Pissing in a River

by Lorrie Sprecher

  Melissa sighed. “Amanda, be reasonable.”

  “I will not be reasonable.” I could hear my voice sounding slightly hysterical but couldn’t rein it in. “No one touches me but you,” I repeated.

  “Calm down. Alright, I’ll do it.” Melissa changed direction and soon we parked behind her dark office. I rarely went to see her there because she was always so busy. She helped me to the door and went through her keys to let us in. Turning on some lights she said, “Let’s get you into a consulting room.”

  I sat on the examining table. Melissa laid out instruments on a tray and put on sterile gloves. She held my hand and examined it in the bright light. She flushed out my wound with normal saline then swabbed the whole area with a yellowish-brown solution she said was povidone-iodine. “How long since your last tetanus jab?”

  “Just this past year when I got my London Underground tattoo and my leg got infected.” I had the symbol for the tube in red on my right leg.

  The corners of Melissa’s mouth twitched into a half-smile as she prepared a local anesthetic. I watched her clean the surface of the ampoule with alcohol and unwrap a sterile needle. She squirted a tiny bit of liquid out of the syringe, tapping it with her finger to get out all the air bubbles. Watching her hands while she worked was soothing. Now that my hand was actually injured, I didn’t freak out thinking it was going to come off. For some reason the injury made it feel more solid. Like the one psychiatrist who’d actually helped me had said, “There’s a lot of stuff holding it on.”

  Melissa said, “This’ll sting a little. Breathe in. Exhale.” She gave me four quick jabs of lignocaine in my palm.

  “Ouch!”I said. “Ouch, ouch, OW! Fuck me, that hurts.”

  “I know,” Melissa said sympathetically, “I’m sorry. I knew it was going to hurt but what was I supposed to tell you? That it’ll hurt like fuck? I had to give you the injection. Nothing I could say would make any difference. So I lied.” She smiled at me. “I don’t make that a habit.”

  I smiled back.

  Melissa had me lie down on the table, and we waited for my hand to become numb. She sat next to me, and I could barely breathe with her so close. She reached over me to adjust a light, her breasts rubbing against my arm. I turned my head so I could watch her. Melissa pulled a curved needle with thread through both sides of my gash with a silver clamp, and I nearly jumped even though I couldn’t feel it. She wrapped the thread around the clamp three times then pulled through the other end into a knot with forceps. She tied off every stitch. I wanted to say you’re beautiful when you sew to make her laugh, but I felt a little queasy. Melissa had me lean my head all the way back against the table. “Maybe you shouldn’t watch,” she suggested.

  “No, really,” I tried to sound neutral, “it’s interesting.”

  Melissa tied off the last stitch. “Alright?” She tousled my hair. She examined my ankle again and wrapped it in an elastic bandage. “It’s just a slight sprain,” she said, and I was irrationally disappointed. A minor injury seemed anticlimactic after the life-or-death drama of my harrowing escape. “Let’s get you home and dry.” I panicked at this until I realized she meant her home. She held out her arm to help me sit up so I could get off the table. I put one hand in her hand and, with the other, held onto her strong arm. She pulled me up.

  In the spare room downstairs, Melissa helped me out of my soggy clothes. She elevated my ankle on some pillows and put an ice pack on it. “How’s the pain?” she asked.

  “It’s not too bad, but I feel kind of sore all over.”

  “You strained your muscles when you fell.”

  “Cheers for fixing me up. I’m sorry I made such a fuss. Can I do without the ice? I’m freezing.”

