The Small Backs of Children

Love Is an Image

It’s quiet like snow.

The filmmaker is holding the writer’s hand in the hospital room.

His head is on the bed near her chest.

Their breathing — a husband’s, a wife’s — synchronizes and hums with the hospital’s life-machine sounds.

Their beautiful boy is walking around the room with his Canon camcorder. Filming the lines on the linoleum floor, the fluorescent lights of the ceiling, the IV going from its transparent bag of liquid down the thin tube to his mother’s arm, the TV with his mother’s heartbeat signals, the somber hang of the curtains. Filming himself in the little mirror above the sink. He turns to the bed. His father and mother look asleep. He walks as quietly as he can toward their faces. With his six-year-old finger he pushes the zoom until the faces fill the frame, then farther, until it’s just his mother, then just his mother’s eye and cheek and hair. . everything.

Where White Is

I am into a white. As white as snow covering a field, stretching out toward all horizons. As white as a page. If there is a surrounding forest or mountain or city I cannot see them beyond the white.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here, or how deeply in I have traveled. I am aware that outside this place there is a room, and in the room they say a woman is not well. I think the woman is me, but I am so far away I cannot breathe language back into her, and so she rests, like a sleeping body, like a sentence yet unformed.

Sometimes I can feel my husband’s body — his physical presence — in my bones, and so I know when he has entered the room. He cannot enter the white. And sometimes I can smell my son’s breath and hair and skin, and I want to rip my heart from my chest and hurl it.

To them, I must look dead.

But I am not dead.

The white is soft. Soft against the eyes and the body, soft in your ears and throat. Not like mist or smoke. As if the air around you suddenly had dimension. You can almost touch it. This white before you. Where I am.

Inside the white I can hear things and see things. Sounds and images resolve and dissolve at random intervals. And different times present themselves — different times from my life or the lives of people I’ve known or the lives of random people, little scenes of being, all of them come and go.

The stories here move differently from the way they do out there. Inside the white, stories move backward and forward in time and appear in all places at once. Language and images split into thousands of universes. Stories and people and images connect with faster-than-light transfers of information. Many worlds coexist.

I do not feel unconscious or crazy or comatose. I feel part of the motion of all matter and energy, and thus I am a participant with agency. If I want something to come or go, it does.

I hear something now inside the white. It is a word. The name of a street: Bakszta.

The name of the street is immediately comforting. It is the street of my ancestors. The only one in the world who knows the people who lived there and their names, names that became my name, the name that began as one word and deteriorated down and down and under and across until it was utterly atomized into my American last name, the only one left: me. Because of all the daughters, some of them childless, I am the last. I am a locus.

Juknevicius. A name.

Bakszta. A street.

Through the white: a girl.

It is her. The girl who haunts me.

I go through the possibilities again. Maybe she is my dead daughter. And maybe she is me, or some relative before me. Maybe the girl is simply a metaphor for what we lose or what we make. And maybe the girl is just a girl, an imagined one, one created from the mind of a woman lost in the spaces between things.

I open my mouth to speak.

Perhaps it is the name of the street.

Perhaps it is the name of the girl.

Perhaps it is the name of my son, or my husband.

Or just a name, my name, my brother’s, a friend’s, an artist’s, a poem, a country, any name.

But no name comes from my mouth.

My voice — language — is swallowed up by the white.

I see the girl’s blond tangled hair as she walks away from me into the white, into some other story. I hear a blasting sound. I follow her.

The white turns to a scene of war. Like a movie.

I open a door in a bar in an Eastern European village. My husband and son are there too, but I am not near them. I am near other people — artists who are dear to me. My brother. The poet, the photographer, all of them. I can see my husband and my son, though. Across the space. They’ve made hats from paper cups. They are laughing. My husband is drinking beer. My son is drinking apple cider. His cheeks little apples. Someone is playing a guitar. Someone else is playing an accordion. There is amber-colored wood on the floors and walls and chairs. People seem intimately close, like in a not-American bar. Their faces warm and rosed. Their gestures swept up in song or laughter. No one is picking up on anyone, or arguing, or using money, or wearing a certain thing. No one’s hair matters. This is a not-American room, a room not made for money and action and ready-made lust thrusts, a room where people are speaking intellectually while drunk, the artists and the farmers giving each other equal weight, and leaning into one another’s bodies without concern — men leaning into men’s bodies and women into women’s — so that the air of it carries all of our hearts and loosens all of our minds and anyone could be from any country for this moment. Loving anyone they want. Saying anything.

The myriad conversations make a kind of voice-hum over the room, and I look up at my husband and my son and I smile.

But there is a war raging just outside, and the information comes to be known that we are all about to die, that a thermonuclear blast is coming. The information is coarse and immediate, as I assume it is for farm animals. They catch the smell, their spine fur shivers, they shift weight from one leg to another, feel restless, look up. The time we have left is understood. I hear it and know it and within ten seconds I make my way to the beating heart of love (my husband and son) so that we can be inside a group embrace, looking into the planets of one another’s eyes as the white life-ending cataclysm occurs.

The embrace and the blast happen at once, comfort and annihilation. Our bodies the universe.

I am in the white again.

Energy never dying.

Just changing forms.

I lie down in the white.

I know why I am here.

I’ve come to ask my questions. The ones my dead girl left inside me.

Is it my fault.

What happened to you.

Are you happy.

What do you want from me.

The girl is here, inside the white. When the time is right, I will ask her my questions. And then I will either go back or she will take me.

The woman in the room, the one who is maybe me, they say she is dying in a hospital bed.

Bloodsong

The widow is in the kitchen making soapy circles with her hands on plates at the sink. I can hear her humming. How long have I lived here with her? How old am I? Am I still a girl?

I am looking at the widow’s book of paintings of the crucifixion of Christ. It is beautiful, this book of Christ paintings. It is the size of my entire torso. Death, I’ve learned, she lives in all of us the moment we are born. The pink wrinkled skin of a squirming infant can’t hide it. It’s just true. Maybe that is why there are almost no paintings of babies — except the Christ child, and what kind of baby is that? A fat little fiction — a baby that comes from the sky through the body of a dim-witted woman.

