A Kind of Compass

by McKeon, Belinda; Rahill, Elske;

  ‘So why is she the saint of mental illness? Why not the saint of women traumatised by wacked-out patriarchal violence?’

  Brian listened, nodded, but didn’t register the story as Esther did. He told her it was usually a male saint or apostle appeared to him, anyway. This is where mental illness gets interesting, Esther wanted to say, but stopped herself. She did like Brian, even if he lacked specifics; that fatal flaw of the faithful. He went on about Jesus coming to him, laying hands; treacly imagery from her own, tired girlhood. Next it was Francis of Assisi, a hallmark version of goodness and love.

  But back to the real story here, which is about Harold, and now that we’ve discovered where it begins, let’s get to the point. There is a point! I promise. For example, here’s Esther, out of bed now, in jean shorts, no bra, carrying the big book to the door. It’s Harold’s book. Harold won’t walk through the entranceway, she notices, a new boundary. She hates boundaries. Boundaries are for maps, a woman protested, in a play she had seen some weeks earlier. That’s how she felt. Maps. Keep your boundaries for your maps.

  But not really. She liked boundaries sometimes. She liked them when Brian was around.

  Here’s what Esther wrote of the moment later, in her notebook:

  I said fuck you but not out loud and only in retrospect. I wanted to be back in bed. You could see that and yet. You needed it. Something about your father. I said I will give you something. And I got your book, a big book, which I never wanted, with an essay you insisted I read, an essay I of course read, an essay about rape, an essay written by one of my favorite writers ever, a writer you would only call ‘weird’ which fine so what or was it ‘scary’? No ‘scary’ was how the other prof, my default-prof, described Kathy Acker: ‘Scary’.

  Some background: back when they still liked each other, when boundaries were for maps, maybe, but certainly not for student-professor relationships, Harold appeared at Esther’s door one afternoon; he carried a big book.

  ‘You have to read this,’ he told Esther, of the book, but not the book itself but just one particular essay within the book, an essay written by a female writer Esther admired. In the essay, which Harold wanted Esther to read, the writer argued – or so it seemed to Esther – that date rape was a reductive, problematic term; women, the writer suggested, were less often the victims they wished to be considered.

  Or so it had been in her experience.

  The writer of the rape essay was the first to articulate for Esther what it was to be woman right now. Not in this rape essay but in her fiction, which Esther admired, where the writer wrote sharply, smartly about women doing stupid, dark, destructive things: fucking men they feared or despised, for example.

  Esther sat down to read ‘The Rape Essay’ as she came to call it, though that was not the title. She ignored the implications of Harold gifting her this way, but acknowledged the gesture as ritualised courtship, which Harold took seriously. She hadn’t expected how essential this phase would be for Harold: the opening of car doors, for example.

  The problem, the admired writer argued in this essay, was that many women allowed themselves to get to a risky, dangerous place – flirting, drunk, physically involved – because of the erotic charge – and yet, these very women wish to call it ‘rape’ when it ends violently or forcibly or merely regrettably.

  Esther and Harold had bonded over asylum stories. ‘War stories,’ he called them, but it was also intellectual inquiry; she found it exciting. Sparring as flirtation.

  ‘It reminds me of, like, Bill Cosby.’ She tells him later, by phone. He groaned.

  ‘Didn’t he like blame black people for not being, you know –’

  ‘If you think you can compare what it is to be a privileged white woman to what it is to be black in this country, under the hold of systemic racism.’

  ‘That’s not what I –’

  ‘The juggernaut of 20th-century feminism.’

  Esther re-read the essay in bed that night, and again the next: what the woman argued was for a more nuanced understanding of relationships between men and women. Sometimes women got what they wanted but didn’t want. Be careful what you ask for, as a particularly simpering asylum keeper would say to Esther and the others.

  Back in the doorway, things are still rising: Harold, esteemed and brilliant, appears helpless, shy; lacks the energy or bravado of his first appearance in her genkan.

  It was hard to believe that this was the man she’d been hating with such intense feeling all week. It was easier to hate people who weren’t bodies, who didn’t have faces.

  ‘It’s true that some of us are, well, complicit in ways we don’t want to acknowledge. In our own joy and suffering. It’s not possible not to be.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean that –’

  ‘Rape still happens.’

  ‘I read the essay –’

  He doesn’t move.

  You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.

  Q. Why was the t-shirt special?

  A. It was from the American Philosophical Association.

  Q. What did it say?

  A. On the front it read ‘The statement on the back of this shirt is true.’

  Q. And on the back?

  A. ‘The statement on the front of this shirt is false.’

  The large book fell open first to another essay in the book, which contained one of Harold’s essays. It fell open to the page, she discovered, where Harold had mutilated some text, taken scissors to pages, cut entire paragraph-sections.

  You are like me, but worse, she thought.

  You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal.

  ‘Was he a cutter?’

  ‘Not really, but.’

  ‘Same thing?’

  ‘For sure.’

