Boink, page 13
My muscles tense, fingers squeeze into fists, eyes clamp shut. Blood runs down my arm, cools and congeals onto my skin, pillow, and sheets. My mouth screams, my body screams. Brittney holds me by the shoulders, fingernails digging into my skin, holding me down while my fingers stretch, reaching toward the scissors, toward nothing. Jen slams open the door, Meredith trailing behind her. They both are yelling.
Meredith: “Jen, leave her alone. Leave her alone. Don’t go near her!”
Jen reaches for me, pleading, sobbing. My legs flail towards her.
“Get away from me! Don’t touch me!” I can’t have her near me, trying to hold me. She flies into the unstable coffee table, scattering papers, spilling water, snapping it off its legs. Meredith pulls her up and out of the bedroom door. There are shouts and banging doors and sobs.
I am a ball. Feet tangle in the sheets, knees are tucked under my breasts, blanket over my head. I feel Brittney sitting next to me as I wail.
I press my foot rhythmically against the wall, rocking back and forth. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this.”
My friends didn’t tell my parents anything and we all woke up the next morning with the great hope that this would all end when Jen went home the next quarter. We had a week left until spring break and the pressure was coming from all sides. When I, supposedly the strong one, finally broke down, our friends didn’t know how to handle it anymore. We needed escape, release. The week between quarters was that escape for most of us. But I was just starting to face reality.
I’m at home in Indianapolis over spring break. At a neighbor’s party I down five, six cosmopolitans. Beer after beer after beer. I black out, then eventually make it home and supposedly call Jen on my cell phone. “Fuck my life. I’m going to lie here forever. Forever. Alone.” Jen is helpless, four hours away. She calls my house. My parents run upstairs. I’m on my bed, blood smeared everywhere: on the carpet, on the tile, on my sink, on my clothes, and on the sheets. Fuck you Mom! Fuck you Dad! Fuck Jen fuck Jen fuck Jen! Mom leaves my room, Dad takes out his hearing aid so he can’t hear me screaming, swearing at him. He watches me in horror, waits for my head to spin and green slime to spew from my mouth.
I awake the next morning, still drunk. My arms tucked under my body, blood smeared and dried. My eyes puffy. Face swollen. Mom asleep on the floor.
I really never wanted to kill myself, no matter who tries to convince me otherwise. I never slit my wrists with the intention of bleeding to death; I took a blade to the side of my forearm simply because I needed to feel pain. I felt so many conflicting emotions—I still do, but I guess now I can deal with it day to day instead of suppressing it and letting it emerge all at once in a drunken craze—and I wasn’t used to feeling such deep hurt, anger, rage. I just wanted to bring that pain to the surface and I didn’t know how.
My parents made me see a therapist, but it took me a long time to stop spouting what I thought she wanted to hear and actually open up. I started talking not only to my therapist, but also to my friends and family, about how trapped I had felt in my relationship with Jen and how helpless I felt. I had always tried to keep up happy appearances while I dealt with Jen and our desperate situation on my own. My catharsis came when I realized that I was allowed to show sadness and anger and pain on the surface. And that I was allowed to ask for help, or even demand it.
* * *
“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.”
* * *
Jen visited me a few weeks ago and it seemed that the impossible had happened: we were able to just be friends. After a year during which I couldn’t talk to her without having a panic attack and another during which we tried to rebuild our friendship over the phone, we finally were able go out drinking without screaming at each other or fucking each other. The first quarter after she left school, I remember sitting in the room that was now my own with my body tense and expectant. I realized that I had been in a constant, tangible state of fear and anxiety when we had lived together because I never knew what kind of mood she would be in. We would have good days, but most of the time she would get angry about something and the fighting would be intense. I had to learn to relax again and let go of the fear. As Mark Twain said, “When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.” I have experienced madness, the type of insanity that takes hold of your very core. But doesn’t the act of falling in love embrace madness? Giving yourself over to someone else, body and soul and mind. Isn’t there a touch of insanity in that?
