“I have to go to bed,” I tell Claude. “I’m exhausted.”
“You’re exhausted? Or you’re afraid I’m going to rape you?”
I jerk back, raising the front legs of my chair off the sand.
“I’m kidding,” Claude says. “Une blague française.”
“It’s not funny. It’s terrifying.”
He leans toward me and grins, more at ease now that I’m afraid.
“Thank you for the drink. Good night.” I stand up. He stands up, too, so abruptly he upends his chair. He takes my hands in his and squeezes until my knuckles grind against each other. He pulls down on my arms until I sit back down. The lights in the café have gone off. The tiki torches have burned out. The blackened windows of the nearest hotel glisten when the moon shines through the cloud cover. I no longer feel unacceptable. I feel like a word I’m trying not to hear.
“I don’t have to leave quite yet,” I say. “We can talk a little more.”
Claude moves his patio chair directly opposite mine. His knees grip my knees.
“I’d like your opinion on something, actually,” I say. “I’m sort of obsessed with the war. That’s partly why I came to Sri Lanka in the first place.” Claude tilts his head and fixes his eyes on me. His silence is reassuring. “It seems really fucked up to be obsessed with a war in this kind of voyeuristic way, but then when I think about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and how it suddenly became normal to talk about torture with strangers at a bar, holding people’s heads underwater and hanging them from the ceiling until their shoulders dislocate and they lose consciousness—this became just something our country does sometimes, like all the other countries. And then there are these games on the Internet where you can torture people for fun. Free games, anyone can use them. Take a photo of your enemy, click a button, and jam nails in his face, move the mouse over his foot and saw off his toes. I see teenagers playing this game on the subway. Casual entertainment. This is the world, right? And all I’m doing is crying over boys. But I can’t help it, the feelings are true, they don’t stop, I can’t help it. So I guess I thought that maybe if I could just really understand—if it could be not just some sad news story to me, but if I could really understand what it has been to live through this war in Sri Lanka, from the point of view of the people who have suffered the most, then I would—um. You know.” Claude is gradually closing the distance between our faces. His fleshy hand opens and closes on his knee. I speak faster, staring at and not seeing the ripples so small and gentle they seem frozen on the surface of the ocean. “I’ve always known I have no right to be as fucked up as I am. So I’m obsessed with people who have the right. It’s a kind of narcissism. Of course I know that. I wish I could be like Suriya. She’s my friend in Kandy. Or else be an activist. Be like Suriya or be an activist. Or maybe I can just be ca—”
“Are your eyes blue or green?” Claude leans in so that my knees press into his belly.
“Oh, that really depends on so many things. On the light and what I’m wearing and if the person looking at me has some tiny bit of color blindness. Maybe not even diagnosed.” I look at my hands, upturned in my lap. When I called my father after Brian kicked me out of our apartment, Dad said, “Go for a walk around the block. Have a glass of water. Sit still and notice the way your hands look in your lap.” I tried to do all of those things. I couldn’t do any of them. I bought Jared a plane ticket to New York.
My hand is in Claude’s hand now, his palm sweating on my cold, stiff fingers. He pulls my hand to his chest and presses it against his saggy left breast. His heartbeat is rapid and faint. For an instant, it’s soothing to be reminded of the efficiency and independence of bodies, each reduced to the same basic urges. But then Claude clears his throat and spits on the ground by my feet. His saliva makes a tiny glistening pond in the sand. A specific pond on the verge of specifically disappearing. Not a thought at all.
