I can see the stones now. They’re still so distant, protruding from the top of the island, like a crown, like blunted teeth. They’ll gnaw at me. I’ll feed myself to them and pray that I’m enough meat for what I need them to do.
*
I think it’s midday. I have no way of knowing for sure. As I said, it’s true that I have my watch, and I can detect the sun moving through the fog and cloud-banks, but time here is so strange, unreliable, and seems to skip about as if delighting in its freedom from human-constructed tracking devices. It certainly cares nothing for what I’m trying to do.
Anyway: You start to sing.
At first I think it’s only the wind, barreling its way up the line of the cliffs, passing like a rough hand over us as I drag the sledge up the series of terraces. I’m now sure that they were formed by human hands at some point in the very distant past, and my way is marked by laid stones and rotting logs, the remains of walls. Divisions of the land. But now there’s no one to maintain them; this place has not belonged to people for centuries, and the thought of your voice absent pain is strange to me. So you sing, and I don’t recognize it for what it is, except that I find myself singing along. Songs we used to share, in front of fires and streetlights on river water, songs we sang in bed. You were full of them to overflowing.
I sing and I know the song. When I know that it’s your voice beside mine the world blurs away, but I continue. In weariness and terror so great that it feels as though it exists outside of and surrounds me rather than originating in any kind of interior state, I find that I have forgotten the words. But I make sounds like words, things that are the worn remains of words. I look at the standing stones in the distance, their pale weathered faces, and I send my word-ruins up to them. Then I fall silent and only your voice remains, low and somehow strong in spite of everything.
There is no moon in the sky and then there is, sister to the sun and holding close. I’m unsurprised to see it; you put it there to give additional light to guide me by. You’ve never called the moon before but I know it for what it is.
As for the stones, they may know their own when we reach them. The old woman said they might open themselves to us, part as a gate to a way. She said the world you made might be merciful. Then she laughed and laughed.
*
Night again. It comes on fast, like the fall of a dying hand. I don’t make a fire. I sit on a clear patch of ground, mostly exposed slate, and it’s cold but I wrap myself around you, as best I can without touching your broken legs. I checked the wrappings before the light died, and I saw blood blooming up through the cloth. I have no idea if you’re dreaming. What would you dream of, if you did? The last inches of thin air between you and the rocks? The taste of my mouth? The crash of the waves?
Or would you do what you will do, with my knife, and dream the world into being?
I hope you do. Before the meager light returns we’ll make the final ascent, and there must be something left here for you to return to.
*
The wind should be at its cruelest here. Instead it has died, and everything is silent. No waves crashing against the rocks below. No creak and grate of wire. No whispering of grass. No singing, yours or mine, and you seemed to have screamed out your pain long ago. Even the sound of my breathing is dampened. The scratching slide of the sledge over the gravel. Nothing.
The light rises over the circle of stones. It rises out of them. It’s my beacon. I follow it on breaking legs, my head full of rocks and crashing surf. But silent.
Should I make my own little bloodless magic? In the silence that remains, should I give you poetry that made you cry?
We never wrote our own. We were always stealing meaning from everywhere else. You’ll steal from me, except I don’t think you could steal what’s freely given.
*
So we come to the stones.
They aren’t very tall. I don’t know what I expected, I don’t know why they loomed so large on the lower hillsides, except that they’re clearly the only part of this place that’s lasting and real, and I can feel what they can do. What you can do within them. I drag you into their center and let the ropes slither down my arms like seaweed, and I turn to you. As before your eyes are open and they bore into mine. Cut, like a knife. You know. You’re lucid. And you’re utterly without mercy.
Here there’s light, more than anywhere else. Here there’s wind, soft and dull, but it moans through the stones, almost inaudible, your voice. And here are the things that keep me here, staring at you, reaching into my boot for the knife.
You: singing love songs on the balcony of that first hotel, your hands wet with sweat of a champagne flute and your fingers on my cheeks. You: running on uneven pavement in new shoes and almost falling until I caught you, laughing. You: lighting fingers calling a storm. You: lips against my ear telling me how all this was going to work. You: shattered on the rocks with your hair a slick, wet tangle, staring up at me, pleading, yes, but behind the weakness a certainty that this was a final test of your power. My love.
And the knife and the fire and the stone.
The first cut doesn’t hurt; I’m faintly surprised. Kneeling before the central stone, thick and gray and wearing a coat of dully-colored moss, the blade of the knife parting the skin of my upper thigh, it should hurt. It should be agony. Blood runs down and makes dark patches in the dirt, and I cut deeper, flaying back the flesh, red and pink and the pale yellow of fat. I catch a glimpse of bone. With bizarre, clear precision I avoid the artery; I must be conscious. I must stay alive until the end.
