Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

I was only the medium through which his statements were passing,

The defense lawyer does not have recourse to such cowardice, he or she must not only listen to but carefully study the record of these acts, he or she must inhabit and inhale their atmosphere. The very thing that the rest of us are unable to endure is the very thing inside of which the defense lawyer must live.

The gesture was reassuring rather than erotic, the touch of a friend or even a father, although it could turn on a dime, its intention mutable.

a narrative becomes persuasive not through complexity but conviction,

the body is both more resilient and more fragile than one expects,

the stability around us was simply a matter of appearances.

Every certainty can give way without notice.

There are prisons and far worse all around us, in New York there was a black site above a bustling food court, the windows darkened and the rooms soundproofed so that the screaming never reached the people sitting below. People eating their sandwiches and sipping their cappuccinos, who had no idea of what was taking place directly above them, no idea of the world in which they were living.

identities should be so mutable,

The attention, which until that moment had been focused on the witness and the prosecutor, now atomized, scattering across the courtroom.

charisma was not inherent but had to be constantly reinforced.

I realized that for him I was pure instrument, someone without will or judgment, a consciousness-free zone into which he could escape, the only company he could now bear

exhibition spaces at some museums, their size so immense they seemed to force an experience of sublimity upon the visitor.

it was the very act of posing, the relationship that act implied, that created this sense of uncanny familiarity.

It means something, to face inward, to turn your back on the storm brewing outside.

I had been complicit in my own erasure.

It’s gone quickly, their childhood, but it’s also gone very slowly.

violence that was not contained on their tablets or phone screens, that was not abstract but fully realized.

The effect was to make his injuries seem more inherent to his character, less temporary and more integral.

he became the person whose perspective I occupied.

I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable.

She spoke with great deliberation, so that each word was like a link in a chain and the entire thing held fast, even as it moved across languages.

so that I still had the sense that I was speaking for her, despite the layers of language between us.

I looked down at the witness, it prickled through me, the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.

They no longer seemed like the well-adjusted individuals I had met upon my arrival, instead they were marked by alarming fissures, levels of dissociation that I did not think could be sustainable.

she seemed so thoroughly of this city, she understood the language and the customs, the unspoken ideologies of its culture. In the end, it took only a decade to become of a place, and that was not so very long.

But I like the Dutch, they are quite neutral as a people, although even that is in and of itself something to adjust to.

I like this woman, because she is not truly from the West. But in the end, you are part of the institution that you serve.

no longer believed that equanimity was either tenable or desirable. It corroded everything inside.

They had the right temperament for the job. But at what internal cost?

and I understood that what had happened had been its own thing for him, in the way that these past months had been for me,