The Small Backs of Children (14 page)

When the girl was walking toward the door of the artist’s warehouse, there was a voyeur.

The photographer.

As random as any image of our lives, she happened to have returned to the States then. She happened to be walking down the street going in the other direction. She was not, in fact, thinking of the American male painter, even as she knew his studio was brushing her right shoulder. Her life path took her past the studio plenty of times, and this time she was thinking of more important things.

But that day she saw the face of a girl-turned-to-woman that made her gasp. The fall air pulled into her lungs, then shot out again.

The prizewinning face, the face that changed her life forever.

Older, yes, much, but still.

Her face burned as it was into her retina, her skull, her heart.

And she is fully aware of what has transpired in the plot of all
of their lives. The photographer knows the story. They told her in e-mails and faxes and phone calls. She had never let it enter her mind. At least not fully. She couldn’t. Too much. The image incarnate. Too much.

In fact, though they are not aware of it, she has severed her relationship with this company. She cannot bear the weight of them, and her new life has somehow untethered itself from everything she was connected to before. She hasn’t the heart to tell them; her plan is simply to live without them.

The only one of them she wants to see, was on her way to see, is the writer.

They say she has recovered.

They say she is alive with writing.

They say the girl’s story—and her alive son—and the drive of her husband—brought life back to her. That they pieced her back together from a dead place. Strange made-up family.

She didn’t let it into her and she didn’t let it be true and she didn’t think. She said to herself, Don’t think. Too much.

And so, as she walks briskly to see the writer, whom in truth she wants to devour with a kiss though she is incapable of doing so, she sees the girl from the photo. Her photo. The girl who was lost after the photo.

She sees her enter the warehouse building of the American male painter.

She stands there dully for several minutes.

Still shot.

And then she walks back to her car and sits in it for four days, eating PowerBars, squatting by the sidewalk to pee when no one
is looking, walking to a corner café to shit or eat or drink more, unable to leave until she witnessed the girl again.

But the girl does not reappear. She thinks perhaps she missed her in one of her sprints to the café, but somehow she also thinks she did not, that she is inside, with him, that this is how history moves, a man and a woman, violence and desire, time and the moon and nations in fragments and nonsensical bursts.

Her hair looks like hell.

Her pussy and her armpits itch.

How long will she wait for the image of the girl?

When the photographer finally takes the elevator up and opens the door to the loft and walks up the stairs to where she can smell the scent of human, what she sees first is the body of the girl covered in red, which she takes to be blood, splayed out ass-side up on a futon. Then she sees the artist leaning on the ledge of the loft wall, then she sees the gun—a gun—on the floor. She sees the gun and all she can think is, This is the gun. The son of a bitch has kept the gun, all these years, and now his true colors are all over the fucking place—he’s shot another one. He’s shot another woman. Since he is not moving—he looks as if he’s in some kind of trance, or he’s so drunk he can’t stay upright—she moves calmly toward the gun on the floor and picks it up and aims it at him.

“What have you done. What the fuck have you done.”

To which he responds by opening his mouth, closing his eyes, and raising his hands palm-side up. He looks like a middle-aged Jesus, bloated and puffy with drink.

She makes a bad assumption because of . . . well, everything.
Her past, her present, everything they are and have been and everything she wishes she could have been and everything she has become. She assumes the girl is dead, since she isn’t moving.

Then, with the calm of a woman who knows what’s what, she aims very simply and without drama and shoots him in the chest.

He topples over the loft wall to whatever.

And here is a detail you probably wish I would leave out:

The photographer has her camera with her. She turns and photographs the body of the seemingly dead girl.

The book of photography that will come from this image will be filled with young women in the throes of desire or danger, and it will be titled
She Placed Herself Between Violence and Desire
, and it will lead to a great deal of money and a documentary film and quite a bit of fame.

The body of the male artist she leaves broken and bleeding on the ground floor of the loft. She doesn’t look. She doesn’t look.

What is the measure of loss?

It is in the hands, the girl-gone-to-woman thinks. It may be the only thing she knows. It is not the heart. It has never been the heart. It is astonishing how much myth has been devoted to that fist-size muscle, that blood pump.

