Hysteric

by Nelly Arcan

  During the session, I had to look like I was about to burst into giggles with my hand in front of my mouth. They weren’t after an expert gesture developed through routine or the pout that has seen it all, quite the opposite, I had to desire something I didn’t fully understand, something urgent in its newness, I was destined for initiation. Openness was capital; Internet users’ attention depended on it. The big bosses at Barely Legal had tested everything, and after years of experience with little girls, they knew that childhood was a place for adults.

  The pictures were taken at my place. Having a downtown studio with a fixed address was asking for trouble for a business like Barely Legal, going to the girl’s place was a way of skirting the scene of the crime. They asked me to look in my closet and unearth leftovers from my childhood, and pick out what might be most convincing: cotton sheets, preferably white, pink and blue clothing and if possible white socks with flat shoes, teddy bears and dolls and roller skates and a jump rope to tie my wrists to the bed, a few Smurfs comics, why not a beach ball. All utilitarian and decorative elements were moved out of the frame, anything that distracted the eye, like the telephone, the paintings on the wall that were too abstract, the plants, books, perfume, and jewellery, the antique oak chest and the large pivoting mirror.

  Most of the pictures were taken in my bedroom, since the other rooms were incompatible, too much stone and wood, too many pots and pans and electronics, those things would be too hard to bear for users, the objects stood for responsibility. In my room they thought I was shy, but not the right kind of shy, there’s that cute shyness of little girls who don’t suspect the world’s bad intentions, then there’s the shyness of women with hang-ups who lack grace, I lacked real youth unburdened by life. They thought I didn’t smile enough but when I smiled I felt like crying, not out of sadness but from the discomfort of smiling when the rest of your face isn’t following, it was endless, waiting for the flash of the camera as the photographer waited for me to smile correctly. He was patient, he said that despite appearances, he understood women my age.

  We moved into the bathroom where I had to wash with a bar of pink soap from Barely Legal’s arsenal. The soap was a point of entry into my body, they said it would give the scene credibility, just soaping up would give men hard-ons. I wondered whether visitors to Barely Legal’s website would notice that all little girls used the same pink soap, I wondered whether this discovery would make it harder for them to jerk off. A rubber duck from their toolbox floated between my legs, I was supposed to push it back and forth. This time it was impossible not to notice the duck and with the duck, not notice the pink soap, the duck and the pink soap would illuminate each other. My breasts were too big, so they hid them with bubble bath, but my stomach and navel had to be exposed. Everyone knows that to excite little girls, you have to tickle their navel, and once they’re laughing hysterically you can move on to more serious things.

  In the bathroom they redid my hair, with two braids crowning my head for that saucy look, but the light was too stark and it showed my age. They asked me to turn over and lie on my stomach in the water, and raise my ass with a braid in my mouth, and not give any particular intention to the pose. At that age, beauty flowed from the absence of calculation, or so I learned. Only my back was missing from the pictures, my waist and my ass were covered in bubbles, they insisted on taking a lot of pictures since bath time is a classic pretence for touching little girls. Everyone knows that the classics deliver general contentment, and everyone knows that soaping up a girl’s back in hopes of having your cock soaped up afterward is part of the primal scene among pedophiles.

  We moved onto the balcony where I got completely naked and was photographed on roller skates with Sherbrooke Street as a backdrop, sending up a volley of honking horns. My white skin shone in the July sun and that was perfect for them, having white skin meant you’d just come out of Mommy’s stomach.

  The three men from Barely Legal were professionals, they didn’t try to fuck me, they had nothing but pictures in mind, as far as my pussy was concerned, they were like gynecologists. They paid and left. In all my life I’d never made so much money for doing so little, it was the first time I’d sold myself. A year later I was whoring.

  I ONLY SAW the pictures once, the day they were taken, Polaroids with saturated colours that made me look like a character from a comic book. Despite my curiosity, I never visited Barely Legal’s site to see which pictures had been chosen for fear of seeing things that should be kept inside the body, like the lump in my throat or my itchy scalp caused by the layers of hairspray used to tame my braids.

  Years later I refused to watch the television interviews I did because there’s nothing worse than not controlling your image or the way it moves, or the redness in your face that reduces the power of the words you’re saying or, worse, the words that come out wrong and end up saying too much or getting on the wrong side of what you intended. On television you see yourself with a feeling of catastrophe the way you would watch your child get hit by a car, all you can think of are the seconds just before the ball bounced into the street when you might have done something.

  Seeing those pictures today make me think of Jasmine and her brown wig that failed to conceal her age. I wonder whether Jasmine posed for Barely Legal and if they tried to make her look younger, maybe in time she posed for hundreds of websites where they had to modify this or that, fill her bra or tuck in her buttocks, in the world of pornography, not pleasing everyone means never pleasing anyone, at least not entirely.

