Rothko

this short story was first published in Slovenian in Ideollusions (LUD Literatura, 2014), and was since translated into Estonian and German

translated by the author

Night flight Paris – New York. The time is … I don’t know. I don’t know what the time is. We’re high up in the air, we took off at 9 pm and we’ll also land at 9 pm, if I understood it right. So the time must be zero, or whatever the time is in Greenland, over which we are supposedly flying. I say supposedly because outside the earth is covered by mountains from landscapes of Flemish masters – clouds, get it? – which, in the light of the sun rebounded from the white moon, look like crumpled aluminum. I would say like silver – and I guess I wouldn’t be the first to say so – but the bluish dusk and the broken constructs of mist do not remind me of silver but instead of a kind of a hi-tech graveyard encased in ice.

We are gliding above it. The hum of the motors is thick and muffled and the air tastes like canned oxygen. The lights are off and most of the passengers are asleep. She is also asleep, or is just pretending to be, so we wouldn’t have to talk. We already said it all, she says, three or four times over, and because her misfortune can’t be solved by conversation I am frequently accused of talking for the sole purpose of giving up my role in the whole affair. Which is of course not true, but I can’t counter this accusation in a way that would be sufficiently considerate to her, so I just shrug and bite the insides of my cheeks. Truth is for the healthy and the fortunate while the rest of us are left with silence and the conviction that we have kept silent with the best of possible intentions.

I am in a plane of pixels, crossing Greenland. I am seated somewhere in the tail and on this screen I do not take a thousandth of a pixel of space. I am assailed by slight claustrophobia, which I try to temper by latching onto the gazes of stewardesses. They are not crazily attractive, but they are professional, since they all stay with my gaze for just the right amount of time so we can both know we have looked at each other, but not for so long that it could become – with the obvious absurdity of flirting that can’t possibly lead anywhere – awkward. I guess in the event that our gazes would be locked for too long I would be the first one to become uncomfortable, but only for a moment, after which I would be immediately washed over by fantasies of manliness and for a while I would then be drowning in a hasty narrative leading in the most believable way to my hand on her neck and wet thrusts of skin against skin, to sunspots and perfume, but this would end quickly, since I don’t allow myself true freedom even in my own fantasies, which always automatically diverge into strange scenarios of unwelcome endings or inabilities or interruptions, which is, I think, the defense mechanism of my person, relieving my mind of the fact that I never turn my fantasies into reality, and I would doubtless then end my fantasy with a clear awareness of the impossibility of bringing pleasure to a person I did not even know existed a few hours before, which will then ease my conscience for the lack of trying, and I would probably be then free of this fantasy, willed into being by the drawn out gaze, at least up until a certain evening – maybe I would drink too much, or not enough – when my throat would burn up with the memory of the feeling caused by the contact of our eyes, and I would know then that I am a man whose demands on real life are always decisively too modest.

But this is not supposed to be my story, so I will try and speak as little of me as I can. In the end – I am doing all of this for her.

I look at her from the side. She is still unbelievably beautiful. This might sound silly – still – since she is in her late twenties and there is no reason for her not to be, struck as she was by this unheard of luck of attracting the attention of men of all kinds at the tender age of fifteen, when she still seemed too young to have taste and common sense and the possibility of choice, when her beauty had not yet ascended from the general cuteness – although even then her cuteness was not the cuteness of a little or even a sweet little girl, but more like the cuteness of a Disney princess, so not a random, cute cuteness, but a sharp, planned, with a ton of market research supported, almost militant cuteness – to her current shining beauty of pure, perfect features, causing men, unwilling to live their lives with the knowledge that they once held in their hands something infinitely more beautiful than the creature they will once be, undoubtedly, forced to end up with, to run, but then – when she was merely cute – they all tried their luck with her, her classmates, her teachers, the school principal, the mailmen, neighbors, local drunks and a priest, and at least three cousins and even one uncle, which was for a teenager, whose insides were not as attractive and singular and cute as her outsides – they were more or less ordinarily teenaged – of course confusing, complicated and deeply disconcerting, and all this even more so because all of those men under her spell have, in the moment when she finally managed to accept her appearance and began to push forward her personality with a slightly greater degree of confidence, disappeared from her life. She became too beautiful.

