The Red Parts

by Maggie Nelson

  The principal organizers of the protest set up a helpful if daunting informational Web site that listed all the ways one might protect against or treat hypothermia. One steadfast, activist colleague of mine at the university promised to go with me no matter what; another begged me not to go, insisting that my presence wouldn’t affect what happened, and all I would do out there was freeze to death. I tried to explain to her that you don’t go to a vigil expecting to halt an action. You go to bear witness to what the state would prefer to do in complete darkness. And if your family has lost a loved one via an act of violence, you speak out so that advocates of capital punishment can’t keep relying on the anger and grief of victims’ families as grounds for their agenda. I tell her that I consider anti-violence activists to be bodhisattvas, “master warriors”—not warriors who kill and harm but warriors of nonaggression who hear the cries of the world, as one Buddhist book puts it. [M]en and women who are willing to train in the middle of the fire … [men and women who] enter challenging situations in order to alleviate suffering.

  The author of an essay with the frightening title “The Moral Worth of Retribution,” which I came across in a primer called What Is Justice? lent to me by an ethicist at the university, sees things differently:

  My own view is that [a transfer of concern from victim to criminal] occurs in large part because of our unwillingness to face our own revulsion at what was done. It allows us to look away from the horror that another person was willing to cause. We almost cannot bear the sight…. By repressing anger at wrongful violation, we may be attempting to deny that we live in a society in which there really are fearful and awful people.

  Certainly I didn’t feel unwilling to face my revulsion. Sometimes I felt as though that was all I was doing. But was I “repressing anger at wrongful violation”? Was I denying the fact that “we live in a society in which there really are fearful and awful people”? What would it mean not to deny such a thing?

  Ross’s execution didn’t happen that winter. A federal judge threatened to disbar Ross’s lawyer for being insufficiently suspicious of his client’s willingness to die, and the lawyer subsequently requested a new hearing on Ross’s competency. The execution was delayed indefinitely.

  To Hell or Bust

  THE LONG, dismal winter in Middletown finally gave way to spring, and my mother and I both found ourselves on the fence about whether or not to attend Leiterman’s summer trial in full. It would be expensive, it would require canceling weeks of work, it was more or less guaranteed to be traumatic in ways that were impossible to foresee. The state had offered to put us up in a single room in a motel, and the idea of sharing a motel room with my mother for a month during a murder trial sounded like a setting for a macabre reality TV show. Worse, I flashed momentarily upon the ghastly scene in the French film The Piano Teacher in which Isabelle Huppert, who sleeps nightly with her mother in the same bed, suddenly attacks her in such a way that you can’t tell if she’s trying to rape her or kill her or both.

  But this notion of bearing witness—of trying to approximate these noble warrior-bodhisattvas heading into the fire—had a hold on me. Jane’s mother, my grandmother, had died many years ago, and neither Jane’s father nor brother wanted to go to court every day. Emily, who had by now rejoined the fold and moved back to the Bay Area, wanted to come but couldn’t get off work. It became clear that if my mother and I didn’t go, the front-row bench reserved for Jane’s family would sit empty. That seemed plainly wrong.

  So we committed to attending together. She’d fly in from California, and I’d drive my car from Connecticut so that we won’t have to pay for a rental car. Eventually her cousin Jill, who lives within walking distance of the courthouse, will graciously offer to stay with her boyfriend for the month, giving us her house so that we won’t have to stay at a motel. Emily says she will try to fly in for the verdict.

  On 6 A.M. on the morning of July 10, 2005, on the eve of jury selection, as I was getting in the car to drive the twelve hours from Middletown to Michigan, however, the plan seemed wrong. Simply put, in the meantime, I had become a brokenheart. As winter moved into spring, then spring into summer, I found myself losing the man I loved. I was falling, or had fallen, out of a story, the story of a love I wanted very much. Too much, probably. And the pain of the loss had deranged me.