In ninth grade, the boys in my classes started fighting in the soccer field after school. The violence was taken for granted, a foregone conclusion. I felt dizzy whenever a kid with a black eye and swollen cheeks passed me in the hall. Someone had done that to him. He had felt that being done to him. “I’m telling you, don’t mess with him, holmes,” I heard one kid telling another in the cafeteria. “I pissed blood for a week. I thought I was gonna die.” When I went to a Take Back the Night march a few years later, and held a candle while I listened to girls—some crying, some stone-faced—telling stories I wished I didn’t have to hear, I remembered that small-nosed teenager. Is one kind of violence worse than another? Or is the idea of rape as a violation of the most inviolate part of self—one’s soul or essence or purity, or whatever you call it—the unnecessary second arrow of suffering, intensifying the energy of an experience whose horror might be limited to the physical and temporal? Is the perceived power inherent in inflicting that psychic violation part of what incites rapists to rape? These thoughts come to me as shapes and textures. I sense what my mind is trying to say, but I can’t yet hear the words it’s using.
Claude holds my chin between his thumb and index finger and leans toward me. The insides of his large lips wet my closed mouth. He pulls down on my chin and presses his tongue against my tongue. Without meaning to, I bite down. Claude sits back and slaps me with halfhearted aggression that matches mine. He kisses me again. I let his tongue circle the dead weight of my own. He stands up and walks behind my chair, squeezes and releases my shoulders, kneads my collarbone, moves his fingers to the hollow at the base of my throat and presses hard. I can’t breathe for a moment. He releases his hand. I cough. He places his palm over my forehead and pulls me back against the base of his belly. His penis hardens against my neck. For a moment, my body opens to the familiarity of the touch. Then there’s a sound like strings breaking in an orchestra in some windowless school auditorium in a little town filled with mostly empty parking lots. I fall into that other frequency, far below the clamoring moment, sorrow great enough to forgive me. Claude kneels in front of me and touches my face and smears the tears against his thigh. “I need sleep,” I say.
He lifts me out of the chair and puts his arm around my waist. I hiccup as he walks me back to the motel.
At the door to my room, I mumble, “Bonne nuit,” but Claude takes the key from my hand. I stand in the doorway as he reties my mosquito net over my bed and fumbles with the light switches until he finds the one for the fan. He returns his arm to my waist and walks me to the bed. He won’t hurt me, not really. This will be the kind of badness that I can’t help but recover from. He cups my shoulders and lowers me onto my back. He wheezes as he wrestles with my pants, still damp and clingy with saltwater. Sitting upright on the edge of the bed, he jams his fingers inside me. I put my hand on his wrist and tell him to get a condom out of the toiletry bag in the bathroom.
As he walks back to the bed, I think of a scene in a movie that shows only boot-clad feet, that kind of cheap foreboding. I like the thought, and nestle into it as Claude parts my legs with his knees. He lowers himself onto his elbows, depressing the mattress on both sides of my head. Raising himself onto straight arms, he pushes in. His hips move in a slow, rolling motion that makes me feel nothing. Here I am, all grown up. This is not rape, not sex, not life, not death, not right, not wrong. Unwanted, but here. I have succeeded. I have rid sex of its vanity. I have stripped myself of my ego. I have lost all concern for my circumstances. This is enlightenment, for a regular person (Suriya’s phrase) who is not close to ready for enlightenment, who skipped the part about circumambulating the temple with my head bowed, begging Lord Buddha—or whatever you call it—for absolutely nothing. Without the humility required to make some sacrifice, however simple, all the spiritual insights in the world still add up to nothing. A drop of Claude’s sweat falls onto my face. I turn my head and wipe my cheek against the sheet.
With no warning, he pulls out and walks into the bathroom. I am too tired to speak or move, which is not the worst postcoital feeling I’ve e
ver had.
Minutes or hours later, large hands pull me into a sitting position. “I will come to get you at noon, okay?” Claude says. “My driver will take us to lunch at a resort in the mountains. Bring your swimming suit. You will love it.” I nod. He pats my foot and stands up.
After he leaves, I get out of bed and draw the lock across the door. I glance at my stuff, scattered on the floor around the room: a bottle of Rite Aid sunscreen, a faded blue bikini hanging from the doorknob, hiking sandals caked in dirt. “I’m glad Claude didn’t beat me to death,” I tell my things. I wish they could laugh.
