402
DAVID ZANE MAIROWITZ
She is called upon to disrupt the power, to turn institutional murder
in upon itself. Yet, she must constantly adjust the wig, which the
hands of Kropotkin have thrown into permanent disarray. She feels
unclean and the cake of her face weighs on her cheeks like cloth.
It
occurs to her she is without her knife, lost somewhere perhaps in the
garden of the clinic or taken by the investigating poli-::eman.
At the gates of the intended building she is struck by migraine.
She walks through the gaze of the Security Guard, explaining
that she has come to see her husband, a certain Mr. Y. who works
in the plant, no, there is no need to call him, she knows the way,
lovely new carpets (she has been told to say), whatever happened to
nice Mr. D. who worked as a guard last year - to establish an iden–
tity.
She places the bomb with five minutes to spare. She goes to the
mirror, a woman's mirror in a woman's white porcelain room, and
in it discovers an eyebrow dangling from the outside of her eye like
a worm. She knows, in the feel of it, that it has been so for some
time.
Outside the door she hears voices, and her failure is written
on the night. The explosion is now three minutes away and she
freezes at her edges. In her head a pulse, like the slow crack of the sea,
is gathering its thunder. She rushes to the sink and washes her face
clean of its mildew. Also, she scrubs her neck of its rust, watching
the bomb lever twist closer to holocaust.
As
the towel unveils, in its
drying, a chalky whiteness stares back at her. Voices are mumbling at
the door in anticipation, she hears the running of feet, the shrill echo
of police whistles. She feels she is gaining a laceration in the heart of
Power. Will she gain the Power? She doesn't know.
Again she tries her mirror. The face she sees has accepted noth–
ing, wants nothing.
It
watches the explosive in its final minute, now
the ticking is her troll-lover, prodding her with his sex. They are
pounding on the door for her to come out, smiling killer police who
will not enter a lady's Sanctuary for their embarrassment. It is the
world of their embarrassment and its antiface, their brutality, she
must unmake. Without eyebrows, if necessary.
No. She does not want the Power, and she leaps. The policeman,
the same who has incarcerated her, catches her as she pushes into
the hallway. She fights against him for cover. She wants, she thinks,