All bodies are death bodies. But the best death body of all is the crucifixion. A beautiful womanman hanging naked from a cross, stuck with nails, bleeding, thorn headed. Of all of them, I love the Velázquez the most. I am looking at it now. I lower my head to the image and close my eyes and rest my cheek upon his body. I put my mouth to the page and lick it. I wish it was in me.

I can feel my body. I can feel the heat at my chest and ribs and belly. I follow the heat story with my hand. I can make fire between my legs any time I like. I open my eyes and raise my head from the page of the Christ body. I look at it. I don’t care about this puny faith. I have died and been resurrected hundreds of times. What’s the Christ story compared to the bloodsong of one girl? How flimsy that story is. I believe in Velázquez. With our hands and art. I believe we must make the stories of ourselves.

My name is Menas. This is my story.

There was a bomb.

Once I asked the widow, when I could not find the story in any of her carefully collected news accounts: where is the story of my bomb? There is no war, she told me. There’s been no war for fifty years. There is only the occupation, and what that has meant to people. Your family killed. My husband sent to Siberia. The bomb that killed your family?. . Listen to me. No one knows where it came from.

What has happened to us — there is no story.

But there was a family. My father the poet. My mother the weaver. My brother, my other, child gone to ash. I am like a blast particle — a piece of matter that was not destroyed, a piece of something looking for form.

There is the widow and her house and how I came here. Through the violence of men, through the forest, across a snow-covered field. I do not believe in the word meilè—love. Nor tëvynei—love for one’s country. Nor vaikams—love for children. Motinos—maternal love. None of them. In the place of love there is art.

There is my body and what has happened to it.

There is painting.

I paint on wood. Sometimes the widow and I pull the sides of abandoned houses apart. My paintings are of girls. In one painting a girl is chewing off her own arm, her hand caught in a steel trap. In another, a girl’s mouth has a house in it. Unlike a photograph, my girl faces are blurry. I want them to be blurry. I always make myself stop from putting them right, for what will it mean? Right for whom? By whose hands? The face of a girl should be blurry. Like she’s running.

There is a history to art, I’ve learned. Religion. Philosophy. Myth. Photography. I am reading about them. But there are chapters, whole books, missing. I see the stories of women, but they are always stuck inside the stories of men. Why is that?

The widow fills a kettle and puts it on the stove.

I pull down from the shelves a book of world mythology and my sadness grows. Artemis, why the paler sister of Apollo, whom she brought through blood into the world from her mother’s womb with her own hands? I turn to the section about my part of the world, and in the mythology of my so-called people — the goddesses — what use are they? Why did I ever like these stories? What is Gabija, goddess of fire, who protects against unclean people? I do not need this protection. It is a trick to place fear there. What use is Laima, goddess of fate, luck, childbirth, marriage, and death, if she keeps women inside the house, away from the open space of the world? Saulė—saint of orphans, symbol of the sun. . who cannot teach me what the fire inside me is. Who would have me put it out, or give it to a man? Still, I have torn pictures of them all from books and pasted them next to my own paintings in the barn, hoping for company. Though I find it hard to trust them. I wonder about what they want.

The kettle sings. The widow pours hot water into a cup filled with tea leaves.

History, mythology, literature, all the pictures and stories in time: women as witches and monsters, women as prizes and slaves, women as frozen bodies. A woman burning on a stick, queens about to lose their heads. Where are the artists? Where are the bodies who would break out of the story and rescue the others? Where are the daughters with fire in them?

I reach for another book: Indian mythology. It’s easy to find the page I want. I have looked at it so many times I can smell my skin on it. It is a painting of Kali. Great mother. Killer. Next to her image, her story.

Once upon a time, there was a war. A young woman named Durga was facing a demon named Raktabija. Durga wounded the demon, in lots of ways and with many weapons, but she made things worse, because for every drop of blood that was spilt, the demon made a copy of himself. The battlefield was filled with him. Durga, in need of help, prayed for Kali to fight the demons. With a gaping mouth and red eyes, Kali killed the demon by sucking the blood from his body and putting the many demons in her mouth. She ate them. Then she danced on the field of battle, stepping on the dead bodies.

I do not care about India, or Hinduism, or Buddhism. I do not need a savior.

It’s the art of her.

I stare and stare at it. I can feel the blood under my skin. Her picture gets inside me, so that we are not two, but one. No longer a picture, but a mirror. I open my mouth. I stare at the image until it is everything, and I go, I mean I literally leave and go wherever the image takes me, and I am glad, for I have no ties to this world. Such images make me a different kind of alive. I become the thing I am looking at. Her body my body. I touch between my legs. Heat. My mouth fills with spit.

Bloodthirsty warrior mother. I envy her tongue and might. Can this house even hold the two us?

The widow drinks tea and reads from an underground newspaper; she says Democracy is coming.

An Invisible Union

I’ve never written about this. I’ve not told anyone. To my knowledge, the experience exists only in memory between us, a writer and a photographer, but it has no representation, so it may not even be real.

The camera had nothing to do with anything. It didn’t matter.

I’m lying. It did matter. It mattered that she used a camera. It mattered so much that my mouth fills with spit as I think of her, even now.

For example. She walked into the white room of our motel. She stripped the mattress white.

This is important. The whiteness. And her volition.

She was dressed in tight black pants, tight black sleeveless cotton shirt, Gap-like and stiff and new. Her hair the precise wheat color of mine, only short and raging. Her eyes the precise transparent blue of mine, but more driven. Us both Geminis but not quite twinning. Sexual questions between us — her insistently straight, me bisexual — the what of it.

Her camera gave her self-possession. I did not expect her to direct things; I thought she would want me to. But immediately she said lie down on the mattress. I did it. Her voice was calm and quiet. She said take off your pants. I did it. She said take off your shirt. I did it. Sweat formed on my upper lip simply from her asking me to do ordinary things. From language out of the mouth of a woman. She said touch yourself. I petted myself lightly. Heat. She said close your eyes. I did. I heard the first click of the camera. She said — but it was not as if she was saying it — it was the power of the camera in front of her face giving her the means to direct things — squeeze the meat of your pussy until you are wet. I did. That’s when I felt her eye on me close in — the lens of her. She said take one of your tits out of your bra and squeeze it like it’s full of milk. I did. She said milk it. I did. My mouth opened barely. My pussy became wet.

