The Other Side

by Lacy M. Johnson

  Maybe it is not the white pill, but at the same time I start taking the white pill, I start to feel-like. At night I feel like dressing in skimpy clothes—Look at how skinny I am!—and I feel like putting on dark eye makeup, so I tell My Good Friend I feel like going dancing. At the club a man comes up behind me and grinds his pelvis against my ass and puts his hand on my stomach and says This muscle—this one right here—is so sexy. I push away from him, from his erect penis, and grab My Good Friend and we go running out the door laughing. I feel like spending the night at her boyfriend’s house and I feel like sleeping in her boyfriend’s roommate’s bed. I feel like putting on the roommate’s clean running clothes because I don’t have any pajamas and I feel like he should fuck me but he just lies very very still.

  In the morning there is a message on my voice mail: I’ve been fired from a job at a veterinary hospital I forgot I had. I pay the electric bill with my credit card and buy groceries with the credit card and when my landlord shows up at the door looking for the rent I get a cash advance from the credit card. I pay the credit card bill with another credit card.

  When I start fucking the man who will become My First Husband I tell The Therapist that things are going very wonderfully and I feel all better now, thankyouverymuch, and I tell The Psychiatrist that I don’t need to meet with him anymore, I’m doing very wonderfully now, thankyouverymuch, and he smiles and claps his hands together and says This is wonderful! Just wonderful! and I laugh out loud because I can’t tell if I’m thrilled or terrified by this.

  One afternoon the apartment phone rings and I wake up from a yellow-pill sleep to answer it. Lacy, it’s me. Which me? The voice starts explaining how I need to drop the charges. Sodomy? I didn’t fuck you in the ass, he says. I know, I say, the room coming slowly into focus, but that’s what they call it. He offers to pay my court fees if I withdraw my statement. The worst that can happen is you’ll get in trouble for lying to the police, he says. Dust motes swirl, the sunlight lynched in the blinds. I wonder how he got this number. It should be unlisted. The bile in my stomach also swirls.

  After he tells me he loves me, that he’s been shot, that he’s lost weight, that he’s a new man, he hangs up the phone. I throw up in the toilet and then call The Detective. Within minutes uniformed officers knock on my door. One explains there will be an emergency strap put on my phone, which can be done remotely. No one will be listening in on my conversations, but they’ll be able to trace any call I receive. I thank the officers and close the door. I swallow one of the yellow pills before I unplug the apartment phone and drift back to sleep.

  I am like Superman, he tells me in an e-mail. A reverse search of the IP address confirms that this e-mail, like all the others before it, has come from Venezuela, where he also holds citizenship. The Detective stands behind me, careful not to touch, looking over my shoulder into the computer monitor. He isn’t hopeful that the Venezuelan government will cooperate with the extradition, but speaks encouraging words into my ear while I type: That’s it. That will really get him. That’s the trick. In my e-mails back to Venezuela, I play the victim. In my e-mails, The Detective has bullied me into pressing charges against the man I love. It’s the detective’s idea, I write. He thinks this could be a big case. It might mean a promotion. In these e-mails, I write that I wish we could still be together. I beg him to come back to rescue me. The police have charged him with kidnapping, felonious restraint, sodomy, and rape. They have frozen his credit cards and his bank accounts. They have flagged his passport, notified the FBI and Interpol. In these e-mails, we’re trying to lure him back into the country so he can be arrested and brought to trial. We’re setting a trap: I am the bait.

  Later, back in my new apartment, sitting at the dining table I salvaged from the curb, on a chair I pulled from a dumpster, I hack into his e-mail account. I see all of the e-mails I’ve sent. He’s forwarded every one to his attorney. I see he’s applying for jobs in Caracas, and has been corresponding with a South American publisher about a potential memoir deal. One chapter in the proposal is titled “Leather and Lacy”—it’s the only chapter in which I will appear.

  I change the password of his e-mail before pouring half a bottle of wine down my throat. I take my pills, extras for good measure, and pass out fully clothed in bed.

