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for Gian
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The door to the house resists me. It squeaks, not as much as it used to, but not because someone fixed it. Things can fix themselves, it’s just that we usually don’t give them the chance to because we leap in with glues and wrenches. The porchlight though is waning. That could be the reason it doesn’t get lit anymore, or perhaps it’s just another thing that’s been turned off for me, like health insurance past a certain age.
The hallway has the light. Hot and musty, the exposed heater emitting its breath of fire. It curls up the floor tile at the edges, the plastic covering made to look like tile, dirt and flies underneath. My piss escaped down this subterranean river a long time ago when it couldn’t hold itself, when the bladder holding it had been numbed out by alcohol, when the door to the apartment refused to open in time. Another door opened too late. The hallway stank for weeks. Someone upstairs alerted the landlord. The tenants were uncomfortable with homeless people coming into the building and squatting in the hall. The landlord sent around a note assuring the tenants they would have cameras put in, so from then on everyone calmed down and went about their business. But if you look up into the spiderwebbed corner of the ceiling, you’ll see there’s nothing there.
The door opens into the foyer, right into the Christmas tree with its twinkly lights and fake frost, the chocolate candy adorning it long eaten off. It’s been there for months. So many months that it’s transcended Christmas. At this point it’s just a decoration, a ceramic goose dressed up in holiday outfits by Republican next door neighbors. We could redecorate it for a different holiday, but Valentine’s Day is the only one coming up, and neither of us need reminded.
My father is in his bedroom in the green tartan bathrobe—his bedroom being the living room, to the right of the foyer, separated from the rest of the apartment by a too-short gray curtain—the stubble on his chin ashen, the skirt of his mustache dip-dyed by black coffee. Gray bits of screenplay stuck to the wall. The glow of the laptop lights up his face, the pores and crevices, the gray bags under his eyes. He feels my presence but he does not see me, does not emerge from behind the curtain to look. He trusts that it’s me. My footsteps are familiar. He is not proud of me for coming home sober the way a father should be, proud of his daughter for resisting temptation. The way he might’ve been fifteen years ago, if the daughter coming home was still a teenager, and not a woman past thirty, who should know better by now.
Spokoy nochu, he says from behind the curtain. He does not take his eyes off the screen.
My bedroom is dead dark. A sanctuary. My mother said to always spend a few moments quiet in a dark room upon entering, so as not to frighten the ghosts. You interrupt their activity when you come bursting in like that. They have to settle, warm to you, slowly share their space. And yes. Something relaxes, and the air gets warm. The floor mattress looks inviting, unmade, antique mirror with gold trim, everything in the disarray it was left in, but ready for me, open, somehow.
The gin is in the coffin on top of the dresser. It is a cardboard coffin from the discount party store that housed Krasotka’s goth makeup, when she went through that phase. The gin is a fancy gin and the bottle is marked Honeymoon. The only funds with which to plan one came from Krasotka selling her entire wardrobe to a secondhand store for no more than fifty dollars, but she left before we could drum up the rest. A person of higher moral principle might have thrown the gin in the trash post-divorce, or shattered it against a building, or, if really making a point, shattered it against a building and then drank from the jagged neck, but that is also the type of person who would do violence to a blameless bottle of gin, who makes a big show out of dropping a twenty in the collection basket, who sobs harder at the death toll on the news, but only when people are watching.
Happy anniversary, Krasotka.
No part of me wants to drink anymore but sobriety with a capital S scares the shit out of me. Despite all my training in the mechanics of deliverance some part of me refuses to wake up a member of the spiritually reformed. No amount of alcohol will stop my mother from being a pile of dust in an aluminum travel mug at the bottom of a lake, and no amount of alcohol will make me feel warm, loved, happy for longer than an hour, and no amount of alcohol will bring Krasotka back, and all of this is clear to me, and yet. Despite my mantras and ablutions the resistance comes from a part of me that doesn’t believe in rebirth. Despite my self-study, and despite telling students in savasana You have a birthright to daily resurrection, there is an inborn acknowledgment of failure. When you stop drinking there is a pressure to call everyone you know and share the good news. This is meant to hold you accountable, but mostly it makes you want to fail.
Still, you can’t be a pussy. Plenty of people don’t drink to live. Kids don’t drink. Think back to the last time you were sober and happy. Back, all the way back. Childhood, ballet. Twirling in the air like a spinning top. Kak Anna Pavlova, my mother would say, filming my dance classes with a blocky handheld camera. Muscles free in their limitless stretch. Before it was brought to my attention by pinch-nosed teachers that my body was too big, too muscular, not dainty enough for this delicate art, and there was no fixing this, because you can tell at age nine how a girl will look at nineteen. And that was it. My nonexistent career was sunk, like a bag of rocks underwater.
But perhaps the cap on it was my doing. There is another way. To place doubt aside and take right action. Go to bed early and rise before the sun. Warm up. Stretch. The body remembers. It wants to stands on its toes. The arches take their shape. You’ve done this before. Remember? You don’t need poison anymore because now you have tonic. Set about replacing the bad with the good. If the rishis can stand naked in a river for three weeks at a time, taking rain and snow and hunger and ridicule and curious fish nibbling their ankles, you can quit crying about recognition and do what you’re made for.
To realize destiny is the purpose and pleasure of life. So say the rishis.
But a couple weeks in the pounding in my head got so loud, so insidious, there was no way to continue. My skin was clear, my eyes bright. My body remembered how to move, how to bend, it wasn’t that. There was no physical locus of pain. It was purity, purity itself that hurt. It was getting up in the morning and doing everything exactly the way it should be done, according to plan, every minute of every day metered out, put through its paces. It was shower and bed by ten o’clock, after doing prayers, after doing abhyanga, last meal three hours prior, the functioning of my body as regular as the clock that ticked out the time left on earth. Infinite time on earth—the start and stop my body was allowed, allowed to be allowed. And in the morning to the kitchen for hot water, sit and wait for the bowel movement to arise, unaided by a cigarette, sit and wait, shit, wash, dress, stretch. Rock back and forth in half splits, side bends, practice my turnout, forty-five degrees away from the goal, my body obeying me, reluctant, obeying. The clawing in my stomach not hunger.
Does the redemption occur when there’s no one around to issue the stamp?
