Remittance Girl's Blog, page 10

The Slow Act of Love

[image error]Just as the monsoon rains hit Hue, I visited the secret garden of Doctor Minh Khanh Nguyen. I’d heard about it from a couple of students snarfing Cao Lao by the canal and getting smashed on cheap rice vodka.

“Oh,” said the girl, “I can’t describe it. It’s just too obscene.”

Her student boyfriend elbowed her. “Don’t be coy. It’s horticultural art.”

“It’s pornography!” She giggled, then pouted theatrically and slapped him on the cheek, rather hard, I thought.

“Where is it? I must see this garden.”

“It’s over the old Japanese bridge, down the second alley on the left.  Then there’s a sub alley off that one. It’s very hidden.”

It was very hidden, and I got lost several times, which meant I had to drink several iced coffees at street stalls. You can’t very well ask for directions and not buy something.

By the time I reached the walled villa, the rain clouds were roiling, the wind had picked up, making the thickets of TV aerials rattle on the roofs of the surrounding houses. I was also suffering from a kind of tunnel vision brought on by an excess of caffeine.

The gate was a chipped, sick-green piece of metal set in a high, whitewashed wall. There was no bell, so I knocked on the gate. It reverberated like thunder. I waited. Nothing.

The first fat drops of rain spattered onto the dusty tiles on the street. I knocked again. Nothing. The air smelled chalky and sour from the dust and the build-up of pressure.  My caffeine infused blood pounded in my ears, my temples began to throb.

Fuck this, I thought, which is pretty much what everyone feels like about everything just before the rain starts.  I contemplated the sweaty, wet walk to my room, back over the old Japanese bridge which would now be packed with everyone and their dead fish trying to get out of the rain. My stomach rebelled at the thought of the smell. Fuck this, I thought, and pounded at the gate again.

“Doctor Nguyen?” I hollered.

“Patience, patience!” a voice beyond the gate yelled back. It was reedy and emphysemic.

Metal grated and squealed and the steel door shifted a little.  A face like a dried up apple peered out at me.  Its bald head was splotched with melasma. Small eyes like gleaming lychee seeds looked me over.

“What?”

“Doctor Nguyen?”

“Everyone here is called Nguyen.”

“Are you the Doctor Nguyen with the famous garden?”

“Go away. I don’t want any more problems with the Ministry of Culture.”

The rain had started to plummet down in earnest now. I could feel it trickling over my scalp, running down the back of my neck.

“I’m not from the Ministry of Culture. How could I be? I’m a foreigner.”

“Those bastards turn up in all sorts of disguises these days. And I’ve told them: it’s foliage. How can foliage be pornographic?”

“I promise, I’m not from the Ministry of Culture.”

“Well, maybe not. What do you want?”

“I came to see the garden.”

“Come back when it’s not raining,” he said, and the door began to grind closed on its rusty metal runners.

“Please. I don’t live in Hue. I’m just visiting!” I hooked my fingers into the opening, to stop the gate from closing, but it had a momentum of its own.  The pain shot through my hand, down my arm, and I screamed. Then suddenly the pressure was gone.

“Stupid woman,” he said. “Obviously not from the Ministry of Culture.”

“No,” I said, cradling my fingers against my chest. “Ow.”

“Let me see. Let me see!” he said, grabbing my wrist and pulling me through the gate and into the small tiled area that fronted the house.

“Don’t. It hurts!” I tried to pull my hand back, but his bony, tiny frame was misleading. He had a strong grip.

“I’m a doctor. Let me see.”

“Oh, I’m bleeding,” I muttered, feeling slightly woozy.  It was hard to see through the downpour, but my fingers were dripping blood onto the puddle forming on the tiles.

“Crazy foreigners. It’s lucky you aren’t missing any fingers.  Yes, they’re all still attached,” he said, holding my hand out in the rain and inspecting it.

I heard the skittering rip of lightning tear the sky above our heads, and then a deafening clap of thunder.  Fuck this, I thought, and fainted.

