Wreck and Order (4 page)

Around the time I resumed my translation project, a lawyer representing a Guantánamo detainee came to Carpinteria to give a talk at the library. It seemed substance was conspiring to enter my life. The lawyer was short and curvy, wearing a navy pantsuit and high stilettos in which she seemed perfectly at ease as she paced before the small crowd. Her client was a young father who was sold into U.S. custody in Pakistan, a country we've never been at war with. He was fitted with sensory deprivation goggles and earmuffs, then shackled to the floor of a plane in a painful stress position for the long ride to Cuba. He was not told where he was going or why. Once at Guantánamo, he spent his days either alone in wire cages or being interrogated. His fingers were broken. His head was stuffed down a toilet. He was deprived of sleep for days. Early into his captivity, the government concluded that he represented no threat yet took no steps to free him. When the lawyer attempted to get him tried before the military commissions, they denied his petition because he was already cleared for release and so had no need of a trial. “It's like something out of Kafka,” she said. This was her only bit of editorializing. She was straightforward, unpoliticized. When someone asked why she decided to represent a Guantánamo detainee, she said, “Because it's my job. Protecting the Constitution. That's what I was trained to do.”

I approached the lawyer afterward and asked if she would be willing to let us publish her talk in the
Carp Weekly
, at which I implied I had more power than I did. I wasn't thinking about logistics. I was overwhelmed by love. It had been so long since I'd felt awed by another human.

I begged Donnie to run the talk as a cover story. He agreed in the manner of someone letting an underling play at power. No matter. This was the closest I'd ever come to activism. A week after the issue came out, Donnie stopped by my desk. “Very few people picked up the torture issue,” he said. “We have hundreds of extras.” The implication was clear: This was a failed experiment; now we'd go back to giving the people musicians and wineries and summer-camp guides. Indeed no one but Jared—and my father, ad nauseam—commented on the lawyer's article to me, to which I'd added sidebars explaining relevant bills and Supreme Court rulings. Why was it so fucking hard for me to do one decent thing?

It seemed I needed a job that required me to be alone a lot of the time. I made lists of publishers and literary journals and began sending off sample chapters of
Fifi
.

I got most of my translating done after I broke up with Jared, which I did often, usually when I was drunk. One time, I broke my bedroom window at the same time, trying to yank it open to dump Jared's beer outside, shrieking that he was a drunk and a loser and this was the last time I was going to let him hurt me. When the window came out of its frame and crashed into the yard, crushing sixty dollars' worth of freshly planted flowers (according to my roommate's quiet, embarrassed estimate the next day), Jared laughed. I shrieked at him to get the fuck out, I was done with him, done. He was still laughing when he walked past the crushed flowers and broken glass, out onto the empty, yolky street. A Sunday, dawn. Nowhere to be, no one to answer to, Clam Shack would be serving Bloody Marys soon, the ocean was huge and the world was beautiful.

After our breakups, I would feel strong in my anger during the day, eating a lot, running a lot, laughing a lot at nothing in particular, believing that whatever flaws I had, it was Jared—discrete Jared, a real person who was not me—that had turned my life into an obscene performance of resistance.

I had one good friend in Carpinteria, a girl who worked in sales at the newspaper. She was the least analytical person I'd ever met. I could talk to Caitlin about Jared all I wanted, but the conversation would never verge on problem solving. She was interested in specific facts of human behavior—what our sex had been like the night before, whether he had slapped another girl's ass again, how I had responded this time—but she tolerated no feeling-talk. She drank a lot of beer, which made her raunchy without being flirtatious: She'd shout in a crowded bar, “Does anyone have a tampon?,” or have guys buy us drinks all night and then, just as the interaction was moving into the realm of the sexual, scare them away by saying that most women experienced more pleasure with a vibrator than an actual man or that the only man she'd ever been really attracted to was her grandfather. She was daring men to be strong enough to subdue her chaos. She made me laugh and laugh.