To hell with it. Abstinence was for cut-rate swamis. For holy men who had nothing better to do with their minds than keep them clear for eight hours a day. Cheating heaven out of its own experience, pulling it down to earth where it doesn’t belong. Creating an entire self, a way of life—a way out of life—from the refusal to engage. Celibacy and moderation the lofty goal. Though most of the holy men have since been accused of sex crimes and developed rickets.
Besides the gin there is so much in the room that doesn’t belong. So much of Krasotka that doesn’t belong. Adverse to me, antagonistic, the room is almost entirely constructed from these alien things. Rejection the motivating principle of her aesthetic. An insistence on wanting things others don’t. For her to love it, a thing did not need to have attractive qualities—to have been discarded was enough. My desk. It came from the fucking street. The desk had no fault other than being pockmarked, ugly, and missing one leg, and someone with the wherewithal to spend money on a brand new, flawless desk, with all its legs intact, crafted by a Swedish designer with no more than a first name, had the effrontery to eject a good one into the trash heap. A cracked mirror, from a different trash heap, the crack disfiguring my face or my ankles, depending on how it’s flipped. A coffee table book about the artist Yves Klein.
Krasotka once wrote an article about Yves Klein and Le saut dans le vide and years later the museum the piece had hung in sent me a threatening letter—sent her a threatening letter, though she had moved since—on account of her lack of proper attribution. Apparently it was important to have named the museum the portrait was hanging in at the time. In the article Krasotka writes how she’d thought Klein had taken a real leap into the void, that, looking at the picture, it really looks like the windswept vault off the building had resulted in the end of his life, such is the force of his falling, the angle of the body, fatal, the wind bearing him up for as long as it can hold. How, having seen the picture, she was struck by an artist’s singular dedication to his art to the extent of trading his life for the purity of artistic integrity, in a greater way than the pretenders who give their lives for art do, meaning little more than abandoning familial responsibilities in the name of the Muse. Her guilty disappointment at the early photo editing that managed to take out the lifesaving tarpaulin.
In Overcoming the Problematics of Art, Klein writes: Today the painter of space must, in fact, go into space to paint, but he must go there without trickery or deception, and not in an airplane, nor by parachute, nor in a rocket; he must go there on his own strength, using an autonomous individual force; in short, he must be capable of levitation.
It was a very angry letter. The museum administration was threatening a lawsuit. The museum itself was small and had a garden where we’d walked around trying not to look like we wished we’d brought wine in a Thermos. The museum had all kinds of things you could’ve glued together in the basement and dripped ugly splotches of paint all over and passed off as something with meaning. But you didn’t think to do that, did you? Hell no. There are better things to do with your time. And what are they? Who knows. So, why don’t you go down into the basement and try dripping ugly splotches of paint? It’s as good a thing to do as any. Maybe you wanted to, as a child. Who poisoned it out?
We kept walking. There was a pile of bodies in a white room. The bodies were made of plaster or some sort of concrete material made to look like plaster and they were all laid out along the floor in a line from wall to wall. They were meant to depict a fraction of the body count after this or that tragedy. Like the magically embalmed saints in their caskets in gold dust cathedrals, preserved by God’s eternal adoration, plaster sheets over plaster faces as light and delicate as veils.
Why did there have to be a pile of plaster bodies on the floor? Just go visit one of the countries we’ve been bombing to death and collect some of their bodies for free.
We went down into another room that housed more of Klein’s canvases, gigantic monochromes. Floor to ceiling swathes of International Klein Blue. The picturetakings of a man who stared at the sky long enough to locate the color of the soul, unrepresented in the available tubes of paint. There were several identical monochrome canvases whose sisters, according to the plaque, were all priced at different amounts at auction—and sold. A treatise on value and wealth. The invaluable, valueless, in value nonetheless. Burned blue surfaces, blasted craters. One canvas he’d strapped down to the roof of his car and driven through a rainstorm, to get at the fury of water.
My canvases are only the ashes of my art.
Krasotka stood there and looked for such a long time it seemed like she’d never move from the spot. Then she said she wished she could make something like that. It took everything in me not to say, You can. Look at it. But it would’ve sounded stupid to say so. It wasn’t about blue paint on a canvas or red paint on a canvas or canvas or paint or blue or red. If she was going to make something like that she’d have to descend into the underworld and let herself be maimed and blessed by the angel, and the result, if there was anything left of her, would not be walls of blue.
The scourge of the Western world: the hypertrophy of the Me, of the personality.
My eyes have something that feels like sand in them. The antlike scritch-scratch of filmy eyeball tissue coating being invisibly torn. It’s too late for sleep. The divide has been crossed. Going to sleep now will only end with being wild and awake in three hours, head pounding harder, electricity in the mind under a chemical spill. Wild and awake at five in the morning with the urge to call Krasotka, keep calling until she answers, or worse, book a last-minute flight to wherever she is, calling from the airport sweaty and hungover, asking her to choose, once again, her life, her future, or me. Being surprised, again, when she makes her choice.
My father, under the light of the living room, choosing his future. Puffing cigarette smoke at the typewriter. When he wants to see that something has form in the world, he gets out the typewriter and works, line by line, one finger clack at a time, so he can feel the words, the weight of the ink on the pages. So he can feel with his hands that he has made something warm. Something separate.
It’s the left eye that’s itching. Pink and bloodshot, the eyeliner come off from rubbing. The other eye still has a swipe of charcoal powder, the heavy black line holding steady underneath the lower lashes. Like a linebacker, Krasotka used to say, casually tossing in a football term she had no personal experience with, putting forth a valiant attempt to improve my makeup application, disgusted with my flat unwillingness to do the right things to my face. Just put some mascara on, she begged. Your eyelashes are collapsing. It was impossible to explain to her that swiping a small toothbrush of black glue up and down my eye hairs made me feel like the biggest tool of the patriarchy the world has ever seen. Can you imagine a man risking blindness every morning on account of some sick aesthetic leaning that convinced him that otherwise, the world would not know he had eyes at all?
