heavy water

rabbit eyes, broken lights, and bondage.

Forgive me my trespasses, my oscillation, my frequently-utilized capacity for evil, my fragmentation, my dissolution, my (also frequent) self-betrayal. Give me today my daily bread. Lead me not into temptation— historically speaking, temptation (to do what?) seems to find me regardless of what I say, but I suppose it’s the thought that counts— and deliver me to nowhere, because nowhere doesn’t exist. Typically the doxology is next; rumor has it that it was added in the Byzantine era and isn’t part of the Alexandrian texts, so we’ll leave that off. It’s unnecessary praise where praise isn’t due. But I digress.

Have you ever looked a rabbit in the eye? Not a bunny— nothing domesticated counts here— and not a hare, either, because they’re too far down the line. Rabbits have very hard eyes, you know. You look into a rabbit’s eyes and you’re looking into a flat mirror. You bounce right back into yourself because you can’t penetrate a rabbit’s eye— you can worm your way into a lot of other animals’ eyes, but never a rabbit’s. It’s incredible. It’s beautiful. And it’s not that there’s nothing to penetrate into, because rabbits have plenty of depth; they just also have these hard, bright eyes to keep you out of that depth. They don’t let you in because they don’t like you, which is aggressively apparent if you ever make eye contact with a rabbit. They live with the knowledge that they’ll die at any second. Living like that does some weird things to you, sure, but you get tough. It’s not from fear, either. Even if it was fear, you would never know, because their eyes are too hard. You can’t go into them to see the fear, so you’ll never see a rabbit afraid— just blank and resentful and preoccupied with the minute shifts that the world constantly makes. And isn’t that beautiful?

Look. Everyone who identifies with a prey animal these days will eventually be ravaged by their own weakness, including me, but my mother thinks I look like a rabbit and I’ve got a pretty good feeling that I’m going to die in some horrific manner— don’t ask me where that comes from, I don’t know, I don’t even know if it’s getting bad again (I go off like a gun at the lightest breeze, which isn’t unusual, but, well) (six months of therapy and she tells me that no one will ever be capable of understanding me)— and I will be absolved for it. So forgive me my trespasses, my oscillation, my capacity for evil, my fragmentation, my dissolution, my self-betrayal, etcetera. In another life, I was a revered priestess. In another life, I was a housewife on barbiturates. In another life, I was a serial killer. In another life, I sat still and did nothing at all. Now my eyes are hard.

Isn’t that strange? I’ve always thought it was so strange. I’ve always thought everything was strange. Only one conclusion you can come to after thinking that, really. Let’s both keep the secret for now.

---

The headlights on my father’s car don’t work anymore, so he pulls his dashboard apart and drags half of the carcass into the garage, YouTube video pulled up so he knows which veins need to be redirected. Something in the circuits, he tells me. The clock is also fucky— fucky is, of course, the scientific term for this sort of thing— so it must be the circuits.

I sit in the garage and watch him because I have nothing better to do. The garage itself is one of my favorite places in the house— it’s freezing cold in the winter, but it smells like brake fluid and old metal, and when it’s hot out, the massive wooden door adds a hint of cedar to the air. Bike chains and animal furs hang from the top of the workbench. The shitty boombox is always playing. There’s a sharp object everywhere you turn. In the evenings, the leaded glass shifts the last bit of sun into something oily and inconsistent, washing the whole room out like a tinted heat mirage. I guess I like it because it’s the only place in the house that exists almost entirely for the sake of functionality, which means it’s the only place where I can draw a straight line from someone else to myself. Which means it’s the only room I can find beautiful. Isn’t that selfish? This is my father’s room. I can understand the room, cluttered and disorganized as it may be, which means I can understand him. Most rooms in this house aren’t like that.

