of art in the store.

“The Mona Lisa is four segments. That’s a sale, it had been six all month. The Bruegel is two.”

President Invective had been fishing through his wallet, counting his bills.

“Segments?” he asked.

“That’s a great price on the Bruegel,” Orkideh said to the girl. “I’ll take it.”

“Cool,” said the cashier. “Any preference which hand?”

“Surprise me,” said Orkideh, setting both hands down on the counter and looking away. Her hands were missing several fingers, some cut off at the top knuckle, others cut all the way down to the palm. The cashier squeezed her left middle finger, still full, at the base, and then pulled a great cleaver from behind her back. Orkideh breathed a deep breath and the cashier dropped the cleaver down in one massive stroke, cutting the finger at the middle knuckle.

Orkideh sucked in air through her clenched teeth, said, “Fuck! Fuck.”

“Do you want me to wrap the painting up for you?” asked the cashier as she cut the loose finger into two segments at the top joint.

“No, I’ll carry it out as is.” Orkideh pulled a white handkerchief from her pocket and wrapped it around the bloody stump of her finger, the red growing through the white like a flag, like weather.

“You people are crazy!” President Invective screamed. “You people are absolutely batshit crazy!” He ran out of the store as fast as he could, leaving a trail of low green light behind him.

Orkideh smiled a little at the cashier, shrugged her shoulders, then walked out of the store with Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus under her arm.