K. Tempest Bradford writes: “Carmen Maria Machado’s stories build and build until they surround and ensnare, and at the end you’re always glad to be all tangled up.” Machado is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and the author of the forthcoming collection Her Body and Other Parties. As to why she writes speculative fiction, she writes: “From my earliest years, the currency of my Cuban grandfather’s communication with me was storytelling. Every tale about his life - from his poverty growing up in Santa Clara to his immigration and McCarthy-era deportation and return, his military service, and his life in DC with his wife and children - was told through a lens of humor and hyperbole.” In “Difficult at Parties” a woman discovers that, in the aftermath of a sexual assault, she has taken on some strange new powers.
Afterward, there is no kind of quiet like the one that is in my head.
Paul brings me home from the hospital in his ancient Volvo. The heater is busted and it’s January, so there’s a fleece blanket wedged at the foot of the passenger seat. My body radiates pain, is dense with it. He buckles my seatbelt, and his hands are shaking. He lifts the blanket and sets it down on my legs. He’s done this before, tucking it around my thighs while I make jokes about being a kid getting ready for bed. Now he is cautious, fearful.
Stop, I say, and do it myself.
It is a Tuesday. I think it is a Tuesday. Condensation on the inside of the car has frozen into ice. The snow that I can see is dirty, a dark yellow line carved into a space near the curb. The wind rattles the broken door handle. Across the way, a teenage girl shouts to her friend three unintelligible syllables. Tuesday is speaking to me, in Tuesday’s voice. Open up, it says. Open up.
Paul reaches for the ignition. Around the hole there are long scratches in the plastic where, in his rush to get me, the key had missed its destination over and over again.
The engine struggles a little, like it doesn’t want to wake up.
The first night back in my house, he stands in the doorway of the bedroom with his wide shoulders hunched inward and asks me where I want him to sleep.
With me, I say, as if it’s a ridiculous question. It is a ridiculous question. Lock the door, I tell him, and get into bed.
The door is locked.
Lock it again.
He leaves, and I can hear the stifled jerks of a doorknob being tested. He comes back into the bedroom, flips back the covers, buries himself next to me.
I dream of Tuesday. I dream of it from start-to-finish.
When the thin light of morning stretches across the bed, Paul is sleeping in the recliner in the corner of the room. What are you doing? I ask, pushing the quilt off my body. Why are you there?
He tilts his head up. Around his eye, a smoky-dark bruise is forming.
You were screaming, he says. You were screaming, and I tried to hold you, and you elbowed me in the face.
This is the first time I actually cry.
I am ready, I tell my black-and-blue reflection. Friday.
I draw a bath. The water gushes too-hot from the spotted faucet. I peel my pajamas away from my body and they fall like sloughed skin to the tiled floor. A halo of flesh gathers around my ankles; I half-expect to look down and see the cage of my ribs, the wet balloons of my lungs.
Steam rises from the bath. Somewhere in this room I am remembering a small version of myself, sitting in a hotel hot tub and holding my arms rigid against my torso, rolling around the churning water. I’m a carrot! I’m a carrot! I shriek at a woman, who might be my mother. I’m a carrot! Add some salt! Add some peas! And from her lounge chair she reaches toward me with her hand contorted as if around a handle, the very caricature of a chef with a slotted spoon.
I add a fat dollop of bubble bath.
I slip my foot into the water. There is a second of brilliant heat that slides straight through me, like steel wire through a block of wet clay. I gasp but do not pause. A second foot, less pain. Hands on the sides, I lower myself down. The water hurts, and it is good. The chemicals in the bubble bath burn, and they are better.
I run my toes along the faucet, whispering things to myself in a low voice, lifting up my breasts with both hands to see how high they can sit; I catch my reflection in the sweaty curve of the stainless steel, tilt my head. On the far side of the tub, I can see the tiny slivers of red polish that have receded from the edges of my toenails, crescent moons ebbing into nothing. I feel buoyant, weightless. The water goes too high and begins to threaten the lip of the tub. I turn the faucet off. In the absence of the roar of rushing water, the bathroom echoes unpleasantly.
I hear the front door open. I tense, until I hear the rattle of keys on the hallway table. Paul comes into the bathroom.
