Drifts

by Kate Zambreno

  The next morning, having slept in the clothes I wore to the police station, I open the door to two officers, trying to keep Genet from humping their legs. They dust for prints everywhere, leaving a residue like fine ash. I am supposed to make my hand go limp as one of the men mashes into the inkpad with each finger, each tip, the side of each hand, as if I were dead. I can’t do it. They show us photographs of their own dogs on their phones.

  A few days after the robbery, having received a summons under our door, we dressed up as we would for a funeral. The self-consciousness of walking through the courtroom, feeling the grand jury watching me, perhaps watching the dress I was wearing. It was my only really nice dress, black, mid-length, three-quarter sleeves, sedate—my most respectable item of clothing. I repeated what the assistant district attorney had rehearsed with me, that I did not see the man, whose name has now been identified, but yes I knew there was someone in the house, yes I was frightened. As I sat there on the stand, my period suddenly began, and I bled with a gushing feeling into the only pair of good dark tights I had. I just sat there and bled.

  We purchased all the items we could to replace what was not recovered. We thought this would make us feel normal, to have our things back, to be able to move on. I bought the same exact wallet, except in a different color. A similar winter hat and scarf. My makeup. I replaced my new white silk blouse, which was in the bag, as I had had a meeting that day with my department chair and wanted to look nice, and then spilled salad dressing on it. I felt like I was walking about like an impostor, with my impostor wallet, my impostor hat, my impostor scarf, my impostor white blouse. The same but not quite.

  To replace the copy in my backpack, I had to buy a new edition of Hervé Guibert’s Ghost Image, his book on photography, now with Guibert’s beautiful face on the cover. I hadn’t realized that before he was sick he looked like an Abercrombie & Fitch model, which unsettled me. I still had the photocopy of the pages I was going to teach, my passionately scribbled marginalia.

  In the weeks that follow—weeks when I was unable to write, to record being an exhausted, legislated, bureaucratized body—I was most disturbed by the loss of the blue notebook. Also that so many of my identity cards were stolen, though luckily I found my passport in a drawer. A few days after, as we left the house to walk the dog, passport in the pocket of my winter coat, we saw the old woman from the yellow-and-brown house crossing the street. I had not seen her for weeks. She was crossing the street, and I waved at her.

  I find on the camera the last series of photographs I took, of the black-and-white cat who lives with the Japanese woman and her young daughter across the alley. After the robbery I would often find her staring at us, watching what was going on.

  I realize writing this I never used the old camera again.

  The week of the burglary, an Italian moved upstairs, in the room above ours. It was as if he just suddenly appeared. He was subletting for the actress, away doing a play. The week after he moved in he knocked on our door, and, when we invited him in, he sat at our table and drank our bottle of whiskey. He told us that he was a performance artist and graduate student. He was enrolled in the same critical theory program as the photographer, which convened annually in Europe. When he saw a DVD of Gilles Deleuze interviews on our bookshelf, he eagerly asked John if he could borrow it. Technically it was mine, as it was sent to me, but I hadn’t watched it. I told him I’d gotten lost recently on the Wiki “List of Suicides,” as I was supposed to be writing an essay on Chantal Akerman for an anthology, and wanted to see if her name had been added to the list. I hadn’t realized that Deleuze had died by jumping out a window. He started talking to us about Deleuze’s long uncut fingernails, showing me a photo on my laptop—they reminded me of Murnau’s Nosferatu.

  He kept on knocking on our door late at night, wanting to hang out. We smoked his cigarettes with him on the front porch, in our winter coats. I asked him if he was the one leaving out pancetta and milk for my raccoon cat—I thought he might do something like that—but he said it was the self-help guru. She doesn’t leave her room, but Skypes all day with CEOs, he tells us. I wonder what she says to them, what she gurus. The Italian reminded me of the charismatic boys I used to know, artist types and intellectuals who were adrift. I am turned on when I can hear him above us, shifting, moving things around, when we are in our bed at night.

  At the café, I see the Italian sitting with his theory books. I go over and say hello, but he is absorbed in his reading. A few minutes later, thinking I’ve already left, he sends me an email of apology. When he goes to use the bathroom, he sees I am still there. He stands in front of my table and starts telling me he is interested in stupidity and performance, like Chris Burden shooting himself. Or Vito Acconci masturbating in the empty gallery, hidden under a ramp, responding to the movement of visitors. I ask him if he’s ever read Elfriede Jelinek’s Wonderful, Wonderful Times, which he hadn’t, and promised to leave out a copy for him on my doormat, as I had several.

