Then, with the calm of a woman who knows what’s what, she aims very simply and without drama and shoots him in the chest.
He topples over the loft wall to whatever.
And here is a detail you probably wish I would leave out:
The photographer has her camera with her. She turns and photographs the body of the seemingly dead girl.
The book of photography that will come from this image will be filled with young women in the throes of desire or danger, and it will be titled She Placed Herself Between Violence and Desire, and it will lead to a great deal of money and a documentary film and quite a bit of fame.
The body of the male artist she leaves broken and bleeding on the ground floor of the loft. She doesn’t look. She doesn’t look.
The End. Three
What is the measure of loss?
It is in the hands, the girl-gone-to-woman thinks. It may be the only thing she knows. It is not the heart. It has never been the heart. It is astonishing how much myth has been devoted to that fist-size muscle, that blood pump.
After they have painted several blood paintings and several not-blood paintings, after they have fucked each other every way possible without once thinking of love, either of them, after they have come and pissed and shat and sweated and screamed and scratched and cut and bitten and everything else, they are reduced finally again to their animal selves.
In a quiet moment of breathing and drinking wine and staring into space, she asks him if he still has the gun.
He looks at her.
But he does not say, What gun? It is the gun from the story.
Of course he still has the gun.
She asks if he will show it to her.
His hand slips under the futon where he keeps it. Of course he shows it to her.
She fingers it. She turns it and turns it between her strangely bloodied hands. Her hands that have every possible trace of human on them.
He is not thinking, This woman is about to shoot me.
She is not thinking, I am going to shoot this man.
But neither are they not thinking those things, if by thinking we mean the mind brought to the very cusp of action. Even mindless action.
So when she points the gun at him, and he doesn’t move, and he closes his eyes, and he smiles very faintly, and when she pulls the trigger, without any kind of emotion in her at all, a person might wonder what it is that she does think and feel.
What she thinks and feels is this: This is a world of men. They come into your country, they invade your home, they kill your family. They turn your body into the battlefield — the territory of all violence — all power — all life and death. And we take it. We do. We keep taking it. We have lost track of the reasons we do not slaughter the world of men, but we do not. Yes, there are good men. She sees the face of her father. She sees how the filmmaker loves the writer. She sees the yet-unwritten life of the writer’s son. She sees her. . brother. Beautiful smear. But it is the world of men that creates pure destruction. And this is a truth we cannot bear: Since we bear them into the world, we cannot kill them. Cannot be done with them. Cannot exile them into oblivion.
We simply keep going, letting them enter us and seed us, unable to stop loving the meat and drive of them, for without men, would the world even spin in its orbit? The action of a man — without it, would there simply be a hollowed-out black hole? Empty space?
She doesn’t know.
She says a prayer for the soul of this man, just as she said prayers for her dead father, her dead brother, lovingly. As lovingly as possible.
She aims the gun at him.
Then she pulls the trigger.
Blood shoots everywhere between them.
His face is not shocked or filled with hate or rage.
He looks peaceful.
He looks done.
Neighbors call the authorities. A Homeland Security SWAT team arrives, and the girl is arrested. A week and a half later, she is deported.
The poet will be arrested for illegal aid to an illegal alien. An Interpol search will be conducted to find the performance artist. The poet will write a book of poems from her time in jail. It will solidify her career as a political poet. She will win numerous prizes, in America and abroad.
The writer will be told what happened. She will go into her bedroom and close the door, very calmly. The filmmaker will nearly lose his mind with worry, but in only two days she will come back out of the bedroom. She will not go down. She will spend the rest of her life communicating with this young Eastern European artist. The art each makes will inform the other’s. The writer’s stories, the young woman’s paintings, between them everything. It will keep both of them making art until each of their deaths.
The girl will live on, in a country emerging on the world stage. Someday the economics of her country will count for something, or they will join up with another country and matter. Someday this girl’s paintings will meet an audience, whether over the Internet, or by cosmic accident, or through back channels and counterculture trades, through thievery or trade or black-market wishes. But they will find their way into the world, her paintings.
Superpowers will topple and reorganize.
China and India will become something we never imagined.
Russia will make new allegiances. Siberia, unfreezing, will become a land grab.
France will take on a militant tone, leaving its beautiful cultural tower to chase power after all these years.
Canada and Russia and Greenland will stake new claims in once-frozen waters.
Africa will become an out-of-reach commodity instead of the expendable refuse heap we’ve treated her as.
Germany will forgive itself so much that it returns to arms.
And the Middle East, well, I think we can all see what we’ve made there. What a hand we’ve had in the making of our own demise. How masterful.
And the world will continue to be melted by a sun we’ve crossed terribly with our progress.
Nations will shift like stones in the hands of a girl making a city in the dirt.
And men and women. . either they will finally see each other and do what must be done to evolve, or they will not.
The filmmaker and the writer will invent a kind of love from making art together and loving a son.
The End. Four
The painter takes one last look at her asleep on the futon and thinks: Enough.
He reaches under the futon, where he has always kept the gun. It fits into his hand like an identity. It’s nothing, really, his magnificent and glorious death drive, up against the stories the girl told him about what happened to her. What is a man? he thinks. Wishing he was the story. This girl. This astonishing, gendered thing. What she has endured.
The sleeper.
He places the gun inside his mouth.
He shoots, the blood spray making its beauty behind him. If only someone were there to recognize this kind of beauty, to admit it. If only someone were there to capture it.
The End. Five
The hospital curtain shivers, almost imperceptibly. The rise and fall of the writer’s breathing. The image of a heart monitor, the audio silenced.
Two women alone in a room. The lives that might have been.
And the photographer’s hand, as hushed as whisper, or was it love, resting a Polaroid of the writer upon her unconscious body.
Fatherlands