He looks over toward his sister’s room, then back across the waiting room at the performance artist. The only other permanent member of the tribe. His suspicions tug at him. He narrows his eyes at her. She chews her fingernail to the quick. One side of her hair is neon blue, the other bruise blue. How old is she, even?
Where’s the filmmakerhusbandbrotherinlaw?
He stands up. He passes the performance artist in silence, walks to his sister’s door. He steps in, out, in, out, and then in. He crosses the linoleum floor, avoiding tiny fissures. He reaches out, across the antiseptic air and beeping monitor, and holds her hand. The hand of a writer and the hand of a playwright and the silence between them.
She’s a caterpillar in a cocoon. His mind goes slack and gentle. Her body is emaciated. Studying the blue veins in her eyelids and wrists, he recalls the primal scene which separated them—his boyman self on the cusp confronting his father with the truth of his assault—how he’d brought a knife, he’d meant to stick it into his father’s gut as hard as he could, but his father had quickly overpowered him—his father the brute, his father the big-bodied masculine animal—his father then knifing his mouth wider, the blood shooting up and then pooling around his teeth and tongue.
His mother a useless blur in the hallway. His sister under the bed, eyes pleading.
Later, he had his mouth repaired, in the same hospital where his sister had lingered between life and death, after the push and cut of father. And yet, the next day, even knowing what it meant to his sister, he—the words slow down in his head—
Left.
Her.
There.
It was the last time he saw her.
It’s a terrible love he carries. His guilt keeping the distance between them, East Coast and West. His guilt driving him to be the New York playwright, the star, the success. The bad brother. The toast of the town. The great gay playwright and the penthouse that he built. The abandoning one. The one who left her to the wolves.
He opens his mouth and whisper-speaks to his sister between the pulses of the heart monitor. “Where are you?” He stares at their hands. Everything they are now is in their hands. He puts his head down. He kisses her hand once, twice, three times. The magic of fairy tales and children. She doesn’t stir. People don’t know anything about love. It’s nothing, they told us. Fate moves over the small backs of children. They carry death for us the second they are born.
He returns to the hallway, pacing in and out and in and out and in and out of the doorway. He sits back down. Back to his laptop, he registers the performance artist’s Where-the-hell-have-you-been looks, but ignores them.
What is she doing here, anyway? Perched with her knees up, scowling at everyone who comes by? Pieces of words now like glimpses float in the hospital corridor: “I wonder if I can donate blood while we are here” and “I’d die for a vanilla latte but all they have here is sludge water” and “Yeah, five-thirty A.M., isn’t that the crack of shit? I hate getting up early but we have rehearsals in the basement of a free clinic and we can only use it before they open or after they close . . .”
But then, suddenly, everyone around him stops their ambient babble.
The playwright looks up from his typing. The hospital people aren’t saying anything. Why aren’t they saying anything? He closes his laptop, gets up. An orderly walks by him with a tray of hot towels. He grips his own biceps, too hard. He grabs the fabric of his own shirt. The performance artist is the only other person in the room who is directly involved. He clears his throat and asks her where the filmmaker is.
The performance artist looks up with the slowness of a neon Lorax. “He said he needed to walk around.”
“Listen,” the playwright says, rubbing the back of his neck in little three-circle massages. “Do you understand what happened? Because that story they told me on the phone is nonsense. Tell me any details you know. Tell me what the doctors are saying. She looks unbelievably pale. Her skin looks as thin as a communion wafer.”
The performance artist sits mute and still. She looks to him like fatigue dumped a load of human in a hallway, like refuse. Can a person die of inside-hospital ennui?
“I bet you get a performance out of this,” he says.
“Yeah? And what the hell would that look like?”
In the urban dictionary next to the word emo is this girl. “Well,” he persists, “you know, there’s a Beckett play. It’s called Happy Days. There’s a woman in it named Winnie, who gets buried in mud. Up to her breasts.”
“You don’t say.” The performance artist eyes the elevator.
“Yes, but we never learn how she got buried.”
