by TJ Price
In last month’s column, as in the month’s before, I began telling a story that has its beginnings in a therapeutic modality called “narrative reprocessing.” Essentially, this is the act of re-authoring one’s trauma(s) in order to defragment painful memories, which in turn allows for a type of spiritually retroactive agency over events that caused distress in the past. I would advise reading the prior segment first before reading this one, and the one which preceded that as well. (I apologize for the falsehood in the first post that there would only be two parts; the story rather took on a life of its own, and went to some surprising places—this is the third, and final instalment.) To those of you who have followed along with me to this point, thank you. For those of you who have read the thing in various states of its composition—and, in some cases, urged me to press through to the end—thank you isn’t enough.
Please be advised that—in this instalment, as in the first and second—there will be a number of sensitive topics involved, including mentions of sexual assault, suicidal ideation, threats of physical violence, and general injustice.
5.
I did go back to school in the fall, as planned. My old roommate, Eddie, even stuck with me, and we were granted a spacious room to share on one of the top floors of the building, looking down over the entrance into the dorm itself. The summer had done things to us both, and in different ways. He came out to me fairly early on, and saved the grand reveal for a few months later, expecting it to be a huge surprise. Instead, it was met with a lot of amusement and laughter—what, you thought we didn’t know?—and nothing changed except for how he spoke in mixed company regarding his feelings for other men. I didn’t envy him. He did seem happier after he came out, though it was tempered with a bit of brittle arrogance, as if he had attained this fragile apotheosis of identity, and now had no time for those of us who still mucked around in the quagmire of confusion. His way forward was clear to him, and he had ever been goal-minded. From that moment on, it seemed he was making up for lost time. He became driven, and focused—I probably could have learned a lot from his hustle, if I’d been in the right place to understand it. Eventually, he and another musical theater major took up with one another, a guy that my roommate had apparently been completely enamored of for some time, but who had also felt uncomfortable with announcing his sexual preference (and who also, when he finally came out, was greeted by the same response we gave Eddie.) They seemed happy. They spent a lot of their time together. I think they eventually broke up, but for a long time they lived together, in an apartment off-campus. I even visited them once or twice, before we all faded away from each other, as photographs and friendships are liable to do.
I didn’t get to find out what happened to Ricky. The last time I saw him was that fall, in the top-floor room I shared with Eddie, busy with my own creative endeavors. I was writing a full-length play, a fictionalization (loosely) of my own awakenings as a college student, as a man who desired the company of other men but was repulsed by the urge, someone who couldn’t abide being touched. The play is interspersed with scenes held at a local coffee shop, during open mic sessions, in which the protagonist and his cohort of various artists take turns reading poetry, or speaking monologues.
Eddie had gone with another one of our friends to visit their family for the Thanksgiving break, and I remember I’d stood up from my desk, near the end of writing the script, to look out the window. The world outside was crusty—brittle with frost, and a light hoar of snow. Slushmelt made recalcitrant mirrors of the pavement below, between the building I was in and the dorm next door. Attached to that dorm, at the ground level, was a daycare facility of some kind—I was used to seeing little kids burst out of the side door and run, shrieking, around a fenced-in portion of grass—and it was the busy time of day. Cars were lined up, some shouldered into make-believe parking spots, and parents were standing around, milling, trying to corral their children while making small talk with the other parents. It had something to do with the university; I don’t remember what. Maybe you got work-study credit to watch kids. I had one of those jobs: I worked the ticket booth at the theater, and ran concessions during intermission, if they were called for. Lots of students had work-study jobs.
And then I saw Ricky, coming out of the door to the daycare facility. He was beaming, cherubic. The chill ruddied his cheeks like a grotesque Santa Claus, and he’d even grown a dark beard to replace the goatee I remembered. He squatted down, and held his arms out. The muted sunlight glinted off of his earring, and the plastic rims of his eyeglasses, as a small boy ran for his embrace. The moment the kid came into Ricky’s orbit, Ricky snapped his arms around the kid’s waist and hoisted him into the air. Even from behind the closed window, four stories up, I could hear the delighted shrieking of the kid as he slapped at Ricky’s shoulders, crying out in mock-protest: “NO! NO! STOP! STOP! PUT ME DOWN!”
Ricky did not heed the boy’s cries. He only began spinning in circles, helicoptering toward dizzy, and for a brief, horrible moment I imagined him lifting off from the ground, still with the kid slung over his shoulder—rising slowly to the level of my window, completely filling the frame, his rictus grin growing as he saw me shrinking away from the glass within…
I shook my head. There was nothing I could do about it. He had touched me. He would touch others. Lord knows how many others he would touch, and how many others would invite it. Everyone invites touch, even those who say they don’t want it. They tell you that you need to constantly touch the geriatric among us, especially those who have been isolated, without contact from the world in general. They say that touch can affirm your physical reality, can ground you in the here and now. They have even gone so far as to say that you must be touched; which to me implies that the longer you go without being touched, the more chances you have of simply turning to a fine dust and dissolving away.
I left the window, and returned to the computer. I was writing one of the final scenes, the climactic open mic night when the protagonist confesses, in a monologue extending over two or three pages, that he hated being touched. That the kind of touch he wanted was deeper than just flesh coming into contact with flesh; more than fluids and disgusted clean-up after a dizzying rush of ecstasy. I couldn’t get through the monologue. I couldn’t stop thinking about how Ricky had lifted up that kid, how he was working at a daycare of all places, how could they let him be around kids after …
But I had just been “testing the waters.” Filled with this bitterness, this exculpatory rage, I resolved to find out what had happened. I went down to the campus police station to inquire. They asked if I had a file number, a record number, a case number, something like that, and I did not, and after some sighing and searching a computer database, they were able to pull up the information I needed. Unfortunately, they said, they were not at liberty to discuss that information with me, despite the fact that I was named in the documentation. They apologized, but it wasn’t that kind of apology. I left.
What had I expected?
That night, I sat in a circle with the last few residents still remaining before the break—we were playing King’s Cup, and I played with a fifth of Jack Daniels when everyone else was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon. This was widely seen as a bad idea, but I did not care. Before we’d even made it to the first appearance of a king, I was completely shitfaced. With it, however, came not blurriness nor amnesia—instead, a kind of awful clarity came over me, a feeling for which I did not have—and nor will I ever—the language or vocabulary to describe.
This lasted well into the night, through the entire bottle of whiskey, and I was working on a forty-ounce bottle of Milwaukee’s Best Ice (don’t judge, it was $1.99 at the 7-11) when a new guy came into the room. He was a stranger, I’d never seen him before. Tall, lanky, and muscular, his mischievous grin was LED-bright.
Does anyone want some? Molly?
I thought he was asking someone named Molly if they wanted “some,” until I realized there was no one with that name in the room. I laughed, and then suddenly he was proffering a small tin of Altoids in my direction, within which were what looked more like Canada mints—that same medicinal pink, and stamped with the maple leaf.
Molly? He said again, directly to me. He wore a tight t-shirt that clung to his every defined muscle, a living anatomy lesson. The fingertips at the sides of the tin were rough, and I could see thickened calluses on the mounts of his palm. The others in the room around us were demurring, backing away.
Sure, I said. Why not. And my fingers groped around one of the little wafers and I swallowed it whole. He liked me, I could tell. I didn’t even know his name.
The drug kicked in fast. Before I knew it, I was breathless, wired, in the world and out of it simultaneously. I was flawless, invulnerable. The others began to wizen, enervate, slouch off toward sleep, but the stranger just clapped me on the shoulder and beamed, and I followed that beam out the door and into the night. I, too, was only wearing a t-shirt, but the cold didn’t bother me in the slightest. He told me his name was Nick, though I don’t even know if it was his actual name. Nick was a Marine, newly returned from a tour in the Middle East. It’d only been a year or so since the attacks of mid-September, and the war on terror’s inception. He didn’t want to talk about the military, he said, even as he thrust a bottle of water at me and instructed me to hydrate, over and over.
