Spring 2007 (6 page)

“Jane Doe” was Judith Louise Darger, born 1992, Ph. D.
in Anthropology from Yale, specialized in urban neomythology, syncretism, etc.
& did a book with HarperC back in ‘21–
Bloody Mary, La Llorona, and
the Blue Lady: Feminine Icons in a Child’s Apocalypse.
Sold for shit, out
of print by 2023. But found a battered copy cheap uptown. Darger’s gf and
victim, she’s dead, too. Another suicide, not long after they put Darger away.
Turns out, she had a history of neurosis and self-mutilation going back to high
school, & there was all sorts of shit there I’m not going to get into, but
she told the courts that what Darger did to her, and to herself, they’d planned
the whole thing for months. So, why the fuck did good old Welleran Smith leave
that
part out? It was in the goddamn press, no secret. I have a photograph of Judith
Darger, right here on the dj of her book. She could not look less remarkable.

Sabit says there’s another Trenton Group show this
weekend & don’t I wanna to go? She’s hardly said three words to me the last
couple of days, but she told me this. Get another look at #17, she said, &
I almost fucking hit her. No more pills, Schuler. No more pills.

August 20, 2027

No sleep last night. Today, I filed for my next
assignment, but so far the green bin’s still empty. Maybe I’m being punished
for blowing the DL on Weds. night, some sort of pass-ag bullshit bcause that’s
the best those weasels in senior edit can ever seem to manage. Or maybe it’s
only a sloooowwww week. I am having a hard time caring, either way.

No sleep last night. No, I said that already. Time on my
hands and that’s never a good thing. Insomnia and coffee and gin, takeaway and
Pop-Tarts and a faint throb that wants to be a headache (how long since one of
those?), me locked in my office last night reading a few chapters of Darger’s
grand flop, but there’s nothing in there–fascinating and I don’t know why
it wasn’t better received, but still leading me nowhere, nowhere at all (where
did I
think
it would lead?). This bit re: La Llorona (“Bloody Mary”)
from Ch. 3–“Some girls with no home feel claws scratching under the skin
on their arms. Their hand [sic] looks like red fire.” And this one, from a
Miami
New Times
article: “When a child says he got the story from the spirit
world, as homeless children do, you’ve hit the ultimate
non sequitur
.”
Homeless kids and demons and angels, street gangs, drugs, the socioeconomic
calamities of thirty goddamn years ago. News articles from 1997. None of this
is gonna answer any of my questions, if I truly have questions to be answered.
But this is “Jane Doe’s” magnum opus, and there is some grim fascination I
can’t shake–How did she get from
there
to
there
, from diy
street myths to sewing her gf’s mouth shut?

Maybe it wasn’t such a short goddamn walk. Maybe, one
night, she stood before a dark mirror in a darkened room, the mirror coated
with dried saltwater–going native or just too fucking curious,
whatever–and maybe she stood there chanting
Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,
over and over and over and La Llorona scratched her way out through the looking
glass, scarring the anthropolgist’s soul with her rosary beads. Maybe that’s
where this began, the snips and stitches, #17. Maybe it all goes back to those
homeless kids in Miami, back before the flood, before the W. Antarctic ice
sheet melted and Dade County FL sank like a stone, and all along it was the
late Dr. J. L. Darger let this djinn out of its bottle in ways people like
Sabit have not yet begun to suspect and never will. I’m babbling, and if that’s
the best I can do, I’m going to stop keeping a damned journal.

I’ve agreed to be @ CeM tomorrow night with Sabit. I’m a
big girl. I can sip my shitty Merlot and nibble greasy orange cheese and stale
crackers with the best of them. I can bear the soulless conversation and the
sweating porcine walls. I can look at #17 and see nothing there but bad art,
fucked-up artless crap, pretentious carnage and willful suffering. Maybe then I
can put
all
this shit behind me. Who knows, maybe I can even put Sabit
behind me, too.

August 20, 2027
(later, p.m.)

