Copyright 2004 by Cheryl Andrews. All rights reserved. No portion of this excerpt for brief review may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise - without the written permission of the author.
Biological Conflict
Like words, a psychological signifier always arrives at its unconscious destination.
It hides death from us as it displays death in front of us.
When the brain is in trouble because of stress, it transfers the responsibility of management to the organ best suited to dispel it.
Angeles Wolder Helling
The Art of Listening to the Body
…and so I find myself a sign, a clear sign, and like any sign I am indifferent to the nature of the thing that I designate or, for lack of a better word, signify…
Percival Everett
The Water Cure
Mascara smudges far too easy, and I’ll be damned if I leave this restroom with less than perfect eyes. Especially since my blue metallic eye shadow has just the right amount of glitter to catch the stage lights. I’ve been working up to this night for weeks, reinforcing my inner mantra: I know how to act to get a man. And I can perform in all the right ways to get him to tear me apart even as he pieces me together.
After all, love is not a feeling word, it is an action verb. And action is older than subject. When love is the subject… yes, my love, close the door. Subject naturally lacks confidence, lies suspended between verb and noun, the space of nothingness. And if I continue to stay here, the song will end, and I will be left alone, again.
So tonight, I will be the opposite of subject. Tonight, I will be the verb. Tonight, with my shimmering eyes all a glow, the dance floor is mine. With my perfect moves, I will pull from my pelvis, flirtatious and coy. I will revel attention. I will rise, confident in my ability to be seen. With a few drinks, the air will be electric and boundless. Women will hate me. Men love me. And it starts with a simple reapplication of mascara.
The lather from my hands reddens. I dig at the blood imbedded under my nails, surprised at how sticky it becomes as it dries. I only wanted to talk to her. Know her secret. Make it mine. Share a cigarette.
She was who I planned to be, but she was already there being me when I arrived. She took the floor as I sat in the corner waiting to summon the electricity to strike her down. A single bolt from my eyes to hers. And when she finally stepped outside, I followed to ask why? Why her? Why not me?
I asked for a cigarette. Then a light. Told her I liked her moves. Asked where she got them. If I could have a few. She laughed. “Honey, you can’t give moves like mine. You’re either born with them or you’re not.” She shook her double D’s till they liquified beneath her skin. Laughter lifted into the darkness, pushed upward from the smoke she exhaled. “And Baby, I was born this way.” Her shaking flowed down her spine into her hips. Cigarette held between her closed lips, arms rose above her head. She shook everywhere. Shook herself out of her right shoe and stumbled hitting her face on the oversized dumpster as she fell toward the cement. Her hand bounced. Twice.
At first, she did not move. I watched the blood pool around her eye and cheek, watched the smoke continue to rise from the burning cigarette still in her mouth. She moaned and her leg jerked; I jerked. Pounced on top of her. Pounded her head into the ground. Harder! and harder! My hands warmed by her exiting.
For days I read the paper. Watched the news. Nothing was ever reported. Online I found the police report: Believed prostitute beaten to death in the alley behind O’ Flannigan’s.
Later in the early morning night after I washed her off my hands, I re-lite the half-smoked cigarette I took from her mouth and inhaled her final breath over and over and over. I finished her off complete and whole.
An even trade, one body for another.
Leakage:
Fantasy is alive, is memory. It is what drives us. Over time it leaks out, provides motive.
A man’s past is not simply a dead history…It is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shutters and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
George Eliot.
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
Anais Nin
Detective Matthew Reason has been running from a smallness inside him his whole life, running toward a wide openness he experienced briefly while racing with his brother in the space of a clearing alive with long grass. The wind tugged at their roots. Purple and gold blooms wide open dusted the air in pollen. Two boys running wild. Their freckles burnt by the sun. His inner smallness perfectly proportioned to his little boy body.
Reason has grown since then, grown from an unconscious thought. A child’s thought buried in his adult body; it hardens his lungs with each breath. Every step, every expression, every action reinforces his suffering; it permeates his entire being.
And as the world’s civil morality presses against his skin, as if through osmosis, he enforces the rules and regulations we humans choose to abide by in this civilized world. You see, Reason hunts monsters. It’s what he does; it’s who he is.
