But in that booth, in that smoke-filled, not-American, crowded bar, she’d hit what was supposed to be the zenith of her career, and she felt . . . more empty than a shell casing. Having reached the only voice in the universe she ever loved—even just her voice-mail recording—all she could think was, What a voice. Even knowing there was no category for her love, or might never be back home in America, land of coupling, land of sanctioned marriage and two-person twined knots, land of tireless good-citizen living, land of the happy family, land of the free and the brave and the locked imagination, land of ignorant homeowner masses lined up in twos. Why can’t I just be gay, her head went, or why can’t we just live with the people we love and not worry about the sex, or why is sex such a big deal when it’s so cluster-fucked anyway, her head tumbling thoughts until she was cross-eyed.
“I’m sorry,” she said into the phone, and rang off.
As she moved back to her table of colleagues she thought, They will give her this. They will allow her this one night to act out. But tomorrow she will need the pumps and the black skirt and a crisp button-down white shirt, French or Italian, and her vinyl black hair captured in a tight ponytail. Because The New Yorker will be interviewing her by phone tomorrow. Because Vanity Fair will. All because of this award. The award.
I don’t feel anything.
Remember what Virginia Woolf said: Give back the awards, should you be cleverly tricked into believing they mean something. Do not forget that the door you are being ushered through has a false reality on the other side. Do not forget that the door is opening only on someone else’s terms, someone else’s definition of open.
Then someone pulled her cheek and the whole table seemed to burst into whooping laughter, so she released her mind, these endless thoughts, and slid back into the booth.
This drunk successful woman making her choices.
She wanted to take her clothes off. She wanted to start a revolution. She wanted to give the prize back. Instead, she wiped her mouth to the recognition and celebration and alcohol, and with a great, swollen swagger she raised her glass and offered a wrong-mouthed toast:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled mazzes . . . yearning to breathe free,
The wrejjed refffff . . . use of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tozzedome,
I lift my lamp be(burp)zide the golden door.
There she was, a towering woman with people looking up at her, toasting her, a woman who had peed upright, a woman falling back into applause and laughter and adulation and dessert. Would it end there? Or would her momentum do what it does with drunk successful women, catapult her toward some man who would come inside her, an American six-footer maybe, between her legs as if her legs were meant for that opening up, her pussy meant for that entering, and all night inside her would he maybe say, You are so great, oh baby, god baby, you are greatness itself, yeah baby, let me give it to you, and would he? Give it to her? As if that’s what she was made for, as if her body itself was brought to full height by the sexed-up flattery and hard prize of an American man?
Keep drinking.
The Poet
The poet is emerging from a dream. Her head on her desk, her eyes catching glimpses of things in retinal flashes, the crouch of unwritten words in her fingers.
She sees the world on its side, blurry and colored like waking is. She sees what must be the hairs of her own arm foresting up in front of her. She takes a deep breath, holds it, squints; the ordinary objects of the room keep their secrets a few seconds longer. She wets her lips with her tongue, which pulls her fully from sleep and activates the nerve-twine and vertebrae of her neck. She muscles up her biceps and pop she’s awake.
She is in Prague. Her poet self brought her here. Prague: the way history stays alive in some cities: Art. Architecture. Absinthe. Sunflowers. Roads made from stones. She gazes out the frame of her window, sees the steeple of an eight-hundred-year-old church, mouths the word psalm. Pages of her own work rest under her arms, on the table, in view, urgent. She fingers through them. The sound of the paper is something like petrified wings.
She is in Prague working with another, more famous poet. In some older world, time, place, this would mean apprenticeship, would fall into an order, well placed. She has left America to position herself in a line with Eastern Europe, amid others trying to revive the buzz of history. World wars and hidden jars of honey. Night skies filled with sirens or people trying not to let their breathing sound. Sex under cover of bridges. The voices of writers exiled and humming like electricity.
But she stops being nostalgic. She knows she lives in this world, not some other, no matter how old and beautiful European cities are. She’s an American poet in Prague.
She can afford to be. Capitalist pig.
