Violation (37 page)

Walking on a summer evening. Just walking. The power of the stride. Leg swinging foot, shadowed trees, cloth sliding on skin. Barely conscious. Almost barely conscious. And then conscious again. So rarely felt. Look at them now: my children's past lives, their rebirths, their many deaths. How can we know, how can we
be known
, when all this knowing and striving to be known is done by fragile beings in the midst of arriving and departing, too barely conscious to be quite here? For the briefest of seconds, we meet, and then are lost again. The immutable opacity of
relationship
is as rippled and broken as the pond into which our ancestors gazed. This shrill striving for proximity that we seem to trade only for the echoing hall of solitude—how to bear it?

I have friends; I have family; I love; I am loved. But what mystery, this solitude in the midst of these specific people. For a long time I thought love meant not feeling alone. I thought love would cure the bounded self. In moments, so it seems: transparent collapse into the space of another, the rainbow oil of the bubble's skin splitting without breaking until two are one and still two. How elusive, that Venn diagram of the wounded psyche; most of me still outside, a fraction shared, and we call this trust.

I AM IN
Kampala, on my way out to a rural village for a stay of weeks, when I realize that I have forgotten to pack a mirror. I spend a day looking—and a day shopping in Kampala is a long day—without luck. The dim little shops selling thongs, hair gel, liquor, and dish soap do not have mirrors. But neither do I find mirrors in the bigger stores, not even the supermarkets white with fluorescent where you can fill your cart with groceries, cosmetics, lawn furniture, DVDs, and Christmas tree lights. Finally I give up in a kind of existential panic. I cannot see myself at all. Now when everything, everything is recorded, presented, reflected, preserved, when all image is manipulated and no photograph is real: now, I do not know how I look.

So I give up and go, and for some time I share a cool room with several Ugandan women I know. They deflect compliments even as they invite the eye, each one beautiful and perfectly groomed; their warm brown skin clear, smoothly lotioned, with careful makeup. Their hair is done in elaborate braids; they seem to have no luggage but wear different clothes every day, all mysteriously pressed where there is no electricity. They love to talk, they
are always together, laughing, shushing each other, lightly teasing, touching on the forearm, the neck, lying in the bunks together, murmuring under the mosquito nets. “So long as I am together with others, barely conscious of myself, I am as I appear to others.” Beside this unfettered beauty, I curl up alone in my bed. I hold myself apart. I wonder,
how do I look?
but I don't really want to know.

We are never visible to others exactly, nor is the world wholly visible to us; the shell is always there in between. I look out through a fogged window. So I accept that mine is a partial view, the product of untold errors and limits; I accept that I can't see all of a thing because I can't see everything. I accept that no
one
can be seen, and so I believe that no one will ever wholly see me—and what relief, at once, to know this. So I will call myself planetary, cosmic; my darkness hidden in the darkness, in the far side. (I do not, of course, really accept this. I am being as I long to appear. I will pretend this is some kind of consolation, that this is the point, that it is due to our largeness, the very size of our selves, that we are each larger than each other's views.)

Perhaps we are not reflections at all. Do I have it completely wrong? Are we instead completely brightness, completely light? Such light that it casts no shadows? For weeks in Uganda I am surrounded by their warm darkness, the laughter, the damp perfume of clean skin. Either they are radiating bodies themselves, or they are perfect mirrors, each reflecting the other. What closeness.
How do I look?
one says, tilting her head. The others say,
Yes
. They say,
You look fine
.

Unpublished

Over the years, the themes of family, time, memory, body, and expression have begun to meld into a theme I think of as presentation. How do we appear in the world—to others, to ourselves? How much of the self is merely reflection? These are the questions that I carry into my writing now
.

     
Publication notes

“Orphans” was first published in
Zyzzyva
, Winter 1986–87.

“Fetus Dreams” was originally published as “We Do Abortions Here” in
Harper's
, October 1987.

“The Only Harmless Great Thing” was first published in the
New Yorker
, January 23, 1989.

“Burning for Daddy” was originally published as “Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire” in
Harper's
, January 1990.

“Gentleman Caller” was first published in
Zyzzyva
, Fall 1991.

“The Weight” was first published in
Harper's
, March 1993.

“The Happiest Place on Earth” was first published in Linny Stovall, ed.,
Kids' Stuff
, Left Bank #6, Blue Heron, 1993.

“Meat” was first published in
Antioch Review
, Summer 1994.

“The Basement” was first published in Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer, eds.,
Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own
(New York: Pantheon, 1995).

“The World Made Whole and Full of Flesh” was first published in Linny Stovall, ed.,
Secrets
, Left Bank #9, Blue Heron, 1996.

“Big Ideas” was first published in
Antioch Review
, Summer 1997.

“The Hounds of Spring” was first published in
Salon
, July 1, 1997.

“Temporary God” was first published in
Salon
, September 16, 1997.

“Crossing to Safety” was first published in
Salon
, August 7, 1998.

“Recording” was first published in
Threepenny Review
, Fall 2002.

“Violation” was first published in
Tin House
, Summer 2001.

“Second Chair” was first published in
Antioch Review
, Fall 2002.

“The Birth” was first published in
Portland Magazine
, Spring 2003.

“Scars” was first published in
Portland Magazine
, Winter 2003.

“On Being Text” was first published in
Creative Nonfiction #22
, 2004.

“Balls” was first published in
Seattle Review
, Summer 2007.

“Chemo World” was first published in
Harper's
, June 2007.

“Twitchy” was first published in
Antioch Review
, Spring 2008.

“The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies” was first published in
Conjunctions
, Fall 2008.

“Falling” was first published in
Conjunctions
, Fall 2011.

“Here Be Monsters” was first published in
Conjunctions
, Fall 2013.

“The Indigo City” was first published in
Conjunctions
, August 12, 2014.