And still no pain. I don’t look up at you, I can’t, I don’t know if I could go on if I did, but I wonder if you’re eating the pain, pulling it into you to become poetry later on, murmured out over your flesh remade. You’re stronger than me, love. I need you to be.
My skin comes away in thick strips. The blood makes the knife slippery. Twice I nearly drop it. I lift one of my hands and paint the side of the stone, turning the moss black. And here comes the pain at last, perhaps more than you could take, crashing against my rocks. Hissing through my grass. Almost pushing me over. But I love you. I keep cutting. And now here are my bones, here is my exposed hillside, my cliffs. Here is what I can break myself against. For you. All for you.
I pile my flesh at the foot of the stone, under my bloody handprints. I lay my skin over it like a sheet. There’s a heavy rock by the stone, because there had to be. I don’t know if I’m strong enough, except I know I will be because you will it so. My final ascent. My final fall. I pick up the rock; with it in my hands at last I can lift my gaze to yours. And of course your lips are moving. You, crying like before, burning with life, and if you were in the water you would be making it boil.
I don’t hear my own bones shatter. I hear your voice, strong and beautiful as you unmake the world.
*
We tell a story of one of us who died—how does not matter—and who was laid out at her keeper’s side. Her keeper was still asleep, dreaming of wholeness, but she was awake and watching before the darkness took her. She spoke to them before that happened, and she said In the end you decide why you’re alive and that determines how you die.
She died in silence with her eyes open.
Her keeper sang contralto at her funeral, left pages of poetry on her casket in lieu of flowers. In the end she went away, thinking that, while it wasn’t a good ending, it had at least been one chosen.
In a manner of speaking.
Love in the Time of Vivisection
Overview
I’m asking questions when he makes the first incision. This is the deal we made.
Why?
Why is always there. You can come at it in a number of different ways.
You can ask at the beginning, when the cuts are small and fine and the pain is keen, or somewhere in the middle when the pain lessens and you begin to be able to feel your muscles divided and peeled back and away from your bones, or toward the end, when the pain is gone a
nd he has his fingers in the slippery tangle of your viscera. When he holds your heart in his hands.
You can be direct, blunt, or you can be subtle and careful and lead up to it with all kinds of nuances and implications; you can create a lovely garden labyrinth of words and at the center of it is the question. Whose way out does it represent?
Who escapes?
This is another question. You must never ask this one. Both of you will fear an answer.
One
I ask why? I am very direct by nature. He meets my eyes as he peels back the skin over my ribcage. There is a little blood but not very much. This is taken care of early on, by means that are unimportant to the greater inquiry. I will not bleed to death. I will not bleed at all.
Why? And he gives me reasons. There is a very long list. I will give you a few of them: Because I have to, because it’s time, because it’s what you wanted, because I love you.
These reasons may or may not be legitimate. The deal we made does not require that he answer me honestly.
A Setting
Stripped of its skin, muscle is very beautiful.
He brings a mirror and shows mine to me, my powerful, corded thighs and the harder stripes of red and white at my hips and the bars of my stomach. My arms. He has left my breasts untouched; those will be handled with exquisite care when most of the rest of me is done. I am a creature of glistening red. I am a wet ruby, run through with pale flaws. I move—I still can, a little—and I watch my gemstone body pull and flex.
He says he loves every part of me. As he pulls me slowly to pieces, he has an opportunity to acquaint himself with all of those component parts. This is both a gift that I give to him and a demonstration of himself to me, proof of what he says.
The ultimate test of any claim is whether one can hold to it when it is made as literal as possible. As literal as flesh. As bone. As the edge of a knife.
Anniversary
We made this deal years ago. We sealed it with words but deals like this must always be sealed with much more. I wore white, he wore black; we balanced each other. But all balances are a kind of lie, covered over, possessing buried seeds of conflict. This does not necessarily mean fighting, but it does mean that in the end someone will be cutting and someone will be cut.
I remember how my hand fitted into his. I remember: I knew then that his hands would tear me to pieces. And that I would allow this.
Two
What does this make you feel? When he finally does carve my breasts away, they tremble. As if they’re afraid of him. As if they ache for him. And I am still in pain, gentle pain that washes over me like warm waves. But my breasts are not the question. I am not the question. He is. Answer yourself. What are you feeling right now, with me in your hands?
If you wish, you can lie. If you really believe that will save you.
Unforeseen Consequences
I also promised years ago that I would never hide anything from you.
Now I am being tested, too.
Three
I lose my muscle. Before, I could barely move; now I am immobile, stretched out flat with nothing to shift my bones. He brings silver pans and pails and lays the strips of me carefully into them. My skin is stretched out on a rack; it already looks like leather. He could wear it, if he chose. He could play at being me. He could wrap it around himself like a cloak. I would shelter him.
But I do not think he would understand me any better.
