Also known as: ElEa, the Phi Being, Being 1.618, Bill Kaulitz (my mistake, the first of many)
Occupation: Walked out of Medicine for the Arts University. Designs tattoos, and people.
First appears: Chapter 001
Status: Came back. I am still checking.
Usually seen with: Seven teenagers in black who move through a room like a shoal of herring.
Her philosophy of life, as far as I could reconstruct it
Dia did not believe in explanations; she believed in proportions. A face, a sentence, a man: everything was either in the right ratio or a draft. She could not get drunk, so she got everything else: needles, drum and bass, other people’s secrets. Drawing was the only activity capable of making her genuinely still. I suspect it was also the only one in which she told the truth.
What I think she thinks of me
Dia read me in four minutes, sitting astride me, using me as a polygraph: my parents, the wall, Sylvia Plath, my small appointments with death. She seemed mildly disappointed by how little time it took. I took this as proof that I was interesting. Three weeks after she finished my tattoo, she was gone. For years I kept two explanations: either she had discovered that I loved her, or the experiment was over. Both made me important. She would find that amusing.
What I think of her
The night we met I told her she was the golden ratio made flesh: not merely beautiful, but beautiful with the terrible precision of something that ought to exist only in mathematics. I was twenty-one, spectacularly high and pleased with my own precision. She turned to her herring and asked, laughing, “I like him. Can I keep him?” Nobody asked me. I didn’t object. She wore a private Studio Ghibli retrospective on her skin, in black and grey, and drank black absinthe for the smell, because she could not get drunk. I considered that an intolerable advantage. Twenty years later she came back blonde, without a single tattoo, in green trainers: the same impossible proportions, rendered in a banal font. I have been revising everything I knew about her ever since. The results remain inconclusive.
The most interesting things she said, which I never answered
“You know that the cosmos is a trope and that human beings are little more than a restlessness of style.”
“It isn’t poetry, is it? It’s poetic thinking.”
“This is how I mark my territory. Some people use branding irons. I prefer needles. They’re more intimate.”
“You are the only man who has managed to take me by surprise.”
“Blond is the simplest way of telling people about the psychological problems you’ve had throughout your life.”
Andrei’s footnote: She drew everything in fineliner. Including me.