Hey, he says.
Hey, I say. You had a meeting.
What?
You had a meeting. You’re wearing a dress shirt.
He looks down at himself. Yes, he says, slowly, as if the choice of his shirt has not occurred to him before this moment. Actually, he says, I went and looked at some houses on the other side of town.
I don’t want to move, I tell him.
You should find another place. He says this with force, as if he has spent his entire day building up to this sentence.
I shouldn’t do anything, I say, I don’t want to move.
I think it’s a bad idea to stay. I can help you find a new apartment.
I wind a hand into my hair and pull it away from my skull in a wet sheet. A bad idea for who?
We stare at each other. My other arm is crossed over my chest; I release it.
Unplug the tub for me? I ask.
He kneels in the cold puddle on the tile next to the tub. He unbuttons the sleeve at his wrist and begins to roll it up in a neat, tight coil. He reaches past my legs, into the water still thick with bubbles, down to the bottom. Suds catch on the roll of fabric around his upper arm. I can feel the syncopated drumming of his fingers as he fumbles for the beaded chain, weaves it around them, pulls.
There is a low pop. A lazy bubble of air breaks the water’s surface. He withdraws, and his hand brushes my skin for a moment. I jump, and then he jumps.
My face is level with his shins when he stands; there are wet circles on the knees of his dress pants.
You’re spending a lot of time away from your place, I say. I don’t want you to feel like you have to spend every night here.
He frowns. It doesn’t bother me, he says. I want to help. He vanishes into the hallway.
I sit there until all of the water drains, until the last milky swirl disappears down the silver mouth and I feel a strange shiver that starts deep within me, worryingly. A spine should not be so afraid. The receding bubbles leave strange, white striations on my skin, like the tide-scarred sand at the beach’s edge. I feel heavy.
Weeks pass. The officer who’d taken my statement in the hospital calls to say they might have me come in to identify someone. Her voice is generous, too loud. Later, she leaves a clipped message on the answering machine, telling me it’s not necessary. The wrong person, not the right one.
Maybe he left the state, Paul says.
I stay away from myself. Paul stays away, too. I don’t know who is more afraid, me or him.
We should try something, I say one morning. About this. I gesture to the space in front of me.
He looks up from an egg. Yes, he says.
We lay out suggestions on a hot pink post-it note that is too small for many solutions.
I place an order for a DVD from a company that advertises adult films for loving couples. It arrives in a plain brown box, neatly placed on the corner of the cement stoop in front of my apartment. When I pick it up, the box is lighter than I expect. I tuck it under my arm and grope the doorknob for a minute. The new deadbolt sticks.
I put the box on the kitchen table. Paul calls. I’m coming over soon, he says. His voice always sounds immediate, present, even when he’s speaking over the phone. Did you get the —
Yeah, I say. It’s here.
It will take him at least fifteen minutes to get to this side of town. I go to the box, which is sitting quietly where I’ve left it. I pull a perforated tab marked pull, and the cardboard opens like a book. I remove the plastic case: shiny, wrapped in cellophane. I tear open the corner of the wrapping with my teeth, wincing at its high squeak.
The number of limbs tangled on the front cover doesn’t appear to match the number of faces. I count, twice, and confirm that there is one extra elbow and one extra leg. I open the case. The disc smells brand new and doesn’t snap easily from its plastic knob. The shiny side gleams like an oil slick, and reflects my face strangely, as if someone has reached out and smeared it. I set it down in the DVD player’s open tray.
There’s no menu; the movie plays automatically. I kneel down on the carpet in front of the television, lean my chin into my hand, and watch. The camera is steady. The woman on the video looks a little like me — the same mouth, anyway. She is talking shyly to a man on her left, a built man who has probably not always been so — he seems to be straining out of his shirt, which is too small for his new muscles. They are having a conversation — a conversation about — I cannot make out any of the individual pieces of the conversation. He touches her leg. She takes the tab of her zipper and slides it down. There is nothing underneath.
