Work Text:
“If you cut a heart from parchment, is it still
a heart? A nontrivial knot, where turns of every gradient
may kiss and tell. Does the
vessel have edges?”
-from Triptych for a Topological Heart by Alice Fulton
Her 1st test was that she had to stand before the man with stone eyes as he looked her over very slowly like she was a cut of meet and he was afraid of rot. Her father used to do that all the time. He took his time in butcher shops even when she was a crying baby in his arms desperate to get away from the smell of blood. She knew that look but her father had never used it on people. It made her wonder if there was something inside her that has gone funny, moldy and squishy.
Her second test was answering questions. “How old are you?”
“6.”
“How long have you been here?” “2 years.’
“When was the last time you touched somebody?” “I hit Ivan. He tried to take my bread.”
“When was the last time somebody hugged you?” “I do not remember.”
“You are a very serious little girl aren’t you.”
“My dad said standing still and being honest made nasty things go quicker.”
“You’re father sounds like a very smart man,” stone-eyes says at last, “but you’re father is dead now.”
When the man had promised her that he could give her a home and that she would never be hungry he had lied. Her 116th test was going days with only water and bread crumbs while the other girls, her sometime sisters, ate real meat and thick slices of toast with butter. It was not favoritism, each had taken their turn at this challenge, but she lasted the longest.
Hunger clawed at her insides, made room for itself between her intestines, demanded with teeth and anger to be sated, but she ignored it. Ignored it until it became part of her all, all of her, consumed her. Even when she broke days and days later and stole sausages from the larder and was caught because she was to weak to turn her foot steps into ghosts like they had been taught the hunger did not go away. It had made its home inside her. Every time she looked in a mirror she could she its shadow there beneath the surface of her.
Her life was nothing but tests, one bleeding into another.
There were tests in the morning when she had to run long miles, her red hair bouncing behind her in sweeps and jolts. In other countries, other places, the sight of them might have recalled the preppy steadiness of cross country teams but to her it just meant the click of timers. They ran in silence but always there was the necessity of going faster, faster or they’d never get away. If you did not run fast enough then you ran after lunch too, and also dinner.
There were tests in the afternoons when they had to spout out facts as fast as possible. Countries, capitals, populations, gun models, mountain ranges, presidents and dictators poured out of their mouths creating a sort of pattering rain song as they landed in the warehouse turned classroom. She was not so good at facts and figures; she was better at the questions that sometimes came. This or that professor would sit them down and ask them things about the root causes of this war or their opinions on that book. They would answer in different accents and as different people.
She understood Plath. Natalie Reagan, who was American and bore no relation to The Reagans but was proud of her name any, did not like Plath’s poetry because she did not understand it. She could slip so wholly into this mind sometimes that when she tried to read it any meaning that she had once gleaned from those words slipped away from desperate grasp.
There were tests when you did not expect them, or since she and all the girls came to expect tests always, there were tests that did not announce themselves and instead started slowly so that they did not immediately realize they were being tested in a new way. Four girls got sick from tainted food before they started checking what they ate and started smuggling food in whenever they were let outside. Or there tests that started very suddenly with them literally hauled out of classes and taken to unfamiliar cities and told to find something but they do not what only that it is their ticket back to their dormitories.
She considered, once, disappearing into the city and never even searching for the thing. Only, by that time she understood that failure did not mean release it meant termination. And anyway, by that time the need to pass and prove herself worthy of life had taken hold.
One could loose themselves in tests, had to loose themselves or loose and be lost. She was eroded slowly by them until she was nothing left but scores, successes and failures, piled into the shape of a girl but not a girl at all.
Her 71st test was to go a week with out letting anyone touch her. If they touched her she failed. “Think of it like a game of hide and seek, or a game of tag,” stone-eyes said when he gave her the challenge like he was giving her a gift. He called it a challenge as if that lessened the implicit instruction that failure was not a viable option if she wished to continue on with them at The Red Room, or in any living capacity at all.
At first it was hard. She realized then that she was not as aware of people as she should be. The awareness of her sister’s bodies that she carried with her, in what they called “the ballet studio” where they were pitted against one another, needed to be extended. She always won there, she would win in the hallways and the classrooms and the dormitories as well.
At first she flinched away. She would realize there was a friendly hand, an unsuspecting elbow, a clumsily placed foot coming towards her a second to late and she would reverse in a sudden jerk of panic, and people would look at her through narrowed eyes. She grew better. By the end she was simply never in peoples reach at all. She pictured the spaces between their arm spans as doors and went through them. When forced to stand close to others or to stand in crowds she bent herself into unobtrusive angles and redirected people’s gazes so that when they reached for her they never reached her only grazed through her outer orbits. By the time the realized this they had forgotten whom they were reaching for in the first place.
You do not want to touch me, she told them with her eyes and they did not want to touch her.
On the third morning of the test she was asked to fight her sister Isobel. In the chalk circle on the parquet floor she was forced to make a distinction. Isobel was strong and wicked in the ring, if not the most tactical of fighters; she could not win with out offence as she might with the younger girls unused to fighting. She could not be touched but to touch was different. She would fight Isobel but would not let a single finger land on her.
