Thrust: A Novel - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Lidia Yuknavitch (Epistle) #8

Epistle

Cruces 6

Sometimes photographers came to document our labor, to capture our motion in a stilled image.

At first, we might have felt seen. Once, when her hand was still plaster but not yet covered with copper skin, we gathered around it, posing like children. We looked so small there, next to her enormous hand, but without our labor, she would never have been born, so standing together there made us become, in that moment, a single body. The photos were made into postcards, which were sold — another means of financing the project. Our names were not attached to our bodies, but when we looked at the postcards, we could see how tall we were standing next to our work. The organism of us. My name — Kem — never appeared in any story. Nor did the names Endora or David or John Joseph.

But the photographs were not about who we really were, or our labor, or our lives; they were about the story she was becoming, the spectacle. Sometimes newspaper stories would make their way to us. We read and heard many insults against her, even as we were still building her. One in particular stood out to me, from the Cleveland Gazette: “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and his family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed.”

None of us said anything out loud when the insults and challenges came, but those words went into our bodies alongside our labor, and we ground them into us, maybe the way the bodies of the people who built the pyramids were ground up into the stone and grain and blood of the structures.

I told Endora and John Joseph and David about the Cleveland Gazette story one day, after it lodged itself in my dreams. I started to have nightmares about Black bodies in boats. I didn’t want the images to take over my life. My father and his father and his father had moved through slavery stories, had carried them forward like the bodies of sons.

I thought about the revolution in my country that no one here ever told stories about. How self-liberated Haitians had fought successfully to overturn French colonial rule. I thought about John Joseph and his stories of genocide perpetrated under the brutal cover story of discovery. How his ancestors’ stories got buried like bones. I thought about Endora being haunted by a dead infant buried in the ground next to her church in Ireland — how many babies were likely buried in that ground, how at night the wind and dark were their only solace. I thought about the scars on David’s back, how I wished I could tongue them away.

Could we ever become part of the story of this place? Or was something always slipping away?

I thought about the girl who had come from the water, and the woman we were building between the water and god. Then it occurred to me that I had never met grace in any god like the grace in David, Endora, and John Joseph. God was just a story.

The day her body became a freestanding statue, a joy got into all of us. But so did a sadness. Looking up at this body we’d built with our hands and arms and legs and sweat and hearts — it opened up our throats a bit, stretched and stiffened our spines. Seeing her gaze out across the water made our chests open up, as if that were something hearts could do, as if you could just open your arms to the universe and sky and tilt your head up and open your mouth, and suddenly your heart would be something more than a muscled-up fist pumping in your chest. As if the beating of all our hearts might be something different than the life of one person.

The day before she was presented to the world, with pomp and presidential speeches and tickets sold to well-dressed onlookers and wealthy businesspeople, the body of us climbed off the last scaffoldings back to the ground. We spent the night before her birth celebrating beneath her shadow, with beer and wine and chocolate and music and rabbit stew and potatoes and sausages cooked over open fires, and puddings, breads, and cakes; we the body filled time and space with dancing of a hundred different kinds, so much dancing, to fiddles and guitars, pipes and harmonicas and concertinas and drums of all sorts, a singing made from everywhere we came from in waves of voices. Howling deep into the night. The sparks from the fire rose up toward the sky; our voices made bridges between people and land and water and animals and trees. Some of us slept right there on the ground, drunk on one another’s bodies, drunk on the end of things.

But it turned out that it wasn’t the end of things.

Is there ever an end to things?

For us, the statue stood unfinished, in a way. Or maybe what I mean is, she stood always on the verge of becoming.

My dearest cousin Frédéric,

I have nostalgia for apples. The story of our becoming! I have thus included in this letter reproductions on a theme: the Fall of Man.

My three favorite paintings of the Fall of Man are Jan Brueghel de Oude and Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man; Hendrick Goltzius, The Fall of Man; and Michelangelo, The Fall of Man. In that order.

My choices are due to the arms and bodies of the women, although my most beloved of all has a singular feature that distinguishes it from the rest: the animals. In the shared gaze of Brueghel and Rubens, the humans are no more visually important than the animals and trees. And the snake looks like a snake, the apple like an apple, the woman like a woman.

Second place goes to Goltzius, because the woman’s back and arms are strong. As strong as a man’s. Her sexuality is not foregrounded — and the little-girl face on the snake? I must admit it makes me laugh. I know I should be outraged, but it delights me. And the tiny apple! What idiot would condemn a species for eating such a diminutive… what is it, anyway? A crab apple? Be serious. The cat does look pleased though, as cats do.

Third place goes to Michelangelo. My god. Have there ever existed more masculine women than his? She could take Adam in a wrestling match. Even his snake exhibits feminine musculature. The split image, the not-quite-a-diptych composition, fascinates me to no end. Both the snake and the avenging angel appear as branches of the knowledge tree. But my obsession with this painting rests on a missing element.

There is no apple.

In Michelangelo’s vision, the tree is a fig tree on its fruit-bearing side, and an oak on the punishment side.

In the fourth century AD, a scripture scholar named Jerome was tasked with translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin. This endeavor turned out to take fifteen years. The word for evil and apple, in Latin, was the same: malum.

However, in the Hebrew Bible, the fruit might be any fruit on the planet, because the word peri in Hebrew is a generic term. Peri is not an apple, not necessarily: It could just as easily be an apricot. A grape. A peach. A pomegranate. A fig. (Am I incorrect about the specifics? Perhaps. But you see what I am getting at.)

I don’t know if I am correct about this, but I do believe that Albrecht Dürer was the first to paint the tree as an apple tree — which, to be clear, makes nearly no sense. And that moron Milton codified the apple as the sinful fruit of women in his Paradise Lost, a book I have repeatedly thrown across the room. In many ways, the story is one of our teeming wriggling thriving city, our capitalist drive and thrust, complete with a snake-oil salesman.

What is behind desire — behind the endless waves of pleasure and ecstatic pain — is one thing: the fact of a body. A body untethered from the stories we’ve been told in an effort to contain us. My dearest, the rest of the Darwin story — yes, I finished it; I admired his drawings of animals — is that the human body has been hog-tied, stunted, kept from its own evolutions. All in the name of power and progress. We’ve been assigned roles inside a predetermined myth, roles that keep us contained. Some of us more than others, but rest assured, we are all imprisoned by the great narrative of ourselves as masters of the universe.

