Zeyna and I met when we were nine, and determined to make ourselves ugly in order to avoid the attentions of the Town’s men. We had few ideas and no money and not much of an imagination between us. So we ate cigarette butts, we rubbed shit in our hair, we smashed our teeth with hammers—these were the more trifling behaviours. I will not tell you the rest.
Later, Zeyna spent months touring the Town doing a poorly received piece of performance art that involved humping the air and screaming while wearing a fluorescent skeleton suit and an upside-down cow mask. She still blames me for the damage she did to herself over those scant months when we were trying to take ownership of our flesh.
Today, we are flung out on her lawn like worms after rain, and I know that she hates me, a little; I know that she wishes I would die, a little, because I co-created the body she has now, and it is a body with much to hide. Zeyna is painting her bathroom and has taken down her checkerboard shower curtain; we are lying on it. I alone am sweating. She’s wearing a moonstone ring—like her, it seems to aggressively resist being part of this world. In fact, both Zeyna and the ring look like objects retrieved from an ancient shipwreck, and I am jealous of her long, polished, hairless body in its gold lamé bikini and cannot, as a result, stop staring at it and tearing up handfuls of grass.
When I am around Zeyna, I worry constantly about hygiene. I shave my arms and legs before one of our appointments, as if I’m preparing to have sex with a stranger. I select enormous sun hats that leave most of my face in shadow. I choose loose dresses made of the thinnest silk; they hint at my body without fully admitting to its presence within them. These dresses cost more than a month in the hospital, and Zeyna is the only person who sees them. Some women, it seems, have a knack for cleanliness; she is one of them. She wanders over to her garden and eats a handful of nasturtiums. She seems to mostly live on flowers. On the windowsill she’s brewing tea in a mason jar. I see lemon slices and feathery, celestial herbs.
Black squares, white squares, the spectacle of her body splayed over both. My body infecting the whole yard. You have less soul than a dog, I say to myself. What? says Zeyna. She can easily hide her damage with makeup and tattoos, whereas I work from home and can only swim at night or while wearing a wetsuit. If you met me you would find me too effusive, because I desire so much to be accepted. I know people think I’m revolting; I watch them duck into shops and slide down alleys—everyone retreats from my florid compliments, my wet eyes and close talking. If anything I own is admired, I feel compelled to give it away. I press upon bewildered strangers my earrings, my sandwiches, my shoes.
I’d like to be able to choose the work I do, the hours I keep. I would like the cleanliness that I achieve only through great difficulty to mean that I am no longer distracted by the question of my own cleanliness. But in trying to vanquish my body I have rendered it more visible. I am marked over and over again by my own attempts to vanish.
Zeyna is narrowing her eyes at me as she always does when she senses I am drifting. I want to tell her how hard it is to focus when I feel myself flowing over or shrinking from my clothing, protruding at odd angles, shivering then sweating. When I long to gather my stomach and my breasts into my hands and slice them cleanly off. If I were capable of gentleness I would want my breasts to just fall off, like raindrops. I’d like to rise, and leave my body sleeping on the rubber sheets it requires: entirely oblivious, and made beautiful by my absence. I’d like to dissolve into substancelessness, like a bouillon cube dropped into boiling water. These are the kinds of stupid desires I form my life around.
I knew he was a bad boyfriend but I didn’t know how bad; none of us did. He was not a human being in the regular sense of those words. But I’ve never regretted one second of knowing him.
The Town that surrounds us fills with mist and the men in all of their despicable freedom saunter or skateboard right up against its borders. I want to ask Zeyna: how do you manage to seem happy to be alive? But she will not let me get close enough to her scars to lift the edges and peer inside. The long slices down her face healed with barely a trace; her boyfriend the Chancellor terrorizes her but he also funds many of her reconstructions. She will not speak of our time together. The more I see of her the more surely I know she has closed herself to me. One eye open, one eye shut, half in sun, half in shadow.