The Red Parts
Page 15
Need each other as much as you can bear, writes Eileen Myles. Everywhere you go in the world.
I felt the wild need for any or all of these people that night. Lying there alone, I began to feel—perhaps even to know—that I did not exist apart from my love and need of them, nor, perhaps, did they exist apart from their love and need of me.
Of this latter I felt less sure, but it seemed possible, if the equation worked both ways.
Falling asleep I thought, Maybe this, for me, is the hand of God.
Coda
A HUGE thunderstorm is rolling into town. My mother and I are sitting on Jill’s screened-in porch, sharing a cigarette, as the sky grows dark, the air starting to crack with thunder. The rain, when it comes, comes hard.
Maybe because I grew up in California, I get easily spooked by thunder-and-lightning. It always seems to me a sign that the apocalypse is nigh. But my mother loves big storms. We weather this one in our little mesh box of borrowed porch, as if lowered into the deep sea in a cage to protect us from whatever snub-nosed sharks might come banging at the bars.
We trade some observations about the day’s events in court, the orange cherries of our cigarettes bobbing in the darkness, my mother’s face intermittently illuminated by purple flashes of lightning. Then gingerly, warily, as if testing out a sore tooth with a darting tongue, we start to talk about the autopsy photos. Maybe talking about them casually on wicker furniture will tame their force. Their anarchy.
I bring up the first shot on the gurney, the one featuring Jane’s pale armpit.
She looks so beautiful in that one, my mother says wistfully.
Instantly I want to disagree—partly out of habit, and partly because it sounds as if she’s trying to pick out the best of a roll of publicity head shots. But really there’s no point in arguing with her. The calm profile of Jane’s face, her mouth tipped slightly open, her young skin emanating light—probably a result of the bright flash of the medical examiner’s camera, but nonetheless making her skin radiate like the divine in a Renaissance painting—she looks beautiful in that one.
My mother goes on to say that by the time she saw her sister at the funeral home Jane didn’t look like herself. She had that strange, bloated, alien look of the several-days dead. But in this photo, taken within hours of her murder, she recognizes her. Even with the dark bullet holes, even with her hair matted with wet and dried blood, even with the stocking buried unutterably deeply in her neck, she recognizes her. She says she is glad to see her again. She says she is glad to see, finally, what was done.
Before we go to sleep, she will open all the windows of Jill’s house, so that we can really hear the rain.
I NEVER ENTERED my father’s bedroom on the night of his death, but my mother did ask if I wanted to see his body before it was cremated. I said I did. We drove to the funeral home in silence.
She led me into the room where his body was lying on a table, embalmed, wearing one of his business suits. She asked if I wanted a moment alone with him. I said yes, and she left, shutting the door behind her.
This was the moment I’d been waiting for, the moment that would deliver the solid fact of his absence, the moment that would reveal the secret, the secret that would allow me to let go, to say good-bye.
As soon as she shut the door I felt completely panicked. I scanned the room wildly, like a polar cub on the tundra suddenly separated, potentially fatally, from its pack. I searched the tastefully lit, elegantly furnished room for a place to hide. A red velvet divan seemed a possibility. No one would ever find me. Eventually I would just disappear.
But disappearing was not the task at hand. The task at hand was to approach my father’s body, which, sooner or later, I did. He was wearing his glasses, which seemed right but odd, as I knew he did not need them anymore. His hands were folded on his chest and his fingers were dark purple at the tips. He looked like he was trying to keep a straight face, but was about to jump up and call the whole thing off. I am immortal until proven not! I looked at him long enough to be sure that this was not the case. Then I told him I loved him, kissed his face, and walked out of the room.
Sources and Resources
SOURCES
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (SF: City Lights, 1986)
Samuel Beckett, Endgame (NY: Grove Press, 1958)
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (NY: Vintage, 1998)
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (NY: Penguin, 1979)
Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2001)
Joan Didion, The White Album (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1979)
James Ellroy, My Dark Places (NY: Vintage, 1996)
John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
Edward Keyes, The Michigan Murders (NY: Pocket Books, 1976)
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955)
Joni Mitchell, “California,” from Blue (Reprise Records, 1971)
Michael S. Moore, “A Defense of the Retributivist View,” in What Is Justice?, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Mark C. Murphy (NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Eileen Myles, “To the Class of ‘92,” in Maxfield Parrish: New and Selected Poems (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1995)
Bruce Nelson, Papers (printed by Charles M. Hobson III, 1984)
Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Plato, The Republic and Other Works, trans. B. Jowett (NY: Anchor Books, 1989)
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (NY: Penguin, 1970)
Paul Schrader, screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976)
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1985)
RESOURCES
American Civil Liberties Union, www.aclu.org
Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, www.cuadp.org
Combined DNA Index System, https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/biometric-analysis/codis
Critical Resistance, www.criticalresistance.org
Death Penalty Information Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org
DNA Fingerprinting and Civil Liberties Project of the American Society of Law, Medicine, & Ethics, http://www.aslme.org/DNA_ELSI_Grant
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, www.fair.org INCITE!, Women of Color Against Violence, www.incite-national.org
The Innocence Project, www.innocenceproject.org
The Justice Project, www.justiceproject.org
Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, http://www.worldcoalition.org/Murder-Victims-Families-for-Human-Rights-MVFHR.html
Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, www.mvfr.org
360 Degrees: Perspectives on the U.S. Criminal Justice System, www.360degrees.org
Acknowledgments
Thank you PJ Mark, Liz Stein, Maris Kreizman, Amra Brooks, Brian Blanchfield, Matthew Sharpe, Suzanne Snider, Wayne Koestenbaum, Janet Sarbanes, Mady Schutzman, Eileen Myles, Sally Baumer, Lauren Sanders, Richard Nash, Cort Day, Kate Egan, Jordana Rosenberg, Lily Mazzarella, Gretchen Hildebran, Judy Kann, the Michigan State Police—especially Detective-Sergeants Eric Schroeder, Denise Powell, Patrick “PJ” Moore, James Bundshuh, and Kenneth Rochell—Deputy Chief Assistant Prosecutor Steven Hiller, Victim/Witness Advocate LeAnn Kaiser, Maureen Maher, Chris Young, and Gail Zimmerman of CBS News, Dan and Lynne Mixer, Dr. Dan Mixer, Jill Johnson, Kristi Gilbert, Phil Weitzman, Craig Tracy, Kat Hartman, Barbara Nelson, and Emily Jane Nelson. This book would not have been possible without their intelligence, generosity, and humanity.
MAGGIE NELSON is a poet, critic, and nonfiction author of four other books of nonfiction: The Argonauts (2015); The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (2009), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Something Bright,
Then Holes (2007) and Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir). She has been the recipient of a 2013 Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2007 Arts Writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Since 2005 she has taught on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. She lives in Los Angeles.
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