I let go of my tits and they drop like fallen faith.
I move my hands down. She says pull yourself apart first and show me. She says show me your clit, I want to see your swollen clit. I do it. I drive my hips toward her voice. I think I hear her use a zoom. I fuck the air showing her my clit and my wide-open pussy, as slowly as possible. The throbbing seems like it’s bringing me close to death.
She says finger your clit. She says play with it between your thumb and forefinger, hard. I do it. She says with your other hand shove your fingers up into yourself. I do. I think I am maybe panting and sighing or crying. My fingers are swimming. I’m creaming. She says taste yourself. I do. She says now lift your legs up show me all of yourself. Make yourself come for me.
I can’t see her, but I know the camera is nearly touching me at the site of all creation.
If a camera could record smell and heat and taste.
Click. And click. Clicking like sparks.
I begin to cry inside my ecstatic state, I am close to release, she knows it, she photographs it a frame at a time, I picture the obscene position I am in, I am close to surrender without touching anyone or anything except this woman with her lens.
When I come I make an animal sound and the shiver overtakes me endlessly. The cum shoots from my body in a way that has never happened before. Like a man’s. I come and I cry. The shivering lasts several minutes. This opening that is me, it opens and closes in violent contractions, the dark of the inside of me meeting the light of the white walls, the production of an image, the intimacy of art, the space between two women, everything balanced in its dark and light. My eyes still closed, I feel the weight of her body, finally. She lies on top of me, naked. That’s all. She doesn’t move. She asks me not to move. She cries, and her tears fall on my face, wetted whispers.
When I open my eyes she is back in a chair in the corner, sitting like a beautiful and quiet bird. Taking film from the camera. As if it was all the camera.
She never speaks to me that way again.
This is the only night between us like this.
Journey to the Underworld
After the poet has slept the sleep of crossing countries.
After she has moved through the rooms and faces, the déjà vu and pulse, the light and shadow of Prague—the mother of cities—and entered its black-and-blue night.
After she has taken the performance artist—spoiled brat—to the apartment of a Russian washed-up gymnast turned sculptor—dearest friend—who will take the young woman in for as long as it takes. An apartment shared with a post-op Czech transsexual. Overlooking the river Neva.
After she has dined with her friend the poet journalist from Krasny 100%. They talk the talk of outsider writers. The poet is warm in her chest.
After she has gotten drunk with the poet journalist and his friends—a collage artist and his contortionist cousin—after she has witnessed the sexual excess of all of them together in a five-star hotel room, the impossible bend and lurch of the cousin’s body, her eating herself, her howl still animal in her head. How travel loosens sexuality until it hops like a parasite from host to host, feeding, always feeding.
After she has made her way into the further night of this city—walking with sex smeared against her pants and thighs, and alcohol still blurring her vision and the taste of blood, cum, and ecstasy still tangy on her tongue—this city haunted by its own past, the ever-lit-up Crystal Palace with its winding bulbs and sword spires, the opulent squares and palaces seemingly divorced from modernity, the pieces of land fondled by the finger of the Neva River, kissed by the tides of the Baltic Sea. City of waters. Canals. Rivers. Lakes. Floating city. City of a night sky reflected in waters. City of lost names: Petrograd. Leningrad. City of revolutions: Decembrist. February. October. Bolshevik. Lenin’s Great Terror. Stalin’s Red Purge. City of Dostoyevsky. Akhmatova. The Stray Dog Café. Pushkin. Gogol. Tchaikovsky. Shostakovich. Nabokov. City of white nights. City of the stone of tsars carved through with animals and poverty and piss-stained alleyways. City of women trafficked like fruit. City of locally grown poppies and the sweet stench of Black. City of child junkies. City of gypsies. City of porn with the thick-tongued accents of Soviet-era fantasies. City of war and sexuality. City of domination and submission.
City of the Tambov Gang.
She has not come here for the Summer Literary Seminars. Not this time.
