Her Body and Other Parties

by Carmen Maria Machado

“DENIAL”: Stabler finds the police report for his wife’s rape. It’s so old that he has to call in a favor from a guy in the records department. The sound of the paper scraping against the thin manila envelope slows Stabler’s heart.

  “COMPETENCE”: Stabler and Benson respond to a report of a rape in Central Park. When they get there, the mutilated body has already been taken to the medical examiner’s office. A confused junior cop is busy rolling yellow crime scene tape from tree to tree. “Weren’t you just here?” he asks them.

  “SILENCE”: Benson and Stabler grab beers at a pub down the street from the station. They hold the frosted mugs tightly in their hands, leave glossy, sweating prints that look like angels. They say nothing.

  SEASON 4

  “CHAMELEON”: Abler and Henson respond to a report of a rape in Central Park. They examine the mutilated body. “Cult,” says Abler. “Occultists,” says Henson. “A cult of occultists,” they say in unison. “Take the body away.”

  “DECEPTION”: Henson sleeps through every night. She wakes up refreshed. She eats a sesame seed bagel with chive cream cheese for breakfast, and with it a mug of green tea. Abler tucks in his kids and spoons his wife, who laughs in her sleep. When they get up, she relates to him the very funny joke from her dream, and he laughs, too. The children make pancakes. The hardwood floors are flooded with pools of light.

  “VULNERABLE”: For three days in a row, there is not a single victim in the entire precinct. No rapes. No murders. No rape-murders. No kidnappings. No child pornography made, bought, or sold. No molestations. No sexual assaults. No sexual harassments. No forced prostitution. No human trafficking. No subway gropings. No incest. No indecent exposures. No stalking. Not even an unwanted dirty phone call. Then, in the gloaming of a Wednesday, a man wolf-whistles at a woman on her way to an AA meeting. The whole city releases its long-held breath, and everything returns to normal.

  “LUST”: Abler and Henson are sleeping together, but no one knows. Henson is the best lay that Abler’s ever had. Henson’s had better.

  “DISAPPEARING ACTS”: “What are you doing here again?” the victim’s grandmother asks them. Benson looks at Stabler, and Stabler at Benson, and they turn, confused, back to her. “I already told you everything I know,” the old woman says, waving a gnarled hand at them dismissively. She slams the door so hard a flowerpot jumps off the porch railing and lands on the lawn. “Did you come and see her?” Benson asks Stabler. He shakes his head. “You?” he asks her. Inside, a Mills Brothers record starts up with pops and scratches. Shine little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer. “No,” Benson says. “Never.”

  “ANGELS”: Abler’s sons bring home perfect grades and don’t even need braces. Henson’s many lovers bring her to increasingly ascending levels of ecstatic transcendence vis-à-vis the clitoris, vis-à-vis asking her what she wants, yes, what she, yes, what, yes yes yes fuck yes.

  “DOLLS”: The bells ring, ring, ring through the night, the peals stripping skin from Benson’s body, or that’s how it feels, anyway. Faster, faster, go faster. “I need to sleep,” Benson says. “I need to sleep to go faster.” That makes no sense. We never get to sleep. We never sleep. We tirelessly pursue justice at all hours. “Don’t you remember needing sleep?” Benson asks wearily from her unwashed sheets. “You were human, once.” No no no no no no no no.

  “WASTE”: There are so many notches in Benson’s headboard—so many successes, so many failures, maybe she should have kept them apart?—that the wood looks like it’s been chewed away by termites. When the two-tone beat sounds, the chips and shavings tremble on her carpet and nightstand.

  “JUVENILE”: “Five-year-olds murder six-year-olds,” Benson says dully, the skin beneath her eyes dusky ash from lack of sleep.

  “People can be monsters, or vulnerable as lambs. They—no, we—are perpetrators and victims at the same time. It takes so little to tip the scale one way or the other. This is the world we live in, Stabler.” She sips noisily on her Diet Coke. She tries to look away from Stabler’s wet eyes.

  “RESILIENCE”: Benson watches a lot of TV on her days off. She gets an idea. She spreads a line of salt along her threshold, on the windowsills. That night, for the first time in months, the girls-with-bells-for-eyes stay away.

