The Other Side

by Lacy M. Johnson

  I remember that the blue pill makes the feeling go away so I start taking it first. The panic goes away, and the anger goes away, and the guilt for the way I’ve been raging at My First Husband. The white pill makes me sleepy, and dizzy, and costs almost as much money as I earn teaching freshmen to write about literature. The white pill makes it harder to write poems. My body feels very far away. I’m prescribed another pill, and another, and another. And after months of taking these pills, I still don’t want to have sex with My First Husband unless I am very very drunk, and even then I close my eyes very tightly and let my thoughts drift somewhere else.

  We start couples’ counseling and the counselor suggests we go on dates. My First Husband takes me to the movies but I can’t decide which one to see. He takes me out to dinner and we sit across from one another at a tiny, candle-lit table. He tries to hold my hand across the white paper tablecloth, but his touch makes my skin crawl. Neither of us can think of a single word to say.

  Meanwhile, I try to have an affair with one of my married colleagues. He starts it, I swear, by looking at me in that hungry, awkward way, saying vaguely inappropriate things that I roll around in my head for hours, trying to understand what he could mean. Increasingly, I stay after class to “study.” I sit in his office while he paces, his hands in his pockets, insisting he can’t, he can’t.

  I cross and uncross my legs, begging to differ.

  If we meet off campus, it’s over coffee—so benign—and in bookstores or libraries. Sometimes he agrees to meet me but then never actually comes. While I wait, in the highest, farthest reaches of the library, I imagine him fucking me, frantic and rough against a stack of musty books. I check them out as souvenirs and bring them back to the apartment, hoping My First Husband finds them.

  He doesn’t even notice.

  He starts humping me in his sleep. I make him sleep in the spare bedroom as punishment. Each night, I hear him whimpering and think of beating him with a rolled-up newspaper.

  I can never bring myself to do it.

  When he gets drunk at a cookout and pushes me to the ground in front of all of my friends, I kick him out of the apartment. I pack his clothes and CDs into boxes and file for divorce. I cut off all my hair and send him my ponytail through certified mail.

  I tell myself I’ll never speak to him again.

  Except I do speak to him again. The night I kick him out of our apartment, he shows up on My Older Sister’s doorstep. She calls and asks, What the fuck? I haven’t told her we’re having problems. I haven’t told her anything. She can’t understand what has gone so wrong between us.

  Twice a week he comes to pick me up from our old apartment to take me on another miserable date. I don’t let him hold my hand. I don’t let him kiss me. I say, Maybe we should do this only once a week. Then, Only twice a month. Meanwhile, with no one to watch over me, I eat less. I start taking diet pills in addition to the other pills and fall in love with the constant and perpetual neural hum of time travel: how the world slows, how the mind speeds through it.

  Back in the apartment I now have to myself, I stay up late reading and writing as long as I want. It’s the first time in my life I’ve actually lived alone. I have only myself to cook for, my own dishes to wash. Only my own laundry to wash and fold. Only one body in the bed: me, mine, my own.

  [eight]

  I STAND IN the parking lot outside the offices of the literary magazine where I am an intern, unlocking my car, when I hear my name and turn around. I see him crossing the lawn, climbing the hill, walking toward me through the grass. At first I don’t recognize him. He wears a twill bucket hat, which is strange because I have never known him to wear hats. He perspires, looks pale. His pupils dart: two pinpricks. Then I think, Oh. He’s high.

  He clears his throat before announcing he no longer wants me back. Actually he’s moving far far away. He’s going back to Arizona, to be close to his mother. He’ll teach in a school. He’ll finish his thesis. Maybe he’ll write a book.

  Relief floods me, and a breath leaves my body, taking with it all reason and care. But I still have some of your things, he says neutrally. Give me a ride to the moving truck—it’s just up the block—and then you can follow me home.

  I should know better, should ask him to mail them to me instead. But then he will make excuses. And then we’ll argue. And if we argue, he’ll pull the words right out from under me. Anything I say, he’ll twist around and use against me. He’ll twist my words until I’m apologizing and he’s in a rage. I should know better, but agree.

  Pulling into the abandoned parking lot, I think Where is the moving truck? And just as I suspect but do not believe that something is terribly wrong, I turn to see the stun gun in his outstretched hand. My mind goes blank, empties completely. My stomach enters free fall. He says he will drive now and I can either go peacefully, or in the trunk with permanent nerve damage.

  My hand reaches to open the door to run. My legs move so quickly. An opening between the bushes. A backyard. A bike. A ball. He moves more quickly. He catches me by the hair and reels me back in.

  You won’t escape. He whispers this with his lips near my ear, my hair in his hand, holding the stun gun to my throat, in the place where blood enters my face through the jaw. I hope, but do not pray to God, that he does not pull the trigger.

