Mary Gaitskill - Don't Cry

Until now, that is. The chattering soul of the infernal brain girl was everywhere, including outside the prison, tapping on the walls and whispering through the bricks. Her terrible pictures penetrated the thick walls of the prison and the soul inside saw and understood — for he had been effaced for a very long time. The pictures did not seem terrible to him; on the contrary, their violence gave him hope because they confirmed what had happened to him. In the language of the soul, his eyes spoke to the girl through the prison wall in feelings, words, sights, and sounds.

Naturally, this response only increased the girl's pain. On top of her own soul calling out to her, she was hearing from him, too, in the most confusing way possible. She heard him like the American sailors searching the Baltic for a wrecked Russian submarine at the bottom of the ocean heard, with their elaborate sonar, cryptic tapping, which they could not be sure of as signals, and which did not help them rescue the doomed crew. The signals of his soul were like this tapping, which could be anything or nothing, and they haunted her day and night. Day and night she heard him, and nothing she knew about obsession and projection could help her.

She wanted desperately to buy his records and bathe herself in his voice; she didn't because she knew that would only enflame her. But now all music was about him, and she heard his voice in every singer. And she craved music almost as much as she craved the boy Where her soul had once held space, there was now a ragged hole, dark and deep as the pit of the earth. At the bottom of it ran boiling rivers of Male and Female bearing every ingredient for every man and woman, every animal and plant. Without the membrane of her soul to buffer and interpret the raw matter of the pit, her personality was now on the receiving end of too much primary force. Music temporarily filled the empty space, soothing her and giving shape to the feelings she could not understand.

She went with her friend Angelique to see a live band with a powerful woman singer. The woman sang like her songs were giant weird-shaped things pulling her this way and that as they came through her body and out her mouth. Her songs rose through the room in huge moving tableaux that dissolved in the darkness, then rose again — fantastic pictures heard as sound by the clumsy ear, but seen vividly by the souls present. The songs reflected these souls and spoke their language: Emotion, thought, sound, image, wordlessness, and words mixed together in the place between the life of this world and the pit.

But because the girl's soul was missing, the music didn't reflect her; rather, it filled her, and she reflected those around her. She experienced these reflections as a feast, as if she were a clear pool with senses and a mind, glutted on the sights that passed through it. She wandered away from her friend into the live darkness, blooming with the painted eyes and lips of a hundred stories. The rest room was a burst of light and filth, rushing water and voices. A young pregnant woman in high-heeled boots and a fur collar laughed and shook water off her fingers, as if she were scattering tiny jewels into the air. A sparkling bracelet flashed on her wrist. She smiled into the mirror and rubbed her belly, and this double reflection was delicious to the girl.

Still, she was full of humiliation and pain. She was full of anger at the boy and fear of him because she believed he'd caused her suffering. But because she still heard, without knowing what she was hearing, the plaintive message of his trapped soul, her abjection and anger were strangely mixed with tenderness and pity She came out of the bathroom staggering a little; she already felt drunk.

Meanwhile, onstage, the singer was singing about love. She stood still with her naked legs apart, as if the song were splitting her open and offering her, whether she was wanted or not. Offering layer by layer, until she was splayed so wide that her spine was made to offer its long, sensitive nerves. It was not an abject song; it was proud. It said, See how I can open. And at the end, when she put her legs together with a quiet “Thank you,” it said, See how I can close again. The crowd was still and rapt, receiving her, honoring her, acknowledging all things that open, including themselves. Bouncers and bartenders presided with nimble grace and witness. They had been there a thousand nights and they knew it already.

But the girl, who had opened with the song, could not close again. She found Angelique standing alone with her arms wrapped around herself, her teeth clamped against the rim of her paper cup. When she saw the girl, she took her teeth off the cup, leaving a dark, blurred imprint of her lips. “What's wrong?” she said.

“Oh!” Heavily, the girl put her arms around her friend and laid her head on her shoulder. She rubbed her cheek against her denim jacket and, shuddering, felt the movement of every stranger's reflection flitting through her. Especially, and gratefully, she felt Angelique.

Angelique was a chunky redhead with a beautiful face: big lips, scarred skin, and green eyes that were watchful and passive at the same time, like an animal's. Except her eyes were sad, too. Once they'd gone to LA. and stayed on Venice Beach for a few days with some Mexican boys they'd just met. The boys had renamed them. They looked at the girl and said, “You'll be … Prestige.” To Angelique, they said, “And you're Infinity” They were joking, but they were also right: Angelique had a window in her soul and Infinity poured through it, slow and sorrowful as dust. But while Infinity can be sorrowful, it can be calming, too. Right now, for the girl, that desolate calm was like a draught of opium. She shuddered again; in this borrowed Infinity, the boy was just one tiny star among thousands, speeding past.

Abruptly, Angelique shrugged her shoulder and stepped away.

“What's wrong?” she asked again. The girl looked up, to see Infinity staring at her with the face of a worried office mate.

“Nothing,” she said, straightening. “I'm just drunk.” She looked at the stage, but instead of seeing the singer, she saw the boy, sitting next to her at the bar. He was talking about the movie they had seen. In amazement, she gazed at this ordinary boy who had apparently destroyed her. Help me, she said to him. Please help me. I don't understand what is happening.

And he heard her. Her soul, still in his possession, made sure of that. He was sitting in a bar, half-listening to his drinking partner talk about the ghosts in his apartment while he brooded about his music. His songwriting had not been going well. He was used to writing music that was light and lovely; it had no weight because all the young man's darkness and heaviness was concentrated in the prison house. It could've been a good thing artistically that he was finally hearing from the forgotten soul inside it; he could've used the weight of sorrow in his songs. But since it had been awakened by the foreign agency of the hijacked female, its effects came through an alien sensibility and were distorted. He felt chaotic inside, his thoughts like tiny boats scattered on a strange sea with a cold, unknowable heart.

The ghosts, his friend said, had come out of their usual corner and had taken to floating up around the bed as he lay in it, even floating between him and the books he read before going to sleep. The young man smiled.

“Why don't you try slamming a book on them?” he asked.

The friend said something, but he didn't hear it. He thought the ghost thing was ridiculous, and anyway, he had noticed a girl sitting across from him. She was beautiful, with dark, heavy-lidded eyes exaggerated by makeup, and an almost overly full mouth. She looked at him, frank and confident in her beauty There was a black bat tattooed on her clavicle.