  Melissa covered me with the brown duvet and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “This reminds me of the time I fell off a wall in Ottery St. Mary,” I said. “When I was at Exeter, a bunch of us went for Guy Fawkes night. Do you know the tradition there? Instead of just a bonfire, people run through the narrow streets carrying burning barrels of tar on their shoulders. When they can’t hold onto them anymore, they heave them. It’s totally mental. I’m surprised people aren’t killed. I didn’t want to be trapped in the crowd between the buildings with no way out, so I climbed on top of this very high wall and sat at its pinnacle. I thought I was safe there, my legs dangling well above people’s heads, until one bloke lost control and flung his flaming barrel of tar directly at me. It exploded against the stone right where I’d been sitting, and I toppled off the wall backward. I crashed to the ground, pulling all the muscles in my stomach. I couldn’t straighten up and had to crawl around the wall to find my mates. They helped me back on the bus. I was doubled over in agony, and they had to fetch a doctor to give me muscle relaxants.” I started to laugh and held my stomach. “Ow.”

  Melissa adjusted the pillows behind my head. “You must be knackered. How about a nice cuppa to warm you up? Or do you just want to sleep?”

  “Can’t I sleep in your room? It’s so fucking cold.”

  “I don’t want you climbing any stairs tonight.” Melissa heaped blankets on top of me. I stopped laughing and started to cry. “Shh.” Melissa moved closer to me and stroked my hair. “You’re just overwrought.” I sat up and pressed my face into her breasts. I felt her arms go around me and cried harder. I couldn’t tell her I was mostly crying because, with my defenses down, being near her caused me such agony. Why is love so awful?

  In the midst of this, I panicked, wondering how I was ever going to sneak myself upstairs to get my medication. If it had been anyone else, I would have simply asked her to bring down my drugs. After all, the pills were in a plastic bag, not in their prescription bottles. They could be anything. But Melissa was a doctor. I was afraid she would recognize them and know what they were for. Then I saw my guitar sitting on the floor and, with a jolt of relief, remembered I had medication in the case. “Do you reckon I could have that cuppa now?” I asked to get her out of the room.

  “Course you can, love.”

  When Melissa went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, I hopped to my guitar case then to the downstairs loo to take my pills, jarring my ankle and exacerbating the steady ache.

  Melissa brought me tea and paracetamol. Then she wrapped a hot-water bottle in a towel and tucked it under the blankets on my sore stomach muscles. She pulled up a comfy chair next to the bed and sat with me. I finally dozed off thinking about how comforting it had been when she’d stretched out her arm across me to help me up. The memory of it made me feel reassured, warm, and safe.

  That night I had the strangest dream. I think it was a result of what I now referred to in biblical terms as “The Fall” and of landing in a Jewish graveyard. I dreamt there was a disease called “green leaves” that made people tiny. Then I looked down at my arm and saw that my skin had darkened. The green leaves were the jungles of Vietnam, and our role in the Vietnam War made America shrink into wee nothingness. My darker skin was a statement about how rich, entitled, white kids went to college and poor, disenfranchised, black kids got sent to the front lines.

  I woke up thinking about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden and suddenly understood the book of Genesis. Good, evil. Black, white. Rich, poor. We recognize good as good because it isn’t evil, and evil as evil because it isn’t good. When Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they create meaning through opposition. In the Torah, only God can create something without its opposite, without its shadow. But Adam and Eve can’t understand good without knowing evil. They have to leave the garden in case they also eat from the tree of life and become like God. Once people have the knowledge of evil they can’t be allowed to create life, each one alone, each in his own image. Adam and Eve probably weren’t even different sexes in Eden. They only became that afterward to ensure that no single human being could create life by himself.
The bringing of evil into this world is the creation of opposites and opposition.

  Melissa was curled up in her chair asleep. My heart ached to see her there, so kind, so adorable. I shook the toe of one of her brown, black-soled baseball boots and she stirred, uncurling her legs. “Have you been here all night?” I asked. “You are unbelievably sweet.”

  She shivered, hugging herself. “I fell asleep. It’s fucking freezing.”

  “Get under the covers.” I pulled them back. Through the uncovered window I saw how misty it was outside in the dawn. She kicked off her shoes and crawled in next to me under the duvet. “Why were you sleeping in a chair? You know you could’ve climbed in with me. It’s not like I would have minded.”

  Melissa yawned. “I was afraid of bumping your hand or your ankle and hurting you.”