* * *

I woke up on a broken lawn chair, tilting sideways. The sun was out, gleaming on every wet surface, throwing up reflections, off the leaves, off the white-tiled walkway. I shut my eyes against the glare and felt the throb in my hand.

“Ow.”

“Lucky. No broken fingers. I had to put a few stitches in one, but you’ll be fine.”

I cracked my eyes open again, squinting through the tears.  Dr. Nguyen was squatting next to me with a stained, chipped cup in his hand.

“Drink this.” The cup rattled on its mismatched saucer and I watched a raindrop from the roof plop into the pale yellow tea. “Come on.”

I took the cup with my good hand and sipped it. It was lukewarm and smelled of chrysanthemum and honey.  “Thank you.”

“Take these, too,” he said, rummaging in the pocket of his oversized, grubby shorts and pulling out some pills. He presented them on his outstretched palm. It was calloused and brown. The creases stained darker with ingrained dirt.

“Uh, no thanks. The tea is fine. Thanks for taking care of my fingers.”

What I was really thinking was that I needed to start a course of heavy-duty antibiotics fast. I closed my eyes and tried to remember when I’d had my last tetanus shot. If he was a doctor, I was mistress of the universe.  But when I looked down at my throbbing hand, it was neatly bandaged in blindingly white gauze.

“Still want to see my garden?”

“Yes.” I knocked back the last of the tea and put the cup back onto the saucer he was still holding.

He stepped aside and turned, like a tiny half-naked magician. “Take a look.”

Two rows of huge, ornate pots. Growing from each of them, were the strangest, most tortured bonzai trees I’d ever seen. I struggled to get out of the lopsided chair and he caught my arm, and led me down the walkway that bisected his garden.

Each tree had been coaxed, clipped, wired and bent into the shape of couples. It wasn’t just the leaves that had been clipped into shape, but the thick, gnarled trunks and branches too.

A woman with her legs around a man’s waist, her arms around his neck, her head thrown back into a burst of emerald green, his bent forward, as if nuzzling her neck.

The second, also a scene of ecstasy, but here there were three trunks, three bodies, intertwined, hips joined together, the roots of the miniature figs their tangled legs. Some branches as arms flung out, some curled around the trunk of the other, clinging, on the verge of something.

“This is my favourite,” he said, pointing. “It was hard to get the trunks to grow sideways, they kept wanting to spring upwards, but I said, no, no! You’re not finished yet.”

The two stunted trunks, lay almost horizontal, but bowed. One hunched over the other, growing over her, the arms wrapped around her waist, tiny knots above them, hanging like breasts.  Soft green leaves and tiny white flowers clipped into a ball for her head. His arched back, elongated, also flowering.

“How did you begin this?” I asked.

The doctor chuckled. “It wasn’t my idea. I wanted to learn the art of bonzai when I retired, and the first pot I got had two figs in it. They just began to grow this way.”

“Like this?” I said, astonished, pointing at yet another erotic tableau in bark and leaves.

“Not exactly. But it didn’t seem to matter how much I tried to train them apart, they just wanted to be together, intimately. I couldn’t stop them, so I decided to help them.”

“And then?”

“Well,” he said, shrugging. “You know what it’s like. Desire is like the measles. It spreads. The next plant I got saw what the first one was up to, and that was it.”

“It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Do you think it’s pornography? That’s what the bastards from Ministry of Culture say it is. They’re coming back next week to take them all away.”

I looked around the garden at all the little pots with their tangled, enraptured trees, each growing into an achingly slow act of love.

“I don’t know.  What will you do after they take them away?”

He tilted his stained head towards the sky and set his jaw. “I’ll just grow some more.”

I’d forgotten about my hand.

Molly At the Breakwater

[image error]

 

Molly at the breakwater.

Submitted for

The Last Word – Part 3

[image error]Men.

Men and love.

