Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  He falls precipitously into a deep sleep. Seeing my alarm, the Assistant Director sends for the Director. Together, they help him stagger to his feet, one of them supporting him on each side. The Director tells me that they will take him where he can lie down in comfort and sleep until his exhaustion wears off. He will be quite all right, they assure me. Would I care to accompany them?

  But all at once I know that they will do—already have done-something ghastly to K. It somehow has been accomplished by his having toured the laboratory and repeatedly inhaled the strange odor there. Yet the substance is so subtle that it merely wearied him, and was then fully activated by the plain aspirin I myself acquiesced to his taking. One thing I know. I can be of no help to him while I am in their clutches. I break from them, freezing just long enough to see their gazes fix on what I have dropped in my haste: my jacket, bunched up on the grass—and lying beside it, only half hidden, the axe. Over the unconscious, lolling head of my lover, the Director and his Assistant flash me a look of unmasked challenge. I turn and begin running.

  I know I have very little time. I race across the quad to the white-shuttered cottage, glancing back only once to see the Director and the Assistant Director dragging K. off between them.

  My little friend is waiting at the door of the cottage, and she hurries me upstairs to her room. She seems to know all that has taken place out on the lawn without my having told her. She refuses me her name, but tells me hurriedly that the model asylum is one massive torture chamber to “recondition” rebels and misfits, and that she and a few others in her cottage are part of a small but effective underground resistance which has been operating for some time. They have arranged my escape; a taxicab with a male member of the underground posing as its driver is waiting now at the gate just some yards from the cottage—she can lead me there. I can be gone before any pursuit is possible.

  I counter with refusals and questions. I cannot leave without K. And how do we get him free? What about her and the others in her house? Surely I have been seen entering here. Now she and others of the resistance will be endangered.

  She dismisses all my concerns while throwing a dark cape over my shoulders, rearranging my hair, and bustling me toward the stairs. She tells me that the Director has for some time suspected her and this house—the underground is not afraid, and I can be of more help to them outside, rallying help and telling the truth about the so-called model institution. Rescuing K. is hopeless, she says. He belongs to them now, the aspirin-activated chemical having changed him utterly, as I somehow feared.

  She rushes me downstairs and toward the back door of the cottage, but I refuse to go. I tell her it is impossible to leave without K., that I can undo whatever effects they have wrought on him, that I must and will, that she does not know him as I do. We quarrel, frantic in our urgency. Then, all at once, we hear shouts and cries from in front of the cottage. I rush to the window, to see advancing there across the broad lawn about twenty men—the Director, the rest in the white coats and trousers of hospital attendants, and K., in front like a leader. The girl tugs frantically at my arm, but I pull away. K. is coming, I must wait for him, together we will find our way out of this nightmare. She says he is changed forever, but I will not, cannot believe her. At last she leaves me, fleeing herself, though whether out back or upstairs I don’t know.

  The men now stand before the heavy wood door of the cottage. K. knocks and calls my name. Paralyzed with fear and indecision, I make no answer. The attendants begin growling at K. to let them handle this; they’ve had experience, they know how to deal with me. But he seems to refuse, and I hear his quiet voice saying, “She will open the door for me.”

  I feel I must trust him or die. I open the door.

  The attendants make as if to rush me, but he restrains them at the threshold, merely standing there. Perhaps nothing can be done unless I myself invite him in. But I am riveted by the change in K.’s face, his manner, his whole appearance.

  He seems older, statelier, more distinguished somehow. His hair is shaped in a suave cut and touched silver at the temples. His blue suit seems darker, better cut, and he is wearing, of all things, a matching vest. It is a look totally unlike him, although this person is clearly K. But the flavor is that of a politician, a judge, or even, yes, the Director himself. Yet it is K. who stands before me. But without his own soul.

  My whole body hurls itself against the door, and I almost manage to force it shut again, taking the men by surprise. But then their combined force pushing back outbalances mine, and I am flung back into the room. K. enters, and the attendants crowd in behind him. He smiles at me. He is carrying the axe.

