Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  I half jog my way toward baggage claim, but when I see Roman I’m doused in icy water, cold from head to toe. I carve a smile on to my face, open my arms, pray they hold steady, and bury my head into his chest. I hear his heart, the steady beat that I hope will lure me back to sanity. I glance up and stare at his face, at the hazel-green eyes, the sideways grin. He looks like a man in love. The scream inside my head continues, rising in volume.

  Roman takes me home, to bed, where we reunite, having been denied eight weeks of each other’s bodies, and I try to find joy in him. You don’t deserve this. I want to whisper in his ear, Tell me I’m not a slut. Tell me I’m a good person. But I can’t unwire my own jaw to ask. You don’t deserve him. I know that! I know that. I’m choking on terror and self-loathing. I never deserved him, I know this now, and knowing scorches.

  But I smile. I’m astonished by my own acting abilities.

  A few hours afterward, at dinner, I feel something low in my stomach. It presses against my lower back and distends my abdomen. I groan and fold in half.

  “What’s wrong?” Roman asks, resting one hand on my back.

  I’m dying and I’m taking you with me.

  “I don’t know,” I whisper. I take a sip of water, trying to wash away the bitterness in my mouth. “Maybe it’s a UTI?” Maybe. I haven’t had sex in eight weeks and doesn’t that happen when you suddenly up and have it again? Stupid bitch, you know what this is. Think about it. About his hand right there on your thigh, about his tongue at your mouth. You did this. I did this.

  Roman drives me to the local VA hospital, where the doctor tells me I don’t have a UTI. I should be relieved but I’m not. My anxiety spikes. Roman rubs my back absently with one hand. I wonder if he can see me screaming. He says nothing.

  The ER doctor tells me to make an appointment with my primary if the pain doesn’t go away, so I do. I feel something rotting low in my stomach. I want to slice off the entire lower half of my body. I’ll lose the legs but at least the vagina will be gone.

  The doctor meets with me. Then a psychiatrist joins us. “This isn’t how these things happen,” they say. “You did nothing wrong,” they add with brows flexed in mild confusion. I did, I did, I did. I am complicit in my own punishment.

  “But we can do tests just to give you peace of mind,” they say. Yes, let’s do that. “And give you medication for your anxiety.” Yes, please. Please. Please. “And you’ll need to continue weekly therapy.” Yes, sure. Twice a week. Three times a week. Anything to dislodge this demon.

  But it will not budge.

  I have to go back to life with it still wrapped around my body, slowly splintering me from the inside. I have to go back to college classes filled with white noise. All my energy goes into the mask: a light smile, a bounce in my step. But my grades are slipping. There goes summa cum laude to my left. I’ll never get into my grad schools with just magna. What does it matter? What the fuck does it matter. I balk, twist, and smash my dreams onto the floor.

  My favorite history professor tries to talk me out of it. “Don’t let the Greek scare you away,” he says. We sit in his office as I change my career plans, shelving my academic pursuits. He sees great things for me. I see nothing now.

  “No, it’s okay,” I lie. “I’ll still be in history, I’ll just be a high school teacher. And it’ll give me more time to write. That’s what I really want to do anyway.” I try to console myself. Being a teacher would give me a lot more time to work on my fiction career, wouldn’t it?

  He leans back in his chair and for a brief moment he looks defeated. “Well,” he says with a sigh. “Don’t lose your love for the ancient world.” It’s a dismissal. I can leave now.

  I step out of the office and into an empty, dark room, and bow my head to cry. My heart is broken. I’m broken. I don’t see the point in putting myself back together again.

  * * *

  Sometimes, when I’m driving, the median looks very enticing to me. I could smash my car into it. It would be really easy and probably quick. I don’t think about the pain. I don’t want to die. I want silence. I dream of the afterward, of lying in a white, sterile hospital bed, alone, of white curtains and quiet beeping machines, and it seems so peaceful. It doesn’t occur to me that it’ll hurt. Possibly dying is secondary, an afterthought. A car jets in front of me on I-95 and I contemplate not hitting the brakes. It doesn’t occur to me that I could hurt another, too. I press the brakes more out of habit than need. I expect a rush of fear at the close miss, like the time the Subaru hydroplaned across the highway, or even the sudden relief at surviving a near accident, but there isn’t anything, especially not silence.

