Our dynamic was precarious. We were both nervy and curious for different but very similar reasons. It was almost karmic. Ego wrapped around our necks till we were choking on our own misgivings in the vague mood of a bar. It was edgy, this in-between thing we had going- two lone cacti sucking earthwater and spitting it out, sometimes at each other and sometimes at the poor desert moon that watched us shrivel in its light.

This is how we met. It was late night on Dawson Street. We had just been up at Reds Gallery to see Christine Loh’s Koi Fish and Floral paintings that were quite beautiful, as was she in her backless maxi. I was there with a girlfriend, who was two glasses of red behind me and it showed. I was moving my arms in grand sweeps, pink with anecdotes about the artworld in Mumbai and they were eating it up- Tony Strickland and Joe and all the Irishmen in their tophats and quips about Raja Ravi Verma. Gushing and flushing and blushing till closing.

Downstairs, on the street, Helio was chatting to us about his photographs and BDSM- something about empathy and nature- when a man on a bicycle pulled up to the curb. He seemed amused at the sight, at the smell of merlot on our breath as we greeted him, enthused and wide eyed- this tall man with his brown leather shoes and his grey hairline and Loden coat on a bicycle.

We shook hands. Eugene. Shanaia. All else disappeared.

There was something savage about our introduction. He looked at me with the eyes of a kite and I played my part, feathery and coy the way older men like to be humoured. He had me locked in and answering his silly little questions, sick desperation leaking onto the pavement, till a pool of vanity splashed onto my boots as a garbage truck drove by.

We met again weeks later. On purpose this time. Camden St. at an in-between spot, a short walk from Trinity and his art studio in Mountjoy. Table by the staircase where he sat opposite me- black linen shirt, pressed in all places except for his sleeves which were long and unbuttoned. There was a candle between us and the walls were maroon, the night cold, the music jazzy.

We were inches apart, the hard part of his calf grazing mine when he paused between stories. He told me about this movement retreat he had been to a week prior. The participants were told to pace around an empty room and pause to mirror a specific identity. Eugene’s mother was a black woman in a frayed poncho. He watched her move to the music- carefree and untethered, like a young girl picking strawberries in the spring. Eugene’s father was a short woman with a bob and purple socks.

‘Now Eugene, say something to your father’

‘Errrr you’re a pussy’

The bob parted to reveal smile lines and a little nose.

‘I wish you hadn’t killed yourself’

The players cried and held each other- fatherless, motherless chicks in a delicate nest of ideas. Eugene’s nest was a tawny mess, all six of his affairs threatening to knock it over until it fell- flat and disfigured- at Electric Picnic when he was on ecstasy taking photographs of his fourth illicit lover near the big stage.

They were seemingly alone in a house of mirrors and his camera, in the deep red of the tent, got her fringe and the white glint of her glasses as she held her skirt to the light, catching odd reflections in its silk pleats till the E brought putrid guilt to the edge of his throat and his wife caught the vomit in her palms like maybe when their daughters were little and sick from all the sugar they had after dinner. Eugene was a child, her child, in this maze of the uncanny and there was nothing she could do about it.

He was at the festival with his crew from Uganda. Equatorial Africa, where he had lived many years and in that time, taught seven black boys how to breakdance. I saw a video once of him bending his white M&S knees to some trappy music at his studio, his photographs hanging on the walls around him, ‘Shadows in the Valley’ like he was some god or Dick from that Chris Kraus show, dancing in the centre of his mind as if the discomfort of its char, coal, intimate blackness could never threaten his ego.

‘So are you seeing anyone?’

I wasn’t. But I was curious to know if it would bother him. So I lied and he shifted awkwardly in his seat and made a joke about polyamory. I liked watching him squirm- something about a broad-backed man hot and bothered by the attention I was getting elsewhere. From women in particular. Perhaps all the life he had lived made it easy to be jealous of a woman. Her grit, wit, wickedness, the way she knows herself and the body and its lips, and the pain she can bear from the inside out. He asked how many. I said three. It was like a game and he seemed delighted to be losing. Excited by this new power I had over him.

‘By the way, African men have multiple wives.’

