Lullabies for Suffering

by Caroline Kepnes et al.

  But eventually I realized that I am neither using the knife as a zipper nor that we’re just blood-filled balloons. No, I came to know that I was actually trying to see more clearly. That the pain was trying to show me something large and profound. An unknown further from my rational perception than even Bro Culture and organized religion.

  And I was quickly becoming hooked not just on the pain, but whatever it was that the pain was trying to show me.

  #

  I slid easily through the digestive tract of college, was shat out with little aplomb into a life I barely understood. Full-time job? Expectations? Responsibilities? I’d like to say I saw all this coming, that I knew it loomed like the tiptop of the head of some huge kaiju, tearing up the landscape just over the horizon.

  But I didn’t.

  I spent four years drifting through coffee houses, doing the occasional paper or homework necessary to keep my solid C average, going to parties and concerts, seducing a whole procession of unlikely girls—from my sophomore Comparative Religions prof to a few of the cheerleaders of one of our school’s basically worthless sports teams. I think it was football…or maybe basketball.

  Whatever.

  And then, suddenly, there I was in real life. And it sucked. Hard.

  But pain, oh, pain was always there for me when I needed it.

  And I needed it.

  But unexpectedly, the cutting wasn’t enough. Cutting seemed so juvenile, so tentative, so demure, even when I learned to cut deep, through the skin into the bright, red quivering muscle of my arms and thighs.

  Not enough to help me cope with the sheer blunt force of reality.

  Pain is a gateway, I was understanding.

  And I was simply unable to get through the opening cutting afforded me.

  It offered me a peephole.

  I needed a window.

  #

  The sun slid through the slatted blinds like rays of dust. Early morning, rosy gold, easy light filled the bedroom, and Livy lay on her back, arm thrown over the pillow next to hers, staring at the pockmarked ceiling.

  At her side, a thick, brown woman lay curled atop the bed, her skin dusky in the golden light. An eruption of dark curly hair sprayed over her pillow. Livy watched her round stomach, uncovered, rise and fall with each shallow, sleep-filled breath, her breasts drooping to either side of her chest.

  Livy smiled, licked her lips, tasted the girl—Rayne? Rana? She couldn’t remember. Reaching out, she touched the girl’s hair, played with a few strands of it, letting it slip through her fingers, then grasping another few strands.

  She rolled over to more closely study the girl’s massive tit closest to her, deep olive skin finely pored, with enormous areola. As one hand toyed with her hair, her other gently prodded the girl’s nipple, watched it tighten, harden.

  The girl stirred at that, and Livy leaned in close, exhaled her warm breath over that erect nipple, watched the brown flesh gather, furrow.

  "That’s a nice way to wake up," she muttered, stretching and moaning under Livy’s touch.

  Livy moved closer, snuggling into the warm cleft of the girl’s body. As she did, she untangled from the twist of the bedsheets.

  There, at the end of the bed, was a large, irregular blood stain.

  The girl—Raina, Livy finally remembered, relieved—craned her neck up to take a look.

  "Yeah, about that…" she said.

  "Don’t worry," Livy murmured, burying her face in Raina’s side. "We were both pretty drunk."

  "It made a mess," Raina protested.

  "I’ll clean up later."

  "Doesn’t it hurt?"

  "Of course it does. That’s why I asked you to do it."

  With waves of that pain drumming through her foot—seemingly intensified by talking about it—Livy wrapped herself around Raina and let the pain carry her away.

  #

  Later, in the bathroom as Raina snored, Livy sat on the edge of her bathtub, foot raised, propped on the edge of the sink. She examined the damage. The entire nail of the big toe of her right foot was torn away. Blood crusted the toe, slithered down her foot, and dried in a Rorschach blot at the base of her ankle.

  She reached for a small kit case on the corner of the sink, unzipped it. Methodically, she pulled out a bottle of peroxide, a tube of Neosporin. Leaning back, she turned on the hot water in the tub, grabbed a washcloth, waited for the water to get hot.