But Krasotka was not convinced. She did not care about the nefarious industries of the patriarchy, real or imagined. Things were the way that they were whether any of us liked it or not. Anyone of any gender simply looked better with mascara on, and that was the end of it. It was not her fault that men were such as they were. There was no reason to let what they did with their eyes hold her back from fully expressing her beauty. Sometimes we’d walk down the street holding hands and the men who shouted curses and threats out of rushing car windows were so calmed by the look she gave them, this beatific all-loving look that hinted at oneness, the possibility that with the right word they might be invited to share in the delight of the soft world we’d built. There was a number of times the way Krasotka looked at men had saved our life. And it made me hate her.
You love it. You love to be looked at. She looked at me like she’d been slapped. But it hurt me too, she had no idea how much, that it seemed like she needed the eyes of someone, of many someones, to be reassured of her realness. Holding out for the second, third, fifteenth opinion. It was her safety net. In case she couldn’t trust my eyesight. In case it turned out to be defective, sand in it, a crack in the glass that distorted vision, making the image swim.
Nothing on the surface of the eye, but there’s something inside. The makeup remover rubs off the remaining resins, the oily cotton pad scratching over the delicate eyelid skin, once, twice, gently, gently. Krasotka urged an eye cream. The most delicate skin is the one that gets treated the roughest, with rubbing and salt tears, of course it does. Another spurned attempt to get me to take care of my face. But alone in the bathroom, a cautious pinky dipped into her jars and vials, making the tiniest unnoticeable indent, patting the creams that cost half a month’s rent in the orbital hollows and under the brows, the way she did it, ritual, reverent, there was something to it. Doing our solemn part to preserve our earthly wrapping. Arching my eyebrows and pouting my lips, the potential for beauty was there, right there. Sucking my cheeks in and steeling my jaw to become my mother, all her hills and hollows, the extreme angles of an empress. Letting my expression go slack, flattening out my mouth and forehead, relaxing tongue between my teeth toward the nonplussed blankness of my father. It could go the other way too. Moving back and forth between these two faces, mother, father, mother, father, mother, farther, farther.
The spirit speaks clearly, but in what language? Whatever wants to speak is throwing pots and pans against the wall but using no words. Is the not-understanding the fault of the listener or the speaker? No interpreter exists. We don’t pay attention to things that stand there breathing on our pant leg. Polite and obedient, waiting for us to notice. The unambiguous messages from the universe are transmitted with force and force only. The only time you are aware of romantic discord is when there is a mountainside of packed boxes in the living room. The only time you are aware of your throat is when it’s furry and raw from vomiting, or when someone wants to know how deep it can take them. Only then do you feel its outline and capacity for spread. The space it creates, and how good it feels, after everything, to just let it all be closed.
At the height of our lunacy Krasotka would crack open a bottle and we’d drink until it was time to go to bed and fuck, not because we needed to get drunk to fuck, but because we needed to get warm, because there were parts of us handed down that couldn’t get warm regardless of method, our extremities, the pits of our bellies, the garage of the heart, parts that carried the weight of pasts that weren’t ours, the wounds of war, we were born too late to bear the blood wounds and yet, and through this we were laughing—the spirit voice responsible for forward motion drowned in the background saying this is doomed, this is unsustainable, this is born to die—born to die being meaningless to us as all things are born to die but not all things are made to die, this was the difference, the texture of death being the anticipated outcome, the finish line speeding in on peg legs toward the vehicle, looking to amplify the crash. We drank whiskey and tequila and vodka and whatever sugar-filled energy drinks were around, ours or not ours, mixed purposefully horrible concoctions to find the sweet spot, a test of strength, pausing the show or the movie or the record to eat popsicles or each other’s pussy or whatever box of expired provisions we found in the freezer, making a game of the lethal limit. When we ran out of things to drink we’d run, red-cheeked and sweating, to the corner store, where we’d buy bottles of diluted tequila and cigarettes just in case. Krasotka had a silver case for her cigarettes and she liked to transfer them from the paper pack they came in, which she considered too unromantic, lacking style, to this new one, and one by one she’d close them until they didn’t fit into her little metal case, snap.
How deep can this go, said Krasotka, working the neck of a liquor bottle into my cunt. She pushed it in until it hurt, one bottleneck against another, and at the same time my mother called, and Krasotka said, Answer it. Are you crazy? Yes. Ten minutes of my mother asking about school with the front end of a Hpnotiq bottle weighing on my asshole. Bored of watching me talk Krasotka took a knife off the nightstand and started to slide the handle into her cunt. The phone dropped to my chest. She hadn’t gone to the kitchen to get it, the knife was just there. Was the whole thing premeditated, a big piece of performance art, right down to the phone call? Had she asked my mother to call me at this exact time? Did she run the knife under water at least, clean it, disinfect it—did she think about bacteria, did we ever think about bacteria? There was her face, moon white and shining, the rolls of her belly folding in, and the huge chopping knife with dull blade, ripping a hole in the world from the heart of light. She saw the breath catch in my throat and smiled, a Cheshire smile, and moaned and worked her kegels to make the knife pulse in and out without using her hands. To prove to everyone and God herself that the space inside her was infinite.
Meanwhile the holy metronome metering out our time, some primordial ticker in the hand of wing-pulling Kronos watching the second-hand tick. tick. tick. The depth of wounds a competition: whose father did what and when, who had the worse childhood, whose mother wanted a different kind of daughter, who was the more fucked up from it now. Almost as if the rope between us would slacken and cease to bind if one of us stopped pulling, even for a moment.
Girl in dress. You’re just a girl in a dress. She’d pinned me to the mattress. Maybe she was stronger than me. Stronger than she looked. But that’s all she was, a girl in a dress. Looking pretty. A compliment. Girl in dress, girl get dressed. It felt good to keep saying it, good underneath her, the warmth of her thighs, her lavender violence, pinning me down and straddling my chest, her hand to my throat. One hand then both, one over the other like she’d practiced it on stuffed animals, girl in dress, girl in dress, until the words got stuck in my throat and she was really pushing, her face getting hot. It was too late for an apology. My fists pummeled her back and my hips tried to buck her off but she held on tight like an expert rider, like she’d ridden more than horses, won the highest matadorian honors for taking on the mechanical bull. She released for a moment to give me one breath—the Lord giveth, and She taketh away—before she started to push down again, hard. In case there’d been any doubt of my ownership. But as deep within as we were bonded no part of me was ready to lie down and die for this crazy bitch. Giving up pummeling her back, my hand instead thrust itself under her dress and into her wet cunt.
