Christinas' World

No. I know. There’s usually more people in here: it can get loud sometimes with all that echoing; those clustered bodies; claustrophobic even. Lucky us, we are all alone for a moment.

Two faceless women with the same name, stranded inside four corners.

No. It’s fine with me if I activate your orbitofrontal cortex; trust me, you wouldn’t be the first person to cry in here, and you certainly won’t be the last. I don’t take it personally; often I make children frightened, send chills down their developing spines. You get used to it, being called “creepy” or “scary” or “sad.”

I know you’ve been crying, unable to sleep for days. This is the first moment you’ve had alone to yourself all trip; you’re grateful your husband took your children to the ice rink over in the park. Big of you to venture in here today, to be a patron for an hour or two, versus, say, wandering to find a bald patch in the otherwise snow-blanketed park, ostensibly touching grass, or the closest thing to it. Or bed-rotting in that stuffy hotel room, do not disturb placard dangling.

Wouldn’t it be something: if instead of doorknobs, we fastened them around our own collars? Better than belts, I bet.

No, I know you’re disturbed. It’s not funny. You’ve been consuming those files, your morbid curiosity has not allowed you to stop; I know this is going to be the stain over every memory of this family trip you’ve taken here: you can’t see your children on these sidewalks without imagining some teeth out tiger or banker in their shadows. All your touristic photos taking worm’s eye views of Times Square or bird’s-eye views from the Empire State Building—I know all of it feels heavy and unreal. Your perspective is now warped and skewed. Then the stain will follow you back home: while opening your suitcases full of dirty clothes; while dropping your children off at school with sunbutter sandwiches in their backpacks and socks on their feet; while walking your dog around your block, even, amongst all your suddenly suspicious-seeming neighbors’ homes.

Just like that, everything that once felt so safe and boring for you now feels repelling and gross, soiled somehow.

Go ahead, Christina, you can cry in here.

***

You had such an ordinary childhood. You never minded your parents until you aged into your thirties and, suddenly an adult yourself, wondered if the therapists were right, maybe it was all their fault. But while others had traumas and hardships and adversities they could write 500 word admissions essays about, dazzling readers showingnottelling them their struggles (crawling through inequitable fields towards their big, daring dreams!), you were bored and safe and sleeping in. You skipped those essays wholly; didn’t even need financial aid to begin with.

You try sometimes, how others meditate, to imagine if there’s something back in there you suppressed. Someone must have harmed you, right? Surely there’re locked up creepies and scaries; that has to be the reason why you feel so battered these days. So affected, sickened, sleepless.

Even your friends who you were attending a bachelorette with didn’t understand why you cared so much, years ago.

“I cannot believe he killed himself! This is not the way I envisioned this story playing out!” You’d said, everyone sitting around the rented swimming pool with self-made mimosas and coffee, in sweats and bikinis. Hungover.

“I can,” one friend said, flexing her toes in the water. “He knew he was fucked, too much of a coward to deal once people saw him for what he was.”

“It’s all a conspiracy,” the bride-to-be said behind her sunglasses, blowing on her coffee.

“Do you mean controversy?” Asked toe-flexer.

“No, I do not,” she said, sipping, her ring sparkling as she gripped her mug. You merely shook your head, repeating your disbelief.

And it all got buried in a weekend with penis straws and matching, screen-printed paraphernalia; with sanitized, ritualized debauchery.

Sometimes, if you smell a mimosa’s fizz on vacation, pulpy carbonation tickling your lobule, you return to that trip, that conversation; you can feel your wet painted toes in chlorine. Back then—before you’d become trapped yourself in parenthood and maternal anxieties and mid-life identity crises—you'd been so verklempt by the idea of a very bad man hanging himself inside a jail cell. It still haunts you; you wonder why your brain itched so badly over the thought, as though a little man was inside your skull or soul, poking around, tinkering on and on and on with your thoughts. Like Leonardo Dicaprio to Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack infecting your subconscious, spinning tops across your gray matter, fuzzying things; streaking your brain with bright white spots everywhere the male-gazed and top's spinning tip grazed on and on and...

***

I know, of course, how you feel. Coming to a museum like this, navigating through the halls would have been unbearable for me. But then again, maybe being mounted inside here is worse.