“Fascinating.” The performance artist gnaws at a new finger.
“Or trapped.”
She chews her fingernails.
“What’s he done? Becker? Anything on streaming?”
“Beckett. Samuel.” Briefly he wants to slap her into womanhood.
Mercifully, the elevator makes a holy ding and the filmmaker enters stage left. The playwright walks—nearly hopping—twelve steps in sets of threes to meet him.
He touches the filmmaker’s arm—Jesus, this guy is big. I mean, nothing he didn’t know, but Jesus. He could do some damage with those cannons. He pulls the filmmaker aside, whispery, needy, as if they’re guy pals or comrades or anything but what they are: the brother who abandoned her and the husband who can’t cope with her descent. “Just give it to me straight, no chaser. What’s going on? Really.”
The filmmaker’s skin looks blue-gray and heavy mugged. “She’s . . . I don’t know how to answer that. None of this makes any sense.” His eyes are marbled in hues of hazel specked with brown.
“Well, what was the instigating event? All they’re telling me is that she suddenly went deaf and dumb, and went on some kind of Kafkaesque hunger strike.” He swallows, trying to lower his voice an octave.
“One morning she seemed a little distracted. Staring at the wall. That’s all. I said, ‘Baby, are you okay?’ She turned to me and smiled. We kissed. I went to work. So did she, I assume. I assume the day was like any other day—it rained, she taught her classes and I taught mine, neighborhood dogs barked, the mail came. I came home that night, she was on the floor. Unconscious.” The filmmaker draws a breath, sucking oxygen like a human vacuum.
“She just dropped? Just like that?” Don’t say DEAD don’t say dropped DEAD don’t say DEAD. The playwright’s sphincter twitches. His lover’s voice in his head: Be aware of social codes be aware of social codes be aware. But it’s not working, the hallway lights of the hospital are too bright, the filmmaker is so physical, he’s like walking physicality, and the playwright’s longing to write it all down is creeping up on him, like it always does, like black letters and words growing larger and larger until they’re walking around on the white floor before his eyes, big as people, the word DEAD bigger than any, with cartoon-muscled arms and shoulders.
“Yeah. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this right now.” The filmmaker closes his eyes and rubs at them with his thumbs.
“Okay, yeah. Of course. I’m going to see if I can find a doctor to talk to me.”
“You know what?” the filmmaker nearly shouts. “You do that. You get a doctor to talk to you. I’m sure you New York people deal with this stuff all the time, right? Depression? Neuroses? Pathologies? You want to know what they’ll say? They’re gonna tell you the same story they told me. They’re going to tell you there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s a goddamn physical specimen. See how far that gets you.”
“Nothing wrong with her.” The playwright starts ticking the fingernails on his thumb and forefinger in sets of threes.
“Look, I’m sorry,” the filmmaker says. “I told you, it’s hard for me to talk about this right now. I haven’t slept much, and my kid is with my mother . . .” His hands knot themselves into fists. Dangling fists with nothing to do.
“You got it. Not another word out of me.” But the playwright is
lying. He suddenly feels a sense of thrilling danger. Several sentences line up in his mouth. He bites the inside of his cheek.
But then comes another menacing ding, and the elevator door opens again, wide as a fucking mouth.
There he is, Mr. Asshole. The painter, the exiled ex-husband, the walking ego with a ready dick. Who the hell invited him?
The performance artist stands up. The filmmaker has his back to the elevator, so he doesn’t see the painter until he realizes the room has gone quiet again. The playwright feels coiled, urgent, ready to lash.
“What, did somebody die in here? You all look like fucking corpses.” The painter, laughing his ass off. Stale booze fills the air.
The performance artist flushes in the face like she’s eaten niacin; she puts her hand up like a stop sign and closes her eyes.
The playwright counts to three; he can feel the action before it happens.
The filmmaker, now husband, he’s turning, turning, he sees the painter, until one man faces the other.
The filmmaker throws an exquisite left hook and drops the painter to the floor.
Blood mouth-splatters across the linoleum.
