Wreck and Order (12 page)

In a forest in India two thousand five hundred years ago, the Buddha explained pain to a group of men who had devoted their lives to noticing what happened when they sat very still. He said something like this: “Imagine a man is pierced with an arrow. The man feels pain. The man cannot avoid this pain. Imagine this man is pierced by a second arrow. His pain increases twofold. The first arrow is inevitable but the second arrow is a choice. It is the man's hatred of the first arrow.” I reread this parable on the Internet one early morning to get myself to stop pacing. My head was spinning an endless tale about how pain was the enemy attacking my heart and my head was going to be the hero vanquishing the enemy, it just had to figure out the best tactics, the right weapons, the correct configuration. But Heart's pain and Head's story communicate on different frequencies. So Head cannot help Heart, try as it might, and this trying was the clamor that made bearable pain unbearable. I understood this after I reread the parable. If this understanding helped at all—and it might have—my head was not aware of it.

I started taking a hodgepodge of counterindicated pills before bed, which permitted me to remain for hours in the desert between wakefulness and sleep. I was startled out of this state one night by the sound of a man's angry voice in my basement apartment. Seconds later, I was standing naked in the concrete backyard. My fan was on high, facing the wall—I needed the loud hum of white noise to doze off—so I couldn't hear deeper into my apartment. My purse had recently been ripped off my shoulder while I waited with a man I'd just met to get into a seedy club. The purse had held my keys and several forms of ID. I had not gotten the locks changed. I ran back inside the apartment to grab my phone off my bedside table, dialed 911, gave the dispatcher my address.

The police couldn't come in the front door because I was too afraid to walk through my apartment to unlock it. So they banged on the main entrance to the building until they woke my upstairs neighbor, a hard-bodied Japanese woman who closed her curtains whenever I stepped into the backyard. They charged through her apartment and came out her window, shining boots pouring over the sill and landing with a clack in the concrete yard where I stood naked, still gripping my phone to my ear. Red and white lights, wailing from the car on the street, chased each other on my neighbor's ceiling. The police walked down the steps to the basement in single file, guns drawn.

When I saw the guns I knew the apartment was empty. I followed the cops into my bedroom, picked up a towel off the floor, wrapped it around my chest. I wanted them to find all of my belongings smashed to bits. I wanted a lunatic wearing blackface and an adult diaper to leap out of my closet, shrieking and karate-chopping the air. The cops prowled through my kitchen and bathroom, turning on lights, peering behind doors. “Is it always like this in here?” they asked of the living room, littered with clothes and shoes, old coffee cups, crumpled pages torn from books and magazines. My absentee roommate's large TV, which she planned to sell, sat on the floor in the center of the chaos. Yes, it was always like that.

After the police left, I made a list of my potential identities.

Only after I finished writing did I realize that I stole both the idea and the final option from Spalding Gray. He made a similar list in his journal, published after his death. He did kill himself, abandoning a wife, children, success as a writer and actor, worthwhile projects that only he could complete. Whereas I had to steal even my thoughts about my life from those who had found a form to match their inner world—all of which argued strongly for a serious consideration of option 11.

How, though? If that really did end up being the only choice? I have no capacity for violence. I don't even kill mosquitoes. It would have to be pills. And I couldn't be cowardly about it, the way I was in high school, taking handfuls of Advil and pretending to believe that this time something truly different would happen.

I got my locks changed. But that night, I heard the man's voice again, addressing me in a singsong whisper. “Elsie. The calm before the storm. Elsie. The calm before the storm.” Again, I found myself standing naked in my backyard, heart trying to break out of my chest. I knew I couldn't call the police again, but I was too afraid to go back inside. I sat on a folding chair. Rain from a late-afternoon shower soaked my bare ass. After the blackness overhead gave way to gray murk, I got back in bed, called Jared, asked if he would stay with me for a while.

