This is the Part We Need to Kill
An imaginary medical emergency, cybernetic art, and who or what I am
cw: body horror with needles, mentions of rape
Wounds suggest sex and aperture: A wound marks the threshold between interior and exterior; it marks where a body has been penetrated. Wounds suggest that the skin has been opened—that privacy is violated in the making of the wound, a rift in the skin, and by the act of peering into it.
-Leslie Jamison, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”
I’m in our backyard in Philly, a version of the matchbox-sized and brick-floored backyard that I have never known. Clean of weeds, absent the falling-apart wooden fence, open as an orifice, instead, to a vast wilderness. Obliterated: the skinny alley down which I used to sneak and run. Obliterated: any neighboring homes. I’m prone on a bench, sunning myself like an iguana, while my dad sits nearby. And along comes an elongated fox, stepping elegantly. I point it out with the awed yet mundane tone of a child on a road trip noting horses or cows, but the fox takes notice of my noting and swerves, entering our space with its lack of clear delineating rather than continuing on through the wide lush green of everywhere. It comes right to me and I hold my breath. It nuzzles at my arms, my cheeks, my pulsing neck. I am terrified. I ask my dad what to do and he doesn’t know. All I can do is let myself lie limp while the fox with its tall socks on soft balletic legs seeks comfort from my inactive form, waiting tensed inside for the moment that it gives up the cuddly act and tests fangs against jugular.
Later, the fox has entered the house. Our long-dead squashy calico cat rides astride its back through the halls. A scene of peace, lion and lamb. But I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop and grow bloodthirsty—shoes often grow bloodthirsty, you know, cutting into heels and birthing blisters; this is no stretch.
But at six a.m., the world darkly shrouded, I awake with a jolt. None of it was real. Still, reverberating through the marble halls of my body, is this acute terror of the moment when pastoral peace flips over into pain. To compensate, I gorge myself on Hershey’s miniatures fresh from the freezer and finish the last few pages of Leslie Jamison’s “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” from The Empathy Exams. Focusing on wounds and wallowing, wombs and womanhood, figures I know intimately except, we might argue, for that last one, one I did find familiar until the day it revealed itself an illusion, an imposter; I was an illusion and imposter, built out of blue eyeshadow and flaking foundation, mounds of lace like whipped cream on a frozen drink from Wawa, black tights encasing and hiding my legs, and hair bigger and floofier than the lace. Insubtantiality that I attempted to transubstantiate into truth.
When I say that nothing makes me feel like maybe I’m still a woman the way suffering does, Aurora responds, “This is the part we need to kill,” and I agree. It’s the silliest of essentialisms, the most depressing shit. I want to carve it out of me with my slim, pretty switchblade. Burn it out with my pink BIC lighter. But all I can do is talk it loose, coax it free to fly from me. Ail, suffer, wallow, and be a man at the same time, and turn the mirror on this confluence until the part we need to kill fixes its eyes on my heretic reflection and says, “Yes, okay, okay,” and swims up into the disembodiment of air and chokes on all that nothing.
An animal often visits me in my waking hours too. I call her a woman, “Hello woman, pretty woman.” She is a cat. My neighbor’s cat, with a shaggy, luxurious dark brown coat, very round eyes, and a penchant for perching dangerously on our air conditioner over a three-story drop to the yard below. She likes to exit her home’s window and walk around on our shared fire escape, rounding the bend to come up to our kitchen window, which is closed to her advances. Brendan sometimes makes offerings—bits of cheese or meat or even smoked salmon. I offer only cooing and petting her through the screen against which she thrusts her soft body. I’ve named her Coffee-to-go, for her lovely rich color and warmth and how she isn’t here to stay. In Massachusetts, I had a different frequent visitor, a big orange stray I dubbed Lottery because of my luck in knowing her at all, the blessing of her kindness. Like a Disney princess sweeping a chamber, I make animal friends everywhere. Even when asleep, it seems. But this tendency is not indicative of womanhood any more than pain and illness or a womb or the pinkness of my lighter are. None of it adds up that way; all of it betrays its surface symbolism.
My first time in the hospital since uncovering the false-ring of my womanhood, the flake and floof of its foundations, was to get an ultrasound. A very classically, bioessentially feminine endeavor, but located all wrong. One Wednesday I was administering my weekly hormone shot; the syringe plunged needle-downward into the stretched skin and—deeper—twitchy muscle of my thigh; I depressed the plunger, depositing the alchemical fluid deep in my body; I lifted the syringe, and with it did not come a needle. It seemed I had not only deposited fluid inside myself, but laid the needle like botfly eggs beneath my skin, to birth into a Tin Woodman, perhaps, bursting forth one day from my leg like Athena from Zeus’ skull, lusty for oil and a heart. Or perhaps it would be a Terminator, and satiate its programmed bloodlust how my dreamfox never got to. Panic seized me in its fist. Squeezed me Gogurtishly, splurting me all over the room. Frantic, I searched around my crowded bedroom floor for a fallen needle, and came up empty-palmed.