  After he leaves, I start to eavesdrop on a couple who seem to know each other but are seated at different tables, yet are carrying on with each other as if their conversation was ongoing or had been momentarily interrupted. As they speak I take notes in the margins of my notebook. They are both Russian. The body is an object, she asks him, or tells him, it’s unclear. He agrees, the body is an object, but a person is a subject. So the dead body is an object, she says to him. Yes—a dead body is an object. Unless it’s a ghost. But a ghost, she interjects, is a subject. So a ghost’s a subject but a body is an object. Interesting, she says, I’ll have to think about that. Then, at some point later, the woman asks: Do you think it’s a crime if someone takes the object and does whatever they want with it? Yes, it’s a crime, the man says. So it’s a crime to have sex with a dead body, even though it’s an object? Yes, he says. Why? she asks. Because it’s the property of the state, he finally says. So the government owns us when we are gone, she says.

  I have to leave because a couple has left their little Chihuahua terrified and freezing outside, while they sit inside, leisurely, and I become rigid and uncomfortable with my anger. At the same time I want to weep. Another woman locks her puppy up outside, but he escapes the halter and runs into the café. I go over and capture him, stroke him, while not looking his person in the eye.

  When I get home, the Italian has sent me a link to a video of himself dressed up in a picnic table cover, writhing around. Isn’t this stupid, he writes. I watch his body make specific gestures for some time. I don’t email him back.

  After the robbery, a constant feeling of dislocation. John takes me to see dingy cottages in faraway towns upstate. We spend whole days driving back and forth, stuck in city traffic. Yet we decide to stay in the same place, where we remain as I am writing this, gathering up my notes. Anna and I both abandon our country house fantasies at the same time. Was this fantasy, Anna writes me, a fantasy of not being distracted? But it was actually an elaborate form of distraction. The goal in life is to be still, Anna writes me, not to live a big life, but to be quiet and to write books, to continue to write beautiful books, great books. At least we aren’t having children, she writes. Not only for the time. But because we will get our existential satisfaction from working, not from raising human beings. I wasn’t sure if this felt true to me, I often didn’t feel existential satisfaction from working, but Anna was always so sure and convincing in her pronouncements.

  The problem, we decide, is that we can’t focus, we can’t go deep, we are always skimming the surface. I can’t figure out how to work on the novel, beyond moving around my notes from the fall. I am so outside of the book, I write to Anna. I have awful menstrual cramps. Should I take a muscle relaxer? If so, that’s it for me for the day. But I write Anna that, even when I’m disciplined and off screens, I cannot think all day, or I start feeling overrun. Work for me is to stop thinking as well as thinking, I write her. She appreciates how seriously I take distraction
, she writes me, viewing it as a problem to explore rather than overcome. But how much of that is just further procrastination? I don’t know. How much do I let myself take it easy, let myself be distracted? It’s uncomfortable to be in the space of a work too long, just as it’s uncomfortable being in the space of the day. Once I get to the couch and begin watching TV I’m done for, and I wonder if that’s what I wish for. I crave that relief, of nonexistence. It’s the trance of worthlessness, Suzanne writes me. She encourages me to listen to Tara Brach meditation recordings instead, though I don’t. Danielle sends me the same Tara Brach links. I think of how Wittgenstein needed to go to the movies immediately after a class ended. He needed it like a shower bath, he said, to bathe his mind after his lectures, exhausted and revolted by them, by himself perhaps. Genet is looking at me, waiting. I just took him out, in my holey pajama pants—bleary-eyed, mind racing. He takes forever to pick a spot. My winter boots sink in the mud. The blue tampon applicator, the empty Magnum condom box, a box of generic menthols, chip bags, all blowing everywhere, petrified shit. Glass from a broken beer bottle. How disgusting the trash is outside. A half-eaten doughnut in the garden, a gold condom wrapper. At one point G gobbles up a piece of shit, and I toe him with my boot to get him to stop, just as someone walks by. The pizza boxes pile up outside. Some are ours, some are from upstairs. Dishes pile up. I haven’t showered. I can’t read. I can’t leave the house. This fold of time I go into, as if lost.

