You Are Contractually Obligated to Withstand Violence
Y
ou see yourself again in the window of a foreclosed travel agency. You’re advertising a yoga retreat in Bali. Sun-glossed rice paddies unfold behind you, your hands pressed into a gentle prayer. Namaste! Now at a 25 percent discount when you book a year in advance! *flights not included. You’d felt like a beggar when they’d arranged you into that pose, but in the poster you look serene, all-knowing.
It happens every day now. You are everywhere: on breakfast cereal boxes and in election campaign videos, ads for car insurance and shaving cream. This morning it was the coffee shop bulletin board, advertising an AI math tutoring service called ThinkZoo. Equations buzzed around your head like a swarm of gnats. You left so quickly you bumped into a table, spilling the pistachio milk turmeric latte Anya had sent you out for. On the way home, you materialized on the LED billboards lining the subway station. You were dressed like a Viking: furs draped over your shoulders, hair bolted into braids, swords crossed at your back, a neon-blue stream of Ice Brew energy beverage tumbling from your drinking horn.
Your roommate, Anya, is a model. This was the first thing she’d told you when you’d met, though you could have guessed. She floats instead of walks, has limbs like alabaster matchsticks, the alien yet regal features of a chess piece. She wakes up at 6 a.m. to meditate, sits on the floor and eats a breakfast of sunflower seeds, gogi berries, green tea—like she is her own pet bird. She posts pictures of her morning carrot juice, her collarbones, her bell-sleeved wrists. When you’d moved in to the empty apartment, she’d told you she doesn’t believe in furniture. “Like, that it exists?” you’d said.
“That its presence is meaningful.”
Anya was new to the city, trying to launch a hand modelling career, always had her sleeves pulled over her fingertips to protect from sun damage. You were not new to the city, not trying to launch anything, no part of you so beautiful it was more valuable when concealed.
Shortly after you’d moved in, Anya asked if you’d ever considered modelling. You worked as a waitress, served martinis and pilsners and platters of calamari to off-hours prosecutors and football coaches. They boasted about their raises and affairs as you tried to remind them of your presence, silently begging for them to demand something of you. It paid less than minimum; the other servers made better tips. They had larger eyes, or slimmer necks. They were feline, or childish, in ways you didn’t know how to replicate. There was a job Anya’s agent said she was too ethereal for. They needed someone domestic. Someone proportional but forgettable. She said you’d be perfect.
A representative from the agency called and told you to dress in a way that screamed universal. You said, “Like an astronaut?” He said, “No, like, relatable. Everyone will see themselves in you. You’re a recently divorced corporate lawyer, a nepo baby fashion model. You livestream about video games or zero waste, or you work nights at a warehouse, who cares! You’re everywoman, right? Everyone will see you and think, she’s just like me.”
You didn’t say that this wasn’t possible. Instead you said, “Jeans and a button-up?”
“Make it a t-shirt. Keep it neutral. Try to match your undertones.”
You didn’t know what your undertones were and four online quizzes gave you four different results. The photographer met you in the backlot of an outlet mall. You spent all day being marionetted into exaggerated poses: holding a bouquet of flowers, slouched dramatically against a wall, contently sipping a coffee, dancing with headphones on, comparing two soup cans in a grocery aisle, and many photos with no context whatsoever, where you merely laughed, stared morosely, dramatically crossed your arms, or looked into the camera with the blankest expression possible as if for a passport or a mugshot. They took you to a hospital, pretended to wheel you into surgery, asked you to stare out the window of an unlit room. They praised your universal banality. At the end of the day, they gave you a cheque and a release form. “What’s this for?” you asked. They said it was just protocol.
You cut your hours at the pub and spent your free evenings going to the pet store. Your apartment doesn’t allow pets, but you liked to watch the goldfish flash through the tanks. One night, near closing, you studied a pair of lovebirds in a silver cage. They nuzzled each other’s downy heads, their feathers the colour of candy hearts. You wished you had someone to send a picture of them to. Someone you could say they remind me of us to.
You passed a display by the registers. The standee wore athleisure, a cardboard border collie leaping over her shoulder, a metallic orb in its teeth. Man’s best friend deserves the best—Bark Bot! Special Offer: $79.99!
You lay in bed until sunrise, listening to sirens and car alarms, trying to deep breathe wellness into your kidneys or your blood.
You placed a hand over your ribs as your organs tightened into a stitch. The standee didn’t move, even though she looked exactly like you. You tried to breathe the cramp out of your gut as you rushed to the door, face hidden behind your hands.
