I had this dream for the first time only six days after coming back home, actually.
(I’d been in Switzerland. Before that, Africa. Before that, Ann Arbor. Before that, St. Helens, yada yada. Before that, other places, no longer important. Already discussed. You know.)
It was tempestuous, this dream, that’s a word I connected to it when I woke up and when I would have it in the coming months and years—it was stormy and, in a way, just more intense emotionally than anything I’d felt before, awake or asleep. Because in the dream, down in it, the first time and every time afterward—it was true—it felt like fear focused by sleep, Ben, somehow like a magnifying glass held over me and I’m an ant, normal fear but stripped of the world, gravity free, a hot laser beam of feel this, you know? Burning me.
And totally different too. More than I could feel awake; it went beyond that in the way dreams do, and when I had the dream it was as though I was on, like, a gurney with electrodes glued to my head and they sent pure evil into my brain. Totally pure evil. Do you know? Do you know this feeling? Probably not, I know, I know.
So the dream took place in a seaside shack somewhere in Alaska. Lauren, me, I’m the girl in the dream but also not, was trapped in a room of the cabin and could see, through cracks in the walls, monsters in the other room, hairy creatures, mammalian, and yet all of them also in possession of octopus beaks and fish eyes and tentacles and scales and more unidentifiable accoutrements of the ocean. Phallic, too, many of the extra appendages. The story of the dream was that the creatures were having a meeting. They were together to discuss a plan, some plot to kill humans, and this Lauren/me was unfortunate enough to be overhearing them. So it was a matter of circumstance. The first mood of the dream was that she didn’t know how she got here even. In the dream she wore an old cotton nightie, dirty and white, too short, torn, and she was crouching, looking through the cracks. There was something about sex to it all, in the same way horror movies are at root about sex. She was turned on, looking at them, is what I’m saying. Which is embarrassing but whatever. She was terrified. Then one of the beaked monsters looked over and pointed at her through the crack, its tiny avian eye wide, looking right at her. “There,” this monster usually said. In a soft, sad voice. “This one.” Next its yellow beak would slowly close, the two hard bills clicking as they came together. “She’s there.” So they can see me. Right? And that moment is the moment when the fear is unbearable, and so that’s why I always think it’s a dream about being seen. Or maybe this, which is different: about being noticed for the first time by the eye of bad intentions.
That night I woke up with a sleepy and gulped yell and sat up in bed, first only sweating and breathing. I looked up at the ceiling and remembered where I was. Outside, soft rain. I started to cry, sitting in the dark, because of course by then I was remembering. I was back. I stared for a long time at the gray wall. To wake up and not feel Will nearby was unusual, and I hadn’t adjusted to where I lived. None of it. The terror from the dream followed me too, and it was still there as I was awake, but after a few minutes I was able to sit still and breathe and tell myself, again and again, that dreams are dreams. Dreams are dreams. Lauren; dreams are dreams.
I turned on the light.
Sitting there, I thought of the shape of a neuron and considered the human subconscious. I quizzed myself on the brain. What is a ganglion? Remember, Lauren, at the end of the axons are terminal buttons. Polysynaptic membrane. Periaqueductal gray matter is neural circuitry, I thought. This trick of listing is what I used to do in medical school when I felt anxious, and it’s also what I used to do when I prepared for spelling bees long ago, in grade school. Another kind of map, I think. You know? Go through the lists, know the material well. Memorize, and you won’t be surprised. Know things. Know as much as you can. When you’re tired, go through it again, then sleep, then wake, do more. The body, medical school—it was also a series of spelling bees. So in this case, remembering the very first thing we always forget, that we’re physical, that it was physical—and that therefore dreams are physical things too, they really are, they’re made by the brain, which is physical—put me at peace. Fear goes away when you remember it’s produced by a machine. That you are a machine. That we are machines. The body and life are all physical; therefore horror can always be managed.
And so the fear eventually slipped out of my chest in a vapor ribbon and I was able to go to the bathroom and get a glass of water.
But after I finished at Michigan I was in Chad for six months, only half my original UniMed commitment, but I think not finishing was forgivable, as there was an evacuation. I didn’t quit. I never moved forward, I never did a residency, so after that I stopped, yeah. But I didn’t quit. I just never finished. I should have just gone straight to St. Louis after med school, they were offering me a spot. But I felt I needed to do something different, and to see something else. To see something far away and the opposite of what I knew.
Because before that, before Chad, there was only one thing: school. And I knew that I wasn’t a genius, that whole thing was gone by then. That was wrong. I was motivated and focused, yes. I wasn’t gifted. The harder work near the end of high school, the 4s instead of 5s on the AP tests, my trouble making any sense—any sense at all—of differential equations… I wasn’t blind. I was not good Will Hunting. I was disciplined, driven, organized. I had limits and I knew where they were. I knew what I had to do to get to where I needed to be. I had few friends. I had one boyfriend my freshman year of college, then no more. Boyfriend if he could be called that—a graduate student named David from Professor Ishagara’s neurobiology seminar, which I’d talked my way into. He liked to walk with me after class and use the word asinine to describe the drunken undergraduates—this when I was an undergraduate—who ran rampant through Ann Arbor on the weekends. We had sex twice when I was eighteen. Both times were painful and horrible. Hot garbage breath.
I moved forward. I stayed still. I did well. I agreed to the UM offer to stay and enter their med school. Life was better then, to a degree, and I listened to my father’s advice—I had opened up to the idea of a “phone relationship” with my father, BTW, sometime during junior year in college, upon his request—but slowed down and refused the accelerated path when they offered it to me. “You’ll burn out,” my father said on the phone from Montreal (again), living in what was probably squalor, his having been unemployed for some time in this era, but I never went to see him there and didn’t know. “You’ll burn the fuck out, kid,” he said. “Slow down, genius,” he said another time, and I rolled my eyes and shook my head at his ridiculous point of view.
I dissected my cadaver and spent hours—weeks—studying the human eyeball.
I made plans.
I dated no one.
I finished medical school.
I went to Chad.
This day is horrible, though. But okay.
