In the Body of the World Read online

  SCAN

  THIS IS WHERE YOU WILL CROSS THE UJI RIVER

  It’s dark in cancer town when we get up. Toast, Kim, and Paula walk me from the hotel to the hospital. We are all dazed from Valium. They are holding me by my arms, propping me up, and no one is saying a word. I feel like Gary Gilmore on his way to being executed at Utah State Prison. I believe he was killed by a firing squad, four shots to his heart. This could easily be my last morning, and there isn’t even any bloody sun. My final memory will be the last thing resembling beauty, the faux Pakistani carpets in the Marriott Hotel lobby. It’s dark in Tumor Town, but it’s prime time, busy. There are so many of us online at 4:30 a.m. that it feels like the airport. The crowd is midwestern and overweight, starving and empty from last night’s enemas and cleansers. The Mayo workers are way too cheerful for this time of day. But here in the Cancer Airways terminal there is no time. There are just the sick and the people who help the sick, the people who are about to be put to sleep and the ones who will put them to sleep. There are the madly chipper airline workers and the rest of us who are all going somewhere with our matching plastic heart-you ID bracelets but who are not so sure if and how we’re coming back.

  I relinquish my clothes and my jewelry and attempt to wrap myself in the skimpy hospital gown. I find some comfort in the bare cotton blankets. After endless bathroom trips from the final enema, and after I have tried not to worry my friends by being too dramatic and saying things like, “If I don’t come back, please give my books to …,” they come to wheel me away. As I climb onto the gurney, I understand why you don’t walk into the operating room. Your bare legs just wouldn’t take you there. There is no one going with me on this trip. This one’s on my own. This one is the big one.

  I see Toast and Kim and Paula waving. I flash them the V and give them the best smile I can and I close my eyes. I am standing in the wide-open field in Panzi at City of Joy in Bukavu. It is right after one of those mad Congo downpours. The Earth is wet and green and now the sun is just breaking out. The mountains are in the distance. I see the buildings are finished. I see the women strong and moving from class to class. They are becoming leaders and revolutionaries. I see them cooking and dancing. Mama C and Dr. Mukwege are greeting me. Alisa is there and Jeanne and Alfonsine and Mama Bachu. I have made a promise. That is all that matters. Keeping my promise. I do not think about all the people who are suddenly standing around the gurney in masks and gowns with needles and machines and tape. I do not think about what they will find inside me, that I could wake up with a death sentence or never wake up. I do not think that my mother is not there and my father is dead. I do not even notice how much I am shivering from the freezing cold. I am in Bukavu. It is hot there. I am in the sun. I keep my promises.

  You must be firmly resolved. Do not begrudge your fief; do not think of your wife and children. And do not depend on others. You must simply make up your mind. The reason that you have survived until now when so many have died was so that you would meet with this affair. This is where you will cross the Uji River. This is where you will ford the Seta. This will determine whether you win honor or disgrace your name. This is what is meant when it is said that it is difficult to be born as a human being, and that it is difficult to believe in the Lotus Sutra. You should pray intently that Shakyamuni, Many Treasures and the Buddhas of the ten directions will all gather and enter into your body to assist you.

  The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, Volume 1

  SCAN

  TWO QUESTIONS

  I open my eyes as they are wheeling me down a long corridor and my sister suddenly comes into focus. She is standing next to Dr. Deb. I am sure I have died. I have not spoken to my sister in years. They are both smiling at me. Well, my sister is trying to smile. There is something about her trying that makes me want to cry. My face is not yet attached to me, so I do not know how to cry or smile. I hear myself saying through strange things that appear to be my lips, “Is it in my liver?” Dr. Deb says, “No.” “Do I have a bag?” Dr. Deb says, “Yes, but it’s temporary.” Okay. It is not in my liver. My bag is temporary. My sister is here. Blackout.