Greshniki. The Sinners Club. A gay club styled as an old mansion taking up four floors. The motto of the club: “We’re all sinners. We’re all equal.” So many rooms: a dance floor with mirrors, a balcony, a restaurant, a video Internet bar with free wireless access, and a “dark room.” Young naked men dance all night on the stage, their flex and thick getting under the skin. Her sitting at a table.
This is where she is to meet the man from the Tambov Gang. When he walks up she is writing a poem.
I’ve weaved my way to stand
between two seated, manly queens
dressed down in thin denim.
The boy on stage, sexual
and sure, enters his finale.
I’m drunk. I’ve never felt
such love in any room.
I join the thick applause,
cry and lurch a little, ignore
a hissed sit down! sit down!
and pursed lips from the drink
I’ve spilled with a light hip-check,
launch more hoarse cheers,
monstrous American daughter
with real tits, tears without salt,
snotty air-whistles, a real cunt.
When the man from the Tambov Gang touches her arm, she looks up and she is startled by his exquisite androgyny. It takes her American breath away.
“You will drink, then?” His voice a masterpiece of Slavic history.
“Yes,” she offers, letting her hands go slack on the tabletop.
He looks to the bar, snaps his fingers, and sits.
The music’s beat massages the soles of her feet, the chairs. She can feel it in her palms on the table.
“Do you have a light?” He leans toward her with a brown cigarette.
The poet commits chivalry. Pulls the silver lighter from her leather jacket pocket. Lights the cigarette. Smiles at his smile curling under the veil of smoke. He is wearing gray sleeveless mesh. His arms are . . . written. Tattooed in a language she sees as beautiful skin symbols. He looks at the stage. Laughs deeply. Then throws his beautiful head back into a deeper laugh, his blond sculpted hair like oiled wood shavings, his lips full and wet, his neck smooth and exposed. He turns back to her.
“It is good like vodka, yes? It is like holding something very good in your mouth, before you swallow, these boys . . .” He laughs again. “ . . . these beautiful boys.”
The poet examines the thinness of his skin. She thinks perhaps she can see the veins gleaming. The skin of Russians and Baltic peoples—so white it carries other colors. Blue. Green.
Four vodkas arrive. In shot glasses. No ice. As they do here. He says, “We drink Zyr first. It is not perfect, but it is not American either, yes?” Laughing, he drinks the shot in a single gulp, and she follows, holding the cold in her mouth, letting her teeth take it. They eat little crackers immediately. In the way of this part of the world. “Again?” They kill the next two. He laughs. He looks at her—around the whole of her, his eyes outlining. Then he says, “Next is coming the Jewel of Russia Classic . . . you will not be able to stand it.” He smokes the cigarette and the music thuds up through their spines and the boys move and move and she wants more and more.
They drink four shots of the Jewel of Russia before he says, “We talk now?” But another four vodkas have arrived, and he holds his hand up with something like the power of history. “No. We drink. This. This is something the world did not expect.” He holds his glass to hers and taps it. The sound coming from his mouth: za ná-shoo dróo-zhboo. He has made a toast. They drink.
In the poet’s mouth the vodka becomes a
poem: a slight oiliness. A hint of apple. Faintly sweet. And the burn. Pleasing. She closes her eyes and lingers there. She opens her eyes and mouth and says, “What is this?”
“Chopin. Isn’t that simple? Distilled from potatoes, of course. Stubborn Poles. But what they have done to us all! The irony.” And his laugh fills the space around them like a cave swallowing a body whole.
“Now. We talk. Yes?”
“Yes.” The word emerging from her lips like something she can taste.
He puts his cigarette in an ashtray, crosses his arms over his chest and leans back a bit in his chair, lifting his chin up, looking down on her, but not with malice. “I have a question for you. Why do you seek this girl? This girl is unknown to you, yes? Is it a little pet that you want? Or will she be . . . a commodity, perhaps?” He smiles, barely.
“Nothing like that. We just want to get her out. I can’t explain.” The words sound impotent even to her.
