(Source: The Natural Trajectory of Human Consciousness)
In the end, she could not tell apart strawberry and blood. That’s how broken—or healed—she was, depending on your perspective.
We are careful with the world that we have built. We are pleased with our minor achievements. We smile often and nod at the right time to show how contented we are. After some years, nothing can get in or out of our shell, not even air. So, we have to subsist on stale or recycled air.
And then something is damaged, unexpectedly, inevitably. It may be something as trivial as a word said out of place, a careless or incidental gesture, or something more serious like an illness or a shock of some kind. And a crack appears on our shell so that a bit of air and light, unusual and unfamiliar, can begin to filter in. One may begin to wonder. One casts about like a bundle of nervous energy. Why have you kept me in here?
“But you are only seventeen,” the sisters had said. Was it her age then? Were they sorry for her for being a certain age? What was so pitiful about being seventeen? But you are only seventeen. Those five little words were like five little cancers, five little tombstones.
* *
The bellhop would state: “She kept calling me baby. She had blood all over her. And then I saw the bloody mess in the room. I thought she would kill me too.”
The night manager at Motel Z would submit: “We had all the hallways blocked off. But we were too late. She had to have slipped away just as we were coming up.”
* *
At Light of Sumatra, a restaurant on the second floor of Motel Z, a local beauty queen had been hired for the evening. She paraded herself from one table to the next, talking to no one, just walking as though too proud to mingle. And the slit in her skirt went all the way up to her hip. One diner nearly choked. Another man chewed on a piece of string as he stared. She was just a girl; this was how she earned her way through college. The diner looked again, feeling weak and guilty. He reminisced about Jesus and the disciples. He said the world was wicked, and the Lord promised to return and smite us.
“You believe that?” his friend asked.
“It gives us hope.”
* *
As Suen looked for the remote, she had to be careful not to disturb the man lying under the sheets beside her.
“It’s all inevitable,” she muttered to herself. “Not only are there no easy solutions, there is no solution, period.”
She shook her head slowly and let out a deep sigh.
It was a cheap trick of the brain, this notion of there ever being a future.
Sometimes, she felt the sadness that hit her conveyed the deepest truth.
There was nothing left for her back in New Town. (Wasn’t that an ironic name for a run-down settlement for refugees?) The hovel she had grown up in, and others like it, had been torn down to make way for an apartment complex. Did it look nice now? Were the people there happy? She wished she had something like that growing up rather than just grinding poverty.
And where did all the people in the squatter village disappear to? She imagined illnesses or even death had taken some away. But what about the young ones like her? Had most of them gone the way she had? Or had at least a few of them made it to respectable life? Not that she ever much cared about being respectable.
She wanted to hate her old life, but she could not. How could she when her present life was just as wretched?
On TV tonight, two well-dressed men were going at it from opposite lecterns. At first glance, they appeared energetic and verbose. Suen listened to them for a while. And then she listened some more. What’s wrong with them? Why are they so hard to understand? She did not remember leaving the TV on. But there it was, bright against a darkened backdrop, with the volume on halfway.
It seemed the two men could not agree on the cost of water or whether it should even cost anything as one of life’s essentials. Since last summer, Suen had been in the city, and no one had said anything about rationing.
We don’t have a water problem here, do we?
Even a prostitute, you see, could not stay entirely disinterested, for she too got thirsty from time to time.
Suen noticed the bigger man’s long fingers. Was this all a put-on? Was the man, in fact, a pianist or a painter? Maybe this whole exchange was supposed to be humorous. If it was, it was lost on her.
And the smaller man was drunk. He swayed as he spoke, like a blind man reacting to music.
After a while, even parts of the room had turned gray. It was as though the TV had contaminated it. And why a black-and-white TV? Aren’t those things hard to come by? But there it was. And its monochrome had to be contagious. The colors kept draining away from all around her until there were only bare-bones outlines.
Then, from somewhere, a small voice emerged. A baby’s voice, it was, and it sounded distressed. It took her a while before realizing it was her baby speaking to her. But, of course, the baby wasn’t there. It was a figment of her imagination. Or it was the baby’s ghost, which would mean … (but she didn’t want to pursue that line of thought).
The baby said: “The doctor’s hands were hot and shaky. Maybe he was angry. Or maybe he was hungry. I am not sure which. I was thirty hours late when I finally came out, and, Mommy, you were a wreck. It was not your fault, though. It was not like you had wanted that. It wasn’t like waiting for a bus. It had to have been horrible for you too. Just as bad for you as it was for me. You were covered in sweat. I saw how your stomach had caved in to fill the vacuum I left behind. And I could make out a sigh coming out from between your legs. A sigh too faint to hear, except by baby ears.”
“It was the beginning of speech,” Suen said, feeling compelled to explain. “Not just for you but for all of humankind. It’s a caving-in, a collapse, just as every word spoken is a small collapse. A word gives something a shape, and something else is taken away, obliterated.”
When the baby resumed talking, it had gotten much closer. It felt like it had crawled up next to her and was speaking directly into her ear. The baby said:
All the strangers had gathered around me to tell me what a handsome boy I was and what beautiful hair I had. And if it hadn’t been for my large forehead, which had done so much damage to your body, they said, it would have been a perfect birth!
And just as I was basking in their praises, I heard you for the first time. You sounded a little different from when I had been inside of you. Your voice plunged me back into darkness again. That voice, that familiar voice, it was as familiar to me as my own hands and feet. But what had been muffled before was now crystal clear, as though you were not speaking to me but were actually inside my head. And your face was nothing like what I had imagined. It was prettier. I wanted to look at you forever. But I kept looking back at the blood.
I asked you: “Mother, what are they doing with your blood?”
“It’s all right, baby. It’s all right,” you said.
“It’s not all right, Mother. They are pushing it to a dirty corner when you still need it. You need it put back into you … and what’s that inside the bucket, mother?”
“A platypus.”
“A duck-billed mammal?”
“Placenta, I meant placenta.”
“So it’s not a mammal then?”
“It served you well, baby.”
“It looks bad.”
“Now it must be torn down.”
“Is that what happened to him too?”
At this point, Suen looked at the man lying beside her.
“Him?” she asked, confused but feeling obliged to finish the conversation. “Don’t worry about him. He is just a man I killed.”
“But why, Mother? Why did you go and do a thing like that?”
“I . . . I can’t quite recall. It just happened, you know? Kind of everything just fell into place.”
She turned to look at the man again. She slipped a hand under his head and lifted it toward the imaginary baby as though to offer it up as a gift for her child.
It slowly came back to her.
(To be continued in Naked Awareness 2)
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