She said take off your panties. She said take off your bra.

I heard her steady the camera. She said whatever you do, don’t open your eyes again. I don’t. Everything becomes present and past tense, like in a photo.

She says play with your tits. First, I squeeze the full-palmed whole of each breast, kneading them up and out as if I am readying them to be devoured. They become swollen and my nipples harden. I pinch my own tits over and over again thinking I will make them red for her, I will make them mouthable and hard and huge and reddened. I picture them as I play with them. I keep working them until I can feel them becoming the picture I want. I can hear the camera and I can feel her moving in and out and in and out. When she is near I feel heat, and while I am pinching my tits I can’t help it: I undulate my hips and my pussy begins to cream.

She says play with your tits again so I start to shake them by holding my nipples and jiggling my tits. This makes me arch and moan and I lift my hips up to where I imagine she might be. Then I cup each tit with each of my hands and jiggle it for her like a porn-paid woman might for some sap of a man. She says put your hand up yourself and I do, and my pussy becomes swollen and like a begging mouth.

I moan and whine.

I can feel her photographing me. I can hear the shutter clicks. I think I might lose my mind.

I pull my own tits up so hard it makes me cry out. I push them together and I wait and wait doing that until I cannot wait any longer and then I shove one tit up to my mouth and suck my own nipple. I bite and suck myself. I say please and spit covers things. I can feel her lens very close to me but not touching me and I think a little this is what it is like to go insane.

Or this is desire, convulsive.

It is no wonder men cheat.

It is no wonder women cheat.

Desire is larger than god.

Ask a believer.

While I’m sucking myself hard and wild like an animal or infant, I suddenly hear her say play with yourself.

I let go of my tits and they drop like fallen faith.

I move my hands down. She says pull yourself apart first and show me. She says show me your clit, I want to see your swollen clit. I do it. I drive my hips toward her voice. I think I hear her use a zoom. I fuck the air showing her my clit and my wide-open pussy, as slowly as possible. The throbbing seems like it’s bringing me close to death.

She says finger your clit. She says play with it between your thumb and forefinger, hard. I do it. She says with your other hand shove your fingers up into yourself. I do. I think I am maybe panting and sighing or crying. My fingers are swimming. I’m creaming. She says taste yourself. I do. She says now lift your legs up show me all of yourself. Make yourself come for me.

I can’t see her, but I know the camera is nearly touching me at the site of all creation.

If a camera could record smell and heat and taste.

Click. And click. Clicking like sparks.

I begin to cry inside my ecstatic state, I am close to release, she knows it, she photographs it a frame at a time, I picture the obscene position I am in, I am close to surrender without touching anyone or anything except this woman with her lens.

When I come I make an animal sound and the shiver overtakes me endlessly. The cum shoots from my body in a way that has never happened before. Like a man’s. I come and I cry. The shivering lasts several minutes. This opening that is me, it opens and closes in violent contractions, the dark of the inside of me meeting the light of the white walls, the production of an image, the intimacy of art, the space between two women, everything balanced in its dark and light. My eyes still closed, I feel the weight of her body, finally. She lies on top of me, naked. That’s all. She doesn’t move. She asks me not to move. She cries, and her tears fall on my face, wetted whispers.

When I open my eyes she is back in a chair in the corner, sitting like a beautiful and quiet bird. Taking film from the camera. As if it was all the camera.

She never speaks to me that way again.

This is the only night between us like this.

Journey to the Underworld

After the poet has slept the sleep of crossing countries.

After she has moved through the rooms and faces, the déjà vu and pulse, the light and shadow of Prague — the mother of cities — and entered its black-and-blue night.

After she has taken the performance artist — spoiled brat — to the apartment of a Russian washed-up gymnast turned sculptor — dearest friend — who will take the young woman in for as long as it takes. An apartment shared with a post-op Czech transsexual. Overlooking the river Neva.

After she has dined with her friend the poet journalist from Krasny 100 %. They talk the talk of outsider writers. The poet is warm in her chest.

After she has gotten drunk with the poet journalist and his friends — a collage artist and his contortionist cousin — after she has witnessed the sexual excess of all of them together in a five-star hotel room, the impossible bend and lurch of the cousin’s body, her eating herself, her howl still animal in her head. How travel loosens sexuality until it hops like a parasite from host to host, feeding, always feeding.

After she has made her way into the further night of this city — walking with sex smeared against her pants and thighs, and alcohol still blurring her vision and the taste of blood, cum, and ecstasy still tangy on her tongue — this city haunted by its own past, the ever-lit-up Crystal Palace with its winding bulbs and sword spires, the opulent squares and palaces seemingly divorced from modernity, the pieces of land fondled by the finger of the Neva River, kissed by the tides of the Baltic Sea. City of waters. Canals. Rivers. Lakes. Floating city. City of a night sky reflected in waters. City of lost names: Petrograd. Leningrad. City of revolutions: Decembrist. February. October. Bolshevik. Lenin’s Great Terror. Stalin’s Red Purge. City of Dostoyevsky. Akhmatova. The Stray Dog Café. Pushkin. Gogol. Tchaikovsky. Shostakovich. Nabokov. City of white nights. City of the stone of tsars carved through with animals and poverty and piss-stained alleyways. City of women trafficked like fruit. City of locally grown poppies and the sweet stench of Black. City of child junkies. City of gypsies. City of porn with the thick-tongued accents of Soviet-era fantasies. City of war and sexuality. City of domination and submission.

City of the Tambov Gang.

She has not come here for the Summer Literary Seminars. Not this time.

Greshniki. The Sinners Club. A gay club styled as an old mansion taking up four floors. The motto of the club: “We’re all sinners. We’re all equal.” So many rooms: a dance floor with mirrors, a balcony, a restaurant, a video Internet bar with free wireless access, and a “dark room.” Young naked men dance all night on the stage, their flex and thick getting under the skin. Her sitting at a table.

This is where she is to meet the man from the Tambov Gang. When he walks up she is writing a poem.

I’ve weaved my way to stand

between two seated, manly queens

dressed down in thin denim.

The boy on stage, sexual

and sure, enters his finale.

