Kate Zambreno - Green Girl

Do you talk of me to her? I beg you: not one word about us to those who come after me.

To fill time, she slips in and out of electronics shops on the street, walking by fast moving images conjured up on large screens, not making eye contact with any of the salesman whose eyes settle on her with desperation, canines dripping, a heart-thumping deer amidst a drought. She walks into grocery stores and flips through celebrity magazines and tabloids, IS SHE PREGGERS I LOST TEN STONE THE WEDDING PICTURES YOU HAVEN’T SEEN ignoring the watchful eye of the security guards.

Other names other faces. She’ll put those on. She can take off her own and breathe.

Ruth wanders back into the theater, past the smell of burnt popcorn in the lobby. The bearded lady breaks her ticket in half. She sits in the center in the dark, staring at the wrinkled turquoise curtain. She touches her hand to her nose. It comes away dotted with a sticky red. Her nose is slightly bleeding. She wipes it with the back of her hand, a scarlet smear. There are two French children with their father in front of her, adult-sized popcorn bags the size of their insect-like torsos. They are a little young to be watching the movie. A little girl in knotty dishwater hair, a dirty white sweater with candy-colored hearts. Her brother starts sobbing. His father has refused him something. Ruth tries to drown out his childish gulps, fixating on the turquoise curtain. The adverts come on, the same for every movie she has seen in that theater. She laughs too hard at the automobile ads and mobile phone commercials, a tick of loneliness. She is advertising her own isolation.

Trudging home. Buskers at Tottenham Court Road. A man plays the theme song to MASH on his synthesizer. Near the stairs for the Central Line, a woman with long red hair and shearling boots pinches the harp to the clang of pence being occasionally dropped into her black case.

HE had always told her his dreams of taking off and playing music in the train stations of Europe. Rounding the corner or descending the steep elevator underground she always half-expected to see HIM picking away at a guitar with a furious expression on his face.

That empty feeling of listening to your own voice on an answering machine. That’s what life is like for Ruth now. She pushes with the push of flesh climbing down the stairs to the platform, slowly moving, milling, careful not to trip.

The next morning she woke to a wet pillow, her eyes glaring like red light bulbs. Agnes had not come home the night before. Ruth calls in sick to work even though it was the week before the holidays. She knows that she could be sacked but she doesn’t care.

She does not leave the house. She is in hiding. She hides because out there is too intense. The city a cruel hole with too many eyes. She sentences herself to a voluntary imprisonment. Lying on the mattress wanly watching the blur of Agnes’ TV set, drooling catatonic onto her duvet, hand in her pajama bottoms. Making friends with the furballs under Agnes’ bed.

Exclusive video: Ruth self-destructs.

Oh my Ruth how she suffers.

And yet, I am the one who is cruel. I experience joy at her suffering. I want to save her and then drown her like a surplus puppy.

She teeters between awake and asleep. When not sleeping she surrenders herself to a stream of images, festering and filling the room. She is incubating agitation. The weeping is back. The littlest things make her break down. She only gets up to make herself tea and shuffle back to her mattress. She aches terribly. The pain makes her unable to breathe. She cries out to herself in anguish:

I long for you. I can’t stand it. I long for you. This thing inside, I can’t get at it. I can’t claw it away can’t vomit it away can’t drink it away. I want to destroy it. I want to destroy myself if that will destroy this thing inside. I imagine you everywhere. It hurts It hurts It hurts so fucking much this aching, this longing, this thing. And you feel nothing.

On days like this she cannot shower. She needs to collect, to accumulate. She needs to savor in her filmy layer. It is her protection against the world. To shower, a shock or a scream. Everything surrounding her she cannot wash away. To shower would be almost an admittance of a new day. To carry with her the same skin is to allow each day to blend into each other and be one day. The days will never end and neither will she. Days and days. No showering. She builds a protective armor. It’s important, somehow, she knows. She cannot wash it away.

Collapsed on her mattress. She sleeps on magazines stuck to her thigh. She sleeps and sleeps and sinks and sleeps some more. Sedentary. Like grass, dirt, shoveling and shoveling and buried. She grows weak. She feels her muscles start to atrophy.

She eats peanut butter sandwiches. Honey O’s in cereal bowls gather at the foot of her mattress, the milk sour and congealed. Green and Black’s chocolate bars, the chocolate smeared on her sheets.

Agnes returns. Ruth pretends not to notice. She tiptoes around Ruth, quiet so as not to disturb the disturbed, stepping over her, bangles jangling. Ruth prepares her defense in this trial inside of her mind.

I’m not crying over you. Do you think I’m crying over him? Don’t be so arrogant. Do you think you’re anything to me? You reminded me of someone else, that’s all. You reminded me of someone else. I never chased after you, I never tried. I never wanted you. I merely wanted. That’s

the difference.

(Agnes and Ruth on stage, in between them a bemused Olly)

(Bleep) you (Bleep) you (Bleep) you.

Is that the best you got?

You took my man.

He wasn’t your (bleep)ing man, he was nobody’s (bleep)ing man, he wanted me more.

Maybe that’s because you’re such a (bleep)ing slut.

(Ruth throws a chair, Olly tries to hold off a furious Agnes. Bodyguards rush to the stage. The crowd goes wild. Pandemonium ensues.)

She wakes up to find a worried Agnes standing over her. Go away, she mumbles. This is how I choose to spend my holiday. Why couldn’t anybody let her have a simple breakdown?

You need to get up.

I’m in a funk, Ruth explains. Ruth licks her lips. They were dry. ( How is it that the clouds still hang on you ?)

Well, you need to snap yourself out of it.

Agnes still stands over her. Is this about the other night? Agnes refuses to budge. She feels guilty, Ruth realizes with surprise. It was not an emotion Ruth thought Agnes experienced. Ruth looks around Agnes, towards the flickering miniature people on the screen. Liz Taylor as Maggie-the-Cat begging Paul Newman to love her. I’m not living with you: We occupy the same cage, that’s all. She imagines saying that to Agnes: We occupy the same cage, that’s all.

Ruth sighs heavily. She feels deep inside that she hates Agnes. And that maybe Agnes harbors a greater hatred for her, a hate and a love both so intense it confuses her. It’s just the holidays. I’ll get over it.

The next time she looks up Agnes is gone.

She knew what she had to do. Ruth stands in front of the mirror and studies herself.