What a sorry lot.

We could have been anything! We could still.

Did you know that under a microscope, pig and human embryonic material share many traits?

I’m rooting for the pigs.

Listen: I know why women such as I make a more sophisticated species of pervert than their male counterparts. Women, of all creatures, remain bound to their object status in this world we’ve made, whereas male artists — you, my love — are allowed to apprehend pleasure as a sublimity.

Between inert and pervert, I choose pervert.

If Eve showed up on my street, I’d buy her a drink and bed her in an instant. In lieu of that, I created the Room of Eve as an homage, as a reclamation, where an apple has a quite different significance. You are the only person I have ever allowed to enter that room.

I am leaving, my love.

Do not look for me.

Remember us.

Aurora

The Water Girl and the Floating Boy

Alone in his detention room, Mikael stares at the withered umbilical cord on his pillow.

She was real, it tells him. The baby was real. And Vera who sang was real — and he had been real too, a long time ago, as a boy. This tiny lifeline to nowhere, the last evidence of them all. Why does no one listen to children?

He does a childlike thing. He puts the crinkled object underneath his pillow, climbs onto his bed, and puts his head on the pillow. He closes his eyes. He can’t really remember what she looked like, but he does remember the tattoo on her neck, so he pictures that color.

Indigofera tinctoria. Indigo, Vera told him, represented the sixth chakra, the third eye. When they grow up, indigo children will have the power to master complex systems. And to care for both animals and humans.

As near as Mikael could tell, he was no master of anything: he could not care for a child, he could not master complex systems, he could not care for animals and humans. He felt as dead as the crinkled object underneath his pillow. No use left for him. Besides. The only part of “indigo children” he didn’t think was full of shit was the word itself: indigo.

He can’t sleep but he can’t not sleep either.

His hands make fists. He wishes he could hit something. He considers getting up to hit the wall, which he’s done many times before. If he cannot draw, he thinks that what is stuck in his body, in his hands, will kill him or someone else.

He knows they’ll find the object; they always do. There is nothing he can keep, nothing that is his, not even a self.

He thinks of William and bombs.

He thinks maybe the world deserves to be bombed, given what the world has done to children.

He wonders if he will ever get out of this place, and if he will become like William, not for any real reason other than the deep aloneness.

He rolls onto his side and faces the wall of his room. He punches the wall hard and quick. His knuckles bleed. He sketches a nautilus shell on the wall with the blood.

Then he hears water running. The running water sounds like it comes from his bathroom shower, but that seems nonsensical unless someone else is in his room, which never happens, because they think he will harm other boys.

He slides off his bed onto the carpeted floor like he’s slipping into water. His T-shirt rides up a bit; the carpet scratches his skin. He slides like a snake across the floor toward the bathroom, using his elbows like flippers. For a moment, he stops to put his cheek against the carpet. Heat and texture against his face. If death could just be this, as simple and animal as this.

The falling water recaptures his attention. It is his bathroom shower. A bit of steam like fog coming through the half-open door. Whoever is here, they shouldn’t be here; no one should be here, even he shouldn’t be here, especially right now when his ears are beginning to ring and his head feels hot and he is beginning to grind his teeth. Whoever is here, he will hurt them.

When he is very near the bathroom doorframe, before he can push himself up off the floor, a figure emerges. Standing there before him is something not possible: a girl. A naked girl, her hair wetted and making black S shapes against her body. She towers over his body, his belly still against the floor. He studies her a glance at a time: her feet, her shins and knees, her thighs, her sex glistening with water droplets, her hipbones, her belly, her ribs, her tits — mostly nipples — her shoulders, her neck, her face, her mouth. She looks to be about his age, maybe a little older. He wants to bite her. He has no idea why. The urge to bite her is so strong that he drools a little.

“Are you a scientist? Or an artist?” she asks, her words falling gently down at him.

Is he dreaming?

Is he dying?

“Yes,” he says.

“When is the time in your life that you felt the most human?” she asks.

He doesn’t want to talk to her, he doesn’t want to acknowledge anything about her, but his body won’t listen to him. “There was a baby. A long time ago.” He slaps his own jaw to make himself shut up.

Something moves between them.

Her hand.

With her right hand, she parts the lips of her cleft and fingers her way to her own blooming; she makes small rhythmic circles with her middle finger above him.

Why shouldn’t he kill her, this naked girl in his room? She is clearly not meant to be here. Is she a hallucination? Or some insane person who has somehow snuck in to murder him and steal his possessions? He thought of the shiv he’d been working on; it was lodged between the mattress and the bed frame, not quite done yet, but sharp enough.

A thief.

Probably a crazy thief.

“I have something to give you,” she says, holding her left hand out to him.

He gets up off the floor in a quicksilver snap, the way teen boys are able to do. Now he can see it: he is taller than she is, but she’s a little older than he is.

But that’s not what matters in the moment. What matters is that her face is flushed.

What matters is that her right hand is furious with her own desire. He’s never seen a girl’s desire before, only held and ravaged his own in his hand, his ejaculations captured in his own sheets or wiped up with socks.

What matters is that his cock is so hard, and his rage is ramping up, and this girl is so naked that it feels like a crack in the world is about open up.

The impulse to bite is so strong.

“Kneel,” she says.

What?

“Hold as still as a statue,” she says, and without knowing why, he does it. There in front of her. His face close enough to her hand and sex that he can smell the salt of her. “It’s not wrong to want to be loved,” she says.

His mouth lolls open.

Something is emerging between her legs, behind her hand. He stares so hard that he shivers.

An apple.

An apple blooms from between her legs, and she pushes her hips toward his head until the apple touches his mouth, and finally, the bite of him can come.

Then the apple is blood, or his mouth is blood — blood gushes between her body and his head. He pulls back. If they find a dead girl in his room, a bloody scene, his life is over — if he even has a life left to be over.

“My god, are you okay?” he screams.

Blood covers the floor. A tide of it rises in the room. The blood comes in waves, impossible waves, until they are both near drowning. He is terrified, but when he looks up at her face, she is smiling. Then laughing.

“We have to leave this place,” she says, cradling his head. “The waves are rising. Your drawings will come to life where we are going. You are not dangerous. You are not violent. Your drawings are not wrong. They are just in the wrong time and place.”

