Gunfire muffled in the distance.
The girl is led to a chair, told to sit. She looks at the floor. Then slowly, from the floor up, she looks at this American woman standing in the room. In her black leather jacket with her short hair and slim frame, she looks like . . . Hollywood from the books.
One of the men—the heavy one—says something to the other in Russian. The lighter of the two looks at him for a long minute, then at the girl, then at the poet, then leaves the room. The poet hears him lock the door. Her neck hair bristles. She takes her hands out of her pockets. She looks at the mass of man in front of her. He pulls a wad of documents from inside his coat, puts them on the table. The poet studies what must be their paperwork. Then the man asks her, “Do you have the rest of the money?” The poet stares at him, her mind seizing around reality.
The girl’s toes curl up inside her shoes and she grips the underside of the chair.
An explosion rattles the walls, some distance and yet near.
The poet looks at the papers on the table and starts to narrate her position, but in the middle of her carefully crafted sentences a fist finds her face and she is sent hard to the floor. She tastes metal and her ears buzz. Then she is lifted from the floor like a puppet and punched in the gut. Then the door opens and the second man comes in and in his hands are thick braided ropes. While the lighter man moves toward her with the ropes, the heavy man hits her again twice in the face. Her eyes swim. Then he pulls out his gun and instructs her to strip if she wants to live. The poet doesn’t move and the man points the gun at the girl. The poet removes her clothes to save the girl. The poet closes her eyes and looks inward. When she opens her eyes she keeps her gaze locked on the eyes of her tormentor. Dead stare. Then they tie her wrists to two lengths of rope and bind her ankles together; the lengths of rope are then looped up and around metal pipes near the ceiling, so that her arms are extended on either side, her feet bound but still on the ground.
The girl opens her mouth and yells Ne! and is then sent across the room in a single blow, her head shattering the mirror.
The smaller man is instructed to leave. The man turned beast takes off his belt. He begins without ceremony to whip the poet. Welts rise red and swollen on her breasts, her torso, her belly and abdomen. She does not make a sound. Instead she bites the inside of her cheeks until blood fills her mouth.
When the girl comes to, she is flat on the cement floor. She thinks she sees what people call Christ being beaten in front of her. Velázquez. Then she remembers what is happening. Pieces of glass surround her head. She picks one up. Because she is small and quiet like animals are and no threat to the action—for what is a girl—neither the poet nor the man beating the poet hear her take off all of her clothes, so that when the man unzips his pants and moves toward the poet yelling obscenities in Russian, the girl’s voice surprises him. Here, she says, and lies down on the table, her sex hairless and her breasts barely rising, her spread legs unimaginably open.
Language leaves the poet at the image of the girl’s body.
The man laughs in a guttural slobber and lurches toward the body of the girl and throws himself on the slight of her. The poet starts yelling American obscenities in violent bursts, trying to make words kill things. The girl makes her eyes dead. And as the man pierces into her she stabs him in the side of the throat with the glass. Again. Again.
The man places the beef of his hand on the girl’s face trying to smother the life from her, then dies on top of her, his blood on her face and breasts. Stillness.
The girl stands on a chair and unties the poet. The poet’s arms drop around the shoulders of the girl, and for a moment the two look as if they are in an embrace. The poet lifts the girl’s face up and looks into her eyes. The poet opens her mouth. But no words come. Silence.
The poet and the girl re-dress, collect themselves.
When the door begins to rattle, the poet picks up a chair and stands ready to smash in the skull of whoever enters, and the girl raises her arm with glass in her hand, but as the door opens whoever it is turns to sound as an entire wall explodes around them.
Artillery fire. Or a stray missile. Or a bomb. Avisual. Reverse origin.
The poet and the girl run from the room through the blast hole, fire around their forms.
How a story can change in the violence of an instant. How content is a glimpse of something.
And in the end a train carries them. And a plane lifts them into the sky. On the plane the poet tells the girl the story of how she came to find her, and why. The girl listens, not catching all of what this woman is saying to her, since her English is still forming. But individual words and lines and images go into her. And the quivering in the poet’s hands when she lifts the little airplane drink up to her face again and again. And the tiny lines near her eyes that have written themselves this day. And the marks on the poet’s body that the girl knows hide violence like a skin song beneath her clothes. And the girl carries something with her as small as a seed.
Part Four
Making Art
The first year I lived with the American artists is a collage.
This is a house.
These are the rooms.
This one, your room.
A room of your own.
We are giving it to you.
Because we can.
This is the table of the artists, where we eat and speak and act out relations.
This is the school, the American Interdisciplinary Art School.
Isn’t it something?
This is the in-home entertainment system with Sensurround sound and these are the Mac computers and this is a cell phone with a computer and this is software to make films in the sanctity of one’s own home.
