Something I Could Control

They were docked for her.

The offence was not that she was dead. It was that there had been something of value in that room and now there was not, and four men had allowed it, and somebody had to answer for the loss.

Twenty thousand pesos, split four ways, straight out of what they were paid.

I know the figure because it was said out loud in the room while I was in it, twice, by a man who was irritated about it. Nobody lowers their voice in front of the merchandise.

Twenty thousand pesos. A year of somebody, and a finished course, and a certificate they had not got round to issuing her, and the correction for the whole of it was five thousand pesos a man.

I want to be fair to them. It was real money to them. They were properly annoyed.

And every one of us in that room did the other arithmetic that same afternoon, and not one of us said a word about it to anybody.

If they were going to be docked, they were going to have it back. Nobody needed to say that out loud. They took out of us what they had not been paid.

Out of. Or I suppose, what they left in us, when they were finished.

I have worked out the exchange rate since. I had the time, and arithmetic is a thing you can do lying down.

Say a tear is worth ten pesos. That is generous, and I am being generous on purpose.

Five thousand pesos is five hundred tears. Each of them. Two thousand between the four, and that is only if you accept my rate.

And five hundred is a great deal more than it sounds like. You cannot get five hundred out of a person in one evening. You cannot get it out of her in two. It has to be collected in instalments, over days, by somebody willing to keep coming back.

Which is why it took a week.

My hips hurt. My legs. All the places he used, and he used them, and he used them a great deal, and he was not kind, and the unkindness was the item.

Everything hurt, everything was bruised, everything was backed up.

They had to give me pills so I could shit.

A girl who cannot go becomes a medical problem in about three days, and a medical problem is a girl who is not available, and not available was the only phrase in that building that meant anything.

I think I found that humiliating the first time. I could not tell you when I stopped.

He wanted to hear it. That was the whole of it. He wanted the screaming and he wanted to watch me cry, and he would stop when he got it and start again when I stopped, and he was patient about that in a way I have never managed to describe to anybody who was not in the building.

They were square by about Wednesday.

Nobody stopped.

The debt was paid in the middle of the week and they went on collecting until the end of it, and that tells you what the five thousand pesos actually was.

It was not a reason. It was a permission.

She had one thing left to spend and she spent it, and I would never have asked her to hold on to it for our sake. I am saying it because both things are true, and leaving the second one out would be a kindness to nobody.

There was one night in that week that has never filed with the others. It is not the worst of them. I have stopped trying to work out why it is the one that stayed.

I felt him come in before I heard him, and the whole shape of what he was carrying, sitting in him with nowhere to go and a dead girl at the bottom of it who could not be billed for any of it.

And then I felt him while it was happening.

Everybody understands the mechanics. There is nothing clever in them and they do not need explaining. What I cannot make you feel, and I have tried, in rooms with people who loved me, is that I got both ends of it.

His and mine. At once. In the same place, which was me, at the same volume, with no way to sort one from the other.

I could not separate out afterward which parts of that were his. I have tried to separate them since, the way you pick threads out of a hem, and they do not come apart. Some of what I felt in that hour was relief, and I know exactly whose relief it was, and it was in me, and it has never fully left.

They do not mark the face. Everything else was fair game, and by then most of it had been used.

The back is a record. The rest of it is weather.

I got up afterward. You always get up afterward, there is no alternative on offer, and the state I was in matters. I was not distraught. I was not anything, particularly. I got up, and I did the rest of the day, and I lay down that night, and that is when I could not find myself.

It is the closest I can get to it. I lay there and went looking for the edge of me and there was not one. There was a room, and there had been a man’s satisfaction in my chest, and there were eight girls asleep around me who I could all still feel, and somewhere in that was supposed to be a Marisol and I could not locate her.

So I used my nails.

My hand did it and I watched. Inside of my forearm, up high, where the skin is thin and nobody looks and there is nothing there they wanted.

And there she was.

There is the entire thing. It hurt, and the hurt was small and bright and it had one address, and the address was me. Not eight other people. Not a man on the other side of the room. Mine, and I knew it was mine, and I had not been able to say that about anything in my chest for a very long time.

Everything else was dull. That is the part nobody gets right when they talk about this. The year was heavy and grey and it went on, and it arrived in me mixed up with everybody else’s. This was a clean note in the middle of noise.

I went back the next night. And after that it was a thing I did.

I was careful, and the care was not only about hiding. Arms and thighs. High up. The inside, where it is soft.

Never anywhere they were using.

I have had that put to me as though it were squeamishness and it is the exact opposite of squeamishness. Those parts were not mine to cut. They had been taken and they were in use and I had no more authority over them than I had over the door. What I had was maybe eight inches of skin on the inside of each arm and a stretch at the top of each leg, and inside that border I decided everything. Where. How deep. Whether tonight. Nobody consulted, nobody informed, nobody’s permission.

It was the only property I had left and I administered it.

The territory got smaller. I watched that happen over a few months without ever once thinking about it in those words, and I am only able to put it like that now, with the benefit of a great deal of distance and several years of not being there. They kept finding new places, and every place they found stopped counting, and the map I was working with kept being redrawn by somebody else.

I never ran out. It got close, and I never ran out.

Puchica. Listen to me. I sound like a woman defending her garden.

Leaving that out would have been the kind of lie I told you I would not tell. So. You are going to want to know whether I was trying to die.

No. That is the honest answer and it is not the comfortable one.

I was trying to find out where I stopped.