I’m drunk. I’ve never felt

such love in any room.

I join the thick applause,

cry and lurch a little, ignore

a hissed sit down! sit down!

and pursed lips from the drink

I’ve spilled with a light hip-check,

launch more hoarse cheers,

monstrous American daughter

with real tits, tears without salt,

snotty air-whistles, a real cunt.

When the man from the Tambov Gang touches her arm, she looks up and she is startled by his exquisite androgyny. It takes her American breath away.

“You will drink, then?” His voice a masterpiece of Slavic history.

“Yes,” she offers, letting her hands go slack on the tabletop.

He looks to the bar, snaps his fingers, and sits.

The music’s beat massages the soles of her feet, the chairs. She can feel it in her palms on the table.

“Do you have a light?” He leans toward her with a brown cigarette.

The poet commits chivalry. Pulls the silver lighter from her leather jacket pocket. Lights the cigarette. Smiles at his smile curling under the veil of smoke. He is wearing gray sleeveless mesh. His arms are. . written. Tattooed in a language she sees as beautiful skin symbols. He looks at the stage. Laughs deeply. Then throws his beautiful head back into a deeper laugh, his blond sculpted hair like oiled wood shavings, his lips full and wet, his neck smooth and exposed. He turns back to her.

“It is good like vodka, yes? It is like holding something very good in your mouth, before you swallow, these boys. .” He laughs again. “. . these beautiful boys.”

The poet examines the thinness of his skin. She thinks perhaps she can see the veins gleaming. The skin of Russians and Baltic peoples — so white it carries other colors. Blue. Green.

Four vodkas arrive. In shot glasses. No ice. As they do here. He says, “We drink Zyr first. It is not perfect, but it is not American either, yes?” Laughing, he drinks the shot in a single gulp, and she follows, holding the cold in her mouth, letting her teeth take it. They eat little crackers immediately. In the way of this part of the world. “Again?” They kill the next two. He laughs. He looks at her — around the whole of her, his eyes outlining. Then he says, “Next is coming the Jewel of Russia Classic. . you will not be able to stand it.” He smokes the cigarette and the music thuds up through their spines and the boys move and move and she wants more and more.

They drink four shots of the Jewel of Russia before he says, “We talk now?” But another four vodkas have arrived, and he holds his hand up with something like the power of history. “No. We drink. This. This is something the world did not expect.” He holds his glass to hers and taps it. The sound coming from his mouth: za ná-shoo dróo-zhboo. He has made a toast. They drink.

In the poet’s mouth the vodka becomes a poem: a slight oiliness. A hint of apple. Faintly sweet. And the burn. Pleasing. She closes her eyes and lingers there. She opens her eyes and mouth and says, “What is this?”

“Chopin. Isn’t that simple? Distilled from potatoes, of course. Stubborn Poles. But what they have done to us all! The irony.” And his laugh fills the space around them like a cave swallowing a body whole.

“Now. We talk. Yes?”

“Yes.” The word emerging from her lips like something she can taste.

He puts his cigarette in an ashtray, crosses his arms over his chest and leans back a bit in his chair, lifting his chin up, looking down on her, but not with malice. “I have a question for you. Why do you seek this girl? This girl is unknown to you, yes? Is it a little pet that you want? Or will she be. . a commodity, perhaps?” He smiles, barely.

“Nothing like that. We just want to get her out. I can’t explain.” The words sound impotent even to her.

“I see. Just another American taking the world’s children from harm to safety. What a wondrous benevolence. Just like your American movie stars, yes? The power of American. . love.” He picks the cigarette back up, takes a graceful drag, and blows a smoke ring upward. She stares at its slow, blue ascension. “And money!” His laugh thunderous. “You know, you do not look what I expected.”

“No? How so?” She curls around his words, cautious as prey.

“You do not look as. . commanding as I hear you are.”

She feels him study the face of her, the neck, the collarbone, her hands.

“But then, this is a facet to your personality behind closed doors, is it not?” Again he throws his head back, laughing deep enough to drug someone unconscious.

She wonders briefly how he knows this. Then decides it is part of his job to know, and anyway, it is mind-bogglingly flattering. Think of it: a worldwide reputation. The admiration of this lyric-mouthed Russian androgyne gangster. She wishes he would look through her hard enough to slice her open.

The wickedly beautiful man from the Tambov Gang then puts his glass down hard on the table. He looks at her seriously. “I make you this deal. I give you the papers you need. The passport. The transport instructions. Who will be your help. And then,” he leans in like a thief, “we go then. You and I. From here, tonight. I want that you will help me with something. I want to put the power into your”—he covers her hand with his—“capable American hands.”

There is no good reason to agree to this. In anyone else’s life it would signal danger. Maybe even death. But this is not anyone else’s life, and she has lived hers on the edges of things. . and what is a life if one cannot walk into the night with a stranger? Following the universal instincts of leather life, then, she turns her palm up underneath his hand until it is nearly a handshake and says, “For you, then?”

“No. Alas, not for me, beautiful hard woman.” He stares at her. His eyes echo the waterways of this city, centuries haunting the pupils. “For someone I know who has suffered enough that he cannot feel his own skin. Do you know this kind of suffering?”

The poet nods her head. Suffering happens in all places, doesn’t it, all times, in the flesh of any skin, in the hollow of what should be a heart.

“His family, killed. Like so many. . Bosnian. But choose your country these days. No?”

The poet nods again.

“There is only one cure for this suffering. Violence for violence. I think you can help him to feel his skin again. Even for one night only. For me you can do this?”

The poet nods.

“Good.” He puts his hand on her shoulder. They both look at the boy body on stage, its cock and hips, its torso, its incomprehensible physical truth. Then he turns to her and slaps her cheek — the blood rushing to the surface of her skin—“But the money too, of course!”

The poet nods.

The Violence of Language

The performance artist sits, motionless, in the empty kitchen of a Russian and a Czech who are strangers to her. Deposited here by the poet to help save the life of the writer. In a city that holds no meaning for her. Looking out the window at an overcast sky, heavy with almost-rain. A very old stone bridge. Water. Birds. Lamps. An emptied-out self. She’s tired. She doesn’t know these people, this city. She’s drinking vodka in the morning from a small antique shot glass.

