With Feeling

People will make me up to be a whore. But I do take part in this process as well.

A Bedtime Story for all the legendary children, the upcoming legendary children and all those who still think they could dream they could desire they could hope

I.
It all began with a sudden pain in her right lung. She desperately wanted to reach it. It possessed the dangerously radiant magnetism of the one and only dimly glowing red button that would release the world into the throws of doomsday ecstasy. She believed if she could reach it, all of the membranes would dissolve, all bones crack and all the bitter darlings be turned into harmless shadows in one singular flash of passion lasting the world a necessary hour and a half of pain and an eternity of peaceful and quiet afterglow. She wanted to join forces with her piercing pain, but deep down she knew that they are on parallel paths in an unfeeling universe, which does not curve ever so slightly to allow parallel lines to meet at its very end. That would be too easy. Too much of curtain-fall-y final folly. But she continued to reach from the top as well as from the bottom, as the world around her did, with her hand too short and too stiff behind her back with fingertips seeped in gnawing frustration, for the vision of mutually assured destruction.

II.
It all changed when the listening device came into her possession. She always knew she was being followed, but she usually discarded this fluffy paranoid sentiment on account of being a foreigner in her own body and continued to suspect that the person following her, was in fact her very own self, separated from the physical vessel in some freakish accident involving a picnic and a bolt of lightning. On that faithful morning however, when she moved aside the heavy fridge that her father had delivered to her flat by two burly, surprisingly civil men, to release some precious object from underneath its expansive torso, she found a single eye, blinking at her fervently and coldly, attached to what could only be a government issued listening device. Silently she pried the gadget off her favourite kitchen appliance and stared at it intently. Unthinkingly she started taking off her clothes, holding the device gently in between her teeth to allow for unobstructed movement in the act of disrobing. When she was fully nude, she closed her eyes and moved the device along her body, first touching the nape of her neck, her earlobe, her clavicle, moving down from the armpit along the ribs, back up to her breasts. She tried introducing the device to her pain, but she could not reach. Shortly she held it squeezed between her thighs, gazing straight onto the creation of the world itself and fixed her hair absent-mindedly. Suddenly a resolve and firmness entered her body. She placed the device atop the kitchen counter and got dressed quickly but calmly. She cloaked her body in her large winter coat, that had pockets, which could each easily fit the complete works of Lord Byron and exited her flat with the listening device in one pocket and her keys in the other. As she made her way towards The Academy, she felt a deep affiliation with the device. Disregarding its source and purpose completely she dreamt of putting one listening device in each of her cells. The noise of public transport was drowned out by her imagining what her blood whispers about in the soft darkness of her body. She wanted to know if it complains about her. She wanted to sense what the asymmetry in her body sounds like. She wanted to be there, be present. The mechanics of the device provoked her to come close to her own body more acutely and more perceptively that most living things. She made a pact with herself. To be exact and above all, to listen. For the first time in her life she felt human without the urge to vomit immediately, prompted by the understanding that the one and only distilled ability that the listening device possesses is an ability of deeply human nature. She wanted to use it. Use her body. Like this beautiful, blameless device. The only reason she did not throw the little spy into the river was her realisation that her curiosity would lead her to follow. To examine what a drowning body sounds like.

III.
Informed by the listening device she suddenly understood why she adores The Engineer. She loves the way he speaks to all that surrounds him, to all creation. He possesses the confidence to ask anything at all about anything at all. Free from anxiety and the shadow of the second guess. And that is why he manages to crack every single material open and get it to speak, to sing, to answer. He is not afraid to argue with the world or agree with it. Even though he does argue with a significantly more pronounced fervour. He understands what belongs where, as if an ancient power or an extra organ guided him towards completion. He simply looks for the connection. Until he finds it he accepts no other vocation, no other mission. Something eventually gives him a hint. Something becomes enticed, enthused, seduced. His pragmatism is noble because he takes everything and every thing into play. What if? What if, she repeated to herself entering The Academy, clutching the sudden realisation of her potential beauty to her body like a sought for carton of eggs, that one stands in line for for hours on end and carries them home in the winter slush carefully as if life itself was contained in their shells.

