Eyes of a Burn Victim: Ode to Leonora Carrington
by Ashley Yu
Art by Jeremy Siedt
A white fox would run through the parking lot behind Christine’s building, every night at 2:13 am. It would stand still, sniff around and lay down just five feet outside Christine’s window of her first-floor apartment. Christine would pray to the fox. She had named it Nadja, as an homage to Andre Bretón; to who she dreamt of being when she first learned that beauty should be convulsive or not at all.
Christine, contrary to the popular belief held by many white patrons of the restaurant where she worked as a waitress, was a college-educated woman. She understood that she was nothing but a pantomime of her culture while on the clock— with her diaphragm-deep laugh, elongated vowels, and array of silk headscarves piled onto her head so the customers would stop complaining about finding non-existent hair in their Caesar salads.
And this was what Christine pondered as she turned off the lights and locked the door of her apartment. She had gotten a scholarship for a painting she had made when she was seventeen. It was a fifty-feet tall canvas filled with the dusty mauves and dark reds that imitated the shape of her vulva. Her mother, a middle-school teacher with a penchant for French literature, recognized within Christine her future as the noveau génie of Surrealism.
But that was Before, when she was still painting. Christine always stopped herself whenever her mind edged close to that unfathomable pit.
She picked herself up to get ready for a shower, noticing the sweet and sour scent of her armpits. She let herself marvel one more time at the majestic confidence of that white fox as it stood one paw lifted, snout in the humid air of an April evening, and a wet nose twitching at the smell of domestic garbage.
“Hi, Nadja” whispered Christine. Her voice seemed to echo in the empty apartment. “It’s warm outside tonight, huh girl?”
The fox stared at her, its white ears twitching.
“I know. But you always get by, don’t you, Nadja?”
Christine watched the fox circle around its tail a few times and crouched down in the middle of the parking lot. Its corneas reflecting back at Christine under the orange overhead lights of the parking lot. If any of her neighbors were to see Christine talking to the fox, they would think her insane. But Christine, like all the great Surrealists she dreamed to be, saw meaning in all little coincidences, felt the threads of the universe thrumming in her limbs, as all artists do. Christine had even made a little shrine for Nadja on the window sill of her bedroom: a frayed paintbrush, representing the Surrealist need to create; an empty liquor bottle, for the courage that she needed; a plastic fork, for Christine’s unending hunger for a life beyond the crooked one bedroom apartment in the Bronx. How else, Christine asked herself, would she pray to Nadja?
She had just moved in to this creaking tenement building where everything was brown. The hardwood floors were brown, scuffed and swollen. The kitchen cupboards were a rotten brown. Even the bathroom tiles, once white, was tinged with the water-stained brown that belonged to the eternally damp. A little plaque on the beige stucco façade of the building declared its year of creation in a rusty green: 1912. More like year of damnation, Christine thought to herself when she saw it the first time, dragging her suitcase up the ramp to the front door.
Christine padded towards her open suitcase in the corner of her dingy little bedroom, fishing for panties that she could turn inside out, and the same coffee-stained sweater that hadn’t been washed in two weeks. Laundry meant cash she didn’t have—all of it had already went to the deposit for this new place last week. Before she went into her bathroom, she reached into her backpack she had left next to her suitcase and took out the book that she had borrowed from the library. She got it the same day she moved in. The book was a thin, burgundy-colored thing.
But it was the illustrated cover that scared Christine so much her hand shook when she first picked it up. It howled at her to take it home:
There was a white ghostly girl running down a country road. Her hair stuck straight out like unbroken spaghetti in a small pot. As she fled, eyes wide with manic smile, she carried a black amorphous thing on her shoulder that had its clawed hands out in despair. It had the flat white eyes of a burn victim. They were just negative space—infinite and empty. She stared and stared, sweat beading on her flat nose, her dirty pajamas bundled tight against her chest, and Christine was looking for something, anything in the eyes of this dark illustrated ghost, inside the clean white abyss for eyes. It knew and it was staring back.
A loud metallic clang. Christine jolted and slammed the book onto her desk. Her eyes ripped away from the forceful gaze of that thing.
It was just Nadja pawing for morsels of food outside, Christine laughed at herself. She could see a white tail swishing to and fro from the corner of her window.
How silly, she thought, the late nights were wearing her out after all. She slipped her fingers underneath her glasses, rubbed her eyes and went to turn the hot water on.
The pipes were old—the kind that spat brown water out the ceramic shower-head for a full minute before turning clear with a high-pitched whine. Christine didn’t mind it, she thought as she scrubbed herself raw with a loofah. She wasn’t the type to be bothered by much anymore. She ran her hands through her conditioned curls, dragging her fingers through the strands, and pulling the loose hair out in clumps with a sadistic glee. She liked examining the fallen strands of hair. For Christine, it marked that time had passed and will keep on passing, whether she paid attention to it or not. In a few weeks her head will be different. The line of tender bruises on her back will dissipate into normal flesh and she could once more raise her arms above her head without that jarring ache. Her left ear was still muffled from when—from Before. Sometimes she could hear her own blood pounding past.