She smiles again as she treads the bloodwater. Though he knew no such thing was possible, he watched as the blood bored a hole into the wall of his room, like a mouth opening, like a portal, and they slid out of the hole together.

The Butcher’s Daughter at Dawn

Had she lost him forever? Another boy falling away? What happened?

Back in the heart of her city, Lilly walked the network of streets leading to her own apartment, but she kept turning away from home. You had one job, she chided herself, hating herself even more for the stupid fucking cliché.

Was she helping or hurting?

Who takes the side of boys who don’t belong to anyone?

Who steps inside male violence in some small hope of rerouting the story?

Who should?

How many boys had she failed? How many had she lost?

Mikael was gone. There was a hole in the wall of his detention room, as if a bomb had gone off, but there was no record of any bomb, except the news about Oklahoma, the homegrown terrorist loner, too many dead people to fathom.

The only thing left of Mikael was found later, scrawled underneath the shitty-ass carpet of his former room. A complex layering of drawings and carvings and scratches and clawings, full of shapes and buildings and strange forms no one understood. Like a landscape of chaos inside his mind.

She turned it over in her head as she listened to the pattern of her heels on the pavement. She hated the rhythm of her own feet, wished something would drop out of the sky and land on her, get it over with. She stopped. She looked up at the sky, the high-rises on either side of her stretching upward, constructed, unshaken. A pigeon flew by. Nothing fell from the sky to touch her. Not even pigeon shit.

She looked down at the ground, because that’s what a stupid woman whose guilt is eating her alive does after looking up at the sky, right? There on the ground near her foot was some kind of stain, dirty and brown and ugly. Or, maybe, a coin.

She squatted. Picked it up. Yeah, that’s it, a coin.

Rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. An old weird coin. Some kind of penny. A fucking penny. Probably worthless. It figures.

She dropped the coin back on the ground.

But there she was, alone on a city street, hunkered down on the sidewalk. She closed her eyes and took a breath, inhaling so deeply that her bra nearly cut off her circulation. When she opened her eyes and looked up, she realized she was in front of an old favorite bar: the Tabard Inn.

“Well, let’s give the old girl a drink,” Lilly muttered. She stood up and pushed her way through the door.

Nostalgia is a funny thing. At certain moments in life, it can hit you so hard that your whole body vibrates with it, almost like you’re on the verge of time travel. Lilly’s skin began to tingle — with the history of the place, and with her own memory of the last time she’d been there.

The story was that the Tabard Inn had been run by Marie Willoughby Rogers, who named the place after an inn from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Lilly went there originally because it was female friendly, not the usual misogyny cave. During the second big war, the inn had opened up as a boardinghouse for WAVES — the navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. She liked that. She liked the dark wood and she liked the low lighting and she liked the tiny indigo flowers stitched into some of the upholstered seats.

The last time she’d been there, she’d gotten into a fight with a woman she’d slept with exactly once before deciding she was too clingy, too needy, just wanted too much. The last thing the woman said before she stormed out was, “I’m not needy, Lilly — you’re just Antarctic.” If only the woman could have seen what Lilly needed most, which was to be cut open, aggressively, like an ice-cutting ship parting a frozen bit of sea. But all the woman wanted to do was kiss — incessantly, like some kind of fruit fly you can’t bat away — and cuddle and engage in a little sixty-nine. Absolutely meaningless.

In the bar today were four women and two men, and a girl bartender who looked to be about twelve years old. Youth culture—great. Her age, it seemed, was aging her faster and faster. The lines around her eyes increasing their creases, her eyelids growing extra lids. She sat down hard at the bar, averting the gaze of the mirror behind the bartender.

“Scotch, please. Neat. Make it a double.”

Here, at least, she could drink without some shithead pawing at her or trying to kiss her or making some pathetic pass. This town was filled with men who had no game, just suits and questionable taste in footwear and ties.

When a woman in an alabaster pantsuit sat down, one stool away from Lilly, she tried to shoot cold daggers from her eyeballs. Why can’t people give other people space when they’re clearly there to drink alone with their own rage and guilt? Isn’t it motherfucking obvious? Isn’t it all over me like porcupine quills?

But when the stranger failed to move, and Lilly turned to make her feelings clearer, what arrested her attention was the woman’s stern beauty. She looked to be sixty-something, maybe even pushing seventy. Her hair was silver, shoulder length, brushed back away from her face in waves. Her eyes were blue, or that kind of blue that fades with age. Even after Lilly turned away again, she could see her plainly in the mirror. The stranger noticed, but she didn’t flinch.

The woman ordered vodka on the rocks with a lemon wedge. Lilly’s relief that neither of them were drinking cocktails kindled a little warmth in her chest.

The infant bartender asked Lilly if she wanted another, and Lilly nodded. When the other woman received her vodka, she downed it and asked for another with her eyes and a slight nod to the child bartender.

Lilly’s mind drifted away from the bar and the stranger, lighting on her work, her success rate as a mental health professional. Some of the boys she’d worked with had been saved, in a way; they’d found foster homes and counseling and mental health resources. At least that’s what the data she entered said on the paperwork. But the follow-ups she’d conducted had been dismal. The truth was, no matter how hard she labored, nothing seemed to get much better.

She thought about her nightmares. Horror show.

She thought about her sex life. Ridiculous.

So when the woman moved to sit directly next to her at the bar, Lilly held as still as a statue. Anything was better than her life right now, wasn’t it? Anything was better than drowning in your own mire.

“I don’t mean to intrude,” the woman began. “But I noticed your hand is bleeding.”

Make the heart hard, like a baseball.

Lilly held her hand up and looked at it in the mirror in front of them. Sure enough. She looks like Vanessa Redgrave.

“Can I have a napkin, some water?” Lilly asked the bartender. She side-eyed the stranger. “I’m fine. Really. I must have brushed it against something — opened up a scab.”

“Must be a story there,” the woman next to Lilly said. “Not exactly a paper cut.”

No, no it wasn’t. Lilly knew where the wound had come from. She’d scraped her hand against a cinder-block wall after she left Mikael — done it intentionally, the pain the only thing she could give herself in the moment. He’d taken the umbilical cord, and she’d taken his story about some lost girl out in the world, and she had no idea what the fuck to do about any of it. Now he was gone. If they found him, he’d be truly fucked.

