#WhyIMarch

I am not a rib

I am not a peel-away subset of a male species
created for your pleasure
I do not owe you
my life
my body
my smile
my silence
my attention
my obeisance
or my time
I give these
All of these
They are not yours to demand

I march
to remind you
where your rights end
and mine begin

I am not just a pussy
mr president

I am not your rib
I have my own ribs
and I will stand in this land
and yell
until they crack
that I am whole
not as mother
daughter
wife
but as human

I am as you
but I did not come from you

you came from me.

The Waiting Room - Part 2

Back to Part 1  

There’s something invigorating about being in the room, at first. You are waiting for something. Something will happen, and it doesn’t matter that you don’t know what it is or what form it will take. It’s a special wakefulness of hopeful uncertainty that keeps your mind and body pulled tight like a guitar string.  It makes it hard to eat and sleep. You have to be ready; you have to be aware.

But nothing happens.

They send you crossword puzzles and math problems, The Officer turns the lights on and off; you debate the sheets and try to find the right word for the shade of yellow in each identical plastic chair. You create timelines. You ask questions. You build a veneer of sense over the insensible.

Still nothing happens.

The tautness you began with draws too far, until the sinews of your expectation start to pop or lag with overextension. The something you’re waiting for becomes salvation, complete with an aura of holy unapproachability. It falls into myth, though you don’t always realize it. In a final flare of faith, you defend, evangelize, project – you ascribe impossible goodness to this something you can’t define, to lure it to you with the blindness of your devotion.

Nothing happens.

***

Cambridge organizes us when he feels motivated. He must have been a good executive; he says that’s what he used to be, or still is, if time has stopped, which is one of our theories that keeps cycling back.

He coordinated the discussion about the sheets, when they came.

The room had been quiet in the lights and darks before that. psychokitten’s eyes were swollen from wakefulness and crying. They often were back then, before The Baby, but she could usually be cheered or chided to composure. There was no one, this time, to cheer her. Even Marco hunched alone, his brows knitted. The garbage pile heaped untended in the corner.

Cambridge had slowed to stillness in this time. I’d been watching him, morbidly fascinated with the process of his despair. His shoulders fell first; then his chest sank; his belly sloughed a fraction further over his belt. I could stand very close to him and he wouldn’t notice me. His familiar mask of charming confidence cascaded into resigned folds. Then he slumped against the wall and slid to the floor, where he stayed for a long time. 

When The Officer flipped on the lights to reveal the stack of white linens neatly folded on the linoleum, all I thought from my hard yellow chair was that I had slept again, and missed an arrival, again. None of us moved to pick them up or look more closely. We had all missed it. And we would keep missing it, and there were no answers, and nothing would ever be clearer than this.

Then Cambridge’s voice rang out, metallic against the walls. “Warmth or privacy?”

I looked up at him wondering for the billionth time if I was delusional; he sat immobile, just where he’d been, his face still and apathetic. As I watched, though, his mouth formed the words a second time: “Warmth or privacy?”

He rose unsteadily, with the focused exertion of a man climbing a mountain. He walked in a wavering line to the center of the room. He squared his shoulders, looked at each of us, and stooped to pick up the stack of sheets with both hands. His shoes clomped hollowly as he raised himself up onto the plastic seat of a chair, brandishing the stack high above his head.

“Warmth or privacy?”

No one responded.

“Come on. We have a decision to make. Sit up. Wake up.”

One by one, we gave over, shuffled to our feet, turned our sluggish thoughts out into our palms.     

“There you go. Now let’s talk.”

Cambridge arranged a debate, laid out the guidelines, moderated the proceedings. Marco, Harry, and I argued for privacy. We would hang the sheets up; we’d make spaces to be alone in.

“Look at these! They’re too thin to warm us up anyway,” sniffed Harry. He tried to snatch one off the stack but Cambridge pulled it out of reach. “The temperature is always the same; it’s not like we’re going to freeze.”

“Also there are the mental health considerations,” Marco added, in his light Chicano accent. “Without privacy one feels unable to escape. Unable to breathe one’s own air. I think we can all agree we are in an unusual situation here,” he laughed, a doctor’s laugh. “Shouldn’t we do all we can to squash our sense of helplessness? Shouldn’t one have a room of one’s own, so to speak?”