She looks at the pieces of paper strewn around her: lines, scribbles, some words and pages barely decipherable. She picks up a half-eaten sandwich. Fuck it. She reaches over and pours an ounce of absinthe into a Pontarlier reservoir glass. The bulbous bottom swells with wet. Then she lays the flat, silver, perforated spoon across the rim and places a single cube of sugar on its face. She drips ice-cold purified water over the sugar until the color rises, until the gradual louche.
She lights a fire in the little room, sits in a hundred-year-old velvet chair. The heat brings on a dreamy glow of amber light. She drinks. Her hand moves to her other mouth, beginning the rhythmic throb. Because there is this: she’d rather live in the dreamy blur of everything she knows is dead than face the stark realism of an ordinary hand at the turn of this stupid-ass century. What a dull turning it’s turning into.
With her want she makes a decision: tonight she will abandon the prestigious workshops and seek out live porn. It is easy to make a clean exit when you are unburdened by relationships.
In the not-American night she is partly her poet self and partly her id. She passes a man near a bar who says something ludicrous to her. She doesn’t respond. Most of the time she’s either in her mind or in her body—thinking or acting. She doesn’t talk much. Never has.
She is aware of three things: the bruise-black effect of the night in the corridors of this city; her feet and their syncopated physicality; and the street itself.
A pounding between her legs.
She drains a flask from the inside pocket of a black leather jacket. She has been given the address to a place where a woman might mouth the mouths of other women.
What she wants first is to watch. To watch two women, not American, bring themselves to the brink of animal. The cum, the piss, the shit. Blood and sweat and mouths and salt. Skin reddened or scraped or bleeding or bitten or bruised. Shoved.
That violence.
Then she wants to dominate the scene.
If the scene fails, the writing will.
Of course she finds what she wants.
She purchases what she wants, gives herself exactly what she wants. She gives it and gives it until the having of it becomes the word mine, and beyond that even, until her thinking and her physical responses obliterate each other.
The poet watches from a velvet chair. A Moroccan, her skin black as oil, is fisting a Pole. The Pole is blindfolded, and her arms are bound to her sides with heavy white hang-yourself rope. She is on the marble floor of a large, high-ceilinged flat. Her legs are spread so wide she looks as if she might dislocate at the hips.
The Moroccan’s ass is high up in the air and her pussy and asshole are alive, opening and closing alongside her labor. She works hard on the Pole, her blue-black arm disappearing into the white.
Make her red and swollen, the poet says. She sits with her legs crossed, breathing calmly, her hands clasped beneath her chin. A delicate glass of absinthe on the table next to her.
The fisting of the Pole extends over time in waves.
When the poet is satisfied at the raw cleft of the Pole, she instructs the Moroccan to stop. The Pole’s breathing heaves; spit slides from her parted lips. Red blotches bloo
m on her white skin, randomly, the colors of the Polish flag. Her lips more than swollen.
The poet carefully opens a prepared towel, revealing a row of syringes with fingertip-size blue caps. She sits back down, tells the Pole to keep her legs spread. Don’t move. If you move or make a sound, it will be the death of you. Then, after a pause: Go on, then.
The Moroccan takes one needle and removes the blue cap. She crouches over the Pole with the intensity and concentration of a doctor. The Moroccan’s biceps flex as she moves in. She pierces the Pole’s inner thigh, close to her pussy, in a place where blue veins river-shudder beneath the infant-thin skin. Down first, pressing her finger at the skin firmly, then up, making a stitch. The Pole’s skin quivers but she does as she is told, does not move her body. She swallows a moan. The Moroccan caps the little needle and chooses another.
A small dot or two of blood emerges like the red head of a pin on a world map.
And again.
With each needle the Pole’s breathing deepens and heavies.
Sweat forms quickly on her upper lip, her cheeks, her stomach, her inner thighs.
The poet almost feels the Pole’s increasing light-headedness. The dizzy rise from pain to the rush of endorphins, the delirium at the top, the uncanny wish for more, even as a blackout seems imminent.
