by Aimee Pogson
I wonder what I am meant to take away from this film and why we are showing it to children. I think about the line between the carnal and the civilized. When I close my eyes, I see the man who never returned phone calls. I see his hands, the freckles that dotted them. I feel the rough patches of skin at the tip of each finger, along each knuckle. I sense the way love can be endless, deep, consuming, terrifying, and the way he embraced that love, expecting me to do the same. Then I remember jumping from the bedroom window, spraining my ankle, and dragging myself on despite the pain.
Am I supposed to understand the were-man, or am I supposed to fear him, to be afraid of ending up like him?
There is a salmon on the coffee table, reclining beside the candy dish. For a moment, I consider touching the salmon, running my fingers along its scales, looking into its empty eyes. So many salmon and I haven’t truly touched a single one. I lean forward until I can see each individual scale, the patterns of color. I reach out my hand, straining toward the salmon, and then stop, unable to bring myself to touch the fish. I lean back against the couch, study the salmon, and wonder how much longer this will go on.
Red Ballooning
I don’t know where to start, but I love him, and so I slice off my ear. There is nothing more true to ecstasy—all those starry, starry nights—than an ear wrapped in tissue paper, tucked in a box, and sent through the US mail.
If it fits, it ships. He’ll receive it in exactly three to five days.
Balance comes from the ears but also from something deeper, because I was often unbalanced before I met him, and I’m unbalanced now but also very, very balanced. So balanced it’s like I’m standing straight on a trampoline with a tray of red wine while everyone else flies off in chaotic directions. It’s like I’m in a flat land with flat people, and everyone is talking in whispers, and I’m there, too, flat, beautifully flat, but also very colorful, like a peacock.
What I’m saying is my sense of balance hasn’t changed since I lost my ear. I have only a bandage now and a lot of hats to cover my deficiency, if you prefer to call it that.
He received my ear, and he says it’s nice, but can I maybe not do it again. He’s concerned about infections and public opinion, but I tell him not to worry. I never consider what other people think, and I have enough hydrogen peroxide to sanitize a thousand missing ears.
I take my balance and imbalance and sit by my living room window, watching the neighbors as they walk by my apartment building on their way back from the grocery store. It is late October: the leaves are changing, and the sun is low in the sky, casting my neighbors in an orange haze. The people are lovely in their complexity, and I wonder about the way their soft skin winds itself around their bodies, enclosing organs, minds, a whole lifetime of experiences. It gives me shivers, and I think of him, the way he surveyed my body one night, my head down to my legs, and told me to be careful when I was driving. You have to take care of yourself, he said, you’re too important. And in that moment I knew that I was—that I was a body, mind, and more.
I spread my hand across the windowsill. I stick my tongue out and examine my reflection in the window. These are superficial choices, I know: the hand I use to hold him or the tongue I use to kiss, to taste-test the food I so lovingly prepare for him. Which will he appreciate most when he opens his mailbox, home from work and tired? Which will reveal the ever-expanding part of me that glows for him?
I send him the tip of my tongue as a sign of eyes-closed kisses, the soft exploration of one mouth by another, and as a gesture of my selflessness. I can always get by with one hand, but I have no backup tongues. For him, I send my one and only.
I go to the mall with my best friend. We pass by the soft pretzel booth, even though I love them and all their glorious saltiness. We pass the cookies and the sandwiches, and my friend gives me a sidelong glance, strangely drawn to my tongue-less mouth but too polite to stare. Yet she can be polite for only so long. We’ve known each other since third grade, and she’s not timid. She takes me to the pretzel booth, and I politely decline while she buys herself a pretzel, tears it apart, and shoves it in her mouth right in front of me.
“Where’s your tongue?” she asks. “What did you do with it?”
“I mailed it,” I say. “And just the tip.” My words come out garbled, but I have nothing to be ashamed of.
“Of course you did. Did it ever occur to you that maybe you needed your tongue?”
