Open Me

by Lisa Locascio

  “Now the vicar will be upset because the children have stolen the candlesticks. His sister is concerned because her crafts business is failing. That man is a former police officer with a passion for gourmet cooking. He is secretly in love with the woman who grooms the horses. That was on the last series.”

  The hash restored the relaxing time my problem chewing had punctured. Every night we spent a happy handful of hours on the couch, climbing all over each other, kissing and cuddling, staring at the television, drilling each other with questions about our lives before we met. Søren liked it when I asked him about my future, about what I should do in the ten years it would take me to catch up to where he was now. High, he was uncharacteristically optimistic.

  “You will have everything you want,” he told me. “I know you will. You are lovely and talented. You are a person of quality and discernment.”

  High, I believed that he was right. Nothing would go wrong for me. I would simply go and go and go. Up into the air like a balloon.

  We grew sleepy, cuddled closer. I thought he was falling asleep. But Søren surprised me. As soon as I thought he was gone, he rose under me. His way of taking my body fit a fantasy. Mine. His. Ours. A young, unsure girl led astray by an unsavory older man. The fantasy drew us together, made the words he whispered in my ear real, gave his hands an edge as they moved outside and inside my body. In one moment I was beneath him, facedown in the couch cushions, feeling him grunt and push—in the next straddling him, my hands nearing his throat. The first time Søren laid his hand on my neck, my eyes rolled back in my head and I caught him inside me with my muscles and wouldn’t let go. He pinned both of my hands above my head and made use of my helpless skin, biting my neck so hard that I had purple welts the next day. He bent me over in some corner, entered me standing as I braced against and let go of the wall. I wanted him to draw blood, for him to open me that way too.

  We careened. I closed my eyes and saw a car crashing with us inside, smashing against each other. Dying. I let him turn me in his hands and learned to turn him, too. One night as I sat astride him on the couch, his hand lingered behind me. I became conscious of it. His hand was there for a reason. He tapped my asshole once, twice. Pressed with the pad. Pulled the finger back and dipped it in his mouth. I looked him in the eye and then his finger was in my ass, slow and difficult. I liked how hard it was. What it meant that he was there.

  Every night we went a little farther. Two fingers. His bathrobe’s terry cloth belt repurposed as a blindfold. I was his student, his charge, a responsibility he had chosen to abuse.

  “Are you lost?” he asked. That was how I knew the game was starting.

  “Yes,” I told him. “Yes. I am lost.”

  I found the ritual incredibly sexy, an illustration of his dark scenario. Me as confidante, corrupted student, unwitting victim. Søren as Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera, Rochester, Heathcliff. All those forbidding men I sought out, again and again, rereading hungrily. Søren gave me the same frantic tremor as a vampire in Mama’s bedroom once had.

  When I was nine years old, Dad went out of town and Mama allowed me to sleep with her in their bedroom. We watched an old movie on the television at the end of their bed, and during it she fell asleep. I stayed awake to watch the next one, a Dracula film from before I was born. I thought the movie was boring and slow, not scary at all, but when I fell asleep I went to the vampire’s realm, a garish pink and red place where all night he preyed on me. I could not wake. I could not sleep. I dreamed him and fled him. His blurry face just a gash below the black V of his widow’s peak. Burning in my chest and throat and between my legs until I was only bone.

  Somehow by morning I found my way back to Mama. It was the last time I was allowed that special little-girl pleasure of sharing her bed. Waking to her sweet smell, helping her briskly reorder the sheets. She looked at me like she knew.

  At ten, I dreamed myself into the tower of a Swiss castle, trapped up high like Rapunzel but with no beautiful long hair to show for it, only a flimsy gown, drifting from implement to implement—spindle, churn, abacus, astrolabe—until I saw a boy in a far corner, a chivalric knight in armor and a bright green sash. Shining like a statue, coolly considering me.

  Then everything went purple and I woke up upset, but I didn’t know why.