You left your shifts—covered in gin and sweat—to find yourself at the metro station posed with a vacuum cleaner or drinking apoptogenic mushroom tea or wearing a necklace that sends full-body health reports straight to your phone. It looked like a tiny golden spear, resting against your sternum. You lay in bed until sunrise, listening to sirens and car alarms, trying to deep breathe wellness into your kidneys or your blood. At work, the broad-chested men who barked at you for refills seemed to observe you with a new wolfishness. They never said anything, but they must have recognized you. You could see it in their eyes, their teeth, their veins. Their breath hot and sharp and hungry.
You struggled to fill pitchers of beer without spilling, to carry trays through the smoke-laced room without bumping into lither co-workers. Your eye always skipped between the television screens mounted in each corner. They played baseball highlights, bikini boxing matches. No mention of heat waves, uprisings, the cost of apples.
And one night, there you were, in each corner of the room and above the bar. You were seated in a board room, then at a movie theatre, then a family dinner. The world moved irritatingly fast around you while you shifted in discomfort in your seat. Suddenly, you were on the toilet in a public bathroom. A tube of medicated ointment appeared in your hand with a tiny puff of smoke, your jaw cranking into a smile at its reveal. You said, in a voice you’d never heard before, “Thankfully, when I have a yeast infection, there’s Valextren! It soothes vaginal itching, while rebalancing my pH, so I can—”
You didn’t stay for the list of side effects. You left mid-shift and never returned, forfeited the night’s tips and your final cheque. You did not leave the apartment for a week, not even to buy food, and instead stole bites of the pre-cut watermelon or sesame-ginger snap pea salad Anya stocked the fridge with. Foods that had to be eaten cold and tasted only of water. Eventually, she left a note asking you to transfer her $57.83 to cover what you’d taken. You couldn’t watch TV so you listened to the radio, but the all songs were about love, so you listened to podcasts, but the hosts talked only about capitalism and hopelessness, so you read books, but all the books were about loneliness and dead parents, so you watched documentaries about animals who went extinct before humanity even existed. Dinosaurs, trilobites, the five-eyed Opabina.
It has been weeks—you’re not sure how many, only that it rains more—since the pub. After the travel agency it was an air purifier and after the air purifier it was a meditation app and after the meditation app it was a sleep mask with built-in Bluetooth headphones. You can fall asleep to pre-programmed soundscapes. Jungles, oceans, birdsong.
Anya wants you out of the house because she is doing a guided meditation where she transports her body to the moment of her own death in order to grieve and process her mortality, and she thinks she is going to cry a lot, and she is a very ugly crier. She says it’ll take about four hours.
You get to the bus stop, your hair and shoulders soaked in rain, and you’re already there, advertising a birth control prescription app called PlanConnect. Let’s get intimate! reads a bubbly pink font that is both sexy and awkward. You cover your lips with your fingertips, eyes wide in coy embarrassment.
You can’t remember the last time you were intimate with someone, just that it wasn’t very memorable nor very recent. You download the app and plug in your insurance information. Might as well, to regulate your hormones, or just in case it comes up.
You get on the first bus that arrives. You’re more aware of your reproductive organs than you typically are, so Google what a hormone is—seriously, what is a hormone? Some chemical floating through your body that makes you sad or horny or hungry? This is very concerning. A threat to free will.
A girl wearing pink headphones and a leather jacket gets on at the next stop. She has a bouquet of tulips in her lap. You wonder if she’s an actress or if she plays viola in an orchestra, if she has a boyfriend who makes her pastries or a girlfriend who sings her to sleep. She’s very beautiful, so she probably has someone.
The screen above her flashes. You stand with your arms outstretched in a field of grass tall as your waist, you face tipped skyward. Be one, be pure, be free! You glow like you’re about to ascend to the heavens. You’re pretty sure Anya is in this New Religious Movement—The Oneness, you think it’s called. It seems to have gotten quite popular.
The idea of an eternal soul partner sounds nice. Someone to rock you to sleep, to put their hands over your eyes.
You press the button for the next stop, but you don’t know where you are, some industrial suburb you’ve never heard of. The doors open; you stay seated. You are frozen with guilt for wasting the driver’s time. You ride the bus all the way around the city, watching the cars pinball out the window, like everything is going at warp speed.
You get home past midnight and ask Anya if The Oneness has brought her complete inner peace.
“Yeah, totally,” she says, plucking puffed lotus seeds from a ceramic bowl. “I met my eternal soul partner there, everyone does. We have universally aligned energies.”
You ask if you should join. The idea of an eternal soul partner sounds nice. Someone to rock you to sleep, to put their hands over your eyes.
“I don’t think you’re spiritually compatible. You have to be an innately metaphysical person. You have to be cosmically open.”
