Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

and the moon lights up the rain; and I am wet. I turn away

and go home.

*

The windows were open, as always. The cold no longer

streamed in as it had the first few months when the windows

first had to stay open day and night: winter, fall, summer,

spring: wind, rain, ice, fire. Now the cold was a tired old resident, always there, bored and heavy, lazy and indifferently spinning webs tinged with ice, stagnant, ever so content to stay

put. Even when the wind was blowing through the apartment,

blowing like in some classic Hollywood storm, the cold just

sat there, not making a sound. It had permeated the plaster. It

had sunk into the splintered red floors. It was wedged into the

finest cracks in pipes, stone, and brick. It sat stupidly on the

linoleum. It rested impressively on my desk. It embraced my

books. It slept in my bed. It was like a great haze of light, a

spectacular aura, around the coffeepot. It lay like a corpse in

a bathtub. The cats hunched up in it, their coats wild and

thick and standing on end, their eyes a little prehistoric and

haunted. They tumbled together in it, touching it sometimes

gingerly with humbly uplifted paws to see if it was real.

Prowling or crouched and filled with disbelief, they sought to

stumble on a pocket of air slightly heated by breath or accidental friction. There was no refuge of more than a few seconds’ duration.

The fumes that polluted the apartment came through the

walls like death might, transparent, spreading out, persistent,

inescapable. A half mile down, five long flights, immigrants

cooked greasy hamburgers for junkies, native-born. Each

hamburger spit out particles of grease, smoke, oil, dirt, and

each particle sprang wings and flew up toward heaven, where

we tenement angels were. The carbon monoxide from incomplete combustion was a gaseous visitation that blurred vision, caused acute, incomprehensible pain inside the head,

and made the stomach cringe in waiting vomit. The gas could

pass through anything, and did: a clenched fist; layers of human

fat; the porous walls of this particular slum dwelling; the

human heart and brain and especially the abdomen, where it

turned spikelike and tore into the lower intestine with sharp

bitter thrusts. Molecules whirled in the wall: were the wall

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itself whirling: wondrous: each molecule providing elaborate

occasion for generous invasion: dizzying space for wandering

stink and stench and poison. The wall simply ceased to be

solid and instead moved like atoms under a microscope. I

expected to be able to put my hand, gently, softly, kindly,

through it. It would fade and part like wisps of cotton candy,

not clinging even that much, or it would be like a film ghost: I

would be able to move through it, it not me being unreal. The

wall had become an illusion, a mere hallucination of the solid,

a phantom, a chimera, an oasis born of delirium for the poor

fool who thirsted for a home, shelter, a place inside not outside,

a place distinctly different from the cold streets of displacement

and dispossession, a place barricaded from weather and wind

and wet.

Each day— each and every day— I walked, six hours, eight

hours, so as not to be poisoned and die. Each day there was no

way to stay inside and also to breathe because the wind did

not move the fumes any more than it moved the cold: both

were permanent and penetrating, staining the lungs, bruising

the eyes. Each day, no matter how cold or wet or ugly or dusty

or hot or wretched, the windows were open and I walked:

anywhere: no money so there was little rest: few stops: no

bourgeois indulgences: just cement. And each night, I crawled

back home, like a slug, dragging the day’s fatigue behind me,

dreading the cold open exposed night ahead. In my room,

where I worked writing, the windows were never closed because the stench and poison were too thick, too choking. After midnight, I could close two windows in the living room just

so no one went in it and just so they were open again by 6

am when the cooks heated up the grease to begin again.

Sometimes, in my room, writing, my fingers were jammed

stiff from the cold. Sometimes the typewriter rebelled, too

cold to be pushed along. I found a small electric heater, and

if I placed it just right, out of the wind but not so close to

me that my clothes would burn, my fingers would regain

feeling and they would begin to bend subtly and hit the right

keys, clumsy, slow, but moving with deliberation. Less

numbed, they moved, a slow dance of heroic movement:

words on a page.

Each night, until dawn was finally accomplished, fully alive

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and splendid, I wrote, and then I would crawl, broken-hearted

and afraid of dying, to one small distant room, the size of a

large closet, where the fumes were less, and I would sleep on

the floor on an old Salvation Army mattress with springs that

some reformed alcoholic had never quite finished under an

open window. I would dream: oh, Freud, tell me, what could it

mean: of cold, of stench, of walking, of perhaps dying. Morbid

violences and morbid defeats: cement, rain, wind, ice. Time

would pass: I would tremble: I would wake up screaming:

driven back to sleep to be warmer, I would dream of cold, of

stench, of walking, of perhaps dying. Then, it would be time

to wake up. I would be tired and trembling, so tired. I would

walk, six hours, eight hours. After the first two winters I never

got warm. Even in the hell of tenement heat, I never got warm.

I dreaded cold like other people are afraid of being tortured:

could they stand it, would they tell, would they beg, would

they die first right away, struck down by dread, would they

dirty their pants, would they beg and crawl. I wanted to surrender but no one would accept my confession and finish me off.

He kissed me against my will and then I walked home,

slowly, in the rain, wet.

My love, the boy I lived with, lay sleeping, curled up in a ball,

fetal, six feet, blond, muscled, and yet his knees were drawn

up to his chest and his sweet yellow curls fell like a two-year-

old’s over his pale, drawn face, and his skin was nearly translucent, the color of ice spread out over great expanses of earth.

He was dressed in layers of knitted wool, thermal pants and

shirts, sweatshirts: we always wore all we had inside. The quilt

with a wool blanket on top of it had shifted its place and his

knees and face were brought together, his hands lost somewhere between them. I sat watching him, lost, in this room of his. He was on brown sheets. The radiator clanged and

chugged: the noise it made was almost deafening, only in this

room. There were big windows, and a fire escape splayed out

under them going down to the treacherous street. There was a