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>
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>
No comments:
Post a Comment