Excerpt
I come to. I wasn’t, then, suddenly I am. I rode my bike and next thing I know—
I’m in my boyfriend’s high-ceiling cottage studio, the familiar tousled green of a treetop visible in the skylight, the white room awash in the cheerful brightness of the morning. Outside there’s a sound of the summer’s heat rising, and buzz of insects, and sawing, and hammering in the distance that despite cracking the quiet morning, here it sounds pleasant, far away from the city where the noise is constant and threatening. My boyfriend is beside me, and he’s awake. I reach for him and he looks at me startled. Maybe he’s startled because of the state of me or maybe it’s because my hand sneaks down his belly, I don’t know. When I grip him harder, his eyes soften with love or melancholy and something like resignation.
He moves above me; he is gentle, restrained, obliging. I shut my eyes. None of this is real. I focus on the pleasure, his skin against my skin. I pull him closer, bite his shoulder to signal he can get rougher. (When we talk about this moment, in the future, he will tell me he worried about breaking me even more, but I seemed so desperate. I was.)
I am aware that something is very wrong. Sharpness where there was softness and order. Scaffolding coming apart inside me. I feel my face–it’s sticky–and I open my eyes. Look at my fingers. Red. I am frightened. The anxiety combines with the pleasure spreading from my core; it elevates it. I look into my boyfriend’s impermeable, deep dark eyes, his face a mask of worry and tenderness.
Every couple has their cute story or two, about a funny mishap or how they got lost in a big city or ran into Keanu Reeves. A story that showcases something about their bond and that is told at dinner parties, shared with others.
Our relationship isn’t an every couple’s relationship. We have no dinner parties to go to, no one asks us how we’ve met, do we have a funny mishap to share. We got together shortly before the pandemic and existed in almost total isolation where we created our own strange universe with its own rules. I am not making excuses for my boyfriend acquiescing to my sexual demand despite my state, but looking back when we tell this story – over and over and only to each other, we can’t make sense out of it ourselves except that it seemed necessary.
The slogan for the pandemic was „We’re in This Together.” This is our This that despite its fuckedupdness bonds us. During this stolen moment we don’t have to acknowledge the reality of whatever was wrong, a desperate 10 minutes like holding onto the Before before we slip into the After.
Or maybe we are holding onto the fantasy that we are like those normal couples, normal people taking bike rides, going to sleep, waking up, and making gentle love. What I remember well is a feeling of something ending from which there was no coming back. As wrong as it seemed later, the sex was our desperate need to reaffirm life.
Last night, I died briefly on the boardwalk on the north side of the Toronto island, near the Rivera cafe. I rode my bike and smashed head and shoulder first into a concrete wall, my eye an inch away from the corner. I crawled into a ditch. My boyfriend looked for me everywhere and passed the sack of bones I’ve turned into twice until he went back and finally found me in that ditch near the restaurant, conscious but hurt, with a side of my face bleeding. I tried to convince him that I was fine. I have no recollection of any of that. In the end, I let him half-carry-half-walk me, first on the boardwalk, and then the road, then over the bridge, the road, again… When I try to review this part of the tape, it is blank after I get on the bike to ride on the boardwalk. He fills in the blank: He brought me back to the cottage where he washed me in his big jacuzzi tub and bandaged the gash on my face and then stayed up waiting to sober up himself while watching me breathe[1]. Our relationship was only a few months old at that point; it was the first time he clued in that I drank differently from most people. It was the first time he considered breaking his promise to not read the first book I published where I talked about just how differently I drank.
Is it bad?
It’s bad, He says, our first conversation of the day.
I don’t feel any pain.
We should call the paramedics now.
No, I say and he closes his eyes and sighs.
Not yet, I say.
He knows not to argue with me, I always win.
I get up, stumble to the bathroom. There is blood on the towels lying on the floor. I look in the mirror and the monster looking back at me is naked and skinny and slightly scrambled like one of those images produced by AI where something is definitely off even though it all looks human. The bandage on my face is dark brown. My shoulder is in the wrong place as if weighed down by an invisible anvil.
I don’t feel any pain, I think.
But I’m worried.
I pee, crying. I shut my eyes and again, try to sift through frame after frame of film where what happened should be recorded. It isn’t. And it won’t be, no matter how many times I will try in the future.
I don’t know what I did but I know I did it again.
I did what I do because I am who I am.
A story forms in my head. A story I won’t have to be ashamed of that will match what I am not. Maybe a story we could even tell it at dinner parties one day! When I come out of the bathroom, I tell my boyfriend the story and he finishes telling me the story that did happen as he hands me my dusty-rose-colored silk taffeta dress with a generous skirt and a tight bodice with spaghetti straps. My pink sweater. My pointy red flats. I am decked out as if for a party. I always dress for a party when I fall apart. It used to be a sexy funeral when I first relapsed–black furs, black faux leather pants, patent-leather wedges–but these days it’s a prom in an insane asylum. Silk slips and princess dresses, pretty, impractical shoes reminiscent of pastries, some variation on eclair.
I try to brush my hair but give up and ask him if he can do it for me.
I don’t brush my teeth because some of them are not quite seated in my gums. A recurring nightmare I used to have was waking up to find out all of my teeth were falling out of my head and today the nightmare threatens to come true. I touch the top back molars with my finger, gently, feel the crushed bottom one with my tongue. I try to add the information that I have so far—the bandage on my face, the bloody towels, the feeling of bones, fear—but I know there’s more, a whole shattered constellation inside me.
The boyfriend makes the call and tidies the bathroom.
When the paramedics arrive, we give them the story I came up with and rehearsed together. I point to my red flats and joke about not having proper biking shoes: Fashion victim. Ha ha. Two fingers on my wrist checking my pulse. Questions about lightheadedness, questions about today’s date, the Prime Minister, my son’s name. Headache? Nausea? Vomiting?
