Oliver Benjamin
could not explain himself.
“They all what?”
“They’re all about me. About you. About youth itself,” he said.
Lily looked surprised. “He knows about us?”
“He doesn’t just know about us,” Yak replied, “He knows about
everything. With this…with the ideas in this book one could recreate
an entire universe.”
“How can anyone know everything?” she pulled her knees in
towards her chest.
Yak flipped to another page and read excitedly, jumping around
within one long marked-up passage: “The poet makes himself a
visionary through a long, gigantic and rational derangement of the
senses. He searches himself. The soul must be made monstrous: in
the fashion of kidnappers of children. He exhausts all the poisons in
himself and keeps only their quintessences. The poet is truly the thief
of fire. A language must be found. Every word being an idea, the
time of a universal language will come.”
Tears streamed down his hollow cheeks, losing themselves
among the black rushes of his silky beard. Lily was startled, and
moved away imperceptibly. He put his arms around her and drew her
in, rubbing her smooth back, releasing profound sobs from the pit of
his deranged heart.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“I have to go write,” he said, suddenly breaking away from her
and running out of the plastic tabernacle. She chased barefoot after
him through the empty wooden hallways of the mansion. “When will
you come back?” she cried as he strode down the driveway. But he
was already too far gone. Ermita stood at her side and coaxed the
crestfallen girl back into the massive house which seemed to grow
proportionally bigger and hollower as she did.
She was no longer a green girl. Her nascent beauty was already
causing problems for her in school. The boys wanted to try things, to
touch her, to press themselves against her; not the way Yak did, but
in hungry, frightening ways. The attention she received caused the
other girls to insult her, to shun her. She was afraid to socialize, and
spent her lunches, her recesses, her afternoons, her weekends alone.
At home her parents were rarely there and even when they were
home they were too busy to spend much time with her. Yak was the
only person in the world who understood her and whom she thought
she thought she understood. He was her universal language. Her love
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