Not the ugly kind under the bed or in the closet, not the kind who jump out of the shadows or from behind the refrigerator. Not the kind who cover their faces. Reason’s monsters are everyday people who look… ordinary. So ordinary they are everywhere. Mothers, fathers, brothers, aunts and uncles motivated not by love but fear, a perversion of the innocent. Their actions seep into him. Corrupt his DNA. Inside Reason’s humanity, life stagnates, and death forgets its own rebirth.
There are brief moments of relief. Moments when Reason can escape the outside world and his inner condemnation. Reason breathes into the stillness, between his inner fear as it pushes outward against the fear pressing inward. A palpable friction in-between outer and inner. His skin razor thin. In this moment, lost in the body’s memory, time slows to a stop, and Reason is no longer alone. It is here Reason loses the ability to see his own singularity. And once again he is running wild in the space of an open field with his twin brother, Sammy.
However brief, in the bottom of his pelvis, inside the inner lining of his stomach rests a deep state of being under the surface of his own ordinariness; beyond rules, beyond felt emotions there is a God like state half guessed, half believed, but never fully realized. Outside of morality, there is symmetry in duality. Good and Evil, Love and Fear, Life and Death are one.
These brief encounters, perish as quickly as they arise. Revealed to Reason, he experiences them as doubled edged. Each equally cuts his heart asunder. For inside these states of mind rests a static just at the edge of hearing, an inaudible hum deepens into a low- level whisper felt only as an unsteadiness that makes his teeth itch.
Reason slows his vehicle to a stop behind an unmarked police cruiser, takes a deep breath. Rolls down the window. Turns off the ignition. Snow accumulates in the space between his body and the door, weightless white bees. The wind their stinger. The icy air ushers in another chance to see a child’s smiling photo posted on the evening news. Reason’s breath a sudden burst of ghosts. He spits his gum into a wadded-up piece of newspaper. Another case, another chance for redemption.
Apprehension rises like a whip. Splits the air and grants Reason entry into a transcendent state of mind, a somnolence. Reason leaves his moral reality and enters a dream like state where he is placed inside the mind, the body of another, the attacker or the attacked. Their thoughts, their actions become Reason’s thoughts, Reason’s actions. Murdered or Murder. Their terror, their elation become Reason’s terror. Reason’s elation.
Often called a miracle of second sight, a gift from God. Reason has his own word for the punishment God has gifted him. He calls them Invisibles. Trauma captured in energic waves and stored inside the environment, inside any living organic substance. The air made fluid records every whimper, every insult to the body, till the final sopranic climax. Death’s invisible frequency strengthened as it re-experiences itself played over and over till it’s ready to birth itself back into human flesh. Reason’s flesh.
Reason’s little boy smallness is tuned to a unique frequency, childhood. His attachment dates back to his twin brother’s attack. Stories whispered behind his back. The family waited weeks after in the hopes the Rangers would bring Sammy home. Weeks turned into months. Sammy’s body was never recovered. Reason’s mother decided to bury Sammy’s little blue suit. Sammy’s name embroidered on the inside of each garment: ruffled shirt, button down vest, jacket, and pants, so God would not mistake his absence for someone else.
To this day, Reason wonders if he hadn’t cleaved to his brother’s absent body, night after night after night filling his empty suite with his own body, his own guilt, then maybe God would have skipped Reason and given his Invisibles to someone else. Maybe just maybe, Reason would be something other than the monster he’s grown into.
Even now when he remembers Sammy, in an instant Reason is back inside his brother’s coffin laying in complete darkness. He listens to the dirt as it presses against the lacquered wooden box. Reason’s little boy head rests on the silk pillow sprayed with the floral woody musk of his mother’s perfume, Black Swan. Water drops fall onto his forehead and cheek. Soak the silk sheets underneath his little boy tininess. He fills the waiting suit; its cold blue space with his arms, his legs, and his still beating heart. Reason breathes. Raises the suit a few inches and holds his breath.
