THE SULTAN OF NOTHING by Mary Michael Wagner
Jacked up on black coffee and cigarettes, we sit in a circle regurgitating our childhoods. We rock or fidget in gray folding chairs, tear hangnails, gnaw cuticles. Our bodies, after years of crashing in Tenderloin hotels, on car seats and on heating grates, are shocked by the quiet and routine of our setting – elementary school-type lunches of Sloppy Joes and Tater Tots, a warm bed night after night. Our mouths are full of sore gums and teeth going bad. We have been AWOL from our own lives for years.
Sarah runs the afternoon group. She’s not like most of the other counselors here, the ones who’ve been where we are, who know what it’s like to stick a needle in their arm or sleep in a cardboard box behind Safeway or steal a kid’s Sting Ray bike to hock for five bucks. Their hard laughs make you think of dump trucks full of quarried rocks. Sarah has smooth skin and an earnest face. The only time I’ve seen her lose her temper is once when the water fountain wouldn’t work and she kicked it. You can tell she talks about us after work, frets about us. She cares. There’s a compelling mix of shyness and vigor to her, like a dog that’s never been kicked.
In group, Sarah asks us to take our journals out. “Okay, ladies, let’s begin.” I used to snicker at being called a lady, but now it sets off a secret plume of longing in my throat. A hairball of feeling lodges in my trachea, equal parts derision and some other soft liquid sensation I don’t have a name for. I imagine Sarah, paying for the bound journals from her own money, at night after work. I see her rummaging for the prettiest colors. Looking around the circle at the women’s journals, after only a couple of months the edges are fraying, the flowers have been doodled on by leaky ballpoint pens. I swing my journal open and eye the dizzying slant of my handwriting.
I glance around the circle at the other women. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, ours are the kind in a rundown warehouse with a slab of plywood nailed on top. Our ring of shoes tells our life stories. Decaying Goodwill shoes, with the heels mashed because we’ve flopped around in them like slippers, white laces gone to gray. The soles are all worn down along the insteps. Does this mean that we want only to fall in upon ourselves? Who doesn’t? We look older than we are, so it’s funny to think most of us are still fertile, and could incubate something as delicate and helpless as a baby.
I look up to find Sarah standing next to my chair staring down at the blank page in my lap. “Are you having a hard time writing, June?” Last week Sarah told us she was pregnant. I catch myself staring but her stomach still looks flat, so the baby must still be smaller than a fist. Sometimes with Sarah I feel awkward and girlish, new, like I did behind the Rollerdrome the year I would kiss boys only with a tightly closed mouth. By twelve, with shoplifted pint bottles of whisky, I had molted into something wild and unrecognizable.
Sarah rests a warm hand on my shoulder. I follow her gaze to my own arm with its litter of track marks and tiny scars from a habit of picking at my skin.
“Write whatever comes to you,” she says. Her voice is soothing but in an unbullshitty kind of way.
As she walks back to her chair, I notice on the back of her heel a tiny circular Band-Aid. I realize her shoes are new and she has worn a blister. She sits and smiles over at me.
I write the same thing I have been writing for weeks – the first thing that’s come to me. Why must I write it over and over? But I can’t seem to help myself. The first time I pressed so hard with my pen tip it tore through the page.
At first I thought maybe it was a memory of being born because there was a churning wetness and pressure, a dim, watery light far away. The light belonged to me but it was also something that was being done to me like the strawberry marks I have on my arms from the forceps the doctor used to yank me out. But then in my picture a flash of brown, kicking shins materialized. And I recognized not a baby but my own kid shins studded with mosquito bites and tree-climbing nicks.
I knew what day it was. It was summertime, a family Sunday. The campground glittered with beer tabs. We ate hot dogs charred black in fresh, airy buns. My parents and their loud-mouthed friends we called Aunt Ruth and Aunt Rita and Uncle Rock and Uncle Pie. It was a happy day. All of us kids had our own radar; our arm hairs were tiny antennae that received our parents’ moods, the pitch of their voices. But today there was laughter, my mother happily chain-smoking, and singing to my baby sister, “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anybody else but me,” and my sister saying, “We don’t have an apple tree.” My father wasn’t drunk. Instead, he was a father who inflated my brothers’ rafts and water wings. Who said parental things like, “Don’t go in the creek until after your food’s digested” and “Watch out for the fire ants, you monkeys.” I was the oldest and I felt myself in Father’s radar that day. I felt something particular, some kind of flesh-of-my-flesh feeling, a sullen pride.
