Oneiron Read online

  Pyotr’s mother was supposed to read these lines in Pyotr’s ear as he died, so long as he continued to breathe, so long as her son maintained contact with the material world. And when Pyotr had stopped breathing, when his arteries had ceased to throb, he should have been turned to rest on his right side with his right hand at his head with the palm against his cheek. This was the position in which Gautama Buddha died, the position from which Gautama Buddha passed immediately and directly into the final resting place of the soul, parinirvāna·

  Now, Pyotr complained to Serjoža, he would be relegated to wade through hallucinations of his memories alone, without a guide. He would always fear losing his way, because the bardo was full of false allurements, which came from his very own consciousness, from his projections, fears, and desires. How would he be able to keep his wandering thoughts in check without his mother guiding him, without his mother reading in his ear:

  O child of noble family, death has now arrived, and so you should adopt this attitude: “I have arrived at the time of death, so now, through this death, I will adopt the attitude of the enlightened state of mind, of friendliness and compassion . . .”

  Pyotr wept bitterly, because he had not recognized the “basic luminosity of the first bardo”, the pure, immaterial, colorless, unfettered, gleaming, and shimmering brightness, nor the secondary luminosity of the second bardo. For this reason he was forced to walk, so he shouted at Serjoža, toward the terrifying karmic illusions, toward the horrors of the Lords of Death, toward the deceitful colored light and frightening sounds of the false kingdom of the bardo of dharmatā. Right now, as they spoke, he walked there, and he was afraid because no one could help him. No one was there to tell him: This is the natural sound of your own dharmatā, so do not be afraid or bewildered. And no one whispered in his ear: You have no physical body of flesh and blood, so whatever sounds, colors, and rays of light occur, they cannot hurt you and you cannot die. And his mother did not assure him that: It is enough simply to recognize them as your projections. And he would never receive instructions for closing the door to the womb in the bardo of becoming. He would be eternally alone, wandering in the muddy swamp of samsāra, as the living dead, separated from his loved ones, his mother and his sister, who would now have to survive alone under his father’s tyranny.

  At this point in the story, Serjoža would have tapped the ash from his cherry cigar and enjoyed his first shot of cognac. He would have looked at Polina carefully, observing the effect of Pyotr’s patient history on her. Then he would have looked at his wife, Maruska, as she purred like a cat, only to nod gently to indicate that now it would be her turn, that now it would be her job to guide Polina back to good sense and away from these follies that would only bring Polina to grief. “Dear Polina,” Maruska would begin to warble, “these are the kinds of stories madmen tell. They’re an amusing distraction, aren’t they! But I’ll tell you now that no matter what you invent, Serjoža will always be able to give you one better. And he doesn’t even have to use his imagination. Being a doctor is enough for him!”

  But here Polina was more sensible than many others, for example Shlomith, whose bony finger began to look ridiculous as it wagged. Surely they all understood by now that when you’re dead, you can’t die any more—or kill anyone else. Did Shlomith really want to grab her by the neck (that’s how it looked) and strangle her only to see that she couldn’t be strangled any more? Only to be forced to admit defeat, to admit that their inviolability and immortality offered final proof of the claim she had just made that de facto they were dead? Polina waved in the direction of Shlomith’s finger and gave an irritable hiss.

  And in that moment, right on the heels of that hiss, which seemed to echo around the women, apparently only due to the suppressed anger with which Polina ejected it, Nina began to talk about the place. The point of reference, the safe harbor, the fireplace, the campfire—the wig. Peace be to you, Shlomith and Polina! No fighting. We’re all grown women!

  Thankfully adults also have permission to play. Especially around a campfire. Shlomith was the one who came up with it, as she watched Nina crouching to fluff the wig and saw her belly protruding like a ball bursting with life from beneath her black maternity shirt, a counterpoint to everything Polina had said, an exclamation point affirming life. Let’s play dead! Shlomith decided to make a game of it: OK. Let’s pretend we aren’t in the land of the living any more. It might be fun, a little like reading a mystery where each of us dies in turn, Polina, Nina, Maimuna, Wlibgis, Shlomith, and Rosa. It might put a little excitement in our . . . this, whatever we want to call this, it’s all the same.

