I.V. excerpt from "The Saint" by Carina Finn
It may be important to establish a timeline in relation to my novelistic boredom and sadness. One minute I’m sitting in a Lebanese restaurant in the East Village contemplating suicide and the next I am singing on a stage to a crowd of people who think they love me, or I am walking around the Financial District and I haven’t been drunk in at least a hundred days. Events melt together. My life in relation to the life I imagined in relation to the life I live in my dreams comes out to nothing. Then I’m sleeping on the couch in the dungeon underneath a scarlet tablecloth dreaming of all the foreign watresses I would sleep with if I had the time or money.
In my first apartment, the windows all faced air shafts. It is scientifically proven that a lack of natural light causes plants to die and maybe I’m not a plant but I could be. I get a cactus and it dies. I get a cat which also dies. A year later I destroy every piece of art I made in that apartment and move in with a drag queen.
My roommate’s name is Liza Minelli and all she does is paint her nails, burn pink candles, and play the same Dolly Parton record. Liza is an inspiration. While I’m living with her I eat three meals a day and put on makeup before I leave the house. We live in an enormous industrial loft decorated by a dead housewife entirely in stuff from Crate & Barrel, which does not suit us and we like it. The dead housewife was formerly the housewife of the pimp who owns the waterfront building and no one is sure how she died. Liza suspects a botched butt-implant. Three blocks away from the building, the derelict Domino’s Sugar Factory breathes its burnt-ash breath. At night, I walk to the factory and wait for the conveyor belt outside to start moving.
At least once I week I try to convince Liza that we should break into the Domino’s Sugar Factory. This becomes my singular ambition. I start to believe that to break into the factoy will be my greatest accomplishment in life, better than having a child or winning a Pulitzer. I smoke incessantly with my face pressed against the chainlink fence. I close my eyes and try to will the factory back to life. The injustice of a defunct sugar factory strikes directly through my heart, sweetness being one of the things I value most in life. I long to see all of Williamsburg presided over by the beneficence of sucrose, all the vegan juice shops and their skinny salesgirls usurped by patisseries and a cavalry of buxom maitronesses. Sometimes I bring little white blue-printed sugar packets from restaurants and throw them at the feet of the factory, an offering.
Liza shows almost no interest in my act of vagrancy. As I said, all she wants to do is paint her nails and listen to Dolly Parton and cry. In the morning we drink coffee incessantly until our blood is so overwhelmed by caffeine we can no longer sit in one another’s presence. We put honey in our coffee because in spite of my love for it we keep no refined sugars in the apartment. We drink coffee sitting on the spotless floor of the kitchen. Sometimes I read a magazine or the one book I brought with me, a copy of Nietzche’s Genealogy of Morals, and Liza always paints her nails.
“I think we should break into the sugar factory today,” I say on a completely unexceptional morning. Liza is singing I Will Always Love You and ignoring everything I say. I flip through the pages of the copy of British Vogue I bought self-indulgently on St. Mark’s after an underwhelming yoga class. Liza of course has no interest in the factory, being as she is a sugar factory herself. But I ply her with promises of a month-long supply of organic coffee which I will buy and make every day without complaint, and she puts on a green knee-length calico dress acquired from God-knows-where, something straight out of Little House on the Prairie the TV series, and we leave the apartment together.
The factory is surrounded by chain-link fencing and barbed wire that spans many blocks. The sky is streaked pink through the afternoon and I wish I had a camera even though I know that no electronic device could ever capture this: Liza in her green dress smoking a cigarette through the fence with total disinterest, humming a little, I don’t know what.
“What do you want to sing?” I ask. She bats her false eyelashes.
“Crosby, Stills, & Nash,” she says, and doesn’t. I take a drag of her cigarette. Three days later we still haven’t penetrated the factory and I’m dressed entirely in black. The love of my life is stuck in a sadness for which I am mourning. She, too, is a saint. Her black curls and bronze haloes traverse the skies above Manhattan. She is a saint of the gods and I am a saint of mortals on trains. As I said I am wearing a black dress black boots black bag and a cape. Enormous dust-colored bugeye glasses that shield my entire face. A beautiful transvestite across the way clad entirely in pleather stares at me and I think about what it would be like to fuck or be a lesbian tranny. She gets up and offers her seat to a Chicana nanny and her pretty charge. The tranny’s hair is long and sleek and her dark cheekbones pert nose are perfect I think I’d fuck her and I would. Then she’s waving at me with a talon’d hand saying brightly,
“Miss, miss!” She gestures towards my head and removes her earbuds. I cannot imagine what she might want to say to me. Strangers on trains are always telling me their horrifying stories or reciting strange prophecies and today, all I want to do is listen to the same stripped-down version of a stupid MGMT song that makes my heart beat fast, but I take out my headphones anyway.
“Where did you get those fabulous glasses?” she asks. I loose my held-in breath.
“On the street? They were like $5,” I say, removing them. I really smile.
“Like Chinatown? Canal Street?” Her voice is high and sweet.
“Like Soho? Broadway and…17th, maybe. They had them in a few different colors. Seriously, $5.”
Later I find love on the street sadly smoking a cigarette. Whenever I encounter love this is how I find her: dejected, on the ground, dying. This, I begin to think, is the nature of love. The sky above her is gray as the concrete beneath her artfully torn jeans. She is crying but she is also smiling.
“Do you want to break into the old Domino’s factory with me?” I ask, but of course, she doesn’t. There are new brown buds on the trees. A small wet rook on a low-hanging branch. Love is only interested in the brilliance of her sadness. I take her to a cafe for coffee which is bitter and acidic and costs $5.75 a cup because it comes from an impoverished country. I buy her a gluten-free blueberry corn muffin which she doesn’t eat. Eventually, I eat it. Love weeps, I gaze upon her, and we hardly speak.
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