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LEE: Shit. Now it’s my turn. I have nothing to say.
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Jen and Charlene were threatening me. Jen sent me an email saying that she’d had no choice but to call my father. She wrote that if I didn’t talk to her about that guy on the street that she was going to call my father again and tell him exactly what Charlene saw. I miss you, Myra. I wanna drink with you again and we can talk about what is going on.
What a fucking contradiction. I didn’t write back. That made her mad.
Charlene stepped it up in another email: It’s racist, Myra. It’s totally fucked up what you did with that black dude. He looks crazy and I’m gonna tell your dad what you did even if Jen won’t.
Right. I was racist. What the fucking fuck.
Then came their final joint email, a multiplication of lies: That weird dude followed us after he left you. He was calling us beautiful and telling us to come to his hotel. He’s a fucking perv, Myra. Just sayin’. You should be careful.
There were only two more months of school till summer. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky, my History and English teachers, called me in for a meeting at lunch. Ms. Bain said they were sorry to hear about my mom. It was totally embarrassing. I looked at the floor. I couldn’t believe that my dad called the school, that he would’ve told them about that. Then Ms. Bain said that she understood that finishing school would be hard for me this year and so she offered, along with Mr. Rotowsky, that I could hand in one joint essay assignment for them both instead of doing tests and taking final exams.
‘You will still need to attend my class,’ said Ms. Bain, acknowledging that I’d only been there once since March Break. ‘We’re on Asia next week. The Japanese-Korean war.’
‘And I expect you will not skip my class either,’ Mr. Rotowsky added. We’d been reading the Beat Poets in his class, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. ‘I want you to use this academic opportunity for your benefit, Myra.’
‘I will,’ I said. Because I knew immediately what I wanted to write about. I was going to write about those Korean sex slaves, like in that book my mother had been reading in Key West. We were on the Japanese-Korean war. My mother was lost in Korea. Testimonies of the Comfort Women was about sixteen-year-old girls being taken from their homes and raped by soldiers repeatedly. The rationale of the Japanese government was that their soldiers needed women for sex, sex was comfort in times of war. I was going to connect the Korean sex slaves to the stuff that Aaron had been lending me, like Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, and Georges Bataille, Inner Experience. I wanted to write about women and slaves. I mean, in a harrowing life-or-death situation, do people, essentially, have to become slaves? Aaron said that all the European intellectuals were now into Agamben, that they were creating radical cells and writing communally. Aaron said that communal writing was the way of the future. Stoned in Aaron’s room, I read Agamben’s whole book about the Holocaust, about the Jewish slaves in concentration camps, about these half-dead, half-alive people who were called Muselmann. What would have happened if the Korean comfort women could have written communally while they were enslaved? And what about the porn girls? Were those teenage-looking girls in my porn clips slaves? I remembered that exhibition from our trip to Key West, The Last of the Slave Ships. The chains around the people’s feet, those emaciated slaves. My mother had been more disturbed than me. I knew how to get my porn clips from the net now by subject. I ordered sado-masochistic porn: Teengirltied, Ballandcunt, Slutinchains. The Japanese soldiers raped the Korean comfort women, who were now demanding compensation. How could you compensate a slave? Why did I want to be Elijah’s slave?
I felt like I was in a tornado, squeezed so high that I could barely breathe.
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Elijah had one arm around my waist, one hand on my mouth. The orange curtains in their room were woolly, no light came through from the street. I heard the shriek of the gulls above us on the roof. There was a broken chain lock on the inside of the door. I had been completely subdued.
That woman who slapped me in Key West lay with spread legs on the bed in an old white poncho. The tassels were dirty and full of knots.
‘We thought it was going to be cooler up here,’ she said, looking at my skirt, how short it was.
I remembered her grinding and coming in Key West. I remembered the blood on her robe in the shape of a lake. Her two-eyed breasts, her full-handed slap. Elijah ate her out in Key West.
I knew that she could tell I’d been crying. Elijah’s palm was so big it covered my nose. Three burlap sacks were lined up against the wall.
‘This is Gayl,’ Elijah said. ‘Gayl, meet Myra.’
‘You still have that pretty pink bathing suit with the holes in the sides?’
My pink bathing suit had shrunk in the dryer. I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put spandex into heat. My mother had never taught me about laundry. Now it was ruined, a thing for a doll.
‘What’s the matter with her? She shy or depressed? She looks shocked, E. Kind of a good look.’
Elijah took me to the bed that was a foot away from Gayl’s. His palm left my mouth.
I tried not to look at her straight. Gayl’s hair was not the same as it had been before. It was more prominent now: two thick brown coils over her ears like headphones.
‘Yeah, anyway, she’s fine,’ Gayl said. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’
I tried not to show my confusion. Gayl was thinner than I remembered, but still those big breasts. She breathed kind of raspy and full so I could hear it. The carpet
in their room was colourless. There was a wobbly kitchen table with a hot plate in the corner.
‘We’re certainly glad you could join us, Mira,’ Gayl said, overly friendly.
‘It’s Myra.’
‘Myyyyra? Okay. Yeah, E., she’s not afraid to speak her mind. Very nice.’