—
I always made sure I had at least two blankets on my bed when I was a child, so they could keep each other company while I was at school. If I realized that one hand towel in the bathroom was getting used more than the other because it was closer to the sink, I switched the towels to give them equal affection. I broke down sobbing at my fifth birthday party when my mom suggested my friends and I take a plastic baseball bat to the piñata she had stuffed with my favorite candy. My care for objects was rewarded. Pillows, towels, markers, socks comforted me, offering themselves up with infinite friendliness. Then I entered junior high and learned that my behavior was acceptable only as a literary technique. But there was nothing poetic about the consciousness I attributed to things. I was possibly psychotic. This was one of many indications that it would not be wise for me to speak my true thoughts aloud.
At some point during one of my meaningless sexual encounters in Paris or during the barhopping years afterward or at several points during several such encounters, I had the thought that if I had been able to maintain that easy mutual love for things, I would have been always filled with love. People-oriented attachment and desire would not have been able to control me. Even if there were some truth to this thinking, the truth could not shift anything in me because, at the moment in which I was thinking this way, I was only exploiting the thought to feel something other than the reality of two bored people trying to feel a tiny bit good. It was a comforting distraction to conceptualize the sex as existentially sad, and my desire for it as existentially pathetic, because I could not then bear what I now know the sex truly was: banal, affectless, rien du tout.
—
“Protect this vow, even at the risk of your life.”
I am lying at the coincidence of two infinitudes—black air above, black water below. I had to swim far out, past the lines where the huge waves break, to be able to float on my back. I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in his teachings, I take refuge in the people who abide them. That is the vow the Tibetan saying asks me to protect with my life. The water is wide awake and warm. I am terrified of sharks and sea snakes, one of which crawled out of the water and hissed at a group of drunken tourists the other day. I take refuge in the Bu— Stop.
I rise and fall along the crest of waves about to break. One sucks me under, tumbles me, releases me. There is no hope of refuge, no chance of being saved.
This man saved me. This job saved me. This exercise routine saved me. This religion saved me. This house saved me. This child saved me. This book saved me. This vitamin saved me. This parakeet saved me. This country saved me. Enough.
It takes a long time to swim back to shore. Afraid, okay, afraid, okay.
Afraid? Okay.
My English teacher in high school used to tell us that suicide was never an option in fiction. So this is what he meant. Of course people kill themselves in novels. But first the plot must be entrenched in such an eensy-weensy, immovable, rock-hard crevice that suicide becomes the only inevitability. In real life, suicide is always just one of infinite options, as avid and useless as any other fantasy.
KANDY
Loudspeakers crackle to life before blasting recorded pirith. The smell of the ocean is spicy and proud, not yet overpowered by frying rotis and burning trash. The bus stop is in front of a fancy hotel enclosed by a tall brick wall, which I lean against to relieve the weight of my pack. I don’t have to wait long before the bus barrels toward me, the loud complaints of its engine stirring up a gust of butterflies from a patch of grass on the other side of the road. Their bright, motile mass disappears into a palmyra grove, and I climb up the back steps of the bus, shouting “Kandy? Kandy?” to no one in particular.
An elderly man nods. “Kandy, yes. Long trip.”
I push through thickets of flesh in search of a place to stow my bag. The bus is packed with children in white school uniforms, businessmen in suits, businesswomen in saris. I tighten my abdomen and widen my stance to keep from falling when my sweaty hand loses its grip on the seat back.
Relief. We’re all just a person on a bus.
When I called 911 soon after Brian and I broke up, I knew, the instant the police filed in—guns drawn, backs to the wall—that there was no intruder. It was just me in a towel and two police officers whose jaws were set against the terror of being surprised by an armed lunatic. After they left, I walked over to the antique mirror Brian and I had carried home from a flea market one late-summer day, fallen leaves cartwheeling at our feet as the sun turned our noses pink. It was the only piece of furniture I’d taken when I moved out of his apartment. I sat down cross-legged in front of the mirror and met my own eyes. For the first time, I was glad Brian was gone. He would have been horrified that I’d mistakenly called the police, would have made me promise not to mention the incident to his parents, so ashamed he often was of my odd transgressions against decorum.
