Twenty‑eight

At four o’clock this morning I was woken by a voice that led me to the study. It was the woman in brown with the slashed wrists.

I looked at her, frightened, and she grinned crookedly.

Often, during my nightmares, I have felt an oppressive weight that keeps me from screaming, from calling for help, from running. The same thing often occurs to me in reality as well, and it happens when I can’t keep track of myself and my ghosts.

“Pick it up, ” she said to me, nodding to the pen on the desk.

I didn’t move.

“I said pick it up! ” Her narrow lips didn’t move, but I understood.

“What do I have to do? ” I asked her, half frightened, half curious.

“You know what you’ve got to do. Don’t be an idiot and pick up that bloody pen – hurry up. ”

I picked it up and held it as though holding the metal probe of a scientific instrument. I clutched it very tightly.

I went over to him. He was asleep, the sheets wrapped messily around him without covering him up. His lips were half open, his feminine eyelashes very, very long. He looked like a beautiful little girl.

His chest was bare, so I brought the tip of the pen to the skin, with the intention of tearing it. And then eating it and not digesting it.

I brought it a little closer and my eyes filled with tears. I pressed the pen against his chest, but I didn’t plunge it in. I let a drop of blood color his white, white skin.

I remembered a line from a song: “Maybe it’s not quite legal, but you look great covered in bruises. ”

I woke him up to make love. To heal his wound.

And mine.

And the deeper he plunged, the more he healed me; the more he healed me, the more ashamed I grew, the more I longed for death, the more he said he was waiting for it.

When he made love to me, pressing me close, drowning his love and desperation inside my madness and desperation, I heard a Sicilian voice call, “Iettiti, Vora, iettiti”– “Blow, north wind, blow. ” All my madness floated to the surface, stimulated by my echo. Not the kind of wind that cleans and refreshes but a wind that brings with it detritus and ancient breaths, ghosts, and memories.

Then I disappeared.

Then he disappeared.