  Washing her foot thoroughly, gingerly daubing at the angry red of the exposed nail base, she cleaned the blood away. She wrung the washcloth in the flow of water from the bath, turning it momentarily pink.

  She cleaned the nail bed delicately with peroxide, applied a blob of the ointment, then wrapped her toe in gauze, sealing it with a piece of white tape.

  Livy could still feel it throb beneath the bandages, sending delicious pulses of buzzing warmth up her legs. She considered taking a few ibuprofen to take the edge off, but quickly dismissed it.

  Why harsh the buzz?

  She zipped the kit shut, set it back onto the counter.

  Now, to get rid of the girl.

  #

  Raina dawdled at getting dressed, and Livy tried to suppress her growing annoyance. She sat at the small kitchen table outside the bedroom, sipping at a cup of black coffee, drumming her fingers on the table’s surface.

  "Never done anything like that…with anyone," Raina’s voice floated in from the bedroom. Livy heard movement there, the rustling of the bed linens, clothes.

  She rolled her eyes at Raina’s statement. How many times in her life had she heard that?

  "You mean the toe thing or the rest of it?" she asked, letting her tone slip partially into snide.

  "The toe thing, of course," Raina huffed, sounding as if she were pulling on her jeans. "You’d be surprised, though. I’ve met a bunch of people that have that same…whaddaya call it? Fetish?"

  Livy sneered at that word. How she hated it. Her fetish, was it? Fetish seemed such a suburban word to describe what she saw as normal as breathing or eating. Taking a piss wasn’t a fetish, was it?

  Well, she supposed, sipping at the coffee, it could be.

  "Really?" was all she could allow in response.

  "Yeah," Raina said, coming out of the bedroom, shrugging back into her retro Black Flag T-shirt. "One of the professors on campus is doing a study on pain. I’ve met a few people who are involved, people who’re into that shit."

  That thought piqued Livy’s curiosity. A study on pain.

  "What exactly are they studying?"

  Raina shrugged and reached over to play with a strand of Livy’s hair that had fallen across her face.

  Livy was finished with pleasantries and intimacies, but she let Raina toy with her hair, at least until she answered.

  "Not sure, but it’s pretty hush-hush. They’re paying people to participate in the studies, some nice coin from what I understand. I hear they’re studying how much pain a person can endure, what it does to ’em. But…"

  Livy tilted her head away from Raina’s hands.

  "But?"

  Raina sighed, pulled her hand back. "I’ve met three of these people at parties. Never saw ’em again."

  #

  Addicted.

  It’s not a lovely word, is it?

  I never liked it. I never liked thinking that I was beholden, to a person or a thing. I never liked the sound of needing something more than I could control. Of not being able to quit, of failed promises to stop. I was either cutting or thinking about the next slice, the next slam of a door against my fingers. Acting on it during the day, dreaming of it at night.

  Addicted. I hate it.

  Plus the word has dick in it.

  Okay, that was a joke, but an honest one.

  When did I realize that I was addicted to pain?

  Right after high school and before college is when that particular curtain parted.

  I was in love in high school. Who wasn’t?

  Her name was Jennie, and
she was brilliant, beautiful, daring. And I loved her, loved her with the true, absolute, overly dramatic, gushing heart of an eighteen-year-old.

  That summer we spent after graduating high school was idyllic. Making out in darkened, beer-smelling basements as music blared all around and boys hooted at the voyeuristic thrill of us kissing.

  We made out in cars with the windows open, warm summer air flooding over us, pulling our long hair into streamers, carrying our laughter away.

  We made out at friends’ pools and darkened movie theaters where the air smelled of fake butter and dried, sticky soda and she tasted of strawberry lip balm.

  And finally—literally—we made out at a swimming hole, just a few of our close friends at a pond on one of their parents’ properties. Under a blazing July sun, unadulterated by clouds or propriety, we stripped off and dove into water that was muddy and smelled faintly of fish. We played and splashed, dove and swam blindly under the water, grabbing for each other’s legs and asses.