Who’s to say.

Tour-guides might tell you one thing, your phone another; countless further details you can consume, consume, consume and yet, barely comprehend or swallow. But really, all you can do in here is let yourself feel something, and I mean that sincerely.

So. Seeing as how I have my back, or at least, a back, turned to you, you may cry all you want in this room. Even if someone else enters, I promise, they won’t notice you, not the way you imagine they would, at least.

After all, everyone in here is looking at me.

***

No, he never did ask if I wanted to be captured like this; another woman, trapped in society’s man-made permanent collection.

***

Yes, I know. You had different ideas for your future when you met your husband, as many modern women do these days. You might've changed cities or jobs, could've fallen in love with another woman, why not? Your eyes and heart were open, the possibilities were endless.

No, you told him, seated at a bar's counter after work. “I don’t want to have kids. The world is so fucked up, if anything, I’d rather adopt children who don’t have a good home than bring any more into this world.”

You said that, you did. You felt it, pledged it to him before sharing drawers or meeting parents, so that he knew. He loved that about you: your big heart, your desire to do good in a world you never asked to be a part of.

“You’ll make a great mother,” he said to you, rubbing your thigh, ordering another round. And you thought it was a compliment he painted you in that light, said things like that; that you'd be good with kids, were marriage material.

No, I know. Back then it didn’t feel like a warning, a trick, a little red flag totem.

***

There are no answers in those files, of course; you know that, don’t you? None in here, either, unfortunately.

***

32 1/4 x 47 3/4".

And you?

***

Go ahead, scroll some more, I won’t mind. What am I, but a masterpiece, to be ignored in your presence. You are so hungry for ugly truths you carry around in your pocket, all that accessibility at your fingertips.

***

That barn in the distance, it looks so small and impossibly far away, right?

And that little dirt road, oh, how it disappears in these grasses—everything, this field could swallow up whole!

The shadows and lighting? I’m stuck forever inside a late, hazy summer afternoon, like some invertebrate fossilized from tens of millions of years ago. Or a girl posing for a man.

Am I Christina? Someone else? Am I this canvas?

Am I whatever you want me to be?

What am I made for?

"A psychological landscape," the tour-guides explain.

Is this even supposed to be Maine, or your brain that's being captured, splattered with scrambled egg, a thousand little blades tickling the surface, everywhere?

***

Another couple enters the room, approaches me.

“'Christina’s World.' Isn’t this famous or something?” She whispers, looking from me, up to her companion, down at their paper map and back up again.

“I guess,” He shrugs, bored eyes on me. “I don’t get it. Let’s go find the Pollack.”

Alone, again.

***

I know some of your secrets, I can feel things activated in this room, too.

You don’t know if you can trust anyone. What does trust mean anymore. In scandals, you don’t understand how spouses are shocked when ugly truths come out. Doubting him now, why, that would be worse than having your legs cut out from under you. Your chest carved open, rummaged around in, a beating organ or wet bone yanked out.

Adam made Eve from his rib in your namesake story.

Andrew made me from tempera batter. Raw egg yolk, vinegar, paint.

Another Andrew, a zoologist, made the claim that before the Cambrian Explosion, none of us could see anything at all. And before we could see, we couldn’t feel fear.

“Once the lights were turned on, species faced an adapt-or-die scenario.”

Adapt-or-die, adapt-or-die.

My namesake wouldn’t have died if she sat in a chair, but some small part of her felt she might, so she didn’t.

What else is adapt-or-die? Do you ever wonder?

How some small part of a small child thinks a man who isn’t creepy-creepy or scary-scary doesn’t merit being tattled on; no, perhaps it is the child whose feelings are wrong? When they feel that way, self-dismissing, tell me: are they adapting or dying?

Can two things be true at once?

Nowadays, you call those men, those predators, “tricky people,” isn’t that right? It’s good to take the weight off the children, so they don’t dismiss themselves, stumbling over language and lessons. So they can feel their feelings. Sit with them, maybe cry in a room, or be taken away to skate on ice.

Again, just feeling is quite alright here. The answers aren't as important.

***

Even though Andrew looked down on me from his property into mine, he wanted you to have a worm’s eye view when you stared.

