The Small Backs of Children

Making Art

The first year I lived with the American artists is a collage.

This is a house.

These are the rooms.

This one, your room.

A room of your own.

We are giving it to you.

Because we can.

This is the table of the artists, where we eat and speak and act out relations.

This is the school, the American Interdisciplinary Art School.

Isn’t it something?

This is the in-home entertainment system with Sensurround sound and these are the Mac computers and this is a cell phone with a computer and this is software to make films in the sanctity of one’s own home.

Can you believe it?

This is what’s bad: The Nixon administration. The Reagan administration. The Bush administrations. War. Poverty. Injustice. Christians. Oil. Racists. Global warming. Homophobia. Corporations. The plight of third world nations.

This is money.

This is how we shop online.

This is Organic.

This is a haircut, makeup, jewelry, scented soaps. This is how to be a girl in this country. Pink.

I am upstairs in the painting room they created for me, in a house surrounded by firs, ferns, alders. I am the only one home. I lick the skin of my arm. Salt. Then I hear the UPS truck grumbling its way toward the house. I know it will stop here; I can see when it arrives from this wide upstairs room where I paint. It comes once a month. For years. Once a month a delivery of canvas, paper, paint, brushes, linseed oil, turpentine, art books. For me.

The deliveries come from a man who has become the exiled American painter in my mind’s eye. I have learned about him through their stories of him, how he rose to fame as an abstract painter, how he used women as if they were paint, how he shot his wife the writer. And I have read about him through my own research on the Internet, through all the media this country so lavishly spills all over everything.

It seems important to them that he is a kind of villain in their stories. This seems American.

There is something I have never told them. For seven years now, deep inside the delivery packaging, this man — the American painter — hides little notes, and I find them as I use the materials. Sable brushes are preferable to any other — don’t waste your time with the small ones. Detail work is for Dutch dead men. Use the light from the window in the room they’ve created for you — never artificial light. Never. Take ten steps back from your work every hour or you will lose sight of it. Don’t think. Don’t know. Just paint. If you must paint with your hands, use these — latex gloves. Oil paint can kill you, for fuck’s sake. The notes are rolled around tubes of paint or brushes, slid between pages in books, buried inside rolls of paper or written in pencil on canvas. These secret hieroglyphics from the man who shot his wife.

All I ever wanted was canvas. Even when the environment was dire.

The UPS truck is pulling up the gravel drive, through the alder trees. I close my eyes and breathe.

The second year I lived here is a mural with the images of three women on it in different states. The first woman is the writer. I saw her one morning emerging from the shower, dripping with water. A woman who suffered great loss and did not die. Baptismal.

The second image of a woman is the poet’s body before I untied her in the room of her torture, her arms outspread, her naked body carrying the trace of violence as if her wounds had been painted. Velázquez.

The third image of a woman is a girl — for there is no girl we are not always already making into a woman from the moment she is born — making a city in the dirt next to the boot of a man. It could be rage or love in his feet. The girl could be me or any other girl.

The third year I lived here is a double portrait, like a deformed reflection.

The left side is a girl with a wolf’s paw in place of a hand. She stands naked in a pool of her own blood, her head lifted upward as she laughs a whole sky filled with snow geese and song. The right side is the writer, her journal resting in her hands, the words filling the space so that her face, her hair, her mouth, her eyes are made of language. A mother and a girl who are separate but joined.

The fourth year is a painting at the bottom of the stairs, in the living room opposite the wall that wears the famous photo of me as a child. How strange to look at one of my paintings next to this photograph of. . is it of me? How?

My painting is different from the photo. In the photo, they say over and over again that the girl is a “victim of violence.” But in my painting, a young woman comes out of fire with a vengeance in her stare. Her stone blue eyes finding you.

The fifth and sixth years are animal: wolves turning into girls, girls turning into fire.

The seventh year is now. The painting I am making now.

To make a small pool of blood to use with paint, place a bowl between your legs, not an artificially scented wad of cotton. You must move outside what you have been told.

I am painting the spread legs of a grown woman, the mouth of her opening up to the viewer, her breasts a terrain just before her face in the distant background.