  After that, the dreams came once a year, like gifts, and always ended before anything could happen. I remember them clear as movies. Clearer for their sharp power, the queasy excitement that kept me ashamed long after I woke up. I wanted more to happen. I wanted to stay in the castle, to roam those rooms decorated as intricately as the illustrations in my book of fairy tales and finger the drapes, for the boys to do something. But I always woke right as it seemed the action was about to start. Frustrated, I read dream dictionaries, which mentioned something called lucid dreaming, a way of visiting the interstitial state between sleep and waking. Meddling with those shadowy meshes struck me as unwise. I had visited these meshes, where the vampire lived.

  When I was eleven, a dream came in my own room, a vivid attack. A man with a scratchy red beard accosted me as I walked to school. Dragged me into an alley and ripped off my clothes, blue corduroy overalls with a pink T-shirt underneath. Yellow underwear with green polka dots. My new clear plastic backpack was dashed to the ground, spilling the pencil case and books arrayed so prettily inside. I was too little for a training bra, but he tore my long white undershirt in half and with his tongue drew a thick stripe of spit down the center of my chest.

  I was naked. The man raped me. No colors swelled. I was conscious and terrified. My rapist had desperate, red-rimmed eyes and a morose matter-of-factness, as if his actions were preordained. His face hovered, he breathed hard, he sobbed. He burned inside me, and in the dream I understood, without question, what this meant.

  I was a little girl, a fifth grader. I had not yet begun to take showers. Mama still regulated my bath time, rinsed my hair, worked in the conditioner. She and Dad still tucked me in with a little ceremony of bedtime kisses and extinguishing lights. But that morning I woke a different person. The plastic gaze of my stuffed animals shamed me and I snapped at Dad when he told me to have a good day. I worried that it was a prophetic dream or that I wanted it. How and when it might happen. My own face in the mirror made me flush and wince in shame.

  4

  ON MY FIFTEENTH DAY IN JUTLAND, I WOKE TO SøREN KISSING ME ON THE FOREHEAD.

  “Good morning, skat!” He squeezed me. “Good morning, little sleeping Roxana! I am going to take you on an adventure today.”

  I hadn’t been outside in weeks. I put on my linen dress and my orange scarf, wanting to look nice. When I opened the door to leave the bedroom, a new, dry smell rushed in from the hallway, breaking the seal between night and day. The table was set with hard-boiled eggs in eggcups, rolls, jam, butter, and cheese. Søren showed me how to peel thin slices of the cheese with a T-shaped utensil strung with a wire.

  “This is very nice,” I said.

  “It is my pleasure,” Søren said, peeking up to give me one of the sunny smiles I remembered from the beginning.

  It was our first real breakfast, the first nonstoned meal we had eaten together in many days. I watched him split a roll, butter it, spread jam over the butter, and drape a white sheet of cheese over the jam. The egg yolks were golden jelly, darker than any I had ever seen, and they tasted like sunshine. Only after we finished eating did I realize Søren hadn’t said a word about my chewing.

  “Ready to go, little dreaming Roxana?” Søren asked, packing items from the refrigerator into his bag. I took his arm.

  Being outside felt like being high. I had missed the sun, its caress of heat. Everything looked friendly, the brick buildings, the pearly cobblestones, even the flat squares of pavement. I wanted to walk and walk. But Søren went to a little black car I had never seen before and opened the passenger door. Fuzzy upholstery and stale plastic. It smelled exactly like hot cars at home. He settled in the driver’s sea
t and turned the key.

  “I thought you didn’t have a car.” I said.

  “It belongs to my girlfriend’s mother,” Søren said and then put his hand over his eyes. “Sorry. That was stupid.” He slammed his head against the ceiling of the car.

  “Please don’t do that.”

  “I am an idiot.” He head butted the ceiling again, hard, and then a third time. “The car belongs to Mette’s mother,” he said. “My ex-girlfriend’s mother.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I knew it couldn’t be your girlfriend’s mother, because her car is a green Honda, and it’s on the other side of the Atlantic.”

