The Dark Space (3 page)

“Really?”

“
Si.
”

“What are you going to do with that?”

“Move to Los Angeles.”

“Fair enough.”

I stood in front of his desk, half out of my coat, and now I was looking out Dad’s window not knowing what to say. I don’t even know why I brought it up. It wasn’t the boots. At least, it wasn’t just the boots. It wasn’t how she looked right at me in Maggie’s share circle and basically told me to get a life. It wasn’t simply that before that day, I had never seen her before.

It was all of it together — the boots, and how she looked at me, and that I had no better idea who she was than Dad did.

Most of all, I was standing in my Dad’s office like a total dumbass because for a moment, hardly even enough of a moment to be a moment, I thought Winnie Frederickson was going to
hit
me.

And I’d stepped closer.

At the end of class, we all had to lie down flat on our backs and tighten our muscles from our feet to our scalps, muscle by muscle, holding the tension until we felt, as Maggie explained,
oppressed by the energy
, and then let go. Let go of the contraction we’d forced, of our breath, of the energy. We were all energy-aware infants, it seemed, and this exercise was to start us from the beginning to learn to be familiar with our own energy, the shape of it, before we engaged in someone else’s.

Except I don’t think it worked, because every time Winnie let go of her energy, with this low-down rasp that sounded more like she was holding something in than letting something out, it hit me all sweet in the pelvis and high in the throat.

“Where’d you go, Cal?”

I looked at the water stain in the paint around the window sill that had gotten darker and wider every year. Familiar as my own fingernails.

“Wherever you go, Dad.”

We were quiet together for a good long time.

That night, I lay on my narrow dorm bed in my single room — the privilege of being a senior who still lived in campus housing was a single of my own, small as a prison cell, overwarm, underdecorated — and tried to compose my first journal entry for Contact Improv.

“Write about what you’re learning about energy and movement,” Maggie had told us. “Write about how the class makes you feel, but don’t stop there. Tell me what it means for bodies on the stage. Tell me what it means for you as an
actor
.”

I couldn’t do it.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard, and I kept typing things and deleting them.

When I hoarded the energy in every muscle, I discovered how much of it I had, and I didn’t want to let it out. I wanted to keep it, because

Delete.

It surprises me how much movement there can be in stillness. I think of how, on stage

Delete.

I am always acting. I’m an extra on this campus, nameless, playing the part of “undergraduate girl in the background.” I’ll leave this place and become an extra in the wider world, an actuary for an insurance company or an accountant for H&R Block, and I’ll get the alumni magazine and look back on my four years — four years I yearned for with everything I had — and I’ll think

Delete.

I felt him beside me. I didn’t know that was possible, to lie on the floor and concentrate on my own energy and to receive, somehow, another person’s energy. As though I’d become an antenna. As though he had so much energy that it came off him and into me and I thought about sex.

That’s why I was so mad afterward. Because he penetrated me with his energy.

Pushy fucker.

Delete.

I’m afraid of this class. I’m afraid of my feelings.

I’m afraid, I’m afraid, and we haven’t even started yet.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

We lost a guy.

After a couple minutes with the weirdest fucking syllabus of all time, which had a reading list long enough to seriously disappoint me — isn’t that always the way with these low-credit art classes? — Mags broke up the share circle.

Which got me down, because in Winnie’s attempt to avoid sitting next to me again, she got stuck right across the circle from me, which was even better. Planted across from her, I could enjoy her vigilant attempt to avoid eye contact.

In fact, she
didn’t
look at me so hard that I couldn’t stop grinning. I watched her copy Maggie, who was showing us how to sit in lotus position — watched her stretch her black skirt over her black legging-clad knees so I couldn’t see up her skirt, watched her inch her body away from facing front into the circle, watched her profile with its sharp little jaw lock so tight the tips of her ears were red with the effort where they poked through her elf-hair.

If I licked her ears, they would feel hot.

Now we were all sitting on different X’s Maggie had taped to the floor, all over the stage. It turns out our energy is too unformed and selfish for the share circle, except in small doses. When she told us that, Hyong looked right at me, and my answering
What, me?
smile did not accomplish what it normally does.

My X was way out by the footlights. I couldn’t help but notice my X was the farthest away from anyone. Maggie made me sit facing out into the dark and empty seats so that I would
discharge
.

Except, instead of discharging my energy like a snap from a doorknob in winter, my staring into the dark, folded into lotus, just sent my energy right up into my spine, where it found — I know it did — its other pole. Because I felt, right where Maggie had left Winnie, a tug.

So I let myself drift on that tug. Let it center me like I was a boat swinging on anchor.

I believe in this energy stuff, is the thing. I feel it all the time from people, from groups of people. I pick up on it, and I send it back with an extra push from inside of myself. Nothing better than the give and take; it’s why fucking or anything related to fucking stops time. Fucking becomes the battery that powers the world, and no other force matters. You’re each inside the other — tongues, fingers, dicks, heat. You’re powered up, and it’s power for the sake of burning itself out for a momentary shove into oblivion.

I drifted and I thought of that, of hot ears in my mouth and what would happen if all of Winnie’s focus were on me like it was outside the tunnel, when I watched a blotch of pink make a mess of her paper-white skin. I eased into that, the yank of it, and sank right into the pumping throb these thoughts made of my dick. Right at the base of my skull where I was connected to her, I was charged with wet skin and open mouths and rubbing hands and filthy, defiling, sucking thrusts. I was spreading her ass and tonguing her asshole, I was dragging my balls over her sweaty thigh, I was fucking her mouth while she looked into my eyes and slid a middle finger in deep.