  Interim II

  And then, one singular, unparticular day, I sit up in bed and for the first time in over three months, I can breathe. The terror has dissipated. I hear nothing. I feel silence. I blink at the morning sunlight. Just like that, I’m me. No rhyme or reason, no trigger or indicator, nothing I’d be able to replicate or control. I float down the stairs, hover in the kitchen. I’d forgotten what normal feels like. No heavy knot in the stomach, no tense muscles, no jittery fingers and hands and feet. I stand in stillness. My chest expands.

  I’m me. Mostly. There’s a tiny quiver at the very bottom of me, a fear that it will come back and that if it does, I have no idea how to duplicate this sudden restoration. But overall, if I ignore that glaring detail, I’m restored. I smile. Genuinely. I smile so deeply my cheeks hurt.

  As I move forward, though, the world tastes different. The air lacks a certain bite. I’m still me, but I’ve grown a little less bright, like a gas lamp turned low. Since I’m no longer aiming for Ivy League grad school, I flag. I lose my pursuit and direction. No one really notices. That’s okay; I don’t want them to. I have an extra year of school now, a fifth year of undergrad as I finish some English credit classes. There’s no need for history teachers in Connecticut; I’m rerouted toward becoming an English teacher. Fine.

  I need a challenge, though. I knock tentatively on my creative writing professor’s door. I had taken a creative writing course with him once, my first year of college, and written a short story about a futurist American civil war, the protagonist an infantry woman, because women in combat arms seemed like science fiction in 2006.

  “The heart of this,” Tim had said in workshop, “is really about a woman in this massively male-dominated world, and her struggling with themes of masculinity and fitting in.”

  I snorted. “Sounds like the story of my life.” The class stared at me. I waved off my explanation with one hand. “I was in the Army and Iraq and all that.”

  “Oh my God.” He firmly planted one finger on the manuscript. “That’s what this is. That’s what this needs to be. Write that!”

  I took his advice and wrote a short piece involving a military rape victim forced to work with her rapist. The class didn’t know what to do with it, a silent workshop, a handful of undergrads refusing to make eye contact with me as they shuffled the papers. But Tim knew.

  “You really should do a creative thesis for the English Department,” he told me way back then, and I made a face, laughed it off. I had to be serious about my academic pursuits in history then. Writing was my dream, but I needed to be financially stable first. Writing doesn’t keep the lights on.

  But here I am now, hands clenched around my book-bag strap, nervously shifting weight from one foot to the other, because I need direction. He is thrilled that I’m finally interested and together we make something raw and ugly and simple, but it’s mine. It somehow feels good to get it out there into the air. It makes my reality something to mull over, to casually and openly deliberate over words like rape and trauma. There’s no place to hide here and, to my surprise, there’s a comfort in that.

  Tim tries to encourage me to keep writing, to apply to the university’s MFA program, but I’m too afraid to take that jump off the stern cliff of financial stability. No. I’ll be an English teacher and write on the side. I’ll squirrel aw
ay moments in dark hours of night to flesh out fiction characters and plots, when everyone else is sleeping. This is a plan, right? That’s sort of a future. I feel no flutter of excitement, though. No joy anymore. But I assume that happens to all adults, when their dreams skulk off to die in a forgotten corner somewhere.

  * * *

  And on an early October morning in 2011, I wear a white dress, a feminine full-skirt, off-the-shoulder gown, my long hair curled and coiled to one side. I clutch a bouquet, stare down the long aisle to the man by the altar, his hands clasped nervously in front of him. His smile grows. I barely feel my feet as I walk, eyes locked with his, and I forget everyone else in the room, the church, the world. My heart swells. I blink back tears and reach out my hand to touch him, my Roman. And when we kiss, now husband and wife, he slips me a little tongue just because he knows it’ll surprise and delight me. I break away with an unruly laugh, head thrown back, and I’m happy. Perhaps I’ll never be so happy again.

