Challenge accepted, government lawyer dude.
In the end, I will have presented the judge with enough hard evidence of the trip’s intent as a generator of income to provide reasonable doubt over the government’s charge of “willful misrepresentation” that she will reinstate my benefits from the day I arrive home from Nepal until the day, a few weeks later, when those benefits will run out anyway. But I will still get docked $806 in unemployment benefits for being away “on vacation” during those two weeks in Nepal when I should have been searching for paid work, despite two published articles proving otherwise. The fact that I’d nearly died the week prior and needed time to recover from surgery, the fact that I’d had my cervix removed three weeks before that will be immaterial. Both the algorithms and humans in charge of calculating unemployment benefits in the U.S. make no accommodations for illness, near-mortal or otherwise, nor for attempting to find work, as required by unemployment law, by doing that which you have always done since college to earn money as a freelancer: to seek out and report some story out there in the world, on a wing and a prayer, in the vague hope that someone somewhere will want to publish it. Which is just so American it will make me laugh until I cry.
“You ready?” says Finn, snapping one last photo of me lying between the bowls.
“As I’ll ever be.”
“Just breathe,” he says and winks. Our own private mantra, born of a Pearl Jam song we played once and then every day thereafter when we were together, sometimes several times in a single hour. During the song, I was not allowed to fret over money, kids, or work. Or to get up to do chores or to respond to electronic beeps and buzzes. It was an enforced three minutes and thirty-five seconds of quiet breathing, often in his arms.
Finn, born into the kind of rural American poverty that produces childhood memories of the tap of rain on tin roofs and the thwack of men slamming doors, sees it as his god-given duty to connect with and lessen the burdens of others. From the evening we met in front of that bar on Bleecker Street, and I spotted him crossing Cornelia as if in slow motion and thought, “Who is the lucky woman who gets to hang out with that man tonight?”—before suddenly realizing, staring down at his photo on Tinder, that that person was me—I’ve felt as if I’d dreamed Finn into being.
“The bar’s way too noisy to talk,” I’d said. “Wanna go to John’s Pizza instead?” The restaurant, one of the few untouched and still-reasonable gems of old New York, stood across the street.
“Twist my arm,” he’d said, all Southern drawl, which was another ironic Finnism. You never had to twist his arm to do anything. Earlier that day in Kathmandu, he’d found us a houseful of blind masseuses. “They see with their hands!” he said. “How cool is that? It has to feel good.” Of course, he was right.
A line from the Pearl Jam song hits me, as the bowls start vibrating. Yeah, I don’t wanna hurt, there’s so much in this world to make me bleed…
Earlier that morning, a Hindu priest guarding the dead at Pashupatinath Temple had walked up to me, without asking, and smeared a red tika, made from dried turmeric, onto my forehead. “Protection,” he’d said. Not from you, I thought, as he held out his hand for rupees. Nor from the sadness of seeing a boy weeping over his mother’s corpse on the banks of the Bagmati just prior to her body being set aflame. How had she died? I asked. One of the boy’s relatives mimed illness in the area of her reproductive organs, and I had to hold in my tears. I pictured my own young son, safely ensconced in his miniature bunk bed at camp. A counselor walking in, had his older sister not been home that bloody night, to tell him…what? How had this sobbing boy learned the news of his mother’s death? Was he there when it happened? Or did a grown-up have to tell him? Her feet, I note, are unusually small, dainty, like a child’s.
The tika on my forehead was placed, like all tikas, between my eyebrows on the ajna, the sixth chakra and “third eye,” the so-called seat of concealed wisdom. The ajna, according to Hindu tradition, marks the point at which creation begins, which makes sense with its proximity to the brain. Its role is intuition, intellect, and imagination: picturing that which you cannot see with your own eyes, so you must “see” it with your third eye. Such as a book, as yet unwritten; my father’s face, now that he’s gone; a boy at the moment he is informed of his mother’s last breath.
