Door 8:  With a Kiss, All Things Return to Worms

Let’s imagine, then, for the sake of argument that something could happen, even if only hypothetically, if Xie were actually able to break the endless cycle of which we’ve been so painstakingly describing up to now—if, in fact, she were to be even temporarily resurrected, what might happen then…what might come next?

To say that it is evening is to say very little; it is evening, it is always evening, and she is haunting the streets as she always does, like a breeze that shifts the leaves of the potted geraniums outside the Plaza Hotel or the luminous eyes of an unknown actress on a movie poster staring out seductively at nothing, as the streetlights change over an empty intersection, hours and hours before dawn.

She rides the subways, the bone-white of her face flashing into and out of view, startlingly beautiful, but hollowed out like a mask of vengeance no longer worn by anyone. It was outside of a cozy French bistro that she saw them, sitting at a small iron table beneath the burgundy umbrella, the female just a smile behind fashionable dark glasses, little more, unimportant, something petite and vivacious, full of life and electrical excitement, albeit temporarily.

She could have been anyone, what difference did it make (and yet it did, it made all the difference in the universe, that’s one paradox). It was him who had the spotlight, the unblinking eye of the camera, alternately charmed and stunned, and Xie watched this man whose hands she could feel inside her still, like a spirit-surgeon, caressing her internal organs, an intimacy that should have healed, that should have magically lifted out the pain and disease, but instead, placed it irretrievably inside her, an ache as deep and empty and eternal as the frozen center of the cosmos would have been before the cosmos even existed, moons and worlds and star systems, the explosion of all that, but unexploded.

After a light supper, salmon crepes for him, tartines for her, they strolled up Broadway towards Lincoln Center where the spray from the fountain blessed them all like holy water shaken from the stolen fronds of some mythic underworld tree.

He clasped her hands at first, said something tender and irreproducible; it made the woman smile, and their eyes shared the same light from somewhere far away for longer than seemed possible. (Oh how Xie hated her in that excruciatingly timeless moment, a feeling like falling in a dream, and she woke with a kiss that had the impact of finding a snake in one’s bedsheets, never had she felt a kiss so profoundly, this kiss that hadn’t even touched her lips, this kiss that had been place on someone else’s mouth, that wasn’t meant for her).

Of the inevitable, do we even speak of it, is it necessary, is anything? Let us speak of it. The cab ride across town, the easy banter with the doorman (several missing minutes in the elevator) the lights on in the seventh-floor apartment, and then, only minutes later, off, as if the last star in the sky had burned itself out like a cigarette on the lip-like flesh of Xie’s heart.

If I had not died before, she thought, I’d die again. If I had not been buried, I’d never wake. If forever meant oblivion, I would never have loved, etc., all these phrases, pregnant with meaning, but meaning nothing, flashed ceremoniously through her mind like a slide show of a romantic Stations of the Cross, each slide as shocking as the instant of a head-on collision, and all of it, each panel, printed and displayed in 40x40 format at an upscale gallery where everyone who’s anyone among the Hampton set is sipping hummingbird aperitifs and tastefully discussing one of the more arcane social aspects of sexual cryogenics…

{Next slide, please.}