I’m not sure why I fought for privacy. It isn’t real privacy when you know you’ll still see the outlines of your neighbors’ bodies against the light, when you’ll still hear them sitting and rising, when their movements are so familiar that your mind will show them to you even when your eyes don’t. But I had to fight for something.  

We bickered for a while, and eventually privacy won.

To be fair, the other side didn’t offer an argument. The Officer rarely speaks and never takes sides, psychokitten said nothing but watched us, her feet tapping the floor, and Begonia countered every point with the same retort: “But I’m still cold!” In the end, we let her keep one sheet.

We shoved the corners of the other ones between the ceiling tiles, standing tiptoe on chairs, holding each other up, laughing at one another as we reached and stumbled. That night we talked after the lights went out and pretended that every deep breath didn’t make the walls flutter. They fell down before long. It didn’t matter, really.

***

Begonia pokes me with one sharp finger.

The room trembles in droplets on my eyelashes, its inhabitants for a moment blissfully undefined. I blink the sticky sleep away.

“He’s doing it again.” The old woman’s voice needles and cracks.

In the opposite corner, the figure of Harry sharpens. He squats, cutting his eyes at us. I shift The Baby into my other arm, waking her, to see what he will do. There. He’s watching her, not us. His gaze shifts with her.

She wriggles against me, her lips smacking, her tiny fists jerking. When I lift my shirt to feed her, Harry’s face doesn’t twitch. The Baby latches and releases and latches –the tension unsettles her.

Begonia shuffles to her feet. She leans forward at the waist and waves her hands at him as though he were a troublesome tomcat on the front stoop.

“Psshhhht!” she spits. “Sssssstt!”

Harry aims a stony grimace at her, gargoyle knuckles of one hand pressing into the floor.

There’s nowhere to shoo him off to. He’s still over there.

***

Harry’s transition into the room has been different, they say, than everyone else’s. I guess that’s to be expected; why should we all handle the same trauma in the same way?

Night got harder when Harry came. He screamed through the dark hours.

He hasn’t read the book that is his namesake. He wears glasses, and he has a scar. He was hit in the head with a bat when he was four.

He and psychokitten have been the youngest. They bonded at first. They would curl up together in the corners and she would trace his lightning bolt with one finger while he stared at nothing and told her in a monotone all the stories that his head played out when he closed his eyes:

The voice that spoke too fast.

The numbness.

In one nightmare he was a fly and he was also the giant finger that crushed the fly.

In another he was dropped from a height by skeleton hands, collected from the ground, and dropped again. And again. And again.

He was an epileptic soldier in one, his hand glued to his assault rifle, so when he had a tremor he fired wildly, shooting himself in the legs and murdering everyone around him as he fell.

The way he told his nightmares gave us nightmares. When he told the soldier dream, he recounted the searing in his legs explicitly. “It’s true,” Marco whispered to me. “What he’s saying … that’s too accurate. You don’t know that much about pain from playing video games.”

***

  

We keep a timeline, written on a crumpled sheet of notebook paper, stuck to the wall with a piece of gum.

The Officer is where the timeline starts.

The Officer keeps the time. From his place by the door, in full uniform and sunglasses, he periodically pulls a pocket watch from his belt, peering at it over his glasses. It’s the only timepiece in the room. He doesn’t let anyone else see it. The Officer controls the light switch; he controls day and night. This decision was made at some point on the far left of the line, before Cambridge. Begonia will not say who made it.

The Baby is where the timeline ends, for now, or always. We are always looking for new tick marks.

When I arrived, I represented two arrivals. I was about six months along then. Cambridge knew, right away: The Baby was a future event that would occur, a mark on the right side of the line. It would be good, for everybody. We were all Expecting. The Baby charged them with possibility; it flowed into them like an elixir whose potency I didn’t respect until after she was born, when their withdrawal set in.

Now she’s here, and the arrow still points to the right.

Continue to Part 3

The Waiting Room - Part 3

Back to Part 2                 
Back to Part 1

One night, when we were still trying to sleep in shifts, psychokitten told me she was certain The Baby would get called out before anyone else.

Before The Baby came, phsychokitten lurked, staying near the walls. She had done something in the life before, or something was done to her. We don’t know more than that. She used to talk as though she wanted to tell you, or as though she already had and you’d forgotten. Now she talks of little besides The Baby.