Digging for Ithaca
by Rob
State College
VICTORIA’S LIPS TASTED OF ash and stout: strategic, wise, and drunk as they glided against mine. The pale skin on her neck was smooth but pliable, dignifiedly weighted by its thirty-five years. The dense air of a Dublin summer night curled through the front door and into the hotel lobby. I felt it lick the back of my neck as I turned into the kiss. I was engulfed in a pulsing, warm haze of raised neck hairs, tobacco, and perfume. Lilac. It reminded me of the large, purple flowers that clustered in a corner of my yard, looming high and fragrant in my childhood.
I was twenty, newly single, and in Ireland to study James Joyce during Bloomsday, a national literary holiday held in his honor. At 8:00 a.m. on June 16, 1904, the original Bloomsday, the fictional Leopold Bloom of Joyce’s Ulysses took his first steps from his front door—his Odyssean Ithaca—and into the Dublin streets. A century later, I was sitting in an academic symposium session, a comfortable, familiar place for my egghead sensibilities. Twelve hours after that, I was contemplating my first steps away from my better senses and towards a woman who, despite the fifteen years between us, compelled me forward with her ironic humor and her cavalier posture—wrapped in a sleek beige skirt, her legs crossed at the knee, her elbow propped on the table, chin in her palm, and playful, alert eyes. She was kinetic, bold, and assertive. Her laughter was unchained but never too much. Most importantly, she wasn’t afraid to let our eye contact linger to excitingly uncomfortable lengths.
* * *
Most importantly, she wasn’t afraid to let our eye contact linger to excitingly uncomfortable lengths.
* * *
We met just after the exceedingly bizarre Bloomsday street parade. Imagine shutting down the stocky, antiquated streets of dirty Dublin and filling them with puppeteers on hallucinogens. After the avant-garde stilt show, out-of-place African drum ensemble, and drunken street performers, came the finale. To the strains of a symphony, a Joyce impersonator, complete with eye patch and fabric wings, was hefted on a crane, assaulted with ten-foot industrial fans and confetti, and swung recklessly above the cheering crowd. Let’s just say I’ve never been able to view my heritage quite the same way ever since.
I retreated with friends-of-the-moment to a pub half a block from Joyce’s statue on O’Connell Street. Victoria was sitting at the far end of our massive table with an older crowd, and our groups slowly mixed. While my young Irish friends played up their accents to the wallets of American forty-year-olds, I wrestled my way through a handful of thirty-something competitors and planted myself next to Victoria. I choked back my apprehension, gathered my wits, and committed. We talked emptily about Bloomsday, Joyce, her photography, my writing, our accents, the shithole politics of my native Boston and her native London—the nonsense conversations you have with anyone you meet abroad until someone gathers the daring to expose a genuine part of his or her personality. Thankfully alcohol was created for that very purpose. Once that hurdle was cleared, we fell into the frighteningly earnest confidence that can only happen among strangers who will never see each other again.
She was returning to school for painting, had a strong literature habit, and was just out of a relationship with a rock-star wannabe who couldn’t keep his pants on around his groupies. I was here on academic business, actively seeking misfortune, and two weeks free from a girl I might have married had she not moved a continent away. Victoria drank stout, walked like a lady, and wasn’t above popping a squat in an alleyway when nature called. I drank whiskey, spouted high rhetoric, and had been electrified with cocky ecstasy by escaping a near mugging the night before. She continually fiddled with and admired my chaotic, dirty-blond hair, which bent against her touch, only to spring back like bamboo seedlings. My fingers traced the developing lines on the back of her hand.
We made an unspoken agreement not to ask about our ages at first. By the time we got around to disclosing, it was four hours into the night and too late to back out. We were already hand-in-hand, manacled to our choice with acceptance and laughter.