Then he talked about his daughters. One likes jazz and the other refuses to speak to him after the truth broke her heart into little pieces of lead that he sometimes uses to sketch out scenes from his old life. With the house that he built and the married sex and the married friends having married sex. But he tells me, between bite-sized tapas (and flirting with the waitress), that there was always something rancid burning under the surface.

One bottle of wine and three small plates later, we are walking along the Grand Canal. He stops to ask a stranger for a rollie and makes a funny joke as barter. Skinny rain falls onto my lashes and the wind is blowing hard. We kiss under the willow trees, his hands are cold against my waist, tracing my breasts, anticipating an invitation. But I’m not quite ready. I make something up, say ‘I don’t have sex with strangers’ and he replies, ‘I was making love to you the first time we spoke’.

Anyway, he’s nice enough about it and waits with me, offering another anecdote about the time he swam in the canal on new year’s eve, a day before they found a woman’s body at the muddy bottom. I thought about it the whole taxi ride home, his image murky in the rearview as I drove away.

The first time we slept together was at a row house under construction. Him and Pedro were flipping it for an old friend and I was interested in spending a night in this shell of a home with a man who resembled its structure. The sex began much earlier that evening. My photographs were up at the Iova Winter Show and he was there. Everyone at Shaku Yard had seen his film. We walked along the wall and I could tell he wasn’t very impressed by my pictures but I didn’t mind because neither was I. We smoked many cigarettes, flitting from one pretense to another with alarming ease. I could tell we were quite similar. That this was foreplay. That something quite important was about to happen that night.

The house was bigger than he let on. The electricity wasn't up yet so he led with a head torch- his slender shadow ducking under stray wires till the corridor led to a kitchen, or what was to be a kitchen, past the promise of a burning fire and a beige couch and a real family. He offered me some tea and when I refused, he brought out a bottle of tequila. I said no thank you, still mildly cautious as I took in the scene.

There was white tarp on most things, the floor was sawdusty and the coatroom in particular was really starting to freak me out. I thought I should tell him, perhaps in some ways hoping that if he was in fact planning to chop me up, my humour might save me. Maybe it did because he laughed quite hard and said he found it amusing that I was honestly afraid he would hide my head in its dark corner.

We were soon in what was once a balcony. It was a small room and in the corner, a single mattress. By its side, a portable lantern projected its light onto a small pile of books. ‘House of Holes’ by Nicholson Baker. On the cover, a woman had her legs spread open and a circus tent in place of her vagina. I told him to read me a page. We sat side by side, his navy bedding the only thing between our bodies and the wooden floor. Outside, the night was bright and from the large window, a thick stream of moon mixed with the golden hole in the floor and we looked at each other as if under the stars in the woods somewhere quiet.

“She pulled him up to her clitty and he circled it. 'Oh that's nice,' she said." It then makes an O with its fingers whereupon Shandee dematerialises, flows through the circle and finds herself outside the eponymous House of Holes; a kind of wet dream Club Med on a lake, complete with Masturboats and a Cock Ness Monster, owned by big-bosomed Lila. Several other Shandee-like men and women…find themselves at the House of Holes. There, they avail themselves of an "ass-squeezer's licence", or have their own rear end temporarily enlarged, or video themselves masturbating and then watch other people masturbating to the videos, or call down to room service with demands along the lines of: "I want ball loads of hot manslurp landing on all my soft parts. This is an emergency top-level request for dick."

I laughed and then Eugene laughed after me, pleased that I had such a sense of humour. Cool girl humour. Young. Witty. Dark enough to give it back to him but tender to the touch. Brown girl humour. Brash. Bitty. A cool refreshment in the sweltering heat of his life. His taxes and mortgage and…

all the films he wasn’t making.

Soon enough, he was taking off my coat but I was so cold and really wanted to keep my thermals on. He was hot and convincing though, big hands used from all the sawing, drilling, scaffolding and they were all over me and it felt good or thrilling, the idea of reviewing this night in retrospect. I was writing his lips on my skin before they knew where to kiss me. It was so intense- his tongue in the sense of his language- so sure of itself. I was hesitant. ‘Chill the fuck out’ he said into my ear to which usually I’d say something like ‘How about I get the fuck out before you tell me what to do again’ but instead, I chilled the fuck out and let him have me.