With my hands.

On a six-feet-by-six-feet canvas.

In this room in a house they have given to me.

Inside her cleft will be hands.

Her hair will be woven with wolves.

The UPS truck is nearly at the house, and I am the only one here just now, so I will need to go to the door and sign for the delivery. I clean my hands with wipes, leaving the act of painting and moving into the act of looking.

I think of the canvas like a body. It is alive. It is a body and I am a body and my inner rhythms tell me how to move with this other body.

I have read about the history of painting.

There are things in my head that no one has taught me, that I have not read or seen or heard anywhere else. They come out from my hands.

For the fleshy inside of her thighs, then, I will use blood and indigo.

I turn and leave the room, making my way down the stairs of this house. The UPS truck’s little horn blows three times. My feet on each stair step look cartoonlike to me — little Nike symbols making their marks.

Are there more brands of shoes in America than there are children in the world?

Seven years I have lived with this small group of American artists. I know all their stories. The playwright’s story is the drama of a brother and sister; a family plot. The poet’s story is a relentless body. The filmmaker’s story is flex and light and speed: action and male. The writer’s journal crosses the terrain of loss and love like a great white tundra.

The painter shot his wife and the photographer shot me, to make art.

I think art is a place where all our stories collect.

They mean to keep me safe, to give me a story that will hold me. There are many kinds of love, but there is never a love, or a life, without pain.

I mean to paint my way home. I am ready.

The End. One

You must consider filmmaking. It is the dominant mode of artistic production in our time. You know more about filmmaking than most of what you were taught in school. You are the camera’s eye. You are in control of everything we see. Hear. How things are framed. What the shot-reverse-shot relationships are, what every cut is, you are shooting. You are, after all, American. Eternal superpower, the camera’s eye.

For the opening, you decide to move in slow motion and black-and-white. An excruciatingly beautiful girl gone to woman, walking. A girl who has toppled over into woman, her lips already in a pout between yes and no, her torso and ass breaking faith. Moving down a tree-lined city sidewalk. Fall. Her coat pulled up to the flush of her cheeks. Her hands stuffed down into pockets. Her hair making art in the wind.

Her eyes. .

Her eyes.

Think of actresses who could fill the screen with them.

It is a remarkable passage, a symphony of aesthetics, when a girl stops walking like a girl and begins to walk like a woman.

I’m not sure anyone has ever captured that before. Perhaps we are afraid to name it, that coming of age, that passage. We’ve one great story, I suppose: Lolita. Several painters come to mind. Perhaps a few photographers. And of course film stars. In any case, none of it, nothing in the history of art, is quite right for this particular moment, is it? For this simple reason: she is not the object of desire now in the ways we are used to, is she? I mean, from the point of view of the American male artist she is, and from the point of view of the photographer, and maybe all the artists, but from the point of view we’re inhabiting she’s new. A man desires her more than he can stand, to be sure, and everyone who peoples her life just now desires her in one way or another, but that is not what is propelling the action or creating this plot, is what I’m saying.

It is her and you.

This has not been narrated in a previous scene, and yet, you know that blood is what’s driving her.

Blood driving her down the tree-lined sidewalk.

Blood driving her to the door of the warehouse building where the artist’s studio sits wombed among other artists’ spaces.

Blood driving her sexualized body.

You wish I would stop speaking of all this blood, but I’m afraid it’s the point.

Stop wishing it wasn’t.

Just once, the story will keep its allegiance to the body of a single woman.

Not the object of her body, but her experience of her body.

With all of history deeply up and in her.

So then. You have kept the entire scene of her walking to the door of the building in black and white. As she approaches the door to the warehouse, you give color. You give the door and her lips Alizarin crimson. And as she enters the throat of the building, more things go to color, but you filter it with a kind of midnight blue bruise tone.

You can do that kind of thing.

You can manipulate everything.

You can make meaning no matter what the reality.

American.

As she enters the cargo elevator, floor by floor, you return from slow motion to regular time.

By the time she reaches his floor, lurchingly, the speed of things is how we think we experience it in reality (forgetting everything we know).