  The Bat

  Less than a year later that interim of sanity ends. In the late summer of 2012, a bat breaks into my bedroom and I have a mental breakdown. It happens a month after Dorian Gray dies at age eleven. The VA says those events are not connected, but I think they are. Dorian has always been there. When I thought I was okay, everything fine, fine, fine, but then not, there was always Dorian, soft and sturdy, his body against my legs. The more nervous I became, the more relaxed he grew, a vigilant sentinel of long white fur and dark eyes, watching everything so I didn’t have to.

  But then there was the cancer, sudden and devastating, and our last day was the same as our first, me lying on the dog bed beside him, resting my face close to his, so that our breaths intermingled, so he would know I was there. He passed there in the living room, quiet as he always was, forever the gentleman, now forever gone.

  So when one month later, a bat breaks into my bedroom, I go crazy.

  * * *

  It’s not instantaneous. I wake to the sound of thumping and half turn, one hand drifting down to the side of the bed to brush Dorian’s fur, then remember he’s not there. Freya, our Alaskan malamute puppy all grown up, is standing in the middle of the room, hopping up into the air at odd intervals. In the dark a thing zooms by her, swoops over the bed, loops around, and dives for the other side of the room. Freya jumps up, jaws open, trying to snatch it out of the air. I push Roman’s shoulder, trying to rouse him. “What the hell is a bird doing in here?”

  Roman rolls over, rubs his eyes, and leans back against his mountain of pillows, observing the scene. “That’s not a bird,” he says at last. “That’s a bat.”

  “What?” I squawk and hunch down on the bed, clutching a pillow over my head. “Get it out! Get it out!”

  He shrugs, a lot less concerned about this than I am. As if waking with bats doing aerial laps around the room is a perfectly normal thing. “Let Freya get it.”

  “She can’t! She’ll get rabies!”

  “She’s had her shots,” he reminds me.

  “That doesn’t mean she still can’t get rabies!”

  “That’s sort of exactly what it means,” he says drily.

  I’m clutching another pillow against my body, making a soft, downy fortress. “It could bite her and take out an eye!” I glare from the inside of my fort until he sighs dramatically, rolling out of bed. I follow him to the kitchen, half dragging Freya down the stairs. She’s the only one reluctant to leave.

  I hunker down on the kitchen floor, as if being closer to the ground will make me less of a target, even one floor down. I clutch Freya to me like a fur barrier. Roman comes up from the basement dressed in a camo jacket, hood up, string tied tight under his chin, and pulling on old gardening gloves. He holds a broom at the ready, bristle-side up. “Go to my mom’s. I’ll call you when it’s done.”

  And off he goes to hunt the bat, calling one of his friends for backup, and they ransack the house looking for the little creature or its friends or a nest, none of which they find, because the bat went out the same way it came in—through a tiny hole in the AC unit.

  Which is all kind of funny in the light of day as I tell my peers in my Alternate Route to Teacher Certification Program. It’s a good story, quirkier because I even snapped a picture of Roman decked out in his hunting gear. I pass around the phone with the picture and we laugh, until one of the students sits back in his chair, crosses one ankle over his knee, and says, “So did you go get a rabies shot?”

  I pocket my phone, smile flagging. “No. It didn’t bite us.”

  He shrugs. “That you know of. Their fangs are so small that they can bite you and you wouldn’t wake up or even know. That’s what the doctors told my uncle when they found a rabid bat in his house. Like over half of all bats have rabies, you know. Or maybe higher.”

  And just like that, I have rabies.

  Like my terror of HIV in Ireland, it is an all-consuming, irrational fear, an instantaneous anxiety that seizes my brain. It breeds nervous energy, forcing me to stay perpetually in motion, as if I can move away from the fear, physically separate myself from the terror.

