The Small Backs of Children

The Widow’s Watch

The widow hears the girl make noises in her sleep. One night, when she hears the girl moaning, she pulls a blanket around her own shoulders and pads her way to the girl’s bed to rub her back, to take her from nightmare to otherwhere, but when she arrives at the body of the girl she realizes she is not moaning.

She is laughing.

Another night, the widow is again pulled from sleep by the sound of the girl — she is walking toward the front door. Is she sleepwalking? The widow believes it: Whatever this girl has been through, it must have lodged in her subconscious forever. Likely this girl will be haunted the rest of her life. But again, when she reaches the girl, when she extends her arm out to wake her or stop her from leaving the house, she sees that the girl is not opening the door.

She is instead placing her cheek against it. She is kissing the door. She is smiling. Then the girl curls up on the floor at the base of the door and sleeps deeper.

Then there is the night the widow hears singing. Is it singing? Again she rises from her bed and moves toward the girl’s bed, but the girl is not there. The widow moves silently toward the front door, but the girl is not there either. The widow’s heart makes a small tightening fist in her chest. But then she looks toward the kitchen window and there the girl stands, looking up and out, the moon lighting up her face. Eased by the sight of her, the widow listens.

The girl is not singing. In her hands is a tiny brown owl. The owl chirps and trills in small rhythms between the girl’s palms.

The Photographer

The night the photographer won the prize, she called the writer. From the bar where her colleagues took her to celebrate. A very prestigious bar in the country of the war zone, in a city big enough to be untouched by the violence, at least not visibly. One of those cities of money and bars and galleries and governments and five-star hotels, all over the world, that sit next to human atrocity. Later, she would send each of their friends their own framed print of the black-and-white photo. But that night the writer was the only person she wanted to tell. In a phone booth inside the bar. A phone booth with strange faux gold paneling all over the door and walls. A little golden box. And she was drunk as a monkey. Little bleating voice of an operator. Little buzzings and ringings. Crackling. Then, hello from America, voice mail.

Later, they would argue, the photographer and the writer, about the girl in the photo. What about her? the writer demanded. What became of her? How could you leave her to fate? The words would sting the photographer’s eyes and throat.

But in that booth, in that smoke-filled, not-American, crowded bar, she’d hit what was supposed to be the zenith of her career, and she felt. . more empty than a shell casing. Having reached the only voice in the universe she ever loved — even just her voice-mail recording — all she could think was, What a voice. Even knowing there was no category for her love, or might never be back home in America, land of coupling, land of sanctioned marriage and two-person twined knots, land of tireless good-citizen living, land of the happy family, land of the free and the brave and the locked imagination, land of ignorant homeowner masses lined up in twos. Why can’t I just be gay, her head went, or why can’t we just live with the people we love and not worry about the sex, or why is sex such a big deal when it’s so cluster-fucked anyway, her head tumbling thoughts until she was cross-eyed.

“I’m sorry,” she said into the phone, and rang off.

As she moved back to her table of colleagues she thought, They will give her this. They will allow her this one night to act out. But tomorrow she will need the pumps and the black skirt and a crisp button-down white shirt, French or Italian, and her vinyl black hair captured in a tight ponytail. Because The New Yorker will be interviewing her by phone tomorrow. Because Vanity Fair will. All because of this award. The award.

I don’t feel anything.

Remember what Virginia Woolf said: Give back the awards, should you be cleverly tricked into believing they mean something. Do not forget that the door you are being ushered through has a false reality on the other side. Do not forget that the door is opening only on someone else’s terms, someone else’s definition of open.

Then someone pulled her cheek and the whole table seemed to burst into whooping laughter, so she released her mind, these endless thoughts, and slid back into the booth.

This drunk successful woman making her choices.

She wanted to take her clothes off. She wanted to start a revolution. She wanted to give the prize back. Instead, she wiped her mouth to the recognition and celebration and alcohol, and with a great, swollen swagger she raised her glass and offered a wrong-mouthed toast:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled mazzes. . yearning to breathe free,

The wrejjed refffff. . use of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tozzedome,

I lift my lamp be(burp)zide the golden door.

There she was, a towering woman with people looking up at her, toasting her, a woman who had peed upright, a woman falling back into applause and laughter and adulation and dessert. Would it end there? Or would her momentum do what it does with drunk successful women, catapult her toward some man who would come inside her, an American six-footer maybe, between her legs as if her legs were meant for that opening up, her pussy meant for that entering, and all night inside her would he maybe say, You are so great, oh baby, god baby, you are greatness itself, yeah baby, let me give it to you, and would he? Give it to her? As if that’s what she was made for, as if her body itself was brought to full height by the sexed-up flattery and hard prize of an American man?

Keep drinking.

The Poet

The poet is emerging from a dream. Her head on her desk, her eyes catching glimpses of things in retinal flashes, the crouch of unwritten words in her fingers.

She sees the world on its side, blurry and colored like waking is. She sees what must be the hairs of her own arm foresting up in front of her. She takes a deep breath, holds it, squints; the ordinary objects of the room keep their secrets a few seconds longer. She wets her lips with her tongue, which pulls her fully from sleep and activates the nerve-twine and vertebrae of her neck. She muscles up her biceps and pop she’s awake.

She is in Prague. Her poet self brought her here. Prague: the way history stays alive in some cities: Art. Architecture. Absinthe. Sunflowers. Roads made from stones. She gazes out the frame of her window, sees the steeple of an eight-hundred-year-old church, mouths the word psalm. Pages of her own work rest under her arms, on the table, in view, urgent. She fingers through them. The sound of the paper is something like petrified wings.

She is in Prague working with another, more famous poet. In some older world, time, place, this would mean apprenticeship, would fall into an order, well placed. She has left America to position herself in a line with Eastern Europe, amid others trying to revive the buzz of history. World wars and hidden jars of honey. Night skies filled with sirens or people trying not to let their breathing sound. Sex under cover of bridges. The voices of writers exiled and humming like electricity.

But she stops being nostalgic. She knows she lives in this world, not some other, no matter how old and beautiful European cities are. She’s an American poet in Prague.

She can afford to be. Capitalist pig.

She looks at the pieces of paper strewn around her: lines, scribbles, some words and pages barely decipherable. She picks up a half-eaten sandwich. Fuck it. She reaches over and pours an ounce of absinthe into a Pontarlier reservoir glass. The bulbous bottom swells with wet. Then she lays the flat, silver, perforated spoon across the rim and places a single cube of sugar on its face. She drips ice-cold purified water over the sugar until the color rises, until the gradual louche.

She lights a fire in the little room, sits in a hundred-year-old velvet chair. The heat brings on a dreamy glow of amber light. She drinks. Her hand moves to her other mouth, beginning the rhythmic throb. Because there is this: she’d rather live in the dreamy blur of everything she knows is dead than face the stark realism of an ordinary hand at the turn of this stupid-ass century. What a dull turning it’s turning into.

With her want she makes a decision: tonight she will abandon the prestigious workshops and seek out live porn. It is easy to make a clean exit when you are unburdened by relationships.

In the not-American night she is partly her poet self and partly her id. She passes a man near a bar who says something ludicrous to her. She doesn’t respond. Most of the time she’s either in her mind or in her body — thinking or acting. She doesn’t talk much. Never has.

She is aware of three things: the bruise-black effect of the night in the corridors of this city; her feet and their syncopated physicality; and the street itself.

A pounding between her legs.

She drains a flask from the inside pocket of a black leather jacket. She has been given the address to a place where a woman might mouth the mouths of other women.

What she wants first is to watch. To watch two women, not American, bring themselves to the brink of animal. The cum, the piss, the shit. Blood and sweat and mouths and salt. Skin reddened or scraped or bleeding or bitten or bruised. Shoved.

That violence.

Then she wants to dominate the scene.

If the scene fails, the writing will.

Of course she finds what she wants.

She purchases what she wants, gives herself exactly what she wants. She gives it and gives it until the having of it becomes the word mine, and beyond that even, until her thinking and her physical responses obliterate each other.

The poet watches from a velvet chair. A Moroccan, her skin black as oil, is fisting a Pole. The Pole is blindfolded, and her arms are bound to her sides with heavy white hang-yourself rope. She is on the marble floor of a large, high-ceilinged flat. Her legs are spread so wide she looks as if she might dislocate at the hips.

The Moroccan’s ass is high up in the air and her pussy and asshole are alive, opening and closing alongside her labor. She works hard on the Pole, her blue-black arm disappearing into the white.

Make her red and swollen, the poet says. She sits with her legs crossed, breathing calmly, her hands clasped beneath her chin. A delicate glass of absinthe on the table next to her.

The fisting of the Pole extends over time in waves.

When the poet is satisfied at the raw cleft of the Pole, she instructs the Moroccan to stop. The Pole’s breathing heaves; spit slides from her parted lips. Red blotches bloom on her white skin, randomly, the colors of the Polish flag. Her lips more than swollen.

The poet carefully opens a prepared towel, revealing a row of syringes with fingertip-size blue caps. She sits back down, tells the Pole to keep her legs spread. Don’t move. If you move or make a sound, it will be the death of you. Then, after a pause: Go on, then.

The Moroccan takes one needle and removes the blue cap. She crouches over the Pole with the intensity and concentration of a doctor. The Moroccan’s biceps flex as she moves in. She pierces the Pole’s inner thigh, close to her pussy, in a place where blue veins river-shudder beneath the infant-thin skin. Down first, pressing her finger at the skin firmly, then up, making a stitch. The Pole’s skin quivers but she does as she is told, does not move her body. She swallows a moan. The Moroccan caps the little needle and chooses another.

A small dot or two of blood emerges like the red head of a pin on a world map.

And again.

With each needle the Pole’s breathing deepens and heavies.

Sweat forms quickly on her upper lip, her cheeks, her stomach, her inner thighs.

