Her Body and Other Parties

by Carmen Maria Machado

  “PAINLESS”: “Don’t you worry,” the gynecologist says to Stabler’s wife. “This isn’t going to hurt one bit.”

  “BOUND”: Benson decides to try the spell. She combines the ingredients like the man had shown her. She crushes the beans and the bone. She uncorks the bottle. “Tip it fast,” he’d told her, “and catch it under your pestle, or else it’ll float up and away.” She turns the bottle toward the mortar, but suddenly her brain convulses and she is remembering something that never happened, a screaming, burning pain, a dark room lined with windows, curtains drawn, a cold, black table. She stumbles blindly backward and knocks over the mortar and pestle. She falls to the floor and trembles, shakes. When it finally passes, she sees a girl-with-bells-for-eyes staring back at her. Ringing back at her. The first of many times, she says. All night, Benson dreams, dreams, dreams.

  “POISON”: One afternoon, at her desk, Benson feels the telltale tickling. She shifts in her chair. She crosses and uncrosses her legs. On the way home, she stops at the drugstore on the corner. In her bathroom, she squats. She walks carefully to her bed and gets horizontal. She feels the bullet melting inside of her, making her better. A girl-with-bells-for-eyes comes to the side of her bed, bells swinging wildly like she is a church caught in a stiff wind. Come on. “I can’t.” Why not? “I can’t get up. I can’t move. I can’t even cough.” What is happening to you? “You wouldn’t understand.” Get up. “I can’t.” The core of her is soothed and calmed and she cannot move or else everything will come out. The girl-with-bells-for-eyes gets as close to the bed as she can without walking through it. She begins to glow. Benson’s bedroom is filling with light. Across the street, a man with a telescope lifts his head from the eyepiece, gasps.

  “HEAD”: “Okay, so, here’s my theory,” Stabler says to Benson when she gets back into the car with the coffees. “Human organs. They are wet and thick and fit together like pieces of a puzzle. It’s almost like someone zipped open every body before birth and slopped them in there like oatmeal. Except that’s not possible.” Benson looks at Stabler and squeezes her cup so hard a little fart of scalding coffee runs down her hand. She looks behind her. She looks back at him. “It’s almost like,” he says thoughtfully, “they were grown on the inside, and are meant to be shaped together.” Benson blinks. “It’s almost like,” she says, “we grow. In the womb. And keep growing.” Stabler looks excited. “Exactly!” he says. “And then, we die.”

  SEASON 6

  “BIRTHRIGHT”: Two of Stabler’s daughters get into a fight over a bowl of soup. When Stabler gets home, the oldest daughter has an ice pack on her forehead and the youngest is kicking her feet above the tiled kitchen floor. Stabler goes into the bedroom, where his wife is lying on her back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “They’re your daughters,” she says to Stabler. “Not mine.”

  “DEBT”: Benson and Stabler don’t play Monopoly anymore.

  “OBSCENE”: Benson buys twice as much produce as normal, and doesn’t even wait for it to rot. She throws a ripe vegetable into every garbage can in a twenty-block radius. It feels good to spread it out like this, the wasting.

  “SCAVENGER”: After the body is removed, Benson and Stabler stand around the dried pool of blood. A police officer comes into the bedroom. “The landlord is outside,” she says. “He wants to know when he can get to cleaning up the apartment for rental.” Benson pokes the stain with her foot. “You know what’d get this out?” Stabler looks at her, his eyebrows knit. “OxiClean. It’d get this stain right out,” she continues. “You could rent this place next week.” Stabler looks around. “The landlord isn’t here yet,” he says, slowly. “OxiClean would get this right out,” she says again.

  “OUTCRY”: Only after the sixth small black girl goes missing does the police commissioner finally make a statement, interrupting the season finale of a popular soap opera. The enraged letters start coming soon after. “Are you going to tell me if Susan’s baby belongs to David or not, Mister Police Commissioner??????” says one. Another person sends anthrax.

  “CONSCIENCE”: The drumming won’t stop. Stabler considers that it’s his conscience making that horrible, horrible sound.

  “CHARISMA”: Benson likes her Tuesday-night date too much to go home with him.

