THERE IS NO WAY TO TELL THE STORY OF A GREAT VIOLENCE.
To tell this story, the narrator became a child beauty queen. She enrolled in evening elocution courses. She trained herself to paint a second face atop her own face. (Masks are subtext read aloud, the private wish made public.) She performed the talent of the baton twirler, the musician, the tap dancer, the actress, and this proved that the truest talent is mime. (You know, it was the parrot, not the child, who first suggested the difference between the human and the animal is ability to self-reflect, to see oneself in a mirror and say: That is myself. Our narrator developed late. She will tell you this story soon, after she explains how she learned the language of the pageant.) At the age of nineteen, she learned to answer the questions of adults. Of course, she was already an adult, but she had not yet been asked any questions. She had not yet become interested in anything enough to ask a question.
She learned that a story is only the shape of a story. If anything about the story could act as a mirror, there was little left for her to do. That is, I suppose, what allows this to be a story about the dead.
Our narrator is now tapping. She is about to tell us.
Chapter 1
WHEN I TRY TO REMEMBER THE LATE NINETIES, I MOSTLY remember climbing into a tanning bed with a rabbit’s head sticker pressed to my hip. The same spot, every time, for the entire summer of ’99. In Pompeii, the third cause of death was instant dehydration triggered by extreme heat. I learned this in school, but never thought of it as I pulled the plastic goggles over my head and lowered the lid. It felt wonderful; it was an actual bed of light. The goggles had tiny pinpricks in the middle covered with black lenses to protect the thinner skin of the eyelids. I felt a chill of success whenever I surveyed the augmented pigment of my skin.
Once, only laborers spent enough time in the sun to tan. If you perform a slight dissection on the word parasol, you get para=to shield and sol=sun. (The events I am telling you about take place after I
graduated from a high school that sat in the middle of the country—the oeil de taureau of America, stoic and dry. Now I am seriously committed to the German, but as a student I took one year of each Romance language. Je m’appelle Jessica. Mi nombre es Jessica. Mi chiamo Jessica. I can recognize a root, determine what lexical waters a word has been washed in. Now, Mein Name ist Jessica. I am so much closer to the present.) Protection, of course, has always been the prerogative of the rich.
Gloves, wide-brimmed hats, mineral creams, smart glass, umbrellas, and veils protect the skin from signs of use. Tans now exist because a French fashion designer spent too long on a yacht in the Mediterranean—she went sailing and it showed. But all she had to do was say she meant to do it. She was born in an orphanage and inverted basic economy with a dress that suggested less was actually more. At one point, she was a Nazi intelligence officer. She knew how essential intent is when it comes to assigning culpability. So the tan became fashionable. Another economic subversion: what was once a sign for poverty became a sign of wealth. Probably because I love deception, it impresses me when a person who traffics in images is adept at rhetoric. The designer’s name was a diminutive of a diminutive; an abbreviation of the French coquette. My own name means “rich. God beholds.”
I have always felt more the beholder than the beholden, which is why it is very hard to believe in God at all. If this story is about anything, it is about being somewhere in between; the importance of the aurea mediocritas. The opulent wedding ring twisted inward in public, the right balance of visibility and existence.
I spent all my time in that sun bed because I didn’t have a job. When I finally got one, my skin had the glow of a ham under a heat lamp; the sacré-cœur of a country club Father’s Day brunch. My own father didn’t eat ham, didn’t belong to a country club, and did not worship the sun. Before my disappearance, he
was a professor of boredom, and, in fact, the founder and chair of the Boredom Studies department at the Midwestern University I dropped out of. My taking time out from the world to meditate on my dermis was rare, hard for him to understand. I believe it made me the primary subject in one of my father’s case studies on boredom. Maybe even the inspiration for it.
There was something almost spiritual to his theories; he taught a course on Chaucer entitled “The Devil’s Workshop,” in which students considered Proverbs 16:27, the professed origin of St. Jerome’s declaration, “fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum.” Anyway, the final exam for The Devil’s Workshop involved a staring contest. Grades were not curved.
Dr. Clink—that’s my father’s name—and I have not talked for a long time. I’d like to ask him if he ever thought, inversely, that boredom could be harnessed. Held in the same way that a poltergeist harnesses the body of its host. If this were possible, then it follows that intentional, controlled idleness could become a means by which the devil could be tricked into doing one’s bidding. I doubt this idea occurred to him. His students occasionally went insane during the final exam. The insanity was temporary. That seemed to be more Dr. Clink’s treatise on boredom—its impermanence.