  Both Polina and Nina eagerly joined in the game, relieved that the quarrel was past, as did Maimuna when Nina was good enough to promise to translate between French and English. Rosa Imaculada also would have had a tale to tell, perhaps the wildest tale of all, but the time for that was not yet, not in this place, not around this campfire. Here it came out of Rosa’s mouth in a confusion of languages fit for Babel, and no one could catch hold of the plot. Rosa grew frustrated and tried again and got flustered and finally began to irritate everyone. The others began to hope, secretly, or less than secretly, exposed in the slightest expressions and gestures, that Rosa would be quiet. That Rosa would content herself with listening. Maybe Rosa would gradually learn to express herself better. Listen and learn instead of constantly getting so wound up.

  And poor Wlibgis. With no voice, with no words.

  But Shlomith, Polina, Nina, and Maimuna began to play murderer for their own enjoyment and to entertain the rest. Someone (or something) had rubbed them out, had knocked them off; someone (or something) had wanted to get rid of them so suddenly that they hadn’t even noticed where their enemy was, who (or what) was hounding them, or who had a motive.

  SMALL CINNAMON-BUN-SHAPED STORIES

  Shlomith said:

  As you know, I am an artist. I do performances, and my work takes me to extremes that are unpleasant and even dangerous. But I never hurt anyone other than myself at most. The world is full of violence, but that wouldn’t diminish even if I blew up shopping centers full of trash produced in immoral working conditions. I shake people up, but I never violate anyone’s person or free will. If someone is hurt, that’s a matter of interpretation, that I’ve hit a tender spot, metaphorically speaking. Is everything clear so far?

  My final memory relates to a performance I did in my home city of New York, in the Scheuer Auditorium at the Jewish Museum. I’ve just given a presentation on the connections between anorexia and Jewishness—I use my religion and my culture as material for my performances. I’ve finished, and I’m standing in my underwear behind the microphone, waiting for the audience reaction. Even though I’ve only been telling the truth, conveying simple, cold facts, and even though I’ve stated that I take full responsibility for myself and my work, in some people I awaken a primitive rage. I’m prepared for rotten fruit, eggs, water bottles, even small pebbles. Nothing truly dangerous could come flying from the audience because the security screening has been even more strict than usual. Everyone walked through metal detectors, all bags were opened, and no large backpacks were allowed in the auditorium at all. Just to be safe, my assistant, the indispensable Katie McKeen, is ready in the wings just behind the red curtain. We have agreed that if anything starts raining on the stage, she’ll come and get me. She’ll open a large black umbrella, and we’ll walk together under cover to a back room where no outsiders are allowed.

  Two armed guards stand at the door. In the restricted courtyard behind the museum a car waits for me, an ambulance. I can see that this astonishes a few of you. The deliberateness, ribaldry even, that unavoidably attends this performance. But let’s not talk about that now. All I did was go on an expedition into my culture, which in a roundabout way is the culture every one of us self-righteous bastards shares. I harnessed my body completely, as I always do in my art, for use in my research. I made it into an instrument, which I cared for with great
love. Vitamins, trace minerals, fatty acids, all carefully calculated and controlled; nutrition therapy was instrumental. My goal was not to starve myself to death, but of course I dropped my energy intake relative to consumption very low. I shot for a body mass index of twelve, met it, and even went a bit below. I knew the risks. I’m not stupid.

  My motives? When I start something, I go all in. Nothing less is possible. I’ve been sick for years, assuming you want to call voluntarily abstaining from food a sickness in this world. Ultimately I wanted to gaze into the soul of my sickness—and not just for selfish personal reasons but for cultural research. Because in the final analysis, this is a sickness we all share. This sickness and its different variations have a soul, and it is the Jewish soul, the landscape of the Semitic spirit. This is my argument, and this is the soul I believe I succeeded in revealing.

  And I received enormous applause for this service. No rotten fruit or stinking eggs. Those would have been thrown by neo-Nazis, Haredi Jews, or Christian extremists who had infiltrated the crowd, because they all have one common enemy, and I am it. Polina, there’s no use staring at me that way. I’m not boasting. This is simply a fact! During my career, I’ve received death threats, I’ve been stalked, and once someone tried to run me down with a car. But I’ve never retreated: the call of art has been stronger than fear. I have an obsession with honesty, and I don’t give up, even if my honesty might drive some with weak nerves to insanity.

