Arc d'X

21

MONA SAYS, OOOH HE shoots me up inside. Ohhhhh. It’s not so bad when it’s only a feeling like opium, something I can think about when I have nothing to think about. In the dark he isn’t there at all, and one night when he says the name of the other woman it means I’m not there either. He slips out and sleeps, I push him away. I get up and go to eat at the place in the south Arbo, I hear him splash inside. When I come back from work I think maybe he’ll be gone. One morning when I wake he’s gone but I go to work and come back and he’s back. I’m back, he says. I’m back for good. He tears my clothes. He wants to tear everything, he does it to me fast. After that he looks at the window and smiles. “Only the night now,” he says to the window, smiling, “nothing but night,” and I’m looking up at the window and see the morning light come in, shine on his smile. But he just says over and over, “Only the night. Damn the light.”

I almost never go outside but sometimes when I do the blue points of the city make me think of when I was a little girl growing up in the Ice, the chimneys of my village the way they line the road coming into town. The smoke of the chimneys the way it rises in the sky like the Vog of the mountain like the smoke of the sea and I’d ride with my father in the wagon down the road of our village and the chimneys line the road like tombs, like the empty trees. And the smoke of the chimneys rises and hangs over the road like an archway. And my father sits nearer to me on the wagon seat to keep me warm, he says, he moves his body next to mine to keep me warm. He comes at night to keep me warm. I hear him in the night in the next room keeping my little brother warm. I hear my little brother’s cries and I think, Please don’t stop, keep my little brother warm all night. Because when he’s finished with my little brother he’ll come for me: so don’t stop. The louder little brother cries the happier I am. My brother is eight. Mother sleeps in the other room across the hall from mine but I know she doesn’t really sleep, I know she lies in bed saying, Please don’t stop keeping my children warm. Please don’t stop because when he’s finished he’ll come for me, my mother thinks, lying in the bed across the hall. One night I take what I can carry and walk down the road beneath the long arch of smoke until I’m far enough away that I won’t have to pray anymore that the cries of my brother never stop.

I know about the stone. I know how Wade stole it from the cabinet, in its place is a small wooden woman’s head. Someone once told me these things are, what, forbidden …? None of this matters to me. Someone once told me that I’m, what, attracted? to these things because they’re forbidden, but forbidden means nothing to me, so what’s to attract. The stone was more real than memory or love. I could put it between my legs and feel it there. I could push it into me a little bit and it hurt and it was a hurt I believed, not the hurt of the heart or head which aren’t real. But after the morning when I found the stone gone he came back and fucked me and afterward when he slept I found the stone hidden in the corner of the flat behind his clothes. I left it there until later when the thing happened with the other man, later when I wasn’t so sure about the hurt of the heart. Later when, after Wade had been here a long time, I saw the other man who came to Fleurs d’X with the glasses that made his eyes big, who smiled sadly and was lost in the hurt of his heart. One night he dropped his glasses and I was on the floor in the dark helping him to look, and the way he looked at me when he put them on I knew at that moment he was ridiculous like all the others. I laughed. I laughed at how ridiculous and sad he was. They’re so easy to forget, the men. It’s the best thing about them, the way they’re so easy to forget, the way they’re never really there at all. But his sadness is in my head now and I can’t forget it, his sad smile makes me feel what I don’t believe. And now I wait for him night after night to come. I wait for him to give up what all the men give up. They think it’s about them, the way I dance, but it isn’t about them, it’s about the way they’re nothing, and the man with the glasses is only another fool, but his foolishness is in my head and heart and I don’t know why, and then one night Wade comes to the club when the one with the glasses is there too. After a while I know Wade’s watching him. After a while I know he’s watching me watch him, and he doesn’t like it.

I liked it better the way things were before. I liked it better when the feeling of a stone between my legs was more real than memory or love. One night I come home from work and open the door and step in and find the floor beneath my feet gone. I look up and the ceiling is gone. I look around and the walls are gone, far away I can see into the other rooms and halls and doors. Wade is there naked waiting for me like always, like always he has that look on his face. His thing is hard. We’re there hanging in the middle of nothing, everything’s vanished. I scream and he nods. I scream again and he keeps nodding.