You are twenty-two. July, Kreuzberg. The staircase down to the basement has fourteen steps.
You counted them coming and going all week. The first time you went down with him on Day 2 they were only steps. By Day 5 they were a number you had. By Day 7 they were the fourteen. Day 11 of 14, now, and you know them in your feet before you count. You have not told him you are coming down here. You have not told him you know where the kit is on the shelf. He showed you once, passing through, the way someone shows you a drawer of kitchen knives — this is here, don't cut yourself.
The basement is not his. It is the building's. The building has held it as a coal room, a bomb shelter, a storage lock, a utility. What the building is holding it as now is up to the person inside it.
Your hand stopped at the phone upstairs. The song was under your thumb; you did not press. You could not hear it down here anyway.
You pull the cord of the bulb. The bulb is bare. The bulb hums at a frequency you can hear.
The room is one room. A chair, wooden, one leg shorter than the other three by a finger's width. A table the size of two palms. A shelf above the table: inks, black and brown and red, in small bottles. Needles in a glass jar. A steel bowl. Alcohol in a brown bottle with a hand-typed label. A rag.
The floor is poured concrete painted grey a long time ago. The paint has worn through where feet have stood in the same places for years — two patches, one in front of the chair, one by the door. A cold comes up through the feet. Through the boot-soles first. Then the arch of the foot. Then the top of the foot where the boot goes loose. Your feet know the cold before you name it cold.
No window. No street sound. Three smells, distinct: damp — concrete-damp, old. Cold paper — the shelf, the rag, something under the rag. Metal — the needles in the jar, the bowl, the thin rim of the brown bottle. What you hear is the bulb at forty watts — a hum at a low frequency you can feel in the teeth if you let it in. A pipe running water somewhere two floors up, in the wall. The building's other breath, which is the settling of concrete still settling after seventy years. Somewhere beyond the building, faintly: the S-Bahn passing on its raised line.
You set the chair under the bulb. It rocks on the short leg, once, settles. You do not take off the boots. You will need the floor to be where the floor is.
You take the shirt off. The shirt goes on the chair back. You keep the jeans on. The basement is cold.
Не я. Four years old. Ink faded the way ink in sun fades — not lost, softened, the letters wanting to be read still but quieter. Your left hand finds the tattoo without looking. Four years is long enough to know where a mark is on your body.
Under it, the skin is clean. A finger's width before the ribs curve. You have thought about this for weeks without thinking you were thinking about it.
Your right hand is on the skin. You find the spot with the finger-pad and you hold it. The skin is warm. The bone under the skin is not.
You dip the needle. Indian ink, cheap, black. The bulb at your shoulder is hot enough to notice — a forty-watt the man has been meaning to change.
The needle touches the skin without going in. A surface contact, not a break. You hold it there. A breath you did not decide to hold is already held. You let it out. You take another. You do not count the breath.
I am the one who chose this. I am the one with the hand. And I will remember what I chose.
The couplet comes up through the work. Not from thinking — from the hand. Memory arrives in the body when the body is doing a decision.
You are twenty-two. Three months of Auden on the train.
For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man.
The needle goes in. The line will be inked over in eleven months. The needle goes in. Out. In.
A bead of ink on the surface of the skin. You wipe with the rag. The wipe is a small thing done with the wrist, not the fingers. You dip. You go in. You go out. You wipe.
A small redness rises at the margin where the needle has been. Not blood. The skin lifting to meet what the skin is being asked to carry. The first drop of blood will come in a minute. You are not at the blood yet.
I am doing this.
The skin is skin. The skin takes. The pain is not pain the way cut-pain is pain. It is the pain of small sustained decisions made one after the other by a hand that is doing a thing. The hand organizes the pain the way a hand organizes any work — by repetition, by grip, by a rhythm that belongs to the shoulder and the forearm before it belongs to the fingers. The pain sits in a specific ring no larger than a coin. Outside the ring the body is a body. Inside the ring the body is the work. You hold your breath. You do not hold your breath. You let the breath go. You take a breath that is a breath.
Each decision is the same decision. Dip. Touch. Go in. Come out. Wipe. Each decision is smaller than the last because the hand has been making it for fifteen minutes now and the making is the hand's, not yours. The hand has taken the work over. You are watching the hand.
The work is small work. In, out, wipe. In, out, wipe. The chair rocks on the short leg when you shift your weight. Each shift you feel the rock through the sit-bones before you feel it through the hand. The bulb does not care. The bowl of water pinks slowly. The ink is cheap and takes.
I am the one with the ink. I am the one with the needle. The hand is mine.
You do not sing. Your grandmother sang when she cooked. Your mother did not sing. You are making something neither of them made.
The pipe runs water two floors up for two minutes and stops. In the silence after the pipe the hum of the bulb is louder for a second before it is the same hum again.
You keep working.
Your shoulder has a set to it you did not choose but that has arrived. The set is the set of a hand doing careful work. The set holds even when you shift. You can feel the set, and you do not loosen it.
The line is done. You don't look. Then you do.
You sit for a second that has no count. Your hand stays near the skin without touching. The pain settles. The skin under the fresh line is hot in a way that has no word.
You stand up. The chair rocks, settles. You pour the water from the steel bowl down the drain in the corner of the floor. You pour slowly because the bowl is small and your hand is still shaking. The water goes pink down the drain grating and is gone. You wipe the needle. You put the needle back in the glass jar with the others. You cap the ink. You fold the rag and put the rag where it was. You leave the room the way the room was.
Under Не я, the line. Under the line, the rest of you.
I am the one who wrote what I wrote.
You put the shirt on. The shirt settles. The line is under the shirt where the shirt knows it. You pull the cord. The bulb goes. The basement is dark.
Fourteen steps up. The steps up are longer than the steps down were. You take them one at a time. Your right hand finds the railing and holds on. You do not decide to hold on.
The man is in the kitchen. Shower-wet. The kettle has gone on again. He is holding two cups.
"Where were you?"
"Down."
He doesn't ask down where. He hands you a cup. The tea is the kind of black he makes. You hold the cup. You do not hold the cup well. Your right hand is shaking at a rate that does not match any rate of your body that you know.
He moves across the kitchen toward you and his hand comes up toward your ribs. His hand does the landing it does. Your body has learned the landing. His palm lands flat on the cloth over the spot. Not where the line is. A finger's width above it. The cloth is between his hand and what is under the cloth. You do not move. You do not flinch. The hand stays for the second it always stays and then lifts.
He looks at your ribs where the shirt is flat. He doesn't see anything. There is nothing to see yet, through the cloth.
You drink the tea.
Keep your face still.