It was 3:00 a.m., June 17, 2004. A century before, Leopold Bloom chased the young Stephen Dedalus through the Dublin slums. In this episode of Ulysses, the narration slips into a hazy absinthe dream in which Bloom’s identity is shattered into the multiplicity of thoughts, expectations, and desires that compose him. Fed by the kerosene of a brothel’s red lamp, Bloom’s burning mind unfurls itself, fancying him a pathetic victim, a benevolent dictator, a cross-dressing submissive, and all the other manifestations of his id and superego. Bloom eventually escapes the breakdown unscathed. The readers don’t get the same luxury, having had to come to grips with their own fragments being laid before them by Joyce’s dissecting pen.
It was another bar, two hours after the hotel. After we’d split from the rest of the group and found a dark corner booth and two more rounds. It was a trashy tourist bar, painted in a dirty, garish yellow that got more offensive with every drink. Germans, Swedes, Japanese, and the ubiquitous Irish-Americans gave us dirty, intrigued looks when they glanced away from the blaring televisions. We didn’t care: we entwined and devoured each other as if digging for some hidden treasure without a map.
“You’re a gorgeous, lovely woman.” I really should have been slurring my words at that point, but I wasn’t, “Truly lovely.”
She blushed and nuzzled her hairspray-laden brunette curls into my hand. “Stop it,” she said. She shook her head at me and I caught a hint of the embarrassed disbelief that a fourteen-year-old girl must feel when she’s unable to handle her first compliment from a boy. She ran her hand along my chin, up my cheek, and wrapped her fingers in my hair. She gave it a tug, she dug herself into the crook of my arm and spoke, her breath burrowing my neck like entrenched wisteria, “I like you. A lot.”
* * *
Victoria drank stout, walked like a lady, and wasn’t above popping a squat in an alleyway when nature called.
* * *
Her response shocked me in its youth and simplicity. For all her experience, stories, and years of dating, she treated me with the kind, open affection that usually precedes having one’s heart truly broken for the first time. I laughed and tried to say something witty.
She was traveling with a man—a roommate. I didn’t ask, she didn’t tell, but the bed was obviously not an option. But in the pitch black of her hotel bathroom every touch and sound was amplified. He snored on, clueless of the warm bodies on the cold tiles ten feet away. Even though it was only kissing, his presence made it exciting, like the first time you have sex in a car: a dirty, open secret. But we had to stall. Neither of us had condoms. This set us alight with frustration and we dashed to the drugstore. At the hotel door I laughed: she’d forgotten her shoes. I, the responsible one, offered to go back and get them for her, but she grabbed me by the hand and took off, almost skipping as she bounced barefoot through the alleys.
The nosy night porter, who thought we were laughing just a little too much, threw off our plan. His dirty looks drove us into the basement lobby, and—somewhat in spite—to the ladies’ room. There, against the stark canvas of white tile and antiseptic lighting, our inner multiplicities cohered, divided, reconfigured, and exploded outward like paint on a Pollock. The foreplay was an arm wrestle, except that half the time you were playing to lose. The scratching nails and gasping breath barely registered, dwarfed by the head games. Social roles and power dynamics twirled like a kaleidoscope: pliant, firm, bitch, butch, sub, dom, cock, cunt, lord, slave. As the elder, she was given authority. As the man, I was given dominance. We shredded these social expectations to tatters, struggling for power and giving it freely as the mood struck.
* * *
The foreplay was an arm wrestle, except that half the time you were playing to lose.
* * *
We indulged in our selves and our anti-selves. It was an accomplishment, fancying myself a man who could convince an older, intelligent, more demanding woman to bed him. It validated a young, insecure manhood: I wasn’t a boy being preyed upon—I had initiated contact, out-charmed competitors twice my age, and followed through in a way that the awkward, un-dateable seventeen-year-old I once was could never have imagined possible. Her girlish antics, her blushing, and her young openness contrasted with the bold, travel-wizened, cosmopolitan front she’d put up hours earlier. Just as I was seeking sophistication, I suspect she wanted to temporarily lose the responsibility and good sense that comes with each decade of life. At nineteen you can let yourself fall to pieces when your musician boyfriend fucks a groupie. At thirty-five you don’t have that luxury anymore. I gave her an opportunity to feel guileless one more time.
