10.
As I enter the fitting room, I wait for the knock on the door, followed by the saleswoman’s voice. How are you doing in there? she asks. You need anything?
WE, THE WOMEN
We, the people of the great American city, we leave our city twice every week, and head north. Up north, there is a small American town where we, the people of the great American city, can learn new things.
There, in the small American town, we perfect our craft. We seek inspiration. We become a community. There, in the small American town, we are assigned mentors, and those mentors tell us that they once used to be just like us, young people of the great American city, traveling north in search of knowledge.
* * *
We, the people of the great American city, we are, in fact, women. Up north, we learn our gender is important. We sit on green velvet rugs and stare at dark wood burning in the fireplace, our mentors saying, Look beyond; imagine. Up north, we learn that fire is a screen, we learn to dream. Our mentors, they tell us of a world where women scratch tomatoes with their nails and the fruit doesn’t bleed. Up north, we think maybe that world can one day be our world.
We, the women of the great American city, when we are not up north, we roam our urban streets. We look for inspiration to hide inside our purses, we look for the kind that travels well. Instead, we, the women of the great American city, we find men. These men, they are not the men we have at home, waiting for us with a cooked meal. These men, they try to buy us and we try to ignore them, because up north, in the small American town, we’ve been taught that no comes in many forms.
We, the women of the great American city, we turn our backs on these men, and they then grade our backs, grade our asses. We, the women of the great American city, we usually get a ten. This ten, it excites us and revolts us, and we throw up at the side of the road. We, the women of the great American city, we then go home to our meal-cooking men, and our men see the remnants of puke on our lips and know what the streets of the big American city were like today. Our men, they wipe our faces clean of puke, and kiss our chaste, voluptuous lips.
We, the women of the great American city, we fuck our men on hot summer nights, because we despise weakness, and fucking feels like strength. We fuck our men whether we feel like it or not; we climb on top of them to prove a point, and the scent of our intestines has yet to fade.
We, the women of the great American city, we row the muscles of our men until they cannot tell pleasure from pain. Then we row some more. (We, the women of the great American city, we use our bodies to speak our minds.) We enjoy inflicting pain upon our men, and when they cry, we lick their tears: returning the favor of compassion.
We, the women of the great American city, we slap our men’s cheeks when they are dry of tears — we slap them hard. Our men, some of them don’t understand, and we, the women of the great American city, we have to explain it to them.
This is how we explain: we hold our men by their balls, and we squeeze. This squeeze, it hurts them, but it is necessary. This squeeze, it explains to them by way of the body, by way of pain, that we know. We know, the unbearable pain in their crotch tells them in no uncertain terms, that they, too, were once ass-grading men on the streets of the great American city. We know that deep down they still are, and further deep is where they always will be. Our men, they then cry like babies. Our men, they swear to us that they are different, that they love us.
We, the women of the great American city, the following morning we always drive north. We, the women of the great American city, we want to consult our mentors. This is what we want to know: how to trust. Our mentors, they say trust is overrated. They say the secret is simply to be, to get up in the morning without murder in your heart, and pour green tea into porcelain cups.
* * *
Every time we head back south we ask, Have we learned enough? Every time, we think, Tonight, we will look the grading men straight in the eyes and say, Zero; your grade is zero. Tonight, we will not puke. We, the women of the great American city, as we descend upon our city through the windows of our cars, our trains, our planes, as we descend upon our city, we try to pretend that on this journey we have educated ourselves about trust, about puke. We, the women of the great American city, we look at the great American city drawing to a close, and we know: at times there is murder in our hearts.
THE BEGINNING OF A PLAN
1991, Part 1: My Escape
In 1991, I went to jail for canning goods without a license. My factory was small, really a mom-and-pop shop, but when they caught me it made national news, because they blamed the whole bruchtussis epidemic on me. A reporter named Dolly P. investigated my operation with the kind of zeal people mostly demonstrate when their children’s lives are at risk. Dolly P. had no children, but she had ambition. She traced the first case to the same small town in Israel that manufactured most of my ingredients. For a while, every time a kid ate bad canned soup, it was my fault; the mother would go on television and cry, My baby is coughing all the time now, my baby never used to cough, and the newswoman would wipe away a tear, sigh, and remind the public once again that my trial would soon begin. I got ten years.
I was a tough woman, a strong woman. But even the toughest human being feels the sting of mortality when the law comes and says, Give us the best decade of your life. I’d just turned twenty-one; it hadn’t even been a year since I’d left Israel. I had to escape.
Dolly P. was visiting me on a weekly basis, out of guilt. One day I told her, That’s all very nice, but I need to get out of here, and what can you really do for me? She said, There’s talk of a time-stop, you know, like in the Middle Ages — why don’t we wait a few days, see what’s what. I said, Dolly, what the hell are you talking about? If you don’t want to help me out, just say so. I knew how to work her. She said, What do you need? I said, A rope, a knife, a pickup truck. She said, I do this for you and we’re even, that’s it. I said, I get out, we’ll talk.
1991, Part 2: The First Time-Stop in More Than a Thousand Years
The first thing people noticed when time stopped: clocks and watches. Nobody could bring back the ticking. Expert horologists from around the world were working the case day and night, except there was no day and no night, only a dim gray. With time went the date: calendars disappeared, the top right corners of newspapers were naked, and the postmarks on letters just said Sent.
Time Counters started emerging everywhere. They would stand in public places and count out loud: seconds, minutes, hours. They were determined to prove that time hadn’t really stopped, that this was only a problem of counting mechanisms, and that humans had to step in and do the work until things got better. It soon became apparent that no one could reliably count time for longer than ten hours, so Time Counters formed teams and used special signals to let each other know when one Counter wanted the next to get ready. They were extremely meticulous, but really they were nothing more than singers of repetitive numbers. After a while, they began to fade away.
Dolly P.’s newspaper ran the story of my escape twice in a row, in successive dateless editions, then had me on the front page a third time. I understood, Dolly P. needed to cover her tracks, be the good reporter no one would suspect of any wrongdoing. But for a while every time a stranger looked at me I felt my muscles flex, getting ready to run. At some point it became clear that no one was reading the paper anymore; when people don’t believe there’s a future, they don’t bother staying current. For the first time in a long time I thought, Maybe I can feel safe.