Can you believe it?
This is what’s bad: The Nixon administration. The Reagan administration. The Bush administrations. War. Poverty. Injustice. Christians. Oil. Racists. Global warming. Homophobia. Corporations. The plight of third world nations.
This is money.
This is how we shop online.
This is Organic.
This is a haircut, makeup, jewelry, scented soaps. This is how to be a girl in this country. Pink.
I am upstairs in the painting room they created for me, in a house surrounded by firs, ferns, alders. I am the only one home. I lick the skin of my arm. Salt. Then I hear the UPS truck grumbling its way toward the house. I know it will stop here; I can see when it arrives from this wide upstairs room where I paint. It comes once a month. For years. Once a month a delivery of canvas, paper, paint, brushes, linseed oil, turpentine, art books. For me.
The deliveries come from a man who has become the exiled American painter in my mind’s eye. I have learned about him through their stories of him, how he rose to fame as an abstract painter, how he used women as if they were paint, how he shot his wife the writer. And I have read about him through my own research on the Internet, through all the media this country so lavishly spills all over everything.
It seems important to them that he is a kind of villain in their stories. This seems American.
There is something I have never told them. For seven years now, deep inside the delivery packaging, this man—the American painter—hides little notes, and I find them as I use the materials. Sable brushes are preferable to any other—don’t waste your time with the small ones. Detail work is for Dutch dead men. Use the light from the window in the room they’ve created for you—never artificial light. Never. Take ten steps back from your work every hour or you will lose sight of it. Don’t think. Don’t know. Just paint. If you must paint with your hands, use these—latex gloves. Oil paint can kill you, for fuck’s sake. The notes are rolled around tubes of paint or brushes, slid between pages in books, buried inside rolls of paper or written in pencil on canvas. These secret hieroglyphics from the man who shot his wife.
All I ever wanted was canvas. Even when the environment was dire.
The UPS truck is pulling up the gravel
drive, through the alder trees. I close my eyes and breathe.
The second year I lived here is a mural with the images of three women on it in different states. The first woman is the writer. I saw her one morning emerging from the shower, dripping with water. A woman who suffered great loss and did not die. Baptismal.
The second image of a woman is the poet’s body before I untied her in the room of her torture, her arms outspread, her naked body carrying the trace of violence as if her wounds had been painted. Velázquez.
The third image of a woman is a girl—for there is no girl we are not always already making into a woman from the moment she is born—making a city in the dirt next to the boot of a man. It could be rage or love in his feet. The girl could be me or any other girl.
The third year I lived here is a double portrait, like a deformed reflection.
The left side is a girl with a wolf’s paw in place of a hand. She stands naked in a pool of her own blood, her head lifted upward as she laughs a whole sky filled with snow geese and song. The right side is the writer, her journal resting in her hands, the words filling the space so that her face, her hair, her mouth, her eyes are made of language. A mother and a girl who are separate but joined.
The fourth year is a painting at the bottom of the stairs, in the living room opposite the wall that wears the famous photo of me as a child. How strange to look at one of my paintings next to this photograph of . . . is it of me? How?
My painting is different from the photo. In the photo, they say over and over again that the girl is a “victim of violence.” But in my painting, a young woman comes out of fire with a vengeance in her stare. Her stone blue eyes finding you.
The fifth and sixth years are animal: wolves turning into girls, girls turning into fire.
The seventh year is now. The painting I am making now.
To make a small pool of blood to use with paint, place a bowl between your legs, not an artificially scented wad of cotton. You must move outside what you have been told.
I am painting the spread legs of a grown woman, the mouth of her opening up to the viewer, her breasts a terrain just before her face in the distant background.
With my hands.
On a six-feet-by-six-feet canvas.
In this room in a house they have given to me.
Inside her cleft will be hands.
Her hair will be woven with wolves.
The UPS truck is nearly at the house, and I am the only one here just now, so I will need to go to the door and sign for the delivery. I clean my hands with wipes, leaving the act of painting and moving into the act of looking.
I think of the canvas like a body. It is alive. It is a body and I am a body and my inner rhythms tell me how to move with this other body.
I have read about the history of painting.
There are things in my head that no one has taught me, that I have not read or seen or heard anywhere else. They come out from my hands.
For the fleshy inside of her thighs, then, I will use blood and indigo.
I turn and leave the room, making my way down the stairs of this house. The UPS truck’s little horn blows three times. My feet on each stair step look cartoonlike to me—little Nike symbols making their marks.
Are there more brands of shoes in America than there are children in the world?