  He pushes me into the passenger seat, sliding me over his lap, puts a black wig and a hat on my head, sunglasses over my face. The lenses are covered in thick black tape. I can see out the sides, but I don’t tell him that. When he asks whether I can see, I tell him I can’t see. I don’t want him to know that I know exactly where we are the whole time he’s driving around in circles. That when we pull up to a stoplight near the apartment we once shared, I can see the woman in the next car over. So close I could almost reach out and touch her. She sings to the radio and looks straight ahead, tapping her fingers on the wheel. I could open the door. I could scream or flail or run.

  He makes a U-turn at the stoplight near the apartment we once shared and goes the opposite direction, fast, through an intersection and down a hill. We exit the boulevard and turn to the right, onto a quiet residential street lined with redbrick apartment buildings I’ve never seen before. When we pull off the street, into a driveway, behind a tiny fourplex, I can see that half of it is buried underground. I know, having lived here all my life, that burying things during a long summer keeps them cool.

  While he comes to my side of the car to open the door I wait in my seat. Terrified. Obedient. He leads me by the arm toward the building, fishes a ring of keys out of his pocket. He opens the storm door first, leans against it while he unlocks the deadbolt, and pushes open the heavy steel door. He leads me across the threshold, into the dark basement apartment, through a dark living room. Out of the edge of the glasses, I see building materials stacked on the floor: scraps of two-by-fours, boxes of nails and screws, a hammer, a drill. Plastic shopping bags discarded in corners. The first door on the right is the one he opens, leads me through, closes behind us and locks. The light comes on. The glasses and wig come off.

  The room, maybe a bedroom under any other circumstances, is small. Thick blue Styrofoam covers every surface but the gray-carpeted floor: the walls, the ceiling, the door. I can see no windows, but I’m not looking for them yet. All I see is the moment of my death, not far away.

  In the middle of the room there’s a giant wooden chair constructed of two-by-fours and four-by-fours. Like an electric chair. A hole in the seat opens to a bucket underneath. Two steel U-bolts are attached to the thick wooden arms with galvanized fencing staples. A choke collar hangs from the headrest.

  I’m going to rape you now, he says while I undress. Or I’m sure that’s what you’ll call it, anyway. In the corner of the room there are several sheets of paper folded into a neat square: a letter he’ll read to me after he’s bolted me into the chair, after he’s fed me a turkey sandwich, his hands hot and sticky with his own semen. While I’m swallowing and choking a
nd spitting it out he explains that I’ll call My Good Friend to tell her I’ve decided to take him back. On the phone, I clear my throat nervously and tell her I’ll come by in a few days to pick up my clothes. She wants to know what clothes. Sorry, I can’t come by tonight, I say. I’ll come by in a few days. She’s so confused. Where are you? What is happening? I can’t speak, with him sitting right beside me, demanding I hang up the phone. I want to say, Send help. Instead I say, I don’t know.

  Or maybe the phone call happens first. At one point he tells me to put his penis in my mouth—he’s so angry he can’t get it hard for this—and at another he tightens the dog collar around my neck, gesturing toward the places he’s planted explosives in the walls, a camera in the corner, a detonator in the kitchen. All the possible outcomes play like a movie in my head: He cues the explosion. Pieces of my body fly in every direction. But then he puts his face close to mine and says No one can hear you. Go ahead and scream.

  I do not scream.

  I sit on the edge of the mattress, which is sloppily dressed with a fitted white sheet covered by a clear plastic sheet, covered by a goose-down duvet, the same one he gave me on my birthday. The mattress lies on the floor in the corner.

  He doesn’t live here. No one lives here.

  He asks who might be expecting me. I consider whom to call, who could best handle answering the last phone call I ever make. Not my parents. They aren’t expecting me. I have just moved into my new apartment, and I planned to spend the night unpacking. Yesterday, my parents took me to the store to get new sheets, new towels, a new comforter for the bed. The mattress hasn’t been delivered yet. Mom said, I don’t think we can afford to keep setting you up all over again like this.

  I lie and call My Good Friend. She’ll tell me later that she knew something was wrong. She spends the whole night driving around looking for me: the old apartment I used to share with him, the new apartment, my favorite bars downtown, ditches beside the road.

  He says, I’m going to rape you now. And it doesn’t matter that I am on my period, because he pulls my tampon out by the string and lays it beside the mattress. The police will find it later and catalogue it into evidence. My blood pools on the clear plastic sheet, which they will also catalogue into evidence.

  At first, I have a body, a wild animal body I throw and thrash against his cage. I almost break a limb before he catches me in his hands. I growl and hiss and bare my teeth. But then, my body is not a wild animal body. It’s a human girl body: the two arms pinned, a cross; the two legs spread, a tomb. It’s the mind that goes thrashing so wildly. The body remains calm. The body undresses and lays itself down.

  But the mind goes thrashing so wildly. The body lays itself down on a clear plastic sheet, hears but does not listen to the soup of human-like speech boiling in its ears, spilling exactly the length and width of the room. The mind skitters safely out of reach.

  The body lays itself down but does not know with precision in which direction or at what point, if any, in the future it will rise and go. Or if it will be physically possible, the future having maybe splintered the body into a thousand wet-shining shards.