Molodec, Krasotka.
Krasotka blowing smoke into the red night. Climbing onto the roof, falling backward off her discount stripper heels after too many Everclear Jello shots she made herself, and cleaned out the contents of the refrigerator for so that they would have a safe space to incubate, rows and rows of technicolor jellies resting in little cups like the populace of the brave new world. Krasotka looking me dead in the eye like it was the first time she’s ever seen me in her life, and it was—You’re so fucking beautiful she said and wham, straight back, right onto the concrete sidewalk, blonde hair spilling in white snakes over the dirty ground and the fluorescent flashbulbs at the end of her stick straight legs lighting up the night sky in rainbows. She didn’t finish the party trick. Krasotka. Krasotka. She liked to play dead. To see how much she could squeeze out of my fear and concern before it rounded the corner into unmanageable hysteria.
She came to after the fifth slap in the face. She got that face, the face she got after Sergei’s seventh refill, so red a passing baboon would’ve been inspired to mate with it. Like the lifesaving slaps had called her weak. Like they had said, Honey, it’s a bad idea to go shot for shot with a Russian. She raised one hand, swanlike, and slapped me back with it. So we could both see the stars.
A revision: Honey, it’s a bad idea to go shot for shot with a middle-aged alcoholic. But the point at that point was for Krasotka to fall in love with my family, and that sentence just doesn’t have the same charm.
(All that time we were saying we’d always be there for each other but when it came to the moment of being she had one final talent, shapeshifter, the collapsible heart of weatherproof material tucked in among the passports—)
Now there were things to clean and things to move. There’s always something to cleanse, to get rid of. Things are never pure enough, even when faced with an empty white room there’s still a spot on the wall to search out and paint over. Krasotka’s last boxes in the corner awaiting their forwarding address for the past six months, not that it’s coming. Results of the mad cleansing episode we enacted post-Russia, Sergei jetlagged and more than a little out of his mind, unshaven and crazy, unleashing his human impotence upon a coil of heavy-duty garbage bags. Never mind that the concept of joy is malleable and not meant to include things like measuring cups and electric heaters. Never mind that the scarcity mentality comes back to claim what belongs to it, and would have him muttering and swearing for weeks, kicking himself for having gotten rid of so much truly useful stuff. Never mind that they tell you where to put everything but your grief. By the end of the day half the house was on the curb. Everything that couldn’t justify its place had no place. And after that the house didn’t look any cleaner.
The Christmas tree remained.
But no guru who teaches you how to cleanse will teach you how to not acquire, because there’s no accounting for basic human need. It’s wired in our DNA, this compulsion, like the compulsion to eat and feel warm, fill our bellies with security, and this is why diets don’t work, and why everyone in America is both starved and fat as hell. As it turns out there’s no easy remedy for the need to feel human, in all the ways one can feel it. It turns out we have a need to feel like we have. And then we have too much, and it chokes us, and we feel the need to cleanse. We do a cleanse of our stuff but our insides are full of stuff anyway, no matter how much we try to cleanse that, we can’t help it, it’s in us, the tendency to accumulate, to make our outsides match our insides, even if we don’t like it. We cleanse more and more to get rid of the human parts of ourselves—the parts that, despite our best efforts to bring them around to neutral, continue to want and to need—to reach beyond our consciousness into something that feels like divine promise, light it up like a Christmas tree the remaining 364 days of the year—and like Prometheus stealing down the fire of the gods to have and to hold, holding it high like a scepter and spiriting down the mountain to spread the good news, if it’s anything like that, the value lies in the difficulty of acquisition, and if it’s anything like that, the price of light-bringing is our insides pecked out.
Over the next six months, things eventually found their way back to the house, with interest. A set of cerulean pots my mother would have liked the floral design on. A laser printer, still in its box. Industrial-sized packs of toilet paper in case of apocalypse, stacked one on top of the other at the bottom of the basement stairs. Notebooks and pencils, for each of my remaining years of school, hidden and stacked in unfindable boxes. The Christmas tree in the foyer, with more and more ornaments. Books lining the shelves in the living room, watching Sergei do everything but read.
In my front splits there is a good four inches of space between the wall and me. All it takes is a couple more minutes of stretching a day, a little more time sitting in the discomfort, but the muscles scream and back away from their full unwinding when pushed. Some form of ancestral resistance. Self-handicapping. From the years of training my body to believe there are some things it’s not equipped to do and giving up early, what it chooses not to do on its own is a shock. It’s hard to get away from your own restraints, but you do if it’s important. There’s a woman who has been coming to the shala for eighteen years and still can’t do a handstand. Longer than my teaching, longer than the shala has been open, she’s been there, having migrated from a different place different time different mindfog before marketing emails and candles for sale in the lobby, someplace green and pure. But still no handstand after eighteen years of practice. She’ll do several promising hops but something stops her from getting up away from the wall. At the wall she can handstand just fine. But away from it, even with me spotting her, she loses her nerve. She thinks too much about falling. The hard smack of the ground. An aversion. She hops up, lets her feet find the safe zone of my hand, and even before my hand thinks of moving away, she reverse curls back down. Keep trying. One day, when you least expect it, you’re going to come charging up and hold yourself there, a triumph to hard work and practice. But everyone has a limit. Unless you find a better teacher, you’ll never get over that fear. Because your teacher has an acute wrist injury which prevents her from putting all her weight on her hands. All she can do is see if your form looks good from here.
What kind of pain are you in, Krasotka? You show your pain on the internet. You’re sober now, that’s good, and you have a daughter. That’s good too. You write long posts about motherhood, there is a lot to say, whereas the captions on your canvas pictures are short, one word, a sign. Luck. Flip. Wax. These big canvases that look like the Yves Klein canvases we saw in the museum. You just take a bunch of paint and smear it on a shoebox or whatever—use all available resources, non?—and then vault it off a building and go collect it at the bottom armed with ready-made interpretations for cigarette ash and pigeon shit. Legwork transcendence. Waxing on like a Mormon housewife in a house filled with pastel flowers and antique brass watering jugs, mooning around lifting a knife to lovingly decapitate vegetables while waiting for imaginary husband to return from work. You could just as well be printing the photos at a kiosk and sticking them in an album to be enjoyed over tea. But you don’t. You want to share. Here is your daughter. She looks like you. She looks more like you than you do. There she is, attached to your back like a koala, smiling wide and kicking her legs, your back in a perfect halfway lift even though you’ve never set foot in a yoga studio—although maybe that’s changed, maybe that’s where you go now, it’s not for me to know. Is it? A close up of her angel face, her dark hair and blue eyes, the way she looks at you, up at you—the way you had to go down into the basement of yourself and pick up the seeds, and plant them in the only fertile soil you had left, make a person against whom you would be able to know love. Maybe that’s the only way to know love. To make it yourself.