The poet almost feels the Pole’s increasing light-headedness. The dizzy rise from pain to the rush of endorphins, the delirium at the top, the uncanny wish for more, even as a blackout seems imminent.

Twenty little needles up one thigh, twenty little needles down the other, blue caps creating railroads across the territory of a woman’s body.

The Pole’s toes shake like someone hanged.

The Pole clenches her teeth now and again.

Drools.

Still, she makes no sound.

Her hair flowing out from her head like a sunflower.

Her beating heart, to the dictatorial eye of the poet, is as stunning as a Warsaw uprising. How glorious the nearly silent criminal adventure.

Later, after each needle is removed, after the Pole is carefully wiped with antiseptic and given water and a loving warm hand bath by the naked poet and the Moroccan, after she is double body-cradled and sung to and rocked, all three women fuck the night into dawn, trading powers and alliances, surrendering or annihilating without attention to origin or plan. There is blood from more than one body. Mouths attack and retreat. Bruises rise like bomb blasts. Hands and fingers disappear into tunnels and caves. There is piss and cum and tears. Smears of shit make new symbols on the sheets. The sounds coming from the room would be intolerable to anyone on the outside, were it not for the fact that the lodgings are bought and paid for.

Then, after, she sleeps like a baby, heaped there with them on a bed made from women without rules.

She wakes with her face nearly smothered between two swollen breasts — Polish, whiter than white. The other body spoons her from behind — African Moroccan, so black it is blue. She is between nations. The salt and stick of cum between her legs smears across her thighs and ass and on her cheek and shoulders. A streak of blood near her mouth, the taste of metal. The scent of the inside of women is pungent and loud even inside her breathing. She licks her teeth and opens her mouth as if to speak, but she is not speaking.

It is the silence before the line.

Briefly she wants to linger there. Maybe she wants to die there. Then not. She gets out of bed, stumbling like a drunk morning-after man. She looks and looks and finds nothing, no pen, no pencil. Where the fuck is anything? Where the fuck is she? Right. Not her own room.

A purse on the floor.

She rummages through it. Women shit. Kohl eyeliners — penlike. Paper? Nothing nothing nothing. She scans the room in that way that eyes work in the early morning, meaning not much, malfunctioning lenses.

Pillowcase.

And thus she begins, the first line already bursting toward rupture in her brain, what other people would call a hangover or the cusp of a migraine. She nearly barfs before she can get it down:

This impression I could ravish us/this blood-bodied pang

Her phone rings. She holds it to her ear.

The difference between a sentence and a line.

The writer has been hospitalized again, says the voice. She has stopped eating, speaking, everyone has gathered there at the hospital. Won’t she, please, come?

History and time open like a mouth, inside which pulses the small pang of an ordinary woman.

The Playwright

Why is everything in hospitals the color of mud or mold? The playwright stops typing for a second and stares at his hands on his laptop. He can’t believe he’s already writing this. Already twisting it into art. Cannibal. He feels a pang of guilt. You’re in a hospital. Your poor sister is dying. But even as his heart is beating him up in his chest, he can’t not do it. He can’t. He looks up at the strange and sporadic rivulet of people coming by to see his sister: former students, acquaintances, colleagues, fans of her books. It’s a pitch-perfect humanity parade. If he doesn’t get it down right now, it will blur and hum away like a train.

She’d be on his side. Wouldn’t she?

Then again, she’s dying. That’s what they’re all so somber about. When they spot him in that Naugahyde chair, hunched over a laptop, they must think he’s odd. But there is a profound sibling secret, like a spider’s thread, from his body to hers: No one knows more about the death in life and life in death than he and his sister. Their family a war zone. He breathes the artificial air. God, this place smells like someone shit antiseptic.

When they were children, he used to make his sister play Romeo and Juliet with him. Love scenes and death scenes from the play, which he’d been assigned in school. Though she was only six at the time, and he fifteen, he reconfigured his sister into a Romeo. Green leotard tights and a black down ski vest. He even cut her hair in what he considered an Elizabethan style, much to his mother’s dismay, and talked her into a small codpiece he’d made from a sock. He taught her many of Romeo’s lines to Juliet—let lips do what hands do — wherefore art thou—kid sisters were like chimps, you could get them to mimic anything. Her adoration knew no bounds. He’d stand at the top of the stairs, his sister at the bottom, all her longing in words and body reaching upward to him.

She was good.

Although no one, in any production he’d seen since — in Central Park, London, L.A., Venice — had been a finer, more beautiful, bath-towel-for-hair-hanging-past-his-ass Juliet than he’d been, in his mother’s silk robe.

But during one of their private performances, when he was sixteen and she was seven, his sister did the unthinkable: she improvised a line. Pity the small backs of children, he heard her saying. They carry death for us the second they are born. They gazed at each other with a heavy stillness, then, his Juliet at the top of the carpeted stairs, her Romeo holding his hand out and up toward her, like faith.

“That’s not your line,” he said.

“But it is,” she’d said. “My line.” And she’d grabbed at her codpiece and thrown it to the shag carpet. It was their last performance together. Something was shifting, he remembers thinking. She was acting more like Hamlet than Romeo.

He can see her clearly now, in his mind’s eye. Was she a writer even then, his sister? At six, seven years old? Some strange prodigy primate taking form underneath him?

Sometimes it feels as if he can’t exit the family drama he left when he was sixteen. Or thought he left.

His skin itches. Doesn’t it? He scratches his own wrists three times. Six. Nine. He knows exactly what the itching is. He feels all wrong, away from the calm and the cedar-soap smell of his lover’s skin, the ground wire of his voice. He can feel his own internal organs lurching, especially his lungs and heart and possibly his prostate. Can one feel one’s prostate? He takes a deep breath. Holds it for three seconds. Blows it back out, pacing his breathing. He does it three times. He hears his lover’s voice: You need to self-soothe. Self-soothe! Self-soothe.

He closes his eyes. He sees his lover’s body in the dark of their penthouse bedroom. New York City night light — the moon, the windowed eyes of adjacent buildings, neon signs and street traffic glow — illuminates the terrain of his lover’s body: the top of a shoulder, the hill of a hip, his hair like a forest of wood shavings. He can smell the skin of his lover. He breathes him. Cedar-scented soap cedar-scented soap cedar-scented soap.

The only calm he has ever known has come from this: a man loving a man in the face of this city, in a room lit by night and skin. Why can’t he always feel like this? He grinds his teeth exactly three times. Every other moment of his life, his ordinary life, ordinary days and hours and weeks and the ever-excruciating ticking and grating of time and tasks and human pretenses, feels to him like a series of chops. Like a carrot cut quickly on a wooden block. He hears the chop chop chop in threes. He doesn’t want to leave this room. He doesn’t want to feel anything outside this room. He wills the chopping sound to stop by breathing in cedar and skin. The chopping sound melds with someone’s heels on linoleum.

His sister. He keeps his eyes closed. Sister. Simultaneous lifeline, loveline, and yet stone to the bottom of everything.

An alarm goes off in the distance. Some other hallway. Code blue. Some shuffle of scrubs. “Death is a body everywhere,” he types onto his laptop. Then deletes it. Then retypes it. Deletes. Until it’s just the word death staring at him.

Being on the West Coast makes him feel homicidal. That’s just true. Part of him thinks, Well then, go ahead and die already, my sister, my imperfect other, it’s astonishing we made it this far. You deserve it. Rest. Some other part of him bitch-slaps the first. Vulgar. Insensitive. Asshole. What kind of brother thinks a thing like that?

He retunes his ears to the scene around him. His fingers then flurry. He can’t stop typing. Typing everything the visitors, orderlies, doctors, nurses around him in the hospital-hell hallway are saying to each other. He just can’t not do it.

He sighs. He hates hospitals. Well, everyone does, but his hatred has a locus, an image arrested from the past.

His sister, as a girl of eight, on her stomach in a hospital bed. Her blood blooming up red from below, staining the white of the sheets, staining the word daughter with father and family. Blooming from her injuries. A paternal rape gone so badly wrong they had to keep her on her stomach.

He looks over toward his sister’s room, then back across the waiting room at the performance artist. The only other permanent member of the tribe. His suspicions tug at him. He narrows his eyes at her. She chews her fingernail to the quick. One side of her hair is neon blue, the other bruise blue. How old is she, even?

Where’s the filmmakerhusbandbrotherinlaw?

He stands up. He passes the performance artist in silence, walks to his sister’s door. He steps in, out, in, out, and then in. He crosses the linoleum floor, avoiding tiny fissures. He reaches out, across the antiseptic air and beeping monitor, and holds her hand. The hand of a writer and the hand of a playwright and the silence between them.

She’s a caterpillar in a cocoon. His mind goes slack and gentle. Her body is emaciated. Studying the blue veins in her eyelids and wrists, he recalls the primal scene which separated them — his boyman self on the cusp confronting his father with the truth of his assault — how he’d brought a knife, he’d meant to stick it into his father’s gut as hard as he could, but his father had quickly overpowered him — his father the brute, his father the big-bodied masculine animal — his father then knifing his mouth wider, the blood shooting up and then pooling around his teeth and tongue.

His mother a useless blur in the hallway. His sister under the bed, eyes pleading.

Later, he had his mouth repaired, in the same hospital where his sister had lingered between life and death, after the push and cut of father. And yet, the next day, even knowing what it meant to his sister, he—the words slow down in his head—

Left.

Her.

There.

It was the last time he saw her.

It’s a terrible love he carries. His guilt keeping the distance between them, East Coast and West. His guilt driving him to be the New York playwright, the star, the success. The bad brother. The toast of the town. The great gay playwright and the penthouse that he built. The abandoning one. The one who left her to the wolves.

He opens his mouth and whisper-speaks to his sister between the pulses of the heart monitor. “Where are you?” He stares at their hands. Everything they are now is in their hands. He puts his head down. He kisses her hand once, twice, three times. The magic of fairy tales and children. She doesn’t stir. People don’t know anything about love. It’s nothing, they told us. Fate moves over the small backs of children. They carry death for us the second they are born.

