Buttercups and the lips of his wife.
Did he have a wife?
The day of their liberation came suddenly and without fanfare.
After the prisoners had forgotten their own names, officers began shooting prisoners at random, even as other officials were fleeing in jeeps, even as the camp was being overrun by liberation troops, their quarters burned to the ground, their leader handcuffed and scorned and whisked away for war crimes or picked up off the ground after suicides, still, the soldiers were shooting prisoners as best they could, and the old man still went on narrating everything he could remember about history, as he headed for a truck that would take him to safety, the photographer’s hand held out to him with a few fingers still tingling with life, the old man babbling away and becoming nonsensical, storming from the mouth with the last vestiges of history, saying something, what was it, something about Galileo, and wasn’t that extraordinary, that Galileo looked into a night sky and reversed an entire epoch, wasn’t it something? And who among us would ever raise their head to a night sky like that again, he was saying, when they shot him. And an intense memory seized him in that moment of danger — he was a photographer! He knew what the shot would be! — the old man’s head rocked back with the bullet shot and his mouth too red and agape, almost like he was laughing, toward a dead heaven, toward a godless sky, into the white.
And then the ping at his lower vertebrae, and then nothing.
Acknowledgments
My astonished gratitude to my agent and dear soul sister Rayhané Sanders and to the brilliant editor Calvert Morgan, without whom this book would not have made the leap into the hands of readers. Thank you for finding me and throwing a line into the waves.
Endless thanks to Chelsea Cain, Suzy Vitello, Monica Drake, Mary Wysong-Haeri, and Chuck Palahniuk for their support and help with this book. For years.
Of course my whole heart to Andy Mingo, who helped me transform what began as an epic poem whisper thing into an actual sort of novel. Deep in the woods of Oregon.
Thanks to Liz Fischer Greenhill, who read an early copy of the novel and helped keep me from fear with her heart-shimmer.
Gratitude to Raphael Dagold, who let me use and torque one of his astonishing poems in this story, and to Menas in Lithuania, whose paintings drove me down to the depths and back up.
I am in debt to the poets, novelists, painters, musicians, and filmmakers whose phrases are woven throughout this novel, including but not limited to H. D., Carolyn Forché, Walt Whitman, Marguerite Duras, Francis Bacon, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Alain Resnais, and Doris Lessing.
And to my sister Brigid, who gave me literature, life.
And to Lily. Whose death rose writing in my hands.
About the Author
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH is the author of the widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water and the novel Dora: A Headcase. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Iowa Review, Mother Jones, Ms., the Sun, the Rumpus, PANK, Zyzzyva, Fiction International, and other publications. She teaches writing and literature in Portland, Oregon.
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