Thrust: A Novel

Aurora, my dawn, my loss,

Had we seen each other, Aurora, in your Rooms? Did we see each other that very first time, as children, locked inside your moment of desire and blood and mouth and apple? Did that moment turn into our entire lives?

I have so much left to tell you.

I cannot stop stuffing bottles with letters. Throwing them into the river or sea. So many stories I should have shared! I throw them into the abyss as if they might yet reach you, or finish me. I want to write you a devotional, a confessional. I want to tell you my origin story, straight into the gaping mouth of your absence.

I was not the first boy born to my mother. There was a Frédéric before me.

He died when he was seven months old. My parents also had a daughter, I’m told, who died after a month. There were these floating siblings, a boy and a girl, the boy inhabiting a space in womb and world before me, the girl so small. Smaller than anything. Not even a word.

So, you see, I was the second Frédéric — born inside their grief and loss. My siblings floating away. Like you.

When I was nine, we moved to Paris. That first year, my mother made my remaining brother and me lunches, and we ate them on a park bench near l’Arc de Triomphe. That monument was my first object of desire. I couldn’t stop looking at it; I heard nothing my mother or brother said to me when in its presence; often, distracted as I listened, I bit my tongue or the inside of my cheek while chewing. The arc was pure magnificence.

We lived on Rue d’Enfer, a fact I hope you find wonderful.

We lived near the Hospital of Found Children and Orphans and the site of the famous guillotine. In the Place de la Concorde, a pillar had been erected — a statue made as a gift from Egypt to Paris. The obelisk erected itself inside my imagination as well. I began to dream of Egypt without knowing more of that ancient land than I learned in history books and lessons. You will no doubt accuse me of exoticizing. I confess immediately. I request punishment.

I attended school at the same institution as Molière, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo. I interacted with Chopin, Liszt. There is a dreamy haze to this part of my life, the times before Napoleon III’s rise to power and his declaration as emperor.

On the outside, as you know, I am a man with a success story. A prominent artist, sought-after, world-renowned. But my memories arrange themselves differently from what my lineage and pedigree might suggest. If anything, I would say I was carried to success on a wave of infamy. But even that seems too simple. My memories do not hold still inside a story.

When I worked on the now universally despised Rapp statue — even now I can hear my critics asking about the confounding position of the arm — I fell from the highest point of the scaffolding, near his head. I lay on the floor at the statue’s feet for an entire hour, or so my mother told me later. My brother tried to revive me. I don’t remember much about being unconscious there at the feet of the statue. I do remember that, when I regained consciousness, I saw my brother’s face first. I was covered in leeches.

Sometimes, if I close my eyes, I can still feel the leeches on my chest.

Perhaps that is why I was attracted so to the Room of Burning Cups. Or is that room perhaps a throwback to your nun desires?

Here is an admission that would end my career if anyone but you knew it: I have since then suffered from episodes of amnesia, sometimes including seizures. The seizures feel uncannily like a departure from reality, like traveling to some other time and place. The colors of life turn washed out or muted. People I know to be dead and gone reappear. Sometimes, fragments of previous experience play out before me, as if memories could be acted out on the stage of the brain. The seizures also give me gifts, Aurora — images and ideas to last a lifetime — or maybe time itself cleaving open enough for me to gently pull imagination forth from the slit before it sutures shut.

The seizures, Aurora. No one knows. Should anyone find out, my life’s work would be over. I tell you this as a traded intimacy. The sustaining thrill of knowing you deeply is worth the risk. I tell you this as a spell, in the hope of conjuring you back.

My memories live scattered all over my body, in a way that my knowledge and training do not. I remember, for instance, the first time I made a small model out of wet bread. Before I learned how to use clay. To this day, when I cannot sleep, I will procure bread and knead it with water, using it to create small models — usually of breasts or cocks — in my off hours. It brings me a kind of calm.

But sometimes the forms that emerge from the bread are different: not lovers, but a boy and a girl. Lost, penniless, huddled together.

I am haunted by the dead boy who came before me, inside of whose name I stand.

I am haunted by the girl who lived so briefly.

Sometimes I call the colossus my Big Daughter.

Sometimes I call out to you across time and water. Sometimes I think of following you, stepping off the edge, going to water.

Yours eternally, into the abyss,

Frédéric