Chapter 14

Eyes open?

Eyes closed.

Doesn’t matter.  Same view.

Warm water, body temperature and salty, like fresh piss.  Body, water, air, all the same warmness and wetness.

Hard to get a good breath in here.  Breathe. No, deeper.

Keep trying.

Where are your hands?  Wiggle your fingers. 

Okay, good, there they are.

Ba-bum, ba-bum. 

Ba-bum, ba-bum. 

That is the sound of your own fucking heart, beating. 

Fuck.

How long has it been? 

Don’t think about it. 

One full hour of this.  Can you do it? 

Think about your talk. ABJECTION. Be creative. 

Ba-bum.  Ba-bum.

Where is your body? Is it still there?  

Wiggle your fingers!!! 

Okay.  Your toes.  Okay.  All right, good.  Breathe.

The talk. Abjection in No No Not Now. 

Where should you start?  The wrists.  The slicing rope, blood dripping red down the arm.  The rubbery white hands.

Remember the first time you saw that play?  You were nineteen, and you had just fallen in love with Liam Stump, after your Modern Drama course.  If someone was performing Stump, you were there. You rode BART from Berkeley to San Francisco, that shoebox theater in the Tenderloin.  The muttering, toothless skeleton people who like cockroaches stumbled towards you on the sidewalk instead of away.

Remember when Maddy fell to the floor.  Fell with a hard smack, loud, the sound hurt.  Lay all contorted on the ground.  So different seeing it than reading it.  Raised herself up to her knees, face smeared with her own blood.  Crawled on knees and stumps to find the hands, the left one close by, the right far-flung across the empty stage. You cried when you saw her like that, a bloody mess, trying to fix her broken body under the indifferent swinging of her husband.  You cried and cried like an unhinged woman.  When the lights came up, you slunk out with your head lowered to hide your puffy eyes.  

So that’s what it takes to make you cry? Audrey said.

You always thought you would marry her, like your parents and her parents wanted. She was a nice girl, that’s what people always said about her, a really nice person, but she had gotten depressed.  Remember her accusing eyes, disgusted. Our relationship has always had bad energy hanging over it. Had it? Could you have missed it, like an idiot thinking you were happy? For two and two-thirds years?  It was your fault, because you couldn’t talk about feelings, you hated fighting, you didn’t want to work on it. 

Tears mingle with the slimy water and the slimy air and the blood from Maddy’s wrists.  That’s what blood is, salty water, right.  You’re not crying; Maddy is the one crying.  She looks up, eyes shooting beams of hate.  

YOU are TERRIFIED of actual people’s actual bodies! Maddy says.   

It’s true.  It’s true, she’s right. You never cared about the baby.  That’s why women hate you.  

You’re supposed to care about babies.  Why didn’t you care? Just imagine, a little baby, growing in your body.  You would nurture it with your own body, feeding it your energy and mass.  How could you not care about a little baby like that? How could you not cry for the mother who had to give that baby away?

You just thought, pregnant, you know, gestation, lactating, blah blah, words. The most intimate possible relationship and you never even thought about it.  Not once. I mean, way more intimate than something like sex, more than just your bodies stuck together, a whole person living inside of you. 

Like your own mother.  A robust, blonde woman, fake-blonde now, strapping, an inch taller than your Chinese father. That woman grew you inside of her.  You lived in her, can you imagine, like she was your apartment, your bed. And when you were ready, they had to cut her open to pull you out, because you were in there backwards.  Ass-backwards, she used to say.  You never think about that, do you?  Cut her wide open.  When did you call her?  Last week?  No, longer. Does she miss you, like Maddy misses her baby?  Does she cry that her only child is thousands of miles away?  Why don’t you ever think about if she misses you? 

STOP.  

Where are you?  Is your body still there?  This tank is twice as big now as when you started, at least twice, so your body must be twice as big, too, which means your toes are very far away. Can you move your feet?  Try, try.  Move your left toe.  Fuck.  Move—your—left—toe. 

Ahhh.  It moved.  That was scary.  

Quick, your right toe. 

Okay, good. Your right toe doesn’t even exist any more. 

No more need to worry about your right toe. 

