Laceration

by Allan Graubard

I.

SHE IS SITTING UPRIGHT, upright, rigid on the couch. My hands are around her throat. But this time I burn with anger. I’m possessed by a desire to squeeze, squeeze till she slumps down, eyes white, lifeless. And while we play like this sometimes as we fuck or just before — “I like it,” she says, “squeeze harder.” — this is different. I can feel the blood rush to my brain, my eyes are swimming in blood. I squeeze tighter, and she knows, whether or not she calls the buff — if it is a bluff — that I am mad. That I can no longer think; that with the right provocation, no matter how small, I will squeeze till she drops.

It is just a second but a second that inflates, that tears loose, that rises into the beating in my brain. It is a second in which her life, encircled by my hands, tips this way and that.

She pushes me off, enraged, and stares straight ahead. She leans forward, shudders then sobs. Tears well from her eyes and fall down her face.

II.

I’m on a train between two cities. I don’t know where I’m going. It’s dark; a black swathe has drowned the light. The train slows down, changes tracks. The girl across the aisle stares at me from time to time. She wonders who I am. What I’m doing. When I return her gaze — her eyes set in an oval of chole, deep black eyes that yearn for something more they haven’t seen — she turns away.

The train lurches forward, picks up speed. It hurtles through the night. Another train whips by in the opposite direction.

And it seems, in that intersection of coming and going, that the two trains twist on their axes and displace reality: one soaring up, one plunging down.

I recall last night, my hands around your throat, a triumphant sense of having crossed a boundary, of having left the land of the living, and all the voluptuousness of the power in that sense returns to me.

I wish that it return to me.

But I am as arid and empty as a corpse.

III.

There’s no one about. I’ve called several friends, left messages. They’re not around. I’m in a new city I don’t know, an old city I know too well. I’m on the street where whores warm their hands over a makeshift fire in a trashcan. I am at a party where I don’t know anyone. 

The train swings sharply, the darkness pricked by street lamps.

IV.

I was already asleep in bed when she crept in beside me. With dawn, she murmured and turned over. My eyes slit open. The rise and fall of her breasts in the dank light, her pallid flesh, gave off an odor of sweat and grime. I tried to wake but a thick oppressive fatigue weighed me down.

V.

I washed, shaved and left. An hour or so later I called.

“Where were you? You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why not?”

“I wanted to tell you something.”

“So tell me.”

“You’ve got to be here. I can‘t talk on the phone.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“When will you be back?”

“About five. Wait for me at the cafe.”

“Fine. At five.”

Then she hung up, and the silence at the end of the line spiraled through me like dirty water down a drain.

VI.

I decided to catch a museum exhibit uptown. I took a train that bypassed my station, heading straight into Harlem. I got off angrily at the first opportunity, crossed the platform and waited for the downtown local, which pulled in several minutes later. Then I transferred to a bus and walked several blocks to the museum. Two guards talked idly on the front steps. 

Inside it was warm, too warm. I felt as though I were in a hospital where the heat finally pushed patients over the edge. I bought a ticket and took the elevator to the exhibit: a minor painter of strict explosions whose reputation, several decades after his death, was now at issue.

I walked up the stairs to another exhibit, a survey of Jewish cultures that ended in an oval room of heavy silver Menorahs behind glass.

There they were, perfectly restored but without candles; useless purposeless objects, crypts for the prayers once given them.

The room was insufferable.

I slipped into my coat and made to leave, passing through a gang of students lined up on each side of the corridor that led to the elevator. They were no more than 13 or 14 years old. Each one wore a yarmulke on a hydrocephalic head. They weaved and bobbed as if the floor were pitching beneath them.

Seed, deranged seed…

A sun the color of ox blood poured through the trees.

VII.

I could see her from half a block away, sitting at the table, sipping wine. I knew it was wine because it was five o’clock when she took a glass of wine. She was wearing her thin white raincoat and had wrapped half of her head in a glistening green shawl, her hair spilling out infectiously.

She was gazing straight ahead.

Then she turned — she knew, I’m sure that she knew — and lifted her glass in my direction…

VIII.