  I am alone now in this log-cabin living room, among these chintz-covered chairs and this corduroy sofa, before this fieldstone fireplace, alone with these men and my lover.

  “We are about to play a game,” K. announces.

  One of the white-coated men brings in a bushel of wood chips, each about the size of a silver dollar. He picks up one chip and throws it into the air, out toward where I am standing. K. hurls the axe at the chip, hitting it midair, near my head. An attendant retrieves the axe and another chip is hurled. I learn to spin and dodge and wheel and run about the room, between the furniture, like a mouse from a cat, twenty cats. The axe, of course, is never hurled at me, only at the wood chip—which is always thrown deliberately a few inches from my body. I know I am ridiculous in my terror, my movements panicked, contorted, slapstick—I know this myself, even before the attendants and K. begin laughing uproariously at me. I am too busy running about, scurrying in my humiliation, to know if I am sobbing or panting. I know that I alone am not laughing.

  Then there is a split-second chance: one attendant has been slow at retrieving the axe. It lies at my feet, and it is in my hand before he can slide across the floor for it. I stand like a hunted animal at bay, breathing hard, the axe handle smooth in my sweating fist. The men fall silent. K. steps forward. “Give me the axe, my dear,” he says calmly.

  “Send them away,” I hiss.

  “Come. Give me the axe. You’ll hurt someone. You don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  “First. Send. Them. Away!”

  At a look from him they all leave, although I know they are waiting just outside the closed front door. I have no plan now: only, perhaps, to talk with K., to get him alone and pull him back to himself, then to think together how we can leave this place …

  But when he turns back to me he is changed again. The mask is gone from his face, which now wears its own dear familiar expression. And he seems dazed, lost. He staggers to a chair.

  “How did I get here?” he murmurs. “What … how … what happened?”

  So immense is my relief at his return to himself, even in confusion, that I rush to his side, forgetting everything else, dropping the axe at his feet, embracing him, laughing wildly at his blessed confusion, his needing me, his unmurderous clear blue eyes now filling with tears in recognition of me. He doubles over onto his knees, crying, as he begins to remember what has happened. But I am desperate now only to get us both free, and I run to the back door to look for any sign of the taxi driver. Off beyond the trees, I can see the taxi waiting, the driver in his seat, our deliverer. I turn back to tell K. the glad news.

  He is standing in the middle of the room, changed again, the axe in his hand.

  Whether the previous moment was genuine or a trick, this is unmistakably real now, and I know that it is a fight to the death. He comes to me, unsmiling, robot-like, swinging the axe. I whirl and run, dodging the furniture again, awkwardly eluding him as I try to think. I call his name. I call my love to him. He pursues, relentless, swinging the axe. He backs me up against one long wall, aims the axe at my forehead, and throws. But he has miscalculated, and it lands just beside my ear, embedded deep in the wood. He lurches closer, but I slip out of his grasp, and across the room, to what I have just now noticed hanging above the mantle—a rusty antique sword. I wrench it down and advance on him. He is
still struggling to pull the axe out of the wall. But before he can manage this, I whisper his name. He wheels, that blank alien hatred in his eyes melting like snow into his own confused and loving blue. I watch the change. I watch it.

  And I stab the sword deep into his body.

  He slumps to the ground, crying for me. He does not know who he is, where he is. He asks, “What have I done that you should kill me?” And in time to each of my dry sobs, I stab him again and again and again, feeling muscle and gut and bone-shard and gristle shudder up through the blade, through my own arm, shock upon shock in waves to my brain. He is changing back to himself again, matching my rhythm, leaning up to meet my blows, gasping even, “Yes, my dearest, you must, you must kill me or you will never be safe. For love, for pity, oh destroy me so that I will never live having destroyed you. Take that too on yourself, this one last time, oh my love.”

  At last he lies still, his eyes open, conscious, his beloved face wet with tears and spattered blood. The sword is poised above his heart, but I cannot send it home.

