The Small Backs of Children (8 page)
Read The Small Backs of Children Online
Authors: Lidia Yuknavitch
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General
Night. Interior. Living room. The playwright, the poet, and the filmmaker are together in the filmmaker and writer’s house. They all have a glass of scotch. It’s midnight. The poet has a plan. She’s laying it on them
.
| THE POET . | Look. It’s a direct action. We have to go get her. |
| THE FILMMAKER . | Right. Let’s spring her from that hell. Just what she needs. Hospitals are death houses. |
| THE PLAYWRIGHT . | Oh my god. You’re not talking about getting her out of the hospital. Are you? |
| THE POET . | No. I’m not talking about her at all. |
The playwright’s circle rubbing between his thumb and forefinger seizes up, interrupted. The filmmaker jerks his head up.
| THE FILMMAKER . | What? Then what are we talking about? |
| THE POET . | I’m talking about the girl. |
| THE FILMMAKER . | What girl? |
| THE POET . | You know what girl. The girl in the photo. |
The filmmaker stands up the way a man stands up when he’s thinking, Wait just a goddamn minute here.
| THE FILMMAKER . | Wait just a goddamn minute here. That’s crazy. What are you talking about? |
| THE POET . | I said, we’re going to go get the girl. I know people. Just-this-side-of-criminal people. We can track her down. We know what town she lived in. We know what happened there, and when. And we have a photo. And we know the photographer who took the photo. I’m saying I can find her. |
| THE FILMMAKER . | That’s insane. You want to fly back to Europe and steal a human? |
| THE POET . | Oh, I can find her. |
| THE FILMMAKER . | Oh, really. Fine. Right. You’re just going to go pluck a girl we don’t know from a war zone and . . . Whatever. This is ridiculous. Okay, let’s say you go all the way to Eastern Europe and you . . . you find this girl. Which is insane. What then? What the hell happens then? |
| THE POET . | What then? We bring her here. To live with us. |
The filmmaker and the playwright both start speaking at once in great incredulous waves of objections. She backs up a bit and looks at them. She crosses her arms and waits for them to peter out.
| THE POET . | Are you two finished? Okay, then listen. Think about it. What kind of life does this girl have there, anyway? |
| THE FILMMAKER . | Remind me why I care? She’s got nothing to do with me. With my wife. I’d rather just go get my wife. |
| THE POET . | Listen. I know what I’m talking about. It’s about the girl. Her family’s atomized, she’s probably living some corpse life in some pocket of hell. I mean, shit, remember how they tracked down that green-eyed Afghan girl? And she’s now a leather-faced crone ? Because her life went from misery and shit to more monotonous and meaningless misery and shit, while her famous photo went ’round and ’round the world making that McCurry guy famous? I say we do it. |
| THE PLAYWRIGHT . | Do what, precisely? |
| THE POET . | We do what our rising-star photographer failed to do. What all photojournalists fail to do. We go get her out of that death of a life before she dies. |
| THE FILMMAKER . | For the love of God. What does this have to do with my wife? |
| THE PLAYWRIGHT . | Whatever. This is crazy. So let’s pretend it’s even possible to pursue this fantasy. What does it accomplish? What is the purpose? How does it speed my sister’s recovery from wherever she is? |
| THE POET . | Listen to me. This will matter. To your wife. To your sister. I don’t expect you to understand. Either of you. But you are just going to have to trust me on this. It’s a . . . ( She searches the ceiling.) It’s a woman thing. If we get this girl out of her deadly circumstance and bring her here and give her a chance at a real life, it will help your wife. Your sister. The only friend I’ve ever given a damn about in my entire life. |
| THE FILMMAKER . | You’re serious. You are being serious? |
| THE POET . | Look. Did you ever hear of Kevin Carter? You know, Kevin Carter. The South African photographer who took the picture of the vulture stalking a starving girl. He won a Pulitzer for that picture. Two months later he connected a hose to the exhaust pipe of his pickup truck and quietly suicided. They say he’d come back from assignments and lapse into bouts of crying, drinking, drugs. Sometimes he’d sleep for days. After he shot his prizewinning picture, they say he sat under a tree and cried and chain-smoked and couldn’t get his mind away from the horror of what he saw. He checked out. People referred to him as “gone.” |
| THE PLAYWRIGHT . | Yeah. I remember. He was universally condemned for not helping the girl in the picture. He caught all kinds of shit. Said he was haunted by memories of killings, corpses, starving or wounded children, and trigger-happy madmen. So he offed himself. |
| THE POET . | Exactly. So you get it? |
The filmmaker stares at her blankly and the playwright’s eye twitches.