Unless we want them to keep upending the dinner table, sooner or later we have to learn to set a place for the ghosts.
When you wore that tiny leather skirt to the bar with no underwear, for me, and for some reason you brought your ex-boyfriend, who came to visit you at school like nothing had changed but it had, completely it had, you didn’t tell him you were seeing someone, a woman, you didn’t tell him you were in love, or me, you didn’t tell anyone anything, content to let the disaster play itself out live, and we sized each other up, him and me, each one knowing something about the other you neither confirmed nor denied, and when it came down to it we got mad and got drunk and smashed every pretty martini glass against the wall on the patio, making a show out of who could throw the furthest while you puked your guts out in a bathroom stall, and neither of us went to check on you until all the glass had been broken, and in the end it was me you went home with not him, blood dripping from your mouth, either from your vomit or the blood on my hands, poor thing you were in such bad shape, you’d pulled up all your roots and overturned the soil, and the next morning in bed while you moaned and clutched your head and rolled around in a little ball you let me cook you white rice and feed you small spoonfuls like you do to a cat, and cheer every time you kept one of them down.
Molodec, Krasotka.
But a story needs to be read to exist. It’s not enough to write it. It’s not enough to sit there, drunk and half crazy, grasping at sunyata with the dry ridged beat of fingers. There has to be someone there to receive the call. Otherwise, what? God doesn’t care. God is just as happy to watch pundits and supremacists hurl greasy-breathed insults at each other, inflaming the world. God is just as happy to let infants die after their first breath, to let heart-atrophied bullies play nuclear roulette, to let gifted children not finish the fourth grade, to let women die in childbirth and waste their divine electricity on sliding ottomans under the feet of drunk husbands, thanking Him for the gift of having a family at all. God spends no time in tears. He doesn’t care if Dostoevsky writes the book or if Sweeney writes the book or if my father writes the book or you or me. God is impartial to elation and suffering, just as happy to see things work out as not. He is the orchestrator of the grand divine chaos. Only an idiot would care about results. This way or that, the result is the same.
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On the red eye to Russia my blood soaked through the seat. There was nothing to be done about it. It was too much to move the poor old man next to me over every forty minutes, which is the exact amount of time it takes me to bleed through an ultra-size tampon, and so out it went, nothing doing. The flood was biblical. It spread over the back of my leather jacket and down into the navy polyester. The old man next to me could smell it. He twitched. Like a hunter. Coming to collect his fallen kill. Neither of us moved. And Sergei didn’t move, oblivious, one foot on the backpack on the floor at all times, as if someone would go through the trouble of unfolding themselves from their sardine seat to take a chance on the dubious treasure inside his particular backpack. On the mad run out to customs we passed a small room marked sanctuary and it wasn’t clear from the outside whether it had space for more than one person or not.
In Murmansk it was night, like always, but when we arrived it was night-night, biological night, night by virtue of being anti-day, even at the same level of darkness. We exited the airport terminal with our backpacks and Sergei convinced a cab to let us squeeze in with the singular passenger who had hailed it first. See, we don’t have anything, just two backpacks, no trouble. If Sergei had been alone or with another man, it wouldn’t have been so easy, but on account of a woman in the mix, the driver obliged. Sometimes you can thank sexism. We crunched down the road, through the salted slush, and looked out the window at the underworld. We arrived in the center of town.
On the tenth floor of one of the gray Soviet-bloc apartments Tetya Yuliya opened her door and appraised us at first without recognition, as if she had no idea who we were, or worse, had no idea we were coming due to Sergei neglecting to share the travel plans, which was altogether possible. A spinster by definition, Tetya Yuliya had gone nowhere when it was time to go somewhere and was now left to watch time pass in the crumbling apartment alone with a cat. The cat was white with red eyes. Tetya Yuliya was white too. In a bloodless way, like a creature from the midnight zone. She had wispy yellow hair with the most absurd cut of bangs, a straight-across chop that resulted in a little curly poof over her forehead, silly and disturbing. The poof said so many things. It was holding onto her childhood, a childhood lived on the banks of not-childhood, trips to the store clutching her mother’s hand in search of Poltava sausage, morning cigarettes on the banks of Lumbolka, digging shitholes in the forest floor with a sandbox shovel. Not that she wasn’t interested in whether or not people found her attractive, no one could guess that, but rather, the poofy bangs suggested she didn’t think about attraction at all, because in order to think about it, what happens in the mirror must begin as an appraisal of something, and there was none of that. Tetya Yuliya looked at her reflection as another fact of nature presented to the categorically detached observer, a chipped piece of coral or a lichen-covered rock. Something to look at, that exists, but is not to be acted upon. Beneath the poof, an aquamarine pair of globular eyes, and a tiny little mouth that, by the looks of it, could comfortably admit no more than a baby spoon.
She was incredible.
After a few sentences we were let inside the apartment, where the scent of cabbage was strong enough to taste. There was no cabbage on the stove or in the oven. The cabbage scent was all over the place, pervasive, a piece of built-in furniture passed down from tenant to tenant like a bootleg domovoy. The icons on the walls were like the ones in our home, gold and wood and brass, the somber Black Madonna with her black and somber child, cheek scars wide like an arm. The peeling paint on the walls and single cup in the sink, a mushy-looking couch opposite a squat television, the whole operation illuminated by a single hanging bulb. The bathroom was through the bedroom, to the left of an ancient yellow-tinged vanity and a dumpy bed with a cat-sized hole in the center, where there was one thin strip of crinkly brown paper hanging off the roll. It scratched weakly at the dried blood between my legs.
