In the Body of the World (12 page)

SCAN
SHIT

I remember my mother once proudly telling me that she toilet trained me in a week. I wouldn’t learn, so she just kept me in my soiled diapers without changing them for six or seven days and she laughed, a strangely wicked laugh, and said, “Believe me, you got it. You begged to have those diapers taken off you.”

Have I told you my mother was obsessed with giving me enemas as a child?

I don’t remember being constipated. I don’t think that is why she gave them to me. I think it was about cleaning me out, getting this thing out of me, this badness. I was born dark and Jewish and she was a Wasp. Well, kind of. She was part Wasp and part other things. Poor white kinds of things. Whereabouts and origins unknown. No one ever thought she was my mother, including me. I was convinced for a long time that I was
adopted. When they discovered the hundreds of thousands of orphans in Romania after Nicolae Ceausecu’s twenty-five-year reign of terror, I was sure I had come from there. Enemas were my mother’s way of making me something else. Perfect, French twist wrapped up tight—elegant, no mess. Enemas were about making me something that wouldn’t embarrass her.

For years I was terrified of shit. I was plagued with dreams of shit, oceans of shit, swallowing and consuming me. Now I really was swimming in a sea of shit, shit I could no longer control. Now I was wearing a bag of shit, a swampy pouch of my unexpressed feelings pouring out at their discretion. This made leaving the house treacherous. Sometimes the bag just exploded. When I was anxious, my stomach swelled. The stoma glue couldn’t hold and it was a mess. The bag could not be trusted if I ran into a person on the street speaking to me in the way that people speak to a person with cancer. You know? That sanctimonious pity that makes it horrifyingly evident that they have written you off. I smile that bald-headed smile and take care of them, tell them not to worry, I’m fine. Cancer free. Not going to die. But my bag is pissed off. By the time I’ve finished my bullshit sentence, the stoma is already beginning to swell, the bag filling up. Or, at a reading of a new play a producer I am having serious
doubts about comes up to me, and as I go to shake his hand, I look down and realize my hand is covered in shit.

It was shit. Unpredictable shit. My shit and it was out there. There was no more hiding it or keeping it in.

SCAN
RADA

I call my friend Rada with the red hair and the Yugoslavian accent. Rada speaks fifteen languages and knows the history of every country, and if you point to a bridge or a monument anywhere in the world, she can tell you when it was built and why. She is a linguist and a feminist and an activist and makes the best vegetable soup I have ever tasted. She wrote the Finnish/Croatian dictionary. I need Rada. I ask her to come. It isn’t just her soup, or her hands, or her skin, or her imagination, or the way she talks, or the things she knows. It isn’t just that she is at once the brainiest and earthiest, or that she will be the one person who is not afraid of my bag or poop. It isn’t just that. It’s what we’ve been through traveling to war zones together.

I met her in 1994. I had seen a photograph on the cover of
Newsday
, six or seven young girls in a state of
shock and terror having just escaped a rape camp in Bosnia. There was something about the picture, about the idea of a rape camp, that compelled me to find a way to get there and meet these girls. There was a place in Zagreb, the Center for Women War Victims. I faxed them a letter. They didn’t respond. I faxed them again. It was clear they were not impressed. It was clear they had become cynical about journalists and writers coming from outside the country. I must have faxed four more letters and finally they agreed I could come and sleep on their office couch. I felt like I had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Rada was one of the women running the center. She was to be my translator, and it was clear she was not thrilled with the assignment. I was just another writer coming to steal their stories and leave them in pain. She was not enthusiastic, but she wasn’t unkind, and she devoted hours to translating for me. We spent days in refugee camps and centers, backyards, and crumbling Communist compounds. It was summer and hot. We traveled in tight buses, sweat, trauma, and terror rising from the soaked clothes of the displaced and forgotten. That August we were engulfed in clouds of cigarette smoke and misery, drinking thick Turkish coffee and eating burek and baklava. It was in Bosnia that the women’s stories began to enter me. Hundreds of stories of women
dragged into public squares and raped in front of their husbands, families, and friends. Stories of young girls held for days like slaves, their bodies used over and over by psychotic soldiers, sometimes six or seven at a time. Stories where it was clear that rape was being used as an organized and systematic tactic to destroy Bosnians, Muslims, Croats, and, in some cases, Serbs. Stories of women being forced to leave their cows, goats, and fields, being forced to watch as soldiers led their husbands and sons away, never to return. Stories entering me like emotional shrapnel lodging in my cells and gut. Stories that would eventually own and direct me. Stories that would never let go. And of course these stories would lead to other women, other countries, other stories, all of which would eventually lead to the ultimate story that was the Congo. It all began here in Bosnia with my friend Rada and the stories I needed to hear, although I am not sure what I was seeking. I needed to know what violence looked like. I needed to know how others survived. I needed to listen. But what I really needed was to know the world, the truth of the world. I needed to find the invisible underlying story that connected everything. I returned to the Balkans again and again over the next years. Each time Rada was my host and companion.