This is a learning opportunity, too. If I was paying attention, I could be learning how to rewire my headlights. And it’s not that I’m not paying attention. I just have other concerns. Mainly the pores in my father’s hands, or the way the sun hits his arm hair. He burnt most of it off working in hot kitchens; the light clings to what’s left. So forgive me my trespasses, my oscillation, my ongoing list. I’m not around people very often. I’ve recently discovered that I want to watch skin move, that I like to watch skin move. Instead of focusing on the circuit board he’s messing with, I’m watching the way his wedding ring warps the webbing between his fingers. It’s like a large rock in fast moving water. The tiny, tiny lines, structured to accommodate the bend and stretch of nearby joints, are held in place and distorted. I was fascinated by anatomy as a child. Now, as an adult, I can name each moving muscle in his hand— the first dorsal interossei as he pinches something between his thumb and pointer, the abductor digiti minimi as he flexes his pinky outwards.

Sometimes I wish I noticed things less. Or that I noticed the right things more.

“The goal,” he says, “is to get these little nodes into the corresponding divots. You see that?” He tilts the chunk of his dashboard towards me and gestures to the little plastic indents under where the circuit board is supposed to go. I nod, and he puts it down again. “But they’ve got to be the right ones.”

“Right means to the right ends or it gets fucky.” I can’t always keep track of what I sound like when I talk, but I know that I don’t sound like this when I’m alone, and I can’t place where the difference is.

“Or it gets fucky,” he echoes. “Don’t want your clock hooked up to where your engine light should be.”

I hum in agreement, and we go quiet again— him to focus on popping the nodes in, me to watch his fingers bend around them. There’s a hot breeze coming in through the door, even though the sun is going down. Summer is here. It’s been here for a long time, now. I can smell him standing next to me, tiger balm and WD40 and aliveness. You know, I didn’t really realize how much being alive changes the smell of a person until I got close to a dead body. Even when I turn my head away, I can still smell him. I could probably hear the high whine of his nervous system if I pressed my ear against his ribs. I would never do it, but if I did, I probably could.

“When are you leaving?” he asks. He doesn’t look me in the eyes; keeps staring at the plastic.

“Ninth or tenth. Don’t really know, Mom won’t tell me.”

He grunts, and we go quiet again. This is how most of our conversations go.

“Don’t like the idea of you alone in the middle of nowhere like that,” he says, finally.

I’m looking out that big wooden door into the driveway. Cars are passing in the street; across it, light reflects off white paint and goes straight into my eyes. Not long now. Days, hours, minutes. I can feel my teeth in my mouth— I can feel the way they sit and the place where they connect to the flesh of my gums. It’s a strange awareness.

“I know,” I say, and he knows, too. “I’ll be alright, though. Nothing I haven’t done before. At the very least, it’s nothing I can’t weather.” I’m trying to change my voice back to the way it usually sounds, but I don’t think it’s working.

“I think you’re a little less capable than you think you are.”

“I think, historically speaking, that nothing has proven that I’m not as capable as I think I am.”

“Well, of course you think that,” he says. “You’re like me.” And I am. Forgive me.

---

Tonight, it’s me, a rack of ribs, and the world wide web. I’ve never really understood why so many people nowadays complain that the internet isn’t fun anymore. Everyone is just looking in the wrong places. I go on Flickr and it takes me four minutes to find a delightfully grainy, bluish photo from 2005 of a teenage girl pointing a revolver at the camera. Bang bang, she’s captioned it. And yeah it’s loaded. I scroll through her account— a dog in a pile of leaves, an old car, her awkward mirror selfies, her friends with their arms around each other, her world beyond mine— until I get bored of the voyeurism and move elsewhere. It takes me under ten minutes on the Internet Archive to stumble into someone’s porn collection. Whoever this guy is, he’s got everything from turn of the century erotic photos to Instagram models posing like mannequins in lingerie. Dead eyed topless women arch their backs on vintage magazine covers. Nudists smile at the camera. Impossibly-proportioned girls plead for their lives in World War II-era bondage art. This is the world beyond the world.

