Yours and only yours,
My accidental idiot cousin,
Do me a favor, will you? Slap your own face as hard as you can. Hard enough to leave a mark.
No, I am not trying to conjure some metaphysical vixen in your head. I had no intention of planting a prostitute in your visions. Where in god’s realm did you get the idea?
I feel nothing but rage with regard to your colossal misinterpretation. I feel I could break a man into pieces just to think of it — to rearrange him so that his head is up his own ass.
How comic. You hear my vision, and it takes for you the shape of some voluptuous whore? For male consumption?
You go from mother to virgin to whore? Could you be more dull-witted?
I must calm myself. I shall return to this letter when I can.
My lamb,
Let me tell you my new idea to rid us of this idiocy.
I want to arrange a theft from the British Library. A thief is an artist of extraordinary merit. Do you laugh? I will remind you that I have access to a wide array of clientele with undreamed-of talents and even more capital. What I mean to have stolen, my love, is the perfect object. Better than a painting or work of so-called art. Rather, a keepsake of profound meaning. Even to be near it, I feel sure, would make me tremble.
A book — but not just any book. A book with a kind of frame nested within its leather cover. Framed within one of two ovals on the volume’s front doublure, or decorative lining, rests a lock of Percy Shelley’s hair and a bit of his ashes; in the other is held a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair. The volume itself is a collection of manuscript letters. Devised as a keepsake, it is so much more — a relic! More important to me than pieces of a saint. I want to touch them, these pieces of those extraordinary bodies. I want to kiss them. Even if I must return the object eventually, it would be worth it to have a moment within their aura, no matter how brief.
Your perfect thief,
My love Aurora, I am kneeling. I am begging forgiveness, and I love it.
How could I have made such a mistake twice? Tell me how long to kneel and I’ll do it. You know I will.
And a warning: Please do not become a thief. Please do not commit a crime.
Perpetually,
Oh, cousin,
You are, as always, my perfection. Forget not that you are a man of means and merit!
All is always forgiven, as I don’t believe in sin and redemption. Forgiveness is dull. As there is no godhead that can hold me, I call and raise. In place of sin and redemption, I offer my Rooms.
Did I understand you correctly? Darwin married his cousin? Do you see the hilarity of that? He crafts a theory of evolution, with clear implications concerning bloodline and mutation, and he marries his own kin?
I’ve changed my mind! I want to meet him! I want to create a Room for him!
Aurora’s Thrust
There was to be a Raid on my house. On the day of the factory fire, a client approaching from the back alley had seen our faces pressed against the window; to him, we must have looked like fugitives, all those faces of children like question marks. The client alerted the authorities. When we learned of the plan — you’ll not be surprised that my sources extend to the city’s official bureaus — we needed an escape, and though I did consider other options, in the end it was that otherworldly girl who won me over, by reciting to me with precision exactly everything that had happened to me and to the children in the last few weeks despite the fact that we had never met.
It was this all-knowing girl who offered the most promising plan: to escape by water.
She sealed the case in an unusual way: by showing me a coin she said she carried with her at all times, a one-cent piece from the nation’s earliest days, its central figure a woman with the hair of a lion. “When this penny first emerged,” she said, “people thought the image was a horror. They thought she was monstrous, that she looked insane. Her unruly hair, is what they said.” She turned the coin over and over in her hand. “Like mine,” she said. Her own long black hair, wrestling its way down her back, was unruly — beautifully so. I reached out to touch it, but she pulled back. My hand hung suspended just above her head. Something about the coin, the girl, something about women and children and monsters, set into my abdomen.
There exists a city within this city, made by women and children.
Cagey, sly, and ingenious girls with barely-there breasts furrowing paths beneath the ebb and flow of city life. Bellicose wives with tongues as formidable as whips and torsos the size of battleships. Hopeless-to-the-point-of-reckless house cleaners and cooks and ladies’ maids. Bands of little-girl thieves, their faces of hunger merging with their oncoming sexuality and drive to survive. Tiny ambitions in collision, or collusion, with desire. The city they inhabit inverts its own alleged social structure. Women and children first may be its cover story, but women and children creating their own society — their underground economy, below where its very sex sits — that is a deeper story.
This girl, she had an unimaginable plan for our escape. I remember feeling a little dizzy from the sheer will of her. But the story she told, in trade for my trust, won me over.
“This is a story from my father,” she said. “But it is actually the story of my mother. Aster has carried it long enough, though. I think perhaps he is dying from carrying this story,” she said, and the sorrow on her face seemed larger than a body.
“This is the Tale of the Fur Spinner,” she told me. “Sit down in that green chair and I will perform it for you.” And then she began.
“The moment my father first saw my mother, Svajonė, he had a seizure. Sometimes I think he wishes he’d died right then, inside the image of her following his fall to the ground, kneeling to put his head in her lap.”
“What kind of seizure was this?” I asked. I had not yet been enveloped into her storytelling.
“Epileptic. People with epilepsy have suffered greatly, you know. They are thrown into places with criminals and mentally ill people, just like prostitutes and poor people and orphans are. If we ever meet again, I’ll tell you the story of the Salpêtrière — which started out as a gunpowder factory and later became an infamous hospital. In your time, it will become a teaching center for those who study the brain.”
I was restless for her to continue. “But what became of your father?”
“There is nothing wrong with my father. Sometimes he just slips time because he can’t hold the weight of his life. That is the story I came here for. But you need to listen. Can you hold still while I tell it, as still as a statue?”
From that moment, I understood. My task was to listen.
—
“My mother was studying the Yakut indigenous language. My father’s mother had been Yakut. When my father met my mother, he knew only a few phrases, words really. The village he grew up in within Yakutia rested inside a tension next to a former Siberian gulag. Former gulag prisoners taught the villagers how to grow potatoes, how to fight for a life — so many things about the space between living and dying. After the collapse, most of the villagers became hunters and fishers. The villagers simply never found someplace else to go. A woman who lived alone in the woods where my father grew up gave him a bone necklace that she claimed belonged to his mother. The woman had no idea if the shards of bone were from a human or a reindeer or what.