Abject

I was seventeen the first time I did it for money. They put me on a podium and mispronounced my name. The judges handed me a check and my name in ink on a certificate. I had become a commodity that they took under their sheets to devour late at night. My English teacher was proud. Augs beamed when I showed her my anthologized self and she ran her index finger down the spine of the book. Open me, buy me, won’t you? I will sell myself to you.

They congratulated me over the morning announcements. I was sitting in biology class on fish dissection day, ambivalent. My creationist biology teacher wanted to know what my short story was about. In fewer words, I told him that I had written about the tragic inevitability of the quotidian and the ravages of routine. The story was about a city overseas that I wouldn’t visit for another year and a half and hapless crowds of people whose comings and goings on the sidewalk marked the hours like clockwork. The protagonist was a lackluster engine salesman; when his artist girlfriend left him, she stole his espresso machine. He drank his coffee with cream and vanilla and didn’t know his girlfriend’s favorite flower. It was painful, predictable, the kind of story where the reader will mope a bit at the conclusion because they feel they’re supposed to, but unsure as to why. I was dissatisfied with the piece. It was shallow and it was cheap, but the judges for the creative writing contest at the local college bought it and bound it all the same.

The anthology was thinner than I had hoped, less regal, less stout. It felt limp and lifeless in my hands. When I tore off its skin, the contents were all where they were supposed to be: the fibrous pulp of memoirs, the fat of fiction, the coiled entrails of poetry winding in switchbacks across the page. It smelled like fresh ink. Words floated in the murky translucence of cheap paper and titles were stuck on like masking tape on preserving jars. I found a misplaced comma as I sorted through the bowels of my short story. I wanted to gouge it out with a scalpel.

When I read my own writing, I am often overcome by a horrifying nausea like at the first whiff of chemicals upon opening a sealed dissection bag. The sight of something so recently alive paralyzed in parallel lines makes me retch. Dry heaves claw up my gullet and threaten to expel themselves in inky splotches all over the page. I am compelled to delete, to shred, to erase the evidence of my insides exposed. Nonfiction is the worst. I lay myself down on the surgical stage, spread-eagle, palms up as I come at myself with forceps. I can see my toes; my feet are splayed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvius. Under the penetrating gaze of my writer-self, I want to find my insides clean. Clean. Clean. So clean that there won’t even be blood when I peel back my plasticized skin and pin it to the table and the page.

Writing is not butchery. It is vivisection.

I can’t stop doing it. I carve up my skin with razor blades. Adorning my past with adjectives feels like giving a name to a dissection animal. Is it sick or is it humanizing? Or perhaps the grotesque is edifying in and of itself. I tear myself to shreds to extract a memory tumor from my brain. I place it on the table, prod it, poke it, peek inside to see what I couldn’t recognize while it was still in my body. I learn about it and then put it in a jar on a shelf with my books and try not to open it again for fear of the smell.

My mind and my body can’t seem to coexist. When I write I often forget to eat, to drink. My mouth turns to cotton as I speak out of my fingertips and not my lips. I huddle inside a moment of suspension, confusing what’s real and what I want to be real. That shadow scurrying through the black hedgerows looks familiar and I fall in love again with characters I’m sure that once I knew. I dig up bygone lovers and try to remember what rain felt like sizzling on our sunburned skin. I revitalize our barren seasons, but it’s Another who relives them. My surrogate self vicariously inhabits my memories so I don’t have to.

I cannot stop writing my own autobiography, but when bits of it scare me, I become she, and an arbitrary third party buckles under my trauma, not me. Once, while blacked out in a bed in France that smelled like lavender, I explained to the paper what had happened to her. In the morning, when I woke devoid of recollection of the night before, the page told me the curious story of a girl thrust against bathroom tiles that smelled of piss and of smoke and stuck to her skin. On her purpling flesh there was bruising in patterns that followed the path of those anonymous hands. They prowled like the conquerors of a strange new land that was never theirs to explore. I slice her story into to a six-stanza poem. Her dismembered body floats in poetry, without a name, without a face. She can’t possibly be me. I have moved on; she dangles in disbelief. But I am she as you are she as you are me and we are all together.

When I write about France and its lavender kisses, I am tempted to only reconstruct the landscape that I love. I muffle the misogynistic mumbles of men and replace them with the whispers of a lesbian lover. I take the snipping sheers of poetic license and excise the poisonous parts of my memory until I barely recognize my voice in the paper-mirror. Although I remove all that makes me wretched and rotten, my body is no cleaner than before. Scalpel cuts still leave chalky scars, mocking my attempt at self-healing. My endeavors to cleanse myself leave me carved up and disfigured. My body becomes a battleground, pitted with deep-dug trenches. I cease to respect it; I objectify it, abjectify it. My body can be sold like my writing. Open me, buy me, won’t you?

