Abandon Me

by Melissa Febos

  The pilgrims were those head-spun wretches. Maybe they also carried that thorn-bush.

  In the museum at the base of the monument are a series of dioramas, beginning with “The First Encounter,” in which the Wampanoag fought and then fled the interlopers, surely fearing their pestilence as much as their gunpowder. At the next, Amaia burst into laughter. The diorama featured a cast of hungry pilgrims amid neat rows of cornstalks. “Finding the Corn,” read the title.

  Finding the corn! We both doubled over.

  More like stealing the corn. We laughed so hard. We laughed at that human ability to build the story we wish for, and make it true. Laughed at a wish so fervent it lived for centuries. Laughed that there was not a single diorama depicting the lives or deaths of those natives. Laughed that we still managed to be surprised by this, in the year 2014.

  Until then, I had resisted the draw of that history. Maybe it was in me, but I would not colonize it with my white fetishism. How could I ever know my own motives? The Pilgrims believed God had cleared a path, that the pestilence delivered by other whites was a path the Lord had cleared for them. They called it “The Miraculous Plague.” The natives called it “The Great Dying.” By the time of King Philip’s War—the end of the Wampanoag tribe—there were less than a thousand left to kill.

  By the summer of 2014, I knew both the glory of conquer and the erasure of colonization. My own small tastes of these, and the legacy of them that built me: my European people, my native people, my captain’s Taino people. At the top of that granite tower, I knew I was both head-spun sinner and Hare in the Moon. In me were both brothers, all the circles of Hell, damnation and salvation. Like Dante, I wept, and then walked back down those steps.

  Later, in the hotel, Amaia knelt between my legs. She reached her hands up over my belly, my breasts, and then pulled me by the hips, pressed her tongue into me. After, we lay side by side, arms draped across each other’s bodies.

  You know, she said, winding my hair around her palm. You can call yourself an Indian. I nodded. I also knew I didn’t need to. What I’d found inside me was enough.

  57

  We stayed at Foxwood’s for two hours. Jon settled Pat into her favorite machine—the Lucky 7’s—and then followed me to a game of my own choosing: Tiger Treasure slots.

  Don’t you have your own favorite game? I asked him.

  I like watching you, he said.

  I nodded. I could let him watch me. I was there to watch him, too.

  I scored a bonus and digital tigers danced across the screen, accompanied by bells and whistles. I thought of Borges’s Dreamtigers, and the hubris of thinking we can conjure our own beasts. “Oh, incompetence!” laments Borges. “Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for.” His tiger appears, but it is stuffed. It is weak and it has the touch of a smaller animal—a bird, a dog. Maybe, a man.

  I went to the ladies room and when I returned Jon had gone. I wandered the casino floors and pressed my fingertips against my arm, my thigh, my mouth. All my life, I had surveyed strangers’ faces, woken to rooms I didn’t know, unfathomably far from the rooms that knew me. I had felt like smoke, dissolved into particles, reassembled in some Emerald City. In that smoke-soaked place, I knew that there was no Emerald City. And I had always been.

  On the drive home we laughed. Something had shifted, maybe each of us sated in our own way. Jon smelled like liquor and Pat muttered in the backseat. What a beautiful day, she said. What a beautiful day.

  I cannot save these people, my people, from their addictions. Maybe I cannot even love them. But I can laugh with them. I can look at them. And I know that looking can be the truest kind of love.

  For the first time, I did not cry as I drove away from them.

  In a letter to Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Jung wrote that the hunger of addiction is “the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”

  I have often thought of love in those terms. Its craving is also a hunger for wholeness. Jung’s solution to addiction—spiritus contra spiritum—suggests that God is the only thing that can sate our craving. I know that God is in other people. But people are not gods. We can’t find wholeness in them any easier than in a bottle.