Past the obligatory blowjobs, past the mouth-that-looks-like-mine straining, past perfunctory cunnilingus, they are talking again.
the last time, I told him, I told, fuck, they can see my —
I can’t hold this down, I can’t hold this down, I can’t —
I sit up. Their mouths are not moving. Well, their mouths are moving, but the words dropping from those mouths are expected. Baby. Fuck. Yeah. God. Underneath, something else is moving. A stream running beneath the ice. A voiceover. Or, I guess, a voiceunder.
if he tells me again, if he says to me that it’s not okay, I should just —
two more years, maybe, only two, maybe just one if I keep going —
The voices — no, not voices, the sounds, soft and muted and rising and falling in volume — blend together; weave around each other, disparate syllables ringing out. I don’t know where the voices are coming from — a commentary track? Without taking my eyes off the screen, I reach for the remote control and press the pause button.
They freeze. She is staring at him. He is looking somewhere out of the frame. Her hand is pressed down on her abdomen, hard. The swelling knoll of her stomach is vanishing beneath her palm.
I un-pause it.
okay, so I had a baby, this isn’t the first time that’s —
and if it’s only a year, then maybe I can follow —
I pause it again. The woman is now frozen on her back. Her partner stands between her legs, casually, like he’s about to ask her a question, his cock curved to the left against his abdomen. Her hand is still pushed into her stomach.
I stare at the screen for a long time.
When Paul knocks, I jump.
I let him in and hug him. He is panting and his shirt is damp with sweat. I can taste the salt in my mouth as I press my face against his chest. He kisses me, and I can sense his eyes flickering the screen. You okay? I ask.
I was running, he says. I had to park a few blocks away. How are you? How was class?
I didn’t go. I don’t feel well, I say, turning off the television.
He looks concerned.
I feel sick, I tell him.
He asks me if I am soup-sick or sprite-sick. I tell him soup-sick. He goes into the kitchen and I lie down on the couch. In the sharply focused dark I can hear the thunk of the cupboard door striking the cabinet next to it, the dry sliding of cans being sorted through, the sloshing of liquid, the tap of a pot on a burner, the metallic clink of him using the wrong spoon to stir. When he brings it out to me, chicken broth hovering precariously at the top of the bowl, napkin resting beneath it, I thank him. He warns me that it’s hot. I sip it too quickly, and bite down on the spoon in shock. Vibrations resonate through my skull, and I burn my mouth.
His friends invite us to a housewarming party for their new home out in the country. I don’t want to go, I tell him, the pale blue light from the television making shadows on my face as three men intertwine with each other, each mouth full.
I’m worried that you’re spending too much time in the house, he says. It’ll be mostly women.
At the party. It’ll be mostly women. All people that I know. Good people.
I wear my turquoise dress with black stockings underneath and take a small aloe plant as a gift. In my car, we speed out of the dim lights of our small town and onto a country road. Paul uses one hand to steer, and rests the other on my leg. The moon is full and illuminates the miles of glittering snow that stretch in every direction, the sloped barn roofs and narrow silos with icicles as thick as my arm hanging from their outcroppings, the herd of rectangular and unmoving cows huddled near the entrance to a hayloft. We drive in straight lines, and turn at right angles. I hold the plant protectively against my body, and when the car makes a sudden left some of the sandy soil spills out onto my dress. I pinch it from the fabric and drop it back into the pot, brushing a few crumbs of dirt off the thick, fleshy leaves. When I look up again, I see that we are moving toward a large, illuminated building.
So this is a new house? I ask, my head pressed against the passenger window.
Yeah, he said. They just bought it, oh I don’t know, about a month ago. I haven’t been there yet, but I hear it’s really nice.
We pull next to a row of parked cars, in front of a renovated, turn-of-the-century farmhouse that glows with the lights inside.
It looks so homey, says Paul, stepping out and rubbing his gloveless hands together.
The windows are draped with gauzy curtains, and a creamy honey color throbs from within. The house looks like it is on fire.
The hosts open the door; they are beautiful and have gleaming teeth. I have seen this before. I have not seen them before.
Jane, says the dark-haired one. Jill, says the red-headed one. And that’s not a joke! They laugh. Paul laughs. It’s so nice to meet you, Jane says to me. I hold the small aloe plant toward her. She smiles again, so deeply that her dimples look carved into her face, and takes it. Paul looks pleased, and then leans over and scratches the ears of a large white cat with a smooshed face that is rubbing against his legs.