IV.
In the unclear hours between afternoon and night she sat down to take wine with The Other Engineer. The girl. The listening device still rested snuggly in her pocket wrapped in a handkerchief to obscure it’s never sleeping eye from all who might be so awake as to see its light pulsing through the thick woollen fabric of her coat. They chose to sit in the narrow corridor right next to the kitchen. Alone but for the smells of food that curled and twisted around them and settled in their hair. Black and red. Unspokenly expressing interest in each other and simultaneously not wanting to be disturbed they each ordered a whole carafe of red wine. The silences between them immediately grew tentacles and tendons, green shoots and small leaves, wrapping around both women like an invisible cocoon, sheltering them from the banal chatter of the pub and shattering unwanted attention into sea foam and breeze. They both spoke in sonorous, concentrated voices, making speech utterly tangible. Dripping. With each drop of each syllable her pain seemed to subside and her shoulders usually frozen in the gesture of one who expects to be hit settled in a soft downward curve. She knew she met her sister. And The Other Engineer, The Red Girl, she knew she met hers. They felt the abundance of time that lay folded neatly on their hands and when they laughed the entire world shook its skirts acknowledging that the legendary red button is, but a trick compared to this kind of quiet rapture. She reached into her coat and stood up and felt the cocoon of conversation stretch. The gaze of The Sister was clinging to her like the tender slime of a snail as she excused herself to go to the bathroom. Once she carefully locked herself in the cabin, she ran the water, placed the listening device on the floor, said a short prayer under her breath and stepped on it forcefully. She threw it into the toilet bowl and pissed on it with great delight, flushed the toilet and took care to exit elegantly. Aware of the moisture on her hands she sat down and proposed to recite a poem for The Sister, hiding her hands underneath the table. She spoke looking down onto her hands. As she proceeded her hands dried and she placed them carefully on the table. When she finished, she caught the unbroken stare of The Sister, just to see the words: “I want to kiss you now,” leave her shapely lips. “I was thinking the same thing,” she said. They both rose as blooms open to the command of spring and embraced in a seamless kiss, which rendered the universe utterly pointless. Gone. All membranes dissolved and bones cracked. They sat down pairing the warmth of the kitchen with their own. As they were leaving the pub, she ceased to think in sentences, everything came to her as a fragrance. A remark about love at first sight intermingled strangely with admitting that they are both currently bleeding for the sins of all women. The Sister dreamt of wolves. She hardly slept at all.

V.
When she crossed the square leading to The Academy the next morning the heels of her shoes hit the cobble stones as if each step were to ignite a spark. She felt beautiful and dangerous. Vile and murderous. She felt like a gorgeous dick, a laughing black cunt. With a smile that could cut throats, free from all possessions, in league with both the sun and the wind. Headlights blazing like crazy and each and every poor existence in sight jumping away like frightened deer. She was unsure if this would be good, but she was damn sure it was love. It was decided. Clear like a slap to land from ear to nose. She was in no condition to hurt anyone; she was simply unafraid and the partisan blood of her torn up family boiled so in the moments of happiness. Her frame of reference was utterly empty. She was scouring her mind for music, for songs, but she could not find any, her feeling was so unknown and so large it showed out everything else. All words. Gone. She felt the reality of The Sister all over her body, all over the city, all over the cursed world, holding its breath. Only she was breathing freely. Because they belong to each other. She made another pact with herself. To find what it sounds like to think of The Sister. The sound which she kept looking for but could not find. Not the flower, not the crown, not the clear soprano silver bell. The Sister is the centre. Perfect centre. Encounter. To think of The Sister must be to hear something that she never heard before. The drawn out female vocal, deep but undimmed by sadness. Nothing innocent, nothing light. To hear blood flow where it should flow. At the right place and the right time. Perfectly undramatic, because it possesses a flow rather than large movement. Some kind of love like a plant.

