Not all men! The world always interrupts before I can think of the right word. My world will not be interpreted, pinned down, named, lest that give me power over it. True names are witchcraft, faery magic, not translatable into the language of science or publishable by English-speaking men in peer-reviewed journals. Not all men! Not me, I am one of the good ones! I didn’t say all men. I said men. A generic (men), not a universal quantifier (all men). Birds fly. Not all birds fly. But language is not allowed to work if it would make a point we are not allowed to make. What’s in a True Name™? What power does it have? Are our words little maps of the Real Essences, the Platonic Forms, the Fundamental Physics? We’ve sure come up with a lot of names for the deep structure of things. Words aren’t enough. They aren’t solving this.
I didn’t tell Jeff the therapist I was wondering what the right word was for being scared of men. Once, I told him about how my mind’s copy-and-paste function goes off without warning and I paste in quotes from other people’s stories. He started calling these “intrusive thoughts” and “auditory hallucinations” but he never specified into what they were intruders, or why the resultant verbal collage should be considered any worse than the mess that was there before.
Instead, I gifted Jeff a little history. See how he liked it. Jeff Bryson, it turns out, was a science whizz in high school but also a kind soul and a good listener. Now you might think this rare combination would make him every bully’s dream, but you’d be wrong. In fact, he was the kid who willingly gave away all his notes around exam time to slackers who’d skipped class, who once or twice might have “helped” with another student’s physics homework but who was counting. He was valuable. Then Jeff studied psychology at Harvard which meant spending a lot of time in roomfuls of women. By the end of each term about 70 per cent of the class would be in love with him but he never dated any of them, preferring to wait for his long-term girlfriend in Canada. Most of the women suspected this Canadian girlfriend of being made up, a beard perhaps, but she was in fact not only very real but also cheating on him with a much older man called Anthony Black, of whose existence Jeff would be unaware until the summer after graduation.
“Victoria?” Jeff said again.
I’m Nobody. Who are you? Are you—Nobody—too?
“I want to help you not worry so much. I know you worry about turning out like Mum.”
I can’t stand it when other people call her Mum that way. Like they’re talking to a child who is too young to realize Mum isn’t Mum to everyone.
“I’m sure it’s scary to think about, but there is much more help available now. We understand these things so much better. The science has come on a lot. Therapy has modernized, and we have better medications. And society has changed. Sure there are some things in our past that we’re not proud of, things we regret—”
“Science or society?”
Jeff didn’t always notice when I interrupted. He just carried on.
“…—about the way mental illness used to be treated. But you are one of the lucky ones.”
Lucky, you know, joined the English language as gambling vocabulary. Dicey stuff. He didn’t care about that, though, so I didn’t bother to say it. That was the kind of communication that didn’t work in here. I looked at my hands. What might a hand communicate? The tree outside Jeff’s office had better symbols in it than this room. Its higgledy-piggledy trunk was an awesome stack of trophy animal heads: buffalo facing east, ram’s skull to the southwest. In the root was an empty lobster tail, and the claws. As though the lobster inside were recently eaten. It is an intense tree.
He ploughed on without me.
“If you can work with me, I know we can get you to a good place. I believe you can make peace with this…with whatever has happened. With the past. You have a life in the present, you know? I’m not going to say a normal life—that’s not a very useful way of talking, is it? But you have your job, your career, your friends. Maybe you’ll meet someone, get married, have kids. And it doesn’t matter what you believe in your own head, or what you write in your journal at the end of the day, or what you say in your prayers, or what you say to me. You just need to keep it from taking over other aspects of your life. Can you work with me on this?”
I don’t pray. He knew that. It was the same thing every week now. What Jeff wanted—what would count as a success for him—was for me to betray Deb. To give up. Every time, I gave him the same answer: If I stopped thinking about Deb, I might as well stop thinking altogether. Might as well die.
—
And by a sleep to say we shit out the day. In good dreams, I am putting on my makeup. The eyes are missing but I still have eyelids, so I colour them in dark browns and greys. I sweep highlighter across the high points of my cheeks, along the bridge of my nose, the inner corner of my eyes. The colour of my highlighter is “ice.” The top note. My blush is “hot shame,” trapped underneath. I have a mouth but it won’t open, so
