“That’s sensitive of you.”
“How is that insensitive? You were friends, you said. What else aren’t you telling me?”
“We were friends. Since I’m part of a trial about this issue, since I did know the woman accused of these things, you might not try to get me to do them.”
“I’m not trying to get you to do the things she’s accused of doing but to have some fun with me. Remember that?”
I sucked in a long, audible breath then heaved it out. He stood. “I don’t know what you’re about. You don’t want me to feel sorry for you. But you’re making it hard for me to feel anything.” He walked out, leaving the door open and the air cool. I drained the water and stayed in the tub. He came back in, coat on, and held out a towel. My skin squeaked against the porcelain as I stood up and let him wrap me.
“Kiss me, so I can go to work,” he said. I gripped his sleeves and kissed hard, relieved. He never went out without saying goodbye.
Fighting with Alex left me revved up, contrite, driven. After breakfast, I put on Nirvana, closed my eyes, and flung my body around. By the end of the song, I screamed along: “A de-nial. A de-nial.”
Panting, I took my library book into my office. I’d given up reading slave narratives from the southern U.S. and returned to true crimes. I’d found one about a girl in California whose captor kept her for seven years, two of which she spent in a box under his waterbed. Through a vent hole she could see a patch of driveway beneath his mobile home. Each day she was let out for a couple of hours to empty her bedpan, eat leftovers, read the Bible. Her hair fell out, her muscles atrophied, and her vision dimmed. She signed a contract and wore a gold collar she believed would identify her to other men who would seize her if she escaped. She had a slave name, K.
I identified with K, though it didn’t make sense. My dad lived half an hour away and Jenna wrote letters. Until recently, I’d had a job, and besides, Alex and I didn’t have that kind of relationship. He joked about tying me up — for fun, he’d said. He didn’t torture me or keep me in a box, and he wouldn’t. I hated that I wanted to read about K. I hated what Alex must see in me when I brought up serial killers and he changed the subject. That I liked to read about other people’s pain, that it didn’t hurt me. It did, though. What K suffered shocked me, and I cried sometimes, though more often she showed up in my dreams. When I read about her watching dawn rise through her vent hole, I got the idea for a pinhole camera.
A hole in the box’s door could project an inverted and reversed image on the opposite wall. I could record what I saw on a piece of photographic paper. It wouldn’t make sense in the novel, but I wanted to try it anyway. Besides, I hadn’t worked on that novel since the interview with the cops.
Canvas covered the chicken wire on the box. The cone measured six feet long and three feet high at its wide end. Like K, I couldn’t stand up.
Today, I sat inside. The walls needed lining so the chicken wire wouldn’t print hexagons on my skin. I hung a quilt over the opening then climbed in again. I’d seal the box with opaque tape and spray-paint the lining flat black. A pinhole camera had to be light-tight.
“Polly” came on, a song about a man torturing a girl. I’d read that the real girl, the one the song was based on, had escaped her captor. The line “she’s just as bored as me” made the rage sound sympathetic and hollow. I could relate.
I nudged the honeycombed foam with my palms, soles, knees, and back. I rolled my face against the wire, pursed my lips and tongued the chromic thread, the spongy give. In here, the panic wound down a notch. I’d touched this calm in a sex shop once when I’d let Jenna belt me into a straitjacket as a gag. When I had the door and lining in place, I could crawl in here and sink into the familiar numbness.
The weekend before the trial started, we went to a wedding at a hippie church in the Ottawa Valley. I was marvelling at the bride’s grey hempen braids when the pastor said, “Through submitting to Adam, Eve is submitting to God.”
The bearded pastor clasped his hands in front of his rainbow-banded robe. Jeans and earth shoes peeked out from beneath the hem.
“While Eve submits to Adam,” he said, “and by submit we mean that she hands him her will and asks him to bend it to God’s ways, she must cultivate her own will that it may be tested through Adam, and that where it is true, she have it shown right back to her and know it to be so. Now I won’t say they submit to each other — Adam, as the man, is next to God — but only that Eve must not give up her self, or her soul. As Adam’s wife, she is part of a holy union made robust because she ministers her own will for the purpose of its submission to Adam, and through Adam, to God.”
I studied the women. The unadorned faces with warty cheeks and unplucked chins. The grey-pink skin and shapeless hair. And the strong, sinless eyes. As if they held no secrets. Or if they did, they defied anyone to wrong them for doing so.
My hand crept over to Alex’s, and he pressed it. For courage or sustenance, I couldn’t tell. Maybe forgiveness. I hoped so.
Earlier in the week, Alex had brought a print of a Japanese silk painting home from a History of Surgery exhibit at the College of Medicine. He’d unrolled it on our living room floor and secured it with art books.
In the foreground, a woman lies serenely in a flowing turquoise and white kimono, head on a red and white bolster, hair tied off her face with a maroon scarf and spilling over her pillow, eyes shut. A man kneels beside her on a bolster, hands on thighs. To his left sits a black lacquer box with an open drawer and a red lacquer teapot with platter and spoon. To his right, a greyhaired geisha in glasses fans the prone woman.
“It dates from the end of the eighteenth century,” Alex said. “That’s Seishu Hanoka using a preparation of datura.”
“Datura. Didn’t Carlos Castaneda?”
“No, not him. That voodoo zombie guy.”
“The Serpent and the Rainbow,” we said in unison. I touched my ring.
Alex continued: “Hanoka used his datura preparation as an anaesthetic agent given by mouth. This print shows Hanoka experimenting on his wife. See that spoon? The teapot? That’s how he administered the preparation.”
The wife is talcum white while the husband and his helper are a healthy olive. The wife lies stark-faced, at rest, arms straight at her sides. Hanoka looks placid, yet keen.
I leaned over the print. A ceremonial knife sits above the tied waist of Hanoka’s pants, its handle obscured by the pattern of the silk.
A slip of paper in the bag said Seishu Hanoka founded the Hanoka School of Surgery in Japan. Even if he’d orchestrated his wife’s surrender, I suspected her sacrifice held pleasure, and intent. After the anaesthesia discovery, such a wife, her will well-tended, would insist her body be subject to further experiment. For her husband’s career, of course, but for her own reasons besides.
The couple stood to take their vows. With Alex, I had submitted by agreeing not to make the relationship official and by showing only a loveable version of myself. I’d handed over nothing in bed, though. I stayed shy there, left his kinky offerings unsampled. Since our fight in the bathroom, I’d thought about my testimony at Ramona’s trial and whether Alex would react more to the fact of my secret or to what it revealed.
I returned his hand-squeeze. A woman strummed guitar and a man played the organ as we all stood and sang “Here Comes the Sun.” Alex and I spent the rest of the ceremony Morse code–pressing each other’s palms, eyes on a life-sized felt hanging of God banishing Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
When the Ramona Hawkes trial started on March 30, 1992, I added the morning news to my routine. Anchor Tad Stiles read highlights of the opening remarks while the screen showed text superimposed on shots of Ramona’s arrest.
The Crown Attorney for Peel