and black surfaces, skin. This trying to take hold, but slipping. Cao Xueqin writes into the text the word “pian”—”to deceive.” “Do not be deceived by the author”—this phrase recurs often, I don’t know why he does this. Words, crumbled bridges, vapor, scars. No grammar for this. Thought’s odd ferocities. I drink my tea. I listen to the crickets.
This cold wind’s a ripped robe as I walk, or certainties dissolving in my hands if certainties could materialize and be touched. Red Inkstone wrote that maybe there could be no “settled version,” and that maybe this isn’t such a bad thing after all. Always I feel this, that there is no single angle or story to belong to. Your face and others’ drifting from me, changing.
I don’t know if Claire stands at her window in the snow, or if she dreams of Allegra (but how could she not dream of Allegra?). Does she stand on a ladder of ash? And you—I don’t know where you went or what you thought that night you left me. Even my own skin’s mostly alien, mysterious. The hidden cells inside my brain opaque and changing. And even though Red Inkstone wrote in the margins, nothing of what he said solved the questions left open by his friend Cao Xueqin.
My Friend,
This place I live in, I think it was once called Mourning-The-Red-Studio. So I write to you from a place of mourning and redness. Here your words revolve in planet-like obsession, a gravity that tugs and binds me: “acid tartaric,” “atropine sulphate,” “there have always been captives,” “why should I be an exception,” “spasms,” “refusals,” “a tenderness that suffers.”
“Disruption and resistance built into the very core of sight.”
What can I tell you? Baoyu’s fallen into another coma. His teeth are clenched, his skin’s cold, but his mind’s traveling, vibrantly alive. A mysterious monk leads him to a desolate region where he comes to a dwelling with twelve cabinets, their doors partly open. These are the same cabinets he saw years ago in a dream (as you repeatedly return to her white room, her clothes, her notebook). Inside are twelve albums, but the writing’s blurred. Only “pity” and “sighing” come through clearly. He doesn’t know what to do with all those pages when he can only read two words. When the monk reappears he asks him: “Did you pry into any secrets here?” “Yes, I saw some albums. I tried to read about people I know, the ones I love who died and suffered, and those still alive, but I could only understand two words.” The monk replies: “All earthly ties are bewitchments. Now you must go back.”
As you and I in our own ways are turned back. The albums inscrutable, the print blurred.
What is blinking?’ A pulling away. A pulling back. Flinching built into the central workings of the face. Absence making its quick claim. Everything partial. Beneath the skin, whole tracts of hiddenness. The beggars on Beggar’s Bridge at once visible and hidden. The sister’s skin was shame to her and visible but what of the rest of her that wasn’t visible?
I don’t know if Cao Xueqin lived to finish his book. I don’t know if you’re alive. I write from this place of mourning and redness. I see your face through red light like the smoke trees in autumn.
I think of Red Inkstone’s words to Cao Xueqin, “perhaps there will be no settled version.”
Last night I saw Claire. She was standing at her attic window in Moscow in the snow.
“I don’t want to be back here,”
she said,
“I liked it better under the walnut tree in Aosta. And why all this dwelling on what skin is, what blinking is? Do you think the Northern explorers would have stopped to worry about that? That Parry would have dwelled on that? They waited their snow blindness out when they had it, that’s all. Waited and didn’t complain. Though I suppose I dwelled on walls and ladders, so I’m as bad as anyone. Allegra’s been dead a long time now. And Shelley.”
“Why do you never think of Mary?”
“She suffered over you, but you hardly ever mention her.”
“I miss writing in my notebook. When I speak—as I’m speaking now—I sound more harsh than I feel. I feel little freedom when I speak. I don’t want to speak.”
Waking, I felt lost. I remembered looking into your eyes when I first opened mine, how you flinched and turned away. I felt a coldness dry as dirt. No “tenderness that suffers,” no