“At your service, milady,” he said in an overdone cockney accent at the end of another lame California night. I turned on my computer. LAX, JFK. Click. The money was just a number on a computer screen.

And then Jared and I were lying in bed together and I was no longer hearing the singsong whisper of an imaginary man. I was hearing Jared's snore. He rolled away from me but our feet remained entangled. I pictured us from above, bodies forming a vague V. A child learning to write. Odd that I didn't long to have one. How else to be of use? Why didn't I want anything that made sense? Maybe my personality—sensibility without sense—was a type that was meant to die out. My face reached for the window. The shades were drawn but light tried to crest the sill. Noonday sun, noonday sun. I repeated the phrase to make one part of my mind seem pretty to another part. Jared's anklebones crushed mine. There was no way to touch him that would allay the loneliness. Or there might have been, but I didn't want to try. I just wanted someone, anyone, to see that our faces were the tips of a child's squiggly V, woman's eyes open, mouth closed, man's eyes closed, mouth open. If only someone would take a photograph or paint a picture of the aerial view of this moment, if only my feelings belonged to a scene that had some meaning. But why would a stranger care that my face was reaching for noonday sun while my lover's ankles crushed mine? So instead I thought of the words I would use to describe the image to Jared, after he woke up, after we had sex, while we were eating cereal with the frozen blueberries I was proud of myself for keeping on hand.

“Ducks can hold their breath for a long time, but many hens still drown during peak mating season, killed by mallards during copulation. Female ducks are raped so frequently that they have evolved complicated vaginal passages, spiraled tubes with hidden pockets that allow them to store and later eject semen from unwanted partners. Most birds mate by joining their reproductive openings, positioning that requires cooperation. But ducks have penises and vaginas.”

An acquaintance's Facebook status led me to the article about duck sex, which I read aloud to Jared one afternoon, crammed onto the lower side of my lopsided bed. The computer warmed my bare thighs as I wondered aloud about the mating habits of ducks—how cruel that evolution has fostered female defensiveness instead of curbing male aggression, and how wrong that my body found animals committing homicidal gang rape erotic.

Jared took the computer off my lap and pulled me down to him. “It's not wrong,” he said. “You're not choosing to feel like that. Don't worry about it so much.” He was propped on one elbow, his face a few inches above mine, the crevices in his cheeks footholds in a sheer cliff. I watched myself, tiny, climbing up his right cheek and resting on top of his nostril. I grazed the joints of my fisted hand over his cheek, a gesture that wanted to have meaning. “Have you been fantasizing about me?” I asked.

“All the time.”

“Tell me one.”

He put one hand on my neck and one hand over my eyes. “I break into your house and push you onto the bed and I rip off your pants and—” He rolled on top of me and pinned my wrists overhead, liberating me from movement. The drum-tight mound of his beer belly pressed against my abdomen. He didn't care how his torso looked; he only saw mine. I didn't care how he looked, either. My arousal came from knowing that my body aroused him, so that I got to live, briefly, alongside my body instead of inside it, my skin and breasts and armpits and cunt independent of me, giving and receiving of their own accord. Jared fucked me shallowly at first, touching my clitoris with a practiced precision that made my orgasm short and hollow, as if the tremors happened in isolation, cut off from their source. He moved his hand away and quickened the pace of his thrusts. He ejaculated with a pinched yelp, pressed his lips to my forehead, sighed. Then he began snoring, his open mouth resting on my shoulder. I looked at the ceiling, immobilized by satisfaction, a state that can feel a lot like despair.