  These people I found are the people from whom I learned hunger. I also learned it from the people who loved me. My affliction, the thing I have tried so many times to define, to resist, to eradicate, to succumb to—it is the hunger of the abandoned. It is the result of being cut off from yourself. That hunger, denied, becomes a hunger for other things.

  Every addiction, every mad love transcends the legacy of singular people. Historical trauma is a legacy of abandonment, of erasure. I believe in the science of genealogy. But I don’t think science invents us—we invented it. We saw the symptoms of centuries of genocide, of lost language, of estrangement, and we called them systems. The Wampanoag people lost everything. My Taino legacy is the same legacy of the Cherokee, the Navajo, the Aztec, all of us. Call it science, how a hunger is built into a body. Call it reincarnation. Call it any word. We don’t conjure our tigers. They have been dreaming us all along.

  58

  A few days before Amaia moved to New York, I called my mother. I think I want to write about all of this, I told her. But I feel like I’m not supposed to. It’s about too many things. It’s not enough of any one thing.

  It’s about you, she said. Isn’t it? About how you are not enough of any one thing. It was true. I am Puerto Rican, but not really. Indian, but not really. Gay, but not really. Adopted, but not really. I cringed at the thought. I’d never wanted to be one of those people who felt not enough.

  It seems like a very American story, my mother said.

  It struck me that she was right.

  Can I tell you something terrible? I asked.

  Of course.

  Sometimes, I wish Amaia would do something awful, so that I could leave her.

  My mother paused before answering. She already did, honey.

  On the first day of class, I often subject my students to an uncomfortable exercise. I ask them to turn to the person seated next to them and make direct eye contact for one minute. If there is an odd number of students, I participate in the exercise. Try not to laugh, I urge them. Try not to look away or dissociate. When my timer goes off, they collectively sigh. It is hard for them. For most people, this kind of sustained eye-contact only precedes violence or sex.

  But in that minute, the room tone changes. The usual jostling of egos, of postures and fears that assume so much space, dissipates. We are all more naked, as Berger defines it in Ways of Seeing, “To be naked is to be oneself.” That is, in looking at each other, we become less occupied with being seen. Something else enters the room. Reverence, maybe. If you want to write about something, I tell them, you have to look at it. You have to look long enough that your own reflection fades. Total self-absorption is the dubious luxury of non-writers. If you want to write about yourself, I tell them, you must meet your own gaze with this same attention.

  We all craft a story we can live with. The one that makes ourselves easier to live with. This is not the one worth writing. To write your story, you must face a truer version of it. You must look at the parts that hurt, that do not flatter or comfort you. That do not spare you the trouble of knowing what made you, and what into.

  I used to wonder if my own difficulty in doing this made me a hypocrite. Now, I’m not sure I believe in hypocrites. We often prescribe for others the thing we most need. It is part of how we learn.

  59

  I waited at baggage claim with balloons, a pizza, and flowers. Amaia walked toward me and I saw the trepidation on her face. I saw her searching for something that looked like home. I looked at the baggage carousel.

  We drove over the Verrazano Bridge, the city glittering ahead. Look, I said. Do you feel it?

  She looked at the constellation of lights, at my cit
y, and then at me.

  You don’t want me here, she said.

  Yes I do, I said.

  You want to, she said. But you don’t.

  There was a fight about money. It felt so ugly. Before she had moved to New York, Amaia had asked if I would continue paying the rent on the apartment. She was keeping her house and car in the desert and was concerned about expenses. Amaia had ten times the amount of savings that I did and earned nearly twice what I did in regular salary. Still, I understood. Partly, I understood her worry as misplaced anxiety about moving her life to New York. I agreed to pay the rent until she felt more secure.

  After a month, it stopped feeling all right. The lack of parity felt like a reflection of other imbalances in our relationship. Once again, I felt alone with the burden of our complete reality. Once again, I had compensated because I understood that she could not see it.

  I thought hard about how to approach the subject. Asking for things from her had never gone well. I consulted my therapist on the best way. One morning, I cautiously asked her if she could contribute a third of the rent. It did not go well.

