Desire in the Dead Wing - What Happened Before

A new lecturer attracts Nana’s attention. Vernon comes from Albuquerque in the U.S. state of New Mexico. The well-off, German-born scholar appears larger than life in the academic idyll of Landgrave Philipp University. Vernon is a man of quick decisions. Since their first night together — which turned out differently than he had expected — he has regarded the equally polyglot and polyamorous Nana as his fiancée. But he has reckoned without the innkeeper. We know what Vernon still has to learn: he is one of many, even at the university. And of course he ranks behind Professor Goya, in whom the North Hessian superpower CC seems incarnated.

Vernon is secretive by nature. He served as a lone operative and sniper. Nothing connects him to the faded, imploded personalities who try to carve out quiet existences along the margins of the main battle lines in the small university town of Ederthal. Nana’s intense and unpredictable sexuality confuses Vernon, yet he believes he can bring her into line and make her submissive side the center of their relationship. He is not the first to have such ideas, but he is certainly the toughest of the earthly players.

Vernon grew up on a ranch of almost Dallas-like proportions. In his thinking, women and horses exist on the same level. He has just tried once again to “educate” Nana. It didn’t work. Nana is not angry with the cowboy. After all, she wants nothing more than control. To control your opponent is fundamental, as the Chinese saying goes.

How It Continues

Let’s keep playing, Nana begs silently in her mind. Vernon immediately bites. The answer comes as quickly as his confidence.
“And if I want to nail you from behind.”

Nana replies contentedly:
“Then you do exactly that — and I’ll remember it when I’m a dried-up old hay sack and nobody wants to do that to me anymore.”

She writes this. But she has something else in mind. Nana wants an iconic situation in an unusual setting, without penetrative sex. While she thinks about how best to bring Vernon into line, her desire drives her up the walls again.

She retreats into a room in the abandoned wing of the university, a building constructed like a medieval castle. She wedges the door handle shut with a chair. An opened fish tin smells of rot. A clouded mirror leans against a wall. Nana remembers a line from Joyce — “a maid’s broken mirror” — which the poet saw as the signature of his native Ireland. Insect mummies lie caught in cobwebs, woven sarcophagi, works of art created by nature.

She slips out of her jeans and pulls her panties down to her knees. She leans forward over an antique desk. She forbids herself to touch herself. Instead, she strives for complete manifestation.

For the first time, she succeeds. In the junk room, Nana experiences a premiere. She is not merely playing with a thought. She is not simply giving space to imagination. The thought creates a second reality in which the subject believes they can experience everything that is humanly possible. The manifested space looks like the real one.

Shy Eyes

He sits at her desk. She kneels beside him, sharing his view of her breasts, listening to whatever comes into his mind.

Samuel Beckett wrote in French. The Godot line “We always find something to give us the impression we exist” is a translation back into Beckett’s mother tongue. Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov also wrote in adopted languages.

Birdsong in the front garden. The sound of parking outside. Someone needs several attempts to properly pull into a space.

Without a doubt, Nana will never again find a man she can be as fond of as Vernon. The realization tightens her stomach and fills her with fear. She hears herself say:

“I’ll never let you go again.”

She would prefer to become nothing more than a beautiful image from now on. Nana wants to become an indelible part of Vernon’s inner gallery of images. He should never be able to get her out of his head. She stores the sentence for later:

“We have used up our excitement and now look at each other with shy eyes.”

Hours Later — Landscape Highlights

Nana plays model, spaghetti straps sliding across her shoulders, standing on the remains of a limestone wall that once secured a headland. Three thousand years ago, the spur may have been guarded day and night. Stone bones and flint arrowheads were found in a nearby shaft.

Midnight Blue

Nana fills diary pages with experiences stranger than anything she could have imagined. She begins email conversations with even the most fleeting acquaintances. Often they continue even after she points out — always with the same delight — that she has just taken off her panties, and, importantly, that she has done so especially for the person she is writing to.

Writing is necessary to distill a specific kind of pleasure — one that is by no means ultimate, but is a distinct variation.

Some days Nana entertains and excites herself with three lecherous pen pals at once. She could copy a passage once and paste it twice. She could save herself a lot of typing — but that’s not the point. The point is to rewrite it every time:

I just took my panties off. I did it for you.
You can see me sitting on my office chair.
Should I pull the dress up over my butt?
Do you like the idea of my boss bursting in with the flimsiest excuse imaginable?
He stares at my cleavage.

Nana is unaware of how compromising such communications are in a world without privacy, where every well-rested twelve-year-old knows how to spy effectively on their neighbors. If a man is prudish enough to find such explicit comments questionable, Nana simply considers him a spoilsport.

Now she is sitting in her office. She is wearing a skin-tight, sleeveless wrap dress with an intricate pattern on a midnight-blue background.