I expected the girl who had been violated on bathroom tiles to wither and die on the page where I had left her. I had excised her experience from my memory and those pathetic six stanzas shouldn’t have been able to survive once severed from myself. I hated her. In the poem, she is reduced to a number. She becomes the unfortunate numerator of a fraction of the population, the dirty minority placed on a pedestal above the innocent denominator. The Assaulted. The Abused. The Victim. I make her as much of a stranger to myself as she was to him—that anonymous Moroccan man who followed her to the bathroom of the bar and barricaded her exit with his big hands that smelled of turmeric and shisha tobacco. She hadn’t consented to this.

***

Upon my return from France, my own country and my own body felt foreign to me. The English tongue gagged me. I stopped eating. I stopped speaking. It was me that was shriveling up, not her. Upon finding me huddled like a fetus on our bathroom’s tiles, my parents decided to take me to Canada. Any international border would do.

About halfway through Pennsylvania in the backseat of my family’s van, I started writing. I didn’t stop until Montréal. I could hardly write coherent sentences. I was reading Kerouac at the time and my desperate lines roamed like Sal Paradise, trying to find some concrete destination or someplace to call home. But that filthy girl kept creeping up on me, no matter where I wandered. She limped across my lines. She didn’t wither and die like I had expected her to. The words remained as bloody and bold on the page as they were when I first wrote them, blacked out in my bed in France. And much to by petrified surprise, they began to have a heartbeat of their own.

In the feverish writing that I expelled during my expatriate escape to Canada, that girl with the purpling flesh was depicted over and over again. She appeared in one story as a whore, in another as a lesbian, and in another as a victim of sexual assault. I couldn’t create enough fictionalized surrogates to keep up with my successive repulsions and repressions of that memory. My mother suggested therapy. My therapist called it post-traumatic stress disorder, which I vehemently denied despite my blackouts and nightmares and displacement and guilt. I avoided public bathrooms for months, but I still crawled back to France a year later, to that city that loves me yet damns me.

***

A summer evening the next July—the twenty-first, to be exact—I was sitting on the banks of the Rhône in Avignon, writing a short story about an encounter I once had with a prostitute in a bus stop. Each evening around ten, a camp of white vans sets up in the parking lots outside of Avignon’s ramparts. Prostitutes sit in the driver’s seat with their legs splayed on the dashboard, a red light dangling from the mirror to illuminate their cleavage and inner thighs. By midnight they drift into the bus stops and stand with their hands on their hips, their broken bodies angled in fluorescence. I used to trek through their territory on my walk home from the bars. Eventually, I grew used to the heckling, to the violating stares and gawking from café terraces, to the beer bottles hurled by boozy boys perched like vultures on the rampart walls. But I was alone once—a mistake. A prostitute wearing leather and bangles like chains howled at me in French and in gibberish. I gagged at the thought of the toils and snares that had made a wretch like her. I left her to her nightly predators.

I wanted to redeem her and to respect her body in a way that she had forgotten how to do, so I tried to write about her months after the incident. But the story was rudely hacked off in the middle of a word. As I was writing, a stranger sat down next to me on the banks of that river and told me that my eyes looked magnificent in the evening light. The tired refrain of hollow lust commanded me to gather my things and leave, but my Jeep was parked a fifteen minute walk away, and I was yet again, mistakenly, alone. There is a picture of me on his digital camera. He captured my profile without my consent as I looked away to the horizon, trying to ignore him, trying to remain calm despite his hungry eyes. When his searching fingers seized my neck I screamed at him in French and in gibberish and ran.

The story I had been writing remains unfinished. I was writing myself in circles, objectifying her every much as the men had, deconstructing her body in details, eroticizing her fingernails, her ankles, the zipper on her bodice. The last full sentence reads: “It was an outfit for fumbling fingers to remove in the dark.” The prostitute’s story is my story is ours. I hope I never finish it. It’s a case still left open for consideration. I have not yet buried that woman in her stereotyped paper grave. A sentence without a period still holds hope for redemption.

***

When I left France for the second time, I wept on the train that hurtled me north away from Avignon. I had fallen in love with a country that left purpling bruises on my skin. Upon my return to the United States, it was cloudy in Ohio and uncharacteristically chilly. My parents did their best to make me feel comfortable. They let me talk when I needed to and more often left me to my silence. I unburied my journal from the year before from where I had shelved it among a cemetery of dead authors. With the morbid fascination of a mourner at a wake, I peeked inside. That girl was still there, a forgotten orphan in her spiral-bound cradle, abandoned but still alive.

Sometimes when I sit at my keyboard she inhabits my fingers, begging to be remembered for what she is—an ostracized organ no less vital than the spleen. I can’t heal without her; I bleed without clotting, I harbor bacteria in my blood without being able to filter it. I lay myself back down on the surgeon’s stainless steel, open up my chest cavity, and put her back inside where she belongs.