Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

and smiled. It was the only time to be awake and alive on that

Lower East Side street corner. The light would be not quite

daylight: night was still mixed in with it: and there was peace.

Then the sun would be up, glaring and rude. The night would

be defeated and angry, preparing to return with a vengeance.

The vagabonds would shit and move. The fumes would begin

anew for the day, inevitably thicker and more repellent than

before, more repulsive than it was possible to be or to imagine

or to engineer or to invent. The whores would go home short

and lose more teeth. The boys across the way would shoot up,

sleep, eventually ride their bikes or go stand on street corners.

I would go to the small distant room and try to sleep on the

Salvation Army mattress under the open window. I would hear

the sirens. I would wake up burning, with ice not fire.

*

I would sit by the open windows in the living room and watch

the dark, then the light: dawn was my pleasure, a process

pungent with melodrama, one thickness edging out another,

invading it, permeating it: dark being edged out, a light

weighing the night down until it was buried in the cement.

You could slice the night and you could slice the day, and it

was just the hour or two, some parts of the year it seemed like

only minutes, in which both mixed together resembling peace.

The light would begin subtly and I could just see some tree-

tops up the street in the park. At first they looked like a line, a

single line, an edge of jagged mountaintops etched against a

dark eternity with a sharp, slight pencil, and gradually the line

filled in, got deeper and deeper until the shape of each tree got

filled in, and then color came, the brown branch, bare, the

leaf-covered branch, green, the blossom-covered branch,

chartreuse. I could see some dogs being walked early, the first

ones of the day coming, forms under artificial light turning

into creatures of flesh and blood when the real light came. I

could see, in the next room, the tousled head of my love, the

boy I live with, sleeping. Soon he would wake up and I would

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go to sleep and he would go to work and I would have stopped

working: now while he still slept and I was a vigilant consciousness I opened the windows that had been closed in the living room and sat down next to them to watch the dawn, the

kindest time.

In the hour before my turn came, my turn to sleep, night

would brand me: it would go through my brain, and make

pictures there of itself: every figure of horror would escape the

night and enter my brain: and each mundane piece of a living

day, the coming light, would grow huge and induce fear: a

drip under the sink was a torrent, irresolvable, menacing: so

there was no time to sleep: and the plaster falling from the

ceiling would become the promised disaster: and there was no

time to sleep: and the crack in the toilet threatened sewage and

flood: and so, it was impossible to sleep: and there was the

landlord to be called, and the windows were open, and congestion in the chest, and shopping to do, and noises on the roof, and some strange sounds from below: and so it was

impossible to sleep. The drip under the sink would mean calling

the super: and this meant no sleep: because he was a small,

mean, angry man, aloof but radiating hot cruelty, one little

man knotted into one fist of a man. His wife, having no English, would answer the phone and in terror stammer out

“ asleep” or “ not here” or “ no, no. ” Once she begged me in

splatters of languages I did not speak: do not make me get

him, miss, he will hurt me. The sink would be stopped up

beyond help, or there would be no heat or no hot water, for us

in this cold place a disaster of unparalleled dimensions, and

she would whisper in chokes: do not make me get him, miss,

he will hurt me. I knew the sound of the swollen larynx waiting

to burst.

The day would be solidly established, that graceless light,

and the people of the day would begin moving on the street,

the buses would come one after another, the traffic would rev

up for the day ahead, the smoke from all the motor engines

would begin escalating up, the noise would become fearsome,

the chatter from the street would become loud and busy, the

click click click of shoes and boots would swallow up the

cement, the voices would become various and in many languages: and I would make my way down the hall to the small 112

room with the broken springs in the mattress under the open

window and try to sleep.

I dreamed, for instance, of being in a tropical place. It was all

green, that same steady bright unchanging green under too

much light that one finds in the steamy tropics, that too-lush

green that hurts the eyes with its awful brightness, only it was

duller because it seemed to know it was in a dream. And in the

steaming heat of this too-green jungle with its long thin sharp

leaves and branches resembling each other, more like hungry

animals than plants, stretched out sideways not up, growing

out wide not up, but still taller than me, there was a clearing,

a sort of burnt-out, brown-yellow clearing, short grass, flat, a

circle surrounded by the wild green bush. There were chairs,

like the kinds used in auditoriums, folding chairs set up, about

eight of them in a circle like for a consciousness-raising group

or a small seminar. The sun burned down. I was standing.

Others were sitting in the chairs, easy, relaxed, men and

women, I knew them but I don’t know who they were by

name, now or then, and I have a big knife, a huge sharp knife,

and very slowly I walked up to the first one and I slowly slit

her throat. No one moves or notices and I walk to the next

one and I slit her throat, and I walk to the next one and I slit

his throat, and slowly I walked around the circle of sitting

people and I slit each throat slowly and purposefully. I wake

up shaking and screaming, burning hot, in terror. In the dream

I was truly happy.

Or I dream the dream I hate most, that I am awake, I see

the room, someone is in it, I hear him, he has a knife, I wake

up, I try to scream, I can’t scream, I am awake, I believe I am

awake, but I cannot scream and I cannot move, my eyes are

open, I can see and hear everything but I cannot do anything, I

keep trying to scream but I make no sound, I cannot move, so

I think I must not be awake, and I force myself to wake up

and it turns out that I wasn’t awake before but I am now, and

I hear the man in the room, and I can see him moving around,

and I am awake, and I try to scream but no sound comes out

and I try to move but I cannot move, but I am awake, and I

see everything and I hear everything, every detail of the room I