Somehow the burden of it — handing over her identity, agreeing to wait a month to be taken home — somehow, though it depresses her mind, it thrills her flesh. As if her body knows something she does not. She hates the flesh thrill, resents it, and yet she cannot not feel it. Like a fire just getting born. Something she carries against her chest like a beating heart. Letting her know she is alive.

The performance artist pulls the letter from the painter out from beneath her shirt. She has kept it there, in her bra against her tit, for three days. Day and night. Her skin smell on the envelope comforts her. At least she has this. This letter from the painter. Strange lifeline in this insane story they’ve abandoned her inside. On purpose she has not opened it. Especially not in front of the poet. On purpose she has guarded its contents like intimacy itself. For she loves him. She loves him more than her own life. She loves this man they have ejected from their fucking reality, so much that she almost can’t breathe thinking about him. In her heart and beyond she knows she is the only one who truly knows him. The only one willing to go all the way with him. Through the crucible of sex and art. Through the excess of him. Through the story of all their tangled-up lives, down into the hell of him, like Persephone. The man who nearly murdered his wife. The unapologetic alcoholic artist. A love unto death, if necessary. And he will fucking love this. That she did this thing. He will see that she is like him. And when this all ends, well, she’ll go wherever with him. No one will be able to stop her. And the two of them will make art and make love and leave the world of the rest of them. She drinks, and drinks, until things liquefy.

She brings the letter to her face, closes her eyes, and smells it. She can see his face, feel his body. Something like sapphires under her tongue. She slips a finger underneath where he has licked the paper with his own spit. She opens the envelope. She pulls the paper — thin white — from the envelope, her heart beating, beating:

Well, here it is.

I am leaving you.

By the time you read this, I’ll be in Paris in the arms of another woman. One I’ve known for years. One of many. This thing between us, it wasn’t anything. And now it’s gone sour, too complicated. I’ll have none of it. You are too close to the black hole of my past.

You know I am no good with words, so this will be abbreviated, but true. Or true enough. Fuck words anyway.

I’m giving you something though. A diptych of a life.

I will not be seeing you again. I’ve cleared all trace of you from my loft, and when I return, if you come here, I won’t let you in. Don’t try. I will never visit your loft again either. If I see you in the street, I won’t acknowledge you. You no longer exist. But I am giving you something. For your art. Try to remember that.

This will hurt.

1.

The year before I shot her, there was a night when we had an argument. One in a series. We were both skunk-ass drunk. At one point she grabbed a knife and ran into the bathroom — locked herself in there. I threw my weight against the door but nothing happened. I laughed. Then I slumped down on the floor against the door and fell asleep. When she opened the door, the first thing I saw was her blond bush — eye level. Then she thrust out her fucking arm and I saw my name, with blood like a dot-to-dot, carved into her arm. She immediately went back into the hole of the bathroom. I walked to the kitchen, grabbed a serrated bread knife, and hacked her name into my own arm in stick-man strokes. I still have the scar of her. The word of her. On my arm. In certain light.

2.

A year later, one night, I was deep into my drunk in the living room. It was peaceful. I was naked. She was in the bedroom asleep. I’d picked up a gun earlier in the day from a junkie I knew. A 9mm Beretta. I had the gun resting on my thigh, near my dick. I’d had it that way for hours. I heard her stir. She came into the living room. She was naked. The years of. . what is it? Passion? Chaos? Death? In the air between us. I don’t know why. I pointed the gun at the wife of her. She lifted her hand up. I shot. I hit her hand and her shoulder. In the dark, she dropped to the floor like a beautiful felled black-and-blue goose. We didn’t move like that, the smell of the shot hanging in the air, for long minutes. Love is a gun.

There. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

Perhaps you can make your performance of this man and this woman into something. Art is everything.

You know, every street in Paris is wet. Every person in Paris has a dog. Every hand in Paris holds a cigarette. Every mouth in Paris is a kiss.

Last night I dreamt myself covered in paint; the paint may have been blood. It was warm, like a bath almost. It seemed to look good on my skin. Beauty. Death. The same. Drink yourself drowned. Cut your skin with knives. Fuck with your genitals. Paint a painting. Shoot a gun. American.

I tell you, it scares me what I have done to her.

It terrifies me, even.

And yet I am not sorry.

I am as deeply unsorry as a person could be.

There is nothing that one human will not do to another.

Ce n’est pas rien. Au revoir.

The performance artist. Her idea of herself. . drifts weightless as an astronaut in her skull. Her chest hollows. Her body goes slowly numb. Her hair. Her face. Her hands. Nothing. The air she is breathing. Useless. Thoughtless.

She folds the letter back up and places it again against her skin. She pats it against her chest as if she is much older. She looks out of the window, but sight. . sight just isn’t in her right now. She stands up. Puts a coat on. In a regular way. Thinking, it isn’t necessary. Just be molecules. Light. She gently wraps her neck in a blue wool scarf hanging next to the door — someone’s. She opens the door to the flat. Steps out. Closes it. She walks down the hallway. Down several flights of stairs, her feet on the steps not connected to anything.

She opens the big wooden door to the stage of outside. St. Petersburg. She steps out onto the walkway. Just be light. She stops, closes her eyes, takes in a big breath. . blows it out slowly, like tiny white moths from her mouth. Like all the body’s memories leaving as light. In her head: a man leaves.

She walks to the bridge.

Stands dead center.

History makes the distance from the bridge to the water epic, dramatic, artful.

She places her hands on the historic stone. She looks down at the water, a kind of gray that is nearly black, washing sins away. City smells float around her. Pedestrians are perfectly absent. It begins to rain, lightly. Her age makes her look like a painting. The girl in pain or love. She leans over the ledge of things, her stomach and chest pressed hard against the stone. She can see the pink-and-white flesh of her hands. The blue of the wool scarf. She can hear the water so precisely it is like voices. Why, when she was a child, didn’t anyone teach her to swim? But she knows why. She was the imperfect child. Dumbed and drooling. Love lost to her from the get-go. She does not know where her father ever went. Her mother lost to philanthropy and activism in a celebrity world. The stone underneath her is as hard as anything in the world. Her ribs under her clothes no longer feel necessary. She lets the air leave her lungs. Molecules. Light. All the world’s a stage. We are all of us without origin. Who’s to say we were ever here at all? She closes her eyes. She can feel the letter against her chest, near her breast, where her heart should be. And then she pushes forward. The toppling body of a young woman with nowhere left to perform love.

