When We Were Animals(77)

You can only noise yourself for so long. And I felt small again, blissfully, tranquilly small, the ember of my mind cultivated true in the silence and darkness of my bound body. Mute and blind and immobile, the ache of my stubborn muscles, the searing of my bare skin—it was all far, far away, and I was at peace somewhere deep in the lost or abandoned corners of my brain. I was lost and gone, fallen down the deepest of wells, singing myself to sleep while my body burned itself to cinder and ash.

Roy shuddered silently against me.

His breathing slowed. His hands went away, first the one on my mouth, then the one on my eyes. His body rolled to the side. Cool air blew over me, and my skin tingled with the shock of it. I did not open my eyes.

But I was at peace. I was hushed everywhere inside.

*



Because Lumen is also vagina. It refers to anatomy as well as light. The last time I went to the gynecologist, I saw my name on a map of the alien landscape of a woman’s insides. The poor woman was only a middle—all splayed open and colorful, with words dangling by black lines from all her secret features.

“There’s my name,” I exclaimed to the doctor when he came in to examine me.

“Is it?” he said, as though he were speaking to a child. He is a doctor. He doesn’t listen to the things I say, so focused is he on the language of bodies.

After I saw my name on the woman map, I went home and did my research, as I used to do as a straight-A student, as my father’s good daughter, all those years ago, when encyclopedias were holy magic.

Lumen is just one name for vagina. There are others, many of them crude, which I would not utter but which pulse in my brain and have their own linguistic heartbeats. But Lumen is the best of them all. It makes you think of moons and astronomy and the comforting light of science.

Actually, a lumen is just a tube. It refers to any number of tubes in your body. Your throat is a lumen. And your ears and nose. Your arteries and veins. Your lungs are filled with branching lumens like the roots of a tree growing in your chest. You are made of tubes, and through your body of tubes pass fluids and gases and ephemeral magics that can’t be named or quantified.

Our bodies are factories. Food is put in at one end of a tube, it is processed over time, and it is ejected at the other end of the same tube. When it comes out it is something else. Also, the vaginal lumen. A boy puts himself in you. Your body accepts that offering and performs magic on it. Nine months later, out of the same lumen, a miniature human is disgorged.

My name is a processing function.

No. More to the point, a lumen is not the tube itself but rather the space within the tube. That’s important. Don’t you see how important that is?

That space is the lumen.

So I am Lumen. I am light, and I am space. I am emptiness. I am all the holes of the world. I am hallways and passageways. I am open doors. I am deep, dank wells. Maybe even gaps in time. Maybe I am the empty hiatus between day and night, the held breath of dusk. Or the excruciating nonmoment between an action and its consequence. I am the hiccup on the telephone line when someone delivers tragic news.

I am empty space, and I am the light that illuminates that space.

I am that furious lacuna between prolonged girlhood and the womanhood that refuses to come—when your breasts don’t bud and your limbs stay bony and your blood won’t come.

I sometimes grow tired of myself. I grow hateful.

I have been in love with punishable things.

*



I must have slept, but I don’t know for how long. The sun was low on the horizon when I woke. Blackhat Roy sat in the corner. He was looking intently at the cover of the book I brought him, but when he noticed I was awake he tossed it aside.

He said nothing, just watched me while I shifted my clothes back into place. My skin was pinched, my joints aching, my body on humiliating display. All I wanted was to get out of there as quickly as I could, but when I was about to leave, he came over and stood before me.

“Hey,” he said.

“What?”

“Just…”

He reached out, and at first I thought he was going to seize me again—but this was something new, something gentle. He moved himself against me, and it was a full moment before I realized he was embracing me.

Feeling bitten, I recoiled and pushed him away.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Lumen, I—” And he moved forward again.

“Don’t you dare,” I said and backed away. “Don’t touch me.”

He looked at me, confused, then down at his own hands as if to discover some unintentional threat there.

I didn’t want to explain. I was revolted by tenderness. I simply didn’t want to be loved by Blackhat Roy. The idea was unacceptable to me.

He came toward me again, and I clenched up.

“No,” I said. “Don’t.”

“Goddamn it, Lumen,” he said, exasperated, “I’m just trying to—is it this?” He gestured all around him, at his broken-down house, his meager life. “I’m just trying—”

He came at me again, more forcefully this time, trying to bind me in his arms. I fought against him, but the more I struggled, the tighter his hold got.

“Stop it,” he said. “Lumen, just stop—I’m not doing anything wrong.”

And when I finally wrenched myself free of him, my body swung backward, spiraling out of control, my face catching the edge of a plywood shelf, and I fell to the ground.