by Yann Martel
After some seconds I started to cry. I eased myself to the floor.
Tito
baby
Tito
Tito Tito Tito Tito
Tito Tito Tito
Tito
Tito
baby
baby
baby
baby Tito
baby
baby
Tito
Tito baby
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.......fear pain
fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear.......
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fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear.......... .
pain.....................
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pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear.......
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pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain.......
.... pain.......
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... fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear
fear fear fear fear.......
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... pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear pain fear.... fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear.......
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fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain.......
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fear fear fear fear fear fear
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baby.... pain.......
pain.......pain.... pain
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Oh! Oh!
Why didn't I fight back? I have read that it only takes a few pounds of pressure to detach human ears. Why didn't I do that? During his pain and surprise I could have got round the fourth wall.
Never again to be so open to attack. Never.
This time it started with a terrible headache. I thought my head would split open from the pain. I wanted to scream, but I just lay there all night, holding my head in my hands, aware of each passing minute. In the morning, the downy blonde hairs between my breasts were darker.
Otherwise I couldn't pinpoint the source of pain. Breasts flattened, vulva closed up and then grew outwards, my every subtle aspect changed -- without specific discomfort, only a nausea that made me want to die. I vomited several times. Hair grew with an itch and I scratched my chest and legs till I bled, but that was a self-induced pain. My emerging penis revolted me, but that was another self-induced pain.
I lost my baby, my child, my future. Perhaps this was the source of the nausea. Finding that its normal exit to the world was closing, my baby, in panic, migrated north. It swam around my bowels, it squeezed its way past my stomach, it came to my heart, it slid up my trachea. It came to lodge inside my head. This I know with certainty: the day I am found dead and the necessary autopsy is performed, there will be discovered inside my head, just beside my memory, a pale, unhappy fetus, no longer attached by its umbilical cord to a placenta, long ago consumed, but to my very brain, feeding off its flow of blood, oxygen and words, and it will have lived there all my life, adapting to its environment as we all must, an environment dark, lonely and cramped, removed from the sunlit world by only a smooth curve of bone and skin, but inescapably removed. I cannot say I interact with this baby -- I don't even know its sex -- but it's there, it's there, high up on the side of my head, on the left, though sometimes I feel it move forward to an area above my frontal lobes.
The hormonal maelstrom inside my body helped my wounds heal quickly, my external wounds.
With my newfound strength, in rage and in hurt, I stupidly destroyed some of poor Tito's plates. Fig Leaf cowered in a corner. I cleaned up in tears.
Sleep was as vivid as wakefulness. Perhaps some of my nightmares were daymares. I slept no more than ten hours that whole week. I ate everything that was left in the fridge, until I was eating stale bread with mayonnaise.
I thought of suicide.
I cut my hair. Though my thoughts were dead and calm, my hand trembled.
To him, I was nothing worth respecting. I was reduced to nothing, my being, my feelings, wilfully disregarded. You can't imagine how slippery and difficult the slope upwards is from such debasement back to self-respect. You continually slip back. You become suspicious not only of others but of yourself, of your body. You live in fear, a fear that never leaves you, never. Never. You are often seized by f
eelings of panic. Your body becomes something alien, beyond your control; it vomits often, contracts colds all the time. You get migraines. Sleep becomes enemy territory, peopled by your worst fears.
I don't know why they call it rape. To me it was murder. I was killed that day and I've had to drag death around in me ever since, a roaming greyness in my colourful interior; sometimes it's my stomach that's dead, sometimes my head, sometimes my intestines, often my heart.
I left Montreal -- left my life -- abruptly and untidily. I stuffed my backpack with my novel and clothes (and, without thinking, tampons), and departed. Not a word to the restaurant or to the Hungarian community or to Danny or to anyone else. For my dear Tito, a scrawled note, the hardest words I've ever had to write. There was only an angst-ridden Fig Leaf to see me go. I gave him a last walk, left plenty of food out for him, petted him -- but he knew something was wrong. As I was closing the downstairs door he grunted louder than he had ever grunted before and it broke my heart. I dropped the key through the mail slot and it left me with an image: his flat snout visible through the slot, sniffing wildly at my hand, imploring me through his nostrils not to leave. But night-time was coming. It filled me with fear. I had to get out of town before it was dark. And a storm was starting -- yet more snow. Fig Leaf had to last only a day. Tito would be back tomorrow. I stumbled towards the bus station.
This thing wasted four years of my life. Four years of vagrancy and confusion. And counting.
Sometimes I would forget. It was most often right after sleep, when I managed to sleep. I would open my eyes and look at the geometrical shapes of sunlight against the wall, and for a few seconds I would be open to the day. Then my emotions would wake up and the book of my memory would open at that page, among the thousands of pages, and it (and the fear, the anxiety, the nightmares, the sleepless nights, the panic, the depression, the loss, the sadness) would come back and the day would become an ordeal, a trap of five senses and one voice inside my head, a voice that never shut up, only sometimes changed languages.
I took a bus to Toronto and arrived early in the morning, but next thing I remember I was in an eighteen-wheeler heading west. I believe I got the ride somewhere along Lake Superior, along that huge reservoir of tears shaped like a fish arching in the air, a caught marlin. I remember that ride only because of a road sign that has stayed imprinted in my memory. The truck's cab is a large, well-appointed space that looms so high above the highway I feel I'm in a low-flying plane. It's very warm. I feel numb. I'm resting partly against the back of the seat, partly against the door, not looking straight ahead but off at an angle, so I can keep the driver in the edge of my field of vision. He doesn't talk much; last thing he muttered was, "Manitoba soon." He's concentrating on the snowstorm outside, the great sweeping gusts of white numbness that obliterate everything with a raging howl. He has both hands on the steering wheel, as big and round as the globe. I don't see much outside. Then a sign appears out of the blankness: "Lake of the Woods". Away, away into the coldness I go. I'm numb, so numb, God, so numb. Away, away I go. I fall asleep as we roar through Demeter's rage.
