The operator on the other end of your call to
Emergency never sounds quite human. Their questions don’t sound like normal
questions, they are mechanical, specifically designed to be understood under
extreme pressure, to be easily and quickly answered. It’s easy to imagine that
if you speak as they do, in layman’s terms, a conclusion ending in help will be
possible. Reply to the operator’s questions in the same emotionless tone they
ask them in, keep your head straight and deliver the facts. Their lack of
empathy is calming, I guess.
The first time I had to call 9-1-1
was when my roommate, L—, fell out of her bunk in the middle of the night.She
woke me up when she hit me on the way to the ground. I remember rising and
feeling vague pain and confusion, and then finding L— on the ground. I quickly
discovered that in her fall from the top bunk, L— had hit her leg on the edge of my bed: the skin on her shin
looked like a pint of strawberry ice cream with one long scoop spooned out of
it. I laid her down on the floor, very slowly. We were both really scared. She
could barely walk when they came for her but she hobbled down the long hallway
to the elevator anyway, using my body as a crutch. I drove her in her car to
the emergency room. There, they gave her 8 stitches.
She had fallen at about 3 AM, and
when we left the emergency room, morning was in full-force. The sunlight
hitting my eyes as I left the hospital with her was disorienting, it felt like
leaving the movie theater after a matinee show time and being surprised that it
was light out. When we got home, I looked at our beds, still bunked. I looked
at the floor by my bed and saw some of L— ‘s blood on my textbooks. Then, I
went to sleep in my clothes. I slept through all of my classes and woke up
sick. I was sick all weekend.
The second time I called 911 was on
Halloween, during the walk back to campus from the party on Elsmere. I was
walking with N—, drunk, and an old woman stopped us. We had actually already
passed her when I heard her call out to us, faintly, from behind. She said to
us, “Can you help me?” I probably would have ignored her if N— had not been with me, a fact that
merits its own short story, sans doute.
Anyway, we turned back to her, and I saw that the old woman was barefoot. It
was cold, so I wondered why she went out without shoes. As we got close to her,
I could see a wetness around the edge of her eyes, which surprised me. I
thought maybe she had wanted to ask us a question, but when I saw her wet eyes,
I understood that she called out to us because she needed help.
She said her husband was lost. I
didn’t understand right away—“How does someone loose their husband?”—but then it became clear to me that this woman was
sick, that she had one of those problems caused by holes in her brain, and that
she probably did not neglect to put on shoes before she stepped out, but had forgotten
to put shoes on, or had maybe even forgot
about shoes. I no longer felt
drunk. This was serious. I wondered how long she had been walking around like
this. N— asked her where she
lived, she replied with, “San Antonio,” but could not be more specific than
that. The moisture around her eyes began to turn into tears and I got the sense
that I was failing her. I looked around at the neighborhood as I held her arm
to support her, hoping that I would see some sort of impossible sign or beacon
floating over a house that would direct me where to take her, something like a
big neon arrow flickering over a roof.
Feeling an urge to move though we
had no destination, we began to shuffle along to somewhere. I looked down at
the sidewalk and saw the asphalt shimmering with stones and grit. I saw her
bare feet, wrinkled and paper-white. She was so white, all over, and it
occurred to me that she could have been a ghost. It was Halloween, after all. I
thought that maybe it would have been better for her to be unreal… that this
situation would be easier to understand if this were an instance of the
supernatural. This time, when I made the decision to call 9-1-1, it was not out
of an immediate response to something that had happened, but because there was
nothing else to do. We had to get an officer on the scene, get someone to take
care of this woman, someone to bring her some shoes.
As the phone rang, I realized that
this was call number two for me and experienced the grim thought that maybe I’d
just called 9-1-1 too many times for a life as short as mine.
I seduced you later that night when
we got back to campus, despite everything. Nothing I did to you was spontaneous
for me, I don’t know, maybe it was for you. I began the night with an
intention. In fact, I began preparing for the moment I would seduce you around
4pm that day, watching Mad Men so I
could study and emulate those re-created 60s-era sirens: their hips like a
curve in a flower vase, their lips like a red button on a white sweater, cheek
bones perfectly flushed, eyelashes blinking and shoulders round; every part of
them representing the maximum feminine aesthetic I could hope to obtain. As the
episode ended, I plucked my eyebrows to provocative rock music while drinking a
beer, loosening up my hips, believing that behaving this way was going to get
me laid. I made eyes at you during the party. I intentionally brushed your arm
with mine on multiple occasions. I asked if you wanted to leave with me, which
might have sealed the deal in your mind—it would have been understandable if it
had.
