At the worst point, I would sleep with the lights and the radio on so it would seem as though I was still alert. (Mr. Young told me men had come by and asked which apartment I lived in, which of course he didn’t tell them, but it fed my nervousness.) I didn’t sleep well and still don’t. I was, as they say of traumatized people, hypervigilant and I was setting up my home to appear hypervigilant too. My flesh had turned to something brittle with tension. I used to look at the thick steel cables holding up the Golden Gate Bridge and think of the muscles in my neck and shoulders that felt as taut and as hard. I startled easily and flinched—cringed, really—when anyone made a sudden movement near me.
I tell all this not because I think my story is exceptional, but because it is ordinary; half the earth is paved over with women’s fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie underneath see sunlight, this will not change. I tell this to note that we cannot imagine what an earth without this ordinary, ubiquitous damage would look like, but that I suspect it would be dazzlingly alive and that a joyous confidence now rare would be so common, and a weight would be taken off half the population that has made many other things more difficult to impossible.
I tell it too because when I wrote about all these things in general—in the objective voice of editorials and surveys of the scene—I didn’t represent enough of the way it harms you, or rather the way it harmed me. There’s a passage in Sohaila Abdulali’s book on surviving rape about a kind of voice—“a way of telling the story in a smooth arc; matter-of-factly, with intonation but no real emotion. . . . No matter how many details we share, we leave out the unbearable ones that nobody wants to hear.” In my book on walking I wrote, “It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness out of doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wished to harm me for no reason other than my gender, that sex so readily became violence, and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem,” but that too didn’t quite plunge into what it was like inside my head.
Danger wracked my thoughts. Scenarios of attack would arise unbidden, and sometimes I addressed them by imagining winning the combat, usually by means of martial-arts moves I’m not really capable of, and so I killed in order not to be killed over and over during the grimmest years of that era, in imagined scenarios that were intrusive, unwanted, anxiety-driven, a kind of haunting and a way of trying to take control of being haunted. I realized then that making you think like a predator was one thing predators could do to you. Violence itself had penetrated me.
I had more ethereal ways of coping. Casting about for strategies to be safe, I imagined protective clothing, and if you imagine clothing sufficient to stop harm, you imagine armor, and then, if you were me, you’d end up with the full medieval metalware pile. I became preoccupied with armor for a few years and visited it in museums and read up on it in books, imagined being inside it, aspired to try it on. Toward the end of this time a friend of mine became a studio assistant to a New York artist, Alison Knowles, whose husband, Dick Higgins, was from the wealthy family that had established the Higgins Armor Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. I wrote him a letter asking if he could arrange for me to try on armor, making the request cheerful, cerebral, an interesting experiment rather than a fantasy born out of agony.
I never got closer to the armor, and it was an imaginative and not a practical solution. What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you? But maybe being in that cage would have freed me in some way. Or maybe I was in it and both freed and stifled by it: when I think of who I was then and often am now, the hard reflective, defensive surface of armor seems like a good image for it. There’s a way you can throw all your consciousness into that surface, into being witty, vigilant, prepared for attack, or just so stressed out your muscles lock up and your mind locks down. You can forget your own tender depths and how much of life that matters takes place there beneath the surface and the surfaces. It’s still easy to be the armor. We die all the time to avoid being killed.
Images of levitation also arose unbidden as I revisited or imagined attacks; I dreamed often of flying, but I wasn’t asking for that full freedom, just imagining lifting out of reach, however many feet that might be above the head of a pursuer. If I could not have a body too solid to be harmed, an armored body, could I have one too ethereal to be part of the clashes on the surface of the earth?
I imagined that so earnestly that I can still feel and see myself rising up to the level of the street lamp outside my apartment, hovering there in the halo of light in the night, safe not just from predators but from the laws of physics and the rules governing human bodies and perhaps from the vulnerability of being a mortal who had a body and lived on earth and from the weight of all those fears and that hate.
Disappearing Acts
1
One night late in my teens, my friend who’d given me the desk and a friend of hers and I walked down Polk Street, the lower stretch of the street where the bright lights of the cheerful old buildings with late-night bars and stores gave way to taller, blanker facades that cast longer shadows and where the runaway children sold themselves to the men who purchase children. We were walking in the dark, and I was reciting the refrain to a song that had taken possession of me, that I couldn’t get out of my head, that had a power that seemed as though it could be my power, so perhaps I possessed it instead, like an amulet, a spell I could cast, a fuel that could surge through me and make me something unstoppable.
It was “Mercenaries (Ready for War)” by John Cale, the avant-garde musician and sometime rocker who cofounded the Velvet Underground. I must have heard it on the radio because I never owned the record. The lyrics, if you read them, are full of scorn for soldiers, but the rhythm and the voice said something else. Disapproval was the railroad tracks but power was the train rumbling over them; the song had it both ways. The force of the thundering drum and bass and the howling, raging man’s voice intoning “Ready for war” over and over was a soldier’s power, was itself a desire for war, a hypervigilance that was a high, a readiness for anything, an armor made out of attitude. I didn’t want a war, but since there was one, or many, I wanted to be ready for it. Or them. “Just another soldier boy” went another of its refrains.
I didn’t imagine myself as a man but in those moments when I felt swept up by power that surged like confidence and sureness, I didn’t imagine myself as a woman. I wanted to be rugged, invincible, unstoppable, and I didn’t have examples of women who were those things. But I lost myself in the moment and the music; to be myself was to be, it seemed then, outside that power or unable to access it, to be vulnerable not in the sense of openhearted, but prone to harm. I think that a lot of girls and young women have this yearning that is part desire to have a man and part desire to be him, to merge with this force, to be where power is, to be powerful, to cleave unto it in the self or by bringing your body to it as an offering and as a quest for transmission. To be the armor and not what’s vulnerable behind it.