The tall pines reached up to the star-struck sky, seemed to stretch even further than their own treetops, clawing at the dark, begging in supplication to a force much, much larger than myself. At one point, in the full thrush of the drug’s disassociative mania, I called my sister. It must be said that I am not exceptionally close with my family—I wouldn’t say that we were estranged, but let’s just say that her name did not appear in my phone’s history, so this call must have been somewhat startling for her to receive. It must have been midnight, too, maybe even beyond, and though I don’t really remember the conversation we had, I do remember passing the phone to Nick, who spoke with her briefly, winking at me when he did. It was a brotherly wink, I thought, and I felt safe in my luxuriant cocoon of drugged-out bliss. Then Nick handed the phone back to me and she told me to listen to Nick, that he seemed like a good guy. I said I love you, and she said I love you too, bro, be safe, and then we hung up.
Later, I remember the woods, and the crunch of the snow under our feet. I remember that at one point, trudging through the crunch of snow in a field, I overbalanced and leaned into Nick too hard. He was stiff, rigid as a corpse, every muscle seeming to hum. I instantly pulled back, apologizing profusely. He blinked, said nothing, shrugged.
No big deal, Nick said. Don’t have to freak out, bro. I got you.
I hadn’t even realized—he had gripped me by the arm; was steadying me, supporting me.
I opened my mouth to explain myself. I was going to tell him the whole story, from start to finish, from where I began to where I stood. My fear of touch. Ricky. Cut my body up. Bury it in the desert. Colin. My shame. My guilt. My rage. Maybe I’d even say I was gay!
I closed my mouth.
Then, I closed my eyes.
Later, during the comedown, I lost track of Nick.
Dawn had started to stain the world with a thin, weak blue that smeared over the sky like runny albumin. All around me, the trees had started to wake up, shift, and shiver. I started to question myself: had Nick even been real?
Of course he was. I remember his touch. I remember his hand, and what seemed to radiate from it, from beneath it. Perhaps it had never been about touch after all, and more about what lay beyond it—what was exhibited by the mind and the soul, pressed out through the faulty medium of flesh. (And it is faulty—whose does not, in the end, turn traitor? Is not aging a chronicle of the many ways our bodies betray us?)
There have been moments between then and now where I have allowed myself to hover over the half-imagined, half-constructed landscape of that night, full of a wild, jubilate frenzy. Yes, it was drug-induced, but the clarity that came over me at that very second was staggering. It seemed everything in the world was made of glass, and dripping, melting, with the rising of the sun behind it.
All that is solid melts into air, I thought.
Nearby, a tree branch terminating in a tight, fat spindle of new bud wore the slim dangle of an iciclette. I reached out to touch it with a finger, feeling my pulse in its tip, and grazed right along the base of the ice, where it attached to the twig, and it broke off instantly, shaking the whole branch with its exit.
6.
The morning that grudgingly came made the prior night seem unreal in retrospect; made almost everything that had happened to me over the past year seem distorted on a grand scale—or else it was the comedown from the molly. I don’t remember entirely how I got back to my dorm, but I did, and I remember exultantly swinging wide the door to my room, like a conquering hero returned from the war. But what war had I won? The battlefield was liminal, at best—and so was the room, still cluttered with darkness and minor disarray. Shadows struck across the floor—I’d left my computer monitor on, and its spectral, anodyne glow bathed the room.
In the small mirror, I saw my face flash by— white as a mask, hair unkempt. I looked like a zealot of a fanatical religion; dirt smeared my features like warpaint—and I had a brief image of Nick’s thumb, pressing gently-but-firmly into the ridge of my cheekbones, a solemn-but-silly ritual. Reflexively, I reached up to touch my own face where he had touched it. Pressed with my own thumb into my own skin so hard that the blood fled away from the surface.
And then a new image burst upon me, with such clarity that I stumbled at its receipt. The beach … the water … the shrieking of gulls. I could even hear the murmuring of those gathered, splayed out on their towels, crackling as they tanned beneath the furious sun. My birthday was coming up; I’d be damned if I was going to turn seven and still didn’t know how to swim.
“It’s easy,” my father said, wading out further. “Come on.”