Her hotel window faced west towards Heuston Station, where my Galway train would depart in eight short hours. We returned to her room and watched the sky turn from velvet purple to the otherworldly blue of pre-dawn, wrapped up in each other as the man in the other bed slept. We never ended up consummating. At, literally, the brink of coition, we hesitated. I felt a sobriety of self—play is play, acting is acting, but the reality of having sex in our disguises made us pause. The spell was broken and there was no point in having sex anymore. It would have felt forced and artificial.
* * *
For all her experience, stories, and years of dating, she treated me with the kind, open affection that usually precedes having one’s heart truly broken for the first time.
* * *
Even so, we melted into the experience of each other. A line had been drawn, but within that line we were free to do as we pleased. We continued to admire our respective entropy and evolution, our growth and decay. We whispered intimate details about our thoughts and pasts. Like Leopold Bloom, the fragments of our cohesive selves were laid out before us. We became free to explore the elusive facets of ourselves that we seemed to find in each other: her lost innocence, my unbuilt confidence.
It was 8:00 a.m. on June 17, 2004. A century before, Leopold Bloom returned from his all-night odyssey in the slums to his wife Molly. Their marriage was fraught with difficulties, but Molly was still his beloved port of origin. He reclaimed his fractured self at her side. In the tradition of Homer’s Odyssey, Leopold’s epic journeys cease when he has at last made his epic return to himself, his wife, and his home soil.
The sun painted the squat, gray buildings of Dublin with an orange tint. Victoria looked tired and travel-weary. She wanted to come to Galway with me, but the pieces of her she’d left in London couldn’t be abandoned any longer. We lingered in a kiss at the front door of her hotel room, and I caught a flare of whimsy in her eyes. We shared an intimate smile and I sent her off to her native harbor.
I launched into the streets, heading for my hostel and my westbound train. I headed for my bags, my books, my clothes, my phone cards, my train tickets. I headed west until I hit Galway Bay. It was lush, beautiful, magical, and humming with life. A city made of legends. But I sat on the rocks by my choppy Mother Atlantic, looking towards home. The waves crashed—intermittent, chaotic—the same as they did in Boston Harbor. Like Odysseus on the shores of Circe’s island, I sat in the midst of endless splendor, plenty, and novelty. Like Leopold in the brothel’s haze, I sat in a pile of my own fragments that, if explored, could offer me nuanced knowledge like I’d never known. Yet I only sat, staring and shaken, yearning for my Ithaca, my Molly, myself.
The Quiet Ones
by KRISTEN
PRIVATE COLLEGE
I ACCIDENTALLY DROVE WITH my headlights off. Thank God for that nice driver who flashed his brights in my face, helping to prevent a possible collision. About a half hour earlier, one of the Sigma Nu brothers had handed me a bottle. I squeezed my nose and, without even eyeing the label, took a gulp straight from the wet rim. Bacardi 151—the stinging sensation trailed down my esophagus and ran into my stomach like the fuse on a firecracker. Now, after a series of raunchy text messages, I’m sitting here at the wheel of my old Mercury Cougar, tongue still tingling from the taste of rum.
It’s a chilly Friday night. Red cups litter the sidewalk, and hungry drunken students have begun filling Gino’s pizzeria. The campus police just raided a party on Counter Street, so I’m avoiding a crowd of disappointed party-goers as they stumble toward the bars.
When I swing left onto Walnut Street everything is quiet and dark blue. There’s just one light that illuminates the blacktop with a cone-shaped glow. I park on the opposite side of the street, a few houses down from number 17, and punch the words “I’m outside” into my cell phone. I unwrap a piece of peppermint Orbit and begin chewing frenziedly. I flip down the visor and examine my face in the mirror. The reflection pleases me; my eyes look sultry and dark, I think, not too smudged up from the long night.
By the time I’m ready to step out of my Cougar, there’s a dark figure creeping slowly along the perimeter of the yard, dodging shrubs and heading towards the road. This after-hours meeting relies on me being as stealthy and as quiet as possible, but I can’t help the loud giggle from escaping my mouth. This is exciting.