She felt the pang of her own uselessness. As always, she felt desperate to do something—to punch someone, to stage a breakout, to get that boy out of there, deliver him to freedom, even if it meant risking having his rage flare up again in the process — anything to avoid punishing him into becoming a permanently violent man. That’s why she’d scraped her hand at the detention facility, to keep from feeling helpless and numb; maybe she’d scraped it again, on the brick wall outside the front door of the bar, just to keep things alive. But that was too long a story to tell an innocent stranger, wasn’t it? That was the trouble with her entire existence.

“No. Not a paper cut.”

As she blotted at her hand with the napkin, Lilly stole another glance at the woman. In some ways, she looked like an apparition, some artist’s vision, with her light-gray suit and silver hair and eyes as transparent as water. Or else she’d been dispatched to override all Lilly’s usual choices with an image of something she’d never imagined.

The woman placed her own clenched hand on the bar in front of Lilly. Lilly stared at the woman’s fist. She clearly was holding something. She felt a prickle of curiosity in her shoulders. They eyed each other.

The woman turned her hand over and opened it. In her palm was a coin. “I saw you drop this on the ground before you came into the bar,” the woman said. “I thought you might want it back.”

The fucking penny. Before Lilly could respond, the woman dropped it into the last half-inch of her vodka, swirled the clear liquid around, then fished it out. “This is worth quite a bit of money,” she said. “It’s a Flowing Hair cent. 1793. I don’t think you want to ignore this object. I think you want to keep it.” Now she dropped the coin into Lilly’s drink. “I would know,” the woman said, turning the collar up on her gray suit. “I have one exactly like it.”

Oh god. A fucking geriatric coin collector. “So you collect coins?” Lilly kept her eyes on her drink. Vacant and transparent, like alcohol.

“No,” the woman said. “I don’t have any special interest in coins.” She took a sip of her dirty vodka. “I do however have a collection of certain… objects I’ve procured over the years.”

Lilly felt both attracted and repulsed. Wasn’t there a word for that? She ordered them both another round. They drank in silence, adjacent.

“I love the way that third shot brings your shoulders down away from your ears, don’t you?” the woman said finally, stepping down from her stool. “Opens your chest up to — well, almost anything. You know?” She made ready to leave. Slowly. Ran fingers through her silver hair.

Her magnificent mane of silver hair. Her goddamn beautiful height and broad shoulders when she stood. Lilly kept her eyes on the mirror image, steadying herself. If she looked at her, if she made eye contact…

“Have you ever had opium tea? I have some at my place — I live very near here. It’ll turn the hurt on your hand into nothing.”

Lilly had to admit it: in that moment, there was nothing on the planet she wanted more than this strange woman’s opium tea. She didn’t know why, and she didn’t care. When would she ever be offered opium tea again? Besides, her hand was truly throbbing. So was her clit, a little.

—

The walls of the entryway to the woman’s apartment were covered with images of snakes. Postcards, photographs, paintings, drawings, even some bright-colored snakeskin patches, hundreds of them, all pinned to the wall.

Aurora said nothing as they walked down the hall to the main room.

Lilly held her tongue too. It was as if an agreement had been forged between them in that narrow passage, the hallway spilling out into each of four rooms. Lilly felt the question softly tickling at her—What’s with the snakes? — but she did not ask. She liked the snakes. Instantly. They were not your ordinary welcome.

She still didn’t know the woman’s name. She decided she didn’t care.

The woman went to the kitchen to make the tea. “Have a seat,” she said, gesturing toward the living room, where an enormous turquoise velvet couch took up most of the space. “Transformation,” she said, running the sink water. “Snakes. I like creatures that know how to shed their skins.”

Lilly sat on the plush couch and thought about how many skins a woman must shed in order to survive a lifetime. Something more than attraction spread across her chest. Something like a mutual recognition, which was nothing she’d ever felt in her entire life.

The tea was delicious. A warm slide down the throat, a hint of lavender the woman must have added, a numbing of the lips; then, within half an hour, a rush of endorphins and a giddy painlessness. “Oh my god, I haven’t felt this in so long,” Lilly said. They’d both settled on the enormous couch, arranging their bodies more and more comfortably as time ticked by.

“What this?” the woman asked.

“This calm. This nothingness. This floating. I love it.”

The older woman smiled. “Would you care to see a very interesting room?”

Lilly felt silly and seductive at the same time. She giggled. A snorting laugh came out. Ordinarily, that would have embarrassed her, but not when she’d been dipped in opium tea.

“Yes, I would love to. If it’s anything like your entry hall, I’m all in.” Lilly tried to get up from the couch, teetered a little, and snort-laughed again.

The woman opened the door to her bedroom. Or, not a bedroom, really, but something else: a room filled with intricately designed furniture and machines of some kind — the word contraptions came to mind. As Lilly stepped all the way into the room, her understanding grew. The furniture was all antique, and — a deeper truth — everything in the room was sexual in design. Lilly stopped in front of what looked like a vintage battery, with a wand attached.

“You’ve seen these before, I’m sure. A ‘muscle relaxer’ from the 1880s, marketed primarily to men. Until it emerged that doctors were using it on female patients to cure hysteria. In other words, the first vibrator.”

Lilly chuckled, but she was distracted by an object in the center of the room: a square padded table that sprouted a black rubber ball about the size of an apple near the center. Lilly put her hand on the ball. It felt cool and smooth to the touch.

“This thing was supposed to be for treating pelvic disorders in women. From a medical standpoint, it was… medieval. From another point of view, something else entirely. When women figured out their own home uses for a table like this, doctors warned that they should be supervised so as not to… overstimulate. The engine that vibrated the ball was steam-powered.”

Across the room, mounted on the far wall, was something that looked like a saddle.

“Obesity. Gout. And again, hysteria. But that’s not why women used them.” She smiled.

Ropes hung from the ceiling, silently coiled like beautiful thick snakes. On a small raised stage sat a crossbeam equipped with a set of leather wrist cuffs, and a second set of cuffs, for the ankles, spread far apart at the base. Lilly felt dizzy. Her mouth filled with spit.

“What’s this?” Lilly gestured toward an elaborate machine near the door.

