Precisely in this way, in other words, it was not the hurt thumb that was at issue, and you understood that perfectly. And that’s the point, my dear—you knew everything right from the start; no, you knew it even before the start: about a week before that trip to the festival there was one evening when your bared nerve ends, painfully-thirstily, as only happens in the fall, exposed to the outside world—out to meet its faltering autumn colors and mysterious rustle in sleepy leaves—captured this passage, which you didn’t grasp then and so left it unfinished:
—and now it has all come to pass, down to the very last word: go ahead, learn, learn now the lessons of parting—with life, with yourself, with your ill-fated gift, because it’s unlikely that you’ll now be able to raise it up—you’ve never yet managed to raise this barbell to full extension anyway.
Ah, damn it all…
No, I would really like for someone to explain to me: why the hell would one come into this world a woman (and in Ukraine, yet!)—with this fucking dependency programmed into your body like a delayed-action bomb, with this craziness, this need to be transformed into moist, squishy clay kneaded into the earth’s surface (always, always liked the bottom position—sex from below, flat on your back: only then could she be eliminated completely, merging with the rhythm of her own body cells and the translucent pulsation of universal expanses—nothing even remotely like that ever happened with that man; at the moment when it seemed that she was just about to take off, he, without stopping, would awaken her from above with the harshly exhaled: “Hmm-yeah, you’d need an infantry platoon to finish this job!”—she had found this funny, but no more than that: “What kind of talk is that?”—she’d be offended: not at the words but at their detached tone—“Silly, it’s a compliment!—you should really consider trying it with two guys, you know what kind of rush you’d get?”—it’s quite possible that she might, she did, after all, like to bite during lovemaking, to suck hard at either a finger or a shoulder, to inhale a kiss until it made her head spin, a temple whore—that’s who I must have been in my previous life, but in this life—in this, my dear, it is so much not all the same to me who I’m with: I remember sitting on a New York subway once, my head stuck in Toni Morrison’s latest novel, and someone flopped down on the seat next to me pressing my whole body to the metal bar—and instantly I was electrified with a pure charge [like a high musical note] of such a powerful erotic urge that my body responded with an aroused swell, all buds bursting open inside like a tree in springtime: simultaneously I realized that this man had been hovering over me for a few subway stops already and had we not been people we’d already be fucking on this spattered floor, lovemaking for real, fusing not with your partner, no—with that wild, anonymous force that penetrates all living things with its current, you plug into it in order to, if only for a moment—aahhh!—catapult into the fiery-contoured darkness that has no name, no limit, on which all pagan cults lay their foundations, it’s only Christianity that has classified this as union with the kingdom of the black god, sealing all exits for humans except for one—through the top, though not for our age, already essentially post-Christian, already cut off from the path of return back to the orgiastic feast of universal unity: we, each on his or her own, hopelessly infected with a cursed consciousness of the heaviness and density of his or her ego, and that is why the victoriously pure, loud, and high musical note broke off and extinguished itself in my body at the very moment that he, the one on my left, began talking: he spoke up after about one subway stop, some kind of uncivilized accent, asked what I was reading: am I in school or something, a student?—that’s when I first looked at him, he was a young man in his late twenties, not tall but compactly built, a “Hispanic” hewed from a single block of wood, his gorgeous eyes the color of dark plums softened by a sensuous grayish mist, that’s the way hundreds of men of different nations and skin colors have looked at me, each one from behind the bars of its own life, one can get out for a while, but not for good; “Pardon me?” I asked with that deliberately sharp voice one uses to dispense with insolents, and that Juan or Pablo or Pedro immediately realized that—it’s over, the line’s been cut—“Nothing,” he blurted and continued to mumble something under his nose, now in his own language—the powerful animal voice of his body wilted, contracted, quickly-quickly went out, and beside me sat an ordinary immigrant lech—and anyway, he soon got up and headed either for the exit or elsewhere, I was no longer looking and back to reading to my book: the person, having peered out, broke the spell of the sex. Perhaps, really, the only way out of this prison is to go out at night, hiding your face deep in the hood of your coat, to get into strangers’ cars without giving your name, the hand of the driver on your knee, a low, husky chuckle, a feverish rustle of excess clothing, no need to turn on the lights, just listen to the rumble of your blood, the male percussion part and your no-longer-your-own dissolving, dispersing, spreading, ah, you’ve opened up so nicely, yes! yes! more! more!—it’s just that they all want to talk, splattering saliva and sperm they want a gulp of you: what are you reading, where are you going, are you married, you have to dream up a story—What’s your name?—Irina—there was one incident when after locking into a strong deep steely kiss in an apartment entryway she slipped out and ran away, chuckling to herself, they all need to vanquish, that’s the point, the give and take of a fair exchange like carbon dioxide–chlorophyll–oxygen is not for them, they don’t know how to do it, and that man who’s about to croak somewhere out there in the Pennsylvania wilderness currying favor with his diaspora blood brothers without a penny to his name or a word of English [which he was supposed to have studied up a little before coming, moron!]—boy, did he ever jump up, did he ever jerk his face up like a damned horse that’s just been lashed when you finally sat him down in the coffee shop and, summoning all your fortitude to your aid, tried to introduce at least some kind of therapeutic clarity into your mutual physical and mental sickness—yes, everything you say is true, dear, and the fact that I no longer love you is also true: “So you—what,” the click of a jackknife blade popping up: “feel like a ‘victor’ here, that you’ve won?”—I think you just sat there with your mouth wide open: Mykola, you think we’ve been playing tug-of-war?… “You know,” again that steady ominous stare as though something else was peering through those eyes, rimmed by swollen red eyelids, like through the slits of a mask, “if you were a man, I’d smash your face in!” Very charming of you, dear—I, too, oh so often regret that I’m not a man).