Sometimes it takes so little to make an ending.

Triptych

1.

Gunfire in the distance. The photographer is washing her face in the tiny bathroom of another random family’s home in Eastern Europe. Even as she’s been gone for more than a year, somehow the poet has found her, and wants to meet with her, about the girl in the photo. She doesn’t want to. She dries her face and looks in the mirror and sees the woman she was and the woman she is, at war with each other. She moves back into the family. All the motion and energy in the house moves toward dinner. None of them looks up, and she is glad to be this unnoticed. She wishes she could lose her identity altogether. Potatoes go into a pot. A mother’s roughened hands. Rabbit — its neck snapped an hour ago — in the oven. A father stokes the fire and smokes a pipe. Cedar and tobacco. The daughter sets the table. The son cleans a gun. Out of the corner of her eye the photographer is always looking doorward. For trouble. She shoots a look over to her camera, dangling from a hook on the wall. This image maker. This thief. This lover. She thinks of the event that took place yesterday that nearly destroyed the son, and of the photos she took, and how she smuggled the film out as if she were smuggling humans to safety.

After dinner, the son, a teenager, begins to tell the story of the event. We knew that the soldiers were using the real bullets; we knew that the tanks crushed the people. Freedom came from all of us in this square; all of us, teenagers who still went to school, like myself, the students, the teachers, the factory workers, the bus drivers, the mothers, widows, amputees, all of us! The father embraces the son. The mother claps as if she is at a play and her cheeks fill with blood. This is my son. The sister does a dance in front of the fire, some kind of domestic and darling resistance. Then the front door blows open and soldiers with rifles clamor in and fast as a shutter clicking first the photographer’s camera, and then her left cheekbone are smashed in by the butt of a rifle, changing her face forever.

2.

The man from the Tambov Gang drives the poet in a black BMW through the streets of his city speaking of its ghosts: Maksim Gorky. Pushkin’s wife. Sculptors, pianists, painters, musicians, poets. The oldest drama house in the country. Then he asks her if she knows of Maria Spiridonova. The Russian revolutionary? she asks. Yes, he says, the woman who shot in the face a general responsible for brutally suppressing a peasant uprising. Who was dragged facedown on cobbled steps, stripped and raped and whipped, cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts. Who was exiled to Siberia. Who spent most of her adult life in a state of being beaten. The poet puts her hand to her throat and asks, What became of her? History, he says. She was executed. And his voice and the night bleed into each other until they are out of the city, arriving at a redbrick house surrounded by oak trees and flax fields. When they leave the car, before they enter the house, he tells her that the materials she requires will be delivered to her the following day: the doctored passport, the travel papers, the false identification verifications. He says, And when you find the location of the girl, my men will pick her up and take her to the train station at Vilnius. But after tonight. He smiles.

As they enter the building, it does not alarm the poet that they go straight down into the basement. In her life, there are many nights in basements, where ordinary people act out physical fantasies in homemade dungeons or playrooms or simply low-lit rooms away from the socius. But when they get to the belly of things, a great dark room with a concrete floor covered in places with giant oriental carpets, a towering wooden cross beam hanging from the ceiling, and one large black wooden table in the center covered with a white linen cloth and more instruments of whipping than even she has ever seen, she is surprised. For there is not one man waiting, but nearly a dozen men, all wearing brown or black Cossacks with roped belts. She freezes behind the man from the Tambov Gang. Has she been led into real or imagined danger? He turns around, takes in her fear, and gently touches her arm. Leads her ahead of him. She bites the inside of her cheek. What is this? she says, trying to sound in control rather than captured. He gently eases her down by the shoulders into a chair. Sit, my friend. Do not be alarmed. You are among friends. But we are not the same as you. We punish the skin for different reasons. Maria Spiridonova flashes up in her mind’s eye. But she holds her face, her shoulders, still. Somehow. He continues. We are Khlysts. She feels the air in her lungs again. Khlysts. One of countless break-off religious sects that practices ecstatic ritual. Sexual orgies. Flagellation. Cleansing the soul through pain and sexual excess. She wrote a fucking poem about Khlysts. The poet quickly reexamines the room, looking for a woman. Each Khlyst cell, she dimly remembers, is led by a male and a female leader, the “Christ” and the “Mother of God.” Where is the fucking woman? The poet tries to recover her position in this story. Reaching down her own throat to rescue herself, to become the American poet dominatrix, she asks in a husky voice, Where is the Mother of God? The man from the Tambov Gang smiles, then bows, then goes to his knees before her. It’s me, she realizes. I’m the woman. He looks up at her. Remember what you promised, beautiful hard woman. We made this deal, you and I. He takes her hands in his. Suffering to cleanse suffering. They stare at each other. And then he speaks the name of a man, and one of the men steps forward, to be washed, anointed, and then tied to a cross and hung from the ceiling for her to beat clean.

3.

The Neva River flows from Lake Ladoga through St. Petersburg to the Gulf of Finland. It is the third largest river in Europe, after the Volga and the Danube. During midwinter, the river freezes. Grigori Rasputin drowned in the Neva in 1916; after assassins shot him several times and attempted to poison him, they beat him, wrapped him in a sheet, and dumped him into the freezing waters. Later his body was burned. Peter the Great died at the age of fifty-three after diving into the Neva River in winter to rescue drowning sailors. The icy waters are said to have exacerbated his bladder problems.