  “DAMAGED”: Stabler rubs his wife’s shoulders. “Can we talk?” She shakes her head. “You don’t want to talk?” She nods. “You want to talk?” She shakes her head. “You don’t want to talk?” She nods. Stabler kisses her hair. “Later. We’ll talk later.”

  “RISK”: Abler and Henson solve their ninth case in a row, and their captain takes them out for celebratory steaks and cocktails. Abler gnaws on hunks of steak too big for his gullet, Henson polishes off one dirty martini after another. Ten of them. Eleven. A man on the opposite side of the restaurant, who has been nibbling birdlike on a Caesar salad, begins to choke. He turns blue. A stranger delivers the Heimlich, and a half-chewed wad of meat lands on the table of a lifelong teetotaler who is starting to feel a little strange. “I feel like I’ve had twelve drinks,” she says, giggling, hiccupping. She has. Henson drives Abler home, and they laugh. Thirteen blocks from the restaurant, they grope at each other, kissing as they stumble out of the car. Henson puts Abler’s hand on her breast, and her nipple tightens.

  “ROTTEN”: Someone keeps leaving sacks of perfectly ripe produce in a trash can. Henson frequently finds herself pulling it out, taking it home, scrubbing the beets hard. How crazy. How weird to let a good thing go to waste.

  “MERCY”: The gunman lets all of the hostages go, including himself.

  “PANDORA”: Benson is lonely without the bells. Her apartment is so quiet. She stands in her doorway, staring down at the white line. She takes her big toe and probes it. She remembers being at the beach with her mother when she was a child and burning her feet on the hot, smooth sand. She pushes her toe, breaking the line, and says, “Oops,” but doesn’t really mean it. The children come rushing at her like a flash flood rolling through a narrow gorge. Their bells ring chaotic, gleeful and rapturous and angry, like a swarm of euphoric bees. They tickle her skin with their desperation. She has never felt so loved.

  “TORTURED”: You are the only one we trust, the girls-with-bells-for-eyes say to Benson. Not that other one. Benson assumes they mean Stabler.

  “PRIVILEGE”: Abler and Henson notice the bullet casing buried in the dirt. They notice the smear of blood near the door frame, the orientation of the street. They look at each other and know that they’re each calculating the sunlight on this avenue at the time of the crime. By the time they get inside, they know to arrest the wife. They don’t even have to ask her any questions.

  “DESPERATE”: “If you are dead, you can see everything,” Benson says to the girls-with-bells-for-eyes. “Tell me who the others are. The—the doppelgängers. Why are they so much better at everything than me and Stabler? Tell me, please.” The bells ring and ring and ring.

  “APPEARANCES”: Benson sees Henson coming out of the precinct. Her stomach gnarls. The same face, but prettier. The same hair, but bouncier. She must find out what kind of products she uses. Before she kills her.

  “DOMINANCE”: “You’re a lunatic,” Henson says, struggling against the handcuffs, and ropes, and chair, and chains. Benson leaves Stabler another message. “My partner is going to come and get me, you’ll see,” Henson says. “He’ll come for me.”

  “FALLACY”: “Stabler will come and back me up. He knows what you’ve been doing. Stealing our cases. Pretending to be us.”

  “FUTILITY”: Stabler pulls out his cell phone as the ringtone dies. 14 New Voicemails. He can’t do it, he can’t. The phone buzzes in his hand like an insect. 15. He turns it off.

  “GRIEF”: Abler comes for Henson. Of course he does. He loves her. Benson watches as he gently unties the ropes, unwraps the chains, unlocks the handcuffs, and lets her stand up from the chair on her own. Benson is holding her gun in her hand. She unloads three bullets into each of them, not expecting much.
They keep moving as if nothing were happening. They foxtrot down the street and out of sight.

  “PERFECT”: “Detective, how can you not account for bullets missing from your gun? What are you listening to? Benson! […] No, I can’t hear it. […] There’s no sound, what are you talking about?”

  “SOULLESS”: “Father Jones,” Benson says, her forehead pressing into the rough carpet in his foyer, “something is really wrong with me.” He puts his tumbler down, sits next to her. “Yeah,” he says. “I know the feeling.”