  The next day, the e-mails start coming: each more frantic, more threatening, in turns more bartering, more berating, more abusive. I don’t respond and eventually he stops sending them.

  The story is in the paper. It’s on the local news once or twice. I never come forward and identify myself as the victim, and without a face to attach to the story, without some culprit to arrest and parade before the cameras, the public loses interest. I don’t lose interest. I send a copy of a newspaper article to his ex-wife in Denmark with a message attached: This happened to me. I thought you should know. She responds by asking for my number, wants to know if I’d be willing to talk on the phone.

  Her voice relates without emotion another version of the events from years earlier: the divorce, the abduction of her children, the trial, and her husband’s deportation from Denmark. In her version, she had finally left him after a decade of abuse. In return, he locked her in a basement and fled the country with their children. You are lucky, she says, that he didn’t get you pregnant.

  Rumors begin to surface: a woman claiming to know me personally sends an anonymous e-mail confessing that he came to her door one night asking for sex. It doesn’t surprise me. Someone writes to say he once saw The Man I Used to Live With shooting up in the back room of a bar downtown. This seems like a stretch. I never knew him to shoot up, never saw him shoot up, but after all that has happened, I don’t know what to believe anymore.

  One sunny afternoon The Detective escorts me to our old apartment on campus before it is emptied and its contents are either given away or destroyed. He stands outside the front door while I wander from room to room, touching only the very tops of things. I’m supposed to be looking for my belongings: a silk shawl, some pottery, a textbook or two. Eventually he opens the door: Everything okay?

  If he comes into the bedroom he will find me sobbing in the closet, my face buried in the hanging clothes.

  At some point I destroy all the photos of him, but I don’t remember how or when. I remember going into the apartment we once shared while The Detective waits outside. I remember looking for the pottery and the jewelry we bought in Mexico. I remember finding an album on one of the shelves in the living room and taking it with me when I leave.

  I remember there is a time in my new apartment, after my bed has been delivered, after My Good Friend finally feels safe enough to move in, after there is furniture in the living room and food in the refrigerator, and after there are always empty alcohol bottles on the countertops and dirty dishes in the sink and cigarette butts in empty planters on the balcony, I sit down on the floor of my bedroom and open the album. I shut it again almost instantly. Maybe at that moment I pull out the photos of him and throw them into a trash bag and carry the bag out to the dumpster and heave it in.

  I remember there is a time when I have many photos of him—of our two bodies standing in front of the same granite monument, of his face frowning or smiling, of his hand moving blurrily through the frame, of his shirtless belly, his eyes like two bloodshot slits, of one shoulder and the back of his neck—and then suddenly I have none.

  For years and years I have none.

  And then I find a photo of him buried in an album on his mother’s Facebook page—she and I are not actually “friends”—from a trip she took to Venezuela. In the photo, the two of them lean together. She smiles. They are outdoors or near a window. Her caption reads: My son. He has changed very little. Maybe he’s put on weight. His hair has gone gray. He wears it shorter now. Mostly he looks just as I remember, directly into the camera.

  I can’t delete the photo, or cut it up, or erase it.

  I can’t even look away.

  I destroy the photogra
phs of him, but I keep the ones of myself. Even though they’re more troubling to look at. There is the one of me sitting on top of the pyramid at Chichen Itza, my bare wrists resting on my bare knees. I’m wearing a gigantic floppy hat and cheap plastic sunglasses like every other gringa tourist in the park that day. Later, as we cross the border from that state to another, border guards will stop us and search our car, one with a machine gun slung over his shoulder, the other with the gun pointed at me, his tongue passing over his lips.

  There is the one of me squirting lime onto a raw oyster in Veracruz, my hair bleached white from the sun, my nose and cheeks burned bright red. The next night, after The Man I Live With locks me out of the hotel room, I will stand on the street in my underwear, banging on the door, begging to be let back in.

