Giannina Braschi - Yo-Yo Boing!

Bottoms up. Down the hatch. Want some more? Well, help yourself. Now’s the chance. Her mouth is open. It’s now or never. You’ve got to act fast. You’ve got to find the first little crack and peep through the gap and squeeze yourself through, yes, jump right in there, between her two front teeth. C’mon, hurry, hurry, you’ve got to hurry, it’s a golden opportunity, a once in a lifetime chance, you’ve got to hurry and slide down her nose, bypass her tonsils, and say hello palate — good morning, tongue, excuse me, molar, yummy gobber is passing through — quickly, yes, run and run as fast as you can and push your way through, swing from her tonsils, bounce off her palate, and land behind her two front teeth, push your way through, squeeze between the gap, and hoist yourself onto the front tooth, yes, the one on the right. What a riot! Though she searched and searched and couldn’t find you, she laughed and found her dimple instead, open and naked with its shameless grin. Hey, sweetie, look at me. She looked at the cabinet mirror and saw three little hairs on her chinny, chin, chin. She took a pointy pair of tweezers out of her makeup bag and tried to pluck the first little hair. Impossible, it was newly born, smaller than a zit and far from ready yet. She went after the second little hair with another pair of tweezers that were squared at the tip. Harried and obsessed, she quickly sized it up from the corner of her eye and plucked it out with one swift pluck. She returned to the first the little hair and plucked and plucked and plucked until she finally plucked it out. She traced her jawline and yes, there was peach fuzz, as well as scanty pricks, and though they had no thorny tips, they stood out in the sunlight ugly and thick, and so, she uprooted them one by one using a magnifier and the tweezers that were squared at the tip. Then she ran her fingers underneath her chin searching for the last prickly-pear, the third little hair. Three smart tugs. No such luck. She switched back to the pointy pair, firmed her grip, grabbed the third little hair by the head, and yanked it out. Root and all. Now her chin felt flat and smooth like an iron, and she felt happy and soothed. Then she began browsing her jaw for pimples to pop, but found only dark marks of the pimples she had already popped. Her bare face was full of little pliers and wires, nooks and holes, warts and moles. She needed base to cover these dreary blemishes, these daily woes. She dabbed some drops of Doré on her forehead, letting it dribble a bit, before dabbing some more on the tip of her nose and gliding it down the wings with her forefinger, covering holes and dashing Souci on her cheeks, she started spinning, smearing and encircling her flushed cheeks, skating in concentric circles, and sliding her greasy fingertips over little lumpy bumps, shooting comets and bullets, and gliding them back over the nose as if they were trapezists or tumblers. Crossing a catwalk of memories, memories that breeze by, quickly regarded, as swiftly as a train leaving behind town after town in the blink

of an eye, journey and remembrance, staring out the window at grazing animals, batting eyelashes, and dimples. She smoothed the base into her forehead, allowing it to blend into her temples, and then gave an orange, green, and violet expression to her eyes. The eyeliner flowed across her eyelids, startled eggshell, yellow yolk, and started spitting and shining and doodling little blossoms. She opened the dusty blush-on, huffed and puffed on it, then wiped its mirror with Kleenex. She didn’t see her turtleneck, pug nose, or open pores. As she turned sideways, her nose blocked the view of the bags under her eyes, but not the blinking of her lashes. She lowered the mirror to see her dry lips, which she moistened with the tip of Nimphea. She chose Bloonight from the cabinet, as well as a round hand mirror to magnify the dimensions of her complex, perplexed misfortunes. She saw ticks and roaches and sank in the terrifying panic of her pain. She flipped the hand mirror over and once again contemplated the surface of the landscape and the geography of her continent. She coated her lashes with Bloonight, which was sputtering at the mouth, and as she was batting her lashes, the mascara brush hit her eyeball, causing a furious flutter and a long, thick crocodile tear, salty and black. She drew a cover stick over the bags under her eyes to mask the stain, blinked again, and powdered her face with a powder puff like an eraser on a chalkboard. A clown. All painted up in white, with two dark shadows over her eyes, and two plums on her cheeks, and her lips, wet and ready to kiss a cherry, were puckered and painted in blood-red wax. And down her temples flowed two streams, two long streaks of sweat that lingered in the wrinkles, not wrinkles quietly settled by age, but wrinkles quickly etched by the emotion of her eyes, by the furrows that furrowed and drained into her mouth where they melted on her tongue and vanished beyond the knot in her throat. It was mesmerizing to watch how the lashes resembled the blustering of an autumn tree trying to balance its branches, how the leaves were falling, blinking leafy and startled, how the windows of the skin opened to breathe, and how the pores absorbed the makeup that was melting like a candle in a candlestick, and how the illusion was darkening, and how the powder, in trying to hide the caves and thorns, made them even more noticeable, and how the cold transparency shone through and how it warmed and thawed in the flames, and how the same lights and shadows and the dance of lights and shadows were playing havoc on the neck, while the skin was sucking the succulent juice of the grease, and one wondered whether it was the grease that came from within, maybe from deep within, or whether it was the cream from the makeup, or whether it was a combination of both, with the dusty, crusty blush-on and the dry, chapped lips, having used all the lipstick, and even when she wouldn’t remove any of these face paints, when her face had already become the mask it was, when she could no longer rid herself of the magical spell of her sweat, and the furrows and reefs where the currents of her tears flowed, and the smile and stretch of her squinting eyes and the wrinkling of her smooth expression, cooked, uncooked in its crucifixion were sculpted into caterpillars, warts, turtles, spiders, hunch-backs, tattoos, in markings that no longer grow, or if they grow, they only grow old, but at least they don’t crawl backwards like crabs; instead, they persist in prolonging themselves, in opening themselves wider, in extending their movement and growth until paralyzed in high maturation toward the death of youth, and the ear of a wrinkle listens to the