But this is also what drew him to me. He loved to watch me devour ice cream or tear up at the first threat of sadness in a movie. “You’re so susceptible,” he said once. “To everything.” And he laughed in a way that relieved me of the obligation to respond.
That first morning in our newly shared apartment: drinking mimosas, singing along to Neil Young, making pancakes filled with strawberries. We were so hopeful. He insisted we not get dressed. I sat on his lap and ate pancakes with my hands. At first, I kept my feet on the ground to take some of my weight off his lap. But as we both kept eating and drinking, I forgot to hold myself up and I let his thighs support me. An overly explicit metaphor. It was always like that with him, crystal clear, no surprises—like even our best times were part of a script that had been written long before we met. The bus hits a pothole and I’m jostled into an older woman. I almost grab her hand. Brian’s arm around my waist as we walked down an icy sidewalk: This is what I imagined love was, when I was a child. But they were only moments. We did not share the world that surrounded them.
At the other end of the bus, a pimply middle-aged man is waving at me and pointing to the empty seat in front of him. “Ne, ne,” I say. But the people in the aisle all stare at me while he gestures, so I make my way to the front. Best just to accept the kindness. The driver hands me a plantain. “Sthoo-thiy,” I say. Thank you, Brian, I think. For making me leave. The driver beams at the road before him. It’s not so difficult, really, to share moments of love with others.
As we near downtown Kandy, I hop off the bus at a storefront advertising international calls. A skinny boy in a Yankees shirt leads me to a curtained phone booth in the back. I start dialing before he pulls the curtain closed. The space between each muted ring is too long. On the other side of the curtain, the boy shifts in his squeaky chair. My chin curls toward my chest. No one home. Click. A man clears his throat.
“Bueno. Dime.”
“Jared? Why are you speaking Spanish?”
“520 Clark.”
“What? Jared, it’s me.”
“I know, come over. It’s not a party ’til you’re here, doll.”
“Jared. It’s Elsie. I am in Sri Lanka.” The words are slow and heavy, trying to stave off panic.
“Elsie? Oh, hey baby. I didn’t recognize you.”
No, no, not this voice—sloppy, affectedly deep, unchanging in tone and quality no matter what I do or say. He cannot be in that state now. He cannot be unreachable now.
“I really need to t
alk to you.” I clutch the curtain in my free hand, twisting it round and round my fist.
“Now’s not great. I’m having this thing.” Girls cackle near him. A stereo blasts anthemic rock. Talking to Jared is impossible right now. I should not try. I should hang up.
“What thing?” I say.
“We’re starting an S&M club. Come over, baby.” These words are not Jared’s. They are spoken in a woman’s high-pitched bravado, the voice of a sexual aggressor who never gets her needs met. I smell her sticky red lipstick as she leans against Jared’s cheek, stealing our conversation with his consent.
“Jared,” I say, “if you don’t leave that room right now and find a quiet place to talk to me—”
“Jesus Christ. You are always mad at me. I’m hanging up. Good luck out there, Elsie.”
“Please, Jared, please, please.” I’m whining, digging my fingers into my cheeks, about to lose myself. I see it happening, cannot stop it.
“Jesus H. What is it now?” He sounds like an overworked CEO who has just been screwed out of millions of dollars. Alcohol, parties: This is his confidence.
“I need you right now. Please leave the party and talk to me.”
“I will be back imminently,” he announces to everyone but me. “Apparently I am needed.”
“I need you here, Jared!” the S&M woman trills.
“Get away from that bitch,” I say. “I need to talk to you.”
Wreck and Order Page 25