“Drink is included in the price,” Dato tells me, pressing his lips to my palm. He hands me an enormous plastic water container filled with wine the color of honey, wrung from the deflated grapes that shield the terrace from the sun. “If you are having a party, you must ask me, and I will bring you wine. Everybody knows me here. They know I am a good man.” He owns half the flats on the ezo—the shared courtyards Georgian inexplicably refer to as “Italian-style.” The other half belongs to relatives from the village. They know him, and soon, he hints, they will know me. As his lodger, I am under his patronage. Shopkeepers will warn me off the expired milk in the refrigerators, and young men will refrain from speaking to me in the street.

By midnight, I am his daughter. His wife Eka, an animated woman with a heart-shaped face, presses me to her breasts and coos blandishments into my hair. I am, as ever, the kargi gogo, the good girl, the American girl who studies hard and does not come home with strange boys, and who pays the rent three months in advance. She has a feeling about me, she tells me. She loves me as she loves her own daughter. When I am in the ezo, all is at peace in her soul. I am like the sun, radiating all manner of wonders, easing the ache in her bones—she works so hard! And of course I must come to her son Giga’s wedding next month.

I move in three weeks later. The washing machine shoots pernicious sparks into the sink and the Internet stops working by sunset, but I don’t mind. I am home. My window looks out over the Metekhi Church. From my terrace, I can see the Narikala Fortress, which at night is lit gold like a circus tent. Dato forces a bunch of balcony-picked grapes into my hands; it takes every ounce of my appropriated Englishness to glide smoothly into the kitchen before I frantically shake off the spiders. Eka brings me presents: a plastic rabbit, a jewelry box, a cured goatskin tapestry. Dato brings me more wine.

A few days after I arrive, an American couple moves out of the upstairs flat. They leave in the night, without warning, a wad of cash wedged underneath the door. I get the story through the black-market whisperings at the expat cafe: The heat didn’t work. Dato refused to fix it. There was a scene in the ezo. Things were said.

I tell myself that this will never happen to me. I am the kargi gogo, the adopted daughter. I sit with Eka at the kitchen table, eating her food and refusing her cigarettes. Over tea, I am effusive about the Georgian mountains, about the Black Sea, about the places I have gone or will go, about the marketplace I have discovered in the underpass beneath Pushkin Street, about the new French cafe hidden behind the synagogue. She complains to me about her daughter, Khatuna, brilliant but mulish, whose piercings and sitcom-English are at once a source of consternation and secret pride. I pay my rent three months in advance.

Their son gets married; we skin a goat. He and his new wife Anushka, nineteen and breathtaking, live at home. Eka cleans up after them. Anushka, she insists, must study for her exams. I leave briefly for England, subletting my flat to a Spanish journalist, and then return again, bringing gifts and sweets in my suitcase. This offends Dato. I am the guest, the daughter, the gogo. I do not bring gifts.

I visit Eka at nightfall. By now I am intelligible, if not conversant, in Georgian. In our blend of languages, I tell her about my research, about my travels. She tells me about her past. Once she was a professor of Iranian studies at the university. She still teaches sometimes, she says, but she holds down another part-time job with the electric company, a position that far from guarantees our own power supply. Like Dato, she started out as a refugee, an ethnic Georgian expelled from one of the breakaway regions on the border with the Northern Caucasus (he from Abkhazia, she from South Ossetia). They met in exile in Tbilisi; they married soon after.

“My mother did not want me to marry a Georgian man,” she tells me. But Dato kisses her hand at the kitchen table. They flirt, and Khatuna rolls her eyes. “My Khatuna is clever,” she tells me. “She is moving to Paris. She will not marry a Georgian man.”

I tell Eka that I am thinking of converting to the Orthodox Church. I ask her to be my godmother. She cries with joy and force-feeds me cake. In the absence of my own family, I become used to our routine, our evening teas. It is Eka who comforts me when I fail to win a scholarship I’d been counting on; it is Eka who strokes my hair when I have a telephone argument with my boyfriend. When my own mother and I fight—an inevitability even with five thousand miles between us—Eka makes me tea.

The first problem is the neighbors: a young Georgian couple barely out of their teens. The walls between my flat and theirs are thin like ricepaper. I have a looming deadline; they have sex at four in the morning. There are fights—the smashing of furniture, the smack of flesh on flesh. There is a child, four years old at the most, who holds conversations with her teddy bear on the terrace. She speaks slowly, deliberately; she is the only one I can understand.

I complain to Eka about the noise, and she buries me under an avalanche of apologies. “Some people,” she sniffs. “They are not educated people, you know.” Eka is educated. She has art books on her coffee table. She holds a doctorate in Persian studies. She lets out one of the flats to an American lesbian, quietly enjoying the scandal it causes in the ezo, and effusively welcomes her Russian girlfriend, bringing them bowlfuls of potato soup and flushing at her own daring.

Soon we learn the whole story. Eka hears from a waiter at a nearby hotel that our neighbor is a prostitute, soliciting clients at the local bathhouses, sometimes bringing them home. Her putative husband is a gay man (“blue,” Eka calls him); they protect one another. When I come downstairs they are gone. “Think of Khatuna’s reputation,” Eka sighs.

There are new problems. By now, half the apartments on the ezo are empty—there have been too many departures—and, short of money, Eka grows frantic. I pay rent four months in advance; I circulate the flat details among my expat friends. But Dato’s method is swifter. He cuts a deal with local taxi-drivers serving the Ortachala bus station, where marshrutkas from Iran come in every morning. Groups of young men, come to Georgia for the licit gambling and the free-flowing wine, stay for a night or two or three, six to a room.

This offends Eka’s sense of propriety (“They are not educated people. Not like Georgians,” she says, expecting me to agree with her, and lights a cigarette) but she says nothing to Dato. He owns the building, after all, and when the whole courtyard is awakened by the shrieks of two prostitutes pounding frantically at the door, it is Eka who dries the blood, who throws away the broken furniture, who sends the guests away.

I come upstairs one night to find Eka weeping. The lights are off. Dato and Giga are out drinking. Khatuna is asleep; she has an exam in the morning. Eka hasn’t had the heart to ask her to help with the chores—she must focus on her studies, after all—and so she has been cleaning for the past six hours. She has cleaned until her fingers began to blister, and now she can do no more.

Dato is having an affair, she tells me, but she doesn’t mind. It comes as a relief to her. It means one less thing to deal with. Eka tells me about the man she loved before Dato—her true love, she said, the only man she’d ever loved. He was killed, like so many others, in a car crash in the mountains, where shrines to the dead mark every hairpin turn. In despair, she’d married Dato soon after.

“But he is a traditional Georgian man,” she says. I hold her hand and she sobs into my shoulder. “Did you know? The first time my mother came to our house, after we were married, she took one look at me and she started to cry. She saw me cleaning for him, and she cried, because she knew my life was over.”

She cannot regret it, she says. She has Khatuna, and Khatuna is her life. Khatuna will not marry a Georgian man—she is too clever for that. She has piercings and hair dyed an uncanny shade of red. She studies hard.

“You, genatsvale, are my daughter,” Eka says. “Ra kargi gogo!”

That night I believe her. I hold her in my arms and try to understand. For this, she does not forgive me.