The morning after that first nightmare, right when I’m back in St. Helens, is a Sunday, and I get up at 10:45 to find the house empty.
I wander downstairs to the kitchen in my pajamas, looking for coffee, and I find the Bunn pot warm and full. My mother has left it for me.
I stare at the brown liquid, still worried about the dream, still feeling all of those feelings. I know what it was. Basically. What it actually was, not what it meant. I think what I know now is that it’s going to be a part of me, and that it has to be. I’m stuck. I’m a new person and I’m stuck with it.
My mother is at church, probably, or brunch. There’s no note. So far I haven’t gotten any pressure to attend either social or spiritual events (does attending the Unitarian Church count as a spiritual event, ha-ha? I’m sorry), but I worry about it whenever I imagine my mother sitting in a pew smiling while the congregants talk about their disillusionment with Halliburton. Or whatever. Talk about Darfur like they care. What are we doing about it? What will we do about it? Fist in palm!
I know it won’t be long before I’m invited to attend too, and maybe even “relate my experiences” to the congregation. The people will lap it up with liberal-doggy obsequiousness, as though doing so with great enthusiasm connects them to me and therefore connects them to “being good.”
Even though they are all exceptionalists with no intention of ever taking a risk or sacrificing a thing in order to improve the lives of other people.
Even though they don’t care.
Even though they love their wealth as much as anyone else does.
Even though they would never, ever, ever give it up. Not for anything.
So.
I make a bowl of Cheerios.
I pour myself a cup of coffee.
I go into the living room.
I sit down and turn on the TV.
I watch E! Entertainment News for forty-five minutes.
I’m satisfied by it.
My mother doesn’t know anything, I reason in the shower.
That’s a problem and it will make this living situation unsustainable. This. Here. This won’t work. Being back. It’s not her fault, and I have to admit, my mom has let me be, so far hasn’t pushed too much for details. Which is good, because she probably couldn’t deal with it. And there are more complicated questions to be addressed too; for example: Did any of it happen? Any of it? Or is it all like that nightmare I’ve just woken up from, but a longer nightmare with different nightmares inside of it, and I am still in it but it’s not real? And soon I’ll get that amazing feeling of relief you get when you wake up from a nightmare and realize there aren’t any consequences that have ruined your life?
No.
No, though.
It is real.
That’s what I think, shampooing.
No, though.
How nice that would be to be the kind of person who pretends things don’t happen. Or the kind of person who knows it’s a lie and keeps going anyway.
I towel myself off and I think: Of course it happened. I saw it happen.
I let it.
Do you know this?
There is, in the world, one truth.
There is a sole sequence of events.
There is one true history made up of many, so large it can never quite be seen.
Do you know this?
There is one big river, Ben, and in that sense, yes, each moment in time exists and will continue to exist.
But we don’t get to swim in that. It’s too big and we would drown. You know? Instead, we swim in our own eddies. The little flows. Just parts. Little labyrinths of water.
That’s why it’s all so confusing.
And—at least what I thought that day, that morning, there in the bathroom, the first time I realized it, and to be clear, I don’t think this anymore—life being like this is totally unsolvable and therefore totally unacceptable.
Later, I went back to the kitchen in my mother’s plush white robe and white slippers and poured another cup of coffee. I went to the front door, opened it, and looked down at the Sunday New York Times, wrapped in its blue sheath. I was surprised this could be delivered in St. Helens, but then again, it wasn’t as though we were in a hidden backwater. Milwaukee was right there. I looked up toward Milwaukee.
Everything the rest of the country had was also here now, even though that was not how I remembered the town. I remembered waiting forever for video rentals. I remembered the movie theater sucking. I closed the door and wandered back to the living room. On the coffee table, I saw my copy of Clarissa and nearly burst out laughing.
It was the Penguin edition, black-spined and intimidating. Its size had caused me to pull it from the shelf in the English Classics section of the airport bookstore as I waited for the flight from Zurich to Chicago; I’d wandered in looking for a celebrity gossip magazine, as these had begun to draw my eye in the airport, totally numb as I was on that particular day, as they suddenly seemed so bright, so colorful, so warm, so rich with something that I wanted, so unlike Zurich, which had been so gray, so incredibly gray, but I saw the shelves of books and drifted toward it, thinking there was something wrong with my buying Us Weekly, it was something that other people bought. There was that feeling, but there was the deeper feeling when I saw the other shelf too: excitement about literature. Real books. How good they can be. How special they are; how nothing can be like them. You know? I had forgotten. It was the same kind of excitement I remembered from a long time ago, even before high school, when I would read the Baby-Sitters Club books for hours beneath the tree in the backyard, indifferent to my surroundings or to the comings and goings of my family. Actually indifferent. You went somewhere. This, maybe, before I was known as gifted? I can’t remember. These were the new thoughts. In the bookstore, that version of me who is standing there, remembering that older version of Lauren—pigtailed, wearing a pair of overalls, sitting in the dirt, sipping at a red box of Hi-C, so innocent, so good, so unreasonably happy as I wait for Mary Anne’s story lines to come back but I go along with the other stories too because okay—all at once and from nowhere she seemed to come alive and take control, seemed to urge me toward the books, seemed to tell me, Lauren, go to those, in her little-girl adolescent voice. So I drifted, thumbs hooked to the straps of backpack, to the bookshelf and I looked for the most substantial and daunting book I could find: Clarissa. Samuel Richardson. I read the back. That sounded right. That sounded right if you wanted to look the thing in the eye.