  “You’re so sweet,” I repeated softly. “Melissa, I think I understand the story of creation in the Bible.”

  “Amanda, take the batteries out of your head and go back to sleep.”

  “No, really. I have to tell you before I forget. The Garden of Eden is a parable about the human condition. And the trinity is a parable about salvation. With the number three, nothing is in direct opposition to anything else. It’s a triangle.”

  “Amanda, you’re not becoming a Jesus freak?”

  “No, it’s a very Jewish story. Listen. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were equals. They were not opposites. And their fall from grace was, in reality, the construction of compulsory heterosexuality, which we mistakenly take for morality. Gender is only the story of how we create life. It’s not supposed to mean anything. Men and women were created different solely for the purpose of reproduction, so that no single person could create life. Because only God can create good without evil.”

  “I thought Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden because they were disobedient,” Melissa said sleepily. “Because they ate from the tree of knowledge after God told them not to.”

  “No. They were kicked out so that they could not also eat from the tree of life and become like God, immortal creators. The reason no single human being should be allowed to create life is because we are a combination of good and evil and power corrupts us. We might only want to create life in our own image and then have power over that life. We would become little Hitlers, creating Nuremberg rallies, wanting our stamp to be on everything. It’s dangerous enough when two people create a child, name it, and have power over it. Just like when Adam names all the animals and believes he now has dominion over them.”

  It was like the song “So Neat” on my favorite Partisans record, the 2001 EP. “I wanna have it all / gonna make the world just like me.”

  “Oh, man,” Melissa said. “A theology lesson and the meaning of life without so much as a cup of tea.”

  “In the first story of creation, God creates male and female together, both in God’s image, both equal. In the second story, God creates Adam alone, then Eve out of his rib, and gives Adam power over everything. Including Eve.”

  “And?”

  “The men who transcribed the Bible panicked when they saw that first story. They rewrote it so Eve was not Adam’s equal but created as an afterthought. The first story wasn’t even supposed to be in the Bible but accidentally got left in the manuscript.”

  “And you know all of this how?” Melissa asked, amused by my earnest yet impossible conviction.

  “Educated guess.” I waved my hand to sweep away her objections. “They write that Adam’s sin is having listened to the voice of his wife. And they have God say to Eve, ‘I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain shalt thou bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee,’ establishing compulsory heterosexuality with one sentence to cover up the fact that Eden was not a heterosexual paradise.”

  “You make it sound like a conspiracy.”

  “Isn’t it? Plus the two creation stories were probably written in reverse order, the second coming first, so they were obviously arranged to denigrate Eve. Do you think that means God really created Eve first?”

  “Take a breath, Amanda,” Melissa laughed, shutting her eyes. “You have a wonderful imagination.”

  “Listen. If heterosexuality were so natural, why did God have to tell them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply’? Why wouldn’t it just have happened? If heterosexual sex were predetermined and the only option, it wouldn’t occur to God to tell them to do that. Besides, it takes imagination to get back into Eden,” I murmured, my eyes getting heavy again. “Your imagination is the only thing that’s not constrained by time and space.”

  “Amanda, can I please go back to sleep? I promise to become your disciple later when I’m fully awake. Really, I think it’s lovely that you’re starting your own religion and I’m really chuffed you’d share it with me, but I’m almost unconscious. If you see a burning bush, put it out until a decent hour. By the way, I think you’re probably brilliant,” she confided, winking at me and rolling over to go back to sleep.

  TRACK 26 Heaven’s Inside

  “Anymore audiences with the Almighty?” Melissa asked first thing when she woke up. She checked the bandage on my hand and got up to look at my ankle. The swelling had gone down, and there was a bit of bruising. “How does it feel?”

  “Much better today.”

  “It’s not a bad sprain. I think you were more frightened than anything else.”

  I creased my brow. “Surely that’s not good enough. Not after a fall like that.”

  Melissa smiled. “Don’t worry. Your hand was sufficiently gory.”

  “Was it really?” I asked with some excitement.