That night we tore into each other with all mute violence of despair. We licked the blood we drew, sudden scratches that seeped red, and plunged down each other’s throats, avid to taste the salt of death. And when we were through with it and we split apart, heamorrhaging spite on opposite sides of the bed, we smiled for having mixed our sweat and inflamed our hunger.

The sacrificial humiliations of lust…

IX.

Weeks passed. I went south; you went north. We agreed to spend a weekend together at a small hotel on the edge of a beach in a nondescript town we knew from summers passed. I’d arrive a day before you; I’d be there when you walked in.

Nothing had changed. The hours spun their knives. Day thrummed into night. And the surf pounding the sand, the cold wind, the distant crackle of thunder did not diminish that awful tumescence. 

I sat in the room gazing at my palms.

X.

I have lost the thread that kept us together, face to face, breath to breath. I have lost the words. And the silence that rises up, perturbed, venomous, pearls black at the edges of midnight.

XI.

Is she you? Or her? That one holding a door open, bags at her feet? Or her, swaying down the street? That other before a storefront window putting on lipstick? Them — the two of them talking and laughing, enjoying the admiration they so carelessly squander? That young one, too young, ridiculously young, who smiles incoherently? Or that other one, not knowing which way to go, reading a map? Or her selling chestnuts from a rickety stand?

XII.

The train rushes nowhere. A billboard, a truck farm, two gas stations, a cafe, an airport, a factory parking lot…

In an hour I’ll walk through the door. You’ll have laid the table: drink, food, heat… You’ll have laid yourself out for plunder.

A distant siren. The woman across from me returns to her book. They announce the next station in a language I don’t understand.

What ridiculous game am I playing? What is the game…?

XIII.

I have no hope, no fear: the woman I wish to kill is you, isn’t you. As she sits there, rigid, on the couch, she is someone else, another woman with another name who has absorbed you, taken you.

That I will tighten my grip, that I will squeeze till the air rushes from her mouth and her pores close down, one by one, as if hope were a word, a vanishing word, is nothing in the end. Nothing.

XIV.

I wander out into the streets. I turn a corner, another corner. Beneath the tree in a sickly yellow light is a faint brown stain. I see it as I feel my face. I see it and remember who you were, what you were.

XV.

The train rocks on the tracks. I dream this train that dreams me dreaming. I write this train that writes the word “train,” then stops, starts again, stops, starts.

Outside night closes down its dull heavy leaves.

Inside night etches its first wiry noose.

You are in the bedroom asleep, your face turned toward the window, which you have opened despite the cold, and the vacant low whistle of cars. You have opened the window to prevent me from wrapping my hands about your throat; to prevent me from crushing it; to prevent me from leaving these hands, my hands…

XVI.

Silent invectives shiver silently. Silence opens its mouth, which is my mouth; and pours through my mouth and satiates in my words.

You are asleep. You are silent.

You.

XVII.

You are sitting on the couch, rigid, tears falling from your eyes, trembling. My hands are your hands. And you take them, place them around your throat.

“You must squeeze till there is nothing left.”

And my hands move, they move at your command. They obey you. They will not do anything but obey you.

If you have the strength, if from the pit of your pain you can endure a terrible dizziness, if you can refuse, if you can turn your back on struggle, if you are not the woman you believe you are, if you can accept your death, its final numb concussion…

“You will crush my throat. You will stifle me. And when my heart stops, when I fall back on the pillows, you will not regret your loss…

XVIII.

I cannot remember when I saw you last. Does it matter? Does anything matter now that you have vanished, and I, within you, where I no longer am?

Our eyes meet, once, twice. A faint smile plays on her lips. She realizes I’m too old, that it was only a fantasy, a slight inescapable reason for evoking the least measure of hope.

She’s beautiful enough. Nude on a bed…

Then her phone rings. And she opens her mouth; you open your mouth…

oOo

Allan Graubard is a poet, writer, playwright, literary critic, and curator of art. His works are translated in numerous languages and his plays have premiered in the U.S. and EU. Poetry and fiction titles include: Sun Step Black Lake (Broken Sleep Books, UK, 2023), Western Terrace (Exstasis Editions, Victoria, BC, 2020), Language of Birds (Anon Editions, NYC/LA, 2020), and others.