He returns to the hallway, pacing in and out and in and out and in and out of the doorway. He sits back down. Back to his laptop, he registers the performance artist’s Where-the-hell-have-you-been looks, but ignores them.

What is she doing here, anyway? Perched with her knees up, scowling at everyone who comes by? Pieces of words now like glimpses float in the hospital corridor: “I wonder if I can donate blood while we are here” and “I’d die for a vanilla latte but all they have here is sludge water” and “Yeah, five-thirty A.M., isn’t that the crack of shit? I hate getting up early but we have rehearsals in the basement of a free clinic and we can only use it before they open or after they close. .”

But then, suddenly, everyone around him stops their ambient babble.

The playwright looks up from his typing. The hospital people aren’t saying anything. Why aren’t they saying anything? He closes his laptop, gets up. An orderly walks by him with a tray of hot towels. He grips his own biceps, too hard. He grabs the fabric of his own shirt. The performance artist is the only other person in the room who is directly involved. He clears his throat and asks her where the filmmaker is.

The performance artist looks up with the slowness of a neon Lorax. “He said he needed to walk around.”

“Listen,” the playwright says, rubbing the back of his neck in little three-circle massages. “Do you understand what happened? Because that story they told me on the phone is nonsense. Tell me any details you know. Tell me what the doctors are saying. She looks unbelievably pale. Her skin looks as thin as a communion wafer.”

The performance artist sits mute and still. She looks to him like fatigue dumped a load of human in a hallway, like refuse. Can a person die of inside-hospital ennui?

“I bet you get a performance out of this,” he says.

“Yeah? And what the hell would that look like?”

In the urban dictionary next to the word emo is this girl. “Well,” he persists, “you know, there’s a Beckett play. It’s called Happy Days. There’s a woman in it named Winnie, who gets buried in mud. Up to her breasts.”

“You don’t say.” The performance artist eyes the elevator.

“Yes, but we never learn how she got buried.”

“Fascinating.” The performance artist gnaws at a new finger.

“Or trapped.”

She chews her fingernails.

“What’s he done? Becker? Anything on streaming?”

“Beckett. Samuel.” Briefly he wants to slap her into womanhood.

Mercifully, the elevator makes a holy ding and the filmmaker enters stage left. The playwright walks — nearly hopping — twelve steps in sets of threes to meet him.

He touches the filmmaker’s arm — Jesus, this guy is big. I mean, nothing he didn’t know, but Jesus. He could do some damage with those cannons. He pulls the filmmaker aside, whispery, needy, as if they’re guy pals or comrades or anything but what they are: the brother who abandoned her and the husband who can’t cope with her descent. “Just give it to me straight, no chaser. What’s going on? Really.”

The filmmaker’s skin looks blue-gray and heavy mugged. “She’s. . I don’t know how to answer that. None of this makes any sense.” His eyes are marbled in hues of hazel specked with brown.

“Well, what was the instigating event? All they’re telling me is that she suddenly went deaf and dumb, and went on some kind of Kafkaesque hunger strike.” He swallows, trying to lower his voice an octave.

“One morning she seemed a little distracted. Staring at the wall. That’s all. I said, ‘Baby, are you okay?’ She turned to me and smiled. We kissed. I went to work. So did she, I assume. I assume the day was like any other day — it rained, she taught her classes and I taught mine, neighborhood dogs barked, the mail came. I came home that night, she was on the floor. Unconscious.” The filmmaker draws a breath, sucking oxygen like a human vacuum.

“She just dropped? Just like that?” Don’t say DEAD don’t say dropped DEAD don’t say DEAD. The playwright’s sphincter twitches. His lover’s voice in his head: Be aware of social codes be aware of social codes be aware. But it’s not working, the hallway lights of the hospital are too bright, the filmmaker is so physical, he’s like walking physicality, and the playwright’s longing to write it all down is creeping up on him, like it always does, like black letters and words growing larger and larger until they’re walking around on the white floor before his eyes, big as people, the word DEAD bigger than any, with cartoon-muscled arms and shoulders.

“Yeah. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this right now.” The filmmaker closes his eyes and rubs at them with his thumbs.

“Okay, yeah. Of course. I’m going to see if I can find a doctor to talk to me.”

“You know what?” the filmmaker nearly shouts. “You do that. You get a doctor to talk to you. I’m sure you New York people deal with this stuff all the time, right? Depression? Neuroses? Pathologies? You want to know what they’ll say? They’re gonna tell you the same story they told me. They’re going to tell you there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s a goddamn physical specimen. See how far that gets you.”

“Nothing wrong with her.” The playwright starts ticking the fingernails on his thumb and forefinger in sets of threes.

“Look, I’m sorry,” the filmmaker says. “I told you, it’s hard for me to talk about this right now. I haven’t slept much, and my kid is with my mother. .” His hands knot themselves into fists. Dangling fists with nothing to do.

“You got it. Not another word out of me.” But the playwright is lying. He suddenly feels a sense of thrilling danger. Several sentences line up in his mouth. He bites the inside of his cheek.

But then comes another menacing ding, and the elevator door opens again, wide as a fucking mouth.

There he is, Mr. Asshole. The painter, the exiled ex-husband, the walking ego with a ready dick. Who the hell invited him?

The performance artist stands up. The filmmaker has his back to the elevator, so he doesn’t see the painter until he realizes the room has gone quiet again. The playwright feels coiled, urgent, ready to lash.

“What, did somebody die in here? You all look like fucking corpses.” The painter, laughing his ass off. Stale booze fills the air.

The performance artist flushes in the face like she’s eaten niacin; she puts her hand up like a stop sign and closes her eyes.

The playwright counts to three; he can feel the action before it happens.

The filmmaker, now husband, he’s turning, turning, he sees the painter, until one man faces the other.

The filmmaker throws an exquisite left hook and drops the painter to the floor.

Blood mouth-splatters across the linoleum.

Orderlies rush in like moths.

Then, in three seconds that feel more like minutes, the playwright snaps out of it, rushes over to the filmmaker, grabs his big-ass arm, and ushers him out of the building. No sense in anyone getting arrested right now. He hurries the filmmaker through an EXIT door into a stairwell, down and down and down until they reach the parking lot.

There, in the lot, things slow back down to human speed. They walk to the filmmaker’s car like two men walking, though one of them is counting steps. He can still feel the filmmaker’s rage. If I die at the hands of this man in a parking garage, in some ways it will be a fitting end. Dying, finally, in his sister’s moment of peril.

They arrive at the door of the filmmaker’s car. The filmmaker opens his mouth again, then closes it. The playwright touches his shoulder. “Look, you just go home now. Try to get some rest. I’ll call you if there’s any change. Just get out of here for a little while. You need a break.” He has no idea where this modulated voice comes from, but he suspects he’s channeling his lover. Have empathy for others have empathy for others have empathy. Even if you have to pretend at first. Is he pretending?

The filmmaker drives away, taillights illuminating the exit. The playwright makes his way back up the stairwell from the parking lot in steps of threes.

Back in the hospital hallway, the painter is now upright in a chair, hurling slurry, hushed obscenities into the dead white hallway. “Cocksucking motherfucker. .” The playwright touches touches touches his own elbows as he crosses the room and takes a seat.

Settling in with his laptop, he looks at them — the painter and the performance artist — and he sees it: She’s here for him. Not for his sister. She knew he’d show up.

Just look at them. They’re like a human West Coast tableau. Like scraps of indigo and blood-colored glass, foreign money, vintage jewelry and hip little buttons, hair art, toy soldiers and firecrackers and pieces of wire and bullet casings and the feathers of birds, the bones of animals, a half-smoked joint and a bunch of foreign beer caps and Dunhill butts. The look like they should be at Jim Morrison’s grave. Père Lachaise. Drinking Courvoisier. The painter takes out a flask. The playwright smirks.

Who are we in moments of crisis or despair? Do we become deeper, truer selves, or lift up and away from a self, untethered from regular meanings like moths suddenly drawn toward heat or light? Are we better people when someone might be dying, and if so, why? Are we weaker, or stronger? Are we beautiful, or abject? Serious, or cartoon? Do we secretly long for death to remind us we are alive?

He shivers. What the hell was that about? Was that his sister’s voice, or his? He claps three times and says, “Okay, people — you’re not the center of the universe here, right? Everybody get a grip.” He walks over to the pile of performance artist and painter. “We shouldn’t all be trying to stay here this way. It’s not helping her. It’s pathetic. Look what comes of it. We should just take shifts. Come tell me your work”—he glances at the performance artist—“or whatever, schedules. I’ll call everyone. I’ll make a visitation chart.”

But that’s not what he’s typing.

He’s typing out stage directions.

A doctor steps into the room, as if on cue.

Nightmaking

In her sleep, the night sky stitches a story through the girl.

Her brother is a fox pup chasing a mouse over a snow-covered field. The fox pup leaps straight up into the air where the mouse tracks end and plunges nose first into the blanket of white. The fox emerges and shakes its head to free the snow from its fur. The fox is laughing. A mouse in its mouth.

Her mother is a moon eye in the sky. Not perfectly white, but bruise-hued. The moon eye casts a gaze over all of the world, over violence and lovers with equal compassion, over living and dead, over children and old men curling into brittle-boned fetal positions in bed, curling around what used to be their wives, taking their last breaths, over chickens and badgers and snakes and trees, over rivers and rocks and breath.

Her father is not a tree.

Let all the other fathers before hers be trees.

Her father is a door.

Anywhere.

Anytime.

Opening or closing, depending on the story and the girl’s place in it.

The Filmmaker

The filmmaker is beating a heavy bag to death.

