The performance artist sits, motionless, in the empty kitchen of a Russian and a Czech who are strangers to her. Deposited here by the poet to help save the life of the writer. In a city that holds no meaning for her. Looking out the window at an overcast sky, heavy with almost-rain. A very old stone bridge. Water. Birds. Lamps. An emptied-out self. She’s tired. She doesn’t know these people, this city. She’s drinking vodka in the morning from a small antique shot glass.
Somehow the burden of it—handing over her identity, agreeing to wait a month to be taken home—somehow, though it depresses her mind, it thrills her flesh. As if her body knows something she does not. She hates the flesh thrill, resents it, and yet she cannot not feel it. Like a fire just getting born. Something she carries against her chest like a beating heart. Letting her know she is alive.
The performance artist pulls the letter from the painter out from beneath her shirt. She has kept it there, in her bra against her tit, for three days. Day and night. Her skin smell on the envelope comforts her. At least she has this. This letter from the painter. Strange lifeline in this insane story they’ve abandoned her inside. On purpose she has not opened it. Especially not in front of the poet. On purpose she has guarded its contents like intimacy itself. For she loves him. She loves him more than her own life. She loves this man they have ejected from their fucking reality, so much that she almost can’t breathe thinking about him. In her heart and beyond she knows she is the only one who truly knows him. The only one willing to go all the way with him. Through the crucible of sex and art. Through the excess of him. Through the story of all their tangled-up lives, down into the hell of him, like Persephone. The man who nearly murdered his wife. The unapologetic alcoholic artist. A love unto death, if necessary. And he will fucking love this. That she did this thing. He will see that she is like him. And when this all ends, well, she’ll go wherever with him. No one will be able to stop her. And the two of them will make art and make love and leave the world of the rest of them. She drinks, and drinks, until things liquefy.
She brings the letter to her face, closes her eyes, and smells it. She can see his face, feel his body. Something like sapphires under her tongue. She slips a finger underneath where he has licked the paper with his own spit. She opens the envelope. She pulls the paper—thin white—from the envelope, her heart beating, beating:
Well, here it is.
I am leaving you.
By the time you read this, I’ll be in Paris in the arms of another woman. One I’ve known for years. One of many. This thing between us, it wasn’t anything. And now it’s gone sour, too complicated. I’ll have none of it. You are too close to the black hole of my past.
You know I am no good with words, so this will be abbreviated, but true. Or true enough. Fuck words anyway.
I’m giving you something though. A diptych of a life.
I will not be seeing you again. I’ve cleared all trace of you from my loft, and when I return, if you come here, I won’t let you in. Don’t try. I will never visit your loft again either. If I see you in the street, I won’t acknowledge you. You no longer exist. But I am giving you something. For your art. Try to remember that.
This will hurt.
1.
The year before I shot her, there was a night when we had an argument. One in a series. We were both skunk-ass drunk. At one point she grabbed a knife and ran into the bathroom—locked herself in there. I threw my weight against the door but nothing happened. I laughed. Then I slumped down on the floor against the door and fell asleep. When she opened the door, the first thing I saw was her blond bush—eye level. Then she thrust out her fucking arm and I saw my name, with blood like a dot-to-dot, carved into her arm. She immediately went back into the hole of the bathroom. I walked to the kitchen, grabbed a serrated bread knife, and hacked her name into my own arm in stick-man strokes. I still have the scar of her. The word of her. On my arm. In certain light.
2.
A year later, one night, I was deep into my drunk in the living room. It was peaceful. I was naked. She was in the bedroom asleep. I’d picked up a gun earlier in the day from a junkie I knew. A 9mm Beretta. I had the gun resting on my thigh, near my dick. I’d had it that way for hours. I heard her stir. She came into the living room. She was naked. The years of . . . what is it? Passion? Chaos? Death? In the air between us. I don’t know why. I pointed the gun at the wife of her. She lifted her hand up. I shot. I hit her hand and her shoulder. In the dark, she dropped to the floor like a beautiful felled black-and-blue goose. We didn’t move like that, the smell of the shot hanging in the air, for long minutes. Love is a gun.
There. Don’t say I never gave you anything.
Perhaps you can make your performance of this man and this woman into something. Art is everything.
You know, every street in Paris is wet. Every person in Paris has a dog. Every hand in Paris holds a cigarette. Every mouth in Paris is a kiss.
Last night I dreamt myself covered in paint; the paint may have been blood. It was warm, like a bath almost. It seemed to look good on my skin. Beauty. Death. The same. Drink yourself drowned. Cut your skin with knives. Fuck with your genitals. Paint a painting. Shoot a gun. American.
I tell you, it scares me what I have done to her.
It terrifies me, even.
And yet I am not sorry.
I am as deeply unsorry as a person could be.
There is nothing that one human will not do to another.
Ce n’est pas rien. Au revoir.
The performance artist. Her idea of herself . . . drifts weightless as an astronaut in her skull. Her chest hollows. Her body goes slowly numb. Her hair. Her face. Her hands. Nothing. The air she is breathing. Useless. Thoughtless.
She folds the letter back up and places it again against her skin. She pats it against her chest as if she is much older. She looks out of the window, but sight . . . sight just isn’t in her right now. She stands up. Puts a coat on. In a regular way. Thinking, it isn’t necessary. Just be molecules. Light. She gently wraps her neck in a blue wool scarf hanging next to the door—someone’s. She opens the door to the flat. Steps out. Closes it. She walks down the hallway. Down several flights of stairs, her feet on the steps not connected to anything.
She opens the big wooden door to the stage of outside. St. Petersburg. She steps out onto the walkway. Just be light. She stops, closes her eyes, takes in a big breath . . . blows it out slowly, like tiny white moths from her mouth. Like all the body’s memories leaving as light. In her head: a man leaves.
She walks to the bridge.
Stands dead center.
History makes the distance from the bridge to the water epic, dramatic, artful.
She places her hands on the historic stone. She looks down at the water, a kind of gray that is nearly black, washing sins away. City smells float around her. Pedestrians are perfectly absent. It begins to rain, lightly. Her age makes her look like a painting. The girl in pain or love. She leans over the ledge of things, her stomach and chest pressed hard against the stone. She can see the pink-and-white flesh of her hands. The blue of the wool scarf. She can hear the water so precisely it is like voices. Why, when she was a child, didn’t anyone teach her to swim? But she knows why. She was the imperfect child. Dumbed and drooling. Love lost to her from the get-go. She does not know where her father ever went. Her mother lost to philanthropy and activism in a celebrity world. The stone underneath her is as hard as anything in the world. Her ribs under her clothes no longer feel necessary. She lets the air leave her lungs. Molecules. Light. All the world’s a stage. We are all of us without origin. Who’s to say we were ever here at all? She closes her eyes. She can feel the letter against her chest, near her breast, where her heart should be. And then she pushes forward. The toppling body of a young woman with nowhere left to perform love.
Sometimes it takes so little to make an ending.