A little later, I found my keys and soon was walking down my mother’s street. I took the pills then. Hampton Street. There were birds. Two cars went by, courteously prowling, front bumpers almost smiling (right?) at me as they skimmed low to the concrete. Both were electric cars, and they sailed by with nearly no noise. I was in white shorts and a yellow tank top and I found myself walking (wandering) with my hands behind my back, linked loosely, one around the wrist and the other holding the book, feeling nothing. I was trying to look like a person who was enjoying looking at houses in the neighborhood. I was here on vacation, visiting my mother. Pretty soon I’d be heading to Kyrgyzstan or somewhere. I was a superhero, after all. I had more lives to save. Hands behind my back… it was an unusual way for me to walk—it was possible I had never in my life walked this way. I hoped it was an aristocratic stroll; I wanted to be the most casual and indifferent person on the street. The dry desert heat had been replaced by this soup of humid ninety-degree afternoons. Nothing was happening. The thin sheen of sweat that coated my face and neck was illogically heavy and for that reason offensive—how many grams could my total sweat weigh? If I had a way to pour it all into a bucket? Sweat: it reminded me of softball and beer. That’s what America is, I thought. I looked at the sky. There would be thunderstorms tonight. Lightning would flash through the white curtains in my bedroom and the curtains would be expanding and contracting like a breathing bladder built into the side of the house. Would it be the world breathing or the house breathing? The bed was too far from the window. I asked my mother if I could move it. No. I passed a father playing catch with a toddler, one hand in his pocket. I said, “Hi,” to the father, who smiled and seemed to be reinvigorated by the exchange, as though there had been a reshuffling of happiness, as though seeing me had reminded him of something he liked. He went back to his game. I unlinked my hands and ran one through my hair and made a sloppy ponytail that I held in place. My hair—I hated it. Always too dry and too thin. Brown. What? What seemed to matter now more was the way the African men had responded, the way they had accused me (fondly, faux nativism, We are all so stupid here, we are savage) of divinity because of beauty. I had no rubber bands. My mother’s cat liked to eat them. George. And there was something comforting about the regimentation of life here—I had never thought of America as a regimented place before—but then again, the safety of this stroll was embarrassing. St. Helens was the most grotesquely safe place in the fucking universe and that was the one good thing about it.
How can I explain? I can’t.
I passed a young couple, two boys walking with them. You two are in love, I thought. You help me, I help you.
Or: You save me, I save you.
Except there is no such thing as love, I thought.
But then, in response to this thought, I told myself to be fair. Be fair, now.
I heard it in my mother’s voice in my own head. All this was extrapolation and when it came down to it, despite having lain in a hammock with him naked and despite knowing the intricacies of his lower back and the shape and feel of his ass in my hands and his smell and his everything else, I didn’t know him well enough then to know, actually—hadn’t he told me once that he didn’t believe in the subconscious? “Existentialists don’t believe in it.” A declarative sentence—had that really been what he said? Really? And I’d actually been taken in by it? Like it meant he was someone I would want to know and get close to? I found myself at the coffee shop.
Hillary’s, it was called, really the only one in town. It’s still there. So simple, so small, so quiet. I had been here four times in my first week back in St. Helens, initially as a way to facilitate reading. Because I was doing a lot of reading. Now I’d fallen in love with the coffee shop. Both things seemed to be good things. (What is good, even? Not to get distracted. I remember thinking it right then, when I was in the bathroom, when I put my finger down my throat and I was puking in the bathroom and I saw what I thought was most of them come up and float harmlessly. I marveled at the question when it went through my head, as it was so simple and I really didn’t know and had never thought about it.) I did not buy a coffee.
Outside on the sidewalk, I looked back in through the front window. I’d guessed, already, that Hillary was the woman who worked most often and seemed to pay most attention to the customers. I hadn’t asked. There was something about the place. Something yellow and good. There were often fresh flowers in vases on all the tables. There wasn’t a chalkboard with the typical excruciating pastel handwritten lists either. I imagined Hillary had transcended this aesthetic. Had thought: I recognize the custom and the comfort of it but I am tired of these pastel boards with writing on them. I will not do that with my place. Instead, there were three white panels hanging on the wall behind the counter, and the coffees and sandwiches were listed in a typewriter font. I looked at the few people who were in the shop. A girl by herself. An older man reading a newspaper. The possible-Hillary was behind the counter, cleaning something. Maybe, I thought, I would have a sandwich. Maybe, I thought, I might also—I realized that a mental room, a theater with no one in it, was still thinking about Will, and remembering, of all things, what it was like when his cock was in my mouth, how there had been something about him that redefined the act for me, how I didn’t remember the strained nose-breathing or the pursuit of right place to hold for leverage, balls or ass or thigh; I remembered nothing in particular about his penis, it wasn’t that; it was something about him, something good and rich and kind I always thought I saw, or did see, something in him that had made me more willing and less preoccupied with it, and in fact, not wanting to deal with the idea of sex at all. Since concluding my theories on the messy act of procreation so many years before, back in Ann Arbor. Its dispensability. With Will, there was a better tenderness there, more about the body, and reciprocal, of course. It had nothing to do with power or even pleasure. Just hot Africa and our hut homes and the sense of that life despite the feeling of it all when it was nighttime, when we were out there in the night, exposed to and overwhelmed by so much ongoing vicarious terror. Exposed to the idea that had started as a worm but had bored into me in only a few months: no matter how much help the West tried to give, it would not be enough. Because the West did not want it to be enough. Like all the people in the pews. It worked better this way. It was not going to change.
Not only that, but that the attempt itself was laughable, possibly condescending, unsolvable, corrupt. A kind of production. A play. A farce. The amount of healing in the world would always be less, exponentially less, than the amount of pain. Because of, in part, this really simple thing: it’s too easy to destroy. It always is.
All true. Indisputable. So the formula was set. And right in the middle of it, Will. He had been an amazing lover right in the middle of that, and I found out that sex could be an incredible thing right in the middle of that, and of course he had known it all along.
I left Hillary’s window and kept moving toward the park. A day like this, even though it was a little too hot, there would be plenty of people. I crossed Fourth and the hot lanes of growling, stopped cars, thinking about love now as a possible creator, not the biology of love but love on its own, love as a possible answer, and I escaped into the park. I walked along the third-base line of an empty softball diamond until I was well into left field, then cut across to the grass. I hoped there would be no games today. Every time I’d tried to sit here to read for any length of time, a group inevitably showed up and wanted to do batting practice. Empty now, though. I was crying, very thirsty. I wiped at my face with the back of my hand. This was a very, very annoying thing. This would require a therapist. Perhaps I could find a therapist, begin doing some good work, then introduce him (or her!) to my mother and the two of them could date. This right here is some kind of episode, I thought. Right now. Where would I find a good therapist? Milwaukee or Madison? Or was there someone good here? They had WiFi now in St. Helens and so maybe they had psychotherapy? I went deep into center field, so far I was only thirty feet from the concrete path and the hot-dog stand. I liked it out here—alone in a field of green. I sat cross-legged in the grass and began to read. I was at the end of the ninth letter of Clarissa even though I had already read the first seventeen. But now I was back. I read the last page, which I had marked on the airplane, which ended with:
That no man should be allowed to marry another woman without his then wife’s consent, till she were brought-to-bed, and he had defrayed all incident charges; and till it was agreed upon between them whether the child should be his, hers, or the public’s. The women in this case, to have what I call the coercive option: for I would not have it in the man’s power to be a dog neither.