Having recently clocked the painter, he finds that slamming the heavy bag feels more satisfying. In the backyard behind his house, at night, his blows land and thud. He pictures the chest and gut of a man. Fisted speed dug deep from a bellyful of rage and jabs extended until they’re shot-strung back to the shoulder. Again. Again. The throbbing sound so familiar he doesn’t recognize it. Comforting.

It’s what he knows how to do in the face of inertia.

What if a man’s body is all that drives action, and not the stupid heart?

Anything but the heart.

So he beats the holy hell out of this simulacral man in the backyard for hours, until he’s spent, until he’s just a man bent over and panting. His breath fogs before him in the cold night. It seems good that he can’t kill the heavy bag. He hangs his head. This is killing him. No, not killing him. But it is some kind of crucible he doesn’t understand.

His wife. How can there be nothing he can do to fix it? It makes him want to hit things as hard as he can.

He looks at the back of his house. It stares dully back at him. Wifeless. Sonless. Without life. He goes inside, and when he looks back through the window to the backyard, all he sees is black, like the screen before the film begins, the moon a white projector’s beam.

This is the first night in seven he has come home from the hospital. It’s the only respite he has given himself. A night to fight and release the chemical chaos of things. Without turning any lights on, he walks through the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, removes a Newcastle beer, twists the cap off, drinks most of it standing in the fluorescent glow. Then he removes his Everlast workout gloves, carefully unwraps his hands, the black bands falling to the floor like tired-out snakes. They sting from the gap between cold night air and warm domesticity.

He grabs another beer, then walks through the dark and lifeless house to his wife’s writing room. He stands in front of her bookshelves. He stares at the shelf of her own books, books written by her. The beer going down his throat branches out across his chest. His throat is warm. His hands ache. Their lives together make a list in his skull, because that’s all he’s able to think or feel.

Before she was a writer, she was an abused daughter.

Before he was a filmmaker, he was a neglected son.

Before he turned to art, he was a bouncer at a casino.

Before she turned to art, she was a flunking-out addict.

Both of them briefly arrested and incarcerated.

Both of them stealing their lives back, pursuing lives of the mind. Both of them carrying invisible injuries, injustices, betrayals, all in silence.

When they first met, he took her to Gold’s Gym. Taught her how to box, how to defend herself, stayed with it even when she accidentally punched herself in the nose. She took him to a swimming pool to do laps, because she said water was the one place she felt free, and he swam laps even though he was allergic to chlorine.

She introduced him to the movies Cool Hand Luke and On the Waterfront.

After the gym, he played Bach for her on the cello.

It was as if the crappiness of both their lives opened up and let them at each other.

Before they were anyone, they were who they would become in each other’s arms, each of them passing through crucibles to reach the other, each of them arriving at art instead of death.

She writes stories of their lives and desires and fears.

He makes art films based on the stories.

She collects experiences and images and pulls them down to the page.

He takes actions and images and projects them up onto a screen.

Who are they? What is their love? Is it their son? Is it their art?

He touches the spines of her books in the dark.

Love isn’t what anyone said. It’s worse. You can die from it at any moment.

He picks out a book she wrote, containing one of the stories he adapted to film. The film is nearly finished. The closing scene is her. She is walking naked toward the angry ocean on a cold day in November. Her blond hair wrestles the wind. She keeps walking even after she is knee-high in waves. He knew, as he filmed her, that the water was freezing. He also knew she wouldn’t flinch. She walked far enough to dive straight into the oncoming waves, the camera trained on her, their son perched in a carrier on his back. And then she swam against the waves. Bold strokes into white-frothed swells. Far enough that he screamed, “Cut!” Far enough that he stopped filming. Far enough that he started to yell into the wind and the noise of the surf — it was a cold day, no one else around on the beach—“Stop! Come back!” Her name, but his voice was swallowed by gales and tides. His chest tightening. His thoughts racing as his body readied itself for action: Set the child on the shore remove your boots remove your jacket and pants enter the ocean for her even though you are a weak swimmer enter the ocean for her do not watch her disappear into water. Their son’s voice behind his head a cooing sound, “Mama,” as he reached for the strap at his shoulder.

But she did stop.

He saw her turn back to look at them, the way a seal’s head pokes up sporadically to eyeball a human on shore.

And then she swam back to them.

She left the water cold and shivering, and he wrapped her in a towel, and she said to him plainly and without the suggestion of drama, “Did you get the shot? Was it okay?” Her lips blue, even as she smiled, a little like a corpse mermaid.

Is their love their art? Are their lives making art?

He stares at the spines of the books in her writing room. He feels she is the other side of things — the balance, the space to his motion, velocity, force. If in him need drives the fist, then in her space receives all action. But it is not a velvety romantic love. It is creative and destructive. He thinks of her body. He wants to fuck the room of her. The whole house.

Suddenly he needs to be in the bedroom. He makes his way upstairs, into the higher-sexed place of their marriage. In their bedroom he sees deep burgundy and indigo sheets in wrestled piles on the bed. He can smell their sex. Dead candles, waiting for dusk and sex, hide in the shadows. On the wall above where her sleeping head should be there are black-and-white photographs of. . what? Him and his wife. Right? Taken by their photographer friend, lovingly. Right? He pauses and his eyes fall on them, on their revelation, on their presence. Two-dimensional selves in giant oak frames, perfectly square. The photo of her: wife half underwater, half surfaced, seal-like and caught off guard. Her hair splayed out like seaweed. The photo of him: a fighting scene, his own arm extending mid motion in blur, half his face in the frame, half not, the object of the blow entirely out of the shot. He looks at the two images, caught there like that above the world of the bed, and wonders what he is really looking at. Is it true? His chest hurts some. He steadies himself by sitting on the edge of the bed.

His hands rummage around in the bedside table drawer. He isn’t looking. He’s feeling. The aqua glass pipe finds his hand. And the pot inside a plastic bag, just like in anyone’s house. The perpetual life of the lighter finding his fingers. In this way he is able to breathe like a normal fucking man again. He fills his lungs with haze and lift and the promise of the rational mind’s loosening. He misses his son. His body aches for his wife. Thoughtless and animal heavy. Come home, he thinks, like a mantra. Swim home.

Alone, in their house, without her, he does what men do when they are not crying. He puts his beautifully violent face in his own hands and hangs his head and his shoulders heave. Something like silent pantomime crying. And then it breaks through him, guttural sounds, and then the sounds grow into moans and then he’s throwing the glass pipe at the photo of himself and shattering glass all over the place. Goddamn it. Nothing nothing nothing but this: he cannot save her, fix her, make it right. There is nothing he can do but love his son and love his wife and wait. He sits up on the edge of the bed.

What is a man without action?

He drops his head, defeated.

That is when he sees it, down beyond his scabbed and roughened hands resting on his thighs, past his battered knees balling up in front of him, all the way down to his feet planted helplessly there on the hardwood floor. The edge of a book jutting out quietly from beneath the bed. Without thinking he reaches down and picks it up. It is not a published book, like the rows and rows that fill their home. It is not one of her books, and yet it is most definitely her book. It is a book people write in when they mean for it to be kept out of the world. It is a journal. Its cover burnished red and worn. A leather strap wrapped and wrapped around it. A pen periscoping up from the top.

Quietly as a child he opens the book, looks at pages randomly. Flipping through. Her novel. The one she’s writing. . was writing. Pieces of stories, little drawings and notes, and whole pages of narrative. He stops on a page and starts to read, with only the moon for light:

The Girl

You must picture your image of Eastern Europe.

In your mind’s eye.

Whatever that image is.

However it came to you.

Winter.

That white.

One winter night when she is no longer a child, the girl walks outside, her shoes against snow, her arms cradling a self, her back to a house not her own but some other. It is a year after the blast that has atomized her entire family in front of her eyes. It is a house she has lived in with a widow woman who took her in — orphan of war, girl of nothingness. .

He stops reading for a minute. He feels like he knows the girl. He feels like he can see her. Has he read this before? No, that’s impossible. He looks down again and reads on, and in the reading he begins to see images in frames:

On the ninth day the widow takes the food straight to the girl. She squats down on the ground. The girl immediately starts to point to her creations and name them. The woman nods. They eat carrots. When the girl is finished naming, the woman points to a smooth blue-gray stone, which seems to inhabit a forest of sticks.

Vilkas, the girl says.

Wolf.

On the tenth day the girl finishes the city and enters the widow’s house.

Inside, the house is filled with books and photographs. Books and books from all places and all times. Old history books with spines reddish brown like old blood, more recently published books with the sheen and glow of the West. Oversize books and palm-size books, every color imaginable, titles filling the room like voices. Books and photographs, more books and photographs than dishes or furniture. Photographs of Paris and Germany, of America, Poland, Prague, Moscow. Photographs of crowds in squares, their coats and hats testaments to cold, photos of farmers and villagers, their faces plump and red as apples as they break from the fields for something to eat and drink. Photographs of animals caught entering or emerging from the forest, their animal faces wary and low to the ground, their animal eyes marking the distance between species. Books and photographs of trees and houses and festivals, of musicians and artists and mothers, of statesmen and children, of soldiers and guns and tanks and bodies and snow made red. Books and books about art. Photographs of the widow. Of her hands. Her cheek and hair. The white of her collar and the nape of her neck. Photos taken by her husband who was arrested, beaten, and stolen away to a Siberian prison.

The widow broken by loss and the girl with the blown-to-bits family begin to live together in this house made of art.

This house made of art.

His heart is pounding. His head is pounding. No — it’s the door. It’s someone at the front door. At first he’s frozen, stuck in the snow-covered story of a girl inside the words of his wife. Then he’s back in his own house in the dark. He tucks the journal underneath an arm and moves toward sound and action.

Moving Action

It’s the poet. At the door. The filmmaker can see her face through the thick-paned glass. He opens it. The night air nearly snaps his psyche in two.

She rubs her cropped thatch of hair and the leather of her black biker jacket makes an ache sound.

