by Sasha Grey
Funny, the affectations that we share with our families. My mom and I have the same rapid double blink when we’re truly excited. I’ve felt myself do it, and I’ve seen it on her face.
It makes me feel like a part of Inana is here with us. Maybe connecting us.
“I understand what you’re going through—to a lesser degree than you feel. It was my best friend, not my sister, who got wrapped up in something that swallowed her whole.” I’m referring to Anna, but I leave it ambiguous to be more persuasive to Lola. I want her to relate to me, but surprisingly, it feels good to talk about Anna after so long. It makes it all feel real , and this time I’m the one sitting back in my chair, getting lost in thoughts of the past.
How much worse would it have felt if it had been my sister who went missing for months on end, then turned up dead?
For the first time, worry for my voluptuous, devilish, free-spirited friend fills me to the core. I look up at Lola, and she nods, seeing the fear in my eyes.
I worried enough about Anna to try to find her—and found Bob instead.
We are our choices.
I am denial.
You’re incorruptible. Irreducible. You understand. Bob’s words skitter across my skin.
Denial, denial, denial.
Lola’s sigh cuts off my thoughts. “I can tell you understand, but it’s still hard to trust anyone after everything that’s happened. People exploited my sister while she was alive, and it got even worse after her death. Like cockroaches, people came crawling out of the woodwork, claiming to have known her—to have fucked her.”
I cringe along with her, but mostly reacting to the things Bob said to me.
How they’re still true.
I swallow hard. “That’s awful.”
She nods and her gaze softens. “It might seem like I’m a bit militant about my sister and her art, but it was important to her. And now that she’s gone...
“It’s all you have left.”
“Yes. And I hate that she’s become synonymous with something she never stood for. Cheap thrills and whoring herself out.” She grimaces and takes a sip of her coffee.
I see my opening. “Lola, I know it won’t make things better— nothing could do that—but I can help you tell her story—the one she wanted to tell. Put that out there instead of the trash-talking and sensationalism. Our paper has a solid reputation and a credibility that the tabloids don’t. If you answer some questions for me about Inana, I promise you I’ll give you the platform to set the record straight.”
She chews the inside of her lip.
“More than that, hers is a story I want to tell. It’s personal to me, too, you know?” She nods once, decisively, and I decide to press on.
“What’s something you wish people had known about Inana?”
“How smart she was. She wasn’t manipulative, taking her intelligence to a place of cunning. But she could make you feel things by reducing them to their most basic fundamental ideas, stripping away the bullshit.”
“Stripping away your expectations and preconceived notions,” I add, remembering the hands on Inana’s body, how she wanted you to think that the most personal touches would be on her breasts and crotch, but the most erotic part about that video was the anticipation—the way the viewer ached for her release right along with her.
“ Exactly.”
“I’m all in if you’ll let me be. But the questions aren’t going to be easy, and I want to warn you up front about that. What I want to do is get inside Inana’s head. See what she saw, feel what she felt. Show the readers, I mean. To do that, I need to know her a lot better.”
Lola holds her hand up to stop me, and my heart sinks, but I wait for her to speak. “I’ve got something that might help you out with that.” She leans down and grabs her handbag from the floor, setting it into her lap in a smooth, languorous action. “But you need to promise me that you will protect this, keep it safe.”
Whatever it is, I suddenly want it more than my next breath. “I swear.”
She stares at me for a beat long enough to make me uncomfortable, but I don’t look away.
I must meet her approval, because she suddenly nods and pulls a worn, dull red book out of her bag.
Inana’s diary.
“This was her diary, Catherine.” She slides it across the table toward me.
My hand twitches to snatch it, but I twist my fingers around unseen on my lap beneath the table, frightened by how close answers are. Frightened by how much I want it. “Are you sure you’re okay with me reading it?”
“I think you’ll tell the story that needs to be told, with sensitivity.”
She’s right about that. I hope.
It might be a little too close to home, like writing about the person I almost became.
Who I could still become, if…
“I know it’s a sensitive subject, Lola, but why don’t you believe that your sister committed suicide? You understand why I have to ask.”
“Are you religious?”
I hedge. “I was baptized Catholic.”
She nods. “No matter what else she did, said, or was, Catherine, my sister was a good Christian girl at the core. She’d never have committed suicide. Never.” Her voice holds such certainty that I have a hard time meeting her eyes. She places a set of keys on top of the diary and jots down an address on the back of her receipt. “This is Inana’s address.” She taps the diary. “I’m giving you access to what was in her head. You might as well have access to the home she wrote the diary in as well. This is her life. I know you’ll treat it with the respect it deserves.”
I nod, and make my exit from the coffee shop with the diary and the keys.
SIX
A GOOD CHRISTIAN GIRL.
What does a good Christian girl do? The same things a good Catholic girl does.
She keeps her knees together. She keeps her hands clean.
She never has impure thoughts.
She drinks a lot of wine during socially acceptable hours and pushes out as many kids as her husband’s penis can put inside her in the missionary position whenever he wants to do it.