  It’s funny how easy it was for her, Esther, to imagine that to be Harold was more satisfying than it actually was. To be Harold was, in fact, excruciating. Or so his mutilated pages revealed.

  This could be the climax: a few days after dropping off the book, he invites her to take a ride in his new Volvo. On the way to the Super Kroger, he spoke of his work.

  Did he bring it up, or did she?

  It’s hard to say. She told him she hadn’t read his big book. Which was true.

  Was reading it required?

  He said that was good. He said it was a relief. He said he much preferred hanging out with people who hadn’t read his books.

  She said, But I loved the others, and that one story.

  Which?

  That was the story of my life! she told him.

  Did your family read it? she asked.

  My mom and sister I think.

  Not sure.

  Really?

  They don’t talk about it.

  Why did they speak of it?

  She closed her eyes, thought: I want to sleep with you because I want to be you. Or, as the poet wrote: I want to sleep with what I want to become.

  That wasn’t it.

  He wanted her to know: I am nothing. Nothing. And the fact of you desiring me because I am something has me wishing only to make you feel that nothingness, too, as I do.

  She’d read something in the paper.

  I don’t read it.

  You were mentioned.

  I don’t read it. The Japanese woman, she called me a misogynist.

  He was parked in front of her house now, just across from a park. He looked at her.

  That really hurt.

  She didn’t ask.

  Why didn’t she ask?

  Maybe we are all misogynists, then.

  They both knew what the Japanese lady meant.

  Esther could no longer say how many men had given her books to read, or told her to see a certain movie or listen to certain music. But how many of those men held the authority of Harold?

  Harold did not care for or about her at all. He never had. The simple truth was perhaps obvious to everyone from the beginning – but had not been to Esther.
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  ‘It would be, as your professor, an act of love to maintain boundaries,’ the doctor asserted. ‘That’s what parents do, what professionals must do, too. To do otherwise is selfish.’

  To his co-professor, to fellow students, to the many other women who had been objects of Harold’s attractions, this was not news.

  ‘Abusive, too.’

  ‘It sounds simple but it’s profound: the ability to love in this way, from a distance, through restraint.’

  Rang cherries was Harold’s phrase for that shock of recognition. The essay was contained in the large book Harold held in his arms; the book also contained an essay written by Harold, though he did not mention it.

  It was funny how you used the word date. We both laughed. It was funny how you opened doors for me. It was funny that when I commented on the insistent opening of doors you said that your mother had taught you. To open doors. It was funny that I knew then that I would teach my son the same thing.

  They laughed, Esther thinks now, because they both understood the absurdity of the charade. There is nothing more attractive than shared secret knowledge with another human being – secret knowledge that will lead the two of you to a shared space.

  Socrates: the best learning takes place in bed.

  Harold’s joke that wasn’t a joke.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Esther confides in Harold, ‘sometimes I need so badly to write the book that is in my body, yet feel unable to write it – and this gap makes me want to die.’

  Harold told her she must write, no matter how afraid.

  ‘You write as if saving your life,’ he tells her.

  ‘It will kill you but you have no choice.’

  ‘That’s when it matters, when you have no choice.’

  The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

  Years later, people say to Esther – You are brave – and it will chafe.

  What does it mean to be brave when you don’t have a choice?

  The older you get, Harold told her, the more you feel that line of Heidegger – that to be fully alive means to feel yourself in decay, moving toward death.

  So, is there a resolution? Maybe it was the night Harold told Esther he admired the rape essay but otherwise found the writer herself scary.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Just scary. That was my impression.’

  In the box with the notebook she’d kept while knowing Harold were papers she’d saved from college. One was a paper she’d written in asylum, in response to an assignment for a course titled Skepticism and Affirmation, taught by Maire Jaanus, the striking Estonian who had been married to Edward Said. This she only learned later, reading Said’s obituary in the New York Times.

  ‘In the future, perhaps we will all attend college while living in a mental hospital,’ she joked.

  ‘It made me sad to read of this woman and scholar so essential to my undergraduate education, to my inchoate intellectual identity – now rendered a mere footnote in the obituary of a great man.’

  ‘And later my default prof called Kathy Acker scary.’

  ‘This made an impression on you?’

  ‘It seemed that women could very easily be scary – and these were women I most admired – women I wanted to be.’

  ‘I began to understand how terrified I was of these women, and how I wished to become them – at once.’

  ‘Perhaps it is that some of us need to write and others shouldn’t be writing.’

  ‘The world is divided into two kinds of people.’

  Toward the end of The Rape Essay, the writer Harold described as ‘scary’ wrote:

  A few years ago I invited to dinner at my home a man I’d known casually for two years. We’d had dinner and comradely drinks a few times. I didn’t have any intention of becoming sexual with him, but after dinner we slowly got drunk and were soon floundering on the couch. I was ambivalent not only because I was drunk but because I realised that although part of me was up for it, the rest of me was not. So I began to say no. He parried each ‘no’ with charming banter and became more aggressive. I went along with it for a time because I was amused and even somewhat seduced by the sweet, junior-high spirit of his manner. But at some point I began to be alarmed, and then he did and said some things that turned my alarm into fright. I don’t remember the exact sequence of words or events, but I do remember taking one of his hands in both of mine, looking him in the eyes, and saying, ‘If this comes to a fight you would win, but it would be very ugly for both of us. Is that really what you want?’