  SEASON 5

  “TRAGEDY”: Miles away from the precinct, a teenage boy and his seven-year-old sister drop dead in the middle of their walk home from school. When they are autopsied, bullets are pulled from the purple meat of their organs, though there are no entrance wounds on either of their bodies. The medical examiner is baffled. The bullets clink clink clink clink clink clink in the metal dish.

  “MANIC”: The DA laughs and laughs. She laughs so hard she coughs. She laughs so hard she pees a little. She falls down onto the floor and does a little quarter-roll, still laughing. There is a knock on the bathroom door, and Benson pushes open the door, uncertainly. “Are you all right? The jury has come back. Are you—are you okay?”

  “MOTHER”: “Your mother called today,” Stabler’s wife says to him. “Please call her back so I don’t have to make an excuse for you.” Stabler looks up from his desk, where the manila envelope is resting, so anemically thin he wants to scream. He looks over at the mother of his children, the hollow at the base of her throat, the fine fringe of her eyelashes, the fat zit on her chin that she is probably minutes from popping. “I need to talk to you,” he says.

  “LOSS”: “You have to understand,” says Father Jones. “I loved her. I loved her more than I have loved everything. But she was sad, so sad. She couldn’t bear to be here anymore. She saw too much.”

  “SERENDIPITY”: Father Jones shows Benson how to pray. She clasps her hands together like a child, because that is the last time she tried it. He talks about opening her mind. She pulls her knees up to her chest. “If I open my mind any further, they’ll crowd out everything.” When he asks her what she means, she just shakes her head.

  “COERCED”: “I made it up,” the woman says dully. Benson looks up from her yellow legal pad. “Are you certain?” she asks. “Yes,” the woman says. “Start to finish. I certainly, definitely made it up from start to finish.”

  “CHOICE”: Outside of the courtroom, protesters shove and shout, the wooden dowels of their signs knocking noisily against one another. It sounds like percussion. The worst percussion. Benson and Stabler use their bodies to shield the woman, who sobs and shuffles. Benson looks left, looks right. Shots. The woman crumples. Her blood runs down a storm drain, and she dies with her eyes half-open, an interrupted eclipse. Benson and Stabler feel the beat at the same time, down beneath the pavement, beneath the screaming and the panicked crowd and the signs and the woman dead, dead, there it is, the one-two, and they look at each other. “You can hear it, too,” Stabler accuses hoarsely, but before Benson can answer, the shooter takes out another protester. Her sign falls facedown in the blood.

  “ABOMINATION”: The DA rolls down the hill in her dreams, stumbling, tumbling, rumbling down, down in the deep. In her dream, there is thunder, but the thunder is the color of rhubarb and it comes in twin booms. Every time the thunder sounds, the grass blades change shape. Then, beneath her body, the DA sees Benson, lying on her back, touching herself, laughing. The DA dreams her clothes off, and dreams herself rolling her body against Benson’s, and the thunder rolls, too, except not really; it’s more walking. Dum-dum. Dum-dum. Dum-dum. The DA comes, and wakes. Or maybe wakes, then comes. In the afterburn of the dream, she is alone in her bed, and the window is open, the curtains fluttering in the breeze.

  “CONTROL”: “Why did you look it up?” Stabler’s wife asks. “Why? All I wanted was to bury it. I want it to be hidden. Why did you do it? Why?” She cries. She pummels her fists into a giant, overstuffed throw pillow. She begins to walk from one end of the room to the other, holding her arms so tightly to her torso that Stabler is reminded of a man who once came to the precinct, covered in blood. He held his arms like this, too, and when he let them drop, his wounded abdomen opened up and his stomach and intestines peeked out, as if they were ready to be born.

  “SHAKEN”: “Hey,” Benson says to the DA, smiling. The DA’s hands squeeze tightly into themselves. “Hi,” she says quickly before spinning on her heel and walk-running in the opposite direction.

  “ESCAPE”: The girl staggers into the precinct wearing nothing but a burlap sack. Stabler gives her a cup of water. She drinks it in a single gulp, and then vomits onto his desk. The contents: said water, four nails, splinters of plywood, and a laminated slip of paper with a code on one side that seems to indicate it came from a library book. The things she says are disjointed, but familiar; Benson recognizes a quote from Moby-Dick, and another from The Price of Salt. They put the girl in a foster home, where she continues to express her grief and lamentations through everyone else’s words.

