It was the coldest moment of her life. Even to lift her gaze, to make her eyes available to the prying world, in that moment would have been arduous, but to look up and see precisely the woman she saw, intending to put an end to her suffering, to be overwhelmed by the meditation of a famously melancholy Dane, or not to be, all of this and her powers of sight getting lost in the small, slow, indifferent, black expanse of the weapon pointed at her face, her face of all places!, the weight was simply Jovian. The weight of it was stripping away the tatters of her flawed identity-play, or rather, the danger seemed so immense that everything about herself that was familiar seemed to be fleeing the scene, unwilling to witness the final moments.

In the distance between her body, her desire, her instinct to live, and the life that was running out of her, there was only a mass of cold space, an emptiness, a terrifying inability to remember the shapes and the names of things... a loss of vision, a blackness, equal to the blackness and indifference of the barrel.

She was fixed on these thoughts, and they were repeating arithmetically, against her will. It became, in that instant, her life's only concern, the question of what exactly lay at the back end of the barrel, what was its size, its potential force, its guiding intention, was this akin to hers? could it know this about itself, this buried catalyst? could it know about motive? where did it want to go? would it answer if called? could one call it Pietro?

She had loved his name, it had contained her, she ruminated on and within and around it. Pietro, as utterance, had within it a sequentially unique combination of sounds that had warmed her even before his life and hers began to pretend convergence.

She thought about the weight of stars, how they hung in space, and how if you examine gravity with subjective considerations, a star can't weigh more than our Earth, nor Jupiter more than our Moon, nor we ourselves anything less then the Milky Way nor anything more than the inborn life's project of a tse-tse fly. Everything in revolution, everything alive, it's a wonder that moments such as this can occur.

Again, she felt the sweeping formication of life itself deserting her, from under her skin. Whole segments and portions of life more precious in themselves than the whole seemed to be departing like a colony of ants seeking richer tomorrows. These are the chills that correct one's vision of self. She wondered if there was some way to gather up her inner strength and turn it to a single desperate proud determined act of vanishing. Could she make this event into her own decision? Would that suffice for escape? It is always a dark and vertiginous trial for the mind to come upon the question of vanishing, or of wanting to vanish, but it comes with greater concentration these days, almost like the sound of an old friend's voice. The question comes, and one feels like answering it with a fall. Answering with an act of acrobatic dereliction, throwing oneself against the certainty of solid ground. Never knowing if the fall will carry one safely away-from or further-into the danger of such meditations, the experiment becomes more and more tempting.

'You wouldn't!' she bludgeons. Then fear. 'You should try to spell it out, I mean, talk openly. It's more edifying.' Not the discourse she ever imagined herself presenting to Death, to dissuade the inevitable, but she is testing the water, to see if the end is actually near, or improbable.

Nothing.

Thinner strains of fear.

'I never learned a lot of things, you know. I never knew where he kept his memories, though his arsenal was vast.'

That couldn't have been a comfort.

'He must have known real happiness before me.'

Now she seemed to be trying to inflict the other woman's revenge upon herself. Insult, mortify, humanize herself. Give this lady pause.

Silence was fear, a new revelation.

'I'm tired.'

Tears.

The gun fell to the floor, the chamber opened, the impotence and the farce of the whole affair were revealed. There had been no ammunition. The death she had experienced had been precipitated by her own assumptions. Logical presumptions... necessary... but no more real for that.

It had been Pietro at the back of the barrel. It had been his rhetoric, his sly words, his nimble conscience always bending to fit the moment, to teach him immediately about the kind of guilt a lover would need to observe in order to grant him absolution.

'I am beginning to feel love for you, in this emptiness.' She was unsure about the words, sounding so unprecedented, so polymorphous as to shock the imagination; she was unsure about their meaning, as she was about whether they had acquired sound at all. The woman now let her arm extend from where she lay coiled, half-sitting, sobbing on the hardwood beside her eloquently impotent Colt revolver. At the near end of the woman's arm, was a hand, helplessly draped on an unseen rail of sadness, looking devastatingly elegant, trembling slightly. And on the fourth slender digit of the woman's surrendered hand, she noted the ring, the stone that had once contained so much hope, and now was like a drill trying to enter them both.

She had known who the woman was, from the first. It could not have been any other human being alive that would want to deliver the coldest moment into her life in such a way, that would want to put the fear of death into her conscious self, which always consisted in believing herself in every way innocent in the prosecution of her urge to survive. For such a self-fashioned innocent, no woman other than this particular visitor, this strategically perfect Other, could have conjured up the intention of coming to this place, in order to transform her from the sort of woman who could never have a gun pointed at her face to the sort of woman that could.

She knew it was Dora, she knew the ring on the finger that curled around the handle of the weapon had been given for a tenth anniversary, she knew that life was starting anew, broken clean for both of them, for these two women. They had been moving toward this moment, in which Pietro would be exiled, fading into the unwanted fabric of their former lives. The cold of the coldest moment had been the introduction of freedom, but only because there had never truly been any intention to fire the weapon.

