Darby and Jean Claude

AND THE CELEBRATION OF REMORSE

Darby's has six friends who don't go to college with her. They live across the street. A string of tin-can phone line runs across the street, for real. They live opposite her in a house with a wrestling pit dug into the muddy lawn and a person-size hole torn through an interior wall for convenience. Now out of that house they come clambering noisily barefooted onto the sidewalk. The sun assaults Darby's sight line and ignites electrical fires in the tissue paper cortex of her crumpled morning mind.

They stumble down the steep paved road enclosed between their two houses. Toward the soaring concrete footbridge elevated from the precipice where they sometimes throw moldy vegetables in the splashing nighttime river. To reach their secret swimming alcove further up the creek, to prostrate themselves in its mossy waterfalls, to scale the old walls of the crumbling mill and jump from its boarded-up windows, to momentarily sink in the fresh-water deep like a moldy projectile vegetable, they first must cross the footbridge then descend the rocky path into the river chasm from the other side. Darby’s friends and Darby clop clop barefoot down the hill.

The pavement evaporates and rushes to regenerate under their forward feet. They’re the only people in the world, which is fortunate for everyone else, who would right now hear them screaming at a sidewalk enchanted by daydreams. No one else has existed since the night before, since Darby left her house and went next door. She brought with her into this mysterious world a first-timer, a colleger, an outsider, the boy whose infatuation presently occupies her imagination.

Jean Claude, digging inside himself and throwing into heavy air the shiny countless flickerings of their mutually discovered treasure chests. Jean Claude, here on Darby's sidewalk on the other side of the night. Making himself comfortable in the second-story closet of her haunted social context. Taking in her scenery. Wearing Darby's favorite pair of his revolutionarily overpriced jeans, the pair that limits strictly its privileged existence to two places only, the legs and the carpet, an enriched encasement of itself. He is also wearing two concentric button-down shirts. His glasses are fashion, his cheekbones primeval, his hair lengths affixed with a long duckbill clip.

Logo pockets, scuffed-up buttons, family cufflinks, broken socks. Seamless loafers, faceless watch. Jean Claude mixes with Darby's neighbor friends like a pinball on a conference call, scattering conversation, after speaking one whole sentence fully shifting his attention to any person who acknowledges it, lighting up their eyes, glimmering for an instant, covering a lot of conversational ground without gaining progressive distance. With persistence.

Darby doesn’t intervene with conversational assistance. She’s faster down the sidewalk from him commanding invisible legions. Tomboy prom queen. Dirty circus. Wearing a stack of overlapped squares cut from retired mosquito mesh. A circle had been cut in the middle of every mesh square. After all the empty circles were stacked and sewn together, there was only one circle, the waistline, dripping staggered points of sloppy kerchief skirt, voilà. The mesh fabric is quaggy ethereal in time-worn scraggly sepia, the edges brown and decomposing, but the aesthetic gist of it is pretty much still white on white on white. Eventually, it will disintegrate, and Darby will wear a mess of an identical replacement. There’s plenty more mosquito mesh.

The sun chews Darby's shoulders at the stringy thinning borders of her tattered tank top, also white, and the outdated message hand-painted in screen-printing ink diagonally across the back. Her shirt was previously a notepad like her skirt was previously a mosquito net. Her hair is blondest knotted blond and feet are barefoot black. She was full of bubbles.

Jean Claude thinks Darby is magic. He thinks she practices fairy magic and accused her of it flatly when they first began to master telling themselves each other's narratives. With pandering pretend disgust and fascinated boyish lust, Jean Claude calls down the hill for everyone to look at Darby. Her fairy skirt! Her circus of dirt! Jean Claude explains to Darby’s six friends that Darby doesn’t exist. She is an extension of his imagination. A tenuous presence created from him.

The neighbors aren’t listening. They’re chasing the mystery, the cyclic reappearance of the road against their feet, blackest barefoot steeply clopping down the scratchy pavement. At the bottom of the hill the footbridge is impatient.

Introducing gender to the disappearing world, Darby's friend Lara, a lanky actress, just now becomes aware that she and Darby are the only two girls. She strategizes tactically to backwardly attract Jean Claude. She shimmies nonchalantly close and now she is behind, beside, and keeping fleeting pace with him.

Transparently faux-reverent, Lara slathers Jean Claude in high-pitched common sentiment. She eulogizes loudly on the topic of Darby's hotness, gushing, Darby is the model for her school photography project. Lara is still in high school, a special do-whatever-you-want school for children of over-educated parents.

Jean Claude dismisses Lara's photography assignment as insignificant- after all, he reads Baudrillard, he's a sophomore in college- and grumbles at Lara incredulously regarding her selection of Darby as an object of photography:

               "Darby can’t be your model. She doesn't show up on film."

This idea makes a surreptitious, almost criminal, escape from Jean Claude's inner monologue. It overpowers him and showers him in his own poetic insight. She doesn't show up on film. He knows now what an expert on Darby he must be, to idolize and dehumanized her simultaneously.

Objectified Darby doesn’t mind, the bubbles inside her are slimy with pride, he hyperbolized her in front of her friends. Now all of them, even loitering Lara eventually, are careening barefoot past him, while he stands still. Darby has six friends who don’t go to college with her who have reached the bottom of the steep hill between their two houses.

Above them is Jean Claude, standing greasy sleepless on Darby's sunny secret sidewalk, twisting his mouth to trap his laughter, extending frenetic arms at her in a choreography of apology. Relishing perceiving her as celebrating back the tacit discourse of remorse. He imagines he insulted her, and insulted himself by romantic extension, but he’s the only one feeling insulted and he’s also the only one laughing. So he performs reverse penance. Unfamiliar with atonement, he demands indulgence. He orders Darby toward him to embrace him where he stands, that he may emerge reborn through her vulnerability and continue his life in the warmth of her forthcoming forgiveness.