A young man found the body of the performance artist on the banks of the Neva thirty-three miles downstream from where she jumped, and pulled her up onto the shore with little effort. Though only sixteen, Afanasy already weighed two hundred pounds and stood six feet three in his socks. Afanasy sat on the bank and rubbed his head and rocked and puzzled over what to do; her body was bloated and stiff now, and he was not at all sure how to carry her home, like an oversize plank across his shoulders? When he arrived at the house, his mother came running out and thought for a moment that she was looking at the Christ, then she saw that it was her only son, and she shouted his name and shouted his name and shrieked, What have you done? What have you done, my son? Sobbing and throwing her hands into the sky. For Afanasy had been born without any wits, and her manboy of a son had already crushed a village girl when he found her lying facedown in the snow, raped and bleeding. Even though she believed her beautiful too-big son, that he had tried to save her and keep her shivering body warm until help came, no one believed it was not him who killed her, and the only reason he was not sent to Siberia was that his mother had given them their life’s savings and begged with her very life to keep her dim-witted son with her. What use is he to you? And all the soldiers had laughed, perhaps the one who had raped the girl the hardest. But what if a second girl was discovered? And so mother and son built a fire at midnight and threw this unknown girl’s body into the flames. For a moment she appeared to sit up, no doubt due to the frozen tendons in her legs heating up in the fire, but for the boy with the softened mind and the distraught mother it was a terrible omen. The boy had nightmares the rest of his life of a girl coming out of a fire to kill him, and the mother never forgave herself for letting this girl’s name slip from existence. And the performance artist’s body went from water through ice to fire, and then into ash, and as the morning came and the sky went white whatever she had been was covered with snow.

White Space

In the white, life moves in pieces. Little fragmentations and synchronicities and echo effects. The story you have of yourself is loosened and made random. There is something deeply comforting in this — to see your life again in glimpses and patterns that are free-flowing. Something beautiful happens when syntax and order, chronology and narrative sense give way. Part of me wants to stay here forever.

When the men come for me, I am in the barn painting. I am working on the painting of a girl with a house in her mouth. I am using images from memory. A house. And inside the house was a family. And inside the family was a girl. A girl who must have been me, and yet that girl is lost to me. In her place, I paint. I am this body of heat. These hands of fire. Like blood makes a body, I use blood and paint to make a girl.

I can hear something coming. And there is a faint, soft, sweet smell, like only a child’s skin can smell. The white seems to breathe.

When the men come I can hear them and smell them long before they reach the barn. There is a sound that is men. There is. At the door with guns there is nothing to do but what they say. I wait, but no harm comes. They tell me I am to go to America. They say a woman poet will take me. I look at my painting. My hands. I think about all the girls left to nothingness.

Then I see the girl. She is running toward me. Running with all her might. Her golden hair tendrils out wild behind her. The blue of her eyes like opals nearly shatters me. My legs feel weak. I take a step back, not sure if I can withstand her.

I look at the men. They smell of cologne and leather and hair cream. They look — they look like they are in a movie. How the men look in the widow’s books about the history of film. Am I in a movie, then? They say that they will return the following morning to take me to a train station in Vilnius. This American poet they speak of will be there. This will begin my journey.

What it has meant to stay alive when my daughter did not. What it has meant to suffer a heartbeat after carrying the weight and form of her inside my body, wedged just beneath that fist-shaped muscle. The girl runs toward me with a fierce velocity. Closer and closer with speed and light and then she runs straight into me, wrapping her arms around me tightly, taking my very breath away.

That night, the widow reads to me from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. She plays me music made by a man as black as night, even his name a song: Coltrane. She says this is the better story for my life, to go to this other country, to become an artist in the company of artists. She tells me to never forget where I came from, to carry the spirit of this place in my heart. Where do any of us come from? Is it a country? A mother? Or is it perhaps an image, a song, a story inside which we feel. . named?

This is my death. This embrace. And I close my eyes and lower my head and wrap my body around her the way a mother fits a child, and I let the air leave my lungs thinking yes, like this, I will let go like this and it will make an ending.

Leaving the widow — this woman who delivered me from ash to art — it is heavy in my chest. This childless woman who stood in the place of a mother, like a painted symbol in a new language. How she gave me a story of my own blood, read to me, played music, let me go inside all the books and photographs and paintings and music of her house, how we pulled the boards from dead buildings so that I could paint on them, how we lived so smally, quietly, together in the eye of history, with no one to know us, with no one who killed us, just our two bodies present inside loss.

But the girl’s strength surpasses mine in a mythic burst. Any child is stronger than a mother, since the love we have for our children could kill us. She sends me an electrical jolt and grabs my hand and pulls me in a dead run farther into the white.

The night before I leave I give her the painting of the girl with the house in her mouth. She hangs it in the very center of the largest room. We don’t speak. Then she helps me burn every other painting I have ever made.

We run until I see a bonfire coming into focus. It is a good fire. I know this because the girl is laughing, and her laughter sings my bones. I begin to laugh too, until I am crying and laughing, and together we swing ’round in circles holding hands.

Ashes ashes we all fall down!

Fire always looks like butterflies to me.

We laugh ourselves out, then sit quietly looking at each other, our breathing finding its rhythms again. Her smile — it is the end of me. I see what should happen next. I wait for the air to still, the fire’s warmth to cradle us. I look her in the eye. I take the longest breath of my life. Did I kill you? She shakes her head so simply: no. Are you happy? She nods her head yes. May I stay with you?

I don’t know why some of us live while others die. It all seems to me an accident, someone digging in the dirt with a spade, someone else given a gun to shoot him in the head. One girl goes to school and becomes a doctor, another is raped and beaten and left to rot in the snow like a dog. One family escapes war and finds a new home, a new nation, the price of freedom to erase the homeland from their memories; another family blown to bits without the barest notice.

And my girl stands up, takes my hand again, and walks me slowly and lovingly toward a window — a small yellow glow — a cluster of butterflies. I look back at her, and follow her gaze.

I will never again have a father, a mother, a brother. I will never again live in my home. My country is not in me except in the violence that has crossed my body. But the smell and feel of oak trees and flax fields, my feet in the river, the colors of this place in flowers and roots and leaves and berries that I have ground down and heated into pigment, the will to live so that I can paint. .

The small yellow shape pulses with life. Still thinking of butterflies, I place my hand on the glass of the window, and then she places her smaller hand upon mine, and the years of pain and loss barrel up from my belly until they thicken and choke my throat, until my mouth opens and the wail of mother comes, and still she keeps her hand on mine and I can feel her hair brushing against my arm, and I am certain I am dying, either I am dying from this grief I have held so long or I am dying from the joy of her, and when the sound begins to quiet and drift away and my throat opens back up to ordinary air, I hear her say, “Look, Mama, open your eyes,” and I open my eyes and out the window is my writing. Words and words. Pages and pages of white, the roads and paths carved through in intricate hieroglyphics. This has been

my life. It is not a black hole of grief. It is making art.

