Prospero couldn’t guide me to my nature. Only Caliban could.
“Somewhere beyond right and wrong there is a garden,” wrote the classical Persian poet Rumi. “I will meet you there.”
I like to think Caliban lives in that garden. Somewhere beyond right and wrong seems like the only place where I can speak to him.
So I stepped outside. Sea air filled my nostrils.
“You smell like a fish, Cal,” I told him. “A strange fish.”
He smiled. I met his eyes.
“I don’t want to have a body anymore,” I said.
“Why not?” Caliban replied.
“My body is my enemy,” I told him. “It hurts; it breaks. It wants things I can’t want.”
Caliban nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “I understand you.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think anyone understands,” I muttered. “I—”
My voice broke. The acid inside my stomach felt rough, and violent, like a storm-tossed sea that sinks ships. I thought of the awful moment, at the end of The Tempest, when Caliban resubmits himself to Prospero’s slavery. “How fine my master is!” he says. “I am afraid he will chastise me.” And: “I shall be pinched to death.”
Caliban’s story always ends this way.
I looked down.
“I have the most disgusting things inside my head,” I admitted.
Caliban looked at me for long seconds. Then he put his hands on my shoulders and leaned down to speak in my ear. “Be not afeard,” he whispered.
. . . the aisle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometime a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about m-m-mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will m-m-make m-m-me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds m-m-methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon m-m-me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
Tears welled in my eyes, threatening to escape. I pressed the heels of my hands into the sockets. I needed to believe, more than anything else, that even we monsters could surrender to nature without becoming monstrous.
“Stay with me, Cal,” I begged him. “Teach me to hear the same instruments that you do.”
Caliban held my hand, wrapping my fingers in his own webbed fins.
“Not everything that looks scary is something to fear, sweetheart,” he said. “Give in to your own gravity.”
Then he reached up and, with a gentle touch that left a streak of seawater on my temple, pushed a lock of hair behind my ear.
I leaned my head against the fish scales on his shoulder and sobbed.
A FEW MONTHS later, my mom was mad again. I don’t remember why.
“I hope you die of MS,” she shrieked, standing on the step outside our front door. I was on the sidewalk. We were nothing if not dramatic.
I was torn. On the one hand, I’d just won. Every vulnerable place in me had already calcified into armor. She couldn’t hurt me. Her comment was merely a claim check I could save for later, to make her feel guilty in one of her good moods. And she didn’t literally mean what she had said, of course: no one had spent more time researching homeopathic treatments for my disease than my mom. I knew that she often said and did things in anger that she would later regret. (Once, a year earlier, I had cut the back of my wrist with a kitchen knife, in a performative attempt to demonstrate how painful her mood swings were for me. “If you’re trying to kill yourself,” she had replied, “you cut the wrong side.” Then she got in her car, drove away, and left me alone in the house, still holding the bloodstained knife.)
But on the other hand, I was pissed off. I thought she was being a bitch, and I told her so.
“Get out,” she said. “You don’t live here anymore. I wash my hands of you.”
“I wash my hands of you” was my mom’s favorite phrase. She yelled it all the time, to declare her cyclical disinterest in motherhood. She had shrieked it the first time she threw me out of the house, when I was nine years old, and had remained an Olympic champion at figurative handwashing ever since.
I tossed a few things in my school backpack and left, rolling my eyes. Getting thrown out of the house loses its dramatic weight the third or fourth time around, it turns out.
“I have lost my daughter,” Prospero admits at the end of The Tempest.
A few weeks later, I walked into my high school registrar’s office and announced that I would not return for the following semester. Nothing inspires action like disease. If I was destined to waste away, I sure as hell wasn’t going to waste away in Arizona.
There are brave new worlds to find.
2.2 The Winter’s Tale:
An Aspect More Favorable
The first time I met John, my hair was wrapped up in a blue bandanna.
I was seventeen. By that point, my MS diagnosis had convinced me that what they say is true: I should seize-or-whatever the day. So I dropped out of high school, signed up for a correspondence course that would let me finish my diploma through the mail, and flew to Seville, Spain. (My mom, to her credit and my gratitude, had paid for my flight and some other expenses, like a Spanish class. She was always in favor of adventure, and I’d been right to assume that her remark about my death could be deposited for cash.)
I stumbled into my new apartment in Seville, struggling under the weight of my heavy backpack, and John, one of my three new roommates, was the first person I saw. He was sitting on the couch in our living room, watching a Spanish-dubbed episode of Felicity. John had the tall, broad-shouldered build (and, I’ll be honest, the slightly receding hairline) of a television marine. He was handsome.
“Hi,” I said. “Is Seville in the same time zone as London?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “What time is it in London?”
I slid the bandanna off my hair.
