Ministry of Moral Panic

by Amanda Lee Koe

  Forty of you held forty yellow chicks in hand, and you were the only one who had the urge to squeeze, you couldn’t say why. You loved animals and you were a good kid. The chick’s head stuck out over one end of your closed fist, and you felt its wings beat against the insides of your palm as you closed in on its small, warm body.

  You only wanted to see how far you could go, like the time you ended up stapling your finger. Also the time you pushed a pearl into your left nostril. The thrilling terror in the moment, the twin flecks of blood, the momentary impediment to respiration. Except you didn’t understand then the difference between doing things to yourself, and doing things to other things or people, and now, there was a dead chick in your hand.

  Everyone agreed it was an accident, because you cried. You didn’t start crying right away, you were answering their questions stoically. You didn’t cry not because you didn’t feel bad—you went home and you threw up—but because crying seemed so juvenile and hypocritical; you’d just performed a very costly experiment at the expense of a living thing. But then you saw that your impassive demeanour was arousing suspicion in the teachers questioning you, and all you had to do was cry to be let off, and so you did, because what else was there to do? What good would it be to capitulate to petty, facetious chiding when your internal landscape was burning? In that moment as your tears began to fall, blurring the small, fuzzy, yellow corpse on the table behind the zookeeper, you saw yourself perfectly.

  Just one more thing on this. As they let you off, as the teachers began offering consolatory, maternal embraces and scented tissue, you saw the zookeeper drop off the chick’s limp form into an organic waste bin. When everyone went for a toilet break later, you snuck back into this shed. The zookeeper wasn’t in, and you reached into the bin, which was full of peat. The chick’s body was still warm, and you had a dead chick in your pocket for the next four hours. You moved with a delicate fastidiousness, in the manner of someone who’d been very recently circumcised. When you got home, you buried it under a frangipani tree three doors down from your bungalow with the long driveway, in front of someone else’s house. Every day, until you moved away, you placed a frangipani bloom by the stone marker you’d wedged deeply into the ground.

  • • •

  When you were thirteen, you were having a casual conversation with your classmate about movies, when she ended up confiding in you: she didn’t understand why, when people engaged in prolonged lip-locking onscreen, she felt like urinating.

  This classmate was not a close friend of yours, she just happened to be seated beside you in the class plan, which was aggregated via random assignment, in the form teacher’s hopes of attenuating the classroom noise level. She was also, normatively, a nerd, whatever we make of these terms within a crude, teenaged social prism in which we hope to see ourselves favourably reflected.

  And so you told her about masturbation, and what it was to be turned on, but only because urinating was so inelegant a misunderstanding of her immediate situation, so grossly fallacious. You were careful to preface what you were saying with the fact that you did not, yourself, masturbate (which was true) nor were you (unlike her) turned on by prolonged lip-locking onscreen. You knew these things only in theory, because you were well-read in general. You also thought it was pretty lame that mere kissing would give her a rush down south—would porn give her an aneurysm? Not that you’d seen any (true again), but just saying.

  She listened calmly, and asked you further questions, questions that were way out of your league, which was in fact not by any measure a league at all: she and you were in an all girls’ school (the best one in town, too). Everyone who gets deposited in a single sex school is placed there by parents looking to delay sexual maturation and quash emotional distraction, confident as they are of the assumedly more conducive studying environment—you knew so very little, you were not curious enough to transgress these unspoken boundaries on your own, and neither was she.

  But together, by the motivating power of two, the legitimacy of having a partner in crime, you both made a unit that was collectively curious enough to want to know more. You went over to her place (Doing science project, you told your mother, which wasn’t so far from the truth), and together you surfed (the verb had not yet fallen out of fashion) the internet.

  By the time you went home for a late dinner, she and you had found out what scat, snuff, pegging, red rhapsody, face-sitting, bukkake, tentacle erotica and creampie were.

  You went home, not giving it too much thought, had your dinner, did your homework, and went to bed. Subsequent days passed with no fanfare, the two of you no longer discussed masturbation et al., it was as if she’d never brought it up at all, as if you’d never gone over. Which suited you just fine, it wasn’t something to be proud of, but neither were you particularly embarrassed or guilty, you’d looked upon it objectively, in the interest of satiating a faint adolescent curiosity that really wasn’t a priority, though there was, you felt, some pressure to be aware of things in practice, just so you would never be the butt of any innuendo-carrying joke without knowing it, just so you were more worldly.

  So it was with some surprise that you were called down to the principal’s office the following week, where your sitting partner sat in-between her parents on the couch. The principal sat behind her desk. There was an empty chair before her.

  Sit, the principal said by way of greeting, and you sat.

  The principal explained that the parents of your sitting partner had caught her surfing snuff porn, and had then found copious amounts of porn on her computer, with the earliest saved file dating from two weeks back, the night after you went over. Your sitting partner had quickly confessed that it was you who’d led her astray, who’d told her about masturbation, suggested a virtual field trip into internet porn, and encouraged her to watch porn on a nightly basis.