It was like being in the driver’s seat of some huge American car, with power everything: steering, brakes, cruise control.  It would start up and take off like a 747, with the windows down and the music playing loud on a massive, sunny six-lane highway, then slowly the day would cloud over, the music would switch to a station that made her feel like the world was closing in. The accelerator would get twitchy and stick to the floorboard, then the brakes wouldn’t work, the steering would lose power and suddenly it felt like she was trying to keep a fifty ton tank from going off the shoulder.

She got mean, then, needling, sarcastic, belittling. She’d push and push, scratch and bite, turn condescending when they placated her.  They’d give and give and give, like malleable, half-asleep passengers.

The smart ones with any kind of instinct for survival woke up and left.

The ones rendered stupid by love let her grind them to paste and became irrelevant. She didn’t dump them. She didn’t have to. After a while, they just turned to liquid, leaked down through the floorboards, and were gone.

Carmen’s world was full of nice men. And she ate them. Not one of them ever hit back, bit back, pulled the car over and left her by the side of the road. Not one, until Craig.

Craig came with the car keys and a road map and a fixed destination: a ticket to Buenos Aires that could not be changed. He drove the car. He seduced her. Every time she reached for the wheel, he slapped her hands away.  Every time she aimed a dart at his eye, he ducked and fucked her into an exhausted haze. As if he knew there was an invisible thread, strung taut, between her malice and her cunt or some hidden well of rage that could only be depleted through physicality.

He played games without telling her the rules. He moved so fast, there was no keeping up. He was infinitely perverse, as if his brain was a machine for crafting new edges, as if he could smell the boundaries of her tolerance and pushed her to the precipice of each of them.  He didn’t give her time to refuse.

The night before he left for Argentina, he took her to the chain link fence that bordered the runway at the airport, and did her there, with her face pressed into the metal mesh, watching the planes take off. An unsubtle ending to a sore three weeks, but Carmen had been in love.

The kind of love that makes you gasp for air, reach to grasp and fail to grab anything that might settle the vertiginous feeling of the plummet. Unsafe, uncontrolled, uncivilized. Love that only has the body as its harness as it walks across the wire. Where only the muscle spasms, the pleasure, the pain, the stink of sweat and the acrid taste of semen ground you and save you from autodestruct.

It had the end written into it from the very beginning.  And Carmen learned that it was the only kind that kept her from turning into a monster.  She’d kept her eye out for them ever since.

And here, she thought,  as the writer closed the door of the shop behind him, balancing the pressed paper coffee tray in his other hand, was another.

An Open Letter to Henry Rollins, and Others: Or Fuck Henry Rollins

This blog post in in response to Henry Rollins’ article Fuck Suicide, which appeared in LA Weekly on Aug. 21, 2014

It will give you an indication as to my age when I tell you that Henry Rollins was a hero of mine. But no more. His article is arrogant, self-important, and ignorant. And I’m sorry parenthood, wealth, success or whatever it was, turned him into the opinionated narcissist he has become.

It staggers and appalls me that at the dawn of the 21st Century, educated, traveled, world-wise people with seemingly critical intellects cannot seem to grasp the fact that mental illness – major depression, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, in fact any psychotic disorder – makes no distinction between those with immense fortitude and the weak willed among us.

It pains me to realize that people I thought were intelligent and empathetic do not have the imagination to comprehend that the more mentally ill you become, the less rational choice you can bring to bear on your life.

Do you really believe that Robin Williams was selfish? Didn’t love his children quite enough to suck it up and stay on the planet? Really?

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 28. I was fortunate to have a milder version of the disorder. I got help, I took my meds and did five years of three hours of therapy a week. I don’t fool myself that I was responsible, or had the moral fibre or the internal fortitude to be responsible. I was simply LUCKY ENOUGH NOT TO BE SO SICK I COULD NOT DO THAT.

I have lost people to major depressive illness, and this is what they thought: I am going to find the courage to take myself off this planet so I don’t poison the lives of the people around me. They were loved, and appreciated, and desired, and delusional.

People in the grip of major depression – especially very severe and chronic depression – aren’t making rational decisions. It’s not that they’re sad and should snap out of it, it’s not that if they only pulled their fucking socks up and sucked it up, they’d get through. It’s not that no one showed them that they were loved, or gave them good enough reasons to stick around.

