Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

The police couldn’t come in the front door because I was too afraid to walk through my apartment to unlock it. So they banged on the main entrance to the building until they woke my upstairs neighbor, a hard-bodied Japanese woman who closed her curtains whenever I stepped into the backyard. They charged through her apartment and came out her window, shining boots pouring over the sill and landing with a clack in the concrete yard where I stood naked, still gripping my phone to my ear. Red and white lights, wailing from the car on the street, chased each other on my neighbor’s ceiling. The police walked down the steps to the basement in single file, guns drawn.

When I saw the guns I knew the apartment was empty. I followed the cops into my bedroom, picked up a towel off the floor, wrapped it around my chest. I wanted them to find all of my belongings smashed to bits. I wanted a lunatic wearing blackface and an adult diaper to leap out of my closet, shrieking and karate-chopping the air. The cops prowled through my kitchen and bathroom, turning on lights, peering behind doors. “Is it always like this in here?” they asked of the living room, littered with clothes and shoes, old coffee cups, crumpled pages torn from books and magazines. My absentee roommate’s large TV, which she planned to sell, sat on the floor in the center of the chaos. Yes, it was always like that.

After the police left, I made a list of my potential identities.

1. Translator

2. Wannabe translator living with her father

3. English teacher in foreign countries

4. Buddhist nun

5. Trophy wife

6. Patient in mental hospital

7. Jared’s life partner (combine with option 6?)

8. Sex Ed teacher

9. Accidental mother

10. Drug addict

11. Suicide

Only after I finished writing did I realize that I stole both the idea and the final option from Spalding Gray. He made a similar list in his journal, published after his death. He did kill himself, abandoning a wife, children, success as a writer and actor, worthwhile projects that only he could complete. Whereas I had to steal even my thoughts about my life from those who had found a form to match their inner world — all of which argued strongly for a serious consideration of option 11.

How, though? If that really did end up being the only choice? I have no capacity for violence. I don’t even kill mosquitoes. It would have to be pills. And I couldn’t be cowardly about it, the way I was in high school, taking handfuls of Advil and pretending to believe that this time something truly different would happen.

—

I got my locks changed. But that night, I heard the man’s voice again, addressing me in a singsong whisper. “Elsie. The calm before the storm. Elsie. The calm before the storm.” Again, I found myself standing naked in my backyard, heart trying to break out of my chest. I knew I couldn’t call the police again, but I was too afraid to go back inside. I sat on a folding chair. Rain from a late-afternoon shower soaked my bare ass. After the blackness overhead gave way to gray murk, I got back in bed, called Jared, asked if he would stay with me for a while.

“At your service, milady,” he said in an overdone cockney accent at the end of another lame California night. I turned on my computer. LAX, JFK. Click. The money was just a number on a computer screen.

And then Jared and I were lying in bed together and I was no longer hearing the singsong whisper of an imaginary man. I was hearing Jared’s snore. He rolled away from me but our feet remained entangled. I pictured us from above, bodies forming a vague V. A child learning to write. Odd that I didn’t long to have one. How else to be of use? Why didn’t I want anything that made sense? Maybe my personality — sensibility without sense — was a type that was meant to die out. My face reached for the window. The shades were drawn but light tried to crest the sill. Noonday sun, noonday sun. I repeated the phrase to make one part of my mind seem pretty to another part. Jared’s anklebones crushed mine. There was no way to touch him that would allay the loneliness. Or there might have been, but I didn’t want to try. I just wanted someone, anyone, to see that our faces were the tips of a child’s squiggly V, woman’s eyes open, mouth closed, man’s eyes closed, mouth open. If only someone would take a photograph or paint a picture of the aerial view of this moment, if only my feelings belonged to a scene that had some meaning. But why would a stranger care that my face was reaching for noonday sun while my lover’s ankles crushed mine? So instead I thought of the words I would use to describe the image to Jared, after he woke up, after we had sex, while we were eating cereal with the frozen blueberries I was proud of myself for keeping on hand.

—

“Ducks can hold their breath for a long time, but many hens still drown during peak mating season, killed by mallards during copulation. Female ducks are raped so frequently that they have evolved complicated vaginal passages, spiraled tubes with hidden pockets that allow them to store and later eject semen from unwanted partners. Most birds mate by joining their reproductive openings, positioning that requires cooperation. But ducks have penises and vaginas.”

An acquaintance’s Facebook status led me to the article about duck sex, which I read aloud to Jared one afternoon, crammed onto the lower side of my lopsided bed. The computer warmed my bare thighs as I wondered aloud about the mating habits of ducks — how cruel that evolution has fostered female defensiveness instead of curbing male aggression, and how wrong that my body found animals committing homicidal gang rape erotic.

Jared took the computer off my lap and pulled me down to him. “It’s not wrong,” he said. “You’re not choosing to feel like that. Don’t worry about it so much.” He was propped on one elbow, his face a few inches above mine, the crevices in his cheeks footholds in a sheer cliff. I watched myself, tiny, climbing up his right cheek and resting on top of his nostril. I grazed the joints of my fisted hand over his cheek, a gesture that wanted to have meaning. “Have you been fantasizing about me?” I asked.

“All the time.”

“Tell me one.”

He put one hand on my neck and one hand over my eyes. “I break into your house and push you onto the bed and I rip off your pants and—” He rolled on top of me and pinned my wrists overhead, liberating me from movement. The drum-tight mound of his beer belly pressed against my abdomen. He didn’t care how his torso looked; he only saw mine. I didn’t care how he looked, either. My arousal came from knowing that my body aroused him, so that I got to live, briefly, alongside my body instead of inside it, my skin and breasts and armpits and cunt independent of me, giving and receiving of their own accord. Jared fucked me shallowly at first, touching my clitoris with a practiced precision that made my orgasm short and hollow, as if the tremors happened in isolation, cut off from their source. He moved his hand away and quickened the pace of his thrusts. He ejaculated with a pinched yelp, pressed his lips to my forehead, sighed. Then he began snoring, his open mouth resting on my shoulder. I looked at the ceiling, immobilized by satisfaction, a state that can feel a lot like despair.

—

Only now that there was, overtly, nothing wrong with spending time with Jared anywhere and anyhow I liked, did the appropriate sense of regret, guilt, and anxiety take shape, a black mass filled with swirls of electronic noises screeching at a frequency only I could hear, hovering over the bed where Jared snored, gripping my shoulders while I swiped credit cards at Barnes and Noble and asked customers if they wanted to join our frequent buyer’s club. Perhaps the worst part of my hellish new companion was that I could not describe the hell to Jared, the person who let me be the most unhinged. He had never acted jealous of Brian, but he had always calmly, assuredly predicted that our relationship would not last and I could not bear his calm, assured triumph now. For the first time I could remember, I felt far away from him even when he had his arms around me. I couldn’t believe how much I missed watching movies on the couch with Brian, missed his laugh and long limbs and the perfect half moons of his fingernails. I had been lulled for so long by the belief that the insipid solace of his company would shape the better part of my remaining days, and now I was wide awake to immediate love for him, and all alone with it. I called him sometimes, when I was not with Jared. I left at least a dozen cheery voice mails before I gave up.