How much longer?  It’s already been years, seventy, eighty years, dog years, turtle years. Time is moving so slowly that it dissolves into grainy shreds of dark like newspaper print.  Ba-bum.  Ba-bum. It’s so, so sad in here.  So much thick heavy sadness hurling through space at the speed of dark, spreading towards the edges of infinity.  It was that baby.  That fucking baby had turned this place so, so sad.  

If this had been the darkest place possible, it's darker now.  Black, sticky dark blackness that cloggs up your lungs and gets mucked up in those little alveoli.  Now you can only breathe in blackness, breathe out blackness.  This is a sick, dark pit, and your lungs and guts are rotting into it.  A dissolved pit of rot. Did it stink?  No way to know, with your nose so gunked up with stick, nostrils collapsed in on themselves.  Why have you been left here to disintegrate into this stink pit? It's something you did.  You did something disgusting.  What was it? 

What did you do to Rona Gomez? 

Something horrible, you have done some horrible thing to Rona.  You were doing something horrible.  You did something horrible.  Was it, did you disown her?  You disowned Rona Gomez.  You grew her in your body, like a mouse in a snake, and when they cut you open and pulled her out, you dismissed her like rotten garbage, like a dirty sock full of semen.

You slit her neck, remember, and what came out was dark rusty blood and a flood of maggots. Stop thinking about it.  Rusty fucking blood rust rat babies.  Is there any way to make this stop?  All your fault, because of the baby, because you murdered Rona, clawed through her heart with your teeth and fingernails until she dissolved into an aborted bloody hemorrhage.

Why is this place SO FUCKING DARK ? 

<Chapter 13
Chapter 15>

Chapter 13

The guy who answered the door at Indiana Isolated was tall and really skinny, like as skinny as possible. Not just his body, but everything: the bolo tie, the slim green pants that would look obscene on fleshy legs like Gavin’s, the mustache that could have been drawn on his lip with a Sharpie.  Gavin had seen ironic twenty-somethings who dressed this way, especially when he went home to Northern California.  But this was a grown man, in his mid-thirties at least, with a web of tiny wrinkles spreading around his eyes.

“Ah.  Lovely,” he said, holding the door wide open to enjoy the growing storm outside.  He inhaled deeply through his nose and stared over Gavin and Rona’s heads, as the snow piled higher on their coat sleeves and hoods. 

“Can we come in?” Gavin asked.

“Oh, you’re cold,” the man said, like, poor babies, who let this happen to you?  “You should come inside.”  

He opened his arms and pulled them into his enormous wingspan, steering them up the stairs and into a little waiting room with two mismatched couches and murals of frolicking dolphins on the walls.  On one of the couches, a young woman, maybe Rona’s age, sat next to gray-haired guy.  They were sipping tea and sharing a book—filled with colorful illustrations of dolphins—spread open between their two laps. Creepy. I mean, old enough to be her father was such a cliché, and Gavin knew age was an arbitrary construct and everything, but ick, gross.  

“Coats and shoes on the racks there.  Then you can have a seat.”

Rona sat down on the empty couch.  Now that Gavin could actually look at her, the messy bun and gray sweatshirt were kind of cute, albeit in an I-am­-definitely-low-maintenance way, like she was a struggling young artist or something.  He sat next to her, but as far away as he could get, which was not very far, maybe a foot of space between them. He hoped it would be clear that, whatever transgression of cultural mores was happening over there on the army-green couch, here on the tan couch, normal boundaries were still in effect.  Right?  Because okay, sure, Gavin had fantasized about dating his students before, but those were just fantasies.  It’s not like he expected them to actually happen. 

The skinny guy came over, carrying a low stool.

“So you’re Rona and Gavin, three-thirty appointment, right?” He put the stool down and sat across from them, spreading his legs like a giant spindly spider.  “I’m Guy.” He didn’t say it the Canadian way, Ghee, just plain old American Guy.

Gavin felt something wet on his ankle.  A tiny dog, smaller than a cat, was licking an exposed bit of skin above his sock, where he hadn’t bothered to straighten his cuffs after he took his boots off.

“That’s our mascot, Lilly,” Guy said.  “Get it?”