  “DOUBT”: Father Jones prepares to deliver the Eucharist. The first people in line look like Stabler and Benson, except different. Wrong, somehow. When he lays the wafer on the first one’s tongue, the man closes his mouth, smiles. Father Jones feels forgiveness melting down the back of his own throat. The woman, then, too, takes it, smiles. Father Jones almost chokes this time. He excuses himself. In the bathroom, he rocks back and forth on his feet, clutching the counter and weeping.

  “WEAK”: Stabler works out three times a day, now. He insists on jogging to crime scenes instead of using the squad car. Whenever he takes off from the station, his button-down and tie tucked into bright red running shorts, Benson goes and gets herself a coffee from the bodega, reads a newspaper, and then drives to the crime scene. Stabler always arrives a few minutes later, his fingers pressed against his pulse, shoes striking the pavement in an even rhythm. He jogs in place while they interview witnesses.

  “HAUNTED”: On the subway, Benson thinks she sees Henson and Abler on a train running in the opposite direction. They blast past each other in a blaze of butter-yellow light, the windows flashing by like frames on a filmstrip, and Henson and Abler appear to be in every one, moving jerkily as if they are rotating through a phenakistoscope. Benson tries to call Stabler, but there’s no signal below the earth. Across from her, a little girl playing a video game on her mother’s phone kicks off one of her flip-flops. Benson realizes, with utter certainty, that this girl is going to die soon. She gets off the train and vomits into a garbage can.

  “CONTAGIOUS”: Benson stays home with swine flu. Her fever reaches 104; she hallucinates that she is two people. She reaches over to the opposite pillow, years empty, and feels for her own face. The girls-with-bells-for-eyes try to make her soup, but their hands pass through the cupboard handles.

  “IDENTITY”: Stabler offers to take the children out for Halloween. He goes as Batman, buys a hard plastic mask. The children roll their eyes. Before they go out, his wife faces him. She reaches up and snatches the mask off his face. He seizes it back from her and slides it back on. She pulls it off again, so hard the band snaps and catches his face. “Ow,” he says. “What are you doing that for?” She shoves the mask into his chest. “Doesn’t feel very nice, does it?” she hisses through clenched teeth.

  “QUARRY”: The man takes out his rifle, braces it against his good shoulder, and squeezes the trigger with all the seductive force of a beckoning. The bullet strikes the missing woman’s neck, and she goes down, loosed of her life before she lands in the leaves and sends them up like ashes.

  “GAME”: The man lets out another sobbing woman. As she begins to run for the woods, he realizes he’s tired and wants to go make some dinner. He takes a few steps toward the tree line, and she joins her sister.

  “HOOKED”: “I choose this life,” the prostitute says to the social worker with the worried eyes. “I do. Please put your energy into helping girls who aren’t here by choice.” She is so right. She is murdered anyway.

  “GHOST”: A prostitute is murdered. She is too tired to become a spirit.

  “RAGE”: A prostitute is murdered. She is too angry to become a spirit.

  “PURE”: A prostitute is murdered. She is too sad to become a spirit.

  “INTOXICATED”: The girl-with-bells-for-eyes—the first one who had sought Benson’s sour sleep breath and twitching eyelids all that time ago—comes into Benson’s bedroom. She walks up to the bed. She presses her fingers into Benson’s mouth. Benson does not wake up. The girl pushes herself in and in, and when Benson’s eyes open, Benson is not opening them. Benson is curled up in the corner of her mind, and she sees through her eyes distantly, as if they were windows on the opposite side of a lengthy l
iving room. Benson-who-is-not-Benson walks around the apartment. Benson-who-is-not-Benson takes off her nightgown and touches her grown woman’s body, inspecting every inch. Benson-who-is-not-Benson puts on clothes, hails a cab, and knocks on Stabler’s door, and even though it is 2:07 a.m., Stabler does not look even a little bit sleepy, though he is confused. “Benson,” he says. “What are you doing here?” Benson-who-is-not-Benson grabs his T-shirt in her hand and pulls him toward her, kissing him with more force and hunger than Stabler has ever felt in his own mouth. She releases his shirt. Benson cries into the darkened walls of her own skull. Benson-who-is-not-Benson wants more. Stabler wipes his mouth with his hand and then looks at his fingers, as if expecting to see something. Then he shuts the door. Benson-who-is-not-Benson returns to her apartment. Benson looks up from her knees to see the girl-with-bells-for-eyes standing in front of her. “Who is driving?” she asks thickly. The bells ring. No one. And indeed, Benson’s body is lying heavy as an unanimated golem on the bed. The bells ring. I’m sorry. The girl-with-bells-for-eyes sinks her fingers into Benson’s head, and “NIGHT”: Benson wakes up. Her head is throbbing. She rolls over onto the cool side of the pillow, her dream ebbing away from her like a rubber duck bobbing gently out to sea.

