Mature Themes by Andrew Durbin

Prism is itself an ocean of feeling. Its waves quiver under a moon the shape of Katy’s transformative, prismatic face ebbing in the dark, haloed in blue.
    Your ocean is flowing toward me, Katy, I thought, as I stood under the canopy of a palm tree at the empty shore, which wasn’t so much a palm as it was a pun on the fist unballed before a reader who began to trace its creases. He ran his fingers along the groove of my palm, searching the revelatory lines that have crossed one another to locate the coordinates of some future rapidly becoming present.
    I asked him what it meant, but he just shook his head.
    I looked at him and tried to understand what this might mean, but he didn’t seem to know. He sat at his desk and sighed, looked at his computer screen, and transferred information he located in several databases into a few Excel spreadsheets open on his desktop in preparation for an extended memo due at the end of the week. His chair squeaked and he wrote a Post-it note to remind himself to tell head of operations that he needs a new chair. He occasionally looked at the clock near his outgoing mailbox. As always, he felt “stretched thin.”
    He often wondered if his coworkers were as bored as he always was. He doesn’t have an office window to look out of but he frequently likes to pause in his day to imagine what is outside the building: the parking lot, the road that leads out of Virginia and back to D.C. He finds this life theoretically beautiful though in practice he could see himself doing other work. That other work remains unknown in its details to him but he thinks about what it could be fairly often. It would be something practical but beautiful.
    Whenever the song “Dark Horse” plays on his iPod shuffle, the reader thinks about suggesting that title as a name for a program the office—or rather, the complex of agencies collated into what he refers to as “the office”—is developing. The song, like the other songs on the album, reminds the reader of a time he had dinner with a high school girlfriend’s parents, the night of a significant local football game. Her father was an intolerant man who, after 9/11, found a vital resource for his hatred in the internet. Her father peddled in conspiracies related to the complicity of the Bush Administration in designing and executing the attacks, which he cryptically referred to as “the Opening.” He would often begin sentences: “Before the Opening” or “After the Opening.” The Opening, as he described it to the reader, was the event that both admitted the veracity of the lie and the falsity of the truth simultaneously; that is, the Opening articulated two points about reality, holographic in its lush, simulated surfaces: one, that the perceivable conditions of life in the United States were lies that covered up the generators of those conditions and, two, the lies pre empted what created them and so remain the primary “reality” (and not, as shadier conspiracies might have it, the reverse). He liked to say that facts were useless things. What matters is the dream that gives those facts a purpose, a life.
    After that dinner, the Opening became a frequent reference point for the reader as he left his hometown, attended Georgetown, and began to work in the DC metropolitan area. He often thought about its merits and debated it with himself privately. Soon the reader began to feel the Opening everywhere, at every instance, whether he was at work or at the gym or having a drink or listening to Prism , which he gradually discovered (as he discovered with many, many things) was based on this exact twinned point. Perry puts it more simply, the reader thinks, in arguing that the fantasy that renders the present experiential does not conceal a “deeper,” more “true” reality. Rather, it is fantasy that allows reality to spread.
    He leaned back in his chair. It squeaked under