He embraces her. The hug is awkward, the journal still under his arm. The poet’s body feels to him like it is alive in a way that his is not. Like she’s filled with current.

The poet twitches away from him, and moves into the house. “Are you going to turn a light on, or do you just want to sit in the dark like we’re in a movie?” she says.

“Sorry. I’m just. .”

“Exhausted?”

The filmmaker turns on a lamp. The room honeys-over in hue. He goes into the kitchen to retrieve his wife’s bottle of Balvenie scotch. He hands the bottle to the poet. She thanks him, then proceeds to drink straight from the bottle. He sees her neck screen size: the muscles are filmable, her head tilted back and back in the way of a real drinker. He likes her masculinity. They get along.

She stares at the thick of him. “Would you like to just sit here together, or do you feel like talking?” She pulls a fattie and a lighter out of her black leather jacket pocket, wets it between her lips, lights up, and hands it to him.

He doesn’t say anything, but he holds it up between them with a quizzical look on his face that asks, Customs?

She shakes her head. “Got it on this side. The orderly was holding.”

He’s glad she’s here. The poet on their couch across from him, as if things were the way they’re supposed to be.

“We have to do something,” she says. Her words echo through his body.

The filmmaker smashes his empty beer bottle onto the coffee table in front of them. The sound tightens the cords in the poet’s neck and jaw, but she doesn’t flinch.

Silence.

The filmmaker sets the journal down on the table as if this whole night is moving normally. How does anyone survive any relationship? How does anyone move through humans without killing them, or themselves?

The two of them stare at the object.

“Yeah. I don’t know,” the filmmaker says. “This is hers. I don’t know if there’s anything in there that matters. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”

“Lemme see it.” The poet holds out her hand.

The filmmaker opens the journal to the part he was reading before and hands it to the poet. He puts his head in his hands, for he feels as if it might sever from his neck at any moment. Partly he wishes it just would. The second the poet’s voice begins, the writer’s story rises up to them something like heat does, invisible and under the spell of physics. She reads the writer’s words aloud:

One day the girl is reading a poem in the widow’s house. Next to the poem is a drawing of the poet: Walt Whitman. Next to the drawing the girl’s imagination retrieves something it has not touched for a long while. A father. The girl’s father before the blast was a poet. There. It is a thought, “father,” it is the thought, “poet,” and it does not kill her. The girl closes her eyes and fingers her tangles of blond hair and goes back, perhaps for the first time, to the memory of her father, her family before the blast.

Her father was a poet, her mother a weaver. Her father could engineer and build anything with only his hands, her mother could sing and make medicines and calm a child into dream — everything they were, happened between their hands. Her father taught her poems, and how to build a tiny city from mud and straw and twigs. Her mother taught her songs and how to make a pattern with cloth and color. And there was a brother. She lets the word become an idea. Brother. She remembers the touch of his hands. The warmth they shared when their cheeks met. How he smelled next to her before they drifted into sleep at night. Her mother the weaver. Her father the poet. Her other: brother.

She looks back at the image of Walt Whitman. She wonders, is a poet really a poet if his only songs are to his daughter, his wife, his son? If his extraordinary lyric merely puts children to sleep like moon whisper, or fills a house with star-shaped dreams? Is a poet a poet if there are no books that carry his words, his name, a drawing of his face?

She is the not-dead daughter of her father the poet.

In her memory she is four. She is on her father’s shoulders in the darkened woods, next to a frozen lake. They skirt the woods without completely entering; forest animals scrutinize their movements. She is laughing, and that’s how she remembers it: she is holding tight to her father’s ears, he is saying, “Not so tight, my tiny, not so tight, you will pull your father’s ears from his head!” Her laughter and his.

Is it love to want to die there, inside that image?

The not-dead daughter.

Later, her father creates an oral history of that moment, tells and tells it around great fires after dinners, after work, after the tiny family — a wife, a son, a daughter — has settled and touched one another and drunk and moved between house smells and fire. For something else happened there besides her love for him. Her knees pressed against his cheeks. A story. A story about animals.

“A caribou was walking against the forest next to a frozen lake with his family. The youngest fell lame and the mother, who was already weakened from childbirth, insisted on carrying her. The mother became weaker and weaker, and at some point was so delirious with fatigue that she let slip the tiny life, into the great flattened white of things. A human girl and her father came upon the tiny thing just as it was dying. The girl held its head and the father sang a very old song with his eyes closed. It was what to do. Then she died.”

And her father narrates the ending in song, lyric. But the girl’s imagination. . travels.

In her head, the girl continued her own story beyond the ending of the father and daughter who came upon the dying animal. In her story, the girl wonders, What was the last thing the youngest caribou saw? Was it the image of her animal father and her animal mother disappearing into blur and ice? Or perhaps by chance she saw her, her and her father, before she passed. If it was the strong back of her animal father and the tender rhythm of her animal mother’s legs she saw, maybe her leaving took a home with it forever. And if it was the human father and daughter she saw last, perhaps the difference in their species melted as snow in a great thaw, the word she and the word her becoming each other, daughter and caribou, perhaps their beating of hearts simply became the earth’s cadence, perhaps bodies returned to their animal past — hand and hoof releasing to the energy of matter.

She loves the story, this story her father told and told before her family was blown to bits — their bodies exploding back to molecules and light and energy. Fatherless, beautiful story poem.

It becomes a story she loves to death.

The not-dead daughter.

It is the story of children.

The poet puts the last of the joint out in the palm of her hand. “How long has she been writing this?”

The filmmaker answers, “About seven years.”

But then the front door cracks open and the playwright flutters in like an enormous unstoppable moth. “Listen,” he yell-breathes.

The filmmaker stands up.

“They said they. .,” he sputters.

The filmmaker walks to the playwright and wordlessly grabs him by his arms, briefly lifting him slightly off the ground.

“They said they don’t know if she will make it through the night. They’re trying to determine if she took something. They won’t know until morning. They said come back when the sun comes up. They said this should be over by then. One way or another.” His words dissolve into breathing.

We have to do something.

The filmmaker lets go of the playwright and heads back out the front door, grabbing his car keys from a table. The front door swings behind him, open as a mouth.

The playwright stares at the poet, and at the broken glass, as they listen to the sound of a husband peeling out of his own driveway and neighborhood.

The poet cradles the writer’s journal like a child.

The playwright holds his own arms. “What should we do?”

The poet stares past him into the night. Then she turns her gaze to the living room wall, there in the writer and filmmaker’s house, the house where they’ve all come to know one another, the wall with the photo they’ve all seen.

She’s thinking about grief and trauma, how they can hide out inside a woman, how they can come back.

The playwright follows her eyes, until he sees what she sees.

The photographer’s framed image, the orphan girl lit up by the explosion, a girl blowing forward, a girl coming out of fire, a girl who looks as if she might blast right through image and time into the world

“I know what’s happened,” the poet says.

Expression

When the girl paints a red face, with orange streaks shooting from the eyes and mouth, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Are you angry?”

When the girl paints an indigo face, with aqua eyes and a green mouth, with hair like sea grass, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Are you swimming?”

When the girl paints a bright yellow face, with bright blue eyes and gold hair splaying out like the rays of the sun, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Are you happy?”

And when the girl paints a black face with a crimson gash interrupting the eye, the nose, the mouth, nearly dissecting the image, the widow asks, “Is that your face? Is that your fear?”

It is only when the girl paints a face that looks like a girl’s, expressionless, flat, calm, just a girl looking out, not a smile but not the negation of one either, that the widow stops asking the girl about the faces. The widow smiles and hangs the painting of the quiet, calm girl on the wall in the common room.

The girl goes back to her labor. Every color alive.

Hundreds of faces on wood — as if a forest of faces could come alive.

The Painter

It’s three A.M. He’s thirsty. His jaw hurts where the fucking filmmaker tried to knock it off his face. He’s lying next to the performance artist on a futon in her loft. She brought him home with her from the hospital, and not the first time. They’ve been doing it for years. The rest of the gang may have exiled him from their little posse, but not her. As long as he stays away from them, away from the woman who used to be his wife, there’s not a goddamn thing they can say or do.

Whatever. He looks around the performance artist’s room. She’s snoring. He needs to not think. Badly. He reaches for a half-empty bottle of wine on the bedside table and drinks the rest in a single motion. He stares at the blank wall. He gets up. The naked man pads into the kitchen, finds another bottle of wine, opens it, brings it back to the bedroom. Drinks half. He rifles through some CDs there on the floor, finds The Doors. He sticks it in the CD player. Volume low. Sleeping, sexed-up woman. He finishes the bottle. He lies back down.

Resting there like a wetted corpse, next to this particular lover — who has always looked a little like a Nabokov nymphet to him, her pale taut skin, her pointy tits and hip bones, her girlboy frame, one of those women with an eternally twelve-year-old body — he thinks of his life as a series of women’s bodies. Women’s bodies in every room he enters, every country, every gallery, every bar, every store or post office or restaurant. Married women and single women, professional women and working girls, women in therapy and women with money and women who barely spoke English, junkie women and artist women and famous women and skid-row women and all-used-up women and somebody’s-daughter women. Women of every age. Riders on the storm. He drinks.

He has a memory of his ex-wife. The body of her, the devouring wife love hole. He thinks of the day he left her, remembers thinking something like, It’s easy. I can leave the room, the house, the country. I can stop pretending to like Miles Davis and Nina Simone and Frida fucking Kahlo and Marguerite Duras. I can go to another house or state or country, and women who are not American might come sit on my face.

Faces are what he paints. Abstract faces, over and over and over again. He thinks of something someone said to him at his last show, entitled “I Am Cross with God: Intimate Portraits,” a series of abstract faces, eight feet by eight feet. The person had said, “Why do the faces look like they are in pain?” It’d been half an hour into the opening, and he’d had seven glasses of wine. And he’d said back, “The next time you kiss someone you love, open your eyes. Think about what their face looks like. That close. That familiar. So familiar you can’t bear it. Distorted.” Then he walked away, grabbing two of the wine bottles on his way like a cowboy with a pair of revolvers.

