The Electric Woman

by Tessa Fontaine

  This was crushing. All those years of believing that finding God came from somewhere beautiful, somewhere inside, now seemed a sham.

  When she believed in something, she wanted to believe in it all the way. For its beauty. For the way it felt true inside. But she never wanted to be duped. Never wanted to seem like she wasn’t smart.

  She stopped drawing Jesus and became a hippie instead.

  Some of those ideas, some of what Jesus taught, some of what the free-flowing skirt people taught, were the same. And these were the things she carried with her. Kindness. Sacrifice.

  Driving in the car to a soccer tournament when I was thirteen or fourteen, she’d made two pieces of toast each for us with mayonnaise and sliced garden tomatoes, big thick red slabs. I ate my two, scarfed them down the way a teenager would, and she’d just finished her first slice.

  “Here,” she said, “eat my other one. I’m not hungry anymore.” We had hours and hours ahead of us on the foggy soccer fields. I knew it wasn’t true that she wasn’t hungry, knew it wasn’t a nice thing for me to do, but I gobbled down that other piece of toast, too, licked the mayonnaise from my fingers, and, later, tried not to look at her much from the other side of the field where I sat on the sidelines across to where she sat on the sidelines, chatting with one of the other moms probably wearing pearls, knowing not to wave at me, but watching me. We watched each other a lot. She wanted something from me. She was desperate with how much she wanted it. I thought it was success, to have a daughter who did all the things she hadn’t done—go to college, have a career, achieve financial stability, be a person other people called smart. Find a job with health insurance. Dental insurance. Move forward in the world with a paycheck. She believed in art but wanted desperately for me never to be an artist. It took me a long, long time to figure out that although all that was important to her, it wasn’t the main point.

  “There’s one thing missing from my life,” she told me when I was twenty-one. “One thing that has been the biggest heartbreak of my life. The biggest hole. It’s you. It’s that you don’t love me.”

  I didn’t say anything back.

  I knew this was the wrong thing to do. This was a moment where she was reaching across our chasm and all I had to do was say what was true, which is that there was always love, even if it sometimes felt like a broken train, like a suitcase of weapons, like a sick dog. Even if I didn’t always believe my love was true.

  I like to think that if I’d known that in five years we’d never be able to have a spoken conversation again, I would have grabbed her hands and, tears cresting, told her that of course I loved her then and always had, that I was so sorry I’d been cold and distant but that I’d felt hurt by her for so many years and it seemed like distance from her made the hurt feel better. And maybe now could be a time we could start again and get to know one another.

  But I didn’t know the future. I only knew I had a little power. I stayed silent. It was one step kinder than what I’d said to her in the past.

  MONSTERS

  Day 49 of 150

  World of Wonders

  August 2013

  One afternoon, I see the boss laughing and chatting with a short guy who is gesturing around our stage with great familiarity. His head darts back and forth, scanning the tent like he’s selling hot watches from his trench coat. I lose track of him while I perform, but when I return from my act he’s waiting for me backstage.

  “Hey, can I talk to you?” he asks me. Eyes the other girls. “Privately?”

  We walk out back as I hear the guillotine music begin, which means I have about four minutes until I need to slide into the headless woman’s chair. A few carnies are walking in a cluster along the dirt road we’re parked beside, an entryway to the back alleys of carnietown, and I can see my toothpaste spit from that morning drying in the dust.

  “I’d love for you to get eaten by a monster,” he says, grinning. I’m silent. Interested, obviously, but wary. “I make these movies,” he says. Tommy had told me that a guy named Raymond would show up at the fair, and that he was eccentric and hyper and made some adult movies, and that he was a friend of the show’s. “There’s a monster named Vore I’ve built and you’d be tied up and eaten by him. If you agree, after the fair closes one of these nights, I’ll pick you up and bring you to my studio, and we’ll film you getting pretend-eaten by a huge papier-mâché monster, I’ll give you a hundred bucks, and bring you back. Sunshine has already agreed. She’ll be the dominatrix. I’m going to ask Pipscy, too. You two will be sidekicks. No nudity, no violence, nothing you don’t want to do. Just getting eaten. Oh, by the way, I’m Raymond. How’s that sound?”