  There is the photo of me standing near the baggage claim at Brussels National Airport, just inside a pair of automatic doors. I’m wearing his blue flannel shirt, my cargo pants, a brand-new pair of hiking boots. I hoist an army ranger backpack over my shoulder and carry a purse in front of my body like an egg. We have just disembarked from a seven-hour overnight transatlantic flight; he slept with his back to me the whole way.

  And then there’s me nursing a beer from a paper bag in Brussels’s Grote Markt, one hand on a knee of the brass statue of Everard ’t Serclaes near the square. I smile. I look happy and young and in love.

  There’s one of me stepping out of the tent at Camping Zeeburg in Amsterdam, cutting through the fog with my long skirt, my face obstructed by a curtain of blond hair. Underneath: a bruise across my cheek.

  There’s me sitting on the wall of Napoleon’s fort in Paris, tired of smiling for the camera.

  Me straddling a narrow alleyway in Toledo, one hand and foot against each of the two opposing walls, the flesh between my legs raw and pulsing with pain.

  There’s one of me buying a shawl from a silk merchant later the same day, my back to the camera.

  And the one of me looking out the window of the train between Prague and Berlin, watching the towns pass, the trees pass—the leaves just a blur of green—realizing even then what he’s captured in this photograph of me.

  [five]

  HOW IS IT possible to reclaim the body when it’s visible only in a mirror? A reflection of the body, external and reversed: the image both belongs to me and doesn’t. The photos, which I still have tucked away in the plastic sleeves of leather albums, reflect something more than what they show: a gaze that follows across the distances of continents and years. I can move my body through the world, and yet there is also an image of my body that resembles in every way the real thing: two people, bound together by this perceived resemblance—a woman who has died, a woman who goes on living.

  In the photos of me at ten, eight, and two, there’s the long blond hair falling in ringlets, the wide easy smile, the dimple on each rosy cheek. At seven, I am entered into a beauty pageant by my parents, my mother’s idea, an excuse to squeeze me into puffy Easter-colored dresses, to fuss and fuss over my hair and makeup. In the pictures, I don’t look like a child of seven. I walk in that sashaying pageanty way I’ve learned from watching Miss America on television—I’ve practiced in the hallway of our house for hours, for days—back and forth across the stage, back and forth in front of the audience, the judges, all of them veiled in shadow, only their smiles visible.

  When I go from being a beautiful child to a beautiful young woman, men compliment my body all the time: the crossing guard tells me I look lovely on my way to school; a classmate comments on my budding breasts; a teacher takes note of my flattering new haircut; a supervisor at the grocery store where I work compliments my thigh-grazing skirt; my regular customers offer me cash tips, phone numbers, fake proposals of marriage. I blush, or giggle, or smile at all this attention.

  I would give anything to keep getting it.

  At first I get tattoos as a late-teenage rebellion. On my eighteenth birthday, Mom calls us at the apartment I share with My Older Sister and tells us she has breast cancer. The next day, My Older Sister and I drive to the tattoo shop downtown. We each pick a design from the wall. She picks a rose; I pick an abstract symbol resembling both a tulip and the female reproductive system. We each sign a release. We each sit down in a chair. In the morning, we drive to the hospital, where the rest of our family—Dad, My Younger Sister, our aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents—holds hands in a circle around Mom and prays. Then the nurse comes, the doctor comes. My Dad leans down, presses his lips to my Mom’s lips. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen them kiss. The doctor says a few reassuring words before wheeling Mom away.

  I get a second tattoo a few months after the first: a compass centered just above my pubic hair. There is no occasion, really. It’s just a thing I want: something tiny and easily concealed. My Biker Boyfriend kisses it each time he goes down on me.

  Soon after, I pierce my belly button and start wearing crop tops to show it off. I watch men watch me walking down the street. Months later, I get a third tattoo: the silhouette of a fire-breathing dragon near my ankle. I pierce my tongue and roll the stud around in my mouth while I sit in class. My Biker Boyfriend says it makes me look kinky.