I looked up. Two guys—high school, maybe?—were playing Frisbee out in right field, yelling and laughing, and I watched the green disk as it traced its silent path back and forth against the blue background of the sky. I looked to the left. On the path, a mother and father walking with a double stroller, and I squinted to make out the shapes of the two white faces. Both infants wore sunhats. It was quiet for a park, for so many people around. And the parents laughed to each other. Babies. Babies were always going to be a problem. I looked right. I felt like I could faint, maybe, just very quietly keel over in the grass. Maybe even die right there, right then. Or spontaneously combust. Wouldn’t that be amazing? A girl sitting in the middle of a field with a book, but on fire, not moving? They did that in Vietnam. Zara. When it was through I would smolder, collapse, and it would look like someone taking a nap in the park. Or I could not die. I didn’t want to. I knew that. A nap, and I would wake up and no one would know. I got up. I found someone—I thought I remembered finding someone. But I didn’t remember much more because I actually then did lie down and almost die.
Back more, the deeper nightmare in the nightmare: The day things collapsed in Africa, though, began with me in Will’s arms at dawn, sweat soaked and claustrophobic. He stank in his sleep, he was apey and musty. I woke before him and lifted his arm and sat up and wanted to get back to my room before people began to move about and the camp came alive, before the women lined up, before the new arrivals came with their swollen feet and infected blisters, or worse. At this point it didn’t matter much who saw me leaving Will’s little hut, it wasn’t that—people always saw, the UNICEF workers knew and treated us as husband and wife, pretty much, and most of the other doctors from UniMed—doctors who knew us better, knew more about our lives back home, knew that Will was supposedly engaged—had at the very least seen us laughing together here or sharing a moment there and had assumed quite accurately that we were lovers. Did it matter here? Hardly. No. What was sex in the face of what we did? That Will had a fiancée at home didn’t bother anyone and in fact wasn’t relevant, if you can possibly understand. Not even relevant to me. He would talk about her with me there beside him, we would have conversations about her, he would tell me why he loved her as though his fingers had not hours before been inside of me as he kissed down my neck and I’d looked at the thatch ceiling with wide eyes, teeth pressed together, his other hand at my breasts, his fingers scraping at my neck. My feelings on the subject—well, I just did my best to seem not to care when he talked about her, because it wouldn’t make a difference and because I wanted him to think of me as that kind of person, as somehow bigger and more complicated than others. Bigger and more complicated than I actually was. Somehow so stabilized by science and the Hippocratic oath and what we were doing there and why we were there that marriage or commitments back in America, the land of the safe, were political things to be cast off in order to better understand the twenty thousand people, their lives upside down, who were living and often dying in squalor just down the road. I knew something was wrong with it, yes; you can’t be unethical just when you’re away from home, as though ethics stay in your house like furniture.
And didn’t Will see the marriages that remained intact even there, in the camp? Yes, he did. Didn’t he see the husbands and the wives who walked fifty miles together, with death almost literally at their backs, with nothing left but a few possessions and perhaps a child or two? Didn’t he see them starving together and arriving with smiles on their faces, obviously in love? Didn’t that mean something to him? It did, and it did to me too. Maybe that’s what happened to him. That place—that place had not turned out to be the completion of the puzzle that was my perfect education. In fact, at this time, this place had begun to tear me open. Because of dehydrated children dying in my arms, yes, but because of love too. More because of love. Simple love. Here was Will talking about his fiancée back home and also professing to me that he didn’t believe in love, not really, and I often nodded and added my two cents on the subject and my heart said: You love him already, Lauren. This is what it is. I had fantasies that went beyond an affair with him here, in Iriba, but each time they began to quicken a little in my head, I turned away and told my heart to shut the fuck up and thought of a spelling bee or the makeup of the human inner ear, that thing again, and that was that. I had things balanced for a time.
“Come back,” Will said to me from the bed, eyes still closed.
I was on the other side of the room, brushing ants from my shoes and my pants. I looked up at him and smiled and saw that his arms were out in a comic-size hug, as though I would run back to him and leap into bed.
“I have Zara,” I said. “I gotta go.”
“It’s five in the morning.”
“She comes early.”
“It’s five in the morning.”
“You can’t sleep anymore anyway. Don’t you have antibiotics to hunt down?”
“I grow antibiotics in my hydroponic setup,” he said, “beside my wicked kind bud.” He let his arms drop down, then opened his eyes. Something, but no smile. I pulled up my jeans, found my shirt, wiped it off as well. At first I thought there was a grease stain but then I remembered the night before, Will coming on my stomach after he pulled out, and exactly at the moment I just lay on my back, hypnotized by the initial squirt of semen, and I thought: We actually are machines, my God. I lay there listening to his grunts, just thinking that, but then I remembered that my shirt was on and I said, “No!” and pulled it up and let the rest of it land in my belly button.
“Loser,” I’d said to him. “Just come inside me next time. I’m still on the pill.”
“I got caught up.”
I poured water on the stain now and rubbed at it. I passed my thumb along the whitish crust. Dried semen reminded me of Bill Clinton. I used to wonder (in the ’90s) how exactly he’d accidentally ejaculated onto the dress. The specific details. The exact look on his face when he sees what he did. I wondered, too, whether it had occurred to him that he should clean it himself before he left. Because DNA! It wasn’t so big yet, but he knew, he was the one so crazy about the Human Genome Project, so you have to wonder.