We’ve made a coatroom out of the bedroom, Jill says. Paul reaches for my coat. I slip it off and hand it to him, and he vanishes up the stairs.
A man in the hallway with buzzed hair and pale skin is holding an ancient camcorder on his shoulder. It is gigantic and the color of tar. He swings it toward me, an eye.
Tell me your name, he says.
I try to pull away, out of its view, but I cannot shrink tightly enough against the wall.
Why is that here? I ask, trying to keep panic out of my voice.
Your name, he repeats, tipping the camera towards me.
Oh Jesus, Gabe, leave her alone, says Jill, pushing him away. She takes my arm and pulls me along. Sorry about that. There’s always some retro-loving jackass at parties. And he’s ours.
Jane comes up on the other side of me and laughs down a scale. Paul, she says, where’d you go?
He reappears. Onward, he says, sounding giddy.
They ask us if we want the tour. We wander from the living room to a wide-open kitchen, shiny with brass and steel. They tap each shiny appliance in turn: dishwasher. Refrigerator. Gas stove. Separate oven. Second oven. There is a door toward the back with an ornate, bronze-colored knob. I reach for it, but Jane grabs my shoulder. Stop, she says, careful.
That room is being renovated, says Jill. There’s no floor. You could go in there, but you’d go straight down to the cellar. She clasps the knob with her manicured hand, and turns it. The door opens, and yes, the no-floor yawns at me.
That would be terrible, says Jane.
The camera follows me around. I stand near Paul for a while, awkwardly smoothing my dress. He seems anxious, so I move, a satellite released from orbit. Away from him, I feel strange, purposeless. I do not know these people, and they do not know me. I stand near the hors d’oeuvres table, and eat one shrimp — meaty, swimming in cocktail sauce — tucking the stiff tail into my palm. Another one, then a third, the tails filling up my hand. I swallow a glass of red wine without tasting it. I refill, and drain another. I swirl a cracker in something dark green. I look up. In the corner of the room, the single eye of the camera is fixed on me. I turn toward the table.
The cat saunters over and paws playfully at a hunk of pita bread in my hands. When I pull it away, she swipes at me and takes a chunk out of my finger. I swear and suck at the wound. In my mouth, I can taste hummus and copper. I’m so sorry, says Jill, who swans up as if she has been waiting offstage for the cue of my blood. He does that to strangers sometimes, he really needs anxiety medication or something. Bad pussycat! Jane touches Jill’s arm lightly and asks her to come and help clean up a spill, and they both vanish.
Friendly people I have never met ask me about my job, about my life. They reach across me for wine glasses, touch my arm. Each time, I move away, not directly back but a half-step to the right, and they match my movements, and in this way we move in a small circle as we speak.
The last book I read, I repeat slowly, was —
But I can’t remember. I remember the satiny cover beneath the pads of my fingertips, but not the title, or the author, or any of the words inside. I think I am talking funny, with my burned mouth, my numb tongue fat and useless inside my mouth. I want to say, don’t bother asking me anything. I want to say, there is nothing underneath.
And what do you do?
The questions come at me like doors thrown open. I begin to explain, but as soon as the words leave my mouth I find myself searching for Paul. He is in the far corner of the room, talking to a woman with short hair and a strand of pearls that wraps around her neck like the coils of a noose. She touches his arm familiarly; he bats her away with his hand. His muscles look taut enough to snap. I look back at the woman who asked me what I did. She is curvy and taller than most and has the brightest shade of red lipstick on that I have ever seen. Her eyes flicker over to Paul. She takes another long swig of her martini, the olives rolling around in the glass like eyes. How are things with the two of you? She asks. A pimento iris lolls in my direction. The woman with the pearls touches Paul’s arm again. He shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. Who is she? Why is she —
I excuse myself and walk into the dim hallway. I press my palm into the iron sphere at the base of the railing, and swing myself up onto the staircase.
