“I'm sorry.”
“Liar.”
“I meant to comfort you but then I heard Charlene lying about me so IâI'll leave now.”
“She wasn't lying about you. You're up to something with Frank and you're not to be trusted, but don't leave,” Pocahontas said to Stickboy. “That would be worse than if you were to stay.”
He stayed.
The night was dark, my eyes were swollen halfway shut, and my view was obstructed by the clumped stems of an unnamed bush, so what I saw was a blurring movement of two dark bodies.
“Touch me here,” I heard her say.
“There?”
“No, here.”
“Really?”
“Really, fakely, I don't care.”
And so he did, or so I imagine, try as I might not to. Just then I wanted to relieve myself of the burden of form. Instead, I tried and failed to stand.
“Stop, it hurts,” she said, to my relief.
“But I wasn't evenâ”
“I said
stop
. What part of âStop, it hurts' don't you get?”
“I thought maybe you were just kidding.”
“What's the matter with you?”
“Well a minute ago you said everything everyone says is false.”
“Shut up.”
She said this affectionately, and hugged him, or so it seemed to me from where I lay with standing up in mind. I'd told her as best I could. What she'd heard and what she did I couldn't control.
Powhatan, my half-brother, lay on a bed a room. I laid my body parallel to his along the bed. Everyone I knew was lying down: my husband, my niece, her cousin, my brother, my neighbors, me. I pictured all humanity on its back, an attitude from which you'd think it could do least harm.
“How are you?”
His planetoid form seemed to draw all smaller forms in the room toward it.
“Children say things they don't mean.”
“She's not a child.”
“Do you mean if she'd cursed you last week, before she âbecame a woman,' you wouldn't have taken it to heart?”
His response was a deeper kind of lying there, a fuller habitation of stasis, a rehearsal, it seemed, for the lull between the frenetic struggle of life and the unwilled busywork of decomposition.
“Adults say things they don't mean too,” I said.
“She has a history of undermining me.”
“A history? She's nineteen.”
“That I love her most is a sign that I desire my own subjugation.”
“So you've been talking with my husband the psychiatrist. Anyway, what's so bad about subjugation? Women face it every day and we think it's just swell.”
“I'd rather die than submit to these bumbling New York asses.”
“Oh, them.”
“They think we have oil. If we had oil, wouldn't we already have driven up and killed them for theirs?”
“So why don't you kill them now that they've saved you the inconvenience of travel?”
“They have better weapons than we do.”
“But they're stupid, they're slow, and they're careless. You could pick them off two by two and be done in a week.”
“This is a turnaround for you.”
“I'm just saying.”
“We can make better use of them alive.”
“And yet they're who your favorite daughter has predicted you'll be defeated by.”
“That was no prediction. That was a curse. And
we. We'll be
defeated. If I'm defeated, so are you.”
“And again I report to you from lifelong experience that defeat isn't the worst thing that could happen to a person, or a people.”
“What is?”
“Victory.”
“Your sense of humor is charming.”
“Look at you. You're what victory looks like.”
“No, this is the result of a defeat urged on me by someone whose remarks I can't ignore.”
“This is also the result of your having banished her from your sight.”
“Yes, that's true.”
“What decision of yours of the last twenty years has not been predicated on the fear of defeat?”
“So?”
“The victor is completed by the vanquished. Victory and defeat are each other.”
“This is sophistry and I'm tired. The crucial difference between me and my defeated enemy is that he's dead and I'm alive. He's enslaved and I'm free. What he owned is now mine.”
“You should go to her,” I said.
“She should come to me.”
“Is that all it would take?”
“Is that all
what
would take?”
“For you to forgive her.”
“I'll never forgive her.”
“Why should she come to you then?”
“Because she's my daughter. Daughters attend to their fathers.”
He closed his eyes and lay inert, and so did I. And so we joined all humanity, in resemblance if not in fact.
Pocahontas
To the edge of the world I am running
Beyond the land, beyond the sea
I evade my predator with cunning
And so does my virginity
So that's a rough translation into English of a song I am singing to myself in my real language. Singing and trying to pretend to be insouciant are what I'm doing to strive against the leaden heaviness of my heart and neither is working but that song is taught to generations of my town's girls by their moms and aunts with a somewhat different purpose than the one I'm using it for, namely, to evade a neighboring town's hunter in the sexual predation phase of his hunt, during which he's looking not only to use the body of one of his enemy's girls to slake his rage and lust, but to humiliate the girl's brothers, uncles, cousins, dad, and mayor, and to get her pregnant toward the ultimate goal of making everyone everywhere into more of himself: rape in battle is an economical activity, and lots of guys do it who wouldn't under normal conditions. Thus the song, and ain't it ironic that I'm using the song to help me flee from guys whose humiliation-by-proxy the song is kind of meant to make not happen?
I'm still a virgin, by the way. I almost “gave it up” to Stickboy last night but no, I continue to be beautifully intact. He and I did some light touching and that was definitely something I'd like to do more of but I got overwhelmedâtoo much else going onâand had to ask Stickboy to stop, plus my Aunt Charlene was lying behind a nearby bush looking, listening, and breathing, and what girl wants her first sexual experience to be witnessed by an aunt, even a cool one? Not I, thought the princess whose dow'r's now her mind.
Oh English speaker, why does ah persist in thinkin to if not fo you in yo pretty but lazy tongue? You're probably as bad as my guys are, or worse, and yet I can't but think for twoâme and youâto try to use my brain to know and say at the same time. I feel like my head is about to crack open; what would you find in there? Eggs and jelly.