  “BROTHERHOOD”: Stabler only ever wanted daughters when he first married his wife. He’d had a brother. He knew. Now, he is paralyzed with fear for them. He wishes they were never born. He wishes they were still floating safely in the unborn space, which he imagines to be grayish-blue, like the Atlantic, studded with star-like points of light, and thick as corn syrup.

  “HATE”: Stabler’s wife has not spoken to him since the manila folder. She chops vegetables with a large knife, and he would rather she stick it in his gut than continue the sparking silence. “I love you,” he says to her. “Forgive me.” But she keeps chopping. She puts clean slits in the stippled plastic cutting board. She lops off the heads of carrots. She undoes the cucumbers.

  “RITUAL”: Benson goes to a new age shop in the Village. “I need a spell,” she says to the proprietor, “to find what I am seeking.” He taps a pen against his chin for a few moments, and then sells her: four dried beans of unknown origin, a small white disk that proves to be a sliver of rabbit bone, a tiny vial that appears empty—“the memory of a young woman losing her virginity,” he says—a granite basin, a wedge of dried clay from the banks of the Hudson.

  “FAMILIES”: Stabler invites Benson over to his house for Thanksgiving. Benson offers to help pull the guts from the turkey, something she always wanted to do as a child. Stabler’s wife gives her a bright orange bowl, leaves to attend to her squabbling children. Benson notices that Stabler’s wife is not speaking to Stabler. She sighs, shakes her head. Benson sticks her hand deep into the turkey’s guts. Her fingers push through gristle and meat and bones and close around something. She pulls. Out of the turkey comes a string of entrails, on which are suspended tiny bells, slick with blood. The meal is a great success. There is a photo of it on Stabler’s hard drive. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is having a very nice time.

  “HOME”: Benson and Stabler go to the New York Public Library. They show the feral girl’s photo to the librarians. One of them says she doesn’t know her, but her eyes drift upward when she says this. Benson knows that she is lying. She follows the librarian to the break room and shoves her up against a vending machine. Inside, bags of chips and pretzels rustle. “I know you know her,” Benson says. The woman bites her lip, then takes Benson and Stabler down to the basement. She pushes open a metal door to an old boiler room, from which hangs a broken padlock. A cot stands against a far wall, stacks and stacks of books make a tiny metropolis all over the floor. Benson flips open a cover, then another. All of them have a red stamp: WITHDRAWN. The librarian pulls the gun out of Stabler’s holster. Stabler shouts. Benson turns around just in time for a fine red mist to paint her skin.

  “MEAN”: “How could you possibly let her get your gun?” Benson yells at Stabler. “How could you be looking at books when there was a kidnapping librarian in the room?” he yells back. “Sometimes—” she starts angrily, but her voice trails
off.

  “CARELESS”: The captain takes the last photo down from the bulletin board. He wants a drink more than he has in many years. “All it would have taken,” he says, his voice rising with every syllable, “for ONE WOMAN to survive would have been my detectives not being ASLEEP,” here he slams the photo down on the desk with more force than had actually killed her, “on the JOB.” Benson looks down at her legal pad, where she has anagrammed and anagrammed the serial killer’s clue, never succeeding.

  “SICK”: This is how it went. The girl was sick with prophecy. She touched the arm of young Ben Jones, later to be Father Jones, before she knelt herself to death off a Brooklyn rooftop. He carried it inside of his body for decades. Stabler was the one to restrain him when he freaked out during Mass, and now had it, too. He sees his children, projected into their terrifying futures. He sees his wife, living long and always remembering. He cannot see Benson, though. Something shades his vision. She is smoke, elusive.

  “LOWDOWN”: Stabler is grocery shopping with his oldest daughter when he sees a man picking up apples, examining them closely, and setting them back down on the pile. He recognizes him. The man looks up. He recognizes Stabler, too. He calls him by his first name, except it’s not his first name, really. “Bill!” he says. “Bill!” He looks at Stabler’s daughter. Stabler grabs her arm and pulls her into the next aisle. “Bill,” the man says, sounding excited, knocking over a display of corn tortillas. “Bill! Bill! Bill!”

  “CRIMINAL”: A man in a ski mask robs a bank with a plastic gun and gets fifty-seven dollars. The teller saves the day by slicing off his face with the machete that he keeps under his counter.