The coat room, I think. The coat room. The bedroom full of coats. The repurposed —
The stairs move away from me, and I rush to catch them. I search for the door, a darker patch among darkness. The coat room is cool. I press my hand on the wooden panel. The coats will not question me.
In the shadows, two figures are struggling on the bed. My heart surges with fear, a fish with a steel hook through the ridge of its lip. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I realize that it’s just the hosts, writhing on the heaps of shiny down jackets. The dark-haired one — Jane? Or is it Jill? — is on her back, her dress gathered around her hips, and her wife is over her, grinding her knee between her legs. Jane — maybe Jill — is biting her own wrist to keep from crying out. The coats rustle, slide. Jane kisses Jill or Jill kisses Jane and then one leans down and rolls down the top of the other’s stockings, a rolled line of underwear, her face disappearing into her.
A pleasurable twinge curls inside of me. Jill or Jane writhes, pulls up fistfuls of down coat with her hands, makes a soft noise, a single syllable stretched in two directions. A long red scarf slides to the floor.
I don’t wonder if they can see me. I could stand here for a thousand years and between coats and syllables and mouths they would never see me.
I close the door.
I get drunk. I have four flutes of champagne and a strong gin and tonic. I even suck the gin out of the lime wedge, the citrus stinging the scratch on my finger. Gabe finally puts the camera down on a chair in deference to its extraordinary weight. It sits there, quietly, but it holds me inside, somewhere, for precious seconds that I cannot take back. A face that I have yet to really look at, resting deep in the coils of its mechanical innards.
I walk past the camera and take it, my fingers tightening around the handle. I am sure that when I lift it from its perch the handle will give way. It will crash to the floor, tremendously, and the heads will all turn. But it comes up easily. I control it now. As I begin to walk nonchalantly toward the front door, taking care to point the lens away from my body, I see the white cat with the smooshed face, watching me from the landing. His pink comma tongue slides out and makes a leisurely trip over his upper lip, and his blue eyes narrow accusingly. I stumble. I do not bother to get my coat before I walk through the front door.
Outside, my boots crunch loudly through the glittering ice and mean snow. Near the end of the path that leads to the driveway, someone has emptied a half-full coffee cup, and dark brown is splattered grotesquely across the white lawn. Narrow tracks in the snow suggest a deer has seen this sight, too. My skin is stippled with goosebumps. I realize I don’t have the keys, but I reach for the trunk handle anyway.
It’s unlocked. The trunk opens to me, and I thump the camera down into its shadows.
I go back inside and have a glass of wine. Then a shot of something green. The world begins to slide.
Instead of passing out like a dignified person, I stagger out to the car again, sit in the cold passenger seat, recline it, and stare out the sunroof at a sky crowded with delicate points of light.
Paul gets into the driver’s seat.
Are you all right? He asks.
I nod, and then throw open the door and vomit cocktail shrimp and spinach dip onto the gravel driveway. Pink chunks and long dark strands like hair settle among the stones and snow; the puddle gleams and reflects the moon.
We drive. I recline and watch the sky.
Did you have fun? he asks.
I giggle, laugh. No, I guffaw. I snort. Fuck no. Fuck —
I feel something cold on my face and I pick it off. Spinach. I roll down the window. Icy air hits my face. I throw it out of the car.
If that were a cigarette, I say, it would spark. It should be a cigarette. I could use one of those.
The cold stings.
Can you roll the window up? Paul asks loudly over the rushing wind. I roll it back up and lean my heavy head against the glass.
I thought it would be good for us to get out the house, he says. Jane and Jill really like you.
Like me for what? I pull my head away, and there is a circle of grease obscuring the sky. I see a black stain flash briefly under the headlights, then a huddled mass on the side of the road — a deer, blasted apart by the tires of an SUV.
I can almost hear the line between Paul’s eyebrows deepening. What do you mean, like you for what? What does that even mean?
I don’t know.
They just like you, that’s all.
I laugh again, and reach for the window crank. Who is that woman with that pearl necklace? I ask in the sudden silence.
No one, he says, in a voice that doesn’t fool either of us.
At my house, he carries me to bed. When he lies down next to me, I reach over and touch his stomach. He doesn’t ask me what I am doing.
You’re drunk, he says. You don’t want this.
