The Last Bullet Is for You Read Free Page A

so much.
    On the way home, my heart was leaden. I wanted to tell you how the audience was invited to sit on the stage like in the lobby of a grand hotel or the business lounge of an airport. I wanted to describe to you what I felt when Antony leaned against my shoulder during a tirade so he wouldn’t lose his balance as he moved among our bodies. That evening, Shakespeare was speaking to me through Antony’s mouth: “Thou hast seen these signs; they are black vesper’s pageants. That which is now a horse, even with a thought, the rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct, as water is in water.”
    I don’t know who you are anymore. For months, I felt like I was living with a stranger. I wonder what happened to the man I knew.
    When I walked back up the Main, it was late and the sidewalk was crowded. Punk nightclubs, chic restaurants patronized by the Mafia, half-naked girls in high heels, and gorilla bouncers guarding the doors. The voices were shrill, crystalline high notes spilling from scarlet lips, music scattering onto the street and those long platinum manes, the extravagant punctuation of their heads.
    Their voices entered my ears like a foreign language, accents I didn’t recognize, and that irritated me. Like a dog shaking itself after a bath, I brushed them off, I freed myself from the particles of this world that had nothing more to do with me. A cloth has wound itself around me, a shroud of pain. I don’t belong to this world.
    Antony took his life when he learned of Cleopatra’s death. Would you die if you learned I was gone? If you died, I could mourn the dead instead of burying the living.
    When in Rome, do as the Romans do. I will compose my tragedy in their company. In the ruins of ancient Rome I will write our love story, the end of what we had, in which you played every role. Prince, emperor, and dictator.
    Only a wound can cure me.

You forbade me from writing about you, as if writing could steal some part of you, pilfer your soul, as they say about photographs. You talked about writing the way the ancients did, claiming that icons had the ability to reveal the invisible, or maybe the opposite, that by beauty and the emulation of reality, art could step between God and his faithful. You said that writing should be revelation and not description, and you forbade me from creating images that were too much alive, and you forbade me from bringing your existence onto paper.
    I will write my love for you until it dies so I won’t die from losing it. I will write it and rewrite it until it wears away completely, the joy of my body against yours, the sweetness of your skin, my fingertips along your chest, sliding down your body to touch you. My hands travel back to the nape of your neck, I grab onto you, I sink my claws into your hair. I need to go back to that, whatever the cost. I need to answer the call, my name on the list of those sent to the gulag of love. The dictatorship of desire still demands that I satisfy it, that I conquer the territory one more time. I want to remain romantic, relentless, innocent, and pathetic, go on believing that nothing better exists, that Stalin is the father of the motherland looking after its children and that I can write to him and denounce the evil people who sent innocents off to their deaths in Siberia because I firmly believe he’s not aware of it, tell him there are lists where the names of the next victims are inscribed, and that he, Stalin, must do something about it.
    I want to imitate the naive and stay faithful to love.
    Write until the images fade by themselves, worn away or replaced, images on their last legs, at the end of their rope, and only then will I retreat, and give up the fight.
    I’ll stop waiting for text messages. I’ll stop checking my inbox fifty times a day in hopes of reading a note from you. I’ll stop jumping every time the phone rings. I’ll stop dreaming of the country you described so