We went for a ride this morning. My front wheel got wedged between two planks on the boardwalk and to avoid falling, I somehow catapulted myself into a wall.
Did you black out?
No, I didn’t. I don’t think so. I would know, no? We walked back here and I washed up. He helped me wash up. I wasn’t sure what to do. We called right away. My front wheel got wedged—
I will repeat a version of this story many times. It passes the test, the paramedics don’t argue with me. I’m assuming I don’t smell of alcohol. Nobody asks me if I drank. Not till later, till I talk to the people to whom my morning-bike-ride story sounds suspicious. (And even then, the ask is more, Imagine if you were drunk? and waiting for me to confess, which I don’t, so then, a headshake, never mind.)
I count five men inside the bright cottage room: the paramedics, a neighbour, and my boyfriend. And me in the middle of this weird party like Snow White with her dwarfs, the cheerful fir in the skylight window further confirming this is a fairytale.
My boyfriend helps me walk down the stairs and then we drive for less than a couple of minutes to the docks, in an ambulance. We take a small utility barge back to the shore and my boyfriend snaps some pictures when I ask him to: me perched on some boxes in my princess dress, my arm in a sling, my movie-star sunglasses with men in uniforms bustling about the boat. It’s a difficult scene to decipher if you don’t have the context, there’s something absurd and fabulous about it, a whiff of a celebrity getting rescued and escorted.
Or that’s what I tell myself when I feel the waves of shame accumulating and crashing within my adrenaline-spent body as I sit in the ER and scroll through the photos on the phone, mostly looking for some other, more innocent time.
When I get examined, the female doctor comments on the gash in my forehead, how it’s not a fresh one. I repeat the story about the morning bike ride. I can tell she doesn’t believe me or maybe she is just tired, her sharp, yellowjacket face impatient as I blabber on. She decides against stitching the gash as the blood has coagulated already. I am sent for various scans and X-rays. Possible concussion. Something about sinuses and some of my teeth are definitely loose. My clavicle has splintered like a twig. My occipital bone and cheekbone have been broken and chipped too (“multiple facial contusions, fractures involving the zygomatic arch, orbital floor and orbital wall,” reads the report).
There are bone fragments everywhere in the upper-left side of my body (“a closed clavicle fracture that is comminuted”).
The gash in my forehead is ugly. I want them to stitch it. But because I know all of this is my fault, I also feel like I deserve this, and I am convinced the Yellowjacket read me, saw me catapulting drunk into the wall and she agrees that I am a worthless piece of shit who should just live with a hole in her forehead (but later, reading her assessment, I am described as such: “She is a pleasant lady.” I wish myself worse than anybody else possibly could.)
When I tell him about not getting the stitch, my usually calm boyfriend gets impatient with the ER staff, he demands to see a supervising resident, he stops nurses, they ignore him, they ignore, me, he gets up, he paces, he leaves and comes back with treats–smoothies, chocolate bars–he blows up rubber gloves and pretends to milk them like udders, he asks me to remind him of my medical sex fantasy, he tells me I am the most beautiful woman on the planet. He is like most of the boyfriends before him: insane, loyal, and equally frustrated, a cross between a horny teenager, a stern-but-loving dad and a fed-up Prince Charming—fed up with me, that is.
He goes to look for the ER doctor but Yellowjacket is gone, replaced by another resident who takes a look at me and the gash and says they can send me to Plastics, another hospital where they repair broken faces.
We take a taxi to the hospital at the other end of the city. I don’t know if it’s still the morning or evening and does it matter? It does not. I rest the good side of my face on my boyfriend’s shoulder, he smooths my hair and occasionally kisses me on the side of my head as if to soothe my crying, which I’m not, crying. The only time I do feel close to it is when I text my son about having „a little accident” and having to cancel our regular night. He texts back and then calls me but I don’t answer because his „are you ok mummy?” threatens to undo me. The British spelling of the word always conjures him as a little boy, that need and unquestionable devotion to mummy only little boys are capable of. He is a big boy now but I remain his mummy even though he doesn’t need me like that anymore.
At the new hospital, I am seen by a young male resident with blonde hair, very American looking, healthy, sporty. I feel old and fragile around him. I am old and fragile.
He lifts my chin gently and takes a look at the gash in my forehead. I complain about Yellowjacket, how she seemed so busy. I say nothing about my accident. He says nothing about the blood coagulating. And he doesn’t ask, he is only interested in the gash, his eyes shining with excitement as he moves closer to see, so close that I am suddenly on the moon of his face, stepping, admiring his poreless skin. I’ve aged out of being younger than doctors a long time ago but now they seem too young, like children playing dress-up on Halloween with stethoscopes.
The baby doctor says he would love to stitch me up—he actually says the word “love” and as I imagined the sparkle in his eye, now I imagine a certain vibration in his voice. For a moment, I wonder if they don’t let him practice such unimportant, minor needlework enough, or if this is his fetish.
He sews me up, turning me ever so slightly, his fingers steady and tender. I am a Tim Burton puppet and he is Tim Burton and this is Halloween except it’s June and I had smashed my face and my clavicle into a concrete wall and I don’t remember a thing because I never remember what I do after 7 pm these days.
I close my eyes. He says something about how I might be eligible for a filler if it turns out the cheekbone is chipped.
When he is done, he holds up a mirror for me to admire his work. He seems pleased. My face looking back at me seems pleased too despite its one bloody eye.
He leaves and I look around the room, behind me there are cotton balls stained with red and the suture kit is opened, looking a little disheveled, like it threw up all its tiny scissors and thread and scalpels. This is a still life with trauma and I am its museum.
