Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  Before I could leap back to the remote and change the channel, I was swept away in what I saw and this, I can reasonably say, was probably the moment that marked my first real psychological snap. I stood tall among a group of elementary school girls huddled in sleeping bags watching this disgusting display and I thought to myself . . . That’s it?!

  And then: That’s what I get for surviving adolescence? That’s what this life of alienation and humiliation and self-loathing and public torment is hurtling toward? That’s what it means to be an adult? Someday I, too, will be bent over and squealing like a sow on a slaughterhouse floor while some grim-faced refrigerator of bulbous muscles and leathery skin that weeps off in folds smashes his vein-suffocated manhood into me from behind, grunting and pulling at my swollen breasts? . . . Only dumb, how a nine-year-old would think it.

  It was at this point that she scooted into the sleigh and turned on her back, putting her feet into the air. His hulking carriage barely accounted for the change in placement as he continued to joylessly hack away. I will always remember her shoes, commonly referred to as “stripper shoes,” a towering clear platform with a burst of white fluffy material across the toe. I fixated on them, drowning in horror, that someday I would have to endure this and furthermore would have to lie back, watching my feet shake up and down in high heels with little fuzzy pom-poms on them.

  It was a dense darkness that came over me. I’d never experienced greater antipathy in my life. Here again, I thought to myself, No.

  The camera suddenly fixated on her little clitoris ornament and zoomed in with its unwavering lecherous gaze until all we could see was the glistening shaft of his penis and the incoherent bouncing of the little red ball. She shrieked and shrieked.

  One cry was so blood-curdling that the spell broke and I realized I was still surrounded by my classmates. I grabbed the remote just as Sarah Gill grabbed my pant leg, her eyes rapt on the television, and she said with the same blank, affected worldliness with which she said everything, “That’s a cute ornament.”

  As if the idea dawning—this is what sex looks like—hadn’t been practically voluptuous in its horror, I then had to realize I was completely fucking alone in recognizing what we’d just seen. I knew it was sex and not a single one of the other girls had come to that same conclusion. Yes, as soon as the popcorn was gone and I was relinquished of the remote, not only would this false camaraderie evaporate, but I would also be separate from them developmentally. I could never go back to the world of believing in man’s goodness.

  —

  We watched another movie, mostly in silence. Then we all fell asleep. The next day, we went back to our respective homes, and the day after that, we went back to our respective social stations.

  I didn’t really care as much as I had before, though, because it was in that moment of watching the little ornament waggle back and forth—in the very moment I distinctly remember thinking that her labia looked like turkey spilling out of a sandwich—that I somehow became a little older than the rest. If Sarah Gill, the most cosmopolitan of the group, could look on that image and see nothing but a prop in a vacuum, then every last one of them were still affixed to a place that I, for some reason, had been severed from. Because of this, the teasing didn’t smart quite the same way it had before. Plus, I learned a valuable lesson: don’t let children watch hard-core pornography. Which is a lesson a lot of people don’t have to learn, but life is about the journey.

  MY FAMILY’S HOMEMADE SEX TAPES

  I’ve been an insomniac my whole life. I don’t have the kind of insomnia that affects sleep itself; when I do sleep, I sleep fine. I have the kind where you can’t get there. Which is to say, I don’t really have insomnia so much as I have anxiety.

  I just lie in bed for hours, worrying ceaselessly about everything in the world. When I was really little, I’d worry about something living in the closet and I’d fill in the horror blanks with little bits I’d picked up from edited-for-television versions of movies like It and The Shining. As an adolescent, I worried about social politics. In college, I fretted about home invasion and dying in a plane crash and violent murder. Since graduating, I’ve had terrible recurring nightmares wherein the administration discovers I haven’t gone to math class for an entire year and forces me to repeat the whole thing lest they revoke my degree, which makes me nostalgic for the plane crash visions. In ten years, it will be stomach cancer and under-eye bags.

  I can worry with the best of them: I’ve never been the first in a pool for fear of invisible, chlorine-adapted great white sharks. Whenever I say anything bad about someone, I experience a flash of crippling paranoia that somehow my phone has accidentally dialed that person in my pocket and he or she has heard everything. I don’t go on roller coasters and I wonder if all my friends secretly hate me. I refuse to take out my trash at night because I’m afraid of mountain lions (I live in Brooklyn). I’m so afraid of home invasion I’d put padlocks on my cereal boxes if I could. I’m horrified by children in formal wear. I worry when I’m at the gym that someone on the treadmill next to me can smell my vagina. I worry they think it smells like a pet store. Or a marina. Or cleaning a deep fryer. When a trailer for a horror movie comes on at a theater, I cover my eyes and plug my ears. Just the other night I was lying awake in a sweat thinking about this movie where maneless lions stalk Val Kilmer in a region of Kenya called Tsavo. I’m petrified of the idea of getting mauled to death by maneless lions but I was just as disturbed that his manager would let him make a decision like that and also by the concept of fame (which sounds like a prison!).