  But now they succeeded after all. Let’s just agree on that if we really are dead. They killed me, let’s just say, and pretend that you’re right, Polina. Let’s assume that it happened in the following way. The performance is done, the applause has been given, and people are lining up to greet me. They thank me, and everyone wants to exchange a few words. Believe it or not, many people cried! They cried because my example gave them permission to cry. Wait, Polina, let me continue! You’re thinking that I suffer from megalomania. But that isn’t so. To put it simply: people want to be led. When that happens in a safe place, like in a museum or in a gallery, and they all receive the same conduit, which in this case is me, at the same time, they surrender. I call it intermental metabolism. It does the audience good, and ultimately it makes all of society healthier. I wouldn’t do my art if I didn’t believe in this. But this all has a dark side too.

  So the performance is done, and everyone has given their hugs, their thanks, their tears. The auditorium begins to empty. The guards are friendly as they usher the audience out the door, and I watch them all like one might watch an anthill or the draining of a bath full of water. I am empty. I drain as the people flow out of the room, approaching complete emptiness of thought. I register movement but no movers. The people are vertical lines, multicolored hairs, backs, and bottoms, each dressed differently, being sucked by the door to the other side. Very soon they will be gone.

  I am exhausted. I could fall asleep on my stool, but suddenly I snap awake. My attention focuses on the final person leaving the hall, who has stopped. A disturbance in the landscape. He turns and reveals his face. A middle-aged man with glasses, perfectly normal, or so you might suppose if you saw him on the street walking with everyone else. Suit jacket on top, relaxed jeans below, slender, obviously in good shape. Maybe he’s a marathoner, since something in him seems tenacious that way. There is determination in his movements, with a dash of compulsion, which is needed to carry out the plan he has been nursing for so many years in his mind.

  He has the wiry stride of a long-distance runner, but now he isn’t in his own element, out in the fresh air. The hall stinks of a mass ecstasy whose causes he can only understand one way. In front of the crammed door, he makes a small, restless turn and finally lifts his eyes to me. I see in his gaze that he is looking at Satan himself.

  He has hung behind to the last in order to ensure being noticed, so I will see his significant gaze, which is meant only for me. Then he slips out the door. In that very moment I realize I am in great danger. He isn’t working alone! There are several of them here. A moment ago I had seen that same look in the queue that formed in front of me. I remember a young man whose body language was similar, made tense by a stubborn vehemence; behind him walked a young woman, and I remember her too. They came together. Neither of them cried. Neither of them looked for comfort in my eyes. Their eyes were full of something they had brought into the auditorium themselves and which they took with them when they left. And I thought they were upset! How blind a person can be. They were full of hate and nothing else.

  The young woman wordlessly slipped a piece of paper into my hand, and I placed it on the stool under my rear end to wait. More people were coming, and I tried to brighten my face for each of them, to be unique for each of them for one moment.

  Once the marathoner is gone, I pick up the scrap of paper and unfold it. BITCH YOU’RE AN INSTRUMENT OF SATAN YOU OUGHT TO DIE!!! The message is written in block capitals with a black marker, and after it are three exclamation points: a vertical line and a dot, a vertical line and a dot, a vertical line and a dot. Any less would not have been sufficient. Sensible, vigorous Katie McKeen comes from behind the curtain now. She just waves when I show her the paper. “It’s a wonder there weren’t more of those crazies this time,” she says. She just wants to get me to the ambulance. “You aren’t going to die in my arms,” she adds. I love her black humor.

  Katie drapes a caftan over me and hands me my favorite slippers, these silly fuzzy ones. From one side of the stage we can walk downstairs to the basement, to a cluttered dressing-slash-storage room, and from there outside. I can walk under my own power, supported by Katie. I’m at my thinnest point and the uttermost limit of my strength, and that was exactly how it was supposed to be.