'I have always been Dora, always walked a thin line, always thought of myself to be strong and whole. Now, I see, I was not even aware of my own intentions. I wanted to know you, and to be able to love you, the woman that changed him. That had been my dream all along. You had lived my dream. There must have been a part of the more-evolved Dora I had always aspired to be contained somewhere in you. This would seem to make no sense, this desire to penetrate you, to know you, if I loved him at all, but it does seem to me now the perfect expression of my pain, of the empty gun I have been carrying behind my eyes. I wanted to come here and to start this clean new life, with you.'

Nothing so stunning had ever happened in this apartment. She knew her entire personal history had been broken clean, and she was being introduced to new possibilities. The possibility of borderless friendship. It was only because they had shared the coldest moment that this friendship and this feeling of regeneration could have meaning.

There was a secret scruple, regarding happiness, that entered both women's minds, each of their bodies slouched against an opposite side of the double-wide doorless archway... healing... quietly. As a pair they began to feel that this new limitlessness was actually a corruption, not a purification, of human interaction as they had known it. Perhaps only in reference to the irrefutable limits of the physical world, nature mandated certain borders within which human individuals would be allowed to move. Two minds could not mesh, love could not kill, not as love, and survivors could not want to disappear. This new feeling of theirs, that they should now vanish into one another and be new, whole people, wholeness at last!, this feeling was outlaw. They were in strict violation of all the rules of the game.

'Do you think it was a game, for him, Dora?'

'I'd rather not know that sort of detail, fundamental as it may seem to the meaning of all of this. I'd rather there not have been meaning at all, until now.'

'Maybe if it wasn't love's game, maybe if it was Pietro's own, then we could rewrite the rules, here beneath these ribbons of aftermath.'

'And forget him.'

'And forget the gun and forget each other, if you'd like.' At this point, it began to seem that forgiveness and friendship (if one were honest, if one's mind were intact) had to be incompatible. Forgetting would require a mutual agreement, and that would require a distance that eliminates the possibility of active friendship.

And there was this strange attraction within each toward the other, toward a being who had held the resonance of wishes and suspicions and the answers to broad aggravated questions, over so much intimate time, attraction to a representation of the beyond, all that was previously beyond reach.

It was this feeling of wanting to make contact, to learn and to venture into another life... to kiss one's enemy in the projected death-spring place, wherever that might be, wherever the strange beauty of an impossible leap of reconciliation seemed to emerge. It was a willingness to forsake the import of an imagined hatred. It was a willingness to die as hate and be recreated by the moment. It was the unique way in which this temptation to invent a kiss for the occasion so utterly lacked erotic drive that it almost became infused with genuine erotic import. As if only by approaching the most delicate emotions of this other being could one confirm her knowledge of what love is were intact. It was something wholly other, unique to this place and time, impossible otherwise, and it could be achieved by the sweet-bitter surprise of tensions annihilated.

Did it matter that the kissed would be woman, as the kisser asserted her womanhood, her gentility, her potent vision of what life meant and would mean? It was something much more akin to the moment one disappears into the mist at a great waterfall, wanting desperately to commune with the blankness of the place, wanting desperately to say, I can exist here too, and be loved. It was purpose cascading into the fray, to stem the danger. Purpose that could recreate a universe of expectations and necessities.

'I want to be recreated.'

Dora had not prepared herself for so ritual an encounter. The thought came to her, without shame, I am Humanity's Essence Reified Overtly, the epic focal point, a point of light moving strategically to where I am most needed, I who came with the express motive to end a world and a way of perceiving existence, I have come to offer hope...

This was not clarity. It was, she knew, a guilty excess of emotional hospitality for grandiose reflections that stripped her of any necessity to face what promised to unnerve. We all desire recognition for salvaging what is good in others, for this heroic or messianic act. It is subconsciously the ultimate use of human intelligence, though for fashion's sake many alternative uses are proposed by one's conscious self. She had read about this in a work by the hoary thinker known to his readers only as Pseudo-Manuel.

[The name to which his writings were attributed appeared next to the word Instructor on no syllabus, in no catalogue, at any university, and the author had never spoken about his works in public. It was the perfect format, some had cooed, others had criticized, for delivering abstract philosophical ruminations directly into the reader's self-awareness... allowing the reader to belief that the ideas were not already claimed by any recognizable figure. Dora had liked this about his texts, and had recently taken up many of his proclamations.]

While time stood trembling at the feet of this odd confrontation, Dora was indulging her weaknesses, in search of a way out of this near catastrophe. She was declaring herself HERO Infallible and then raking her conscience for justifications, references, fragments of testimony that would work to her advantage.

Not far into this wash of autolaudatory affectations, this examination of classical standards of storytelling, Dora guessed the metaphysical position of this woman now before her, now seeming weak with sympathy, now awakening to her own invented mirror-self...

This personage is problematic for Truth, because she stays at the moment of crisis, awaiting the fever of an aftermath, entertaining porous intercessions from the very demons that had brought crisis to be. Dora presented the threshold between two possible dimensions of a single world: one that contained the moment of crisis, one that did not. The truth was something larger than all of this, at the middle of all of this, and here, between these two women wounded and healed, there was nothing to do but wait and watch and awake...

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

HAPPINESS
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

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