Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis

longer a pleasure or solace to recognize what cunts and monsters all the others were, those who would not even admit, even now, the comprehensiveness of our history’s disgrace, so comprehensive it engulfed even themselves. I told Electra to call off her séances. I wanted nothing more with them. It had all been a fool’s errand anyway. I had sat there in the dark befuddled. But she beguiled me. She wouldn’t quite take my “no” to be final. She intimated that just then, when all hope was lost, when one’s being had lost every structure of expectation and support, was when a miracle might occur. Though of course to her it was no miracle. To her it was all very scientific. The logic of the universe was called upon.
    I gave in to her persuasions. I invited her and what I took to be her sorry band of followers for one last audition in the house. The procedures began, so banal I’m ashamed to write them, the hand-holding, the silence, the candles. When Electra channeled, her voice broke into a million pieces. She could have been anybody. I can recall that I stared at the bowl of oil that night and on this one occasion my mind did not flee to resentments or self-accusations or fantasies. My eyes seemed to slip into the bowl’s oily substance, to swim in a place where vision is blurred. This is also absurd to write, is it not? Even now I can imagine my dear would-be landlord at the top of the stairs, listening in with condescension and confusion. What were these preposterous people doing in her house? And then, you can take this for true or not, you can tear it apart, you can ask what I really mean, you can believe your own fantasies about me, you can be fantastically cruel, whatever you wish, I cannot control it, be a cunt, go ahead, be my guest. But I became aware that both my parents were in the room, and that they were there together, it wasn’t one of them on the left and the other on the right, avoiding each other’s gazes and intimations, no, they were there together, as if hand in hand, they had reconciled.
    How did I know this? You will of course want to know the gory details, whether I saw them with my eyes or heard them with my ears or through Electra’s thousand voices or taps on the table or in a swoon, an ineffable sense, and was I like a saint struck down by God, a biblical story, what about a biblical story, that would make a nice story too. You’ll want to have plenty of information to smash me with, to prove my impossibility. But I swear to you, and you can take it or leave it. My parents were there, and they were together, not hand in hand, I didn’t see their hands holding one another, but it was as if they were hand in hand. Have you enough rope to hang me with yet? I expect little of the world, and from it least of all understanding. I felt their presence. And I knew that it was not a dream. It was entirely different from a dream. I felt their presence with a sense that I did not know I had.
    I told my would-be landlord, she who would never get to boot me out now: “I’m leaving.”
    She was either surprised or relieved, but in any event she was speechless.
    â€œI’m leaving Germany!” I said.
    â€œWhere are you going?” she asked.
    â€œJerusalem,” I said.
    â€œWell, that’s a switch,” she said.
    â€œYou know what happened? You know what my breakthrough was?”
    She shook her head that she didn’t know what it was. “Does it have something to do with your meetings, your…”
    â€œYou can say it! Séance! Séance! It’s not a dirty word. Yes, of course!…My mother and father came!”
    â€œTo your séance? I thought your parents were…” Only then did it seem to occur to her that the entire point of a séance was for dead people to come. But I forgave my would-be landlord her dullness. I was too entranced. I was in love, I was at peace, I was overflowing with