You know, you’ve so many choices here. A letch of a middle-aged man, about to meet the image of his dreams. A familiar story.

But that’s not this story, is it?

His desire has not driven, well, anything. It’s downright impotent.

It is her desire that has begun to set the entire building on fire.

It is her action.

It is her subjectivity that is taking its fullest form — and she is not doing what we’d hoped or wanted.

She has come there in a premeditated way from the belly of history itself.

She has come to make an image take form, to complete an image of a self.

She placed herself between violence and desire.

She has come from an atomized family.

From the slobbering violence of men.

From the lost youth of a girl.

From the foreign hopes born between women.

His door is ajar. He is of course there, drinking, not painting. He is thinking of painting, but the only thing he wants to paint is the girl from the photo. And so he goes to the studio every day and drinks himself into oblivion and either sleeps in his own excess or stumble-fucks his way back home. I don’t know how these people stay alive, but they do. They do. And then they don’t.

How you frame it is all in her hands.

She takes her right hand out of her coat pocket and you move to slow motion again. Her hand then takes up the entire shot, larger than life. Her hand (with blood-red traces) pushes the door open as if she is moving gender itself.

He turns and looks at her, but the camera’s point of view is hers, not his, and so he looks small and puzzled, like a circus midget, at first. Then he looks like a tiny symbol of a man whose prayers have been answered, and he lowers his head, and no I am not kidding, he cries. Huge heaves like a kid. He cries and cries.

You will think there are pages missing, whole scenes.

But there are no pages or scenes missing.

This is the room of art.

Your life rules do not apply here.

Hold still.

I have related this earlier, but I will remind you: the first thing he says, the first words out of his mouth are, I have been painting you.

There is no conversation about this.

There is nothing that. . confuses her or hoodwinks her or overpowers her.

She simply removes her clothes — and how you film this is mostly through color and odd angled blur, a little abstract and almost underwater looking — until she is nude there before him, except that again it is not his point of view, so it is not really before him, and to the audience it looks like some mythic woman god taking up nearly the entire frame except for the almost-cowering man in the lower-right-hand corner.

A miniature man of a man. Twitchy and nervous and simian.

Her body is enormous and milk-blue-aqua.

It almost glows.

You fill the screen with her out-of-focus back and ass and oceans of blond hair. And you take a further risk: you let the camera linger there, with the little monkey of a man frantically painting in the small right-lower corner, for an enormously long time.

It isn’t very dramatic how they come to each other. It’s actually rather simple: His erratic monkey-man gestures finally overtake him and he lunges at her and she absorbs him, like energy disappearing into its opposite.

She laughs, but the sound is loving, not mocking.

For four days, they wrestle-fuck — what is making love — what has it ever been — what is it in this moment — violent “making”—on the floor in the paint and the sweat and the secretions of a male body and a female body. They eat and drink minimally, mostly alcohol and water and pretzels and oranges.

A word about mouths and hands.

You will have to work hard to figure out a way to do credit to this on film. Because the fact is, their devouring mouths and their uncontrollable hands are much more important than their genitals. This has never been filmed before, nor captured in writing, but it is the truth beneath the lie of what usually passes for the “sex scene,” and all I am doing is naming it.

This may not be true for everyone, but it is true for them: that their mouths and their hands are the center. The absolute fulcrum from which all energy emerges. And every other organ or opening is simply an extension or metaphor.

It goes without saying that they both bleed, numerous times.

Biting, scratching, tearing, cutting.

It goes without saying that they paint together with blood.

Four days.

A bloody, messy lovemaking.

That’s it. That’s the scene.

The End. Two

When the girl was walking toward the door of the artist’s warehouse, there was a voyeur.

The photographer.

As random as any image of our lives, she happened to have returned to the States then. She happened to be walking down the street going in the other direction. She was not, in fact, thinking of the American male painter, even as she knew his studio was brushing her right shoulder. Her life path took her past the studio plenty of times, and this time she was thinking of more important things.

But that day she saw the face of a girl-turned-to-woman that made her gasp. The fall air pulled into her lungs, then shot out again.

The prizewinning face, the face that changed her life forever.