  We’re wrong to have stopped believing in taboos, people die every day from not knowing them, or go crazy from them. One day, men will be allowed to marry their daughters with the excuse that love is blind, and on that day the Earth will explode.

  I told you that what urges men toward women could be satisfied with very little, a piece of satin cloth, on the other hand you could ask for the moon and despise nature with its limits. On the Internet you can see women who make a living pumping up their breasts so they can only move around in wheelchairs, in Africa, women spend their lives stretching their necks with golden hoops to hoist themselves up to the level of men and look them in the eye. I told you that women look for a way out of their bodies by exaggerating their extremities, with men it was easier, they just wanted release.

  AMONG THE EVENTS that broke us apart, a dream stands out. After I had it, I began taking sleeping pills and thankfully the pills put my dreams to sleep too. I definitely didn’t want to relive what I had gone through that night in your bed. I wanted my nights to be peaceful, I didn’t want to face anything, with Serax I entered a dark hypnosis where my thoughts were pulled to the bottom of a pit; just below lay death. My last moments of happiness came from Serax, they came from repose where you weren’t allowed in.

  That night I was in your bed while you were writing, I fell asleep with the sound of your fingers on the keyboard and that reminded me of my mother chopping garlic. I fell asleep and in my dream you left the room to go walking in La Fontaine Park. I got up and went to your computer, I wanted to use your absence to go through your collection of pictures. I figured that since they were opened day after day, as you looked with your pelvis straining toward their mouths, they must have been worn out and maybe even filthy. My intuition was right, most of the photos were dog-eared, some more than others; I understood that the dog-eared ones were of women you had actually touched and they had somehow showed traces of your fingers. In the dream the pictures said all there was to know, they were like my aunt’s tarot cards, if you interpreted them in the right order, the meaning could be teased out from what was invisible, they had a direct relationship with the person looking at them.

  First I wanted to see all the details, like a therapy designed to domesticate them. People who have phobias try to cure themselves by facing their fears; some pick up spiders in their hands and let them walk on their arms and necks. Usually the method doesn’t work, it only makes the fears worse. In the dream I also fa
iled and tried to destroy the pictures but your computer reacted defensively, it had an instinct for self-protection. Inside was a program that defended it against users’ harmful intentions by desensitizing the keyboard. I typed on the keys but got no results, your computer took control, inside was also a program that anticipated your daily routine, in the morning it meant you could have your coffee in one hand and your cigarette in the other while you went through the news, and in the evening you could masturbate with both hands.

  On the screen was a list of porn sites that were also the names of women. Every possible name with “N” and “I” was there, dozens and dozens of almost identical names followed by words like BlackBoots, FuckmeToes, WildTeens, and LittleYoungSluts. My name wasn’t there and I knew why, my real name that isn’t Nelly had been detected by your system that could ferret out impostors. My real name had been blocked because it didn’t fit with your virtual score sheet, the sound stopped the passageways because your love could thrive only with the homophone Nannie. Today I know that if I had come to you that first night at Nova with my real name, we would have never seen each other again.

  In my dream your computer sped down the path laid out for it by the web addresses, the little white cursor in crazed activity, searching the screen where windows opened onto naked women, split open by huge cocks, mouths full and bodies aching for pleasure, and they all had dark hair. Their faces were contorted by orgasms; after climax they immediately closed up. In the dream, pictures and websites appeared chaotically, some addresses were backward or stood vertically, others fell apart in strange ways, their letters tumbling to the bottom of the screen like in a game of Tetris, it meant they were directing users toward illegal content, leaving no traces behind, covering your tracks.

  Then I had another revelation: every address and photo had something in common: a tree. Behind the tree the answers lay, and that tree was accessible from where I sat. By decoding numbers and letters, I always returned to the word maple, maple was the key to everything. I understood that all addresses opened onto a background of La Fontaine Park, I turned to your bedroom window that overlooked the park and saw you skipping your way beneath a blinding sun, your laptop under your arm. Walking through the Park made you feel like writing, you had done things there that gave you something to say, you were going to Café So to make sense of it.

  Then I woke up from my dream and saw you sitting in front of your computer, your cock in your left hand. I saw something in your face I had never seen before: fascination. You were trembling, you were about to come. I screamed as you shot your wad, I started crying and you apologized, you felt ashamed. That night I cried a lot and you held me, you took me in your arms to prove I hadn’t lost you, or that I had gotten you back. For the first time, I asked why. You didn’t know what to say because you’d never tried to understand it, you had a right to what was inside you, the virile force that moved among so many women.

  That night I understood, without really understanding, that living by your side meant having to close my eyes.

  WHEN WE FINALLY left the loft on Saint-Dominique Street, at dawn after our night at Nova, an event occurred that we never spoke of again. It was a sort of present we gave each other, with dawn came the beginning of my twenty-ninth year, you were the first to wish me happy birthday.