Although complex and still not completely understood, at the core of depressive illness is a neurochemical problem in the brain. Yes, environment can have an impact, as can events. But it is not that a circumstance causes someone to commit suicide when they are depressed. It is that their ability to cope with that circumstance becomes severely impaired. At the root of it, is a chemical imbalance in the brain. In the same way that insulin can keep a diabetic alive, it will only work if other environmental factors don’t add to the problem.

At that stage of depression, you have no capacity to see the world with even a modicum of objectivity. You can’t wonder what other’s will feel if you commit suicide because the disease interferes with your ability to possess affect. You DON’T feel the way healthy people feel. You don’t feel sad. You feel dead. Or worse, you cannot FEEL.

And sadly, if the drugs don’t work well enough (not all anti-depressants work on everyone, the way all antibiotics don’t work on all bacteria), or someone has misdiagnosed you and is treating you with the wrong meds, or if you are so disoriented and alienated and delusional that you refuse help, there is a very good chance you will die.

We have to stop thinking that mental illness is different from physical illness. It is a disease of the brain the way cancer is a disease of the body. Some people manage to survive it, and some don’t.

We don’t question the morality, the humanity, the courage or the fortitude of a person who dies of cancer of the liver. We are glad for those who survive and we mourn the ones who succumb to the disease.

Please treat people with mental illnesses with the same respect. Some of us make it, and sadly, many of us don’t.

We have known that many mental problems are actually, at least in part, neurochemical or neurostructural illnesses for a long time. So why is it that we keep desperately trying to insist that it has something to do with our fortitude, our courage, our emotions? Why do people as intelligent and learned and with so much access to knowledge as Henry Rollins still insist on reading depression as some unfathomable moral conundrum instead of a disease, that can often be treated, but sometimes can’t?

I’m not sure, but here is my hypothesis: We want very much to believe that our mind and our ‘soul’ are ours and are one. We want desperately to believe in our own autonomy, and our ability to see the world objectively. If we cannot trust our minds to perceive reality correctly, where does that leave us? Who are we then? Do we have the independence, the individuality, the agency we want so desperately to believe we have?

Contemplating that sometimes the organism goes so wrong that we lose the thing we value most – we lose ourselves – is horrific. It attacks our understanding of what self means, what reality means, what cognition is, what being is. And this terrifies us so deeply, we insist that it must be impossible, that there must be a ‘rational’ explanation, that it is a matter of weakness vs courage or a matter of strength of feeling or human bonds. Anything not to contemplate that… we are complex systems that can go wrong. We have less problem accepting how they can go wrong when we can see the flaw – that big fucking tumour sticking out of the side of your neck, that’s your body gone wrong. But when it is something inside the brain, when it affects our very experience of reality, we often refuse to see it. We’ll tell ourselves any lie to avoid accepting that our system can fail us this way. And sometimes it fails us fatally.

And if you just cannot grasp this, the intelligent, kind thing to say is… you just don’t understand. Then go educate yourself. Start here.

 

Just Like That

[image error]Just like that, you might have…

I can’t think about it. I can’t not think about it. I can’t push the weight of possibility off my chest. It sits there like an engine block, crushing me with parallel universes of outcomes. You could have died, before I even got to…

Know you? Touch you? Hear your drowsy voice? Whisper gibberish into your skin? Feel you come?

What?

I’m snared in the anticipation of the loss of something I will never have had.

We keep to our sides of the world, of the terminator, bleeding over into each other’s longitudes with sleek digital tongues. The uncanny magic of zeros and ones cleverly organized into letters and numbers and punctuation marks. You are everything to me and words on a screen.

I am paralyzed by the quantumness of you.