Older, yes, much, but still.

Her face burned as it was into her retina, her skull, her heart.

And she is fully aware of what has transpired in the plot of all of their lives. The photographer knows the story. They told her in e-mails and faxes and phone calls. She had never let it enter her mind. At least not fully. She couldn’t. Too much. The image incarnate. Too much.

In fact, though they are not aware of it, she has severed her relationship with this company. She cannot bear the weight of them, and her new life has somehow untethered itself from everything she was connected to before. She hasn’t the heart to tell them; her plan is simply to live without them.

The only one of them she wants to see, was on her way to see, is the writer.

They say she has recovered.

They say she is alive with writing.

They say the girl’s story — and her alive son — and the drive of her husband — brought life back to her. That they pieced her back together from a dead place. Strange made-up family.

She didn’t let it into her and she didn’t let it be true and she didn’t think. She said to herself, Don’t think. Too much.

And so, as she walks briskly to see the writer, whom in truth she wants to devour with a kiss though she is incapable of doing so, she sees the girl from the photo. Her photo. The girl who was lost after the photo.

She sees her enter the warehouse building of the American male painter.

She stands there dully for several minutes.

Still shot.

And then she walks back to her car and sits in it for four days, eating PowerBars, squatting by the sidewalk to pee when no one is looking, walking to a corner café to shit or eat or drink more, unable to leave until she witnessed the girl again.

But the girl does not reappear. She thinks perhaps she missed her in one of her sprints to the café, but somehow she also thinks she did not, that she is inside, with him, that this is how history moves, a man and a woman, violence and desire, time and the moon and nations in fragments and nonsensical bursts.

Her hair looks like hell.

Her pussy and her armpits itch.

How long will she wait for the image of the girl?

When the photographer finally takes the elevator up and opens the door to the loft and walks up the stairs to where she can smell the scent of human, what she sees first is the body of the girl covered in red, which she takes to be blood, splayed out ass-side up on a futon. Then she sees the artist leaning on the ledge of the loft wall, then she sees the gun — a gun — on the floor. She sees the gun and all she can think is, This is the gun. The son of a bitch has kept the gun, all these years, and now his true colors are all over the fucking place — he’s shot another one. He’s shot another woman. Since he is not moving — he looks as if he’s in some kind of trance, or he’s so drunk he can’t stay upright — she moves calmly toward the gun on the floor and picks it up and aims it at him.

“What have you done. What the fuck have you done.”

To which he responds by opening his mouth, closing his eyes, and raising his hands palm-side up. He looks like a middle-aged Jesus, bloated and puffy with drink.

She makes a bad assumption because of. . well, everything. Her past, her present, everything they are and have been and everything she wishes she could have been and everything she has become. She assumes the girl is dead, since she isn’t moving.

Then, with the calm of a woman who knows what’s what, she aims very simply and without drama and shoots him in the chest.

He topples over the loft wall to whatever.

And here is a detail you probably wish I would leave out:

The photographer has her camera with her. She turns and photographs the body of the seemingly dead girl.

The book of photography that will come from this image will be filled with young women in the throes of desire or danger, and it will be titled She Placed Herself Between Violence and Desire, and it will lead to a great deal of money and a documentary film and quite a bit of fame.

The body of the male artist she leaves broken and bleeding on the ground floor of the loft. She doesn’t look. She doesn’t look.

The End. Three

What is the measure of loss?

It is in the hands, the girl-gone-to-woman thinks. It may be the only thing she knows. It is not the heart. It has never been the heart. It is astonishing how much myth has been devoted to that fist-size muscle, that blood pump.

After they have painted several blood paintings and several not-blood paintings, after they have fucked each other every way possible without once thinking of love, either of them, after they have come and pissed and shat and sweated and screamed and scratched and cut and bitten and everything else, they are reduced finally again to their animal selves.

In a quiet moment of breathing and drinking wine and staring into space, she asks him if he still has the gun.

He looks at her.

But he does not say, What gun? It is the gun from the story.

Of course he still has the gun.

She asks if he will show it to her.

His hand slips under the futon where he keeps it. Of course he shows it to her.