Orderlies rush in like moths.
Then, in three seconds that feel more like minutes, the playwright snaps out of it, rushes over to the filmmaker, grabs his big-ass arm, and ushers him out of the building. No sense in anyone getting arrested right now. He hurries the filmmaker through an EXIT door into a stairwell, down and down and down until they reach the parking lot.
There, in the lot, things slow back down to human speed. They walk to the filmmaker’s car like two men walking, though one of them is counting steps. He can still feel the filmmaker’s rage. If I die at the hands of this man in a parking garage, in some ways it will be a fitting end. Dying, finally, in his sister’s moment of peril.
They arrive at the door of the filmmaker’s car. The filmmaker opens his mouth again, then closes it. The playwright touches his shoulder. “Look, you just go home now. Try to get some rest. I’ll call you if there’s any change. Just get out of here for a little while. You need a break.” He has no idea where this modulated voice comes from, but he suspects he’s channeling his lover. Have empathy for others have empathy for others have empathy. Even if you have to pretend at first. Is he pretending?
The filmmaker drives away, taillights illuminating the exit. The playwright makes his way back up the stairwell from the parking lot in steps of threes.
Back in the hospital hallway, the painter is now upright in a chair, hurling slurry, hushed obscenities into the dead white hallway. “Cocksucking motherfucker . . .” The playwright touches touches touches his own elbows as he crosses the room and takes a seat.
Settling in with his laptop, he looks at them—the painter and the performance artist—and he sees it: She’s here for him. Not for his sister. She knew he’d show up.
Just look at them. They’re like a human West Coast tableau. Like scraps of indigo and blood-colored glass, foreign money, vintage jewelry and hip little buttons, hair art, toy soldiers and firecrackers and pieces of wire and bullet casings and the feathers of birds, the bones of animals, a half-smoked joint and a bunch of foreign beer caps and Dunhill butts. The look like they should be at Jim Morrison’s grave. Père Lachaise. Drinking Courvoisier. The painter takes out a flask. The playwright smirks.
Who are we in moments of crisis or despair? Do we become deeper, truer selves, or lift up and away from a self, untethered from regular meanings like moths suddenly drawn toward heat or light? Are we better people when someone might be dying, and if so, why? Are we weaker, or stronger? Are we beautiful, or abject? Serious, or cartoon? Do we secretly long for death to remind us we are alive?
He shivers. What the hell was that about? Was that his sister’s voice, or his? He claps three times and says, “Okay, people—you’re not the center of the universe here, right? Everybody get a grip.” He walks over to the pile of performance artist and painter. “We shouldn’t all be trying to stay here this way. It’s not helping her. It’s pathetic. Look what comes of it. We should just take shifts. Come tell me your work”—he glances at the performance artist—“or whatever, schedules. I’ll call everyone. I’ll make a visitation chart.”
But that’s not what he’s typing.
He’s typing out stage directions.
A doctor steps into the room, as if on cue.
Nightmaking
In her sleep, the night sky stitches a story through the girl.
Her brother is a fox pup chasing a mouse over a snow-covered field. The fox pup leaps straight up into the air where the mouse tracks end and plunges nose first into the blanket of white. The fox emerges and shakes its head to free the snow from its fur. The fox is laughing. A mouse in its mouth.
Her mother is a moon eye in the sky. Not perfectly white, but bruise-hued. The moon eye casts a gaze over all of the world, over violence and lovers with equal compassion, over living and dead, over children and old men curling into brittle-boned fetal positions in bed, curling around what used to be their wives, taking their last breaths, over chickens and badgers and snakes and trees, over rivers and rocks and breath.
Her father is not a tree.
Let all the other fathers before hers be trees.
Her father is a door.
Anywhere.
Anytime.
Opening or closing, depending on the story and the girl’s place in it.
The Filmmaker
The filmmaker is beating a heavy bag to death.