  We drank Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and Everclear with grape Kool-Aid. We sunned ourselves on huge beach towels, applied lotion and zinc oxide, sprayed our hair with Sun-In.

  And we talked, gabbled, really. About each other, about the coolest guys and prettiest girls. About the colleges we were all going to in just a few weeks.

  One by one, as the day waned, the girls left, and it was just me and Jennie. She lay beside me on her towel, toyed with braiding and unbraiding my hair.

  We were going to school soon, different schools.

  And that was the end of it.

  She told me as she braided my hair that we needed to grow, see other people. That this was an opportunity for us both to embrace.

  Oh well, right? I mean, boo-fucking-hoo. How many relationships are ruined in that huge, gaping chasm between high school and college? It seemed so naïve, so innocent, so fucking small-town America.

  I couldn’t do much more than laugh. I thought it was light and effervescent on the cooling air. I’m sure, to Jennie, I sounded like a maddened hyena.

  She left me there, stretched nude under the early evening sun pushing through the trees that skirted the edge of the pond. Its light was colored golden-green, coruscating over the brown sheet of the water.

  I felt the wind toy at my hair, and it reminded me of her.

  I sat, pulled my knees up and rested my head there, thought of crying.

  My hand, blindly, found a rock near the edge of my towel, the size of a good orange. The fingers curled around it exposed the promise ring she’d given me just a few months prior. A stupid thing, a girlie thing. A thin band of silver and some tiny flake of a blue stone she told me was sapphire, but was probably glass.

  We’d laughed over it, but I wore it every day since.

  No more.

  I tore at it, trying to get it off, trying to remove the reminder of her I carried with me. It refused to slide over my knuckle. I twisted and turned it furiously, sputtering in anger.

  Then, the rock.

  I flipped it to my other hand, splayed the ring hand’s fingers on the ground, brought the rock up until it eclipsed the sun.

  Down, hard onto the ring. But mostly the finger.

  A surge of pain roared up my arm, and before I could stop myself, I brought the rock smashing back down again and again.

  Each time, that pain burst over me, washed things away. My threat of tears, yes, but also all thoughts of that other pain caused by Jennie. Her departure. Her absence.

  I felt disconnected from my emotional wound but fully embraced by this physical one. It seemed nurturing and kind, even sexual in a way.

  With each blow of the rock, the pain seemed to soften into pulses of warmth that throbbed up my arm, lapped against my consciousness like the waves of some deep, uncharted ocean.

  I saw the vision even then, though it took me years to recognize it. It opened onto me as if a slit had been cut in my closed eyelids, and the darkness came rushing in. But it wasn’t the darkness of the night sky and the glittering grains of its stars. No, it was some deeper darkness, something bigger than that, bigger than empty space, at once ancient and otherly.

  And from that, swimming across my vision like a glimpse of some unimaginably huge leviathan, an indistinct pattern there in the darkness behind my closed eyes; something vague, as if glimpsed through chiffon. Something I couldn’t quite make out.

  All I knew then was the pain. I orgasmed from it and passed out.

  When I came to, it was night, full-on summer night, stars scattered over a hazy sky and crickets crazily skree-skreed. I pulled myself up, my hand throbbing. I put on my clothes, gathered my stuff in my good hand, and made my way to my car.

  Under the dome light, I could see my hand was a mangled mess. The promise ring was gone, as was much of the skin of the back of my hand. The ring finger was crooked as hell, bent and smashed, as were the two fingers on either side.

  Oh, shit, yes, it was all broken. The next day at the emergency room, I was told I’d shattered quite a few of the bones in that hand. I told my mother that I was so upset I punched a rock. Close enough to what had actually happened. She bought it so easily. I knew she just wasn't comfortable pressing for the actual truth. It wasn't the first time she'd ignored the scars tattooed across my flesh, the telltale marks I did my best to hide, and she did her best to overlook.

  And for the next few weeks, alone in my room most of the time, I toyed with the broken fingers jutting from the plaster cast signed by no one. I pulled at them, pushed them, anything to elicit the delicious waves of pain.

