Don't Cry Stories Part 3

Which is exacdy what the feminist author did not do. I drained my second gla.s.s of wine. The feminist author-she told and then read her disturbing stories as if she were a lady at a tea party, as if there were no mystery, no darkness, just her, the feminist author skipping along, swinging some charming little bag, and singing about p.e.n.i.ses, la la la la la! I?

Another server wafted past, a young woman with her mind clearly on something else. I reached for another gla.s.s of wine, then changed my mind. Of course, someone might say-I can picture a well-dressed, intellectual lady saying it-well, why not? And rationally, there is no reason why not. These things are accepted now; these things are talked about in popular comedies on television. So why not? Because everyone knows such television shows are nonsense. Because glib acceptance does not respect the profound nature of the agonized face.

I reconsidered having another wine; looking for a server, I noticed that the Somali author, momentarily unpestered, was looking at me with a kindly expression. He was handsome, well dressed, and elegant. Impulsively, I crossed the room and introduced myself His hand was long, dry, and warm. He had come from New York, not Somalia. He came every year. When I told him it was my first time, he smiled.

"Are you enjoying yourself?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "though it's been a long time since I've had two quick drinks this early in the day"

He laughed, raised his winegla.s.s, and sipped from it.

"And you?" I asked. "Do you enjoy this?"

"Oh yes," he said. "One meets such curious people. And, of course, interesting people, too."

"What about her?" I indicated the feminist author, now chatting with her back to us. "What did you think?"

"Oh!" The Somali author laughed. "I've heard what she has to say many times-it's nothing new. But I did admire the panache with which she said it. Did you see Binyavanga speak on cultural rationalism?"

But we were interrupted by more people wanting his signature, and then it was time for his reading. "I hope you will come" he said.

The Somali author read from his award winner, the novel about civil war and familial bonds. He skipped through the book, reading excerpts from several chapters, starting with a tender love scene between a husband and his wife, who magically has two sets of b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the normal set augmented by a miniset located just under her rib cage. Their young son runs in and cries, "Are you going to give me a sibling?" Then the author jumped ahead, and suddenly there it was again: the agonized face. The son, now grown, is being pursued by a fat, whorish girl who claims he owes her a baby, even though she has AIDS and he is engaged to someone else. We learn that this very girl, an orphan who was briefly taken in by the family when she was fourteen, once s.e.xually attacked the grandfathe%| who responded by righteously kicking her in the face. When the mother learns that this s.l.u.t is back again, she decides to get a gun, humiliate the girl, and then kill her. The grandfather, though, does not want the mother on the street during the escalating civil unrest. "Leave her to me " he counsels; "there is, after all, something unfinished between us." He goes to the sons house to lie in . wait, and sure enough, the s.l.u.t comes calling. She's looking for the son, but when she finds grandpa, it doesn't matter; she wants his baby, too. He pretends to be asleep while she m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.es him She thinks, How beautiful his p.e.n.i.s is! She longs for his children! She mounts him, and the grandfather reports, with a certain gentlemanly discretion, that he and the s.l.u.t "went somewhere together." But nonetheless, almost as soon as they are done, the girl is mystically stricken with discharge and gross v.a.g.i.n.al itching; she runs down the road, scratching her crotch as she screams, "I itch! I smell!" The son is happily reunited with his fiancee, and the wife, his mother, finds new tenderness with her husband. The grandfather meditates on history.

If he had been an American or a Canadian man saying these things, he might've been booed as a misogynist. But an African man-no. It was wonderful, especially the way he read it-with the earned hauteur of a man who has seen war, persecution, and the two sides of the agonized face: the mother who is poignant in her open-legged vulnerability, and the visage of the female predator. Because for all its elegance, his voice-unlike the voice of the feminist author-did not try to hide reality: the pain and anger of the unsatisfied womb grown ill from lack of wholesome use, a fungal vector of want, thick with tumors, baby's teeth, and bits of hair inside each fibrous ma.s.s. Pitiful, yes, but also nasty, though we in the antiseptic West don't say so.

"Motherhood is the off-and-on light in the darkness of night," concluded the author, "a firefly of joy and rejoicing, now here, now there, and everywhere. In fact, the crisis that is coming to a head in the shape of civil strife would not be breaking in on us if we'd offered women as mothers their due worth, respect, and affection; a brightness celebrating motherhood, a monument erected in wors.h.i.+p of women."

The audience went wild.

In the big reception hall, we celebrated the Somali author with more drinks, and I caught up with the American novelist whose son actually had been nearly killed by a drunk driver. She was a good egg, hawk-nosed and plainly dressed, and she was having a stiff one. When I asked her, she said she'd disliked writing about the accident, but that if she hadn't written about it, she never would've been able to pay the medical expenses. We gossiped; we admired the Somali author. "I can't imagine an American writer saying something like that," she said. IA monument erected in wors.h.i.+p of women.' "

"I know," I said, "it was lovely." As long as you're the right kind of woman, I didn't say. I glimpsed the feminist author across the room from us, standing by herself, eating a fistful of grapes. The American writer was saying something about how irony is the most human of artistic methods, but I was thinking of something else. I was thinking of a girl I had known in high school named Linda Phoenix. She was a thin girl with a stark, downy back, who f.u.c.ked every boy, plus some girls. Jeff Lyer, an angry fat kid, brought pictures to school of her drunk and sucking someone's p.e.n.i.s, and people pa.s.sed them around the cafeteria, laughing or feeling sorry or just looking.

