The girl opens her mouth and yells Ne! and is then sent across the room in a single blow, her head shattering the mirror.
The smaller man is instructed to leave. The man turned beast takes off his belt. He begins without ceremony to whip the poet. Welts rise red and swollen on her breasts, her torso, her belly and abdomen. She does not make a sound. Instead she bites the inside of her cheeks until blood fills her mouth.
When the girl comes to, she is flat on the cement floor. She thinks she sees what people call Christ being beaten in front of her. Velázquez. Then she remembers what is happening. Pieces of glass surround her head. She picks one up. Because she is small and quiet like animals are and no threat to the action — for what is a girl — neither the poet nor the man beating the poet hear her take off all of her clothes, so that when the man unzips his pants and moves toward the poet yelling obscenities in Russian, the girl’s voice surprises him. Here, she says, and lies down on the table, her sex hairless and her breasts barely rising, her spread legs unimaginably open.
Language leaves the poet at the image of the girl’s body.
The man laughs in a guttural slobber and lurches toward the body of the girl and throws himself on the slight of her. The poet starts yelling American obscenities in violent bursts, trying to make words kill things. The girl makes her eyes dead. And as the man pierces into her she stabs him in the side of the throat with the glass. Again. Again.
The man places the beef of his hand on the girl’s face trying to smother the life from her, then dies on top of her, his blood on her face and breasts. Stillness.
The girl stands on a chair and unties the poet. The poet’s arms drop around the shoulders of the girl, and for a moment the two look as if they are in an embrace. The poet lifts the girl’s face up and looks into her eyes. The poet opens her mouth. But no words come. Silence.
The poet and the girl re-dress, collect themselves.
When the door begins to rattle, the poet picks up a chair and stands ready to smash in the skull of whoever enters, and the girl raises her arm with glass in her hand, but as the door opens whoever it is turns to sound as an entire wall explodes around them.
Artillery fire. Or a stray missile. Or a bomb. Avisual. Reverse origin.
The poet and the girl run from the room through the blast hole, fire around their forms.
How a story can change in the violence of an instant. How content is a glimpse of something.
And in the end a train carries them. And a plane lifts them into the sky. On the plane the poet tells the girl the story of how she came to find her, and why. The girl listens, not catching all of what this woman is saying to her, since her English is still forming. But individual words and lines and images go into her. And the quivering in the poet’s hands when she lifts the little airplane drink up to her face again and again. And the tiny lines near her eyes that have written themselves this day. And the marks on the poet’s body that the girl knows hide violence like a skin song beneath her clothes. And the girl carries something with her as small as a seed.
Part Four
Making Art
The first year I lived with the American artists is a collage.
This is a house.
These are the rooms.
This one, your room.
A room of your own.
We are giving it to you.
Because we can.
This is the table of the artists, where we eat and speak and act out relations.
This is the school, the American Interdisciplinary Art School.
Isn’t it something?
This is the in-home entertainment system with Sensurround sound and these are the Mac computers and this is a cell phone with a computer and this is software to make films in the sanctity of one’s own home.
Can you believe it?
This is what’s bad: The Nixon administration. The Reagan administration. The Bush administrations. War. Poverty. Injustice. Christians. Oil. Racists. Global warming. Homophobia. Corporations. The plight of third world nations.
This is money.
This is how we shop online.
This is Organic.
This is a haircut, makeup, jewelry, scented soaps. This is how to be a girl in this country. Pink.
I am upstairs in the painting room they created for me, in a house surrounded by firs, ferns, alders. I am the only one home. I lick the skin of my arm. Salt. Then I hear the UPS truck grumbling its way toward the house. I know it will stop here; I can see when it arrives from this wide upstairs room where I paint. It comes once a month. For years. Once a month a delivery of canvas, paper, paint, brushes, linseed oil, turpentine, art books. For me.
The deliveries come from a man who has become the exiled American painter in my mind’s eye. I have learned about him through their stories of him, how he rose to fame as an abstract painter, how he used women as if they were paint, how he shot his wife the writer. And I have read about him through my own research on the Internet, through all the media this country so lavishly spills all over everything.
It seems important to them that he is a kind of villain in their stories. This seems American.
There is something I have never told them. For seven years now, deep inside the delivery packaging, this man — the American painter — hides little notes, and I find them as I use the materials. Sable brushes are preferable to any other — don’t waste your time with the small ones. Detail work is for Dutch dead men. Use the light from the window in the room they’ve created for you — never artificial light. Never. Take ten steps back from your work every hour or you will lose sight of it. Don’t think. Don’t know. Just paint. If you must paint with your hands, use these — latex gloves. Oil paint can kill you, for fuck’s sake. The notes are rolled around tubes of paint or brushes, slid between pages in books, buried inside rolls of paper or written in pencil on canvas. These secret hieroglyphics from the man who shot his wife.
All I ever wanted was canvas. Even when the environment was dire.
The UPS truck is pulling up the gravel drive, through the alder trees. I close my eyes and breathe.
The second year I lived here is a mural with the images of three women on it in different states. The first woman is the writer. I saw her one morning emerging from the shower, dripping with water. A woman who suffered great loss and did not die. Baptismal.
The second image of a woman is the poet’s body before I untied her in the room of her torture, her arms outspread, her naked body carrying the trace of violence as if her wounds had been painted. Velázquez.