Second post of the day: Part III, Chapterlet 1

III. The Caress (a translation from The Possessed)


1.

When Yuriko, accompanied by Kennedy Charleston, returned to Tulsa, she seemed preoccupied. She wouldn't listen to Kennedy's suggestion that they should run away and make a life together somewhere else. She said prison was "adequate." Kennedy couldn't get her to do anything; it seemed as though the impetus that had directed Yuriko's life, governing her nights and days, had been badly damaged. For a couple of weeks, she refused to go out, then, finally thinking herself solitary, she began haunting the cab companies, taking taxis to different parts of the countryside, wandering without a plan, going into ramshackle one room church buildings, sitting in the corner on a metal folding chair or leaning against the wall, feet turned towards each other, her hands sometimes gripping each other, sometimes stroking each other, her head inclined to one side. Kennedy followed her. As she had been baptized long before, now she returned to church like he was turning her back on something filled with pain or sin; her hands in front of her eyes, she would kneel, her teeth sometimes seeking the flesh of her palms, frozen in an unreflective cessation of movement, as if she had been told of the death of a loved one; the death that could not take shape until the frozen tongue gives its chilled permission to the heated brain. Moving like a temporary maid called to straighten the disorder in a house filled with rich strangers, she walked to the pulpit as if holding a lit candle against the dark, and receiving the laying on of hands, she turned, putting her ridiculous white mittens on gravely, and with her newly burdened step, left the Pentecostals to their worship. Kennedy, making sure she was herself unobserved, darted up to the pulpit and stopped, working her hands, as if trying to undo what had been done. She, to, received the laying on of hands, and left.
Yuriko walked through the sunlit fields of winter in the same somnambulistic way, tugging at long, dried sweet grasses, muttering in a low voice at the occasional rustle of an unseen bird. The stray dogs that braved the cold to come near her she caught with her hands, pulling the fur of their necks back until their eyes were pulled wide and their teeth bared. She showed them her own teeth, lip laid back as if an unseen hand was upon her neck as well. Because Yuriko's conversations were with the invisible air, because in her cadence and the thought she expressed mutely through gesture there was a desperate view of oblivion, Kennedy became frantic. She accused Yuriko of "sleeping with—no, fucking the entire world." And by putting her anger into words, she gave herself more injury than she did her lover. She did not understand anything Yuriko felt or did anymore, which was more unendurable than the times she disappeared with Her. Kennedy walked back and forth in her darkened apartment, cursing, weeping, stumbling, while Yuriko made circuits in the night.
Yuriko now headed up into Allison's neighborhood, but Kennedy was not fooled by the gradual nature of Yuriko's approach, though she was uncertain if Yuriko herself knew her ultimate destination. She circled like a turkey buzzard suddenly deprived of a thermal, tighter and tighter, with one wing tip pointed always at the carrion unseen below the treetops. Sometimes, Yuriko slept in the park near her house. The stillness that she caused by her entering the rec center was broken by the tide of activity moving over her intrusion, which was forgotten in the quiet way she sat her place on the bench, its return destroying her as a single grain of wheat is lost in a great silo. Sometimes the park bench was given up for a cot in a rundown religious shelter adjacent to it (she had even taken some of her things there), but she somehow never got closer. One night, she woke up to the yelping, in the distance, of Allison's chocolate lab. As she had frightened the rec center into silence with her own, the yelping brought her to her feet, stiff and immobile.
Yuriko now headed up into Allison's neighborhood, but Kennedy was not fooled by the gradual nature of Yuriko's approach, though she was uncertain if Yuriko herself knew her ultimate destination. She circled like a turkey buzzard suddenly deprived of a thermal, tighter and tighter, with one wing tip pointed always at the carrion unseen below the treetops. Sometimes, Yuriko slept in the park near her house. The stillness that she caused by her entering the rec center was broken by the tide of activity moving over her intrusion, which was forgotten in the quiet way she sat her place on the bench, its return destroying her as a single grain of wheat is lost in a great silo. Sometimes the park bench was given up for a cot in a rundown religious shelter adjacent to it (she had even taken some of her things there), but she somehow never got closer. One night, she woke up to the yelping, in the distance, of Allison's chocolate lab. As she had frightened the rec center into silence with her own, the yelping brought her to her feet, stiff and immobile.
Half an acre away, Allison, sitting at her computer screen in a blue wash of light, raised her eyes to the wall above. Bernadette was running about the yard; she heard him first on the one side, then on the other; she whined as she ran; barking and yelping she heard Bernie farther and farther from her. Allison bent forward, listening; she began to shiver. After a moment, she got up, opening the French doors to the back yard. Then, she sat down with her hands in her lap, but she couldn't wait. She went out into the yard. It was heading towards midnight, and she could see little to nothing. She walked toward the hill which sloped down to the street and, beyond that, uninterrupted by fences all the way to the park. She no longer heard Bernadette, but she kept walking. She heard the rustle of the leaves along the street and amongst the leaves. A small briar bush tripped her, but she did not call to her dog. At the bottom of the hill, she could see a dim outline stretching against the ground and rising into the sky of the broad white wall of the shelter; there was the tiniest suggestion of light in the doorway. She began to run, cursing and crying, and blind from the tears, without warning ran into the jamb of the shelter door.
On a make-shift stand, below a holographic image of a blue-eyed blonde Jesus, a candle was burning next to a battered, gilded Bible. The light fell across the floor and the dusty, empty cots. At the foot of the Bible stand were flowers and abandoned toys. Standing next to them in her pajama pants was Yuriko. Her position, alarmed and broken, was fixed at a point where one hand had almost reached to the shoulder, and, at the moment that Allison\'s shoulder hit the painted metal door frame, Yuriko began to fall. Slipping down she went; down, her hair swinging, arms to each side, dark streaks of almost color in the half-light, falling with her, running down her arms, and Bernadette stood there, rearing up onto his hind legs, hackles up and body trembling. The blood rushed to the surface of Allison everywhere all at once, the cold of the outside unable to prevent the thrill of seeing her and the confusion of escaping life it from springing to the front, making her throb in her fingertips, her forehead, and her thighs, as she leaped forward to try to catch her.