It is most likely that I would have run away too, when we met, but my gaze was then, in the gallery, focused on the canvas, and when I felt the presence of a strong energy beside me I, inspired by the main attraction of all gallery openings (cheap red wine), fell into some type of a soured stream of consciousness and for the next five minutes amazed myself with every sentence that came out of my mouth. I do not remember well what I was saying – for that I am quite grateful – but, when I turned to her at last and my heart fell down into my stomach and my knees trembled and she took my breath away and all the rest of these tired tropes which signify the general activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight response, my sight was chained to her eyes, in which there was no trace of the things one has learned to expect in the eyes of a beautiful woman – the bored contempt at the predictable salaciousness of the entire male race, the upfront pleasure at the expectation of the first sleazy assault’s instant rebuke, and the vain, slightly insecure demand that I should worship her beauty and in the moment I agree to this doubly worship its unattainability – but were instead full of some desperate frailty, weakened by who knows what kind of failures to the point where it was openly threatening to break. I did not know what to do – the vision of sharp porcelain dust which would crash into me from her eyes if I made the wrong step froze me to the ground – so I pushed my face slightly, but with determination, forward (if that was just a drunk, momentary lapse of balance, I do not know and do not wish to know), have, in a sense, exposed myself to her, let her know that I can feel her anguish and that I am not afraid of what was to come. I chose to fight.

This night flight was a deliberate choice with an express purpose, despite the fact it is much more convenient to land in the middle of the day, get to the hotel and catch a late lunch, than to trust the late night taxi drivers (who are, because of the dangerous nature of their occupation, without exception more rough, nervous and suspicious than the ones driving during the day) and risk the receptionist dozing off and missing the ringing of the bell, which will ring at first three times in normal succession, and will then, with the night beasts, always attentive to the smell of tiredness and fear, gathering around the couple outside, ring faster and faster, with more urgency and panic, and ring in the end without stopping, before finally going abruptly silent. I am genuinely pleased when I look out the window and see that this risk was not taken in vain.

She sleeps by the window. I hold her shoulder and gently shake her. She is in deep sleep, or in deep pretense. Nothing surprises me anymore. I move closer to her neck, and catch her warm scent, the time capsule of all that is ours. Is this nostalgia that envelops me every time I catch it love’s memory of being in love, or the memory of love itself? I kiss the skin beneath her chin – she flinches, moves her head away and looks at me with bloodied eyes under a frown (she was really asleep) – and tell her:

“Look.”

Outside, above the clouds, above the horizon, the earth’s atmosphere is dancing in bright green waves.

“It’s beautiful,” she says quietly, but in the past two weeks, since we went on this trip, I have heard her say ‘it’s beautiful’ so many times that I no longer believe it. We are looking at an incredible natural phenomenon from a perspective which was, a hundred years ago, unthinkable for any human being, in the relative comfort of jeans and sweaters, speeding a thousand kilometers an hour, ten kilometers above ground, and this should be enough to push any consciousness into an enraptured state of wonder, into at least a single moment when a person could forget about itself and simply let the tangle of sensory perceptions to erase time – but for her I know – I know! – that beauty does not touch her, that she is already dismantling the scene into its basic components of cause and effect and hastily pumping all the magic out of it, so she would not have to, even accidentally, face something which could relieve her misery. Her lips are moving. She is whispering.

“What?” I ask her.

“The solar wind carries the electrons and the protons from reactions on the surface of the sun.”

“No,” I say.

“Where the magnetic field is the weakest the collision of particles with the atmosphere creates the northern lights.”

“No,” I say, almost too loud.

“Aurora borealis,” she says.

“No. Those are the Inuit spirits of beluga whales and seals, of salmon and moose, coming to bless the hunters, to tell them they understand the grand cycle of nature and that they do not resent them …”

I stop.