How do you know what I want? I ask. I inch closer. He takes my hand and lifts it away. He holds it aloft for a minute, not wanting to drop it, not wanting to put it back. He settles for resting it on my own stomach, and then rolls away from me.
I reach for myself. I don’t even recognize my own topography.
Most mornings, Paul asks me what I dreamt about.
I don’t remember, I say. Why?
You moved around. A lot. He says this carefully, with restraint that betrays itself.
I want to see. I set up the camera to record my sleep, tucked on the highest shelf of the bookcase next to my bed. The DVD from the other day is obviously broken, so I put it in the garbage can, shoving it deep in the bag past potato peelings curling like question marks. Then, I order another DVD. It shows up on my cement stoop.
This one is in many parts, smaller parts, like film shorts. The first one is called Fucking My Wife. I start it. A man is holding the camera — I can’t see his face. The woman is blonde and older than the last woman and she has meticulously applied mascara.
How do I say, how do I say, how do I say —
I cannot hear him. I look at the video case again. Fucking My Wife. I don’t understand the title. I can’t hear him. All I can hear is her voice, tinged with desperation.
How do I say, how do I say, how do I —
I don’t want to hear her anymore. I hit mute.
How do I say, how do I say, how do I —
I turn off the DVD player. The television blinks to the news network. A blonde woman is staring gravely at her audience. Over her left shoulder, like an advising devil, there is a square graphic of a bomb, blasting apart the pixels that make it. I unmute the sound.
—a bombing in Turkey, she is saying. Viewers should be advised that the following images are —
I turn off the TV. I yank the plug out by the cord.
Paul comes over. How are you feeling? he asks.
A little better, I say. Tired. I lean into him. He smells like detergent. I lean into him and I want him. He is solid. He reminds me of a tree — roots that run deep.
The DVD player is broken, I say, heading off the question before it can be asked.
Do you want me to look at it? he asks.
Yes, I say. I plug in the TV again. As the DVD begins to play, and the bodies begin to unfold, I can hear it again. That voice, that sad, desperate sound, the questions repeated over and over again like a mantra, even as she smiles. Even as she moans and her mind flits between her question and the pattern of the carpet. Paul watches with a determined courtesy, absently stroking my hand as it plays. Nothing on his face indicates that he can hear what I hear. As the scene draws to a close, he looks over at me and asks me what’s broken about it.
Can’t you hear it? I feel the nails of my free hand digging into my jeans.
He cocks his head to the side and listens again. He shakes his head regretfully.
I turn the TV off. I stand in front of him, my hands dangling heavily at my sides. He stands up and puts his arms around me; rests his chin in my hair. We rock back and forth slowly, dancing to the sound of the heating vent struggling to keep us warm.
I think I found you an apartment, he says into my hair. It’s on the third floor of a building on the other side of the river.
I don’t want to leave, I say into his chest.
His muscles tense, and he pulls me away from his body by the length of his impossible arms.
You can’t keep doing this, he says, his voice loud, upset, pitched into the ceiling. You have to find a new place.
Please don’t yell, I say. Please just listen.
It’s like you’re not even in there. He grabs the sides of his arms. You’re responding to all of the wrong things.
Please stop, I say. He reaches for me, but I knock his hand away. I need you to be simple and good, I say without looking into his face. Can’t you just be simple and good?
He looks straight through me, as if I already know the answer.
Each morning, I slide the monstrous cassette out of the camera, rewind it, and watch it in the VCR. I fast forward through the stillness, though there is not much of it. Camera-me flails. She grabs for the air as if she is trying to pull party streamers down from the ceiling. She knocks her limbs against the wall, the oak headboard, the nightstand, and does not recoil in pain but goes back to them, over and over. The slender lamp crashes to the floor. Paul gets up, tries to help, holds her arms, holds my arms, trying to pin them to her sides, then looks guilty and releases them. She comes down. She struggles against the blankets. She slides down onto the floor, rolling half-under the edge of the bed, partially hidden by the pulled sheets. Paul tries to get her back up onto the bed and she takes a wild swing at his head, and I can hear her steady no, no, no, no, no, no, no even as he tugs her back up onto the mattress, getting close enough to talk into her ear, something too low for the camera to catch, and then getting her down, down onto the mattress, down into his arms in a grip that looks both threatening and comforting. This lasts for a moment before she — before I — am up again, and Paul pulls me into him, even as I hit his chest, even as I slide again to the floor. A whole night of this.