| THE POET . | Don’t you get it? They had a BIG argument. She said someone should have done something to get the girl out of the war zone. Your wife— your sister—told our friend the photographer that the prize had blood all over it. I don’t think they’ve spoken to each other since. Didn’t she tell you? |
| THE POET . | ( Shooting for authority. ) We’re going to go get that girl. |
| THE PLAYWRIGHT . | Right. Got it. I’ll finance the whole thing. The trip, the papers, whatever it takes. |
| THE POET . | We can go to Prague first. Then on to St. Petersburg. That’ll be the easy part. I know a counterfeiter in Berlin. And I know who else we’ll need to get from there to Vilnius—I have people— |
| THE FILMMAKER . | Hold on. Stop. Just . . . WAIT. What the . . . HELL are you talking about? What “people”? This isn’t real. The picture. The story. The girl. None of this is real. Except . . . except that my wife is trapped in some hazed-out dreamland in a hospital and I want her back. And if I don’t do something, I’m going to lose my mind. |
A phone rings offstage. The filmmaker reluctantly goes to the kitchen and answers. His voice sounds low and muffled, almost as if he is underwater. When he returns to the living room, the blood has drained from his face.
| THE PLAYWRIGHT . | What? What is it? Is she all right? |
| THE FILMMAKER . | Barely. |
The three figures—filmmaker, poet, playwright—stand together for a long minute, staring at the floor. The light in the living room brightens, until they look hot and lit. The three of them look at one another.
| THE FILMMAKER . | You’re not going to finance the whole thing. I can’t let you do that. |
| THE PLAYWRIGHT . | It’s not a problem. You know I can handle it . . . |
| THE FILMMAKER . | No, you don’t understand. I have something— ( Exits stage left. ) |
Sounds of a man thundering downstairs. The poet and the playwright hang in the air like inverted commas, waiting for the filmmaker. They hear pounding and something like destruction sounds, like he’s down there killing something. Then they hear him coming back up the stairs in some kind of alpha-man overdrive. When he finally reappears in the living room, it’s not a man’s body at all. It’s a giant canvas, eight feet by eight feet. Once their eyes adjust, they see that it is a painting of a giant abstract face. They hear a voice behind it as if the painting is speaking.
| THE FILMMAKER . | This is his painting. She kept it. Wouldn’t let me burn it. I hear these things are going for over ten grand these days. ( To the playwright. ) You take it to New York. You sell it. You use the money. You do it. You get this thing out of my house. |
The playwright looks up from his laptop, closes the lid. He drums with his fingers. He is seated on a blue velvet chair in an auditorium. Men and women raise little Ping-Pong paddles in the air. The auctioneer has been mouthing bids—for how long? months? years?—but the playwright has been working away silently all the while. He is interested in only one lot, only one artwork, the one he came there to sell.
Then the voice of the auctioneer arrests his attention. With his little flip of silver hair, he announces the lot: “
Facetious.
We open at ten thousand dollars. The opening bid is ten thousand dollars.” The playwright snaps his head up and bites the inside of his cheek three times so he can lift his numbered little paddle. “Excellent. I have fourteen thousand dollars. The bid stands at fourteen thousand from the gentleman from New York. Do I have a—fourteen thousand, eight hundred dollars. I have fourteen thousand eight hundred. Do I have a best? Fourteen thousand eight hundred on the floor. Do we have movement? Excellent. Fifteen thousand. I have fifteen thousand dollars. We are standing at fifteen thousand from the gentleman from Lyon. Fifteen thousand, I have fifteen thousand dollars. We are at
fifteen thousand. Fifteen thousand once. Fifteen thousand twice. All right, then, for the third and final time, fifteen thousand.