Woman’s corpse, Pashupatinath Temple, Kathmandu, Nepal, July 2017, © Deborah Copaken
Forgetting the red mark had been placed on my ajna, I wipe the sweat from my brow, and now my Jewish forehead is smeared in Hindu turmeric as my Christian caretaker and I wait for the Buddhist ceremony to begin.
I’m an equal opportunity mender.
As is Nepal, with its long history of religious tolerance. Hindu remains the primary religion, but signs and acceptance of other beliefs flutter in the wind everywhere. Earlier that morning, Finn had stood in a shaft of light, dressed in his tai chi clothes, arms outstretched to the sun, with striped shadows of Tibetan prayer flags fluttering behind him. He looked so much like the embodiment of Nepali tolerance—Taoist Jesus in Buddhist Hinduland—I yelled out, “Don’t move!” and snapped a photo.
The only major world religion missing from this particular moment in the bowl shop, I realize, is Islam. But back when I was covering the war in Afghanistan, the mujahideen had taught me to recite the opening lines of the Koran (Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim, la ilaha illallah muhammadur rasulullah…) while we shivered in our mountain cave, hiding from Soviet bombs, and this ability to speak the kalima out loud apparently automatically makes me a Muslim. It also makes me popular with Muslim cab drivers.
“Finn” in Kathmandu, Nepal, July 2017, © Deborah Copaken
Wait! I think. That cave. That freezing, foodless, fetid cave, with the frozen drip castle of shit out front, and the photos of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Kalashnikov lining the walls inside, in which I slept and starved and hid during those first few months of 1989. That cave was also in the Himalayas, a thousand miles northwest of here.
Duh. Of course.
The previous morning, Finn and I had wandered into a used bookstore in Thamel and found a dog-eared, annotated copy of Shutterbabe facing out, exactly at my eye level, part message in a bottle from my former self, part rebuke. And though Finn had insisted on shooting a souvenir photo of this odd little moment, my brain still hadn’t made the connection until just now.
Pain, I guess, will do that. It scrambles everything in there except the hurt.
Used bookstore, Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal, July 2017, © “Finn”
As the singing bowls start to vibrate all around me—what an odd and lulling sound, I can actually feel the vibrations entering my body, as if I’ve suddenly atomized into mist in a belfry—it finally dawns on me that I’ve returned to the same stretch of tectonic plate subduction in which Act I of my adult life began: at war; in the snow; my twenty-two-year-old brain filled with Hollywood fantasies of how the story of my life might unfold, none of which came true. I did not remain in the field of war photography: Words became too urgent, my need for roots too strong. I did not marry the young man I met in Jamaica and would later visit in London; fate intervened to make him lose that scrap of paper with my phone number on it when he came to visit me in Paris. I did not live happily ever after but rather as we all do: in fits and starts of joy and sorrow.
My body, back then, had not yet produced three humans or been carved up by the vicissitudes of womanhood. Now, three decades later in these Himalayan foothills, it is summer, not winter. Peaceful, not war-torn. Technicolor, not the blacks and whites of night and ice. The vibrations entering my chest originate from bowls not bombs. I’m no longer eager and unlined and throwing myself at danger, but rather circumspect, cautious, corrugated, crisscrossed.
How ironic, I think, that covering actual wars produced only one tiny wound in the webbing of my right hand while existing in the form of a woman’s b
ody has produced an entire constellation of scars. “There’s a war going on, and I’m bleeding.” That was the first line of that first book, about my years covering those wars, but only a few readers noted the subtext, and none—not even I—could have predicted its foreshadowing.
Yes, back in Afghanistan I got my period in a minefield, and one of the mujahideen sat on my backpack, crushing a bottle of rubbing alcohol all over my one box of tampons, and that was less than ideal, hygiene-wise, but the larger point I was trying to make was not about actual menstrual blood in an actual war but about how living in a woman’s body, too, can feel like war. But now, deep in middle age, my body bears so many actual scars from what I once wrote off as metaphor, I’ve lost count.
