“The tyranny of narrative is beginning to frustrate me.”
–Steven Soderbergh
Calvert Thorne, familiar to club scene fans as DJ Sergey, sprinkles pine pollen in his hair. He collects it himself, scrambling up mighty ponderosas, nimble as someone half his age. Each spring, a year’s supply saved in antique apothecary jars. It’s his only obvious affectation—indeed, apart from pop music chops, he seems bourgeois to the toes.
He likes pilsner, soft cheeses, interfaith prayer services, an early summer—“young-leafed June,” he quotes Larkin—game of croquet. He has opinions but hates anything brusque in naming them, though he tolerates no challenge to his admiration for Op Art. He began collecting early, so long before it got costly that his collection exceeds what anyone of his modest fortune could now achieve. He praises Op’s shifting indeterminacy as “trippy,” a slangy holdover that further dates him.
Why not drop it? After all, he hates being dated, a condition made worse by its trap: it wants to scream but cannot without attracting smirking attention, circuses of mockery.
Besides he has lost faith more generally since the death of Franca, his daughter, under suspicious circumstances, that vague yet precisely devastating indecision of words—the Danish police unwilling to say either “faldt” or “skubbet” about her movement from the top to the bottom of the stairs. Copenhagen, an otherwise safely flat city in a low and level country. Franca, an environmental statistician, there attending an oceanographic conference. The terrible phone call to Calvert in the calvary of a Baltimore ballroom where he’d gone to receive a statuette of industry recognition.
“Bright Red” by Laurie Anderson: “did she fall or was she pushed?” The song DJ Sergey obsessively remixes.
He believes older ways of dealing with suffering no longer work. He wants, he fiercely needs, a new approach, altered forms of presentation. He has reached out to Steven Soderbergh, but Steven Soderbergh has not reached out to him.
Knowing celebrities, greeting them each evening as DJ Sergey does, is not the same as being one. Pollen, its saffron blessing in his hair, like the nimbus of a saint or aureole of a demigod, is visible, irresistible. Calvert Thorne, Op Art collector, croquet player, Larkin reader—“the million-petalled flower of being here”—, dated and 58 and bereaved, is not. Any study in perception, tyranny or republic, will let him go.