Maidenhead (24 page)

‘Yeah, I am,’ I said. What’s the problem with that?

Gayl put the knife back into the coil for another hit. She set it up quick and sucked in a funnel of smoke.

I was basically committing myself to being in her films.

The slave revolt is a leap into the unknown, I wrote, into Bataillean non-knowledge, into direct, definitive confrontation with the power of the master that has defined the slave, defined the slave in her innocence. Because the slave also defines the master. The loop of the master and slave thus cannot be closed. It is open, repeating, electrically charged. This is the narrative structure of liberation: a possibility of non-identification with oneself – how one was born, how one wakes up – either master or slave. Because you can be fucked a thousand times and still be a virgin.

‘We’re only here for a little while longer,’ Gayl said at the top of her breath, holding out the smoking knife and spoon for me to take her remnants. I leaned over the table to take it in. ‘But you know that, Miss World Traveller, don’t you?’

I held in my smoke. No, I didn’t know that.

‘You’re an explorer who flaps her legs open like a book.’

Smoke exploded from Gayl’s nose. She was a dragon, red-eyed, dominant. I felt my mother-money in my pocket like a weapon.

I had emailed my essay to Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky. I’d emailed Chris, Lee and Aaron a copy too. I’d even sent one to Jen and Charlene.
Girls
, I wrote,
wrestle with this!

Gayl set up our last hit of hash. Her forehead protruded and shone like a dome. ‘Once you started, you just couldn’t stop, right? Once you started you got so open that you’d do anything.’

‘Yeah, that’s it,’ I said. ‘That’s what happened to me.’

Gayl offered the last hit to me. ‘I hear him call you our little bourgie bitch,’ she said.

‘Fuck you,’ I said. I felt like Lee.

I half stood up to reach for Gayl’s arm over the table. Then I held her there and sucked. I wasn’t afraid of anything anymore.

‘You aren’t so young, Myra, but sometimes you really seem young. Like, maybe twelve, not seventeen.’

Our faces were close. Gayl was scrambling or something, her eyes were glossy. When you’re eighteen you can do whatever you want, I wanted to say. My mother got married when she was nineteen. I felt my waist in the edge of the table. My mother gave me this shitload of cash. I was on the verge of showing my money to her. Sharing. Gayl’s mouth opened. Her swollen eyes closed.

Gayl had seen me and made me do things that I wanted. I breathed my smoke out into her mouth. Her lips opened wide and easy.

But Gayl extracted her wrist from my grip and went to lie down on the bed. The smock she was wearing rode up around her waist. Gayl had on see-through yellow underwear.

‘Camera,’ she said, pointing.

The burlap bag was by the wall. The room felt webbed up with smoke. The camera in the sack was heavy and plastic, all its cords twisted up.

‘It’s already charged,’ Gayl said quietly.

My body was shaky with hash. I looked through the eye. I pressed the red little button on the side.

Gayl was in a goddess position. An exposure position.

She pulled aside and pinned back her underwear. She had short black hairs around her cunt like the ring of an eclipse. A part of her down there looked way too red, how my face had been red from Key West, burning alive.

I filmed her until the tape ran out. My eyes went blurry behind the camera. Gayl closed her legs and her eyes. I put down the camera. It was six o’clock. It was time for me to go.

‘Don’t leave,’ Gayl whispered. She looked so sleepy. ‘You can be my little helper.’

‘I’ll come back,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’

It was weird, for a moment, to leave her there alone on the bed.

‘He’d be so disappointed if I let you go now,’ Gayl said. ‘The bitch got away. Our little bourgie bitch.’

The door was locked, it was locked from the outside. I rattled it back and forth to get out. I remembered that safety pin in the handle. I don’t know how long I was there at the door not wanting to realize that we were locked in. It was on purpose.

When I turned around, Gayl was back at the table.

‘I have to be home for dinner.’

‘Home for dinner!’ Gayl laughed. ‘This is happening, so you just better sit.’

I didn’t want to miss Anna’s dinner with Jeff and my dad, with Jody and Lee. I must’ve look panicked. Gayl was tracing the veins on the back of her hand, her worker’s hand.

‘He was disappointed, you know, that you weren’t so rich.’

I wanted to call my dad. They couldn’t keep me in here.

‘Myra, man, it’s the way of the world!’

I took my money out of my pocket.

‘Yeah, you people travel from wish to wish and want to want. You people think that the world is a playground.’

‘How do you know what kind of person I am?’ I said, holding my two-thousand-dollar-stuffed envelope. ‘You don’t even know me!’

Gayl slammed her hands so hard into the table that one leg collapsed. The hot plate shifted.

‘Did you have your own bedroom growing up?’

My body felt skewered like the table.

‘Myra, sit the fuck back down.’

I did not sit back down. I wanted to stand.

‘I slept on the floor with four brothers.’ Gayl said, looking up at me. ‘Head to foot and foot to head.’

Could the house I grew up in reduce me to this? I stared down at Gayl, at the clear space on her forehead between her eyes.

‘We don’t have this desire to be like you, Myra. I don’t, at least.’

I knew she wasn’t saying this stuff to make me feel bad.