  All through our story I had my doubts, I wondered whether, when we left Nova, you’d seen what I had but I never dared ask since it concerned your life more than mine, I waited for you to ask. On the day you left me I finally understood you’d seen it too.

  At five in the morning at Nova, we still didn’t want to let go of each other. Annie had left with her friends, Adam and the rest of the DJ Orion crew had begun breaking down the electronics. We went outside where the dawn with its summer warmth awaited us, where birdsong, so strange, reached us through the opaque wall of six hours of techno still echoing in our ears. We didn’t want to let chance decide when we would meet again, probably at Black Hole that autumn; someone had to make the first move, even if it was a small one. You asked if you could walk me home, forty minutes away. I said Yes like a little girl, putting my hand in front of my mouth to hide a smile, and you made the first move, you kissed the back of my neck. Once more, your beauty struck me. In the loft I had sensed it in the half-light, I’d begun deciphering it, feeling for it, but with the first light of day highlighting your dark eyes, it wasn’t hidden any more, quite the opposite, your beauty threw itself upon me almost violently and I had to look away. If you hadn’t been so beautiful, what came next might not have been so flagrant and the world around us would have returned to its normal proportions; beauty is there to deflect our gaze from the truth. You had spent all night at Nova but your skin was perfect, on your face I read the robust determination of men who make decisions and the freshness of your youth. You thought I was beautiful too, you were happy, you had Nelly Arcan at your feet.

  We began to walk. We were talking about movies, I remember because as we headed north on Saint-Dominique Street, you whistled the tune from a Sergio Leone Western, you whistled as you watched me from the corner of your eye, and then a woman’s scream cut us short.

  It wasn’t a scream of terror. It wasn’t the scream of a woman being beaten or threatened with a knife, but a long, hoarse howl that ended in sobbing and the work of someone trying to catch her breath.

  We stopped and looked in the direction of the scream. A dozen people had gathered around the scene, some of them fresh from Nova. Coming closer I saw two women bending over a third sitting on the ground, her back against the window of a sex shop that displayed three mannequins wearing the same pink, red, and black leatherette bodice. Instinctively my eyes searched the ground near the screaming woman for the body of the one she’d lost, but there was no corpse, just a second wail that tore through the heart of the city and ended in sobs and ragged gasps. After a few seconds of silence that wiped away our happy memories of the evening, it began anew, blind to a promise of the future.

  I came near, I pushed through the crowd to see who the woman capable of such profound despair was, God, she must be beautiful. I saw something I hid from you afterward, on the ground among people’s feet, I recognized Annie’s red glittery handbag. Knowing it was her, I immediately thought of you, and what you were going to do for her, I thought of the spot next to you that I’d taken from her and how she had fallen away, bound to her pain on the sidewalk. I thought of her screams that pushed against the coming day and that could have been mine, I understood that our story should not happen, that nothing good would come of us.

  I went back to your side and said nothing. In the dawn light I acted as Annie had that night, I pressed my handbag to my breasts to keep them from touching you, I held them back. I let destiny decide whether to show her to you or not, I played dice with the suffering I knew too well.

  The next time I looked at you, you seemed undone, and I was afraid I’d lost you again. The whole time you stayed in the background, you waited for me to tell you what happened. When you asked whether I had seen anything, I said no. Then you said something that seemed both ordinary and heavy with meaning, you said that everyone had a burden to carry.

  We started walking again in silence, hoping that the light of this death would need years to reach us. Nova was over.

  WHEN IT ENDED between us, I went to your house unannounced, it was a February night. I’d been waiting for you to call for three days, your silence was gaining ground on the time we’d spent together and giving me stomach pains that had me bent double, but I’d learned not to take the first step with you or only in moments of hysteria; carried by madness I came to you that night.

  I went to your apartment so you would leave me, I threw myself into your lair. I knew our story was over, but still, it could have lasted longer, it isn’t very hard, when you think about it, keeping a woman around you don’t love any more; lack of interest gives love greater flexibility.

  For a month my life was nothing but waiting. I waited all day a
nd all evening and into the night for your number to show up on my call display, I waited for you to say something to me, just hello or not even, a noise, a clearing of your throat, I waited for you to decide where and when we would meet, fuck, and go out, I waited for you to consider my existence. I was nothing but openness to you, and you, sensing that my openness had turned me into emptiness, you backed away to keep from falling into it. At home I did nothing but wait for the signal of your voice, I covered entire sheets of paper with your name and invented imaginary scenarios where I was the strong one. In them I was jovial and carefree, I had lovers drafted from your circle of friends, I was Nadine and being Nadine, I made you suffer from my determination, I could forget you for days on end. In my scenarios, you were nothing.

  When I got to your place that night I did something I’d never done, I spied on you through your bedroom window. I saw you sitting in front of your computer as usual, but my view was cut off at your waist. I could see only your big hands typing on the keyboard a few seconds then leaving my sight for somewhere lower down on your body, you must have put them on your thighs a few moments before bringing them back up to write.