by Jasmine V. Bailey
One steady fact that emerges in my attempt to inhabit these narratives is the power of abuse to erase those who suffer it.
A Fictional Account
I want to tell the story of my crimes: not just the ones I’ve committed, but those I’ve suffered, those I’ve wanted to commit, those I’ve understood.
A woman stands before a classroom. Her colleagues are married. They say they love sculpture, or the Second World War, but actually none of them loves anything, especially what they teach. They live for changing out their mid-level SUVs every five and a half years. They like to imagine that not becoming I-bankers was both a choice and evidence of their personal virtue. They have children who they are determined should learn Mandarin on an immersion basis.
Her students are not impressed by their teacher, but it isn’t personal; they are impressed by almost nothing. They are here to learn Spanish, the most “useful” language their parents dream they are smart enough to learn. She has tried to move them with poetry, with the discovery of what a syntactically difficult sentence means in a second language, which you have to pull apart like a piece of origami at the center of which is an opal, lit with stone fire. But they do not pay attention. Two students pay attention, and with her help come to understand what the sentence means, and find the opal, but they are not impressed. They have personal devices and very, very expensive headphones. One day, they make her listen to Avicci on someone’s headphones, worth more than her car. They watch as she places them over her ears and listens. She is duly impressed by how the headphones make it seem like she is alone in the universe with the music she is listening to, which she doesn’t care for. She makes sure to say, “This sounds wonderful!” before handing them back, and when she yells this unintentionally because of the sound-cancelling power of the expensive headphones, they erupt into delighted, satisfied laughter. This represents a good day.
She has little time alone between classes and sports and study hall and “family dinners” with randomly-assigned students wearing awkward suits like undertakers-in-training, but she stays up anyway trying to write about how memory wants to kill us. She is more like a cicada than any human being in her life. She drives home to see her parents too often because they are the only interesting people she knows, with their failing nature photography business, the used Lexus they can’t afford to drive, the eighty-dollar pills her mother can’t sleep without that are probably making her compulsively buy jewelry online.
Eventually a student takes an interest in her. He is tall and in the best physical condition he will ever be in, swimming and wrestling against other young gods whenever he isn’t eating and sleeping to grow the body he brings to class to display before her. It is the fact of touch that she craves, to feel fingers rappel down her spine. She has not projected onto him a great mind or soul. What he really is suffices: a simple beauty, a new person with few thoughts clouding his determination for what he wants. First he begins to come for “extra help,” which is not a bad idea in principle, but doesn’t work in practice. Then he starts spending study hall in the art building, where she is proctor and there are a lot of empty rooms, including the instrument practice rooms, which are soundproof. She rapidly loses track of the convictions she’s carrying with her like the formula for compounded interest. He’s fifty pounds heavier than she is, but he doesn’t force her, and this gentleness intoxicates her. It may be true no one could appreciate him quite as she does. It is certainly true that soon enough he may become an average asshole, drinking Natty Light and trying to pass ECON. If he is rejected, he may forget how to look for whatever he sees in her and, instead, like everyone else, just look for women with low BMI.
If they are discovered, she could be fired and tried in a criminal trial. She would enjoy that the school would have to expend resources containing the scandal. She could be given twelve years, but the real cost would be the things people think about her. Straight men would say out loud, “I wish I had had a teacher like that,” while mothers would call her “predator”, “pathetic”. There are people who feel they are touched too often, whom you can teach the meaning of a sentence, show the opal, but never bring to awe.
A Story Tayeb Salih Made Up
At fifty-five the Headmaster is struck with love for a fourteen-year-old girl. He is not content to pine, and asks her father for permission to take her as his second wife. This is in a village in Sudan decades ago, but the father says no, says, the age difference would not give me peace, and thanks the Headmaster for asking in order to ease the embarrassment they feel, to gesture that he is not so horribly foolish, though he is. Everyone sees it: the honored man demeaned. He is equal parts in love and embarrassed, but love is strong, the body is an animal we rarely get a good look at in daylight.
The Kind of Story You Hear Every Day
Make the headmaster a professor, the daughter a college student, the time the present, place the father God-knows-where, and soon you have the plot of the Squid and the Whale. It is cold comfort to dismiss the fact before you as cliché and doesn’t work when you’re consoling your friend, for whom this affair, which ended seven years ago, is never finished. In the end, Jeff Daniels and the real-life Latin professor are either publicly disgraced or whispered about, but the young woman is not intact. For her, his mistake lingers; it goes bad like a piece of fruit left at the bottom of a bag, bruised by books and bottles, the rot sinking deep into the fabric of the bag so that you can never clean it out. But neither can you throw the bag away, because it’s your life.
One That Happened
Anna Stubblefield becomes a tenured professor, and her interests start to wander. She becomes fascinated by a new practice called facilitated communication, which purports to allow people who can’t communicate to do so with the help of a trained assistant. She ignores the abundance of research discrediting it. She learns how to hold the patient’s arm and help him point at images and type. She is struck with wonder and becomes a messenger of this good news. She involves herself in the case of a man with cerebral palsy who communicates, for the first time, with her hand under his elbow. She helps him take literature classes; she feels herself to be his prophet. Before long, they tell her he has fallen in love with her and try to seduce her. They type shocking things to her when they are alone. For what feels like forever, she resists. There is her husband to consider and their eleven-year age difference. And yet, they have crossed a fathomless deep to step onto the shore of a world they alone share, like two Italian B-actors in Swept Away. She has never been as beautiful as she imagines she is to him, lit with gratitude. Partly sex is something she wants to give him; partly it is something she wants to share. His family will learn this because she will tell them as the latest installment of the revelation. They will not see it the way she sees it; nor will the judge, whose decision about what evidence to allow will condemn her to two consecutive 12-year terms in jail and lifetime parole supervision. But first, the family’s anguish will take her by surprise. She will furnish evidence: “Tell them!” she’ll beg of her lover, with whom she’ll write that she resisted for a long time, the oldest excuse in the book. The word they will use to describe her resistance is valiantly. The term the jury will use for what she and her lover shared is two counts of aggravated sexual assault. This will send a tremor through her belief. But it is not unusual for prophets to be misunderstood. They are describing a world no one else can see, and the visible world is vicious in its jealousy to be the only one.