Across the room, two reporters approached the feminist author, with their tape recorders. I thought of the blurred pictures of Linda Phoenix. I thought of my daughter, standing before the mirror, pus.h.i.+ng her lower lip out, making seductive eyes. I thought of her sitting at the kitchen table, drawing scenes from her favorite book, Magic by the Lake. I thought of her frightened awake from a nightmare, crying, "Mommy, Mommy!" I remembered was.h.i.+ng her as a baby, using the spray hose from the kitchen sink to rinse s.h.i.+t from the swollen petals of her infant slit-a hole she may fall down if she opens it too early, a dark Wonderland of teeth and bones and crus.h.i.+ng force. The hole in life, a hole we cannot see into, no matter how closely we look.

I had had too much to drink and too little to eat, and for a drunken instant the hall became a courtroom, the authors and journalists members of a jury overspilling the box to cry out: Now hold on a minute! Are you completely out of your mind? It is one thing to express disdain for this so-called feminist, who may deserve it. Even the muddled atavism about rotten wombs full of baby teeth-well, it is loony and gross, but in the locked closet of our inmost heart, we can see how you might feel that way. But your daughter? What kind of mother are you? Leave her out of this grotesquerie, please!

And of course the imaginary jury was right. I would love Kira no matter how many boys she did what with, or girls, for that matter. Things are not like they once were. s.e.x and the City is on TV. Still, when I think of her as she will be-dripping with hormones and feelings, nursing the secret hurt of a seed about to burst into flower-it makes me uneasy. To think of her opening her warm spring darkness to any lout who wants it makes me feel sadness, followed by a surprising surge of anger (anger that includes an even more surprising burst of sympathy for my mother's anger, sympathy even for the time she slapped my face after she caught me and Donald Parker doing it in the rec room). But even as I feel the anger, even with my mother's anger crowding behind it-my mother, also single, now a mild alcoholic in old age, calling me to give me a piece of her mind about the latest nonsense on the news-even as I feel the anger, love rises up to enclose it. Inside love, anger still secretly burns-but it is a tiny flame. I can hold it like I once held my daughter in my body, a world within a world.

But just now I allowed myself to enter the little flame and feel it all the way. I did it in the spirit of the feminist author-and to show her up, too. So, she can be the innocent girl and the prost.i.tute and the author, eh? Well, imagine a full deck of cards, each card painted with symbols of woman-the waif, the harlot, the mother, the warrior, the queen-until the last card, on which we see Medea, a knife in her raised, implacable hand. Yes, there I am and there any woman can be, even though we don't stand up on stages and make a fuss about it. And we can skip lightly back through the deck, carelessly touching each card as we do, before returning to the card of the good mother, or the lover, or, in my case at this moment, the stolid female worker in my brown skirt and flat shoes. Every woman knows all about everything on those cards, even if her knowledge is wordless and half-conscious. It is wordless knowledge because it is too big for words. Sometimes, it is too big for us. Stand up onstage and put words on it and you make it small-and then you say it's s.e.xist when people don't like it.

Except that, if I am going to be honest, I have to admit something that weighs in on the side of the feminist author just slightly. The anger and upset that I let myself feel, that mere hot pinp.r.i.c.k in the ardent wetness of love-when you let yourself feel it, when I let myself feel it, it is, was, very strong. Strong and primitive. Enter in through that tiny spot of fire and come out in a h.e.l.l of shape-s.h.i.+fting and destruction. In that h.e.l.l lives a beast that will devour anything in front of it, and that beast is especially partial to woman. Why not split her open all the way, just for the pure animal joy of rending and tearing? For a woman even to skirt this place is dangerous because she has the open part. She needs rules, structures, intact shapes to make sure the openness doesn't get too open. For a man, it is different-he can align his strength with the monster and tear the prey with its teeth. For a second, he can walk triumphant in a place of no place. Then he can say the woman lured him there.

That is why the grandfather in the Somali author's book wants to f.u.c.k the s.l.u.t. He tells his son that because she has no children, he feels sorry for her, that he is f.u.c.king her out of sympathy. But he does not seem to feel sorry for her. He wants her; you could even say he needs her, for through her he can descend into a terrible, thrilling world and then come back in his suit and tie and be good The Somali author almost acknowledges this in his frank fascination with the s.l.u.t. For if she were not there, how could he go to that place of no place? He would have to discharge his anger and contempt on Mom with Double b.o.o.bs, and this would be more than anybody could bear-for, like me, he has more love than anger. How unfair that men get to go to this mysterious place and come back whole. How n.o.ble that the feminist author stands up onstage and tries to speak for the s.l.u.ts they go there with, even if she fails. Even if her story makes something terrible into something light and silly, even if she herself is light and silly.

This is what I was thinking as I sat in the hospitality lounge, nursing a seltzer water with lemon, after attending a reading by a man from the prairies who had written a prizewinning novel about a heroic woman who rescues an orphan from an abusive foster parent. I was sitting by the window, and, in the sunlight, the room seemed composed of impossible purple and mahogany hues. Caterers discreetly moved in and out, replacing platters of food and trays of drinks.