She fingers it. She turns it and turns it between her strangely bloodied hands. Her hands that have every possible trace of human on them.

He is not thinking, This woman is about to shoot me.

She is not thinking, I am going to shoot this man.

But neither are they not thinking those things, if by thinking we mean the mind brought to the very cusp of action. Even mindless action.

So when she points the gun at him, and he doesn’t move, and he closes his eyes, and he smiles very faintly, and when she pulls the trigger, without any kind of emotion in her at all, a person might wonder what it is that she does think and feel.

What she thinks and feels is this: This is a world of men. They come into your country, they invade your home, they kill your family. They turn your body into the battlefield — the territory of all violence — all power — all life and death. And we take it. We do. We keep taking it. We have lost track of the reasons we do not slaughter the world of men, but we do not. Yes, there are good men. She sees the face of her father. She sees how the filmmaker loves the writer. She sees the yet-unwritten life of the writer’s son. She sees her. . brother. Beautiful smear. But it is the world of men that creates pure destruction. And this is a truth we cannot bear: Since we bear them into the world, we cannot kill them. Cannot be done with them. Cannot exile them into oblivion.

We simply keep going, letting them enter us and seed us, unable to stop loving the meat and drive of them, for without men, would the world even spin in its orbit? The action of a man — without it, would there simply be a hollowed-out black hole? Empty space?

She doesn’t know.

She says a prayer for the soul of this man, just as she said prayers for her dead father, her dead brother, lovingly. As lovingly as possible.

She aims the gun at him.

Then she pulls the trigger.

Blood shoots everywhere between them.

His face is not shocked or filled with hate or rage.

He looks peaceful.

He looks done.

Neighbors call the authorities. A Homeland Security SWAT team arrives, and the girl is arrested. A week and a half later, she is deported.

The poet will be arrested for illegal aid to an illegal alien. An Interpol search will be conducted to find the performance artist. The poet will write a book of poems from her time in jail. It will solidify her career as a political poet. She will win numerous prizes, in America and abroad.

The writer will be told what happened. She will go into her bedroom and close the door, very calmly. The filmmaker will nearly lose his mind with worry, but in only two days she will come back out of the bedroom. She will not go down. She will spend the rest of her life communicating with this young Eastern European artist. The art each makes will inform the other’s. The writer’s stories, the young woman’s paintings, between them everything. It will keep both of them making art until each of their deaths.

The girl will live on, in a country emerging on the world stage. Someday the economics of her country will count for something, or they will join up with another country and matter. Someday this girl’s paintings will meet an audience, whether over the Internet, or by cosmic accident, or through back channels and counterculture trades, through thievery or trade or black-market wishes. But they will find their way into the world, her paintings.

Superpowers will topple and reorganize.

China and India will become something we never imagined.

Russia will make new allegiances. Siberia, unfreezing, will become a land grab.

France will take on a militant tone, leaving its beautiful cultural tower to chase power after all these years.

Canada and Russia and Greenland will stake new claims in once-frozen waters.

Africa will become an out-of-reach commodity instead of the expendable refuse heap we’ve treated her as.

Germany will forgive itself so much that it returns to arms.

And the Middle East, well, I think we can all see what we’ve made there. What a hand we’ve had in the making of our own demise. How masterful.

And the world will continue to be melted by a sun we’ve crossed terribly with our progress.

Nations will shift like stones in the hands of a girl making a city in the dirt.

And men and women. . either they will finally see each other and do what must be done to evolve, or they will not.

The filmmaker and the writer will invent a kind of love from making art together and loving a son.

The End. Four

The painter takes one last look at her asleep on the futon and thinks: Enough.

He reaches under the futon, where he has always kept the gun. It fits into his hand like an identity. It’s nothing, really, his magnificent and glorious death drive, up against the stories the girl told him about what happened to her. What is a man? he thinks. Wishing he was the story. This girl. This astonishing, gendered thing. What she has endured.

The sleeper.

He places the gun inside his mouth.

He shoots, the blood spray making its beauty behind him. If only someone were there to recognize this kind of beauty, to admit it. If only someone were there to capture it.

