Now & Then or A Story in Seven Bodies

cw: death, sexual assault

Note: First, a content warning: this piece goes into explicit details about my sexual assault and the death of a friend. It might be difficult to read or listen to, but survivor narratives are exactly that: the stories of people who survived. And I survived by telling stories, and now I want to start telling this one. Secondly, when I recorded this, I could hear the places where the writing wasn’t quite right, and I almost didn’t post it. There are places where the language stutters, or trails off, or won’t quite hold what I wanted it to. I thought about holding it back, trying to fix it. But I’ve been working on it for six months, and at some point, it felt like it needed to breathe. Maybe posting it will give me the distance I need to see it again. So this is my way of saying: it’s a little unfinished. I hope it resonates anyway.

NOW

Your lives are not circular like theirs:
your lives are the bird’s flight 
which begins and ends in stillness—
which begins and ends
—Louise Glück, Retreating Wind

I wanted to begin at the beginning. That’s, after all, how I was taught to write. “How do you start an essay?” I asked my high school teacher. “Begin at the beginning,” she said.

Beginning, a noun, usually in the singular, means “the point in time or space at which something starts.” I wanted to begin at the beginning. I sat down at my kitchen table (a point in space) at 9.41 pm (a point in time) and began. And it’s a process. There were some old bills on it and I hadn’t paid them. So I did that—or started to. Before I started, I hesitated, checked my bank balance first.

I’m trying to remember the beginning. I am thinking of a moment with E where, within twenty minutes of our first meeting, I glanced at his wrist and said, Is that a Sailor Venus tattoo? Already in my bedroom and already in love and already after, but also just starting. I’m thinking of a moment where he tells me he loves me and we’re standing knee deep in the Great Salt Lake. I’m thinking of a moment where he tells me he’s not in love with me, not anymore. Which of these is the beginning? The beginning of what? I get up and pour two fingers of vodka into a glass. Think that I need to quit drinking. Down it, pour a whole glass. Hesitate.

While I’m sitting at the table, I remember a passage from a collection of work by Jack Spicer. I don’t remember the exact words, I guess. More the feeling that I had when I read them. But then I walked over to my bookshelves (the ones E bought because I hated the old ones) and I looked it up and they said:

“The dead bury the living,” Ken said. He pulled his coat tightly around his shoulders and walked a few yards ahead of me. “The dead never return to the living; it is the living who return to the dead. People search out the ghosts they find.” He walked silently ahead of me for a while and then stopped. He leaned against a heavy box and looked at me with something like pity. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said.

It’s the light first. There’s too much of it. It crawls up the walls—pulsing. Red and blue. For a minute, I think I am going crazy. This is something that I have to worry about now because it happened before. So now I don’t worry about being crazy, I worry about being crazy again—after the beginning of it. But this is real, and so I look down from my window, and the whole block is alive with light. Fire trucks and police cars. Ten feet from my front door, there’s a circle of police and EMTs. A firefighter. They all shift restlessly from foot to foot. In the center of them, like a summoned thing, is a man—flat on his back. He’s not moving—no one is moving. Something very old in me uncurls and slithers up from the bottom of my stomach, tracing the curve of my spine on whisper scales and murmurs in my ear, Dead body. I’m looking at a dead body.

I am trying to remember the beginning because I think you need to have a beginning in order to have an end, I say out loud to no one. Maybe the dog, I guess. Beginning. There’s so much hesitation at the beginning. You don’t want to do it wrong. If you start the wrong way, then you’ll probably end the wrong way. What’s first? Everything gets narrow. Nothing happens, the dead body is a dead body and doesn’t move, and now everyone around it has also become too still. Everything gets wide. Gosh, I don’t know. Gosh? I would never say this word out loud. It sounds so silly, Gosh, Maggie. Paul sure is cute! Maybe we could all go get a malted soda after school on Friday! It’s a word that carries a time with it. A time that I wasn’t in—could never have been in as a Black queer person. And the writer (who I guess is me right now) wants to sound present—wants to articulate the full moment with an understanding, with a completeness. Wants to explain to you why there is a dead body ten feet from my door, or why E left, or why he was there to begin with. Or that’s what people want us to do. And we do try. I mean, I try. Pronoun trouble. I am trying. I am trying to tell you why there is a body ten feet from my house, and why I am unlovable, and how those two things are related. But I don’t know where the beginning of this story is. I don’t know where it will end. Does the story belong to the person who is dead or to the body that is being methodically searched by police who are clearly not finding what they want, some faint buzz of frustration coming from their voices now through my slightly open window. I'd like to start at the beginning. I want to tell you that I was born—that I learned to walk, learned to speak my own name, recognize myself in a mirror. Later on, I learned how to have sex and fall in love. The former too fast and the latter too late. Then there was a dead body.