God gifted Reason with his first Invisible on the fifth night after the funeral. Inside his brother’s suit he opened his eyes and stares into the drop falling from above. Inside the water, Matt sees the clearing…
In the clearing surrounded by pine trees, Matt’s little boy body is enormous. The stars lite the night sky brilliant white, and Matt is out of breath.
The air before him is fluid, water inside water. Matt slaps it with his hand. It wavers and quivers. An invisible boundary made visible. Matt reaches inside. The enormous universe thrust closer all around him, inside him. Then bubbles, iridescent and fragile, soft roe laid out all around Matt, each egg with a person inside. Each bubble linked to numerous other bubbles bouncing up against each other as the person inside goes about their life like something mounting on ecstasy. Human roe.
Matt watches as inside his bubble, he is running.
He leans in, closer and closer, watches as he sprints into the clearing. Matt squints as he watches himself running hard toward the center of the open field, toward the drop off; his face and chest splattered in blood.
The bubble quivered and popped. Thrusted Reason back in his brother’s suit; back into his own body, inside the darkness of their bedroom. In the middle of Sammy’s bed, Matthew curled his body into a tight tinny-tiny ball and cried.
Reason’s Invisibles have been with him ever since. They come hard and heavy at the beginning of every investigation. Visions force him to endure a child’s abduction or death echo. And he knows this child abduction will follow the same pattern as all the others. He knows what to expect.
With shaking hands, Reason opens the glove box and searches for a fresh pack of gum, pushes a piece from its foil, and pops it into his mouth. Chewing hard and fast, Reason walks the salt and pepper snow powered dirt road toward the crime scene, passing several black and white cruisers. His breath quickens as he spies a familiar shadow materializes inside one of the police cruisers. A male figure Reason knows all too well. Reason makes eye contact with the ghost of his ex-partner, Johnny, shot down in the line of duty five months earlier and now able to comprehend unimaginable beauty. An ability Reason envies.
They nod. Reason quickens his pace toward the vehicle almost relieved. He ignores the current state of his ex-partner’s transparent body as it sits in the driver seat, blood still oozing from the hole in the back of his head. Reason discounts the way Johnny tracks his every move, acknowledging Reason’s continued physicality.
The whip descends.
Biological Conflict
Like words, a psychological signifier always arrives at its unconscious destination.
It hides death from us as it displays death in front of us.
When the brain is in trouble because of stress, it transfers the responsibility of management to the organ best suited to dispel it.
Angeles Wolder Helling
The Art of Listening to the Body
…and so I find myself a sign, a clear sign, and like any sign I am indifferent to the nature of the thing that I designate or, for lack of a better word, signify…
Percival Everett
The Water Cure
Mascara smudges far too easy, and I’ll be damned if I leave this restroom with less than perfect eyes. Especially since my blue metallic eye shadow has just the right amount of glitter to catch the stage lights. I’ve been working up to this night for weeks, reinforcing my inner mantra: I know how to act to get a man. And I can perform in all the right ways to get him to tear me apart even as he pieces me together.
After all, love is not a feeling word, it is an action verb. And action is older than subject. When love is the subject… yes, my love, close the door. Subject naturally lacks confidence, lies suspended between verb and noun, the space of nothingness. And if I continue to stay here, the song will end, and I will be left alone, again.
So tonight, I will be the opposite of subject. Tonight, I will be the verb. Tonight, with my shimmering eyes all a glow, the dance floor is mine. With my perfect moves, I will pull from my pelvis, flirtatious and coy. I will revel attention. I will rise, confident in my ability to be seen. With a few drinks, the air will be electric and boundless. Women will hate me. Men love me. And it starts with a simple reapplication of mascara.
The lather from my hands reddens. I dig at the blood imbedded under my nails, surprised at how sticky it becomes as it dries. I only wanted to talk to her. Know her secret. Make it mine. Share a cigarette.
She was who I planned to be, but she was already there being me when I arrived. She took the floor as I sat in the corner waiting to summon the electricity to strike her down. A single bolt from my eyes to hers. And when she finally stepped outside, I followed to ask why? Why her? Why not me?