Caitlin was the first person I called each time I broke up with Jared, although I stopped telling her that's what I'd done after the first couple of attempts failed to last. We would go out and I'd let myself be swept along by her harmless mania. But as soon as I got in bed later and tried to sleep, I became a baby alone in a cave, freezing and starving, helpless to do anything but writhe and bite the blanket and clutch my crotch and stick my fingers into my dry pussy and into my dry mouth and sweat and get the chills and pull my hair, all the while seeing myself at the bottom of a deep, narrow hole in the ground, looking up, glimpsing a face at the top, the one who could lift me out of the hole—there, then gone. A scene from
Silence of the Lambs
: one of Hannibal's victims, kept barely alive at the bottom of a hole. I had known the movie would give me nightmares; even
Oliver Twist
gave me nightmares. But a boy named Simon (accent on the
o
, Bolivian, prematurely mustached, drawer of raunchy comics that he slipped into my desk in English class) had invited me to watch the cannibal movie, and my thoughts were always a drunken crowd clamoring for his attention in eighth grade. So I watched it and let him French kiss me and had nightmares for weeks afterward.

Hell is a state of ceaseless, fruitless relating. The effort makes you so cold and alone that you believe you will die. In fact you would like to die. But the urge for self-preservation is too strong. So instead of dying you build a fire and hurl flaming sticks out in all directions. There is relief at first. Anger believes in itself. Anger will save you. But soon the fire consumes everything with which you had hoped to make contact, until you are alone in the center of the blaze, still unable to stop hurling sticks because the fire has consumed every other possible means of relating and all you want—the only thing you need to calm down—is to have an impact on something other than yourself. Impossible, from where you sit. You cannot exert a force on anything that is not also exerting a force on you. Newton's law, the only thing I retained from high school science. But equally impossible to stop trying. So the only hope was to exhaust myself in the effort.

A day or two after our supposed breakup, I would call Jared at bedtime and ask him (“I'm so sorry I got angry, I was just hurt, I really need to see you and talk to you”) to rescue me. But he would be drunk and high on blow, an indifferent stranger for as long as this particular binge lasted. I would go on calling this indifferent stranger, praying that this time he would not answer the phone surrounded by the racket of people convincing one another they were having fun, and would not tell me I was boring the shit out of him, and would not hang up on me while I was sobbing that he was hurting me so much, I couldn't stand it any longer, please just come over and talk to me.

I lay back down, still gripping the phone. No need to be patient. Patience would not return him to me. He would be returned in the way of pain and its alleviation. This particular pain, in this particular moment of my particular life, was to be in love with an absence. It was not death, not violence, not rape. Everyone suffered, there was no reason I should be spared. I opened my mouth wide, squeezed my eyes into old, hard vaginas sewed up tight. Long, sharp, violent lines flew out of my chest, stabbing the walls and ceiling and floor, gorging the earth straight through, searching. But the absence was hiding inside my room, my bed, my body. There was nothing I could do to force its revelation. I tilted my head back and pressed my chest toward the ceiling. Wait—the violence was golden—lines of strength come to save me. But I did not want to be saved. I wanted my love to exist outside my body. But whenever I tried, however I tried—that time he said that thing, he looked that way, I said this thing, he took it that way, I broke down, he broke—stop. I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my fists into my abdomen. If my heart and mind would only give up hoping, become so drenched in absence that they gave way…Morning now. A woman's voice perfectly suited to whole wheat toast and Earl Grey tea, under my window, retreating, I can't make out her last word—come back, please, no need to rush off. Stay. Chat. I won't judge you, I promise.

When I managed to get out of bed, the reflection of my naked body in the mirror stabbed me. I looked good, I liked my body. That was the thing I still had. It gave me nothing. I was relieved when the mirror caught me at an ugly angle—belly pouched; breasts pointy; thighs big and heavy, pulling my face to the floor.

When I complained about Jared to any of the girls I drank beer and complained about boys with, I liked when the word
abusive
came up. It was neat and respected and freed me of responsibility. One of the girls I knew worked at a home for battered women. During a group discussion there, a social worker asked one of the women why she had stayed with her husband. A chorus of female voices crooned, “Because she looooves him!” But I wasn't a battered woman; I didn't know what I was. Jared would always apologize and I would always let him back in. And then I had to explain to my friends that his behavior wasn't really abusive, that he just drank too much and said stupid things. Soon there was no one left to complain to.

Except for my mother. She loved to talk on the phone when Rick was at work and her new kids were at school. The person who was drunk and invulnerable to his love for me was not really Jared, she assured me; it was the disease. “But, honey, they're all addicted to something,” she said. “Alcohol is better than strip clubs. Trust me.” I told myself that alcohol was better than strip clubs when Sober Jared finally called and said he missed me and did I want to ride bikes to the diner? Yes, I did. I always wanted to ride bikes to the diner with Jared. Just the idea of it made life feel so decadent and generous, made me and Jared seem like the best of friends.

