Last night I dreamt myself covered in paint; the paint may have been blood. It was warm, like a bath almost. It seemed to look good on my skin. Beauty. Death. The same. Drink yourself drowned. Cut your skin with knives. Fuck with your genitals. Paint a painting. Shoot a gun. American.
I tell you, it scares me what I have done to her.
It terrifies me, even.
And yet I am not sorry.
I am as deeply unsorry as a person could be.
There is nothing that one human will not do to another.
Ce n’est pas rien. Au revoir.
The performance artist. Her idea of herself. . drifts weightless as an astronaut in her skull. Her chest hollows. Her body goes slowly numb. Her hair. Her face. Her hands. Nothing. The air she is breathing. Useless. Thoughtless.
She folds the letter back up and places it again against her skin. She pats it against her chest as if she is much older. She looks out of the window, but sight. . sight just isn’t in her right now. She stands up. Puts a coat on. In a regular way. Thinking, it isn’t necessary. Just be molecules. Light. She gently wraps her neck in a blue wool scarf hanging next to the door — someone’s. She opens the door to the flat. Steps out. Closes it. She walks down the hallway. Down several flights of stairs, her feet on the steps not connected to anything.
She opens the big wooden door to the stage of outside. St. Petersburg. She steps out onto the walkway. Just be light. She stops, closes her eyes, takes in a big breath. . blows it out slowly, like tiny white moths from her mouth. Like all the body’s memories leaving as light. In her head: a man leaves.
She walks to the bridge.
Stands dead center.
History makes the distance from the bridge to the water epic, dramatic, artful.
She places her hands on the historic stone. She looks down at the water, a kind of gray that is nearly black, washing sins away. City smells float around her. Pedestrians are perfectly absent. It begins to rain, lightly. Her age makes her look like a painting. The girl in pain or love. She leans over the ledge of things, her stomach and chest pressed hard against the stone. She can see the pink-and-white flesh of her hands. The blue of the wool scarf. She can hear the water so precisely it is like voices. Why, when she was a child, didn’t anyone teach her to swim? But she knows why. She was the imperfect child. Dumbed and drooling. Love lost to her from the get-go. She does not know where her father ever went. Her mother lost to philanthropy and activism in a celebrity world. The stone underneath her is as hard as anything in the world. Her ribs under her clothes no longer feel necessary. She lets the air leave her lungs. Molecules. Light. All the world’s a stage. We are all of us without origin. Who’s to say we were ever here at all? She closes her eyes. She can feel the letter against her chest, near her breast, where her heart should be. And then she pushes forward. The toppling body of a young woman with nowhere left to perform love.
Sometimes it takes so little to make an ending.
Triptych
1.
Gunfire in the distance. The photographer is washing her face in the tiny bathroom of another random family’s home in Eastern Europe. Even as she’s been gone for more than a year, somehow the poet has found her, and wants to meet with her, about the girl in the photo. She doesn’t want to. She dries her face and looks in the mirror and sees the woman she was and the woman she is, at war with each other. She moves back into the family. All the motion and energy in the house moves toward dinner. None of them looks up, and she is glad to be this unnoticed. She wishes she could lose her identity altogether. Potatoes go into a pot. A mother’s roughened hands. Rabbit — its neck snapped an hour ago — in the oven. A father stokes the fire and smokes a pipe. Cedar and tobacco. The daughter sets the table. The son cleans a gun. Out of the corner of her eye the photographer is always looking doorward. For trouble. She shoots a look over to her camera, dangling from a hook on the wall. This image maker. This thief. This lover. She thinks of the event that took place yesterday that nearly destroyed the son, and of the photos she took, and how she smuggled the film out as if she were smuggling humans to safety.
After dinner, the son, a teenager, begins to tell the story of the event. We knew that the soldiers were using the real bullets; we knew that the tanks crushed the people. Freedom came from all of us in this square; all of us, teenagers who still went to school, like myself, the students, the teachers, the factory workers, the bus drivers, the mothers, widows, amputees, all of us! The father embraces the son. The mother claps as if she is at a play and her cheeks fill with blood. This is my son. The sister does a dance in front of the fire, some kind of domestic and darling resistance. Then the front door blows open and soldiers with rifles clamor in and fast as a shutter clicking first the photographer’s camera, and then her left cheekbone are smashed in by the butt of a rifle, changing her face forever.
2.
The man from the Tambov Gang drives the poet in a black BMW through the streets of his city speaking of its ghosts: Maksim Gorky. Pushkin’s wife. Sculptors, pianists, painters, musicians, poets. The oldest drama house in the country. Then he asks her if she knows of Maria Spiridonova. The Russian revolutionary? she asks. Yes, he says, the woman who shot in the face a general responsible for brutally suppressing a peasant uprising. Who was dragged facedown on cobbled steps, stripped and raped and whipped, cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts. Who was exiled to Siberia. Who spent most of her adult life in a state of being beaten. The poet puts her hand to her throat and asks, What became of her? History, he says. She was executed. And his voice and the night bleed into each other until they are out of the city, arriving at a redbrick house surrounded by oak trees and flax fields. When they leave the car, before they enter the house, he tells her that the materials she requires will be delivered to her the following day: the doctored passport, the travel papers, the false identification verifications. He says, And when you find the location of the girl, my men will pick her up and take her to the train station at Vilnius. But after tonight. He smiles.
As they enter the building, it does not alarm the poet that they go straight down into the basement. In her life, there are many nights in basements, where ordinary people act out physical fantasies in homemade dungeons or playrooms or simply low-lit rooms away from the socius. But when they get to the belly of things, a great dark room with a concrete floor covered in places with giant oriental carpets, a towering wooden cross beam hanging from the ceiling, and one large black wooden table in the center covered with a white linen cloth and more instruments of whipping than even she has ever seen, she is surprised. For there is not one man waiting, but nearly a dozen men, all wearing brown or black Cossacks with roped belts. She freezes behind the man from the Tambov Gang. Has she been led into real or imagined danger? He turns around, takes in her fear, and gently touches her arm. Leads her ahead of him. She bites the inside of her cheek. What is this? she says, trying to sound in control rather than captured. He gently eases her down by the shoulders into a chair. Sit, my friend. Do not be alarmed. You are among friends. But we are not the same as you. We punish the skin for different reasons. Maria Spiridonova flashes up in her mind’s eye. But she holds her face, her shoulders, still. Somehow. He continues. We are Khlysts. She feels the air in her lungs again. Khlysts. One of countless break-off religious sects that practices ecstatic ritual. Sexual orgies. Flagellation. Cleansing the soul through pain and sexual excess. She wrote a fucking poem about Khlysts. The poet quickly reexamines the room, looking for a woman. Each Khlyst cell, she dimly remembers, is led by a male and a female leader, the “Christ” and the “Mother of God.” Where is the fucking woman? The poet tries to recover her position in this story. Reaching down her own throat to rescue herself, to become the American poet dominatrix, she asks in a husky voice, Where is the Mother of God? The man from the Tambov Gang smiles, then bows, then goes to his knees before her. It’s me, she realizes. I’m the woman. He looks up at her. Remember what you promised, beautiful hard woman. We made this deal, you and I. He takes her hands in his. Suffering to cleanse suffering. They stare at each other. And then he speaks the name of a man, and one of the men steps forward, to be washed, anointed, and then tied to a cross and hung from the ceiling for her to beat clean.