Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

I did, though, more and more. As she followed her elegant machines, I unearthed my body in the darkness of the bathroom, the only place in our apartment where I could be alone. In the shower, under the rosy sting of water, I fingered and excavated, discovered springs of fluid, smells salty and sweet, expanses. Sure, I sent myself off with the joyous discovering enthusiasm of adolescence, I masturbated under the faucet, on the floor, bent over the sink, but it was more than that, the thing was that as I pressed against the wall, lips on the cool tile, or as I bounced around on the floor or stretched against the roughness of the towel, I knew it was there, I mean the world, its roughness, power, itself, I could feel it. What, you say, what the hell are you talking about? but you have to understand that outside, with Mother, I sometimes felt like everything was papery, flat, like light through stained glass, I felt myself floating sometimes, far away inside myself, and far away, everything, the exhalations of a ghost. When I felt like that I got breathless, but cool, like a stony calm chick, you know, a killer, or maybe a catatonic in a white hospital ward, so I’d lock myself away in the john and tear off my skirt, and mouth my forefinger, middle finger, thumb, then into myself, my radiant labia, my cunny (yes I’d started reading too, what did you think?), ringed pucker, silky curve of belly, tongue and teeth on shoulder, and I planted myself firmly again.

So it went on. Me in the bathroom, Mother outside, me humping and hunching across the cold tiled floor, me at school, serious and nervous. The boys chased me for a bit and then told ugly stories about me. I think I was pretty, but I hesitated, because in spite of everything I wanted to be right for Mother, I tried, I bore the pulping weight of her expectations and tried to become the thing she dreamed for me. All those years we lived together, not saying much to each other, I knew her pride in me, and I felt something else grow like a thorn in my chest, a tight place of resentment that I was ashamed of during the day. But I think I would have done it, I would have let her make me what she wanted to, if she hadn’t cut me.

She cut me, I mean literally. She scalpeled into my flesh, chiseled away at my bone, and so then I hated her. But before I hated her I had wanted to fly for her, I had thought about it and thought and finally I decided that I would become an astronaut for her. The decade had passed me with all its anger and its distant jungle war, and I still knew I had to repay her. I knew she expected something from me, something that was a lot, but she never said anything and so I never knew. In my senior year I saw a movie at school, for a science class, ships silently curving toward each other against a deep black, people turning slowly, connected by silvery umbilical cords, and I thought, that’s what she wants. She wants me to do this, and so I said, quite suddenly, out very loudly, “I want to be an astronaut.” The kids laughed at me, but the teacher, a spiky old Irishwoman, smiled, and I smiled on the bus home, but on the kitchen table Mother had a brown manila folder open, full of glossy brochures and copied pages from medical journals. I could see cross section drawings in black and white, bone and cartilage neatly laid out and explained.

“What’s all this?” I said.

“For you,” she said. “This is the one we’ll go with.”

“For me? For me, a nose job?”

Well, it seemed she had watched it for years, my nose. I looked at it now in a mirror, and it seemed to me all right, but she said it was too broad and flat.

“Too broad and flat for what?” I said, my voice rising. “I like it just fine.”

“Not for anything,” she said. “It just is.”

In the mirror it was a good nose, straightforward and blunt, not disfigured or ugly in any manner that I knew, but she had this thing in mind, she drew it for me on a yellow pad: it was supposed to start from the brow cleanly and well defined, on the thin side but not too thin, then proceed like a blade to the tilted and diamondlike tip, over nostrils sharp and hidden. She had worked on this concept for years, it was the distillation of years of research, and this is what she wanted from me and for me, and again I wailed: “For what? I don’t need a new fucking nose.”

“Don’t curse,” she said, not even angry. She had been putting money together for years, and I was now old enough, so the question of not doing it was not even real.

“Next Thursday,” she said, straightening away her folders. “You’ll have Thanksgiving break to recover.”

She was smiling a little and I understood now that I was supposed to be grateful, this was a gift to me.

“Mother,” I said. “Let me ask you. What do you think I should be?”

“Anything, dear,” she said. “You can be anything.”

I guess it was that stupid damn tale of hope she was trying to feed me, but then it also occurred to me that she didn’t really care what I became, as long as I rose, escaped from her grimy prison of separateness and fit in, got the goddamned nose of belonging. So she cut me. Sure, it was a guy called Schwartz who held a cold chisel to it and in a single tap cracked away the cartilage from the bone, sure, but it was her hands I felt on me. Me, I sat there shuddering at the sound of it, feeling nothing, numb at least locally, I shut my eyes and felt the front of my face freeze. He talked to me, okay, honey, you might feel something now, nothing to worry about, all right, here it comes, and then far away, like an earthquake on the other side of the earth, crack, he broke it. I thought, bitch.

So I lay in my bed, my eyes black-ringed, a white bandage taped across my face. I guess I could say that of the Thanksgiving turkey I casted only bitterness: the capsules Schwartz gave me filled my mouth with a sour taste that stayed for days. I went to school with the swelling nearly gone, but with a big white strip still across my face, and I found that I was already a heroine. They liked me even before they saw the new nose — I guess it was the effort they appreciated. The nose, after Schwartz had removed the stitches, settled slowly into its new shape. Every morning I got up and found a new configuration, and Mother said, it takes a while to get into its normal shape. Truth was that I didn’t really care what it finally looked like, I couldn’t care, it was raw enough just to watch it move, just to see this new thing on me. I mean, this is obvious but it looked the hell like somebody else, now and then I touched it tenderly and my fingers felt for the old, now-invisible contours. I felt done, I felt like I had been fitted.

What about Mother, you say, but I kept quiet and was carefully thankful, biding my time for I don’t know what. I was waiting. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I knew my reply would have to be momentous. Anyway, I knew my NASA plans were off, because even the thought of getting on a plane to go to Texas or someplace like that made me pukey. On the weekends I got up early to go to the park, where I watched the morning workers sweep up the leaves and work with the water and manure. Also I read a lot, mostly, why I don’t know, but mostly folktales, German and Indian, Icelandic sagas, stuff like that. I guess it made me feel better. I talked to no one.

After a while I started to go to the park in the evenings too. I told Mother it was boys, dates, parties, and eagerly she believed me. I sat on the grass and waited as darkness came in, then I got on the last bus and went home. I should have been scared but I wasn’t. One day, I fell asleep and woke up to the sound of sprinklers, a soft shushing sound repeating itself, I felt the water float onto my skin and bead and make it cool, and as I tried to raise my head I couldn’t, it was as if my muscles had given way. I thought then that if I let myself go I would disappear into the earth, become mud and soil, and I sat up and came to myself with my heart pounding. Holding my chest, I scrambled up and started to walk. I went outside the park and walked on, and I walked past many things. First, near the park, were the houses of the rich, big and glowing, the windows like precious soft bits of hot metal, like barriers which hid a whole world. Then I walked past the houses of the ordinary people, past the orderly rows of boxlike, dark bulks. Then came a festive, noisy mall, the lots filled with cars. Then I saw scrubby grass lots, factory buildings, tin sheds. Then I walked past the homes of the poor, rows and rows of apartment houses, stoops, rotting vehicles. Then there was a huge empty place, gray and abandoned, strands of wire here and there, a white animal skull and barking in the darkness, here and there the scattered fragments of a building. Then a long moment of nothing, complete darkness, not even a road. Then, finally, a red glow in the darkness, a circle of neon, a jagged script with lost letters in it, spelling “Joyland.”