After they have painted several blood paintings and several not-blood paintings, after they have fucked each other every way possible without once thinking of love, either of them, after they have come and pissed and shat and sweated and screamed and scratched and cut and bitten and everything else, they are reduced finally again to their animal selves.

In a quiet moment of breathing and drinking wine and staring into space, she asks him if he still has the gun.

He looks at her.

But he does not say, What gun? It is the gun from the story.

Of course he still has the gun.

She asks if he will show it to her.

His hand slips under the futon where he keeps it. Of course he shows it to her.

She fingers it. She turns it and turns it between her strangely bloodied hands. Her hands that have every possible trace of human on them.

He is not thinking, This woman is about to shoot me.

She is not thinking, I am going to shoot this man.

But neither are they not thinking those things, if by thinking we mean the mind brought to the very cusp of action. Even mindless action.

So when she points the gun at him, and he doesn’t move, and he closes his eyes, and he smiles very faintly, and when she pulls the trigger, without any kind of emotion in her at all, a person might wonder what it is that she
does
think and feel.

What she thinks and feels is this: This is a world of men. They come into your country, they invade your home, they kill your family. They turn your body into the battlefield—the territory of all violence—all power—all life and death. And we take it. We do. We keep taking it. We have lost track of the reasons we do not slaughter the world of men, but we do not. Yes, there are good men. She sees the face of her father. She sees how the filmmaker loves the writer. She sees the yet-unwritten life of the writer’s son. She sees her . . . brother. Beautiful smear. But it is the world of men that creates pure destruction. And this is a truth we cannot bear: Since we bear them into the world, we cannot kill them. Cannot be done with them. Cannot exile them into oblivion.

We simply keep going, letting them enter us and seed us, unable to stop loving the meat and drive of them, for without men, would the world even spin in its orbit? The action of a man—without it, would there simply be a hollowed-out black hole? Empty space?

She doesn’t know.

She says a prayer for the soul of this man, just as she said prayers for her dead father, her dead brother, lovingly. As lovingly as possible.

She aims the gun at him.

Then she pulls the trigger.

Blood shoots everywhere between them.

His face is not shocked or filled with hate or rage.

He looks peaceful.

He looks done.

Neighbors call the authorities. A Homeland Security SWAT team arrives, and the girl is arrested. A week and a half later, she is deported.

The poet will be arrested for illegal aid to an illegal alien. An Interpol search will be conducted to find the performance artist. The poet will write a book of poems from her time in jail. It will solidify her career as a political poet. She will win numerous prizes, in America and abroad.

The writer will be told what happened. She will go into her bedroom and close the door, very calmly. The filmmaker will nearly lose his mind with worry, but in only two days she will come back out of the bedroom. She will not go down. She
will spend the rest of her life communicating with this young Eastern European artist. The art each makes will inform the other’s. The writer’s stories, the young woman’s paintings, between them everything. It will keep both of them making art until each of their deaths.

The girl will live on, in a country emerging on the world stage. Someday the economics of her country will count for something, or they will join up with another country and matter. Someday this girl’s paintings will meet an audience, whether over the Internet, or by cosmic accident, or through back channels and counterculture trades, through thievery or trade or black-market wishes. But they will find their way into the world, her paintings.

Superpowers will topple and reorganize.

China and India will become something we never imagined.

Russia will make new allegiances. Siberia, unfreezing, will become a land grab.

France will take on a militant tone, leaving its beautiful cultural tower to chase power after all these years.

Canada and Russia and Greenland will stake new claims in once-frozen waters.

Africa will become an out-of-reach commodity instead of the expendable refuse heap we’ve treated her as.

Germany will forgive itself so much that it returns to arms.

And the Middle East, well, I think we can all see what we’ve made there. What a hand we’ve had in the making of our own demise. How masterful.

And the world will continue to be melted by a sun we’ve crossed terribly with our progress.

Nations will shift like stones in the hands of a girl making a city in the dirt.

And men and women . . . either they will finally see each other and do what must be done to evolve, or they will not.

The filmmaker and the writer will invent a kind of love from making art together and loving a son.

The painter takes one last look at her asleep on the futon and thinks:
Enough.

He reaches under the futon, where he has always kept the gun. It fits into his hand like an identity. It’s nothing, really, his magnificent and glorious death drive, up against the stories the girl told him about what happened to her. What is a man? he thinks. Wishing he was the story. This girl. This astonishing, gendered thing. What she has endured.