The End. Five

The hospital curtain shivers, almost imperceptibly. The rise and fall of the writer’s breathing. The image of a heart monitor, the audio silenced.

Two women alone in a room. The lives that might have been.

And the photographer’s hand, as hushed as whisper, or was it love, resting a Polaroid of the writer upon her unconscious body.

Fatherlands

The widow’s husband hid the last photo he’d ever taken of her, and smuggled it into the prison camp with him. What had been his life’s passion, photography, was now over, his equipment smashed in heaps of glass and black plastic, even his eyeglasses smashed in front of him under the heel of a boot. Twenty-eight years, they said. His sentence.

The sentence became his body. The photograph of his wife against his iliac crest.

It took only five years for the widow’s husband’s mind to wander in that prison camp, in ways that remind him of DNA drifting, or the disintegration of the stars.

After that, he began to have nightmares: a bloody torso inching its way along the frozen ground, a leg without a body being pulled by a dead horse. He wakes in the night as if waking were sleeping and sleeping, labor. A few days ago, he thinks, he may have met a man from a town he perhaps knew in his previous life. The man had stolen wood and was awaiting sentencing. Two days ago they had taken the man away. Yesterday he had returned. They had cut off one of his legs as punishment. The man’s leg looked like an enormous stick of bread, he remembered thinking. They brought it back with them and threw it out where it could be seen from the barracks. Fresh corpses were piled onto sleighs daily, and prisoners harnessed like horses would pull them with ropes, drag them several hundred meters from the barracks and pile them up as if for a bonfire. But never the leg. It was left to rot there in front of them, but not, freezing instead, not decomposing as an ordinary human leg might. It is strange what moves us and what does not.

My wife is not here.

And then his thoughts would fragment and tumble again.

Buttercups.

Entrails.

A boot.

A common treatment for frostbite was to hang a body, barely living, from the ceiling. One girl with sores all over her was hung by the armpits. One man, so starved and shrunken as to appear to be a boy, was hung by his feet.

Men would come and go in his barracks, either in his mind’s eye or in real time.

One was a writer.

With this man, he found bitter shared joy. He without a camera and he without a way to record his thoughts on paper. Art and ideas between them.

If he could produce a picture of their world, it would show hundreds of people curled fetal in their bunks like strange snails because scurvy had infected their joints. The white nights blew beyond thought. People reached the point where they had no sex, just the vague skeletal cage of a bodylike thing, mouths sunken in from lost teeth and disease, eyes glassy in their hollowed-out holes. He and the writer spoke many times of this imagined image. The writer absorbed it as a narrative.

One day the writer was taken away, and he did not see him again. His own strength faltered differently now. As with the loss of a lover or wife. He thought he saw him several times, far in the distance, in the night, the moon shining over a frozen forever delirium of cold. He thought he could see the writer framed by sky and the white of the snow, a skeletal figure, a stick man, harnessed like a horse, dragging the leg, with. . was it buttercups? Falling from the sky? All the images of his life blurring now into one.

How the body goes on living sometimes.

Did he forget himself?

The face of his wife. No, newspaper crackled and blowing across the frozen prison yard.

He finds himself standing exposed, as if shitting in a field in the hours of a long day’s labor, his genitals slowly sucking back into the cavities of his body, shrinking, retreating back. He is squatting, vulgar. He has no idea how long he has been this way. In sight the others are gathering wood, thistles, cones from the edge of a forest under the watch of armed guards. A soldier with a rifle, with a cigarette for a mouth. The rifle is perhaps less than five feet from his own dumb skull. He thinks he sees a flash of red. A woman leaning in to kiss the face of a lascivious soldier; no. A German shepherd dog’s tongue pink against dirty snow, licking a palm. A man’s penis pissing against dirty snow.

He dresses again. He looks out across white and on the white, peopled spots of black and gray and the hint of flesh. Faces? Holes for eyes and mouths. Is it a crowd? Fellow prisoners? Or just shapes? Trees?

He opens his mouth like it’s a shutter.

I was an artist.

I existed.

I made art.