  Falling out of a story hurts. But it’s nothing compared to the loss of an actual person, the loss of all the bright details that make up that person. All the flashing, radiant fragments that constitute an affair, or a love. If there has been a betrayal, you may find yourself holding each of these fragments up to a new light and rotating them there, watching each one grow an unwanted shadow. I found myself there.

  In May I had been on a book tour for Jane throughout the South, and had returned to the East Coast excited to see him. When he didn’t answer my calls, I wondered if I’d misunderstood something about his work schedule, which was incredibly hectic and far-flung. In a fit of uneasiness laced with foreboding and shame, I punched his name and the date into Google. I hated myself for doing so even before I clicked “Search.”

  Up came a blog, right off the bat, which reported having just seen this person at an event with his girlfriend, who was, apparently, a movie star. She’s much smaller and more beautiful in person, raved the blogger. And very down-to-earth.

  This was news to me. It was not news, however, to anyone in cyberspace, not to mention in the “real” world. Soon I would find out that it wasn’t even news to some of my best friends.

  I HAD MET this man two years earlier, exactly nine days after my boyfriend of many years and I had moved into our first apartment together. I had never lived with anyone before, and I felt intense trepidation—so much so that as we began our move I became convinced that the leaky loft we were about to co-inhabit was full of a toxic dust that would kill me. This wasn’t complete madness—the loft was perched on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, a notoriously polluted waterway that purportedly carries live strains of hepatitis. The loft was industrial, not legally zoned for living, with a stall of oil trucks next door that steadily belched up a dense black soot, which within a week of unpacking had coated all my books and dishes. Upon moving in my boyfriend’s cat developed multiple cysts and hid atop a cupboard; mine yowled all night and peed incessantly on my boyfriend’s most treasured belongings. Both of us quickly developed a pulmonary affliction we called “the canal cough,” which manifested itself whenever the wind shifted direction and brought particles from the nearby cement factory our way. It was deadly quiet at night; if there was any sound at all you knew it was trouble. The Gowanus is the end of the line, and has been for over a century—home to prostitutes and johns who seem to crawl out of its weird banks like moss-people, and an infamous spot for dumping bodies, garbage, and cars. Policemen laugh if a suspect they are chasing jumps into the canal to get away—they know he’ll end up in the hospital, sick from the water, within days.

  I lasted forty-one days in this loft, like Noah. My departure was cruel, my boyfriend said. More than cruel: sadistic. I agreed, but I didn’t feel as though I had a choice. I had fallen precipitously in love with this other man, the kind of love that makes whatever you’d been doing before feel instantly untenable. The kind that comes on like a derailed train—all you can do is stand back and wait for it to crash, then stagger around in the wreckage, too dazed yet to wonder who to blame, what the cause.

  On my last night in the Gowanus loft my boyfriend asked if he could choke me with a silk stocking while we fucked. I assented; I even got the stocking out of my drawer myself. I have always had an erotic fondness for asphyxiation. It feels good not to breathe a short while before coming, so that when you finally come and breathe together, you get an astonishing rush: the world comes back to you in a flood of color, pleasure, and breath.

  I did not know that earlier that day he had read my journal, and had there found out that I was in love with someone else, that I had made love with someone e
lse. I had only told him that I was leaving. As we had sex I suddenly suspected that he knew more than I’d told him. I suspected this when I said, aghast, This is how Jane died, and he said, without missing a beat, I know.

  Years before, I had had a lover who was a welder. As a gift he once welded me the single most beautiful object that I own. It is a palm-sized box made of Plexiglas, with several stacked layers of blue-greenish broken glass sealed inside. The box, he explained to me, is the love. It is the container that can hold all the brokenness, and make it beautiful. Especially when you hold it up to the light.

  This is what I wanted love to be.

  I wish I could say I left the loft for the man I’d fallen in love with—and I would have, but that was not our story. But I had hope, a dogged, superstitious hope that sustained our affair for the next two years. Until the blog about the movie star.