On Earth As It Is in France
Bardot makes the name Brigitte sublime just in time for you to enjoy it. You marry a banker and with him create three children, which, you discover, the body can survive. The first child is your introduction to how massive love, in fact, is. You are calmer the second time, acquainted, and your luck holds a third time, the beauty unfolding in a wave of blood. You work at a posh school, evaluating Latin translations with the patient tyranny of a demigod.
You grow old slower than even other French women, and when Emmanuel Macron appears in a seat before you, a powerful man not yet grown, and even joins suspiciously your drama club, you do not turn away like a sensible woman because you know no one ever won kleos who wouldn’t gamble with the gods. You throw everything on their table, and manage, against all odds, to keep that job at the lycée, to never go eight months without a husband. Like Aphrodite you pine, but no boar comes for this Adonis; some sympathetic god makes him President instead. Only of France, but you know when to take what you can get. And if he was born just months after your second child, the better to show love’s strange habits, how closely love tends to keep to pain.
The first Adonis was made to show all beauty for its dark sources. His mother, Myrrha, became crazed with love for her own father, and went to him under cover of night. Eventually dawn revealed with her rosy knuckles the crime. In his rage, her father chased her for nine months, until she pleaded with the gods, who took her resplendent child from her and turned her into a tree. That is the story of the first myrrh tree.
Cinyrus, angry at his daughter, his rapist. All he had meant to do was sleep with a girl his daughter’s age every night. He was the king of Cyprus; he could afford it.
Once, Someone, a Genius, Wrote Lolita
In the classic Sufi love story, Majnun, lovesick for Layla, wandered in tattered clothes ribboning in the wind, a beggar who forgot to beg. He wrote love poems, tore them up, and scattered them in rivers hoping they might carry one piece to her. She loved him too, from her tower of privilege, which meant marriage to whoever bought her. Some versions note that her husband was handsome.
In a version I read, Majnun saw Layla again after years of singing and wandering in single-minded devotion. She knew him at once and called out to him, but he didn’t recognize her, even after she pleaded with him. It’s a mystical story; its moral is that the things of this world are both illusions and means by which we may, with enough mortification, achieve union with the real Beloved. Leila’s face was a paving stone Majnun stood on to reach the lips of God.
I am a failed mystic because I think only of Layla’s eyes, no longer worth settling a fortune on, when Majnun looks right through them, how long life must have been after that. It is meant as a tale of enlightenment. But I turn back to earth, to the person in every story who doesn’t find a way out.
Freya Stark begins her memoir of her journeys in the remote Hadrhamaut with the harvesting of incense. Traditionally, only a few families were allowed access to the area where the trees grew, and were themselves considered sacred, inheriting the right to gather the gum. During the harvest they abstained from the pollution of women and the dead, which enhanced the value of what they gathered. Harvesters of incense travel to the scarred trees in the right season and wound them for their astonishing blood. A balm that can smear the rottenness from a carcass, or send the prayers of the desperate to heaven. Besides gold, these were the gifts the magi brought Jesus at his birth. Such a thing to give a child, a god, the only kind of person who would never need it.
I want to tell the story of my crimes: the ones I’ve committed, the ones I’ve suffered, the ones I’ve wanted to commit, the ones I thought I understood. Sometimes I want the freedom of the penitent absolved. But somewhere in the telling remorse eludes me. I am Myrrha going back night after night, and I am her father, so corrupt I mistake myself for pure. It is for me the ascetic harvests the trees’ blood. It’s worth the price of incense to smell better than you are. It was frankincense Freya Stark wrote about, but I misremember it as myrrh.
We take it for granted that people who write about the past, especially the fascinating figures of the past, deal heavily in speculation. But it takes speculation to write about people who are alive too—especially conflicts involving two or more people with different perspectives and internal ambivalences. When #MeToo began to gain traction as a movement, I began to think of stories of sexual misconduct (or that could be construed as misconduct) that had fascinated me over the years. They tended to be the least straightforward cases or those I related to in some way. One steady fact that emerges in my attempt to inhabit these narratives is the power of abuse to erase those who suffer it. Like the story of Myrrha, so many ancient Greek myths resolve this way—with a young woman running from a man; a god; a furious spurned goddess; a set of ugly, arbitrary rules—straight into oblivion. They must endure in part because we recognize the truth in that.
—
Jasmine V. Bailey is the author of Alexandria, Disappeared and the chapbook Sleep and What Precedes It. She has been an Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University, a Fulbright Fellow in Argentina, and a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. She won the Michigan Quarterly Review's 2019 Laurence Goldstein Prize, the 2020 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize from Ruminate Magazine, was a finalist for the 2018 Gulf Coat Translation Prize, and is a contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.