“I see. Just another American taking the world’s children from harm to safety. What a wondrous benevolence. Just like your American movie stars, yes? The power of American . . . love.” He picks the cigarette back up, takes a graceful drag, and blows a smoke ring upward. She stares at its slow, blue ascension. “And money!” His laugh thunderous. “You know, you do not look what I expected.”
“No? How so?” She curls around his words, cautious as prey.
“You do not look as . . . commanding as I hear you are.”
She feels him study the face of her, the neck, the collarbone, her hands.
“But then, this is a facet to your personality behind closed doors, is it not?” Again he throws his head back, laughing deep enough to drug someone unconscious.
She wonders briefly how he knows this. Then decides it is part of his job to know, and anyway, it is mind-bogglingly flattering. Think of it: a worldwide reputation. The admiration of this lyric-mouthed Russian androgyne gangster. She wishes he would look through her hard enough to slice her open.
The wickedly beautiful man from the Tambov Gang then puts his glass down hard on the table. He looks at her seriously. “I make you this deal. I give you the papers you need. The passport. The transport instructions. Who will be your help. And then,” he leans in like a thief, “we go then. You and I. From here, tonight. I want that you will help me with something. I want to put the power into your”—he covers her hand with his—“capable American hands.”
There is no good reason to agree to this. In anyone else’s life it would signal danger. Maybe even death. But this is not anyone else’s life, and she has lived hers on the edges of things . . . and what is a life if one cannot walk into the night with a stranger? Following the universal instincts of leather life, then, she turns her palm up underneath his hand until it is nearly a handshake and says, “For you, then?”
“No. Alas, not for me, beautiful hard woman.” He stares at her. His eyes echo the waterways of this city, centuries haunting the pupils. “For someone I know who has suffered enough that he cannot feel his own skin. Do you know this kind of suffering?”
The poet nods her head. Suffering happens in all places, doesn’t it, all times, in the flesh of any skin, in the hollow of what should be a heart.
“His family, killed. Like so many . . . Bosnian. But choose your country these days. No?”
The poet nods again.
“There is only one cure for this suffering. Violence for violence. I think you can help him to feel his skin again. Even for one night only. For me you can do this?”
The poet nods.
“Good.” He puts his hand on her shoulder. They both look at the boy body on stage, its cock and hips, its torso, its incomprehensible physical truth. Then he turns to her and slaps her cheek—the blood rushing to the surface of her skin—“But the money too, of course!”
The poet nods.
The Violence of Language
The performance artist sits, motionless, in the empty kitchen of a Russian and a Czech who are strangers to her. Deposited here by the poet to help save the life of the writer. In a city that holds no meaning for her. Looking out the window at an overcast sky, heavy with almost-rain. A very old stone bridge. Water. Birds. Lamps. An emptied-out self. She’s tired. She doesn’t know these people, this city. She’s drinking vodka in the morning from a small antique shot glass.
Somehow the burden of it—handing over her identity, agreeing to wait a month to be taken home—somehow, though it depresses her mind, it thrills her flesh. As if her body knows something she does not. She hates the flesh thrill, resents it, and yet she cannot not feel it. Like a fire just getting born. Something she carries against her chest like a beating heart. Letting her know she is alive.
The performance artist pulls the letter from the painter out from beneath her shirt. She has kept it there, in her bra against her tit, for three days. Day and night. Her skin smell on the envelope comforts her. At least she has this. This letter from the painter. Strange lifeline in this insane story they’ve abandoned her inside. On purpose she has not opened it. Especially not in front of the poet. On purpose she has guarded its contents like intimacy itself. For she loves him. She loves him more than her own life. She loves this man they have ejected from their fucking reality, so much that she almost can’t breathe thinking about him. In her heart and beyond she knows she is the only one who truly knows him. The only one willing to go all the way with him. Through the crucible of sex and art. Through the excess of him. Through the story of all their tangled-up lives, down into the hell of him, like Persephone. The man who nearly murdered his wife. The unapologetic alcoholic artist. A love unto death, if necessary. And he will fucking love this. That she did this thing. He will see that she is like him. And when this all ends, well, she’ll go wherever with him. No one will be able to stop her. And the two of them will make art and make love and leave the world of the rest of them. She drinks, and drinks, until things liquefy.