Or…
Maybe she squeezes her thighs together while having impure thoughts about the new, young priest, imagining him taking her on the altar, using the rosary to rock against her clit the way I did. She imagines way more interesting things he could do with that anointing oil.
I couldn’t understand how we weren’t supposed to fantasize about him. If God made him beautiful, we were surely meant to see his appeal.
Even before I had had sex, my imagination was rampant with impure thoughts and anticipation. Creative about the ways pleasure could be achieved—not that I found anything near satisfaction with a partner until Jack. My fertile fantasies were probably a huge part of the reason I was so let down. Until Jack, I was prepared to be underwhelmed unless I was alone with my hand. It’s sad to realize that women are still conditioned to feel and think this way.
But this was before Jack, and before I’d had the chance to be underwhelmed by a partner in bed.
Good, Catholic, virginal Catherine.
I used to feel shame at my impure thoughts about the priest while at church, until I realized the whole place was teeming with sex.
I’ve said it before and I’ll reiterate now—if there’s something the good book isn’t short of, it’s sex. You can barely turn a page without people wondering when God will come, when Jesus is coming, when salvation cometh. There’s nothing more transcendental than the rapture of an orgasm.
When you come.
Maybe Inana didn’t know that. Maybe she didn’t believe in anything except her vision anymore. But even if she no longer believed in God, she still couldn’t entertain the idea of suicide.
Inana’s diary radiates temptation from the passenger seat. At every red light, I reach over, running my fingers across the worn, red leather, a touchstone, to reassure myself that it’s still there and that soon I’ll get what I’ve wante
d for days. Longer than that, if I’m being honest.
An unmet need will soon be met.
I’ll get to know. To read her thoughts and see her world. Unfil-tered by societal expectations and politeness. We’re honest with our diaries, if not with ourselves. Maybe that’s why diaries fell out of fashion, or maybe the language of expression changed. Selfie sticks are our new pens, capturing our lives with pictures instead of words.
Only now we post everything online for other people to see and care about, keeping very little to ourselves when we should be even more vigilant about our privacy than ever before. Cyberbullying, cyberstalking, cybersex. Why write your thoughts out when you can film yourself and put it online and go viral?
Be a star. No talent needed—just do something scandalous and people will pay attention for a few minutes.
But then, Inana was a real star and she wrote things down. Do other celebrities keep journals? Are they praying that they don’t get out—or praying that they will, to revive stuttering careers with a little controversy? Dear little Anne Hathaway knows the invasive nature of her words being read by someone they were never intended for.
But then there are people like Anaïs Nin who intended for people to read their journals—they even revised and edited them. Hell, some people have only read Nin’s journal, eschewing the novels she wrote about perfect fake characters to instead read about real people in her diary.
Did Inana self-edit, or let the truth speak for itself?
Good Catholic girls must not tell lies.
What kind of woman was Inana?
What kind of woman am I?
Most people think of Catherine the Great when they hear my name, but that’s not where I got it. My parents had a thing for Catholic martyrs and saints and named me after Catherine of Alexandria. Born to a noble family, she found Christianity at a young age, as the people in the stories often do, through a dream where she was married to Jesus by Mary. To me, that reeks of teenage crush, but back then there weren’t any demigods like One Direction or any Belieber groups to squee with.
She was very vocal about her conversions, and passionately converted others to the faith using logic and reason, to the point where she went to the Emperor Maxentius and insisted he stop persecuting Christians and personally convert as well. This went over slightly better than you’d imagine—initially.
Instead of immediately killing her, as they were wont to do back then, he predictably refused and locked her away, during which time he sent many pagan philosophers to try to convert her to paganism. Probably trying to make an example by getting her back on his team.
Maxentius underestimated Catherine’s appeal, wit, and persuasiveness when it came to her faith, and she ended up converting an embarrassing amount of the pagans he sent to her. He had them killed. Back in those days, population control wasn’t an issue—and we can all see why.
Anyway, eventually even the Empress herself got wind of this young woman and, intrigued by the things she’d heard, visited her in the cell.
You guessed it—Catherine converted the Empress, too, which went over even less favorably than her other conversions.
Maxentius had his wife, the Empress, put to death when she tried to intervene on Catherine’s behalf and spare her life.
If I can’t pray with you, nobody can!
Maxentius then decided to put Catherine to death on a torture wheel, but his plan was foiled by the supernatural. Apparently, Catherine Hulk-smashed it with her purity—at her touch, or an angel’s, depending on the version you hear, the torture device shattered. And a few hundred pagans were killed as well, which seems to go completely sideways to Jesus’s teachings, as miracles go. Catherine is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, and people still pray to her.
But, righteously pure or not, Catherine was eventually beheaded. There’s still debate about whether or not she truly existed or was made up to help fill a virgin martyr quota, but the Church itself declared her story to be a legend, not fact. And yet, even as a legend, it still follows the rules women bow to under religious dogma.