I could tell people it was toothpaste. Like it mattered.
I pulled the shirt down over my head, feeling dirty and tired. My hair was greasy, and I pulled it back into a ponytail. I needed to bathe. So easy to forget, and even with the sex it didn’t matter. He liked it to be dirty, he didn’t care, and in the last month I’d been surprised to find that I, too, liked to be dirty and sweaty and still smelling of the day’s work when I came here and we drank and he made love to me. Everything was so human. This place. Now. This morning I was feeling queasy. I would have time for a shower, but only a quick one, standing beneath the drizzle of the cold water back in the shower house.
“I’m glad you stayed,” Will said. “I hate it when you don’t stay. I feel like a whore.”
He was sitting up now, watching me dress from the bed, his hair sticking out in all directions. So charming, so insouciant. I’d seen Will save many lives, more lives than I could count. Here he was racking them up as though this were a video game. His score kept adding up in the right-hand corner. And what if it were someone else in his place? Someone slightly less talented, slightly less calm in the face of an appendectomy or a ruptured spleen or a mystery pain in a child’s head? What if that somebody else saved 89 percent of the Sudanese Will had saved? That made him a god. Was he not an angel, here, at least? Was it not entirely justified that he did (and he did) anything he wanted? Ignored the Chadians, walked right past them with their guns, had no time for the UNICEF helpers, bitched out the French Legionnaires whenever he could? Was he not allowed to do whatever he liked?
For this reason, and other reasons, I had fallen in love with him.
He had a hairy chest but he was fit; I liked how the muscles beneath had shape. I once joked about waxing him, told him that I wanted to see him hairless. He’d said, “We don’t do that where I’m from,” with a smile, and I’d said, “You come from California. You do do that where you’re from,” and he laughed his hearty laugh and that was that, no Nair. He was such a man. When I thought of Will I thought of power. He was such an adult man, so different than the man to whom I’d lost my virginity. David. The boy. So different than my brother and my father, even, who were men, but weaker.
“Truly,” he added. “You never stay anymore.”
“Maybe that’s because I don’t want to be the camp whore,” I said. “Which I am already anyway.”
“I just said I’m the one who feels like the camp whore,” he said.
“You’re a man,” I said. “That’s a point of pride.”
“It’s not like you’re not allowed to care about me beyond sex,” he said. “Right?”
“I do care about you beyond sex,” I said. “Have you not been listening to me?”
“I have.”
“Have I not told you a thousand times I’ve had sex with one other person in my life? That this isn’t something I do?”
“You have told me that a thousand times, yes,” Will said. “You don’t have to keep saying it. I get it. But you’re sitting on another continent. Maybe you should admit you’re already a little different than you were when you got here.”
“How do I respond to that?”
“I promise you, you are not the camp whore,” Will continued. “I met the camp whore. I treat the camp whore every other day for whatever STD she’s got. Then I treat all the men who say they caught it from a witch doctor who touched their penises in the night when they were sleeping.”
“You’re talking about Africans,” I said. “I’m talking about aid workers.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You know the difference.”
“Your reputation will not be following you home. Only the glory of helping people and this aura of…” He waved his hands around above his face. “I don’t know. Good.”
“Don’t be a dick,” I said.
“I’m reminding you that no one cares we’re together,” he said, softer now. “Serious. I like you. It’s not the sex. I like you.”
With that, he twisted and put both feet down on the floor and sat up. He was naked. He slept naked. His dick was hard and he was staring at it as though it were the newspaper. I rolled my eyes and looked for my socks. I never slept naked, even though he tried, every night, as we were drifting off, to get me out of my pajamas. I didn’t know why I resisted it so strongly. What would happen? I would wake up to him fucking me? That happened anyway. No. No, it was something beyond that, some admission of intimacy I didn’t want to make. I am naked with you and you are naked with me and there are no barriers between us. Awake, we had two walls of consciousness to protect us from such closeness. Asleep, no. Awake, three drinks at the end of a day, lonely-shoulders sore, needing to be touched by him, I could admit it then. And in fact I could say even more: I could admit that I had been yearning to be touched like he touched me, and to be picked up by the hips and turned and just fucked sometimes, for years. For the years I had been a woman, not a girl, and couldn’t find anyone, or wouldn’t let myself be found. All that anger, all that energy put into focus. Almost as though each test that came back perfect for the last decade had been paid for with a loss of physical intimacy. I’m yours, I thought, or this new voice in my head thought, after the three drinks and the day in the sun amid dying, lonely-shoulders sore. Even though this is wrong, even though this is not me, even though you have a life at home, even though I am from a small place far away from here, even though I want a husband who is a nice man, and you are not a nice man, I can see that, not by a long shot, and you may have something off. In the head. There have been moments. Even though all these things, please, yes, Will, do what you have been doing. More of that. All that when awake, okay. But still in sleep, I had to protect myself. It was almost as if I knew he had danger in him. It was almost as if I knew.
“How’s Zara doing?” Will asked, feet still down on the floor.
“You know.”
“This is the Zara with the scar? Under her eye? The pretty one? With HIV?”
“She’s fine,” I said, now sitting on the floor to put on my shoes. “She’s thirty-four weeks. She might be the only person in this place who trusts I’m going to get her baby out safe. Every time she comes in she has a story about her sisters thinking I’m trying to use her child for an experiment.”
“And the husband?” Will asked, still looking down. “Still a problem?”
“Not really,” I said. “We talked. We have an understanding.”
“Which is?”
“He leaves me alone and I give him condoms and I don’t talk to Zara about it when he goes.”
“Is he also positive?” Will asked, squinting.
“No. Somehow.”
Will raised an eyebrow. “A gentlemen’s agreement, then,” he said. “I bet your idealism didn’t run such things by you when you were living in the Michigan dorms.”
“I never lived in the dorms,” I said. “Not the real dorms. I was stuck in overflow housing.”
“You didn’t live in the dorms?” he said. “In the Big Ten? You missed everything, baby, didn’t you?”
