All Roads Lead to Blood

by Chau, Bonnie;

  In one moment, a million synapses were firing in my brain of brains, mind of minds, not the heart, the threat of hearts. On that balcony, we spoke like this, fifteen feet apart, in the coldness, the darkness, the newness of the new year, about what, about things I was always desperate to speak about, especially in the cold, the dark. About the newness of life, about living near train tracks, about people and travel and what they do and what it does. But then, finally, I was too cold, and things were swerving, the universe, its intentions, its will—it was incredibly strong, wasn’t it? And I would never be able to resolve or reconcile pieces then or later, but when I had made the tiniest degree of a movement toward a decision, when I was headed inside, Sam was calling me over, to the corner, where nobody would be able to see us, and I might have just disappeared and left friends and obligations and righteousness behind in a flailing, falling pile, which, if you just worked your hand into the bottom, and flicked your wrist, the pieces would fly up, weightlessly, and would take such a sweet time to float gently back to the earth.

  In a way, it seemed like I didn’t actually have to do any thinking, or move even the tiniest degree. Sometime in the last few years or so of my life, a change had been made, a decision was formed and dispatched, and it was in my blood, you see, and I laughed, loud, free, and shook my head, no, no, leaving Sam to understand, to turn his head back down to look at the tracks below, and finish his cigarette in the sharp, black cold.

  Back inside, both on the couch, his eyelashes looked like stars, as if wet. I had thought, before seeing him in Paris, about the wild mess of hair he’d had that night in May in L.A., when we were swimmy with margaritas, but it had been cut, and it only charmed me more, that it was cut shorter on the sides and in the back, and left longer in the middle, the longest portion falling forward in waves into his eyes. It looked cocky. It made me laugh.

  I’m not sure which one of us was thinking this, because we both turned to each other and laughed, in the same way that made me think—realize even—that either one of us could have been thinking of the same thing, or if not of the same thing, the same sentiment, and what did it matter what the thing was if it made you feel the same way?

  “I think that’s important,” I heard myself saying, “laughing about the same things.”

  “How do you know we were laughing about the same thing?” he asked teasingly, and I was struck by the fact that he was able to say this teasingly, and how this validated me, and how sometimes you are right, but that doesn’t save the day, much less your world. I pushed him. I had learned this from someone three someones ago, pushing, pushing to get what you want, even if it meant pushing yourself into the moist brown soil in hopes of hiding and growing something at the same time.

  *

  When I think about Sam now, I think about the fluttering energy of skin and skinniness, the fervid bright, the feverish insomnia, the constant stream of charge and compulsion. I think about the squawking inhalation of his laughter, like raucous dragging gasps, grasps at air. The steady hum of isolation and being by yourself, an only child. The wandering, fumbling, the mistakes, the blundering, the rashness. I think about how he called me sweetheart, and how I allowed myself to like it.

  “You don’t have to isolate yourself so much, you know,” he had said that night of margaritas and sex. I probably said whatever. I probably rolled my eyes. But what he said had turned me transparent, for a moment. For a moment I didn’t have to say anything, and he could see me. I wanted to disappear into the couch cushions, but he was sucking on my lips. I said, “Yeah, so you know me, so then what?” I said it in a way that indicated I did not care either way. I couldn’t be bothered. I could only be seen for a moment, lit up, a blinking-open like a firefly, and then gone, changed back into a normal gray-black insect body vibrating lightly in the air.

  I think now about how what he said had turned me transparent, for a moment, but only to him, and not to myself. I think now of the bareness of the unlit insect body, untethered, unseen, free.

  One night, my mother makes braised short ribs for dinner. She tells us that she can never get them quite right, that she doesn’t know what the secret was to my grandma’s version. My grandma used to cook feasts on the regular. My grandpa used to take hundreds of family-gathering photos and edit with two VCRs hundreds of hours worth of home-video footage. They don’t do these things anymore, but still they seem ceaselessly happy. Even in the oldest photos of them that I’ve seen, they are already in their twenties and married. I am only able to imagine them from that point forward, their war-torn childhoods are nowhere to be seen.

  *

  It was time to leave the party. After five hours of inhaling invisible cat, my lungs felt scraped and hollow and my cough sounded like metal, and Alex’s unwanted advances had proven too much, and Lana and I both desperately wanted out. For a while we seemed free, to leave to go back to Alex’s place without him, and then suddenly, maybe brought about by one glimpse of a confused expression, one second of instability, one utterance of less-than-100% knowledge, Alex changed his mind. His mind, his pace, he was getting ready, putting on his jacket, there was no stopping him, despite all our protests and assurances, he was going to walk us home to his home, and whatever happened once that happened, I knew it wasn’t going to be exciting. There was no way out.

  We walked in silence, and then prepared to part ways with Sam. Hugs, lackluster farewells, I felt embarrassed for all of us, for finding ourselves in this situation, this version, in which not one person was promised a happy ending. Sam disappeared down into the entrance of the metro station, and we turned to continue on. But then suddenly Sam shouted back, was racing back up the steps, the metro gate was closed, it wasn’t running after all, and in the next instant Lana was turning toward me, whispering about not really wanting to go back to Alex’s place and how uncomfortable it was and in a crucial moment of chaos, a flurry, that single second when something can happen, when the window is slightly cracked open and things are free to fly in either direction, I said calmly, quickly, “Hey, it’s a sign. I think we should go to the Eiffel Tower.”