sound of a seashell, and one wonders whether they will ever be warts or moles or wrinkles again. Oh, mirror, mirror, on the wall, shattering into so many faces, which is the realest of them all, which always lies, which fears it’s not the call of death, which is too real, but the very death that is reality and won’t swallow lies or mask itself in makeup. She turned on a little green bulb, spotlighting her left side. As the light spread across her face, she closed her eyes slowly and strained to open them again. Reflected was the displeasure of seeing herself sideways, half in darkness, deformed, not only by the light, but also by the disharmony she felt in her eyes and crooked mouth. She searched the surface of her face for the cause of her displeasure. She figured it was a fixation, just a peeve that made her see herself this way; if she had some distance from the reflection, she would have liked being herself, yes, maybe that was it, that she was tired of seeing herself confined to the loneliness of her own face. And if that weren’t so, then how was it that others found her attractive? How could they, unless they saw her differently than she saw herself? She thought about the tone of her voice, so shrill when she screamed, when she didn’t know why or how she became so enraged with a rage that sent tremors through her jaws, hardened her gullet, and scorched her throat. She thought about all the times she knew exactly how she wanted her hair to look but no matter how she combed it, it did whatever the hell it wanted. But what bothered and baffled her, truly baffled her and set her beside herself, was the desire to see herself as others saw her. She wanted to know what they were thinking of her, and if they kept what they were thinking to themselves, and if they were thinking something different than what they were saying, and why was her face, and not only hers, but everyone who looks at herself, a high cement wall, so impenetrable, so truly impenetrable, mysterious and silent. Why were they at war in her face, the greasy buildup, the shiny crocodile tears, and the daunting bags under her sleepless eyes? And she heard within herself, throughout herself, in a muted stillness forming a shore in her face, shores of thoughts, not thoughts buried in a tomb of an alarm clock, not thoughts barred in a coffin with padlocks, but those wrinkles that flourish and blossom, those subways heading downward from the tip of the nose, toward the half-open mouth, because they were puckered and marked and cooked, they were the ruminations of the face with the face, the encounter between the interrogator and the interrogated, between the trench and the ditch. As the film, awash with stains, was developing in the sunlight, as she was revealing herself at this very moment, as if she were veiled in white, as she was appearing, never the same in the changing movement since the first toboggan ride down her side, she wanted to free herself from herself and from all her thoughts. She wanted to reflect without them behind her forcing the way. When her eyes were focused on a fixed point and she began to project all kinds of images on the screen of her forehead, it was almost always after spending a night far away from her yearnings, her desires, when they returned eager to appear on screen. And they almost always came light, soft, not rough, like a waterfall, like cheerful solace, refreshing her face and allowing her eyes to recover the first illusion. Indeed, her eyes clouded and cried with childish excitement, and while the music played on the stereo, she started speaking with the images that suddenly appeared, bubbling, easy, uninterrupted,

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