  But you chose to live in this city, she said. It’s ridiculously expensive.

  And now you have chosen to live here, I said. And to keep your other life intact.

  It doesn’t even feel like my apartment, she said.

  I wanted to see it her way. Our stalemate was agony. It went on for days. Finally, I agreed to keep things as they were. It’s fine, I said. But it did not feel fine.

  A week later, she was scheduled to present at a conference an hour away. As usual, she wanted me to go with her.

  I can’t do it, I said. I have to get my own work done. I need to go to my meetings. I need to see my friends.

  You can get more work done there, she said. You’ll have the hotel room to yourself. You won’t be distracted.

  I’ll come on the second day, I bargained.

  Fine, she said. But it wasn’t fine.

  I drove her to the conference. The hotel reeked of old smoke and the children in the next room screamed all morning. I attended Amaia’s first presentation and, as always, she was wonderful. I hooted from my front row seat with pride and then we ate dinner with her colleagues.

  I was desperate to accomplish something the next day. Amaia slept badly and in the morning was frantic before her second presentation.

  Can you print my notes and bring them to the conference center? she asked.

  What about checkout? I asked. Don’t we have to leave by noon? When will you be done? The room was scattered in piles of clothes, shoes, and books. Toiletries littered the bathroom counters.

  I’m sorry, she said.

  I printed and delivered her notes, packed our suitcases, and loaded the car. After checkout, I waited for an hour in the idling car outside the conference center until she finished.

  I felt petty. I hated my frustration. But it wasn’t this time that mattered. It was every time. When I’d brought it up under similar circumstances, Amaia had been shocked and deeply hurt.

  You’re not used to working like a team, she had said. I would do it for you, she said. Next time, it will be your turn.

  But if I am always helping you, I thought, then I will never get to my own work. It will never be my turn.

  When I thought of Amit my heart hurt. I tried not to think of Amit. When my mother called to see how things were going, I didn’t answer. I had not called my brother in months. Amaia and I were together nearly all the time.

  There were no more fights about text messages or phone calls because no one texted or called anymore. In The Book of Hours, Rilke writes, “I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough / to make every moment holy.” I missed my friends. I missed myself. I even missed her. I told myself that this was everything I’d wanted. I told myself that I just needed to adjust to the change. But it didn’t feel like an adjustment. It felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  One morning, I stood in the bathroom. Through the cracked door, I saw the slope of her leg, her elegant foot on the wood floor. I felt such an ache of tenderness for that small slice of her that I braced myself, hand against the wall.

  It kept happening. Her earlobe after I removed her earring. Her hands on her thighs in the passenger seat of my car. A swirl of her hair on the bedroom floor. Her neatly folded T-shirts in a drawer. While she slept, I smelled her perfume bottle, as if she had already gone.

  Sometimes you love someone most of all as you are leaving them.

  I could not see her for so long. I saw only the red throb of what I wanted from her. Love me, I asked her. Heal me, I meant. In the end, I wanted my green goggles back. I wanted the infrared vision of cathexis. I didn’t want the true story. I wanted my story.

  A few nights after the conference, we drove home from the university where I teach. We sang with the radio, my hand on the back of her neck as she drove. She had begun trying to convince me to move to the New Jersey suburbs.

  We can buy a house, she said. You won’t have to commute anymore. Think how much more writing you’ll get done. Think how much money we’ll save.

  It seemed almost possible. She painted such a beautiful picture. In moments, I believed in it. But then, alone with my thoughts, the fantasy dissolved. I loved my city. It wasn’t the city that kept me from writing. It wasn’t my friends who kept me from writing. The idea of being even more isolated from the people who knew me gave me chills.

