I also want none of this. I want David Chen to stay turned away from me, so that all there is of him is his back, the hieroglyphics writing the unsaid story of whatever happened to him, his back the new world. If he stays turned away from me, if he stays asleep, nothing and no one can ever take my love for him away. There is another kind of freedom in that.
Bless this man’s body. Bless his skin, his cock. Bless his sleep.
The girl pulled something from underneath her shirt and brought it over to me. A perfectly coiled white rope. “When do you feel most human?” she asked me.
I didn’t say anything. I just looked at David’s back: His hair. His shoulders. The rise of his hips. His feet. His sleep.
“This is kinbaku,” she said. “Kinbaku-bi means ‘the beauty of tight binding.’ This rope is made from hemp.” She placed the rope on my belly. “In the late Edo period in Japan, Seiu Ito studied the art of binding prisoners of war. Hojojutsu was used to capture and restrain prisoners, and sometimes to hold prisoners in place for execution or crucifixion or death by fire. Someone’s limbs might be tied to decrease their mobility. Rope loops at the neck, or anywhere blood vessels and nerves are, so that numbness might be achieved during struggle.” There must have been some look in my eye — a look of something unknown, unresolved — that made her pause, then continue. “Ask Aurora. She knows a different story from torture. David has met Aurora. He knows how to find her Rooms. Freedom isn’t what they say.”
I don’t say anything to the girl. For the rest of the night, I hold the rope tightly to my chest. My mouth goes wet, then dry, then wet again.
—
The next morning, she was gone. I’m not sure what the four of us were thinking about her anyway — did we think we could make a family inside our shared labor? Make this girl one of us?
But her words stayed with me. I did find Aurora. And her Rooms. And so did David.
It is possible that desire needs to let loose, here and now, before it is snuffed out by laws meant to suffocate and kill it. It is possible that we need to find the doors of the Rooms where we feel most human, and open them out toward the sky, the water, the world, and back to one another’s bodies.
I keep thinking about the broken shackle, the way it was supposed to be prominently held in the statue’s hand for all to see — and how it ended up near her foot, like something hidden or disappeared.
I keep thinking about how her skin changed from copper to green, its own kind of vitiligo.
After our work was completed, after we had no more reasons to be bound together, we broke apart. The breaking apart of the body of us happened in the same streets and political forums where Reconstruction had crumbled even as we were working. It happened in the same courts that crushed the rights and protections that had made us feel part of something larger than ourselves, as if we were living in a country that could see us and count us as real. It happened in the tightening grip of laws mandating separations of peoples in public schools, public places, public transportation, pulling us apart in restrooms and restaurants, pulling our very lips away from fountains of water.
Every day that passed, we were told in more and more ways that we could not fully exist. Could not vote. Could not hold a job. Could not get an education. We faced arrest, jail, violence, death, each of us in our own way. And I began to emerge between us, purely for survival reasons. It felt like the we of us couldn’t hold.
Endora found work at an orphanage. As a groundskeeper.
John Joseph returned to the nation north of here. He returned for many more ironworks projects in this city as it grew. So did his descendants.
For many years, Endora, John Joseph, David, and I would meet up in the fall and ride out together to see the statue. We’d make a toast together at her feet, smile and reminisce, then go back to our lives — the lives where we had to make a go of it, as Endora said, no matter what came next.
The statue did turn color over the years.
No other girl appeared.
Sometimes I found myself checking the level of the water.
David and I…
I can see the head of the statue over David’s shoulder through the window of our loft. The room is not large, but the windows stretch out for an entire wall. She’s something like a secular angel, crowned and stern, our labor inside her forever.
David stirs but does not wake. A light rain whispers morning.
Bless his exquisite form.
The story of workers is buried under the weight of every monument to progress or power. Our labor never reaches the height of the sacred. No one ever tells the story of how beautiful we were. How the body of us moved. How we lifted entire epochs.
May our story survive the rise of this city.
The Apple
Cunt.”
The air in the room vibrates.
“Say it.” Aurora looks down at me kneeling beneath her on the carpet. “Say, ‘My cunt.’ ”
I do.
“Hold still,” she says.
I do.
Between her thighs, between the folds of her labia majora, is an apple. Most of the apple is visible. The rest of the fruit is nested inside her.
A quivering apple.
Her legs are neither pressed together nor apart; the space that exists between her legs is the width of the small red world.
This room and every object and texture in it — the lushness of the indigo carpet, the cherrywood tables and chairs, the deep-green velvet curtains skirting the floor like a woman’s dress, the mahogany bed layered in linens and satins of red and umber and black and blue, gold and orange and bone white — the hues of the body’s internal truths — makes a pocket for my soul in a way that life does not.
On my knees, in the Room of Kneelings, my hands bound behind my back with an intricate weave of rope braided from human hair, head and neck and spine already aching from looking up and up at the colossus of her, my face less than an inch from her cleft, I can see her labia and the hot wet seeping sap of her already making a kind of halo around the apple.
Between her legs… oh, but I can never see her legs as legs.
One of her legs, yes, is a leg. It stands her upright from beneath red and black velvet waves of skirt, spliced up the middle and pinned back like open curtains.
The other leg — there is no other leg. Where the other leg should be, to my right, is the leg I built for her. Rosewood inlaid with gold-leaf roses from ankle to hip, its hinged knee patterned after the Salem Leg but modified to mirror the fullness of a woman’s thigh, its slender foot painted with delicate red toenails.
The apple, deep red with a bit of yellow at the top curve — that yellow is somehow maddening; any painter would agree — is situated so close to Aurora’s cleft that it seems to convulse as she pleasures herself. I try to look past the apple, up toward her head, her eyes. It hurts to try too hard to see up the length of her. My mouth is as open as I can make a mouth, as she requested. My jaw torques, the apple suspended between my lips and the gaping mouth-sex of my cousin.
From this angle, she looks larger than life.