When I am done, I rewind it to the beginning and replace it in the camera.
I stop ordering DVDs by mail. I begin free trials at four different websites. There are no voice tricks in internet porn, no weird commentary tracks.
I can still hear them. A man with slender wrists wonders endlessly about someone named Sam. Two women are surprised about each other’s bodies, the infinite softness. No one said, no one said, a tanned woman thinks in a whisper. It echoes around her mind, around mine. I lean in so close to the screen that I cannot even see the picture anymore. Just blotches of color, moving. Beiges, browns, the black of the tanned woman’s hair, a shock of red of which, when I pull back, I can’t see the origins.
A woman mentally corrects a man who keeps referring to her pussy. Cunt, she thinks, and the word is dense and sits in the air like a wedge of underripe fruit. I love your pussy, he says. Cunt, she repeats, over and over again, a meditation.
Some are silent. Some have no words, just colors.
A woman with a black harness around her fleshy hips prays as she fucks a thin man who idolizes her. Each thrust punctuates. At the end, she kisses his back. Benediction.
A man with two women on his cock wants to be home.
Do they know what they are thinking, I wonder, clicking through videos, letting them load like a slingshot being pulled back. Do they hear it? Do they know? Did I know?
I cannot remember.
At two in the morning, I am watching a man deliver a pizza. A woman with breasts that float wrongly against gravity opens the door. Not the right house, of course. I think that I have watched this before, maybe. He sets the empty cardboard box on the table. She takes off her shirt. I listen.
Her mind is all darkness. It is full, afraid. Fear rushes through it, white hot and terrified. Fear weighs on her chest, crushing her. She is thinking about a door opening. She is thinking about a stranger coming in. I am thinking about a door opening. I can hear him clutching the doorknob. I cannot hear him clutching the doorknob, but I can hear it turning. I cannot hear it turning, but I hear the footfalls. I cannot hear the footfalls, I cannot hear them. There is only a shadow. There is only darkness blotting out light.
He, the delivery man, the no-delivery man, thinks about her breasts. He worries about his body. He wants to please her, really.
She smiles. There is a smear of lipstick on her teeth. She likes him. Below this, there is a screaming, rushing tunnel. No radio signal. It fills my head, it presses into the bone of my skull. Pounding, pushing it apart. I am an infant, my head is not solid, these tectonic plates, they cannot be expected to hold.
I grab my laptop and hurl it across the room at the wall. I expect it to shatter, but it doesn’t — it strikes the drywall and hits the ground with a terrific crash.
I scream. I scream so loudly the note splits in two.
Paul comes running out of the basement. He cannot get close to me.
Don’t touch me, I howl. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me.
He stays near the door. I slump down onto the floor. My tears run hot and then cool on my face. Please go back downstairs, I say. I cannot see Paul, but I hear him open the basement door. I flinch. I do not get up until my heart slows.
When I finally stand and walk over to the wall, I tip the computer right side up. There is a massive crack down the center of the screen, a ruptured fault line.
In the bedroom, Paul sits across from me, his fingers tapping idly on the denim of his pants.
Do you remember, he says, what it was like before?
I look down at my legs, then up at the blank wall, then back to him. I do not even struggle to speak; the spark of words dies so deep in my chest there is not even space to mount them on an exhale.
You wanted, he says. You wanted and wanted. You were like this endless thing. A well that never emptied.
I wish I could say that I remember, but I do not remember. I can imagine pumping limbs and mouths on mouths but I cannot remember them. I cannot remember ever being thirsty.
I sleep, long and hot, the windows open despite the winter. Paul sleeps against the wall and does not stir.
The voices aren’t happening, not now, but I still perceive them. They drift over my head like milkweed. I am Samuel, I think. That’s it. I’m Samuel. God called to him in the night. They call to me. Samuel answered, Yes, Lord? I have no way of answering my voices. I have no way of telling them that I can hear.