I could have tried to get him to stop drinking. But he was self-medicating, and if he stopped drinking, he would be overcome by an anxious depression nursed throughout a neglectful childhood and a decade of partying instead of working, and if I were the one who insisted he give up booze, I would be solely responsible for helping him cope. So after he went to a few AA meetings and pronounced it soul-deadening, I believed him when he said he wasn't really an alcoholic; he just needed to drink a little less. Some nights—many nights—he met his modest goal and we had fun. Life was fun. I liked drinking, too. And I could not help him change his life in ways he hadn't the courage to change it on his own. Or so I imagined my mother would have told me, if I had the kind of mom who said things like that.

I did believe it was possible for a person to change. I had known other versions of myself that allowed me to hope the situation I was in would not be my life. I just couldn't leave the situation. I loooooved him.

I decided to backpack around Sri Lanka for a few months, to try to free myself of my addiction to Jared, so that something new might happen. The only thing that had changed tangibly for me since I'd moved to Carpinteria four years earlier was a two-dollar-an-hour raise. Jared thought that if I was willing to take so much time off and spend a grand on a flight, the two of us should have ourselves a delightful holiday much closer to home. “I'm trying to get over you,” I said. “Good luck,” he said, and rolled on top of me. We were lying in his bed on a Wednesday morning; fog pressed against the window; I dug my fingers into the flesh above his hip.

When I got home from work that night, the travel guide I'd ordered was waiting on my stoop. I looked at the charmingly cheesy photos—palm trees, sunsets over the ocean, monks kneeling before Buddha statues—and booked my ticket. I liked the idea of going to a tropical paradise that was also a recent war zone. Not long ago, the Buddhist government had won their war against the Tamil Tigers by bombing the shit out of the Tamil-populated north. In preparation for my trip, I read articles about the thousands of civilians killed, the emergency laws overriding civil rights, residential land seized by the military. I wanted to believe my attraction to other people's suffering was compassion, but more likely it was a twisted need to justify my own unhappiness. Either way, Sri Lanka was perfect.

It also appealed to me because it's a Buddhist country, and Buddhism had helped me in my childhood, although I didn't realize it was helping me at the time. I thought it was some desperate New Age nonsense my mother clung to now that her dancing career was over and she had no choice but to teach Pilates to sixty-year-old women with platinum hair. Her friend Sharon gave her some meditation tapes that she swore were totally life-changing. Throughout elementary school, I often found Mom lying on her back on the living-room rug, bound in a silk face mask, listening to a dude with an Irish accent asking her how it felt to be clothed in her particular biochemical garment at this particular moment on this particular planet. The tapes made me want to puke, and I told her so. Once when my father and I were joking and laughing in the kitchen during one of my mother's solitary séances, she marched into the kitchen and asked us to please keep it fucking down, she was fucking trying to meditate. “Just notice, just feel,” the Irish dude intoned. “Free of desire, free of judgment.” Mom slammed the kitchen door as she rushed back to his voice.

Part of my mother wanted to be quiet and sacred and take up as little space as possible. But her needs of the moment were always louder than her will. The quiet part of her brought me to a Buddhist temple every Sunday—a schoolhouse-like structure painted bright reds and yellows and adorned with gilded statues of beaming fat men, filled with dark-skinned people carrying fruit offerings and clutching long bead necklaces in their palms. My mother and I would sit in the back of the temple on flat, lumpy cushions while a man at the altar spoke a language we couldn't understand in a singsong hush that reminded me of
Goodnight Moon
, and the people around us—most of them wearing white—rocked slightly on their heels, their palms pressed together at their hearts. My mother was different at the temple. She never wore lipstick, she didn't laugh for no reason and touch strangers on the arm. She sat cross-legged—back straight, eyes closed. I watched her with a concentration that felt like magic. Our knees touched. Sometimes I would jiggle my leg so that I could continue feeling the contact, whose sensation had been numbed by stillness. Only by agitating my body could I feel it clearly. I didn't realize that the point of stillness was to
stop
feeling the body and feel something else instead. Mom was so still that she didn't even tell me to cut out all the jiggling.

After I booked my flight to Sri Lanka, my mother told me the temple she'd brought me to was Cambodian. But what did that matter, she was just
so
happy that I was following my inner light and she didn't mind saying she was proud of herself for raising a daughter with such
important
interests in shit that really matters, not like some Wall Street asshole trying to finance his third yacht, but anyway she had to go, she and Rick were going for a sunset hike, there was really nowhere better in the world than Phoenix, why didn't I visit more often? My father also thought it was terrific I would be leaving the daily grind of America's corporate machine to get to know myself on my own terms. He must have been secretly happy I was getting away from a boyfriend who sounded unstable at best, but Dad rarely allowed himself to criticize my choices.

It was almost too simple to get to Sri Lanka, nearly nine thousand miles away. Twenty hours on two planes, during most of which I slept away my hangover from partying with Jared right up until my morning flight out of L.A., and then I was blinking at the buses and cabdrivers crowding the airport exit, the men in suits and flip-flops calling me madam and gesturing to the backs of their taxis, the bright smell of sewage and the ocean, the tanned backpackers and women in saris piling onto buses, one of which had a sign that said
KANDY
, the Buddhist epicenter of the country, according to my guidebook, and my first stop. I took the last free seat and jammed my backpack under it. As the bus grumbled away from the airport, a tiny man wearing a fanny pack walked up the aisle, collecting fares. “Kandy,” I said. He wrote 325 on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. About three dollars for what the Lonely Planet promised to be a three-hour ride inland. The woman sitting next to me pulled a curtain over the window to close out the sun, but I caught flashes of the outside world when potholes or short stops jostled the curtain aside: piles of burning rubbish in dirt yards, women in sarongs with soapy armpits standing barefoot on rocks in muddy rivers. The driver blasted talk radio, a steady stream of chatter in a language I hadn't even heard of until a few weeks ago. An unanswered Brahms ringtone played every few minutes from the seat in front of me. At least I remember being sure at the time that it was Brahms, and thinking it was unusual for me to recognize a piece of classical music. But I just googled “Brahms ringtone” and none of them sounded like the tinny waltz I can still, for some reason, hear clearly. No one on the packed bus was doing anything but trying to stay put as we bumped along the washed-out dirt roads. I gripped the seat back to keep from tumbling into the crowded aisle. The things I'd planned to do on the bus—read my guide book, change into sandals, drink water, eat a protein bar—seemed funny now. I was ecstatic with the freedom of being unable to accomplish even the simplest task. But as the sky above the curtain darkened, I remembered the problem of my physical self. How would I know when to get off the bus? How would I get to the guesthouse? Was Kandy safe? Could I get in a rickshaw with an unknown driver after dark? Where would I get drinkable water? Was the man standing in the aisle beside me intentionally putting his crotch that close to my face? The ticket taker interrupted my boomeranging worries by tapping my shoulder. “Kandy. Here. Kandy.” The bus stop throbbed with hurried people carrying baskets of pineapples and mangoes, food stalls at which sweaty men fried snacks that looked too colorful to be edible, a barefoot hunchback groaning and holding out his palm. Before I was even aware of my bewildered presence inside this scene, a smiling rickshaw driver pointed to the back of his three-wheeler. “Rose Land?” I said. “Yes, madam,” he said. “Two hundred rupees only, madam.” I heaved my pack onto the small bench at the back of the rickshaw and clambered in after it, relaxed in a way that reminded me of kindergarten recess, when I rarely knew the rules of a game well enough to care about winning.

I arrived at the guesthouse that my guidebook recommended just after dark and shook the gate, secured with a tiny padlock, until a middle-aged woman with a serene face and wild gray hair admitted me. The front room was large and spare, except for a snoring blond dog, a few plastic chairs, and curling posters tacked to the walls, one of a monkey eating a banana (
STAY FIT!
), another of cherubic white children photoshopped onto a field of sunflowers (
BE A SWEET HEART
). There were no available rooms at Rose Land, so the owner offered me her grandsons' upper bunk for two hundred rupees. Of course the boys wouldn't mind sharing a bed, I shouldn't be silly. She handed me a faded pink towel from the pile atop the dining room table. I felt again the odd relaxation of being beholden to circumstances, far from my phone, my car, my bed, every person who knew my face—alone in a way I never was in Paris, where the city's judgment and coldness weighed on me even in sleep. No one here seemed to care whether I knew the rules or not. I excessively thanked the owner for making room for me and asked her name. “Call me Mary,” she said, and pointed to a bedroom on the other side of the courtyard.