I sat down in front of the computer, applied my shaking hands to the keyboard, and began to finish the monologue I’d started—the protagonist at the open mic, describing to those gathered about his fear of touch. It was one of the first moments I felt vertigo while writing, actually remember being lifted out of my body to hover at a canted angle slightly above and to the side of myself, like I’d joined a shadowy, murmuring throng gathered invisibly all around me. My vision tunneled, until all I could see was the bright white square of monitor and the black ants of my words marching across the page. The dark of the room seemed to press in, an audience hanging on my every keystroke.
I was scared that I’d vanish into all that blue, stick to the sky, pressed up against its vague wall like a mashed butterfly. Everything was rushing somehow, away from me, and I stood for so long in one place that the water carved the sand from under my feet.
“Are you coming in, or do I have to drag you in?” My father, yelling, his head bobbing impossibly above the waves, as though the ocean had grown him just to speak to me.
“Something big is happening,” I murmured to myself. My father surged up, caught me, dragged me under. The saltwater filled my mouth; the pounding of the waves muffled in my ears. I came up, gasping for air, released suddenly from my father’s grip, spitting and sputtering.
He had the strangest look on his face. A dreamy, disconnected smile. Then he seemed to notice I was there again. He took my arm—gently, this time—and turned me away from the shore. We stood there, staring out at the horizon, where the Earth begins to bend, where the great big slippery world begins to curve away from everything, and I had the strangest sensation of falling—
I thought, at first, that a starfish, cold and clammy, had entered the front of my trunks, its arms grasping for a hold in the tumult of waves, until I recognized it was not a fish—it was a hand. My father’s hand. I was confused. I wanted to press away from him, through the growling ocean, I wanted to make everything mute again and dive beneath the water, submerge into the dark, green-blue world where his legs were like giant ruins, pillars left by a fallen civilization. I looked at him, squinting, as the sun squirmed loose from the clouds. He had his back to me, was reaching behind himself as if he did not want to see what he was doing. I noticed the wing-like sweep of his shoulderblades, the rigid tail of his spine, and in that terrible moment, I realized what I saw: my father had a dragon under his skin. A dragon that moved his fingers to do things he didn’t want to do.
Later in life, my mother would say he was sick, that he had a “hole in his head,” and I spent far too long imagining that, beneath his curly dark hair, he hid a secret opening—but what was worse; that things could get in, or that things might leak out? After all, hadn’t I leaked out from him? Wasn’t my very existence only an extension of his flesh? And if that were true, and his flesh were diseased—wasn’t mine also so afflicted?
I sat back in my chair and stared at the blinking cursor, its infuriatingly patient metronome. Where had all that come from? It wasn’t a memory. That hadn’t happened to me. Had it? I had no way of knowing, really. Did it need to be true? If I’d learned anything from Ricky, from the trial, it was that truth didn’t matter. Besides, this was fiction I was writing, wasn’t it?
Still, it unnerved me, the brightness of that image, the pure clarity of it—everything but the face of the father, of course. He, in the memory, was obscured, scuffed out as if hastily erased. I could see the contours of his body, sense his tallness, his presence. I could even smell the sunscreen he had lathered on his skin. But had I imagined it all?
I put that question away, and ended up finishing the script a few hours later, submitting it for formal review the next week in my playwriting class. It was a four-person drama, with a unit set—three men: one openly gay, one questioning (and possibly bisexual), and one closeted—as well as one woman, the ostensible girlfriend of the closeted man. I make no pretensions as to its quality: I was in college, and I fear that the melodrama of the script outweighed its few strengths. Still, it was chosen to receive a full production—one of the mainstage shows that year—and I was able to see my words come to life in the person of some very talented actors. (I’ll never forget the first words of feedback I got from the professor-cum-director, infamous for a predilection to plays where they could cast freshmen girls, written on the title page: What if sexes reversed? 3 F, 1 M??)
On opening night of my play, I sat in the audience. Watching the actor conclude that monologue, I felt a keen awareness, a hyperreal sense of floating just outside of myself, a dangerous vertigo. I heard the rustle and cough of the others around me as sharply as an owl at night hearing the scuffle of voles in the underbrush. A sniffle or two. Then, a slow, almost dazed applause began to rise. My heart juddered a bit in my chest—there was, after all, still a scene to go!—and yet, the response continued, grew even louder. The lights came back up on the empty set—the actors still hovering in the wings, unsure if they should enter, or wait til the sound died down.
