Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

So it was I, not Jared, who bought handles of Tanqueray and Absolut, which I started drinking straight with a few slices of lemon, pretending this was an acceptable afternoon cocktail. I even drank in the late mornings before my shifts at the bookstore, hiding my dependence from Jared, who had a real alcohol problem — I told myself — while mine was temporary, a life raft to convey me to a new state of being.

Careless, I drank too much one morning and was uncharacteristically talkative at work, blabbing on while I stocked books about how I had no tether, how my only hope for an acceptable life was to complete the translation of a French novel that I’d worked on intermittently for years, that I had to get very serious about this work now that I was no longer getting married, so that I could then translate a lot of different books and maybe be a teacher or get a fellowship to travel abroad or something, but how awful that my one big hope in life now depended solely on me, I was not to be trusted, I really should answer to someone besides myself, this was a terrible setup, how to break into “society?” was I “insane?” With my forefingers, I exaggerated the quotes around the words. I had the sense that I was being funny, but no one laughed. When it was my turn to work the register, the manager pulled me aside, said she was sorry I was having a rough time, and suggested I go home early. I walked out without saying goodbye. The last thing I needed was to be dismissed from the one place to which I was beholden.

I came home to David Bowie blasting in my living room and Jared doing lines off of my roommate’s coffee table with a couple who lived upstairs, to whom I had never spoken because I rarely speak to strangers and because these particular strangers screamed curses at each other late into the night. Now, though, they both seemed to be painfully bursting with a newfound inner brilliance, which they were trying to communicate by craning their necks and opening their eyes wide and moving their tongues at breakneck speed as they told me dull details of their days — when they had moved into this building, how much their utilities cost, their favorite restaurant in the area. There is nothing worse than spending an evening being talked at by dullards on drugs. So I did a couple of lines, too, and then, because the black mass of regret was shrieking in my ear, I drank a lot of vodka, and then, because the people in my apartment were removing their clothes and applying their tongues to each other’s exposed skin, I took three bong hits in the hope that marijuana would make me want to get naked and lick stuff, too.

And although the three pairs of hands roaming my skin were too insistent and hurried to give me real pleasure, the abundance of human life temporarily concerned with my life did make me feel almost good, okay enough to believe Jared had been right to invite these strangers over, that perhaps this vulgar chaos was exactly what I needed to propel myself into the new state of being. But wait — I was now being touched by only one body and that body was covered in coarse black hair that was entirely unfamiliar to me and the penis that sprang out of the hub of those unfamiliar hairs was getting encased in protective plastic.

I looked around for Jared. He was sitting on the couch, holding a pair of tits shaped like huge jester hats around his dick. My breasts are small. Jared was enthusiastically engaged in the one sex act we could not do together. The sight pained me, but I could not feel the pain through the layers of intoxicants in which my mind was suffocating. So I let the hairy, man-shaped creature put his thing in me. He was silent as he fucked me and my vagina felt nothing but a vague pressure. This lack of particularity left me all alone inside the scene, unable even to comment from inside my head on what was happening, turning the sex into a darkly comic villain who tried and tried to destroy me, but could never succeed in hurting me more than I hurt myself. My brain started pulling sounds out of the past, hearing Brian yell, “You freak out when you don’t have an orgasm.”

If only I could know the exact number of times Brian had fucked me and come and then stolen into sleep without offering me a word or gesture, and I had managed not to yell or beat his head with a pillow or dig my nails into his forearms (I did that only two — at most four — times, and that was after he fell asleep while he was touching me), but instead I got out of bed and took some NyQuil and read on the couch until unconsciousness took me. If I could know the exact number of times I fell asleep in that state of miserable acceptance, I would have a solid true fact that made me deserving of forgiveness. But I had no idea how many times I had done anything with Brian — two? twenty? five hundred? — and now I would never know, and I was suddenly shrieking at the man on top of me and the woman with pompom nipples to take their hideous bodies the hell out of my apartment, leave us alone, didn’t they have any shame?