A sunburned Norwegian, a lanky Dutch guy, a dreadlocked Italian couple, and a small, excitable Frenchman were smoking cigarettes and eating cream-filled cookies around the table outside. The Italian woman offered me a cookie. I licked lemon cream as I listened to their introductions. The Norwegian girl was traveling for a year before starting a master's program. The Dutch electrician had just phoned his boss to extend his trip for a month. The Italian couple was stuck in Sri Lanka for two weeks because their six-month Indian visa expired. The French guy had been country-hopping for three years and would do so as long as his savings lasted. He took the cheapest bed in any given town—a mattress on the floor of a poor family's living room, a hammock in a backyard, he'd take it, he didn't mind—he only ate curry packets from the street vendors (fifty rupees fills you up for hours!) and he only traveled by bus and foot: a first world tramp on a third world vacation. One way to spend a life, no worse than most. The Norwegian girl offered me a beer. I was too exhausted to be tempted.

I propped my backpack against the bunk bed in Mary's daughter's room, which she shared with her two young sons. Sarasi was sitting on the double bed, looking over her sons' schoolwork. I thanked her for sharing her room. “It's no problem for us.” She had the faintest hint of a British accent. “I just hope we won't bother you in the morning. We wake up at four thirty.” I asked where she worked, rummaging through my bag in search of pajamas and a toothbrush.

“One of the best hotels in town, thanks to my English. Growing up in a guesthouse, you know.” She tried to sound bored, not proud. At least I hoped she was secretly proud, which would have made my presence in her bedroom less of an intrusion. Her hair was short and gelled, unlike the long, slick braids I'd noticed the women on the bus wearing. The small radio in her room was tuned to a station that played Billy Joel, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson.

A black Lab pushed through the flowered curtain covering the entrance to the room, tongue dangling. “This is my puppy,” one of the boys said. “He is called Teega.”

“Hi, Teega,” I said.

“Careful for—” Sarasi said, just as Teega pounced on the protein bar I'd just taken out of my bag. He sprinted out the door. I lunged after him, but he was a galloping blur of black fur, swinging the square of calcium-enriched puffed rice from his mouth, running victory laps around the table in the courtyard. The Dutch guy leaped in front of him with a balletic karate chop. Teega paused, gave his stolen goods a fierce shake, and then continued his rampage, sugar-free caramel smeared over his snout. Mary stepped into the courtyard, holding a slingshot armed with a tiny pebble. She yelped, cocked her arm, and fired a warning shot onto the tin roof. Teega let the emptied bag drop to the ground. He prostrated before Mary, tiny head between overgrown paws. “Bravo, Mama,” the Italian woman cried, flapping her hands together. Mary returned to her bedroom. Her daughter peered out from behind the flowered curtain.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I hope that wasn't your dinner.”

“No, no,” I lied, too tired to care whether I ever ate again.

Sarasi gestured me into the room and pointed to the bunk bed. “Take the bed you prefer,” she said. “The boys sleep with me. At least for now.” She lowered her voice. “We don't know where their father is at the moment.” She looked at her short, rounded, pink fingernails. “People are so mean. They make the same mistake again and again.” I didn't know whether she was talking about the boys' father or herself for forgiving him, but before I could ask her, her older son was pulling on my hand, introducing himself, telling me about his mosquito net.

“This is a new one,” he said. “Best kind. You are so luck. There are many dengue fever mosquitoes. One of the boys in my class has died. I saw him before he has died. He looked like—” Tilak sucked in his cheeks and rolled his eyes to the back of his head. I grimaced. He grinned, gratified.

Sarasi's younger son was curled on his side in the double bed, his cheek resting on the back of his hand. “My brother goes to sleep so early,” Tilak said as I hoisted myself into the upper bunk. “I like to be awake late in the night.” He warned me to fully close the gap in the mosquito net and scanned the room to make sure no one left out a glass of water. Dengue fever mosquitoes plant their babies in the old water. They are silent, so you have no warning before they bite. They're so tiny you could kill them with one finger but still they get to you before you get to them and just like that—Tilak clapped his hands above his head—your whole body is filled with the disease and you turn purple and your blood freezes and you die.

Sarasi told Tilak to hush. She lay down next to her younger son in her jeans and T-shirt and blinked at the ceiling.
Wish it was Sunday.
After Tilak's breath grew long and deep, she pulled the sheet over his balled-up body and returned her face to the ceiling.
That's my fun day.
I tried to stay awake long enough to appreciate my cramped spine elongating against the hard mattress, '80s pop mixing with the crickets outside, the interplay of accents coming from the courtyard, the odd comfort of sharing an unknown family's home. But I'm only making up those details in retrospect. What I remember is that, just before I disappeared into dreamless sleep, I felt like nobody, far away from all the usual thoughts, both scared and safe.