Lidia Yuknavitch - The Small Backs of Children

do

something, I’m going to lose my mind.

A phone rings offstage. The filmmaker reluctantly goes to the kitchen and answers. His voice sounds low and muffled, almost as if he is underwater. When he returns to the living room, the blood has drained from his face.

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

What? What is it? Is she all right?

THE FILMMAKER

.

Barely.

The three figures — filmmaker, poet, playwright — stand together for a long minute, staring at the floor. The light in the living room brightens, until they look hot and lit. The three of them look at one another.

THE FILMMAKER

.

You’re not going to finance the whole thing. I can’t let you do that.

THE PLAYWRIGHT

.

It’s not a problem. You know I can handle it. .

THE FILMMAKER

.

No, you don’t understand. I have something— (

Exits stage left.

)

Sounds of a man thundering downstairs. The poet and the playwright hang in the air like inverted commas, waiting for the filmmaker. They hear pounding and something like destruction sounds, like he’s down there killing something. Then they hear him coming back up the stairs in some kind of alpha-man overdrive. When he finally reappears in the living room, it’s not a man’s body at all. It’s a giant canvas, eight feet by eight feet. Once their eyes adjust, they see that it is a painting of a giant abstract face. They hear a voice behind it as if the painting is speaking.

THE FILMMAKER

.

This is his painting. She kept it. Wouldn’t let me burn it. I hear these things are going for over ten grand these days. (

To the playwright.

) You take it to New York. You sell it. You use the money. You do it. You get this thing out of my house.

The playwright looks up from his laptop, closes the lid. He drums with his fingers. He is seated on a blue velvet chair in an auditorium. Men and women raise little Ping-Pong paddles in the air. The auctioneer has been mouthing bids — for how long? months? years? — but the playwright has been working away silently all the while. He is interested in only one lot, only one artwork, the one he came there to sell.

Then the voice of the auctioneer arrests his attention. With his little flip of silver hair, he announces the lot: “ Facetious. We open at ten thousand dollars. The opening bid is ten thousand dollars.” The playwright snaps his head up and bites the inside of his cheek three times so he can lift his numbered little paddle. “Excellent. I have fourteen thousand dollars. The bid stands at fourteen thousand from the gentleman from New York. Do I have a — fourteen thousand, eight hundred dollars. I have fourteen thousand eight hundred. Do I have a best? Fourteen thousand eight hundred on the floor. Do we have movement? Excellent. Fifteen thousand. I have fifteen thousand dollars. We are standing at fifteen thousand from the gentleman from Lyon. Fifteen thousand, I have fifteen thousand dollars. We are at fifteen thousand. Fifteen thousand once. Fifteen thousand twice. All right, then, for the third and final time, fifteen thousand.

“And it is SOLD to the good gentleman from Lyon at fifteen thousand dollars. Very well.”

The playwright looks down at the play in his laptop, and then up at the sold painting, the one he came there to sell, the one the filmmaker made him bring: a giant abstract cum-stained bloodstained face.

The performance artist’s ears go full-blown tinnitus because it’s the poet going Just calm down and then the playwright going Use your imagination and the filmmaker going Just wait Just wait It’s not as bad as it sounds so she amplifies her voice and launches it at them. “It’s not as bad as it sounds? You want me to fake being hollow headed all the way to Europe and it’s not as bad as it sounds ?” She can’t believe it, can’t believe what they are saying. This is the plan? She stares at them all like they want to eat her, saying, “You want me to do fucking what ?”

And then it’s the playwright going Look do you want me to say it all again and everyone getting impatient with her like she’s a child, look at all their smug fuck faces with their we’re all a decade older than you paternalism and her going, “Um, actually, yeah, I fucking want you to say it again because this sounds, you know, insane .”

She crack-twists another tiny bottle of vodka open, pours it into her plastic airplane cup, slams it, then returns the empty miniature to the poet’s tray table. Well, she’s got to hand it to them, they fucking got her on this goddamn plane with the Nazi poet, didn’t they, and they used the oldest trick in the book, the trick of Catholics and Jews. Mega-guilt. Pure and simple. When she had resisted, the poet had walked up to her and like gotten all up in her face, going Look this is the least you can do you’re screwing him and we all know it you have been for years, you owe her this, she went, like there’s some kind of woman sexual history rule book. Some kind of woman sexual sin plus-and-minus column. Like they’re all holier than her. She reaches up and hits the flight-attendant-get-the-hell-over-here-I-need-a-drink button, then looks briefly at the poet, at the side of her face, and yes, she has to admit it, she’s a little afraid of her.

She rubs the letter she’s carrying pinned by her bra against her skin underneath her clothes. A letter from the painter. Well, you make your bed, you lie in it, that’s what her mother used to say, so here she is on a plane to Eastern Europe drinking midget vodkas with a lesbian dominatrix. When the flight attendant arrives, she leans over in the flight-attendant way and says to the poet in pity hush tones, “What does she need?” Because when you’re wearing a special helmet acting like you haven’t enough brains to buckle a seat belt you can’t be seen drinking vodka like a normal adult woman. She has a cuss-fest inside her head. The poet stamps down on her toe underneath the tray tables. She tries to make her face go slack. The poet asks the flight attendant for a pillow for her, and more vodka for herself. When the flight attendant leaves, the poet elbows the performance artist so sharply she cries out.

“What? I was just adding a little Tourette’s to the scene.”

When more vodka comes, the performance artist turns her head to the airplane window as far as she can. How did she get here, I mean how did she really get here, what were the choices, what’s a past — she takes a long drink — what is psychological development ? Is it as fucking Freudian as it sounds? She sighs the big sigh of twenty-six, wondering if we are all trapped inside identity, genetics, and narrative — some whacked-out Kafka god handwriting our unbearable little life stories. Then she thinks an American-artist thought, the rough-and-tumble kind: how can I use this? She rubs the letter underneath her shirt, she thinks she sees the reflection of herself in the airplane window, like a black twin, and she’s falling back to memory, she prays to the god of Diamanda Galás.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Well, let’s have it then.

When she was seven years old, a mediastinal cystic parathyroid grew in her head. The tumor, the medical professionals told her so-called parents (one a famous architect, the other a famous concert pianist, both mega-narcissists), was “inoperable.” And there was this: the tumor was pushing on the beautiful gray folds of her brain in just the right way as to make her behavior look, well, there’s no other way to say this. . retarded. Like in immediate need of a helmet.

The effect this had on her mother was momentarily devastating. But that isn’t the story. What her mother did with her devastation was to jettison it, and jettison it the way intellectual mega-famous narcissistic people do, until it was so buried in the layers of her psyche and her body and her motherhood that it rested at the base of her spinal cord near her fucking tailbone. She didn’t shit right for years.