Antigone

My name is An. My mother is my grandmother. I am my grandmother’s daughter and I am my mother’s granddaughter and I am mother and I am daughter and I am An. My father or my cousin or my uncle or my brother or whoever-you-name-it begot me. And I carried my brother’s or my cousin’s or my nephew’s or whoever’s, I carried his cold corpse, while keeping it from my uncle or my great uncle or whoever-you-name-it, so I may bury it. After all, maybe there is no uncle or father or cousin or nephew, or mother or sister or daughter. Maybe at the end of the day, it is just a man and a woman.

My dear Isa, I will now carry you, your body. Perhaps it is the female destiny to carry a body, whether it’s to bear a man’s weight on her back, a soul between her legs, to sustain a fetus in her womb, to raise an infant in her bosom, or to carry a corpse down to the grave. Such is the circle of life carried out. Just go into a Catholic church and look at all the madonnas, all the men she carry, from the infant to the corpus. She is the carrier. Men also understand this destiny. They observe with so much disdain, that “she is the womb”, or “she is the navel”, until they realize that they all are once carried by a woman. Then they grab a hair pin and gouge out their eyes.

My father or brother or whatever killed his father for kingship. My mother carried the body and buried it. My brothers or nephews or whatever killed each other for kingship. I carried their bodies and buried them. The pattern here is obvious: men kill and rule; women carry and bury. My brother’s heels felt so cold and rigid when I grabbed and dragged them, my nails clinging into the flesh. Facing downwards, he plowed out a little ditch on the barren soil with his lifeless hands; his blood dripped and watered the ditch. You farmer, you Abel, murdered by his own brother.

When the tomb was near I postured myself: I squatted down, shoved my hands beneath him, and carried him-- so frail, so silent, his blood dried and his stains crusty. I lifted him up, marveling at the strength in me, a woman, who managed to lift up her brother’s corpse without a flinch. To be fair, I could not even flinch. They're all dead. My mother’s dead and my grandmother’s dead and my father's dead and my brothers are both dead and my cousins are dead and my nephews are dead and now my uncle wants me dead. I am the only one living.

I bent down and settled him into the pit, sealing my own doom while doing so, for my uncle had forbidden anyone to bury my brother. When he found me later, he demanded that I be buried alive in the same tomb. Men rule and kill, I told you so. As for my own burial, well, it was not a terrible process: I smiled at the daylight above me as it faded away piece by piece while they were building the mausoleum. I even felt a sense of relief when the final boulder was lowered and the last bit of lime was sealed, when the rumble outside of the mound eventually ceased and all fell silent, leaving me, alive, and my brother, dead, in this liminal hollow, a womb and a tomb.

People do sometimes bury women alive, sometimes purposefully, sometimes by mistake, and sometimes in “a purposeful mistake.” Y’all are obsessed with this. (An laughs.) The Chinese sing of the lady of the white snake pressed under the pagoda, they sing of the goddess of the lotus lantern locked under Mountain Hua. As for America, Edgar Allan Poe wrote so much on this particular phenomenon, about women locked inside the coffin, the wall, or the head. As for me, my murderer buried me alive because he wanted to not only kill me: he wanted to suppress me eternally. He wanted to rule beyond killing. But I managed to survive. I yanked off my braided locks and hung myself onto the ceiling of the dome: a fetus tied from her navel to the mother’s placenta. Locked between life and death, I’ve been living in the tomb since then.

So here I am, sweetie, I'm your portress, your guide to the underworld. (Am I... ?) Not yet, not fully dead, and never will be. (But how…?) Magic. Quantum physics. Save your questions. (Why… ?) Why me? I’m your namesake, thanks to your father who named you and murdered you-- the rule-and-kill pattern, eh?

(An Chuckles.) Your name is interesting–our name is interesting. Look at the Chinese character An 安, a woman 女 under the dome 宀. That is me. That is you as your lifeless body currently lies in the Institute. (What? No–) That is the hidden under, the tomb, the womb, the omphalos.

Give me your hand. (Grasps Isa’s hand.) Your hands are cold. (Caresses.) So smooth, so young, so beautiful. (Looks into Isa’s eyes.) I love you–(Holds Isa’s face.) I am you. (Yanks Isa towards her and kisses her on the lips.) I take your breath. (Drops her hand, parts Isa’s hair and looks down.) You’re bleeding, precious.

She skimmed her hand down Isa, who was standing naked in front of her, her marble body gleaming under the pale lab light. She parted Isa's hair and rested her hand on the latter's bosom, revealing a stab wound on the heart. She pressured the wound with her digit. Blood, viscous, oozed out and edged down.

“I am mother and I am daughter and I am the unholy ghost.”

She stepped closer, their noses touching. “I am the carrier, I am the burier.”

She dipped her index and middle fingers into the blood and brushed them over Isa’s temple. “It’s me. It’s you.”

Precious. Lighter than a feather. She drew down her bloody hand from Isa’s forehead over Isa’s eyes. Her paling lips. Her bloodless neck and trembling throat. Her cleavage. Her navel, her mons pubis–blood clustering on her pubic hair– and finally, her vulva. The wine-dark blood slithered down the pale flesh.

This is my blood. The blood of birth. (Presses Isa's navel.) The blood of death. (Points to the vulva.) Carrying the cycle of life.

“Isabel Fu. Fu An.”

“Isa. An. Isa. An.”

“It’s me, it’s me.”

She kissed Isa on the lips again, the pair of lips now smeared with blood. The pungent scent exploded as their tongues touched and entwined. “I will carry you.”

Isa, standing, bleeding and naked, fell unconscious inside the arms of An. An gently embraced Isa and shifted her to the shoulder, while the latter's blood wetted her white peplos, poured down her shoulder, and pooled around her sandals. As she walked away, from her peripheral vision she saw a small man recoiling into the corner of the lab while the pool of blood dispersed more and more. Screaming, he scrambled open a gallon jug of formaldehyde and poured it over the ground, as if he was fending off a threatening demon of redness. Then he threw another jug. Then another. Then he fished out his lighter and threw it over.

Carrying Isa, An paced out of the lab and a bursting wave of flames followed. She floated through the hollow dome towards the cloudy night sky as the sirens mumbled afar below. The Charles, catching the reflection of the raging fire, turned as bloody as the Styx. And so Antigone, daughter-sister of Oedipus, carried An “Isabel” Fu across. She laughed silently but gloriously. As she carried so many, she learnt to never bend before adversity.