The Other Side (10 page)

When I ask Dad to watch the kids while I get tattooed, he prays about it for a few days before saying no. He says tattoos are not part of his belief system. He says he knows it probably has something to do with
what happened
. He knows this but says no anyway. I stand in the hallway while we're talking on the phone, passing and repassing a pair of mirrored sliding doors, packing my bags for our upcoming trip back home. I watch the reflection of myself talking to him, trying to explain. He's a thousand miles away.

Sometimes I feel like a very small person. Like I barely fit around the space of a breath. I don't speak because I think no one will hear me. I rarely leave the house. Or if I do leave the house, I wear disguises: long hair, sensible clothes, a pretty, fresh-faced mask. I'm disturbed by the sight of my own naked body. I want to cover the bruises on my stomach and pelvis and back.

Not all of them are imaginary.

I think sometimes about running away. As when I drive anywhere on the highway and it would be so easy just to keep going. It would be easy to change my name. Easier to drive off a bridge or headfirst into an eighteen-wheeler.

Sometimes I imagine cutting myself open to look inside, to dig around for the coldest, hardest, pulsing mass and swallow it whole. I want to take it like a pill and let it
dissolve inside me. Or smuggle it across the border—any border—and shit it out in the street.

I want to stitch myself shut.

DO NOT ENTER. CLOSED INDEFINITELY FOR REPAIRS
.

I enter the room at the back of the building and find him ready for me: capfuls of black, yellow, blue, and red ink, blue sterile tape on the lamp and tattoo gun, Vaseline and paper towels spread out and ready to go. A padded black bench waits for my weight, towels and pillows in place.

He tells me to lie down. Or to lie back. To pull up my sleeve. Take off my shirt. Unbutton my pants. To lie still.

Ready?
he asks, his foot testing the pedal.

I nod once and then the needle enters and passes over my skin, leaving a thick black line. The layers and layers of tissue are injected with pigment, absorb the pigment, disperse the pigment down and down and down through the damage that does in fact bleed: the endorphins releasing strength enough for me to run, to jump, to burst through walls if necessary. My heart, my breath: in my chest, as they should be, slowing by the end, exhausted.

And afterward, when I go home to wash and look in the mirror, I feel the mark in all its swollen fullness: raw and exposed and seeping. My hands shake as I turn on the faucet. I shiver pulling off my shirt. I look at the reflection.
It both belongs to me and doesn't. A play of light in the mirror.
This is not my body
, I think, feeling dizzy. But then something in me wobbles, collapses, shifts.

I can feel this body: static, living. Not a surface, but an opening.

[six]

AT OUR FIRST
session, The Newest Therapist asks me to write two lists: one that describes every terrible thing The Man I Used to Live With ever did, another that describes each thing he ever did that made me feel special and loved. I start to panic. I make excuses. I say,
I have a lot on my plate right now
. She doesn't fall for it. She points to the door, says only,
Write
.

Somehow, the terrible list is easier to start: how he kidnapped and raped me, how he murdered my cat in our kitchen, how he threatened to abandon me in foreign countries. It's harder to write about how he saved me from getting crushed by a surge of people rushing the stage at a concert. How he dragged me to the outer edge of the crowd, his arm around my chest.
We watched the rest of the show at the crowd's perimeter, his arm around my shoulder
.

It's easy to write about the argument we had while traveling in Spain, how he shook and shook me by my shoulders until I wound myself into a tight ball. He left and didn't come back until I was asleep.
He lifted me from the bed so
gently, so lovingly, it seemed. I thought he was going to apologize. Instead, he put me on the floor
. I remember it so clearly: the fluff of hair under the bed, the cold seams of the parquet.

It's easy to write that I'm afraid of him.

It's harder to write that he taught me about film, and cooking, and to admit that I'm probably a writer because of him, because of all that happened.

It's hard to admit that I loved him.

When I give The Newest Therapist the list—not two lists but one—she does not put it in my folder like I expect. She puts on her glasses and reads. Occasionally she sighs, or shakes her head. I have nothing to do with my hands, or my face, or my feet. Panic washes over me. Eventually she looks up, her eyebrows slightly raised, as if expectant. She says nothing. She waits and waits for me to speak.

It's possible I'm not remembering right
, I finally mutter, my hands in my lap, my head pointed in the general direction of the floor.

She laughs out loud, puts down the list. She asks,
Is there any other way of remembering?

I remember how a late spring rain darkens the tarmac as we board the plane for Europe: a smell like dirt, like exhaust, like grass and engine fumes. I hold his hand and lean into
his shoulder as the plane accelerates down the runway, tires spinning across the level earth, lurching into that curved space between longitudes, where at first we do not sleep but turn and rock and slouch across the aisle, our heads bent together or apart; and of all the voices droning on across the ocean his grows the most tender and cruel. I remember a blanket, a swirling indigo scarf, news of a typhoon. When someone leans over the seatback and whispers a question, like an aunt in my ear, I remember admitting to nothing but being an odd pair.

Odd, too, how cool the hour we shuffle from the plane into the fog-filled Belgian city, too early for the black knot of streetcars and taxicabs, no one in their native streets at all except four women in hairnets outside the
boulangerie
, cigarettes leaning out the windows of their open mouths, curtained by the sweet bread-tobacco scent, gossip in an unwelcoming tongue. And odd how our pair weaves and unweaves itself through the stone-gray monuments toward separate beds in a rented room:
Too tired
, I tell him over my shoulder,
for that now
. It doesn't matter. My eyes don't close for hours that night—a surprise concert of fireworks washing the Grote Markt walls in audible light: too loud, too bright for sleeping. The shadows of anonymous bodies dance across our wall like marionettes, each one dangles over the great crack that branches
from the floor to the ceiling of our room in the hostel, and surely beyond: the bond between earth and edifice, brick and mortar, history and memory loosening, sliding, suddenly giving way. And like that: anything can be broken.

I remember how a scrubbed-clean body can rise like new in the morning. I remember how to pack and repack a bag. I remember how to blame myself for almost anything at all as I watch cities pass, stations pass, rail-side tenements pass: brown, rust-brown, gray-brown; blue unshining windows shuttered against the mist-gray sky. I remember how to share a seat on a train with a man whose touch might make me shudder or wince, who often dozes with his head against the window or takes my photograph while I read a book. I remember how we sit behind a commuter in a wool-blend suit, across from two students playing cards. At the front of the car, there's a young mother tucking a curl into her infant's navy-striped cap. Her husband, I imagine, is young and smiling and kind. From my place in the train car I can see how, even on a morning like this, clean sheets hang to dry between the buildings on clotheslines: the white squares bleached bright as beacons.

We ride the train to Amsterdam, where we pitch our tent at a campground on an island in the IJmeer. At the campground bar, I let a Scottish day laborer buy me a beer. He's as old as my father, at least, and I'm trying hard to understand what he is saying, the music playing loudly, when I look up and see The Man I Live With crossing the bar, returning from the bathroom outside. He places my beer on the bar and leads me by my arm back to the tent, pushing me through the door, face first into the ground, my cheek hitting a rock under the tent floor, his hands inside me, his whole body inside me.