Eka stops inviting me upstairs. She is unfailingly polite, even effusive, when we run into each other, when I pay the rent, but she no longer looks me in the eye. She knows that I know, now, and when Dato puts his arm around her she flushes, and I know that I have shamed her. She proffers a few halfhearted invitations—come for dinner next week, let me teach you to cook ajapsandali—but we both know the phone will never ring.

The heater stops working for hours on end. The water spits out of the faucet, intermittently at best and never on command. The terrace has become a storage facility for flea-ragged sofas, broken chairs, mildewing blankets.

The ezo remains a source of concern. Dato builds two more apartments and lets them, almost exclusively, to groups of young men. There are Armenians on the ground floor; ten Iraqis share the one-bedroom next to mine. They hold parties until dawn and leave the front door unlocked. Sometimes they stumble, drunkenly, against my window. They play music and invite girls downstairs. Sometimes I complain, to little avail. After one orgy, my neighbor comes over to apologize. His wife is coming on the train from Baku next week, he explains. Things will be quieter then.

At times I hear the sounds of violence—more slaps, more screams. My Georgian is insufficient for me to call the police, and nothing will happen if I do. I will only shame Eka. Word will get out that all is not well in the ezo. They will be the laughingstock of the neighborhood. People will think Khatuna was involved.

Eka declares that she has had enough. “We are educated people,” she insists. They are landowners, not slumlords. In any case, they have always let to Georgians—maybe an American or two, at most, but certainly not to Turks, Armenians, or Azeris. Even in Abanotubani, a neighborhood known for its diversity, our ezo has always been Georgian.

But Giga’s wife Anushka is pregnant, and Khatuna must go to graduate school, and Dato owns the land, and so the ezo is filled with cigarette-smoke, and none of us can sleep at night.

When Eka asks me for money she does so with downcast eyes. The fiction we maintain is that this is a loan, or else an advance towards the bills. The rent, after all goes to Dato directly. We both know this is a lie. She needs money to leave him. She needs five thousand dollars. I can afford one hundred. I don’t know what offends her more: that I can pay her so little, or that I pay her at all.

Within days of her departure, Dato rents out the master bedroom. Khatuna comes home from class to find a strange man sleeping in her bed. He refuses to let her take her schoolbooks from the shelf. He has paid for the room, he shouts, and that includes everything in it. She and Eka stay, briefly, with friends.

I run into Khatuna in the courtyard. “You know he beats her, right?” She lights a cigarette and throws her scarf over her shoulders. “Typical,” she snorts. “When I earn enough money, I’ll get us both a place.” She has two master’s degrees. She can’t find a job paying more than a hundred dollars a month. Paris is indefinitely postponed.

Of course, Eka returns. I learn through the gossip of the ezo that she had no choice. The house, the ezo, everything, is in Dato’s name. The lawyers wanted a hundred thousand dollars to challenge it. She appears one morning on the terrace, dressed in black, and greets me as if I don’t know where she has gone. She calls me a kargi gogo and offers me tea. I know enough to decline.

When the noise starts up again at four in the morning—the smashing of furniture, the echoing screams—I think at first that it is coming from downstairs, where a group of Iraqis have instated a makeshift speakeasy on the terrace. It is only once I’m outside that I realize the noise is coming from above.

Their fight lasts for hours. I can hear Eka scream. Anushka’s new baby starts crying; plates smash against walls. The wails are so long and loud that I consider, briefly, putting in earplugs. Immediately, I am ashamed. Khatuna, stoic and awake, posts pictures of cats on Facebook. We don’t contact one another. This happens every night for two weeks.

The night before I leave Tbilisi, I pack my bags. I can’t bring myself to knock on the door. I can hear the fighting from my room, and I don’t know what to say. I want to hold Eka in my arms, as I did the night she told me about her first love, to take her in, to repay her kindness with my own. I want to call the police, to physically wrest Dato off her. I know nothing would shame her more.

I do not say goodbye.

Georgia has new leaders now: the national Georgian Dream Party. The graffiti has started in my neighborhood: swastikas, racial slurs, warnings to immigrants, to my neighbors, Azeri and Armenian alike, that soon the violence will come. The Narikala Fortress is half-shadowed—the new regime, the rumour goes, wants to save electricity.

Anushka has dropped out of university. She helps Eka with the housework, now, and tends to the baby, whom Giga doesn’t see. She has lost her looks; she doesn’t need them. Giga stays out like his father does, going to see prostitutes at the bathhouse. Khatuna still can’t find a job.

Eka and I stay in touch. Sometimes she posts comments on Facebook, going into raptures over pictures of my boyfriend, our new house, our English life. She tells me how beautiful I look and reminds me how much she misses me, how much she loves me. “You are my daughter,” she writes. “Chemi kargi gogo.”

I write back, tell her I love her and I am thinking of her. It is not, and never will be, enough.

***

Listen to Tara read her essay:

***

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

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 ***

Richard Slotkin: “In American mythogenesis the founding fathers were not those eighteenth-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather, they were those who . . . tore violently a nation from implacable and opulent wilderness. . . . Regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience.”

In describing the evolution of the myth of regeneration through violence, Slotkin describes the hunter character as a type of hero whose “starting point is the commonday world, that part of reality which we know well and over which we have established our dominion and power.” For Slotkin, the key to understanding the myth of the hunter is the fact that “the myth of the hunter…is one of self-renewal or self-creation through acts of violence.”

Slotkin: “In the hunter myth, the emigrant’s sense of guilt for having broken the family circle by his departure is seen as the grounds for establishing a spiritual kinship with the Indians. But this kinship is justified in that it makes the hunter more effective as the destroyer of the Indian, as the exorcist of the wilderness’s darkness. He comes to know the Indian only in the act of destroying him. Beyond the exorcism, there is further explanation in the fact that the destruction of the Indian makes the hunter obsolete. His final atonement with society may take the form of voluntary exile [such as suicide, as occurs in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers] . . .  or a marriage with a white woman. With the Indian’s vanishment, the dialectic of the hero’s history ends, and the masculine rifle is hung on the wall above the feminine hearth. But the cycle of the myth never ends.”

***

Slotkin: “Guns are not simply tools or commodities; they are instruments of social power. And social, economic, and demographic changes over the period 1865-1925 led to a series of complex and often violent struggles for power. The industrialization of the economy threatened the status and well-being of workers and farmers; worker discontent seemed to businessmen and conservatives to threaten revolution; and the demographic transformation produced by new immigration and the migration north of southern blacks threatened social hierarchies. In response, cultural and political leaders at both national and local levels began to advocate a new approach to the administration of violence in American life. They called for more coercive measures against the new forces of disorder, from restricting the ballot for immigrant and racial minorities to an increased use of the military against organized labor. Gun manufacturers marketed pistols to the public for self-protection in a time of fear. But to governments and corporations they offered a new weapon, the machine gun, which was designed to allow a small professional force to outgun a conventionally armed mob.

“The number of guns in circulation is certainly an element in the modern gun culture, but the cultural ethic that sanctions private violence is the critical element. Switzerland and Israel, where army reservists maintain their own weapons, have comparable levels of distribution. Yet those weapons are rarely used for private revenge or crime. Nor can we put all the blame for gun violence on the excesses of the contemporary media. European and Japanese audiences consume violent American films as avidly as we do, and their own studios produce highly successful ultraviolent movies without comparable national homicide rates. What makes the difference is not just the availability of weapons but the ethic, rooted in our cultural history, that teaches the people how, when, and on whom violence may be used.”