  Three nights later, Raymond meets us as the show is closing at midnight and leads the three of us, each carrying a bag with costume options and a makeup case, down the darkening midway. I would never do this alone, but I trust these women, and they seem to feel just fine about going with Raymond. The lingering carnies wipe down the counters in food trucks or hang new prize stock in their game stands. I expect a big truck or old Chevy convertible out in the parking lot. I am surprised when Raymond unlocks the door of a midnineties Honda, the back seat sprinkled with Cheerios and a baby-doll bib beneath a car seat.

  “Wanna see pictures of my niece?” he says, and begins scrolling through a series of photos on his phone: the baby behind a plate of spaghetti, the baby tottering across a wide, open field.

  “Raymond? We should get going if we want to get back before we open tomorrow morning.” Sunshine nudges him.

  “Oh, right,” he says, “that’s good. You should keep me on track. Whenever I start to lose track like that, just say, ‘Raymond! Stay focused!’ And I’ll try to get focused. I’m just”—he stops to giggle for a moment—“so easily distractable.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, we pull into the driveway of a suburban brick house. The kitchen windowsill is covered in owl figurines; crocheted pot holders and sunflower dish towels hang from the oven. There are checkered drapes by the windows and the smell of years of pot roast and rhubarb pie baked into the Formica. I don’t even know what rhubarb pie smells like, but still I believe it’s what the kitchen smells like, the idea of rhubarb, the idea of readying for a picnic in the shade on a June day in the Wisconsin suburbs.

  “I got the call when I was with the World of Wonders,” Raymond says, tossing pink puzzle pieces back into a box. “My mom had just died.” The fridge hums behind his whispered explanation as he gets up and searches one of the cabinet drawers for pens. “I left the show, came home right away. That’s when I started making movies.” For four years since then, he’s been living in this house with his dad, who’s getting on in years. He helps his sister, who lives close by, with her daughter. He makes his movies down in the basement.

  “Here we go,” Raymond says, setting down three stacks of paper and three pens in front of us. “A contract?” I ask.

  “To protect the adult entertainment biz. So that actors can’t have some come-to-Jesus moment later in life and ask that their kinky porn be taken down by the production company.”

  I can see the words Moral Consent printed along the top of the paper.

  “Driver’s license?” he asks, holding his hand out.

  I’m surprised by the formality surrounding this papier-mâché-monster-fetish-movie-filmed-in-dad’s-basement, but it also feels somehow good to be bound to this. To have no option of backing out. Aside from agreeing that Raymond can use any video or audio he takes at any point tonight for any purpose, there is no more information about a binding “moral code,” what it means to give away the rights to one’s own future moral perspective. There are plenty of contracts to be locked into—loans, cell phones, insurance claims—but they are all uninterested in the kind of people we will become. This contract asks that my judgment at this moment be forever binding. How much do I trust myself right now? I sign.

  Raymond has requested bare legs, so I peel off the fishnets I’ve been w
earing for fifteen hours. Per usual, I have the distinct imprint of diamonds down my legs, something reptilian or fishy. I have on bicycle shorts beneath my velvet flapper dress, and heels. Because it is already the end of a fifteen-hour performing day, I look like I’m at the end of a fifteen-hour performing day. Sweaty. Makeup a little smeared beneath my eyes, glittery on the bluish puffs, and the black specks of fallen mascara on my cheeks. I take out my makeup kit and try to do some of the fix-its I’ve learned on the road, dotting concealer under my eyes, adding another, darker line of liquid eyeliner on top of the fading, smudged one, applying new lipstick. I’m getting better at burying who I am.