The guard cocks a trigger in a perfectly synchronous motion. The sound prompts the man to join the sticklike figures nearly cracking from their own actions. He is now part of the still life: prisoners gathering wood.

He remembers washing a man’s back. The rag following the moles of his back as if they made some strange constellation, his own hand magnified to him, more than human, the man’s flesh taking the hand’s motions as a gentle whisper, like a woman’s gesture, a woman washing a body, he remembers the skin reddening where he rubbed. The giving over to love, isn’t it? The tiniest of gestures exploding like small compassionate bombs between them? Did he look upon the back of the man with longing? Where were the definitions of words going in this place? The black curls of the back of the man’s head, so black, so coarse, so like a forest that he wanted to rest his face there, calmly and without intention, as natural as putting a head to a pillow in bed at night with his wife.

And cupping his own elbows in the alone. Oh, to let go to death.

In his tenth year, he is scratching his name into a wooden plank in the wall — or thinks he is; the word he actually is scratching is Father—when somewhere nearby an elderly man, emaciated but for his oddly round and melon-hard belly, laughs out loud, a thunderous laugh, almost hideous. He does his best to ignore the monstrous laughing man, focusing instead on a single letter of his work. Finally he turns to the cackling jackal of a man and tells him to go fuck himself. Can’t the man see he is busy?

My dearest friend, the man says, I beg of you, forgive my intrusion. As it happens, I was just thinking that all my life has been given over to a pure insanity. You will wonder what I mean. In my case, it was science. Science! I have, as I say, given my life over to it, if you can believe the absurdity of that, the pursuit of that brand of knowledge in which the proven outscores the given. And at the age of seventy — at least I think that is the age, who knows in this place — it happened into my mind that the waste has not been these years in Siberia, but rather the years I spent toiling away in my lab, making “meanings” of things, working for the state believing with all my heart that physics was beyond anything, beyond patriotism or God, beyond the heart, the head, the concerns of the body, beyond any thought or drive. I am giving my life to the magnificent order of the universe, I thought, freely and with zeal! And when I saw you sitting there, friend, it reminded me of all my righteous-mindedness and idiotic sacrifice to the pinpoint world of microscopes and mathematics. He laughed again. Do you see?

In the time that he knew the old man, it seemed to him that there was not a single moment in which he was not talking. Narrating his knowledge, even in the face of its destruction and uselessness. It was as if an entire human history were pouring forth from his mouth. He believed himself to be dying, in fact, a cancer, yes, he was certain, his great and authentic big-headed knowledge of science assured him like second sight, even without his instruments, that his body was indeed being invaded, bombed, taken over, so to speak. Whether the old man was right, he hadn’t a clue. He only knew that he wished the old man would go on speaking forever, since he had discovered that his primary fear was that he was losing his aesthetic awareness, his ability to see pictures and chart the world image by image — he was afraid he was no longer a photographer.

Once he had dreamed of winning a prize, the prize. But that might have been a man he read about. He couldn’t be sure.

Buttercups and the lips of his wife.

Did he have a wife?

The day of their liberation came suddenly and without fanfare.

After the prisoners had forgotten their own names, officers began shooting prisoners at random, even as other officials were fleeing in jeeps, even as the camp was being overrun by liberation troops, their quarters burned to the ground, their leader handcuffed and scorned and whisked away for war crimes or picked up off the ground after suicides, still, the soldiers were shooting prisoners as best they could, and the old man still went on narrating everything he could remember about history, as he headed for a truck that would take him to safety, the photographer’s hand held out to him with a few fingers still tingling with life, the old man babbling away and becoming nonsensical, storming from the mouth with the last vestiges of history, saying something, what was it, something about Galileo, and wasn’t that extraordinary, that Galileo looked into a night sky and reversed an entire epoch, wasn’t it something? And who among us would ever raise their head to a night sky like that again, he was saying, when they shot him. And an intense memory seized him in that moment of danger — he was a photographer! He knew what the shot would be! — the old man’s head rocked back with the bullet shot and his mouth too red and agape, almost like he was laughing, toward a dead heaven, toward a godless sky, into the white.

And then the ping at his lower vertebrae, and then nothing.