Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

Her father’s eyes weigh on me as she returns the bowl to the kitchen. Suriya serves tea after the meal, heating the water with a metal coil attached to an electrical cord. I take small sips of the sugar-thick liquid. The wrinkles in her father’s forehead knot between his eyes. He raises himself off the floor and walks as if in imitation of an angry man marching. Amma stands up also, glides into the kitchen. The soft splash of water by the tank, where Suriya is washing dishes, stops. I wince every time I hear the words sudhu and Amereeca in her father’s eerily calm speech. A crash of water, a gasp. His footsteps punish the stairs. I find Suriya wiping her face with her shirt, her spine arched into a flat C to keep from exposing her stomach. “Did he just — was that tea? Are you okay? Are you burned?”

“No, Akki. No burn.”

“Is this about the food?”

“Do not worry for that, El.”

“Can you please tell him that I love your food? And I didn’t come visit you just to eat curry?”

“I think he not hear that.” She shakes her head impatiently, as if trying to reason with a child. “He is a madman. Sometime.” She lathers bar soap on the plates, speaking quietly and hurriedly. If she came in second or third on a test when she was younger, her father would heat up the metal coil and hold it against her stomach and back, where the marks wouldn’t show. She has been the top student in her class since she was nine.

“What about your brother?”

“He hates to study. And now he is a soldier. The soldier’s life is so hard. So when he has vacation time he must do as he wants.” She tilts the water jug onto the sudsy plate.

“Your life is hard, too, Nangi.”

She sets the jug upright and faces me. “If you are not here, I am all alone.” I touch her wrist. Suriya lives with her family; she knows everyone in her village; she is always busy with schoolwork and chores. Maybe separateness is not a person’s fault; maybe some people just come into the world that way.

Suriya swirls the water at the center of the plate. Then she giggles. “My father say, You feed sudhu garbage!” She imitates his voice in a deep, robotic whisper. “He say, She will never get you job in America if you—” She claps her hand over her mouth. “That’s not why you’re my friend, El — but — for my father—”

“No, no, of course, I understand.” Confused and embarrassed, neither of us notices when I start helping Suriya wash the dishes. I haven’t considered the roots of her family’s excessive desire to please me. I figured they were simply bored. Just as I was. But every bored person hopes.

—

I dread using Suriya’s parents’ shower — a cold-water spigot and a bucket inside the outhouse — but there is no way I can sleep without freeing myself from the day’s grime and sweat. I latch the door behind me, hang up my sarong, and bend down to fill the bucket, facing away from the shit-smeared hole. I could be staying in a well-appointed guesthouse for less than ten dollars a night. Why am I still here? A sense of obligation to Suriya, a sense that my presence is making her feel more alive or something. Maybe I’m flattering myself. In any case, I will be out of here soon. I miss solitude, living by my own daily rhythms. And Jared. He’s probably upset I’ve been out of touch so long. I don’t want to think of how he might be distracting himself.

The shock of cold water crashing over my head stops my thoughts. How instantly it erases the heat and the dirt, so that I find myself in a new state — cool, private, immediate. After I’ve lathered myself in bar soap, I fill up another bucket. As I’m lifting it overhead, a gleam of light through the outhouse slats catches in the corner of my eye. My throat constricts. I turn my head to the side just in time to glimpse two dark eyes retreating. Disgusted and outraged, I dump the bucket over me and cover up with the sarong, not even bothering to rinse the soap off my legs. I want to chase Ayya down and shout insults, shaming him in front of his family. But for all I know, it’s perfectly acceptable for young men to spy on naked women here. Maybe Suriya’s father has implied that Ayya should make a pass at the American girl. And of course, Ayya could simply deny it and make me seem crazy. Causing a scene would only humiliate me.

How wily of him to put me in a position where I have no way to fight back against his violations. I want to talk to Jared, touch the dimple in his chin as he pulls me toward him and tells me not to worry. Sharp ache. How different helplessness feels when imposed by someone you don’t care for. With Jared, the helplessness hurts, yes, but there is a kind of relief in how he makes me hate him one moment and forgive him the next, as if he’s freed me of the responsibility to protect myself.

—

I once asked a boy I was fucking to pretend to rape me. The fucking bored me and the boy bored me, but I didn’t realize that at the time. I thought I was bored of life. So I told the boy — I don’t remember his name — that I often fantasized about coercive sex. His eyes widened. Would I really let him fake-rape me? With a stocking covering his face and everything? Sure. I would love it, in fact, if he liberated us of his face. I was living with my father after my year in Paris, and I gave the boy keys to our house one Friday night when Dad was away for the weekend, shooting a cereal commercial in Philadelphia. The boy could “break in” anytime he chose. The moments leading to the fake-rape had a limpid fineness — closing my eyes in the shower, leaning into the refrigerator for a jar of peanut butter, turning the handle of my bedroom door, my heart pounding, demanding I be exactly where I was.

But once the boy was really there — he slipped, predictably, into my room just after I turned out the light — I was aware of myself acting, trying to make him feel tough and scary. He gagged my mouth with a stocking, but I could have shouted through it if I wanted. I twisted left and right as he held my arms over my head, but the power in the motion was all mine. I knew how I looked as I writhed, naked from the waist down. I could have kneed him in the testicles, shaken off my gag and captured the tip of his nose in my teeth. Instead I stared up with cartoon fear at the reflective surface of his masked face, and let him hold my hips still with one hand. I made breathy protest moans into the stocking. It took him too long to come and I had to twist and moan ever more histrionically to distract him from his failure at brutality. At last, he extracted himself, told me I’d better not tell a fucking soul about this if I knew what was good for me, whispered that he’d call me tomorrow, maybe we could get a drink. I didn’t even feel like touching myself when I was alone. All I felt was the stupidity of finding even pretend rape erotic. The unsocialized abandon I fantasized about had nothing to do with actual coercion.

The boy called and texted for weeks afterward. I felt guilty every time I saw his name on my phone. Even as my rapist, he couldn’t make me feel more than indifference. Whereas my outrage for Ayya’s real, calculated transgressions keeps me awake long after Suriya drifts off that night, my arms crossed over my squirming chest.

—

The words Ayya is yelling seem like they’re trying to strangle him. His nostrils flare out of his crimson face, his skin stretched tight around his protruding jaw. Or at least that’s how I see him when I enter the kitchen, picturing him in a lookout tower above a Tamil town where the Tigers have killed a prominent monk or taken off one of his friend’s legs with a hand grenade. Ayya’s actual demeanor is more pouty than maniacal. Suriya sets down her knife to pat his hand, speaking quietly. After he stalks out of the kitchen, she explains that one thousand rupees — about ten bucks — are missing from his room. Karma’s a bitch, I do not say out loud.