 ***

Klaus Theweleit: “The soldier male murders differently. He’s not altogether present. One might say he’s intensely absent. . . . The perception of the ‘bloody mess’ doesn’t take place within a relation of observer to observed object in which both are clearly separated from each other. . . . It is hard to say what is seen, and what is hallucinated as an object. . . . They want to wade in blood; they want an intoxicant that will “cause both sight and hearing to fade away.” They want contact with the opposite sex––or perhaps simply access to sexuality itself––which cannot be named, a contact in which they can dissolve themselves while forcibly dissolving the other sex. They want to penetrate into its life, its warmth, its blood. It seems to me they aren’t just more intemperate, dangerous, and cruel than Freud’s harmless ‘motherfucker’ Oedipus; they are of an entirely other order.”

***

Macbeth dares “do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none.”

Cleanth Brooks: “Under the weight of [Lady Macbeth’s] reproaches of cowardice, however, he has dared do more, and has become less than a man, a beast. He has already laid aside, therefore, one kind of ‘manly readiness’ and has assumed another: he has garbed himself in a sterner composure than that which he counsels to his fellows—the hard and inhuman ‘manly readiness’ of the resolved murderer.”

 ***

R.D. Laing: “We have our secrets and our needs to confess. We may remember how, in childhood, adults at first were able to look right through us, and into us, and what an accomplishment it was when we, in fear and trembling, could tell our first lie, and make, for ourselves, the discovery that we are irredeemably alone in certain respects, and know that within the territory of ourselves there can be only our footprints.”

 ***

William Butler Yeats, “The Magi”:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

 ***

Miller: “Puritan opinion was at the opposite pole from Jefferson’s feeling that the best government governs as little as possible. The theorists of New England thought of society as a unit, bound together by inviolable ties; they thought of it not as an aggregation of individuals but as an organism, functioning for a definite purpose, with all parts subordinate to the whole, all members contributing a definite share, every person occupying a particular status. There was, it is true, a strong element of individualism in the Puritan creed; every man had to work out his own salvation, each soul had to face his maker alone. But at the same time, the Puritan philosophy demanded that in society all men, at least all regenerate men, be marshaled into one united array. The government of Massachusetts, and of Connecticut as well, was a dictatorship, and never pretended to be anything else; it was a dictatorship, not of a single tyrant, or of an economic class, or of a political faction, but of the holy and regenerate.”

 ***

Robert Calasso: “Violence is the expedient of whatever has been denied an audience.”

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In a poignantly regretful tone, you said to me, “I don’t remember anything before the age of eleven.” I rested my cheek on the hot plastic of my phone and stared into the light gray of the pavement. I wanted you to know this:

Only I share the secrets of our mother’s womb. Only I can lay them near your restless soul. Only I can whisper just right and make your tears ease behind your blue eyes. I can reach you wherever you are and take you from your unrest.

Do you seek to recover the memories of your mind? Do you want your cloak now? The burden of memory has always been carried by me, your older sister, the brave hand that labored at the loom and weaved the brawny cloth that was to save your memory. I made it for you, hoping that it would keep the fear inside the amygdala of your brain from translating into long-term memory.

I cried with you at the front door. You were three years old. I was five. You scratched at the door, trying to attach your fragile claws into the grains of the wood. You spared no energy attempting to reach for the small octagon window. You wanted to see, maybe for the last time, a mother who told you she was never coming back. You wanted to witness the dark space between her and us as it slowly grew into the darkness where your childhood is stored.

I took your moist hand and led you to my loom. I pulled you from the crime scene, but the sadness had already begun to absorb into your tiny thalamus. I was not yet a master with the satin of a toddler’s mind. My own satin was still just as white.

I cried with you in the corner of your bedroom. You were five and I was seven. We were crouched down in the fetal position. I tried to become the wallpaper, but its dingy, pink flowers wilted as I plead with them. Your head turned toward the doorway when you heard her coming through. You screamed, “Please! I’ll never do it again! I promise!” I urged you not to look. I told you to bury your head as deeply into the blue carpet as possible, but you had to see what was coming. This time the darkness stalked you, bristled against your spine and pinched your chubby arm until it bruised.

I saved some more of your satin and took you back to my loom. I stole the redness from your round, apple cheeks and stained the loose, white satin that I pulled from your spinal cord. I left it to dry, but the lint of your pain gathered still.

I cried with you when dozens of brown stained underwear were discovered behind your bed. You were seven and I was nine. We were outside in the fall leaves playing a game of “ghosts in the graveyard” when we heard the witchy screech calling you inside. I tried to hide you in the middle, in the moldiest part of the heap of leaves, but you refused to stay. You lunged into the lowest bow of an oak tree and held your breath. You wanted to see the darkness coming. When she grabbed your soft, blond hair and pulled you from the tree, you cried out for me. You cried, “Sissy! Sissy! Help me! Please!” I followed you. I held your shirttail as she dragged you inside and up the long, narrow staircase.

While she rubbed your nose in the pile, I stole some soft satin from your medulla oblongata and I weaved some more, but the stench of shame had already traveled to your mind.

I cried with you when the police brought you home. You were nine and I was eleven. The detective said that you ran away with the neighbor girl. You made it all the way to the railroad tracks, at least a mile away from home, before the darkness found you again. I asked you to visit me in my looming room after she was gone, but you fell into a deep sleep after a long guttural cry.

I stole some more white strands from your pons, put them in boiling water with the redness of your cheeks and watched it soak all night long.

When you were ten and I was twelve, you told me that you were happy that I have no father. You called me a “bastard girl.” You laughed jovially and taunted me with your sinister half grins. I pulled you by the shirt and threw you up against the cement wall of the garage. You laughed and called for her help. I let you go and took my beating.

Later, when she couldn’t find her hairbrush, she dragged us into the dim living room and made us fight. I watched your tears stream down in slow motion over the supple skin of your round nose and I punched as lightly as I could. I was stronger. By far I was the stronger of us both. A ballerina’s punch could’ve broken your nose, but I held back. We danced around the room like two tiny sparrows pecking at a fresh worm. We swung into the darkness between us until we were too exhausted to move and you staggered backward into the coral cushion of the couch.

I stole some fragments from your cerebellum, as she continued to humiliate you. She called you a “loser” and “fat little fuck.” I looked into your eyes and grabbed what was left of your pride. I took it back to my loom and inserted the shiny, silver strands into the middle of your cloak.

I was with you when you cried at the front door. You were eleven and I was thirteen. The Christmas tree was laid on its side, the tiny lights blinking into the darkness of night. She said she was never coming back and you believed her. You begged her to stay. You screamed, “Mommy, I love you! I love you! I really do!” She told us that Christmas wasn’t coming this year. She told us that we ruined it all. As she slammed the door behind her, I told you, “Shut up! Stop crying! Its better that she goes and never comes back! I’ll take care of us now.”

During those few hours of peaceful night, I worked away at my loom with the last bits of your graying hypothalamus. I asked you to try it on, told you, “It’s ready for you now.” You turned away and asked me to cook you something for Christmas dinner.

When she threw the grapefruit at your head and you ran through the house screaming and sobbing, I pulled pieces from your parietal lobe to form the sash.

When she grabbed our heads and beat them together, I snatched a string of your occipital lobe so you wouldn’t see my large forehead rushing toward yours. I used this to connect the soft white satin and the red-stained thread together with the shiny silver fibers in the middle.

When she screamed at your teachers because you were failing fourth grade, I went back into the classroom and begged them not to fail you, told them that I would teach you what you couldn’t seem to learn.

When she held you down and bit into your back, I told her that whatever it was you had done wrong was all my fault.

When she laughed at you after you fell from the roof, I bandaged your knees.

When she punished you by telling you that you’d never see your father again, I cuddled with you until your body stopped quivering.

I read fairy tales to you.

I fought off your bullies at school.

I helped you practice for your school plays.

I pushed you around in my pink stroller and made you giggle.

I gave everyone a reason to hate me, so they would stop despising you.

I turned on the closet light when you were too scared of your childhood darkness.

Again and again, I returned to my looming room with the hope that you would someday wear the cloak I made for you. You kept growing out of it. Every year, you grew taller and meaner. You grew more careless and brutal. You lost your way in the darkness. Every year, you rejected my cloak, but I never stopped weaving for you.

When I left you with her, I was fourteen and you were twelve. I took the cloak to the detention home with me. I took it to my single cell and I stitched relentlessly. I sewed until my fingers were raw and peeling.

When I heard that you were living with a friend’s mother and you had been sleeping with her, I stretched your cloak from Aunt Jo’s house to where I imagined you living. I wanted you to feel the softness of my love for you, as the white satin caressed your teenaged face.

When I was in college, I found out that you quit high school and became a father at age seventeen. I borrowed the fabric from my own mind to make your cloak bigger, stronger and wider.

When I bought my first car, I found out that you were discharged from the military for starting and finishing a bar brawl in Korea. I added a camouflage pattern and placed gold stars in each corner.

When I moved to Newark, Ohio for my first job out of college, I found out that you were going to prison for beating a man in his face with a 40-ounce bottle of Cobra. I went back to the loom and began mixing in some barbed wire.

When I bought my first home, I found out that your new girlfriend was pregnant with a baby girl, and you had been sent back to prison for possession of cocaine. I arranged for the cloak to be delivered to you in jail, but you told the guard to send it back.

When I started working on my Master’s degree, I found out that you broke a man’s nose and sent him driving in fear until he crashed into a tree. I sewed some steel wool along the edges and inside the seams.

Two years ago, I learned that you beat a woman in the face outside of a bar. All three of your small children were crying at the doorway when you were handcuffed and driven off to jail. From the front door, they stared into the darkness parting them from you and refused to look away. I began sewing for them, too.

You still hide from the police.

You still beat your wife and snort cocaine.

You still use your paycheck to party with other women.

You have two more children, one you’ve named after me.

You still cry for the love of a mother who told you she’s never coming back.

And when you tell me that you don’t remember anything before the age of eleven, dear brother, I weave for you.

One day, you’ll remember. One day, I’ll cloak you with your memories. I’ll stitch the strands of your brain back together again. The nerves in your mind will reattach in the middle, relax your frontal lobe. Your corpus callosum will reconnect with soft, white satin.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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Since you are a half-a-wide-western country away, I will tell you what the red is like—it is like splotches of afterbirth on white hospital sheets. The blossoms bloom relentlessly with the brazenness usually found in the faces of those gripped by insanity—momentarily unstable or terminally ill—frightening onlookers, emotionally invested or not. It is not ironic, but fitting that there are only six roses. Half-assed, like a marriage proposal that never happened, like a joke where only you laugh, like a therapy session where only you talk. The arrangement contains an unusually substantial amount of the requisite baby’s breath. This bouquet has the showy buds of motel paintings, and those promising sketches of gardening catalogs. Gratuitous almost. So standard they negate their own importance. They are such roses that it is hard to find any subtext. Granted, this seems a little much to expect—that even a bouquet have a subtext. So it seems, but yet it is not.

On my program, Young and Restless, endless flower arrangements regale nearly every scene with nods to romance quite suitably unabashed. The staged settings of fictional circumstance are appropriate locales for the flourishing frivolity of kermit-green gerber daisies and explosions of champagne-colored dahlias. Most every office, boudoir/hotel room, hospital room and condo feature fresh arrangements ranging in luxury according to the hierarchy of the characters in the scene. Bachelor pads, dive bars, and the city jail are the exceptions. Though the more gentlemanly the bachelor, the more likely he will have an arrangement somewhere in his set. Rarely will you see a full-on bouquet of red roses. On Young and the Restless red roses have subtext. There’s subversion. The roses, and their appeal to tradition, matter when juxtaposed against the couple’s non-traditional situation. He is not the father of her baby, but how he will drink deeply the nectar of denial. She isn’t herself, but her sister, and yet, she loves the children just the same. The couple isn’t married to each other, but to other people, but their love is true. You and I? We are married to each other, and yet there’s no truth to tell about our love. The appeal to tradition is endearing when a couple is four children deep into a young, restless and homicidal love. Your roses don’t appeal to tradition. They don’t appeal. They adhere.

The red is like the carpet of our church, excuse me—my church—where I walked on the arm of my father on my wedding day down to meet you at the altar. I try to imagine someone sending such a bouquet with the right intentions. I can’t. I can’t imagine any person being so imbued with the cultural construct that they deserve nothing more than the banality of another bouquet of the quintessential red. Perhaps some do find them beautiful. Perhaps older people do. Irrelevant people. People who are just performing the state of personhood. Do you remember how no one came to our wedding? Do you remember the dark wooden emptiness of the church pews on that Sunday afternoon? Do you know how that comforts me now?

I’d like to say something about the thorns—but we both know that I abhor cliché, and so we can leave out the obvious points of pain. The blossoms caught your son’s eyes and held his attention, which is saying something for an eight week old. My father moved the flowers from the kitchen to a small table in front of the picture window. Here we look out upon a large oak and several feeders. My mother bought a songbird reference guide for my father, but bird-watching has been good for us all. Your son’s baby swing faces the window with the two velvet green chairs on either side. The chairs were in our bedroom when we lived downtown. One of those antique chair cushions was desecrated when you sat on a bowl of spaghetti. You were drunk, and suicidal. You berated me until I made you a bowl of spaghetti. I begged you not to spill. You sat on the bowl. A few months after you sat on the bowl of spaghetti, while I was staying with our friends Mandy and Robbie to get away from you, Robbie came home drunk in the middle of the night demanding to be fed. Mandy fixed him a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup while she cried. Then he dumped out the soup at the kitchen table, cursing the stupidity of Mandy, the filthiness of their home, and the depth of his depression. I wonder how many boys, tongues thick and unmanageable from liquor, come home on any given night to demand food from their children’s young and anxious mothers. The stupid slutty whores that unfortunately have born their damned-able and forgettable progeny? Do you remember those chairs?

I can’t comment on the scent of the roses, because you couldn’t pay me to smell them. Their perfection is pedestrian and infuriating. I refuse to get close. When they came, I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t proud. I wasn’t relieved. I tried to throw them away out in the garage, but my daughter, your step-daughter, your soon to be ex-step-daughter, caught and confronted me in just the way you would expect her to—she’s not your typical nine year old. How could she be after having to throw herself around and on top of me as protection from your harsh words? Hugging me, pushing my hair out my face, as I sat on the floor pressed against the washing machine, the legs of my pants covered in snot, while you yelled. Crazy. Psycho. Hate. Dead.  It isn’t so easy to avoid the thorns, I apologize. Do you remember how you told me you bought your ex-girlfriend flowers on Valentine’s Day while you were in bed with another girl?

The horrid flowers you sent suck up murky water rapaciously. I’m an ingrate. I don’t deny I’m selfish, angry, bitchy, depressed, annoying, and at times stupid. Red is violent, and this is fucking obvious. Someone refills the vase. It isn’t me. I make a daily effort not to lie, but I told my daughter I was putting the flowers in the garage to keep them cool. Cool really isn’t the word for a Midwestern February afternoon when the sky is clabbered over with clouds of coldness so fierce there is no way to describe it except cruel. I don’t want to kill them but I want them to die. My daughter believes we moved in with Grandma and Grandpa because of how much you work—how you’re never home. So that was partly true. Do you remember how the cat shot out of the bathroom, wet with imposed salvation, days after you and she were baptized?

Flowers aren’t cheap, but I’m sure they didn’t cost as much as an expensive dinner out in Santa Clarita or drinks at a club in Hollywood. It seems, from the bank statements, that you have been having quite a few of those. I knew the flowers were from you before I even knew they were roses. They are quality roses, and so I should appreciate that, but really, you just selected the type. The florist is the one who plucked each budding stem from the bucket and placed them with precision. The delivery guy is the one who made his way here. My father tipped the delivery guy a few bucks. It seems that my misguided love for you will never stop costing my parents money. Do you remember how your extended family looked at you, sitting around a too large table, squeezed against the walls in the upstairs room at the rehab center? Do you know that while you were in rehab I slept better than I’d ever slept before or after because I knew that you were safe? That I was safe? That my daughter was safe. That our cars were safe. That our money was safe. That our computer was safe. That my job was safe.

The only time I can stand the sight of the bouquet of bullshit is early in the morning, before I flip on the lights. In the dark their perfection is only imagined, not confirmed by sight. This eases the edges like a pain pill dulls the healing muscles around the site of my incision. Even my mother asks in exasperation, will they never die? We feel compelled to keep them for your soon to be ex-step-daughter’s sake. We want to hide our nausea because it could be catching like our anger. You said I could take a flower out and put it in my daughter’s room, but no one wants to touch them, or talk to too much about them. I can’t stand the thought of one of those pernicious stems lying in her daughter’s room, dying too slowly to be the harbinger that it should so poetically be. When the day comes that even the outermost edges of the petals finally give over to the faintest of juicy browns, hinting at the beginning of rancidness yet to come, I will throw out the whole bouquet—crystal vase, garish red bow, and bracken water. There won’t be any waiting. There will be no second chances. There will be no confusion. The flowers will be gone. Do you remember how I kicked at the plasterboard wall of our closet until it broke its connection to the ceiling? Do you remember every square inch, of every ceiling, of every room we have tried to share?

It’s a shame that the snow is melted. Not only am I emotionally unprepared for the mush and the saccharine sweetness of an Iowa spring, but I would have liked to have thrown the ruddy bouquet outside in the snow so I could see the roses flopped on the ground like bloody victims of pillage, muddied down where the smaller snowbirds and swallows pick at droppings from the feeders. Tossed out like garbage. Useless. Unable to be pawned for money. Disgusting. Frivolous. Your son wears diapers. Not roses. And again. Here I am with the thorns. A baby needing diapers. Home with the parents in Iowa. A baby in a swing. A cliché. A bird-watching, baby- nursing, heart-wrenching cliché.

The warmer it gets, the less I like seeing the birds eat. The more I sit bird-brooding instead of bird-watching.  What does it matter without the snow? There’s no desperation. It is gratuitous. I can’t stop thinking about gratuity. Disgusting. It’s like a boy crying after the loss of his rectitude. A boy slurring his words, staggering with drink, erupting with belches and promises of equal significance. A boy lying until the phone he’s using loses service because the weight of his falsehoods crash the whole network. It turns the stomach. Like a pregnant mother left alone on a mountain with no car. Like a baby pushed into the mind’s burgeoning genre collection of afterthought. Like a placenta fused unnaturally to a cervix. Like the wretched splitting of the mid-section. Like the sound of electric medical equipment sawing through flesh. Like the bloody floor after an emergency cesarean. Like a vase of red roses. Like red.

***

Rumpus original art by Paige Russell. 

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When it happens, I feel this sharp pang that runs right through the center of my body. Or I get nauseous. Or I have to vomit. Or I break into a cold sweat. Or I feel myself shutting down, and I go into a quiet place. Or I close my fingers into tight fists until my knuckles ache. My reaction is visceral and I have to take a deep breath or two or three or more. I have to remind myself of the time and distance between then and now. I have to remind myself that I am not the girl in the woods anymore. I have to try to convince myself I never will be again. It has gotten better over the years.

It gets better until it doesn’t.

 ***

The first congressional hearing on television violence was held in 1954 and in the ensuing years, the debate about television and violence has been ongoing. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 dictated that televisions needed to include a chip to monitor program ratings. The current television parental guidelines went into effect on January 1, 1997. These guidelines were designed to help parents monitor what their children were watching and get some sense of the appropriateness of a given television program.

The guidelines rated television content by age-appropriateness from G (all audiences) to MA (mature audiences only). There were also a second set of guidelines designed to protect children from violence, coarse language, and sexual themes. These guidelines, of course, only work if someone is monitoring what children are watching and is able to enforce a set of standards about what children can watch. Cable boxes and most televisions now allow parents to lock certain channels or shows with ratings they consider inappropriate for their children but there is still only so much a parent can control.

How effective, then, are these ratings and guidelines? In “Ratings and Advisories: Implications for the New Ratings System for Television,” Joanne Cantor et. al. note how research shows that, “parental discretion warnings and the more restrictive MPAA ratings stimulate some children’s interest in viewing programs,” and “the increased interest in restricted programs is more strongly linked to children’s desire to reject control over their viewing than to their seeking out violent content.” Even children want a taste of forbidden fruit. At the very least, children don’t want to be told they cannot taste that fruit.

Television ratings are like airport security—an act of theater, an illusion designed to reassure us, to make us feel like we control the influences we allow into our lives.

We want our children to be safe. We want to be safe. We want or need to pretend this is possible.

When I see the phrase, “trigger warning,” I am far more inclined to read whatever follows. I enjoy the taste of forbidden fruit, myself.

I also know trigger warnings cannot save me from myself.

***

When a man enters my office, I am alone, and he closes the door behind him.

 ***

Trigger warnings are, essentially, ratings or protective guidelines for the largely unmoderated Internet. Trigger warnings provide order to the chaos; they are a signal that the content following the warning may be upsetting, may trigger bad memories or reminders of traumatic or sensitive experiences. Trigger warnings allow readers to have a choice—steel yourself and continue reading or protect yourself and look away.