VI.
Then it became slippery. She trapped herself in her flat like a wild animal slowly losing its senses and waited. Sentenced herself to waiting. When she let herself out, she felt the same kind of itch scratched wide open becoming less and less contained. She sometimes left hoping that another listening device might be installed in her flat in her absence so that she may feel more relevant and wanted. Wait. Until. Until I. Just wait. To unhinge. To cool. To take out. Grow back. Unable to hold. Me. You. Kitsch. Darling. Sunshine. Sonnet. Alexandrine. Goldoni or Corneille? Taste. Wreck. Cavern. Sex. Insert. Open. Close. Or not. Each flower is fresh for someone. So that each flower can make a deal. Until complete – … She wanted to know what it was like. Exactly. In her mind she asked The Sister all sorts of indiscrete questions about her alleged betrayal. The endless rant in her mind was cut off suddenly by the last page of her diary. Her days were fever. Her nights were still better than yours. Stars scintillated like crazy messages from the Party leaders in frantic Morse code. Finally at home in her body she reached for the pain of others. And squeezed. She headed to the Secret Police headquarters and told the understanding officer an embellished version of her encounter with the listening device and the undying devotion to The Party this event ignited in her like a flame blazing through her entire body and a soul in a single flash of piquant annunciation of the one and only truth. According to the records, she immediately followed this confession with detailed accounts of various ways in which both students and faculty of The Academy transgressed against Party doctrine. Interrupted only by her short-lived attempt to seduce the understanding officer, she continued laying out details including names, addresses and phone numbers both fake and real into the early hours of the morning and emerged from the Secret Police headquarters a new woman. This is where the official accounts of her promptly end. Apart for the immortal legend popular among The Academy’s students, that she in fact tried to seduce the officer’s secretary, using some rather lewd and imaginative language – a dirty limerick, which circulates along with the legend, and that is why the protocol lists the seduction as a disruption, because the understanding officer would undoubtedly understandingly fuck her then and there and other minor anecdotes and tickles of the tangled knots on history’s hairy cunt she has ceased to be. She did briefly become an iconic image for The Party, the character of a dangerous deranged deviant who nevertheless saw the light, discarded her perverted love for another woman and ratted out all the friends to The Secret Police haunted various means of propaganda for years, including an unimaginative film meant to instruct the unruly youth, promptly turned into a pornographic spiff vulgar even by their standards by the remains underground movement at The Academy. But in all these many invocations of her unrestful ghost, it appeared as if her life had ended on the very morning, she emerged from her treacherous mikveh at the Secret Police headquarters in a freak accident involving a picnic and lightning. Oh child, but we don’t go judging people by their diaries and their histories. If they say that women and postmodernity have no sense of history, we should take advantage and tell our senseless truth. You must know this. You must know how she gazed into the eyes of two handsome rainbow trout recounting her last painful memory of attempting to prepare fish for her high school crush, who was so overwhelmingly late that it made her eyes as cloudy and slimy as the ones of the fishes before she even managed to rub salt inside their gently disembowelled bodies. You must know how she almost brought the fixedly surprised trout eyes back to life by magical transference of her own eyes shining brightly, when The Sister arrived at her door. You must know that she talked to the fish as she always does and smoked long cigarettes and waved her hands excitedly moulding the thin blue clouds of smoke into Chinese rose flowers as The Sister. You must know that she almost cried when The Sister told her that this was the first time anyone made her a candle lit dinner. You must know how The Sister laid her head into the nook of her arm and she read her short stories from snowed-under Poland. You must know all these things and invent the others I have not had the chance to write yet. You must know she may have lacked a sense for history, but she did not lack the sense for love.