  I knew it wasn’t real. Maybe, if we were different, it could have been. If there had been enough room for two in our world, maybe we could have moved it anywhere. But there wasn’t. I needed her to make more space for me. I needed real parity—something we’d never had. I think she knew that she was losing me. That her only options were to change how we worked or to let me leave. She didn’t want to do either of those things, so she invented a third option: this life in the suburbs, where I would have more time and money, and we could be happy. She wanted me to be happy, I know. And this way, she wouldn’t have to change anything. But it was like a necklace of maggots. If I turned it this way, they looked like pearls. But they weren’t pearls. It was a sacrifice wrapped as a gift.

  For weeks I had woken to a sick feeling in my gut. I had woken to the thought, I can’t do this. The next day, I said it out loud. I can’t do this.

  She was calm. She wanted to stay through the weekend.

  Of course, I said.

  We had dinner in a dark bar at a corner table. It was the quietest hurt we’d ever shared and the worst. Neither of us ate. On the sidewalk outside she pulled me against her. I crashed in a wave against her chest, over and over, wanting her to catch me, but she couldn’t.

  The morning she planned to leave, I woke at 4 A.M., her face wet against mine.

  Please, she whispered.

  I wrapped my arms around her. I wanted to quiet her. I was so tired.

  Yes, I said. I can’t do this, I thought.

  That night, we ran through Fort Greene Park. At sunset, the lampposts burned yellow and leaves gathered in drifts along the stone walls. A small parade of children and parents wound slowly down the paths carrying paper bags with lit candles inside. Their soft torches glowed in a long tail and everything felt sweet and broken. Before going home, we drank tea and shared a beignet at a tiny French café on Dekalb Avenue.

  I realized that I still could not resist her, despite my certainty. The next morning, while she slept, I wrote her a letter. I left the apartment.

  Don’t do it like this, she texted me, when she read the letter. Come back.

  I didn’t return until the following twilight. As I unlocked the door, I felt both hope and fear that she would be there.

  The apartment was emptier than it had ever been. It felt like the first time I had ever been alone. I sat on the sofa and let the windows darken. I watched the shadows slip across the floor, drawing their cloth over all the places she was gone.

  I hated how I had done it. But I wasn’t gone. I was right there.
/>   60

  When I see my half sister again, we meet at a burger place in Burlington and sit on the patio. Mist dampens our hair and meaty white men in hiking boots talk vigorously at the next table. It is easier than the first lunch. I am easier. I have unfolded the exquisite corpse and seen my shadow half. I have cried my weight in tears and done the thing impossible. I am not looking for myself in her this time.

  When I tell her that I’ve met Jon, her blue gaze widens. Wow, she says. You’re braver than me.

  I’m not brave, I tell her. Just curious. Though that’s not true either. I know that I have less agency than the brave or curious. I am compelled. It is not the bondage of addiction but a different kind of drive, a hunger I cannot ignore. Maybe that’s all bravery is: when your hunger is greater than your fear. I resist the implication that bravery is noble. I must face the things that scare me in order to survive. And survival is not noble. It is not a sacrifice of self but in service to the self.

  I want my boy to know where he comes from, my sister says. I want them all to know you. It’s still a secret. When she looks down at her plate, I see it. The shame in her own darkness. I want to tell her that darkness is not bad. It is only the place we can’t see yet. The parts of us we have looked away from.

  We are all the conquered and conquerors, but it is the parts we deny that rule us. Amaia is indigenous Chilean and Spanish; I am Italian, English, native, and Puerto Rican. Together we were a hundred wars and the spoils of those wars. We pass that legacy on in everything we do and everything we love. And when we heed an impulse to erase a part of ourselves, we always fail. You cannot erase yourself. You can only abandon it. But that piece doesn’t die; it lives in exile. And when you love, when you become the home for someone else’s heart, you are like a house with a prisoner in the cellar. Your beloved hears the thump of that cellar door. Your child worries at twilight, feels its blue shadows sliding into her, because she sees the twilight in you—the silvery dark of a secret, of a chosen forgetting. Pulling a curtain around something doesn’t keep the dark out. It keeps it in.