away again, to some sweaty guy playing a video game at the back of the bar. The guy was twisting the controls really hard, like he was strangling them. There was a stripe of sweat down his back.
Come on, I said. Tell me.
Jake sighed.
He said: We dated for six months. We fought a few times. She loved arguing. We broke up. Then a couple weeks after, I ran into her while we were out. We went back to her place and had sex. The next morning I woke up at her house and I said goodbye and left. The next thing I know, she was accusing me of rape. Seriously. Just like that. Actually, she never said it to my face. Which is how you know it’s a lie. And she never even called the police. She just told some other people, some of our mutual friends, and they told me, because they knew she was lying. The truth was she had started dating someone new, and he found out about us, and she didn’t want to admit she had cheated on him. So she said I had raped her. Get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s made it hard for me to trust women. Not you, though. You’re different. You know that, right?
How ironic. Me making all these pictures about how women see and know so much. Me not dating artists because Richard had plagiarized my work. Me saying men are the problem, it’s a structural problem. Meanwhile I thought I had found someone who was immune.
I think I believed him just because he said I was different. Men do that. They separate us from the pack. And we are grateful, because the pack is a dangerous place to be.
That girl. I think about her so often. I dream about her. In my dream, she wakes up drunk and uncertain. She sees Jake next to her and her body tenses. She thought she had escaped. Now she feels it, though. The scraped flesh. The wet truth. She will have to live with that truth for the rest of her life. She rolls over onto the side of her bed and vomits onto the floor. A neat yellow oval.
She wipes her mouth and looks up. She has my face.
I no longer wonder what happened to her that night. I do wonder what happened after. I wonder if I have ever met her. In some ways I think she knows me better than anyone else. I wonder if she’s seen my work, BRAND on the placard, and what she thought of it. I wonder where she is now.
I wonder what my life would have been like if I had heard Jake tell that story and had walked away.
NOVEMBER 15 1993
Tomorrow I will rise.
The air will be crisp. Frosted. Sweet with the sea. I know every needle on these trees, every whorl on their trunks. I know how the salt air will make my eyes water.
Already my heart is issuing its last beats. Tap tap tap. You can barely hear it inside the house. Out there it will be so loud. It will be the only sound in the silence.
Then a fox will rustle. Orange fur in the leaves. It will fix me with its keen eyes and then it will run away. It will live.
The gun will hurt in my hand. And it will also feel like silk. The barrel against my temple like a bobby pin pulled too tight.
I want my last thought to be of my photos. I want all of them to speed together in a collage, little licked shapes, the toys and the bloodied women and the portraits, Bottle Girls and Threshold and Inside Me and Capillaries, and my hands split open, my knee bubbling blood. I want to exit the world thinking about what I brought into it.
Will the recoil hurt? How soon can I get beyond pain?
I’ll fall. The puppet strings cut. Unused blood slipping into the soil.
A heart unpossessed.
A person turned body.
In the distance, the blue dawn topping the trees like a crown.
28.
KATE
That same old cartoon jingle floated up the stairs from the living room, sweet enough to shrivel the wilted rosebuds on the wallpaper. Kate ran down the second-floor hallway, Theo hot on her heels. Freed from the stasis of the darkroom, her heart had started to race again, clawing and tripping against her rib cage as they hurried to the kids’ room.
The reusable grocery bag of books was more or less where it had been the