Soon I would leave, pick up my daughter, and take her for pizza. We would go home and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then maybe that strange anime show, the one we stumbled on last week-a show where the heroine, the good girl, has no arms and the s.e.xy villainess is powerful and crude. It looked like the cartoon s.l.u.t was trying to kill the heroine and steal her boyfriend. But instead, in the middle of a gun battle between hero and villain, the s.l.u.t (admiring the armless girl's purity) took a bullet to save her and died with the heroine in her arms. When the embrace broke, the good girl magically stood up with arms of her own and proceeded to beat the c.r.a.p out of the bad guy. "Yeah, there's gonna be some changes around here!" she announced. Rock music played.

"Weird," said Kira, and, yes, it was.

I drank my seltzer water and reviewed my notes.

Early in my career, I did a piece on the then-burgeoning phenomenon of TV talk shows, focusing on a particular show, a show that at the time had made its reputation by sympathetically telling the stories of victims, stories that had once been too shameful to tell. Rape was a mainstay of the show, and I was present on the set for an episode that featured two women who had been raped by coworkers in the workplace, one of whom had succeeded in pressing charges, while the other had lost her case. The successful woman was a flamboyant redheaded beauty who came on yelling, "I just want to say I've got a shotgun ready for any sumb.i.t.c.h who tries it again!"

But first came the defeated one, a chubby middle-aged woman who tried to hide her ident.i.ty by sitting with her back to the camera and wearing an ill-fitting wig. The man she'd accused of raping her was there, too, and he had a lot to say. "She go like this," he said, "on the desk!" He stood up and bent over, putting his hands out as if bracing himself. "And I say, 'No! I don't want that!* "

The awful thing was, you could totally picture her bent over the desk. Even viewing her from the back, we could see her bending nature-the mild, gentle slope of her shoulders, the sweetness of her excess flesh, the way she turned in her chair to yell, "No! That's not the truth!" Her anger was like a clumsy animal, and you could hear in it the soft puzzlement of a person who does not understand cruelty.

"'You are an alcoholic?" yelled the accused rapist. "Everybody knows!"

"I offered you one drink!" she cried. "I thought you were lonely!"

"You are a wh.o.r.e! You give VD!"

"No!" cried the woman. "No!" And then she just wept.

A stout little woman came on to talk about rape. She planted her feet, set her small barrel body in a "no bull" stance, and gave it to us straight: Rape was bad, and she was prepared to duke it out with anyone who said it wasn't.

"I agree!" screamed the accused rapist. "I agree!"

The wigged woman continued to weep. n.o.body looked at her. In swept the triumphant redhead, who bellowed about her rights. "And I just hope the rapists who are watching the show right now understand that we aren't going to take it anymore!" she cried. The audience cheered. The wig woman wept. The talk-show hostess strode about the set, blond and bristling with savoir faire. She had featured progress, but she had not forgotten the agonized face. Unlike the feminist author, she had put it right up there on the screen.

But wait! The feminist author was not talking about rape, was she? Being a prost.i.tute is not the same thing as being raped, is it? And of course they are not the same. But for the purposes of my discussion here-for the deepest layer of my discussion-they are close enough! The rape victim on TV was treated like a prost.i.tute on an official pro-victim show, and the feminist author-well, it probably wasn't fair to talk about her that way in the pamphlet, even if n.o.body read it, even if it was true. Can you blame her for not wanting to be like the poor, hurt woman on the talk show, preferring to prance around, swinging her little handbag, instead? Can you blame her for trying to put a good face on it? For talking so loudly about things that have been used to shame women for centuries?

Wordless knowledge can be heavy and dark as the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes you want the relief of dryness, of light, bright words. Sometimes you might be on the side of a smart-aleck middle-aged woman who thumbs her nose at the agonized face and f.e.l.l.a.t.es a snotty, s.e.xy man, just for a dumb little thrill. Sometimes you wish it could be that easy.

I looked at my watch. I drank my seltzer and felt myself return to sobriety. I listened to the prairie author entertain a group with a story about how he had been so drunk the previous night that, in a muddled attempt to find the bathroom, he had left his hotel room naked and had roamed the halls until a "beautiful woman" from room service had escorted him back. Everyone laughed. A harried caterer wiped her hand on her rumpled white s.h.i.+rt and made a disgusted face. I looked out the windo'vy; people strolled the sidewalks like sensitive grazing animals, full of trust that what they needed was to be found there on the grounds of the hotel. I heard the prairie writer cry, "And she had the most incredible a.s.s!" There was delighted laughter.

Suddenly, I was flooded with goodwill toward the feminist author. I didn't even care that she had refused to speak with me. She wrote well enough and she was an articulate, perhaps even socially significant, figure. Why should she be dismissed, while a man who ran around naked in public and yelled about peoples a.s.ses was coddled? And yet... some part of me was still troubled by the issue of the agonized face. Because the face is not only about rape and pain.

