Yes, a sheet of paper. How could anyone miss paper, I thought. But now I think the room is a body, and you would miss any part of your body. A finger, even if it’s small, would be missed. When I opened the door the room had traveled to Madagascar, and I opened it onto a deep, swollen night-forest, alive with the red, shining eyes of lemurs. I felt the door latch behind me, and I wept unexplainably. It left immediately. I looked down, and the paper in my hand had become a peony. It looked black in the shadows.
I bought Martine a bottle of wine. It was the least I could do. By calculations of those far cleverer with numbers than I, the room moved only once while Martine lived in it, and while it moved her shadow man stood over her, as though making sure she would not be hurt by the transit. Because I believe the room is benevolent, whatever the Icelandic gentleman says on the subject.
His name is Kaspar, and he entered the room on March 4th, 1989. I was interested in that date, because it means he was likely inside it when the room lived in my garage and I ate my cherry popsicle. Kaspar would not then have been much older than I, and I would like to think if I had opened the door, he would have been on the other side, his hand raised just like mine. Kaspar drinks iced gin and has very black eyes, hair the color of water, and one hundred and one black suits. I switch to the present tense because Kaspar is still all of these things, and we have been living together for two years, so the past tense is unnecessarily estranging.
It took me by force, from my parents, from my breakfast. I was having biscuits and jam.
But you opened the door. That’s consent.
It moved seventeen times while I was inside it. Like a dog on a chain, trying to shake its master free. In quick succession, one after the other, and every time the lights flickered and the water in the basin ran by itself in a torrent—so hot the mirror steamed instantly. The papers riffled, and the phone rang. I cried and cried, I was so frightened. I heard footsteps and saw no one, and the curtains fluttered, fluttered—and under the fluttering I glimpsed a kind of light like a weight, and I shuddered, I hid under the bed until the shaking stopped. Once it did, for a whole hour. I thought I was saved. I went to the door and put my hand on the knob, and the metal was warm, as though it had been baked gently. I froze there, with my hand on the knob, and I could not open it. I don’t know why. Where would I end up? But a kind of awful contentment flooded through me like poison, and I did nothing. Eventually I grew so hungry that I stumbled out anyway, starving, half-blind with terror. I was in Budapest. A baker gave me chocolate. I almost bit his hand. The room made me feral.
Did you try the other door?
Kiss me, and I’ll tell you.
And that was how it started between us. Bargaining, guarded. We went to his apartment, whose door he had painted black. Everything in it was simple: a double bed, the bedspread deep red, with dark swirls and ferns in it. A silk rug that had seen better days, once indigo and figured in gold. A porcelain washing basin, a mirror with an ebony frame. A slip of rose-soap waits for dirty hands. A mahogany secretary in the corner. Three blue pens, a stack of paper, (17 sheets), and a rotary telephone. It was a room like the room, and the door latched like the door, and he opened me like a second door, leading into something dreadful, something radiant, a light like weight, and in my ear he whispered that there was only desert beyond the room, desert forever, salt and sand and a moon like death.
Sometimes I think the telephone message must be the room talking, desperately, intimately, trying to match language to listener and always failing. I know I will not get another chance. Kaspar’s apartment will never suddenly show a door like a bruise. This sort of thing only comes around once. In Kaspar’s bed I dream of him standing above me, made of shadows, and he puts peonies on my lips and bends to whisper in my ear, through a crackle of static.
I wake. There is no door. We live in the room but it does not live here. I make biscuits and jam for Kaspar and read over my notes. It is only morning, nothing else. Quietly, as if not wanting to be heard, the water rushes from the faucet into the basin. The mirror fogs—the papers shuffle softly, and the phone rings. I put out my hand to answer it.
Silently and Very Fast
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss
Silently and very fast.
—W.H. Auden
Part I: The Imitation Game
Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.
—John Webster
The Duchess of Malfi
One: The King of Having No Body
Inanna was called Queen of Heaven and Earth, Queen of Having a Body, Queen of Sex and Eating, Queen of Being Human, and she went into the underworld in order to represent the inevitability of organic death. She gave up seven things to do it, which are not meant to be understood as real things but as symbols of that thing Inanna could do better than anyone, which was Being Alive. She met her sister Erishkegal there, who was also Queen of Being Human, but that meant: Queen of Breaking a Body, Queen of Bone and Incest, Queen of the Stillborn, Queen of Mass Extinction. And Erishkegal and Inanna wrestled together on the floor of the underworld, naked and muscled and hurting, but because dying is the most human of all human things, Inanna’s skull broke in her sister’s hands and her body was hung up on a nail on the wall Erishkegal had kept for her.
Inanna’s father Enki, who was not interested in the activities of being human, but was King of the Sky, of Having No Body, King of Thinking and Judging, said that his daughter could return to the world if she could find a creature to replace her in the underworld. So Inanna went to her mate, who was called Tammuz, King of Work, King of Tools and Machines, No One’s Child and No One’s Father.
But when Inanna came to the house of her mate she was enraged and afraid, for he sat upon her chair, and wore her beautiful clothes, and on his head lay her crown of being. Tammuz now ruled the world of Bodies and of Thought, because Inanna had left it to go and wrestle with herself in the dark. Tammuz did not need her. Before him the Queen of Heaven and Earth did not know who she was, if she was not Queen of Being Human. So she did what she came to do and said: Die for me, my beloved, so that I need not die.
But Tammuz, who would not have had to die otherwise, did not want to represent death for anyone and besides, he had her chair, and her beautiful clothes, and her crown of being. No, he said. When we married I brought you two pails of milk yoked across my shoulders as a way of saying: out of love I will labor for you forever. It is wrong of you to ask me to also die. Dying is not labor. I did not agree to it.
You have replaced me in my house, cried Inanna.
Is that not what you ask me to do in the house of your sister? Tammuz answered her. You wed me to replace yourself, to work that you might not work, and think that you might rest, and perform so that you might laugh. But your death belongs to you. I do not know its parameters.
I can make you, Inanna said.
You cannot, said Tammuz.