Twenty little needles up one thigh, twenty little needles down the other, blue caps creating railroads across the territory of a woman’s body.
The Pole’s toes shake like someone hanged.
The Pole clenches her teeth now and again.
Drools.
Still, she makes no sound.
Her hair flowing out from her head like a sunflower.
Her beating heart, to the dictatorial eye of the poet, is as stunning as a Warsaw uprising. How glorious the nearly silent criminal adventure.
Later, after each needle is removed, after the Pole is carefully wiped with antiseptic and given water and a loving warm hand bath by the naked poet and the Moroccan, after she is double body-cradled and sung to and rocked, all three women fuck the night into dawn, trading powers and alliances, surrendering or annihilating without attention to origin or plan. There is blood from more than one body. Mouths attack and retreat. Bruises rise like bomb blasts. Hands and fingers disappear into tunnels and caves. There is piss and cum and tears. Smears of shit make new symbols on the sheets. The sounds coming from the room would be intolerable to anyone on the outside, were it not for the fact that the lodgings are bought and paid for.
Then, after, she sleeps like a baby, heaped there with them on a bed made from women without rules.
She wakes with her face nearly smothered between two swollen breasts—Polish, whiter than white. The other body spoons her from behind—African Moroccan, so black it is blue. She is between nations. The salt and stick of cum between her legs smears across her thighs and ass and on her cheek and shoulders. A streak of blood near her mouth, the taste of metal. The scent of the inside of women is pungent and loud even inside her breathing. She licks her teeth and opens her mouth as if to speak, but she is not speaking.
It is the silence before the line.
Briefly she wants to linger there. Maybe she wants to die there. Then not. She gets out of bed, stumbling like a drunk morning-after man. She looks and looks and finds nothing, no pen, no pencil. Where the fuck is anything? Where the fuck is she? Right. Not her own room.
A purse on the floor.
She rummages through it. Women shit. Kohl eyeliners—penlike. Paper? Nothing nothing nothing. She scans the room in that way that eyes work in the early morning, meaning not much, malfunctioning lenses.
Pillowcase.
And thus she begins, the first line already bursting toward rupture in her brain, what other people would call a hangover or the cusp of a migraine. She nearly barfs before she can get it down:
This impression I could ravish us/this blood-bodied pang
Her phone rings. She holds it to her ear.
The difference between a sentence and a line.
The writer has been hospitalized again, says the voice. She has stopped eating, speaking, everyone has gathered there at the hospital. Won’t she, please, come?
History and time open like a mouth, inside which pulses the small pang of an ordinary woman.
The Playwright
Why is everything in hospitals the color of mud or mold? The playwright stops typing for a second and stares at his hands on his laptop. He can’t believe he’s already writing this. Already twisting it into art. Cannibal. He feels a pang of guilt. You’re in a hospital. Your poor sister is dying. But even as his heart is beating him up in his chest, he can’t not do it. He can’t. He looks up at the strange and sporadic rivulet of people coming by to see his sister: former students, acquaintances, colleagues, fans of her books. It’s a pitch-perfect humanity parade. If he doesn’t get it down right now, it will blur and hum away like a train.
She’d be on his side. Wouldn’t she?
Then again, she’s dying. That’s what they’re all so somber about. When they spot him in that Naugahyde chair, hunched over a laptop, they must think he’s odd. But there is a profound sibling secret, like a spider’s thread, from his body to hers: No one knows more about the death in life and life in death than he and his sister. Their family a war zone. He breathes the artificial air. God, this place smells like someone shit antiseptic.
When they were children, he used to make his sister play Romeo and Juliet with him. Love scenes and death scenes from the play, which he’d been assigned in school. Though she was only six at the time, and he fifteen, he reconfigured his sister into a Romeo. Green leotard tights and a black down ski vest. He even cut her hair in what he considered an Elizabethan style, much to his mother’s dismay, and talked her into a small codpiece he’d made from a sock. He taught her many of Romeo’s lines to Juliet—let lips do what hands do—wherefore art thou—kid sisters were like chimps, you could get them to mimic anything. Her adoration knew no bounds. He’d stand at the top of the stairs, his sister at the bottom, all her longing in words and body reaching upward to him.