This was how our friendship was forged—two women trying to understand war. Two women trying to love the women who suffered. We slept in tiny beds together, we shared fresh figs, we compared our runs and constipation, we got colds, and we cherished the places with good coffee. We smashed peaches, strawberries, cucumbers, and lemons in a bowl one day and made facial masks for refugees and survivors on an island. We did benefits and performances and workshops. We read books about trauma and took holidays on empty, abandoned Croatian beaches. We shared small summer cottages where we could hear each other fucking with our partners.

Now it was almost fifteen years later and we were both divorced after long marriages. There were new wars. Now I had cancer.

We went to Montauk, which is where I go when I need to disappear. We walked on the beach and Rada made her miraculous soup and we read poems out loud and showed each other photographs. We watched a video of the women building City of Joy. She dreamed wistfully of falling in love. I dreamed of surviving. We talked about war crimes tribunals and the Bosnian women still seeking justice. We talked about the conflict ending in the Congo. If my cancer disturbed her, I
never knew it. It was another battle, another thing we would get through. There was work to be done. She fed my rage by feeding me news, she helped me make plans for the future, she rubbed my shoulders and my neck almost every day—pushing me, loving me, needing me, back, back into the ring.

SCAN
DEATH AND TAMI TAYLOR

James stays with me for a month during chemo. He is the closest I have ever had to a real brother. We come from the same pod. He makes flower arrangements and paints beautiful pictures, organizes my closets, helps me get rid of old books. He builds me a Cat in the Hat bookcase and helps find the perfect glass door for my shower. Because he is an actor and an artist, he is very porous, and I feel somehow that we are doing the chemo together. Each night James and I move to Dillon, Texas. This is a surprise. I have never really been drawn to Texas or football or small towns. The nausea comes. The body aches. We smoke a joint, eat a picnic, and travel. I am not sure why or why now. I know Tami Taylor has a lot to do with it. She is tall with long red hair, supersmart, sexy, Southern, and kind without being stupid. I alternate between wanting her as a mother, a lover, and a friend. I live for Tami Taylor.
James lives for the totally unavailable bad boy, Tim Riggins. It’s a TV show called
Friday Night Lights
that revolves around a high school football team. I have never really watched television before. It always depressed me.

What I love is that we now really live in Dillon, Texas. Our days are just marking time before we can be with our friends: Coach Taylor, Tami, Tim, Matt, Julie, Vince, Jess, and Lyla Garrity. I want to say it’s not that their lives are more interesting, but in fact they are. I hardly leave the house, so this is the closest I get to traveling. I have become a person obsessed with a TV show. There are so many things I never thought would happen. Each day, some way in which I thought myself special or different comes undone. For example, I was convinced that I was not a “cancer person,” whatever that meant. I thought cancer didn’t happen to emotional people or manic people. I was sure I would die of a heart attack or stroke. What I failed to figure in was (a)
emotional
does not mean “enlightened,” (b) the toxic world, (c) it was in my family, and (d) trauma. We make up stories to protect ourselves. I am not a cancer person. I am not someone who would die in a car crash. I had a rough childhood, so the rest of my life will be easy. I paid my dues. These little myths and fairy tales keep us from the existential brink. Now I had crossed
over and had discovered that there are no rules or reliable stories. There is suffering. It is ordinary. It happens every day. More of it seems to happen the older you get, or maybe your vision for it just expands. It is as unavoidable as is your ordinariness, your baldness, and your bag.