  She came outside, sat next to him on the porch. He noticed a scar on her thigh, visible in the midday light. From a far off boulevard, she heard the lone squeal of an ambulance.

  ‘You know I wanted to see you because I saw you the other day in Stevenson –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was getting off the elevator and you were in the –’

  ‘I didn’t see you.’

  ‘I said Hi, and you looked at me, like – like I was a piece of excrement.’

  Esther told Harold she did not recall seeing him that day, but it was possible. They were silent for a while. She found a ladybug on her arm, flicked it away.

  ‘My doctor says it is sexual harassment.’

  ‘Well, I don’t – we could have a fight about it, and I’m not sure who would win.’

  She stared ahead.

  ‘Yes, you would win, but it would be very ugly for both of us. Is that really what you want?’

  ‘There’s nothing to win.’

  He didn’t say anything, just looked ahead: his lips pursed, eyes narrowed, a long frozen stare of gratitude, sadness, anger or nothing at all.

  FINISHING LINES

  Sara Baume

  1.

  I’ve often thought that pigeons resemble tiny, shaved-headed men in high collars with their arms shoved down inside their shirts, the sleeves tied behind their backs. I know this is ridiculous; how can a bird possibly look like a man? But it’s the picture that lights up in my head every time I see a pigeon, inescapably.

  Since I was a child, my mother’s uncle has kept homing pigeons. He lived four doors down the terrace from my parents and me. Almost every evening I’d call to his house on my way home from school, and he’d allow me to measure the un-popped kernels of corn into the feed trays, to choose a bird for him to lift. Then he’d hold her in his lap, his fist encircling her wings, gripping them still for me to extend a finger and stroke her plumage, very gently, very slow.

  These days only my great-uncle and I live in the same terrace, four doors apart. My mother and father are both gone from this town which has, in recent years, become more of a suburb. It has an apartment block and a multistory car park; there are more traffic lights than trees, more supermarkets than churches. Now my great-uncle has lung disease and coughs at the end of every sentence and sometimes at the beginning and in the middle too. Now he wears a red button. HOME CARE PERSONAL ALARM SYSTEM it said on the box it came in, but my great-uncle calls it his rocket launcher, and he never presses it; I know because mine is the number it will phone first if ever he tries to launch his rocket.

  I live here in my mother’s house with my boyfriend, who doesn’t like it when I call him my boyfriend; he thinks it makes us sound slipshod, unserious, liable to be rent apart at any moment, as if we aren’t soldered by stronger stuff. We are soldered by our baby. She was born with so much hair, more than my boyfriend, more than my great-uncle, more than all the tiny men-pigeons I have ever found myself imagining. When I brush her hair, I try not to picture it sloshing around the pools of fluid inside me. Even though she has been born for nine months, has now been out of me for as much time as she was in; even though my boyfriend and I gave her a noble and beautiful name, we have yet to call her by it or cut her hair; we refer to her only as ‘the baby’.

  2.

  Two weeks ago, four of my great-uncle’s pigeons were taken to St Malo for a cross-channel race. He never transports his own birds,
and so has never seen them liberated along with all of the others, like a battery of feathered missiles, I imagine, like ash-coloured fireworks. My great-uncle only ever waits at home for them to come back to him. Three returned roughly when they were expected but there was no trace of the fourth until he received a phone call from a woman in Bethnal Green, a stranger. Then I took out my old school atlas and opened it across his kitchen table. He showed me Brittany and I turned the page and showed him London, and my great-uncle shook his head and said he couldn’t make any sense of that. But it must be my bird, he said, how else could the woman have called my number?

  For years, I believed that the way a homing pigeon navigates has something to do with ley lines, with Feng Shui, with water divining, but this isn’t so. There are particles of iron in the tops of their beaks, microscopic magnets which keep them aligned to the north. When they are far away, they smell the air, they listen to the sound waves: my great-uncle has explained this to me, though in different words. And once they’re closer to home again, they identify features in the landscape. A pigeon can race from six months of age right the way up to ten years, and in most cases, he says, an older bird is better. The strength and speed of youth is no match for the experience and fidelity that comes with age.

  My great-uncle said he could not fly himself, because of what it did to his ears, and he couldn’t sail either, because of what it did to his stomach. But I knew these weren’t the real reasons; the real reason was because he was old and afraid. Think of all the people who’ve been born since me, I’ve heard him say, think of all the things they know which I don’t. He told me that he would pay for the trip if I arranged it, that he did not care about the cost, but it had to be as soon as possible; this was the important part.