Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

When I woke, it was night and my head swam and hurt. I sat up and took my clothes off, went to my window, looked out into the black speckled with stars. A breeze carried my imagination over and through, and I tried to peer in at them one at a time, each sleeping man in a slightly different position, some tucked in curls like infants, others straight as boards on their backs, mouths open. I pictured a man awake like me, trying to see, waiting for something to materialize in front of him, hopeless but resolved. I could see him. I played a child’s game: If I could see him, he could see me. I touched myself.

Things went on this way for a while. The penitentiary just out of reach took up all my thinking. I invented a hundred sexual fantasies that involved inmates, torture or escape, violence or the tenderness proffered after a body has given up. I moved from fourteen to fifteen this way, almost dazed; it was as if nothing at all were happening, as if time were thick and dry like the heat and geography. The people I went to school with had no meaning to me. Books continued to house me in a way that the world did not.

The summer of my fifteenth birthday, my brother did not come home. I had a bottle of Jack, a bottle of Gilbey’s, and tequila under the bed. I spent my days skipping school and getting high with guys I barely knew, guys I’d met through my brother. The more I let them touch me, the more they didn’t mind. From my parents I received a second set of Shakespeare, comedies to go with the tragedies. I count that summer as one that turned me inside out, a snake shedding skin, or just the explosion of a body. By then I had shot heroin a couple times, but that was not my main thing. By then I was making trips from my window to a place two hundred yards away from the fence for long hours at a stretch, waiting in the dark, crouched behind scrub and brush not four feet high off the ground.

They’d emerge twice a day. Once mid-morning, once late afternoon. They’d play ball, walk around, cluster in tight two- and three-person fists there in the yard. I was close enough to make out their figures but not the faces. Faces blurred into little knobs of head, the repetition of orange making me squint. Binoculars helped but also made the dull ache harder to bear. My first distant encounters with the fence of their world came at night, alone, dark, wind, nothing. I sat half hidden by bushes two football fields away. Looking at the patterns of fence, I could feel the hairs on my arms raising, asking, begging. I’d sit out there and drink, and think, acclimating myself to the edge of their world. Then I’d walk home, my feet making crooked tracks, my body not remembering my name, my hands dangling at my sides, fingers itching and twitchy.

All that summer I could hear the electronic drone of the talking heads come through the vents in the house up to the attic like a televised haunting. Debates and news reports and town halls all revolving around the prison, its inhabitants, its dark center. The people on the outside wanted proof that the inmates were doing hard time. They didn’t want those convicts, those perverts and degenerates, to have televisions or weight rooms. No luxuries. Doing time is supposed to hurt. Do they expect some kind of special treatment? I remember thinking, Christ, why do people keep asking that? My thinking is, if you can ask the question, you don’t deserve to know the answer. Go read The Tempest , or don’t even talk to me. Someday I’m going to make a bumper sticker that reads: THIS THING OF DARKNESS I ACKNOWLEDGE MINE.

It came to me the day I was skipping an English class, smoking pot with a couple of heads behind the auditorium. Guys who had brothers who knew mine. Guys who by now had put their hands inside me. I was rolling a joint, twirling the paper till it formed itself into something tight and thin and potent, when the idea hit me. It was the most simple and clear thing I’d ever done in my life. I asked where they got their shit; they told me a guy’s name, said my brother used to know him; I asked if I could meet him. The whole thing took less than a minute. Convincing the guy about my idea was even simpler. Who would suspect someone’s sister, a girl coming to see a man wretched and dismal in his shame? I was already passing as an adult, buying beer and cigarettes at the 7-Eleven, getting into the town bar. My brother had fixed me up with an ID—some girl he met at college. Some girl he probably fucked. I swear to god, we looked like twins, that unknown girl and me, faces echoing each other, two lives touching.

The guy with the drugs gave me the name of the first guy I visited inside. I passed my ID and the contents of my pockets through a slot at the bottom of a Plexiglas window. I was wearing no jewelry, no underwire bra, nothing metal, as I’d been warned. A guard made circles around the edges of my body with a metal-detector wand. My skin shivered. My mouth burned. My lips felt too big. I thought I might cry. But that first time, my body knew a truth that I did not. My legs carried me as if they had memorized the steps without my involvement.

His name was Earl. His gray-blue eyes sucked me up like I was thin as air. He did not smile, he barely spoke, he put his hand near my collarbone as if he knew me. He was supposed to know me—I was supposed to be his niece, maybe, or his daughter or his sister or maybe just some ripe young thing he’d have killed if she tried to run. His hand moved down toward my waist, squeezed me just under the rib. His face came to me, and his image went out of focus as the blurry stubble on his chin got big and he kissed me, not on the mouth but as close as is possible, wet, hot, lingering there before he withdrew. I could feel his tongue, spittle. He’d deftly taken a small bag from underneath my shirt in back. My spine shivered, my belly convulsed, my mouth filled with saliva. I had to pee so bad it was painful.

I’d never felt more alive in my life.

I saw Earl once a week for about a year.

At night I’d continue my vigils, my hands alive and my body firing its pistons relentlessly. Now I had a precise reason to live; it was as if the world had written itself before me and all I had to do was read it into being. Sometimes during visiting hours in the common room, I’d give Earl a hand job or he would me, and we kept on not knowing each other at all, rarely speaking, and the pleasure was so intense I thought I might die. Sometimes a guard would fondle my tits in an empty corridor. Once an inmate came on my hand while Earl and I were getting each other off. And all the time I was reading and reading Shakespeare, all the words spinning me into my body, love scenes that turned into death scenes, identities lost or stolen or deformed, good and evil slipping into each other’s body, murders and suicides and incests erupting in marriage beds, between brothers and sisters, between the powerful and the enslaved.

In my own bed, dreams wrestled me into color and vision, orange to red to blue and back again: armies of men breaking loose from their rooms, breaking walls and heads and bodies, making inside and outside crazy, blowing the stupid human organization of things to bits. I saw the logic of the inside-out. I knew the world through a body and a mind cut pure and fine as a diamond. I felt as if no other world existed. No other home, no other skin for the body. In books and dreams and inside the penitentiary, between my legs, everything was being reborn.

Night wind changes the structure of things. The distance between my room and the prison closed, as if I had forged a dirt river through craggy desert rocks, my little boat-body bringing me to the other side, not to an idea of womanhood but to a chance to reinvent myself endlessly. I became an expert at the logic of waiting, how it housed the forsaken. Like me, the men in that house had the long wait ahead of them, marked off on the wall in chalked scrapes like tire marks on pavement. Their lives like mine were mutating, their bodies turning from one species to another, from hot-blooded mammals to the cold belly of something with night vision, some animal that could survive in the desert. They knew something from our past about survival and deprivation as a motivation to live.