Which is why I jumped out of my goddamned skin when there was an echoing crash from the middle of the stage and Darren Wellborn shouted,
This is fucking bullshit.

When I turned, he was kicking his way through shit in the wings to get to an exit, and Maggie was walking calmly after him.

As I thought about what could have happened to him, all by himself on his X, our eyes met. Mine and Winnie’s, from clear across the stage. It was like rare earth magnets, snapping together from where you’d tried to keep them separate in your palms — precise violence.

Her cheeks were so hot with blood, the color in them made her eyes look bright.

I looked away first.

I looked away first.
I looked away to see my hand fisted in my shirt over my belly, my dick so hard I was afraid of coming lest I break something.

This is fucking bullshit.

I turned back around. Faked my way through the rest of it.

That day, in the four minutes before we left the theater, Maggie told us about “dark space.” About how we would be able to do exercises, a month from now, six weeks, completely in the dark, to push our energy out, to receive energy from others, to know each other and be known, act in a way that we could locate the part of us that wanted to do what we’d been asked to do, that wanted
nothing
more than that.

I couldn’t tell afterward if the dark space meant the theater or the part of us that craved all these forbidden things. The part of us that never said a lukewarm,
Yeah, sure, okay
, because it was too busy saying
Fuck yes now more do it do it YES YES YES.

I didn’t want to find that space.

I didn’t want to skip lunch and bail on my next class so I could fast-walk back to my room, fling off my backpack, lock the door and drop to my knees, my hand already sinking past the doubled elastic waistbands of my skirt and leggings, wrist locked in place, starting to ache as I pushed my fingers past my clit and in, in.

My neck heated, my face, my nipples stiffened, and I didn’t want to be doing it, but the dark space said
yeah
. Yeah to my slick moist wet fingers in my cunt, on my clit. Yeah to the words, dirty thoughts a virgin shouldn’t have, a girl who looks like me isn’t authorized to think about. Friction, pressure, contact,
yeah
.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When I came, it was with my eyes closed, the dark space behind my lids pulsing blue, orange, yellow, green as I remembered the way his thoughts had invaded me on that stage.

It wasn’t supposed to work like this. Like sorcery. Like magic.

It was just a class. A stupid class for theater majors, a make-out class, a joke.

I bit my lip and felt his fingers inside me, his tongue on me.

Every single dirty thought he’d had, flashing through my mind like fireworks.

I’m a smart guy.

Both my parents are smart. My mom’s a writer for public radio, and my dad had no choice but to be a professor or be eaten by wolves for lack of street smarts due to all the other smarts packed in his brain. I grew up without television in a house full of books, with gender-neutral playthings and periodic infusions of cultural programming.

Professor’s kid. It’s like a whole thing.

So when the end of the day found me jack-knifed in my beanbag, my head roaring with questions I had no answer to, my poor dick raw from jerking in a hot shower, I turned to a book.

A book, I had been raised to believe, would have answers.

I flipped to the reading list in the syllabus and started downloading stuff as fast as I could on my tablet.

A few hours later, I just had more fucking questions.

I’d learned, first, that contact improvisation was more typically understood as a kind of partner dancing where partners share a constant point of contact and move together, lift each other, fall and roll together, breathe together, and it is all effortless, because you have learned that your constant point of contact is everything in the entire world, as I understood it.

Hyong means to get us to control the energy that can exist between people until it is a tool no less necessary than pointe shoes to a lead ballerina.

The contact improvisational dance book had pictures and a link to a video. I watched it over and over. It made my nuts ache. My stomach drop. My eyes tear. It made my hands hurt with longing to shape around another body’s energy like that, to look into someone’s eyes and know exactly which direction to follow—

her.

Because, let’s face it. I didn’t watch that video and think about shaping Mark Esparanza’s body with my hands.

It got worse, though, because this class — this class at my unassuming, safe, and respectably ranked liberal arts college — diverged from contact improvisation contemporary dance by way of intersections between method acting theory by gurus like Meisner, Adler, and Strasberg and something else that our own Hyong brought to the table, which was accessing positive sources of energy, like sexual yearning and love, to broadcast this energy to an audience.

We were to touch each other with love and purpose, to lead and follow, to radiate our sexual selves and demonstrate, like this Meisner guy said, how to live
truthfully under imaginary circumstances
.

What I couldn’t work out in all that reading was why I couldn’t stop thinking about dragging Winnie Frederickson backstage and getting every part of her body against every part of my body in every possible configuration until we both fucking
died
of it.

I am no stranger to being horny. I understand wanting nothing more than to fuck yourself against something, to have the taste of someone else’s skin and sweat in your mouth, to get off on getting off, on the way someone’s throat grunts and their eyes cross.

And I was fucking horny, as a baseline, understand.

Particular horniness, however — horniness orbiting around some person — had always been a manageable and pleasant sort of anticipation that fueled my mouth and my brain into patterns of affection, wit, and persistence until I had, at the very least, made a friend and, at the most, a friend with benefits.

The point is, by the time the object of my affection and I were panting into each other’s necks, I
knew
her. My healthy appreciation of the way her thighs squeezed around my hand while I fingered her was part of a larger picture of intellect or specific charm. Part of this was making the best of living as the frigatebird with the smallest throat balloon, but also, I got off on the deeper connection.