He stood, and I got to my feet. He was a big man, well over six feet, and broad. Again, I looked at him, saw what I always saw in him, felt all those things, ignored what I always ignored. I saw strength. I believed (hoped?) he had a heart. He did what he could to pretend there was not one there, but it had been only three months.
“You enjoy making me sound naive,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“I do not.”
“You do. Do you not realize how much you get off on that?”
He smiled, shook his head, frowned at the floor, and started looking around for his underwear. I pointed with my eyes to the corner of the room and he went to it and brushed it off, examined it both inside and out. As he pulled the black shorts on he looked up at me and said, “You’re not naive. I think you get off on thinking I get off on it because you wish you were naive. I’m not a sadist.”
“I know I’m some kind of object to you,” I said.
“What?”
“Why would I wish that, by the way? Why would I wish that you were turned on by thinking I was naive?”
Will shrugged, went past me to the sink. He squirted some toothpaste onto his brush, then carefully replaced the cap. “We really don’t have to talk about this,” he said.
“Wait,” I said. “You’re not joking?”
“I am joking,” he said. “I’m joking. I’m sorry.” He looked at me, brush poised in front of his mouth, and tilted his head to the side, gave me a smile. “I’m joking,” he insisted.
“Is your implication that I’m masochistic?”
“No. What? No. It wasn’t supposed to be.”
“That’s where you ended up.”
“I have seen what turns you on.”
“You do have something weird about me,” I said. “Why do I always feel like a symbol when I’m in here in the morning? Like I have meaning? And I’m not Lauren?”
He started brushing his teeth then, and I watched him for a few seconds. I did want to know the answer. I had not been able to articulate this point until now, but once I’d said it, it felt true, it was a real concern. I prided myself on shedding my romanticism. He had taught me that, maybe.
He worked his front teeth, then the molars on the left, then right, then spat. After he spat he looked at me and said, “I love how smart you are. Do you realize how stupid most people who come through here are? I mean, do you have any idea?”
“Symbol,” I said. “Go back. Symbol.”
“What symbol do you think you are to me, Lauren?” He poured some water on his brush from his bottle, then brushed at his teeth again for a moment. When I didn’t answer, he took the brush from his mouth and raised his eyebrows and said, “I know you have some theory. So what is it? Spit.”
“I think you like the idea of deflowering me,” I said. “Again and again. That I’m your virgin. Or at least was.”
“You weren’t a virgin,” he said. “You told me about the TA.”
“We had sex twice. You and I have had sex maybe a hundred times. And he wasn’t my TA. He was just a grad student.”
“Well,” he said. “I don’t like your theory.”
“Not the virgin, not the whore,” I said. “Maybe the virgin you converted into a whore? Is that the fantasy?”
“Jesus, what happened to you in the middle of the night?” he asked loudly, turning one palm up. He held the toothbrush at the corner of his mouth, hooked there on his lip. I was surprised, too, to hear myself say something like that. His eyes widened a bit and I recognized the pre-coffee impatience within the words. And yet his bedside manner was incredible. He could sit beside a woman after amputating her leg and talk to her about what it would mean and how she’d be able to adjust and what she could expect about the pain and the phantom pulses and let nothing condescending, not an iota of anything but compassion, get through. He could smoke out front with the husband and tell him more, even though he hated smoking, and he could pull long and casual drags from the cigarette—Russian tobacco, even—as though he’d done it all his life. “Seriously,” he said, turning back to his mirror. “Did you have some dream or something?”
“No.”
A few other things I could have said went through my mind. I could have told him that I wanted to know him beneath the armor of Iriba, but that would be… he would laugh at me for that. I could have said something about stress and he would laugh at that as well. He was right, though. Something, this morning, was different. Last night? Could it have been last night? It had seemed normal, it had felt like every night. But maybe there had been a word here or an exchange there, more violence in the way that he held me, and while I slept it worked in my mind and turned into a new wariness. Maybe there was a new problem and it would come to me later. I remember thinking that. I really remember thinking: Maybe. Maybe maybe. And that I would think about the night some more. Away from him, as I worked, I would think about the night and find it, because he was right, something was wrong, I was angry with him. I didn’t know why. And I wish I had had the time to think it through more. I did not.
“So what, then?” he asked, compassionate again as he opened the spigot above the sink and began to fill it. “Are you homesick? Is it your dad?”
“My dad’s sitting in a bar,” I said. “It’s not my dad.”
The sink was full. Why am I still standing here? I thought. Soon he’d be ready, soon we’d be walking out of the house together and into the morning and there would be no disguise at all. I’d have to eat with him; this would have to go on for hours. Just walk out, I told myself. You need to be alone. You need to be away from him or he’ll suck you into his thing. He is better than you at it.
“Look, okay,” he said. “You’ve been here for almost three months. This has happened to people, I saw it happen to your predecessor. All the shock wears off and then you go a few months and you start to think, Hey, I can handle this, it’s fucked here but it’s normal, I can do this. And you settle in.” He made a cup with his hands and dipped it into the sink, then splashed water on his face. “Then a few more months go by and you’re not even in culture shock anymore and you know people and you even think they’re your friends. Like your Zara.”
I waited. I didn’t like the subtext of the speech, how it made me into just another doctor in the string of them he’d been watching come through for years. But I wanted to hear the end. About where I was now.
“So then you usually dip again,” he said. “Everyone does. I did. You get used to it and right when you’re used to it, brain comes up and says, Don’t even start to think that where you are now isn’t the center of the universe and all these people are gonna die anyway and you’re not doing any good at all.”
“I don’t feel that way,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Okay,” he said. “It’s just one theory. What’s yours? And don’t say it’s about deflowering you, please. It makes me feel like a predator and I’m not. Be careful with your words. They mean things.”
“It’s something else,” I said, looking at the door. “It’s not you. I have to—”
And suddenly he was there, shirtless, in only his black shorts, face still a little wet, now smelling of deodorant. He had me in his arms and despite myself I was glad—glad again, about the power, the protection—and he hugged me and said, “Just do the work. Let’s talk tonight. Okay? I have other theories.”
“Do you?”