  When you tried to explain yourself, the principal gave you a withering look, and as you looked at your sitting partner in furious disbelief (she did not make eye contact with you, but was leaning weakly on the pudgy shoulder of her father, who was glaring savagely at you), you realised that this was because your sitting partner was at one glance, a nerd, and well, you were not a nerd. You had been booked by the prefects for having multiple ear piercings (this only meant four in your case, two on each lobe, which was nowhere near the real cool kids, who pierced their upper ear cartilage or noses or tongues or belly buttons), and your school skirt was hiked up. Your sitting partner had heavy spectacles, her skirt fell below her knees, and she still carried a cartoon-character water-bottle with a colourful woven nylon strap.

  Your sitting partner’s father was saying something to you, so angry that spit was gathering at either side of his mouth. The principal was dialling your home number to request the immediate presence of one or more of your parents, to alert them of their daughter’s misdeeds. Her mouth formed the shape of Hello, and you imagined your mother on the other end of the phone. You felt her dying of shame. You wished you could protect her from this, even if not yourself.

  You looked at your sitting partner’s spotless school shoes and neatly rolled down socks, the Casio watch strapped tightly onto her right wrist. Your sitting partner’s father was holding on to his daughter tightly even as he railed at you from his seat, and his pants were tight over his large belly and you could see the bulge of his crotch.

  You gave up. You did the next best thing you could think of. You pictured him red and naked, the glandular smell of the indecently obese. You pictured your sitting partner with her father’s sluggish penis in her inexperienced hands. Her hands were so small and she was so stupid, she’d wrapped two hands around it. She was so timid and inept she was massaging it side to side rather than rubbing it up and down. He was getting angry at her; spit was gathering at either side of his mouth.

  • • •

  For a period of time when you were in junior college, you really couldn’t stop making tidy little lacerations on your forearms. To the
casual viewer, things didn’t add up. You were seventeen. You were popular and you were desired and you were wooed. You were on the arm of a new cute boy every week, taking names and hearts for your own. In your receipt were various items teenaged girls died trying to be given: helium balloons, red roses, handwritten letters, typewritten poems, enormous stuffed animals, branded pencil cases, fine chocolate. Every week was Valentine’s Day for you.

  Yet, you were dissatisfied. You ploughed through the boys looking for something that would stop you dead in your tracks, but they were all so puerile. Till then, you would have to mark the passage of time on your arms, in the fashion of cavemen, four vertical lines, one horizontal, drawn across for quick tabulation.

  Your mother cried, and then your father. They hid all the knives, and all the other tangentially sharp objects, as if they were baby-proofing the house. They conducted bag raids for blades. They brought you to a psychiatrist. Your mother offered to go in with you, and you rolled your eyes at her. As you got up to go in, you looked back at her; she looked so mortified to be alone in a shrink’s waiting room.

  When you went in, the back of his chair was to you. When he swivelled around, you stopped dead in your tracks.

  It wasn’t that he was handsome. But his ugliness was so different, so well-seasoned. Perhaps it had nothing to do with his face at all, but that his back was to you when you entered, and that he’d swivelled around. Perhaps it was simply because he was a shrink, and you were seventeen. When your parents had told you hesitantly about the appointment, anticipating your rancour, the truth was that you’d felt special.

  Hello, he said, and then he held out his palms, like Jesus in the paintings.

  You bared the insides of your forearms to him, allowing him to take them into his hands.

  His hands didn’t close in on you. He withdrew them and said: You’re proud of them.

  You said: That’s no way to treat your patient.

  He said: That’s no way to treat yourself.

  You sat on his chaise lounge. You told him about the emptiness. You told him about the unfledged boys who kept trying to put their hands under your skirt, how you slapped them away not because you didn’t want to, but because they were insipid. If they really had you, they wouldn’t know what to do with you, and you would feel embarrassed for them. You told him about the need to document and annotate time, to write on your body in your own hand. He responded gently now, asked you astute questions, nodded at all the right times, made you reveal things you never wanted to.

  On your fourth appointment, when you touched him on the knee as he sat on the futon beside the chaise lounge whilst your mother waited outside, he drew away, and you were disappointed. Then you saw that his hands were trembling slightly and that’s when you knew he wanted you too.

  One time you said: How can you make everyone feel you understand them and care for them? That’s not fair. I can’t trust you, and he said, To be honest, I’ve taken a personal interest in you. Do you say that to everyone? No, I don’t. You started to unbutton your school shirt, and he didn’t stop you.

  The day you came in on a weekend, out of your school uniform, you could see the disappointment on his face. You didn’t move to sit on his glass table and remove your shirt and bra like you always did during the last ten minutes, and he didn’t lick your tits and jack himself off. You’d always been afraid that he’d wanted more but he never did, only looked at your tits like they made him want to cry.

  The next time you went in to see him, in your uniform, in the last five minutes, whilst he was licking your tits, you said, Doctor, how can I be paying you to lick my tits? and he must have thought you were role-playing because he licked harder and faster and you said, I’m serious, and you got off the table.

