Read The Delphi Room for Free Online Page B

(obviously, or I wouldn’t have seen you), and the gashes on my hands are healed, with only faint lines where I remember gushing wounds. I can’t trust my memory—could we trust it before? It’s like I’m trapped in my own mind. There’s nothing more horrible than being left to the vagaries of one’s head
—
what a capricious enemy! And even if you tell the enemy to fuck off, even if you know her as you know yourself, you can never kill her. The mind shifts like the tides. What a splendid Hell.
    Right at present the mirror shows me nothing but a faithful reflection of my room, and myself, a reflection tuned, as always, to the frequency governed by a prevailing sense of self-hatred, despair and now-justified phobias. You’re the only one able to see my new, shockingly stick-figured self. (Finally I’m in fashion but the audience has grown so scant.) Back in life, I always had a figure that I categorized like clothing: vintage. I kept pictures of women from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s all over my walls, to remind myself that the fleshy hourglass is beautiful. Stuck on my fridge with a
Sunset Boulevard
fridge magnet were the words: “Today’s Miss America contestant is 23% thinner than contestants in the 1960s.” Not that I care at all about the Miss America pageant, but it helped me keep modern society’s rot in perspective. However, looking in the mirror now I can say that I look even thinner than today’s pageant girls. I can see my ribs, several Mona Lisa smiles, which were certainly things I once had to conduct a concentrated search for.
    I want to see you again. I didn’t think it was me at first that you saw . . . you described the woman as beautiful. But then you mentioned the Clara Bow hair. Actually, I was thinking of Louise Brooks when I cut it. Or maybe I wasn’t really thinking . . . I was following instructions. What can you do with hair that resembles offshore storms on the Weather Channel, or with a face like an inverted egg, eyes shadowy as an absinthe addict’s? Though I was never an absinthe addict. I decided it must be me that you saw, unless there’s some poor loony on the other side of you who spent her final moments attempting to channel a silent film star through a pair of dull scissors.
    Here’s some more info, if you like: I lived alone in a lower floor suite of a “heritage house,” which is really just a polite term for an old place in need of repairs. The street I lived on was lined with trees, including a very large one in my front yard. I loved to watch the sky pool in the branches in the early morning. For as long as I can remember, I dreamed about living on a tree-lined street. So the sidewalk forest was the thing that spurred me into renting the place (that and the fact that I had no money), when my senses were assaulted by the rather crumbling suite with its splintery hardwood floors. The house itself was 1920s clapboard with frilly latticework. It was purple, with unfortunate hot pink trim. Purple is my favourite colour, but it belongs in a closet, not on a house.
    Commercial Drive is a bohemian street, although it falls way short of Montparnasse-circa-1910’s definition of bohemian. It’s full of artists and good restaurants and men with dreadlocked hair and women carrying loom-spun purses. It used to be Little Italy—all in all, it’s kind of like “Socialism Meets Gelato.”
    I had worked at the Thai café for a year, long enough to become addicted to coconut milk. Before that, I did some time in the coat check of a bar, which, aside from allowing me the opportunity to test out some inventive outfits, was a nightmarish cave of sweaty-fleshed, sex-hungry mongrels. I prefer to stay away from that sort of thing. I was planning to quit, but before I had the chance I had a panic attack and broke a bottle of Glenlivet, and was told in a not-very-nice-way never to return. So my friend Davie came over to talk me down from the eaves, so to speak, because I was