The Art of Intimacy (8 page)

Percival Everett’s
The Water Cure
frames itself, as it were, as a confession as well, and here the crime is quite blatant. “I am guilty,” writes the main character, Ishmael Kidder. “I executed these actions with not only deliberation and premeditation but with zeal and paroxysm and purpose. . . . The true answer to your question is shorter than the lie. Did you? I did.” What Kidder did was find, capture, and torture a man who might have been—but probably is not—the man who raped and murdered his eleven-year-old daughter. Kidder is crazed by grief; who wouldn’t be? He explains, “With my vengeance eyes burning the horizon for Man X, will Man Y do, and will he satisfy my desire, and am I correct not only in my identification of Man Y as Man X, but also in my belief that there is a Man X at all?” This is the loopy, darkly poignant logic of a man struggling with unbearable emotions. The novel, published in 2007, makes explicit references to waterboarding, Guantánamo, and Abu Ghraib, clearly making a comparison between the use of torture as an interrogation method following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the use of torture as revenge. In the same way that the United States deployed the lie that Iraq was responsible for the attacks of September 11 to go to war with that country, Kidder (pun intended, we may be sure) is using a lie, or an illusion, to satisfy his rage. Ethical and political questions are openly in play; the global tragedy is mapped onto the novel’s domestic tragedy.

The book begins with an image of a mark on a page under which are the words “. . . so we induce”; the next page is blank save for the word
and;
the page after is also blank save for the word
find;
the text proper begins with the words “the arduous nowhere.” The novel proceeds as a series of fragments of various sizes separated by white space; the fragments are composed of the narrative of the murder and subsequent torture of the maybe-murderer, reflections on the nature of language, jokes, riddles, drawings that seem to have been made by a child, bits from Aristotle and other philosophers, reflections on skydiving and welding and geometry, lines written in French and what seems to be a faux Middle English, among other topics and modes. Ishmael is a romance novelist, under another name, so the novel also includes passages from his pseudonymous work and meditations on his conflicted attitude toward it. The fragments encourage us to think with Ishmael, to take leaps across the white space of connections among categories—What does welding have to do with Aristotle? What does a failed marriage have to do with geometry? Ishmael, we are told quite late in the book, is African American and the murderer is white, but where do we put race in this story, this series of discontinuous fragments? What is “the arduous nowhere”?

If Maria was composed of a variety of sometimes contradictory gazes and opinions and versions of herself authored by others, Ishmael is composed of a variety of sometimes contradictory thoughts, observations, conundrums, emotional positions, and languages of his own making.
The Water Cure
is a story about torture, but it is also a monologue delivered by a man, a writer, who doesn’t entirely make sense to himself, who invites the reader to consider the fragments he has shored against his ruin without ever offering us the option of reshaping those fragments into a glibly heroic narrative. If the novel were a collage that the reader could, potentially, rearrange at will, there is no arrangement that would produce Ishmael as a noble, righteous avenger of wrongdoing or a suffering victim. Like Maria, Ishmael considers himself to be many things, but innocent is never one of them. He wouldn’t ask what makes Iago evil, either. Having, like Maria, established his guilt in the opening pages of the book, he also denies the reader the shelter of an ignorant innocence. Didion refused us this innocence by making the book unreadable to the naive. Ishmael binds the reader into complicity via a sympathetic response few could refuse to feel: that is, via our outrage and sadness at this horrible murder of a child, the child of our main character, our narrator, our point of identification.

At first, we don’t put up much resistance to this complicity. Identifying with Ishmael’s hatred is only natural; one might question one’s own humanity if one didn’t share his ire. Whose anger wouldn’t be extreme? As Ishmael stalks the murderer of his child, he tells us, “I was the cop and the judge and the jury and the executioner and god, and god, was I filled with hatred, sweet righteous hatred.” Not long after this moment, the man who might or might not be the murderer is in the trunk of Ishmael’s car; Ishmael has slammed the other man on the back of the head with a bat and bound and gagged him with duct tape. Chillingly, Ishmael doesn’t kill him right away: “I needed him alive so that I could have his life, possess his life, take his life, needed to have him see his life stolen.” Now, queasily, we begin to see that Ishmael isn’t taking revenge on the murderer of his daughter in payment for her life; instead, he is exacting a slow, painful, possibly endless revenge on a stranger for someone—probably not this man in the trunk at all—having destroyed
Ishmael’s
life and sentenced him to an existence that will never be free of sorrow, guilt, and rage. Like John Wayne’s pathological character obsessed with finding the pioneer girl captured by Native Americans in the John Ford film
The Searchers,
Ishmael’s drive for vengeance has, somewhere along the line, become a quest to redress an injury done not to the victimized girl, but to him, to his sense of self.