His doctoral dissertation concerned juridical ethics and the sentencing of crimes passionnel.
A crime of passion is simply defense by excuse. Dr. Clink explained to me that this is a sort of perversion of mens rea that depends on proving the defendant holds no malicious aforethought. Literally, your mind isn’t guilty. Your very mind. In essence, a crime of passion is an act of violence that wasn’t planned on. It’s best if you don’t have the rope or the knife, etc., on your person when you walk into the room. It’s best if you call the police yourself and remain at the scene.
Dr. Clink’s research centered on the manner in which a jury of one’s peers accepts or does not accept an excuse. Determination of guilt or innocence is just, like, the jury’s opinion.
My father would, at this point, explain that there are a variety of tests used to determine culpability. My favorite is the Irresistible Impulse Test, also known as the “policeman at the elbow” test. If you can’t resist committing what you intellectually know to be a crime with an officer of the law only one arm’s length away from you, you have fulfilled the criteria of the Irresistible Impulse Test. I like to remember this as the “well, fuck it” rule, but that’s incorrect. To say fuck it is a sort of negative existential exercise; a proof of the concept of agency via the action which removes the agency.
That’s how the last half of the nineties was, though. While mostly I remember tanning and hair extensions and groups of syncopated pop stars dancing with the unity of a military drill, the other part of me remembers a love of trash. In the year 2000, a very pale, very insane actress once appeared on the red carpet of an awards show wearing a shredded garbage bag and the magnificent wedding ring given to her by her suicided husband. There was willing distortion, music was meant to sound like fuzz. If I listen to her albums now, they possess the polyphony of a whipped dessert, too sweet for teeth, too sugar for earth. Curated decay. I still can’t decide if the sticky double G and guttural vowel of grunge was euphonious or cacophonous. Both.
I suppose that’s why I now hold the idea of agency in my hand like the token for a carnival ride. I’ll suffer if I lose it, although not mortally. In reality, the Irresistible Impulse Test is intended to determine whether or not the defendant is capable of self-control. It asks if the defendant was their own victim; prey to their own impulse. Dr. Clink liked this idea because it suggests that there is a spirit under the body that can emerge at any moment. But he never made enough of the word victim. I suspect that The Devil’s
Workshop was his way of testing the assumption that extreme boredom is the portal used to access the spirit body. He wanted those students to go insane, to commit crimes at the elbow of an officer.
His research began in the early eighties and reached the peak of its popularity among scholars in 1994 as the result of the trial of Lorena Bobbitt. This was a very good time in my life for me to meet Christine.
Christine possessed an unfettered sense of revenge accessible only to people with a supreme, nearly supernatural, sense of self-worth. She was the relation of a relation of a friend of my mother and was, supposedly, the granddaughter of a second wife of deposed Norwegian royalty. Who cares, right? Well, my mother, Grethe Clink (née Strindberg) did. Normally a woman with a vibrant melancholy (a rich misery that won’t commandeer this story until it must), my mother became incandescent at the idea of royalty and the opportunity to speak her native language. She was, in fact, so taken by Christine’s remedial Norwegian that, through the closed doors of Dr. Clink’s office, I heard her raise her voice above its usual tone—a C major with a retained sixth, the mathematic inversion of what some scholars call the Devil’s Chord—for the first time in my life. Like a flute overflooded with air she told my father that she would not “turn her back on her country” for him “a second time.”
I thought that seemed a little overwrought. I sincerely doubted my mother, whose favorite show was Good Morning America, had ever sacrificed much at all.
Perhaps this is exactly what Dr. Clink said in response, because Grethe began to sob. The next words that floated through the door were “She has nowhere else to go.” Several days later I was introduced to Christine.
Christine was a tonique possessing the defiance and dejectedness of a Victorian ghost. Her anger manifested itself in strange and seemingly inconsequential ways. She was very fond of a type of benign
torture she called “dial and dash.” The procedure involved calling people who had wronged her and then channeling her malice into the telephone. She told me once that she envisioned the rage she breathed into the phone to be the cloudy-clear shade of a G&T. Christine was my babysitter.
Christine especially liked it when I dialed the number and held the phone. “It’s like how a tarot card reader can’t let anyone else use their deck,” she explained, “because they don’t want to, you know, junk up the energy.”