My next-door neighbors yanked on their clothes, calling me batshit crazy and psycho-bitchy. They slammed the door on the way out. Jared laughed. He fucked me for a long, long time since we were both too coked up to come. I awoke at dawn on the hardwood floor, toes and fingers icy, mind and heart now clear enough to feel the pain. Of seeing Jared’s cock inside a stranger’s tits. Of the distance between Brian and me being equal to my need to bridge it — that much space, that much need. Of knowing that if you don’t treat people well, you will always have to wonder if everything wrong with life is a result of personal failure. I wriggled out from under Jared’s clammy deadweight and walked to the apartment’s one small window, level with the concrete backyard. The cold glass held my achy forehead. I let my eyes get small and unfocused so that the world became darkness interrupted by dazzles of artificial brightness, one of which I chose to believe was the moon. I craned my neck back and leaned my chin against the glass. But no matter how far up I could see, I was still endlessly far from all the things that matter in a day and in a life.

I left Jared sleeping on the floor and crawled into my ripped sheets, certain of one thing: I had to start working as soon as I woke up, get my mind back inside Fifi .

Sometime later, Jared crawled into bed with me. He was sweet and hesitant. He rubbed my back, said how glad he was that I kicked those losers out, he had no idea that dude was trying to fuck me or he would have kicked his ugly ass. “He did fuck me,” I said. Jared looked away and offered to go buy coffee and bagels. I was at my desk when he got back, rereading the last passage I’d translated, begging my brain to focus.

“You know that your mailbox is overflowing?” Jared said, handing me breakfast in a paper bag. “They’re leaving shit on the floor.” He dumped a pile of paper in my lap — sharp corners made from tree pulp. How incomprehensible the world of objects was. One by one, I tossed the envelopes to the floor. Credit card bills, Amnesty International needing money, a salon offering me fifteen percent off my first wax, a Thai restaurant offering fast free delivery, a thick purple envelope covered in stamps bearing an image of one of the Buddhist gods, I couldn’t remember which one. Inside the purple envelope was a card on which LOVE had been written out of spices, the names of which were listed on the inside of the card, along with an invitation: “Dear El Akki, I wish you can spend Sri Lankan New Year with my family. I ask the gods for that wish. God bless you, Suriya Nangi.”

Oh. Suriya. We hadn’t been in touch for at least a year. And how many years had passed since I met her in Sri Lanka? Four? Five? Was the girl in that memory really me? The one with the greasy hair and the baggy salwar kameez, content to sit and watch, be nobody, go nowhere, for hours at a time — had that really been me? It must have been, because now another human was calling to the girl, practically begging her to exist. This had nothing to do with me, of course — Suriya and I barely knew each other, she just wanted to be close with an American, she probably hoped I would find her a job in the States or something — but the letter was addressed to me. Someone faraway was beckoning. Or rather some thing . Why not think in those terms? It helped, and it was so hard to have thoughts that helped. I reread the invitation to come to Sri Lanka as if it were an invitation from the archaic torso of Apollo. Is it even possible to quote Rilke without irony anymore? Maybe not in public, but I do it all the time in my head. Of course I would visit Suriya in Sri Lanka, help a kind stranger change her life. Which would, in turn, change me. Because I needed to be changed. I wish I were dead. A sentence I thought, wrote, spoke all throughout adolescence. A child’s complaint, stated with the willingness to strike at anything, to demand anything, because nothing one wants seems possible, one is always at the mercy of people, places, words, hours, bodies larger and clearer than oneself. But the childish complaint had become real to me lately, a companion, a comfort — possible. I needed something else to comfort me. I would find it in Sri Lanka, staying with a devout Buddhist family in a remote village. I would finish my translation, I’d get really serious about meditation, I’d become involved in some important way with this poor, kind, Buddhist family — condescending, I knew, but I didn’t care, so much did I need Suriya’s invitation to make me better. Something big would happen to me there. Something external would claim my life. It has to. It will. I am not a bad person.