  —

  But almost nothing in the world keeps me awake at night more than the idea of my high school boyfriend filming us having sex unbeknownst to me. Nothing. This is the most suffocating dread in my life. I have considered emailing him, even though we haven’t spoken in years, just to confirm that he didn’t. The problem is, there’s no real way to word that.

  Granted, the idea of being even a willing participant in a sex tape terrifies me. All I’d need is a single glimpse of stretch mark or stomach roll or an unflattering angle and my clitoris would retract into my abdomen forever and just live in there, devoting itself to God or philosophy or becoming a chess grand master and never coming back out under any circumstances. I also have no idea what my vulva looks like and I’d prefer to keep it that way because you can never love someone if you know for certain your genitals look like a Scotch egg halved lengthwise. Which is a frightening possibility, if porn is to be believed.

  I can’t even have sex with the lights on. Boyfriends will press for this and I always straighten my shoulders in a very serious way and explain slowly that having sex with the lights on is like kissing with your eyes open and the very suggestion of sex you can see is unromantic, awkward, even strange. I manage to make this sound extremely reasonable. This is a good angle: when someone says something that frightens you, just make them feel judged. Usually they stop because they’re weak. Well, weaker.

  It’s not that my fear of being filmed surreptitiously is informed purely by hatred for my weird, doughy, unphotogenic body. The real problem—and I’m being honest—is sex that is genuinely good seldom looks good. Performance sex is acrobatic and straining and meant to be regarded (that is to say porn) and porn stars don’t look like they’re having any fun! Which is super glib of me. Good sex involves all kinds of ugly positioning and bent abdomens. I haven’t even touched on the subject of the faces people make when they’re actually enjoying sex. It’s not a very complicated subject that needs much explication, though: they look fucking ridiculous.

  I have no reason to think my first boyfriend filmed us, other than the fact he was a teenager with a bunch of technology at his fingertips. It’s possible that my anxiety has increased over the years simply because we have grown apart, but I frequently lie awake at night worrying there’s a grainy video out there, taken from a cracked closet door under a sweater. The
possibility of this is far worse than being eaten by maneless lions and approximately one-third as erotic.

  —

  My horror at sex tapes started well before I ever had sex. It was Thanksgiving Day, my favorite day of the year, when one’s appetite and one’s guilt of gluttony are at their most extreme inverse. Thanksgiving was my favorite day because my parents and I would go to my aunt’s house, where much of the family would converge; a magical place where you could eat foods by the handful (even pie) from noon until night. My family was also of the opinion that kids should be able to hold their liquor and there’s really only one way to learn.

  On this Thanksgiving, when I was about twelve, I was entrusted with filming the day’s activities. I was using a camera belonging to the eldest of my three cousins, who was about thirty. We’ll call him Frank. Frank was perhaps my favorite cousin because he was a bit of a delinquent and drove a cool motorcycle and listened to the Beastie Boys and read skateboarding magazines. He’d drink only forties of Mickey’s and one time, when my family was staying at his cabin in the woods, he woke up my parents and me by announcing he hoped none of us had gotten pregnant the night before; he’d “been doing some drinking.” I was about seven when that happened, so I found him extremely cool.

  Despite the honor of videographer duties, I was getting pretty loaded on Jack and Coke because, really, if there’s a better drink for children, I haven’t thrown it up. I was wandering around the house, cocktail in one hand, camera in the other, swaying drunk because the adults monitored the children’s drinking by doing the mixing themselves, a system I ably circumvented by being tall enough to reach the alcohol. That concoction sloshed ruefully with a half pound of boiled shrimp cocktail inside me, further exacerbated by motion sickness from Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

  I’d spent much of the day approaching family members and asking them to offer their Thanksgiving well wishes while experimenting with cool sideways camera angles. Within about an hour, I’d started to think of myself as a regular Godard because everything I did was affected and indulgent. Convinced that I was a budding auteur, I captured the turkey’s odyssey from counter to oven in oscillating close-ups from bizarre angles. I filmed my littlest cousins playing video games and swinging in the hammock outside. I filmed my dad stirring flour into gravy and my aunts being bitches over mimosas.

  Just before dinner, I could sense I’d overdone it. Because I’d been entrusted with the camera, an extremely adult responsibility, I wasn’t about to demonstrate my youth with a parabola of vomit over the tablecloth. In my drunken state, I concluded that slugging a gallon of water beside the toilet would somehow draw attention. I slipped out into the garage, where there stood a refrigerator for soda, beer and bottled water, and sat down on the cold cement beside Frank’s beloved motorcycle to spend a few minutes collecting myself.

  It appeared to have been a false alarm. I took a few bottles of water from the fridge and chugged them, then felt pretty fine and decided to review my work. I flipped the camera on and rewound a bit. I checked the tape, saw I was nearing the beginning but not quite there, and went back to rewinding. A minute later, I pressed Play.

  There came a sight that may haunt me to my grave: my cousin Frank’s wife, head between (presumably) his legs, gulping down his engorged pink cock. She made eye contact with the camera for a single piercing moment and then breached over his shaft. I turned it off immediately, turned my head to the side and vomited down the entire length of Frank’s obsessively shined red motorcycle.