Many feminist communities use trigger warnings, particularly when discussing rape, sexual abuse, and violence. By using these warnings, these communities are saying, “This is a safe space. We will protect you from unexpected reminders of your history.” Members of these communities are given the illusion they can be protected.

There are a great many potential trigger warnings. Over the years, I have seen trigger warnings for eating disorders, poverty, self-injury, bullying, heteronormativity, suicide, sizeism, genocide, slavery, mental illness, explicit fiction, explicit discussions of sexuality, homosexuality, homophobia, addiction, alcoholism, racism, the Holocaust, ableism, and Dan Savage.

Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning.

This is the uncomfortable truth—everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at her or him.

***

When someone comes up behind me unexpectedly.

***

We all have history. You can think you’re over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you.

It’s understandable that some people want to be protected from this truth.

I used to think I didn’t have triggers because I told myself I was tough. I was steel. I was broken beneath the surface but my skin was forged, impenetrable. Then I realized I had all kinds of triggers. I simply buried them deep until there was no more room inside me. When the dam burst, I had to learn how to stare those triggers down. I had a lot of help, years and years of help.

I have writing.

***

When I hear the word slut in a certain tone.

 ***

Every so often debates about trigger warnings flare hotly and both sides are resolute. Trigger warnings are either ineffective and impractical or vital for creating safe online spaces.

It has been suggested, more than once, that if you don’t believe in trigger warnings, you aren’t respecting the experiences of rape and abuse survivors. It has been suggested, more than once, that trigger warnings are unnecessary coddling.

It is an impossible debate. There is too much history lurking beneath the skin of too many people. Few are willing to consider the possibility that trigger warnings might be ineffective, impractical and necessary for creating safe spaces all at once.

The illusion of safety is as frustrating as it is powerful.

***

When I visit the gynecologist.

***

There are things that rip my skin open and reveal what lies beneath but I don’t believe in trigger warnings. I don’t believe people can be protected from their histories. I don’t believe it is at all possible to anticipate the histories of others in ways that would be satisfying for anyone.

There is no standard for trigger warnings, no universal guidelines. Once you start, where do you stop? Does the mention of the word rape require a trigger warning or is the threshold an account of a rape? How graphic does an account of abuse need to be before meriting a warning? Are trigger warnings required anytime matters of difference are broached? What is graphic? Who makes these determinations?

It all seems so futile, so impotent and, at times, belittling. When I see trigger warnings, I think, “How dare you presume what I need to be protected from?”

Trigger warnings also, when used in excess, start to feel like censorship. They suggest that there are experiences or perspectives too inappropriate, too explicit, too bare to be voiced publicly. As a writer, I bristle when people say, “This should have had a trigger warning.” I think, “For what?”

I do not understand the unspoken rules of trigger warnings. I cannot write the way I want to write and consider using trigger warnings. After a while, I would second guess myself, temper the intensity of what I have to say. I don’t want to do that. I don’t intend to ever do that.

Writers cannot protect their readers for themselves nor should they be expected to.

There is also this: maybe trigger warnings allow people to avoid learning how to deal with triggers, getting help. I say this with the understanding that having access to professional resources for getting help is a privilege. I say this with the understanding that sometimes there is not enough help in the world. That said, there is value in learning, where possible,  how to deal with and respond to the triggers that cut you open, the triggers that put you back in terrible places, that remind you of painful history.

It is untenable to go through life as an exposed wound. No matter how well intended, trigger warnings will not staunch the bleeding; trigger warnings will not harden into scabs over your wounds.

 ***

When. When. When.

***

I don’t believe in safety. I wish I did. I am not brave. I simply know what to be scared of; I know to be scared of everything. There is freedom in that. That freedom makes it easier to appear fearless—to say and do what I want. I have been broken, so I am prepared should that happen again. I have, at times, put myself in dangerous situations. I have thought, you have no idea what I can take. This idea of unknown depths of endurance is a refrain in most of my writing. Human endurance fascinates me, probably too much.

Intellectually, I understand why trigger warnings are necessary for some people. I understand that painful experiences are all too often threatening to break the skin. Seeing or feeling yourself come apart is terrifying.

This is the truth of my trouble with trigger warnings: there is nothing words on the screen can do that has not already been done. A visceral reaction to a trigger is nothing compared to the actual experience that created the trigger.

I don’t know how to see beyond this belief to truly get why trigger warnings are necessary. When I see trigger warnings, I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel protected. Instead, I am surprised there are still people who believe in safety and protection despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

This is my failing.

But.

I do recognize that in some spaces, we have to err on the side of safety or the illusion thereof. Trigger warnings aren’t meant for those of us who don’t believe in them just like the Bible wasn’t written for atheists. Trigger warnings are designed for the people who need them, who need that safety.

Those of us who do not believe should have little say in the matter. We can neither presume nor judge what others might feel the need to be protected from.

 ***

And yet.

There will always be a finger on the trigger. No matter how hard we try, there’s no way to step out of the line of fire.

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The first time I saw my father’s specific sadistic brutality manifest in physical terms, I was four. My sister was flopped across his lap, barebottom. He hit her thirteen times with his leather belt. I counted. That’s all I was old enough to do. It took a very long time. She was twelve and had the beginning of boobs. I was in the bedroom down the hall, peeking out from a faithlessly thin line through my barely open bedroom door. The first two great thwacks left red welts across her ass. I couldn’t keep watching, but I couldn’t move or breathe, either. I closed my eyes. I drew on the wall by my door with an oversized purple crayon — large aimless circles and scribbles. Not the sound of the belt—but her soundlessness is what shattered me. Still.

The second time I saw my father’s naked brutality he came at my mother – I mean the second time I physically witnessed my father looking more animal than man, his embodied rage – he threw a coffee mug at her head. Hard. He once tried out for the Cleveland Indians as a pitcher. That hard. He missed, and the mug punched a hole through the wall in the kitchen. My sister was long gone—the escape of college. Afterward, there was dead silence in the kitchen. I know because I held my breath. Even air molecules seemed to still. I’d recently written a fifth grade school report on hurricanes.  It felt like we were in the eye.

My father never struck my mother. She told me it was because she was a cripple. My mother was born with one of her legs six inches shorter than the other. She said, “He wouldn’t dare hit me,” the lilt of a southern drawl and vodka in her never-went-to-college voice, some kind of messed up trust in her too blue eyes. Instead, he molested his daughters.

Our legs were perfect.

Baseball.

Purple crayon.

When I was sixteen a boy older than me asked me out on a date. I was as sixteen as a girl could be. Barely able to breathe with the incomprehensibility of my own body. The heat and pulse and lurch.  When he drove me home, and parked outside my house, we kissed. Because I was stupid and sixteen I thought we were alone. I got out of the car, and leaned back in through his open driver’s side window to kiss him some more, my mouth, his mouth, wet heat and tongue of youth sliding into youth, and my father, who was standing behind me there in the dark, grabbed me by the ear and dragged me all the way back to the house. My ear became more than red and hot. Then ringing. Then pain. I thought he would pull my ear off. Briefly, I saw the boy step out of his car—did he mean to save me? I shook my head wordlessly, no. Or maybe it was just in my eyes through the dark. No. He got back in his car.

That night my father hit me with language. Slut. Over and over again.

Purple Crayon.

