There was nothing before the moment of my eyes opening in the room. An instant held at arm’s length from the conveyor belt of instants, suspended in its own little world, in a self-sufficient pod: a now without a before. Piercing the atmosphere of that moment’s world was a direct plunge into the now; suddenly and without warning came the shock of the unending present, a raw and jagged edge. There, within the suddenness of the unending present, I was born—there I became I. That moment circled itself infinitely, spun on and on as though it would never end. To be born within that moment was to jump from a vertiginous height: the breathlessness of a body suspended, all quiet and hairs standing on end, skin cool in the whipping air. Then the chopping surface of the water below, ice-cold, ripping through the quietude, shredding everything that came before it: identity, history, memory, all torn wide open by the fall, the hole left behind gaping, delirious. The opening of my eyes in the damp dark room was my body smacking into the water, erasing everything that came before it, burning away the other possibilities of what I could have been. Birthing a new I, the I that was just a body hitting the water hard. Birthing the I that was just a body stuck there in the basement room, bloodshot eyes shooting open, panic coursing through veins instead of blood, as I grappled for the world. I became myself as a hook, scraping and tearing, wrestling with the new reality I found myself plunged into. Whatever came before the room, whatever was before the endless now, was torn to shreds. It was ripped apart by the scraping, tearing hook that was me opening my eyes.
When I opened my eyes it all flooded in at once, every detail clamouring for the attention of my pupils. My eyes were only open for a brief moment, but it was still enough for all of it to lunge into me, burning into my mind, stretching out the moment into infinity. I was frozen outside the passage of time, stuck in that singular moment looping around and around itself before my eyes, until I couldn’t bear it any longer. If you’re patient and allow it, a moment can expand or contract as much as it needs to, as much as the circumstances require. But if you try to resist the expanding and contracting of a moment’s boundaries, try to push up against it and change it, something can break; you can lose your grip and dissipate beyond the boundaries of time, disintegrate into the gaps between the clock hand’s stroke. This moment threw itself at me with such force, holding me hostage within it, slipping in through my eyes like a wild animal, that I squirmed desperately to get out of its grasp, unable to relax beneath its rabid insistence. My eyes snapped back shut, but the moment still whirred and knotted inside of me, its afterimage burned onto the backs of my eyelids, its taste on my tongue, forcing me to see it, to know it.
What I saw within that moment were the miserable walls, interlocking grey stones whose cold I could feel viscerally in my fingers, as though I was putting my hand directly to them. Cracked and brittle, flecked by holes and erosion, the mortar in between them dry and flaking. Cold and miserable walls that housed hundreds and hundreds of timid bugs, their little mouths chewing and little legs scrabbling at the soft, worn-down parts of the mortar between the stones, burrowing holes and tunnels, racing with tiny, vibrating bodies through the elaborate labyrinth of their creation. Bugs that scattered swarmingly when the light moved toward them, scattered and squeezed themselves back into the shadows between the stones, their beady black eyes waiting and watching from the cool darkness. Everything in the room, everything that I saw in the moment I opened my eyes, was nothing but a stage for the insects to enact their drama: creeping and crawling, fighting and gorging, fucking and dying on the stage of the room. I didn’t want to be the audience to their drama, that wasn’t the part I wanted to play; I clenched my eyes tight to refuse it, but the drama still weaved itself through me, I could feel it pressing on me like the
ominous gaze of a stranger on the back of your head. The problem was that the drama wasn’t just the insects, crawling in their tunnels, fucking and dying, eating each other and shedding their exoskeletons; it was all of it. It was the walls the insects rubbed their dirty legs on, it was the floor beneath the walls where the exoskeletons and excretions would fall. The floor that was covered in dust, shadows, and darkness, and because of the darkness I couldn’t tell what else there was, so anything else would have to be nameless.