“A spanking machine.” She released a low chuckle. “So you stood here, at one end, bent over this leather ledge, right? And when you turned the machine on, a great THWAP from behind!” The older woman demonstrated the action and they laughed at the force of the metal arm and paddle that shot up from the other end of the device.

On the wall, all manner of cock and cunt chastity cages, hanging like decorations.

But inside their shared laughter, their growing lust and intimacy, another object caught Lilly’s eye: a shallow wooden box the size of a body, with thin metal bars across the top of it, something between a coffin and an ornate cage. Inside it, at the bottom, a blood-red velvet cushion. The metal bars seemed to have openings at chest level, at crotch level, at mouth level. Lilly could not stop staring.

“Ahhhh, I see what’s caught your eye. That’s a holding pen,” the woman said.

“It looks like a coffin,” Lilly said. An array of devices — toys, wands, spurs — was arranged on the box like a crown. As Lilly stood near the box, she felt the flesh in her body ache: Her arms. Her legs. The cleft between her hips and legs. Something in her life ached. That feeling, again, of something both improbable and unsettlingly familiar.

“Would you like to try it?” the woman said, opening the lid.

Would she like to try stepping into her own dream? Into a space that has haunted her body as long as her body’s memory? Would she like to find out, at last, what happens next?

Her body suddenly broke into a heated sweat. Is it possible to reenter your own past, your own dreams and grief and loss and trauma, if someone else is there to guide you through every moment of your experience? Was it possible that she could reach her own deepest pain through pleasure?

“Do you think a person can… confront their own pain?” she asked.

“Yes,” the older woman said, gently opening the box. “Pleasure and pain are a great deal bigger than the story we’ve been told. Like their own epoch.”

Lilly shed her clothes quickly, her clitoris already erect, her desire uncovered — a desire not separate from guilt and fear and negation, but plunging straight into the mouth of it.

As the older woman closed the lid, she said, “Are you sure?”

Lilly nodded yes, but her steady eyes were the word for it.

“My name is Aurora. If you feel unsafe at any moment, say water.”

Lexicon

On the seventh day inside Aurora’s apartment, Lilly rolls her tongue around an apple between Aurora’s legs. Laughter. She can smell and taste the salt wet. Lilly bites into the apple, hard enough to hold it in her mouth, lifts her head, spits it to the floor, bites again into the pulp of Aurora with an ungodly hunger. Breathing. Kissing. Sucking. Tonguing.

Lilly’s fingers inside, one-two-three-four-five — a sea creature entering a water cave until a rhythmic thrusting emerges from Aurora’s hips a flip Aurora topping Lilly’s back Lilly biting down into feathers Aurora eating Lilly’s ass spreading her legs tendriling with her arm octopus up to cunt the other mouth of her has it been hours and hours or days and nights and days sun washes the room through the ceiling-to-floor curtains the color of alabaster the walls midnight blue the carpet bloodred sun washes the room night wave washes the room time moves between bodies the sheets wet smeared tangled necks legs a longing eating into a longing a life eating into a death the bloodbeat of it.

Days.

Nights.

I used to have one leg

My beloved cousin made me another

Then a girl came to me timeless

I want to give you something

From under a pillow Aurora pulls a coil of rope the colors of a corn snake Lilly the model on her belly anticipation lodged like the touch of dreams between each vertebrae Aurora the rigger pulling Lilly’s arms behind her Aurora binding her hands tender gentle torque not then tender gentle torque a gasp please if there is a god or a universe let this time of binding pass slowly or let this language between bodies break time then on to ankles the knots are practiced the knots are loving the knots are tightening with any move Lilly makes Lilly wants to move the torque the gasp of it

Aurora stands

Lilly waits

A kind of death this waiting

Aurora standing

—

Aurora pulls Lilly’s body up and up hoisting her lifting her off the bed into suspension Seiu Ito painted his pregnant wife hanging from ropes whispered into Lilly’s ear the art of it the wet of it the torque of it the ropes taut between Lilly’s knees dividing the lips of her labia up her belly crisscrossing her back arched her legs bent her arms bound behind her a kind of thick hard corset rope stitched across her back the little bulges of arm bitable the woman hanging from the ceiling carabiners glinting rope the color of corn snake caught bird arched swallow strained neck eronawa a whisper semenawa a whisper or a dare Lilly screaming yes except silent the language their bodies the language the tug of the ropes on skin their language eye to eye no one sees the girl enter the room with an object no one sees the girl leave there is just this language of desire this is only Lilly’s suspended body there is only Aurora tonguing her limb by limb then nothing and into the nothing the everything suspended

Apple

Tongue

Aurora

Cunt

Axolotl

Hips

Thrust

Days

Water

Sun

Moon

Cave

Brother

Torch

Umbilical

Ehnita

Father

History

Red

Indigo

Rope

Whale

Wail

Waves

Sapnuoti

Ohne: ka

Suck

Blood

Boy

Girl

Liberty

Treaty

Timir

Dream

Desire

Motina

White

Theft

Room

Snake

Vandens

Boat

Motherwaters

Yakon: kwe

Nights

Leg

Turtle

Arm

Epistle

Yakut

Uol

Imaginal

Story

Kııs

Birth

Blue

Hand over hand, her eyes locked on Lilly’s body, Aurora slowly lowers Lilly to the ground; unties her lovingly; massages every line made from rope on her body; holds her like an infant; kisses her; coos to her; slips her sips of water warm blankets the subspace and afterwhere.

Entwined bodies.

I will hold you forever beyond time even just for now — though look, but just now, look there, look at the object in the corner of the room.

There: a bloody toddler boy, naked and wriggling and laughing, his fat little arms outstretched to the two women drenched in their own pleasurepain.

“What the fuck are we supposed to do with that?” Lilly hisses from inside Aurora’s embrace.

“Use your instincts,” Aurora says, petting Lilly’s hair.

“I don’t have any instincts for that kind of thing.”

Aurora gets out of bed, walks over to the toddler, and picks it up. “Then use your imagination. Tell me a story about your brother.”

Lilly pulls the bed covers up around her like a child might. “I loved him so much. It hurts.”

“Then tell that story,” Aurora says. And she nestles the child between them.

Aurora, my lost forever dawn. Where are you?