  It wasn’t just easier to deal with this pain than the Jennie-induced pain.

  It was preferable.

  And I clearly needed it.

  #

  Livy was able to extract the professor’s name, a doctor really, from Raina as she frog-armed her out the door that morning.

  Alan Atryx, Ph.D., Senior Director of the Laboratory of Cognitive Physics for the big state university that dominated the little Midwestern town. He taught classes, mostly upper-level independent labs and arcane genetics courses. He was a faculty member of the applied physics program, though Livy had no idea what any of that meant, and was stymied as to what connection existed between pain addiction and applied physics.

  She sought him out in the school’s online page for the department’s faculty, but didn’t learn much. Tenured, been at the university for 15 years. Plain looking, with a receding hairline, a Van Dyke beard and hipster-looking wireframe glasses. He looked as if he wore short-sleeved white button-up shirts complete with a pocket of pens. A nerd. A geek. A dweeb.

  Not a professor who studied pain or the people who pursued it.

  Livy wondered if Raina had been wrong, if she’d misheard or misunderstood what people had relayed to her.

  #

  The music pulsed and blared. Some unidentifiable Euro Techno dance stuff. The DJ, promoted on the club’s fliers out front, was hidden behind his rack of instruments and turntables, effaced by the blasts of multi-colored strobe lights and his own bulky hoodie and ball cap. He bobbed and weaved, alternately throwing switches and huddling over his laptop.

  Livy was covered in sweat from dancing to the frenetic music, her Radio Buzzkills tank top sticking to her collarbone, a line of perspiration clinging to her spine. Her hair swung about her face, matted with moisture. Salty lines tracked from her forehead down her cheeks.

  The girl who’d gravitated close to Livy smiled as she caught her eyes through the thick curtain of her hair. A little mousey, Livy thought, but she liked a mousey girl. Perhaps they’d go back to her place, play a little, shed some blood.

  As much as Livy enjoyed the dancing, the hectic thrum of the music, the enclosed heat of the club, she needed a fix. She needed to feel that electric slice of pain coruscating from whatever body part she injured directly into her brain. She needed that surge of dopamine, needed to bathe her nervous system in it.

  But more than that, she needed to see again, to ca
tch a glimpse of the elusive thing that her open, pain-free eyes couldn’t discern.

  She needed…needed to see more.

  Maybe this girl would go home with her and use one of the many crowbars Livy kept on hand—knife or hammer or paddle—to help her pry that door open, get a better look. Lately, she’d found herself more often than not home alone, curled into a ball on the floor, body wracked with pain. Fingers and limbs sticky with blood, smeared over the tiles, drying on the edge of the bathtub. Tears down her cheeks, urine-soaked panties clinging to her when she’d hurt herself so badly her bladder would void.

  She kinda missed having a person there with her, to be there as she rode the waves of pain and pleasure, to be with her as she came down, to hold her, comfort her maybe.

  Then, of course, to leave.

  Livy sidled up to the bar, took an empty seat among the other crushed people, sitting and standing, trying to get the bartender’s attention. Livy waited her turn patiently, still breathing heavily, still sweating profusely.

  As she turned to scan the room, someone appeared before her, startling her with both suddenness and proximity.

  "I wondered where you went," the girl shouted near Livy’s ear. "I thought I’d scared you off. Or bored you."

  Livy found herself smiling. The girl was evidently not as mousey as Livy had believed.

  "Neither. Can I get you a drink?" Livy said, half turning to see if bartender was any less busy. She wasn’t.

  "Sure. I’ll have a 7 and 7," the girl said. "And I bet you’ll have…wait a minute, let me guess."

  The woman stared intently at Livy through her wireframe glasses.

  "Something unexpected. Not beer. A gin and tonic, maybe."

  Livy found her smile widening.

  "How’d you guess that?"

  "Just a good cold reader of people, that’s all. If you’re buying me a drink, can I sit here?" She gestured at a seat that Livy hadn’t seen had opened.