“You can look at babies without looking away,” she told me once. “That’s part of what makes them special, I think. You can look at every little hair rising out of her skin, and stare right into her eyes, and she will look right back at you and smile. That’s what love is, maybe. Not looking away. You know?”

This night, while the rest of the room slept, she reached out two fingers to touch The Baby’s peach furred head. “She hasn’t done anything. I mean, if that’s what it’s all about – what has she done, you know? She doesn’t deserve to be here.”

“None of us does, though,” I said. “I don’t think that’s what it is.”

“Whyever though, you know? Whyever we’re here, she has to be the exception. She’ll get called out. She can’t stay here.”  

And what if she does? I wondered. What if she gets called out without me?

***

Cambridge hangs a threadbare sheet from the ceiling tiles and pushes it against the wall. He makes columns with headings in block letters with the fat Sharpie he keeps in his front shirt pocket.

“OK. OK OK. Who has birthmarks?” Three hands.

Psychokitten: “We’ve done that one before.”

It’s a familiar exercise by now. We don’t know why we’re here instead of other people. We grill one another mercilessly, looking for commonalities. If we find them, if we figure it out, everyone is released. That will be how it works.

“Fine. How many from Connecticut?” One.

It goes on and on. How many nail biters? How many adulterers? How many with ancestors on the Trail of Tears? Who is the middle child?

The caustic smell of industrial ink floods our sinuses.

“Who has lost a close friend?” Seven hands wearily raised. (Even The Officer raises his hand, only from the elbow, from over there in his spot by the door.) We count them and glance at one another anxiously, with a self-conscious excitement of the type you feel when they announce lottery numbers – you know it won’t be you. But … what if it is?

We wait.

When nothing happens, Cambridge jerks his shoulders forward. “Let’s drill down on this one, then,” he says. “We’re getting somewhere! We’re getting somewhere now.”

How old were we when it happened?  Marco was eight when his best friend was kidnapped on their walk to school. She was wearing red canvas shoes. He remembered the wide white of her eyes as they dragged her into the back of a rusty sedan while Marco stood motionless on the sidewalk. He recites the license plate number to us.

What year? Harry’s brother died in his sleep of an undiagnosed heart condition in 1998. They shared a bedroom. His brother counts, he says, because he didn’t have any other friends.

Were we there when it happened? I was there when Cory drowned. The ice was too thin for me to reach him. When the EMTs arrived, I’m told, I was lying in the grass staring into the water, a thin frost on my cheeks. I don’t remember, though. I only remember his whimper when he realized no one was coming.

The Baby wriggles and clenches her eyes tighter. There was no baby on the riverbank. This is not the riverbank. Wherever this is, I am here. And psychokitten is weeping, her forehead on her knees.

It isn’t working.

None of the answers match up.

It doesn’t matter how deeply we excavate one another. All we’re doing is poisoning the air. We’re still here. It isn’t working.

Begonia, who was ravenously engaged at first, shuffles off into a corner. Cambridge calls her back. “We all have to answer,” he says. “Begonia, we all have to answer or we’ll never figure this out.”

The edge in his voice makes The Baby jerk. She begins to cry. I pull her close, her warmth filling my chest.

No one is making The Officer answer. These rules are arbitrary.

“Begonia!” In three fast strides he is there, his knuckles already whitening on her shoulders.

“That’s not my name,” she hisses, pulling to break from his grip. 

“What are you waiting for?” he screams into her ear.

“Stop!”

It’s my voice.

Cambridge whirls. The baby is wailing now.

psychokitten stands, wiping her eyes with her forearm, and pushes between Cambridge and Begonia to reach The Baby, taking her from me and wrapping her up in her arms.

No one speaks or looks at anyone else for the long minutes to night.

***

I count the washcloths I have left, the number of diaper changes. My stomach growls.

My chest expands with some feeling that might be dread, might be excitement. Must be dread. How should I be excited when I realize the world might be ending?

“Marco,” I call quietly. He steps unhurriedly to my side. “Are you tired?”

“Of course I am tired. I am tired of this room, I am tired of Begonia’s snoring, I am tired of no longer knowing my own name--”

“No, are you tired? Yawning, physically tired?”