Belt.

The second time I was molested I was twelve. I was on an out-of-state swimming trip with my swim team. Nebraska. Even now, I understand, the hormonal chaos of all of us half-naked in the pool every day of our lives, six to eight a.m., four to six p.m. pushing our corporeal truths up and out—I understand how hard it was for our bodies to find forms for things. A seventeen year old boy named Robert asked me to come sit by him on the plane and share his Walkman earphones—to hear a song he liked. He had one in his ear and he put the other in my ear. The song was “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty. As I leaned in closely, he reached up underneath my tank top and fondled my barely there tits. I kept stealing glances at the airplane barf bag. But I didn’t move. I remember being terrified to move. Not the terror of violence. I didn’t think he’d hurt me. It was the terror of my own body. My nipples responding to this thing that made me want to throw up.  Or just die there in the seat of the airplane. Crashing, crashing. Wishing for it. “When you wake up it’s a new morning/ The sun is shining, it’s a new morning/ You’re going, you’re going home.”

To this day if I hear “Baker Street,” which is mercifully almost never, I can vomit.

To this day, I would rather have taken ten plane trips sitting next to Robert than live with my father growing up.

Baseball.

Coffee mug.

Walkman.

Barf bag.

The first time a man came at me with a fist I was eighteen. I passed out. Not from his fist though. I’d passed out drunk. When I woke up all my clothes were on the floor, my legs were spread eagle on his bed, and I was wet and sticky and sore between them. There was a bruise between my shoulder and my breast. He was snoring, asleep back in bed. I stood up and watched him sleep. I remember thinking he is beautiful. He had long blonde feathered hair and an astonishingly fit body. He did Karate. Competitively. In fact his power and beauty were what made me go home with him from the bar. I mean I went out of my way to catch his eye, wag my ass, throw my huge mane of blonde lioness hair around. I pretended I didn’t know how to play pool—which my father had taught me when I was ten—so he could “teach” me. He had blue eyes. Standing there watching him sleep, my legs shaking some, I thought, he is beautiful, and I am not, I am stupid, and drunk, and I deserve this and more.

Then I called my roommate from college at 3:00 A.M. and she and her boyfriend came to get me. I couldn’t find my underwear. I waited for them in the dark and cold morning on the front lawn. He came out before they got to me and punched me in the jaw—not hard enough to call the cops, not soft enough to keep my ear from aching, saying, “You tell anyone you crazy little bitch, I’ll find you.” He smiled. He handed me my underwear.

I waited for my roommate to pick me up. I heard a dog bark. I smelled cow shit from Lubbock stockyards. I picked at a scab on my arm like a kid. You’re no victim if you are a drunk ass slut. I didn’t cry. I swallowed it whole.

I didn’t tell anyone. In fact, later that year? I went home with him again. On purpose.

Purple crayon.

Coffee mug.

Vodka.

Underwear.

The second time a man hit me I was in college. The man was a poet. A pacifist. A hippie. Somehow I believed things like that could matter. But he had a hair trigger rage in him. His father had been career military and hit him all through boyhood. The rage in him sat like the crouch of dead dreams in his fingers. Poems came out. And that shot to the bridge of my nose. Probably that’s what drew me to him. It was familiar.

Twice in my life I’ve been homeless, both times the result of emotional trauma. Both times I woke up under overpasses with no pants or underwear, vomit everywhere, a throbbing pain between my legs extending to my asshole. I’m assuming I was raped. But where do you put the story of rape when there’s no man to blame? I put it the only place I knew how to. I put it back into my body.

Belt.

Barf bag.

Baseball.

Purple Crayon.

I’m trying to tell you something here, but it’s starting to sound like what I’m saying is that I deserved these violences. Let me be clear. I did not. No one does. Ever. But when women tell how it is for them, when they self narrate their ordinary lives, it’s instantly sucked up by the culture—there’s already a place waiting for the story. A place where the story gets annulled.  It’s 2012 and I’m still reading about what the girl or woman was wearing that night. Or how she should hold aspirin between her legs. Or how she shouldn’t say the word “vagina” on the floor of congress. Or how a friend at a bar wants the sob stories to end. What I’m trying to tell you is that violence against girls and women is in every move we make, whether it is big violence or small, explicit or hidden behind the word father. Priest. Lover. Teacher. Coach. Friend. I’m trying to explain how you can be a girl and a woman and travel through male violence like it’s part of what living a life means. Getting into or out of a car. A plane. Going through a door to your own home. A church. School. Pool. It can seem normal. It can seem like just the way things are.

To be honest, the first reason I understand the complexities of male violence against girls and women is that I went to college and read a shit ton of books—and even that wasn’t enough education—I went to graduate school, where finally, finally, the books that I read and the films that I watched and the art that I experienced and the teachers that I had showed me just how not normal male violence against girls and women—or boys and men—is. Ever. And yet at the same time, the more conscious I became, the more I also understood that the pervasiveness of that violence has saturated the entire culture. It’s both omnipresent, and unbelievably invisible in its dispersed and sanctioned forms. So many times the cult of good citizenship covering over the atrocities of girls and boys. Mothers who go numb. Counselors who ask the wrong questions. Coaches and priests and teachers whose desires are costumed and sanctified by their authority. Neighbors who go blind and deaf. Paying bills. Drinking lattes.

The second reason I understand is that I am alive. Still. Differently.

It wasn’t that I did not understand the violences against me were wrong. I did. Even at three years of age. It was that I thought I deserved it, and possibly worse:  that deserving it, I could withstand it. Mightily. Heroically. You see? As a righteously indignant defense. I could take it. As good as if I was some body’s son. It was a choice.

When my father raised his hand to me in our garage at eighteen, I said, “Do it.”

When the poet punched me in the nose in my pick-up truck at a stop light, I said, “Get the fuck out of my car or I will kill you.” And I meant it.

I’m telling you this because I know I’m not the only one who came of age like this. Up and through male violence. I’m telling you because there are all the things that need to be done “out there” to stop it. But then there are also all the things that needed to be done in me. To stop it.

Listen, these are not the sad stories. Worse things happened to me. Those aren’t the sad stories either.  These stories don’t carry the pathos to signify culturally in my culture. These stories I’m telling you are commonplace. That’s the point. They just happen and you live them and as you go you have to decide who you want to be.

Victim.

Slut.

Bitch.

Crayon.

Baseball.

Belt.

When I was thirteen, in Jr. High, my best friend Emory was beaten and sodomized in the boy’s locker room at school by some sadistic members of the football team. Because he was gay. Or at least that’s what they were aiming at. In truth, Emory had not yet finished discovering his own sexual self. Like my sister, Emory suffered rectal damage the rest of his life. They used a baseball bat. Emory says, I’ll never be in any kind of relationship. Emory says, my chance at being with anyone, a family, feeling OK, died that day. Emory was also a swimmer, and so after swim practice, sometimes we’d sit in the parking lot waiting for our moms to pick us up and drink vodka from a flask an older girl swimmer had bequeathed to me. I never knew what to say about what happened. I didn’t even understand it until we were adults. I’m only glad we are still in contact – writing. The tether of words when the world isn’t safe like it was supposed to be.

