As she prepared for her performance, Shlomith felt the obedient movements of the rope beneath her running shoes. “She can barely stand upright!”—that claim isn’t even remotely true. Shlomith barely touched the ground as she ran along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade! Despite her thinness, she was more confident and stronger than she had ever been in her life. (Dexamfetamine sulphate 5 mg x 3 helped with this somewhat.) Shlomith’s eighteen-mile run each Sunday would have aroused jealousy in any serious runner training for a marathon. Along with intermediate stops, her jogs took from eight in the morning until six at night. The purpose of this ten-hour slog was to hasten her arrival at her target performance weight of thirty kilograms and dropping to the “very severely underweight” BMI of twelve percent.
The nights were difficult, full of aimless, fleeting, tinny tatters of thought. The emaciated artist tossed and turned in bed more than ever, like a cog rattle on a stick. A terrible grating noise echoed in her skull. Despite the occasional protestations of the radiator, the house was silent; only the familiar background noise of the streets, like the sighing of waves, built up a sound barrier in which it was, theoretically, safe to sleep. But the bed spun and the ratchet clattered, thoughts grating and bringing a taste of blood to her mouth. Sleep remained distant. Maybe it was the sound of hunger, her hunger’s toothy, idiophonic warning rattle?
How to travel eighteen miles in ten hours without muscles
Although Shlomith’s experimental life is beginning to approach its end, we must accompany her on her final Sunday ritual jog. We must tread it at least once with her. Shlomith traveled this route alone eight times during the summer of 2007. Which is a significant accomplishment when one takes into account that she covered each mile more or less by force of will, without muscles, which would have made the journey much more pleasant. Shlomith wasn’t alone on her jogs, so there’s no reason to pity her for that. She was in the company of reflections brightened by dexamfetamine sulphate, and these did not permit a single beat of cog rattling, crushing doubt, or grating questions. Every now and then Shlomith moved in that most unreachable of states, pure thoughtlessness; there was only movement and feet barely touching the ground.
However, for the sake of truth it must be said that her Sunday jogs also entailed enormous amounts of suffering. Shlomith vomited bile at the bases of the trees lining the streets. A number of times she felt an almost unbearable physical pain, a scorching in her stomach, faintness, and vertigo. But that’s just how it is. Like beauty, there is no art without suffering.
So we depart with Shlomith on her final run, not out of pity, and not even as guardian angels, but rather as guides. We do not accompany Shlomith for her own sake (she knew her route by heart), but for the sake of posterity. In case some other maniac (a performance researcher from Japan? Ireland? New Zealand?) gets it into her head to tread the same path Shlomith did to reconstruct the route. In case she attempts to experience something similar to what Shlomith-Shkhina might have experienced during the summer of 2007.
Shlomith started in Park Slope, from the corner of Fifth and Sixth Avenue. She headed up Sixth Avenue until she reached her old home on Carroll Street. That long street transected nearly all of Brooklyn from the water to Lincoln Terrace Park. Shlomith didn’t particularly like Carroll Street. It awoke unpleasant memories, feelings shaped like hatches and dresser drawers—departures, returns, failures, struggles. And precisely because of that she had to travel this route time and time again. Shlomith wouldn’t be Shkhina if she hadn’t decided to go to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade by way of Carroll Gardens along its eponymous street. At this point Shlomith was still walking and warming up her “muscles”.
This route, as long as a year of famine and weighed down with hostile memories, would likely have overwhelmed a person with less strength of will, especially since endorphins were no help at this point in the jog, since nature’s hormone haze wasn’t churning yet in her brain. But Shlomith was made of sterner stuff.
Occasionally Shlomith sprints and then continues walking, running and walking in turn, warming up, preparing for what’s to come. She looks grotesque in her black running tights and form-fitting sweat-wicking black running shirt. She attracts alarmed, horrified gazes in the twenty-eight degree Celsius heat; people stare at her as if at a freak of nature. But we don’t care about those gazes now. We aren’t kin to the paparazzi.
The first stage of the journey begins to take shape as Shlomith passes a familiar landmark. F. G. GUIDO FUNERAL HOME INC.— Family-Owned Business Since 1883. This signifies that only one cross street remains before Henry Street, where Shlomith finally has permission to turn, to change direction ninety degrees to the right. Now, however, Shlomith is forced to step off the sidewalk for a moment: the John Rankin House, a three-story red-brick Greek Revival building where the undertaker’s office established by the first Italian funeral director in Brooklyn is located, is completely surrounded by a film crew. The sidewalk is occupied by enormous, lighting equipment, scaffolds, cameras, and trucks with blue promises emblazoned on the sides: BUDD ENTERPRISES LTD. CONSULTANTS. EQUIPMENT LEASING. THEATRICAL TRUCKING. 212–421–8846. Before the bombastic front door stands a black hearse, model 1888. A heavily-built white horse is harnessed in front of the hearse; it snorts, shakes its head, and paws the asphalt with its hoof; clearly it would like
