nineteen

“‘Time is the trouble,’ I said. I no longer experienced my days as linear or purposeful. I was trapped in cyclical domestic time, I tried to explain, where there was no past and no future because the washing-up, cooking, eating, talking, sex, my period, were always on repeat. He made a little speech about how it takes some young women a while to get used to a new baby and the responsibilities of managing a household. I told him I loved the baby; I understood babies and their wildness; it was not the baby that was the trouble. There were adjustments to be made, said the doctor. On he went. I drowned out his voice by picturing the paper knife on his desk plunged into his heart. It was only because killing him was illegal and I did not want to go to prison again that I sat on my hands and allowed him to live. He went on talking and so I did not tell him about wanting to die when the afternoons took forever to get to the night.

sixty-eight

“I had felt that if I moved, if I spoke, if I breathed, everything I valued and everyone I loved would be destroyed. But with my analyst’s belief in me, that suicide vest packed with the explosive that is shame started to loosen. The heaviness in my chest eased, and I drew breath. The weight had not only been despair, it had been rage. Frozen rage. The ice-fire of helplessness that I had finally turned into words, clumsy words, but because they had been spoken to a man who could hear them for me, a glacier shifted, moved by the melt of tears. It’s been said that there are no monuments to rape survivors. The only memorial I can build is this one, fashioned from words.

But what I really felt was something between panic and penitence. I was certain the end of us was coming, that I had caused it. I was sorry for that. But, again, I was not ready to accept the inevitable. At the first sign of disaster—the chorus of barking dogs, the glass of water shuddering on the table—we scream until the silence is tolerable. We cannot prevent what happens next, but we can forestall feeling the full force of it. We can distract ourselves from the terror with the awful sound of our own voices.

For years, from my fear, I distracted myself by reading studies about orphans. Those studies provided strange comfort. Emotions were reduced to cold science. I reduced myself into them. It was a different kind of denial. Through the studies, I learned that children raised in orphanages often reach out their arms to be picked up, but as soon as they get what they seem to want, they kick and push and wriggle away. Then, once they have escaped, they throw themselves on the floor in utter despair and demand to be picked up again. The first time I read about that phenomenon, I laughed out loud. The story of my life, I thought. Then I curled up on the carpet, closed my eyes, and told myself that reading the studies was enough, that they contained all I needed to know. Into my own soul, I reassured myself, I needn’t go deep.

I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.

If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.

This was the story I wanted to tell without sentiment or cynicism; the one I thought justified speaking hard truths. The flash of insight I’d had—that I could not leave my mother because I’d become my mother—was my wisdom: a tale of psychological embroilment I wanted badly to trace out.

To tell that tale, I soon discovered, I had to find the right tone of voice; the one I habitually lived with wouldn’t do at all: it whined, it grated, it accused; above all, it accused. Then there was the matter of syntax: my own ordinary, everyday sentence—fragmented, interjecting, overriding—also wouldn’t do; it had to be altered, modified, brought under control. And then I could see, this as soon as I began writing, that I needed to pull back—way back—from these people and these events to find the place where the story could draw a deep breath and take its own measure.