Xmas Constellation (Round 3)
Let's workshop this Christmas vignette that explores trauma, memory, and the all-too-human coping mechanisms we use to rationalize and distance ourselves from the real horrors of abuse
Xmas Constellation
The sudden reoccupation of her childhood position, that was the trigger. She had flown north into the snow globe of her family home, opening onto a blast of carnal heat in her face: the same couch and plates, the same smells, the same bubble lights in the tree—everyone prepped, she suspected, not to bring up flying saucers or boyfriends or when she was planning to have children. Distant relatives, not seen in who knows how long, called her little-princess names that titillated hollows they should not have—shoebox photos in living-room circulation: “Look at Susie-Pie, always so somber and serious.” She stood smiling at a distance in the threshold, only to disappear like a dawn star into kitchen tasks alongside her mother.
The abrupt concentration of it all augered through layers of icy resolve. By the time her mother said “Goodnight” and she closed that familiar door, its Sailor Moon stickers peeling only at the surface, trapped skepticism had risen to the back of her throat like acid from the red wine (altogether perhaps a full bottle to the face).
To think it was extraterrestrial experimentation (clinical, devoid of intimacy)—isn’t that more comforting than to think a guardian, someone you trusted and depended on, wrecked your insides into forever-barren tangles?
A vague feeling became a figure that sharpened into Uncle Rick, her mother’s brother who had stayed with them a few days at different points throughout her childhood before flying out from the nearby airport for one of his climbs: Tanzania, Alaska, Argentina. His eyes had met hers, earlier, across the candied yams. He had moved closer, as she knew he would, in the transition to dessert. Seated beside her with his same musk (tobacco and leather and curry beneath jasmine and tuberose), he stroked the hirsute backs of his sausage fingers along her spine as if it were his instrument. Her sweet potato pie was underbaked, doughy and paler than it should be. But he insisted there was no need to give it more time. He cut her slice—dug out the wetness—and topped it with cream: “Oooh yeah, look at that Susie-Pie!” It was much too much cream, but she took each thwack in silent reception—Aunt Betty’s eyes, everyone’s eyes, acting like they did not see (no one intervening, despite the frenzied creaks and groans of wood). She gagged it all down even though it felt like it was going to ooze out from her nostrils, even from under her eyes.
“It’s all behind us,” he whispered into her ear as chairs screeched and her mother and aunt began clearing the table, a faucet already full blast. Their last meeting, soon before she moved down to Austin to study horticulture, had been contentious. He had told the story of an Italian alpinist, a man who—unlike him, he said—loved the very act of climbing the most treacherous summits (not just having had climbed them). The plan had been to ice pick together, through the barriers of language, up the sheer vertical face of the Eiger. But he found too risky the weather conditions, which left the Italian dangling for several years in a bivouac bag under an overhang (free swinging in the summers and sealed inside an ice wall in the winters). She had yelled “Fuck off, you close-minded creep!” and jerked from the table, knocking over glasses as her mother said “Hey, wait!” The last shots on the mountaineer’s recovered camera revealed orb formations in the sky. Yet her uncle had viciously mocked the idea—as if to mock her whole identity—that extraterrestrials had something to do with the mishap, even if only indirectly (say, by frightening the poor climber into a heart attack).
She brought the curtain panels together in the silence of bedtime, shutting out that nuclear light of the real stars glaring off the snow and onto the wall (almost like a tractor beam). Pupils dilating on her back, the plastic stars emerged in their green glow. Her father had stuck them on the ceiling to surprise her when she came home from the hospital after the resistant infection had risen higher (like the hallucinogenic fever) until it reached her kidneys, a stay she remembers only through IV photos.
She understood, of course, what the rehash of doubts suggested. She could almost taste his animalic plume: white flowers muddled inside a full-grain wallet, and yet boozy wood resin leaking over tonka beans and ashy charcoal—an activating blend of maturity and red-light trash. She could almost feel herself lifted up to a height of such violent pounding, ravaging that awakened the cat pee of the jasmine and kicked up a fecal cumin (even a tinge of mildew, like a window AC first turned on after its hibernation), that she had no other choice but to hold tight in needy complicity—the endless joining and rejoining of the puzzle, the repeated collapsing and recollapsing of the distance, seemingly meant to teach (“Oooh yeah, see”) the psychedelic lesson that we are all one flesh.
But no purgatory of second guessing would take root. Although it left intact the wake of clinical zoo smell (one might picture rubber gloves washing the shitty haunches of a hyena with chlorinated water), her response was too potent—too adventurous and yet, at the same time, warm and homey. Her response scattered the face of her uncle, which had been piecing together in a corner cluster of neon, like a sand mandala suddenly met with a gust of chaos. How could it not, given the unforgettable memory—the somatic imprint—of hovering facedown perpendicular to the carpet somehow glowing (an impossible twin strength that, coming from under her thighs and locking back her knees to her ribs, coiled around the back of her head, leaving her arms out like a bird as it pressed her chin into her throat)—the quintessential tractor-beam immobilization, the quintessential sensation of weightlessness paralysis, repeated in too many testimonies around the world?
UFO abduction is worse. People think I’m crazy. People keep a distance. Why would I choose a life of alienation? Had it been a human, especially someone in my family, I’d have all the support in the world! Who in their right mind would resort to aliens to handle the trauma? For all I know, I’m tagged like a bear, like some shark. They could be tracking me, planning future visits. Maybe they’ve already visited. And who’s to say they won’t kill me if there’s a next time? It makes no sense for me, for us (so many of us), to be making this stuff up. How the hell could that be cope?