I was a barefoot sultan, one of my brother’s clean cotton diapers wrapped around my head; I swashbuckled across a decaying log vivid with red, shiny ants. My tiny stomach splayed out, my feet bird-clawing the log, my imaginary sword drawn. My father called out, “Ahoy,” and the grownups assaulted me with a hail of hot dog bun bits saying they were bullets. I stood my ground.
Later I swam in a deep eddy of the rank creek. It seemed wild to a child, though it reaches up only to a man’s chest, and is filled with plastic bags and bottles and cans. Brackish water emptied in from a rusty pipe and green algae and muck pooled beneath it. Out in the middle of the creek there was a ledge where a kid could step into a floating nothingness – a space walk. And I did.
I stepped off and floated like the jellyfish I’d seen at the aquarium on a school field trip, tentacled and free until something wild gripped the top of my head and pushed me down. At first I pushed weakly against the resistance above me. My heart whomped in my ears, a pulse spreading into my sinuses. Then my father’s great hairy arm plunged me down farther underneath the surface. It is in encapsulated moments like these that we meet ourselves – know exactly who we are. I did not remember that my invisible sword was still in my hands and that I might have run him straight through. Water came into my nose. My muscles flexed wildly shooting off synapses like blanks. But how quickly I stopped struggling. (We took a self-defense class here, and the teacher said, “What’s more important? Your life or your purse?” We don’t have purses, I wanted to shout. Any one of us would have scrapped for a dirty one-dollar bill.) Underwater my body, filled with its whirring equipment, went limp.
“Okay, ladies,” Sarah says, “take a minute to finish up.” With our journals in our laps, we would do anything to shrug ourselves out of our acne-scarred skin, our cloudy fingernails. So, in turn around the circle, we tell the worst things that ever happened to us. We believe this will make us well. In the folding chair next to me, Stella, who once broke a glass panel in the infirmary to get at the Nyquil and who has been here three times before, is telling about how her mother, plastered on gin, rammed into a tree at the bottom of their driveway, paralyzing her sister from the neck down. The great compassionate beam of Sarah’s eyes floods Stella, floods the whole room.
The circle is quiet. I look down at my paper. I long to be looked at like that. I know what will happen if I tell Sarah. She will say, “No wonder. Your father tried to drown you.” She will be so happy with herself; at last she will understand what happened to make me the way I am now. She will know that she is nothing like me and never will be. Her father never tried to drown her. She is safe. She will keep waking up and slicing banana on her bran cereal, walking her dog. She will never shoot up on a roof ledge and fall fourteen stories into a fireman’s bull’s-eye.
What would she say if I told her that through my father’s outstretched arm, radiating down the hairy limb, was a question . . . What are you made of? It’s good to know you are nothing, and then, like finding a hidden drawer in a flea market desk with something valuable in it, a small pocket inside you rips itself open. A tiny bleating voice urges you on and suddenly you know you are worth fighting for.
Sarah leans forward in her chair, her ponytail bobbing behind her head. “June?”
I look into Sarah’s face. Beneath my fingertips, I feel the indentation of my writing, where I have pressed too hard with my pen. I see how much she wants to help me.
For weeks I have shaken my head and they have passed me over. Today I will read what I have written, like stepping off the ledge in the creek.
“You can do it,” Sarah urges.
I open my mouth to talk. But then that same fighting impulse from being underwater shoots through me. I know how to protect my own small life. How could she ever understand what really happened that day? The lush gift my father gave to me.
Without looking up from my beat-up notebook, I pretend to read, “My father called me Junebug.”
Sarah nods, she pauses to see if I want to add anything, but I stay quiet. I don’t get the beam of her love. She passes over me, but sitting in the cold folding chair I am flooded by the message transmitted through my father’s meaty hand straight into the crown of my head. My feet hammered his shins, my mouth finding the thick hairy arm. I opened my jaw and brought my teeth down hard as if I were biting through the rind of a shiny, summer orange.
Mary Michael Wagner’s fiction has appeared in Strange Attraction: The Best of Ten Years of ZYZZYVA, Love Stories for the Rest of Us (Pushcart Press), The Cream City Review, Spoon River Quarterly, and in the O. Henry Prize Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies.