Pym’s Story

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Pym’s second cousin fucked her when she was still a girl, is where it started, apparently. He visited frequently during the tender nub of her pubescence. Then, Easter, 1998 or 99: years blur into each other like letters at the optometrist. Pym’s mom woke before dawn and climbed the fence behind the trailer park where they lived in an exurb of Baltimore, back into the woods of scraggly pine and thornbushes to hide dozens of flimsy pastel plastic eggs filled not with candy because they were poor but little folded notes she had written for Pym when Pym was called Tash. Happy memories or nice things about her smile or eyes, mostly misspelled but that didn’t matter because Tash couldn’t spell, either. It happened back there while Tash’s mom sat in the trailer with her breakfast of Parrot Bay. The second cousin had come to visit from Atlanta where he worked in the Bethel office of the Jehova’s Witnesses, led youth isometrics.

Pym preferred to leave the morning’s details to e.h.’s imagination, is what Pym said. They sat in Pym’s bedroom in the moonlight over a bottle of tequila.

Pregnant. Was only a matter of time, Tash figured. Tash’s mom guessed the girl quit menstruating because she was so skinny. And plus either couldn’t imagine who she might’ve fucked or else in fact knew and didn’t want to deal with that. Tash’s father was not a part of the picture. So it was August and two weeks before eighth grade and Tash was well into her second trimester before no one had the option of ignorance anymore. Pym can’t remember by what means Tash found the wherewithal but she went alone to Planned Parenthood, took the bus into Baltimore, found the office, and met with a jovial woman with calm hands who set her up with a doctor right away. After the twenty-four hour waiting period, the hot night alone in the Motel 6, the faked parental consent, after, back home, coming through the trailer’s door, pale and weak, her mother saw what she’d done and slapped her around. God, she said, would not forgive her.

What happened next was not something Pym remembers as being a decision, as even involving conscious thought, which is that Tash gathered her few things – a brush, a pendant with a picture of a brother dead in infancy, a change of clothes, a shredded blankie, cash stolen from her mother – and left, moved to Baltimore and became a sex worker. She became ferociously deft with a condom, as one client would eventually tell her. She befriended other sex workers and stayed with Anabel Lee and slept through the daylight hours. She was twice beaten by cops in the first month. Thrashed with their nightsticks. Tough luck. A balding white man with bluish stretch marks, lost striae along his flanks like comets’ tails and on his fourth finger a wedding band, frequented Tash and would insist, after, that he could save her. They could run off to Aruba. He would do it. Tash had to remind him, each time, that she didn’t need his saving. Then he would whimper and redden around the rims of his eyes. When she told him to go his eyebrows would cut a sharp angle and he’d call her nothing but a dirty teenage slut. But he always came back.

Years go by this way. A parade of cocks. Occasional police brutality. A cum-stained copy of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers found among a shelf of porn that changed the way words looked. She’d never finished a book before, barely started one, but this felt like her crazy dream. The prison shrine, the pin-up saints. None of it made sense but it all made sense and she read it Biblically and this was when Tash became Pym and right around when a cop beat Pym quite truly senseless and so Pym ended up on a bus heading west, again without any memory of having made any kind of decision to do so. Pym, a tee-shirt and jeans, Jean Genet stuffed in a back pocket. Several hundred dollars, crumpled and moist. Two condoms, their packets’ corners’ mashed and without integrity. No bra, never again. New fucking life.

Somerset, Wheeling, Zanesville, Columbus.  Worked for a week or a few in each, washing dishes with Mexicans for cash, flopping with folks “just until I get my feet on the ground.” No I.D., no recollection of a surname. This must’ve been around summer 2005. Worked a corner with trannies in Columbus a few nights, ran at the sight of the cops.

Dayton, Indianapolis, Champaign. All the college kids home on break, diasporic across the prairies of Illinois, dorms called Oglesby and Trelease rising in metal and brick, uniform windows, ideal squatting until the marching band from Normal arrived, horns and hormones, for band camp. Two fourteen-year-olds turned their key to find Pym on the floor in only a long tee-shirt watching reruns of the syndicated Batman series with Adam West. Before Pym could attempt to convince them that a third roommate might be fun, they both ran off to find the Band Director. Rather than flee again, Pym, still without any tangible memory of decision or deliberate, conscious thought, proceeded to make mischief. Found another empty room. In the madcap fifteen minutes before lights-out, the fury of teethbrushing and facewashing and bathroom gossip for developmentally healthy youth, Pym hunched down naked next to the farthest sink. Rumors spread, chaperones came with flashlights. Pym had already moved to another floor’s stall, still naked, head buried in a paper bag to frighten youth with a post-lights-out emergency. All day they practiced their field show. One afternoon Pym climbed the chainlink behind the bleachers and watched from the highest row. Several hundred youth stepping as one, forming constellations, crisp images, projecting a wall of militaristic sound. Two dozen flags spinning in unison. A horrible voice told Pym these were the options. No one came that night. They’d left. Pym woke up on the bathroom tile. Made the routine dumpster rounds. Bruegger’s at dusk, Dunkin’ Donuts at dawn. Not yet aware of the term freegan.

The mini-vans came all at once. Ruddyfaced farm youth off to college, to learn to drink heavily and fuck the opposite sex. Their parents hugging them, mothers enjoying the ambivalent failure to restrain tears. Luggage on wheels with pull-out handles. Furniture from Chicago’s Ikea. Lawns manicured these weeks before Pym’s very eyes and here’s why. Flowers chosen to appear just now in full bloom. Furniture that barely fit in the rickety elevators about which fathers became irritated and short with their wives or ex-wives. Youth obviously waiting for their parents to hug them and ambivalently cry and get it over with already so they could begin subtly testing one another through pop culture references and social power dynamics to learn who to drink heavily with and who of the opposite sex to try to fuck. At the height of anticipatory hope. Christian youth from suburban Chicago looking for cross necklaces, ever more desperately. Other youth who cried more than their mothers, whose eyes spoke of real fear. Pym watched them. The sun roared. Bees traveled from flower to landscaped flower. Pym sat on the steps of Trelease and felt a sort of awakening, like coming to the surface after having been underwater a long time. A kind of mental clarity. They were the same age, Pym and them. They had surnames and high school diplomas. But Pym had a secret. Little siblings tagging along, bored, ready to say goodbye and good riddance and to go afterward to Denny’s, as promised. University officials in nametags and professional smiles standing just off to the side, available for questions, shepherding the confused. They came with tasers and syringes and told Pym to be calm and make this easier for everyone. They in actual fact wore white billowing coats. Later they gave Pym a social security number and a gender. An institutional teal gown and a photo I.D. on a mandatory lanyard. Rictus after absurd rictus of condescending mental health professionals. “How often do you feel sad? How often do you think about killing yourself? Once a week? Once a day?” A parade of sickish smiles. Table tennis with the high-functioning in-patients. Institutional pudding.

e.h. attempting to moderate vigorous nods of empathy with this part of the story.

Lithium, then a quick 180º to Paxil. Often pistachio pudding. A series of halfway houses, New Beginnings North, A Safe Haven, Womens Treatment Center, which was awkward. The obligatory compulsive denial of drug addiction followed by the cliché insistence that overcoming denial is the first step. Actually trying meth for the first time behind a halfway house’s dumpster and mercifully not caring for it one bit. Not running away for reasons that are totally opaque to Pym now. Probably to avoid the cops. Finally finding work through the Womens Treatment Center’s placement service as an overnight stocker at the Walmart in Elmhurst at all of $6.65 an hour and a place out that way, too. A small room in Grenville Apartments with walls water-stained to a brownish-gold, the residue of ghosts, and, instead of a real oven, a double-burner Coleman stove that ran on gas canisters. Pym had to find a microwave on Craigslist and slept on a mattress on the floor. After work, around dawn, Pym would hurry to the magazine rack and stand before it like an altar. The bodies on Cosmopolitan, the pecs on GQ failed even to register. Pym wanted their eyes. In a pants pocket Pym carried a tiny scissors and surreptitiously cut-out the eyes of Cameron Diaz, Mila Kunis, Robert Pattinson. Isolated from the rest of their bodies, sliced into bands like masks, these fashioned eyes expressed for Pym a secret truth, the truth of yearning to hide, the barely suppressed terror of something unnameable. Pym scissored quickly and left dozens of magazines with eyeless covers, slipping them, the eyes, into the little pocket, the pocket’s pocket, for home where Pym Scotch-taped them to the ghosted walls. Diane, the night-shift manager, summoned Pym to her office and asked whether Pym had been cutting the eyes out of fashion magazines with a tone that implied both that this was not in fact a question at all and that Pym was a small, incontinent child, which marked the end of Pym’s career at Walmart. “This ain’t rocket science,” is actually what Diane said upon farewell.

Accustomed to staying up all night, Pym wandered the streets and eventually into Chuckles Bar. Epiphanies strike outside of any means of prediction, like patterns of smoke. It occurred to Pym, sitting at the bar with characteristically upright posture, that sex might be had for other than monetary exchange. At this, Pym laughed out loud. Pym had no money. Pym moved to sit beside a female-bodied person around the bar’s corner and asked to be bought a drink.

“Normally it works viceah-versa,” which Pym had no idea how to make sense of, “but,” this person continued, “yer cute. Whadya want?”

“Rum and coke with ice.”

The female-bodied person leaned forward over the bar, promoting about a foot of cleavage. “A couple of Jamaican sodas on the rocks, Karl.” The person turned and slapped a hand on Pym’s thigh, “I’m Suzanne, what’s yer name?” at which point Pym recognized that Suzanne was about fifteen years older than she’d looked from across the bar and was also liberally drunk. No television show or high school classmates or other set of circumstances had taught Pym that these might be inhibitory to a good night of sex for otherwise than monetary exchange. After the third Jamaican soda, laughter came more quickly. Pym squeezed Suzanne’s thigh.

“Wanna get some air?” asked Suzanne.