Seven years I have lived with this small group of American artists. I know all their stories. The playwright’s story is the drama of a brother and sister; a family plot. The poet’s story is a relentless body. The filmmaker’s story is flex and light and speed: action and male. The writer’s journal crosses the terrain of loss and love like a great white tundra.
The painter shot his wife and the photographer shot me, to make art.
I think art is a place where all our stories collect.
They mean to keep me safe, to give me a story that will hold me. There are many kinds of love, but there is never a love, or a life, without pain.
I mean to paint my way home. I am ready.
The End. One.
You must consider filmmaking. It is the dominant mode of artistic production in our time. You know more about filmmaking than most of what you were taught in school. You are the camera’s eye. You are in control of everything we see. Hear. How things are framed. What the shot-reverse-shot relationships are, what every cut is, you are shooting. You are, after all, American. Eternal superpower, the camera’s eye.
For the opening, you decide to move in slow motion and black-and-white. An excruciatingly beautiful girl gone to woman, walking. A girl who has toppled over into woman, her lips already in a pout between yes and no, her torso and ass breaking faith. Moving down a tree-lined city sidewalk. Fall. Her coat pulled up to the flush of her cheeks. Her hands stuffed down into pockets. Her hair making art in the wind.
Her eyes . . .
Her eyes.
Think of actresses who could fill the screen with them.
It is a remarkable passage, a symphony of aesthetics, when a girl stops walking like a girl and begins to walk like a woman.
I’m not sure anyone has ever captured that before. Perhaps we are afraid to name it, that coming of age, that passage. We’ve one great story, I suppose: Lolita. Several painters come to mind. Perhaps a few photographers. And of course film stars. In any case, none of it, nothing in the history of art, is quite right for this particular moment, is it? For this simple reason: she is not the object of desire now in the ways we are used to, is she? I mean, from the point of view of the American male artist she is, and from the point of view of the photographer, and maybe all the artists, but from the point of view we’re inhabiting she’s new. A man desires her more than he can stand, to be sure, and everyone who peoples her life just now desires her in one way or another, but that is not what is propelling the action or creating this plot, is what I’m saying.
It is her and you.
This has not been narrated in a previous scene, and yet, you know that blood is what’s driving her.
Blood driving her down the tree-lined sidewalk.
Blood driving her to the door of the warehouse building where the artist’s studio sits wombed among other artists’ spaces.
Blood driving her sexualized body.
You wish I would stop speaking of all this blood, but I’m afraid it’s the point.
Stop wishing it wasn’t.
Just once, the story will keep its allegiance to the body of a single woman.
Not the object of her body, but her experience of her body.
With all of history deeply up and in her.
So then. You have kept the entire scene of her walking to the door of the building in black and white. As she approaches the door to the warehouse, you give color. You give the door and her lips Alizarin crimson. And as she enters the throat of the building, more things go to color, but you filter it with a kind of midnight blue bruise tone.
You can do that kind of thing.
You can manipulate everything.
You can make meaning no matter what the reality.
American.
As she enters the cargo elevator, floor by floor, you return from slow motion to regular time.
By the time she reaches his floor, lurchingly, the speed of things is how we think we experience it in reality (forgetting everything we know).
You know, you’ve so many choices here. A letch of a middle-aged man, about to meet the image of his dreams. A familiar story.
But that’s not this story, is it?
His desire has not driven, well, anything. It’s downright impotent.
It is her desire that has begun to set the entire building on fire.
It is her action.
It is her subjectivity that is taking its fullest form—and she is not doing what we’d hoped or wanted.
She has come there in a premeditated way from the belly of history itself.
She has come to make an image take form, to complete an image of a self.
Sh
e placed herself between violence and desire.
She has come from an atomized family.
From the slobbering violence of men.
From the lost youth of a girl.
From the foreign hopes born between women.
His door is ajar. He is of course there, drinking, not painting. He is thinking of painting, but the only thing he wants to paint is the girl from the photo. And so he goes to the studio every day and drinks himself into oblivion and either sleeps in his own excess or stumble-fucks his way back home. I don’t know how these people stay alive, but they do. They do. And then they don’t.
How you frame it is all in her hands.
She takes her right hand out of her coat pocket and you move to slow motion again. Her hand then takes up the entire shot, larger than life. Her hand (with blood-red traces) pushes the door open as if she is moving gender itself.
He turns and looks at her, but the camera’s point of view is hers, not his, and so he looks small and puzzled, like a circus midget, at first. Then he looks like a tiny symbol of a man whose prayers have been answered, and he lowers his head, and no I am not kidding, he cries. Huge heaves like a kid. He cries and cries.
You will think there are pages missing, whole scenes.
But there are no pages or scenes missing.
This is the room of art.
Your life rules do not apply here.
The Small Backs of Children Page 12