I hear the door open and then close but I don’t turn my head. I am staring at the screen. An orgy, now. The fifth. Dozens of voices, too many to count, overlapping, tangling, making the air tight, crowding it. They worry, they lust, they laugh. Sweat glitters. Badly placed tungsten lights cast shadows, slicing up a few bodies for a few moments into slick skin and canyons of darkness. Whole again. Pieces.
He sits down next to me, his weight sinking the cushion so far that I fall into him. I do not take my eyes off the screen.
Hey, he says. You okay?
Yes. I curl my fingers tightly against one another, my knuckles locking in a line. This is the church. This is the steeple.
He sits back and watches. He looks at me. He settles his fingers lightly on my shoulder blade, catching the strap of my bra and running his finger on the curve of my skin beneath the elastic. Gently, over and over.
A woman at the center of a male orbit reaches up, up over her head, so far up. She is thinking about one of them in particular, the one filling her, making her whole. She thinks about the lighting for a bit, then her thoughts drift back to him. Her leg is falling asleep.
Paul talks very close to my skin. What are you doing? He asks.
Watching, I say.
What?
Watching. Isn’t this what I should be doing? Watching this?
The way he is still, I can tell that he is thinking. Then he reaches and puts his hand over mine—covering the church.
Hey, he says. Hey, hey.
One of the men is sick. He thinks he is going to die. He wants to die.
Bodies linking, unlinking, muscles twitching, hands.
Through the woman’s mind, a ribbon of light tightens and slackens and tightens again. She laughs. She is actually coming. The first time we kissed, Paul and I, on my bed, in the dark, he was almost frantic, humming with energy, a screen door banging in the wind. Later he told me that it had just been so long, so long, that he felt like he was coming out of his skin. Skin. I can still hear them thinking, echoing around my head, slipping into the crevices of my memory. I cannot keep them away. This dam will not hold.
I do not realize that I am crying until he stands and brings me with him, pulling me from the couch. On the screen, Pearly arcs of come crisscross the laughing woman’s torso. I lift easily. He holds me and touches my face and his fingers are wet for the effort.
Shhh, he says. Shhh. I’m so sorry, he says. We don’t have to watch it, we don’t have to.
He weaves his fingers through my hair and supports the small of my back. Shhh, he says. I don’t want any of them. I only want you.
I stiffen.
Only you, he says again. He holds me tightly. A good man. He repeats, Only you.
You don’t want to be here, I say.
The floor rumbles; a large truck darkens the front window. He doesn’t respond.
He sits there quietly, radiating guilt. The house is dark. I kiss him on the mouth.
I’m sorry, he says. I’m so—
Now it is my time to shhhh. He stammers to silence. I kiss him, harder. I take his hand from my side and rest it on my thigh. He is hurting, and I want it to stop. I kiss him again. I trace two fingers along his erection.
Let’s go, I say.
I always wake before him. Paul sleeps on his stomach. I sit up and stretch. I trace the rips in the comforter. Sunlight streams through my curtains. I can hardly sleep through such daylight. I get up. He does not stir.
I cross the room and pull the camera from its spot. I carry it into the living room. I rewind the tape, and it whines as it whirs back over itself.
I insert the cassette into the VHS player. I run my finger down the buttons on the machine like a pianist choosing her first key. As I press it down, the screen goes snowy, and then black. Then, the static diorama of my room. The wrinkled sheets with the spray of blue-china pattern, unmade. I fast-forward. I fast forward, spinning through minutes of nothing, unsurprised by how easy it is for them to slip away.
Two people stumble in, my finger lifts, the rush-to-now slows. Two strangers fumble with each other’s clothes, each other’s bodies. His body, slender and tall and pale, leans; his pants hit the floor with a thunk, the pockets full of keys and change. Her body — my body — mine, is still striped with the yellowish stains of fading bruises. It is a body overflowing out of itself; it unwinds from too many layers. The shirt looks bulky in my hand, and I release it onto the floor. It sinks like a shot bird. We are pressing into the side of the mattress.
I look down at my hands. They are dry and not shaking. I look back up at the screen, and I begin to listen.