After Clarice Lispector
Author: I am in quite a state right now. I want to write more than anything, more than I ever have in my life. But I fear that I have nothing else to say. If I can’t find the right way to align the words, Ruth will be nothing. And there is little she fears more than nothingness.
Ruth: I wish I was something else. Something less human.
Author: I feel sorry for her because she does not know that she is a rendering. And I am also jealous of her because she will not know she is not real if I don’t tell her. I am real, but everyone else is more real than me. Their lives have tangible substance to them. I am twice removed from my body and only once removed from Ruth. I am closer to being a figment than a person.
Ruth: I want to be something that crawls upon the ground and burrows in the dirt. Something solitary, and earthly, and desireless.
Author: I, too, am tired of want.
Ruth: God, I seem to have lost my outlines. My highlights and shadows are blending against my will, I am becoming nothing more than a swatch of gray. I am a perpetual overcast.
Author: I wonder what is easier—being trapped in a painting or in a story?
Ruth: Sometimes I make myself sleep for days. I call these my dark intervals.
Author: Although Ruth does not read much, she loves Rilke. She admires his ability to live through and within death. My life is not this steeply sloping hour…
Ruth: I take sleeping pills with a few swigs of wine. Every time I wake up I take more pills and drink more wine. The days lose their boundaries, it is so beautiful to me and I am the rest between two notes.
Author: She is braver than me. I want nothing more than to sleep for days, but I am afraid of overdosing. There is no relief in killing yourself accidentally.
Ruth: As the days go on, my dreams become more vivid and strange. I once dreamt that as I was running through the desert, I turned into a hyena. I woke up, cackling.
Author: Laughing is such a relief, like drinking water after a long run. The hyena must be the freest animal on Earth.
Ruth: I don’t mind the strange dreams. But I know it is time to end my dark interval when my dreams become violent. When my own imagination draws blood. I have no desire to discover whatever depravity is lurking in my subconscious.
Author: She will never discover it because she is it. Each bone is a word, each muscle a syllable, each hair a letter, each atom a swipe of ink. She is contrived by iterations of my depravity. I made her so for my own benefit.
Ruth: At the end of my dark interval, I am sick. I heave stomach bile into the bathtub so violently that I fear that my organs will slither out. I wonder which would be first. I’m sure my liver is tired of me—it would take any chance to escape. My heart next, probably. It works too hard, beating and pumping and sputtering, for someone as lifeless as me.
Author: She is so dramatic, I hate that about her. She likes to think that she is profound, but her thoughts and metaphors are so elementary. Everything is personified to her, like a children’s book. Nothing Ruth encounters is without a face. I wonder what she makes of God. Now that would really embarrass me. I bet she imagines a white man wearing white robes with an even whiter beard sitting on a white cloud watching his aquamarine creations. If that is God, then I bet he envies the vibrance of us. The pureness of white only remains because of absence. This version of God lives in a burdensome lack of substance, it is no wonder he takes it out on us. I want to know what she thinks. Should I ask her or would that be cruel?
Ruth: I woke up this morning and drank water directly from the tap. Suddenly, I was thinking about God.
Author: I can’t believe she is convinced by the illusion of free will.
Ruth: Strange, I rarely think of God. I wish I did though. I am not meant to be agnostic. My core self is a believer, an evangelist even. I have no good word to spread because I cannot put a face to the messenger. There is only a bright light, cruelly vast and consuming. It is nothing and everything at once, it’s staring at the sun unafraid, basking in the blinding sensation of unmitigated light. It burns, but you cannot stop staring and the beauty of the song goes on…