“Resent them what? Death? Come on.”

“We are in a flying igloo, wrapped in the skins of arctic foxes. Everything we know is infinite paleness and cold, and the only warmth, the only true warmth we have, is coming from our hearts. When we look at the night sky it is purple, red and green. Let’s rub noses.”

She turns away.

“I won’t be able to fall asleep now.”

“Aren’t you happy you saw the northern lights?”

She looks at me and gives me a tired smile.

“I am.”

To be with her was pure pleasure. She did not have many friends – actually, with the exception of a few ex-classmates we used to meet around town, I don’t think I ever met a single one – and so we did not have to go through the desperate negotiations among different social circles, meet a bunch of new people, forget about some of the old ones; we went out with my friends, until the jealousy of others’ girlfriends and a few nasty outbursts of infatuation put an end to that (at first they were all rigid and quite likeable in their awkwardness, but when they got used to her they couldn’t help themselves but to compete for her attention), and then we went out more or less alone. Wherever we went I felt, just because I could lovingly hold her hand, as if I actually accomplished something with my life. Men looked at me with respect bordering on awe and women looked at me as if I could at any time make and support a dozen kids. Maybe it is a flaw in my character – am I shallow? vain? arrogant? – but I truly did not need anything else.

But she … I don’t know. I guess I did not understand her then, and I admit that I was not (did not want to be?) entirely attentive to all the secret aspects of her personality – in my state of love it was easy to interpret her as a two-ton steam-roller interprets the world in front of it, and the constant euphoria gave me enough energy to move ever forward without reflecting, plugged into the current of time and deeply convinced that a happy life gives meaning to its empty spaces all by itself – and it does not seem fair to judge her as she used to be through the prism of what I know about her (and of course about myself) now. I hope she was also happy with me. I hope I did not miss something crucial. I made an effort, I gave my love, I took hers. I can’t think of anything I could have, or should have done differently. 

We are landing in a violent storm. Her nails are sunk deep into my forearm. This pleases me – even though the survival drive is not proof of the will to live, I know she is aware of her hypocrisy – but I am more concerned about the fact that the strong turbulence triggers absolutely no panic within me. Am I really that exhausted? Am I in truth already broken but still equating myself with the show I’m putting on for her? After the hard landing she pulls her nails out. I smile at her, she shrugs.

When we slowly roll out of the plane in a long caravan I hardly notice the looks of strangers. It’s been a while since I felt emboldened by them; now I experience their attention merely as a strange, oppressive demand to be someone else. And the looks of beautiful women, offering me some kind of an alliance, a ticket to the elite club of those able to handle beauty, are ultimately just pathetic. Is this all you care about?

I’m tired. I haven’t slept at all. Or else I wouldn’t be thinking like her. I follow her down long, fluorescent white hallways of gray carpets, we stand on the conveyor belt, staring at the panels of advertisements, we wait in line before immigration so a bored employee can check us out with a glance, rattle off a couple of questions to which we respond with rigid, frightened bursts, before we are sent, with a pair of giant steel stamp’s strikes, in front of a carousel of baggage, which hypnotizes me into a trancelike state wherein the only things I’m aware of are the stale dampness of my armpits and the horrible taste in my mouth. Over the Atlantic. Over Atlantic. Overatlant …

She pinches my side, I pounce on the suitcase and pull it down with a single heave. I’m irrationally proud of that. I drag it across customs – I catch the officer who, upon seeing her, pulls in his stomach and straightens his shoulders, before he averts his gaze and signals his defeat with a jerk of his finger, onward – and through a wall of people, waiting outside, in front of which I feel like a pile of presents under the Christmas tree. The taxi driver is an overweight older man in a nice suit, cleanly shaven, with hair slicked back. Her presence does not discomfort him. I tell him where we’re headed and he tells me the price and invites us to sit down while he puts the suitcase in the trunk. The car smells heavily of cologne. She presses herself next to me and I don’t have the heart to tell her to look, even though the city, as we approach it from the East, is gorgeous in the dark.