  Mom says I look like a freak. We’re sitting in a restaurant. She has come to town for a checkup with her oncologist. She says nothing about her cancer except that she is lucky: no chemo, no radiation. She sees my tongue piercing and grabs her purse, her hands shaking. A damn freak. She stands, the food on her plate uneaten, and leaves.

  A year later, before I think of taking a Spanish class, my parents have stopped speaking to me and My Older Sister. I don’t want to ask them for money anymore, so I work as a stripper to pay for my next semester’s tuition. It’s not hard work, and I don’t actually feel all that slimy about doing it. In many ways, it’s the kind of job a girl like me has spent her whole life training for: there’s the makeup and the costume and the hair, there’s the stage and the way of coiling and uncoiling my body until at least one man wants to fuck me enough that he gives me all his money.

  I make a lot of money at the strip club, and on my nights off I get free drinks at My Biker Boyfriend’s bar downtown. But when a group of boys from my high school come into the club, I hide in the DJ booth until the bouncers agree to ask them to leave. At the end of my shift, the owner of the club pulls me aside and suggests that this might not actually be the right job for me.

  I decide to take a semester off from college, and use my tuition money to buy a bus ticket to New York, where I get a contract with a modeling agency. I spend the whole summer sleeping on other people’s couches, in other people’s bathtubs, on a chair in the corner of a living room. One night I sleep on a roof. Men take my picture and sometimes give me money. They ask me to take off my clothes and then they take my picture. They call it art. They call it nude. More often the men call me nothing at all, but instead offer me a line of blow or ask for a hand job in the bathroom before or after the shoot. My agent, a woman, suggests I wear higher heels, pull my hair back, maybe get a boob job. Sometimes the photographers drive me and at least two other models to the Hamptons, where someone hands us each a pill when we walk into the party and on every table girls are dancing with their shirts off. If we stay in the city, the photographers take us to a new club opening in some once-unsavory district. We don’t pay to get in. We don’t pay for our drinks and no one checks our IDs. The doorman opens the red velvet rope and a man in a black jacket herds us through the crowd, up to the stage, to the VIP section, where the club owners keep sending us bottles and bottles of vodka. The party promoters come by to check on us and one keeps trying to finger me on stage.

  Everyone in the club gets to see.

  That image, of the self, does not belong equally to everyone. As a woman, I must keep myself under constant surveillance: how do I look as I rise from the bed, and while I walk through the store buying groceries, and while I run with the dog in the park? From childhood I was taught to survey and police and ma
intain my image continually, and in this role—as both surveyor and the image that is surveyed—I learned to see myself as others see me: as an object to be viewed and evaluated, a sight.

  When I leave New York and return to the duplex I share with My Older Sister and My Biker Boyfriend, to the Vision Center in the big box store, to the large lecture classes at the university, I start wearing a black leather dog collar. I don’t wear it to school or while cutting lenses at the Vision Center. Not while watching Oprah on a Tuesday afternoon. Just while I am out drinking or dancing with my friends. Dressed in all black—black jeans, black leather jacket, black boots—I fit right in at the divey basement dance club downtown, where goth kids drink cheap vodka and watch themselves in the mirrored walls. We’re all underage, but I’m the one dating the biker from New Jersey who has an in with every bartender in town. At night, I take him back to our duplex and cuff both of his hands to the headboard of the bed. I pull his pants off and whip his stomach with a leather cat o’ nine tails while I sit naked on top of him, just out of reach. I clamp his nipples and pinch the skin on his balls. How long do I torture him each night, his cock rock-hard? Half an hour. An hour, maybe, before he breaks out of the handcuffs, or the rope, or the bungee cords I’ve used to bind him to the bed or the dresser or the stack of metal shelves in the garage. He breaks free and chases me down the hall, through the living room or the kitchen, up or down the stairs—we’re both laughing; I’m not really trying to get away—before he catches me, throws me down on the floor face first, and thrusts straight in. I cry out each time in pain or mock pain.