Sabit says the surgeon on #17 will be at the show
t’morrow night. I think maybe it’s someone Sabit was screwing before she
started screwing me. Oh, & this, from
The Breathing Composition
,
which I’ve started reading again & frankly wish I had not. Seems Welleran
Smith somehow got his paws on Darger’s diary, or
one
of her diaries,
& he quotes it at length (& no doubt there are contextual issues; don’t
know the fate of the original text):

“We are all alone on a darkling plain, precisely as
Matt. Arnold said. We are so very alone here, and we yearn each day for the
reunification promised by priests and gurus and by some ancient animal
instinct. We are evolution’s grand degenerates, locked away forever in the consummate
prison cells of our conscious minds, each divided always from the other. I met
a man from Spain, and he gave me a note card with the number seventeen written
on it seventeen times. He thought that surely I would understand right away,
and he was heartbroken when I did not. When I asked, he would not explain. I’ve
kept the card in my files, and sometimes I take it out and stare at it, hoping
that I will at last discern its message. But it remains perfectly opaque,
bcause my eyes are the eyes of the damned.”

& I’m looking thru the program for the Trenton Show
on the 15th, last Sun., & only one piece is
numbered
, only 1 piece
w/a # for a title–#17. Yes, I know. I’m going in circles here. Chasing my
own ass. Toys in the attic. Nutters as the goddamn snips if I don’t watch
myself. If I don’t get some sleep. I haven’t seen Sabit all evening, just a
call this afternoon.

August 21, 2027
(Saturday, 10:12 a.m.)

Four whole hours sleep last night. & the hangover is
not so bad that old-fash blck coffee and aspirin isn’t helping. My head feels
clearer than it has in days. Sabit came home sometime after I nodded off &
I woke with her snoring next to me. When I asked if maybe she wanted breakfast,
she smiled, so I made eggs & cut a grapefruit in half. Perhaps I can persuade
her to stay home tonight, that we should
both
stay home tonight. There
is nothing down there I need to see again.

Part II

August 21, 2027
(2:18 p.m.)

No,
she says.
We are expected,
she says, & what the fuck is that supposed to mean, anyway? So there was a
fight, bcause there always has to be a fight with Sabit, a real screamer this
time, & I have no idea where she’s run off to but she swore she’d be back
by
five
& I better be sober, she said, & I better be dressed
& ready for the show. So, yeah, fuck it. I’ll go to the damn show with her.
I’ll rub shoulders with the stitch freaks this one last time. Maybe I’ll even
have a good long look at #17 (tho’ now, I should add, now Sabit says the
surgeon won’t be there after all). Maybe I’ll stand & stare until it’s only
flesh & wires & hooks & fancy lighting.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette wrote somewhere, “Look for a
long time at what pleases you, and for a longer time at what pains you.” Maybe
I’ll shame them all with my staring. They only feel as much pain as they
want
to feel–isn’t that what Sabit is always telling me? The stitchworks, they
get all the best painkillers, ever since the Feds decided this sick shit
consitutes Art–so long as certain lines are not crossed. They bask in
glassy-eyed morphine hazes, shocked cold orange on neuroblocks & Fibrodene
& Elyzzium, exotic transdermals & maybe all that shit’s legal &
maybe it ain’t, but 2380 no one’s asking too many questions as the City of NY
has enough on its great collective plate these days w/out stitch-friendly
lawyers raising a holy funk about censorship and freedom of expression and 1st
Amendment violations. The cops hate the fuckers, but none of the arrests have
had jack to do with drugs, just disorderly conduct, riots after shows, shit
like that. But yeah, t’morrow night I’ll go back to CeM with Sabit, my heart’s
damned desire, my cunt’s lazy love, & I will look until they want to
fucking charge me extra.

August 21, 2027

So Sabit shows up an hour or so after dark…she’s gone
now, gone again bcause I suppose I have chased her away, again. That’s what she
would say, I am sure. I have chased her away again. But, as I was saying, she
shows up, & I can tell she’s been drinking bcause she has that smirk and
that swagger she gets when she’s been drinking, & I can tell she’s still
pissed. I’m waiting for the other shoe. I’m waiting, bcause I fucking know
whatever’s coming next is for my benefit. & I’m thinking, screw it, get it
over with, don’t let her have the satisfaction of getting in the first blow.
I’m thinking, this is where it ends. Tonight. No more of her bullshit. It’s
been a grandiose act of reciprocal masochism, Sabit, & it’s been raw &
all, but enough’s enough. @ least the sex was good, so let’s remember that
& move on.