The sleeper.

He places the gun inside his mouth.

He shoots, the blood spray making its beauty behind him. If only someone were there to recognize this kind of beauty, to admit it. If only someone were there to capture it.

The hospital curtain shivers, almost imperceptibly. The rise and fall of the writer’s breathing. The image of a heart monitor, the audio silenced.

Two women alone in a room. The lives that might have been.

And the photographer’s hand, as hushed as whisper, or was it love, resting a Polaroid of the writer upon her unconscious body.

The widow’s husband hid the last photo he’d ever taken of her, and smuggled it into the prison camp with him. What had been his life’s passion, photography, was now over, his equipment smashed in heaps of glass and black plastic, even his eyeglasses smashed in front of him under the heel of a boot. Twenty-eight years, they said. His sentence.

The sentence became his body. The photograph of his wife against his iliac crest.

It took only five years for the widow’s husband’s mind to wander in that prison camp, in ways that remind him of DNA drifting, or the disintegration of the stars.

After that, he began to have nightmares: a bloody torso inching its way along the frozen ground, a leg without a body being pulled by a dead horse. He wakes in the night as if waking were sleeping and sleeping, labor. A few days ago, he thinks, he may have met a man from a town he perhaps knew in his previous life. The man had stolen wood and was awaiting sentencing.
Two days ago they had taken the man away. Yesterday he had returned. They had cut off one of his legs as punishment. The man’s leg looked like an enormous stick of bread, he remembered thinking. They brought it back with them and threw it out where it could be seen from the barracks. Fresh corpses were piled onto sleighs daily, and prisoners harnessed like horses would pull them with ropes, drag them several hundred meters from the barracks and pile them up as if for a bonfire. But never the leg. It was left to rot there in front of them, but not, freezing instead, not decomposing as an ordinary human leg might. It is strange what moves us and what does not.

My wife is not here.

And then his thoughts would fragment and tumble again.

Buttercups.

Entrails.

A boot.

A common treatment for frostbite was to hang a body, barely living, from the ceiling. One girl with sores all over her was hung by the armpits. One man, so starved and shrunken as to appear to be a boy, was hung by his feet.

Men would come and go in his barracks, either in his mind’s eye or in real time.

One was a writer.

With this man, he found bitter shared joy. He without a camera and he without a way to record his thoughts on paper. Art and ideas between them.

If he could produce a picture of their world, it would show hundreds of people curled fetal in their bunks like strange snails
because scurvy had infected their joints. The white nights blew beyond thought. People reached the point where they had no sex, just the vague skeletal cage of a bodylike thing, mouths sunken in from lost teeth and disease, eyes glassy in their hollowed-out holes. He and the writer spoke many times of this imagined image. The writer absorbed it as a narrative.

One day the writer was taken away, and he did not see him again. His own strength faltered differently now. As with the loss of a lover or wife. He thought he saw him several times, far in the distance, in the night, the moon shining over a frozen forever delirium of cold. He thought he could see the writer framed by sky and the white of the snow, a skeletal figure, a stick man, harnessed like a horse, dragging the leg, with . . . was it buttercups? Falling from the sky? All the images of his life blurring now into one.

How the body goes on living sometimes.

Did he forget himself?

The face of his wife. No, newspaper crackled and blowing across the frozen prison yard.

He finds himself standing exposed, as if shitting in a field in the hours of a long day’s labor, his genitals slowly sucking back into the cavities of his body, shrinking, retreating back. He is squatting, vulgar. He has no idea how long he has been this way. In sight the others are gathering wood, thistles, cones from the edge of a forest under the watch of armed guards. A soldier with a rifle, with a cigarette for a mouth. The rifle is perhaps less than five feet from his own dumb skull. He thinks he sees a flash of red. A woman leaning in to kiss the face of a lascivious
soldier; no. A German shepherd dog’s tongue pink against dirty snow, licking a palm. A man’s penis pissing against dirty snow.

He dresses again. He looks out across white and on the white, peopled spots of black and gray and the hint of flesh. Faces? Holes for eyes and mouths. Is it a crowd? Fellow prisoners? Or just shapes? Trees?

He opens his mouth like it’s a shutter.