At the time, I wanted to disappear, to crawl under the seats. I even held a mild disdain for the surrounding audience members. What fools, I thought bitterly. Couldn’t they see that the characters in my play were pathetic? Couldn’t they see that I’d made it all up? That I’d just been testing the waters? Everything they’d said about me in the trial, everything throughout my life, it was all true. Wasn’t it? I was a fake person. I was an non-being. I had to be. Why else would touch be so invasive, so horrible, for me—it was as though coming into contact with another person’s flesh reminded me, for one awful instant, how fake I truly was. I believed whole-heartedly that, for deluding myself into thinking I was anything otherwise, I deserved to be punished. I imagined the desert, a desultory tumbleweed. I imagined myself dismembered, the result of hands ripping me apart, twisting and yanking and slicing, rendering my body into smaller and smaller pieces—first great gory chunks, then bones, then crumbs, then dust, and a desultory wind to erase even that remainder.
I have never hated myself more than I did in that moment. Nausea nearly forced me to my feet, to stumble off to a bathroom and vomit. But as the actors made their way onstage for the last scene, beneath the blinding glare of the klieg lights, the applause slowly melted down into a trickle, then a hush, then silence, and I dared to risk a glance sideways. I saw one face glitter with the wet trail of tears, saw another applying a balled-up tissue to their eyes. I’d touched them, I thought, and had to stifle a most inappropriate laugh.
Eventually, the house lights came on, and those who knew me came up and offered their effusive praise. Colin came up to me and hugged me. Didn’t say a word. His girlfriend did the same thing. Amanda came up, pressed me to her, her voice thick with restrained sob. I never did ask her how her part in the trial went, come to think of it. She’d been called to testify on my behalf as a character witness, I think, which I found amusing since she was, after all, an actress. Too late now to ask her about it, I suppose.
Now, decades later, the questions remain unanswered; will always, probably, remain so. Part of me even now just felt a cold stab of paranoia, thinking that just the act of posting this article on the Internet for any and all to read—despite the changing of names—will invite the ringing of a telephone, the bored-sounding voices squeezing through its tinny speaker, will restart the inquisition. What did you mean by that? What do you mean now? Why didn’t you just say no?
I didn’t say no—I said “Napoleon,” and maybe I was wrong. Maybe it meant I’m testing the waters. Maybe in that alien realm of the past, “Napoleon” meant yes, yes, touch me, use my body as you see fit. Maybe there, in that room at the end of the hallway, amidst the sawing, straining strings of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, “Napoleon” meant hold my nose shut, suppress my breath, hold me underwater until I must, lungs bursting, at long last, surface for air—
You’d think, given these answers, that I would have given up on words; perhaps on speech entirely. You’d think, shown this evidence, that communication would be the very last thing I would attempt. But I am still here, still speaking, still frustratedly hurling elements together on the page like an alchemist seeking the Philosophers’ Stone—the Great Work!—in the hopes that, somehow, I can transcend the need for physical touch, to supersede it with something kin more to sympathy. In a way, the writing of this story functions as a kind of closure for me, despite the possibility that memory’s prism has distorted some of the actual events—you see, as I write these final sentences, there is the faintest sensation of someone else in the room with me, though I know I am alone. I do not turn to them, for to notice them would be to frighten them away, back into the haunted house of the past.
In lieu of reaching out my hand to that ghost of myself so many years ago, I offer instead what I have written here—and the hope of peace which I hope can come now, at the end of it.
***
(As a minor note of interest, pertaining to events mentioned in this instalment—I did have the opportunity, this past weekend, at a celebration for our mother’s 70th birthday, to speak with my sister briefly about the phone call, and about Nick. She does remember the occasion, with enough clarity that she can recall her reaction of surprise when I called. However, she confesses that she does not remember my being with another person, nor can she remember ever speaking with anyone else that night. In retrospect, I find this slightly troubling but nonetheless, somewhat on brand for me.)
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