I say nothing. Her questions are logical, and my answers are not. I’m not stupid. I knew I needed my tongue, but I also knew my tongue was a small gesture in a grand scheme. It was nothing really.
“This is what they do in some South American countries,” she informs me, chewing with her mouth open. This is not her most ladylike moment. “They kidnap people who might have money, demand ransom, and then mail the families the victims’ tongues and other body parts to prove they’re serious.” She continues to chew. There’s a fleck of pretzel on her lip. “Is that what you’re going for here?”
To my surprise, she has said it almost perfectly. “Yes,” I attempt to say. “That’s exactly what I’m doing, minus the ransom. I think of it as a gift.”
“You couldn’t just send flowers?” She shakes her head.
I know what she’s getting at. There are so many people who self-destruct for the sake of another, but this feels different. I am not so much self-destructing as I am expanding, pushing my body as far as it will go until it can hold both him and me, a cocoon of air and organs and packing supplies.
“No,” I say. “Flowers simply aren’t good enough.”
Afterward, I drive home slowly, angry drivers behind me, and I admire the sky, the clouds, the sun, the trees. It is all so very, very bright, and I am so lucky. And the more I give, the luckier I feel. I touch my hand to my forehead, consider my options.
An eye like a marble. An orb of bluish green. I send one and keep one. Although I know it’s not possible, I hope that when he looks into my eye, he can see all that I see—the way the world has become impossibly sunny and I am forced to squint because whatever I do, I don’t want to look away.
I try to send a kidney, but the post office won’t let me. “It fits,” I say, placing my neatly wrapped package in their one-size-fits-all box. It is soft and wet, and I have to move carefully for the sake of the kidney and my stitches, but I am determined.
“It’s perishable,” the woman at the counter says. “Among other things.”
I want to explain that I’ve been sending perishable items all along, but it turns out that’s part of the problem. My flat-rate boxes have been oozing unsightly liquids, emitting unseemly smells. “But that’s natural,” I say. “You know how nature works.”
From the look she gives me, she does not know how nature works and doesn’t especially want to know.
“The mail is delivered in the rain and the snow and sleet and hail,” I plead. “Surely you can handle a little oozy box.”
“No,” she says. “We do not want to handle your oozy box.”
There’s no way around it, and I walk back outside, kidney held against my chest. The other customers in line gawk at me, some trying to see what I’m holding, some barely concealing their disdain at a repressive postal system that won’t let a well-meaning patron mail her package when her item clearly fits. The whole world understands how I’ve been wronged.
Out on the step, I call him on my cell phone. I explain how I tried to mail a box, and it was going to be such a nice surprise for him, but the post office wouldn’t let me.
“It’s okay,” he says. “You need your kidney anyway. How else are you going to filter out all those toxins?”
“What toxins?” I ask. “I don’t have a toxic bone in my body.” And it’s true; I feel like everything ugly and mean has been filtered away, leaving a shimmering me.
He laughs at my answer, and that’s enough. Somehow, some way, I’ll get that kidney to him, but for now I have his voice in my ear, guiding me on my walk
home. Once there, I separate the tips of my toes from my feet, little pellets of appreciation, wrap them in a napkin, and place them in my jacket pocket where I won’t lose them. Another gift, I think. Another gift for another time.
The days are growing crisp with impending winter. I go for long walks, my jacket wrapped snugly around me. Soon it will be snowing; I can see it in the clouds, their gray downiness in the distance, slowly approaching, but I don’t mind. Like everything else in my life, winter is burned gold around the edges by a light I can’t see but can certainly feel.
I received a package in the mail the other day. A kidney carefully folded in Bubble Wrap and placed in Tupperware, not oozing. A kidney to replace my kidney. His kidney. I sensed solidarity in his gesture, solidarity against an unjust postal system and a generally hostile world. It felt good to have someone on my side, although I shouldn’t have been surprised.