Elbows hooked, they stumbled several blocks and up the stairs to Suzanne’s apartment and began kissing with flapping tongues, Pym’s back to the apartment’s door. Suzanne’s hand moved brusquely down Pym’s flank and between Pym’s legs, which caused Suzanne’s body’s temperature to seem to drop about ten degrees. Suzanne paused. Suzanne cocked her head and looked Pym in the face and dropped to her knees and undid Pym’s belt and unzipped Pym’s pants and pulled them down and stood up and told Pym to get the fuck out, which Pym promptly did.

The moon was a perfect half.

Sometime later back home Pym fell asleep in the midst of failing to bring those own sex organs to an orgasm that Pym had never had. e.h. and Pym were pretty well into their own bottle of Jose Cuervo and the sky outside had begun to seep the milkiness of predawn. They lay side-by-side on Pym’s bed holding hands though e.h. had hours ago renounced anything sexual tonight or tomorrow night or the night after, also, too. e.h. felt warmly embarrassed at the romanticized poignance of describing Pym’s russet skin in this light as luminescent. There were dangers, here, temptations that e.h. would’ve rather stepped in front of a moving bus than’ve succumbed to. Blame the tequila.

Time passed.

Months, maybe years, the calendar’s way of counting. Pym’s memory fails now, scattered into fragments. e.h. wondered how much of all of it was true but then knew in that same moment with a surge of bilious shame that this was no moment for doubt.

Returning one night to Grenville to find several uniformed men asking for Sondra Thompson, which was the name they’d given Pym in the hospital. Other bedrooms, other towns.

Rockford, Waterloo, Iowa City.

Sandbagging against the flood, whole neighborhoods out together, and when the lines would surely break they worked en masse to move furniture and photo albums from basements on the brink of devastation. A family of redheads took Pym in, provided food and a roof until Pym found a job waiting tables at the Hamburg Inn. Sometimes customers asked about the tattoo of a garden scene along Pym’s forearm, or the bicep’s dragontail, or the blood-tipped thorns at Pym’s nape, or on those warm summer days in short denim shorts the phrase in latin around Pym’s thigh that Pym had no idea what it meant. Pym learned fast the quick over-the-shoulder smile, the flashing eyes, just the threshold of flirtation that swelled Midwestern boundaries and was tipped well for it. Pym paid the rent on time, Pym cooked edible spaghetti. Pym rose into or merged with some kind of surface time, logic of days, weekends, nights-out with coworkers. Made friends, picked up the lingo, the posture of cynical cool, how to mock “hipsters,” to ridicule the bougie climbers of the University town, the 1600 SAT, the 4.5 GPA, the coiffed mothers riven with Ivy-anxiety. Pym parroted the lines, and people by all appearances drank what they called the Kool-Aid, squeezed their eyes together, and laughed. Pym played the part of friend, pulled back hair when Sarah or June “got sick” in a Saturday night stall. Leaned in close and whispered about who gave who a blow job in the back of whose car. For awhile Pym even seemed to care. Months, marked by a calendar on the kitchen wall, passed. A boyfriend named Luke, a car mechanic. Until when Pym spoke, the words appeared visibly in reality as hollow. As in Pym could see them, the words, escaping from Pym’s mouth and sitting there in the space between people hollow as Pym’s empty heart. And visible not as in a metaphor but Pym actually physically saw them, the words, in the air, signifying nothing. At which point Pym hadn’t taken any drugs beyond the Holy Legal Trinity (alcohol, nicotine, and holy caffeine) in at least a week or two.

Friends began looking at Pym funny, asking if Pym was ok. Pym softly shrugged and slumped a little lower. They blushed at the incision these uncanny pauses made into their social fabric. Their words became noise, the wahwah of adults in Charlie Brown. Pym stopped showing up for work. Stopped going out. Lay in bed on oxycodone until forty pills went by. Lay on clouds like marshmallows in the microwave, erupting, consuming Pym in the warm sticky whiteness. Woke up in a bed with steel bars along its sides. “Hello Sondra,” came the silky voice of professional care, “I’m Nurse Barse.” Ceiling panels as worlds unto themselves, freckles become stars against a dirty cream sky, rusty water stains became galaxies. Live there. Short stay. Back on the street, no way Pym’s going to hang with that old crowd again, another bus.

City of Lakes. This was just last March. Trudged a few blocks through the spring snow from the Greyhound station and stumbled into the library of a community college, spent the night in the stacks where the next morning e.h., on a rare academic excursion for a course on queer theory, found Pym huddled beneath a carrel’s desk and asked if she could help. Pym looked up with saucers for eyes, is how e.h. likes to tell the story.

Dawn and its faint birdsongs have by now come and gone.

Life has commenced in all its bustle outside on the street amid the meaty summer heat of morning that gradually penetrates Pym’s window.

Light cuts a slanted, crisscross matrix over their prone bodies. Palm sweat sutures their hands.

“I’m scared to go out,” says Pym. “I’m tired.”

“I know you are,” says e.h., rolling supine, taking Pym’s head to e.h.’s very own soft, flat chest: “I do know.”