Art, she is in me.

Motherlands

In a floating memory, the writer shuts off the light in her son’s bedroom, the boy finally breathing the sleep of little boys before they are asked to do the unthinkable, step into the story of men. She thinks of boys sleeping everywhere, how beyond-language beautiful they are. She knows she is like other mothers in part, but not entirely. In her there is a fracture. The fracture is another child. A girl. His sister who never was. Her chest constricts. Her heart beats past rupture. She can’t leave his room. Can’t walk into the hallway away from him. Who can count how long she stands there.

The first day of kindergarten she cried. She walked him and his miniature backpack into the field of small bodies. She kissed him good-bye. His eyes filled with tears. The kindergarten teacher led him into the classroom, telling her, “It will be okay.”

She walked to her car, got in, closed the door, and sat still for four hours. Waiting the wait of women who have carried death.

Atomization

Explosions in the distance.

The poet shoves her hands in her pockets. She waits in some kind of holding room at a small rural train station. The room is the color of dirty snow or ash. There is a large and scarred mirror on one wall, a long gray-green table in the middle of the room, two chairs, and a picture of the city from the fifties. Above her head, exposed pipes. There is also a tinted window, which the poet suddenly realizes is probably surveillance glass; she wonders what interrogations happened here over the course of history. She looks at the cement floor for stains, traces of human.

The girl has a man on each arm. The one on her left has a cigarette eternally dangling between his lips. The man on her right is heavy beside her. She wonders if her shoulder, arm, are bruised from the weight of him.

The poet’s studious gaze moves from the floor to the green metal door of the room; the doorknob rattles and then the door opens and there are two men and a girl. The poet sucks in a breath sharply. My god. The girl is so beautiful it feels violent. Like god appearing to an atheist.

Gunfire muffled in the distance.

The girl is led to a chair, told to sit. She looks at the floor. Then slowly, from the floor up, she looks at this American woman standing in the room. In her black leather jacket with her short hair and slim frame, she looks like. . Hollywood from the books.

One of the men — the heavy one — says something to the other in Russian. The lighter of the two looks at him for a long minute, then at the girl, then at the poet, then leaves the room. The poet hears him lock the door. Her neck hair bristles. She takes her hands out of her pockets. She looks at the mass of man in front of her. He pulls a wad of documents from inside his coat, puts them on the table. The poet studies what must be their paperwork. Then the man asks her, “Do you have the rest of the money?” The poet stares at him, her mind seizing around reality.

The girl’s toes curl up inside her shoes and she grips the underside of the chair.

An explosion rattles the walls, some distance and yet near.

The poet looks at the papers on the table and starts to narrate her position, but in the middle of her carefully crafted sentences a fist finds her face and she is sent hard to the floor. She tastes metal and her ears buzz. Then she is lifted from the floor like a puppet and punched in the gut. Then the door opens and the second man comes in and in his hands are thick braided ropes. While the lighter man moves toward her with the ropes, the heavy man hits her again twice in the face. Her eyes swim. Then he pulls out his gun and instructs her to strip if she wants to live. The poet doesn’t move and the man points the gun at the girl. The poet removes her clothes to save the girl. The poet closes her eyes and looks inward. When she opens her eyes she keeps her gaze locked on the eyes of her tormentor. Dead stare. Then they tie her wrists to two lengths of rope and bind her ankles together; the lengths of rope are then looped up and around metal pipes near the ceiling, so that her arms are extended on either side, her feet bound but still on the ground.

The girl opens her mouth and yells Ne! and is then sent across the room in a single blow, her head shattering the mirror.

The smaller man is instructed to leave. The man turned beast takes off his belt. He begins without ceremony to whip the poet. Welts rise red and swollen on her breasts, her torso, her belly and abdomen. She does not make a sound. Instead she bites the inside of her cheeks until blood fills her mouth.

When the girl comes to, she is flat on the cement floor. She thinks she sees what people call Christ being beaten in front of her. Velázquez. Then she remembers what is happening. Pieces of glass surround her head. She picks one up. Because she is small and quiet like animals are and no threat to the action — for what is a girl — neither the poet nor the man beating the poet hear her take off all of her clothes, so that when the man unzips his pants and moves toward the poet yelling obscenities in Russian, the girl’s voice surprises him. Here, she says, and lies down on the table, her sex hairless and her breasts barely rising, her spread legs unimaginably open.

Language leaves the poet at the image of the girl’s body.

The man laughs in a guttural slobber and lurches toward the body of the girl and throws himself on the slight of her. The poet starts yelling American obscenities in violent bursts, trying to make words kill things. The girl makes her eyes dead. And as the man pierces into her she stabs him in the side of the throat with the glass. Again. Again.

The man places the beef of his hand on the girl’s face trying to smother the life from her, then dies on top of her, his blood on her face and breasts. Stillness.

The girl stands on a chair and unties the poet. The poet’s arms drop around the shoulders of the girl, and for a moment the two look as if they are in an embrace. The poet lifts the girl’s face up and looks into her eyes. The poet opens her mouth. But no words come. Silence.

The poet and the girl re-dress, collect themselves.

When the door begins to rattle, the poet picks up a chair and stands ready to smash in the skull of whoever enters, and the girl raises her arm with glass in her hand, but as the door opens whoever it is turns to sound as an entire wall explodes around them.

Artillery fire. Or a stray missile. Or a bomb. Avisual. Reverse origin.

The poet and the girl run from the room through the blast hole, fire around their forms.

How a story can change in the violence of an instant. How content is a glimpse of something.

And in the end a train carries them. And a plane lifts them into the sky. On the plane the poet tells the girl the story of how she came to find her, and why. The girl listens, not catching all of what this woman is saying to her, since her English is still forming. But individual words and lines and images go into her. And the quivering in the poet’s hands when she lifts the little airplane drink up to her face again and again. And the tiny lines near her eyes that have written themselves this day. And the marks on the poet’s body that the girl knows hide violence like a skin song beneath her clothes. And the girl carries something with her as small as a seed.