Blue: The Color of Desire
- by Patrick Linney

$9.00
ISBN 0971662320
available through Clean Sheets

Reviewed by Adrianna de la Rosa
(11/27/02)

Whore and monk, we sleep
under one roof together,
moon in a field of clover
        --- Basho

How many times have we needed someone to write us the "right fucking story?" Before the entrance into a relationship we are always hoping for this. He will really know me for the first time. She will be inside my head. She can understand my nine deepest darkest fantasies and do this eloquently. But does anyone ever take the time to really know anyone anymore in a digital world?

Or do we just fuck and dream and spin fantasies of what real connection might be like, while never feeling anything in the process over our Starbuck's coffee? We have endless technological devices to keep us separate from each other, keep us safe. Patrick Linney, aka "Patricio" to the readers of Clean Sheets, begs this question in his novella Blue: The Color of Desire.

Perhaps Patricio was searching for "Blue, his writer cunt" while legions of real women waxed rhapsodical over his prose at Clean Sheets for months. So much damn mystery. Who is this guy anyway? Perhaps Blue was a search on his part, and he thought if he put the prose out there, there might be an answer from his imaginary Blue. The woman he wanted to make real, make flesh from just a dream. Perhaps not -- the mystery remains. But the words were like bait -- crafted to entice, entrance, command, and draw her to him. Women he would never meet swooned and became doubleplusultra-wet and squirmy at the sound of his writing voice. (Check the comments!). What power! And yet perhaps it is all just abstraction. The craft of a masterly writer, distanced and afraid himself of what might be real in his own depths? In this sense, Blue could be an anonymous personal ad launched into the universe in the hope that there might be some chance, however slight, at real connection with someone. That she might be out there, some place in the wide blue flickering Web world.

But of course you have to read it to find out. The whole story. Because one of you might just be her. One of you might just find him, the teacher, the master. Because what he wants most is to be found, by you.

This master wants everything from Blue, and even more than that, because he wants to possess her. He wants her to have him engraved so deeply on her skin that she cannot ever forget him. He wants Blue to be lost to him forever, and maybe this is not really a story about bondage, unless it is a bondage of the heart. Hence the reference to the foxglove and delphinium-filled cottage he will share with her later. He wants her innocence, washed clean, clean, clean of everything else that has ever happened to the two of them. Because he wants to be washed as well.

Who is the master and who is the slave after all?

What is the basis for wanting one rather than another? For the palpable need to become part of that other? He's not the most handsome man she's ever known, yet she aches for that rub of his hand at his neck, for his profile to show, for the way he bends forward; for the something in him...

This is how we fall in love. Something happens in a series of small gestures. Like the crinkles forming at the edges of a smiling eye you learn to love by the repetition of this crinkling, the way it looks on a cherished face. Because it is always love we are after, no matter what. No matter what language we couch it in. Even though sometimes this looks like whips.

The whips are a metaphor for something later that will transpire. Patricio keeps trying to help Blue. Help her enlarge herself into someone sexual that can be beyond pain and suffering and shame. But he is trying to enlarge himself as well. He wants the animalprimalgoddess in Blue, and how many men would search for this and not get it? Not get to see it? Ever?

Legions. The trouble with writers like Patricio is that they know too damn much about the female sex, and since this is supposed to be a mystery... our mystery... men like this are just absolutely doubleplus dangerous. Especially when they can craft a line like this: "Something curves deep inside her, and it begins."

But of course you have to read it to find out. Read it for the poetry alone. Read it for the glimpse of Patricio's heart and soul, the glimpse he offers inside his head. And then find the master if he's yours. Don't be afraid.

I hope that Blue is found....and what do you want to bet is the first thing she changes about him when she finally arrives? Those socks!