Richard Brautigan - The Abortion - An Historical Romance 1966

When I first met Vida she had been born inside the wrong body and was barely able to look at people, wanting to crawl off and hide from the thing that she was contained within.

This was late last year in San Francisco.

She came to the library one evening after she got off work. The library was ‘closed’ and I was in my room making some coffee and thinking about the books that had come into the library that day. One of the books was about a great octopus that had leather wings and flew through abandoned school yards at night, demanding entrance into the classrooms.

I was putting some sugar into my coffee when I heard the bell ring ever so slightly, but always just enough to alert me and to summon me.

I went out and turned on the light in the library and there was a young girl at the door, waiting behind the heavy religious glass.

She startled me.

Besides having an incredibly delicate face, beautiful, with long black hair that hung about her shoulders like bat lightning, there was something very unusual about her, but I could not quite tell what that thing was because her face was like a perfect labyrinth that led me momentarily away from a very disturbing thing.

She did not look directly at me as she waited for me to unlock the door and let her in. She was holding something under her arm. It was in a brown paper bag and looked like a book.

Another one for the caves.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Please come in.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, coming very awkwardly into the library. I was surprised that she was so awkward. She did not look directly at me and she did not look at the library either. She seemed to be looking at something else. The thing that she was looking at was not in front of me nor behind me nor at the side of me.

‘What do you have there? A book?’ I said, wanting to sound like a pleasant librarian and make her feel at ease.

Her face was so delicate: the mouth, the eyes, the nose, the chin, the curve of her cheeks all beautiful. She was almost painful to gaze upon.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you. It’s late.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not at all. No. Please come over here to the desk and we’ll register your book in the Library Contents Ledger. That’s how we do it here.’

‘I was wondering how you were going to do it,’ she said.

‘Did you come far?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I just got off work.’

She wasn’t looking at herself either. I do not know what she was looking at, but she was looking at something very intently. I believe the thing that she was looking at was inside of herself. It had a shape that only she could see.

She moved very awkwardly over to the desk, stunningly awkward, but again the almost tide-pool delicacy of her face led me away from the source of her awkwardness.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you. I know it’s late,’ she said, kind of hopelessly, and then broke away from the thing that she was looking at, to glance lightspeed at me.

She was disturbing me, but not in the way she thought. There was a dynamically incongruous thing about her, but I still couldn’t find it. Her face, like a circle of mirrors, led me away from it.

‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘This is my job and I love doing it. There’s no place I would rather be than where I am now.’

‘What?’ she said.

‘I love my work.’ I said.

‘It’s good you’re happy,’ she said. She said the word happy as if she were looking at it from a great distance through a telescope. The word sounded celestial upon her mouth, stark and Galilean.

Then I noticed what was so extraordinarily strange about her. Her face was so delicate, perfect, but her body was fantastically developed for the fragility of her face.

She had very large fully realized breasts and an incredibly tiny waist and large full hips that tapered down into long majestic legs.

Her body was very sensual, inciting one to think of lust, while her face was Botticellian and set your mind to voyaging upon the ethereal.

Suddenly she sensed my recognition of her body. She blushed bitterly and reached into the paper bag and took out her book.

‘This is my book,’ she said.

She put it down on the desk and almost stepped back when she did it. She was going to step back but then she changed her mind. She glanced at me again and I could feel somebody inside of her looking out as if her body were a castle and a princess lived inside.

The book had a plain brown wrapper on it and there was no title. The book looked like a stark piece of ground burning with frozen heat.

‘What’s it about?’ I said, holding the book in my hand, feeling almost a hatred coming from within the book.

‘It’s about this,’ she said and suddenly, almost hysterically, she unbuttoned her coat and flung it open as if it were a door to some horrible dungeon filled with torture instruments, pain and dynamic confession.

She was wearing a blue sweater and skirt and a pair of black leather boots in the style of this time. She had a fantastically full and developed body under her clothes that would have made the movie stars and beauty queens and showgirls bitterly ooze dead make-up in envy.

She was developed to the most extreme of Western man’s desire in this century for women to look: the large breasts, the tiny waist, the large hips, the long Playboy furniture legs.

She was so beautiful that the advertising people would have made her into a national park if they could have got their hands on her.

Then her blue eyes swirled like a tide pool and she started crying.

‘This book is about my body,’ she said. ‘I hate it. It’s too big for me. It’s somebody else’s body. It’s not mine.’

I reached into my pocket and took out a handkerchief and a candy bar. When people are troubled or worried, I always tell them that it will be all right and give them a candy bar. It surprises them and it’s good for them.

‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ I said.

I gave her a Milky Way. She held it in her startled hand, staring at it. And I gave her the handkerchief.

‘Wipe your eyes,’ I said. ‘And eat the candy bar while I get you a glass of sherry.’

She fumbled abstractedly with the candy bar wrapper as if it were a tool from a distant and future century while I went and got some sherry for us. I figured that we would both need it.

When I came back she was eating the candy bar. ‘Now isn’t that good,’ I said, smiling.

The ludicrousness of me giving her a candy bar made her smile, ever so slightly, and almost look directly at me.

‘Please sit down over here,’ I said motioning towards a table and some chairs. She sat down as if her body were six inches larger than she was. After she had sat down, her body was still sitting down.

I poured us each a glass of Gallo sherry, all the library could afford, and then there was a kind of awkward silence as we sat there sipping our sherry.

I was going to tell her that she was a beautiful girl and she shouldn’t feel bad about it, that she was all wrong in denouncing herself, but then I changed my mind instantly.

That was not what she wanted to hear and that wasn’t really what I wanted to say. After all, I have a little more sense than that. We both didn’t want to hear what I first thought of telling her.

‘What’s your name?’ I said.

‘Vida. Vida Kramar.’

‘Do you like to be called V-(ee)-da or V-(eye)-da?’

That made her smile.

‘V-(eye)-da.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen. Soon I’ll be twenty. On the tenth.’

‘Do you go to school?’

‘No, I work at night. I went to State for a while, then UC, but I don’t know. Now I’m working at night. It’s OK.’