  “Oh, yes,” Melissa assured me, “I nearly fainted.” She leaned down and kissed the top of my head. It was a friendly kiss, the kind she always gave me. I hoped I wasn’t giving off too much of a lesbian vibe. Not that there was anything wrong with my vibe, but I didn’t want her to think I was asking more from her than she could give. I liked our physical closeness and wanted her to continue to feel comfortable being affectionate with me.

  That night, I had a follow-up dream. I was in a tribe of people flooding out of the Garden of Eden. Only John Lennon and I remained separate. Everyone else joined one big group that dressed the same and gave arm salutes in a scene that looked like the Nuremberg rally. I said, “When they can choose to be anything at all, why do they choose to be sheep? And they’re not just sheep. They’re evil sheep.”

  John Lennon said, “Only an evil leader wants to make over the world in his own image.”

  Suddenly I was alone in the middle of a mystery. I picked up a ring lying at my feet, and its inscription said I was a detective and had the same ability to seek the truth as anyone else. I had a notebook and wrote my name: Detective!

  The only place I could go was a library with very limited space that the FBI had taken over. Entering, I realized I had wandered into hell. People were sitting on a bench suffering. They had been shrunken down to one thing, the behavior that had brought them here. This behavior now defined them. Then I noticed that not all of the people on the bench were suffering. Some people were in heaven, some in hell, but they were all on the same bench. Heaven and hell were a state of mind, not a specific location.

  Then the sentence “The images of childhood are so easily explained” came to me, and I was suddenly surrounded by bright colors. Curtains hanging in a window were two stripes of pink and purple. I was in Israel. The colors seemed mysterious and familiar at the same time. The answer was simple. The curtains were the colors of the bathing suit I had worn as a child. I’d seen it in old photographs.

  As I stood in the hot Israeli sun, an olive-skinned girl went around kissing everyone. She said, “We take things for granted. We say ‘no’ to living people!” We were in Jerusalem, Al-Quds, looking down at the Wailing Wall and across to the golden Dome of the Rock, Qubbat al-Sak
hra, standing near a beautiful, brunette soldier sitting in the grass with her Uzi. The girl continued to go from person to person, kissing each one and saying, “Good Shabbat.” She said that the message was simple: include everyone. Notice everyone. There is no great mystery to life, but we run around endlessly searching for meaning.

  TRACK 27 There She Goes

  The telephone rang while I was upstairs looping samples, experimenting with some bhangra beats, and I had the feeling I should answer it.

  “So there you are, mate,” Nick said. “I was looking for you.”

  “I’m still recording at Melissa’s. Where’ve you been?”

  “Manchester. I’m sorry I didn’t ring you. Wanna do something?”

  I didn’t want to tell her what had happened over the phone and asked her to meet me at the Bethnal Green station. I’d spent several days babying my ankle and wanted to go out. I rang Melissa’s mobile, and she said she’d meet me at Nick’s flat later.

  I didn’t have far to walk to reach the Hampstead tube. I took the Morden train south to Bank then changed from the Northern to the central line, which took me to Bethnal Green. Nick was waiting at the mouth of the station. She took her hands from the pockets of her leather jacket just long enough to give me a hug. She was wearing black mitts and the tips of her fingers were red with the cold. “Oi, what’s happened to your hand?”

  “I’ll tell you over a cuppa.” I wrapped the brown tweed coat I’d got at an Oxfam charity shop more tightly around myself.

  “Are you limping?” Nick was wearing bright royal-blue trainers. A light snow was falling as we walked to her flat. It was hushed and beautiful even with the surrounding dilapidation. I had the Jam’s “Dreams of Children” playing in my head because that song reminded me of Nick. “Something’s gonna crack on your dreams tonight. / You’re gonna crack on your dreams tonight.” I had a live version with a guitar riff during that last chorus that could break your heart. I’d recorded a song that sounded a bit like the studio version at the end, with backward guitars and keyboards fading out. I did it by playing my guitar riffs into the digital recorder using the “reverse” effect. It sounded ghostly.