by Eurydice (c) 1999

SCREE :  CONFESSIONS OF A FREE ADOLESCENT

     The way to reach an end is to go back to the beginning.  The only way to find your way is to start over, again and again, like Odysseus. Life is simpler at the beginning. So I like to retrace my steps looting absolution or relief, inconspicuously steering my way toward Ithaca. In my mind my experiences are always just beginning. Every new loss is a new lesson. One day I'll understand.
  ..That year New York turned my body and soul into the ineffable parts of a flawless flesh-eating machine. Those I loved died. It was a local natural law. And I didn't know what to make of that.
..How could I separate myself from that?  Only by escaping from myself. By becoming the enemy.
..Cora was like a shadow. She had lived on St. Mark's for three years and none of us in the neighborhood had noticed her before, she had no friends and she looked so angelic and aerial—she didn't look like she had gravity and meat, but more like she was a succubus, like those medieval manuscript illuminations by De Machaut I like—that she had to be saved, or even that she was on this earth to do some saving. Her body inspired big themes.
..Now I sometimes wonder if I didn't make Cora up and that's why she was perfect. No matter.  The fact is, the love of my life flew off.  But first she asked me if she could fly.  I told her she could, of course. That's the glory of—my love.
..She was the little bird outside a window in winter or a wet piece of wood you find and take near the fire to dry and expect it to grow hands and eyes and a mouth that will ask "Are you a magician?" So, exactly, she was, serene and unspoiled. She took me in.
..I was the arbitrary immoderate one, a stock tragedy tyrant overflowing with pride until she thrust herself into the exceptional action and I was left with a morbid wonder and my hands tied and my mind lost. and I could not go with another woman after Cora, although sometimes I might try it. but I felt I was betraying her, or the other woman, because I didn't want her as madly as I did Cora. Cora was something I couldn't understand. That was her strength.
..At that time my seven housemates and I played games that made people trip and fall or get up and leave when we looked at them. it excited us and it was totally useless, which was fun. So we had been (all eight of us) to Sweet Basil doing that routine to everyone until it was obvious we were not welcome. Then we moved on to Bottom Line as a troop feeling powerful in our black leather boots. And this dealer who wanted to get me into bed had just given us free sense*, we did a bunch and then it happened. I wasn't. ready at all for what happened. I had no interest in making waves because I thought nothing could be defined and I couldn't decide anything anyway because I saw no real differences between things—not enough to judge them by—no control—felt real. So I lived by tossing coins all day, arbitrarily, the un-I-Ching. Suddenly I saw her. Sitting alone, pale, her blue veins glowing in the dark. When our eyes met, I knew. I couldn't of course have said what. That decision took me seconds— which was not like me—I mistook desire for a naked instinct.
..It felt corny even as it was happening. Our eyes met across the crowded club and we immediately fell into despair. Though I can't really speak for her. I had to have her. I know I sighed. It's never happened to me before or since—so instantaneously. It was strong, strange but also mundane. More than anything, she was  unexpected—which is what kept me chained. To this helpless amazement.
..So as if in trance I got up without taking my eyes off Cora and walked on water and sat down next to her, smiling, so badly did I want to touch her. I felt stupid and exuberant like I had found the best toy in the world. My stomach churned and hurt terribly. Everything was silent. And I was floating in mute space, in her direction. Until we got up and left. Together. And all that time we didn't say a word. Which is crazy because I always seduce with words so I can have my lover where I want. But she silently imposed a taboo on that, like she couldn't have understood the words anyway and like they would only slight her, mortify her. We never said much during those three months we were inseparable—when everything was implied. And, ironically, ever since then I've been talking more than ever. I mostly talk about her. Trying to understand. What happened.
..So we walked to her apartment and from then on I felt a quieter kind of hunger.
..Actually, I  remember the very moment I first saw her. I was sitting next to Vincent, one of my housemates, who was an immense solid guy. He raised a beer mug that said EAT ME on it in red.  I was fixated on that. Trying to figure out how I could possibly eat it, what it could possibly mean, and its significance. He, too, died before long. He had a heavy jarring baritone and spoke slowly, cumbersomely, and even looked like Van Gogh with his red crewcut hair and pained, off-center jaw, and it was his habit to reply to whatever you asked him—like, Why are you going or leaving or not drinking—"For Love!" So I was babbling on just then about how death is a lucid arch, it's the virgin bride. I had been reading Mallarme again. And one of them, I think Oleg, said: Life needs some inner structure because death is chaos. To which I replied: No, death is order and life is chaos, still staring at the mug, and—Oleg asked—he later jumped off the roof too. He asked: Why? and Vincent answered as always: "For Love!" and at that very moment I first noticed her. I had this vision of a big fleshy pink mouth, in a de Chirico perspective, with big sharp white teeth, like filed Doric columns, and a red tongue writhing in it like a mean bald gorilla locked in the center of a cage, like Jonah in the lukewarm belly of the hungry fish. Maybe they were playing a Mick Jagger song—'I see a red door and I want to paint it black'?—I can't recall the music because I was in my head too much. I had visions much of the time, not prophetic of course, even though I was always reading The Collected Works of Blake. At that moment I was feeling my fingertips getting pricked.
..I blinked and my eyes dilated and somehow superimposed Cora's lucid gaze on that devouring, imagined mouth-trap vision. Her clear, large and very black, alarmingly opaque eyes staring back.