I was an artist.

I existed.

I made art.

The guard cocks a trigger in a perfectly synchronous motion. The sound prompts the man to join the sticklike figures nearly cracking from their own actions. He is now part of the still life: prisoners gathering wood.

He remembers washing a man’s back. The rag following the moles of his back as if they made some strange constellation, his own hand magnified to him, more than human, the man’s flesh taking the hand’s motions as a gentle whisper, like a woman’s gesture, a woman washing a body, he remembers the skin reddening where he rubbed. The giving over to love, isn’t it? The tiniest of gestures exploding like small compassionate bombs between them? Did he look upon the back of the man with longing? Where were the definitions of words going in this place? The black curls of the back of the man’s head, so black, so coarse, so like a forest that he wanted to rest his face there, calmly and without intention, as natural as putting a head to a pillow in bed at night with his wife.

And cupping his own elbows in the alone. Oh, to let go to death.

In his tenth year, he is scratching his name into a wooden plank in the wall—or thinks he is; the word he actually is scratching is
Father
—when somewhere nearby an elderly man, emaciated but for his oddly round and melon-hard belly, laughs out loud, a thunderous laugh, almost hideous. He does his best to ignore the monstrous laughing man, focusing instead on a single letter of his work. Finally he turns to the cackling jackal of a man and tells him to go fuck himself. Can’t the man see he is busy?

My dearest friend, the man says, I beg of you, forgive my intrusion. As it happens, I was just thinking that all my life has been given over to a pure insanity. You will wonder what I mean. In my case, it was science. Science! I have, as I say, given my life over to it, if you can believe the absurdity of that, the pursuit of that brand of knowledge in which the proven outscores the given. And at the age of seventy—at least I think that is the age, who knows in this place—it happened into my mind that the waste has not been these years in Siberia, but rather the years I spent toiling away in my lab, making “meanings” of things, working for the state believing with all my heart that physics was beyond anything, beyond patriotism or God, beyond the heart, the head, the concerns of the body, beyond any thought or drive. I am giving my life to the magnificent order of the universe, I thought, freely and with zeal! And when I saw you sitting there, friend, it reminded me of all my righteous-mindedness and idiotic sacrifice to the pinpoint world
of microscopes and mathematics. He laughed again. Do you see?

In the time that he knew the old man, it seemed to him that there was not a single moment in which he was not talking. Narrating his knowledge, even in the face of its destruction and uselessness. It was as if an entire human history were pouring forth from his mouth. He believed himself to be dying, in fact, a cancer, yes, he was certain, his great and authentic big-headed knowledge of science assured him like second sight, even without his instruments, that his body was indeed being invaded, bombed, taken over, so to speak. Whether the old man was right, he hadn’t a clue. He only knew that he wished the old man would go on speaking forever, since he had discovered that his primary fear was that he was losing his aesthetic awareness, his ability to see pictures and chart the world image by image—he was afraid he was no longer a photographer.

Once he had dreamed of winning a prize,
the
prize. But that might have been a man he read about. He couldn’t be sure.

Buttercups and the lips of his wife.

Did he have a wife?

The day of their liberation came suddenly and without fanfare.

After the prisoners had forgotten their own names, officers began shooting prisoners at random, even as other officials were fleeing in jeeps, even as the camp was being overrun by liberation troops, their quarters burned to the ground, their leader handcuffed and scorned and whisked away for war crimes or picked up off the ground after suicides, still, the soldiers were
shooting prisoners as best they could, and the old man
still
went on narrating everything he could remember about history, as he headed for a truck that would take him to safety, the photographer’s hand held out to him with a few fingers still tingling with life, the old man babbling away and becoming nonsensical, storming from the mouth with the last vestiges of history, saying something, what was it, something about Galileo, and wasn’t that extraordinary, that Galileo looked into a night sky and reversed an entire epoch, wasn’t it something? And who among us would ever raise their head to a night sky like that again, he was saying, when they shot him. And an intense memory seized him in that moment of danger—he
was
a photographer! He knew what the shot would be!—the old man’s head rocked back with the bullet shot and his mouth too red and agape, almost like he was laughing, toward a dead heaven, toward a godless sky, into the white.

And then the ping at his lower vertebrae, and then nothing.