His ex-wife’s face comes again. But this memory, it’s not like other people’s memories. It’s not a vision of the past. It’s not a flashback. It’s all inside a now. Because that’s how he lives. Inside a now. Like dreams work. An image becomes a story becomes a life becomes a man and then it’s now. The now of wine, the now of sex, the now of painting. So even though the now of her is far away, in a little white hospital room, he sees the used-to-be-them in a now.

The writer. The painter. She used to wear his pants. He used to wear her skirts. She had a half-shaved head. His hair went down past the middle of his back. She liked it in the ass. He liked it on his back. She made the money. He cooked the food. Still life with wife.

He sees his wife’s face. In the kitchen of their then-house. He sees the features of her face, in color and brushstroke. He walks through their then-kitchen, out the back door, on his way to his backyard studio. She turns from the sink to say, “I love you.” He thinks: How can you love me? That’s some fucked-up love. That’s mother love. Relentless and all-consuming. Then he thinks: love is an abstract word coming from a face hole.

In his mind’s eye, then, her face becomes formless. He watches himself moving away, out of the wifehouse. Closing the door. Walking into the then-studio behind the house of her. Closing a second door. A room not the house, not her. A room of himself. The room of his art. And then the image of his self overtakes all the images of women.

Inside the then-image of himself, he sits in his studio in the dark. His hand travels his face, a face unmade from the dark, the hand desiring, fingers longing for form. Five holes: Eyes. Nostrils. Mouth. His face. He has entered this room hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. He always leaves as if he has fallen out of reality. What is a man in the face of art? A little cartoon.

He knows what is happening back inside the house. Inside the house it is night. Sitcoms and cable news and commercials repeat themselves aimlessly. People are dying, commentators narrating. Food sits hiding inside the dull hum of the refrigerator. Marriage objects make sounds and images: the refrigerator and stove and television and bed. Wifehouse. These thoughts are killing him. If he cannot eject them, he will die. Certainly he cannot paint with even their faintest echo in his mind.

In the then of him, he pulls a joint from his pocket, lights it blind. The end glows red for an instant as he inhales what he hopes will be a nothingness. Within seconds things get simpler. If he can just inhale the nothingness and dark around him and breathe out the light of the wifehouse behind him, he won’t have to kill himself. Then he can turn the lamp on. Make his way to the table of brushes and thinner and linseed and tubes and layers of color more familiar than hands.

The ritual is always the same. Hours of pacing and lulling the skull to knock out the thinking. Going liquid. Wine. In bottles and jugs and half-filled jars. Wine and wine and wine and more wine. Lose the mind. Lose it. Jim Morrison. More wine. Thought begins to leave, the joint diminishes to nothing, as if there is still a god, merciful and intimate. He waits for even his teeth to feel mysterious to him.

Comfortably lost inside this image of himself, he keeps following it. His then-self drinks a bottle of wine in about the time it takes to utter a few of her carefully crafted sentences. It pours down his chin and jaw. It burns a bit in his chest. He decides to remove all of his clothes. He squirts a wad of indigo into his palm. He crosses the room abruptly. Thoughtlessly. He assaults the canvas with a handful of indigo, mudlike. Then he retreats, returns to the table. He doesn’t need to look down. His hands read like Braille the piles of tools and cylindrical thick tubes of color, the varying hairs of brushes, jars filled with thin liquid or liquid thick as the jelly of an eye, until his hand unburies a fat half-squeezed tube of onyx.

He consumes another half bottle of wine in the space of time most people would say they were considering an idea, or looking at an object with interest. He removes the pinch-small plastic white lid between thumb and forefinger, throws it on the floor with its fellow refuse. He fills the palm of his hand with onyx. Squeezes his two hands together. The room is a pierced aroma of turpentine, linseed, and pure color. He closes his eyes and paints his face. He smears out the searching of his eye valleys, makes a prayer shape around his nose, gives his mouth a wide black swipe. He stops. He has de-faced himself. He laughs. He drinks. Then he smears the color farther down his neck, to the bones between his shoulders.

This image of himself — it’s turning him on in the present, like it did in the past. Into this house we’re born. Into this world we’re thrown.

Reloading, his then-him hands move down his chest and gut in wild circles toward his dick. A face peering up, a single eye, grotesquely animal. He squeezes as if his dick were a tube of paint. A small ooze of fluid pearls up. He cups his balls. He squeezes another tube of paint and covers his cock, cool thick wet, and makes hand-dick friction sliding up and down, cold to hot. His hips are animal, his head is almost too heavy to hold up. His teeth clench his eyes close his skin sweats his spine nerve and muscle flex break down meaning. Near release he moves his free hand to his asshole and slides a painted finger inside himself. His ass makes sucking noises and his dick hand handles the coming sticking like oil and water, these fluids out of whack and slicked together. His asshole contracts in budding juiced thrusts until his cock, speechless, handless, faceless, dissolves into paint and cum.

His breathing slows. He reaches out to the painter’s table and feels. A knife is closer to his hand than a brush. This is of no great consequence. He cuts. Not at the wrist. At his own jaw, from the ear down some, like a quote. Warm fluid eases in a stream down his neck, like the pool at the tip and the tiny stream down the shaft of his cock. His face is open. His mouth fills with saliva. His teeth calm and drown.

Then and only then does he move with real intention to the canvas. There is nothing wrong with this picture. There is nothing wrong with him. He presses himself against the canvas and pieces of a body smudge random chaotic forms onto white. He paints wildly, physically, with his body, his hands, brushes, oils, fluids, blood. For this is part of his claim to fame — his use of bodily fluids mixed with paint to paint giant abstract faces. He paints with the fluids of a self outside language and thought, he paints in barbaric attacks of color on the canvas of white — fight-back black or blood-born Alizarin crimson, Prussian blue, burnt sienna.

It is only inside abstraction and expression and chaos that he is alive.

In the vacuum left from his spent body, he has again painted an abstract face. Eight feet by eight feet. It might be a man’s face and it might be a woman’s face. Or both.

In the image of his past-him — he remembers — he passes out. But in his present he keeps watching that man all the way to morning.

Morning finds him smoking a cigarette, spent and hunched over and thoughtful. He’s supposed to go back into the house. The house of the writer and the painter, husband and wife. Still life with wife. If he goes back inside the house, he thinks, he will die. It doesn’t matter what love is. If it even exists. If he goes back inside domesticity, he will die. For him it’s this: wife or death.

In the image of the then-him, he stubs out the cigarette and pinches the skin at the cut near his jaw until it bleeds. He half-assedly wipes himself down with a hundred turpentine wipes and puts his clothes back on. His skin stings like fuck. He looks like he’s been in some kind of fire or explosion. If he lit a match right now, he’d burst into flames. He bites the cork out of a jug of wine, holds its mouth to his, and drinks. He tastes blood and wine. He wishes its mouth would drown his. Tears happen hot. Then evaporate against his turpentine skin.

That is when it happens. He looks at the painting of the face. It might be a man’s face and it might be a woman’s face and it might be both. He walks not back into the house, but to the car. He drives not to the store, not to some familiar and ordinary place in their lives, not the corner bar, not the park, not the hills. He drives downtown and gets out of the car and walks to the door of the apartment of a woman less than half his age, half his life. He knocks on her door with his wounds and smeared with paint and smelling of shit and semen and oils and morning wine and she opens the door. He walks into a room away from his wife life and into the drama of women’s bodies. Again. He places his hands on her breasts. Her twat. Her ass. He does not look her in the eye. His gaze is drawn elsewhere. When they embrace, and it is the embrace of carnal excess, hips ground together, chests pushing for breath, he is pulling her head back by the hair, he is turning her face to animal, he is looking at the white wall behind her. Its blankness. He presses her against it and fucks and fucks her. He sees it and sees it on the wall behind her — the image of the face. The last face he ever painted.

His ex-wife’s face abstracted beyond recognition.

I love you, I did, I loved you to death.

Then he hears the performance artist snort out of her snore and murmur something and it’s tonight again, and he turns to the current nymphet woman’s body, which is all of their bodies, and puts his hand between her legs. Jim Morrison. Wine. A woman’s body. Sex. He wakes the performance artist. Fucks her. He’s himself again. Yes.

The Playwright

Night. Interior. Living room. The playwright, the poet, and the filmmaker are together in the filmmaker and writer’s house. They all have a glass of scotch. It’s midnight. The poet has a plan. She’s laying it on them.

THE POET

.

Look. It’s a direct action. We have to go get her.

THE FILMMAKER

.

Right. Let’s spring her from that hell. Just what she needs. Hospitals are death houses.

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

Oh my god. You’re not talking about getting her out of the hospital. Are you?

THE POET

.

No. I’m not talking about her at all.

The playwright’s circle rubbing between his thumb and forefinger seizes up, interrupted. The filmmaker jerks his head up.

THE FILMMAKER

.

What? Then what are we talking about?

THE POET

.

I’m talking about the girl.

THE FILMMAKER

.

What girl?

THE POET

.

You know what girl. The girl in the photo.

The filmmaker stands up the way a man stands up when he’s thinking, Wait just a goddamn minute here.

THE FILMMAKER

.

Wait just a goddamn minute here. That’s crazy. What are you talking about?

THE POET

.

I said, we’re going to go get the girl. I know people. Just-this-side-of-criminal people. We can track her down. We know what town she lived in. We know what happened there, and when. And we have a photo. And we know the photographer who took the photo. I’m saying I can find her.

THE FILMMAKER

.

That’s insane. You want to fly back to Europe and steal a human?

THE POET

.

Oh, I can find her.

THE FILMMAKER

.

