Door 11:  The dialectic of doorways

He’s already inside the room, it’s just as sudden as that, and just as shocking, too. 

Perhaps, there was a mistake and all along it was he who had the key, not her. Or, perhaps, they both had keys to each other’s locks, for as she reaches to open the door what occurs to her (and to us) is that, once closed behind her, upon her very entrance into this room, door number ten instantly became door eleven.

The only thing ever separating the two, the her from the him, is the going-in and the going-out.

What is a door, after all, but a sign that the two things are one, have been one, all along, that there is no real separation: why, for instance, would one need a door to separate what was truly separate?

The door, at most, is a membrane to facilitate passage, the osmosis that channels, but does not forbid, cannot forbid by its very existence, it can only delay, and why delay, except to make the entrance that much more exquisite. (If I encourage thieves, rapists, vandals, and murderers by my remarks, well, I regret the truth as much as anyone.) ((As for locks, well, a discussion for another time, perhaps, but consider: can a “lock” truly be said to exist if there are also “locksmiths”?))

Furthermore, the very number of this door (could it really be coincidental: indeed, it seems it was!) is a numerological illustration of this point, the duplication of one and one, two identical singularities side by side, back to back, etc.

But we digress, and egregiously so, and why not? What is life but a mere finite digression from oblivion?

In any event, the two things are now one, and there is nothing separating anything, including him from her, and, accordingly, Xie staggers backwards from the force of what cannot be told “NO!,” staggers backwards from a face, incidentally, on something faceless.

It is the occasion of two energies meeting, two histories, two irresistible attractions overcoming a shared immovable object—and there is no language to mediate, no instructions to defuse what can only explode within an imperceptible instant of contact marked by a single double-entendre screamed to a cold audience of stars—a mixed message that later, during the investigation, no one in the neighborhood will admit to having heard, except, perhaps, in dreams.

NO!,

Frankly, it means so many things, this nuanced no, this shaded declarative, infinite things, everything, in fact, and so many more besides. The more emphatically it’s said, the more complicated it means.

Why do we talk at all?

Whose hands are around my throat, for instance, whose throat do my hands surround? Behind whose eyes wide open does the scarlet curtain fall, and to whom do the shadows, elongated stick-figures in ancient pantomime around a bonfire dance a performance meaning, what, pray tell.

And, for that matter, the drums tattoo which brain with black anemones that grow like stains across the walls of which room, where, after what terrible estrangement, in what movie that becomes a time-lapse sky watched from whose back lying in a summer field over which ominous shadows ((a predatory helicopter, perhaps?)) revolve…

???

It’s a dream, of course, that Xie is having, we say “Xie,” but does a dream belong to anyone, could it not belong as easily to the lover who lies atop her now, this man with his hands around her throat, could it not belong equally to you, or to me, or to all of us, this dream of rape and death?

For to whom does love belong? Are not some things—by the conditions of their very existence—only shared, love being one such, language another, and life a third?

If a man kills the woman he loves, who and what else is also dying, and who, and to whom does it really belong, if to anyone at all?

I speak in riddles, sure, but if anything is a riddle is a riddle not precisely this? Is love not a riddle, and death, and isn’t murder always a mystery, even when they pretend to solve it on TV?

Xie is dead, she knows she’s dead; it was an impossible supposition except she knew it from the start (and so did you). All things tending towards the tomb in which she woke. She recalled everything that happened hence, including the man now collapsed beside her disheveled body, his horrifically transformed face, no longer truly his own anymore, hollowed out and hidden in his hands.

He’s making no noise, no, that’s not true, he’s making a noise that could double for no noise, the soundless moan of the planet as it orbits in black space to no purpose, drawn towards its inevitable—and now welcomed—annihilation in the sun, but at a rate so excruciatingly slow one might mistake it for eternity.

It is a zone of incomprehensible agony, a kind of Hell where you contemplate her utter absence, the impossibility of her in the first place to the four corners of forever. Worse, it’s as if she never existed at all; and at the same time it’s the irreproducibility of that series of absurd coincidences responsible for it all, like a lottery number of infinite integers.

And there is only you to remember the miracle of it all, down to the very shape of its toenails.

Goddamn you.