  SCAN

  UTERUS = HYSTERIA

  There are bags and tubes coming out of every orifice of a body I soon realize is my own. I can do nothing but push my oxycodone magic button. This is a drug addict’s dream. Only the hint of pain, the thought of pain, the “could be” pain, and I hit my button. The nurses, with their Rochester, Minnesota, accent, ask me, “What is your pain, Eve? Can you tell me, from one to ten?” In the beginning I just say 8. It feels like a good number and everyone will feel fine with me hitting the button. I am sure it is an exaggeration. But I don’t know. Maybe my pain is 8. It all depends on 10. Is 10 wailing, screaming out, bent-over near-dead pain? Then 8 must be close to that. It isn’t really 8 then, but the tubes and the bags account for something, if only just being totally freaked out. Maybe I am 6. The oxycodone keeps me floating, so really there is very little pain. Maybe the memory of the pain is now stored away, like winter clothes, together with the memory of the surgery that was wiped out by the amnesia drugs and, they say, will never come back. It would be awfully scary to be at some fancy dinner party or having sex when suddenly the vivid consuming flash of your stomach being sliced wide open like a fish or pig returns. Did I tell you they cut right through my belly button? Did I tell you I was always afraid of my belly button, afraid even to touch it? It gave me the serious creeps. When I would wash it or clean it with Q-tips, I would always have to hold my breath. Slicing through my umbilicus, the only evidence I was once connected to my mother, the place where her blood and my blood were one. And did I tell you she got very sick right after they cut through my belly button? Right after they removed my uterus, my ovaries, my cervix, fallopian tubes, lymph nodes, lymph channels, the top part of my vagina, and the tissue in the pelvic cavity that surrounds the cervix and all my mother parts. No, that comes later.

  What is most pressing now is, Why cancer in my uterus? Uterus: a hollow muscular organ in the pelvic cavity of female mammals, in which the embryo is nourished and develops before birth.

  I try to imagine my uterus accommodating this tumor the way it might have once held a baby. I almost had two of them. Babies. Is there a point to a uterus if you do not make a baby? Was the tumor a way of growing something? Was I growing a trauma baby?

  I remember years ago—when I was going through a period when I seemed to be sick all the time—a shrink friend saying to me in that knowing and slightly patronizing sorry-for-me way, “You somatize, Eve.” Somatize. It was one of those words like individuate. I had to look it up. Somatize: how the body defends itself against too much stress, manifesting psychological distress as physical symptoms in the stomach or nerves or uterus or vagina. I read that women who had suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse tended to somatize more.

  It turns out that somatization is related to hysteria, which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus, (hysteria). Uterus = hysteria. They always called me hysterical in my family. Extreme feeling. Sarah Bernhardt. Intense. But what is extreme? Again, it depends on 10? I mean, what would be the appropriate level of emotional response to someone beating you daily or calling you jackass or stupid or molesting you. What would be the nonhysterical response to living in a world where so many are eating dirt and swimming in the sewage system in Port-au-Prince to unclog the drains and find plastic bottles to sell? What would be the appropriate nonhysterical response to people blindfolding other people and walking them around naked on leashes or watching waving people being abandoned on rooftops in a flood? What would be the proper way to experience these things? Hysteria—a word to make women feel insane for knowing what they know. A word that has so many implications—hysterical, out of control, insane, can’t take her seriously, raving. Hysteria is caused by suffering from a huge trauma where there is an underlying conflict. What was my conflict? Loving my mother and father, betraying my mother when my father molested me, wanting my
father all to myself even if it hurt my mother? Witnessing and hearing the most horrific stories in the world inflicted on women’s bodies and being unable to stop it in spite of every effort? Wanting to fall in love and being totally unable to trust, hungering for connection and always finding it claustrophobic. What doesn’t cause or produce conflicted feelings? What isn’t traumatizing?

  So, does removing my uterus mean they have removed my hysteria? I don’t feel any less hysterical. Actually, the tubes and bags and needles are making me feel quite upset and I wonder if there is such a thing as rape cancer. Do I have rape cancer? Do we get it if we have been molested or traumatized or raped? Are there rape cancer cells that get formed at the moment of violation and then get released into the bloodstream at another moment of trauma later in life? How many women with vaginal and uterine and ovarian cancer have been raped or beaten or traumatized? Does anyone know? Would Mayo do a study? Is there a way to cure rape cancer? Does each future trauma release more rape cancer cells? Is trauma cancer? Is this kind of obsessing the reason I am sick?

  Am I hysterical? Alert! 8 8 8, maybe even 9. I hit the oxycodone button.