“Why?”

I show him the thin stack of washcloths in my hand. “I don’t think the lights went out.”

He swallows loudly. He glances at The Officer. “Let’s talk to Cambridge.”

I glance at our executive. “No point.”

Today – tonight – today -- Cambridge is slumped on the floor again.

“What’s wrong?” Harry has been watching us. He is standing too close to me.

I would keep this from him until we had some idea what to do, but he has already realized what’s happening. It’s not hard to see, now that we’re looking – on the countertop, where we put the deliveries, there are two single-serving cereal boxes and an apple. We’re being cut off.

Harry’s eyes follow mine. Then he glares at me, as though I am to blame for this – not just this, but everything. He whirls to take in the whole room, his head jerking toward the door. His movements are too loud, too fast, too big. His body yells.

“Hey! You!”

We all turn to look at The Officer in his chair by the door.

“What time is it?”

The Officer’s sunglasses shift and resettle. His chin has grown a red and grey stubble. He used to shave with a pocket knife, without lotion or cream. He used to be bigger. Now his yellowing, oil-stained cuff hangs loose around his wrist as he drops his hand to his belt.

He says nothing.

Harry steps closer. His voice drops to a low trembling.

“What time is it?”

The Officer sniffs. His lip curls slightly. His hand closes around the watch, and he raises it, face outward, to eye level. Harry steps forward to look. We all lean forward, a tidal slide, until we can see it, cracked and scuffed, the second hand jerking ineffectually.

4:06:32. 4:06:32. 4:06:32. 4:06:32. 4:06:32.

Somewhere in me, a desiccated voice of reason says it doesn’t matter that time has stopped. We can just wind it again, and start a new 18 hours. Eighteen hours light, six dark. We can flip the light switch right now, take turns counting out the hours minute by minute. We can fix this.  

But The Officer is control. The Officer is knowable. The Officer is order. There must be rules, even when we know we made them up. There has to be something to stand on.

I watch the second hand tic until my vision blurs. I’m sinking, I think, but I haven’t moved. I think the framework of toothpicks that has held me on my feet since my arrival has just been smashed with a whisper of real absurdity, and I’m afraid to move.  

On my right, Harry has sunk into a runner’s crouch, his teeth bared.

The Officer rises partway out of his chair. The air draws tight. Even The Baby lies tense and motionless in psychokitten’s arms, her eyes wide.  

“I was here first,” The Officer says.

His words rust in the air.

I hear Cambridge scuffle to his feet behind me. That gurgling—that’s Begonia chuckling, forcing air through the ancient phlegm in her throat.

“I know what you think,” The Officer turns to each of us. He nods at The Baby. “You think they’ll let her out. You think she deserves to go.”

psychokitten curls herself around The Baby. Her body seems to gain mass.

“No one leaves before me. I was first.” His tone is even and unhurried.

Marco moves a few steps toward The Officer. “Now, think for a moment. We have no control here. Who we think should go – that makes no difference. We all should go. But we all are here. What makes a difference is that we are kept alive, and it seems we are only to be kept alive if we sometime turn out the lights.”

“If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead,” The Officer says. “I’m forcing their hand. I’m not going to let them sneak her out of here in the dark of night. Not without me. They have to show themselves eventually, or she’ll die. We’ll all die.”

Marco begins to respond, but I can’t hear. Someone is screaming.

Where The Officer was, there are more bodies, bodies making noises that bodies shouldn’t make, thuds and cracks – there are too many fists to count, too many clawed fingers. Cambridge is on the ground.

I see a flash of light and beasts with teeth, grappling, combusting – who lit the fire? Who had things to burn?

I should move quickly when there’s a fire. Stop, drop and roll. We all know that. My feet drag me along to the cupboard, where I pull the door partly closed. This isn’t a safe place at all.

I peer through the crack of the door, and through the smoke I count all the people in the world.

Begonia cackles, her palms upturned, her hem flaming.

I count again.

Harry cries out. The Officer’s fist flashes metal.

They must be hidden in the black clouds, huddled under a chair.

I count a third time. My eyes sting. My lungs ache. The numbers go singsong in my head, a learning melody: me, two-oo, three … four, fi-iive, six …

Six.

psychokitten and The Baby are gone.