Right before we turn onto the Brooklyn Bridge, at the end of Belt parkway, where the lanes are set on top of each other and sticking out of the bank facing Manhattan, the city’s downtown shows itself in all its power. Massive slabs of hematite and emerald, shot through with light, are swaying under the stars in the crystal night sky, and the hum of the road is the hum of their core, the melting furnace buried deep below the earth which keeps all these giants airborne with the pure force of lust, and the miles of concrete and steel, copper wire and the upthrust of light are in perfect equilibrium with the pressure of human fates which would clench all this matter into a fist for a single fair fight with the uncaring sky, and this tension of forces is so tangible that you could paint your presence with a single touch far, far into the future.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispers. I believe her. She is also very tired. On the street where we get out of the cab there are no night beasts (a few identically dressed students are staring into a shop window with disappointment, it is unclear why, the street is otherwise empty), the reception is brightly lit and open, and everything is flowing smoothly, so it takes us just a couple of minutes to get into the room. The bellboy bids farewell with a deep bow and a wide smile over the ten dollars I get out of my wallet by accident, but once they’re already in the air I don’t muster the strength to deal with the misunderstanding, so they end up with him. When we brush our teeth we look at our faces in the mirror and when we go to bed we know we’re too tired to make love. I hold her close to me and kiss her forehead.

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

I look out the window straight at the dark building on the other side of the street and keep awake for another minute expecting that something will light it up.

We spent a couple of days in the city, checking out the collections in Metropolitan, Whitney, Guggenheim, MoMA, and threw away an afternoon in the galleries of Chelsea (we didn’t expect much to begin with, but if these contemporary artists would be aware of how little they have to offer to a person in her state, they would have to feel a deep sense of shame) and only got into a single fight, in the middle of the bridge, to the amusement of smirking tourists, over something silly – I don’t remember how it started, something about public healthcare and the terror of money, erasing cultures; I claimed, full of myself (inspired by the rays of the setting sun, which searched the buildings for cracks and laid infinite crimson strips of light at our feet), that a view like this is worth all the suffering of humanity and she, upon hearing this, threatened to throw herself into the river, which had admittedly hurt my feelings, but I have also then wildly overreacted. Having no other options, we made up before we crossed the bridge.

We rented a car and drove south. The American highway whispered its meanings – Simon and Garfunkel were counting cars on the New Jersey turnpike, Moriarty aka Cassady couldn’t stop the manic yammering coming from the back seats – but truly merely whispered. Everything else was concrete, petrol, brutality. The drivers were speeding, cutting in, hysterically changing lanes, screaming obscenities. I was expecting freedom, or at least its echo, but instead I was wracked with anxiety. The most beautiful scene waited for us in Washington – we left New York long before dawn and when the sunrise spilled bronze over the mighty fortress of Pentagon I was crushed by the terrible beauty of a world controlled – but I chose not to say anything, because I knew it would horrify her. I don’t think she spoke a single word. We slept in a simple highway motel somewhere close to Nashville and we made love with raw need, as it was the only way to fill our hearts with courage. When she cried I pretended to sleep.

Now we just arrived out of Memphis and crossed the state line from Tennessee to Arkansas. Even though the sun is still shining there are already a couple of raindrops on my windshield and in the distance straight ahead there is a dark cliff of clouds like a giant wave threatening to break and crash down on us. For a moment I hope we’ll get to see a tornado. I look at her. She is staring ahead and I can see fear in her eyes. A lightning bolt rips through the clouds and illuminates them with a translucent orange light.

“It’s beautiful,” her voice is shaking. “But it will disappear.”

I keep quiet.

“There will be nothing there.”

I grab onto the wheel and let the outburst of anger dissipate over my entire body. I meditated a lot. I can do this.

“Nothing.”

“It’s there now,” I say with gritted teeth.

“Now,” she looks at me, “now. And then?”

