sleeping inside with everything locked and they get in and do
it to you no matter how bad it hurts. In magazines they say
w om en’s got allure, or so they call it, but it’s more like being
some dumb w riggling thing that God holds out before them
on a stick with a string, a fisher o f men. The allure’s there even
i f you got open sores on you; I know. The formal writing
problem, frankly, is that the bait can’t write the story. The bait
ain’t even barely alive. There’s a weird German tradition that
the fish turned the tables and rewrote the story to punish the
fisherman but you know it’s a lie and it’s some writer o f fiction
being what became known as a modernist but before that was
called outright a smartass; and the fish still ain’t bait unless it’s
eviscerated and bleeding. I just can’t risk it now but if I was a
man I could close m y eyes, I’m sure; at night, I’d close them,
I’m sure. I don’t think m y hands would shake. I don’t think so;
or not so much; or not all the time; or not without reason;
there’s no reason now anyone can see. M y breasts w ouldn’t
bleed as i f God put a sign on me; blessing or curse, it draws
flies. Tears o f blood fall from them; they weep blood for me,
because I’m whatever it is: the girl, as they say politely; the
girl. Y o u ’re supposed to make things up for books but I am
afraid to make things up because in life everything evaporates,
it’s gone in mist, just disappears, there’s no sign left, except on
you, and you are a fucking invisible ghost, they look right
through you, you can have bruises so bad the skin’s pulled o ff
you and they don’t see nothing; you bet women had the
vapors, still fucking do, it means it all goes aw ay in the air,
whatever happened, whatever he did and how ever he did it,
and yo u ’re left feeling sick and weak and no one’s going to say
w hy; it’s ju st wom en, they faint all the time, they’re sick all the
time, fragile things, delicate things, delicate like the best
punching bags you ever seen. They say it’s lies even if they just
did it, or maybe especially then. I don’t know really. There’s
nothing to it, no one ever heard o f it before or ever saw it or
not here or not now; in all history it never happened, or if it
happened it was the Nazis, the exact, particular Nazis in
Germany in the thirties and forties, the literal Nazis in
uniform; when they were out o f uniform they were just guys,
you know, they loved their families, they paid o ff their
whores, just regular guys. N o one else ever did anything,
certainly no one now in this fine world we have here; certainly
not the things I think happened, although I don’t know what
to call them in any serious way. Y ou just crawl into a cave o f
silence and die; w hy are there no great women artists? Some
people got nerve. Blood on cement, which is all we got in my
experience, ain’t esthetic, although I think boys some day will
do very well with it; they’ll put it in museums and get a fine
price. W on’t be their blood. It would be some cunt’s they
whispered to the night before; a girl; and then it’d be art, you
see; or you could put it on walls, make murals, be political, a
democratic art outside the museums for the people, Diego
Rivera without any conscience whatsoever instead o f the very
tenuous one he had with respect to women, and then it’d be
extremely major for all the radicals who would discover the
expressive value o f someone else’s blood and I want to tell you
they’d stop making paint but such things do not happen and
such things cannot occur, any more than the rape so-called can
happen or occur or the being beaten so bad can happen or
occur and there are no words for what cannot happen or occur
and i f you think something happened or occurred and there are
no words for it you are at a dead end. There’s nothing where
they force you; there’s nothing where you hurt so much;
there’s nothing where it matters, there’s nothing like it
anywhere. So it doesn’t feel right to make things up, as you
must do to write fiction, to lie, to elaborate, to elongate, to
exaggerate, to distort, to get tangled up in moderations or
modifications or deviations or compromises o f m ixing this
with that or combining this one with that one because the
problem is finding words for the truth, especially if no one will
believe it, and they will not. I can’t make things up because I
w ouldn’t know after a while w hat’s blood, w hat’s ink. I barely
know any words for what happened to me yesterday, which
doesn’t make tom orrow something I can conceive o f in m y
mind; I mean words I say to m yself in m y ow n head; not social
words you use to explain to someone else. I barely know
anything and if I deviate I am lost; I have to be literal, if I can
remember, which m ostly I cannot. N o one will acknowledge
that some things happen and probably at this point in time
there is no w ay to say they do in a broad sweep; you describe
the man forcing you but you can’t say he forced you. If I was a
man I could probably say it; I could say I did it and everyone
would think I made it up even though I’d just be remembering
what I did last night or twenty minutes ago or once, long ago,
but it probably w ouldn’t matter. The rapist has words, even
though there’s no rapist, he ju st keeps inventing rape; in his
mind; sure. He remembers, even though it never happened;
it’s fine fiction when he writes it down. Whereas m y mind is
getting worn away; it’s being eroded, experience keeps
washing over it and there’s no sea wall o f words to keep it
intact, to keep it from being washed away, carried out to sea,
layer by layer, fine grains washed away, a thin surface washed
away, then some more, washed away. I am fairly worn away
in m y mind, washed out to sea. It probably doesn’t matter
anyway. People lead their little lives. T here’s not much
dignity to go around. T here’s lies in abundance, and silence for
girls who don’t tell them. I don’t want to tell them. A lie’s for
when he’s on top o f you and you got to survive him being
there until he goes; M alcolm X tried to stop saying a certain
lie, and maybe I should change from Andrea because it’s a lie.
It’s just that it’s a precious thing from my mother that she tried
to give me; she didn’t want it to be such an awful lie, I don’t
think. So I have to be the writer she tried to be— Andrea; not-
cunt— only I have to do it so it ain’t a lie. I ain’t fabricating
stories. I’m making a different kind o f story. I’m writing as