Don’t believe the old stories. Love is the opposite of understanding. When we understand, love is no longer possible.
I ask my third question as the pain fades. What will you do? When I am finally pulled apart and all he has are the pieces of me, and those make very poor companions. What will you do then?
I don’t know.
I cannot be sure, but this feels like truth.
Sense Memory
Once: He is looking into my eyes. We lie face-to-face, skin-to-skin, but the skin feels like a barrier. His lips brush my ear and he whispers that he would like to remove it someday.
Once: It was a kind of play. At any rate, I believe that he believed it was so.
Communication
He hasn’t touched my head. I still have my skin, my muscles; I can augment my words with expressions. He can see what I feel as it twists at my mouth. I have my eyes and ears; when sensation vanishes I will know that my body is being separated from me.
He will leave my head until the end. This is so he will be able to say goodbye.
The Fine Print
At some point in this process you may wish to renege. The terms may no longer appeal.
This will be impossible. The moment you begin you’ve already gone too far to turn back.
Four
While he removes my guts, I consider my fourth question. I must choose carefully, I must be very deliberate about my phrasing, but it’s hard to focus when he lifts my liver out of my body cavity and gently inserts the blade into it. It’s like watching him cut into a fruit, soft and overripe, exotic and dark and rich. Something that has sat for a time in its own juices, in the sun.
There is one question I want to ask. But then, it’s not really even a question. It’s a request, and requests are not covered under the terms of the contract. I cannot make them, and he is under no obligation to acknowledge them should I do so. And how would he punish me for the violation?
Perhaps by refusing to continue.
But we both know that will not happen.
Will you stop?
It could be a question. It could be at the center of my cool green labyrinth, but within that hidden center it could change its shape the instant it’s found, like a camouflaged predator. Will you stop? Will you?
Please.
I ask it, my changeling question. I wait to see if he will accept it as his own.
But of course I already know. Whether it’s a question or a request, there is only one possible answer to either.
Seconds of Sharpened Flint
The removal of my heart should be a sacred moment. A sacrificial moment. It should be an offering of something. But it’s lost in a mountain of offerings. It is set apart by nothing but my feeling that it should be somehow different than everything else.
In this moment I begin to understand that when everything is drenched in holiness, everything becomes profane.
What Remains of Elephants
He does not stop. He undresses me down to the bones and I lie there with my head intact and he lifts it to show myself to me, his fingers gentle against the nape of my neck. He has stripped away the last of the flesh, left the ligaments for now but polished me with rough cloths and oils. I gleam. I was a gem; now I am lovely carved ivory, pale and perfect. Except for my head, flesh and skin and muscle and hair; this part of me no longer fits what is left of my body. I have not yet been dismembered but I am already incongruous. I do not connect.
He begins to cut the ligaments away. He is so careful with the cartilage, not to nick or scratch the bone. He wants to keep me perfect until the very last. I appreciate this kind of care.
It is now the only kind he can give me.
Theseus in Reverse
I am a garden. He has pruned me. This is one other way to the center: You can follow the path of the labyrinth or you can take up your blade and cut your way straight through.
Five; a Leavetaking
He takes my bones away one by one. He holds them in his hands and runs his fingertips over the lines of them. He is meditating on the subject of me. He lays them together in a gilded basket and then I am just a head, staring up at him, breathless and bloodless but still here. I am reduced. I am made essential.
I ask my final question.
Will you do this again?
This is a question that is also goodbye, because of what it makes implicit. I am passing away; he may someday take another to replace me, and then he will—again—have to decide what to do.
For a long time we merely look at each other. I love him; h
e must be able to see it. And I know that he loves me, because that was the entire point of this exercise.
He bends to kiss me, so light. And then his answer is the blade through my skull and into my frontal lobe, and goodbye is made final.
He will do it again. Over and over and over.
Benediction
My one remaining hope, as I become an artifact of his extremely fickle memory, is that someday he will find someone stronger; strong enough to make a very different kind of deal.
A Shadow on the Sky
We found her on the third day, spinning whirlwinds around her fingertips.
You must understand that this may or may not have been true, they may or may not have been whirlwinds, and she may or may not have had death in the ichor of her eyes and knitted into her skin, and she may or may not have looked into our hearts, passed judgment, rendered a verdict and delivered our sentence.
She may or may not have done those things, but we know what we saw.
Given that I am the only one who has returned to tell the tale, you will have to make up your own mind whether or not to believe me.
*
As for me, those three days before, they found me in the coffeehouse and laid two hands on my shoulders, spinning me around so that my cigarette almost fell from between my fingers. I was annoyed and I did not hide it. They didn’t care and they did not hide that either, two large men with stern expressions and very blue eyes. Foreigners, and not military, or at least I was reasonably certain of that. We know military men by now-yes, something specifically about the men. We know them intimately.
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