Upon my return from the bathroom Tetya Yuliya and Sergei were seated at the low table in front of a tray of sliced meat and bottle of vodka. Tetya Yuliya poured me some vodka in a crystal glass and motioned for me to take the meat, having been briefed by my father, most likely, on my pitiful grasp of my own blood language. The end of a chain. She gestured again to the sliced sausage and said, Pozhaluysta. But Sergei answered for me. Ona vegetarianka. Tetya Yuliya raised her pale eyebrows. The shot remained in the glass until they raised theirs for a toast, waiting for me. He didn’t know to tell Tetya Yuliya that the vegetarian didn’t drink either. But if he didn’t know, there was nothing to feel like a failure about. There were my vague affirmations about my own existence, and contests to play against myself, and then there was being in the heart of things. To know when to drink to make it bearable, the winter, the absence of the sun.
It was my birthright to feel warm.
Tetya Yuliya poured another round. She really was charming. Underneath that fringe of gold poof there were the round eyes with lunatic soul that had surfaced from the water. The first curious marine creature to come ashore from the deep on its newly evolved set of legs, shaking water from its back, blinking into the light of the sun. Her apartment was charming. To live alone with a working lightbulb, with one’s books, running water, and a cat, it was good. The gift of the smell of cabbage in times when there was none to eat. Here was a woman at the edge of the world who had set aside societal expectation with a firm hand, who had foregone the crushing fate of husband and children and trying to make it, prove something the way it was in her bloodline to do, set up camp in a new country, who had instead surveyed the landscape of available things and plucked out only the things meant for her. A world constructed by the power of her choosing. No husband or children or taking care of sick parents, no fighting into the baggage claim only to be weighed down by suitcases full of multiplying possessions, muscles straining in the ascent to rent-spiked apartments. Happiness was attainable here, right here, in the glow of the lightbulb in the peeling paint box. Why go reaching? There was a bookshelf in the corner. Do you know how long it takes to read all the books on your shelf, once you’ve gone through the trouble to collect them? Years. Years of sitting on your ass reading books one at a time. How to make time for books when making a big spectacle of life with all the other things to fill it with? Tetya Yuliya was the keeper of important secrets. Part of me wanted to reach over and hug her.
Tetya Yuliya asked to see the urn. Sergei produced it from inside the backpack, carefully unzipping and unwrapping it from its cocoon of sweaters and shirts. She took it in both hands and held it up to the light. It emitted an ethereal glow, as if it were possessed of a bioluminescence like one of her deep water comrades. She turned it this way and that, a piece of elegant jewelry, examining its smooth silver skin. Her sister. She asked my father about the price of cremation in the States. She looked at the urn the same way she looked at herself in the mirror, with an incurious detachment, appraising a thing that had no bearing on the path she was walking, litter in the weeds. She was not thinking of the interconnectedness of things. Or was she. Maybe her acceptance of the whole of life was so deeply integrated it rendered any emotional reaction moot.
Tetya Yuliya set her sister down on the table beside the bottle. Besides the icons, there was nothing on the walls. No family pictures, no pictures of anything. Not a copy of the picture that lived on my mother’s dresser among the scattered jewelry and bottles of perfume, a picture from when they were teenagers, hips and breasts spilling out of tight skirts and tops in unforgiving textiles, forest fairies in the in-between stage of not-girls and not-women, immune to the stares and whistles of drunk construction workers for just another couple of weeks. Milky complexions covered in freckles. You’ll meet her one day, my mother had said. She didn’t say when.
Did she write, too? There was no computer anywhere, or typewriter. There was a beat-looking leather-bound notebook on one of the arms of the couch, a pen sticking out from the middle of its bent pages. Its leather as worn as my mother’s black purse that she carried day in and day out, a nicer, more expensive version of the purse in her closet reserved for special occasions that never came. Our most valuable items wrapped up in someone else’s skin. Poetry, letters, diary? There was no way to ask in my Russian.
Spokoy nochu, Tetya Yuliya said as she turned the light out in the living room when the bottle was finished. Spokoy nochu, we repeated. We slept in our clothes.
In the morning we took off through the center of town and arrived at the edge of the frozen lake. Here? The barren black trees stood around it in a protective ring. The purple darkness of daybreak, a different darkness than the darkness of night, darkness with the intention of light, a violet luminescence. The ice across the water glowed with blue crystals. Sergei took the urn out of his backpack and tucked it under his arm. He took my hand, hoary and red with cold, skin dry enough to see the crosshatching. We held onto each other tightly, encouraging the blood to meet and swim, and stepped slowly toward the hole in the center of the lake.
The ice feels solid, like ground, to trick you into believing you are safe. We approach. The hole looks like a real black hole. Like a portal to another dimension. Like the hellmouth the Soviet researchers found, lowering a microphone into the center of the earth and picking up what could only have been human screams. Where my mother and father had taken their first steps together toward a shared life. Him getting down on one knee, cold and wet in the ice, holding out an uncertain future in a strange and difficult land where, at the very least, one could expect the sun to rise.
Sergei says a few words including krasota, lyubov, and vechnost. After a while he wipes his eyes and says, Is there anything you want to say to your mother?
But in the room called The Sanctuary at the breast cancer center we had already said goodbye. There was nothing else left to tell the jar.
Now there was nothing to do but make sure the women fold from the hips, not the back. Nothing to do but pull their sacrums heavenward in their reinventions of the wheel. Assure them the truth has been inside them all along, whether it has been or not, give them a step by step guide into their own rewilding. So close to nirvana if not for the whispering claws of the present, if not for the deities to memorize, candles to buy, detoxes to implement, sacred images to tattoo. They do not like to chant but they make themselves chant. A new language for a new beginning.
Meanwhile trying to hide away the sick parts of myself. Trying not to breathe my toxic vapors on anyone and light them on fire. Trying not to fall in love with the girl. The woman. Who always comes to class after she’s had a few. To lubricate her joints or her spiritual journey. Sinking down unmanageably low in her warriors, sliding deep into full Hanuman with six inches of space tamped down by sheer will to power. Her oceanic breath tremendous and powerful, as if when she stopped breathing the turning of the world would stop. She cries in savasana. When my hands push down her shoulders it’s like it wrings her out, her sternum cracking beneath me, the heavy stone rolled away from the tomb and in its wake, a little cloud of dust.