  That February, Anna writes me that she is fighting with her boyfriend, over how bad her housework is, how he tells her she is an eternal child. You are a great artist! I write to her. You are not supposed to be good at housework! I want to be a great genius like Woolf or Kierkegaard, Anna writes me, but I am worried that I’m not smart or focused enough. I’ve lost the ease in which I used to write, I tell her. I want to write books of moral seriousness, of history and memory, and I don’t know how. I feel it’s just outside of my reach, to figure out how. Every day I try to figure out how.

  I don’t think I want children, that relationship, I tell Anna, continuing our previous thread. But if all was thrown out the window—if I was told I could have a child when I was fifty, and I had finished a body of work I was finally proud of—maybe then I would. It’s about time, and what we choose to do with our time.

  Yes, a miserable writer can create great literature, Anna replies. What does a miserable mother create? Except alcoholic children, ha.

  We meet up with the Italian in Chelsea in the freezing cold to go to an exhibit of Peter Hujar’s downtown photographs. All that year I thought about Hujar’s photographic subjects, often his friends, lying down, but then also dying. Hujar’s photograph of a young, sexy John Waters. I confuse that image with my uncle on his deathbed, as my uncle looked like John Waters in his casket, once shrunken down to half his size. I also kept thinking of that image of Wittgenstein on his deathbed in one of the biographies, his sharp nose. Which I conflate with the face of David Bowie, who had just died. And of John Wayne’s character in the casket with his boots on in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the Western I just watched with my father. In the film both Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne are in their fifties but playing young. I am confusing all these men, lying down. I read, in my Wittgenstein biography, how men in fin de siècle Vienna were never taken seriously, so they took to growing thick beards, paunches, strolling with walking sticks, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles—all out of the desire to look older. I save this detail to write to Sofia.

  The Italian walks around with us to various galleries. How many books have you written again? he asks. I can tell he doesn’t believe me. He asks John about writing instead. Afterward, we take a cab to a Japanese punk bar and drink sake. When the server pulls out my chair, I miss and fall to the ground, so hard that I have a deep bruise for a month.

  At first I found the Italian amusing, but as it becomes spring I begin to find his attentions annoying, or possibly sinister.

  Suzanne writes me of her loneliness. She misses the intimacy of a partnership, of having someone to tell all her neurotic and trivial details. Email can feel so superficial, she writes me. I’m lonely, too, I write to her. Write to me, I tell her, write me all your neurotic and trivial details. She starts sending me letters in the mail, several in one week, which, becoming overwhelmed with other things, I never answer.

  That feeling of ghostliness after the robbery. I still feel followed in every room—like a tracing paper over everything.