The strange doctor listened to my explanation and prodded my already-poked thigh, around the site of dangerous apparent loss, with gloved hands. Asked me, “Does this hurt? Does this?” I felt nothing but the surface discomfort of being prodded at all. No sensitivity lingered or soreness built. At a loss, she ordered x-rays, and on I shuffled to a radiology center further uptown. There, the technician spread me open, my leg bent to the side, a broken bird wing. Something fragile and hollow, once-magic but emptied of its gravity-defiance to be simply a specimen. A tube for looking into. Repeatedly, she repositioned me, like a big doll or a partner whose snoring you hope to silence. Rolling me over and over, and snap snap snap, my insides became starkly captured and illuminated. She said she couldn’t see anything, but she wasn’t the expert here; something might be obvious to the radiologist that escaped her. All there was to do now, freed from my hospital gown, was wait.
I had to trundle off to work, catsitting various sweet or semi-sweet or sometimes only bitter babies dotted all over Manhattan. To care like a Disney princess for animal after animal when my own personal animal may have been invaded, may be carrying a parasite of the robot variety. I was in the lobby of a Midtown building, trying to check in with security despite the uncomfortable discrepancy of my legal name and how my gender read to the furrow-browed guard, when I got the call from someone at the doctor’s office, letting me know the radiologist found nothing. “It must have fallen onto the floor,” the woman assured me. “We don’t think it’s in your leg. But if you develop any pain, swelling, or feelings of heat in the injection site at night, it might be infected. You need to go to the ER immediately.”
Finally, the guard allowed me to head upstairs, keeping my license as collateral. The sun was setting through the wide kitchen windows. Cat litter littered the floor, practically transforming it into a little shore, forming a beach by the captured ocean of the waterbowls. One of the kitties was in the bad habit of running back and forth from the apartment’s wide-open-as-my-dream-yard spaces to the trapped-as-my-thigh confines of her litter box, taking the box’s grainy carpeting with her every time she sprung back for freedom. After cleaning the foodbowls of old dinner and filling them anew, I sighed and grabbed the broom. Another call came. The same woman from before. She told me, nerves in her voice like we were meeting clandestinely, “You know, I wasn’t sure if I should say this, but I’m really worried. If the needle is in your leg, that’s seriously dangerous; it could move and puncture something. I think that when you go home you should check the floor for it, and if you can’t find it, you should go to the ER and get an ultrasound.”
I listened. At home, exhausted from the day’s combination of panic and cat-care, I scoured my floor once more. Once more: empty palms. But it was late. I was sleepy. I nodded off. At first light, hoping nothing had moved or been punctured in my dozing, I shot a message to my manager at the veterinary office, letting him know that I would be late to my receptionist job because I had to go to the hospital, and I took the train to NYU Langone in ritzy Cobble Hill. Right away, I was swept into a gown and bed. I was called the right pronouns, like they’d actually listened to what I said I was injecting when comic tragedy struck. A nurse introduced himself to me as Jay and I introduced myself back as Rae, and when someone else appeared and called me my legal name, Jay said, “Oh, no, this is Rae.” Warmth suffused my chest in answer. How sweet, in my pain, to be seen and identified with accuracy. My real face was not obscured by blood lipsticking me piggishly.
Then came the ultrasound tech to spread body-hot goo on my thigh and rub it around with a piercing eyeball of a device, and we watched the insides of my leg onscreen. Nothing. No needle. I was told once again: it’s on your floor. I felt like I was going crazy, if I could go crazier, considering the reality of my brain as it was. The needle was very much not on my goddamn floor. I had checked and checked and checked, and it was a sizeable thing; I would notice. But what else was there to do now? It was not, it seemed, in my leg. I was whole and unendangered, unmarred. It was time to get back on the train, to change into my scrubs, to go in late to work and be greeted by my coworker springing from her chair and shouting, “It’s my princess!” as she enveloped me in a hug. Blood lipsticked me suddenly, and I remained a hidden pig for the rest of the day.
That night, the two of us alone, the vet asked me why I’d had to go to the hospital; how did I get there and was I okay? No one at this job (at either job) knew I was a man; there was no good reason, in their eyes, that I’d be sticking myself with needles. But I was feeling frisky, risky, as I often did when speaking to him, so I was honest. “I thought there was a needle embedded in my leg.”
Without missing a beat, clearly confident I was pulling his leg, he replied, “Ah, because you thought someone was trying to kill you,” and with a mixture of relief and disappointment that this wasn’t my opening to bullheadedly, impulsively come out to him, I agreed. He let it lie. Probed no deeper than skin and fantasy. No one was trying to kill me of course, but I was trying to kill the part of me Aurora had wisely placed on a hitlist. Just like the time that the vet told me that I seemed like I held a big secret in my clutches, like maybe I was in Witness Protection, he’d brushed sideways up against a kernel of truth.