“Sister, I know things,” he said kindly. “Just remember where you are and what you see before you get too down on yourself, okay? Genius child? You’ve still got a heart and it’s still a living hell three hundred feet out that door for all those people. You serve the residents of the living hell. I don’t know if that means we work for the devil, but it’s bound to crack you open a little bit. All right, kid? You’re way out of your comfort zone.”
“Is that from Casablanca?”
“No.”
“Your speeches make me feel like I’m twelve.”
But I didn’t say it with malice. Just to be able to do this—to be able to be in somebody’s arms and talk, this close, to have someone, not a narrator in a book, tell me earnest and complicated things. I would not have been able to do this before I came here, before him. No matter how much I wanted to escape him and see him for what he was—the alcoholic, narcissistic head of medicine at a refugee camp in the desert who banged all the incoming female doctors until they left or moved on or until he found a new one—my heart asked me to stay where I was in his arms, and I listened.
The next year was better in terms of mental-breakdown recovery and being sane—my brother Bobby finished art school in Cleveland and moved back to town, in part to be near me and make sure I didn’t actually kill myself, and so I had a friend. It was fantastic.
And soon Bobby’s friends, in St. Helens and in Milwaukee—he was better at that kind of thing than me—became my friends. He set up a studio for himself on the first floor of a house just a mile away and made the top floor into his apartment. Occasionally he would have parties; I once kissed his friend from New York on the balcony, drunkenly, but later, when he tried to kiss me again, this time alone in the kitchen and this time both of us much drunker, I put my hand on his chest and said I had to go to the bathroom and left the party and walked home alone without my jacket, furious.
I was furious again. All of those same old feelings.
The house was paid for by our father, who lived in Montreal and rarely visited, but he had money again now and he was generous with it when he had it. Every Christmas he bought three of Bobby’s paintings for more than Bobby was asking and once, maybe as a show of gratitude for all the generosity, Bobby and I flew to Montreal to visit him and to meet his new wife, a French-Canadian woman named Margaret who served us bread and ten different jellies.
I started working at Hillary’s, the coffee shop. I got a job there. For meaning. The place where I had barfed.
Hillary turned out to be far from the ideal, maternal presence I’d imagined her to be those first times I went and drank coffee and read. Less maternal than my own mother, in fact. She was more like one of the wound-up lunch ladies I remembered from elementary school.
I often thought of Will during this time.
Somehow—and I can’t really even remember the specifics of the conversation, and I have only a memory of him standing with his hands on my shoulders talking to me for what felt like forty minutes, an endless monologue explaining himself and explaining the situation and explaining that he did in fact love me as well, and that he’d told his fiancée, and that I should not go back, and that he was not going to go back, that we didn’t ever have to go back to America, and that there was a place we could go together to make a life, and that whatever I thought had happened on the day the guerrillas rode into camp was some kind of illusion brought about by the trauma, or the chaos, and he wasn’t saying that to be condescending, it just made no sense what I was saying, and that he was sorry that Zara and the baby were dead, and he was sorry for what the husband had done, but that more than anything I needed sleep, I needed to rest. Zara was dead but that didn’t mean it was my fault. I remember saying, “I don’t think that it’s my fault at all. It’s her husband’s fault.” “That’s not what I mean,” he said, shaking his head. More important was to concentrate on what we had found together in our months there. Something real, better. He had a place we could go. I felt so confused. Had I ever been to Zurich? We didn’t have to go back at all. It was a bad assumption, you see? He had a plan. There was a job, and he could find me a job as well. We didn’t have to get on the plane. There was no reason for either of us to go back because we were going to be married and be here, together.
I eventually moved out of my mother’s house and into a small apartment after everybody was consulted and we all talked for a long time and decided I was much improved. It was an isolated incident, that thing that had happened. PTSD. Solved. I hadn’t followed through. And more important than that: I went to the St. Helens veterinarian, Dr. Hendrix, and asked if I could work for him. This truly was something good.
“Just so we’re all clear,” Dr. Hendrix had said to me. “I do animals.”
“I know,” I said. “I know what you’re saying.”
“Formal arrangements about this sort of thing can get very difficult,” he said. “You can imagine why. Imagine if I went to the hospital and asked them if I could work on a couple people?”
“I’m not a veterinarian. I only want to intern.”
“The last intern I had was a fifteen-year-old cheerleader who could barely answer the phones. I caught the previous intern stealing the horse tranquilizers.”
I knew Dr. Hendrix was aware of my history as a crazy person—he, like everyone in St. Helens, regarded me with curiosity and kindness both. The town had welcomed me back without asking too many questions; no one talked about what happened in the park. Occasionally, I felt eyes turn toward me when I walked into a store or went to a St. Helens High basketball game, people looking at me as though I were a washed-up and disgraced celebrity, something like that, but still someone to be regarded, despite my fall. I sensed that my reputation was solid and that I received, probably unfairly, a fair share of the goodwill the people in town had for my mother, beloved librarian, but I also knew that people thought of me as someone who had once had a total mental collapse and therefore, even after more than two years of my serving them coffee with increasingly complicated smiles, I was someone to be feared.
But Dr. Hendrix snatched up the opportunity to have a trained physician working for him—one he could pay nearly nothing, and one who was happy to do the work at that rate. They called me an administrative assistant. I had delivered children on tarps, conducted surgeries, and had a good bedside manner too, so I understood how to calm the worried owners of pets; I could do whatever math needed to be done and understood how to calculate dosage based on size and weight. More important, I was a sponge, and throughout that first spring I absorbed everything Dr. Hendrix told me. I took to learning on my own too: I asked for books, studied medical histories, went with him to the farms and watched him deliver calves and treat blackleg, listened to him as he talked to farmers about their herds, paid attention as he drove us around the county and explained the history of the different plots of land and told me about the families, the people. He had been in the same place for almost thirty years and knew everybody, and I saw how people throughout the county responded to him, how everyone seemed to like him, how Dr. Hendrix knew how to treat the owners of his patients with the perfect, respectful light touch. One day, riding in that truck, looking out the window, I thought this: It is possible to find the bucolic even after you’ve done away with the romantic, seen hell, died, come back. You can find it again—it is this. It has something to do with this.
