Door 12: In the bathroom, the sacred

Things have a way of repeating themselves, and when a story, like a life, is over, what can it do but repeat itself, ad infinitum, like a ghost.

So it is that one begins to lose interest, even in love, and, like a ghost, fades away.

It is in approximately this spirit that Xie rises from the desk by the window to answer the door she doesn’t need to answer, leaving behind the letter forever unfinished, and floating across the room, passed the battered body on the floor resembling a crushed origami of indeterminate intent.

Be assured, if  “assured” is the right word (and be assured it’s not), that, unlike a painting in which “you see something different every time the closer you look”, each time you open this door it will reveal the exact same scene. 

The position of the pen abandoned on the desk, the pattern of capillaries broken in the eye-white, the nail head that stands one eighth of an inch above the warped floorboard, etc. Also all the things that aren’t noticed; they, too, remain exactly the same, all the incidental things that lie forever outside view and interest, including but not limited to the shelf-liners, cupcake crumbs, empty light fixtures, fingernail clippings, and so on. This, of course, goes without saying, but, then again, only once we say it.

So, anyway, we follow, like we must follow a slowly panning camera, passed the body, by now all but redundant on the floor, sprawled amongst its fireworks extravaganza of lurid juices. Like a camera, let’s be done with sympathy and awe, the pretense of shock and horror, too; death is cold, after all, we all already know that, and we, too, having seen what we’ve seen, are also already dead.

And, so, continuing, camera-like, Xie whisks, flimsy and conditional as a thought towards the door, which is already thrown wide open, left jarringly ajar, after our hero’s flight from the room, no longer in his right mind, or any mind all, a loveless blasted Heathcliff creature fleeing into a post-Edenic world suddenly filled with imaginary helicopters and telescopic sights and sardonic inspectors in tan trenchcoats who are already in possession of all the answers.

No pity, please, not for either, they brought it on themselves, this endangered species, these x-rated lovebird, we’re all adults here, after all, and such happiness as was promised in fairytales cannot exit on earth, that’s why cancer and drunk drivers exist, what is it Bataille said when, oh who cares, he said something very similar, in any event.

Let’s just get on with it, then, shall we, as it is, we haven’t far to go, one more room, one more door to open, let’s conserve our energy and save our breath. Besides, there goes our hostess, our tour guide or whatever even now; she’s floated passed us and is heading there inevitably and already, the way a compass always points due north.

You see, we were all heading for this rendezvous from the very first step (the slayer and the slain), from first kiss to final frenzied knife thrust, it was all written down, you just had to know how to read the map, the myth, the fantasy.

Just a few brief remarks, then, before the final scene.

The bride, you see, was beautiful, never would he forget the first moment he caught sight of her at the head of the aisle, Every-Bride, she was, from communion’s incarnation, an updated Eve, and as she approached the altar bearing flowers and portentous astrological alignments, who could guess the blackness, the scorpions, and the tides of inarticulate blood she dragged behind her beneath the train of tulle and satin?

Love is always wedded to death and death looks all the more lovely under a veil.

Who could imagine it would end in a sacrifice, wrecked, on slimed bathroom tiles? (Of course, we all did, but we winked, one-eyed, like Odin, through a camera viewfinder, so as not to ruin the festivities, so that life might go on…)

Alright, finally, as promised: the final scene.

In the doorway of that twelfth room, at the very threshold before exiting, Xie stands, well, to be accurate, she doesn’t stand so much as exist, like an idea. But not that either, not exactly. Please, I’m not trying to be difficult. Accuracy is important here. She turns back at the threshold and she views  (contemplates is too strong a word), she simply views from a depersonalized center, the alternate scene before her as if it were depicted upon a frescoed wall.

The man who killed her—friend lover, husband, priest, stranger, anonymous groomsman, whoever the hell he was—is on his knees, a sky-blue Brooks Brothers tie (a gift from her? You know it!) wrapped around his throat and tied above him to a towel rack, an empty prescription pill bottle (too far away to read the label), a vodka bottle (Absolut of course), the lemon-flavored kind, knocked over empty on its side.

Xie pauses in the doorway for a moment, an infinity of moments (infinity, paradoxically, is just a moment, after all: a moment such as this), like another figure but one painted outside a painting, and she views what lies within the frame.

The scene is illuminated like a grotto (this is a toilet we’re talking about, by the way, where the man has gone to vomit, sickened by what he’s seen, what he’s done, and there he has taken his own life, for every murder is a suicide, if not quite vice-versa). The scene is like a grotesque and blasphemous pieta the Virgin has abandoned.

Because she stands outside the frame forever, outside the painting looking in, her eyes are without any expression, painted flat and one-dimensional, pitiless, without passion or ambiguity. But they’re oh-so-beautiful. Perhaps all the more so for their lack of empathy Oh don’t you know it!

And it never occurs to her, not once, not even briefly, not even tangentially, theoretically, or hysterically, that she, too, might be guilty of something, of anything, even if precisely what she might be guilty of would always be impossible to express, fall outside the possibility of words to say.