The woman then understands that the girl will someday leave the house. Maybe soon. That the force within this girl is not anything belonging to the widow. And because she sees something that the girl does not, the woman starts to teach her English. She tells her, “Someday you must leave here and take what we have left in us to America. What we have left in us, buried and ravaged as it is, needs to come out. It is not a perfect place, America. It’s simply a way out of this story.”
In this way art becomes the whole world of the girl. And her hands become painter’s hands; and her body leans toward becoming; and her tongue begins to move from the cornered shapes of one language into the rounded edges of another; her dreams begin to carry scenes from an unknown country; and her origins, which are a white blast zone, begin to seek form, like the crouch of violence in her fingers, like the unstoppable sex of a child leaving childhood, making for the world.
Part Three
Love Is an Image
It’s quiet like snow.
The filmmaker is holding the writer’s hand in the hospital room.
His head is on the bed near her chest.
Their breathing—a husband’s, a wife’s—synchronizes and hums with the hospital’s life-machine sounds.
Their beautiful boy is walking around the room with his Canon camcorder. Filming the lines on the linoleum floor, the fluorescent lights of the ceiling, the IV going from its transparent bag of liquid down the thin tube to his mother’s arm, the TV with his mother’s heartbeat signals, the somber hang of the curtains. Filming himself in the little mirror above the sink. He turns to the bed. His father and mother look asleep. He walks as quietly as he can toward their faces. With his six-year-old finger he pushes the zoom until the faces fill the frame, then farther, until it’s just his mother, then just his mother’s eye and cheek and hair . . . everything.
Where White Is
I am into a white. As white as snow covering a field, stretching out toward all horizons. As white as a page. If there is a surrounding forest or mountain or city I cannot see them beyond the white.
I don’t know how long I’ve been here, or how deeply in I have traveled. I am aware that outside this place there is a room, and in the room they say a woman is not well. I think the woman is me, but I am so far away I cannot breathe language back into her, and so she rests, like a sleeping body, like a sentence yet unformed.
Sometimes I can feel my husband’s body—his physical presence—in my bones, and so I know when he has entered the room. He cannot enter the white. And sometimes I can smell my son’s breath and hair and skin, and I want to rip my heart from my chest and hurl it.
To them, I must look dead.
But I am not dead.
The white is soft. Soft against the eyes and the body, soft in your ears and throat. Not like mist or smoke. As if the air around you suddenly had dimension. You can almost touch it. This white before you. Where I am.
Inside the white I can hear things and see things. Sounds and images resolve and dissolve at random intervals. And different times present themselves—different times from my life or the lives of people I’ve known or the lives of random people, little scenes of being, all of them come and go.
The stories here move differently from the way they do out there. Inside the white, stories move backward and forward in time and appear in all places at once. Language and images split into thousands of universes. Stories and people and images connect with faster-than-light transfers of information. Many worlds coexist.
I do not feel unconscious or crazy or comatose. I feel part of the motion of all matter and energy, and thus I am a participant with agency. If I want something to come or go, it does.
I hear something now inside the white. It is a word. The name of a street: Bakszta.
The name of the street is immediately comforting. It is the street of my ancestors. The only one in the world who knows the people who lived there and their names, names that became my name, the name that began as one word and deteriorated down and down and under and across until it was utterly atomized into my American last name, the only one left: me. Because of all the daughters, some of them childless, I am the last. I am a locus.
Juknevicius. A name.
Bakszta. A street.
Through the white: a girl.
It is her. The girl who haunts me.
I go through the possibilities again. Maybe she is my dead daughter. And maybe she is me, or some relative before me. Maybe the girl is simply a metaphor for what we lose or what we make. And maybe the girl is just a girl, an imagined one, one created from the mind of a woman lost in the spaces between things.
I open my mouth to speak.
Perhaps it is the name of the street.
Perhaps it is the name of the girl.
Perhaps it is the name of my son, or my husband.
Or just a name, my name, my brother’s, a friend’s, an artist’s, a poem, a country, any name.
But no name comes from my mouth.
My voice—language—is swallowed up by the white.
I see the girl’s blond tangled hair as she walks away from me into the white, into some other story. I hear a blasting sound. I follow her.
The white turns to a scene of war. Like a movie.
I open a door in a bar in an Eastern European village. My husband and son are there too, but I am not near them. I am near other people—artists who are dear to me. My brother. The poet, the photographer, all of them. I can see my husband and my son, though. Across the space. They’ve made hats from paper cups. They are laughing. My husband is drinking beer. My son is drinking apple cider. His cheeks little apples. Someone is playing a guitar. Someone else is playing an accordion. There is amber-colored wood on the floors and walls and chairs. People seem intimately close, like in a not-American bar. Their faces warm and rosed. Their gestures swept up in song or laughter. No one is picking up on anyone, or arguing, or using money, or wearing a certain thing. No one’s hair matters. This is a not-American room, a room not made for money and action and ready-made lust thrusts, a room where people are speaking intellectually while drunk, the artists and the farmers giving each other equal weight, and leaning into one another’s bodies without concern—men leaning into men’s bodies and women into women’s—so that the air of it carries all of our hearts and loosens all of our minds and anyone could be from any country for this moment. Loving anyone they want. Saying anything.