Women in the Catholic Church only have two options: virgin or whore. Mary or Mary. Two sides of the same coin, even with the same name. Did they do that on purpose to tell us that it’s all the same, really?
Catherine’s feast day was removed from the calendar, then restored as optional, but she’s still venerated by the Orthodox Church. And now there are fireworks called Catherine wheels. Because what better way to turn the frown of a martyr’s life upside down than by creating bright bangs of ephemeral light to entertain the masses during celebrations? Her public tragedy becomes public entertainment to people who have no idea who she was or what those pretty swirling fireworks are called.
Beautiful, but macabre if you know Catherine’s story.
It’s said that when she died, angels flew her remains to Mount Sinai, and they’re still with one of the world’s oldest Catholic monasteries.
Obviously they aren’t, since angels are just legends.
People still hotly debate the veracity of Jesus’s existence, and yet that doesn’t diminish his importance. What matters more: real teachings from a fake person that make people act better toward one another, or a real, awfully mistreated woman who died for no reason other than believing something different from others of her time?
So many people died for their faith over the years—and Christianity has a lot of blood on its hands as well; don’t think I’m not pointing a giant finger at that machine. The Church doesn’t do what it does out of the goodness of its heart—it’s about numbers. Who’s got more, who’s got more money, who’s mightier.
Because might still makes right.
These thoughts bounce around with me in the driver’s seat of the car on the way back home, calculated to distract me from Inana’s diary, but they fail.
Nothing takes my mind from the book. I imagine stripping naked and shrinking, crawling between the pages, nestling inside the half-closed cover, feeling the paper and ink across every inch of my body to absorb the words, the meaning of the words, the places her fingers touched when she wrote all of them down.
She was no more a whore than I am—was—the night after I fucked a stranger in a mask, surrounded by a wall of flesh. When it’s about experience, like Inana was going for, I think it transcends definitions of dirty or pure. Virgin or whore. Mary or Mary.
The only part of it that made me feel dirty was finding the money in my purse afterward, feeling that Bundy had taken an experience I wanted to have for myself and made it about gratifying someone else, turning me into Séverine. Belle de Jour by default. He took an intensely transformational experience and cheapened it by adding a qualifier: money.
Payment made it feel smaller than it was.
So no—I won’t think of, can’t think of, Inana as a whore, as less than someone on a journey of self-discovery, just because her medium is her body.
By the time I reach our apartment, I’m shaking and nearly feverish with the need to read the diary, clutching it to my chest and hurrying upstairs like a junkie with a fix, hoping Jack’s not home early for once because if I can’t wallow inside this right now I might explode.
No date. Just swirls of blue ink across the page, leading me one letter at a time on a journey I almost took myself on four years ago but suppressed. Desires I suppressed so I could save those close to me.
I flop onto the couch, curling my legs beneath myself, and read.
Hitting like a sharp, cold punch of an early snowstorm. Skin’s still inside the sunlight, remembering that warmth, and it feels every flake on itself like the edges are serrated.
Knives of pain that radiate. Radiation that turns inward, transforming into pleasure.
I am transformed.
And yet, the same.
Truth isn’t a revelation. Our reactions to it are. Our reactions are the world.
We make the world what it is through our reactions. We make more of it than what it is. We twist it to suit our
purposes and the self-serving things we think we need to validate the things we think we shouldn’t feel. Or like.
But we do.
Liking, licking, loving, loathing.
Living.
Some people think I should be repulsed by the things I’ve done and seen.
And I try to explain by giving them more, showing more, creating more, being more.
And most don’t listen because they can’t see.
Some don’t wish to, actively closing themselves off to what’s there. Shouting that they don’t understand instead of listening.
But I say those people are the repulsive ones. What is repulsive? What is revulsion other than society’s patriarchal norms clutching their pearls in terror that we’ll find freedom inside the shackles of our choosing?
I want to feel everything.
If you’re brave enough, life is easy.
I am easy.
I want to take myself further than I dreamed of going, soar to heights through the ceiling I didn’t know was there.
I long to be astounded by the stretches of space between one limitation and the place I go next.
I want to be taken.
That which is freely given can never be stolen. It’s impossible. Gifts are gifts are gifts.
The having and the taking are gifts. Every breath is a gift.
Every gift comes with a price. Knowledge can’t be unlearned. Self-knowledge can’t be unlearned because lying to yourself is the hardest lie in the world to maintain and will poison you from within, spreading out like creeping mold, seeping into the rest of your mind like dye in a pool. Wet. Dark. Inescapable.
You get something, but something else is taken.
Knowledge for ignorance.
Something for nothing.
But things worth having are worth that exchange.
My heart is pounding in my chest reading the words of another woman who felt the way I felt.
The way I feel.
Deep, deep down, a ball of the things I pushed down and tried to forget about squirms free of its own shackles and spreads through my veins, humming inside me. Surging with every throb of my heart. In my head, my chest, between my legs.