This was the nature of our dynamic- Eugene as teacher and I, a curious student until at dinner one evening, a couple weeks later, eating avocado straight from the peel (you cut it in two halves, pool a dressing of olive oil and garlic into both centres and finally some lemon and salt), I realised that he was afraid of me.

It was funny because he had brought over a bottle of red and told me to pop the cork myself, learn self defence, peel the onion. But across from me, in my student kitchen, under the hanging lights that flickered momentarily, I could see it in his eyes. The fear, perhaps of my youth, the reckless heap of words I sometimes threw at him- about relationships and people or the future of our affair.

Soon we’re in my bed on Cork St. where we lounge naked in our thoughts and talk about the orgasm.

‘I know you haven’t finished yet’

‘Well I’m not going to beg’

‘It feels better when you share it. You take when you finish but the second you start to give, it’s explosive.’

‘Maybe next time, yeah?’

I roll over but he’s only getting started.

‘There’s so much of that in the Kama Sutra, I’m surprised you’re not into it’

‘I don’t think it’s that deep Eugene. Sometimes I just like to orgasm or take or whatever the fuck.’

‘But it is that deep. It’s like what Thich Nhat Hanh says about running. He says learn how to stop running, that many of us have been running all our lives.’

Eugene excuses himself and I put some clothes on. When he emerges from the bathroom, his face is contorted, distraught. ‘I look so old’. The lighting in my bathroom is unforgiving. The mirror is long and wide. It catches the folds, the wrinkles, the dead cells and the dirt. And there I am, in my F1 tee and my pinstriped boxers, hunched over an old MacBook, with something sweet and sickly playing on my speakers. 24 and ripe. Stupid. And there he is, standing over me, his swimmer shoulders dropping to his knees and his hair all grey. Shrinking before me to a child and I, now his mother.

It’s like Hélène Chatelain in ‘La Jetée’ when for a brief moment, the images move and she wakes from her sleep. The blink. Her eyes flicker open and the film breaks (a beat) to reveal life for a couple of seconds before returning to the image. And the next. And the next.

Eugene’s breath is caught in his throat till I nurse him into ease. He puts a pair of my underwear on his head and walks about, ‘look at my hat! Look at my hat!’ and in that frenzy, he knocks into my bed frame. The shelf above it is crowded with paperbacks, bottles of merlot, Gerard Byrne’s Charcoalogy catalogue, fake flowers and a white projector.

His long arm that’s used to holding power tools swings at the shelf and down comes the projector. Thump. ‘Ouch!’. A single line across his forehead. And blood begins to fall from its split. The dream machine is on the floor by his feet- totally intact while little drops of scarlet trail back to the bathroom where he’s trying to stop the bleeding. In a panic, I run to the kitchen, grab a tray of ice and hold it to his forehead. Someone must have filled it up quite recently because soon enough, his whole head is wet with ice water and the musky smell of chicken fat. The scene is slapstick. Not so much to Eugene though, who is beside me holding his breath.

That night, we fall asleep to John Coltrane’s ‘Ballads’ with the heater on full blast. In this liminal space. Like his studio. Or King Skewer in North City. The white bones of a house. A home. On Facetime when he’s at his mother’s estate up in Glendalough where he sleeps in his childhood bedroom. In the street by the cathedral, cobblestones wet beneath our dizzy figures. Or at the IFI in row E, Payal Kapadia’s ‘All We Imagine as Light’ on the big screen and I’m sobbing with nostalgia and he’s looking at me. Wondering where I am. And if I’ll ever return.

I think of getting him a Christmas tree. For the corner across his mattress. One of those tins from Flying Tiger that takes six weeks to grow. The year would be 2025. I’d be back in Mumbai, maybe writing for a journal about our acquaintance and the weeks we spent under the Irish sky.

Or maybe I’d forget about it and him and write about something that matters like the Indian rupee or the floods or 1946- the middle of summer. Long and hard and unforgiving. Brow skin shimmering as it worked- toiling, digging, weaving, grinding. The stillness heavy and the tax unforgiving. Brown bison in the street, coats sheening under the sun.

And maybe he’ll make the movie, I’ll melt down into the roll. When the images stop rolling and the scene breaks and Chris Marker’s genius is a resounding desert. Where the cacti thirst. The blink is a farce and the space is liminal. Chimeric. Fiction.