Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Theory has Left the Airport”
by Jacob Ørsted Nielsen
Many men and women have already spent much of their lives defining and discussing the term 'postmodernism.' This text will not be a link in that chain.
Postmodernism exists - "oh yes!" I won't deny it. It was last seen in a deserted carpark in Detroit. A little red Corvette, featuring a handsome she-male giving head to a Scandinavian professor in virtual science. S/he is sitting on his laptop and it's all true.
He sits hunched in a woolly jumper he's had since he was thirteen. You'll think he looks like a man of 76. Perhaps he can tell you about the war and about the loves in his life. About the strange things that never happened to him.
But now he sits here. All his schoolmates thought him dead. But it appears that he's not dead yet. Or not entirely. Or no more dead than the day he was born. His mother still writes to him - yes - but he doesn't feel so alive.
He's been hobbling around for some days now, with a pair of lungs in a state of contraction. In fact, he hobbled around the pool in a fancy hotel in Cuba with his neck in contraction. Something slipped, he couldn't turn, couldn't look up at the sun. Pain caused by laughter? He went to the grand, luxurious concrete complex built for holidaying. Well not luxurious, not at all. Neon and flashing bulbs. Lots of girls on the make. Quite charming in its way, but he did stay out of the bars.
He wore sandals. Sandals are for profs, apparently. His scientific associates at the conference went mad. Plied him with too much rum and seemed like a troop of schoolboys let out for the weekend. And they were.
They all ate a half E on the beach. He threw up shortly afterward. Admitted defeat shortly after that, but not before entering the club with them, swaining around the swimming pool, hanging by the bar and falling for the barmaid dressed in baggy khaki pants and a bikini top. She had bee-stung lips he wanted to suck.
He returned to the hotel, did the mad passionate thing as he wheezed and thought of impending cardiac arrest. He slept with the air conditioning on and woke up shivering when the first beams of dawn hit his eyelids. He had the fever and the cold and a terrible bark emanating from the chest. It dented the holiday for sure. He mustered on like a brave soul, though he had some intensifying thoughts about 'living,' 'room service' and 'TV.'
It was a little depressing to return. The airport was like entering business school (again) though he didn't really have the qualifications to get in (again). It was all ads for satellite connections and laptops and mobiles and "We'll keep your business on the right track all the way into the next millennium" type of sign language. He wheezed and coughed, trying to keep up. Pouring his olive oil. Wanting to get back to the source. Go south. Go away again. Go somewhere else. Change. Change. Change.
He went down in the garage to get his car. Coughed again. A tall brunette had been almost waiting for him. S/he walked over to him and asked if he wanted some company. He thought, "Who wants to consign paltry words of science to the paper after that? I've been lying in bed reading a newspaper in a hotel waiting to die. Eating cheap lentils, the toilet suffering the post-holiday trauma of being completely naked. I don't go out any more. I lie in bed. I cough. I notice the chill in the air and think of autumn. Autumn and illness make me think too much of the past. Fuck that. Let's make art now. It's a good idea. Get involved with life again. I'm sure I could come up with something."
And so he did.
He invited the lady inside his car and took a few pics of 'the happening' with his new black- market digital camera.
Then he left the airport with a smile and sweaty armpits. He just couldn't resist the excitement of this experience and his most vidid urban fantasy was now: To get back to the apartment and put those dirty images out on the Net.
Copyright © 1999 Jacob Ørsted Nielsen All Rights Reserved
Jacob Ørsted Nielsen was nothing but a piece of meat on the 4th. of April 1972. Much later in the same country [Denmark] he edited a literary magazine in Copenhagen [Zoe] and published comics with fellow country man Søren G. Mosdal. He is also a member of the music duo Chicken & Banana, which has brought 'poetic noise' to the capital residents for years. At the moment he is striving to maintain a focus on his last academic paper (upon 1960s 'new-wave' of Danish poets), but he is ever so often distracted by friends, his girl-friend, his modem and the daily chimes from his telephone.