At this point, the reader might become very uneasy, but it’s too late, because the stranger is already in the trunk of the car. Indeed, it’s too late to back out of the book at all, because the scenes of what Ishmael actually did to the stranger don’t occur until midway through the narrative. We have already seen the unbearable grief of the parents, the battered and invaded body of the child, the childish drawings. We have already agreed that we would kill a man who would do a thing like that, that such a man deserves to die. Who cares if he dies fast or slowly? We have already thought with Ishmael about the unexpected conjunctions of language, deep feeling, and philosophy. But as the wronged person being avenged subtly shifts from daughter to father, and as the details of the capture and torture emerge, and as the fact that this is probably not the murderer at all gets louder, like Poe’s telltale heart, we find ourselves holding a bloody bag that we might not be entirely sure we want. How, we might wonder, did we quite get here?

Too late, we understand that Ishmael wants to possess and control the other man at the root in the same way that this crime against his daughter has possessed and controlled him. Ishmael doesn’t want to commit murder; he wants to commit soul murder. In an inversion of the famous lightbulb-filled basement room of the oppressed African American narrator in Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man,
Ishmael fills his basement torture chamber with mirrors. He says to his victim, “I want you to see all these other people and wonder which one of you is feeling the pain, which of you is feeling the pain more, less, which of you is only watching and feeling nothing.” And, later, “I want you to pray to me, pray that I don’t come back and that I never leave you.” What Ishmael wants, in other words, is a profound, lifetime, terror-filled intimacy with this man, this stranger, in retribution for the horrible act of violence against Ishmael’s daughter. Ishmael’s revenge will be a closeness in which the other man can no longer experience himself and can only experience Ishmael, delivered as pure fear. He wants the other man, as in the passage quoted, to be breath to breath with him, forever, and never to know again whose breath is whose.

This is merciless. It is, indeed, a crime, a crime far worse than killing the actual murderer would have been. And can we, as readers, distinguish ourselves from Ishmael? Can we say with any degree of certainty that Ishmael’s unbearable loss wouldn’t motivate us to wish to inflict that same degree of loss on someone, anyone? The irresistible sentiment that we grasped unthinkingly at the beginning of the novel turns out to be filled with nettles that can’t be picked out easily. The distance from the childish drawing to the duct tape might be less than we thought. Everett deploys intimacy—the intimacy between parent and child, between writer and reader, between tortured and torturer—to ask profoundly uncomfortable ethical, emotional, political, and moral questions. The space between, here, is less than a shared breath, an ellipsis, a break in the text, a hall of mirrors, in which love and terror, writer and reader, are indistinguishable. We have seen that meeting in the dark can be fatal; now we see that meeting in the white space, in the blankness, may be just as perilous, if not more so.

In section two of the ten-part Yoko Tawada story “The Bath,” a photographer named Xander attempts to take a picture of the narrator, a Japanese woman. The shoot doesn’t go well. The camera makes the woman anxious (“the lens was trying to trap me”), and the man can’t seem to get the image he seeks. “Can’t you look a little more Japanese?” he says. “This is for a travel poster.” The woman remains uneasy about the camera, thinking, “If it wanted to learn my soul’s secrets, I had nothing to worry about, since there weren’t any. But this camera was trying to capture my skin.” When Xander develops the photographs, the woman is invisible in them, a condition that, he tells her, happened “because you don’t have a strong enough sense of yourself as Japanese.” In order to address this problem, Xander covers the woman’s face with thick powder, lines her eyes, paints her lips the color of her lips, and blackens her already black hair. He marks her face with an
x,
his mark, and snaps the picture. The
x,
reports the woman, “stopped the light from playing and crucified the image of a Japanese woman onto the paper.”

