These Dreams of You

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For Molly, what mercy there is in Jasmine’s murder lies in that the girl has only one mother to destroy, as she now is convinced she’s done. She despises the music that comes from her, that lured back the Pale Flame on that night she dropped the book with her mother’s picture. She wants to turn herself off.

When she flees Berlin for Marseilles, she doesn’t flee for herself or for her own safety let alone self-esteem. She has a body that men notice and that she sometimes trades on; she leaves behind, with the nights whose stories they tell, the tezeta of her commerce — cries through the latticed balcony doors. Men pay for the moans as much as the flesh. They pay for the music, the songs that rise up through them as if the men become tuning forks when they’re inside her. The woman means to flee anything that she deserves, the good and bad equally, because her existence has been rendered so nihilistic that she doesn’t deserve to deserve. So she doesn’t flee her remorse, as though she might watch it from a departing train, as remorse stands there in the U-Bahn station watching her back and growing smaller. Later it will seem like there’s no other place to which she could have gone but the wellspring of all chronicled memory, back to abyssinian purity, as though there’s no guilt in such a place or at such a point.