  “Save us both,” he rasps. “Strike!” But I drop the sword and kneel beside him, leaning over that dear body, crying and kissing him. Then suddenly the young girl is back, with the taxi driver this time, and they are urging me to go while there is still a chance. I tell them that K. has been grievously wounded, by me, and that he must be rushed to a hospital or he will die. I must take him with me. They refuse, but I overcome their intransigence with my furious determination, and together we all carry K.’s barely alive body out to the cab. My young friend, she of the braids and frighteningly cool self-possession, embraces me and disappears. I am settled in the back seat, K. lying across my lap, my clothes wet with his blood. It is a pietà of murderess and victim. The driver guns the motor and we are off.

  For an endless space of time we speed, through countryside and city outskirts, through evening and then night, pursued at first by cars from the asylum, later, alone, having at last eluded them.

  But K. is dying in my arms—the old K., my own lover and husband and friend, he who has always known and loved me best. Oh dear god, he is really dying. He is delirious, talking of poems we wrote and read aloud to each other once, of chess games we played until three in the morning, of love-making under our rain-drenched bedroom eaves. Once in a while he regains coherence and begs forgiveness for having been so changed against his will.

  “No blame, no blame,” I weep to him, begging his forgiveness, in turn, for my death blows. Yet he understands even that, pleading with me to put him out of the car now, before we reach the city, in case his presence should bring suspicion on me. I tell him that we’ll be safe in the city, that he must go to the hospital. No, no, he moans in desperation. He says I don’t understand. That the asylum reaches far beyond its own hedges. That the city too will destroy me when it learns what I have done. That he, dead or alive, must not be found with me. That I should go where the underground driver knows there is safety.

  But I am past listening now, knowing only that I hold what is most dear to me, that it is ebbing away each second, staining my fingers with the loss of love. Nothing matters, nothing is real, but this. The driver leans back and adds his urgings to K.’s. But I am deaf to them both. Nothing again will ever part me from my loving what I have a right to love. Nothing can break the pure pity of this moment, where we cling to one another, casualties each of the other and of what had lain in wait for us all along, live sacrifices bleeding out our love above relentless wheels.

  “I love you, I have always loved you, my darling. I always will,” I murmur over and over. And he replies with the same words, blood bubbling from his mouth at every breath. Two children saying their prayers against the night.

  Then the lights outside the taxi are city-street bright, and we are pulling up to the emergency entrance of a large hospital, the driver nervously cursing to himself at being in this situation. And the attendants rush out, white-coated, efficient, with a stretcher. K. is placed upon it, and I prepare to leave the taxi and follow where they wheel him. But as I step from the cab, more attendants close round me.

  They were right then, after all. The asylum reaches out into the world. It is becoming the world. But it doesn’t matter, if I can save my love; if I can be near him, even if he is dying, stay with him, he whom I risked killing rather than let live without his soul.

  Then the earth’s crust opens before my feet.

  For K., as he is wheeled away on the stretcher, leans up and props himself casually on one elbow, smiling at me through the alien face, self-confident, unhurt, vindicated, saved. He is not ill, not dying, not even wounded.

  Is this the Parable of Paranoia? Or the Parable of Love?

  1 There are of course quite a few practicing women psychiatrists and therapists. There are even a handful of honest-to-goddess feminist women in such practice. But the number and availability of these feminist professionals (in the best sense of the word professional) is still so small as to constitute, for the average woman in the United States, a utopian alternative. For the average woman across the globe this alternative is nonexistent. And, as Dr. Phyllis Chesler so memorably demonstrated in Women and Madness (Doubleday, New York, 1972), the problem is one of frightening magnitude. Patriarchy literally makes us mad.

  2 Among my poems that refer to these experiences are: “War Games,” “Credo,” “Freaks,” “Revolucinations,” and “Nightfoals”—all in Monster, and “The Beggar Woman” in Lady of the Beasts.