I asked for a cigarette. Then a light. Told her I liked her moves. Asked where she got them. If I could have a few. She laughed. “Honey, you can’t give moves like mine. You’re either born with them or you’re not.” She shook her double D’s till they liquified beneath her skin. Laughter lifted into the darkness, pushed upward from the smoke she exhaled. “And Baby, I was born this way.” Her shaking flowed down her spine into her hips. Cigarette held between her closed lips, arms rose above her head. She shook everywhere. Shook herself out of her right shoe and stumbled hitting her face on the oversized dumpster as she fell toward the cement. Her hand bounced. Twice.
At first, she did not move. I watched the blood pool around her eye and cheek, watched the smoke continue to rise from the burning cigarette still in her mouth. She moaned and her leg jerked; I jerked. Pounced on top of her. Pounded her head into the ground. Harder! and harder! My hands warmed by her exiting.
For days I read the paper. Watched the news. Nothing was ever reported. Online I found the police report: Believed prostitute beaten to death in the alley behind O’ Flannigan’s.
Later in the early morning night after I washed her off my hands, I re-lite the half-smoked cigarette I took from her mouth and inhaled her final breath over and over and over. I finished her off complete and whole.
An even trade, one body for another.
Leakage:
Fantasy is alive, is memory. It is what drives us. Over time it leaks out, provides motive.
A man’s past is not simply a dead history…It is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shutters and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
George Eliot.
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
Anais Nin
Detective Matthew Reason has been running from a smallness inside him his whole life, running toward a wide openness he experienced briefly while racing with his brother in the space of a clearing alive with long grass. The wind tugged at their roots. Purple and gold blooms wide open dusted the air in pollen. Two boys running wild. Their freckles burnt by the sun. His inner smallness perfectly proportioned to his little boy body.
Reason has grown since then, grown from an unconscious thought. A child’s thought buried in his adult body; it hardens his lungs with each breath. Every step, every expression, every action reinforces his suffering; it permeates his entire being.
And as the world’s civil morality presses against his skin, as if through osmosis, he enforces the rules and regulations we humans choose to abide by in this civilized world. You see, Reason hunts monsters. It’s what he does; it’s who he is.
Not the ugly kind under the bed or in the closet, not the kind who jump out of the shadows or from behind the refrigerator. Not the kind who cover their faces. Reason’s monsters are everyday people who look… ordinary. So ordinary they are everywhere. Mothers, fathers, brothers, aunts and uncles motivated not by love but fear, a perversion of the innocent. Their actions seep into him. Corrupt his DNA. Inside Reason’s humanity, life stagnates, and death forgets its own rebirth.
There are brief moments of relief. Moments when Reason can escape the outside world and his inner condemnation. Reason breathes into the stillness, between his inner fear as it pushes outward against the fear pressing inward. A palpable friction in-between outer and inner. His skin razor thin. In this moment, lost in the body’s memory, time slows to a stop, and Reason is no longer alone. It is here Reason loses the ability to see his own singularity. And once again he is running wild in the space of an open field with his twin brother, Sammy.
However brief, in the bottom of his pelvis, inside the inner lining of his stomach rests a deep state of being under the surface of his own ordinariness; beyond rules, beyond felt emotions there is a God like state half guessed, half believed, but never fully realized. Outside of morality, there is symmetry in duality. Good and Evil, Love and Fear, Life and Death are one.
These brief encounters, perish as quickly as they arise. Revealed to Reason, he experiences them as doubled edged. Each equally cuts his heart asunder. For inside these states of mind rests a static just at the edge of hearing, an inaudible hum deepens into a low- level whisper felt only as an unsteadiness that makes his teeth itch.
Reason slows his vehicle to a stop behind an unmarked police cruiser, takes a deep breath. Rolls down the window. Turns off the ignition. Snow accumulates in the space between his body and the door, weightless white bees. The wind their stinger. The icy air ushers in another chance to see a child’s smiling photo posted on the evening news. Reason’s breath a sudden burst of ghosts. He spits his gum into a wadded-up piece of newspaper. Another case, another chance for redemption.