  SCAN

  FALLING, OR CONGO STIGMATA

  There are no accidents. Or maybe everything is an accident. My friend Paul says to me, “It’s like you’ve got Congo Stigmata.” Well, actually, almost everyone said it in one way or another. “It doesn’t surprise me, Eve, of course. All those stories of rape over all these years. The women have entered you.” And at first I pushed this away because it’s not really a great advertisement for activism. Come care about others, listen to their stories and their pain, and you can contract it too. Then immediately after the surgery, the doctors told me that they had discovered something inside me that they had rarely seen before. Cells of endometrial (uterine) cancer had created a tumor between the vagina and the bowel and had “fistulated” the rectum. Essentially, the cancer had done exactly what rape had done to so many thousands of women in the Congo. I ended up having the same surgery as many of them. Dr. Handsome, my colon doctor, e-mailed Dr. Deb the day after the surgery and said he had been unable to sleep because he was so in awe of the mystery of what they had found. He said, “These findings are not medical, they are not science. They are spiritual.”

  I have always been drawn to holes. Black holes. Infinite holes. Impossible holes. Absences. Gaps, tears in membranes. Fistulas. Obstetric fistulas occur because of extended difficult labor. Necessary blood is unable to flow to the tissues of the vagina and the bladder. As a result, the tissues die and a hole forms through which urine or feces flow uncontrollably. In the Congo fistulas have been caused by rape, in particular gang rape, and rape with foreign objects like bottles or sticks. So many thousands of women in eastern Congo have suffered fistulas from rape that the injury is considered a crime of combat.

  After three trips to the Congo, I needed to see a fistula. I asked to sit in on a reparative operation. I needed to know the shape of this hole, the size of this hole. I needed to know what a woman’s insides looked like when her most essential cellular tissue had been punctured by a stick or a penis or penises. Wearing a mask and gown, I peered into this woman’s vagina, as she lay on her back, legs spread, her feet tied to steel stirrups with strips of blue-green rags made from old hospital uniforms. As always, I was awed by the vagina, so intricate, so simple, so delicate. There in the lining was an undeniable hole, a rip, a tear in the essential story. It was almost a perfect circle, the size of a quarter maybe, too big to prevent things from getting in or from falling out. I couldn’t help but think of the sky, of the membrane of the sky and the rip in the ozone. Humans had become hole makers. Bullet holes and drilled holes, hurt holes, greed holes, rape holes. Holes in membranes that function to protect the surface or bodily organ. Holes in the ozone layer that prevent the sun’s ultraviolet light from reaching the Earth’s surface. Holes that cause mutation of bacteria and viruses and an increase in skin cancers. Holes, gaps in our memory from trauma. Holes that destroy the integrity, the possibility of wholeness, of fullness. A hole that would determine the rest of this woman’s life, would prevent her from holding her pee or poop, would destroy sex or make it very difficult, would undermine her having a baby, would require many painful operations and still might not be fixed. As I stood there in mask and gown, I realized I had stopped breathing. This woman’s vagina was a map of the future, and I could feel myself falling, falling through the hole in the world, the hole in myself, the hole that was made when my father invaded me and I lost my way. The hole that was made when the social membrane was torn by incest. Falling through the hole in this woman, I was falling. I have always been falling. But this time was different.

  SCAN

  LU

  I open my eyes and my sister, Lu, is sitting by my bed. It is not a postsurgical hallucination. She is here. I close my eyes. I need time to take in her presence. I am not sure how I feel.

  She is watching over me as if it were the most natural thing, as if we had never stopped talking and had been seeing each other regularly for years. She has simply resumed her place. I peek again.

  It is Lu. I love my sister’s face. Her skin is so soft. She has the hugest breasts, which I used to touch and it would make her crazy. They were bowls of comfort. My sister is comfort. Except when she is not. She is by my bed. I am suspicious. Is it pity? I hate pity. Is she finally in control? She is up. I am down. Is it guilt? My illness, proximity to death, unfinished business? Does she want to be here? Is it compulsion? Duty? Could it be care? I want it to be care. I don’t know my sister. She just came. She just flew here. I like that. I am not sure. She is bossy. She will take charge. I like that.

  I reach out and gently touch her hand. She is startled. We are both startled, but she takes my hand. We are both tentative. She smiles. I smile. My sister.