  ART AND FEMINISM: A ONE-ACT WHIMSICAL AMUSEMENT ON ALL THAT MATTERS

  The following feminist “entertainment” emerged from a collage of writings jotted in fits and starts over a long period. At times these notes were motivated by the thrill of realizing a feminist culture was coming into being. At other times they were motivated by anger—at censorship (see “International Feminism: A Call for Support of the Three Marias” p. 202), or at ignorance, or at dogmatism. Yet how much more often I have reveled in the proliferation of women creating art. In poetry alone, even a partial list of names chosen almost at random hints at the diversity: Alice Walker, Joan Larkin, Kathleen Fraser, Dolores Prida, Honor Moore, Michelle Wallace, Louise Bernikow, Yvonne, Marge Piercy, Marilyn Hacker, Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Susan Griffin, Fran Winant, Alta, Leah Fritz, Ntozake Shange, Dianne Di Prima, June Jordan—the words of these women and many others have exploded across the consciousness of an American reading public composed largely, though not exclusively, of women. Still others, like Eve Merriam, Josephine Miles, Ruth Pitter, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Carolyn Kizer, Elizabeth Jennings, Laura Riding, and of course the silver-tongued ghosts of Plath and Sexton—these are the “womandarins,” the more established poets. Of differing generations and consciousnesses, nonetheless these are the women who were carving in English the pain of being female even before they themselves could actually name that pain; whittlers, as it were, of their own transformation shining back at them in the runes of their feminist poet daughters.

  This feminist renaissance, not content with its creative artists, has also produced feminist scholars who are researching and reclaiming older forms of women’s art. I am indebted for the references in this “Amusement” on the background of quilting to Patricia Mainardi (herself a painter), whose comprehensive study “Quilts: The Great American Art,” first appeared in Feminist Art Journal, Winter, 1973, and to Carol Edelson, whose article “Quilting: A History,” was published by Ms. in December 1973. The continuing research done by Rachel Maines and her colleagues at the new and feminist Center for the History of American Needlework (5660 Beacon Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15217) will doubtless prove, in time, that Penelope was a perfectionist artist who unwove her tapestry at night merely to revise; the suitors, and Odysseus for that matter, had nothing to do with it. I want to express publicly the grateful excitement I have felt upon reading Feminist Art Journal—the interviews with women who are poets, painters, sculptors, and composers; the eye-opening ret
rospectives on medieval women artists; the analyses of women architects, and film-makers. I am grateful, too, to Meg Bogin for her book The Women Troubadours (Paddington Press Ltd., New York, 1976), recently published and already a basic resource which inspired part of the following piece.

  Nor does my gratitude restrict itself to new feminists, for without the voices of those who sang earlier, we could not exist. I think of so many women whose different insights have been of incalculable worth: I think of Susan Sontag—the intellectual integrity of her prose; and of Mary McCarthy, whose genius for fiction encompassed a dazzling feminist sensibility—this, decades ago, and alone. I thank them. I think of Dorothy L. Sayers, who in a thoughtful book called The Mind of the Maker (1941; Living Age Editions, Meridian Books, New York, 1960) posed the privileges and griefs of the artist in such a way as to impress me deeply; her terms were of her background and her time—Christian and patriarchal—but her perceptions were her own, and so organically feminist, radical, and daring as to be ours. I thank her, too.

  I even must thank, on this occasion, those who have irritated me into the gall of various statements hazarded in this “Amusement.” I mean certain dear sisters who have sent me terribly sincere and sincerely terrible “political” poemlets. I mean that feminist (who claimed to be an art student, yet) who inspired in me a giddy consternation when I heard her pronounce Daphnis and Chloe “Daphne and Chloe, those great lesbian lovers.” (I waited for her to acknowledge Hero and Leander as her gay brothers, but clearly she’d never heard the names.) I’m grateful to the woman who organized a conference workshop entitled “Poetry as Yoga Practice”—thus making me realize how bad things really were. (A kind soul, surely she meant well, but would she, I wonder, have called a workshop “Brain Surgery as Yoga Practice”? “Thermonuclear Dynamics as Yoga Practice”? Even “Learning French the Berlitz Way as Yoga Practice”? I think not—yet the art, craft, and science of poetry is at least as exacting as any of the above—and merits as much courtesy, if not respect.)