Linguistic clues teach us that, for early humans, any number beyond two was known as many. Three, as a concept, was the same as four, five, six, or a thousand. So counting went something like this: “One, two, many.” I stopped counting my scars after three as well, except when I’m forced to reckon with their existence while filling out medical paperwork before a doctor’s visit. I’ve actually had to jot down all of my surgeries in alphabetical order in the notes section of my iPhone, otherwise I can never remember them all: adenoidectomy (1972), appendectomy (2006), D&C #1 (1983), D&C #2 (2000), frenectomy (1988), hysterectomy (2012), inguinal hernia repair (1997), meniscectomy (2018), Morton’s neuroma repair #1 (1995), Morton’s neuroma repair #2 (2020), trachelectomy (2017), vaginal cuff dehiscence repair (2017).
It’s telling, I think, that my iPhone doesn’t even recognize the word trachelectomy, the only surgery on my list with a red dotted line under it, as if challenging me to prove such a common ladyparts excision actually exists because, yes, even spell-check is sexist.
One day, just out of curiosity, I typed in prostatectomy: prostate removal. Yup. My iPhone knew that one. Then I tried some of the rarer male reproductive surgeries and ailments, such as seminal vesiculitis, preputial diverticulectomy, penile hematoma, inguinal herniorrhaphy, and phallorrhaphy.
My iPhone knew those words, too.
My surgery list also does not take into account the many biopsy scars (five in 2013; one in 2015; another in 2017); or my three episiotomies from giving birth (1995, 1997, 2006); or the stab wound on my right forearm (1989) when I caught those drug dealers in Zürich ransacking my hotel room.
Nor does it take into account all of those moments that became “indelible in the hippocampus,” as Christine Blasey Ford will later call her assault by Brett Kavanaugh, from the multiple assaults I’ve also endured: the policeman in Mexico who grabbed my prepubescent breast while I was asking him for directions (1979); the older teenage boy who placed my young hand down his pants (1980); the large stranger who broke into my college dorm while I was in it typing a paper and threatened to rape me (1985); the combat boot kicked into the left side of my skull from an unseen assailant on my way home from the library (1986); the two classmates in my documentary film class who mistook my enthusiasm for our film for consent to have both of their hands under my clothing (1986); the first thief who robbed me at gunpoint (1987, probably crack-related); the second thief who robbed me at gunpoint (also 1987, also probably crack-related); the group of drunk college boys who collectively assaulted my body outside the video store near my dorm before I beat one with the hard plastic shell of A Clockwork Orange—homework for a seminar on men and violence—and escaped (also 1987, when I was twenty-one, a bad year to be in my body); the fellow student who raped me on the night before our college graduation (1988); the white-bearded rabbi in Israel who stuck his tongue down my throat and placed his hands on my breasts when I was interviewing him (1988); the Frenchman who took advantage of a Métro strike in Paris to fondle my ass (1988); the businessman, in an angry rush, who pushed me down the subway stairs when I was seven months pregnant (1997); the countless frotteurs I’ve had the not-so-unique displeasure of witnessing (1985–present day); and the creepy older dude from Tinder who followed me home on the subway and felt it was his tongue’s right to enter my mouth without asking (2015).
Women, maybe you know what I’m talking about when I lay it all out like that. Maybe you, too, have your own laundry list you pull out now and then to gape in horror before re-interring it under memories of birthday parties and beach walks. Men, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, talk to the women in your midst: your mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, and friends. Ask them for their lists. Theirs might not be as long—being five foot two perhaps makes me an easier target?—but be ready to be appalled by their answers.
This was the original idea behind #MeToo, which was coined back in 2006 by Tarana Burke, a sexual harassment survivor and activist who believed that breaking the silence would elicit change. The movement will go viral soon after my return from Nepal, when two New York Times journalists, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, break the story of Harvey Weinstein’s multiple assaults on the women in his orbit. Like so many other women, I will use the #MeToo moment as my own hour of reckoning with the collective burden of having bodies that make us targets for sexual abuse and harassment.