  I convince Roman to go to the doctor with me, perversely comforted by the fact that he’s in this with me, he could be infected, too, but he lacks the same sense of urgency. As does the doctor, who tilts his head at me, concern pulling his brows together, but it’s not the right kind of worry. He doesn’t see the need for the vaccine, he says.

  Roman and the doctor watch me from across the little clinic room, as if in silent agreement, wholly aware of something I’m not, exchanging sideways glances and excluding me as they shift their weight, glance over my head.

  I squirm in the examination chair, the paper sheet crackling, and finally admit, “I’ve had anxiety before.” This is an understatement. I remember the unwavering terror that devoured my every waking moment for those three months in 2010. I taste a metallic tang at the back of my throat and know it’s panic. Not so much of rabies, but of those three months, because I don’t think I can weather it again.

  “I used to take lorazepam for the anxiety,” I say and the doctor nods, as if he’s already a step ahead of me. It’s the best I can ask for. I can’t push for the vaccine because I know I’m crazy. I can feel the irrational thoughts wiggling around in my brain, taste their off-ness, but the ability to decipher their illogicality is only made more frustrating by the inability to fight them.

  I shuffle out of the doctor’s office, humiliation sprawled across the back of my neck. Roman drives us straight to the pharmacy because I demand it, because I’m hoping to cut off the growing madness before it fully starts. I stand in the Walgreens line, my hands already dancing, fingers bouncing. Roman wraps an arm around my waist, pulling me against his chest as we wait, trying to craft his body into a weapon of comfort, but my muscles are already clenching, growing rigid, and I ache for the medicine, for the white fog of oblivion, anything to cut off what I know is coming.

  The pharmacist finally hands me the bottle and I crack open the top, taking two pills right there at the counter, checking the time, knowing how long it will take to settle in. There is a sense of relief at the chalky taste on my tongue. I’ve got this under control, I think. I can stop this.

  But I can’t.

  Dirty Little Whore

  I used to love male attention. I adored my breasts, the expensive bras that would push them up out of a shirt, straining against a blouse. I loved the validation that came with the male gaze, the way men turned in their chairs to notice me, to grin at me, to catcall, to seek my attention. Being sexy felt powerful.

  Until it didn’t.

  Like a light switch flipped, suddenly I despise sexy. Propelled by an anxiety awoken after the encounter with that random bat, the irrational fear happens abruptly, overnight, and suddenly I feel that gaze like an accusatory finger pointed in my face. Grins are now sneers, catcalls send me into a tailspin, and it all makes me uneasy; I’m suffocating and it’s my own fault. They can lift their noses like d
ogs and sniff out the dirty on me. I think of the night at a casino when the man next to me leaned in and I felt his skin touch mine, the sweat of his palm settling against my lower back, and I wanted to rip off all my skin then, ball it up and throw it away in the trash. I twisted away, mumbled something, but I wanted to scream, Don’t touch me! Why do you keep touching me? Brushing, stroking, converging, touching, as if I am a thing to be handled, examined, cracked open.

  The thought of my breasts now makes me queasy. CrossFit adds tight muscles to my chest and reduces their swell. I revel in the loss. I begin to wear bralettes, ones that bind my breasts close to my body until they’re nonexistent. I change my wardrobe, going Bohemian-chic, my slender frame swallowed by fabric, the curves drowned out, well hidden, and I turn women’s heads, who love the fashion, the edginess.

  I obsess over my diet, carefully restricted and regimented, giving up sugar for months on end, whittling down to a size two and loving it. I love the sense of power that comes with the discipline—the inflexibility that makes me thinner and thinner and this is mine to control. I devote myself to CrossFit and develop squared shoulders, trapezius muscles visible under a shirt neckline, a waist that thickens with muscle, my quads round and hard. “Men don’t want their women to look like that,” people whisper to me. “Men don’t like women who are too muscular,” they say. Well, good.

  I read in a magazine that men don’t like short hair so I shave half my head. Women stop me to compliment it, to comment on my entire look, and I’ve found a way to be pretty, to be fashion-forward but also slip under the radar, because most men don’t notice the muscular girl with the flat chest and shaved hair, and fucking good. That’s the point.