  But if I were honest, or if I were at least to bump into the limits of my honesty, I would have to admit that I knew exactly how this love would end from the moment it began. The loss was probable before it was possible. Maybe it was even actual before it was possible. Why else was I punching his name through Google, becoming someone I despised? The end of the story was clear from the start. I just didn’t care. People in love rarely do. And like most people in love, or maybe like most writers in love, I thought if I could keep formulating it correctly, if I could keep finding the right words to house it, maybe I could change it.

  But, of course, I was not its sole author.

  A FEW DAYS before I leave for the trial I go visit a friend and his wife on Cape Cod, hoping to start eating, feel human, get my act together. I spend the entire visit weeping uncontrollably. On the fourth night of hearing me sob in their guest room, my friend’s wife takes pity on me, tip-toes into my room, and silently hands me a fistful of Ambien. After I nearly faint on the beach the following day my friend says to me in exasperation, You can’t live on cigarettes and agony alone, you know.

  I am getting the bad feeling that my friends are growing tired of me. I am growing tired of me, too.

  I am also becoming painfully aware of the fact that I am not and have never been a “master warrior.” Not even close. Instead of hoping to alleviate some of my mother’s suffering at the trial, train in the middle of the fire, or bear any noble kind of witness for Jane, now I’m just hoping to stay alive.

  For at some point during this time the coin flipped. The zoo of murder mind slipped into the zoo of suicide mind. I watched it happen as though it were happening to the mind of another.

  Stay curious, the Buddhists advise. I tried.

  I watched my suicide mind with interest as well as panic, trying to think of it as a jerky slide show, a scary movie playing behind my eyes, one I could keep watching or walk out of at any time. (Into where, I can’t say.)

  The only person with whom I had ever discussed suicide mind at length was my junkie boyfriend, years ago. Or, rather, we discussed his suicide mind, which most closely resembled, so far as I could tell, a diorama. His ideations always involved a tableau of sorts, a scene happened upon by another. The door swings open, the mouth falls agape, a ripple of shock charges through the air, a fresh wave of damage breaks—not a coda but a reprise, a skip in the groove, a scratch that will not mend no matter how many times the record is played. The song remains the same. The two scenes that recurred for him most often were that of his body hanging from a cord in the center of his bedroom in his Victorian squat in Staten Island, snow from the harbor blowing in through the open windows, and that of his body slumped over on his desk after an overdose, his “works” beside him—which would include his great unfinished novel, Goiter, a Joycean, barely fictionalized account of his mother’s madness, and of her goiter, both of which, from what I had personally observed, were nothing short of ghastly.

  These tableaux held no appeal for me. They seemed to depend upon a traumatized observer, a dependence that seemed to me weak, sadistic. Narcissistic in its theatricality, and a bit silly, all things considered.

  My suicide mind contained, or contains, no before and no after, no swung-open doors, no pain done unto others and none, paradoxically, done unto myself. Just one single gesture—one implacable, irreversible action that cleaves my body (cleanly, simply) out of time and mind.

  AS I GOT ready to leave for the trial I sometimes felt as though the pain of this loss was delivering me unto a form of enlightenment—that through it I was finally coming to grasp that our thoughts, our emotions, our entire lives, are essentially an illusion, a long, rich, various dream from which our death wakes us.

  Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it. Another red part.

  This line of thinking seemed preferable to the other option: that I was slipping into a disassociated, heartbroken fog that any number of contemporary Western psychiatrists would rush to medicate.

  Cure only comes if the patient reaches to the original state of breakdown,Winnicott wrote. Reaches to, not reaches: a crucial distinction. I have no idea how anyone makes it.

  What I do know is this (and here I speak, of course, only for myself): there is no saving thought (think how your _________ will feel; count your blessings; tomorrow is another day; etc.) that is ultimately sustaining, no line of poetry, no holy book, no hotline, nothing but the thinnest of membranes, a doctrine whispered in secret, that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away.