Having recently clocked the painter, he finds that slamming the heavy bag feels more satisfying. In the backyard behind his house, at night, his blows land and thud. He pictures the chest and gut of a man. Fisted speed dug deep from a bellyful of rage and jabs extended until they’re shot-strung back to the shoulder. Again. Again. The throbbing sound so familiar he doesn’t recognize it. Comforting.
It’s what he knows how to do in the face of inertia.
What if a man’s body is all that drives action, and not the stupid heart?
Anything but the heart.
So he beats the holy hell out of this simulacral man in the backyard for hours, until he’s spent, until he’s just a man bent over and panting. His breath fogs before him in the cold night. It seems good that he can’t kill the heavy bag. He hangs his head. This is killing him. No, not killing him. But it is some kind of crucible he doesn’t understand.
His wife. How can there be nothing he can do to fix it? It makes him want to hit things as hard as he can.
He looks at the back of his house. It stares dully back at him. Wifeless. Sonless. Without life. He goes inside, and when he looks back through the window to the backyard, all he sees is black, like the screen before the film begins, the moon a white projector’s beam.
This is the first night in seven he has come home from the hospital. It’s the only respite he has given himself. A night to fight and release the chemical chaos of things. Without turning any lights on, he walks through the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, removes a Newcastle beer, twists the cap off, drinks most of it standing in the fluorescent glow. Then he removes his Everlast workout gloves, carefully unwraps his hands, the black bands falling to the floor like tired-out snakes. They sting from the gap between cold night air and warm domesticity.
He grabs another beer, then walks through the dark and lifeless house to his wife’s writing room. He stands in front of her bookshelves. He stares at the shelf of her own books, books written by her. The beer going down his throat branches out across his chest. His throat is warm. His hands ache. Their lives together make a list in his skull, because that’s all he’s able to think or feel.
Before she was a writer, she was an abused daughter.
Before he was a filmmaker, he was a neglected son.
Before he turned to art, he was a bouncer at a casino.
Before she turned to art, she was a flunking-out addict.
Both of them briefly arrested and incarc
erated.
Both of them stealing their lives back, pursuing lives of the mind. Both of them carrying invisible injuries, injustices, betrayals, all in silence.
When they first met, he took her to Gold’s Gym. Taught her how to box, how to defend herself, stayed with it even when she accidentally punched herself in the nose. She took him to a swimming pool to do laps, because she said water was the one place she felt free, and he swam laps even though he was allergic to chlorine.
She introduced him to the movies Cool Hand Luke and On the Waterfront.
After the gym, he played Bach for her on the cello.
It was as if the crappiness of both their lives opened up and let them at each other.
Before they were anyone, they were who they would become in each other’s arms, each of them passing through crucibles to reach the other, each of them arriving at art instead of death.
She writes stories of their lives and desires and fears.
He makes art films based on the stories.
She collects experiences and images and pulls them down to the page.
He takes actions and images and projects them up onto a screen.
Who are they? What is their love? Is it their son? Is it their art?
He touches the spines of her books in the dark.
Love isn’t what anyone said. It’s worse. You can die from it at any moment.
He picks out a book she wrote, containing one of the stories he adapted to film. The film is nearly finished. The closing scene is her. She is walking naked toward the angry ocean on a cold day in November. Her blond hair wrestles the wind. She keeps walking even after she is knee-high in waves. He knew, as he filmed her, that the water was freezing. He also knew she wouldn’t flinch. She walked far enough to dive straight into the oncoming waves, the camera trained on her, their son perched in a carrier on his back. And then she swam against the waves. Bold strokes into white-frothed swells. Far enough that he screamed, “Cut!” Far enough that he stopped filming. Far enough that he started to yell into the wind and the noise of the surf—it was a cold day, no one else around on the beach—“Stop! Come back!” Her name, but his voice was swallowed by gales and tides. His chest tightening. His thoughts racing as his body readied itself for action: Set the child on the shore remove your boots remove your jacket and pants enter the ocean for her even though you are a weak swimmer enter the ocean for her do not watch her disappear into water. Their son’s voice behind his head a cooing sound, “Mama,” as he reached for the strap at his shoulder.