John was twenty-four and a recent law school graduate from Oklahoma. He had come to Spain to drag his feet against the undertow of time that was pulling him toward the corporate legal world. John was an avid surfer, and he supported that passion with construction jobs. But since John, like me, didn’t have a Spanish work visa, the jobs he could find were infrequent, short-lived, and under the table. So he supplemented his lifestyle with another illegal line of work: selling drugs. Wherever there were loud British or American college travelers, butchering the simple Spanish they had learned in high school, John was there to put them at ease with his slight Oklahoma drawl—then offer them cheap bags of cocaine.
John didn’t use his own product, but that didn’t stop him from offering it to me a few nights after I moved into the apartment. Our two other roommates, Kylie and Ana, both college exchange students at the University of Seville, had invited some friends over for a party.
“How do I know it’s not cut with anything weird?” I had asked, eyeing the line. We were alone in a bedroom.
“Don’t you trust me?” John said.
I narrowed my eyes.
“I met you like four days ago, and already you’ve offered me drugs,” I said. “So, no, I don’t ‘trust’ you, Mr. Stock Character from an After-School Special.”
John laughed. “Come here,” he said.
I walked over to him. He wrapped a hand around my jaw.
His hand was big. I noticed that his hand was big.
“Open your mouth,” he said. There was something about John’s voice. I wanted to do what he told me to do.
I opened my mouth.
“If this is cocaine,” John explained, wetting the tip of a finger on his other hand and tapping it in the powder, “this will make you feel numb, okay?” He slid his finger between my lips and dabbed the powder against my tongue.
I closed my lips and rubbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth.
It did feel numb.
Look—this was not m
y finest moment, or John’s. Don’t judge us yet. (God knows there will be plenty of opportunities for that.) As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t just skip ahead to the fun parts. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare wrote:
There’s some ill planet reigns;
I must be patient, till the heavens look
With an aspect more favorable.
And I, too, had to be patient. My ill planet was coming to the end of its short-lived reign. I just had to get through my bourgeois cliché of a coke phase first.
“Can I do it alone?” I asked. “I don’t want you to watch me.”
John shrugged.
“Sure,” he said, leaving. “I’ll come back to check on you in a minute.”
I looked at a mirror above the dresser, staring into my own eyes. (Movies had taught me that moments of self-destruction are supposed to follow a dramatic moment with a mirror, so I followed the script.) I gazed for a few seconds—that seemed sufficiently emotive—and then bent over the table, stuck a rolled-up euro in my nose, and inhaled regret in a fine white snow.
Outside the room, I could hear the music and happy chatter of the party. There was a knock on the door.
Euphoria rushed through my veins. This was great.
“Come in,” I called. John walked in. He eyed the rolled-up bill in my hand.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“It’s awesome, I think,” I said, hopping up and down. “But I don’t feel much yet. Should I do another line?”
John chuckled. “Let’s start with just one,” he said, leaning against the wall. “If you want more later, I’m always here.”
At the beginning of The Winter’s Tale, one of the characters declares that “a sad tale’s best for winter,” and this winter play does, indeed, begin as a sad tale. At the beginning, Leontes, the King of Sicilia, indulges in jealous fantasies, convincing himself that his pregnant wife, Hermione, has been unfaithful and that the child she carries is a bastard. Mad with jealousy and rage, Leontes throws Hermione into prison and orders that her baby be left to die in some desolate place. But the servant he orders to abandon the baby instead names her Perdita (which means “little lost one”) and leaves her to be raised by a shepherd.
The first half of the play is brutal and tragic. I imagine it lit in shadowy grays and blues.
But The Winter’s Tale is Shakespeare’s meditation on resurrection and rebirth. If its first half is dark, the second half is bright and full of joy—impossibly so, in fact. As soon as the action shifts from the Sicilia of the first three acts to the Bohemia of the final two, the story brightens. There are improbable coincidences, and happy resolutions to unresolvable conflicts. (There is even a joke about “dildoes.” Why don’t our high school teachers ever tell us about that?) Leontes’s wife, Hermione, whom everyone had believed was dead, even returns in a final scene in which she appears to be miraculously resurrected from a frozen statue.
That’s the great mystery of The Winter’s Tale: how does a frozen woman start to thaw?
Sicilia was sad. But don’t worry: Bohemia promises more.
“Wait,” I said to John, still bouncing with energy on the balls of my feet. “Why did you give me that line for free?”
John smiled.
“Consider it an investment,” he said.
KYLIE AND ANA already had friends through their university, so John and I gravitated to each other. We hung out all the time. The sexual tension between us was obvious and immediate—he had literally put his finger in my mouth after less than a week, after all.
One morning, I walked into the living room, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. John was there, ironing a pair of his jeans. He handled the fabric with tender, almost loving care.
I giggled.
“What are you doing, John?”
He blinked at me.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” he said.
“Who irons jeans?” I asked, squinting. “That’s weird.”
John frowned.
“It’s not weird,” he said.
“Yeah,” I insisted. “It’s super weird.”
John shrugged.
“I like things a certain way,” he said.