I remember how it was with my husband sometimes, or, rather, how it was on occasion, or, really, maybe just once. It was before I became pregnant with Kira. We had not been getting along, and we were trying to have a special time together. We lit a candle and we undressed and lay on the bed, outside the covers. We rubbed each other with oil. It was relaxing, and awkward, too-it would feel really good and then he would have a sneezing fit. Or I would turn his foot at a strange angle during the foot ma.s.sage and he would open his eyes and tactfully try to pull it a more comfortable way. When he touched between my legs, I wasn't even thinking about s.e.x anymore. His presence was physical and insistent, like the smell of a wild animal, like a bear, grunting and searching for food, picking berries with the elegant black finger of its tongue-but my mind had wandered away: It wandered like someone browsing a junk store, its attention taken this way and that by each gewgaw, the faded, painted face of each figurine: an argument with my sister, a birthday gift for a friend, the novel I was supposed to review, and, like a tiny reflection on the curve of a gla.s.s, a scene from the novel (hero and heroine in tense conversation on a fire escape at dusk, red flowers climbing the wall, traffic darting below). Every few moments, my attention would return to my husband, and I would feel what he was doing, and caress his rough fur and then dart away again. Except with each return, I darted away more slowly, and then I didn't dart at all. His touch had entered my nervous system without my knowing it. The images in my head softened and ran together, colorful, semi-coherent, and still subtly flavored with the novel. The blunt feel- ings of my lower body came rolling up in dark, choppy waves. He put his hand on my abdomen and said, "Breathe into here." I did. He didn't have to touch me anymore; the flesh between my legs was hot and fat. He touched me with his genitals. I took his large bony head in my hands. We kissed, and we entered a small place sealed away from every other place. In that place, my genitals were pierced by a ring attached to a light chain. He held the chain in his hand and we both looked at it, smiling and abashed-Whoa! How did that get there? Then I became an animal and he led me by the chain. We entered into stunning emptiness; we emerged. He moaned and bit my shoulder with his hot, wet mouth.

Afterward, we smiled, rolling in each other's arms, laughing at ourselves, laughing at the agonized face. But we couldn't laugh at the emptiness. It was like entering an electrical current, pa.s.sing first into a landscape of animate light, and then into pitch-darkness, warm with invisible life, the whispering voices, the dissolving, re-forming faces of ghosts and the excited unborn. Everything horrible to us, everything nice to us. We did not conceive Kira at that time; I think that happened one sleepy morning when, without even realizing it, we entered emptiness again and brought a tiny female out of it.

My husband and I are not friends, but we are amicable. Once, after we split up, I called him late at night, after I'd had a terrible dream, and I was glad for his kind response. But I have never called him like that since, and I'm sure he is glad of it. He is now another wholly separate creature with whom I can negotiate, chat, joke, fight, cooperate with or not. But I remember that moment between us, and it is represented to me by the agonized face. It is easy to be ashamed of the face-and sometimes the face is shameful. But it is also inextricably bound up with the royalty of female nature. It symbolizes our entry into emptiness because it is a humiliation of our personal particularity, the cherished definition of our personal features. Men don't go there because they can't or because they are too scared. (Okay, maybe gay men go there. I'm sure they'd say they go there. But somehow I doubt it.) So they pretend to look down on us for it-but really, they know better.

It is this weird combination of pride and shame that makes you want to snap at the feminist author, like a dog in a pack. Perhaps it is also what gives her an audience; I don't know. But for her to raise the issues that she sweetly raised in her earnest elf voice-the middle-aged woman pretending that humiliation is an especially smart kind of game, together with the casual mention of her experience with prost.i.tution-and yet to leave out the agonized face? No way If she had told the same story, even with the prost.i.tution attached, and let us see the face-that would've been one thing. We could've sat back and nodded to ourselves, a little contemptuous maybe, yet respecting the truth of it. But to tell those stories and pretend there's no agony-it makes you want to pinch her, like a boy in a gang, following her down the street while she tries to act like nothing's wrong, hurrying her step while someone else reaches out for another pinch. It makes you want to chase her down an alley, to stone her, to force her to show the face she denies.

Which in a metaphorical sense is what I did with my article. When I turned it in, the managing editor said, "Whew! She sure p.i.s.sed you off, didn't she?" And I said, "Do you think it's too much?" And the editor said, "No, if that's what you feel . . * Although, of course, I didn't say what I "feel. " I couldn't, because it could not be printed in a newspaper, I had to speak in the fast brute code of public discourse and count on people to see the subtler shapes moving in the depths below the conventional grid of my words.

The day after my piece appeared, there was some discussion among the younger girls at Quick! who did not like it that I had failed to "support" a woman artist, who felt that I used unfair, s.e.xist language. And, privately, when I think of the feminist author, standing there at the podium in her long skirt and her gla.s.ses, blinking nervously, I almost agree that it was not fair. But fair or not, I was right. The agonized face and all it means is one of the few mysteries left to us on this ragged, gutted planet. It must be protected, even if someone must on occasion be "stoned." Even if that person is someone for whom we feel secret sympathy and regard.

And besides, she wasn't really stoned. She will go on writing her books, making her money, standing up on stages. She will probably do better than I. I think of the night Kira and I watched the strange anime story about the armless heroine, and the villainess who dies. As Kira was getting ready for bed, I asked her if she found the story scary.