She brings the letter to her face, closes her eyes, and smells it. She can see his face, feel his body. Something like sapphires under her tongue. She slips a finger underneath where he has licked the paper with his own spit. She opens the envelope. She pulls the paper—thin white—from the envelope, her heart beating, beating:
Well, here it is.
I am leaving you.
By the time you read this, I’ll be in Paris in the arms of another woman. One I’ve known for years. One of many. This thing between us, it wasn’t anything. And now it’s gone sour, too complicated. I’ll have none of it. You are too close to the black hole of my past.
You know I am no good with words, so this will be abbreviated, but true. Or true enough. Fuck words anyway.
I’m giving you something though. A diptych of a life.
I will not be seeing you again. I’ve cleared all trace of you from my loft, and when I return, if you come here, I won’t let you in. Don’t try. I will never visit your loft again either. If I see you in the street, I won’t acknowledge you. You no longer exist. But I am giving you something. For your art. Try to remember that.
This will hurt.
1.
The year before I shot her, there was a night when we had an argument. One in a series. We were both skunk-ass drunk. At one point she grabbed a knife and ran into the bathroom—locked herself in there. I threw my weight against the door but nothing happened. I laughed. Then I slumped down on the floor against the door and fell asleep. When she opened the door, the first thing I saw was her blond bush—eye level. Then she thrust out her fucking arm and I saw my name, with blood like a dot-to-dot, carved into her arm. She immediately went back into the hole of the bathroom. I walked to the kitchen, grabbed a serrated bread knife, and hacked her name into my own arm in stick-man strokes. I still have the scar of her. The word of her. On my arm. In certain light.
2.
A year later, one night, I was deep into my drunk in the living room. It was peaceful. I was naked. She was in the bedroom asleep. I’d picked up a gun earlier in th
e day from a junkie I knew. A 9mm Beretta. I had the gun resting on my thigh, near my dick. I’d had it that way for hours. I heard her stir. She came into the living room. She was naked. The years of . . . what is it? Passion? Chaos? Death? In the air between us. I don’t know why. I pointed the gun at the wife of her. She lifted her hand up. I shot. I hit her hand and her shoulder. In the dark, she dropped to the floor like a beautiful felled black-and-blue goose. We didn’t move like that, the smell of the shot hanging in the air, for long minutes. Love is a gun.
There. Don’t say I never gave you anything.
Perhaps you can make your performance of this man and this woman into something. Art is everything.
You know, every street in Paris is wet. Every person in Paris has a dog. Every hand in Paris holds a cigarette. Every mouth in Paris is a kiss.
Last night I dreamt myself covered in paint; the paint may have been blood. It was warm, like a bath almost. It seemed to look good on my skin. Beauty. Death. The same. Drink yourself drowned. Cut your skin with knives. Fuck with your genitals. Paint a painting. Shoot a gun. American.
I tell you, it scares me what I have done to her.
It terrifies me, even.
And yet I am not sorry.
I am as deeply unsorry as a person could be.
There is nothing that one human will not do to another.
Ce n’est pas rien. Au revoir.
The performance artist. Her idea of herself . . . drifts weightless as an astronaut in her skull. Her chest hollows. Her body goes slowly numb. Her hair. Her face. Her hands. Nothing. The air she is breathing. Useless. Thoughtless.
She folds the letter back up and places it again against her skin. She pats it against her chest as if she is much older. She looks out of the window, but sight . . . sight just isn’t in her right now. She stands up. Puts a coat on. In a regular way. Thinking, it isn’t necessary. Just be molecules. Light. She gently wraps her neck in a blue wool scarf hanging next to the door—someone’s. She opens the door to the flat. Steps out. Closes it. She walks down the hallway. Down several flights of stairs, her feet on the steps not connected to anything.