“I just don’t get it,” she says. “It’s just too disturbing. Let me see your hands. They’re completely burned. Who wrapped them? Don’t you think you should have someone look at them?”
It’s not all that bad. In some ways, it’s actually quite wonderful that my hands hurt.
“Could someone have done it on purpose?” she asks.
The baby closes his eyes. I shouldn’t have come here. I knew that beforehand, and now Ane tells me that Torben is on his way home. He had a gallery meeting.
“I mean it,” she says. “You can stay at The Factory for a couple of days until you find some other place. There’s a kitchen in the hall where you can cook.”
“Star-crossed love is a costly thing,” I say. “She disappears, before long she’s completely white.”
“That’s a strange thing to say. Why did you say that? Did something happen with Vita?” she asks, putting a hand to my cheek.
I’m not a little child. Take that hand away, no, leave it there.
Ane disappears into the bedroom with the baby. She peppers me with questions while I sit in the kitchen waiting on answers, on her, on an exit.
“Thanks for not asking if you can live here,” she says, handing me a sleeping bag.
It’s Torben’s.
“You can have it. He won’t need it anymore. After all, he’s a father now.”
The Factory is enormous. Its roof resembles a toppled Toblerone piece. I’ve been here before. And this is the first time. That doesn’t sound quite right, but that’s how it is. I’m the selfsame who’s different now.
Here mid-break there’s no one, or hardly anyone, around. Light streams into the expansive hall through skylights high overhead. On the floor is something that might have been a wooden sculpture, now sawed to pieces. The chainsaw is still plugged in. Crates and pallets are scattered around, angular islands in the large space.
Ane occupies a long hallway with studios to either side. Here it is. She’s propped her works against the wall with the backs out so they’re not in the way. All the paintings and drawings that she’s still working on. Empty spots along the wall show where the paintings were hung, and long runnels of paint merge together on the floor.
The idea was for her to escape the baby when the time came, so that she could get some work done. The time never came, the baby cried and had an upset stomach. He always had to be on her arm. Torben didn’t want to hear her say it was colic. Recently, he looked at me and said: “Well hell, all babies cry.”
She’s prepared the space for me. The broom is against the wall in front of a pile on the floor. The table has been cleared and there’s a mattress leaning against a file cabinet. I unroll Torben’s sleeping bag. What a smell, I can’t sleep in that. I try the mattress out in the middle of the room and also next to the door. It’s best beside the wall, I think. From here I can survey the whole future. It casts itself rather unsteadily down to the corner store with beer thoughts that make my teeth water.
The Factory is still deserted. I’m a small body in a large building. My hands are unwrapped now. I thought it was worse. These are just beer-filled blisters.
I light a candle and lie down. Now I’m lying and falling, touching upon dream, reality, dream, reality. What’s the difference? It’s dark. Am I asleep?
There’s Grandpa’s house in flames again anyway. And here I come dancing along the rooftop, devouring red wood, licking the paint off with a bubbling tongue, window panes shatter. And now I hear it. Yes. It’s really there. An itty bitty voice. I press my ear to the wall. It’s just the flames’ crackling, rather like suppressed laughter. Justi-hi-hi-hi-hi. Ouch. It’s growing hot. It bites my flesh, I turn and run and run and of course don’t get anywhere. So, it’s a dream then.
Now I wake with my eyes. Light. Am I really awake? Oh; one of the candles has tipped over next to my head. Is it burning? The flame plays with paper sucks in wax, Torben’s sleeping bag crackles. Holding the pillow before my face, I slap at the flames with a cushion. Black becomes gray, and now it’s turning blue outside.
Behind a wooden board in the hall are several large photographs. A girl I don’t know well, her name is Helene, has taken some self-portraits. She’s a painter. In these pictures, though, she’s obviously the photographer. Anyway, she’s the one in front of the mirror. She’s in her underwear. One hand holds out the camera that’s taking the pictures. The flash is a white sun burning a hole through her body. She’s unconcerned, her face beams. There are quite a few photos, a whole series of them, and in each one Helene is thinner. The bright eyes disappear in picture No. 7. She’s standing in front of the mirror and looking at herself in obvious disbelief. In No. 12 and No. 13 she’s holding a piece of paper with a date on it. No. 14 was taken on May 4, 1998. Here a sallow-skinned Helene leans against the wall inspecting a rump that’s no longer a rump. Then comes the last picture, which was taken nearly six months later. Here Helene is different. She’s in the same pose on skinny legs beneath an enormous body that hangs over the waistband of her panties like over-risen dough. She’s smiling. A terrible smile. That smile gives me a bad feeling inside.
I let go; the pictures smack against the wall. That smile’s a state on the brink.
And horribly, it reminds me of something else, Eske from the academy of arts, the guy with the depressed dad. His dad isn’t all there, he calls Eske at home and leaves messages on his answering machine. Every single day. When the answering machine picks up, he describes how he’ll take his own life. He’s come up with any number of ways to do it. He’ll hang himself from a tree. He’ll eat caustic soda. He’ll go straight out into the water and drown himself. Farewell.
Eske had an exhibit for a time with a white box you could crawl into. When you were all the way inside, you could press play on the answering machine and listen to his father’s messages. “I’m going to do it. I’m really going to do it . . .”
I’ve been in that white space.
“I’ll do it soon. I’ll take my belt. The narrow leather one. I’ll fix it right up for you all.”
Ane and her paintings fill the space. My person is broken down to small fragments, flitting around, colliding with everything that isn’t me, but rather her, and coalescing into a body. Finger. Print. That’s always the gist of us, right?
One of Ane’s paintings is a paisley landscape without up and down, near and far, or horizon. She’s made a rip in which the colors blend in spirals inside the brain’s winding coils, and amid a flock reminiscent of thought, an underwater life of seaweed. Fish with bird heads, birds sporting arms, little girls with bare breasts and rough hands, boys without legs, some laughing, some bleeding. Three girls in French braids display their buttocks, spreading their cheeks to show their deep assholes. A boy combs a longhaired cat, and in the midst of it all a dog-ape hybrid is shaving its legs.
I say it now: I think I’m some other. Or how should I put it? I’ve become some other. That other hasn’t become me, though. She didn’t exist before the fire. Or did she? She’s a new condition. At once definitive and boundless. I have no clue where we’re off to now.
To the bathroom, where all is gray, and I inspect her in the mirror. She looks like me. She holds the large scissors in her hand lifts a hunk of hair. It’s my fingers that are chopping, my hair’s a hunk that falls. I’ve kept my hair this long always it’s lived a slow life together with me headed down toward the ground, ready to take root below. I cut again, graying the water, I keep cutting until I’ve come full-circle. The exact same woman in the mirror has an uneven pageboy. We’re different. And now what we want is to fuck, not cut. The place is deserted.
He approaches from the front, a young man, well, a big boy really, with a smile on his open