Her first thought: I want to paint.
So she dragged her body back to the barn next to her own house even as she could barely walk or stand or bear the weight of anything and she found a wooden plank and she took what was left of her strength and painted with her own menstrual blood. That is how her parents and brother found her. Almost like a wild animal.
As she looks at the red water around her now in the bath, the girl thinks, That is the blood that has returned to me now. The blood I have waited for. And she thinks of the wolf’s paw, the severing she witnessed one night when she first came to this house.
The widow shows the girl how to use a pad to carry the blood close to her body, and in the months to come the girl’s and the widow’s monthly bleedings synchronize. From that day forward, the widow accelerates her teachings. She teaches the girl how to be present in her skin, how to leave it; how to kill animals to eat them and to use their skins and fur; how to extract medicine from drying and grinding their internal organs; how to chop wood; dig your way to food or shelter; how to shoot to hunt, how to shoot to kill a man; how to use your hands to make things. How to hold charcoal to draw, how to make oil paints, what a sable brush is; how to take a pinhole photo using a box and the sun; how to hold a violin and draw a bow against its thin, unimaginable strings; how to make language go strange and vertical to make a poem. How to trust the moon.
Sometimes, when the widow is retrieving more wood for the fire, or when she is gathering materials to close a hole in the wall or roof, or when she is milking the goat or digging up frozen potatoes or shooting fowl or retrieving a rabbit from a trap, the woman catches a glimpse of the girl in the act of painting. Out in the barn. On scraps of wood. With colors she has invented from berries and roots and olive oil and mud. She paints with her bare hands. And sometimes, the widow sees her paint with her own blood, her hand dipping down to the well of her body. When she watches the girl paint with blood, it takes her breath straight out of her, lifting it up to a place she has not admitted to for years. Frenzied and animal the girl’s hands are. Wild, her blond tangles of hair. Her body thrusting forward and retreating with an unbashful sexuality. Without anyone’s permission or knowledge. Sometimes the girl is laughing. Sometimes she shouts, “Ne!”
What she paints: a face. And the face is either screaming or laughing, at what it is impossible to tell.
The woman then understands that the girl will someday leave the house. Maybe soon. That the force within this girl is not anything belonging to the widow. And because she sees something that the girl does not, the woman starts to teach her English. She tells her, “Someday you must leave here and take what we have left in us to America. What we have left in us, buried and ravaged as it is, needs to come out. It is not a perfect place, America. It’s simply a way out of this story.”
In this way art becomes the whole world of the girl. And her hands become painter’s hands; and her body leans toward becoming; and her tongue begins to move from the cornered shapes of one language into the rounded edges of another; her dreams begin to carry scenes from an unknown country; and her origins, which are a white blast zone, begin to seek form, like the crouch of violence in her fingers, like the unstoppable sex of a child leaving childhood, making for the world.
Part Three
Love Is an Image
It’s quiet like snow.
The filmmaker is holding the writer’s hand in the hospital room.
His head is on the bed near her chest.
Their breathing — a husband’s, a wife’s — synchronizes and hums with the hospital’s life-machine sounds.
Their beautiful boy is walking around the room with his Canon camcorder. Filming the lines on the linoleum floor, the fluorescent lights of the ceiling, the IV going from its transparent bag of liquid down the thin tube to his mother’s arm, the TV with his mother’s heartbeat signals, the somber hang of the curtains. Filming himself in the little mirror above the sink. He turns to the bed. His father and mother look asleep. He walks as quietly as he can toward their faces. With his six-year-old finger he pushes the zoom until the faces fill the frame, then farther, until it’s just his mother, then just his mother’s eye and cheek and hair. . everything.
Where White Is
I am into a white. As white as snow covering a field, stretching out toward all horizons. As white as a page. If there is a surrounding forest or mountain or city I cannot see them beyond the white.
I don’t know how long I’ve been here, or how deeply in I have traveled. I am aware that outside this place there is a room, and in the room they say a woman is not well. I think the woman is me, but I am so far away I cannot breathe language back into her, and so she rests, like a sleeping body, like a sentence yet unformed.
Sometimes I can feel my husband’s body — his physical presence — in my bones, and so I know when he has entered the room. He cannot enter the white. And sometimes I can smell my son’s breath and hair and skin, and I want to rip my heart from my chest and hurl it.
To them, I must look dead.
But I am not dead.
The white is soft. Soft against the eyes and the body, soft in your ears and throat. Not like mist or smoke. As if the air around you suddenly had dimension. You can almost touch it. This white before you. Where I am.
Inside the white I can hear things and see things. Sounds and images resolve and dissolve at random intervals. And different times present themselves — different times from my life or the lives of people I’ve known or the lives of random people, little scenes of being, all of them come and go.
The stories here move differently from the way they do out there. Inside the white, stories move backward and forward in time and appear in all places at once. Language and images split into thousands of universes. Stories and people and images connect with faster-than-light transfers of information. Many worlds coexist.
I do not feel unconscious or crazy or comatose. I feel part of the motion of all matter and energy, and thus I am a participant with agency. If I want something to come or go, it does.
I hear something now inside the white. It is a word. The name of a street: Bakszta.
The name of the street is immediately comforting. It is the street of my ancestors. The only one in the world who knows the people who lived there and their names, names that became my name, the name that began as one word and deteriorated down and down and under and across until it was utterly atomized into my American last name, the only one left: me. Because of all the daughters, some of them childless, I am the last. I am a locus.
Juknevicius. A name.
Bakszta. A street.
Through the white: a girl.
It is her. The girl who haunts me.
I go through the possibilities again. Maybe she is my dead daughter. And maybe she is me, or some relative before me. Maybe the girl is simply a metaphor for what we lose or what we make. And maybe the girl is just a girl, an imagined one, one created from the mind of a woman lost in the spaces between things.
I open my mouth to speak.
Perhaps it is the name of the street.
Perhaps it is the name of the girl.