Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore Read Free Book Online

and I’d let myself be swept along by her harmless mania. But as soon as I got in bed later and tried to sleep, I became a baby alone in a cave, freezing and starving, helpless to do anything but writhe and bite the blanket and clutch my crotch and stick my fingers into my dry pussy and into my dry mouth and sweat and get the chills and pull my hair, all the while seeing myself at the bottom of a deep, narrow hole in the ground, looking up, glimpsing a face at the top, the one who could lift me out of the hole—there, then gone. A scene from
Silence of the Lambs
: one of Hannibal’s victims, kept barely alive at the bottom of a hole. I had known the movie would give me nightmares; even
Oliver Twist
gave me nightmares. But a boy named Simon (accent on the
o
, Bolivian, prematurely mustached, drawer of raunchy comics that he slipped into my desk in English class) had invited me to watch the cannibal movie, and my thoughts were always a drunken crowd clamoring for his attention in eighth grade. So I watched it and let him French kiss me and had nightmares for weeks afterward.
    Hell is a state of ceaseless, fruitless relating. The effort makes you so cold and alone that you believe you will die. In fact you would like to die. But the urge for self-preservation is too strong. So instead of dying you build a fire and hurl flaming sticks out in all directions. There is relief at first. Anger believes in itself. Anger will save you. But soon the fire consumes everything with which you had hoped to make contact, until you are alone in the center of the blaze, still unable to stop hurling sticks because the fire has consumed every other possible means of relating and all you want—the only thing you need to calm down—is to have an impact on something other than yourself. Impossible, from where you sit. You cannot exert a force on anything that is not also exerting a force on you. Newton’s law, the only thing I retained from high school science. But equally impossible to stop trying. So the only hope was to exhaust myself in the effort.
    A day or two after our supposed breakup, I would call Jared at bedtime and ask him (“I’m so sorry I got angry, I was just hurt, I really need to see you and talk to you”) to rescue me. But he would be drunk and high on blow, an indifferent stranger for as long as this particular binge lasted. I would go on calling this indifferent stranger, praying that this time he would not answer the phone surrounded by the racket of people convincing one another they were having fun, and would not tell me I was boring the shit out of him, and would not hang up on me while I was sobbing that he was hurting me so much, I couldn’t stand it any longer, please just come over and talk to me.
    I lay back down, still gripping the phone. No need to be patient. Patience would not return him to me. He would be returned in the way of pain and its alleviation. This particular pain, in this particular moment of my particular life, was to be in love with an absence. It was not death, not violence, not rape. Everyone suffered, there was no reason I should be spared. I opened my mouth wide, squeezed my eyes into old, hard vaginas sewed up tight. Long, sharp, violent lines flew out of my chest, stabbing the walls and ceiling and floor, gorging the earth straight through, searching. But the absence was hiding inside my room, my bed, my body. There was nothing I could do to force its revelation. I tilted my head back and pressed my chest toward the ceiling. Wait—the violence was golden—lines of strength come to save me. But I did not want to be saved. I wanted my love to exist outside my body. But whenever I tried, however I tried—that time he said that thing, he looked that way, I said this thing, he took it that way, I broke down, he broke—stop. I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my fists into my abdomen. If my heart and mind would only give up hoping, become so drenched in absence that they gave