The woman from the doctor called me again as I stood on my stoop, unlocking my front door, and I gave her the news, that the needle was not on my floor or in my leg. She said, “So, what, your body just . . . absorbed it?” and I laughed and answered that that was sure what it looked like. Maybe my blood was made of acid rain and had broken it down to a silver sludge. I would have wondered if I’d dreamed the whole thing if it weren’t for the syringe, stuck in a Ziplock bag the same way I preserved shadow-flat-and-dark captured specimens when bedbugs haunted our apartment, very absent its gleaming point.
Summers in Massachusetts, wasps flocked to our home. My Disney princess spell, but more a curse in this incarnation: they entered just to die. Our windowsills and the yawning mouth of our lighter-pink living room floorlamp’s plastic shade formed mass graves of fuzzy yellow corpses. Deader by the dozen. I swept them up and deposited them in rubbing alcohol in Ziplocks that I left on the sink in the bathroom for reasons that now escape me. But a hundred of their needle-tipped corpses featured in a project of mine for school, for my course in cybernetic art. We were told to take our little Arduino boards, programmed to chirp like crickets, outside, and record them interfacing with the natural environment in some novel way. This was simple enough; we lived right next to the woods, and one night M joined me out in the dark trees, as I sat on a bench that someone had abandoned there. I wore a black dress, black tights, mourning attire, and tied a black blindfold around my eyes. M recorded me first smoking a cigarette with the Arduino set chirping before me. Then I reached into a baggie and began to drop, onto the board, one by one, the wasps, counting each individual until they were piled so densely that the microprocessor had apparently disappeared. Just like, one day, my womanhood. Like dreamy feared foxes evaporating when I startle into consciousness, or mini chocolates melting in my glutted mouth.
The mystery was not a mystery forever. One Wednesday, I administered my shot, and we repeated the initial scene, with a notable alteration to the script. When I withdrew the syringe from my tattooed and newly hair thigh, I caught sight of the needle withdrawing into the clear plastic body, secreted away. It turned out, this was simply a function of the spring-loadedness of the syringes, that if you pressed too hard or at a certain angle, the needles were sucked up into the tubes and hidden away, smoke and mirrors. I studied the syringe, seeking sight of a shining sliver, and saw nothing, but I had seen it enter. I was sure. It was just so thorough a burial despite there being so much less to work with than six feet of dirt. The opposite of the wasp graves, which were ostentatious displays of golden riches. The needle was not absorbed by my body, but by its own body. A shocking act of simple self-cannibalism. What I long for with the instinct to view my suffering as feminizing: since I can neither cut nor burn it out, I need to suck it so deep into me that it can no longer be seen or heard. That it seems to have all been a dream.
The video jump-cuts, from a dozen or so wasps and my black-clad girlbody to a close-up of their mountainousness as I count ninety, ninety-one. A sharp shift in how we see this work of art. Like viewing an old photo of myself next to a selfie from today. We slice out the complex middlebits of security guards questioning my identity or being called my princess. There was a girl in pain in a black dress, and then there was me. As if the thorny center was only a dream of a fox’s promising fangs. But because of the counting, we know it must have been there and real. Numbers move in orderly lines. We can surgically remove the middle-figures, but we know their names and shapes, the weight of them, the lived days or dead insects they represent.
My next project with the Arduino board that semester, I took my Ken doll in his hospital-white grin and blue swim trunks and lashed him to a brass lamp’s phallic stalk by curling the electrical cord around his body in bondage. I secreted a wire with Scotch tape to the inside of his palm. And I programmed and constructed the whole thing so that when Ken pressed his hand to the lamp, stroking up and down, it set off lights on the board, which I’d attached to the lamp’s fluted head in place of a bulb and shade. Green and red LEDs flashed on and off rhythmically as Ken masturbated the lamp that he straddled and hugged. A Stop! Start. Stop! No, start! yelled brightly even as his hand only seemed to say yes yes yes. A monument to sexual mixed messages or unwitting silence. An opaque honoring of my trauma. My body in its black dress was not featured; nor my body in the pink lace dress in which I was raped, the rape that I here commemorated. But my dreamed-up one-day body was present, in a sense, played by Ken. A human-made body but a whole creature all the same.
Mary Oliver says, “the soft animal of your body,” I say, “the hard plastic animal of my body. An animal nonetheless, visiting me, under my Disney prince/ss spell/curse. I fear it and I coo to it. I dream it and I wake to it. Remembering my Ken—placed in a free box on the sidewalk long ago, now—I think yes, I can suffer and be a man. Yes, I can suck up into my plastic body my sharp needle known as The Delusion to the Contrary, hiding it fully within me, allowing it no puncture or sway. This artificially made body is not invulnerable. We can hurt me. I can hurt. I have wounds and a womb and wallowing, and am grand and unified inside of these havings; I am whole and hole-y, penetrable to the arrows/switchblades/wasp-stings/fox-fangs/needles of the world. The minor and the sharp. Splinters that work their way beneath my too-thin skin, which I pet like a cat through a windowscreen, cooing, welcoming. Enduring and hurting and holding. No woman; yes cry. It’s simple as that. Simple as a needle retracting into a syringe: Occam’s needle. I am what I am, just like the nurse said: this is Rae.