& that’s when I notice the gauze patch taped to her
back, centered between her shoulder blades just so, placed
just so
there
between her scapulae, centered on the smooth brown plain of her trapezius (let
me write this the way a goddamn snip would write it, cluttered with an
anatomist’s Latin). & when I ask her what the fuck, she just shrugs, &
that swatch of gauze goes up & then down again. But I know. I know whatever
it is she’s done, whatever comes next, this is it. This is her preemptive
volley, so I can just forget all about landing the first punch this time, baby.
Sabit knows revenge like a drunk knows an empty bottle, & I should have
given up while I was ahead.

I’ve been wanting some new ink,
she
says.
You helped me to finally make up my mind, that’s all.
& before
she can say anything else, I rip away the bandage. She does not even fucking
flinch, even though the tattoo can’t be more than a couple hrs old, still
seeping & puffy and red, & all I can hear is her laughing. Bcause there
on her back is the Roman numeral XVII, & when she asks for the bandage
back, I slap her.

I
slapped
her.

This use of present tense, what’s that but keeping the
wound open & fresh, keeping the scabs at bay just like some goddamn
pathetic stitchwork would do. I slapped her. The sound of my hand against her
cheek was so loud, crack like a goddamn firecracker, & in the silence
afterwards (just as fucking loud) she just smiled & smiled & smiled for
me. & then I started yelling–I don’t know exactly what–accusations
that couldn’t possibly have made sense, slurs and insinuation, and truthfully I
knew even then none of it was anything but bitterness & disappointment that
she’d not only managed to draw first blood (hahaha) this round, she’d finally
pushed me far enough to hit her. I’d never hit her before. I had never hit
anyone
before, not since some bullshit high-school fights, &, at last, she did not
even need to raise her voice. & then she just smiled @ me, & I think I
must have finally told her to say something, bcause I was puking sick to death
of that smug smile.

I’m glad you approve,
she said. Or maybe she
said,
I’m glad you understand.
In this instance, the meanings would be
the same somehow. Somehow interchangeable. But I did not apologize. That’s the
sort of prick I am. I sat down on the kitchen floor & stared @ linoleum
patterns & when I looked up again she was gone. I don’t know if she’s gone
gone, or if Sabit has merely retreated until she decides it’s time for another
blitz. Rethinking her maneuvers, the ins & outs of this campaign, logistics
and field tactics & what the fuck ever. Cards must be played properly. I
know Sabit, & she will never settle for Pyrrhic victory, no wars of
attrition, no winner’s curse. I sat on the floor until I heard the door shut
& so knew I was alone again. I would say at least this gets me out of CeM
on Sun. night, but I may go alone. Even though I know she’ll be there. Clearly,
I can hurt some more. Tonight I will get drunk, & that is all.

August 22, 2027
(2:56 a.m.)

Always have I been a sober drunk. I’ve finished the gin
& started on an old bottle of rye whisky–gift from some former lover
I won’t name here–bcause I didn’t feel like walking through the muggy,
dusty evening, risking life and limb & lung for another pretty blue bottle
of Bombay. A sober & lazy drunk, adverse to taking
unnecessary
risks. Sabit has not yet reappeared, likely she will not. I suspect she
believes she has won not only the battle, but the war, as well. Good for her.
May she go haunt some other sad fuck’s life. Of course, the apt. is still awash
in her junk, her clothes, her stitch lit, the hc zines and discs & her
txtbooks filled with diagrams, schematics of skeletons & musculature,
neuroanatomy, surgical technique, organic chem and pharmacology, immunology,
all that crap. Snip porn. I should dump it all. I should call someone 2830 to
cart it all away so I don’t have to fucking look at it anymore. The clothes,
her lucite ashtrays, the smoky, musky, spicy smell of her, bottles of perfume,
cosmetics, music, jewelry, deodorant, jasmine soap, & jesus all the CRAP
she’s left behind to keep me company. I don’t know if I’ll sleep tonight. I
don’t want to. I don’t want to be awake anymore ever again. Why did she want to
rub my nose in #17? Just that she’s finally found a flaw, a goddamn weakness,
& she has to make the most of it?