“So, it is okay with you,” Albie asks, “if we skip it?”
“If we skip what?”
A deep breath, Albie sucks back his aggravation. “The party,” he says. “The Frankenhoffs’ party. I really don’t want to go.”
To which Bunny responds, “The windows are hermetically sealed.”
“What windows? What are you talking about?”
“The Frankenhoffs’ windows don’t open. So if you’re thinking I might jump, don’t worry. It’s not possible.”
“Jesus. No. Cut it out, Bunny. Not even as a joke. But really, what is the point of going? To come home and complain about having been bored out of our minds?”
“We don’t have to decide this minute, do we?” Bunny asks.
“No. Of course not. We’ll wait and see. We’ll see how we feel. Later.”
As far as taking a header out the Frankenhoffs’ window, which would be less like a swan dive and more like the Flying Nun, limbs going gawky every which way until the sails of her wimple that looked like folded tablecloth would catch the winds like a kite, even if the Frankenhoffs’ windows did open, it would never happen. People are not kites. With people, gravity kicks in, and Bunny has no calling to splat onto the sidewalk on New Year’s Eve as the ball drops at Times Square.
Never would she make such a spectacle of herself.
Never would she give some fraud at the Frankenhoffs’ party cause to say, “Frankly, I’m not surprised. Did you know that her parents named her Bunny because they raised rabbits? For food.”
Taking note that Bunny has not touched her coffee, that it must be cold by now, Albie asks, “Do you want a fresh cup?”
“What did you say?” She blinks her eyes as if she were just waking up, and not quite sure of her surroundings. “Did you ask me a question?”
Albie repeats his offer to make her a fresh cup of coffee, and Bunny says, “Yes. Thank you.”
“No problem.” He kisses her forehead and then leaves, taking the St. Thomas coffee cup with him.
To fling herself out a window, whether it be the Frankenhoffs’ window or any window, is not Bunny’s idea of the way to relieve what is killing her. Falling or jumping from up high is not of her ideation. Ideation is the way we imagine doing away with ourselves. Even people who would never, ever, kill themselves, they too, although less frequently, indulge in suicidal ideation, imagine their own funerals, relishing the grief, the guilt, the remorse resultant from their self-inflicted death. Ideation, when we get into the specifics of it, when we get down into orchestrated details, is as particular to the individual as are their sexual predilections.
In the kitchen, Albie pours the cold coffee down the sink and drops the mug in the trash, where it lands sailboat-side up. After filling the pot with water, Albie calls out asking if Bunny would like something to eat.
“Not now,” Bunny says.
“I can’t hear you.” Albie raises his voice, “What did you say?”
The pressure of irrationality rises up in Bunny the way atmospheric pressure rises, and under the cover of the blanket, she wraps her right hand around the middle finger of her left hand. It’s similar to warm-up exercises for the piano or the attempt to alleviate writer’s cramp, the way Bunny bends her middle finger back toward her wrist. Because, anatomically speaking, a finger doesn’t bend backward of its own accord, Bunny ought to be showing signs of discomfort, some indication that she’s gone beyond the point of stretching and nearer to the point of tearing a ligament, but to look at her face you’d think, “Here is someone who is at peace with herself.”
It’s plain white, the cup Albie sets down on the coffee table. Bunny thanks him for the coffee, as if coffee were exactly what she’d wanted, and wasn’t he sweet to know. “It smells good,” she says, acting; acting like a normal person, but she makes no move toward the cup, and a normal person wouldn’t be trying her best to snap off her own finger. Because this particular self-inflicted Torquemadian punishment draws no attention to itself—no howling or wild gesticulations or limbs flailing—and her hands are hidden from view, Bunny is like a junkie shooting up between her toes or one of those teenage girls who cuts herself where no one will see, which was something Bunny never understood. Why bother cutting yourself if not for the attention? But Bunny has newfound insight into these girls. She gets it now, how the release of the pressure, like air escaping from a balloon, can defuse what would otherwise explode.
Albie, again, sits on the edge of the couch, alongside her, and puts his hands over hers, her hands covered by the blanket, and gently pries them apart.
More than the weeping, more than the lethargy, more than the utter battiness of it all, it’s the self-inflicted trauma that disturbs Albie most.
Her thighs are a bleed of bruises, like a pansy, purple- and yellow-tinged with the green of the sky before a storm. Whenever she pummels herself or smacks her head, hard, with the palm of her hand, Jeffrey flees to a safe spot under the bed, and Albie wraps his arms around her as if his arms were a straitjacket, and in that same way, she struggles to break free of him. To be held tight like that is suffocating, and she gulps for air. These episodes cross the line of that with which he can cope, and that which is simply too damn much for him. “Please,” he says. “Please don’t hurt yourself.”
It is counterintuitive to inflict pain, tangible pain, as a way of relieving pain, but pain you can point to, pain that has a place, is pain that can be relieved. Bunny’s pain has no place. She hurts everywhere. She hurts nowhere. Everywhere and nowhere, hers is a ghostly pain, like that of a phantom limb. Where there is nothing, there can be no relief. To bring the pain to a place, like leaves gathered into a pile, to a nexus, no matter how much it hurts, to know that it hurts here, is to bring clarity. Only when she hits herself or pulls her hair or bends her finger back or bites the inside of her mouth can she experience the pleasure of pain found and pain released. It is the only way to be rid of the pain that is Bunny. She is the point of the pain.