The myriad conversations make a kind of voice-hum over the room, and I look up at my husband and my son and I smile.
But there is a war raging just outside, and the information comes to be known that we are all about to die, that a thermonuclear blast is coming. The information is coarse and immediate, as I assume it is for farm animals. They catch the smell, their spine fur shivers, they shift weight from one leg to another, feel restless, look up. The time we have left is understood. I hear it and know it and within ten seconds I make my way to the beating heart of love (my husband and son) so that we can be inside a group embrace, looking into the planets of one another’s eyes as the white life-ending cataclysm occurs.
The embrace and the blast happen at once, comfort and annihilation. Our bodies the universe.
I am in the white again.
Energy never dying.
Just changing forms.
I lie down in the white.
I know why I am here.
I’ve come to ask my questions. The ones my dead girl left inside me.
Is it my fault.
What happened to you.
Are you happy.
What do you want from me.
The girl is here, inside the white. When the time is right, I will ask her my questions. And then I will either go back or she will take me.
The woman in the room, the one who is maybe me, they say she is dying in a hospital bed.
Bloodsong
The widow is in the kitchen making soapy circles with her hands on plates at the sink. I can hear her hum
ming. How long have I lived here with her? How old am I? Am I still a girl?
I am looking at the widow’s book of paintings of the crucifixion of Christ. It is beautiful, this book of Christ paintings. It is the size of my entire torso. Death, I’ve learned, she lives in all of us the moment we are born. The pink wrinkled skin of a squirming infant can’t hide it. It’s just true. Maybe that is why there are almost no paintings of babies—except the Christ child, and what kind of baby is that? A fat little fiction—a baby that comes from the sky through the body of a dim-witted woman.
All bodies are death bodies. But the best death body of all is the crucifixion. A beautiful womanman hanging naked from a cross, stuck with nails, bleeding, thorn headed. Of all of them, I love the Velázquez the most. I am looking at it now. I lower my head to the image and close my eyes and rest my cheek upon his body. I put my mouth to the page and lick it. I wish it was in me.
I can feel my body. I can feel the heat at my chest and ribs and belly. I follow the heat story with my hand. I can make fire between my legs any time I like. I open my eyes and raise my head from the page of the Christ body. I look at it. I don’t care about this puny faith. I have died and been resurrected hundreds of times. What’s the Christ story compared to the bloodsong of one girl? How flimsy that story is. I believe in Velázquez. With our hands and art. I believe we must make the stories of ourselves.
My name is Menas. This is my story.
There was a bomb.
Once I asked the widow, when I could not find the story in any of her carefully collected news accounts: where is the story of my bomb? There is no war, she told me. There’s been no war for fifty years. There is only the occupation, and what that has meant to people. Your family killed. My husband sent to Siberia. The bomb that killed your family? . . . Listen to me. No one knows where it came from.
What has happened to us—there is no story.
But there was a family. My father the poet. My mother the weaver. My brother, my other, child gone to ash. I am like a blast particle—a piece of matter that was not destroyed, a piece of something looking for form.
There is the widow and her house and how I came here. Through the violence of men, through the forest, across a snow-covered field. I do not believe in the word meilè—love. Nor tëvynei—love for one’s country. Nor vaikams—love for children. Motinos—maternal love. None of them. In the place of love there is art.
There is my body and what has happened to it.
There is painting.
I paint on wood. Sometimes the widow and I pull the sides of abandoned houses apart. My paintings are of girls. In one painting a girl is chewing off her own arm, her hand caught in a steel trap. In another, a girl’s mouth has a house in it. Unlike a photograph, my girl faces are blurry. I want them to be blurry. I always make myself stop from putting them right, for what will it mean? Right for whom? By whose hands? The face of a girl should be blurry. Like she’s running.
There is a history to art, I’ve learned. Religion. Philosophy. Myth. Photography. I am reading about them. But there are chapters, whole books, missing. I see the stories of women, but they are always stuck inside the stories of men. Why is that?
The widow fills a kettle and puts it on the stove.
I pull down from the shelves a book of world mythology and my sadness grows. Artemis, why the paler sister of Apollo, whom she brought through blood into the world from her mother’s womb with her own hands? I turn to the section about my part of the world, and in the mythology of my so-called people—the goddesses—what use are they? Why did I ever like these stories? What is Gabija, goddess of fire, who protects against unclean people? I do not need this protection. It is a trick to place fear there. What use is Laima, goddess of fate, luck, childbirth, marriage, and death, if she keeps women inside the house, away from the open space of the world? Saulė—saint of orphans, symbol of the sun . . . who cannot teach me what the fire inside me is. Who would have me put it out, or give it to a man? Still, I have torn pictures of them all from books and pasted them next to my own paintings in the barn, hoping for company. Though I find it hard to trust them. I wonder about what they want.