Are you mad at me? The man on the church stoop on 14th St. kept asking, Are you mad at me are you mad at me? His teardrop tattoos and the lines on his face, deep rivers hewn by the trail of tears at midnights staring into the passing feet of strangers—no, what for, why? Come here, he said. There was no one to stop me, pulled by dangerous trust toward a stranger in dead darkness. But—and this is what you have to understand—there is a recognition. There are times when you meet someone in this life and you know, you just know, they have loved or killed you before. God knows what you did to them before that.
Can you help me put on my shoes?
The shoes are turned out next to him like little broken doves. Yes, you say. And there’s nothing else to do but kneel. Magdalena washing the feet of Jesus with her hair, Jesus washing the feet of everybody. Tax collectors and prostitutes and madmen and abusive fathers. Yes. Out of everybody streetwalking at midnight, one soul out of all the others kneels down before this filthy angel and his tears. Tears are something you can hold in your hand, but what can you do with words? You hear them. That’s it. Maneuvering his sweaty socked foot into the shoe and pulling the laces tight. Doing nothing he couldn’t have done himself. But he needed me. Me.
You do understand, the more dimension, the more nothing.
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At six in the morning my temples are on fire, my mouth and my eyes on fire, head pounding out its sound like dynamite, left eye glued shut. Crumpled down in a heap amidst inside out pants and papers, lifting out of this to shuffle into the bathroom where the eye won’t open at all—the world of blindness to my horror, tired Tiresias with both eyes sewn shut. But, optimism. The right eye still serves me, and it’s a beautiful thing. Pulling down on the soft skin at the orbital, making space, urging the miniature muscles up, up, and the eyelids split apart like a clamshell, the eyeball beneath them milky white and bloodshot, yellow gold resin weeping into the corner. Dried beads of pus lining top and bottom lashes. My vision is cloudy and it burns but it’s still two hours until the free clinic opens—sit with it advised by regimented hope-pushing lady at the breast cancer center, with many more words about anxiety and mortality and being ready to die. You have to be ready to die any moment—are you ready? It’s too late for that question if you have to be asked.
Two hours until the free clinic opens. But out in the kitchen there is chamomile tea. When officious medicine fails there are plants, in the background, the backyard, ready to heal with their tendril secrets. When in the absence of a pharmacy Krasotka poured the chamomile tea in a liquor bottle and stuck it up my cunt, to heal a yeast infection, on account of some dubious advice in an herbalism book written by a blonde woman with dreadlocks who’d been to Argentina once. Lying on a pillow with my hips up in the air, awaiting the douche of flowers. That was the second brew. The first time Krasotka accidentally poured the tea down the drain and kept the leaves. The look of horror on her face. But it’s okay, she said, recovering. This way, we can tell both our fortunes.
The aggressive radiator is almost loud enough to convince me to feel warmth, but it’s just sound, just loudness, just someone screaming about their ability to do something rather than having it that’s the true force of change. Nothing new. It’s not time. The chamomile tea cools, and then it goes in a shot glass, and then over my eye. Tilting my head back with the glass attached to roll my eye around in the liquid. The sacred phytochemicals bathing the infected matter in a soothing blend of there there. Clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise. The tea falls back in the glass.
Sergei shuffles into the kitchen and doesn’t ask to know what’s happening. He pops open the can of Café Bustelo and fiddles around with the French press. It needs to be cleaned so he dumps out the old grounds and rinses it. He is pale and unshaven, in his green and black tartan bathrobe, open, the waist tie dragging on the floor. His slippers, the fuzz inside them stamped down like abused inner ear antennae, kitty cat faces with one green eye and one blue, gingham knit in their ears. He boils the water and pours two rounded spoonfuls of coffee in the press and pours the boiling water over top. Standing with his back to the window he waits the minimum three minutes. The three minutes are up. He goes back to the living room and the shot glass goes in the sink.
The dawn starts to break. Lavender sunlight in my cloudy burning eye. In the middle of the bedroom in the little divot in the floor my arms lift to the sky. Wake up motherfucker. It’s a new fucking day. My arms lift and my lungs lift too, pulled up from the depths by a silver string, the soaked stomach jolt of sudden movement. Deep breath in. And out. Thank your lungs for showing up for you today. Thank your body and your breath. Thank your liver for showing up to do its job even though you keep kicking it in the kneecaps. Thank your mind for allowing itself to be stilled. Thank yourself for your ability to recognize suffering, and the courage to alleviate it. For believing that you, yourself, this particular aggregate of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, deserves to have its suffering relieved. Thank your pain for allowing itself to be heard. Now listen.
Inhale your arms up. Exhale down to the floor. What do you see? Are there words in the ruins? Don’t believe everything you read. What are words if not things? Words stand in for things or are things themselves, in fact are more things than things are, the way we hold onto them and live by them and for, as if they were anything more than waves of sound. Sound. Feel the weight of it. Can you hold it in your hand? Can you hold it up to your heart and feel its warmth, up against your ear like a shell? Char marks on the blasted floor, the eye of the marble rolling to the center where the wood starts to dip. It dips, but you balance. Your feet are flexible. Remember this next time you want a pair of shoes that costs four times the rent, and consider what accident of the imagination and failure of the spirit are responsible for a desire that can only be quelled by designer cages for your only hope of getting away. For their service, remember to thank graverobbers.
Thank the floor for supporting you. The beams for holding up the ceiling instead of letting it crash on the head of your early rising downstairs neighbor, making oatmeal. Fold a little deeper. Reach your head toward your knees. Stretch, not too deep. No need to snap or pull on account of your ego. You do not have to be a ballerina. But beyond that, you do not need to be a ballerina. Remember want versus need. Thank your hamstrings for the strain, your cold muscles for warning you about the ways in which you go too far. Acknowledge your edge and respect it. Thank your ego for ignoring these vital messages. For pushing ahead with your own hubris-scented humanness. You are marvelous in your dull ambition, and your lacks. Breathe in.