  So we went. Alex came with us, but still we went. The journey was full of dazed silence, but we made it. We got out at the Trocadero stop on the opposite side of the Seine, walked up the stairs out of the station, and found ourselves having to go downhill, and up again, and everything was covered in trash and broken glass from New Year’s revelry hours prior, but then, how high and solidly the tower rose, and how with even more certainty, it disappeared into the clouds.

  Triptych Portrait With Doors In Closed Position

  2016

  The artist tells me to create a frame for my story. Be a master builder. Erect a steeple to the skies, supported by scaffolding that holds up a clearly defined, easily categorized shape. You can have just a beginning and just an end, but a middle, a core, cannot exist by itself. It’s defined by what surrounds it, what comes before, what comes after. A frame for your story will make it more palatable. It will be easier for your reader, your listener, to hold, to stomach.

  I nod. I like this idea, of my story being something that needed rearranging in order for people to stomach it. An unruly story that needs to be tamed, enclosed, subordinated. Put a frame around it, show people where to look, show people that it is worthy of consideration, if not admiration.

  I ask if I should frame the story with a wedding. Weddings are ripe. Family, friends, strangers, social mores, traditions, every kind of relationship, food, alcohol, dancing, consumerism, money, everything comes into play. Or what about a gathering in a kitchen or around a dining table? Talking and storytelling while eating or preparing food. That seems right somehow, centering around the essential base need for sustenance and company. The artist shakes his head. He’s more of a proponent of private, small-scale encounters. Mundane encounters with the known and unknown. Encounters with people and with other stimuli, like art. Stories tha
t encounter other stories.

  A story within a story within a story. Or, perhaps a triptych. I am more interested in a story on top of a story. A triptych painting kept folded shut.

  I lie in bed between seven and ten p.m., looking out the window. I see a big bug, wonder for a second about the big bug, before it lights up. Fireflies outside my window. Nothing, light, nothing, light.

  2046

  In 2046, people would talk about how love used to be much slower. There would be time-lapse footage of a pale pink flower petal, unfurling itself in grainy slow-motion video, captions flashing across the bottom of the screen, saying just look at the wonder of life, look at the slowness of this woman, revealing herself. I’d have a job like researching old educational videos from the last century—most of them I’d be able to find digitized, though there’d be rumors of many that had been suppressed or “lost.” It is worth the wait, the time-lapse video would drone on, sans serif yellow letters blaring at your eyes, peeling down your lower eyelids. It is worth it, it would menace, the pink petal uncurling to a wider curl, un-arcing, throwing, ever so slowly, itself, its soft belly, to the puncturing of your pupils.

  People would talk about how there used to be events called speed dating, in which many men and many women sat in rows facing each other, and rotated, usually the men did, every five minutes, they scooted their bottoms over to the next seat, for a next date, with the next five-minute woman. There was a host, and a timer buzzer, and you took notes on notecards, so that you could remember your first impressions.

  The ways we come together will always evolve. In tiny ways, in big ways. Take the artist, for instance. The artist and I met in such a humdrum way, and yet he was always trying to tell this very uneventful story of our meeting, and I’d have to stop him before he bored everyone to tears. This type of behavior has probably endured for hundreds of years. This is what I’d be thinking about, while in line for the weekend Turn-of-the-Millennia Throwback Movies event at the MoviePlex, a double marathon consisting of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and Fallen Angels; and then Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, and 2046. Those movies were all about love, how it was never aligning quite right, even though we’ve been trying for eons. In the film 2046, there’s even a train that takes passengers to 2046, a place where everything always stays the same. You go there to recapture lost memories, maybe to relive past love, which remains forever steadfast in 2046. But even then, it still somehow manages not to align quite right. Even with a train that takes you straight there, sometimes you’d find yourself running in the opposite direction. It makes me happy to imagine where I would go, what or who I would visit, if I were to get on the train to 2046.

  The man in front of me in line for movie tickets, wearing a blue sweater, would be trying to tear open the wrapper to his 72-Hour Wide Awake Energy Bar, rip it right down the middle seam, but it’s not opening, and on one particularly forceful effort, the bar would fling out of his fingers and a plasticky thwack would hit him in the face, and he would jerk back, almost stumbling into me. I would barely move, lean my body back, just enough. Just enough so that we wouldn’t touch.

  2006

  Gus and I met up near the bookstore. I’d wanted him to come meet me at the bookstore, when I finished my shift, partly so that he would meet my coworkers, or my coworkers would see him, just so that I could know, later on, that he was real. Someone else would know, that he was a real person, whom I knew, once. Otherwise, once he disappeared, I would never know for sure. On the way to get something to eat, we stopped by my apartment. He stood in the middle of my room. I was not used to other people in my room—it happened so infrequently I could count recent occasions on one hand. He was tall, he was wearing many things, a hat, shoes, a jacket, a belt, a sweater, other layers, a watch maybe, a wedding ring. What are the handcuffs for, Celine? Halloween costume, I said, and continued with my story about small talk, or it may have been just small talk.