I can’t remember if this is the third or fourth bottle I’ve thrown into the harbor with a letter to you inside it. It isn’t hope, unless there really is such a thing as hope against hope. In my heart I believe that you would admire the act too. The care with which I roll each letter into a tube small enough to fit inside a bottle. The bottles themselves are in hues of green and blue and amber, sometimes with an ornate stopper. I watch them float away in the evenings at dusk. I imagine you finding them, beautiful reliquaries carrying what’s left of our knowledge of each other.

I wouldn’t say the harbor water is indifferent. Somehow it seems to me that the swirling eddies and soft currents receive the bottles and epistles gently. Like hands. So many things we put to water to try to give them meaning: Petals. Bodies. Wreaths for the departed. Coins for luck.

And my Big Daughter in the harbor. Standing tall. Still.

I do not know where you are.

I do know that, in your last letter, you told me to watch for a gift if I ever found you gone.

To say that I left my interlude with you the night of the apple feeling a snake coiled at the base of my spine — to say that would be an understatement. I never thought of it being perhaps the last night I would see you. I left with the lunge and swell of someone who can’t wait until the next time, and the next, and the next, like an addict.

Why didn’t you tell me? I just walked away like an idiot, hoping the night would never end.

I have thought many hours since your disappearance about that night: what I did, where I went.

The doors on your street all lead to a place where someone could slip from one reality into another. Two doors to the left and I could lose this ache with someone whose ram’s-head-of-a-cock would bring me quite close to losing consciousness. Our dear friend Kate’s well-traveled establishment around the corner. Four doors down and across the street and I could slip into my dreams through the pipe.

I can still hear you explaining your rules to the client through the door when I was leaving. “No sexual intercourse. In the strictest definition of that term, as you recognize it. If that’s your game, you’ve come to the wrong Rooms. Go down the street with your shriveled”—and here a quick crotch-glance—“imagination.” I know your aims well, my secular and singular angel. Cocks and cunts and anuses and mouths and hands and tongues and feet and breasts and ears and necks and torsos and legs and those muscular flabs that are the sweet thick truth of an ass are for something else than people have been trained to understand. You offered your differently bodied experiences to anyone who was willing to learn how to be in their body differently as well. You meant to push flesh against “the idiotic limits of the ridiculous reproductive impulse.” From your point of view, we’d gotten the body all wrong.

In your Rooms, intense varieties of sensual sensation refigured everything. Nothing to do with immorality or morality. I understood that even in our youth. It was always your imagination at the helm, let loose, navigating us up and through uncharted channels. “Anyone can have sex,” you’d quip. “I’ve been there. I’ve done all of that. What I want is… colossal. Unnamable. Something that might seem like ordinariness or nothingness on the surface until it reveals itself to you as a universe. A going beyond the sexual. An evolution. An odyssey into erotics — not a Homerian odyssey of all-conquering might and war, which to me is duller than death, whole purblind epochs have been built on that tyrannical and impotent thrust”—and you would roll your eyes—“but in its place an odyssey that carries humans past simple pleasure and through ecstatic pain unto deeper pleasure, both a thrust and a devouring.”

When I’d look at you without understanding, you’d speak to me like a child. “Dearest, just picture two women joining their miraculous angles with each other, thrusting endlessly, opening into each other. That will give you a sense of the shape, the how of it. Mouth to mouth in waves. You boys always just want to know where to stick your appendage, where to aim, where to shoot. That’s been part of the problem all along — a formal problem at base. Not your fault, however. You were made that way. The protuberance dulls your wits. If you’d like, I can harness that thing so that your blood flows more freely to feed your imagination.”

An American woman and her two daughters ran the nearest opium establishment. On this street, all people from everywhere bled into one another without discrimination. People recently released from the poorhouses and prisons, well-to-do businessmen and bankers and lawyers and judges, whores and thieves and bar owners and patrons, shopkeepers and laborers from mills and factories, all mixed together — and children, children everywhere. Children who worked the dens or the brothels, children who worked the streets and the clients, children who had no homes to call their own except the streets.

For about eight dollars I could procure a ration of five ounces, then go home to ready my smoker’s kit — a lamp, a sponge, a shell with opium, bowl cleaner, scissors, needle. But my pleasure would be better cared for at the opium joint, where the mother and her daughters could supply me with a reclining sleeping pad, a hookah, a pipe, and tins, and constant soothing, partly domestic and familial attention.

That night, a girl of no more than seventeen, upper-class by the look of her dress, was on the bed just above mine, unconscious, ahead of me in her dream journey. To my right, a man who might have been one hundred years old. I slept.

Then, the detonation.

It shook the beds, my body, the building. The light had come, so it had to be morning. The people who had been near me were gone; others stole in before my dreaming had ended. My head knocked the headboard of the sleeping pad. I got up but not quickly; others were at the window before me. I couldn’t see beyond their heads, but I could hear them.

Fire.

A building had exploded and now it was on fire. I could see the flickering light above their heads.

I retrieved my coat and ran outside, hoping you were nowhere near the blast. I ran past your building a ways, and when I looked up, I thought I saw you — I did, with a hundred faces of children all around you.

But it must have been an opium haze.

Where are you? I am lost.

Frédéric

My beloved Aurora,

I did what you said.

I watched for a gift when I found you gone.

The day your gift arrived, I had risen from a dream in which I wrestled an arm that had no body. Just a giant arm, but the arm was winning. In the dream, the limb was much bigger than I. And yes, I was naked, of course. Though the dream ended without conclusion, it was clear that I had spent myself in every conceivable way.

The day of your delivery, I answered the door in my dressing robes. “What?” I called out with temper at the knock at my door.

When I opened the door, the delivery boy looked a little frightened. He carried a box of the type that usually housed a delivery of long-stemmed roses, and my heart warmed and I smiled a little, as I had just that night been with the ram’s cock, and you know the funny thing about him was his sentimentality. The most sentimental brute I’ve ever known.

I gave the delivery boy more coins than he deserved, closed the door, and took the box to my bed. There was no marking on the box. I lifted the lid, ready to inhale the smell of roses.

Aurora, the box had no roses.

Inside, instead, your leg. The leg I designed for you.

That’s when your words came rushing back to me. “If I am ever gone, look for a gift. An object of importance for us.”

I wept. I felt the gift and the word gone as if they’d been soldered together. I knew I would likely never see you again.

