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Strata

Lidia Yuknavitch

the grammar of movement

     I move.
     Subject verb.
     She moves closer to me.
     Subject verb object.
     I never tell her my name. I never tell her I stopped using it. She says she'll refer to me in her notes and tapes as A. Who is B, I wonder, who C?

rendezvous

     That is the way it is now. Those are the terms I understand. We have an understanding now, not like two people who know each other. We will never know each other. Like two breaths of air meeting in a wind of molecules. That's science for you, as I understand it.
     Right in the middle of our first meeting I lost it and bolted. Couldn't cut the thick of the not world reaching around my throat and gut. Her face became thousands of clicking sparks, her teeth lost their shape to some fuckless hole ridged in white, her hair screamed and screamed until my whole god damn head began to ache like a rock stuck in slab too long. The wrecking of all sound in my ears deaf ache. I shook. Sweat. Beads of it around my mouth, tickling my upper lip like little monsters making fun of the dumb human. Here is where my blood gets bigger than me. It's like highway systems racing from my brain down my arm to my spine and back to my mouth so that I'm close to vomit or rare steak; yeah, that's it, all meat and nerve and fat with a slap down on a white plate. I am uneaten meat and my own flesh crawls off my arms and I see them. Blue. Begging.
     I can't hear her see her smell her. Just the smell of decomposing flesh to meat and vein. The heart is not the muscle we think it is. Only the vein understands desire. I bolt exactly in the center of her sentence, crack it open to ice-light and a table of tipped white spill. She's saying what about chil--and I am clock-struck and movement out. Now my me is out of me like words flying around in space smashing each other to bits. I'm she. She's out the back flap of door smacks her shoulder she's running hand against stone wall prickle of skin slight shred alive and gone. She's pumping each thigh athlete good she's throwing off city tackles and carrying the weight of her own arm. She's sucked to alley to stairs to basement burned out no humans building magnet man standing always where he's standing or some other him if not him. She's asking she's fucking she's cash she's leaving. She's still got semen dripping down her thigh as she's running up the stairs from the basement to the third-floor. Her heart is outracing her feet, her legs are burning lactose, her veins are screaming for home. One more flight that's all there is, then this cunt will be home, god-damn motherfucking life. She's feeling the throb of her own blood in the veins at her neck and an ache in her jaw from running, she's slowing down with the pain of running to the third floor. She's done taking his dick in and out and against the wall in the basement because the waiting is over, fucking is waiting and waiting is fucking and the only life is the life of the veins, the feeding of flesh with the cold. She's still running and her breathing is jack-knifing in her lungs and she is thinking I'm never gonna have a daughter, she is thinking the only birth I'm gonna give this fucking world is a hole, yeah, and the world can just keep filling this fucking hole to keep me alive. She is drooling at the third floor opening the metal door running down the hall to the bathroom, the third floor has the best bathroom because the stalls still all have doors, the only floor that does, she is all heart rupture from the inside out. She is fixing the wound of her world.
     The first vein rolls out from underneath the pierce try, but when the sliver glint of the needle enters the road of her arm and finally finds its blue cord to race she is thinking thank god for my cunt, thank god for my motherfucking cunt.