  Søren made a sound, half laugh half cough, and pulled away from the curb in silence. I shifted in my seat, stung. We lived together. Wasn’t I his girlfriend? I wanted to ask, but I was afraid of what he would say, a feeling that was becoming familiar.

  We came to a stop at a roundabout near a field, beside the smallest truck I had ever seen, beat-up and beige, toylike. A tall man in khaki coveralls walked out of the field and leaned over the side of the truck, digging in a canvas sack in the bed. He had black hair and a short beard. I recognized him, which was impossible.

  “Do you know that man?” I asked Søren.

  The man withdrew a large orange bucket and a power drill from the back of the truck. Wiped his hands on his coveralls, dug in his left pocket.

  “Of course. Geden.” Søren slipped into the muttering cadence of Danish. “Our local hermit.”

  “Gay-den?”

  Søren shook his head. “Geden.”

  The middle of the word was a kind of swallowed trill. The soft Danish d.

  “Gelen,” I tried again. “Gethin.”

  “Closer.” Søren smiled in the way that meant I should stop trying. “But that’s not even his name. It’s just what everyone calls him.” He snickered. “It means ‘goat.’“

  The man looked up from his truck and caught me in his green eyes. I couldn’t look away. Then Søren shifted into gear and we circled the roundabout, the man and his truck becoming specks against the field.

  “He doesn’t look like a goat.”

  “It is not how he looks,” Søren said. “It is about how he acts. Greedy, cold. Only interested if you have something for him. He never talks to anyone, and if you speak to him he just stares at you as if you are not there. Honestly, I try not to think about him, because he can make me very angry, and I do not like being angry.”

  I nearly corrected him: Søren obviously loved being angry. But then I suddenly figured out where I had seen the man before. He had been in the street on my first night in Farsø, when I stood naked at the window. He was the one who had seen me.

  My heart thundered. I tried to make my voice normal. “Did you work with him or something?”

  Søren laughed. “No, I certainly do not work for the municipality, digging in the woods, as he does. But I think when someone is welcomed into my country after the failure of his own—when he enjoys all the benefits of Danish society, goes to our schools, is treated by our doctors, lives in our public housing—I think it is not ridiculous for me to want him to act a bit grateful and respectful of the culture that has been so kind to him.”

  “He’s an immigrant?”

  “An East Monkey.”

  “What?”

  “An Easterner. From the Balkans. Bosnia. A refugee. A Muslim.” Søren cast an annoyed glance at my lap. “Why are your hands shaking?”

  I sat on them. “Why do you call him an East Monkey?”

  “He’s from the Balkans. The East. They’re better at least than the Arabs, who make their women wear those rags and stand around smoking all day. And the Somalis, too, they’re the worst, carrying everything they own in Ikea bags. Some of the Turkish and Palestinian women will go to school and become secretaries or work in shops, but no Somali will ever work. They just chew khat and sit around all day in public housing. No, I would say we like East Monkeys the best of all the foreigners that swarm here. But they are still a social problem. So ungrateful.”

  Shut up, I wanted to say, shut up. Don’t show me how ugly you can be.

  We stopped at a light. He turned to look at me.

  “You hate them,” I said.

  Søren snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”

  A high pitch was sounding in my head, like the tornado warning they used to drill us with in school. He is your boyfriend, I reminded myself. He is not a hateful person. He has experienced things you have not. Just tell him what you think. What you know.

  “If they came here to get away from a war, they didn’t have a choice, Søren. No one wants to leave home. And they still had to make their own way,” I said. “Like anyone else.”

  The car picked up speed. Outside: empty fields, the occasional barn, groups of two and three grazing horses. Søren sat furiously rigid in his seat.

  “I don’t think you’re racist, but you sound really racist when you talk like that,” I said. I wanted to roll down my window and climb out.

  Søren snorted. “If one sounds racist, one is racist, Roxana. Action is what makes a person, and talk is a kind of violence.”

  I was stunned that he was admitting it. But then he kept going.