I am entering a new phase of my life, and he is in the middle and around the edges, and I’m not ashamed at all because I feel full and billowy. I could empty myself of everything—lungs, intestines, pancreas, heart—and there would always be more to give. I am like a starfish. I feel like I am capable of regenerating forever.
I pass by a party store and spot a collection of cherry-red balloons. My body is a collection of impulses, and I pass through the door, bells clanging, and buy all those balloons. I carry them down the street, helium hearts begging to be set free, and people turn to look. They smile despite the coming snow and the cold.
I take them to the park, my red entourage, and when I’m sure no one is looking, I spill the toes out of my pocket and tie one to the end of each balloon. I hold the balloons for a moment, admiring the way they stand out against the sky, wishing I could give more, wishing I could attach the piece of my brain that is responsible for all this swirling, golden joy—but that would require major surgery, and I simply can’t afford it. I point the balloons in his general direction and set them free, watching as they tiptoe across the sky, a cloud of red ballooning as far as the eye can see, a scarlet wing that catches everything and holds it close.
Oh, Dr. Brown
He startles my body in ways I didn’t know it could be startled. Drinks of water, vinegar, and cayenne pepper make my stomach turn, leave me light-headed and chilled. Before I leave he feeds me tiny chocolate bars laced with lavender and salt.
I am cleansing, or so he tells me. When this is all said and done I will be a better person, more in charge of my life than I have ever been before.
I can accept the fact that I am a person in need of cleansing. I go home at night and my apartment is falling apart around me. The dishes need to be washed, and some of them have been on the counter for a very long time. The floor needs to be swept. The edges of my bathtub are turning brown with soap: blue soap, yellow soap, all of those colored bars that have washed me clean, but have never been washed off the tub. There is a leak in my bedroom roof, and the floor below is always damp. I have buckets I could put beneath the leak, but I never think of them. Instead, I gaze in wonder when I come into my bedroom one day and see a small orange fungus rising from the carpet, reaching toward the sky, magnificent in its newfound life, born in a place it never imagined it would be.
The man who cleanses me asks me to refer to him as Doctor. Dr. Brown. I assume that Brown is not his real name, just as I assume that he is not really a doctor. His office is in the basement of his house. His house is in a shady part of the city, a neighborhood where the houses seem to slant to the side, exhausted with their place in this life, and many of them have boarded-up windows, victims of rocks and baseballs, kids who roam these streets with nothing better to do than to heave whatever happens to be in sight.
This is not a neighborhood I would ever drive through with my car doors unlocked. And yet I routinely come here, slip down into the basement of this man’s falling-down house, and disrobe.
Sometimes I feel that my priorities are skewed.
More often I feel that I never really had any priorities to begin with. Everything I do has been dictated to me by an outside force: parents, friends, men I have dated who have tried to hijack my life, often with the best intentions. “Please lock your apartment door when you go to sleep at night,” they said. “You never know who could try to get in.”
I would awaken on those nights, hearing their voices in my head, knowing that my door was still unlocked, and I would hear sounds, all sorts of sounds coming from the living room. Many of the sounds were in my head, but some of them weren’t. The apartment building was old with plenty of bending, creaking parts. And I would lay there listening, feeling more curious than afraid. If someone were to come in, who would it be? What would be this person’s purpose in my apartment at this time of night?
I was never frightened.
Dr. Brown leads me down the steps into his office. It smells old and moldy, like damp newspapers and dirt, just the way a basement should. One wall is fully covered with shelves, which I imagine once held a family’s pantry. Jars of jelly. Boxes of rice. Can upon can of soup and vegetables. Now the shelves house Dr. Brown’s supplies: vinegar, pepper, apple juice, and many other bottles of liquids that are unmarked, unnamed. This is where most of the cleansing takes place.