She was good.
Although no one, in any production he’d seen since—in Central Park, London, L.A., Venice—had been a finer, more beautiful, bath-towel-for-hair-hanging-past-his-ass Juliet than he’d been, in his mother’s silk robe.
But during one of their private performances, when he was sixteen and she was seven, his sister did the unthinkable: she improvised a line. Pity the small backs of children, he heard her saying. They carry death for us the second they are born. They gazed at each other with a heavy stillness, then, his Juliet at the top of the carpeted stairs, her Romeo holding his hand out and up toward her, like faith.
“That’s not your line,” he said.
“But it is,” she’d said. “My line.” And she’d grabbed at her codpiece and thrown it to the shag carpet. It was their last performance together. Something was shifting, he remembers thinking. She was acting more like Hamlet than Romeo.
He can see her clearly now, in his mind’s eye. Was she a writer even then, his sister? At six, seven years old? Some strange prodigy primate taking form underneath him?
Sometimes it feels as if he can’t exit the family drama he left when he was sixteen. Or thought he left.
His skin itches. Doesn’t it? He scratches his own wrists three times. Six. Nine. He knows exactly what the itching is. He feels all wrong, away from the calm and the cedar-soap smell of his lover’s skin, the ground wire of his voice. He can feel his own internal organs lurching, especially his lungs and heart and possibly his prostate. Can one feel one’s prostate? He takes a deep breath. Holds it for three seconds. Blows it back out, pacing his breathing. He does it three times. He hears his lover’s voice: You need to self-soothe. Self-soothe! Self-soothe.
He closes his eyes. He sees his lover’s body in the dark of their penthouse bedroom. New York City night light—the moon, the windowed eyes of adjacent buildings, ne
on signs and street traffic glow—illuminates the terrain of his lover’s body: the top of a shoulder, the hill of a hip, his hair like a forest of wood shavings. He can smell the skin of his lover. He breathes him. Cedar-scented soap cedar-scented soap cedar-scented soap.
The only calm he has ever known has come from this: a man loving a man in the face of this city, in a room lit by night and skin. Why can’t he always feel like this? He grinds his teeth exactly three times. Every other moment of his life, his ordinary life, ordinary days and hours and weeks and the ever-excruciating ticking and grating of time and tasks and human pretenses, feels to him like a series of chops. Like a carrot cut quickly on a wooden block. He hears the chop chop chop in threes. He doesn’t want to leave this room. He doesn’t want to feel anything outside this room. He wills the chopping sound to stop by breathing in cedar and skin. The chopping sound melds with someone’s heels on linoleum.
His sister. He keeps his eyes closed. Sister. Simultaneous lifeline, loveline, and yet stone to the bottom of everything.
An alarm goes off in the distance. Some other hallway. Code blue. Some shuffle of scrubs. “Death is a body everywhere,” he types onto his laptop. Then deletes it. Then retypes it. Deletes. Until it’s just the word death staring at him.
Being on the West Coast makes him feel homicidal. That’s just true. Part of him thinks, Well then, go ahead and die already, my sister, my imperfect other, it’s astonishing we made it this far. You deserve it. Rest. Some other part of him bitch-slaps the first. Vulgar. Insensitive. Asshole. What kind of brother thinks a thing like that?
He retunes his ears to the scene around him. His fingers then flurry. He can’t stop typing. Typing everything the visitors, orderlies, doctors, nurses around him in the hospital-hell hallway are saying to each other. He just can’t not do it.
He sighs. He hates hospitals. Well, everyone does, but his hatred has a locus, an image arrested from the past.
His sister, as a girl of eight, on her stomach in a hospital bed. Her blood blooming up red from below, staining the white of the sheets, staining the word daughter with father and family. Blooming from her injuries. A paternal rape gone so badly wrong they had to keep her on her stomach.