"No," she said, yawning. "But it was sad the other girl had to die." She paused, climbing into bed. I bent to pull the covers up to her chin. "But even if she died, she won anyway," she continued,. "Because it was her arms that beat the bad guy"

"That's right," I said, and kissed her. That's right. As I turned out the light, I thought fleetingly about an article I might write on what you can learn from your children. Then I went to make myself a drink before preparing to get started on the next days work.

Mirror Ball.

He took her soul-though, being a secular-minded person, he didn't think of it that way. He didn't take the whole thing; that would not have been possible. But he got such a significant piece that it felt as if her entire soul were gone. As soon as he had it, he not only forgot that he'd taken it; he forgot he'd ever known about it. This was not the first time, either.

He was a musician, well regarded in his hometown and little known anywhere else. This fact sometimes gnawed at him and yet was sometimes a secret relief; he had seen musicians get sucked up by fame and it was like watching a frog get stuffed into a botde, staring out with its face, its splayed legs, its private beating throat distorted and revealed against the gla.s.s. Fame, of course, was bigger and more fun than a bottle, but still, once you were behind the gla.s.s and blown up huge for all to see, there you were. It would suddenly be harder to sit and drink in the anonymous little haunts where songs were still alive and moving in the murky darkness, where a girl might still look at him and wonder who he was. And he might wonder about her.

It was at one of these places that he met her. She was drinking with a friend of a friend. She was slim and elfin, with dark hair, long fingers, and tapered fingernails. She held her drink as if she held a bit of liquid flame. She smiled at him; he smiled back The friend of a friend started talking about a movie she had seen, a complicated fantasy in which a hero and heroine fall into a hidden world running parallel to ours, and discover that the two worlds are on a collision course. The elfin girl punched him lightly on the hip. "We should go," she said. There was a loud crash behind the bar. They both started and turned to look. They turned back to face each other at the same time.

They went to the movie that weekend and then to a bar afterward.

It must be said: She should not have shown him her soul. She flashed it again and again, as if it were a bauble meant to entice him, or a hand mirror flas.h.i.+ng signals from a dark and lonely place. Everybody knows about dark and lonely places, he thought. But why was she sending these signals without knowing who he was and if he cared to read them? Still, her constant flas.h.i.+ng was dramatic and attractive. Images from the movie they had just seen hovered about her. A woman in black strode through the city with a gun; a woman in white fell on her knees before a killer. The camera lingered on her terrified face; the hero pounded on the door. The girls eyes flashed like her bright, nervous soul.

"Do you know that vintage-record store on Sanchez and Eighteenth?" he asked.

She shook her head and smiled.

"It's got a mirror ball in the window. It flashes over the whole street at night. Your eyes remind me of it."

She looked down, her small Ups in a sweet pinch. Her soul was very visible, and right then, he didn't care why; it seemed natural and lovely. He embraced her, and for a moment he felt that holding her was like holding a bit of liquid flame.

111 show it to you," he said. "It's right around the corner from me."

She looked up. "Yeah, right," she said, and the sweet pinch became a pungent smirk. She took her gla.s.s and swallowed the rest of her drink with a tart little face. He felt annoyed, but he walked her home anyway.

It was a cold fall night with a feeling of secret pockets and moving shadows. They walked past a park full of human shadows, drunks, crackheads, and vagrant kids, half-visible and half-audible in the dark. Cars rolled through pools of street light; blurred faces and pale hands appeared and vanished, on their way somewhere else. She put her cold little hand in his pocket, taking the tips of his fingers in her grip, and he felt as if he were in a fairy tale where the hero is led into the forest by an enchanted ball of light. She looked up at him and said something, and once again her soul flashed in her eyes.

When they reached her door, she invited him in, and her invitation had the same tart face he'd seen at the bar. He followed her slim figure down a long dark hall that smelled of onions. Squalid electronic music came from behind a door. The door opened and a roommate emerged, wearing a short robe with a cat face on it. She was introduced in motion, and her gleaming eyes went from the girl to him and back as she continued down the hall. Another girl sat before the TV in the living room and yet another was in the kitchen making instant macaroni and cheese. There were dirty dishes, a s.h.i.+ny garbage pail, fruit on the counter, notes tacked up on the fridge with colored magnets (magenta and orange).

The enchanted ball of light paled in the bright room; he glanced at his watch. The macaroni roommate was telling him how much she'd loved his last record. She had forthright blue eyes and a muscular red arm that stirred the milk into the gla.s.s bowl while he talked. His elfin date smiled and petted the sharp-cut hair at her temples with both cold hands. She glanced at him, and there it was again-the forest and the ball of light.

Who was she that she should have this? He sincerely wanted to know.

When she led him to her room behind the kitchen, he followed. She lay on her bed, eyes full of invitation. He sat beside her. He said, "I usually like to get to know a girl better," even though it wasn't true. "Why?" she said. "Can't this just be for now?" He felt insulted, although he didn't realize that was what he felt. She lay like she was posing in a mirror, except that she was trembling slightly under the pose. He felt like he wanted to take her and throw her away; he didn't realize that, either. He kissed her. She rose through her body to meet him. He touched between her legs; she opened her pelvis and recklessly unfurled her soul. He felt like a man in a small boat under which a huge sea creature has pa.s.sed, causing the boat to pitch gently. Like a man in a boat, he could chase it or run from it, and he picked chase. If he felt it on her lips, he put his mouth on her Ups. If he found it on the palm of her hand, he opened her hand and licked it up. Her soul darted here and there, sensitive as any creature, tipping her center of balance back and forth as it oscillated.