  “I am not a racist. You do not understand. My feelings have nothing to do with race. An East Monkey like Geden is not even a different race. You can see that as well as I. This is cultural. People pretend multiculturalism is a wonderful force, as if we all live in a clothing commercial, but it has the power to destroy the state, to dismantle all of our gains and advances. Here, refugees do not make their own way. They are helped with everything. They are given a life. It is not like America, where a hospital throws you out on the street when you cannot pay.”

  Maybe “racist” wasn’t the right word. Maybe it was just the label I had. But he had just said talking was violence. I opened my mouth, trying to formulate what to say next. But Søren wasn’t finished.

  “When you come here as a refugee, you are given a place to live. Money, doctors, a whole life. Your children attend school for free. But the immigrants claim they are too traumatized from their little wars to ever work. High percentages take early retirement and never have to work. They can just live off the rest of us forever.”

  “Why do you care if a refugee retires early?”

  “Because they live off my taxes, Roxana!”

  Søren tried and failed to keep his voice level. “War is terrible. Horrible. The things that people do to each other are unspeakable. But I do not understand the entitlement. The rudeness. So they suffered. Do they get to be in a bad mood forever? I do not, no matter what happens to me. I do not just lie down in the gutter with all the other social class five people—”

  Staring out the window, I said quietly, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “Taxes here are calculated based on income. Social class five pays the lowest percentage. They are the poorest people, most simply working class, uneducated: factory laborers, construction workers, things like that. But of course this class also includes the most vulnerable people, and the ones who can’t or don’t work. Alcoholics, drug addicts, the mentally ill. Almost all immigrants and refugees are social class five, of course. The ones who pay taxes at all, anyway. I doubt Geden is actually social class five. The municipality probably pays him quite well. But he lives social class five. His little shit flat. Inside it is like Bosnia all over again. Dirty old rugs, everything stained yellow from cigarette smoke, some sort of illegal homemade distillery in the bathroom. He cooks all his food on a grill. Outside! Classic East Monkey. No interest in bettering himself.”

  Trying to understand him was trying to do what he would not do for anyone else, I realized suddenly. The knowledge tasted bitter. I scooted away from him, grateful for even three more inches between us. Inches, I thought with a perverse pride. I was from somewhere far away. I wasn’t like him.

  “These people,” Søren continued, “think their problems are everybody
else’s fault. Never their own. Keep your own house clean, that is all I ask. I am not a hateful person, but I am not a fool, either. Do not dare—do not dare!—think it appropriate to tell me how to behave in my own country! Even with just a look. An attitude. Especially.”

  It was as though he was two men, or more than two, none of whom knew themselves at all.

  He parked in a lot at the edge of a field. I was so grateful to leave the car. Outside, it felt like we could start over. I followed Søren through the iridescent grass to a sign:

  VIKINGECENTER FYRKAT

  Beyond stood wooden buildings with thatched roofs.

  “More Viking stuff?”

  Søren put his arm around me. “Yes, skat, but mainly just a nice place.”

  He was trying. I decided to try too. We walked into the field on a pebbled path, climbed a small hill, and came to stand on a massive raised circle of earth that enclosed an inner circle. Staircases were set into the rim.

  “One thousand years ago, this was an important Viking fort,” Søren said. “A ring castle to repel attack. The buildings are reconstructions of Viking houses. This is where the castle stood.” We walked, squinting in the hot sunlight. “There is a museum.”

  The ugly things he had said echoed in my head. I tried to turn them down. To see the little white flowers in the grass, the filmy sky. Choose your battles, Mama had always said. I would try to talk to him about it when he was calmer.

  “Do you want to see it?”

  “Not really,” I admitted.

  “Me neither.” Søren laughed. “Come, let’s have our picnic.” We headed for a stand of trees at the rim of the field.

  He grinned and took my hand. He was a different person when he smiled. I had a soaring feeling. Everything could be okay. I could forget the car ride. The things he had said. It could be that easy. I didn’t have to remember. Mama and Dad never seemed to be able to forget, to let anything go. I could choose to be different. Free.