This is a parable about race, and perhaps about gender, but it also touches on the conundrum of how to see, and how difficult it is to see directly. We have considered thus far the various uses of the space between in rendering intimacy in fiction—a few of those charged spaces being the subjunctive, the world, the image, the dark, and white space—but we have yet to consider why it is, or how it is, that a space between is necessary at all. Why must this topos be created in order for the reader to apprehend intimacy? Why can’t we simply experience it directly, as we do in life? Why must we, as it were, climb inside a balloon to feel the most primal, the most powerful human emotion—i.e., connectedness? To borrow the clichés of a million pop songs, what’s so hard about just saying “I love you”?

And yet, rendered that way—
I love you
—the phrase has no weight; ditto
I hate you, he loves her, she loves her, they all loved one another once, he despised him,
and so on. We don’t feel these phrases as meaningful, nor would we be likely to if they were attached to names of characters. In order to feel the weight, paradoxically, we sometimes have to use a mirror, a distorted image that will make the “true” image appear. We grow closer through distance, through a gap of time or space or context across which we are somehow better able to apprehend connection than if that which we seek were directly at hand.

A particularly potent example of the necessity of distance in fully apprehending intimacy is Toni Morrison’s
Beloved.
Set in Ohio in 1873, it is the story of Sethe, a former slave, who did a terrible thing when she was still enslaved at a plantation called Sweet Home: she killed her two-year-old daughter by slashing her throat rather than see the child go on to live a life of slavery. Eighteen years later, that daughter, who was never named except for the single word on her tombstone,
Beloved,
returns in altered form as a strange young woman and takes up residence with Sethe and her family. What follows is simultaneously reunion and exorcism as Sethe wrestles with her own past and her fractured psyche.

Much of Sethe’s nearly impossible task has to do with unsayability, of which there are several layers at play in
Beloved.
The first, of course, is the institution of slavery itself, an atrocity of such magnitude that it can only, in a way, be seen in Sethe’s terrible act. In other words, we can barely look at it directly; we can only truly, viscerally comprehend its horror in the horrible thing it causes Sethe to do. There are gruesome scenes of life under slavery in the novel, but they pale in comparison to Sethe killing her own small child. Death, her action suggests, is better than that life. We
see
the facts of slavery in the literal flashbacks to life at Sweet Home, but we
feel
the atrocity of slavery, we feel its weight, in the unspeakable murder of the child. The second unsayable thing is that very action; to kill one’s own child is unthinkable, unbearable. But there’s a third, subtler, equally disturbing layer of unsayability here, and this layer is where Morrison actually begins her extraordinary book.

As terrible as it is to kill one’s own child, how much more terrible is it when that child returns from the grave, carrying an unimaginably heavy freight of guilt, terror, rage, need, and love? This, in its way, is even more unsayable—that as missed, as mourned, as that child is, to have that child
come back
after being murdered by her own mother is unbearable. One does not wish to say that, it’s an unsayable thought, particularly addressed to a two-year-old girl:
stay dead.
But that ambivalence is exactly where Morrison pitches the tent of the novel. The book begins not during the plantation years, not in the time leading up to the terrible crime, but in the relatively peaceful aftermath—postslavery, postinfanticide. The book begins with something that is not only unsayable, but impossible: the child comes back to haunt her own mother. And, in fact, the first two sentences of the book are somewhat shocking: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” (124 is the number of the house where Sethe and her surviving family live.)

A baby’s
venom.
What a phrase. What a word choice. Not
anger,
not
rage,
not
tantrum,
not
sadness:
venom. Like a poisonous snake.
Spite.
And what this opening page goes on to describe is this ghost, this venomous baby, terrorizing Sethe and her other children so severely that Sethe’s two sons just run away, leaving Sethe and her other daughter, Denver, at its mercy. “As soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake,” writes Morrison, the sons flee. That image of the little handprints in the cake—so domestic, so dear, so, even, sentimental—becomes an image of ominousness, terror, and mortal threat.