  As you were putting your bra back on, he said, Please, please don’t tell your parents. It’ll be over for me, I worked so hard to have this clinic.

  You ignored him and he said, Do you know, a body when it is seventeen, what that’s like?

  Of course I do.

  You don’t know what it’s like for me. I can’t even look at my wife any more.

  You put on your shirt and said, Do you want to see me outside of work?

  Sometimes you wished he could pick you up from school, because he drove a Porsche, but you always had to take a bus to somewhere else first.

  When you got three A’s for your A-Levels, he took you out for ice cream and bought you a quilted Prada bag, and that’s when you asked, Do you have a daughter?

  He spooned the melting honey lavender, a pale lilac, and you put your hand over his: I said, do you have a daughter?

  Yes, he said finally.

  How old is she?

  He was twirling his spoon. You could see that he was deciding whether or not to lie.

  She’s three years younger than you.

  You’d stopped cutting when he’d started licking your tits, and now you looked at his face and thought of saying, It’s over, but instead you said, Show me a photo. When he wouldn’t, you said, It’s over.

  • • •

  A month later you were in university and you met the philosophy professor. We are free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom, he said in a lecture theatre with four hundred students. You were seated in a non-descript locale, off to the left in the eighth row, third from the aisle, but the philosophy professor had looked right at you. He was from Poland, but he had a Russian accent. He had a beard. Only much later would you find out that he had lifted that line off of Žižek. The girl beside you was yawning. You stopped dead in your tracks.

  He fucked you from behind after your very first date, and his large and hairy stomach rubbed coarsely against the smooth base of your spine. Afterwards, he fried up some bacon and you watched him in the kitchenette. You thought of how predictable you were, the way you were collecting men of specific vocations the way girls wanted ponies, the way Nabokov loved his butterflies.

  You didn’t tell him it was your first time. When you were both eating, he fished out your essay on the implications of Heidegger’s Being and Time on the ethics of experience, wrote A+ in pencil and drew a decisive circle around it, leaving a grease mark in the margin.

  You started crying angrily into your bacon, thinking of how many warm young bottoms must have gone before you as you said, That’s what you think of me? I’m not doing this for the grades. You got up to go but he caught you by the waist, swept away the bacon—the plates crashing to the floor—and the whole lot of essays, to take you from the front on the kitchen table. You found this gesture incredibly European. Later, you would try to explain it to him—I could never imagine an Asian man sweeping everything off the table without a care. You told him to do it to you again. Afterwards when he was cleaning up with paper napkins and you perched on the kitchen table hugging your knees to your chest, he said, Myśle, że mógtbym cie kochać. What’s that, you said, but he wouldn’t tell. He would say it ten more times before he agreed to tell you what it meant in English—I think I could love you. When the essay came back in class, you got a B for it.

  A few months after you left the psychiatrist, you agreed to meet him. He’d been asking to see you every week but you’d ignored him. You met him in a café and told him you only had five minutes.

  He rolled up his sleeves carefully and showed you his arms. They were way shallower than the incisions you used to make.

  Try harder, you said. He began crying in the café, and you shushed him.

  Finally he lifted his head and said: I’ll never meet another girl like you.

  I’m only special insofar as your life is boring, you said.

  There was a honk from the road outside the café. It was the philosophy professor in his Audi.

  The coffees you and the psychiatrist ordered had just arrived. You paid for them both and left.

  • • •

  Remember the chick? Forget the chick. You did this to a human being. You’d moved away from that bungalow with the
long driveway and for the first time in your life you were doing your own laundry and ironing your own clothes. You were twenty-seven.

  Somebody loved you and sat in the palm of your hand, and you couldn’t stop squeezing. There are so many ways of making use of a person, far more than there are ways of generosity and loving. The beauty of humans, though, is that they are far less fragile than a three-week-old chick and far more adaptable. The contortions you could tease out of this human being delighted you.

  We won’t go into how you limned squeezing, nor for how long, suffice to say this human being eventually broke. There was nothing gradual nor ambiguous about it: you saw the light go out of this human being’s eyes, the light specific to the torch he carried for you. Before his eyes turned cold you tried to buy him back, like Dido of Carthage pleading with Aeneas to stay as he prepared his fleet to sail away from her. Mene fugis? … fuit aut tibi quicquamdulce meum, miserere domus labentis, et istam: From me are you fleeing? … if there was anything sweet in me for you, to pity my sinking house and this.

  You would even say that at this instance, for you, the spell was broken, and you were ready to love this human being back, and to atone for all the prolix squeezing. Unfortunately, the breaking of the enchantment was a two-way affair, and this human being no longer wanted anything to do with you. You’d succeeded. You’d pushed a human being to the furthest they could stand to be with you before they went off the far edge, you’d espied the precise axis at which angle you ceased to be worthy of love.

  This human being looked past you even as you cradled him in your palm, as you first cooed sweet nothings and promises, and then cried. This human being broke not because he could not be stretched further, but because he saw, finally, that the squeezing was a limit you were testing in your personal vanity. It was not a test of love, as this human being had previously believed. This human being would forever be dead to you.