I keep quiet. There are more and more raindrops. I turn on the wipers.

“Then it will disappear.”

“Not in your memory. You will remember it.”

“Do you remember how it was when you loved me?”

My lungs are expanding, everything is going through the nose.

“Is it the same?” she asks, “now?”

There is a truth, which I dare not speak. I can’t speak it. I don’t want to.

“But I have! I have loved you and I would never change that. I was there. Me! I experienced it. Nothing can change that. And if I could go back, I would go in a second. Just to feel it again. To experience it – again. But this does not make me any less grateful I truly did experience it …”

“You are grateful even though you’ve lost it? Be respectful …”

“What I want to say is – look! It’s right there in front of you, you can see it, you can see it right now! Why do you insist on despairing over the fact that it will be gone? You will die. I will die. Everything will disappear. But I won’t let it, I will not allow it to take the colors out now!”

“Be respectful of the loss. Acknowledge it, respect it, please, that’s the only thing I …”

“I haven’t lost anything. I can never lose anything.”

There is a truth.

“Stop the car.”

I look at her and I see that she’s serious. Her hand is on the door handle. Porcelain. Threat of a schism, a split. My nerves are hotly pulsating but I can gather enough strength to simply slow down, change the lanes and stop on the shoulder. There is not a lot of traffic. I turn the signals on. I breathe out through my nose and look at her all disappointed. What is going to happen?

She unbuckles, opens the door and jumps out. The wind blows her hair into Spring. In the light rain she runs onto the road – I yell, unbuckle, all instinct – and stops the first car passing by with wild waving of her arms. The driver is a black guy wearing a baseball cap. We both lower our windows and look at her.

“What is it?” he yells.

“Do you want to fuck me?” she screams through the wind and I am overcome by infinite shame, infinite powerlessness, infinite frustration over the fact that I have to follow my conscience and perform the rituals of love for someone I, because of the misery which is not really mine, not mine, not mine at all, deeply, deeply …

There is.

“Get lost, you crazy bitch!” he yells at her and drives off.

I am empty. I want to see a tornado.

“Could you please get back in?”

She shakes her head and leans on the front of the car. Her shoulders are trembling. I get out and slowly approach her.

“Go away.”

I hold my hand out. She throws a glance my way.

“Don’t touch me.”

We hear a car and she stands in its path again.

“Please, come on, please,” I beg and my heart is tearing apart.

A large white pickup honks for her to move away, but then pulls over in front of our car.

“Please,” I say.

It’s too late. The doors open and out of them appears first the barrel of a long silver revolver, and before it is followed by the brim of a wide white hat, and before the hat is followed by a wrinkled, leathery face of sharp features and the face by a black boot, and the boot by the long, wiry body of a cowboy, I know it is too late, that I have tried in vain – and I resent her so goddamn much for this – that I have done all of this just to search for and finally find my own grave. I can never lose anything. There is a truth. I hope we will be next to each other in the ground.

“Well now just what do you kids think you’re doing here?”

I am too scared to say anything. I can’t see her face. I want to see it so badly. The cowboy is slowly walking towards us, the gun raised in his hip.

“Robbing cars?”

She shakes her head.

“This ain’t the north. Here you’ll be shot before you say gimme.”

I just want to see her face. He is already standing right in front of her. Please.

“Do you want to fuck me?”

I can’t believe she said it. I knew she would, but I still can’t believe it. She will kill us both. I hate her with such a force that I become unbearably jealous of the fact that he will be the one to shoot her and not me.

The cowboy is taken by surprise. His eyes widen – they’re icy blue – then he bursts into laughter. He looks at me for a moment, humiliates me with a raised brow, and turns back to her.

“Oh no sweetheart, I don’t think that fate planned for me to ever … sleep with a girl as beautiful as you are. Did you have a fight? It’s going to be ok. Everything is going to be ok. You want a sip of whiskey?”

His free hand goes into the inner pocket of his coat and offers her a silver flask. She hesitates for a second, then takes it, unrolls it and takes a large gulp. When she returns it he slightly lowers his gun.