“I don’t think so.” Gavin pulled his pant leg straight and crossed his legs. Then he gave Lilly a cursory pat on the back so it wouldn’t seem like he hated dogs.  Though truthfully he didn’t like them all that much.  Even the dumbest cat had enough sense not to go around licking random strangers.

“She’s named after our progenitor.”  He handed them each a folded brochure, and opened his own copy to reveal a photo.  “Dr. John C. Lilly, inventor of the isolation tank.”  The picture was in black and white and he was sporting one of those kooky triangular chin-beards.

“So it’s your first visit.”  Guy reached out and spread his long, bony fingers over Rona’s knee.  “Have you experienced sensory deprivation before?”

“No, neither of us have,” Rona said.  She didn’t flinch at the hand or anything, but it was creeping Gavin the fuck out. Big spider hand, spread across Rona’s jeans. Didn’t this guy know you weren’t supposed to touch girls you didn’t know? He was worse than the fucking dog.

“Well, you’re in for a treat,” Guy said. “Isolation will facilitate relaxation, enhance your creativity…”

“We know,” Gavin interrupted, holding up the brochure.  Move—your—hand.

 
Guy smiled. “Glad to see you’ve done your homework.  Joanie will show you to your rooms.  Hey Joanie!”

He stood up, which required releasing his grip on Rona’s leg.  Gavin sucked in a gulp of air, like maybe he had been holding his breath for a few minutes without realizing it.

“These the three-thirties?” Joanie came out from behind a bamboo screen with more dolphins printed on it. She was as skinny as Guy, and maybe pretty if you could see her face, but it was mostly hidden under giant green glasses and a thick curtain of bangs. 

She led them behind the screen down a small hallway.  Gavin watched the tail of her shawl swing back and forth over the velour stretch pants covering her meatless behind.

“We don’t have shared rooms, but I made sure you two were next to each other,” she said.

“We’re not…” Gavin said.  Okay, he wasn’t going to finish that sentence.  It wasn’t anyone’s business whether they were or not.  Joanie looked at him, waiting, but he didn’t say anything else. She raised her eyebrows a little.  Actually Gavin couldn’t see her eyebrows, but her giant glasses shifted a half-centimeter upward.  Then she opened one of the doors.

“You’ll be in here, sweetie,” she said to Rona.  “But you can both come in for the orientation talk.”

It looked like a room you would get a massage in, with a little cabinet against one wall (decorated with dolphin stencils) and a basket of robes and towels in the corner. Except instead of a massage table, there was a giant box taking up one half of the room, like a coffin for a linebacker, but white so it didn’t look morbid.

“There’s only one shower,” Joanie said.  “So you’ll have to take turns. Unless you want to share.” 

“I don’t need a shower,” Gavin said. “I showered this morning.”

Joanie’s smile reflected her enhanced levels of tranquility. “We ask all of our guests to shower before entering the tank, to remove oils and dirt from the skin.”

She walked over to the coffin-thing, only a few steps since it took up half the room, and placed her hand on top of it like it was a car she was selling. 

“These are our tanks.  You can see they’re quite spacious, so even a larger person”—she looked at Gavin—“has plenty of room to move around and get comfortable.  You get in here.”

She pulled on a little trap-door on the side. It made a sucking sound as it opened, thwack.  Gavin could see down into the tank, all black inside, filled halfway up with water that looked thicker and juicier than water should look. There was a heavy, swimming-pool smell drifting up from it.

“The water is only about two feet deep, and you’ll be floating at the top, so there’s no danger of drowning. You can open the door any time you want.  A lot of people worry about getting claustrophobic, but…”

Oh shit, yes.  That’s what was happening.  The dark void of the tank seem to be falling upwards towards his face.  He tried to take one of those deep, relaxing breaths that reduced anxiety, but his nostrils filled up with that steam smell and he felt like he was going to suffocate.  What was she saying now?  It sounded important, like make sure you something something and many people prefer to something something.  And what was that about about eight hundred pounds of dissolved magnesium sulfate?  That’s what was in the water, to make you float.  What was magnesium sulfate again?  Bleach?  Chlorine? 

He wanted to reach out and lean on something, but the only things in reach were Rona, Joanie, and the tank.  He took a couple steps backwards and put his hand on the dresser thing with the dolphin stencils.

