Lidia Yuknavitch - The Small Backs of Children

That is when it happens. He looks at the painting of the face. It might be a man’s face and it might be a woman’s face and it might be both. He walks not back into the house, but to the car. He drives not to the store, not to some familiar and ordinary place in their lives, not the corner bar, not the park, not the hills. He drives downtown and gets out of the car and walks to the door of the apartment of a woman less than half his age, half his life. He knocks on her door with his wounds and smeared with paint and smelling of shit and semen and oils and morning wine and she opens the door. He walks into a room away from his wife life and into the drama of women’s bodies. Again. He places his hands on her breasts. Her twat. Her ass. He does not look her in the eye. His gaze is drawn elsewhere. When they embrace, and it is the embrace of carnal excess, hips ground together, chests pushing for breath, he is pulling her head back by the hair, he is turning her face to animal, he is looking at the white wall behind her. Its blankness. He presses her against it and fucks and fucks her. He sees it and sees it on the wall behind her — the image of the face. The last face he ever painted.

His ex-wife’s face abstracted beyond recognition.

I love you, I did, I loved you to death.

Then he hears the performance artist snort out of her snore and murmur something and it’s tonight again, and he turns to the current nymphet woman’s body, which is all of their bodies, and puts his hand between her legs. Jim Morrison. Wine. A woman’s body. Sex. He wakes the performance artist. Fucks her. He’s himself again. Yes.

Night. Interior. Living room. The playwright, the poet, and the filmmaker are together in the filmmaker and writer’s house. They all have a glass of scotch. It’s midnight. The poet has a plan. She’s laying it on them .

THE POET

.

Look. It’s a direct action. We have to go get her.

THE FILMMAKER

.

Right. Let’s spring her from that hell. Just what she needs. Hospitals are death houses.

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

Oh my god. You’re not talking about getting her out of the hospital. Are you?

THE POET

.

No. I’m not talking about her at all.

The playwright’s circle rubbing between his thumb and forefinger seizes up, interrupted. The filmmaker jerks his head up.

THE FILMMAKER

.

What? Then what are we talking about?

THE POET

.

I’m talking about the girl.

THE FILMMAKER

.

What girl?

THE POET

.

You know what girl. The girl in the photo.

The filmmaker stands up the way a man stands up when he’s thinking, Wait just a goddamn minute here.

THE FILMMAKER

.

Wait just a goddamn minute here. That’s crazy. What are you talking about?

THE POET

.

I said, we’re going to go get the girl. I know people. Just-this-side-of-criminal people. We can track her down. We know what town she lived in. We know what happened there, and when. And we have a photo. And we know the photographer who took the photo. I’m saying I can find her.

THE FILMMAKER

.

That’s insane. You want to fly back to Europe and steal a human?

THE POET

.

Oh, I can find her.

THE FILMMAKER

.

Oh, really. Fine. Right. You’re just going to go pluck a girl we don’t know from a war zone and. . Whatever. This is ridiculous. Okay, let’s say you go all the way to Eastern Europe and you. . you find this girl. Which is insane. What then? What the hell happens then?

THE POET

.

What then? We bring her here. To live with us.

The filmmaker and the playwright both start speaking at once in great incredulous waves of objections. She backs up a bit and looks at them. She crosses her arms and waits for them to peter out.

THE POET

.

Are you two finished? Okay, then listen. Think about it. What kind of life does this girl have there, anyway?

THE FILMMAKER

.

Remind me why I care? She’s got nothing to do with me. With my wife. I’d rather just go get my wife.

THE POET

.

Listen. I know what I’m talking about. It’s about the girl. Her family’s atomized, she’s probably living some corpse life in some pocket of hell. I mean, shit, remember how they tracked down that green-eyed Afghan girl? And she’s now a

leather-faced crone

? Because her life went from misery and shit to more monotonous and meaningless misery and shit, while her famous photo went ’round and ’round the world making that McCurry guy famous? I say we do it.

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

Do what, precisely?

THE POET

.

We do what our rising-star photographer failed to do. What all photojournalists fail to do. We go get her out of that death of a life before she dies.

THE FILMMAKER

.

For the love of God.

What does this have to do with my wife?

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

Whatever. This is crazy. So let’s pretend it’s even possible to pursue this fantasy. What does it accomplish? What is the purpose? How does it speed my sister’s recovery from wherever she is?

THE POET

.

Listen to me. This will matter. To your wife. To your sister. I don’t expect you to understand. Either of you. But you are just going to have to trust me on this. It’s a. . (

She searches the ceiling.)

It’s a woman thing. If we get this girl out of her deadly circumstance and bring her here and give her a chance at a real life, it will help your wife. Your sister. The only friend I’ve ever given a damn about in my entire life.

THE FILMMAKER

.

You’re serious. You are being serious?

THE POET

.

Look. Did you ever hear of Kevin Carter? You know, Kevin Carter. The South African photographer who took the picture of the vulture stalking a starving

girl. He won a Pulitzer for that picture. Two months later he connected a hose to the exhaust pipe of his pickup truck and quietly suicided. They say he’d come back from assignments and lapse into bouts of crying, drinking, drugs. Sometimes he’d sleep for days. After he shot his prizewinning picture, they say he sat under a tree and cried and chain-smoked and couldn’t get his mind away from the horror of what he saw. He checked out. People referred to him as “gone.”

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

Yeah. I remember. He was universally condemned for not helping the girl in the picture. He caught all kinds of shit. Said he was haunted by memories of killings, corpses, starving or wounded children, and trigger-happy madmen. So he offed himself.

THE POET

.

Exactly. So you get it?

The filmmaker stares at her blankly and the playwright’s eye twitches.

THE POET

.

Don’t you get it? They had a BIG argument. She said someone should have done something to get the girl out of the war zone. Your wife—

your

sister — told our

friend the photographer that the prize had blood all over it. I don’t think they’ve spoken to each other since. Didn’t she tell you?

THE POET

.

(

Shooting for authority.

) We’re going to go get that girl.

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

Right. Got it. I’ll finance the whole thing. The trip, the papers, whatever it takes.

THE POET

.

We can go to Prague first. Then on to St. Petersburg. That’ll be the easy part. I know a counterfeiter in Berlin. And I know who else we’ll need to get from there to Vilnius — I have people—

THE FILMMAKER

.

Hold on. Stop. Just. . WAIT. What the. . HELL are you talking about? What “people”? This isn’t real. The picture. The story. The girl. None of this is real. Except. . except that my wife is trapped in some hazed-out dreamland in a hospital and I want her back. And if I don’t