  Katie forces me to sit in a wheelchair, which had been left in the corridor for this very moment. I can’t be allowed to walk another foot so I won’t needlessly lose any energy. We start moving. Katie pushes me, occasionally reaching ahead to open a door with an electronic key, which she has on loan from the museum caretaker. This is surprisingly laborious: there are a lot of doors, at least six, and we are deep in the bowels of the museum. The corridor is only a little wider than the wheelchair, so Katie has to stand on her tiptoes and suck in her belly to reach over the chair and open the door; she’s a bit plump, and her belly is large. The doors have no mechanism to keep them open, so they start closing as soon as she lets go of them. So Katie uses her rear end to hold the door open and pulls me by the leg to get the chair through. When I cautiously suggest that I might walk myself, she snorts, wipes her brow, and says, “Sit down, Shlomith.”

  God I miss her . . .

  Then something happens that neither of us expected. One of the doors refuses to open. Katie presses the keycard in its leather cover against the reader over and over again, and the green light flashes. She pushes the door and jerks the handle, but the door doesn’t budge. Is this a technical glitch or sabotage? It’s as if something heavy is in front of the door on the other side. Katie lets out a groan and curses. She tries to call the caretaker, but she doesn’t have any bars in the basement. “Shlomith,” she says with false vivacity to cover her exhaustion, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to go back.” “Yeah, Mama,” I mutter and close my eyes. I feel Katie’s soft stomach against my arm as she squeezes by to the other side of the wheelchair. Katie is a safe woman. I could sleep every night in her arms. She’s so forgiving and round, while I’m hard, too hard even for myself. If I sleep on my side without a pillow between my knees, in the morning my legs are covered in bruises. But Katie can’t be by my side every night. “You hurt me, dear Shlomith. Do you understand? I can’t get any sleep because you’re so sharp you injure me.” Katie has spent so many nights helping me fall asleep before returning to her own home. She has stroked me gently under the thick duvets. Yes, I am the pea, and she is the princess. She is beautiful, vibrant, and real. I long for her constantly.

  She can’t turn the wheelchair around, but Katie still doesn’t dar
e to flout the doctor’s order and suggest walking. She decides to pull me backward to the small room we started from. “We’ll go out through the main floor of the museum,” she says. “The ambulance can meet us there. Besides, the museum will be closing soon, so we’ll be able to move around without curious stares.”

  Katie has moved behind me. She is just grabbing the handles to pull me back when the stuck door in front of us suddenly opens. In the door, in the bright light, stands a bespectacled man; I recognize him from his athletic posture and wiry physique. He is tense, trembling, ready to dash away . . . but first he has a task to complete. He lifts his hand . . . Polina, will you please make up the rest.

  Polina continues:

  Well . . . The marathoner stands before you. He lifts his hand. Maybe he’s holding a heavy object wrapped in gray fabric? And he starts to beat you. His blows land where he intends . . . the forehead . . . and the temples. You lose consciousness. They are forceful, blunt blows that leave no external marks on your head. Numberless internal tissues rupture, causing your brain to swell. Your breathing slows. You will never regain consciousness. You die . . .

  The murderer flees the scene. He leaves your assistant screaming next to your body slumped in the wheelchair. He knows a secret way out . . . Maybe he’s in league with the museum caretaker. Maybe the caretaker thought you were evil incarnate. Maybe the caretaker had that look too . . .

  Whatever lies behind it, you die, Shlomith. You die from your brain injuries, not malnourishment. Are you satisfied now?

  And what about my death? Are we going there too? I’ve given it a lot of thought. I always return to the same point—a warmth, an all-encompassing, tingling warmth. That’s my end. I sense a bright, yellow light, even though I keep my eyes shut. And the tingling . . . It doesn’t focus on any specific location, like the skin. It’s everywhere. Things like “skin”, “head”, “limbs”, “pointer fingers”, “little toes”, no longer exist. Existing that way has ceased. I’m not lying much if I say that at the moment of my death I was at one with the universe. Do you understand what I’m talking about? I didn’t accept the light like Saint Teresa of Ávila. Do you know the statue? Bernini’s Teresa: mouth open, slumped uncomfortably, a cherub nearby threatening her with an arrow? It wasn’t like that. First of all, I wasn’t in any particular position.