Slippery with peppermint lotion and the squeaky rub of soap-cleansed skin, Christine boiled some hot water for a nightly cup of tea. She examined this little thin book. It was about a little thin girl—around her age, actually, and also a painter— going mad in Spain back in the 30s.
Christine sat down on the creaking hardwood floors of an empty living room with her back against a wall. She had the cup of tea in her right hand, the book on her left. But as soon as she prepared to open the book, she suddenly felt her stomach dipping downwards quick and heavy. Her hands felt light like paper lanterns, quivering in mid-air.
It was dread, Christine realized. It was dread that came from nothing and nowhere, swooping fast and constricting her throat. She made the conscious choice to swallow. She looked down and felt the empty accusing eyes of a burn victim on the cover staring wide at her.
Christine laughed. She really was losing it.
She flipped open to the first chapter of the book, skipping past the eternally pretentious introductions. Pushing the paranoia down, she started reading.
It began with the painter regaling to an invisible friend the tale of her internment in a mental asylum in Santander, Spain. Christine’s hands still felt swollen and frail but she felt a softness in her heart, as if for some reason it was she who was the invisible friend; the one to witness this little thin painter’s despair; that perhaps the thing with eyes like a burn victim saw Christine and howled at her in recognition.
For Christine found herself understanding every word this thin little painter was saying, felt it echo somewhere deep below in the infinite pit that was inside her—this unknown girl from decades ago, from a continent that Christine had never seen. But this unknown girl was still speaking and her every word had sunk their incisors deep within Christine. The words were beginning to wrench and heave at the idea of herself that Christine has so carefully reconstructed. She had tried so hard the cover up that tarry pit inside her—the deep dark hole that held the memories of her old life, from Before, where she had stuffed and stuffed any semblance of that vile, fucking feral version of Christine that she used to be. She had drowned that version of herself next to any memory of him. She had sealed that pit—cement and all—so she could still be sane.
But the words of this stupid little painter were digging and heaving at it—Grout, clay, and caulk that was now swirling, spinning, unfurling inside her.
And Christine felt this swirling in her bowels, her dust-bowl stomach. It was gurgling. No, she wasn’t hungry. But she kept going. She didn’t even try to stop reading. Every word satiated an itch. Every sentence propelled her compulsively to read the next. Because she felt it resonate in her bones when the little painter said:
I must live through that experience all over again, because, by doing so, I believe that I may be of use to you, just as I believe that you will be of help in my journey beyond that frontier by keeping me lucid…
Finally, finally, this was someone who understood Christine—had felt the absurdity of circumstances beyond her control and beyond words and here she is! Speaking it. Speaking it because she also understood the burden that Christine carried; the constant fear of losing her grip on reality; the indignation that Christine had carried for so long, and the chaos that churns constant and uncontrollable within her but that also belonged to her alone.
Jeremy Siedt, Rubble to Relic, painting
Christine was barely halfway through the first chapter when she realized she was crying. She couldn’t understand why. Her mouth was dry but she didn’t reach for the cup of tea that was turning cold on the floor without her ever taking one sip. She became voluntarily immobile, reading and rereading every word of this little painter’s—moving only to clean her glasses that fogged up with her tears or to turn the page.
Oh, how this little painter loved her man! Christine was overwhelmed by the love this painter had—the things she was willing to do to save him. And Christine couldn’t stop it now, the onslaught of those words on her nerves.
Because Christine, too, used to love like that, in her old life, Before. That man that she let in her life when she was still in college, and she had loved him so; was willing to die with him in old age. She was 21 and he was ten years older, but she dreamt of being buried next to him.
They had a little apartment together downtown, a place of sweet succor in Christine’s old life. Christine loved him because he was consumed by her— her youth, her manic caprice, her skin that was the perfect shade of brown. He was a photographer. They would spend weekends developing photographs of just Christine—on the beach, in the Sunday morning light, or topless in the kitchen. He loved her in a way that subsumed Christine and she loved him because she was trained her entire life to love that kind of man: white, American, tall and rich.
It was one pendulous moment of his swinging drunk fist that shattered the mirage. The blow had landed on her stomach. The memories were coming towards her now, begging to be exhumed, bubbling up and against the pit in her mind that she has tried so hard to seal up. That cement was cracking, Christine felt them pounding at the base of her skull, and they were going to burst through soon.
With all of Christine’s might, she propelled herself off the floor and dragged her body over to her suitcase in the bedroom. She had a bottle of cheap whiskey wrapped in an old towel. It was a small treat she had gotten herself when she moved in to this wretched place alone last week. She needed it now.