She liked this, and if she had any fear, she did not take it seri' ously. He liked it, too, so much that he could barely concentrate on the chase. Sensation nearly overwhelmed him; his will strained almost to the breaking point when he felt her soul gather its vast-ness in one small spot, pulling so hard that it yanked him off the boat. He felt her all about him in a tingling feminine myriad; out of this myriad appeared formless spirit that lived in the form of their bodies, touching their eyes, their mouths, their limbs, their geni-tals. The unknown rose up through their souls and became joined with the known in the form of feelings. Something hot and glowing flew from her. It was joined with Ardor, and it compelled him; it compelled the part of his soul that was joined with Hunger. He reached for it, and she did not hold it back. She cried out, delirious and ignorant of her danger. Hunger snapped shut its jaws, and her soul, which should have filled the room with her, contracted and went silent. Her cry was clipped off with a sharp, bewildered gasp. Her liquid flame was out, and she was just another girl who shared a flat with too many other girls.

Still-he was not indecent-he felt tenderly toward her body, and toward his own body, too, and he held her close while she buried her face against him. He could sense her diminishment, and that made him feel protective toward her. He meant it when he kissed her good night and told her he'd call her. But out in the hall (which still smelled of onions), he changed his mind. He weighed her good qualities as he walked home in the interesting light of 4:00 a.m but he did it like a man counting pocket change, yawning and half-interested. When he got home, Hunger yawned, too. He dropped her soul on the floor, where it quickly became invisible to him. He forgot her.

Because the dark-haired elfin girl was also a secular-minded person, she didn't know he'd taken a part of her soul any more than he did. But she knew she would not hear from him again. And she knew something was gone. She woke the next day feeling bereft and heartsick. She sulked and drooped around her flat while her roommates exchanged knowing glances. She vacillated be*-tween anger and contempt and terrible longing, and a sense that she must see the young man again no matter what. Because she was a rational person, she was sure that her feelings were illusory. Because she was a proud person, she was determined that she should not act on her feelings and call him. Rational and proud, she controlled her feelings by categorizing them in terms of obsession and projection. "I don't even know him," she said. "I'll get over it." And she waited for it to pa.s.s, much as she might wait for the end of a flu.

What made it worse: Her soul was connected to her through her brain. This was not a fault or a virtue; she was just born that way. Heart, viscera, genitals, brain-none is better than the other; it's a matter of where the soul has found a place to cling. The brain is not higher in moral or celestial terms, nor is a person with a soul connected to the brain always unusually bright. But such connection can give the soul a kind of shocking electricity that will make it stay up talking its head off for nights on end. Now he had it and it was talking to him.

He did not understand where the talking was coming from and he did not like it. The soul spoke in images of sight and sound that were quick and multiple, and which changed form by blending into one another. Because the young man had seized a piece of the soul linked to Ardor, many of these images were about love. But the glowing unknown attached to Ardor was, in the soul of this girl, Effacement. And so the pure, exquisite voice of her soul's love could flowingly transform, for instance, into the shape of a naked woman on her hands and knees, holding a knife in her hand, poised as if to cut her own face. In the physical world, a picture like this would describe insanity and suicide. In the world of this particular soul, it described a mystery of Ardor and Effacement, a mystery the girl was expressing in human form on the night she invited the boy to have her. The soul addressed itself to the girl, innocently and literally mirroring her actions-and she could still hear it, albeit dimly. She did not hear it with her conscious mind; she heard it like she heard her own breath, without being aware of it. And because the young man had possession of it, he heard it, too- and it was not like his breath.

He did not see the naked woman in his mind's eye; he would never have allowed himself to become conscious of something so violently ugly. But he sensed it in his body, and sensed why it was there. Thoughts of the girl came to him, and with those thoughts, fear that he didn't understand. Because he didn't want to be afraid, he had contempt for her. He thought that would work.

The girl tried to feel contempt for the boy, too, but it is hard to have contempt for a person who's made off with part of your soul. She went about her life-her job at a used-clothing store, her once-a-week volunteer stint at the Outreach Center for homeless youth, her evenings out with friends. Outwardly, she did not appear much changed by the misalignment; the first layer of her thoughts was more or less the same, logical and competent enough to get her through the day. But the next layer down, her mind was slowly becoming disintegrated and febrile, unstable on its primary support. Her perception was both heightened and dulled; she would suddenly weep at the sight of an old woman on the bus, or bewilder a friend with her excited a.n.a.lysis of a television character. But the intensity of feeling was misplaced and did not satisfy her. Her mind seized on triviality and substance without being able to tell the difference between the two; she went through it all like a computer on a search, looking tirelessly for what she lacked without knowing what it was.

