Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

I retrieve my Zoom H4n from my Dora purse. I put it near the door and turn it on. It’s definitely sound I want. Their idiotic door poundings. After tonight I’m never going to have to listen to them again.

I rummage around in my Dora purse for my Swiss Army Knife Elite. There’s some crumpled up paper in there. I uncrumple it. Ah. Failed test from school. At school they make us memorize the capitals and main domestic products and political systems of Iceland, of Yugoslavia, of Rwanda. They give us tests with maps that are only the black and white outlines and borders of so-called countries. We’re supposed to fill in the names. Write down the data. In the place where Rwanda is I wrote “Marlene” in red. That’s the only word I wrote. I failed most of my tests. Tests are for pussies.

I lean on the wall I’m writing on. I think about Obsidian incarcerated in some retarded lock-down halfway house for teen fuck-ups. I think about me barricaded in my room. What we need, is a break out. Out of our lives, out of Seattle, out of the dumb script of girl. I draw an outline of a girl on my wall. I give her straight swaths of deep purple hair. And a little necklace with a sharp shard dangling from it. I write “Cuntry.”

Ass buzz. Fuck off.

Boom boom boom and Ida Ida Ida at the door. Ida this and Ida that. I grab my Mac mouse and hurl it as hard as I can at the door. For a second I feel bad for it and think I hear a little yelp. But no, it’s just Peppeleptic making woman noises.

I wonder where voice lives in a body. Is it in the throat, where the flaps pound each other to death, making us think we’ve got important fucking things to say? Or is it in the mind, where thoughts crash crazily into each other pinball-y and dinging, until they slide down the chute and out the hole and into the world? Couldn’t voice come from anywhere?

For a bit there is silence at my door. They must be going for help or some kind of … sledgehammer.

I lay down on my bed to rest from the writing. I finger my Swiss Army Knife Elite. I choose one of those littler blades. Without needing to look, I point it straight at my face. With one hand over my Aphonia mouth I carve a tiny smile on my chin. I smile a wide chimp smile. The little carved chin cut stretches and oozes. My soundless mouth above my tiny bleeding mouth. I touch the tiny carved smile with my thumb and smear the warm wet there and put a bloodprint on my wall. I, was here. Then I suck my thumb.

I roll over and off of my bed and down to one of the last corners of my wall without my life story on it. I write, “Dear Francis Bacon: the best canvas is the body.” I mean, I’m not Francis Bacon. I’m a girl. For sure I can’t paint, so I’ve had to use my body for most everything.

I stare at my girlwalls.

It’s taken exactly seventeen purple Sharpies to write my girlstory on these bedroom walls. In the dim light of my orange and purple lava lamp the words make the walls seem to pulse. All those words. I can almost hear them. Nearly no blank wall space left.

I’ve got until ten p.m. to finish writing and filming this. That’s when my ride arrives.

Ass buzz.

I drop to my knees. I smell my sharpie. I close my eyes. I remember when I was five my mother sat me on her lap while she played fronz shoe burt. I know because she said this is fronz shoe burt. In my head I repeated the words fronz shoe burt. I pictured a guy named burt with beautiful hair and shoes. Long fingers. Even at five I wanted to die sitting in her lap, inside music and the smell of her motherskin and her breasts against my back.

Sitting here huffing my Sharpie on my knees I don’t want to open my eyes. Yeah, I know.

It’s Schubert .

Badaboom. A more potent round of parental authority pounding at the door. Jeez, is that a baseball bat?

Failing.

To.

Penetrate.

I have this weird urge to write Siggy a special note on the wall. Who the hell knows why. It makes my skin itch. Like I owe him a solid one or something. Something like “Don’t shit yourself Sig, no way am I giving your wang movie to the slickters.” Or “Sig, dude, do not surrender to the Vipermedia Asshats! Resist!” Or maybe what I really want to tell him is “Um, brainbuster? Next time you work with a female? Ask her which city her body is. Or ocean. Give her poetry books written by women. Like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and H.D. and Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver and Emily Dickinson. Let her draw or paint or sing a self before. You. Say. A. Word.

But I don’t write any of those things.

I don’t have to. My window is talking. On the other side of my room, tapping on the window that leads to the fire escape, hunched over like a little gargoyle?

Is the Sig.

WITH THE MEMBRANE OF THE WINDOW BETWEEN US, I put my hand on the glass and look down at him. His breath is fogging up his side of the window. “Can you hear me?” he shouts.

I nod.

“I’ve been trying to reach you!” he yells.

I don’t move a muscle. I stare at him.

“Can you please open the window?”

I am a girl statue.

“Ida, for god’s sake, can you let me in?” he yells at the glass.

I fog my side of the window with a few big breaths. With my finger I write backwards: tell me your dreams.

I watch him read it and then begin to curse. The guy truly has a case of Tourette’s. How does he get on in regular life? Talk about borderline whack job. I erase my question with my elbow and refog a space. With my finger I write: your desire is for your mother.

He pounds his hand against the glass pretty hard and hurls some obscenities, but really, he’s just an old guy hunched on a fire escape talking to a minor’s window. If a cop drove by? He’d be so busted. I’m no psychologist, but I know crazy when I see it. It almost makes me like him.

Behind me there’s more commotion. It’s possible they will find a way to break in. I cross my arms over my tits. I take a huge breath. I let him in.

At first he’s all flustered from trying to cram his old man balls body in through the fire escape window. But then I get a good look at his face and he looks like utter shit. His eyes are outlined in red and he clearly hasn’t slept in a good bit of time. And he’s a map of facial tics. He’s … well, my diagnosis? He’s coked up to the nines.

“Thank god I found you at home,” he sputters all out of breath, his hair even more cuckoo’s nest than I’m used to. “I know. I know,” he continues, “this is highly unusual, but…”

Um, unusual? Fuck yeah times ten. Once he’s in, he shuts the hell up and stares at my walls.

I stare at him staring at my walls. I follow his head as he moves close to one wall, tilts his noggin to the side, stretches out his hand, touches some words. “My god,” he whispers.

But then his shoulders jump and he sucks in a wad of old man air — it’s the bedroom door banging again.

“What on earth is that?” he squawks.

My choices for communication at this point are rather endless. I’ve got enough technology in this room to run a space station. In the end? I decide on the simplest thing of all. “DAD” I write on the palm of my hand, and point it at him. Then I walk over to my desk and grab my laptop. Something tells me this is a sit down. I sit down on my bed. I put the laptop on the bed. I pat the bed on the other side of the laptop and smile.

Sig coughs.

The door pounds.

I open a Word doc. I type, “S’up, doc?”

“Shall I speak?” He asks. His hands are shaking like vibrators.

I shrug. To me, it no longer matters where the voices are coming from. But I do think it’s interesting he decides to enter the word.doc.

“Ida,” he types.

I immediately snag the laptop back and tap out “I prefer ‘Dora.’”