  Two steps down into the basement and I stop. Must. Scents of the other world, of families, of my grandmother’s basement with a furnace that would whoosh on, its starving mouth full of fire and malice, this American middle-class suburban basement smell that, though I’ve only been on the road for two months, feels alien in its suggestion of permanence, the possibility of generations living together under the reign of mothballs.

  It’s hard to miss the monster in the basement. He is huge, rounded, about four feet by four feet, big enough to eat a whole human, green, made of papier-mâché and foam. Before we start shooting, Raymond brings his can of green spray paint over for some touch-ups.

  “Try not to touch the monster except for when you’re being eaten,” he says, touching Vore. He pulls his hand away and it’s covered in green crumbles. Vore is decomposing.

  “What’s he made of?” I ask.

  “Lady bodies,” Raymond says. He moves quickly around the basement, setting up his tripods and framing images from behind the stairs, on top of the box of Christmas ornaments, his flip-flops thwacking against his heels as he steps. I haven’t seen him hold still for more than two seconds since I met him.

  “Okay, here’s the plot,” he says. “Tessa and Pipscy are chained up, back to back, over here. You guys figure out why,” he says, nodding over to us. “At some point, Sunshine will come into the frame. She’s your capturer. I don’t care who throws who into the monster, but at some point, you will escape or be released from the chains and then each be thrown or fall into Vore, or he will decide to eat you himself and his giant pink tongue will capture you. Sound good?”

  We nod.

  “Don’t worry,” he says, spray-painting the sections of Vore that just crumbled off. “We’ll make it look good. I like taking advantage of creative inspiration as I go.”

  “Well, let’s go quickly, Raymond,” Sunshine says. “It’s already one forty-five and I want a cigarette.”

  “For the record,” Raymond says, suddenly serious and standing up straight, “I don’t know why this turns people on. The monster thing.” He looks from one face to another with some hint of apology in his eyes for just a flash, but then it’s gone and he’s back to arranging optimal locations for the camera.

  “Don’t look at the camera, and kinda overact,” he says. “Big gestures play well. Thrashing and struggling. That’s what makes the hits.”

  There’s an old exercise bike in one corner of the basement, boxes of seasonal decorations in another. In between, shelves and piles and stacks gather the physical refuse of a loss, the banal items that you somehow don’t seem to have enough authority to get rid of. I know about these items. Picnic baskets. A waffle iron.

  He places Pips and me on a crate, back to back, our arms crossed behind our backs and touching one another, then takes a long chain-link metal rope, wraps our wrists individually and then together. He’s crouched low between us, giggling as he goes.

  “It’s the strangest thing,” he says. “Right after my mom died, I made this animated short of a monster eating a girl and put it on YouTube. Just for fun, you know? It got a hundred thousand hits. Blew me away. Too tight?” he asks.

  We wriggle our wrists.

  “Not tight enough,” Pips says, then lets out a long, low evil-villain laugh. Her eyes don’t have that sleepy tilt Sunshine and I both have, and it’s true she’s younger than me by a few years, but there’s something else. Being here seems to have sparked some fuses that cause her to light up. Plus, she only has a few days left performing with the sideshow, and then she’ll make her way back down to her home in Florida, though nobody is really talking about that.

  “I’m not gonna tie the ends of this chain-link,” Raymond says. “I’m just gonna tuck it behind your hands so when I tell you that you’ve struggled enough and can escape, you can just shake this off. That’ll be a funny joke. Right? Don’t you think that’ll be a funny joke?”

  Pipscy starts thrashing around in rehearsed panic. By virtue of our attachment, I do, too.

  “Can we be funny in this?” I ask.

  “Oh sure,” he says. “As long as you also fight the chains and monster. But just know I might cut out some of your dialogue.”

  “I make a very good angry hero,” Pips says.

  “I can’t wait to feed these girls to the monster,” Sunshine says, eyes not leaving her phone’s screen. But she smiles, a lovely, genuine, private smile that breaks my heart a little with its tenderness, with its purported disinterest in what we’re doing but clear love for being down here together, for performing. Maybe even some love for us.

