Who are we in moments of crisis or despair? Do we become deeper, truer selves, or lift up and away from a self, untethered from regular meanings like moths suddenly drawn toward heat or light? Are we better people when someone might be dying, and if so, why? Are we weaker, or stronger? Are we beautiful, or abject? Serious, or cartoon? Do we secretly long for death to remind us we are alive?
He shivers. What the hell was that about? Was that his sister’s voice, or his? He claps three times and says, “Okay, people — you’re not the center of the universe here, right? Everybody get a grip.” He walks over to the pile of performance artist and painter. “We shouldn’t all be trying to stay here this way. It’s not helping her. It’s pathetic. Look what comes of it. We should just take shifts. Come tell me your work”—he glances at the performance artist—“or whatever, schedules. I’ll call everyone. I’ll make a visitation chart.”
But that’s not what he’s typing.
He’s typing out stage directions.
A doctor steps into the room, as if on cue.
Nightmaking
In her sleep, the night sky stitches a story through the girl.
Her brother is a fox pup chasing a mouse over a snow-covered field. The fox pup leaps straight up into the air where the mouse tracks end and plunges nose first into the blanket of white. The fox emerges and shakes its head to free the snow from its fur. The fox is laughing. A mouse in its mouth.
Her mother is a moon eye in the sky. Not perfectly white, but bruise-hued. The moon eye casts a gaze over all of the world, over violence and lovers with equal compassion, over living and dead, over children and old men curling into brittle-boned fetal positions in bed, curling around what used to be their wives, taking their last breaths, over chickens and badgers and snakes and trees, over rivers and rocks and breath.
Her father is not a tree.
Let all the other fathers before hers be trees.
Her father is a door.
Anywhere.
Anytime.
Opening or closing, depending on the story and the girl’s place in it.
The Filmmaker
The filmmaker is beating a heavy bag to death.
Having recently clocked the painter, he finds that slamming the heavy bag feels more satisfying. In the backyard behind his house, at night, his blows land and thud. He pictures the chest and gut of a man. Fisted speed dug deep from a bellyful of rage and jabs extended until they’re shot-strung back to the shoulder. Again. Again. The throbbing sound so familiar he doesn’t recognize it. Comforting.
It’s what he knows how to do in the face of inertia.
What if a man’s body is all that drives action, and not the stupid heart?
Anything but the heart.
So he beats the holy hell out of this simulacral man in the backyard for hours, until he’s spent, until he’s just a man bent over and panting. His breath fogs before him in the cold night. It seems good that he can’t kill the heavy bag. He hangs his head. This is killing him. No, not killing him. But it is some kind of crucible he doesn’t understand.
His wife. How can there be nothing he can do to fix it? It makes him want to hit things as hard as he can.
He looks at the back of his house. It stares dully back at him. Wifeless. Sonless. Without life. He goes inside, and when he looks back through the window to the backyard, all he sees is black, like the screen before the film begins, the moon a white projector’s beam.
This is the first night in seven he has come home from the hospital. It’s the only respite he has given himself. A night to fight and release the chemical chaos of things. Without turning any lights on, he walks through the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, removes a Newcastle beer, twists the cap off, drinks most of it standing in the fluorescent glow. Then he removes his Everlast workout gloves, carefully unwraps his hands, the black bands falling to the floor like tired-out snakes. They sting from the gap between cold night air and warm domesticity.
He grabs another beer, then walks through the dark and lifeless house to his wife’s writing room. He stands in front of her bookshelves. He stares at the shelf of her own books, books written by her. The beer going down his throat branches out across his chest. His throat is warm. His hands ache. Their lives together make a list in his skull, because that’s all he’s able to think or feel.
Before she was a writer, she was an abused daughter.
Before he was a filmmaker, he was a neglected son.
Before he turned to art, he was a bouncer at a casino.
Before she turned to art, she was a flunking-out addict.
Both of them briefly arrested and incarcerated.
Both of them stealing their lives back, pursuing lives of the mind. Both of them carrying invisible injuries, injustices, betrayals, all in silence.
When they first met, he took her to Gold’s Gym. Taught her how to box, how to defend herself, stayed with it even when she accidentally punched herself in the nose. She took him to a swimming pool to do laps, because she said water was the one place she felt free, and he swam laps even though he was allergic to chlorine.
She introduced him to the movies Cool Hand Luke and On the Waterfront.
After the gym, he played Bach for her on the cello.
It was as if the crappiness of both their lives opened up and let them at each other.
Before they were anyone, they were who they would become in each other’s arms, each of them passing through crucibles to reach the other, each of them arriving at art instead of death.
She writes stories of their lives and desires and fears.
He makes art films based on the stories.
She collects experiences and images and pulls them down to the page.
He takes actions and images and projects them up onto a screen.
Who are they? What is their love? Is it their son? Is it their art?
He touches the spines of her books in the dark.
Love isn’t what anyone said. It’s worse. You can die from it at any moment.
He picks out a book she wrote, containing one of the stories he adapted to film. The film is nearly finished. The closing scene is her. She is walking naked toward the angry ocean on a cold day in November. Her blond hair wrestles the wind. She keeps walking even after she is knee-high in waves. He knew, as he filmed her, that the water was freezing. He also knew she wouldn’t flinch. She walked far enough to dive straight into the oncoming waves, the camera trained on her, their son perched in a carrier on his back. And then she swam against the waves. Bold strokes into white-frothed swells. Far enough that he screamed, “Cut!” Far enough that he stopped filming. Far enough that he started to yell into the wind and the noise of the surf — it was a cold day, no one else around on the beach—“Stop! Come back!” Her name, but his voice was swallowed by gales and tides. His chest tightening. His thoughts racing as his body readied itself for action: Set the child on the shore remove your boots remove your jacket and pants enter the ocean for her even though you are a weak swimmer enter the ocean for her do not watch her disappear into water. Their son’s voice behind his head a cooing sound, “Mama,” as he reached for the strap at his shoulder.
But she did stop.
He saw her turn back to look at them, the way a seal’s head pokes up sporadically to eyeball a human on shore.
And then she swam back to them.
She left the water cold and shivering, and he wrapped her in a towel, and she said to him plainly and without the suggestion of drama, “Did you get the shot? Was it okay?” Her lips blue, even as she smiled, a little like a corpse mermaid.