“Everything okay?” Joanie asked.

Gavin nodded and held his thumb up at her, which should have been a clear sign that everything was not okay, but she seemed to buy it. Actually, he did feel a little better over here, with that tank thing over there.

“Well then,” Joanie said.  “I’m sure you’re anxious for me to stop talking so you can get in and try it out yourself.  Gavin, your room is the next door down, and the shower is the one after that.”

Gavin tried to follow her out the door.  He felt less woozy now.  He had probably just messed himself up squinting at the gray road for an hour; that kind of thing could make you dizzy.  Once he got to his room, he could sit for a minute and pull himself together.

“Wait,” Rona said.  He turned, and she came over to him, arms open.  Before he could figure out how to stop it, she was giving him a hug.

“I really hope this helps,” she said, into his ear.  Actually it did feel kind of okay.

“With what?”

She let go of him, but she squeezed his hand in hers quickly.

“Your talk.  To make you less stressed and more creative.”

Oh, right.  

“I’m sure it will.” He tried to smile in an easy and confident way that said I am super psyched to go lie in that relaxing dark coffin full of slimy water.

He waited in his room for a while, at least ten minutes, to take his shower, so that he wouldn’t run into Rona in a bathrobe.  After the shower, he put on the bathing shorts he’d brought.  Most people choose to go in without clothes, Joanie had said, but Gavin didn’t like the idea of being naked with Rona just on the other side of the wall.  He sat for a few more minutes, staring at the tank, before he finally worked up the nerve to climb in, lower his body to a dead float, and close the trap door above his head. 

<Chapter 12
Chapter 14>

Chapter 12

When Gavin pulled up, Rona Gomez was sitting on the steps of the Alvah Curtis Roebuck Residence Hall.  It was the largest dorm, a no-nonsense industrial tower, gray to match the dirty snow and cold winter sky surrounding it.  Students shuffled in and out like Eskimos, heads lowered against the pelting sleet, hoods raised, hands buried in pockets.  Rona was wearing a giant dark stripy scarf wrapped about fifty times around her neck and face.

Gavin’s stomach lurched when he saw her.   She’s there.  He had half-expected her not to be, like this whole drive-to-Bloomington with Rona thing was actually the bizarre hallucination that it seemed like.

But no, Rona on the steps, reading The Divine Sharpness in fact.  She looked up, shoved the book into her backpack—clumsy with her gloves on—and hopped into the passenger seat of Gavin's Honda Accord.  It was old, but some kind of grandma had owned it before him so it was in good shape.

“Should I just get on 231?” He had already started driving, a slow creep down the icy road. In this state, all highways led to Indianapolis.  If you wanted to go anywhere else, like Bloomington for example, home of Indiana University's main campus and the academic heart of the state, you could take back roads through the countryside and be damn grateful about it.

“Yeah.”  Rona took off her gloves, then unwound her giant scarf, which took about a minute, and put them both into the backpack at her feet.  “I’ll give you directions to the place when we get close.”

Gavin looked over at her, quickly since he didn’t want to crash into the SUV he was tailgating.  She was wearing jeans today, rolled up over her combat boots, a plain gray sweatshirt.  No makeup and her skin was a little spotty.  Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a messy bun kind of thing.  

She was looking straight ahead, patient, like there was no way she was going to start the conversation. Of course that was his job.  She was the deferential student, he the wise sensei.  As such, he should ask her about something about the class, so they could have a meaningful conversation about her studies.

“How are you liking The Divine Sharpness?” 

“It’s interesting.”  She sounded polite, like she was trying to give the right answer.

“What’s interesting about it?”

“The way the characters represent the mind and the body.  And the debate they have.  I haven’t read a lot of plays that are so philosophical.”

They had reached the edge of town—in New Buffalo, that never took long.  Gavin turned onto the state road.  It didn’t seem too bad; not a lot of traffic, and the snow wasn’t sticking to the ground.  Still, the road felt slippery and it was hard to see with so much gray everywhere.

“Cool,” he said.  “So what was that DMT thing all about?”

“What?” 