Only now that there was, overtly, nothing wrong with spending time with Jared anywhere and anyhow I liked, did the appropriate sense of regret, guilt, and anxiety take shape, a black mass filled with swirls of electronic noises screeching at a frequency only I could hear, hovering over the bed where Jared snored, gripping my shoulders while I swiped credit cards at Barnes and Noble and asked customers if they wanted to join our frequent buyer's club. Perhaps the worst part of my hellish new companion was that I could not describe the hell to Jared, the person who let me be the most unhinged. He had never acted jealous of Brian, but he had always calmly, assuredly predicted that our relationship would not last and I could not bear his calm, assured triumph now. For the first time I could remember, I felt far away from him even when he had his arms around me. I couldn't believe how much I missed watching movies on the couch with Brian, missed his laugh and long limbs and the perfect half moons of his fingernails. I had been lulled for so long by the belief that the insipid solace of his company would shape the better part of my remaining days, and now I was wide awake to immediate love for him, and all alone with it. I called him sometimes, when I was not with Jared. I left at least a dozen cheery voice mails before I gave up.

So it was I, not Jared, who bought handles of Tanqueray and Absolut, which I started drinking straight with a few slices of lemon, pretending this was an acceptable afternoon cocktail. I even drank in the late mornings before my shifts at the bookstore, hiding my dependence from Jared, who had a real alcohol problem—I told myself—while mine was temporary, a life raft to convey me to a new state of being.

Careless, I drank too much one morning and was uncharacteristically talkative at work, blabbing on while I stocked books about how I had no tether, how my only hope for an acceptable life was to complete the translation of a French novel that I'd worked on intermittently for years, that I had to get very serious about this work now that I was no longer getting married, so that I could then translate a lot of different books and maybe be a teacher or get a fellowship to travel abroad or something, but how awful that my one big hope in life now depended solely on me, I was not to be trusted, I really should answer to someone besides myself, this was a terrible setup, how to break into “society?,” was I “insane?” With my forefingers, I exaggerated the quotes around the words. I had the sense that I was being funny, but no one laughed. When it was my turn to work the register, the manager pulled me aside, said she was sorry I was having a rough time, and suggested I go home early. I walked out without saying goodbye. The last thing I needed was to be dismissed from the one place to which I was beholden.

I came home to David Bowie blasting in my living room and Jared doing lines off of my roommate's coffee table with a couple who lived upstairs, to whom I had never spoken because I rarely speak to strangers and because these particular strangers screamed curses at each other late into the night. Now, though, they both seemed to be painfully bursting with a newfound inner brilliance, which they were trying to communicate by craning their necks and opening their eyes wide and moving their tongues at breakneck speed as they told me dull details of their days—when they had moved into this building, how much their utilities cost, their favorite restaurant in the area. There is nothing worse than spending an evening being talked at by dullards on drugs. So I did a couple of lines, too, and then, because the black mass of regret was shrieking in my ear, I drank a lot of vodka, and then, because the people in my apartment were removing their clothes and applying their tongues to each other's exposed skin, I took three bong hits in the hope that marijuana would make me want to get naked and lick stuff, too.

And although the three pairs of hands roaming my skin were too insistent and hurried to give me real pleasure, the abundance of human life temporarily concerned with my life did make me feel almost good, okay enough to believe Jared had been right to invite these strangers over, that perhaps this vulgar chaos was exactly what I needed to propel myself into the new state of being. But wait—I was now being touched by only one body and that body was covered in coarse black hair that was entirely unfamiliar to me and the penis that sprang out of the hub of those unfamiliar hairs was getting encased in protective plastic.

I looked around for Jared. He was sitting on the couch, holding a pair of tits shaped like huge jester hats around his dick. My breasts are small. Jared was enthusiastically engaged in the one sex act we could not do together. The sight pained me, but I could not feel the pain through the layers of intoxicants in which my mind was suffocating. So I let the hairy, man-shaped creature put his thing in me. He was silent as he fucked me and my vagina felt nothing but a vague pressure. This lack of particularity left me all alone inside the scene, unable even to comment from inside my head on what was happening, turning the sex into a darkly comic villain who tried and tried to destroy me, but could never succeed in hurting me more than I hurt myself. My brain started pulling sounds out of the past, hearing Brian yell, “You freak out when you don't have an orgasm.”