“And it is SOLD to the good gentleman from Lyon at fifteen thousand dollars. Very well.”
The playwright looks down at the play in his laptop, and then up at the sold painting, the one he came there to sell, the one the filmmaker made him bring: a giant abstract cum-stained bloodstained face.
The performance artist’s ears go full-blown tinnitus because it’s the poet going Just calm down and then the playwright going Use your imagination and the filmmaker going Just wait Just wait It’s not as bad as it sounds so she
amplifies
her voice and launches it at them. “It’s not as bad as it sounds? You want me to fake being hollow headed all the way to Europe and
it’s not as bad as it sounds
?” She can’t believe it, can’t believe what they are saying. This is the plan? She stares at them all like they want to eat her, saying, “You want me to do fucking
what
?”
And then it’s the playwright going Look do you want me to say it all again and everyone getting impatient with her like she’s a child, look at all their smug fuck faces with their
we’re all a decade older than you
paternalism and her going, “Um, actually, yeah, I fucking want you to say it again because this sounds, you know,
insane
.”
She crack-twists another tiny bottle of vodka open, pours it into her plastic airplane cup, slams it, then returns the empty
miniature to the poet’s tray table. Well, she’s got to hand it to them, they fucking got her on this goddamn plane with the Nazi poet, didn’t they, and they used the oldest trick in the book, the trick of Catholics and Jews. Mega-guilt. Pure and simple. When she had resisted, the poet had walked up to her and like gotten all up in her face, going Look this is the
least
you can do you’re screwing him and we all know it you have been for years, you owe her this, she went, like there’s some kind of woman sexual history rule book. Some kind of woman sexual sin plus-and-minus column. Like they’re all holier than her. She reaches up and hits the flight-attendant-get-the-hell-over-here-I-need-a-drink button, then looks briefly at the poet, at the side of her face, and yes, she has to admit it, she’s a little afraid of her.
She rubs the letter she’s carrying pinned by her bra against her skin underneath her clothes. A letter from the painter. Well, you make your bed, you lie in it, that’s what her mother used to say, so here she is on a plane to Eastern Europe drinking midget vodkas with a lesbian dominatrix. When the flight attendant arrives, she leans over in the flight-attendant way and says to the poet in pity hush tones, “What does she need?” Because when you’re wearing a special helmet acting like you haven’t enough brains to buckle a seat belt you can’t be seen drinking vodka like a normal adult woman. She has a cuss-fest inside her head. The poet stamps down on her toe underneath the tray tables. She tries to make her face go slack. The poet asks the flight attendant for a pillow for her, and more vodka for herself. When the flight attendant leaves, the poet elbows the performance artist so sharply she cries out.
“What? I was just adding a little Tourette’s to the scene.”
When more vodka comes, the performance artist turns her head to the airplane window as far as she can. How did she get here, I mean how did she
really
get here, what were the choices, what’s a past—she takes a long drink—what is
psychological development
? Is it as fucking Freudian as it sounds? She sighs the
big
sigh of twenty-six, wondering if we are all trapped inside identity, genetics, and narrative—some whacked-out Kafka god handwriting our unbearable little life stories. Then she thinks an American-artist thought, the rough-and-tumble kind: how can I use this? She rubs the letter underneath her shirt, she thinks she sees the reflection of herself in the airplane window, like a black twin, and she’s falling back to memory, she prays to the god of Diamanda Galás.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Well, let’s have it then.
When she was seven years old, a mediastinal cystic parathyroid grew in her head. The tumor, the medical professionals told her so-called parents (one a famous architect, the other a famous concert pianist, both mega-narcissists), was “inoperable.” And there was this: the tumor was pushing on the beautiful gray folds of her brain in just the right way as to make her behavior look, well, there’s no other way to say this . . . retarded. Like in immediate need of a helmet.