And constant through it all was the memory of the boy she had so casually taken into her body. He was now always present for her.

more overtly than she was present for him. She thought of him against a vast, open sky, with a halo of piercing white. She thought of him astride a leopard, light and graceful in mid-leap. She thought of him moving in an aura of electrical fire, his heart huge and glowing with blue fire. She did not realize that these pictures came from her own soul, which was steadfastly signaling her from the boy's room. She thought she was seeing the boy's fantastical nature. And so she overruled her pride and called him. In two weeks, she left two messages on his answering machine. They went unreturned. She thought, I was very stupid just to have s.e.x with him. I loved him, and I degraded us both. I am a terrible woman. I love him and now I will never see him again. Tears ran down her face.

Meanwhile, the young man was having his own difficulties. Although he was quick to be insulted by a girl who didn't seem to take him seriously, he generally didn't take girls seriously But serious or not, he'd regularly made off with prize bits of their souls: One (Gentleness) sat quietly, chewing its cud, one (Forbearance) grew up his wall like ivy, and one (Instinct) blundered dazedly around in the closet, looking for release. They were pacific and untroublesome, subtle feminine presences that soothed and grounded him-until now. The newly stolen soul was so talkative, so increasingly resdess, that it had gotten all the others going; if he could've seen the female souls cl.u.s.tered in his room, they might've looked like s.e.xy juvenile delinquents hanging around a street corner, smoking and muttering. It wasn't just the girls, either. His soul was starting to get in on it, too. The new captive was talking to it and it was beginning to talk back-or at least half of it was. For this was a young man with a soul in two parts; he'd split it up so it would be harder to get.

He'd done this when he was about two. He'd done it at his mother's advice; she had done it early in life herself She advised her son to follow her example after his father had walked away and left them in their small brick house. His mother was glad she had kept part of her soul back from her former husband, and she thought her son should learn to do the same. When she sat on his bed at night, singing lullabies and pop songs, he heard her advice, not in the songs, but in her supple voice. Her words would say, "You've got to hide your love away," but he understood that meant "hide your soul." Not all of it, just the vulnerable part. And, as he lay on the verge of dreams and sleep, she would show him how. One half of her smiled and bent to kiss him, and the other vanished in the dark like a cat. And, in the moment between waking and sleep, he followed her lead. The bright, strong half of his soul smiled back at his mother and received her kiss, and the weak part of him withdrew, even deeper than she. For although he took after his mother enough to follow her advice, he could not split so easily His fragile soul hid too deep inside itself. It made the darkness into which it fled a thing of shape and substance: a tiny model of his childhood home, except the model had no windows and only one door, which was always locked. The strong soul, out in the world of light and movement, forgot his fragile brother. The dark house became a prison and the soul inside a shapeless, nearly voiceless ma.s.s of pain that did not stir except in the young man's deepest dreams.

Until now, that is. The chattering soul of the infernal brain girl was everywhere, including outside the prison, tapping on the walls and whispering through the bricks. Her terrible pictures penetrated the thick walls of the prison and the soul inside saw and understood-for he had been effaced for a very long time. The pictures did not seem terrible to him; on the contrary, their violence gave him hope because they confirmed what had happened to him. In the language of the soul, his eyes spoke to the girl through the prison wall in feelings, words, sights, and sounds.

Naturally, this response only increased the girl's pain. On top of her own soul calling out to her, she was hearing from him, too, in the most confusing way possible. She heard him like the American sailors searching the Baltic for a wrecked Russian submarine at the bottom of the ocean heard, with their elaborate sonar, cryptic tapping, which they could not be sure of as signals, and which did not help them rescue the doomed crew. The signals of his soul were like this tapping, which could be anything or nothing, and they haunted her day and night. Day and night she heard him, and nothing she knew about obsession and projection could help her. | She wanted desperately to buy his records and bathe herself in his voice; she didn't because she knew that would only enflame her. But now all music was about him, and she heard his voice in every singer. And she craved music almost as much as she craved the boy. Where her soul had once held s.p.a.ce, there was now a ragged hole, dark and deep as the pit of the earth. At the bottom of it ran boil' ing rivers of Male and Female bearing every ingredient for every man and woman, every animal and plant. Without the membrane of her soul to buffer and interpret the raw matter of the pit, her personality was now on the receiving end of too much primary force. Music temporarily filled the empty s.p.a.ce, soothing her and giving shape to the feelings she could not understand.

She went with her friend Angelique to see a live band with a powerful woman singer. The woman sang like her songs were giant weird-shaped things pulling her this way and that as they came through her body and out her mouth. Her songs rose through the room in huge moving tableaux that dissolved in the darkness, then rose again-fantastic pictures heard as sound by the clumsy ear, but seen vividly by the souls present. The songs reflected these souls and spoke their language: Emotion, thought, sound, image, wordlessness, and words mixed together in the place between the life of this world and the pit.

But because the girl's soul was missing, the music didn't reflect her; rather, it filled her, and she reflected those around her. She experienced these reflections as a feast, as if she were a clear pool with senses and a mind, glutted on the sights that pa.s.sed through it. She wandered away from her friend into the live darkness, blooming with the painted eyes and lips of a hundred stories. The rest room was a burst of light and filth, rus.h.i.+ng water and voices. A young pregnant woman in high-heeled boots and a fur collar laughed and shook water off her fingers, as if she were scattering tiny jewels into the air. A sparkling bracelet flashed on her wrist. She smiled into the mirror and rubbed her belly, and this double reflection was delicious to the girl.