  Underneath: bedrock unbuckles with the thrust of vast tectonic plates, skidding at this very moment over an ocean of white-hot magma in the body’s every orifice.

  But the mind goes thrashing. The mind goes thrashing away from the body, which does not move a muscle, does not move an inch from the spot in which it is unraveling, will be unraveling, has been unraveling since.

  [nine]

  THREE YEARS AFTER the kidnapping I can’t find anyone to sleep with me. My married colleague won’t sleep with me. My single colleagues won’t sleep with me. My professors at graduate school are too gay or too old to sleep with me. Tonight, I have just come home from a night of dancing with my girlfriends—the first without my wedding ring. I am drinking vodka from a plastic cup and blowing my cigarette smoke out the window, browsing around the Internet—not exactly a dating site, My Good Friend tells me in the e-mail—when I see the photo of a man who might sleep with me. I e-mail him first, a hokey pickup line. He writes back almost instantly. We e-mail many times a day, every day, for weeks. We tell flirty jokes, trading the grand narratives of our lives, the minutiae of our hobbies, and then he asks me for an actual in-person date.

  I tell my officemates I’m supposed to meet him at his apartment and they think I am insane. You’re not even divorced yet, they scold. One insists that I call her five minutes before I arrive, and she will call after I’ve been there ten minutes to make sure he hasn’t hacked me into pieces.

  He greets me with a giant smile—he’s blushing a little—and a kiss on the cheek. Inside, he offers me something to drink. We spend most of the evening on his couch, smoking cigarettes, sipping from tall glasses of flat water. We take turns talking: his voice, like water, puts me at ease. He tells me what he knows about loss.

  I spill all my beans.

  Instead of the predictable response—the shock, the hand over the mouth or to the chest, I’m so sorry—The Man Who Might Sleep with Me says something like Shut UP! That did NOT happen to you!!!

  I laugh. It is a good first date.

  He reaches over to hold my hand halfway through the high-budget kung fu movie. My palm sweats and I hope he doesn’t notice. Maybe he thinks his palm is sweating.

  Before the credits roll, we’re making out on the couch like a couple of teenagers. I try to unbutton his pants. He takes my hands in his and brings them to his lips. I try again, pulling him close, closer. Closer.

  But this man doesn’t unbutton his pants, or pull my shirt over my head. He kisses me on the forehead and offers to make me a cup of tea.

  It’s not what I’m expecting, not even what I want, but I agree.

  At first I say I don’t want a boyfriend. I’m not interested in a relationship. All I want is someone to fuck me senseless, to pound me until I’m raw and shaking. I want to be held down, pushed aside, flipped over, and smacked. I want to be choked, chained, tied to the floor. I want to bruise, to bleed, to cry out please stop please don’t stop. I want him to leave after it’s done. And then I’ll stand up, take a shower, turn on the television.

  But what I get is two hands on my shoulders when I’m screaming in my sleep. I get a hand on my back, in my hair. I get kisses on my cheek. I get glazed salmon and a glass of chardonnay. I get mixed CDs, and antique books, a shiny new cigarette case. I get picked up after work. I get dinner and a movie. I get a drawer, one side of the closet, a trash can in the bathroom. I get the best spot on the couch, a whole wall for my bookshelves, one half of the rent and the bills.

  I am packing my books into boxes, preparing to move in with this boyfriend, when Dad and his new wife come to town and take me out to lunch. We scootch into a booth in a corner near the window. We are on the second floor of a café in the artsy downtown district: Dad and His New Wife across from me, their backs to the restaurant, my back, like always, to the wall, where no one can approach me from behind. At first, things are tense. I haven’t spent much time with His New Wife yet, and it’s clear she’s still sizing me up. She wants to like me, wants to be liked in return. She has brought me a gift: a pair of silver earrings. I haven’t brought anything for her. I carry only my wallet, my cell phone, the shiny new cigarette case.

  Dad asks how school is going, whether I have decided to go on for the PhD. I talk about a class I’ve been teaching at a local shelter, a poetry workshop for women recovering from substance abuse: their stories, their lives—always in limbo, always tentative. I’m writing a paper, I say, presenting at a conference this fall, two more in the spring. I ask His New Wife to tell me how they met. A blind date he didn’t know he was on, she jokes. A mutual friend set it up. He has already told me this story: how after the divorce he would leave each day before dawn to work at the power plant, sleeping each night in a spare bedroom above his friend’s garage. The mutual friend invited them both over for dinner, where Dad was polite to this woman,
but tired. He left early to go to bed. His New Wife laughs at this now, as she stirs sweetener into her tea. On their first actual date, they went to dinner. Before the waiter brought their drinks Dad learned they share the same birthday. By the time the bread came, he learned she loves to laugh. Sometime between the salad and the soup, he came alive again, he says. She was across from him, looking so beautiful, sipping her wine. She was talking about her children, saying, I have an infinite capacity to love. And that was it, my father says, I knew she was the one. I smile. I’m happy for him, really. I’m about to say so when the waiter comes to take our order.