And while I held — not your leg, but the leg I made for you — I noticed something. Paper. A slip of paper, tucked inside the leg. My hands began to shake.

I pulled from the leg your letter.

My cousin. My love — Oh, Frédéric, isn’t there some other word we might use? What an overwrought and emptied thing that word is.

Love. I’ve something to share with you. This parting gift. Inside this beautiful leg is a story.

There are times when I feel my missing leg in my arm — almost always when I am writing to you. “Phantom limb,” as it’s known. Some amputees, I know, feel pain where the limb used to live; others just a sensation of the thing. Many of the children I have harbored for all these years have known the experience. (Yes, children. My wards. Don’t act surprised, my cousin. Surely you can imagine something more surprising in Room 8 other than carnal pleasure.)

That sensation — so difficult to describe. Something like an itch, almost a gesture, in the part of the body nearest the sever. I have read of scientists who believe that the body may be harboring memories once carried in these damaged regions, that even after a given limb is gone, those memories may lurch forward now and again. One doctor of my acquaintance, Silas Weir Mitchell, has posited that the cause may be an irritation in the peripheral nervous system. But what of those who are born without limbs? I asked him once after a particularly intense session in the Room of Ropes. Such patients have been known to experience phantom limb as well. He admitted that such cases remain a mystery.

Sometimes I imagine a Room filled with all our missing limbs. Most people would consider such a vision grotesque, but in my mind’s eye, the Room is unbearably beautiful. The limbs are ornate, like jewelry or crowns or velvet gowns or feathered hats. The limbs are so beautiful, away from their former bodies, that they take on their own identities as objects.

A hand stands in for a face.

When I write to you, cousin, I can feel my leg. It does not feel like a phantom, not like a phantasm; my leg feels present. Many times I have stood up from my desk without my beloved prosthetic and fallen on my face, forgetting that a one-legged woman must work for her balance in the world.

I have chosen this moment to tell you about the depth of my love for you.

When I was recovering in a hospital far away from the one where my leg was murdered and stolen, I was delirious from pain and the medications for pain — so you might say I was in a suspended state of pleasurepain for weeks. My darling, I want you to understand, I went to a real place. The regular world around me, the comings and goings of doctors and nurses in the ward, the white of the sheets, the blue and white of nurses’ uniforms, I saw them as no more than blurry and dreamlike. Sound too was muffled. It was almost like being underwater. Then, one day as I was beginning to make my way back to our shared reality, I looked down at the place where my leg should be, and I saw — your hand.

I understood why this should be: in the muffled coo of their voices, the nurses had told me that you visited me every day. But on this day, I saw your hand resting where my leg should be on the bed. And so I looked at you and said your name aloud and smiled.

That night I dreamed of waves.

The next day, I could hear you in a natural way, and I could see you, and you came in with a long box. You sat down next to me, as always, and you took an object out of the box. The object was a wooden leg with a foot, the wood oiled and glowing. All over the wood, intricate hand-carved roses. On the foot, perfect toes with painted toenails. So delicate. So beautiful.

That leg took my breath away. Took language away.

I wept an ocean after you left that evening. In place of language, all I had were tears of gratitude.

Was this love?

I am a childless unmarried woman whose pleasure and pain have traveled great distances. What do I know about love? It seemed as if it might be love. I have never felt anything like it, before or since.

I created the Room of Vibrations specifically for amputees or anyone who feels a phantom limb experience. There, for a moment, even someone who has lost a breast or a tooth or an eye — or an I, my love — can feel temporarily whole, the vibration standing in for what is missing. Perhaps, for some, standing in for love.

As I write this, I can feel my leg in my hands. But not just that. I feel my face — that idiotic obsessive surface filled with holes and lies and mistaken ideas about beauty and communication — in my hands. Which is to say, I think my entire identity lives in my hands. I thus renounce my face.

When you think of me (Will you think of me, my dove?), do not think of my face.

Ever yours into the everything (or nothing),

Aurora

Aurora, my dawn, my loss,

Had we seen each other, Aurora, in your Rooms? Did we see each other that very first time, as children, locked inside your moment of desire and blood and mouth and apple? Did that moment turn into our entire lives?

I have so much left to tell you.

I cannot stop stuffing bottles with letters. Throwing them into the river or sea. So many stories I should have shared! I throw them into the abyss as if they might yet reach you, or finish me. I want to write you a devotional, a confessional. I want to tell you my origin story, straight into the gaping mouth of your absence.

I was not the first boy born to my mother. There was a Frédéric before me.

He died when he was seven months old. My parents also had a daughter, I’m told, who died after a month. There were these floating siblings, a boy and a girl, the boy inhabiting a space in womb and world before me, the girl so small. Smaller than anything. Not even a word.

So, you see, I was the second Frédéric — born inside their grief and loss. My siblings floating away. Like you.

When I was nine, we moved to Paris. That first year, my mother made my remaining brother and me lunches, and we ate them on a park bench near l’Arc de Triomphe. That monument was my first object of desire. I couldn’t stop looking at it; I heard nothing my mother or brother said to me when in its presence; often, distracted as I listened, I bit my tongue or the inside of my cheek while chewing. The arc was pure magnificence.

We lived on Rue d’Enfer, a fact I hope you find wonderful.

We lived near the Hospital of Found Children and Orphans and the site of the famous guillotine. In the Place de la Concorde, a pillar had been erected — a statue made as a gift from Egypt to Paris. The obelisk erected itself inside my imagination as well. I began to dream of Egypt without knowing more of that ancient land than I learned in history books and lessons. You will no doubt accuse me of exoticizing. I confess immediately. I request punishment.

I attended school at the same institution as Molière, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo. I interacted with Chopin, Liszt. There is a dreamy haze to this part of my life, the times before Napoleon III’s rise to power and his declaration as emperor.

On the outside, as you know, I am a man with a success story. A prominent artist, sought-after, world-renowned. But my memories arrange themselves differently from what my lineage and pedigree might suggest. If anything, I would say I was carried to success on a wave of infamy. But even that seems too simple. My memories do not hold still inside a story.

When I worked on the now universally despised Rapp statue — even now I can hear my critics asking about the confounding position of the arm — I fell from the highest point of the scaffolding, near his head. I lay on the floor at the statue’s feet for an entire hour, or so my mother told me later. My brother tried to revive me. I don’t remember much about being unconscious there at the feet of the statue. I do remember that, when I regained consciousness, I saw my brother’s face first. I was covered in leeches.