Apprehension rises like a whip. Splits the air and grants Reason entry into a transcendent state of mind, a somnolence. Reason leaves his moral reality and enters a dream like state where he is placed inside the mind, the body of another, the attacker or the attacked. Their thoughts, their actions become Reason’s thoughts, Reason’s actions. Murdered or Murder. Their terror, their elation become Reason’s terror. Reason’s elation.
Often called a miracle of second sight, a gift from God. Reason has his own word for the punishment God has gifted him. He calls them Invisibles. Trauma captured in energic waves and stored inside the environment, inside any living organic substance. The air made fluid records every whimper, every insult to the body, till the final sopranic climax. Death’s invisible frequency strengthened as it re-experiences itself played over and over till it’s ready to birth itself back into human flesh. Reason’s flesh.
Reason’s little boy smallness is tuned to a unique frequency, childhood. His attachment dates back to his twin brother’s attack. Stories whispered behind his back. The family waited weeks after in the hopes the Rangers would bring Sammy home. Weeks turned into months. Sammy’s body was never recovered. Reason’s mother decided to bury Sammy’s little blue suit. Sammy’s name embroidered on the inside of each garment: ruffled shirt, button down vest, jacket, and pants, so God would not mistake his absence for someone else.
To this day, Reason wonders if he hadn’t cleaved to his brother’s absent body, night after night after night filling his empty suite with his own body, his own guilt, then maybe God would have skipped Reason and given his Invisibles to someone else. Maybe just maybe, Reason would be something other than the monster he’s grown into.
Even now when he remembers Sammy, in an instant Reason is back inside his brother’s coffin laying in complete darkness. He listens to the dirt as it presses against the lacquered wooden box. Reason’s little boy head rests on the silk pillow sprayed with the floral woody musk of his mother’s perfume, Black Swan. Water drops fall onto his forehead and cheek. Soak the silk sheets underneath his little boy tininess. He fills the waiting suit; its cold blue space with his arms, his legs, and his still beating heart. Reason breathes. Raises the suit a few inches and holds his breath.
God gifted Reason with his first Invisible on the fifth night after the funeral. Inside his brother’s suit he opened his eyes and stares into the drop falling from above. Inside the water, Matt sees the clearing…
In the clearing surrounded by pine trees, Matt’s little boy body is enormous. The stars lite the night sky brilliant white, and Matt is out of breath.
The air before him is fluid, water inside water. Matt slaps it with his hand. It wavers and quivers. An invisible boundary made visible. Matt reaches inside. The enormous universe thrust closer all around him, inside him. Then bubbles, iridescent and fragile, soft roe laid out all around Matt, each egg with a person inside. Each bubble linked to numerous other bubbles bouncing up against each other as the person inside goes about their life like something mounting on ecstasy. Human roe.
Matt watches as inside his bubble, he is running.
He leans in, closer and closer, watches as he sprints into the clearing. Matt squints as he watches himself running hard toward the center of the open field, toward the drop off; his face and chest splattered in blood.
The bubble quivered and popped. Thrusted Reason back in his brother’s suit; back into his own body, inside the darkness of their bedroom. In the middle of Sammy’s bed, Matthew curled his body into a tight tinny-tiny ball and cried.
Reason’s Invisibles have been with him ever since. They come hard and heavy at the beginning of every investigation. Visions force him to endure a child’s abduction or death echo. And he knows this child abduction will follow the same pattern as all the others. He knows what to expect.
With shaking hands, Reason opens the glove box and searches for a fresh pack of gum, pushes a piece from its foil, and pops it into his mouth. Chewing hard and fast, Reason walks the salt and pepper snow powered dirt road toward the crime scene, passing several black and white cruisers. His breath quickens as he spies a familiar shadow materializes inside one of the police cruisers. A male figure Reason knows all too well. Reason makes eye contact with the ghost of his ex-partner, Johnny, shot down in the line of duty five months earlier and now able to comprehend unimaginable beauty. An ability Reason envies.
They nod. Reason quickens his pace toward the vehicle almost relieved. He ignores the current state of his ex-partner’s transparent body as it sits in the driver seat, blood still oozing from the hole in the back of his head. Reason discounts the way Johnny tracks his every move, acknowledging Reason’s continued physicality.
The whip descends.