There was in the eastern tradition a style of fighting called Circle Dancing. What she preformed now was not that because the principle behind it was the absorption of force and she oozed force, but it looked quite like it in its execution. She became for the span of the fight the ballerina the she might have been. She twirled away and around and about until the pathways of the fight opened up and she delivered a knee to Isobel’s chin and a subsequent elbow to the back of the neck.
Her 334th test was to go to a coffee shop every day for a month and order the same thing every time, to make conversations with the barista, to become a regular. She was to do all this as somebody other than her. She was to wear herself like a mask. It wasn’t hard, she had already become distant even when she was immediate. For her now there was no difference between a million miles and a few inches, either one left her remote. It was easy then to draw the distorting film of another person between her and the world at large then to let that film engulf the tiny core of her till she swims in it.
Maria Sokolov liked decaf lattes. All of her aliases, all of her other skins, liked decaf coffee because it was important that she never become reliant on caffeine. Do not rely on what might be gone tomorrow. Like food, like touch, like burning bright vodka that the other girls sometimes drank at night when they thought stone-eyes was not watching.
She let them name her.
“What’s your name,” the weak and skinny boy behind the counter said, “you look like a Maria to me.”
“How did you know?” she giggled. He knew because she made his guess right, and he knew because every fifth girl in Russia was named Maria.
She could kill him in nineteen separate ways, not counting variations on the same action such as knife to jugular, pen to jugular, fingernail to jugular.
She does not mind that he only looks at the line of pale flesh between her collar bone and where her gauzy white blouse lays open. It makes it easier to become boobs, body, smile rather than name, person, history.
She makes the boy behind the counter fall in love with her. She makes him long for her. Her smiles show just the right amount of teeth so that she does not seem like a wolf but merely a sheep. He looks at her with hunger but he does not know hunger like she does.
She only ever pays for the first drink, the others he gives to her as some sort of token and she laughs and she takes and she takes and she takes. She pockets the money given to her for the purpose of buying coffee and stores half of it beneath her cot with the military rations and the other half sewn into her bra.
Her 499th test was to sit in a long corridor in a new building in a white shirt and a neat grey skirt and to wait with out giving anything away. This was not obviously a test, but everything was a test so she sat very still and very quietly. She made her self so still that she might as well have been a shadow or a statue carved to some clandestine idea of perfection.
Her 500th test was to go from that hallway with its flickering lights and into a darkened room. Her 500th test was a man laying on a messy bed.
She stripped off her shirt as she entered the room, dropped her skirt few step later. Her bra went next the crinkle of the money sewn into it hidden by the man’s lecherous sigh. She stood above him. She pulled his calloused hands to her side, made him touch her, whispered every loving thing she had ever hypothesized that people said into his ear. Her seduction of this anonymous man would not be fragmented as most of her training later would be, instead it would remain in her memory unbroken like a long shot in a movie. Clinical hands to breasts, lips to moth to neck to cock. Red lipstick bled out across his chest pooling in little kiss shaped wounds there.
She kissed him till his fingers shook against her flesh and he came grasping a name that was not hers. A name that meant nothing to her.
You are touching him he isn’t touching you, she told herself.
You have to do this, she told herself.
Pass this test and you can move on, she told herself.
“You passed,” said stone-eyes when she left the room still pulling her clothes back on, “You passed but the next time convince them that they love you.”
For her 511th test she sat in a dim room and watched soviet propaganda on a wheeled in TV. She knew it was propaganda but she watched it anyway because it was better than staring at the blank walls. She sat in the same dim room and watched Snow White on the same TV. She watched Heathers. She watched the breakfast club. She couldn’t fathom how this was a test but it was.
“Do you like the movies?” stone-eyes asked her. Somewhere in her training he had taken up the habit of not looking directly at her, only addressing her from the side. Instead he placed before her some shared vision. They watched the Americans dance and slide along the screen together.
He waited for her answer patiently. He did not mind silences. Neither did she.
“I do not understand.” She said after a while, “They spend all this time caring and no time going anywhere. Endure or act, do not dither.”
“You are a very smart girl,” he said as he got up, “I think you will understand if only you watch a little longer.”
She would endure or she would understand. She watched and she watched till the images blended together and till she could no longer see. She could not find the lesson she knew was hidden between the lines of dialog and behind the blank eyes of the actors. They saw right through her. She sat before them in her demur school girl’s skirt and her snow white blouse and begged them to tell her what she was missing and also she said nothing at all.
She saw it then, the bright flash of red, her red. A distant flash of light against the dark of the scene, fire burning between the frames. She watched for it. There it was again a meteor tapped into the movie.
She stood up slow and paused the VHS, rewound till she found it. She was there watching in the concrete room and she was there trapped in a single still frame image of her body spread out across an operating table like the night spread out across the sky. The white of her skin was lit by flood lights. The veins of her arms were hooked into IVs. And a hundred hands did their anonymous work on her body, faceless and possessive.
“I understand,’ she said the next time she saw stone eyes. “Good,” he sighed, “now we may begin.”
“