Sometimes, if I close my eyes, I can still feel the leeches on my chest.

Perhaps that is why I was attracted so to the Room of Burning Cups. Or is that room perhaps a throwback to your nun desires?

Here is an admission that would end my career if anyone but you knew it: I have since then suffered from episodes of amnesia, sometimes including seizures. The seizures feel uncannily like a departure from reality, like traveling to some other time and place. The colors of life turn washed out or muted. People I know to be dead and gone reappear. Sometimes, fragments of previous experience play out before me, as if memories could be acted out on the stage of the brain. The seizures also give me gifts, Aurora — images and ideas to last a lifetime — or maybe time itself cleaving open enough for me to gently pull imagination forth from the slit before it sutures shut.

The seizures, Aurora. No one knows. Should anyone find out, my life’s work would be over. I tell you this as a traded intimacy. The sustaining thrill of knowing you deeply is worth the risk. I tell you this as a spell, in the hope of conjuring you back.

My memories live scattered all over my body, in a way that my knowledge and training do not. I remember, for instance, the first time I made a small model out of wet bread. Before I learned how to use clay. To this day, when I cannot sleep, I will procure bread and knead it with water, using it to create small models — usually of breasts or cocks — in my off hours. It brings me a kind of calm.

But sometimes the forms that emerge from the bread are different: not lovers, but a boy and a girl. Lost, penniless, huddled together.

I am haunted by the dead boy who came before me, inside of whose name I stand.

I am haunted by the girl who lived so briefly.

Sometimes I call the colossus my Big Daughter.

Sometimes I call out to you across time and water. Sometimes I think of following you, stepping off the edge, going to water.

Yours eternally, into the abyss,

Frédéric

My Dawn,

The sun is setting and the water is blue and orange-yellow, with little caps of white diamonds.

The hole you have left in my life is an unsuturable wound.

Inside this last bottle, I will let go of my letter of goodbye, Aurora.

I am leaving this strange and beautiful place called a country. My Big Daughter is done. The colossus is erected. She seems to grow from the very water itself, in certain light. I have a cough I cannot master either, and thus I return by ship tomorrow.

I hope against hope that my daughter, my brainchild, inspires this young nation to think of freedom as alive. Freedom is a living organism, the statue a symbol to carry the life forward. Perhaps presidents will speak at her feet and inspire the people. Perhaps the masses will gather courage from her. Perhaps she may be a beacon for those caught inside tempests.

But I also hope that this country respects and honors that the whole project of constructing and erecting this statue has been one of enormous generosity and self-sacrifice. Time, work, and money have been sacrificed. At risk of immodesty, I believe the colossus to be the most important statue in the world — and I am her father, her existence born of the toil of my imagination and the countless hands of laborers. Are you laughing yet?

I can hear you. “Ah, the male genius. Always spraying itself about.”

I remember well the raps you so devotedly gave my cock in an effort to reroute both my blood and my imagination.

I meant to make you laugh — or to inspire one of your barbed retorts. Now I just feel ridiculous.

I miss you.

Aurora, if you ever meet Liberty, if you are out there somewhere and you have occasion to visit her, to enter her, please know: I have tried to infuse her form with a kind of power — that is, your power, your erotic power, recognized by Plato as the fundamental creative impulse, with its sensual element. Or, to put it differently — for you would never put it the way Plato did, would you; no, you’d call him someone who sublimated sensation so that he might ejaculate intellect — I have tried to invest Liberty with that profound power and unrelenting bliss you carry inside yourself. Your joy. Your command of pure sensation. Your ever-devouring and ever-generating body. The pure rush of you. If only a woman could be that: ungendered into her power. This is why I have rendered Liberty’s masculine and feminine face and body as one. It is my understanding of you, beloved. No other woman like you exists, except in the form of Liberty. No virgin, no mother, no sister, daughter, wife, or whore. Only Liberty.

I can see your face in youth, bleeding and laughing, sutures ripped open, a bloody apple on the floor.

How we picked the apple back up and ate it with zeal. How you birthed desire and imagination in a boy forever.

My loss is eternal.

My love is likely lost with you — my deepest love — although, you are right, in the end you are always right, we need another word for it.

—

The bottle I pitch into the water is blue this time. A current catches the object, and then all is writ in water.

Ethnography 6

Underneath the massive Capitol building — with its external layers of pomp and authority, with its internal ceremonies and work conducted by elected officials as busy as bees, with its mighty facade of security and order, with its countless portals of ingress and egress, a whole underground city of laborers keeps things running. There are hundreds of us hidden in the bowels of the buildings. Painters and cleaners and plumbers and electricians, mechanics and sanitation workers and food preparation workers. Our bodies carry a different story from those that make the news. The mopping and waxing have given many of us — at least those of us who have worked more than thirty years — arthritis. The marble dusters sometimes break down. I dust the woodwork and clean the cigarette and cigar ash. There are thirty-nine buildings to clean and an underground subway and 1,400 restrooms. There are graveyard-shift architectural and engineering employees, as busy as invisible night creatures.

I like to bring a bag of apples and tangerines for the break room. My father before me, Othar, used to as well. My crew is ten people. One woman, Tisha. Sometimes we tease her, but Tisha is stronger than half the men and she insists on making the coffee. We need four or five pots a night. You can feel the ghost of all the workers before us — the people who labored under orders from others, the people who built the original structures. The battles over working conditions and wages that happened here, the New Deal, most of which didn’t apply to us. Our well-being has not been part of any story. Some of our family members and fellow workers dug through contaminated trash for years without any protection. Contaminated with asbestos or blood or toxic materials, all of it falling like dust over our bodies, some of it surely taken within, contaminating us in turn.

The stories above us happen in dramatic, televised splashes with international weight. Who lives and who dies underneath the belly of things — well, that doesn’t make the news.

I go to work around eleven at night and I finish around six in the morning. I guess you could say we keep the buildings clean so that others can achieve the great work of the nation… but we’re the ones who take care of all the shit. It’s almost like we’re an entire undercity. No telling what goes on above us. Like another history. Another world.

Tisha’s brother ascended, though. He worked for the Capitol Police. He no longer works there or anywhere. There’s a cost to ascension.