The effect this had on her mother was momentarily devastating. But that isn’t the story. What her mother did with her
devastation was to jettison it, and jettison it the way intellectual mega-famous narcissistic people do, until it was so buried in the layers of her psyche and her body and her motherhood that it rested at the base of her spinal cord near her fucking tailbone. She didn’t shit right for years.
And what her mother—her famous concert pianist mother—did next was . . . well, a performance worthy of an ovation. Brava.
Her mother used the notoriety and fame she had garnered as a pianist to be something even bigger, better: She became a triple-A martyr, a mother of tragedy and pain, and—most important—a spokesperson. She headed every lost cause, she was awarded community prizes, was featured on
Good Morning America
. No mother in the country could outperform her, at least when it came to volunteering for lost causes, illnesses, and deformities. Cancer, AIDS, MS, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, lupus, leprosy (yes, there is still leprosy), and all this WAY before she went third world. You get the picture.
Total abandonment of her daughter to the hired caregivers and medical staff and physical, speech, emotional, and spiritual counselors in favor of the martyr limelight.
What her father did with his devastation was a great bit more concrete; perhaps the simplest things we think about gender are utterly true.
It was his role to take the impaired daughter on excursions, so that her seemingly retarded little life didn’t suck outrageously, but only mildly.
So he took her all kinds of places, even though it made his heart have a hole in it.
He took her to the movies.
He took her to McDonald’s.
He took her to libraries.
He took her to the big red bull’s-eye of Target.
He took her to Shari’s.
He took her to water parks.
He took her to boatyards.
He took her to the beach.
He took her to bookstores.
He took her hiking in the forest.
He took her to museums.
He took her on the light rail system.
Again.
Again.
He took her horseback riding.
He took her go-cart racing.
He took her on Ferris wheels.
He took her to record stores.
He took her to music concerts.
He took her to buildings he’d designed, walking her through light and shadow and form.
He.
He.
He was more tired than any man alive, since she expressed her outrageously embarrassing glee at every one of these places
he took her, all of it while wearing a helmet, and everyone always stared and said things under their breath, I mean everyone, I mean always, and at some point, no matter where they were or how it was playing out, she’d get to some frenetic moment where she was in danger of injuring herself or others, a tiny amount of drool sliding from her mouth, pee darkening the front of her crotch, the look of . . . Well, I think you can picture her grimace-smiley too-white face, right?
And so it was that one day, inside his role, this particular thing happened. She was in one of those inflatable worlds that appear at county fairs . . . the kind of inflatable hut kids can crawl inside and jump up and down. You know what I mean.
She entered.
He left.
No, really.
He left.
He left his daughter, he left his wife, his family, his life, radically and without hesitation.
Not that much later—four years, to be precise—her mother was giving a lecture on the child-tragedy circuit. Afterward, a neurosurgeon came up to her and said he knew a doctor in Europe who specialized in the type of operation they’d been told was impossible, and so nearly by accident she got her daughter a different medical team and a world-famous surgeon in Europe, and guess what?
They operated successfully and her so-called retardation disappeared and she bloomed into a completely normal, beautiful, American teen.
Completely normal, except for the pearly skull scar and the emotional scars for fucking life.
And
that’s
how she comes to be sitting in an airplane with the poet pretending to be her past. Because she’s a stand-in. She’s a retarded girl again, being taken to Europe for experimental treatment again, a story from her real past invading her present. Because without makeup and face jewelry and vintage clothes and hair products, without anything on her head besides that disgusting helmet, she looks much younger than she is. Just past puberty. Which means they can swap her. Which means they can use her special retard-girl identity papers to enter the country with her, but leave the country with a different girl. Later, someone will come back and get her and take her back home.
It’s the
least
she can do.
And besides, the poet had said, this is the most radical performance art she’ll ever do in her life.
Emotional cripple. Adult need machine. Fuck addict. American artist. She rubs the scar on her head. She rubs the letter against her flesh. The last thought she thinks before she drops into a twenty-something-year-old vodka sleep is: I hate women.