Behind Gayl was the window that faced the sky. The air was now murky and uniform.

I put my mother’s envelope down on the table.

Gayl clamped her hand on top of it. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She knew exactly what was inside.

Gayl took my envelope over to the window and pulled down the blinds. I had stayed standing, tall.

‘I’m going to sleep now,’ Gayl said. ‘You want to be in the bed with me or what?’

I knew that Lee would be freaked and my dad would be freaked that I wasn’t at home. I thought they would ransack my computer and find all my porn.

A streetcar shrieked on the road, its headlights flashed under the blind. Maybe I did want to be in the bed with her.

‘He shouldn’t be able to do that to you,’ I said.

Gayl didn’t look at me. She got into bed. I watched her twist herself up in the sheets, settle down. I waited for a click, a sound from the door. I thought of Lee and Wils, Aaron and Chris, Jen and Charlene, Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky, all reading my paper on the liberation of the slave. I walked to the bed and stood over Gayl. Sensing me, she turned out the covers.

‘How come you stay with him?’ I whispered.

Gayl reached up for me.

‘It’s a mystery,’ she said.

I climbed in there with her. Her arm swung over my shoulder, landed on my neck. It was fiery. I couldn’t fall asleep. She smelled like coins and smoke and blood.

§

A grey sheet hung and stuck on my face. My back was twisted. I woke up under the three-legged table. One of the sheets from the bed had been placed on top of me. An electric-blue crack lit under the blinds. I was all bruised. I didn’t know why I was on the floor.

Elijah and Gayl were in the same bed, the bed I’d been in. Gayl held Elijah, his humpback knotted with nodes for the spine. The first time I saw him, he was sweating on the beach, cracked grey toes and a walking stick. I was the stranger in this room. I thought about the door. I walked to the door.

Please please please let there not be a lock anymore.

Please please please let there not be a lock.

‘You are not leaving with your money, little bitch.’

My master was standing behind me, way too close.
Bitch
had lost its meaning now.

‘What?’ I said. I did not turn around.

What?
is not a plan, Lee would’ve said.

What?
was weakness, according to Gayl.

‘Come back to bed now.’ Elijah grabbed my upper arm.

‘Everyone knows where I am,’ I said.

Elijah tightened his grip on me. ‘Doesn’t matter. Turn around. I want to see you.’

I knew Elijah was naked and spectacular. I didn’t turn around. He blocked me with his body against the door.

‘Let me go,’ I said quietly. ‘She has the money.’

‘I really like you.’ Elijah put his lips to my ear. He bit my earlobe. I felt my knees hit the door. ‘Don’t you like me, Angel? I like you, don’t you like me?’

I turned my head and we started kissing. My stomach cramped. Elijah’s mouth was on my mouth, his tongue moved inside and he kept pressing up into my body with his whole body.

‘You have my money,’ I said between breaths. ‘I just want to leave now. Please.’

‘You don’t want to leave. Look at you. You’re burning up, baby.’

I couldn’t stop myself from kissing him. Elijah had my whole head. His hand snaked and forced up between my body and the door. ‘Please, please, god, please.’ I heard myself, desperate. I couldn’t stop myself from doing what we were doing.

There was a truck outside, the garbage being dumped.

‘Our slave’s not so willing anymore,’ Gayl said. She was naked behind Elijah. She saw right through me.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Elijah’s fingers slipped inside me. The door vibrated. I pushed down in my legs for more. Noise expanded. I got slammed in the face. Elijah yelled. I didn’t feel him anymore. The door pushed us all down. A woman led me to the wall. Gayl got hit by two men in black gloves. Four cops had Elijah, who fought them off, spitting. His hair was shaking. He tried to find me. They locked his hands behind his back. They put a sheet over his head. Gayl was caped with one of the sheets. She was not shocked, arms behind her like him. She still had her eyes. We stared at each other.

Six cops led them out of the room: tied up, foreign, liberation done.

I’d met Elijah alone on the beach. Gayl had changed the look of me forever. Our meeting was the first in a chain of events that the expansion of my consciousness was built on.

‘Your father is waiting in a car outside for you,’ the policewoman said. She wore glasses that magnified the whites of her eyes.

A few guys in suits were undoing the room. They dumped out three burlap sacks that were stashed in the closet. Small black tapes scattered on the used mattress – the animal shit of the camera’s corpse.

§

My father sat beside me in carpeted rooms. Police held lukewarm cups of tea. My dad held my hand. They’d all seen the way me and Elijah had sex.
Young Canadian Caught up in African Porn Ring.
That’s how it was told in the paper, minor unnamed. My fantasies were elucidated for the masses.

Elijah and Gayl had been deported. Gayl to Lexington and Elijah to Dar es Salaam. Dar es Salaam means Haven of Peace. The cops said that the Americans and the Africans would have to deal with their garbage. The cops gave some psychiatrist’s number to my dad. Everyone wanted my rehabilitation. They’d all seen how I’d taken those blows, the way I hid myself after in the heart of the director.

GAYL: She hid herself in me but I was no place to hide.

LEE: Why did you want to destroy her like this?