“Liza,” she said. “My name is Liza.”
Dear bold, beautiful Frédéric,
Before you suffer one of your terrible lapses of imagination, you must read Mary Shelley’s book — to fulfill your desire as a sculptor and find an answer to your question. You are birthing a creation! A monstrous one, even! If by “monstrous” we might mean something away from the dull drone of fear and horror… Perhaps monstrous is just another word for magnificent. I tell you, this Mary knew more about birth and death and the horror of art and mankind than any writer yet published.
So, then. To contribute to your great art, I will make you a wager. I will finish reading the plodding Darwin you sent me, if — and only if — you read the book designed at the hands of a girl.
But first I must make a final stipulation: you must accept that fiction and fact are not at war. Realism and fact convince us quite seductively that there is no evolutionary transformation, no possibility of radical adaptation, that can rival the formidable matter and energy of pure imagination.
For my part, I hold Mary Shelley against Darwin. If you accept my proposal, the winner — that is, the mind with more acumen, and the body that is more infinite and sublime — shall receive one night’s activity in the room of their choice. A night to murder all other nights. Designed by either you or me. Whoever is most persuaded by our authors and their visions. If I win, the night shall be devoted to my own conjurations, inspired by my divine Mary. If you win, you are free to choose as your model that dullard Darwin. (Though, please, no insects.)
I know you would be laughing right now, were we together. And we would, of course, be drinking. And I would touch your face, and you would touch my hair, and all your intellect and all your success would melt into the simple intimacy of your artwork and my imagination, and I would construct for you a new room. A Room of Rooms. And I would ask you to keep drawing, into the night, and I would simply sit near you until you absolutely could not resist drawing on my body, and I would surrender, and you could map your entire imagination onto my skin. Press the pen so hard, it cuts.
But I know what you want. You want another installment, another chapter in our unending night stories. So that you might figure out what turn your shapes should take in as they rise from the ground to the sky and form your new colossus. (I pretend that you need me to tell you all this. That you need me in order to create. And I pretend I need you to be my adoring audience, rapt and receiving.)
Another episode from my rooms: last night I was with the beautiful David Chen. He is without a doubt the most tortured slumberer I’ve ever encountered. If sleepers mimic the dead, then he is an unholy and active ghost, like a statue suddenly bending and thrashing, liberated from its seemingly captured stone. He comes to inhabit the Room of Rope, but he must always sleep first, as if his exhaustion is his existence. I study his back in his sleep; he always sleeps on his stomach. This is the most remarkable detail, my love: his back is covered all over with what looks like a swarm of white feathers. Or that’s what I thought the first time I saw him unclad. But they were not feathers.
Hundreds of small scars, they were. All of them white and pearled, and small enough that they correspond to nothing else on this earth that I can think of. I know not to ask him, at least not yet. The only things I know about him are his sleep, his desire, and that he worked to help finish the transcontinental railroad when he was twenty. He says he is thirty-six, but the body has its own calculus, doesn’t it?
But when David is disturbed corporeally in his sleep, it is something like an unconscious rapture. I often cannot tell the difference between a smile or a grimace, the sweat of eros or tears of terror — the sentiments are truly indistinguishable. His body is simply taken with the world of night, senseless, out of tune, without law. It looks as if he were experiencing an explosion from the inside out when he sleeps. When he wakes, it is — for a moment — as if he has come out of a great and long illness. And when he realizes where he is, his face contorts into a more familiar animal mask — oh, don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Everyone shifts masks every hour of the day — and he readies himself for the Room of Ropes.
From that point forward, I spend tender hours suspending his body. Touching his skin so lightly with a feather that he weeps.
He hangs for many hours.
I think he wants to touch something he has lost.
That is my story for now. This man moving through torture to tenderness, suspended from thick ropes made from the silk of spiders.
Love unto death,
My soul Aurora,
Your story of this David moved me mightily, and thus conjured another in me. The first time I saw David, the statue, I visited so often that the guards made inquiries. I was warned many times to refrain from touching him. I could not eat or sleep without torment for weeks thereafter. I carried a profoundly base thought in my body: Why is this magnificent David not a possibility in my life? Why can’t my obsession take form in his body? His desire taking me into back alleys and bathrooms and forests at the edges of cities… anywhere I could be unseen and feel the dirt and grime and sweat and cum coming up against the white of marble and perfectly clean skin that plagued my thoughts.
Where is my David?
Do you recall when we first rediscovered each other as adults? Come, you invited me. Come and see what I’ve done with your gift, you said at the door to the boardinghouse I bought for you. The building was brick, painted black, rising three stories into the air — its bulk heaving almost directly out of the water, so close I could throw a cup out of the window and hear a splash. Each story of the building had six rooms. A beautiful banister staircase made of cherrywood to seduce those who enter ever upward.
That night, I asked you if you were a prostitute.
It’s not like there was a shortage of high-end ladies’ clubs peppering the neighborhood. The most esteemed was probably Kate Woods’s House of All Nations, where the claim was that foreign-born women of any extraction could be purchased for the right price. And baser brothels thrived amid the dense and raucous workers’ neighborhoods too. The business of pleasure was booming. It seemed an innocent question.
But it was your answer that arrested me — an answer pushed through lips pursed so tightly, I imagined your teeth screaming.
“I am neither a madam nor a prostitute — not ever again in this lifetime, my love. I do not traffic in the bodies of women. I traffic instead in stories — ones that take a body to its edges.”
You remember how I looked at you. With the blank stare of a bovine, you said later.
But that night you were patient with my dullness. Leaning close enough to kiss me, you whispered: “I draw a very different client, Frédéric. Those who enter my rooms come away not in some banal love or lust, but with a craving to exist, again and again, inside a much more interesting and intense space. An ecstatic state. A space between.”
The cilia in my ears stood up. I said, “Death?” Then I laughed — the laugh of an educated and refined idiot who doesn’t quite know what is going on.
“Close,” you replied. “More like the meniscus between pleasure and pain.” You pinched the skin near my nipple so hard, my lip twitched. But I did not make a sound.
We were children again in that moment.
“I bring to the surface of the body, and the psyche, stories held so deeply within us that we shudder to speak them. I bring stories to life, so that we might recover our own bodies. I am wholly narrative, I am the hole of narrative, I am the holy narrative. These rooms are a storyletting,” you said. And that was true — but I was ignorant, insecure, too anxious to sound witty and knowing.