Oh, really. Fine. Right. You’re just going to go pluck a girl we don’t know from a war zone and. . Whatever. This is ridiculous. Okay, let’s say you go all the way to Eastern Europe and you. . you find this girl. Which is insane. What then? What the hell happens then?

THE POET

.

What then? We bring her here. To live with us.

The filmmaker and the playwright both start speaking at once in great incredulous waves of objections. She backs up a bit and looks at them. She crosses her arms and waits for them to peter out.

THE POET

.

Are you two finished? Okay, then listen. Think about it. What kind of life does this girl have there, anyway?

THE FILMMAKER

.

Remind me why I care? She’s got nothing to do with me. With my wife. I’d rather just go get my wife.

THE POET

.

Listen. I know what I’m talking about. It’s about the girl. Her family’s atomized, she’s probably living some corpse life in some pocket of hell. I mean, shit, remember how they tracked down that green-eyed Afghan girl? And she’s now a

leather-faced crone

? Because her life went from misery and shit to more monotonous and meaningless misery and shit, while her famous photo went ’round and ’round the world making that McCurry guy famous? I say we do it.

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

Do what, precisely?

THE POET

.

We do what our rising-star photographer failed to do. What all photojournalists fail to do. We go get her out of that death of a life before she dies.

THE FILMMAKER

.

For the love of God.

What does this have to do with my wife?

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

Whatever. This is crazy. So let’s pretend it’s even possible to pursue this fantasy. What does it accomplish? What is the purpose? How does it speed my sister’s recovery from wherever she is?

THE POET

.

Listen to me. This will matter. To your wife. To your sister. I don’t expect you to understand. Either of you. But you are just going to have to trust me on this. It’s a. . (

She searches the ceiling.)

It’s a woman thing. If we get this girl out of her deadly circumstance and bring her here and give her a chance at a real life, it will help your wife. Your sister. The only friend I’ve ever given a damn about in my entire life.

THE FILMMAKER

.

You’re serious. You are being serious?

THE POET

.

Look. Did you ever hear of Kevin Carter? You know, Kevin Carter. The South African photographer who took the picture of the vulture stalking a starving

girl. He won a Pulitzer for that picture. Two months later he connected a hose to the exhaust pipe of his pickup truck and quietly suicided. They say he’d come back from assignments and lapse into bouts of crying, drinking, drugs. Sometimes he’d sleep for days. After he shot his prizewinning picture, they say he sat under a tree and cried and chain-smoked and couldn’t get his mind away from the horror of what he saw. He checked out. People referred to him as “gone.”

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

Yeah. I remember. He was universally condemned for not helping the girl in the picture. He caught all kinds of shit. Said he was haunted by memories of killings, corpses, starving or wounded children, and trigger-happy madmen. So he offed himself.

THE POET

.

Exactly. So you get it?

The filmmaker stares at her blankly and the playwright’s eye twitches.

THE POET

.

Don’t you get it? They had a BIG argument. She said someone should have done something to get the girl out of the war zone. Your wife—

your

sister — told our

friend the photographer that the prize had blood all over it. I don’t think they’ve spoken to each other since. Didn’t she tell you?

THE POET

.

(

Shooting for authority.

) We’re going to go get that girl.

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

Right. Got it. I’ll finance the whole thing. The trip, the papers, whatever it takes.

THE POET

.

We can go to Prague first. Then on to St. Petersburg. That’ll be the easy part. I know a counterfeiter in Berlin. And I know who else we’ll need to get from there to Vilnius — I have people—

THE FILMMAKER

.

Hold on. Stop. Just. . WAIT. What the. . HELL are you talking about? What “people”? This isn’t real. The picture. The story. The girl. None of this is real. Except. . except that my wife is trapped in some hazed-out dreamland in a hospital and I want her back. And if I don’t

do

something, I’m going to lose my mind.

A phone rings offstage. The filmmaker reluctantly goes to the kitchen and answers. His voice sounds low and muffled, almost as if he is underwater. When he returns to the living room, the blood has drained from his face.

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

What? What is it? Is she all right?

THE FILMMAKER

.

Barely.

The three figures — filmmaker, poet, playwright — stand together for a long minute, staring at the floor. The light in the living room brightens, until they look hot and lit. The three of them look at one another.

THE FILMMAKER

.

You’re not going to finance the whole thing. I can’t let you do that.

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

It’s not a problem. You know I can handle it. .

THE FILMMAKER

.

No, you don’t understand. I have something— (

Exits stage left.

)

Sounds of a man thundering downstairs. The poet and the playwright hang in the air like inverted commas, waiting for the filmmaker. They hear pounding and something like destruction sounds, like he’s down there killing something. Then they hear him coming back up the stairs in some kind of alpha-man overdrive. When he finally reappears in the living room, it’s not a man’s body at all. It’s a giant canvas, eight feet by eight feet. Once their eyes adjust, they see that it is a painting of a giant abstract face. They hear a voice behind it as if the painting is speaking.

THE FILMMAKER

.

This is his painting. She kept it. Wouldn’t let me burn it. I hear these things are going for over ten grand these days. (

To the playwright.

) You take it to New York. You sell it. You use the money. You do it. You get this thing out of my house.

The playwright looks up from his laptop, closes the lid. He drums with his fingers. He is seated on a blue velvet chair in an auditorium. Men and women raise little Ping-Pong paddles in the air. The auctioneer has been mouthing bids — for how long? months? years? — but the playwright has been working away silently all the while. He is interested in only one lot, only one artwork, the one he came there to sell.

Then the voice of the auctioneer arrests his attention. With his little flip of silver hair, he announces the lot: “Facetious. We open at ten thousand dollars. The opening bid is ten thousand dollars.” The playwright snaps his head up and bites the inside of his cheek three times so he can lift his numbered little paddle. “Excellent. I have fourteen thousand dollars. The bid stands at fourteen thousand from the gentleman from New York. Do I have a — fourteen thousand, eight hundred dollars. I have fourteen thousand eight hundred. Do I have a best? Fourteen thousand eight hundred on the floor. Do we have movement? Excellent. Fifteen thousand. I have fifteen thousand dollars. We are standing at fifteen thousand from the gentleman from Lyon. Fifteen thousand, I have fifteen thousand dollars. We are at fifteen thousand. Fifteen thousand once. Fifteen thousand twice. All right, then, for the third and final time, fifteen thousand.

“And it is SOLD to the good gentleman from Lyon at fifteen thousand dollars. Very well.”

The playwright looks down at the play in his laptop, and then up at the sold painting, the one he came there to sell, the one the filmmaker made him bring: a giant abstract cum-stained bloodstained face.

The Art of Identity

The performance artist’s ears go full-blown tinnitus because it’s the poet going Just calm down and then the playwright going Use your imagination and the filmmaker going Just wait Just wait It’s not as bad as it sounds so she amplifies her voice and launches it at them. “It’s not as bad as it sounds? You want me to fake being hollow headed all the way to Europe and it’s not as bad as it sounds?” She can’t believe it, can’t believe what they are saying. This is the plan? She stares at them all like they want to eat her, saying, “You want me to do fucking what?”

And then it’s the playwright going Look do you want me to say it all again and everyone getting impatient with her like she’s a child, look at all their smug fuck faces with their we’re all a decade older than you paternalism and her going, “Um, actually, yeah, I fucking want you to say it again because this sounds, you know, insane.”

She crack-twists another tiny bottle of vodka open, pours it into her plastic airplane cup, slams it, then returns the empty miniature to the poet’s tray table. Well, she’s got to hand it to them, they fucking got her on this goddamn plane with the Nazi poet, didn’t they, and they used the oldest trick in the book, the trick of Catholics and Jews. Mega-guilt. Pure and simple. When she had resisted, the poet had walked up to her and like gotten all up in her face, going Look this is the least you can do you’re screwing him and we all know it you have been for years, you owe her this, she went, like there’s some kind of woman sexual history rule book. Some kind of woman sexual sin plus-and-minus column. Like they’re all holier than her. She reaches up and hits the flight-attendant-get-the-hell-over-here-I-need-a-drink button, then looks briefly at the poet, at the side of her face, and yes, she has to admit it, she’s a little afraid of her.

She rubs the letter she’s carrying pinned by her bra against her skin underneath her clothes. A letter from the painter. Well, you make your bed, you lie in it, that’s what her mother used to say, so here she is on a plane to Eastern Europe drinking midget vodkas with a lesbian dominatrix. When the flight attendant arrives, she leans over in the flight-attendant way and says to the poet in pity hush tones, “What does she need?” Because when you’re wearing a special helmet acting like you haven’t enough brains to buckle a seat belt you can’t be seen drinking vodka like a normal adult woman. She has a cuss-fest inside her head. The poet stamps down on her toe underneath the tray tables. She tries to make her face go slack. The poet asks the flight attendant for a pillow for her, and more vodka for herself. When the flight attendant leaves, the poet elbows the performance artist so sharply she cries out.

“What? I was just adding a little Tourette’s to the scene.”

When more vodka comes, the performance artist turns her head to the airplane window as far as she can. How did she get here, I mean how did she really get here, what were the choices, what’s a past — she takes a long drink — what is psychological development? Is it as fucking Freudian as it sounds? She sighs the big sigh of twenty-six, wondering if we are all trapped inside identity, genetics, and narrative — some whacked-out Kafka god handwriting our unbearable little life stories. Then she thinks an American-artist thought, the rough-and-tumble kind: how can I use this? She rubs the letter underneath her shirt, she thinks she sees the reflection of herself in the airplane window, like a black twin, and she’s falling back to memory, she prays to the god of Diamanda Galás.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Well, let’s have it then.

When she was seven years old, a mediastinal cystic parathyroid grew in her head. The tumor, the medical professionals told her so-called parents (one a famous architect, the other a famous concert pianist, both mega-narcissists), was “inoperable.” And there was this: the tumor was pushing on the beautiful gray folds of her brain in just the right way as to make her behavior look, well, there’s no other way to say this. . retarded. Like in immediate need of a helmet.