  II

  VERTIGO

  Approaching the close of the nineteenth century, at a commercial photography studio in Prague, a child by the name of René Maria is photographed over the course of several years. To the modern viewer, young René Maria seems to be dressed as a girl. Boys in the Victorian era often wore full-skirted frocks with starched petticoats up until their breeching period, usually around four years old, or later if the boy was sickly, as was René Maria, born two months premature. The reason for this was partly practical and partly emotional. Pulling up a skirt made it easier to change diapers. The high rate of infant mortality meant that many did not survive past early childhood, including René Maria’s sister, who died weeks after her birth, a year before he was born. It appears that René Maria wore dresses until at least five or six years old. Later in life, in supplicating letters that performed a lonely and traumatic childhood in order to ask for money or some pleasant accommodation—in a hotel, a sanatorium, a seaside resort, or a castle—the poet often repeated his personal mythology of a cosseting mother who dressed her delicate son, with the French feminine name, in girlish costumes well past the customary age. Gazing at the black-and-white photographs of Rilke as a small child is like gazing into a series of melancholy little rooms. Following the conventions of the period, the child holds a prop (a stick, a switch, an umbrella) and leans against a piece of furniture (a chair, a bench, a table), which helped to keep the subject still during the long exposure time. In Rilke’s case, these elements appear incongruous, both spare and chaotic. As background there is either a blank wall or a painted landscape, which often creates the unreal effect of exterior blending with interior. One can measure successive years by René Maria’s lengthening hair, curling about his neck, his skirted suit—front-buttoned for boys—worn with white tights and little black boots. In one session, held when he was four years old, René Maria wears what looks like a little straw pompon beret, and brandishes a switch. Befitting a writer for whom dogs would later provide tremendous solace, a rat terrier sits glumly on the small wooden chair where the child rests his tiny hand. In the next photograph, the dog is on the rug, alert, gazing at the camera, and little René Maria, hatless, holds a book bearing two cartoon drawings of animals, balanced against what appears to be a bench. In this session René Maria wears a bored, faintly melancholic glower that resembles the dog’s. There is a feeling of endurance to these photographs. What has the child been promised in exchange for holding still? What complaints has he issued and how has he been soothed? The overall effect of these staged compositions, the strangeness of the surroundings, are like a mood. This artificial staging somehow conjures the solitude of being a child, the discomfort of the body, especially in more formal dress. The one distinctive element in these photographs that stands out, amidst the hectic composition, are his eyes, the steadiness of his gaze. There are two other photos of René Maria a year or two older. In one, with a painted nature background, he wears the same type of white collared dress and pleated skirt, balancing his elbow rather casually against a molded wooden bench. In the other, he is dressed more prissily, but with the same white tights and boots, with a trimmed coat, clutching a frilly parasol and wearing a pointed hat, in a room filled with heavy wooden furniture and a chair with velvet tassels. In this photograph, with his pretty, pointed face, the hat obscuring most of his fringe, René Maria hardly resembles himself. But he stands on the same patterned Persian rug from previous photographs, wearing the same white tights and sturdy little bo
ots. As an older child, when he misbehaved, he would put on a dress and plead with his mother that he was no longer bad René but Sophie, his mother’s name. He remembered how his mother liked to parade him in long dresses in front of her friends, like he was a large doll, and he spent hours combing his doll’s hair, and putting her to bed. All to the dismay of René’s father, who worked for the Austrian army as a railroad station manager and wanted his son to make elaborate battle plans with toy soldiers. Rilke later rewrote these scenes of childhood in the novel, although the fictionalized mother is rendered with softer light than in the letters—an example of what his hero, Charles Baudelaire, called genius as childhood recaptured at will.

  Then there is René Maria at nine years old, dressed in military costume, with polished, high boots, sitting on a tasseled stool, facing the camera in his most assertive pose. By now he had started at St. Pölten’s military academy, near Vienna, which he loathed for its brutal atmosphere. The background of this photograph is more difficult to discern—it appears to be a painted architectural backdrop, a palatial scene of grand moldings and high ceilings. What is fiction, one thinks, but an imaginary space? What is the imaginary landscape of childhood, for that matter, but a fiction? Throughout his life René Maria recalled his time at military school as a torment. He told of being struck in the face by a bully on the playground, and telling the boy, I will suffer this as Christ suffered it, quietly and without complaint. A martyr, fevered by the lives of saints. This ecstatic obsession with death and mysticism would last his entire life. At the military school his sickroom becomes a sanctuary, continuing the punctuation of illnesses that would last throughout his life. His mother comes to comfort him at his bedside. And here is René Maria as a newly wedded man of twenty-seven, posed at his desk in the farmhouse near the northern German artist’s colony, in the first year of his marriage to Clara Westhoff, before he left for Paris and a more itinerant existence. There is an aspect to his face, those eyes, their intensity, that retains something of the little child in all his manifestations. At the desk he looks like he’s suffering, but perhaps that’s the requisite stillness of having one’s photograph taken. He has his new name now, a proper German one, the one that will make him famous, given to him by Lou Andreas-Salomé, his mother figure, lover, and intellectual mentor, though by the time of this photo she has abandoned him, disgusted by his sudden decision to marry. He will revert back to René Maria, not by choice, when he is enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army more than a decade later, and then later again, when he immigrates to Switzerland. At the time of this photograph he has just recovered from scarlet fever, a month of fever and chills, his honeymoon spent at a sanatorium, this rhythm of convalescence following periods of work that characterized his adult life. Perhaps this period of intense illness, which weakens his borders between the past and the present, brought him back to the fevers of his childhood that he will describe so memorably in his novel, to the inner life of things that would later obsess his poetic thought, the destabilizing fear that the button on his nightshirt might be bigger than his head and the little woolen thread coming out of the blanket might be sharp like a wire. How illness stops time, how the body becomes a room for memories.