01001001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00101110 00100000 01010000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 01011100 00100111 01110100 00100000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101 00101110

Translate the binary

 

Podcasted: A Writer’s Seduction

The Last Word – Part 2

[image error]Carmen was sitting on the rug, pulling books out of recently delivered boxes and checking them off against her order sheet.  This was not the part of the job she liked the best. Neither, it had to be admitted, was the proofreading sideline. The English language had its rules and she had met very few clients who didn’t think they were uniquely blessed with the license to break them.  To her it was never about the writer. She had tried, but never succeeded, to venerate some author or other. She’d made an effort to put herself in her clients shoes and understand that what they might need, more than a stern red pen, was encouragement and confidence. But if she had that organ inside her, she’d never managed to engage it. What she loved most of all was the pleasure of opening a book, paging to the first chapter, and submerging in the text. When it was good she could float, cradled in the delicious miasma of the narrative, for hours and hours. As if the language itself were the best of all lovers.

She wasn’t a snob; as long as the writing was skilled, she’d read anything.  Literary or detective fiction, poetry or sci-fi, or even a well-executed autobiography. They were like lovers, with different bodies and minds, with exotic tasting skins or familiar and comforting flavours.  Indeed, she’d tried reading two books at the same time and found it upsetting. It gave her feelings of guilt. As if she were betraying each book by giving the other too much attention.  Carmen would have liked to be a different sort of reader, flitting and faithless, but she couldn’t manage it. Once she picked up the tome and began to read, she was loyal to the very end.

But what she loved best about books was that they did all end – well or badly, in a blaze of violent conflagration or a poignant walk into a melting sunset, all tied up in a neat package, or with the characters dangling there in the wind, it didn’t matter -there was always a last page, a last word, a full stop.

Then she was free to pick up another.

She wished it were like that with human lovers, but they had no plot, no character arc. They arrived and they loved her and then, when any well-written book would have ended, they stayed and clung and dragged all their miserable history around behind them and into her life. Carmen had never learned the knack of ending the thing herself. She just waited, growing cold and cranky and quietly cruel, caring for them a little less each day, wishing it would be over. If only people crafted the ends of their affairs the way that writers finished novels. If only they knew, from the start, how the thing was going to end, love would be more satisfying.  The sex would be better, too; nothing stokes passion like an impending departure. But she could not end it herself anymore than she could stop reading a book before the last page.

So when the little tinny bell above the door rang at three o’clock, and he walked in with a tray of coffee, Carmen looked up from her labours, offered him a genuine smile, and thought: this is a man with a wife and a child. He has an end – that is his end. Perhaps I will seduce him.

The Last Word – Part 1

[image error]One day soon, she knows three o’clock on a Tuesday will pass and the bell above the door won’t chime. The shop’s old floorboards will not creak under his weight, and she won’t look up, because there will be no reason to.

He won’t come bearing coffees from the Starbucks up the street, smelling of crisp cold air and espresso beans.  He won’t reach into his jacket and pull out the ten or twelve sheets of neatly printed writing he pulls out now.

Carmen will have finished her part. It will be over.

* * *

The first time he came to the little shop where she worked selling books and proofreading for a fee, he strolled around, looking at the shelves, as if the books on them would give him some indication of her competence.  He didn’t speak to her then. She only remembered his pale, thin ivory hands. The skin was so white and the fingers so long, it reminded her of the hands she’d seen chiseled in stone, crossed upon the breast of some long dead maiden in a graveyard.

The second time, he had a dark, beautiful woman in tow, and a little girl dressed in a pink leotard. They parted at the door to her shop, and he stepped in, making the bell tinkle.

“I heard you do proofreading.”

“I do.”

“I’m working on something. I need some help with it.”

“I’m not an editor,” she said, still seated at the massive, dilapidated writing desk, that served as both a counter and a work area.

“I can’t afford an editor. And,” he said, tilting his head and giving her a self-deprecatory look, “I’ve no idea whether it’s worth an editor’s time.”

“What kind of writing is it? I don’t take on anything requiring specialized knowledge. If it’s highly technical, I know a few people who do that.”

“No.” His eyes roamed around the shelves, a little embarrassed, she thought. “It’s a novel. At least I hope it will be.”