Worms are serpentine creatures; their species existed during the Cambrian explosion, maybe even before that for some grand total of a billion years. And if they couldn’t see, they couldn’t know what you and I feel so intensely, right? Fear, I mean. But morbid curiosity, as well.

But then, God made centipedes, like billionaires with excess. Centipedes are not worms, but venomous, predatory creatures.

You can’t always make their tops from their bottoms, their heads from their tails.

***

Yes, the tour-guides say, “Her gaze is fixed on the house.” But, the skinny woman's focus is always on the home. And of course, they know what I am looking at, that my destination is domestic.

Perhaps what I am looking at is the birds. It’s not that I envy their weightlessness, their wings. It’s something else.

Some birds are prey. Others, predators. It depends, of course, on your point of view: whether you are the worm, or the beer-breathed man with a gun, wearing a bright vest.

Perhaps all of that is wrong. Perhaps my eyes are closed, I am blind to images in this painting, and I chose darkness; to only see my own thoughts in here. One hand in front of the other.

***

Everyone knows he took the idea of me and put my name on his wife’s backside. Immortalized at fifty-five, I forever have the body of a twenty-something, married female.

Of course I do.

Really though, if our image is altered, to be more beautiful, youthful, lithe, how much of us remains?

Isn’t it funny, how we pray to look like good prey, even though we don’t want to be so scared all the time? It hurts when we feel no predator wants to hunt us anymore, doesn’t it?

Would I have been a masterpiece if I resembled my real self? Some uglier truth?

How do you reckon with so many contradictions? Tell me, does your phone answer that question as well? Do its contents make you feel closer to God?

Do you ever just shut your eyes, too?

If ever there was a place to try it, in here would be as good as any.

***

“Let’s bring the kids to the city,” he said, seated on the sofa you used to fuck on. “Make some new memories there with them.”

“I liked the old memories,” you said, pinching snacks from the bag and skimming the subtitles, putting salt on your tongue. Urban memories when you felt like a girl on the brink of freedom, vicariously thriving in proximity to so much greatness and power.

***

Male creators, female muses, public consumers.

Andrew made me after all, to tell my story for me.

The tourguides say, “The pink of her dress stands in contrast to the muted greens of the field, the grays of the buildings in the distance.”

But that is not my dress. You think if I was clawing myself through a field, refusing assisted mobility, I put on that stain-free dress, with that cinched belt?

Tell me, you think I put shoes on before dragging my way across the ground? Now, why on earth would I do that?

***

No, I do appreciate you noticing my head is held high, my arms are not resting, but active.

I see you, doing the same.

Even if its not my head, its her head. Still.

No, at least we are upright, as can be. Better than supine.

***

The tour-guide asks, how does it make you feel?

What about hope?

Could you last another 500 million years, to see what happens to this species, when another adapt-or-die scenario presents? How are we most likely to get there: supine, or sheer-willed?

Wormlike, right.

***

Once at the playground, the children gathered along the perimeter, huddled and quiet. Yours toddled over to you, seated on a bench just as you are now, and held out her hands. “Vorms!” She whispered, holding the halved, squiggling species in her muddied, stubby palms.

“Careful!” You wanted to say, but for whom or what exactly, you weren’t certain.

***

No. I could tell you if some of those names, those men, have been in this same room too; have undressed me with their eyes, called me names, or perhaps, passed over me altogether, hungry for moreness in other nearby rooms.

More boundaries, pushed by the makers; dreams extracted by the takers.

But knowing they stood where you’re standing now, that won’t help you.

Please, go ahead, cry.

It is just us in here, Christina. And the cameras.

***

Are you ready now? To return to your family, your vacation, your life, and to stay disturbed, but maintain your morbid curiosity from a safe distance?

No, you may go. I’ll still be here.

Or not? Is there something about male architects of female realities you want to make clearer together, before you leave this room?

Very well then. Would you also care to abandon the chair they want to confine you in, to instead drag your body across the earth's surface?

Are you ready to be obstinate? Rebellious; disloyal; incompliant; insubordinate; intractable; resistant; determined; uncompromising; assertive?

Me too.

But, I warn you, it may take 500 million years for the species' next sense to be activated, for the evolution you're waiting for.

No. Beyond their framework.

Come Christina, drag yourself with me.