..Of course that very night we moved in together. I'd never been happy before living with someone. we laughed a lot, we had no reason, we were happy being, we didn't need anything, and I forgot everything. I forgot that I say happiness is like sinking in a scalding hot bath. I forgot about the world and my ideas and all the people I knew and wanted constantly—to make them do things—that they couldn't—and all the other things I liked being—like a puppeteer—and my restless motion from person to person and place to place—identifying with, then contradicting, them, courting risk, running from the familiar, slobbering among washed bones as someone called it. All that crap I was and still am, I forgot. I left my stuff behind in my mates' house on Avenue A, I never saw friends anymore except in the street or buying drugs. In her bed, I was Candide in the garden.
..In Cora's bed I was happy, like back in the isolation of my childhood. We didn't do anything hardly ever except walk the streets looking at all the mad people. It gave us energy, strength. and people always looked at her like she didn't quite exist.
..She only whispered. I never heard her loud voice until of course the very end. I heard her breathe a lot. She had allergies. She had a fixation on birds and wings like young girls sometimes have with horses. She had paper white skin. No spots, no marks of time, terribly thin, transparent, luminous skin, scary to touch in case you broke through to the guts. I liked the risk even though it frightened me to the point of vomiting when I touched her with a knife.  I couldn't stop myself from being rough with her, she was so frail and that—my horror—excited me. And she had this huge blue black shiny hair long and heavy. And black slanted eyes, big, almond-shaped. And eyebrows like wings and pouty Byzantine lips that reminded me of icons of the Whore-Empress Theodora, the one who lay on her back in the Constantinople stadium with her legs raised toward the audience and dropped grain into her vagina and had her flying geese pick the kernels out with their beaks feeding on her, which impressed the Great Justinian enough to marry her. And thin green veins that made a triangle on her forehead, a shape familiar in alchemy, and long tapered fingers, thin at the tips like a Renaissance Madonna's, that looked like they were living worms. And a crescent belly protruding like a Gothic virgin's and. The sexiest feathery round ass. My  favorite part. Twin  charlottes. And she was a virgin in fact.
..It's all a drenched and heaving nightmare. Too good to be true.
..She was tall like smoke and wore loose transparent silk dresses even through the deep muddy snow, like flames dancing around her, red and black or purple, ending in pointed uneven tails flailing around her as she walked, like fiery tongues eating at her. And she had an old white canopy bed with a high sky, soft like a priest's skin always is, and on it I was always the aggressive one, pinching her to turn that frail skin red. I told her how women throughout history had used snakes for playmates and vaginal inserts. I said I would be her serpent. She had never been with a woman before. Neither had I.  But she had never had sex with anyone before, she was a virgin, which made me vain beyond words.
..That first night that we met I felt it was a blasphemy touching this silent otherworldly untouchable flesh that went on and on scented and soft. The moral burden drove me mad. Seeing  Artemis naked and fearing I'd get flayed any minute. Her skin was so pliable I could go deeper than was natural or even legal. I could fuck any part of her like a vagina, with my tongue, finger or tit, I fucked her neck, her armpit, her bellybutton, they just caved in, deep enough to contain me.  Any touch excited her like it was clitoral.  Her body needed me. It trembled like the body of an aerialist, a fire eater, a fakir. I could do anything to it, cure it, kill it. We climbed on to her bed on that first night which I never do, have sex in bed, I find it boring, but next to her I felt I was some gloriously savage aboriginal which I had always wanted to be. And so I couldn't do enough, I was flailing. It felt so public. Like I had found my way inside the world's vagina. I could have eaten her like a cannibal. I felt the whole world was watching. Me. Devour. Her.
..It was too much to feel. I had gooseflesh all over, dizzy spots, nausea, my heart beat so loud in my throat that I was choking. I felt I could have puked it out like a ticking bomb. I don't know what. I was doing to myself. Or where such ravenous desire had come from. I lived permanently flushed, hyperventilating and thinking I'd never be hungry again, so long as she would be my fuel. I'd be her Skene gland ejaculate.  I was this solid silver slippery sphere thrown up into the air through this wall into the unknown beyond. I kissed her for a long time. Then I bit her. Lip hard like in a hazing ritual. I tested her resolve and I loved her for how much she trusted me.
..Then I went down to her white monster breasts that were long like the tits of tall African women, unexpected on her waifish body. I stayed long. I'd never sucked a large erect female nipple before, it was like sucking my thumb. so heavy and so light at once that I expected tongue-scorching milk to flow. Erotamastia: I wondered if I had been harboring a secret breast fetish. I didn't know what to expect of myself. Later in the night she instinctively pushed me lower and I went slowly not too willingly. It took long and I was sweating, like I had been digging for treasure in the dark. She had no smell no taste no past only this heat like a scalding bath with edible suds. Or like imagining infinity. I felt snowblind. I carried fire in my belly.
..This was not like a tangible body in my mouth that sweats and excretes and dreams and fears being judged, flesh that gets tangy or salty or musty or delirious. This was not a fuck. It was a rite of passage, going through fire and coming out dead or maimed or a man.
..At the end I was fulfilled and surprised, and mellow in a secure way I'd never felt before, except perhaps as a very little girl in the arms of a parent. I was too satisfied not to be punished for it, and maybe that's why it all had to end and even why I didn't notice what was coming. I did not watch myself perform when I was with her, as I did with everyone else, I did not ask myself why I did what I did to her, I didn't observe my motives and methods, which is why I missed her signs, and why I now can't talk about it or fathom it or move beyond its moment.

*Scree: loose rock, a heap of stones or rocky debris; broken up chunks of icebergs; a steep mass of detritus on the slope of a mountain; talus.