WORK BY L. N. PEARSON

 


     From INNOCENCE IS A COUNTRY YOU CROSS BY FOOT, PART ONE: FAUNA
      LISA NATALIE PEARSON

     In Neon Lit: The Time Out Book of New Writing Volume 2 (London: Quartet Books, 1999)
From many miles away, over the patchwork of charred pasture and turned fields, stitched together by long straight highways and dry red river beds, you can see it.
     From wide green lawns, well-watered despite the drought, that line the perfect white grid of suburban planning, each cul-de-sac an exclamation point; from the sagging concrete stoops of wood-slat houses in neighbourhoods overgrown with black-eyed susans and strangling vines; from any grocery store parking lot, elementary school playground, city bus window, you can see what everyone agrees is an atrocity.
     An outrage, an offence to decency, good taste, modesty.
     At the heart of the city, one hundred storeys high, it is slender, erect, the acuity of its triangular points an affront to the natural rules of building with parallel lines, cornerstones and materials that do not invite disaster. The tower is made entirely of glass and you think you can see right through it, but it takes the sky and throws it back at you. In those few minutes before dawn when the black sky eases into grey, the sun erases the stars on the glass. The morning red burns on it. The noonday sun, as if pierced by the tower, spills hot light over it, the air quivering, conjuring a mirage of water in the dust below. No one expected earthquakes here until now.
     If you fly into the city, you will see the tower and know you are almost there. Still, another ten minutes before the aeroplane, almost hovering, brings you so close to it, you think you might see inside her corner office on the ninety-fifth floor, actually count the yellow pencils on her desk, look over her shoulder, like he often does, and watch the calm persistent blow of air-conditioning — a monotone hum at a regulated sixty-eight degrees — lift wisps of her hair from the side of her face, chill the bare skin on her forearm, the tiny hairs on her neck raised in a shiver, though the afternoon sun beats on her back.
     If she looked up for a moment and turned to the window, you might think you could read her thoughts as she stares through the vague reflection of her face and looks out at the city, the decay, the sprawl, the emptiness beyond its boundaries, everyone below no bigger than an ant.
     He has no power over you, if you have no desire for him.
     She is sure of that.

It is estimated that seventy per cent of American men suffer from either sexual addiction or compulsion. They never quit even when it might make sense.

Accidental touches, hundreds of them. Fingertips on files, papers, pens, anything that changed hands. Legs and knees brushing beneath a table, a bump, a shift, a brush, a tremble. Touches that lasted a little too long, his fingers on her back, his hand on her shoulder. Not quite a touch but too close, breath on her neck, in her ear, her hair, while standing behind her. Touches she may well have imagined, all of them, because no matter how close he got, everything divided them. A kiss, remote. He was so far away.

     Self-restraint.
     Self-respect.
     Self-control.
     Self-inflicted.

By vibrating a tightly stretched membrane beneath their abdomens, cicadas, members of the family Cicadidae,produce a pitched clicking buzz, that together, in the hundreds, even thousands, becomes a fierce chorus, a staccato wail, a scream sustained for minutes on end, into the hours. In some parts of the country, broods of cicadas invade after an absence of more than a decade, the expectation of their return growing fervently each year they are buried in the ground. Or they are forgotten until the nymphs crawl out of the earth one summer, caked in black mud scraping their way on tiny breakable legs, small wings still wet, to the trunks of trees and thick summer leaves where they will remain unseen and feed, growing until their bellies moan and buzz. Then, their presence cannot be denied.

     Can you be sure you haven't imagined it?
     It's the impossibility of it that turns you on.
     What do you want that you don't have now?
     Am I worth the risk?

She often got close enough to let him touch her if he wanted, if he could, if he dared. Neither ever said a word. When she looked at him to know — did he really want her? — he gave nothing away, and she maintained innocence in her eyes. Their fingertips and hands, knees and thighs, shoulders and arms, discrete, cut off from their heads where the words were.

In the checkout line at the grocery store, her eyes grazed the screaming headlines: 'Ten Hot Spots You Didn't Know You Had', 'The President's Mistress Is a Communist Informer', 'The Bare Essentials for Your Summer Look', 'Test Your IQ: Independence Quotient', 'Easy Recipes for Dining Alone', 'Experts Warn the Apocalypse Is Near!' Who buys this shit, she wondered. In front of and behind her, older, younger, fatter, thinner pushing carts, squeezing fruit, scribbling cheques, counting change. In one basket, bok choy, pork loins, skimmed milk and blood oranges, in another, frozen pizza, diet soda, tampons and toothpaste. What could anyone really know about their lives? What gives anyone the right to judge? You don't know what happens in their beds, behind their doors, no one can know for sure, she thought, certainly not from just looking. Any one of these women could be a wife, his wife, no one's wife. She felt momentarily at home amongst strangers whose lives were startlingly elusive.
     She did know what the statistics told her: two in seven women have never orgasmed, three in five get divorced, one in four will be raped, more than half have been betrayed by a lover or a husband. How many of them know? Likely everyone is on such a list somewhere, fits into such and such a category. She'd like to think she was an anomaly but there was probably a list of the anomalous. Her sense of solidarity faded the more she thought she knew.
     The cool manufactured air and incessant chatter at the registers, the static over the loudspeakers — nothing said directly to her, no words she clearly understood — made her long to stand outside, alone, in the spring sun, the light warm and bright enough to cut through the clutter in her head.

     Why can't we say anything when something needs to be said?

And sometimes she touched him. Her hand taking hold of his arm to get his attention, brace her spill of laughter, make her point, remind him she is there, though it's obvious he has not forgotten. Her hand just below his shoulder to steady her dizzy want.

....