the Lazaretto

siege – v.
1. the act or process of surrounding and attacking a fortified place in such a way as to isolate it from help and supplies, for the purpose of lessening the resistance of the defenders and thereby making capture possible.

He pretended to be Gavin, the meanest boy she had shared a bed with, and she pretended back. They pretended so hard their fictions grew into truths. he named her Jess after the only girl that had ever broken his heart. Because they knew, as well as you know, that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a dumb show like any other, and she felt his gesture in her blood.

The renascent strength of their game of nom de guerres, of Gav & Jess Baby, girlfriend and boyfriend drag, love stalking-horse. This mythomanic tunnel which would eventually squeeze, push, shoot them out its mouth into a cushioned, inoculative domestic life.

There must be some repository in each of us, an iron sacristy guarded by a mental keeper. when our defense is weak, when a lacuna smears one’s tight, glossy exterior, when one’s keeper sleeps - the contents of these compartments slip out, to haunt us.

In times past, during periods of quarantine, authorities built city lazarettos– buildings or ships used to house the infected, the poor, the offal social detritus who were kept separate. We do this too, we wall off puerile thoughts, puerile words. Hearts that might gleam bright with exclamations become weighted down by silent tenebrous coatings, armature which holds us in bondage to our dear cloacal secrets.

There were periods when the thought of death and afterlife and its sweet consoling song overcame each of them, they might have relinquished themselves to it, to the reign of this consuming sorrow- had not they found these multiple exit routes, these frissures, eventually Life would push them through each of pain’s gates (1).

She liked his mother, liked the branches laid out on the carpet arranged against the faded stuffed animals and magic rocks. She liked the way a woman could live off of whiskey, welfare, and watered down milk; the way that his mother’s greatest success was her greatest failure. What they all shared was a disregard for, even disbelief in, prevailing psychosocial illusions. They cared not that the routines they replaced these illusions with were equally fictional, but only that they were their own. The fruit they bare upon this world was fancy, the appearance of the permanent satisfaction of psychic needs.

They didn’t pretend to be Gav and Jess to her, he insisted his mother could see right through any lie; and she could. His mother recounted their whole trip in a matter of seconds without asking a single question. Everyone else demanded facts, empirical data – miles traveled, routes used, food consumed, possessions acquired – his mother described it, the aura that hung around them, what they set out to accomplish in their hearts.

As Gav & Jess they conducted the carnal anarchy worthy of starveling, swilling beasts, pushing those offal bits up and out the rictus using liquor and drugs to grease their shoots. It was this liquid subterfuge, this wild, wet, mental conflagration, it made them let out locked facts; escape with moonlit celerity the social composure enforced to prohibit any deviation.

His ulterior, soberer route was designed by her, his inamorata, her arrow through his lachrymose heart, pierce, rupture, his secrets rushing out by way of a welter - rolling, tossing, his uncensored self heaving true sentiments off as if waves of the sea. She his interlocutor, making her fracture upon his boyish swathe, a smooth, thick crack in his case, his lazaretto opening and spilling out all those sharp, rhapsodic effluvia. Pushing, and pulling, until

He is loved, he is besieged.

It was through these episodes that they learned to bow down at the gates of these lazarettos, to make that painful genuflection because they knew, above all else, it was this structure and its contents which had all power over them, which they might blast and attack, dipping back into its rubble as a well -

Drinking up their new proud redemption from its depths.



1. material taken from Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence (1913)