The kettle sings. The widow pours hot water into a cup filled with tea leaves.
History, mythology, literature, all the pictures and stories in time: women as witches and monsters, women as prizes and slaves, women as frozen bodies. A woman burning on a stick, queens about to lose their heads. Where are the artists? Where are the bodies who would break out of the story and rescue the others? Where are the daughters with fire in them?
I reach for another book: Indian mythology. It’s easy to find the page I want. I have looked at it so many times I can smell my skin on it. It is a painting of Kali. Great mother. Killer. Next to her image, her story.
Once upon a time, there was a war. A young woman named Durga was facing a demon named Raktabija. Durga wounded the demon, in lots of ways and with many weapons, but she made things worse, because for every drop of blood that was spilt, the demon made a copy of himself. The battlefield was filled with him. Durga, in need of help, prayed for Kali to fight the demons. With a gaping mouth and red eyes, Kali killed the demon by sucking the blood from his body and putting the many demons in her mouth. She ate them. Then she danced on the field of battle, stepping on the dead bodies.
I do not care about India, or Hinduism, or Buddhism. I do not need a savior.
It’s the art of her.
I stare and stare at it. I can feel the blood under my skin. Her picture gets inside me, so that we are not two, but one. No longer a picture, but a mirror. I open my mouth. I stare at the image until it is everything, and I go, I mean I literally leave and go wherever the image takes me, and I am glad, for I have no ties to this world. Such images make me a different kind of alive. I become the thing I am looking at. Her body my body. I touch between my legs. Heat. My mouth fills with spit.
Bloodthirsty warrior mother. I envy her tongue and might. Can this house even hold the two us?
The widow drinks tea and reads from an underground newspaper; she says Democracy is coming.
An Invisible Union
I’ve never written about this. I’ve not told anyone. To my knowledge, the experience exists only in memory between us, a writer and a photographer, but it has no representation, so it may not even be real.
The camera had nothing to do with anything. It didn’t matter.
I’m lying. It did matter. It mattered that she used a camera. It mattered so much that my mouth fills with spit as I think of her, even now.
For example. She walked into the white room of our motel. She stripped the mattress white.
This is important. The whiteness. And her volition.
She was dressed in tight black pants, tight black sleeveless cotton shirt, Gap-like and stiff and new. Her hair the precise wheat color of mine, only short and raging. Her eyes the precise transparent blue of mine, but more driven. Us both Geminis but not quite twinning. Sexual questions between us—her insistently straight, me bisexual—the what of it.
Her camera gave her self-possession. I did not expect her to direct things; I thought she would want me to. But immediately she said lie down on the mattress. I did it. Her voice was calm and quiet. She said take off your pants. I did it. She said take off your shirt. I did it. Sweat formed on my upper lip simply from her asking me to do ordinary things. From language out of the mouth of a woman. She said touch yourself. I petted myself lightly. Heat. She said close your eyes. I did. I heard the first click of the camera. She said—but it was not as if she was saying it—it was the power of the camera in front of her face giving her the means to direct things—squeeze the meat of your pussy until you are wet. I did. That’s when I felt her eye on me close in—the lens of her. She said take one of your tits out of your bra and squeeze it like it’s full of milk. I did. She said milk it. I did. My mouth opened barely. My pussy became wet.
She said take off your panties. She said take off your br
a.
I heard her steady the camera. She said whatever you do, don’t open your eyes again. I don’t. Everything becomes present and past tense, like in a photo.
She says play with your tits. First, I squeeze the full-palmed whole of each breast, kneading them up and out as if I am readying them to be devoured. They become swollen and my nipples harden. I pinch my own tits over and over again thinking I will make them red for her, I will make them mouthable and hard and huge and reddened. I picture them as I play with them. I keep working them until I can feel them becoming the picture I want. I can hear the camera and I can feel her moving in and out and in and out. When she is near I feel heat, and while I am pinching my tits I can’t help it: I undulate my hips and my pussy begins to cream.
She says play with your tits again so I start to shake them by holding my nipples and jiggling my tits. This makes me arch and moan and I lift my hips up to where I imagine she might be. Then I cup each tit with each of my hands and jiggle it for her like a porn-paid woman might for some sap of a man. She says put your hand up yourself and I do, and my pussy becomes swollen and like a begging mouth.
I moan and whine.
I can feel her photographing me. I can hear the shutter clicks. I think I might lose my mind.
I pull my own tits up so hard it makes me cry out. I push them together and I wait and wait doing that until I cannot wait any longer and then I shove one tit up to my mouth and suck my own nipple. I bite and suck myself. I say please and spit covers things. I can feel her lens very close to me but not touching me and I think a little this is what it is like to go insane.
Or this is desire, convulsive.
It is no wonder men cheat.
It is no wonder women cheat.
Desire is larger than god.
Ask a believer.
While I’m sucking myself hard and wild like an animal or infant, I suddenly hear her say play with yourself.
The Small Backs of Children Page 9
