Читать книгу Justine - Iben Mondrup - Страница 17

Ane and her paintings fill the space. My person is broken down to small fragments, flitting around, colliding with everything that isn’t me, but rather her, and coalescing into a body. Finger. Print. That’s always the gist of us, right?

One of Ane’s paintings is a paisley landscape without up and down, near and far, or horizon. She’s made a rip in which the colors blend in spirals inside the brain’s winding coils, and amid a flock reminiscent of thought, an underwater life of seaweed. Fish with bird heads, birds sporting arms, little girls with bare breasts and rough hands, boys without legs, some laughing, some bleeding. Three girls in French braids display their buttocks, spreading their cheeks to show their deep assholes. A boy combs a longhaired cat, and in the midst of it all a dog-ape hybrid is shaving its legs.

I say it now: I think I’m some other. Or how should I put it? I’ve become some other. That other hasn’t become me, though. She didn’t exist before the fire. Or did she? She’s a new condition. At once definitive and boundless. I have no clue where we’re off to now.

To the bathroom, where all is gray, and I inspect her in the mirror. She looks like me. She holds the large scissors in her hand lifts a hunk of hair. It’s my fingers that are chopping, my hair’s a hunk that falls. I’ve kept my hair this long always it’s lived a slow life together with me headed down toward the ground, ready to take root below. I cut again, graying the water, I keep cutting until I’ve come full-circle. The exact same woman in the mirror has an uneven pageboy. We’re different. And now what we want is to fuck, not cut. The place is deserted.