Jesus, what the fuck is your problem?  Why did he keep blurting out stuff like that?  It had been happening way too much lately, with Sinder, now with Rona.  Probably stress.  That, or he was losing the ability to control his actions.  Either way, he’d better reign it in before Santa Clarita.

“Sinder said you guys did DMT.”  He tried to sound really casual, like, whatever, we all do some DMT now and again, no big deal. 

“He’s your roommate?” She pulled her scarf out of the backpack and wrapped it around her shoulders a few times.

“Yeah,” Gavin said.  “Do you want me to turn the heat up?”

“I’m okay.”  She put her gloves on.  “You know, I really like Bo.”

“From The Divine Sharpness?” 

“I mean, I think I’m probably more like Mi. But I admire Bo.”

“Well, we’re each like both of them,” he said, wise and teacherly.  “Body and mind.”  

Actually, that was bullshit, and he winced just hearing himself say it. Hadn’t he just cast Rona as mind, not body, in class the other day?  And hadn’t he himself, when he was Rona’s age and aspiring to live the life of the mind, always felt such strong identification with, maybe even admiration (though he wouldn’t have used that word) for Mi?

“But yeah, I can relate,” he said.  “Sometimes it’s tiring being in your mind.  I could see how you might want to get more in touch with your body.” 

Fuck.  That was creepy. He glanced over at Rona.  From what he could see in his peripheral vision, she didn’t look upset or anything, just normal, kind of distant and frowny, like she was thinking hard about something you just wouldn't get.

“You know, the thing about Mi is,” she said.  “I don’t get why Stump doesn’t do more with him.  The mind has so many capabilities. It can do almost anything.”

“I think he was trying to represent minds in general,” Gavin said.  “You know, the normal mind.”

“I guess my mind’s not exactly normal.  It’s okay,” she added, as Gavin started to apologize (he didn’t think he had called her abnormal, but just in case).  “Creative people don’t want to have normal minds.  I mean, like, you don’t want your mind to be normal.  Otherwise you wouldn’t be a professor.”

“Graduate student,” he said.  “But yeah.”

They rode in silence for a while, staring at nothing worth mentioning, just the flat, gray Indiana landscape, the sparsely falling snow. 

Ask her something.  But what?  They had already talked about The Divine Sharpness. Maybe something about abjection, but he needed to do it in a way that didn’t sound like a quiz. 

“Sinder told me,” Rona said, “that he was stressed out about his exams.  I thought the DMT might help him take his mind off them.” 

Or we could talk about that. At least she brought it up herself this time.

“He could also take a bath or watch a movie. Of course, those might seem kind of pedestrian to you.”

“No, they’re okay,” she said.  “Actually I bet the sensory deprivation will be better for stress than all of those.”

“Good, I need it.” Gavin said.  “I’m supposed to give a talk on Friday and I haven’t written it yet.”

“Is it about The Divine Sharpness?”

“It could be.”  They were driving through Spenser now, where US Route 231 met Indiana State Road 46.  You couldn’t switch roads without this detour through town, an oasis of fast food and muffler shops amid miles and miles of empty flat fields.  “But I was thinking maybe another play.  Maybe this one called No No Not Now.”

“I didn’t read that one yet.”

“You weren’t supposed to. We’re not reading it until the end of the term.”

They were stuck at a red light, in a town that they weren’t even supposed to be in, except that it happened to lie between the other towns he was traveling to and from. He looked over at Rona.  Her notebook was in her lap, the same one she scribbled in all through class.  She had written the driving directions on an empty page. It was sweet, Gavin thought, so old-fashioned: most of his students would be using the navigation programs on their phones. Actually that’s what he would be doing, if he were directing.

“I’ll probably read it sooner,” she said. “I read Time Slide last weekend.”

Gavin wanted to be annoyed at her reading ahead again, but wow—Time Slide?  How could he fault a student who couldn’t stop herself from reading his favorite play a month early? 

“Did you like it?”

“It was interesting. What’s No No Not Now about?”

“Huh, let’s see.” 

The vicissitudes of the human heart? 

Two people hanging from the ceiling? 