“Now get back in the car before you catch a cold, all right?”

She nods and goes. She doesn’t look at me.

“Come here, boy.”

I wait until she’s safe in the car before I focus on my legs, try to calm them, and make a couple of careful steps.

“You want some?”

I shake my head.

“I’m driving.”

He nods.

“What’s with her?” he asks.

We look at her. She’s staring over the prairie.

“She’s ill,” I say. “She is going blind.”

He nods again.

“And she thinks that a cowboy’s dick can help her?”

“No. She wants to punish me for not acknowledging … I mean, she wants me to respect the loss.”

We keep silent for a minute and look each other in the eyes.

“Respect the loss,” he says quietly, “well now that is something not a lot of folks can do. A demanding girl. Is she worth it?”

I don’t say anything.

“Looks like she is. Where are you from?”

“Slovenia.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Yugoslavia.”

“Oh.”

He walks to her and knocks on the window with his gun. She lowers it.

“My granddad returned blind from the war. A grenade. Once I asked him what it was like, being blind. He told me that if he wouldn’t piss on everything around him every now and then, he would hardly know the difference. Now you think about it.”

He turns to me, wishes me good luck with a slight tip of his hat, walks off, gets into his pickup and drives away.

Even if I don’t want to, I get back in the car. My mental state is probably impossible to describe and I am absolutely disgusted at the thought of even trying to guess hers.

“I am even prepared to die,” I say while fastening my seatbelt. It’s pathetic, I know, but I don’t know how to communicate anything else to anyone.

She looks at me and it seems like she’s trying to figure out whether to believe me.

“If I had to put my trust in something, I would put it in the psyche of a sensitive viewer who is free of conventional patterns of thought. I know nothing of how the viewer would use my pictures to meet the needs of his spirit, but when the viewer will have both needs and a spirit there could be a true exchange.”

MARK ROTHKO

We arrive at the Rothko chapel in Houston as a pair of spent ghosts, held together only by the static of the storm they have endured. Our edges are porous, we slip through states of matter. Now I am solid, now I am a fume. I don’t know which thoughts are mine and which are hers. I am losing my personality in every line that crosses my path. The pavestones, the leaves of trees, the horizon are all infinite levers lodged underneath my ribs, forcing me to scream, and each scream is expressed with a mere simple step forward.

We are entering.

I am hounded by completely ordinary thoughts, thoughts I no longer wish to trust. It was the ordinary thoughts that brought me here. I would like to drink beer on the street and meow at women. I would go to the funerals and pretend I respect the loss, I would acknowledge it with gritted teeth and solemn handshakes. I would visit brothels and pretend that the whores like me. Everything could be just as simple as buying a pair of tickets, holding her hand – she grabs it at once and gives it a warm squeeze which I accept as an apology – and screaming down the hallway step by step.

We are entering.

I can’t say I understand. Feel it, yes. But, when I say that I feel like a crossroads of color, the intersection of all possible sets of impression, at the same time I can’t shake the feeling that I have stolen something completely and utterly for myself and that I will take this with me to the other side and nobody will ever play even the smallest part in it and that this makes me irreparably selfish. I forget about her and let her wander off into the void of her personal darkness. I make myself susceptible to the assault of shades. They come at me with the arousal of the intro to Beethoven’s Ninth – is this too pretentious? Am I allowed to say it? After all I’m just talking to myself.

I look at her, framed by canvasses, with tears streaming down her cheeks, but her eyes are open and the corners of her lips are turning upwards.

“I want to …” she says and those are the words that I wanted to hear all this time, words she can finish however she wants to, as long as she feels them, really, really feels them – I want to die on the spot, I want to destroy the world, I want to burn down this chapel, I want to do something completely ordinary, I want to live a long, happy life, I want you to disappear from my life, I want to disappear from yours, I want to be immeasurably, impossibly, inconsolably selfish …

“I want to see the face of our child.”