But I did have a name for the two things standing on the floor faced toward me. Those boots with their wrinkled and cracked leather, the colour faded to a dirty brown, worn down with use and time. The boots stood on a part of the floor where the light was sparse, but despite the dark I could still see them: the crusty, hard laces, the scuffed-up toes. I didn’t want to see them, but the vision of them snuck in when the rest of the moment thrust itself into me. I was unable to filter them out. And so I did have names for these things: the man’s two feet in their boots. And names for other things, too, like the light bulb swinging overhead, casting its frail light downward onto the man’s head. The light cast shadows down over the man’s face, so that it was dark under the browbone, dark in the recesses which held the eyes, dark under the nose, dark under the cheekbones, dark beneath the chin. The rest of the face gathered the light, making it so I could see things I didn’t want to in sharp detail, so I could instantly, easily recognize them, so that their names burst out of my mind effortlessly. Things that I didn’t want to recognize, things that I didn’t want to have names for, things that should have remained nameless: like the hair on top of the head, ungoverned and frantic, reaching out in all directions, and dark, nearly black, like what you see in a lightless room before your eyes adjust. Black hair the length of my smallest finger, sticking out in spikes and drooping down over the forehead, slick with sweat.
Beneath the hair the skin was pale, with pink and red rising up from underneath in certain places; on the cheeks, on the bridge of the nose, in between the eyebrows. There were creases in the skin, in the places where skin likes to jump and fold: across the forehead, underneath the eyes, around the mouth. In the places where the light didn’t really touch—across the jawline, under the cheekbones, underneath the nose, inside the nostrils—hair rose up from under the skin and stood quivering against the world, dark and tiny, as thin and prickly as the hairs on an ant’s leg. The eyes were set deep and dull into the pale pink face—into his pale pink face—tiny, buggy eyes, and inside them was a black as dark as the hair, black like the darkness of a lightless room before your eyes adjust. The mouth—his mouth—was slightly agape and drooling a
little, ragged breath going in and out, pulling the room into the body, into his body, and pushing it back out. He and the room were exactly the same; he was part of the dark floor, of the cold grey walls, of the light bulb swinging slowly overhead. He held insects within his body, moving through him swarmingly, burrowing and fucking and dying and eating one another. But the man wasn’t just the helpless audience for the drama of the insects, he was an integral part of it, and he could choose what part he wanted to play. Not like me, who had not been given a way to choose, who was confined to my role. Not like me, who was sitting tied to the chair in the damp basement room.
But it wasn’t I that couldn’t choose—it was whatever came before I, it was that thing that had sat there helpless and dull before everything began, before I opened my eyes in this room. I didn’t know for certain what that thing preceding I was—everything before the current moment had been set alight until it fell apart into ash, into dust. There was no way to remember what I used to be without projecting, fantasizing, like trying to conjure up memories that precede your birth. What I did know is that I had become myself to have a way to choose, so that I wouldn’t just be wilted and anonymous in the chair, wrists bound and breath held, desperately trying to disappear into a crack in the floor while the room and the man and the insects feverishly danced their drama around me. I became myself to give myself a choice, gifting myself an I, the kind of I that you could fill a room with, that you could use to throw machines into motion. I is just a single syllable but there are so many directions in which it can slide and crawl, slick, quiet, low to the ground and watching. With it, I could tear feral claws into the space before the present, leaving a tender wound. I could writhe into the space after the inhale of the present moment, I could fit myself coolly into the forward-crawl of time. I didn’t have to be the passive audience to the drama rolling around me, I could instead be a raw gash, impossible to ignore, impossible to fit nicely into place; a gross weeping sore in the room where the insects fucked and shed their exoskeletons and the man stood smiling under the light bulb’s tragic swing.