I had you in my room for an entire
60 minutes before I executed the last step in Me Seducing You. I had decided
earlier that day that ambiance would be key in this final step; I would need
lights and music. I decided I would illuminate two lamps, thinking I could turn
one of them off when I got you in my bed and turn the second one off as we went
to sleep. The music I chose was from an album that I love and that has
represented many different states for me, but I think it will always be
associated most with bare skin. It was the same music my Seducer played when he
seduced me in my room the previous month. The fact that he picked that
particular album from my music library made it easy for me to say yes to him.
I seduced you, I did. I pretended
to approach you to say goodbye, but I removed your bag from your shoulders and
I kissed you instead. Your eyes would get so wide and then flutter shut the
whole time we were kissing. The way you touched, with the entire length of your
hand, palm to fingertip, felt solid. There was more chemistry between us than I
had expected, some of my work had been done for me. I said to you what my
Seducer had said to me, he had stopped and sat up on his knees and said, “We
should probably decide right now where we want this to go.” I don’t know why I
thought I should say it, why I felt inclined to follow some Cosmic Script of
Seduction, why I repeated those words and chose the same music he played. I
guess it was all of those particular things that made my situation seem so good
at the time. Anyway, you began to answer my question in broad terms, the same
way I had begun to answer my Seducer’s first question; I guess you were
following some other Cosmic Script. I, again, like my Seducer before me,
socratically solicited a response out of you that I could work with,
specifying, “What about for this night only? What do you want?” You answered in
layman’s terms.
You were in constant awe, and very
gentle. I tried not to fake too much of anything. This was important, I had
made up my mind from the beginning to make one deviation from the Cosmic Script
of Seduction; I would, unlike my Seducer, be as honest as possible with you.
Recognizing that it was sort of impossible for me to feel sure about anything
in that moment, I resolved to try my best to tell the truth anyway.
I realized, laying in my bed in the
dark with you by my side, that the cycle of seduction between young people
resembles the cycle of snide comments made by English professors, teachers, or
T.A.s on their student’s papers. Comments like “Really?” or “I would have liked
to see you explore this idea further,” or the vague squiggle next to something
you wrote, and it’s unclear if that squiggle means “Good,” “No,” or “My anger
is too great for words, ergo, this squiggle.” Students get these comments on
their papers, and walk out of their classrooms confused, maybe offended, but
certainly annoyed. Some of these students become T.A.s, teachers or professors,
and once they feel the power of all of those freshly printed essays between
their fingers, the vague and snarky comments they received in their
undergraduate years come to surface in their mind and, hungrily, they bite
their lips and grasp their pencil and scribbling, “Really? Really? How so? And?
How so? W.C. Unclear,” in the margins of their student’s papers. The cycle
continues as students leave the novice teacher’s classroom confused, maybe
offended, but certainly annoyed.
A similar cycle is sparked when
someone seduces you and then leaves you alone, despite any impression or
promise they gave you during the seduction. The next liaison you decide to have
with someone after you’ve been seduced will itself unfold as a seduction. You will want to feel in
control of something physical and primal. You will want to illicit responses,
to get results. You’ll plan every step and execute each of them perfectly. You
will also think of the Seduction as a sort of Evening of the Internal Emotional
Scales: the idea being that in order to feel right again, you have to seduce
someone else—put weight on both sides, if you will. There is a notable fly in
the soup, however: the person you seduce will inevitably feel like uneven
scales and will have to seduce someone else: that is, in seducing your Victim
you have made them a Future Seducer, thus continuing the cycle.
Not your fault, though. You were
not the Original Seducer. There’s some originator of lust somewhere, a
character in the Old Testament or Greek mythology, that you can blame that one
on, you were just innocently thrust into this cycle by chance, none of this was
your idea, and of course you have no choice but to continue it, because I mean
how are you going to live without basic human touch? Celibacy is not the answer
and if you’re not celibate, well… there’s only one other alternative, isn’t
there?
Anyway, this phenomenon is
basically just another way intra-personal connections are made: you’ll be
connected to the person your Victim seduces in the same way that your Victim
will be connected to the person who seduced you; their Victim will have you to
thank for that empty, unbalanced feeling they’re experiencing in the wake of
their Moment of Seduction, and they’ll probably resent you a bit for being so
cold and heartless. Ultimately, they’ll come to understand why you did what you
did in the same way the novice teacher, after some years’ experience, comes to
understand why the vague “And?” really was
all their professor could have said about their concluding sentence for
paragraph 4. They’ll understand because of the cycle.
The next morning, I remember being
next to you, on my back, contemplating the ceiling.
This is beautiful
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