Before I dropped out of high school and enrolled in the diploma-by-mail course, I had been a B student, with the occasional A or C. I did not think of myself as fancy college material. But Stanford had expressed interest in me after I won an Arizona State Shakespeare high school competition a year earlier, so I had sent in an application. By coincidence, John had graduated from Stanford. I didn’t yet know if I’d been accepted, but asking John questions about college was a good excuse to talk to him.
“Why aren’t you in high school?” he asked me.
“Why aren’t you in a law firm?” I replied.
The next morning, I called the airline and canceled my flight back to Arizona.
At seventeen, I was well above Spain’s age of consent, which at that point was only thirteen. (In 2013 Spain raised it to sixteen.) But John was from the United States, where the number eighteen carries a special magic. I didn’t care about the seven-year age difference between us, but it seemed like John did. Although we hung out every day—I imagined that it was like dating—everything was chaste: we never kissed; we never even held hands. But we ate most of our meals together, watched movies, and lost hours in flirtatious conversation. One night, we saw a movie (it was The Passion of the Christ—John chose it) and then stood outside the theater, talking, until dawn, despite the frigid air. I told John about The Tempest and loaned him the shredded paperback copy I had dragged with me to Spain. We ate paella. We ate gazpacho. We had a screaming fight with our landlord, Carlos, about whether the Grand Canyon is in Arizona.
“What is the name of the river at the bottom?” Carlos shrieked in Spanish, as we stood on his roof, drinking wine.
“It’s the Colorado River, but that doesn’t mean the Grand Canyon is in Colorado,” John yelled.
“I am literally from Arizona!” I roared, gesticulating with my wineglass for emphasis. “I know where the canyon is!” Wine sloshed over the rim onto the roof.
“Americans are so stupid!” Carlos screamed.
“You are such an asshole!” I yelled back. (We had crushed quite a few cups of wine.)
The next day, Carlos came to the apartment while we were watching TV.
“I looked it up,” he said, with a shrug. “You’re right.” Carlos plopped down on the couch next to us and pierced a corkscrew into a new bottle of wine. John and I exchanged a triumphant glance. This was international diplomacy at its drunken best.
Life in Seville was exciting and fun. I found a part-time job at a nearby café that was willing to pay under the table for a foreign waitress to serve its English-speaking customers and began to collect the knowledge that builds a life: a place to buy books, a place to see movies, a place to get groceries. I learned how to cook lentils. I made a few friends.
Although he had never touched me, it seemed as if John’s interest was not platonic. All the signs were there. As Leontes puts it, “Is whispering nothing? / Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?”
“What’s that ring?” John said one afternoon, gesturing to a silver band on my left hand.
I fiddled with it.
“A guy named Mohammed gave it to me in Cairo a few months ago,” I said. “It’s dyeing my finger blue.”
“So you’re spoken for?” John said.
I was startled.
“No,” I said. “Mohammed was just a friend.”
In Seville, John and I fell into a routine. He took Spanish classes in the mornings. Most evenings, when neither of us had work, we walked to a nearby park, bought a bag of pistachios from a street vendor, and sat on a bench to talk and snack.
“What is life, on a scale of one to ten?” he asked me one afternoon, as we sat in the park.
I thought for a moment.
“Life is a nine point seven,” I finally said.
Months lat
er, John told me that question was his personal “test.” (An admission that annoyed me, by the way. Who has a girlfriend test?) He asked every girl he was interested in to rate life. “Nine point seven,” he said, was the moment his interest in me graduated from sexual attraction to something more. It was the highest rating he’d ever heard.
“You’re close,” he told me, at the time. “Life is a ten.”
“We’re only point three degrees apart,” I argued. “That’s nothing. You’ll condemn me over point three degrees?”
John grinned.
“I might have to,” he said.
Back in Arizona, my mother collected my college admission and rejection letters as they trickled into her mailbox. One afternoon, I went to an Internet café to check my email and found an email from her. The subject line said: “Congratulations!!!!!” It was a list of all the universities that had accepted me.
I ran across town and into the school where John took Spanish classes. His class had just ended, and students were filing out of the classroom. I yelled John’s name from the lobby below. He leaned over the edge of the balcony to look at me.
“You were right,” I shouted in English, causing heads to turn. “Life is a ten!”
John smiled—with only a touch of embarrassment—and jogged down the stairs to meet me.
“What’s going on?” he said, putting his hands on my upper arms.
“I got into Stanford!” I told him. John dropped his book and swept me up in a big hug, lifting me so the tips of my toes left the floor.
“That’s my girl,” he said.
“Will I like it there?” I asked him.
“You’ll love it,” he replied.
Stanford had organized a special weekend for admitted students to visit the campus, sit in on a few classes, and chat with current students. I obviously couldn’t go, but I felt detached from the pre-college experience my friends were having back home. So I satisfied my curiosity by reading comments on an online message board for college applicants from an Internet café in Seville. I never wrote a comment. I just read other people’s conversations.
One afternoon, as I browsed this website, I noticed a comment that would stay in my mind for years to come. In response to a long discussion thread about financial aid and how to pay for college, one guy wrote:
Sex with Shakespeare Page 5