I am reclining in one of the many stilted corn shacks that constitute my diffuse home in this grim passage of my life. There is a vernal crispness in the air that my bosom feels as gloom, and here comes Frank, whose nickname is Knifeface, and whose face does indeed seem to want to cut your eyeball just for looking at it. Out the back chute of the shack I go, and am running low along the stalks of corn. What the corn thinks of this it won't say. Wish I'd seen Frank coming sooner. Teach me to daydream toward someone who may not exist, English-speaking bastard.
“Hi Frank!” I have just shouted, over my shoulder, to let him know I'm running away from him not because I'm scared of him but because I don't want him to rape or otherwise hurt me.
“Hi Pocahontas!” he has just shouted back very recentlyâI try to report this as it is happening but please forgive me if sometimes there is a delay of several seconds as I trip over a disused brick or concrete block while transforming event into experience and experience into message all with the glorious engine of thought, ow, twisted my ankle, crap, not slowing me down, not slowing me down.
“Back off, Frank!” I have shouted back to him and am now diving over a low stone wall built by the European settlers of this land many hundreds of years ago, the start of all the trouble, or such is the role they've been assigned, someone had to start it, may they be cursed and the rest of us spared, though we are them and they are us by now. I somersault and come up and run and “Oh, hey, Frank, I thought I said to back off!” I shout. My ankle hurts, I wish he'd quit it.
“I just want to talk!” he shouts.
“About what?”
“Things! Nothing special. Relaxed conversation.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because I'm a man of my word!”
“No you're not!”
“With you I always have been!”
Let me test his last remark against a lifetime of memories of him. There was the time when I was a girl and he saw me kissing Stickboy and said “I hate you!” That was true. There was the time when I was a girl and he saw me kissing Joe and said “I hate you!” That was true. There was the time when I was a girl and he kissed me and said “I love you!” That was true too. God I'm so embarrassed about how traditionally girly my memories are that I'm using to figure out whether to trust Knifeface Frank. It's hard to think beyond custom while running with a sore ankle from a man who might mean me harm.
I feel raindrops on my skin and they hurt, not because I'm going through a period of heightened sensitivity but because sometimes when it rains each drop contains a fire that burns the skin. What moments ago was vernal crispness is now shifting over to vernal blur, vernal pain, vernal fear of the fiery rain. One drop won't kill you. Ten drops won't kill you. A hundred drops won't kill you. Ten thousand drops could damage you a bit, and I don't know if you've ever counted how many raindrops land on your skin per second even in a light drizzle but they add up fast, so now I'm running away from Frank on a bum ankle and considering his overture of aimless chat while I look for shelter from the wounding rain.
“I have a spare waterproof garment!” he has shouted.
“Shove it up your ass!” I've shouted back.
We've entered the forest now and are heading for the river. The trees, whose leaves are nearly full, protect us from the rain. He has stopped running, and brief strategic glimpses over my shoulder suggest he is putting on a kind of portable sausage casing for his body. So now it is only I who run toward the river's edge. Can I say that I am chased if no man pursues me? How much longer will the leaves protect me from the rain? What will I do when the trail I'm on dead-ends at the river? Here he comes, suited up, and I've been running all the while as fast as I can, which makes me think that he could already have caught me if he'd wanted, and hasn't. Why?
“Could you have caught me if you'd wanted?” I ask, running.
“Yes.”
“Why haven't you?”
“Want you to trust me.”
“So you can extract information from me for my father and then defile me?”
“No, I want to have an open and honest exchange with you.”
It creeps me out when men say that. What can I do? He'll outlast and outrun me, my ankle hurts, my skin is being injured by the rain. I am stopping now. He is next to me. We breathe hard, standing side by side by an ancient nonfunctioning partial grocery store. He rolls his eyes toward me and looks me up and down. He faces me, our heads a foot apart. “Turn your head the other way,” I say.
“Why?”
“I don't want to breathe in the air you breathe out, it stinks.”
“Want that waterproof garment?”
“No.”
“Umbrella?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Turn your head away still, please.” He turns his head, he pulls his large umbrella from a quiver that also has arrows. He opens it. It protects us. Here we are, breathing and standing and not getting rained on and listening to the rain and thinking.
“How are you, anyway?” he asks.
Though I cannot see it and am not literally touching it, I can feel the angularity of his face. I smell the fresh sweat on it, and the musky, darker residue of older sweat beneath. The tautness, the leanness, muscular strength and strategic know-how of his body, as well as his body's documented viciousness, are all right here next to me in the dim light and light rain of a spring dawn, and I'm trying not to be interested in them or impressed by them or annoyed or scared or anything. I'm just me and this is happening and after this happens something else will happen and I'll continue to be me or one of several things I call myself, unless I die, in which case no big deal, is how I think you'd think it in English.
“I'm fine,” I say. “You?”
“Good.”
“Neat.”
“Nice weather.”
“Yep.”
“You being sarcastic?”
“I wish you weren't in such a hurry to reveal your intentions.”
“My intention is to befriend you.”
It sounds nice, doesn't it? And that's just in English. That same phrase in my language strokes the little bones in the ear that make perturbations of the air sound like speech. And yet because someone you've known all your life standing next to you in the forest stroking your ear bones with a remark about how his intention is to befriend you is just so very screwed up in this certain kind of way, I am now grabbing the umbrella away from him and poking him in the eye with its tip and running, the worst part of which is how demoralized the expression on his face is as I glance back to see how effective my violence has been. That poor man. Did I blind him? Violence sickens me.
And on I skip on this strange morn, skipping along through the stinking, rain-singed, fucked-up forest I know so well. Trees, trees, trees, trees, dirt, water, air, fire, Pocahontas, and in the sky a little light, which means I haven't died in the night. What's this? That man, the dirty, stringy, greasy one, the one who broke that thing in me a while back, the foreigner and barbarian who arrived on a golden armored bus and is ambiguous. “What are you doing, fair man?”