My grandfather spent afternoons in the woodshed drinking rum and speculating about my dead mother’s provenance. He’d wheel over the dirt floor covered in sawdust, barking.
He hated my mother’s skin, the shape of her eyes, characteristics I have inherited. Where’d you get those fuckin eyes. I felt I had retrieved them in the most despicable way—as if, with scooped-out sockets, I had plunged a toilet only to find that my eyes were the objects clogging it.
I would arrive before my grandfather in the morning and he would pull me onto his lap and perform exercises intended to test the speed of my breathing and the responsiveness of my muscles. Then he would scrape my hair into a ponytail, perfume me with rosewater, and send me to the stove to shake cinnamon over his oatmeal.
In moments of rage he would call me close to his face. You are a bowl of fruit, he would say. Which fruit should I remove from you first?
I despised him. Despite this, his anger emptied my heart.
My heart. Deboned, scraped and salted, packed away so tight in my chest.
Eventually forked out of its cavity, passed through spruce smoke, and set on fire.
+
Hello. In the dream of my life I’m rich, reckless, and furred, gleefully unpleasant, and shining with all the metals I attract.
But, as a teenager, I was removed from my grandfather’s care and brought to the Farmhouse to be kept by the Chancellor. I hated myself. More than that: I disgusted myself. My craven, predictable addiction to suffering, my longing for punishment, my desire to be forced.
And the Chancellor beheld these secret afflictions.
And he cupped his hands as my body poured forth, like chaff from a threshing machine.
+
What was my life then?
What was my life then besides fortunate?
Bolted to my throne, sacred and specialized, and approached as one might approach a holy relic: Lo it is I, the beloved skull or finger.
After the first decade, memories began to surface in my mind. One summer I was swimming in the ocean and saw an approaching wave on which inexplicably floated thousands of dead blackflies. That is how I used to feel watching my grandfather advance in his wheelchair toward me.
+
In my middle years, the Chancellor and I would walk together the long path to the marigolds that fringed his property. As his body warmed from his efforts, duelling perfumes arose from it.
I did not yet understand the immensity of the poisons I had ingested.
+
At the end of my youth, ravaged by cancer, I was finally permitted to travel.
The pain was untenable. I bargained with it, I told the pain who I would kill, who I would betray, the hopes I’d abandon and the sex I’d decline, if only it would stop.
For months, I was ferried to hospitals throughout the Town, where diseased parts of my body were sliced off, pickled, then divided into ever-daintier portions.
My doctor’s delight in these verbs: sliced, pickled, divided; once she told me my leg wound might fillet open; how I wanted to marry her, her and her golden nails, then, as in now; someday, meaning immediately.
I felt like a neighbourhood barbecue of varying cancerous meats, a picnic table studded with rotten sweetbreads. I invite you to set a dish of mustard beside my sticky, caramelized leg.
+
Thereafter, what was my life?
Rescued/abandoned/cherished/forlorn, all these grievous gaps in my theories, my history.
For my convalescence, I was returned to the Farmhouse, but I was too old to heal into a fuckable shell.
All day, while the Chancellor pondered my fate, I swung in my hammock above him, dripping infrequently onto the sloping stone floor.
All day he sat at the table, writing minutely on graph paper, shining with sweat even under the programmed fans, trembling with pleasure each time he allowed himself to eat.
His hand would shake so he could barely bring food to his mouth.
+
Most perfect reminders of substancelessness: my tended wounds, each morning’s pour of light, the ocean’s milky turquoise water inching daily closer to our door, and beholding the Chancellor, as the stick beholds the flower.
+
Was I always bound?
Was I always bound to come to this?
Helpless, caged, and dripping.
Devoted to cultivating my shame and abjection.
At night, the obsequious moon cast light on the glittering gems in the Chancellor’s teeth.
+
I listened to the bones move around in my body.
I remembered myself as a child, obsessively attuned to the needs of my grandfather.
We had a dynamic; it went like this. I would say Who do you want me to be? And then he would tell me, and then I’d become.
+
How long will I last? I asked.
The Chancellor took a long time to answer. Meanwhile, he rubbed into his enormous white hands a softening cream the scent and texture of toothpaste.
+
Relentless sawing away at form.
+
When I placed my ear to my thigh I could hear my blood rushing to foam. My braid hung down like a wet snake, and I no longer allowed my wounds to be washed.
I was reaching some uncharted place within me, and every day the Chancellor watched me plunge deeper, but he was helpless to stop me.
I could tell when my gaze—ever-weakening though it was—began to frighten him.
+
There are so many ways to hold a human prisoner.
I am now only held prisoner by my chosen devotion.
I have discovered the spectacular release of finally inhabiting flesh that precisely embodies my self-conception.
A kind of teenage dream, this perfect match between interior and exterior.
I want to describe for you the tremendous satisfaction of this feeling.
But the phrases that come to mind are all so sexual and embarrassing.
+
The Chancellor recognizes this new certainty in me.
You’ve always been so morbid, he says, pretending to stretch and yawn, but I see something shift in his eyes.
+
Eventually, I could see directly into my own soul.
I had always visualized a layer of black gunk at the bottom of it.
But that layer was absent.
The architecture of my soul was not remotely what I had imagined.
The air was warm and vaporous, the ground was clear and greening, and the sourceless light was softer than any I’d seen.
That day, I knew I could do it. I felt as certain of my own ability as I felt of the position of my heart within my body.
I found my teeth, and I tore a hole.
I rose above my fallen form like steam.
I released the cheerful and reckless devil within me.
Keep your speeches short! I hissed at the Chancellor.
May the earth bless you and put you to use, I said to my body, and that was the end of my voice.
It was early morning, and over the hill near the water I heard a few faint coughs, then the singing began, and that was the end of my hearing.
There was no light, but neither was there a pursuer, and that was the end of my vision.
+
Follow water. Block the sun.
I cannot see what waves are at my feet.
I cannot feel what winds are at my face.
+
Now there is the sensation of plunging.
Now there is the sensation of falling.
Now I will sleep in a rush of bubbles.
+
What if I had a secret?
What kind of secret?
The kind that would devastate you.
+
Whose hands are these. Whose arms. Whose voice.
Whose voice, flashing over the black waters.
It is here for only a moment and then it is gone.
+
Infinite night, moonless and steady.
Drift in a veil of white noise.
+
Don’t ever leave me.
I’ll never leave you.
+
Arrival upon this new shore, water running swift and deeply green, like a sudden rush of spring.
The sand frozen in waves, and littered with shipping containers.
For so long, I wanted from him the impossible.
Utter autonomy, and utter abjection. I wanted him to feel the totalizing force of my love, and the totalizing force of my hatred, all at the same time.
Rusted, anonymous, studded with barnacles, they are not only mine, they are everywhere.
+
In each, by damage or design, there is some form of entry.
A door, a window, a crack, a hole.