Waiting For Leonard

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 II.

PART THREE:

Courtney and Love. I felt my heart thrash. So I turned my phone off and readjusted my weight on the couch. People say that our generation is some kind of an extension of social media, and vice versa, I started to think; that the toys we use to communicate with are extensions of us. They say we are a hybrid ecosystem, lost but connected in a vast wave that always makes me think of an ocean and how one little piece of that large connected body, which has traveled miles across the surface of our world, crashes heavily against the shore in a brief instant of selfness only to be re-absorbed into selflessness again.

Maybe it’s our age and interdependence, maybe it’s our class and our place in history, but for a moment I was aware of the fact that in the storm of incoming messages, I was disappearing and somehow at the same time also being exalted within the flow of their meaning. I felt this suddenly, maybe because I was sitting on a red couch in the Chelsea Hotel all by myself, hungry and flickering with electricity, it seemed, like I was a kind of light, actually alive with these phone voices I was carrying inside me as I waited for Leonard, whose absence too was making him larger, and this largeness was also a voice inside me.

I looked up at the man sitting in a blue chair along the opposite lobby wall. The humid grey air from the street had traveled through the windows and landed like a blanket over us, dulling the shadows we cast on the floor. He had pressed pants and loafers on and a pink shirt with a small stain near the collar and a slogan that read Cats Rule the Night. His hair was shoulder length and slicked back in that advertising executive way, which made only the palest outline in the blue arm of the chair where on a brighter day his shadow would have been. I wondered if he had heard Courtney’s confessional, her portrait of her famous dead husband, which felt so right hanging in the air of the Chelsea Hotel with the ghosts of so many other dead famous people. I met the man’s eyes and the way he gazed over me, mildly intrigued, irritatingly bewildered, it was as if he saw me as a...