Ardha uttanasana. Halfway lift. Thank your spine for lengthening, reaching the crown of your head forward, as if to smash straight through the wall. Headstrong pose. Imagine the crown of your head barreling through the brick. Pulling your shoulders back to touch one another. See how your neck lengthens? All that space you never knew you had. Dig your palms into your hip creases and feel the hardness of bones, the foundation of your body. This is what you’re made of. You are the product of a thousand years of love and fear. Turn your mind to your anxieties and worries. Are they worth their weight on the bones? Uttanasana. Forward fold. Plant your hands on the ground and step back. Push the earth away with your hands, feel the sinews spread your shoulder blades apart. Find the lightness in the difficulty. The molecules of air supporting you. Rock back and forth on the balls of the feet. This isn’t any harder than standing upright, you just have less practice with intentional intensity. But it’s time to practice. Remember that you are and have everything you need to survive. Your obsessions will not support you. Nothing you continue to want or need will support you.
Knowing this, are you afraid?
One more breath in. Roll forward. Chaturanga. Exhale as you lower down. Bend your elbows straight back, don’t splay. Look down and ahead, ears to the ground. Hear what the earth has to tell you. What you hear depends on what’s playing in your mind. Do you hear subterranean angels, or hellmouth screams from the Soviet hole? There’s more than one way to charge possibility. Shut your ears off and listen with a different organ. Heart. Full cobra, sacral chakra down. Belly and loins to the subterranean vibrations. Updog, heavenward. Release these terra firma holdings. Is your heart ready to open, your throat lifting to the sky? Not yet, not warm yet, listen deeper. Go down, all the way. Bhujangasana. Baby cobra. The asanas have animal names, connecting you to your animal nature, something we lost that perhaps wasn’t ours. Roll back down, forehead to the floor. Let your third eye touch the dust.
Balasana. Child’s pose. From the mad-eyed murderer to the solar saint, we are all, each one of us, no more and no less than children of god. Womb to tomb, tomb to womb. Clever rhymes that tie up our lives so pretty. Take a moment to check in with your intention, the reason for your effort today. What is this for? What’s making you move? Let it be stupid. Tied up in salvation you don’t have the words for. Push yourself up and back, hips high, into your fullest expression of abject submission to the universe. Downward facing dog.
You are finally learning surrender. Make space now. There’s more.
Lift your heels, bend your knees, look forward, and jump. Land. There’s the future. Slowly peel up, one vertebra at a time. Teachers say vertebrae like they don’t know it’s vertebra, but they do. We can all pass an anatomy test but we don’t think about how we sound when we talk, that’s the trouble. We talk to ourselves, like children. Repeating what we heard someone else say. Feel the crown of your head reach up and touch the palm of the divine. Make it rumple your hair. Call it daddy, why not. Play with the salvation you’re seeking. What is it there for, if not to be tried?
From here sink down into chair pose. Utkatasana. Sit into the discomfort. Everything you don’t want to sit with, sit with it. Grief and resentment and love and half love and all the not-love you feel. Make sure you can see all ten toes, lift them up and sink back in your seat, further than feels sustainable, further than you want, and feel the fire in your thighs, the fire in your shoulders, arms up, broaden across the collarbone, straight spine, tuck your tailbone, acknowledge the work of all the parts at once, stay there in your tight contortion, and breathe. Breathe because you can, because you can do that when you can do nothing else, tied up in ropes. Breathe down into the fire, flattening the soles of your feet against the hot stones. Belly button to spine. Lock yourself. Make a missile from the clampdown of your bandhas. Think of the samanas who could’ve stayed this way for days, weeks. But there is no endurance without an end. Arrive at the lethal limit and accept your gifts. One more deep breath in. Uttanasana.
The hardest thing to do is move intuitively but if you’re going to have any chance of arriving where you’re going that’s just what you’re going to have to do. Is it a good feeling, to not have a teacher? Does it free you, or make you panic? Are you wild in your unknowing, are you unrooted and unmoored, is this thing you’re feeling good or bad, are you still ascribing judgment and values to neutral things that happen, and happen, and happen? Are you married to your process? Did you mean your vows? Where does your body go, undirected? Notice it won’t go to bad places on its own. Not unless you force it. The body is self-protective. It does not stretch itself into horror. It is a loving instrument that wants to echo the eternal sound. Stop fucking with it. What have you been making it do? Are you making a xylophone out of your abdominals? Trust this aggregate. It knows its limits more than your mind does. The muscles know what to do, how to stretch, which corners of the earth to reach to. They want to move in all directions, they don’t need direction, they just need freedom and the release of the rope. Do this in memory of before you were human.
From here try to kick up into handstand. Just kick up. See what happens. Hips over shoulders. Detach yourself from the consciousness of the action. Kick up like you’re trying to kick God in the face. She deserves it. Whether you land it or not doesn’t matter. That’s how you trick fate. You can’t want anything too much because the universe will delight in not giving it to you, just to see you thrash. You know this already from the last thing you thought you’d die without and lost anyway. And here you are. Alive as all hell.
Getting to know the anatomy of your own reaching. How far will you go? How far do you need to? Far enough. Kick. Feel the strength in your shoulders. The only reason your feet are feet and your hands are hands is that you’ve spent your whole life balancing on your feet instead of your hands. Practice the other way. You’re a child. Ceasing to be a child is your choice and your choice only. Knowing this, what do you change? Remove yourself from tasting the fruits of your labor. Remove yourself from the fruit and the labor. Aim to be nothing but a pure soul particle meeting itself in the eradication of the eye. Tears falling. Blurred vision. Occipital headache singeing, singing. What is this body for if not to burn, to break apart, to place at the altar in sacrifice? What is this impulse for keeping sane self-preservation, believing in such things as self and sanity and their need to be preserved, resources unused in times of famine, go forth and know, kick the feet up to the sky, the wrist can be fixed later for the rush of air on the ankles, feel the sky open up for your saut dans le vide, the ground and life-saving tarpaulin kept in place this time because the divine image is not for looking at but for inhabiting.
Don’t be afraid.
Come down. There’s the ground. You’re safe, see that? All that fear and worrying for nothing. All that edgewise surmising for nothing. Outside the garbagemen come and do their rounds. Closed curtains, don’t worry, no one to see this ridiculous journey. No one to see. Let the eyes close, they’re tired from all that seeing. Expand the chest up with breath. Belly chest throat roof of mouth roof of skull, beat of breath into ceiling of heaven. Tap tap. Lift the trapdoor to the spiral staircase. The coil that leads nowhere we can see in this form, but what choice do we have but to climb? To let go of the stones and leap out of the lighthouse, and fall, holding nothing.
Our ascension is a bounce.