There’s a video titled Early VHS Bondage Clip No. 17 1980¹. In comparison with the other randomly-selected porn thumbnails, many of them mid-action, it’s surprisingly chaste— the camera, hidden behind a car, focuses on a couple standing next to a truck. They’re far enough into the distance that you can hardly make them out; two wobbly lines next to a dark square in an endless sea of pale blue. Forty-five years into the future, I am methodically separating ribs with a pocketknife, cutting between each bone to make them easier to eat. It’s dark out, but none of the warmth has left my bedroom yet. Don’t make a move ‘til I say action, Jarvis Cocker sings from somewhere behind me, and that’s that. I guess we’re watching porn tonight.

What qualifies a pornographic film as “arthouse”? Is it camera angles? Technical expertise? Stylistic flair? Bondage Clip No. 17 must qualify. Some of the style can be attributed to bad quality, both from cheap equipment and the fact that it’s a VHS tape. It’s intensely grainy, like stretch marks across the screen. Aside from the streaked-out quality, the lighting has washed out almost all the color, leaving us with a palette consisting of mostly icy blue, white, olive green, pale brown, and deep black. It’s got a memory-fade to it, the dream of erotics half-remembered. Every shot is framed like the cameraman is trying to hide from the actors. Even if the set— some house with guns mounted on the walls— wasn’t small (which it is), it would seem claustrophobic because of the way it’s filmed.

It’s funny how close eroticism is to fear. We pan up the legs of the woman, her pantyhose and heels as she bends over the hood of her malfunctioning car, and you think oh, she’s in danger. Which she is. Her car has broken down, she’s dressed in that cheap, pseudo-professional attire that so much of porn employs, and the man who’ll give her a ride is going to tie her up when she tries to use the phone. Her hair is so dark that I can’t tell if it’s a wig. The lighting harsh enough that you can hardly make out the features of her face, even in the close-ups later on— her eyes rolling in pretend fear, her mouth open in a silent cry. There’s some very Angelo Badalamenti-esque music, an eerie combination of saxophone and piano and synth, that plays instead of the noise that the actors are making; in general, the entirety of Bondage Clip No. 17 has a very Lynchian sort of sleaze to it.

She reaches the man’s truck right as I finish separating the bones. They walk into his house as I scrape chunks of fat off the meat, piling it onto the side of my plate where I won’t have to eat it. Fat will make me nauseous. She goes to the phone, guns straddling the wall behind her— he grabs his rope out of a drawer— I take a bite of meat. He ties her up while I pull cartilage out of my teeth. He takes off her panties and skirt as I snap the bones and dig the marrow out of them with my teeth. He ties her to door frames, to herself, to the dining room table. The little pile of fat and bones on my plate gets bigger. I’m done with the ribs by the time he pours honey into her pubic hair and mouth and then licks it off her. Fade to black. There is no resolution to the narrative; he’s just eating the honey. When is there ever narrative resolution?

Oscillation. Fragmentation. Dissolution. Self-betrayal. I’m told that I have a habit of considering nuance until everything loses meaning— you lose colors in the gray. And there really is this shifting that’s always happening, changing things you don’t think about unless you have to. A heartbeat, an echo, a stain. I believe there is a world underneath the world, beyond the world, and other people believe I’m insane. Or should be insane. I get fuzzy on the details— too much nuance, you know. I focus on the wrong things. I liked to see her black hair on the white-out sky; I didn’t care about the sex. Switch the angle of the camera. Oscillation. Rapid succession of shots. Fragmentation. Fade to black. Dissolution. And then a bird sings outside the window, and I move away from the dream-people to see if I can spot it in the night. Self-betrayal.

Forgive me. Most things end like nothing happened. They don’t even bother to look both ways before crossing the street— the street that leads away from me, as if time is something that moves around me instead of the other way around— because there was nothing there and we both knew it. No cars. No other pedestrians. It’s just meaning imposed on motion, and the motion is moving in the direction of “away”. I’m going away, too. And I don’t want to talk about anything, so I won’t. This is all very strange to me, you know? It’s all very strange. Forgive me.

1. This one.