  * * *

  We begin filming, Pips and I tied up and bantering about escape plans. When we say something that Raymond thinks is particularly clever or actually seems to advance the improvised plot in some way, which is nearly never, he yells, “Pause!” and moves the camera to a different angle, and has us repeat the same line again. I suppose this is a trick of the cinema, to emphasize a line of dialogue by changing camera angles just before the line, jarring the viewer almost imperceptibly.

  We finally break free from the chains by using our wits and are bickering about how to next escape from the room when suddenly Raymond yells “Freeze!”

  He uncoils a long pink cloth that he hooks inside Vore’s mouth, unstretching it all the way to Pipscy’s waist. “Hold this,” he says, placing her hands against her hips as she holds the tongue in place, “and hold still.” He runs back to the camera, takes a few seconds of film, and returns to Pipscy, wrapping the tongue a little farther around her. He tells her to hold still, runs back to the camera, and repeats this series of actions until Vore has her coiled inside his tongue and pulls her into his mouth.

  “I’ll fix all this in editing,” he says, “but for now, Pipscy, I need you to yell and kick and fight, flail your legs out of Vore’s mouth as much as you can without actually breaking the monster in half, and when I give you the okay, slide down his throat.” She obliges.

  “Finally, she’s dead!” I yell toward Vore’s empty mouth when we begin rolling again. Sunshine’s turn. You can hear her five-inch heels tapping and thumping as she enters the frame. She’s in a leather corset and tiny black booty shorts and, in all ways, looks like she knows what she’s doing. I keep hoping my years of school plays will become useful any moment here, but so far I’m relying on overacting and a poor imitation of whatever the other girls are doing. Luckily, my time is nearly up.

  Sunshine backs me up with accusations until I’m just outside Vore’s green, flaky lips. She pushes me in. Here we pause again so Raymond can best adjust the angles of my body for consumption. I am ready to be eaten by the monster. I’m ready to give myself an out, to take myself offstage, to enter a pool of monster stomach acid and let myself break down. When I slide down his mouth and arrive at the bottom, I am warned against hitting my head on the washing machine. I’m told to look out for rug rash on the belly from all that sliding. I’m told to go sit quietly in the back of the basement until it’s time for my final shot, the one where all three of us tangle our bodies on top of a blue cloth and are digested together within the frame of the camera because it is not enough to be consumed, all evidence of life must also disintegrate.

  * * *

  At 5:15 a.m., Raymond drops us off back at the fairgrounds. He hands each of us one hundred bucks. He’ll spe
nd the next month or two editing our video before he releases it.

  “I have high hopes for this one,” he says as we get out of the car. “I think I’ll make my money back in the first week. They’re gonna love it.”

  I crawl into my bunk to sleep for two hours before we open again.

  * * *

  This is who I am now:

  A headless woman.

  A four-legged woman.

  An inside talker for the bed of nails act, sitting on the strong man as he lies on the nails.

  An inside talker for the contortionist act. This is my most important role. I am now a moneymaker.

  My new world is full of boxes. The boxes I put my head inside, the semi’s container we live inside. I run between acts as the show cycles through from first act to last every thirty minutes, the same pattern of movement between my four acts, so that already by noon on opening day of being an inside performer, I could have shown up where and when I was needed almost automatically, my feet moving by themselves.

  I still don’t have much in the way of actual skills to perform, not really, not like everyone else out here, but I know how to talk into a mic. I can look right into an audience member’s eyes and, with a smile, lie.

  When I am not talking into the mic, though, I present my body in various forms. These, for example, are the instructions for losing your head:

  Put on your hospital gown. Step quietly onto the rickety side stage and prepare to slide sideways into the chair. Try not to ruffle the curtains surrounding it. If you do ruffle the curtains, or even if you don’t, a child or teenager or adult might pull the curtain away from the stage anyway, peering inside at you. She will catch you with your attached head right there, midslide into the illusion.