He was professional at first, then became avuncular as he began to trust me. That’s why he was so protective, like you saw.
One night, late in that first summer, he asked me whether I ever considered going back to school to study as a veterinarian. He said that if I would consider it, he would be happy to hire me on and eventually turn the practice over to me.
I said yes. In theory. I’d been thinking about it; he was right. But I didn’t know. I told him that I still had to think.
“School is…” I started. Then I said, “I don’t know if I want to ever go back to school.”
“That’s understandable,” said Dr. Hendrix. “You did so much. Although you wouldn’t have a problem, I don’t think. You’ve probably taught yourself enough by now to coast through at either Madison or Milwaukee.”
“Thank you for saying that,” I said. “I think.”
“Of course,” he said. “It’s true.” Dr. Hendrix was in his early sixties; that day he wore a checkered short-sleeved button-down tucked into his slacks. We were in the office, he behind his desk. I was standing in front in my scrubs, hair tied back in a ponytail. (I loved vet scrubs, by the way—they were much better than the MD version. They had patterns, like colorful doggy footprints near the neck.)
“I’ll start looking at some of the programs,” I said. “Maybe I’ll look this fall.”
“Do what you want,” he said, nodding. “Of course, it’s entirely up to you and you have plenty of time. I’m not retiring. But I am a little ashamed that I can’t give you the position you deserve. Betsy recently asked me how long I plan to continue running a sweatshop.”
“It’s fine,” I said, smiling at the thought of Dr. Hendrix’s wife saying that to him. “I have the coffee shop; my dad helps. My mom helps. It costs nothing to live here anyway. I’m not exactly saving up for anything.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding once more, looking down at his hands, which were placed side by side on the desk. “I am going home then. Betsy and I are going to the movies.”
“What are you seeing?”
“Something called Becoming Jane.”
“That’s the Jane Austen movie.”
“It is,” he said. “I’m concerned.”
“I heard it’s good,” I said. “Where is it?”
“New Berlin, I believe,” he said, sliding his chair away from the desk.
At the moment, there were no animals in residence in the back, and so once Dr. Hendrix left, I had the place to myself.
I made some tea. It was quiet; the smell here was always the same, and I liked it. It was four thirty and I would lock up at six, then go home, shower, eat, and go to Hillary’s, where I would work until closing. This was my life.
I went to the computer.
I had this e-mail:
From: Besco, Will
To: Sheehan, Lauren
Date: 9/23/07
Subject: Long Overdue
There are many, many things we should discuss. I miss you. But I know that won’t get through now, so let me tell you some thoughts I’ve been having.
First, Zara. That accusation has haunted me most since our final argument because it is, out of your many wildly misguided accusations against me, somehow (insanely) the most plausible, the most likely to have actually happened if we’re just looking at the facts. So I’ll speak to it first. I did not sleep with Zara, Lauren. And if he thought it was my baby, he made it up. Why would you believe him? Truly, think about it. Did he have an ounce of credibility? Had he not been visiting the brothel every night for months? Was he not raving at that point, psychotic and delusional? Not ten minutes later they were all dead—he killed her, the baby got hit, he killed himself. You can’t listen to a man about to do that. I did not ever have sexual contact with Zara. Nor did I ever, ever have any form of sexual contact with any of my patients or any of the refugees. I don’t know how to defend myself against a charge like that other than to state the truth and trust that you know, in your heart, that no matter how crass I may have sometimes been and no matter what happened between you and I, my responsibilities as a physician and my responsibilities to all those under my care would have made it, in a word, impossible. I would not do that. Are you sure of what she said earlier? Of how she said it? It’s not true. She had reason to make it up as well, you know that. And still I’m sitting here thinking that I should say I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you’ve spent all this time believing that about me and sorry for whatever untruths came to pass that led you to believe it. I’m sorry that five pickup trucks and fifty men came to the camp and started shooting that day. All I can say is that day was a clusterfuck, through and through, and somehow the wires must have gotten crossed. Whoever told you what you heard must have been confused. Zara must have been confused. Joseph was confused. And armed. It’s simply not true!
I would have begun with a more direct apology to you for whatever confusion happened in Zurich, but this issue of Zara—this issue of what you think happened between Zara and me—has been the exact thing that’s made me feel unable to make contact for the last years, and to tell you the truth, I also believe that it’s because you always believed this thing about Zara that you later reenacted it between the two of us. My therapist has brought this up more than once. You and I both know that I did nothing to you. I did nothing to you, Lauren. I did not hurt you. I was your husband. You drank a profound amount of alcohol. I should have stopped you, I know. I hope that you can understand and try to see it from my point of view, allowing yourself to believe, for an instant, that I might be telling the truth, and what it might then feel like to an innocent person who loves you to hear you say what you said. You made yourself clear that day, and for all this time, I’ve not been able to imagine a way to say a thing to you that would not have sounded monstrous. (You seeing me as a monster, as you said.) But things have happened here to make me rethink that assumption. (I am in California; I am married now.) And enough time has passed. I need to talk. I need to see you.
Your blood test has haunted me as well, as that is an actual fact, at least. There are a multitude of explanations, unfortunately, perhaps the worst being that someone else at the bar spiked the drink, not realizing that you were there with your husband, in which case I thank God you were with me and I could at least protect you. Also, another theory: those tests are simply not reliable, Lauren. I’m sorry. But you know that.
I am so desperately, unbearably, wretchedly in love with you! That doesn’t go away. And in fact, it’s worse—it’s worse than it’s ever been, now that I don’t see you, now that we don’t talk. I’m coming apart, Lauren. You have to communicate with me.
I loved you then. We never talked about it and I don’t think I understood what it meant. Lord knows how dangerous such things can be. Anywhere and under any circumstances. But especially those.
I want to talk. I need to. Can we please talk? We had so much. Please look into your heart and ask yourself if this punishment is fair when there’s no evidence, when I did nothing but love you. Please. I’m begging you.
Yours,
Will
My response:
To: Besco, Will
From: Sheehan, Lauren
Date: 9/23/2007
Subject: RE: Long Overdue
Don’t ever contact me again.