Lidia Yuknavitch - The Small Backs of Children

“Yeah. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this right now.” The filmmaker closes his eyes and rubs at them with his thumbs.

“Okay, yeah. Of course. I’m going to see if I can find a doctor to talk to me.”

“You know what?” the filmmaker nearly shouts. “You do that. You get a doctor to talk to you. I’m sure you New York people deal with this stuff all the time, right? Depression? Neuroses? Pathologies? You want to know what they’ll say? They’re gonna tell you the same story they told me. They’re going to tell you there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s a goddamn physical specimen. See how far that gets you.”

“Nothing wrong with her.” The playwright starts ticking the fingernails on his thumb and forefinger in sets of threes.

“Look, I’m sorry,” the filmmaker says. “I told you, it’s hard for me to talk about this right now. I haven’t slept much, and my kid is with my mother. .” His hands knot themselves into fists. Dangling fists with nothing to do.

“You got it. Not another word out of me.” But the playwright is lying. He suddenly feels a sense of thrilling danger. Several sentences line up in his mouth. He bites the inside of his cheek.

But then comes another menacing ding , and the elevator door opens again, wide as a fucking mouth.

There he is, Mr. Asshole. The painter, the exiled ex-husband, the walking ego with a ready dick. Who the hell invited him?

The performance artist stands up. The filmmaker has his back to the elevator, so he doesn’t see the painter until he realizes the room has gone quiet again. The playwright feels coiled, urgent, ready to lash.

“What, did somebody die in here? You all look like fucking corpses.” The painter, laughing his ass off. Stale booze fills the air.

The performance artist flushes in the face like she’s eaten niacin; she puts her hand up like a stop sign and closes her eyes.

The playwright counts to three; he can feel the action before it happens.

The filmmaker, now husband, he’s turning, turning, he sees the painter, until one man faces the other.

The filmmaker throws an exquisite left hook and drops the painter to the floor.

Blood mouth-splatters across the linoleum.

Orderlies rush in like moths.

Then, in three seconds that feel more like minutes, the playwright snaps out of it, rushes over to the filmmaker, grabs his big-ass arm, and ushers him out of the building. No sense in anyone getting arrested right now. He hurries the filmmaker through an EXIT door into a stairwell, down and down and down until they reach the parking lot.

There, in the lot, things slow back down to human speed. They walk to the filmmaker’s car like two men walking, though one of them is counting steps. He can still feel the filmmaker’s rage. If I die at the hands of this man in a parking garage, in some ways it will be a fitting end. Dying, finally, in his sister’s moment of peril.

They arrive at the door of the filmmaker’s car. The filmmaker opens his mouth again, then closes it. The playwright touches his shoulder. “Look, you just go home now. Try to get some rest. I’ll call you if there’s any change. Just get out of here for a little while. You need a break.” He has no idea where this modulated voice comes from, but he suspects he’s channeling his lover. Have empathy for others have empathy for others have empathy. Even if you have to pretend at first. Is he pretending?

The filmmaker drives away, taillights illuminating the exit. The playwright makes his way back up the stairwell from the parking lot in steps of threes.

Back in the hospital hallway, the painter is now upright in a chair, hurling slurry, hushed obscenities into the dead white hallway. “ Cocksucking motherfucker . .” The playwright touches touches touches his own elbows as he crosses the room and takes a seat.

Settling in with his laptop, he looks at them — the painter and the performance artist — and he sees it: She’s here for him . Not for his sister. She knew he’d show up.

Just look at them. They’re like a human West Coast tableau. Like scraps of indigo and blood-colored glass, foreign money, vintage jewelry and hip little buttons, hair art, toy soldiers and firecrackers and pieces of wire and bullet casings and the feathers of birds, the bones of animals, a half-smoked joint and a bunch of foreign beer caps and Dunhill butts. The look like they should be at Jim Morrison’s grave. Père Lachaise. Drinking Courvoisier. The painter takes out a flask. The playwright smirks.

Who are we in moments of crisis or despair? Do we become deeper, truer selves, or lift up and away from a self, untethered from regular meanings like moths suddenly drawn toward heat or light? Are we better people when someone might be dying, and if so, why? Are we weaker, or stronger? Are we beautiful, or abject? Serious, or cartoon? Do we secretly long for death to remind us we are alive?

He shivers. What the hell was that about? Was that his sister’s voice, or his? He claps three times and says, “Okay, people — you’re not the center of the universe here, right? Everybody get a grip .” He walks over to the pile of performance artist and painter. “We shouldn’t all be trying to stay here this way. It’s not helping her. It’s pathetic. Look what comes of it. We should just take shifts. Come tell me your work”—he glances at the performance artist—“or whatever , schedules. I’ll call everyone. I’ll make a visitation chart.”

But that’s not what he’s typing.

He’s typing out stage directions.

A doctor steps into the room, as if on cue.

In her sleep, the night sky stitches a story through the girl.

Her brother is a fox pup chasing a mouse over a snow-covered field. The fox pup leaps straight up into the air where the mouse tracks end and plunges nose first into the blanket of white. The fox emerges and shakes its head to free the snow from its fur. The fox is laughing. A mouse in its mouth.

Her mother is a moon eye in the sky. Not perfectly white, but bruise-hued. The moon eye casts a gaze over all of the world, over violence and lovers with equal compassion, over living and dead, over children and old men curling into brittle-boned fetal positions in bed, curling around what used to be their wives, taking their last breaths, over chickens and badgers and snakes and trees, over rivers and rocks and breath.

Her father is not a tree.

Let all the other fathers before hers be trees.

Her father is a door.

Anywhere.

Anytime.

Opening or closing, depending on the story and the girl’s place in it.

The filmmaker is beating a heavy bag to death.

Having recently clocked the painter, he finds that slamming the heavy bag feels more satisfying. In the backyard behind his house, at night, his blows land and thud. He pictures the chest and gut of a man. Fisted speed dug deep from a bellyful of rage and jabs extended until they’re shot-strung back to the shoulder. Again. Again. The throbbing sound so familiar he doesn’t recognize it. Comforting.

It’s what he knows how to do in the face of inertia.

What if a man’s body is all that drives action, and not the stupid heart?

Anything but the heart.

So he beats the holy hell out of this simulacral man in the backyard for hours, until he’s spent, until he’s just a man bent over and panting. His breath fogs before him in the cold night. It seems good that he can’t kill the heavy bag. He hangs his head. This is killing him. No, not killing him. But it is some kind of crucible he doesn’t understand.

His wife. How can there be nothing he can do to fix it? It makes him want to hit things as hard as he can.