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By Root 469 0

watching the television but with a thought to avoid more disaster footage, switched the feed to the VCR, where he found himself perhaps an hour or so into Ludwig, Visconti’s bio-epic about the last king of Bavaria. Martin had watched it countless times, not just for his long-standing attraction to the Austrian lead, Helmut Berger—whose high cheekbones and serious eyes, at once sadistic and vulnerable, never failed to entrance—but for the story of King Ludwig, a monarch tortured by homosexual urges (and in this regard, Martin understood the movie to be an accurate representation of history) who cast aside his political power in favor of financing Richard Wagner and building increasingly extravagant castles. (Ultimately declared insane by the state legislature, the king was deposed only days before his dead body mysteriously turned up in a lake.)

Though Martin understood why the movie was not exactly acclaimed—even among Visconti admirers—for its long detours into melodramatic camp, he had always been hypnotized by the decadent beauty of the king’s crumbling empire, at least as it was rendered by the Italian director. Watching now, he was eerily reminded of the Twin Towers footage, except the film was less disturbing to the extent that it struck him as more a reflection of a universal condition than a window through which to observe its horrors. As the credits rolled over the final shot of the dead king sinking into the lake, his face illuminated by watery sunlight, Martin’s mind began to churn, as if he were just beginning to acknowledge the implications of everything that had happened on this seemingly endless, unforgettable day.

He thought about Ludwig’s mad willingness to do anything, even die, for his art, and recalled the famous photograph of Candy Darling—who along with Edie Sedgwick was his favorite Warhol “superstar”—the one taken in the hospital only weeks before her death from a form of leukemia caused by gender-reassignment hormones. In this photo, she was more beautiful and tragically glamorous than ever, the pallor of her skin luminescent against the cruel and sterile white of the sheets and the drooping roses. Martin had often considered her gaze along with the words she had written at the time: “Even with all my friends and my career on the upswing I feel too empty to go on in this unreal existence. I am just so bored by everything.” He had initially found these words tragic and callow, like those of an insolent teenager, until upon further reflection he remembered a scene in the film Dishonored, when Marlene Dietrich, distant and defiant, lifted her veil just prior to execution, and it occurred to him that this was the role Candy Darling had adopted for her entire life, and that her eyes were haunted by the same cerebral and pessimistic desire on display in Visconti’s film, to inhabit another time better than the one in which she was so sadly imprisoned. That Dietrich, like Garbo, died a recluse—and that these two women had most influenced Candy Darling could hardly be a coincidence. As Martin considered this now, immersed in the aftermath of both Ludwig and the New York City disaster footage, he understood better than ever the desire to escape and for a second, he, too, wanted to meet death head-on but in the least violent of ways; he wanted to withdraw, to upraise his existence, to remove himself as much as possible from the mindless cruelty of the present. He wondered if he would have any choice going forward but to resign himself to the past, which made even the prospect of love—which just a few hours earlier had felt relatively, albeit vaguely, enticing—seem hopeless.

Distracted by the rattle of the empty carton against the floor, Martin looked down to find Dante with his head buried in it, lapping up the last drips of the ice cream. “It’s pretty fucking good, isn’t it?” Martin said, unable to resist a wry smile, and as the words bounced back at him off the blank screen of the television, it occurred to him that maybe—just maybe—he was talking about his life, or at least its potential.

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