I nodded as if I had ever seen a tarot deck in real life. I gathered that energy was something personal to Christine.
“You don’t want the phone to lose any of its power,” she added heavily. She wore her lipstick liner slightly outside the ridge of her natural lip.
I regarded the phone. It was a gray-and-black plastic box that spent most of the day unmoored, separated from its charging station. Quite actually, energy-less.
My memory of Christine’s face as she tilted her head and listened to it ring is too private. I was transfixed by the revolution her features underwent as she waited. All I will tell you is that, often, I knew her target had answered by the dull metallic scrape of the Fresca can crushed in Christine’s grip.
You might be wondering why I had a babysitter at the age of thirteen. I have two theories. My parents didn’t know the true timbre of my voice. I always spoke an octave higher and a decibel softer when I was with them. Did you know that the exceptionally traumatized often retain their childhood voice, frozen at the moment of trauma?
Let’s step away from that, though. I’ll tell you what I know about freezing at the start of the next chapter.
Anyway, my first theory as to why I was still being minded like a child at the age of thirteen had nothing to do with me.
My mother often offered Christine extra money to perform unnecessary tasks. She would ask her to vacuum the basement carpet, which still bore the tracks of the last grooming. She paid her overtime to sit around and talk about Norway (a place, I learned, Christine had never even been) in her terrible Norwegian. “Ya, været ved sjøen er veldig fint,” Christine replied, no matter the question posed. Possibly, my father was studying the reactions she had to feeling useless. It was a waste of time, though, because Christine mostly did not live in her corporeal body. She regarded it as the basic technology needed to implement her will in the world. I doubt she even knew she was vacuuming.
It became clear that my mother felt more than a certain noblesse oblige toward her thrice-removed countrywoman. She actually truly liked Christine. Over the years, I would hear them on the phone occasionally when my father was out of town and Grethe felt especially low. Also, I think she wanted to offer the girl some money because she seemed like she needed it. For instance, even though my parents always left us a frozen pizza, Christine ate the jelly and honey out of all our jars. One January, she ate my leftover Halloween candy and puffed the jack-o’-lantern face of the orange bag back up as if were grinning and full. She was quite thin, tall, and heavy-boned and, for reasons at the time incomprehensible to me, she had my mother’s full devotion.
My second theory was that my father had made too much progress in his research and had become a threat to the entertainment industry. Maybe in The Devil’s Workshop he had discovered the cure for boredom and now film directors and writers and magazine editors and videogame designers and puzzle makers everywhere were desperate to silence him. What, after all, would contented people spend their dollars on? I imagined the people who were hunting my father as an America with the volume turned down, a perceptible dimming like when the lights of a flight are lowered to simulate night, promote sleep. I imagined they planned to kidnap and ransom me to keep him quiet, to keep the states loud.
A subtle panic undergirded the atmosphere of our home. My parents rarely allowed anyone inside the house (except of course, for the two people my father deemed essential personnel; his TA, Jeffrey LaPlant, and, of course, Christine). If my father was away on conference, my mother turned on every light in the house, double-locked all our doors and triply secured them by wedging a dining chair under the handles. Then, in a macabre before-bed ritual, walked around with the largest knife from the butcher’s block.
My mother opened even the cabinet under the sink while remarking that Charles Manson was a very small man. Like Barbie, Abe Lincoln, and Frankenstein, I don’t ever remember not knowing who Charles Manson was.
(Is this enough to explain to you why I believed there was some serious and maybe immediate violence always near me? Who are you, by the way? I’ve been imaging you as a sort of panel of judges sitting at a long, faux wood table in the front row of a convention center, craning your necks back to look at the talent, whispering amongst yourselves, never disapproving, sometimes amused, often confused. I imagine you as if I am a little girl at a beauty pageant reciting Les Chants de Maldoror while painting a self-portrait; I imagine you must be judging my French, my brushstrokes. I imagine that you are indulgent, as anyone must be who submits to listen so dedicatedly, at such length, as a thirty-year-old woman talks about the tragedy of being a teenager. I imagine you possess an above-average tolerance for trifles and trauma, but that you’d like me to get to some sort of point. I imagine you imagine this performance might end with me levitating. I see you scan the beams of the convention center for a glint of light off the fishing wire that will betray my trick. They always say an honest person doesn’t have to convince you that they aren’t lying, ...
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