In her room above the pool, curtains drawn, Mu lies in a crumpled mess of sheets. Her body is still damp and she is shivering. Her bowels ache. Her lips are mouthing something, but she cannot quite hear what she’s saying. For a few moments it’s as if she is not in her body. When the evening arrives, she sits up on her bed, rests her diary on her damp, bare knees and writes.
Better not to inhabit your body at all. Bodies let you down, bodies are vulnerable. Lying in my darkened room I remembered how that sense of vulnerability first came to me. An image pierces me now, twisting the knife already in my gut. It’s an old image that always seems to be lurking in the back row of the theatre of my mind, an image from years ago, from when I was nine or ten years old in my home town. A big, rough hand creeping up my skirt in the dark. I could not cry out, nor run away: the large man, with his dumb face, had me cornered in the village cinema. I trembled in the dark while the screen flickered with sound and pictures. I managed to escape momentarily, hiding myself in the space behind the stage curtains. And just when I thought I would be safe, he found me and trapped me again. His groping hand snatched me to him and found my lower body. I never dared tell my parents and I thought I had forgotten it, but now it’s all come back to me here in America.
Fuck me. Even in the Palm Oasis Hotel. How could I let that animal-fool take me in that way? The pain in my bowels shoots up to fizzle and crackle in my jaw. That cockroach man, that machine with a cock, made me feel like a worthless hole. When all is said and done, when I look beneath the smooth exterior, the charming manners, the good looks, the well-dressed ease, the Harvard degrees, you just get fucked. Taken. The fucking-machine takes over.
What can I do here? I am an alien in an alien land, and now it’s made me alien to myself. My body isn’t even mine either. My body makes me feel disgusted.