In May of 2017, I’d sent Ken Kurson’s “How come you never asked me out?” email to the only other contact I had at the Observer, my newly assigned editor, Sarah. “I felt it was my duty to send this to someone,” I wrote, “just so the Observer understands what happened to one of its columnists.”
My new editor’s response? “I am baffled by the pizza emails and not quite sure what I am looking at but it doesn’t feel like any of my business.”
The “pizza emails”? Minimizing takes all forms. Yes, even by women. No, sometimes, unfortunately, especially by women. Patriarchy does not discriminate against whom it infects. Male, female, trans, nonbinary: We are all the unwitting hosts of its systemic toxins.
I shot back: “I’m not sure why that’s baffling. Even reading it now feels icky.” I took a screenshot of his email and pasted it into the body of mine, just to remind her what it might feel like to be the recipient of the words “How come you never asked me out?” from your boss.
She never responded.
A few days later, I entered the cervical mystery tour, and those emails submerged under a torrent of blood.
Bong! Bong! Bong! The vibrations from the bowls grow stronger. I sneak a peek at how they’re produced: a man on each side of my body, in perpetual movement. Each has two felt-covered gong mallets. They place one mallet in the center of the bowl to steady it while striking the outside of it with the other, bowl by bowl, until all the bowls are vibrating at once.
I am now just bowls, brain, and body, the latter of which is slowly letting go. But not so the brain. The brain is still gripping tight to its swirl, either trying to think its way out of what’s happening or willfully holding on to the sight of blood, the smell of bleach, the sound of that anesthesiologist counting backward from ten. Go away, brain! I think, then my brain immediately starts thinking about what it means to think about wanting my brain to go away but not being able to stop it from doing so.
It’s been a week and a half since the life-saving surgery that has repaired and hopefully permanently reconnected the frayed tissue at the top of my vaginal canal. “Good thing your daughter was home,” every doctor and nurse in the hospital kept saying, shaking their heads as they checked my vitals. My vitals: a word whose meaning I’d never really noted until its definition nearly no longer applied. Latin root: vita. Life. Did I understand how rare it is to hemorrhage like that after cervix removal?
“No. How rare?” I kept asking.
“Very rare,” I was told vaguely.
But “very rare” for others means nothing when it happens to you. Winning the lottery is also “very rare,” but if you win, you’re no longer focusing on how often it doesn’t happen, you’re just trying to get your relatives to stop asking for money. The parallel with vaginal cuff dehiscence is that you’re just trying to wrap your brain ar
ound what just happened, since you’ve never heard of this malady before, while simultaneously managing the PTSD of bloody gore and near death. Meaning, each time your daughter stepped out to go to the bathroom or to get food, you googled the thing to death.
Vaginal cuff dehiscence: I had to ask the medical staff to repeat this combination of three words several times before it sank in and became a permanent groove in my cortex. Vaginal: Okay, that one was easy enough to remember. Cuff: That’s the incision that was supposed to be sutured closed but came undone. Dehiscence: A surgical complication in which the edges of a wound no longer meet or tear apart. Here’s what else Google explained to me: “Vaginal cuff dehiscence after hysterectomy is a rare, but potentially devastating complication. If it is not corrected in a rapid fashion, there is significant potential for morbidity and mortality.”
Yes, but how rarely does it happen? And how significant is the potential for disease and death? And how many hours after it ruptures do you have, more or less, before you die? And why had no one warned me of the risks of this particular bloodbath either before or after my trachelectomy or before or after my hysterectomy five years ago? Is there a greater chance of vaginal cuff dehiscence if they have to go in there multiple times, as they did with me? And what are the chances of all of this happening again one day?
Surely someone out there has studied the mortality rates of this thing and knows the answers. But every article I read had a different answer with a similar caveat explaining that we don’t really know how often it happens, because it doesn’t always get reported. Sometimes women just bleed out too quickly and die. Or their bowels and/or intestines protrude through their vaginas and they die. Or their viscera fall out, and then they die instead of being rushed to the hospital for an emergency surgery that can be counted as part of the data set and recorded.
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