  I was not okay. I was not okay, I had asked him, after many iterations and ideas and scenarios in my head, if we could meet and talk, with the understanding that something had been wreaked, something might be irretrievable. But the understandings you come to, by yourself, in your head, with nobody else weighing in, sometimes they only have traction in the confines of your head. His surprise at my seriousness relieved me. Sure, he had said, are you okay??, he had said, with the wondrous shock of many question marks, and this relieved me too. Oh, I said, phew, I thought.

  2046

  In 2046 I would take a “Pre-Modern” drawing class at the Humanities Center, which would be next to the MoviePlex in the strip mall shoppertainmentplex. Sandwiched between the Center and the Plex would be a boba shop, called Boba-Go-Banana.

  In my drawing class, we would do left-brain exercises in which you had to write the answer to questions using your non-dominant hand. The question would be, Where do you see yourself in five years? Using my left hand, I’d scrawl some general answer about doing something creative with my life, and then I’d write, as a sort of addendum: I better not still be fucking thinking about this guy in five years, that’s for sure. I’d feel a small thrill, writing that with my wrong hand, in that strange subversive scrawl, fucking. Although perhaps the more terrifying thrill would be that I had lied, in this meaningless art class exercise, to myself. There would be no this guy. I wouldn’t be close to anybody. The closest I’d come to people would be as an apparition staring longingly at the knit pattern on someone’s intarsia sweater. Once there had been the possibility of the artist, but he was not seriously in the picture, who was I fucking kidding?

  *

  My mother would’ve been one of the pioneers of the Red (Con)Tent method, teaching women the world over how to compartmentalize their periods. She would lead workshops in this, a kind of guided meditation toward bento-box-like separations. As a girl, she would’ve taught me that I’d need to have my periods outside of time, in RagTime/BloodWave time, a zone that didn’t waste the time of men. It gave you this twinned self, you’d get to exist in another compartment simultaneously—a body-&-blood zone. This would’ve been considered, at one time, a kind of kooky hookey hokey mumbo jumbo hippie dippie new age way of going about things. But after the popularity of IUDs diminished over time, it would’ve become the accepted norm. My mother would’ve made a lot of money off the books and comprehensive guides she’d written. I would’ve recently gone rogue though, gone back to having my periods. Back-to-the-landers, but back to the body.

  2016

  After work, I get home, open the door to my bedroom, close it behind me, kick out of my shoes, drop my purse and jacket onto the couch. I click off the light switch. It feels cooler in the room when it’s dark. An optical illusion, a synaesthetic delusion. Tricking your mind is half the battle. Probably more. I lie down on top of the bed. I am waiting desperately for my period to be over so that I can masturbate without getting blood all over my hands. It is enough having to deal with the absolutely necessary aspects of bloodletting—pulling on the string to extricate the sodden red tampon, carefully dropping it into the toilet bowl, carefully making sure it doesn’t swing erratically or touch anything. Unwrapping a new tampon, placing the pads of my thumb and index fingers on the finger grips of the applicator while pushing it in, pushing in the actual swab of tampon, pulling back out the applicator, sometimes bloody, like a syringe, slipping it bloodily back into the torn wrapper, throwing it away. How many moments of getting blood on your hands, the dreading dragging tiny fear of splattering, of bloodying clothing or rug or towel. Plug that shit up. Put a cork in it. Staunch the wound. Do whatever you have to do, to stop it.

  Some women have debilitating periods. Some of them accept this, as a fact, period. Period. This is your life, period. Some of them continue to seek solace, in new medications, new doctors, new pills, new lights (won’t you see it, in a new light?), new exercises, new diets, new surgeries, new alternative holistic cry
stals, homeopathic remedies, poultices that smell like prickly pear. Be the change you can see, some man said. This is, once a month, the only change you can see, the only thing, a huge red splotch in your line of vision, the smear of blood dashed across your car window, and no matter where you steer the wheel, or how fast you force the windshield wiper blades, everything is red. All roads lead to blood.

  Long ago, with my first boyfriend Gus, we fought a lot. He used to mark my upcoming period days on his calendar, months in advance, but I think he actually provoked me more near the red-marked dates. You have no idea what this is like, I would say, feeling out of control, to become a walking wound every month, to bleed this way, to feel like your person becomes defined by its relation to a fucking bloody, bleeding orifice, to have blood smeared on the insides of your upper thighs, to feel this bloody wetness, to be draining yourself of blood like this, to become inured to the sight of yourself bleeding. I hated being on my period, was relieved at the first sight of blood, but every moment after the first sight was so unpretty. The heaviness, the wetness, the sweatiness of having a plastic pad, the sounds of plastic wrappers, the dryness of tampon absorption, wiping blood, the blatant redness of the smear on toilet paper boring a hole into my eyes.