Christine uncapped it, and tipped her curly head back, letting the brown liquid burn down her throat and into her dust-bowl stomach.
She collapsed next to the suitcase in her bedroom. She laughed—she had to laugh because this burgundy book was wrecking so much havoc in her mind that she felt like her heart was sloshing around inside like the whiskey at the bottom of her bottle. It was ridiculous. The fact that she’s slipping so far into her own head on the living room floor in an empty apartment. All because of some painter who thought it wise to write a book in the 1930s. Christine had nothing. Nothing but a few plates, a mug, a sauce-pan, some instant ramen, and a suitcase full of dirty clothes. She stumbled to the window.
Nadja, the white fox, was still there in the parking lot.
There was one sentence that looped and screeched like a barn owl in Christine’s mind:
I begged her to look at my face; I said to her:”Don’t you see that it is the exact representation of the world?”
A banshee’s scream ripped itself out of Christine’s gut. It was a ragged and feral scream. She thought Nadja must have shot awake at that sound. The sound of all of Christine’s injustice ricocheting off the brown drywalls of an empty apartment and rushing out of that black tarry pit in her mind, she’s seeing it all over again:
His pendulous drunken fist, hitting her stomach. His cold hand pressed against her wide screaming mouth, knowing she was hysterical and couldn’t breathe. Her nails digging into his gums and wrenching his front tooth out. Her thumbs pressing into his eye-sockets. A shard of glass from the broken liquor bottle in his hand, pressed against Christine’s cheek. The punch that landed on her left ear and deafened her so much that she could only hear blood. And how he always begged, the morning after—always begging her to stay. How he stubbed a cigarette on his own forehead so no one would believe her. When Christine left, he was screaming, always screaming behind her that the only way she’ll survive now was her mouth swallowing down another man. His pupils were always dilated from the liquor. Christine could feel his phantom fingers clenching around her throat again. He was here. She scrabbled at his ghostly hands on the floor of her apartment, tearing at imagined skin. She saw him bending over her again, his sweat dripping into her mouth as she gaped like a goldfish. His face so close, waiting and wanting, with the violence of a child seeing roadkill for the first time, for her to almost die. She saw it again, the last thing she saw before she passed out that night. His eyes were growing so wide—the eyes that she first fell in love with. The whites of his eyes were clean and empty, like a burn victim.
Before Christine knew it, she was digging like a dog in her suitcase—past her unwashed clothes; past her cheap lipsticks and bottle of peppermint lotion and there, underneath the mess, were her acrylic paints.
She needed them to remind herself of who she was. That she was a painter and a waitress in an Italian restaurant and a college dropout and a 21-year-old girl that lived in the Bronx by herself.
The tubes of paint were congealed now. They hadn’t been touched in months. In the fog of Christine’s mania, she still knew by heart the names on every single tube: titanium white, emerald green, calypso blue, cadmium red, vermillion, vivid violet, rose pink, mars black. She knew them all and needed to see the colors again.
She squeezed them out onto her hands, amazed at the colorful hues that revealed their true brilliance on her skin. She coated her arms with the acrylic paint and smeared them down her shoulder, her bruised chiaroscuro back, her hips, her toenails, her wiry pubes. She reveled in the slippery tactile-ness. She took of her clothes automatically. She couldn’t control her mind but she could direct where the paints were going to next, control how the different shades whirled on her skin. The colors following the demands of her fingers as she traced the veins across her body—some of them still glistening wet in the light, others in dried clumps.
It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, when Christine finally ran out of acrylic, her skin sticky like a freshly-painted canvas, the colors mottling mixing and overlapping against one another. She stopped.
The orange light of dawn was coming through her window now. The kind of light that was clean and pure and held promises.
Christine stood up. Her knees crackling from being voluntarily immobile for the whole night. She padded towards the window. Nadja was still there. The fox never slept the whole night. And right there, covered in sticky paint, possibly drunk, and naked by the morning light, Christine felt a surge of victory. She stared at how the each strand of the Nadja’s platinum fur stood illuminated against the rising sun.
Christine remembered a story she once read about the Japanese kitsune—shapshifting spirits whom after living a hundred years would become a celestial guardian. In that moment, naked and bare, all of her thoughts gushing out of that recessed pit in her mind, Christine truly believed that yes, this white fox, clean and pure in this pristine light, is a sign that all will be okay. That at the end of it all, after all of her own survival instincts, all of the skin that was ripped from her in order to become someone, anyone at all, that she will one day feel a shimmering, glimmering feeling, like glass in the molten kiln, to finally expand into her own person.
She opened the window. Nadja was looking at her. Christine stuck her hand out, waiting for the fox to come smell her hand.
Jeremy Siedt, Rubble to Relic, painting