  I was upset by what I’d seen but I knew I’d have to clean up the mess before I did anything about it. I returned to the refrigerator and discovered that I had consumed the last of the water, so I did what any drunk witless twelve-year-old who’d just watched her cousin’s wife give him a blowjob on camera would: I washed my vomit off his motorcycle with Mountain Dew. The chemical smell of neon soda wasn’t doing my upset stomach any favors, but I slicked off most of the puke and dispersed it with my shoes and still more cans of Dew.

  After I’d kicked the vomit around the garage, I opened the side door to let some air in. I then realized I’d gotten a small aquarium’s worth of shrimp-Coke puke on my shirt, which I was also forced to rinse away with soda. This is invariably what I think of when I hear the brand’s slogan “Do the Dew.”

  I sat down again to think things through. If I had one certainty, it was that I couldn’t just return to my family’s Thanksgiving celebration like everything was normal. If anything, I couldn’t look Frank’s wife in the face across a beautiful turkey spread knowing full well his penis had been in her mouth like that.

  An intense impulse to judge them both swept over me and I concluded they must be taken to task for their appalling behavior. I was furious at the injustice of having to see such an intimate moment and the only thing that outweighed my fury was fear I’d done something terrible and was going to get in trouble. I was also still very drunk and smelled like a Red Lobster bathroom. But I was going to confront Frank because it just didn’t seem right to bottle my outrage.

  Thankfully, I didn’t decide that the best way to do that was over dinner surrounded by family. I marched inside and grabbed my second-eldest cousin—Frank’s sister, Stacy—and told her we needed to have a conversation. She was on mashed potato duty, so she gave me hell about dragging her out of the kitchen but eventually followed me on account of my bizarrely secretive behavior.

  I led her outside and down the driveway. When we stopped, I folded my arms in an extremely serious manner. I began by telling her I’d spent a great deal of my Thanksgiving filming the family and doing my part to commemorate the holiday. To hear my twelve-year-old self tell it, I’d sacrificed my day off to record their memories for them, like some selfless Irish monk cataloging the minutiae of civilization itself.

  Before I could get any further, the third-eldest cousin, Tess, came out. She approached with a look of confusion. I paused momentarily to consider the audience, then decided the more present to hear my story, the better. I backed up and explained to Tess what a giving little videographer I’d been that day. Even now, I’m not sure if this contextualizing was pure self-righteousness or my attempt to emotionally manipulate the audience in the event I was actually in trouble for doing something bad. Also, I was pretty hammered.

  Then, I told them, I’d taken a moment to reflect and rewound the camera and came upon a video. A video of Frank and his wife together. Stacy and Tess didn’t understand.

  “I found a tape,” I repeated, thinking it explanation enough.

  Nothing.

  “I found a tape,” with more emphasis on each word.

  “What are you talking about?” Stacy asked.

  It was at this point I began to shake with worry. As I have a permanently guilty conscience, it occurred to me that perhaps what I’d done was so vile and invasive they couldn’t comprehend it. This was actually all my fault and was going to be a black mark on the family. I’d be exiled or given some terrible punishment and all because of an accident. This is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to fully grown adults who stay awake at night worrying about minor Val Kilmer works.

  Recognition came over Stacy’s face and she exclaimed, “Oh! A sex tape?! You found a sex tape?”

  Just like that, my moral crusade was renewed.

  “Yeah. I did,” I said resolutely, nostrils flaring.

  They looked at each other.

  “And it’s wrong,” I started, “It’s totally inappropriate—”

  Tess burst into laughter and Stacy right along with her.

  Stacy explained, “Oh come on, Ashley. My husband and I have a bunch.”

  “What?” But it seemed so immoral! And gross! “What are you talking about?”

  Tess nodded. “Yeah, pretty much everyone who’s married does that.”

  “When two people get married,” Stacy continued, “they have to do all kinds of gross s
tuff so they don’t get bored of each other.”

  Tess added with a grim, knowing flatness, “Sex tapes are nothing. Just wait till you grow up. You’ll stop being so judgmental.”

  “And you’ll also be really sick of having sex with your husband,” said Stacy. She leaned over and examined my shoulder. “What’s that green stuff all over your shirt? Oh my god. Did you throw up on yourself?”

  “No!” I said and became really, really upset this time because my two adult cousins seemed suddenly more interested in the soda-flavored vomit flecked all over me than in the staggering moral failing of their brother Frank, who had not only filmed himself and his wife having sex, he’d been so devil-may-care as to forget which tape it was and let me record my littlest cousins reading picture books over their ravenous breathless fellatio.

  “It isn’t right!” I cried but my moral high ground was starting to give. “He shouldn’t have left that tape in there.”

  “Jesus, Ashley,” Tess said, “it’s not like you can label them in an obvious way.”

  “Yeah, he probably just mixed them up.” Stacy prodded one of the bigger stains on my shirt and added, “You should go take a bath or something. You reek.”