“Why don’t you finish a first draft, and then get it proofread? Then you’ll know how much it will cost. I charge by the word. Most of us do.”

“How much do you charge?”

“A cent a word, but I can bring that down for a long work.”

He smiled at her. “A cent a word. How old fashioned. What else can you buy for a cent these days?”

She shrugged, and then smiled back. It was hard not to.  He had a mouth like a cherub. So at odds with the hard, bony lines of his face, the angular skull, with hair clipped so short it was almost shaved.  It covered his head like an ashen, velvet cap. He was handsome.  And very married and off-springed, she added mentally.

“My base charge is $100 for 1,000 words. Past 80,000, I’ll bring the price down. So, when you’re finished, please come back.”

“That’s not how I’d like to do it,” he said, leaning on the desk and looking directly into her eyes. “I’d like to bring you a chapter a week. That way, I’m forced to produce a chapter a week.”

For all its pragmatism, there was something about the way he delivered the proposition that sounded, for no reason she could put her finger on, like a proposition. There was something in his phrasing, in his tone: a lazy sung quality, a teasing inflection. And something in the proposal itself, as if he were making her complicit in a perverse discipline he wanted to indulge in.

“What do you say?” He stepped back, straightening and tilted his head childishly.

Or not. She was reading too much into the words of this strangely attractive man. “Bring me the first thousand words and we’ll see how it goes from there. How about that?”

He nodded, pushed out his lower lip and shoved his hands into the front pockets of his jeans.  “Sounds good to me. What about next Tuesday?”

“Tuesday’s fine.”

He turned to go. Reached the door and rested his hand – that strange, white appendage – on the handle. “Does anyone ever come in here and buy books?”

Carmen laughed. “Occasionally. But we do most of our business with schools and private libraries.”

“It’s quiet. I like it here.”

Before she could think of a response, he was out the door and walking up the street. It had begun to snow.

Laundry

[image error]What are these gifts that we’re given? These injections of time-released trouble, slipped between our cells so young and carried unawares into all our endeavours?

I used to say that I was all my own, lived like a second-rate Aphrodite, risen from a sterile sea. Because to live another way was to acknowledge all those choices were not mine to make. And how does blame fix anything? Better, I thought, to insist that all my sins were my own. But here I am, leaking legacy onto your sheets.  No matter how sincere my apology, it’s still a mess.

I could leave, like I always have, and close another door on the stains I’ve made. Take another plane to another country and find another bed to foul. Or I could stay, just this once, and do your laundry.

Under the Livid Sky

[image error]With him, I can. Because he’s all bone and flesh, bear-big and fight-smart. And no matter how the madness breaches in me, no matter how blood-hungry its glory, I will never get the best of him.

I strike him on the cheek, and he smiles and hits back, dislodging the sullenness of lazy lust. The muted thud of my fist against his chest and my reason turns syrupy in the promise of violence.  I kiss him, press my fingers into the hinges of his jaw until he relents and lets me pour the whine of my awful desire down his throat.

He feeds me insults, spitting words like a quick remedy onto a lover’s palm, too eager to fuck before I’m ready. And I swear back into his skin until those quotidian barbs become new vessels to contain the thousand things that have no words.

I kiss him until the skin of his lip tears and gives its coppery insides over on the tip of my tongue. He grins, a fistful of my hair in his hand, and pulls my rabid mouth off his. I know what he sees: the panting, enraged creature I have become. My teeth smeared with his colour.  Or perhaps mine.

If I break myself on him. If I bruise my meat against his hips, if I cut myself on his incisors, if I writhe until his nails bit into my skin, if I tear my inner flesh getting onto his cock, then all the better.

It’s worth the flood of effluvia I’ve drowned him in. It’s worth the one mark I’ve left on him. The dark bruised place of missing ribs. The ugly art my hunger has left on his skin. The geometry I’ve carved into the back of his thighs for not quite managing to fuck me to death.

Oblivion under my livid sky, in that place where I’m mute cunt and vicious scythe and nothing more. He lets me visit, then calls me home.