  “BLOOD”: The butcher takes a hose to the floor, and the blood spirals and sinks down the drain. It wasn’t animal blood, but he has no way of knowing what it was that his assistant was cutting up. The evidence is destroyed. The girls remain lost forever.

  “PARTS”: “Is it me, or is this steak kind of gamey?” Benson’s date says to Benson. She shrugs and looks down at her scallops. She prods one with a knife and it parts a little in the center, like a mouth opening, or worse. “It’s just … a weird flavor,” he says. Another bite. “But good, I guess. Good.” Benson can’t remember what he does for a living. Is this their second date, or their third? He chews with his mouth open. She invites herself to his apartment.

  “GOLIATH”: Stabler takes another long pull of his whiskey. He slumps in his armchair. Upstairs his wife sleeps, dreams, wakes up, sleeps more, hates him, wakes, hates him, sleeps. He thinks of Benson, the way she stood there, the way her clothes looked put on funny, the way she drank from him as if she were dying of thirst, the dreamy way her hand ran over the metal fence, over the iron-tipped gate as if she was asleep, as if she was high, as if she was a woman in love, in love, in love.

  SEASON 7

  “DEMONS”: Shadows pass over the marbled halls of justice, through the police station, across crowded and empty streets. They slide up walls and through grates and under doors and arc through glass windowpanes. They take what they want, leave what they want. Life is created and destroyed. Mostly destroyed.

  “DESIGN”: “If this child is part of the Plan, then the Plan was that I would be raped. If this child is not part of the Plan, then my rape was a violation of the Plan, in which case the Plan is not a Plan at all, but a Polite Fucking Suggestion.” Benson reaches out for the survivor’s hand, but the woman looks down at the water, kneels from the railing, and is gone.

  “911”: “Look, it’s just that I’m walking around feeling like I’m going to vomit out my own toenails, and I want to die, and I want to kill someone, sometimes, and I feel like I’m on the verge of dissolving into a puddle of organs and slop. Organ slop.” A pause. “Um, that’s—that’s—I’m sorry. Look, I just called to report a vandal in my neighborhood.”

  “RIPPED”: They find the actress hours after her disappearance, tied to the mast of a ship in New York Harbor, a reproduction musket laced between the coils of rope and wedged between her voluminous breasts. Her Renaissance Faire corset is half-unlaced, her shirt torn. He wanted her to fight back, she tells Stabler. He wanted her to slap him, and call him a scoundrel, and then to marry him. He called himself Reginald.

  “STRAIN”: Benson gets the flu. She vomits up: spinach, paint shavings, half a golf pencil, and a single bell the size of her pinky nail.

  “RAW”: Benson and Stabler’s favorite sushi restaurant has stopped using plates and started using models. Benson pinches a red swatch of tuna from the hip bone of a brunette who seems to be trying very hard not to breathe. The owner stops by the table, and seeing Benson’s frown, says, “It’s more cost-effective.” Stabler reaches for a piece of eel, and the model takes a sudden breath. The meat eludes his chopsticks—once, twice.

  “NAME”: All over the city, pedestrians stop midstride, a small weight lifted from bodies, a memory snuffed. A barista, marker poised over a cup, asks a man the same question in ten seconds. He stares at her, blinks. “I don’t know,” he says. In graves and ditches, in morgues and mortuaries, in rushes and bogs, dipping and rolling on the skins of rivers, names trace the bodies of the dead like flames along kindling, like electricity. For four minutes, the city becomes filled with the names, with their names, and though the man cannot tell the barista that Sam wants his latte, he can tell her that Samantha is not coming home but she is somewhere, though she is nowhere, and she knows nothing, and everything.

  “STARVED”: Stabler tries to convince his oldest daughter to eat something, anything. She takes the paper napkin in seven small bites.