The boys who committed this brutality were never charged. Emory couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone, and anyhow, at that time, there were no laws on the books to protect us anyway. Also, he was instructed by his father’s lawyer that the term “rape” was not available to him in this situation.

Baseball.

Purple crayon.

Barf bag.

I’m a writer. It’s all I really know how to do, besides being a wife and mother. I consider myself a success story. Because I am alive I mean, and because I think writing and books and art are the reason. As a writer, I’m not so sure I see much difference in the storylines for women and girls who enter the field. I see that some art is rewarded for being “universal,” and it is written by men. Other art is deemed confessional. Or sentimental. Or too subjective. And it is written by women. I see that straight white men are published in prestigious venues more often than women. I see that women are told by editors and agents and publishers to take explicitly sexual or violent or subjective language out of their work unless they can bend the language toward the culture in a way that will sell. These are gendered terms, laden with a force as real as my father’s. I write my heart out. I do. For better or worse. I write my heart out because my heart, well, she was almost taken from me. Every year of my life until now. It’s something I can “do.” A verb. Something that has at least a chance of interrupting another girl or boy’s story with other options. Write. Make art. Find others. It’s a choice.

Listen, I know this is a bit of a dreary story. But whenever I get told that, by friends, or agents, or editors, or publishers, I think, if this dreary story is hard for you to live with, how are we supposed to live with you?

When my father was thirty, he had all of his teeth pulled. Just bad genes with regard to teeth, I guess.  Early dentures. When he came home from the surgery he turned all the living room lights off, became part of the couch, and turned the television on. It was a horrible week waiting for his mouth to heal. I don’t know how to say it—things went too dark and horribly submerged. If my mother or I spoke, he yelled, but we could barely understand him. Laughter and crying kept getting caught and confused in my throat. My mother made soup. Mashed potatoes. Ice cream. I drew on the walls in my room. It was like his rage had gone underground, under the beds, the house, the dirt. But we could feel it, pulsing.  Pervading everything.

They sent his teeth home with him. I never understood that. I just know I stole one. A molar. Off white as a baseball and like a wrong pearl. I have it still.

Sometimes I think about the children that didn’t come out of me. Four. Three of them were zygotes. The zygotes were sucked out of me in what can best be described as a process involving a hoover upright old-school vacuum. That’s what it always looked like to me. Though medical technology has advanced since I was in my teens and twenties.  And yet it’s 2012 and I keep reading about ideas like forced sonograms where the newly or barely pregnant woman is made to watch. I saw a congressman interviewed who actually said, “Well, no one can really be made to ‘watch,’ the woman could just close her eyes.’” While a camera wand is shoved up her. It makes me think of the film A Clockwork Orange.  It makes me think how yes we are forced to watch, every day of our lives, we are forced to watch how our culture still doesn’t get what it means to live every moment of a life in the body of a woman.

Baseball.

Purple crayon.

Underwear.

Belt.

The zygotes that did not become children—I think about them. Who would they be? Would they have lived? It’s a question I feel I’ve earned the right to, since one of the children who came through my body died—nothing wrong with my body or hers, sometimes babies just die. Though for more than a decade I believed it was my body that killed her. My body I’d made into a war zone to mirror the culture as I saw it. When Christians in particular talk to me about “killing babies” and abortions, in my head I think, trust me, I know the difference between a dead baby and a zygote. Once a white Christian woman with shellacked blonde hair and the smallest green eyes I’d ever seen told me I was going to hell on my way in to Planned Parenthood. I thought to myself, lady, I’ve been there and back. Only it was called “family.”

Those zygotes, would they be boys? Girls? Would I have survived? I had no money during that part of my life. I stole food and did things I’m not proud of so that I could eat and have shelter and go to school. I also worked three jobs. And still I needed food stamps, just to stay alive. What would they have eaten, the three zygotes, where would they have lived? Would there have been a man under the beds, house, down in the dirt, his rage and violence waiting? Would I have let him in the door, his face so familiar I couldn’t recognize it?

I carry deep shame in my body for the zygotes. I don’t know a single woman alive who is “happy” to have had an abortion. Or two. Or four. And it’s not just me. Other women. Republicans. Democrats.  Unaffiliated women. Atheists. Christians. Muslims. Buddhists. Armies of us walking around carrying our body secrets. Our shame over the zygotes. Or maybe there’s something deeper than shame—maybe there’s a second self I had to kill in order to live. The Lidia who believed she deserved it. Could take it. Should. It was a choice.

My father’s tooth is in a pink plastic box that was my mother’s. Inside it too, a lock of my hair and two of my baby teeth and that little bracelet they used to give babies that spells out L-I-D-I-A. I’m the one who put my father’s tooth in there after my mother died. I don’t know why. Sometimes I get it out and look at it – hold it in the palm of my hand. So small. The man who terrorized us. His DNA. So large the culture that let him.

I am a survivor of sexual abuse and male violence. I’ve had three abortions. I also had one baby girl that died the day she was born. I have a husband and a son now. My husband plays cello, and makes films and writes, and in the evening he hits the heavy bag; he’s proficient at Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu.  My son can’t throw a baseball properly to save his life. His favorite color is purple. He draws and draws. Me, between them, I am alive, unflinchingly.

 ***

Executive Order — Preventing and Responding to Violence Against Women and Girls Globally

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Policy. (a) Recognizing that gender-based violence undermines not only the safety, dignity, and human rights of the millions of individuals who experience it, but also the public health, economic stability, and security of nations, it is the policy and practice of the executive branch of the United States Government to have a multi-year strategy that will more effectively prevent and respond to gender-based violence globally.

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The suspected shooter, James Holmes, is an Aurora-local and former University of Colorado-Denver graduate student in the School of Medicine. He has not yet stated a motive and has no previous criminal record. He did tell police that there were explosive booby traps in his home, which police say may take days to dismantle.

The largest gun control advocacy group in the U.S., The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, issued a statement expressing sympathies to the victims’ families and wounded. They’ve also started a petition to demand action from Congress in response to the tragedy.

The movie’s Paris premiere was cancelled and the stars of the film have cancelled promotional events and interviews. Warner Brothers and Cinemark have responded to the shooting. WB has pulled trailers for Gangster Squad, which has shown at some Batman openings. In the trailer, men are seen shooting into a crowd at a movie theater. Cinemark, the nation’s third largest theater chain is reviewing its security procedures and other big theater companies have released statements.

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In this interview, he talks about how he seeks a physical response to his fiction, and usually succeeds, as he “keeps “an assiduous count of his ‘fainters’” at readings, where “foyers have been filled with stretchers carrying victims of his gore-filled prose.”

“There is a lot of laughter in most of my stories that make people faint. Making them laugh is a way of breaking the tension. You are confronting people to the point where they are about to remove themselves but then you make them laugh and they remain, and then you confront them again… You keep rewarding and punishing them.”

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In a piece excoriating the Washington Post and Jennifer Rubin for their (as yet) uncorrected assumption that al Qaeda was behind the attack in Norway, The Atlantic’s James Fallows notes that per capita, Norway lost twice the number of people the US did from the September 11, 2001 attacks.

European governments are starting to worry about the threat of homegrown, right-wing extremism.

The NY Times has a solid overview of what happened yesterday.

The Atlantic Wire offers this profile of the mancharged with the attack.

The CBC has first-person accounts from survivors.

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