The effect this had on her mother was momentarily devastating. But that isn’t the story. What her mother did with her devastation was to jettison it, and jettison it the way intellectual mega-famous narcissistic people do, until it was so buried in the layers of her psyche and her body and her motherhood that it rested at the base of her spinal cord near her fucking tailbone. She didn’t shit right for years.

And what her mother — her famous concert pianist mother — did next was. . well, a performance worthy of an ovation. Brava.

Her mother used the notoriety and fame she had garnered as a pianist to be something even bigger, better: She became a triple-A martyr, a mother of tragedy and pain, and — most important — a spokesperson. She headed every lost cause, she was awarded community prizes, was featured on Good Morning America. No mother in the country could outperform her, at least when it came to volunteering for lost causes, illnesses, and deformities. Cancer, AIDS, MS, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, lupus, leprosy (yes, there is still leprosy), and all this WAY before she went third world. You get the picture.

Total abandonment of her daughter to the hired caregivers and medical staff and physical, speech, emotional, and spiritual counselors in favor of the martyr limelight.

What her father did with his devastation was a great bit more concrete; perhaps the simplest things we think about gender are utterly true.

It was his role to take the impaired daughter on excursions, so that her seemingly retarded little life didn’t suck outrageously, but only mildly.

So he took her all kinds of places, even though it made his heart have a hole in it.

He took her to the movies.

He took her to McDonald’s.

He took her to libraries.

He took her to the big red bull’s-eye of Target.

He took her to Shari’s.

He took her to water parks.

He took her to boatyards.

He took her to the beach.

He took her to bookstores.

He took her hiking in the forest.

He took her to museums.

He took her on the light rail system.

Again.

Again.

He took her horseback riding.

He took her go-cart racing.

He took her on Ferris wheels.

He took her to record stores.

He took her to music concerts.

He took her to buildings he’d designed, walking her through light and shadow and form.

He.

He.

He was more tired than any man alive, since she expressed her outrageously embarrassing glee at every one of these places he took her, all of it while wearing a helmet, and everyone always stared and said things under their breath, I mean everyone, I mean always, and at some point, no matter where they were or how it was playing out, she’d get to some frenetic moment where she was in danger of injuring herself or others, a tiny amount of drool sliding from her mouth, pee darkening the front of her crotch, the look of. . Well, I think you can picture her grimace-smiley too-white face, right?

And so it was that one day, inside his role, this particular thing happened. She was in one of those inflatable worlds that appear at county fairs. . the kind of inflatable hut kids can crawl inside and jump up and down. You know what I mean.

She entered.

He left.

No, really.

He left.

He left his daughter, he left his wife, his family, his life, radically and without hesitation.

Not that much later — four years, to be precise — her mother was giving a lecture on the child-tragedy circuit. Afterward, a neurosurgeon came up to her and said he knew a doctor in Europe who specialized in the type of operation they’d been told was impossible, and so nearly by accident she got her daughter a different medical team and a world-famous surgeon in Europe, and guess what?

They operated successfully and her so-called retardation disappeared and she bloomed into a completely normal, beautiful, American teen.

Completely normal, except for the pearly skull scar and the emotional scars for fucking life.

And that’s how she comes to be sitting in an airplane with the poet pretending to be her past. Because she’s a stand-in. She’s a retarded girl again, being taken to Europe for experimental treatment again, a story from her real past invading her present. Because without makeup and face jewelry and vintage clothes and hair products, without anything on her head besides that disgusting helmet, she looks much younger than she is. Just past puberty. Which means they can swap her. Which means they can use her special retard-girl identity papers to enter the country with her, but leave the country with a different girl. Later, someone will come back and get her and take her back home.

It’s the least she can do.

And besides, the poet had said, this is the most radical performance art she’ll ever do in her life.

Emotional cripple. Adult need machine. Fuck addict. American artist. She rubs the scar on her head. She rubs the letter against her flesh. The last thought she thinks before she drops into a twenty-something-year-old vodka sleep is: I hate women.

The House of Art

For more than a year, the girl and the widow live together in the widow’s house while her childhood shifts. When the girl arrives she is eleven. When the girl leaves she is nearly thirteen.

Inside, the widow starts to teach the girl everything she knows about art. The history of photography, painting, music, literature. “Look at this poem. How it travels down the page in lines, not sentences. How its beauty is vertical, like a body.” The girl puts her fingers on the page, against the words, tracing their meanings, touching them and touching them. Silently mouthing.

The widow shows her poetry and science, philosophy and myths from all over the world. She teaches her how religion and science each rely on a violent faith between creation and destruction. She shows her how the history of art carries with it the same duality. She shows her the body — Christ’s body endlessly crucified, bodies in war and sacrifice, the never-ending bodies of women, bodies in pleasure or pain or sleep or death, bodies in rapture, tortured bodies, bodies in prayer, bodies in the static pose of a portrait. The widow tells the girl, “Do not listen to what any society tells you about the body — the body is the metaphor for all experience. A woman’s body more than any other. Like language, its beautiful but weaker sister. Look at this poem. This painting. Look at these photographs. The body doesn’t lie.”

The widow weaves the importance of expression and representation into the smallest details of an ordinary life. She milks the goat and steals the chickens’ eggs while telling stories of archetypal animals. She lights the fire and cleans the dishes while reciting poetry of love or war. She walks miles to the nearest village and brings back underground writings and photos, the same as milk and bread and sugar and coffee and ink and paper, making sure to detail the seriousness of these suppressed objects. She is careful to explain to the girl how it is that human expression is the highest value in life, but so too is death, in this place and time they find themselves inhabiting. The girl takes in everything, rarely speaking, her listening and watching a kind of devouring.

One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl’s legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, “May you bloom.” The girl doesn’t flinch. The widow tells her, “This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature.” The girl asks, “Why is it the word ne?” The widow responds, “When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman’s body to men.” The widow places her hands into the water and says, “Good. You are alive. You and I are alive.”

The girl’s mind floats.

This is not her first bleeding.

Her first bleeding came at age seven, after her fourth rape, four years before her family exploded before her eyes. She had been buying paper. Her mother was across the street at the post. She could still see her mother even as her own body was yanked by a soldier and dragged behind a wall. Her mother searched and searched, nearly losing her mind, until a soldier marched her mother out of town at gunpoint. Having been left for dead in an alley, she lay there for an entire day, into dusk’s falling, thinking, Death is a gift sometimes. Almost sacred. Like a door to something beautiful and profound.

But she did not die. And so it was that on that day, shivering in the alley, her hand moved instinctively to her rose of being and there was blood. Of course there was blood; but this blood was not the blood of soldiers’ forced entrances, dried and day old and smelling of what goes wrong in men. Triggered early, this blood moved through her like a warm river. New and wet and dark and smelling lightly of metal. Reminding her of steel traps. Of animals. In this way, when what she probably needed was warmth, food, water, and more than anything else in the world, the tenderness of a woman, the quiet hush and caress of her mother, she reached down and found only her own small being, red and hot. She brought her hand up to look at it. She tasted it. Salt and copper. Slippery like oil between her fingers.

Her first thought: I want to paint.

So she dragged her body back to the barn next to her own house even as she could barely walk or stand or bear the weight of anything and she found a wooden plank and she took what was left of her strength and painted with her own menstrual blood. That is how her parents and brother found her. Almost like a wild animal.

As she looks at the red water around her now in the bath, the girl thinks, That is the blood that has returned to me now. The blood I have waited for. And she thinks of the wolf’s paw, the severing she witnessed one night when she first came to this house.

The widow shows the girl how to use a pad to carry the blood close to her body, and in the months to come the girl’s and the widow’s monthly bleedings synchronize. From that day forward, the widow accelerates her teachings. She teaches the girl how to be present in her skin, how to leave it; how to kill animals to eat them and to use their skins and fur; how to extract medicine from drying and grinding their internal organs; how to chop wood; dig your way to food or shelter; how to shoot to hunt, how to shoot to kill a man; how to use your hands to make things. How to hold charcoal to draw, how to make oil paints, what a sable brush is; how to take a pinhole photo using a box and the sun; how to hold a violin and draw a bow against its thin, unimaginable strings; how to make language go strange and vertical to make a poem. How to trust the moon.

Sometimes, when the widow is retrieving more wood for the fire, or when she is gathering materials to close a hole in the wall or roof, or when she is milking the goat or digging up frozen potatoes or shooting fowl or retrieving a rabbit from a trap, the woman catches a glimpse of the girl in the act of painting. Out in the barn. On scraps of wood. With colors she has invented from berries and roots and olive oil and mud. She paints with her bare hands. And sometimes, the widow sees her paint with her own blood, her hand dipping down to the well of her body. When she watches the girl paint with blood, it takes her breath straight out of her, lifting it up to a place she has not admitted to for years. Frenzied and animal the girl’s hands are. Wild, her blond tangles of hair. Her body thrusting forward and retreating with an unbashful sexuality. Without anyone’s permission or knowledge. Sometimes the girl is laughing. Sometimes she shouts, “Ne!”

What she paints: a face. And the face is either screaming or laughing, at what it is impossible to tell.

The woman then understands that the girl will someday leave the house. Maybe soon. That the force within this girl is not anything belonging to the widow. And because she sees something that the girl does not, the woman starts to teach her English. She tells her, “Someday you must leave here and take what we have left in us to America. What we have left in us, buried and ravaged as it is, needs to come out. It is not a perfect place, America. It’s simply a way out of this story.”

In this way art becomes the whole world of the girl. And her hands become painter’s hands; and her body leans toward becoming; and her tongue begins to move from the cornered shapes of one language into the rounded edges of another; her dreams begin to carry scenes from an unknown country; and her origins, which are a white blast zone, begin to seek form, like the crouch of violence in her fingers, like the unstoppable sex of a child leaving childhood, making for the world.