publication

     It's for a book.
     She is writing.
     She says I'm the subject. But I'm not. Even I know the difference between the subject and the object. Anyone does. I've probably read more books than she has. It's not like I don't know how to talk in sentences. It's not like I don't understand action verbs. Grammar is hilarious. What are you afraid of? That the words will jump off the fucking page and cut your face apart? Makes me laugh. Is that why you are all scared of us corpses? Because we're too much like words that won't sit still? I ask her this. I'm talking to her again but I can see all of you, you can bet I do. I say all she cares about is collecting what she calls data for the book. I say all she thinks of us as is data. I want to know what kind of line I will make. I think this is the funniest fucking thing I've ever said. She doesn't get the joke. Her clothes are wrinkled.
     We don't meet inside places anymore because that's likely to make it hit. We're meeting outside from now on. It's cold but cold is good, drives your senses deeper into your skull clear like white. She brings this baby tape recorder and she holds it between us like a dead rodent shield. I mean it. It looks like a black rat back. Not to her. Sony. She probably just sees Sony and she probably just believes in its functioning, she's probably desperate with her faith like that.
     It's not just for a book. She's going to broadcast a documentary on PBS. She's going to air an interview on NPR. That's what she says. I think about airing an interview and wondering what that means. I mean I know what it means, she's going to broadcast my life around like air freshener squirts but what I'm getting at is the real meaning, airing an interview. She says sentences sometimes that make me walk around for days with the idea rolling around in my block like dice in a cup. One time she told me that dead skin gets caught in people's carpets, a lot of it, and I had to think about that for 3 days. All that dead skin. Like the floor of the city. No funerals, no sympathy, just dead skin matted into the hair of a floor. Another time she said the word facetious and I had this flash, so I asked her what it meant even though I suspected it meant not true, and she said you know, in jest, it's from a Latin word that means elegant but it went through old french and became funnier, so now it means playfully jocular. But that isn't what I meant exactly. I was thinking about how to spell it, and I was imagining that it had the word face in it. And if it did that would be important. So later that day I went to a newsstand book shop and I found a pocket dictionary and I looked up faces until I got too facetious. Sure enough. This is important because the face is the fattest liar in the universe, it's a screen filled with lies tics winks open-mouthed shit spew, it's a shield against truth of any kind, it's the ugliest horror head ever invented. If you don't believe me watch someone yawn or yell or cum. Smiles-the face slitting open to death. Up close a kiss is a nightmare out of focus cinema big freak. We call smiling and kissing happiness and intimacy. Facetious. You want to know what the next word in the dictionary is? Face value: the value printed or written on a bill, bond, coin, or the like. The apparent value or significance. I pull a dollar out. This is trust, not the words on the bill in god we trust, but the thing itself. The real face value of the bill of the world.
     I know what will happen when the interview airs. People will be driving on the freeway in mildly expensive cars. NPR will be trumpeting its familiar. Everyone will feel safe barreling down the road of their life at 80 miles an hour. The windows will all be rolled up. The seat belt will hug bodies. The foot will rest on the gas. Then this conversation will come out of the dash between a subject and her object. The hand will turn the sound up. After five minutes, the head will be deep in thought. After ten minutes, almost tears will be welling up in their sockets. After fifteen, at the close of the aired interview, she will be asking me if there is anything her people can do to help me, and I will be saying no, I will be trying not to be rude, not to smash her puny and pink little question butting its nub against my leg with a cold hard fist. The hairs on the arms of the drivers will raise just slightly, a small shiver will tickle up the spine. Then the news will come on and they won't hear it for a minute, and then they will. I know these people. Occasionally I sleep with them. You know what a radio wave is? Electromagnetic waves.

getting to know a stranger is easy

     She tells me the point of her book, her interview, her television broadcast. To educate people about women like me. She says people are unaware of what life is like for women like me. She says if more people understood then maybe things would change. I'm listening but I have no fucking idea what she thinks she is talking about. I ask her if she knows what the title of her book will be. She says yes. I say what then. She says The Street You Won't Walk Down: The Real Story of Women Users. I say what about the television program. She says mean streets. I say isn't that a copyright violation. She says no, we paid for it. She doesn't know it but I walk around for a week thinking about all this for a whole week. I ask her why she picked users and not junkies for a word. She says, and first she says she's being frank, which I suspect is the opposite of facetious in her mind, no one wants to by a book with the word junkies in it. I say sure they do, people are real greedy about freak-knowledge today. She says not the market that the book is for. So I say who the hell is the market? I mean, every one's got their god damn channels tuned to real life freak stories 24 hours a day, 24 hours of goombah talk show hosts running around like rats in tu-tu's sticking mikes in people's asses, 24 hours of what is called news but is really an upgraded sit-com, bookstores open 24 hours selling book versions of what is bought and sold every fucking second of human existence, I mean, let's be honest, what market could she possibly be talking about that isn't paying for it, eating it, sucking it, screwing it, drinking it, paying to watch? She laughs hard but her cheeks embarrass. She says I have a point. But what she meant was that the book is for an academic market and there are all kinds of publishing limits. Publishing limits.
     I wake up on Wednesday night in the street under the overpass. There is drool and leftover vomit at the sides of my mouth. The smell. I am not far from the my apartment. There is nothing wrong with this picture. I simply didn't make it. My eyes swim in their little sockets. The folds of my brain are whiskey-sunk. My arm remembers itself. My crotch throbs and I do not remember what gender emerged. I get up. I walk the rest of the way home. My feet make crooked. When I get back to the rooms that house me I write.
     She doesn't know this me. Maybe she would write differently about me, maybe I am some form of performance or culture even more worthy of study than she first thought. I imagine that this is the case. What an object I would make if she knew I wrote. Now that would be true love, no lies, no pretense. A subject claiming her object, vomit, piss, blood, cum, words and all. Right up off the ground and into the book. I do not know if this me that writes could be hers, I do not know if she could image that. I suspect she could, she is very smart. I suspect she could tongue the crack of an ass the same way she can secure an argument. I suspect words do what reality won't for her too, I suspect she lets herself down as human much of the time, I suspect in this we have a lot in common. But you know, it doesn't matter. Thousands of miles separate our strata. Why, it would be a mistake to use a single word to describe us at all--women. Not even close.

