Grossman David - Her Body Knows

"No."

"Then just tell me if during the days we've been here I've ever said the right word."

He remains mute, lifting his arms up high, delighting in the suppleness of his limbs. "I can't tell you, it's against the rules. But if you happen to say it today, then this evening I'll be allowed to tell you that you said it."

They shake hands ceremoniously, and as they look into each other's eyes, his coal-black wades into her green. But he never told her before he left. Maybe he forgot, or maybe she really didn't say the word.

She smiles. "All that, all that whole last bit, I don't know where you came up with it. It's a thousand percent unlike him."

That's how she says it, and I close my eyes, not in pain, but as if I can't go on seeing from the outside. And I don't want to either, because I can almost feel him in me. It finally happens, out of the blue. And it was her negation, her absolute certainty of what was unlike him, that did it. For a moment I feel him hovering in front of me and existing independently and almost without any connection to me. And so for the first time he is suddenly with us in the room, more alive than he had been in all the words I had written, all the thoughts I had imagined and tortured myself with. Out of negation comes affirmation, just because she is so sure of what is a thousand percent unlike him. Eighteen years later, she still knows him with such confidence.

It used to be that just that thought could have shattered me, but now I stand outside my pain for an entire minute, not even caring whether the other things I had imagined weren't like him either, and I even manage not to ask her about the rest of it, about the Chinese restaurant, for example. I think that's unlike him too-so what? I just sit and delight in how much it doesn't hurt, and I am even capable of thinking that everything I'd written and imagined isn't like him. That he was an utterly different kid. A thousand percent. That he was a macho kid, loud and boisterous and wild, for example, or dumb and dense, or even sly and conniving-a bastard who abused her the way they all did. An array of princes and jokers in his image fans out like a pack of cards, and with wonderful peace of mind I close the circle segment and choose one card with my eyes shut, and that is him, my kid-

I dare to breathe in the place that even the writing hadn't opened up for me. It had been sewn up with iron wires, and he-the boy, the kid-is in front of me, alive and sharp, and then, unhurriedly, he changes his shape as in a dream, and now he is a young bird at night, emerging from the darkness into the light of my window, curiously drawn to the light, and we both look at each other through the glass and see each other, and the bird gets scared first and disappears again, and I am left with my longings, but it doesn't kill me now, I don't know why not, it just doesn't kill me anymore.

"So should I take out that whole bit?" I ask in a voice struggling to be dry, and what comes out is a squeaky, choking sound, and I am also stung by a different kind of disappointment. "To tell you the truth, I also felt that it wasn't really him, the whole thing with the winning word, but I really don't want to give up that bit."

"God forbid, don't take anything out."

We both say nothing as we quiet ourselves. I've started getting used to these silences, and I even like them. They're so different from the noise we used to share. I also notice how quiet it is here. It's strange that you can't hear any sounds from the street. Exemplary Walter has done a wonderful job of sealing off his house. No world.

I moisten her lips. My eyes are very close to hers. I ask softly how she feels. She makes an effort to smile. "I wouldn't recommend it." She asks if it's hard for me. I say it isn't. It is. That it's really mixed up. I still can't tell her how it moves me, to be exposed to her like this, as if without my knowledge, and also somehow, without being able to prevent it, with a kind of self-anesthetization or self-abandon, to feel her finally reading my story.

"Listen, you don't happen to have any cigarettes in the house, do you?" And before I can apologize for the stupid question, she digs her hand beneath the mattress with a seductive smile and pulls out a crushed pack of Marlboros, not even Lights.

"Just open the window afterward. He mustn't find out or he'll kill me." She chokes down a giggle. "He might drown me in tears."

I light one for myself and one for her, and take a long drag. I haven't smoked for three months. It was part of the rehab I was asked to do, required to do, and I was hoping it was behind me, that I'd overcome it, but then suddenly this sucking urge came over me. I inhale and look at her. I watch the way her eyes shrink as she takes a drag, the sluttish pleasure of a huntress of delights lighting up in her. Her whole vitality is now contained in the cracked lips that pull on the reddish glow, and for an instant it's as if a curtain has been opened and I can see her as she is, as she should be, as would make her happy, probably, were she not trapped in my little dictatorship.

As always when we reach this juncture, I am struck by the thought that maybe I never really understood what I had been given in the blind lottery of life-what I had won. And again, as usual during these attacks of mental weakness, it's a short road from here to wallowing in the swamp of if-only: How did it happen that I am the only person on the face of this earth whom she is somehow incapable of completely reading? What rare misfortune placed me in her blind spot? And yet I know that even that is not completely accurate, because that is exactly how I wanted it, that's what I fought for, and was slaughtered for. To strengthen my failing soul, I remind myself of all her transgressions, and remember with horror that I have a fairly long list of them further on, a choice little minefield. I sigh and say, "Okay, well, don't tell Melanie either."

"She doesn't let you smoke?"

"Are you kidding!"

We both inhale with a strange delight, somewhat hysterically, filling the room with clouds of smoke and choking with laughter.

"When you were born, you were a little pint-size thing, and you were in the preemie ward for three weeks. I wouldn't let you stay there alone."

"Really?" Instinctively I straighten up in my chair, already hearing the impatient dryness in my voice. You're such a shit, I think to myself, why are you fighting her? Give her the pleasure now, gift-wrapped.

"And I plunked myself down there for three weeks, and the nurses yelled and the doctors threatened, but it didn't do any good, I got under their feet in there for twenty-one days, sunrise, sunset,

drove them all mad. Well, that father of yours was always very busy, and I wouldn't have trusted him with something like that anyway."

The shadow of a smile filled with satisfaction, almost craftiness, passes over her face. That's how I should have taken a picture of her, assimilating the smoke and passing it through her corroded windpipe and bronchi, happily scorching them.

"At night I would sit among the incubators with the preemies and talk to you, and sing to you, and tell you about Siddhartha and Vishnu and Parvati. I told you all the stories I knew. They thought I was crazy. They weren't the only ones." She titters. "They said to me, What can a little thing like that understand? There was this one nurse there, Kurdish, I think, but a real sharp woman, and she said to me back then, Your girl will grow up, she'll be a writer."

"Oh, so now we know."

"I even gave you massages in there."

"Massages? But how. it's supposed to be sterile!"

"Well, you turned out all right, didn't you?" Her thick fingers stretch and move around of their own accord. "I would put my hands through the rubber circles on the sides. You were like a little chick, and you were a bit translucent too, I could see all your veins."