No, this wasn’t a dinner party. Today there was time to kill.  And this was his student, so he didn’t have to worry about boring her with too much Liam Stump talk. “It’s about a husband and wife who don’t get along.  They’re hanging in the air, in the middle of the stage, from ropes tied around their wrists.   Each one keeps trying to get closer to the other—physically, I mean, like they try to swing themselves around, as a representation of trying to get closer emotionally. But every time, say, the wife tries to move towards the husband, he veers off in some random other direction.”

“That sounds hard to stage.” 

“Right,” he said, like he knew what he was talking about.  He’d seen a couple productions of it, and yeah, they had looked pretty complicated.  He had no idea how they did it, but he guessed anyway. “You need a punch of crazy tracks and pulleys and stuff.”

“Why can’t the couple come together?”

“There are a lot of reasons. No overriding, central problem.” 

This conversation was getting a lot better.   He was finally starting to feel comfortable, like this was a normal student-teacher interaction, that this car, hurtling through the sleet at fifty miles an hour, was nothing more than a mobile classroom.

“Just a lot of little things,” he said.  “I guess partly it’s the typical theme of men and women being fundamentally different.  For example, he’s really demanding about the house being perfectly clean.  And the two of them haven’t been able to have children.  And there are some other things that aren’t exactly said outright but are strongly implied, like the man has this flirtation, maybe an affair, with the wife’s sister. And the wife had a baby out of wedlock that she gave up for adoption, because this is mid-century Ireland and there’s no way you can have an abortion.”

“You still can’t in Ireland.”

“Right.”  Did he know that? Probably. “So of course, the man is kind of bitter about the whole adoption thing.”

“Wait.” Rona had been looking out the windshield, as far as he could see, for the entire drive, but now she turned to face him.  Without even turning his head, he could feel her accusing gaze on the side of his face. “Why would he be bitter?”

“Because she had another guy’s baby and not his.”  Wasn’t that obvious?  “And out of wedlock, so I suppose he thinks she’s kind of a slut. That’s not a fair viewpoint, obviously.  Anyway, this is all a minor point in the play.”

“It’s a huge point.  You don’t just have a baby and give it away like it’s no big deal.”

“Fair enough.”  Geez, we don’t need to get in some kind of big feminist debate about it. “Maybe that’s something you can explore in your essay about the play, when we get there.”

“Yeah, maybe.”  She didn’t sound too upset.  She must be one of those people who just likes arguing.  “What are you going to say about it in your talk?”

They passed a road sign: Bloomington 10 miles.  The snow was getting thicker, falling in fluffy white lumps. Gavin hoped there wouldn’t be some kind of unannounced blizzard.  They seemed to have one like every other week. 

“Probably something about abjection.  There’s this really abject thing that happens at the end of the play.  The husband and wife’s wrists are all shredded up and dripping blood everywhere, because they’ve been moving around so much.  Finally the woman’s wrists become so frayed that they snap off, and she falls to the floor.  She crawls around and finds her severed hands, and she’s trying to reattach them.  That’s how the play ends, with her sitting on the ground, one of her hands between her knees, and she’s trying to reconnect it to her wrist.  And her husband is just floating up there above her, watching silently.  I’m not sure exactly what it means yet, but something in there is definitely abject.”

“The baby,” Rona said.  “The baby was abjected.” 

Forget the fucking baby!  

She was really over-reading this baby thing.  It was like, a tiny point in the play.  Basically a single line from the wife: I gave my heart away when I was a girl of seventeen.  Don’t tell me it was my decision. Don’t. I was forced.  And sometime later her husband says: Oh, it was your decision, it was, and a blight brought on your family.

 “Do you mean,” Gavin asked, trying to figure out her reasoning, “because it was ejected from the woman’s life in order to create a societally acceptable narrative?”

“Yeah. Plus isn’t that what the severed hand represents?  Her lost child, out there in the world somewhere, growing up without her?”

“No,” Gavin said.  “Well, maybe.  Normally it’s read as a symbol of her irreparably broken marriage.”

“Oh, normally.” 

Was she making fun of him?  She said it in a neutral way, just repeating, no judgment.  But that had to be sarcastic, right? He wanted to look over and see if she was rolling her eyes or anything, but the snow was pretty thick and he needed to get over.  They were coming into Bloomington.

“It’s the first exit,” she said. 

<Chapter 11
Chapter 13>