  SCAN

  HERE’S WHAT’S GONE

  Nine hours.

  Rectum

  sections of colon

  uterus

  ovaries

  cervix

  fallopian tubes

  part of my vagina

  seventy nodes

  Here’s what’s new:

  A rebuilt rectum made out of my colon

  A stoma

  A temporary ileostomy bag

  A catheter in my bladder

  My face, the size of two faces

  A button I push

  any time I begin to feel what

  is missing.

  SCAN

  THE STOMA

  I don’t remember, but they say the first thing I did when I woke up was ask to touch it. I can’t imagine being that brave or wanting to be that brave, but there were a lot of drugs involved. And I have a history of needing to know and see things. It’s not really bravery at all but more like terror of what’s happening in the dark: the grown man’s scented hand invading my six-year-old body, the selling of the Congolese mines in the back rooms of Kigali, the whispering posse of teenage girls organizing my public demise. It’s why I became a chronic eavesdropper and an unashamed journal invader. I had to know. It gave me mastery. I pulled the curtains back. I opened the door. I controlled the entry of pain. So it doesn’t surprise me that I needed to touch the red fleshy nipple made from my colon that was now magically outside my body. The stoma, a minimouth of sorts that was now directing my poop into the ileostomy bag. I was rubbing it and feeling it, like some gooey species you find in a cave, and I could tell it was grossing my sister out. She never liked to touch it or see it. We were opposites. When it was terrible in our house, and it was often terrible, she would suddenly not be there. She could disappear even if she was still in the room. It never occurred to me until after the cancer that I wasn’t the brave one but the masochistic one. I mistook pain and hardship for a form of protection. My sister was afraid, so she acted afraid. I had never been brave enough to allow myself to be afraid. I had to outdo my father and beat him at his own game. Your hands choking my throat, your fist punchin
g and bloodying my nose: These are nothing compared to what I can do to myself or what I can and will bring on myself.

  Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe the terror was familiar—the adrenaline buzz, the body-clutching, almost-dying sensation as my head bounced off the wall. Maybe that familiarity is what I came to associate with connection, aliveness, love, and why I was always drawn to violent men: men who didn’t beat me, but who lived on the broken edge of explosion. Those men who could go there if pushed and I knew how to push because I needed to get a glimpse of that sugar love, needed to feel that snap zap hit of IhatehityouIhitneedyou. That’s how the milk originally came to me—in smacks—in loud white yelping gulps.

  I was touching my stoma and my sister was asking me why I needed to do that. I could tell the stoma freaked her out. She didn’t want to feel it. It was like the accident on our fancy suburban road when we were kids. There was a lot of glass and blood, and we heard that a woman had gone through the windshield and had lost her ear. There was a group of men looking for her ear. I wanted to go and help them. I wanted to know what it would be like to stumble on an ear in the middle of our road. I wanted to be the one who said, “Here, here, I found her ear. There is time. It is still alive. She can get it put back on.” My sister would not go with me. She would not be my copilot in the flight toward hardship and danger. She steered clear of it and me for many years. And why wouldn’t she?

  I drank myself mad, numbed myself with drugs at sixteen, snuck out with grown men to the Fillmore East for the late show, lived naked on communes, and stole things. I wrote my thesis on suicide in contemporary American poetry as I bartended and got laid on the pool table in the back. I was a caretaker in a Chelsea house for schizophrenics and a group leader in a homeless shelter on Thirtieth Street. I followed Joan of Arc’s route around France and took the train to Rome at midnight and wore spiky high heels for an Italian leather dyke. I took acid for three days on the train from Montreal to Vancouver where I had a one-night stand with a famous Muslim jazz player who seduced me with his saxophone and prayerful calling. I found my way into rape refugee camps in Bosnia, wore a burqa into the Taliban’s Afghanistan, drove espresso-pumped through land-mined roads in Kosovo. I had to see it, know it, touch it, find the ear. Maybe I was playing out my badness, or searching for my goodness, or getting closer and closer to the deepest inhumanity to try to understand how to survive the very worst we are capable of. Then I went to the Congo and it was there that it all shattered. There where in one breath the most grotesque acts of evil were countered with the deepest kindness. I had gone there.