TV always makes me think about death. There is something about the emptiness. I have thought about death since I was ten. Maybe even before.

I was ten and watching
The Invisible Man
, which seems like an extremely sophisticated movie for a child, and Claude Rains—who was my stand-in father, always so witty and clipped and handsome in that impenetrable kind of way—had thick, white, scary bandages around his face and head. In one key scene he unwraps them and I waited for the revelation of something hideous and grotesque. He unwraps the bandages and there, in place of some deformity, was something far worse. There was nothing, absolutely nothing where his face and head once were. Even now my blood chills and the nausea returns. Claude Rains was invisible, gone. I vomited for three days and right after became wickedly afraid of the dark.

Death. I have spent days trying to make friends with it. For many years I was plagued with something
I called the death thing—the sudden and acute realization of my own mortality, a complete flash of understanding that I will not be here anymore, gone. This flash is so immediate and so absolute, it takes my breath away. I have had the death thing in bookstores, in the shower, while working out, in bed. I have had it in my dreams and literally sit up with a gasp. It happened so often I could bring it on, which I began to do in an attempt to control or master it. Now I am in death. It is no longer a thing. It is not a flash of something that could happen. It is something that will happen. It is something that has already begun. I have a catastrophic illness. Many people die from it. I could be dead soon. People say not to think like this. But I wonder why or how I wouldn’t think about the biggest thing that is going to happen to me.

Death is the thing that will end my existence and turn my body to dust or bones, and make it impossible for me to ever see the stars, or walk through the early days of spring, or laugh, or move my hips while someone is inside me. I think crying will help me. I will cry my way into death.

James sleeps next to me every night in my bed. We have never been this intimate. I am nervous. I am dying. I had cancer. My cells are trying to fight it off. It could go
either way. I get up my courage. I say, “Jimmy” (I am the only one who calls him that), I say “Jimmy”—in a Southern accent just like Tami Taylor—“Jimmy, can I put my head on your chest.” He says, in a deep man’s voice, “Of course,” and cuddles me in just like Coach.

SCAN
A BURNING MEDITATION ON LOVE

There is something about the exhaustion of being poisoned, of your body fighting off the attack or just surviving the attack. There is something about being clutched, clenched, chemoed that is so deeply strenuous and catastrophic that it takes you to a mystical place where you are so deeply inside your body, inside the inside of the cavern that is your body, so deep inside that you scrape the bottom of the world. That is where I began this burning meditation on love.

I had been adored as a child and despised. I had been worshipped and desecrated. I knew nothing of love that was not based on conditions, love that did not involve living up to certain unrealizable expectations.

My father’s heart had turned so cold, he was able to leave this world without ever reaching out to make things right or say good-bye. His heart had turned so
cold that a week before he passed, in his delirious state, he told my mother to strike me from his will. (I was never clear why she told me this.) Then he told her to remember that I was a liar and that nothing I ever said could be trusted. When years later, I did the hardest thing I have ever done and went to see my mother by the sea to tell her my father had sexually molested me, she said she never would have believed me if he hadn’t told her that.

Love was something you succeeded or failed at. It was like a corporate activity. You won or lost. People loved you and then they didn’t. As with trees, I had missed the point. The men I, in theory, had loved and who, in theory, had loved me had all disappeared. After years of involvement, not one found his way to my loft during those long burning months. I received a two-line e-mail from my first husband of fifteen years, a card from a partner of thirteen years, and no word from another lover of equal duration. Later I heard he was insulted that I had not reached out to tell him I had cancer. No blame, just the facts. I had failed at love or at the story I had bought about love. As I rode my burning body down to the bottom of the world, I passed through the ghosts and glories of those love affairs—hideous moments and tender ones. Honestly, not much remained. No resentments, no longings. And that’s what was most painful—to think that at fifty-six I had
come to this: no lover, no mate, and no nurturing memories. Despair burned in me. There were days when the leaves of my romantic failings made a bonfire inside me. The story I had been living about love was now clearly over. The landscape was charred. There was no way forward or back.