I opened my eyes again, and there was the man’s shining delirious face, his hair matted with sweat and hanging down over his brow, his crooked smile slanted above his chin. Out of his mouth like a cough was does that hurt you child, and the right answer was yes yes horribly yes, that’s the part I was cast for. He slobbered like a dog, one without loyalty or ties, unbound, tethered to nothing except the raw animal impulse: the teeth, the heaving breath, the hunger, the saliva glands. His breath tore through him ragged and unstable, exhilarated by the stage he had set, in frenzied excitement
at the drama he had taken control of. His spit dripping and puddling on the cold stone beneath us, thick and brown under the low light of the trembling bulb. Child, he called me, the word staining me red with grief. The grief throbbed and flowered, sizzling roughly, a grief that was expansive and demanding, that instead of folding in on itself asked for something different than what was. It asked for a route through which it could reimagine what was. I could route any path I liked; all the threads behind me had been undone with a single movement of my hand and there was nothing left to untether from. I wobbled in the freedom of the empty page, swung my head around looking for something to wind around my finger, a ring that I could be known by. Child was not a jewel that could adorn this grasp that had ripped and torn with its claws, I needed something else. But he was the owner of the drama that weaved through the room. I would be what he wanted me to be, but on my own terms. I would be a child, and like a child I would roll in the mud, unsightly and glorious, just like the dog he was: without ties, without constraint. I could only move within the scope of the drama itself; the man, the insects, the light bulb were there to keep the drama believing in itself, to prevent the intrusion of any lingering possibilities of something else, leaking saliva on the floor, tying me to the chair, casting shadows on the cold walls. I would have to break into a new possibility from within the scope of the drama that had been set—to chisel a ring for myself not from rare metals, not from rare stones, but from the grey rocks of the wall, from the light bulb’s rusted chain.
And I could do it: I became myself, so I could become something else. So I could become the room, become the man, become the shadows and damp air, adopt the whole drama as my own. I could orient my desires, shape them into what I needed them to be. I reached inside myself, through the flesh and bone, and somewhere in there was the black pocket of my heart, and deep inside, so deep I had to really look for it, was an ability to want. I carefully slipped my fingers into it, and immediately the red grief inside me turned into fireworks, beautiful blooms of blue and white and gold. I slipped my fingers into this dark, faraway corner of my heart and stroked and caressed, coaxing out the kind of desire that could relax into the shape of my palm, willing and pliant and versatile. The kind of desire that could bend itself into whatever shape the circumstances demanded. A desire that could be trained and commanded like a good pet, lapping up whatever’s in the open hand before it (whether it’s milk or cyanide it still hits the tongue sweet). My desire wanted only and exactly what it
needed to want, and wanted it so badly it couldn’t keep still, trembling in place with dilating eyes. I wanted what I needed to want, wanted it so badly my breath fogged the air.
The man tightened the binds around my wrists and my desire pushed away, pushed up against the far edge of my heart, still too skittish, fleeing to hide in the corner. It still needed some coaching; I went over to it calmly, took it by the hand and whispered fortifying things into its ear, bringing it back into the open. The chair’s hard arms pressed uncomfortably against the bones of my wrists, the dry rope cut into my skin, tense and burning, almost completely cutting my hands off from my still-pumping heart. With the tightness stinging my wrists I encouraged my desire to savour the sensation, to savour the painful stinging that electrified and stung my nerves. Encouraged my desire to anticipate the bruises that would rise up from under my skin, to adopt an attitude of curiosity and wonder; to be eager for what would come next. To be eager for the colours that would bob to the surface of my skin like fish rising from the depths of a lake to show the sun their shining faces, their gills sparkling with green and violet. My heart choked and throbbed as I led my desire out from its darkest corner, all the way out to the arms of the chair, letting it settle by the burning rope, by the wrists aching and bruised. And here, finally, the yes was drawn out of me, the yes spread through my whole body like the warmest rush. Yes, I desired this, yes, my desire had arrived, was here in the wrists that ached, in the skin that burned and split, in the bruises that rose to the surface and painted me with wonderful colours.
The yes was ready in my throat and in my heart, ...
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