From here, Morrison ups the ante even further. When Beloved really reappears to begin her haunting in earnest, it is not in the form of handprints in a cake or as a two-year-old in a nightgown wafting transparently around the house at night. Beloved, as if she has grown older in real time along with everyone else, walks out of a stream one day as “a fully dressed woman.” Sethe takes her in, not exactly able to understand at first why she’s so drawn to this peculiar young woman. Beloved is thirsty, she has a telltale scar on her neck, and her skin is oddly new and soft. And though her physical form is that of a woman, emotionally she is still two years old. She is passionately attached to Sethe, guileless, sexually curious and omnivorous, constantly hungry, demanding, dear, and prone to terrible jealousy. She is an unhoused, infantile id, but with all the power and size of a full-grown adult.

Though the events in the past that are being mourned are dramatic indeed, the actual dramatic action of the book’s present time is subtle, wayward, and difficult to describe. It’s something closer to a love triangle, or several love triangles, as Beloved proceeds basically to seduce everyone in 124, than it is to, say, a murder mystery or even a ghost story. In overt terms, not much happens in
Beloved.
Sethe, Beloved, Denver, and Sethe’s boyfriend, Paul D, all live in 124 in increasingly strained and emotionally extreme circumstances until Sethe stops being haunted by Beloved.

To stop being haunted by Beloved, Sethe has to do two things: she has to remember who Beloved is, that this is the child she killed; and, even more important, she has to fall in love with her utterly, completely, and unconditionally, in the way that a mother loves her child. Once she does these two things, she can be free. The book reaches its climax when Sethe does this, when she finally claims, “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine.” And for about twenty pages after this point, the text of the book literally breaks down and fragments into prose poetry as Sethe, Beloved, and Denver declare their deep and abiding love for one another, without reservation. They all repeat some variation of “Beloved is mine,” like a refrain. After this point, Beloved finally departs and 124 is no longer troubled.

What I think this suggests is that Morrison is addressing yet another layer of unsayability in
Beloved,
perhaps the deepest atrocity and wound of slavery, which is that, for the slave, it makes
love
an unsayable, a forbidden, word. If your children are literally going to be taken from you and sold, if you would rather kill them than see them live the life you’ve led, if human ties are continually broken, severed, and destroyed, then loving without reservation is a very, very dangerous thing to do. Love—ordinary, daily, open intimacy—becomes unsayable as a matter of survival. The novel, like the history of slavery, is filled with stories of lovers pulled apart, mothers giving up their children, fathers never even knowing they have any children, and people being used in monstrous ways that violate every human sense of trust and connection.

When Sethe makes her first, unsuccessful run toward freedom, she says, of getting away from Sweet Home, in Kentucky, with her children, “Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here [i.e., to freedom in Ohio], when I jumped down off that wagon—there wasn’t nobody in the world that I couldn’t love if I wanted to.” It’s significant that it is
after
this moment, this moment of unabashed love, that Sethe slashes Beloved’s throat. The slavecatchers come to get them and she can’t bear to take her children back to that life. She loves without reservation for the first time in her life, then has to kill what she loves, then is bound by melancholy until Beloved comes back and Sethe can finally say, again, that she loves her.

In the fractured world of
Beloved,
this is the most forbidden, the most unsayable emotion: this mother love, one of the most basic emotions we experience. It’s worth noting in this regard that in Morrison’s
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,
one of her most stinging critiques of Willa Cather’s
Sapphira and the Slave Girl
revolves around Cather’s racist idea in that novel that slave women don’t care about their children, that they are “natally dead,” that they will be complicit in the exploitation of their children. And I think that aspect of racism, its destruction of the ability to speak one’s love freely, is why Morrison wrote the word
love,
bracketed by a few other letters, across the front of her book.

But would we have understood the weight of that word if we had not been brought to the brink of
almost not being able
to say, to feel, this essential emotion? Could we apprehend it without a mirror, in this case the mirror of another time, another place, a set of circumstances that nearly extinguish one of the most fundamental aspects of being human? Could we, in other words, feel the weight of that word weighed simply as itself?
Beloved
teaches us that it may be the case that, paradoxically, we feel the weight of that word more directly by experiencing the weight of the forces ranged against it, that we measure its power in the power of its cost. Over great distance, and through nearly unbearable loss, finally, we get closer.