  “ROCKABYE”: After the children are asleep, Stabler sits next to his wife, who is cocooned under the blankets of their bed. Even her face is swaddled. Stabler gently pokes at the opening in the comforter, and soon the tip of her nose is revealed, a heart of skin around her eyes. She is crying. “I love you,” she says. “I do. I am so angry with you. But I do love you.” Stabler takes her into his arms, her whole cloth burrito self, and rocks her in his arms, whispering sorry, sorry into her ear. After he turns out the light, she asks him to cover her face again. He lays the tucked bits back over her, lightly.

  “STORM”: The air roils. The clouds rush at the city as if they have been waiting.

  “ALIEN”: A new police commissioner rides into town. He makes big promises. His teeth are the color and shape of Chiclets, too even. Stabler keeps trying to tally the number of teeth that show when the police commissioner smiles for the camera, but he loses count every time.

  “INFECTED”: When the girls-with-bells-for-eyes come to Benson’s door, they are silent. When Benson finally opens the door to go to the gym, they are there, filling the hallway. Their bells rock, but no sound comes out. When Benson gets close, she realizes that someone has unhooked the hammers. The bells swing back and forth and back and forth, and they are quieter than they have ever been.

  “BLAST”: Stabler takes his wife dancing. He is surprised that she agrees. Past the doors of the salsa club, she is lithe and hot, sweating, spinning. He has not seen her this way since they were young, since just before they were married. The glaze of sweat and the smell of her turns him on, cracks open his want in a way that he’d forgotten existed. They dance close. She slides her hand down the front of his pants, bites her lip, kisses him. Deep inside his body, something beats. Dum-dum. Dum-dum. Dum-dum. A heartbeat, almost. They take a cab home, and in their bedroom rip her dress getting it off, and they have not done this in years, this, this, and she digs her nails into his back and whispers his name, and they have not been like this since those years before, since that time long ago, before before, but after. He calls her name.

  “TABOO”: After she comes, Benson’s arm cramps hard, like her muscle is folding itself in half. She rubs her forearm and bites her lip. She listens to the distant throbbing of salsa music coming from an apartment across the street. A film of sweat seals her guilt like Saran Wrap.

  “MANIPULATED”: The precinct’s interns sense that something has changed between Benson and Stabler, but they don’t know what. They track their movements in a repurposed notebook from a biochem class. They take photos of them with their cell phones. They sprinkle Spanish fly into the coffee machine. They summon a demon with blood from their own bodies and ash from a cathedral votive and a squirrel bone and white chalk and bundles of dried sage. They beg the demon for his help. Annoyed, he takes one of them ba
ck to hell with him, punishment for making him come so far.

  “GONE”: “Lucy, do you know where Evan is?” Stabler asks her. “He’s never this late.”

  “CLASS”: “Lucy, do you know where Evan is? He’s never missed biochem before.”

  “VENOM”: Benson drains her coffee. Her mouth burns a little. She feels woozy. She lies down in the back room.

  “FAULT”: In her dream, Benson hears the heartbeat. She is on an empty New York City street. There is no breeze. The pavement does move, though, as if something is breathing. Benson begins to follow the sound of the heartbeat down the street. She sees a dark doorway, a sign above it that reads SHAHRYAR BAR & GRILL. Inside, the counters are polished and dark red. The bottles and glasses gleam like the surface of a river, and every time the beat sounds they tremble. There is a door tucked in the corner, a strip of light glowing beneath it. Laughter. Benson thinks it sounds like it did when she was a girl, and her mother had a cocktail party and Benson had to sit in her bedroom, a plate of tiny appetizers and half a cup of apple juice resting on her nightstand. She nibbled a mushroom that was full of something melted, and then drank her juice, and she could hear laughter on the other side of the door, glasses clinking, voices going loud and soft and loud again. She tried to read a book but ended up in her bed in the dark, listening to the voices that were so far and so close, picking out her mother’s bray in the din like pulling a loose thread of elastic from the band of your underpants, pulling, tightening, ruining them. That is what she feels now, the voices on the other side of the door. She reaches for the handle, the distance between her hand and it halving with each passing nanosecond, the metal cold even before her hand touches it. When Benson wakes up, she is screaming.