In the center of the room is a massage table. Dr. Brown insists that cleansing a body begins with cleansing each muscle, ridding it of all the tension a muscle can harbor. He says that he trained to be a masseuse for many years. I had never had a massage before I met Dr. Brown. I have no way of knowing if his words or fingers are telling me the truth. All I know is that when I lie down on the table, I come close to losing myself in his touch, but I have never completely lost myself, just as I have never completely lost myself with anyone. I am simply there, hovering on the edge, feeling my muscles relax, watching the flickering of the candles out of the corner of my eye.
There are candles, too. There are always candles when Dr. Brown is involved.
He works in silence. I wish there could be music, but Dr. Brown says that music would interfere with the cleansing. He kneads my shoulders, the muscles along my back. He tells me I am very afraid. “That is the root of your troubles,” he says. “All that fear.”
I listen to him because he is my doctor. I drink the cleansing liquids he mixes for me in glasses painted with gaudy yellow flowers, the kind of glasses my grandma had before she modernized her kitchen and never turned back. I wait patiently as my body turns upon itself, roiling in shock as it digests the unmarked liquids it has been served.
When I am this sick, I feel apart from my body, a spirit on the ceiling watching myself convulse. I wonder if this is what it means to cleanse, to push your body so far to the edge that your soul goes running. I could ask Dr. Brown, but I don’t have the strength to speak. My thoughts break into a million pieces. Words collapse.
Later, in the safety of my decrepit apartment, I consider this notion of fear. I have never thought of myself as afraid, but it might be so. There is plenty in the world to be afraid of: burglars, rapists, murderers, rare and deadly diseases, car accidents, leprechauns, death. And yet I have never really considered any of these things a threat.
I pour myself a glass of cranberry juice and vodka and think back.
I once stepped into oncoming traffic. There were so many cars, cars upon cars, and I was tired of waiting. Brakes squealed, horns blared, but I made it to the other side.
I once had a cat that had kittens. I remember watching her get larger and larger, her belly extending beyond her whiskers, throwing off her balance. Everyone who saw her was happy. Kittens, they told me. Soon your apartment is going to be filled with playing kittens. It’s going to be so much fun.
I didn’t see the fun, though. When I saw her waddling toward me, purring, eager to be petted, I felt only impending doom. My apartment wasn’t a place for kittens. It wasn’t even a place for me. I imagined them slipping into my soapy tub, breaking their tiny legs, and howling into the shower walls, shrieks of pain I wouldn�
�t hear because I would be sleeping, or worse, not even home. I imagined them climbing the curtains, shredding the material with their claws, and then falling to the floor, unaware of how dangerous a shredded curtain could be. I couldn’t follow these future kittens. I couldn’t protect them from the world or even from themselves.
And so I gave my cat away before the kittens were even born. I was sad to see her go, but I felt weightless at the thought of a world without her.
And that was nothing compared with the pregnancy scare.
When I finish my cranberry vodka, I talk to the bird that replaced my cat. I tell him all about my day, my visit to Dr. Brown, the fact that the root of all my problems is that I’m afraid. The bird doesn’t answer me. It’s not even a talking bird. It’s only a canary I bought at the pet store for fifteen dollars, a deal according to the salesman, despite the fact that there were many other canaries, each identical to my own.
I am waiting for Dr. Brown to mix me my cleansing drink when the police storm his basement. Before Dr. Brown even knows how to react, men in uniforms weighed down by pockets, so many pockets filled with radios and handcuffs and who knows what else, pin him to the wall and read him his rights. I watch the whole scene in silence. I’m not frightened.
After Dr. Brown is led away, one of the officers approaches me, asks if I’m all right. “All right?” I say. “Of course I’m all right. That was my doctor.”
“He’s not really a doctor.” The officer looks me over. “We should take you to the hospital.”
I ignore his suggestion. “If he’s not a doctor, then what is he?”
“He’s a scam artist.”
I wonder what part of my treatment was a scam. Dr. Brown may not have been a doctor, but he made me feel better, sometimes. And he tried to understand me. Wasn’t that the first part of healing? Understanding?