writing

     I'm me.
     I'm in my room. I'm sitting next to a low-watt light dangling from a wire. Complex sentence.
     She's in revision she says. I'm revising a syringe. I duct-taped around and around the plastic until I built a thick handle to grip. Every so often I squeezed it hard to leave the impression of my grip in the tape. When it's done it's like it was made to fit my hand. I cork the hollow. I begin. Looking into a mirror to work I trace around the drawing with the needle slow hard slow hard enough to draw blood. It's this: a needle. A drawing of a needle. My friend drew it for me. The needle is piercing a flag. I worked on the flag for two months. The red isn't that red because I had to use a kind of brown dye. But that's ok because even blood isn't really red. The blue I got from pen ink. So it's real faint. I actually have black ink though. So the line drawing of the needle will stand out. The drawing will then have a sort of perspective I think. The flag deep in the background of an arm. The needle in the foreground.
     When I was small I lived in the midwest. My father took a picture of me once. Like this: four foot nothing standing in the front yard wrapped up in a giant american flag. He made this little helmet with silver spikes coming out of it for me to wear on my head. It took me a while to get it... a dwarf, mutant statue of liberty. He had special cards made and he sent them to all our relatives... we were moving to New York. Get it? There was nothing wrong with my childhood.
     Who are you at war with this week I ask her. She doesn't have an answer except to say that she's trying to write against the system, not in support of it. That books like hers deconstruct myths of benevolence. I spend the next week trying to think of a phrase or a drawing that would symbolize benevolence. Not too literal. I want it to be abstract, so that it barely makes sense, so that it doesn't touch anything, so that it's just floating in flesh, useless and beautiful.

objects for barter

     She wants to give me something back. For my trouble. She doesn't feel right without it. Don't get me wrong, she paid me for all the times we talked. She paid for medical care for me one night. She paid for food I ate when I was with her. She bought me scotch and she didn't mind. She paid for a week of de-tox. A little experiment that didn't work out. Sweet though. I mean I knew she was trying to do something nice. But I kept telling her I wasn't unhappy and I was under control. Telling a person who is miserable and out of control that you are happy and in control is like sticking your face in a bowl of jello to talk. She just won't absorb those sentences. They stick in her thick skin and miss her ears altogether. Oh well. Anyway she asks and asks and asks me what I want. She tells me how much she likes me. She has offered to pay for me to move somewhere else several times. These are the times when I see how ignorant she really is. Pretty and smart but ignorant.
     I think and think and think what to tell her. Nothing nothing nothing is a ticker tape traveling across my forehead.
     Finally I have an idea. I tell her I stopped using my name years and years ago, and why doesn't she give me a new one. There is a long pause. I think I see her face take it in, she smiles anyway, and even though it is ugly I take this to mean the idea pleases her. A junkie face the moment of the rush is never a smile. It's more like sleep. Like sleep overtaking a body.
     Did I mention she doesn't have any kids? She's pretty famous in her field. She's achieved a name for herself. Many people probably count themselves lucky to have one of her books sitting on their shelves.
     Aurora. She tells me it means, the dawn. I know what it really means. I know it means high altitude, many-colored, flashing luminous, light in night, charged particles, the piercing of the earth's magnetic field like a needle into flesh. Or, an early stage. Or, two cities--one in Colorado and one in Illinois. Or, everybody's idea of Alaska who has never been there. Is that what hope means to her? When she looks up in the night sky? Radio and television waves, signals through the flames, night-light.
     I let her give it to me. The name. When her book comes out I find it. I open it. Of course it says for Aurora. Did she think that was love? I walk around with the book jacket images stinging my eyes. It's me. It's a picture of me. Only it's not a picture of me, because it's like an artsy picture that's very blurry on purpose and my face is bigger than the picture frame so I'm kind of bleeding off the edges. And in the background very much in focus is the line of a street like a track running for all its worth down the arm of a city begging to be dosed. Look at Aurora's too big head. No smile. The eyes, even blurry, are truly closed. On the back is a picture of her with many words describing her credentials. It's a small square with her wearing this hideous smile and her hair is screaming again because some fucker has a fan somewhere beyond the eye of the camera. A big blurry face and a little smiling reptilian one. Maybe we are a new species. Maybe we are two new creatures surfacing in print.
     I don't buy it. I don't take it. I don't take it and I don't take it. After a while I stop seeing it at all. I am waiting for the televison to box an aurora clean out of this world.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in Fiction International.