The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [110]
Funny, she thinks, how all that exuberant mysticism of Javier’s was once a part of her, too—a part she’s since abandoned and forgotten.
She finds what she’s looking for: an X-acto blade. She walks back to the living room, stopping at the secondhand bookshelf she bought shortly after moving in, still mostly devoid of books but brimming over instead with a miniature colony of action figures, stuffed animals, bird-call clocks, gyroscope paperweights, and checkout-counter horoscope booklets. Javier would pick up these impulse items and novelties for her wherever he went. She misses getting these little gifts. She misses his broken, vulnerable smile, and the way he held her hand tightly when he talked, and the way his eyes teared up like a child’s at the first sign of trouble—a contagious condition, she’s discovered, as her own now invariably do the same. They’re doing it now, as she turns her and Javier’s breakup over in her mind. She wonders how much her own personal neurosis had to do with her anger at him for drawing those pictures. It’s possible he wasn’t infatuated with Ivy. It’s possible he appreciated her beauty, her youth—possible that he found her attractive, even—without being infatuated with her. Men are always making this distinction. Maybe they honestly believe in it. And in a way those drawings were just making explicit the link Ursula had intuitively made from the start between Ivy and the savage girl. In a way Javier was simply being helpful, completing Ursula’s own thought.
She pictures herself going off in search of him. Pictures herself finding him and committing herself to the project of his rejuvenation. He’ll become the person he used to be, and they’ll go on with their relationship as before. Eventually she’ll marry him, join with him in a perpetual, mystical union, sacrificing a part of her own identity to take on a part of his, becoming henceforth no longer Ursula per se but half of the combination of the two of them, sharing everything, climbing so deeply into each other’s lives that they’ll never again be alone, they’ll grow old together, wandering the streets, witnessing the continually unfolding beauty of the world, perfecting their love for humanity, for each other, for themselves.
She lets the reel unspool itself in the darkened theater of her mind until a car alarm goes off in the distance and she remembers the blade in her hand. Her plan is to cut her left underarm. The place she’s aching to make the cut is the pit of her chest because that’s where all the pain is. As recently as three days ago the pain in her chest was not something she would have called pain as such, not physical pain, but by the day before yesterday the two kinds of pain were becoming difficult to distinguish, and since yesterday she’s been unable to tell the difference anymore. It is pain, it is here, and it is unbearable. Sometimes it feels like a tumor that needs to be carved from the cavity of her solar plexus. Other times it feels like a fluid buildup that a simple puncture would allow to ooze out of its own accord. But she’s too afraid actually to put the knife in her chest. She’s new at this and doesn’t want to injure herself too badly. She’s decided that if she makes a cut somewhere else and it hurts a great deal, if the pain is very sharp and lasts a while, then the pain in her chest, thus starved of her attention, might atrophy and go into remission. She isn’t sure why, but it feels like it will happen this way. It’s worth a try, anyway. She’s decided on her underarm because it’s a place