Still, she was full of humiliation and pain. She was full of anger at the boy and fear of him because she believed he'd caused her suffering. But because she still heard, without knowing what she was hearing, the plaintive message of his trapped soul, her abjection and anger were strangely mixed with tenderness and pity. She came out of the bathroom staggering a little; she already felt drunk.

Meanwhile, onstage, the singer was singing about love. She stood still with her naked legs apart, as if the song were splitting her open and offering her, whether she was wanted or not. Offering layer by layer, until she was splayed so wide that her spine was made to offer its long, sensitive nerves. It was not an abject song; it was proud. It said, See how I can open. And at the end, when she put her legs together with a quiet "Thank you," it said, See how I can close again. The crowd was still and rapt, receiving her, honoring her, acknowledging all things that open, including themselves. Bouncers and bartenders presided with nimble grace and witness. They had been there a thousand nights and they knew it already.

But the girl, who had opened with the song, could not close again She found Angelique standing alone with her arms wrapped around herself, her teeth clamped against the rim of her paper cup. When she saw the girl, she took her teeth off the cup, leaving a dark, blurred imprint of her lips. "What's wrong?" she said.

"Oh!" Heavily, the girl put her arms around her friend and laid her head on her shoulder. She rubbed her cheek against her denim jacket and, shuddering, felt the movement of every stranger's reflection flitting through her. Especially, and gratefully, she felt Angelique.

Angelique was a chunky redhead with a beautiful face: big lips, scarred skin, and green eyes that were watchful and pa.s.sive at the same time, like an animal's. Except her eyes were sad, too. Once they'd gone to L.A. and stayed on Venice Beach for a few days with some Mexican boys they'd just met. The boys had renamed them. They looked at the girl and said, "You'll be . . . Prestige." To Angelique, they said, "And you're Infinity." They were joking, but they were also right: Angelique had a window in her soul and Infinity poured through it, slow and sorrowful as dust. But while Infinity can be sorrowful, it can be calming, too. Right now, for the girl, that desolate calm was like a draught of opium. She shuddered again; in this borrowed Infinity, the boy was just one tiny star among thousands, speeding past.

Abruptly, Angelique shrugged her shoulder and stepped away.

"What's wrong?" she asked again. The girl looked up, to see Infinity staring at her with the face of a worried office mate.

"Nothing," she said, straightening. "I'm just drunk." She looked at the stage, but instead of seeing the singer, she saw the boy, sitting next to her at the bar. He was talking about the movie they had seen. In amazement, she gazed at this ordinary boy who had apparently destroyed her. Help me, she said to him. Please help me. I don't understand what is happening.

And he heard her. Her soul, still in his possession, made sure of that. He was sitting in a bar, half-listening to his drinking partner talk about the ghosts in his apartment while he brooded about his music. His songwriting had not been going well. He was used to writing music that was light and lovely; it had no weight because all the young man's darkness and heaviness was concentrated in the prison house. It could've been a good thing artistically that he was finally hearing from the forgotten soul inside it; he could've used the weight of sorrow in his songs. But since it had been awakened by the foreign agency of the hijacked female, its effects came through an alien sensibility and were distorted. He felt chaotic inside, his thoughts like tiny boats scattered on a strange sea with a cold, unknowable heart.

The ghosts, his friend said, had come out of their usual comer and had taken to floating up around the bed as he lay in it, even floating between him and the books he read before going to sleep. The young man smiled.

"Why don't you try slamming a book on them?" he asked.

The friend said something, but he didn't hear it. He thought the ghost thing was ridiculous, and anyway, he had noticed a girl sitting across from him. She was beautiful, with dark, heavy-lidded eyes exaggerated by makeup, and an almost overly full mouth. She looked at him, frank and confident in her beauty There was a black bat tattooed on her clavicle.

Well, chaos was not unfamiliar to him. In daily life, his emotions were chaos. He let himself become a vessel for them, letting feeling roar through him, pulling him around like a kite, boiling him like water in a kettle, dissolving him in a whirl of elements. Except that normally he could go into his studio and make order. He could make songs that were satisfying containers, for the kite, the kettle, the whirl of elements-he could put each in its place. The. things he was feeling now did not fit into the songs he was used to making.

Thinking he had smiled at her, the bat girl smiled back. Her smile slit open her personality, and out of it tumbled sultry little demons with black curly hair, bright eyes, and naked bottoms. He let himself be distracted. He dropped down into another layer of drunkenness. One of the litde demons hiccoughed and sat down heavily.

That's when he heard her say Help me. He receded more deeply into drunkenness, and, with a little shock, felt her acutely. She was reaching out to him, but he didn't know for what. He stepped deeper into himself, into the little swift-moving stream of music that always played inside him, a stream of songs running together with memory. His mother's smile was there, the one she had smiled when she was young and beautiful and ready to disappear into the dark. Her smile ran together with the smiles of girls he had loved, or tried to. Mother became an old radio song that cascaded into dozens of songs, sweet and cheap, with something real hidden inside each of them Still he heard the call slow and repeated- for help.

He had no ill will toward the girl. On the level that he heard her, he would've been willing to help her. But he had no idea how. He propelled himself back up into his personality and stopped hearing her.