  This is a great mystery which I do not quite understand, Socrates says of this doctrine, shortly before he drinks the cup of hemlock that will cause his death—a death which, two thousand years after the fact, scholars are still debating whether can or should be termed a suicide.

  FOR THE MONTH that I am in Ann Arbor, I will write letters to the man I loved on my yellow legal pad every morning before my mother wakes up, letters telling him how much I miss him, how much my body misses him. I will tell him all about the trial, to which he had said he would accompany me. I will describe each of the autopsy photos in detail, convinced that only he can understand their burden, their horror. I won’t send any of these letters. Even though I have told him that I never want to hear from him again as long as I live, I will check my e-mail on Jill’s computer every night, in case he has written.

  He does write, once. He says that our separation has brought him no joy, but that he feels it’s an important part of the journey, the journey of “stepping into the light.” I have no idea what journey, what light, he’s talking about. I have never felt so lost, never felt such darkness. Perhaps he is talking about his journey, his light. I am coming to see that we no longer share either.

  Every morning before court and every night after I will take a long shower, as the shower is the only place I will have any privacy. In the stall I will get down on my knees and weep, letting the water run over my body, praying to get better, praying not to hurt myself any more than I’m already hurting, praying that this loss, that this whole time, will move over me, through me, like a dark storm passing over a great plain. A great plain which is, essentially, my soul. A soul which is neither light nor dark, neither wholly alone nor wholly with any other, certainly not with God, just flat, open, deathless, and free. Curled up in a wet ball on the tile floor I will hear myself say, Something in me is dying. I no longer know to whom I’m talking.

  Photo #4:

  Jane again on the gurney, its metallic shine underneath her neck and face. A head-on shot, from the sternum upwards, a red ruler under her chin, as if for scale. As if she were an improbable dwarf or visitor from a differently sized planet, instead of a dead woman on a gurney. Her features look jumbled—put together more as a jigsaw puzzle than a face, the red ruler beneath her chin a vain effort to organize her flesh. Her eyes are closed, and the area above them, from eyelid to eyebrow, is bright blue. It looks like heavy eyeshadow, but the examiner explains that the blue is blood that has collected behind the skin. The color is so intense because the skin at that si
te on our bodies is about as thin as a Kleenex.

  Apart from the weird blue sheen, the clotted blood, and the red ruler, here Jane looks just like my mother. Specifically, her nostrils look just like my mother’s—the same two, slim watermelon seeds. This could have been my mother’s fate, as she feared for years it might be. It could be anybody’s.

  Once I wondered how they knew that Jane was shot before she was strangled. Now I know. It has to do with two different kinds of blue. If she had died from asphyxiation, her whole face would have a bluish color, a color the examiner terms “unmistakable.” But the only blue here is the blue blood above her eyes. If she had been strangled first, the stocking would have acted as a tourniquet, and this blood would not have been able to move up to her face. The examiner explains that the force of the bullets fired into Jane’s skull fractured her orbital bones—the bony cavities that contain our eyes—and the blue is all the blood that rushed around the injury.

  This photo may be the worst of them all, I’m not sure. It all depends on what one means by worst. It shows that the body hurries to heal itself, even as it’s dying.

  Sybaris

  MY MOTHER AND I had convinced each other before meeting up in Michigan that our time in Ann Arbor might be a kind of respite. She imagined a month off work, lots of time to think and read, early morning walks, cooking quiet dinners, maybe even trying her hand, at long last, at one of the writing projects she’d always dreamed of undertaking. I imagined a month of getting some distance, or at least distraction, from my heartache, finding a local pool to swim laps in, and quitting smoking, especially so as not to face my mother’s censure.

  After the first day of jury selection, we realize our mutual folly. Every day after court we will stumble home down Main Street feeling as though we’ve been whacked with a slab of wood. Every night will be too hot to cook or sleep. We have to leave for court each morning by seven and we don’t get home until after six, so we are together almost constantly. “Taking space” from each other means walking to or from the courthouse staggered apart by a block, or going to sleep.