One of the police officers leans down and lifts the man up by his shoulders. His head slops to the side unnaturally. Or maybe too naturally. There's no resistance, no intention. Just meat moving. Another person starts going through his jacket pockets. Someone produces an evidence bag and sets it on the hood of a car. He has another jacket. Or there’s another jacket near him. They can’t seem to decide if it’s evidence or not—decide not and toss it away. Ten feet from my front door.

An ambulance arrives. An ambulance that moves with no urgency has something sinister about it. No siren, just more flashing lights. They pull a stretcher out of the back, and three of them lift him up onto the bed. Everything is moving too much or not enough. The light—so much of it—crawls up the walls. Pulses.

I want to tell you the story of my life. I guess I should say now that I was raped. That seems important. I’m not sure how. But I guess it was what I was trying to write. But I don’t know how it ends yet. Not my life, the rape I mean. Because it’s one of those things that doesn’t stop. Won’t stop until I die. And I haven’t died. I don’t know the moral of my own story—the point of telling it. So I just sit in front of blank pages. Hesitating.

I’m jealous, I think, of you, Dead Body In Front of my House. I’ve been suicidal for so long, and someone else just gets to die, right there, where I could’ve died—ten feet from the house. Their story is over; the body’s story continues just a brief while longer. All that’s left is to make a little meaning out of both of them and wrap it up. They load you (it?) into the back of the ambulance, which pulls away as silently as it came—going somewhere to start the administrative work that will pronounce you what you are: a dead body that they found in front of my house.

It’s funny, you know? When it happened, I didn’t feel anything. Writing this now, though I want to throw up.

I think I’m going to be sick.

THEN

You think you have a memory; but it has you.

—John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

The train, which had been late arriving and late to depart, started slowing for no reason— which is a normal state of operations for Amtrak on their best day. I’m heading, surreptitiously, from Boston to D.C to interview for a job. Approaching a station in New Jersey, it slows—passengers start making exasperated eye contact. Then it stops. The speakers above us buzz on, and the conductor's voice takes shape in static. We are held indefinitely due to an earlier incident.

Held indefinitely due to an earlier incident. This is what I’m trying to get away from. My job has stalled. My life has stalled. I’ve been in Boston for almost seven years, and what I have to show for it feels increasingly depressing. I’m overly career focused, but my salary doesn’t seem to reflect the nights and weekends I’m working. There’re a lot of conversations with management that involve the word ‘exposure’ or end in a discussion about my title. My romantic life is a run-on list of mostly mediocre, mostly white men who never seem to make it past the point where I’m worried about whether or not they’re actually going to show up to the date.

The men in Boston are as aggressive as they are unwilling to commit. At the bar, they are always all hands—they grope, they pull, to touch, to kiss. Their hands come at me with a sudden squirminess, always clammy, always grasping. When it happens, I can’t help but think of the first time a man lunged at me. I am being held—indefinitely.

I want to ask a question: what is a body? I want to ask because what happened to me happened to my body. I suppose. Or—it was about my body. It wasn’t about me, specifically. Not about the specificities of my person, what my name is, where I grew up, what I do or do not like in the world. My body became the site of an act—a crime scene. But then again, it also happened to me. It happened to my body. The body that I possess—the body that I inhabit. My body was only altered for a brief time. Or a long time—depending on how you feel about time. But regardless, my body healed. But I’m still altered—still being altered. It hasn’t stopped yet. The story is still being told. I want to ask a question: is it still happening to my body? When I tell the story, I’m telling a story about a thing that happened to a body—like explaining where you picked up a scar. But if the story inside hasn’t reached an end—doesn’t have a moral or a conclusion—has the story outside also not stopped?

On the train, a man is making hard eye contact. When I return his look, he rolls his eyes in exasperation—the invitation of another traveler to commiserate, to have a traveler’s conversation. I nod once and move my eyes to look out the window. Men who want to commiserate are not men you can trust. That’s how he got me after all. Gets me.

Is a body past or present? What tense do I talk about my body with? I was raped is a sentence that I say out loud sometimes (although I more often write it down instead and what the fuck does that mean, y’know? What am I supposed to do with that?) and it has a tense. The tense is past. The rape has happened. But I feel like I want to say I am being raped. or He is raping me. It won’t go away. Won’t not go away. It moves farther away in time, but it also doesn’t. Why doesn’t it? Because it happened to my body—and my body is still with me. What is the tense of the crime scene? I’m not an apartment someone broke into (but I am!). More like a car that gets stolen and then someone gets shot in it, and when the police are done, it’s detailed and returned to the owner. Clean.

The train is moving again. Glacial. Through the intercom, the conductor tells us that we’ll need to be switched to the alternate side tracks. I’m looking at the window, head rigidly turned away from the man with the long stare. Something slick and slimy, a strange white/purple—streaked with red—slides by. Oh.

There’s a dead body on the tracks.