Everyday Psychokillers

by Lucy Corin

  Sometimes when Alicia comes over I look at her and I remember watching her. It feels as long ago as anything I remember. I remember watching her and picturing what it would feel like to be watched. I imagined feeling a bit embarrassed, definitely uneasy, but still part hopeful that it could mean I was worth watching, that I was noticeable. I mean wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be great if you were noticed because you were wonderful—not because you were about to be hacked to pieces? Thinking that way can feel like a matter of survival, of making do with the world you were born into. It is, in a way, what I believe CiCi was trying to do. She was trying to move within terms that the world established without her. She wanted to be unearthed, like a jewel. She wanted to be seen, like a piece of art. What a terrifying and destructive desire.

  I remember watching Alicia, convinced I was watching her for all the right reasons. Because I’d watch her and think, She’s wonderful. And even if I still felt invisible, in watching her I convinced myself she was not. Because of me, I thought, she is not. It was an extremely disconcerting form of power I was feeling.

  There’s watching, and then there’s watching over. One is stolen, and one is allowed, a gift given and received in one move.

  It’s not, I realize, that I was ever going to hack her body to pieces. That’s not what I was afraid of. Someone fooled me into thinking it could be.

  It’s how fragile I know she is, how little it could take to wreck her, simply because someone could do that to her. Because I know how fragile I am.

  The difference between then and now is entirely internal, but extremely real. I believe the world lied to me. It had me duped into seeing myself in its terms, in psychokiller terms. I do, I see myself in terms of girls. And it is, it’s a series of girls. And indeed, they disappear. The difference is between these two possibly forming forces: the killers, the girls. It’s the shadowy difference between dead and alive, between buried alive and alive but buried, and I live in it, I reside there, in this dusk. If the world is what it is, invisible to it is the most beautiful place to be.

  I look at Alicia and she has no idea. She’s reading a book and holding the fringe of my afghan in a fist, she’s throwing a ball for my dog, she’s over there tying a kid’s shoe and glances up, through the fence, to see if I’m around, what I might be doing. When I look at her, she has no idea, but I can see how they formed me, those girls. Here’s the difference: each time, I presented myself, girl after girl, woman after woman, and she presented herself to me. Each time I took a girl to heart I could feel aspects of myself uncoiling from my personality, from the mass tangle of my little history. I heard her speak and watched her behave and I placed myself in her terms, so she might comprehend me, if you know what I mean, if that means something.

  Here is a girl. It’s Alicia, or it’s any girl. I look at her haircut. I listen to what she says first, and then what, and what next. I look at what she’s doing with her hands and her face. I look at what she likes to do with her hips, whether she wants to draw attention here or here, and when. My history resides in a series of girls, one after another, and overlapping. It exists in the way I have told myself to them, and the way that, when they told themselves to me, it shaped me.

  Here, now, in my castle behind its moat, in my hovel, deep in the forest, I feel encased in the world, as Osiris was encased in his coffin, as La Nature is encased in silver and gold, as Jolin’s encased in plaster. These exoskeletons for posterity. It’s not that I no longer believe that the world is what it is, that the system at hand is a dark, deadened, constantly-almost and often-actually killing killer and, alternately, a desperate, equally warped and wounded, wild suffering survivor. I do believe that once you look into it those are your choices, and that living outside those choices makes you invisible, incomprehensible, as the tribes buried in the parts of continents that represent our history are invisible, and that being taken in, translated, represented, placed into recorded history is as much a violence as it is any form of reverence.

  What I mean is that there’s something to be said for looking at it from a safe distance, calling it what it is, and living with the knowledge that all the world’s unrecorded parts are still busy existing, that beauty is not something you capture or depict, it’s what you are. It’s what she is. All those girls.

  I have come to a different kind of stillness, one that makes me think of Cassandra. Remember her on the locker room bench, the muscles in her back and the broad white brassiere that crossed them, and all the noise of violence raging behind her. She’s still, but she’s not bound. She knows exactly what’s going on, and that is why her back is to it. That’s why she doesn’t move. The myth has Cassandra frantic to convince the world of what she knows and then leaves her, in the end, exiled, alone and insane with her knowledge. Not my Cassandra, not me. This stillness is as peaceful as the idea of her has felt since I first saw her there.

  One more thing about the past. About when I bought that smooth wooden box for Julie, the one that fit in my palm as comfortably as my hand fit into hers, and I thought and thought about what to put in it. It didn’t seem right to give an empty box. I didn’t even know at the time that back in Latin the root of the word cunt means empty box. Which of course can be bad, but can also be good, depending on whose mouth it’s in. Talk about something no one wants you to know.

  So it didn’t seem right to give her an empty box. I found an index card that I’d covered with patterns, back before I even knew her. It was warped from its time under the drain. I folded the card in half and cut a heart out of it. You see how close that is to cutting its heart out. I didn’t even know about the heart being the home of intelligence, the only thing left in the body of a mummified Egyptian. I wasn’t even thinking of poor Pandora, if only she knew what was left in the empty box, locked away from the awful, swarming world. There it was, a heart with blurred and complicated and, in some sense, meaningless patterns. I put the flat heart in the box, symbols on the symbol in the symbol, and I gave it to her, a half-intended love note, an accidental confession.

  And there’s one more one-more-thing. About the ancient Egyptians with their papyrus paper and papyrus boats, these organic disappearing vessels, these perpetually told and retold lives, these ever-incomplete deaths and endings. The one more thing is how the immortality of the Pharaoh depended on the remembrance of his name. So what happened was, one Pharaoh would write his story in stone. But then the next Pharaoh would have the name hacked out and replace it with his own.

  It’s that one or that one. It’s girl after girl.

  Do you see? That whole drive toward turning the world’s eyes on you, how destructive it is, that whole angry flailing urge to stop time, to stop it on yourself, to make it be all and end all. How fundamentally immoral it is to make your life be about immortality. How important it is to happily exist invisibly.

  Her liquid cells are surging behind the walls of her skin. I can hear her from here. How I love that girl. And I’m so unalone. I feel filled with the ghosts of nameless unburied girls. I feel I’m moving through them every moment I step through air.

  I can see the future and how I’m in it. I’ll wait. I’ll watch her grow up next to me. She’ll keep coming over. She’ll come over whenever she wants.

  I imagine her grown, and how she could move right over, and into my home.

  I’ll marry her, whatever, or I won’t, it’s okay. She’ll go away. She’ll have adventures. She’ll come back, in one form or another, in one or another girl.

  I’ll loose it on her, and loose her on the world, repeating, you got it: love, love, love.

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