During the height of summer, aided by gin martinis and Indonesian cigarettes, Believer contributor Caia Hagel arranged this fictional interview with Leonard Cohen. Even when imaginary, Cohen is a slippery subject, and what follows is entirely untrue. Catch up with Part I, Part III.

PART TWO: 

I was tempted to order tea and something to eat. But Simeon, James II’s best friend, who is very tall and has long, horse-like hair and is totally obsessed with Virgins, found out that I was waiting for Leonard. He was calling me going I heard you’re half naked at the Chelsea Hotel waiting for Leonard. Make sure you ask him about Virgins, Leonard knows so much about Virgins, Simeon was saying. He writes and dreams about them, even fictive ones, wanting to touch the untainted, longing for the purity of unruinedness. I was like, Simeon, you are such a nerd, and he was like, Whatever, I am totally into worshiping Virgins too. Virginity is like, the rarest thing, and the most precious thing, it’s like a Garden of Eden, it’s like the thing that gets lost and we can never find it again, no matter how hard we try, and it doesn’t even apply just to people and their hymens, it applies to everything, like a Virgin Island where we know it’s there but nobody can find the entry, or like a Virgin Mind that is clean and nobody can break through to it, or like a Virgin Nation that has unblemished values until a dictator comes along and rapes it all.

Maybe you should ask Leonard about Germans too, Simeon went on. He loves war you know, listen to this, he said War is wonderful, it’s one of the few times people can act their best, every single gesture is precise, nobody goofs off, there are opportunities to feel things, it’s like he’s the only one left in the first world who truly sees the romance of the soldier, and he’s Jewish, remember I’m the little Jew who wrote the Bible from that song “The Future” that we used to blast in our Jacuzzi days, where you would film us because you were too underage to even get in the water and where he also says Shove it up the hole in your culture? It’s kind of unexpected and distinguished to be a Jew and to love the Germans in our post-apocalyptic era, said Simeon. I studied A History of German Literature, he continued, and all the good ones are crazy, and they share the same interests as the Jewish interests, like high culture, and terrifying art, and mysticism,...