You ask how a person becomes cosmically open.
“Hmm, it’s kind of something you just are. Like being tall, or allergic to strawberries.”
Every few weeks, a cheque in the mail. Never a consistent amount. $17.44. $96.12. $572.02. Anya sticky-notes your door with reminders to pay the rent, but you stop opening the envelopes even when your bank account dips into the red. You recognize the health-scan necklace you’ve seen yourself advertise around Anya’s neck. It matches perfectly with her set of chunky gold rings, the hoops lanced through her ears. Every night, she must get a report of her perfect vitals, her resting heart rate. She was built to live forever.
You try to figure out how Anya makes money, look at her social media profiles to see the jewelry around her neck, teas that promote weight loss and mental clarity, a pillowcase made of mulberry silk. She is at a yoga retreat. She is eating $12 dragon fruit. You get an ad for a financial planning app in which you alternate from tugging at your hair in frustration to beaming in a rain of dollar bills. You don’t download it, even though you know you should.
Anya starts spending hours in the bath each night. She listens to a tape she claims is supposed to inspire creativity. A genderless, disembodied voice sifts through the apartment like a ghost in the pipes. WHAT IS YOUR FIRST MEMORY OF FALLING? WHAT SHAPE DOES YOUR NAME MAKE WHEN SPOKEN? WHO WOULD YOU THINK OF WHEN LEVITATING? You sit in the dark, listening through the walls, trying to answer the questions. Birth. Hollowness. That dog they sent into space, alone.
Anya’s eternal soul partner’s name is Anthony. You wonder if the soul partner assignments were alphabetical. Like her, he is blond and wears only variations of beige. He works at an investment firm. She leans against the kitchen counter, one hand wrapped around his arm, gazing at him while he cubes golden beets.
“Who’s that?” Anthony says, as you try to dip past them unnoticed.
“Just my roommate.”
“Have we met before?”
“I don’t think so.” You look at the floor.
“You’re from that video. What was it called again?” He points the knife at you in realization, smiling with all his teeth. “Girl buried in quicksand. Right? That was it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, it was you.” He talks like he’s taking a bite. “That’s crazy. I thought it was real. How’d they film that? Did you have a tube up your nose or something?”
“I’m sorry,” you feel like your body is filling with water. “You must be mistaking me for someone else.”
In girl buried in quicksand, you lay naked in a concrete pit, your eyes cast up, your breasts and vulva inhumanly perfect and smooth. You feel more humiliated than if it were your real body on display. A shirtless man wearing a wrestling mask towers over you with a shovel in one hand. You make high pitched, nigh-orgasmic moans as he drops shovelful after shovelful of sand over your head. It drips down your shivering body, until you’re fully encased. You feel the sand smother you, shutting down your organs one by one: your liver, then your eyes, then your lungs.
You look up the release form you’d signed at the photoshoot. It feels like reading scientific jargon. This could be a report on nuclear physics, stem cell research. Agreement commences on the Effective Date and is in effect indefinitely henceforth. The Agency is hereby granted unlimited use of The Model’s Image, with unrestricted use to reprint or modify said image in formats including but not limited to audio, video, photographic, virtual reality, robotic, and animatronic. If The Model breaches any of the above conditions, he or she may be subject to legal action—
You stop reading. You can’t bear to learn what they have the power to do to you.
Rain blears the windows into perpetual dusk. You stay in your bedroom and watch true crime documentaries. You need to teach yourself how to avoid violence. You need to become less huntable. Butcherings of angelic women on screen. You try to imagine their unpaid parking tickets, the ingrown hairs swollen in their armpits, but it only makes you sadder.
You pull the covers over your head to mask the sound of Anya making celery juice. You’ve been waiting until she falls asleep to sneak into the kitchen for a glass of water, to steal grapes or leftover sushi. During the day, you stay in bed with the lights off. Sometimes, while she and Anthony talk in the kitchen, you lie still and silent for hours. Pure obedience, you’re not even sure to what. An ad tries to load through the storm-frizzed wifi, but you don’t shut the screen in time.
You wear a lab coat, syringe raised. You have the power to save a life. Give your blood! You slap your laptop shut and sit in the dark while the whirring of the juicer digs into your brain. Anya’s tape presses through the walls. WHO TAUGHT YOU THE MEANING OF SUFFERING? WHAT DO YOU TRUST MORE: YOUR DREAMS OR YOUR MEMORIES? WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE MORE: YOUR FEARS OR YOUR HANDS? WHY DO YOU THINK GOD IS DISAPPOINTED IN YOU?
You don’t know your blood type and all of a sudden everything feels like a potential freak accident—the faucet, the washing machine, the door trim—so you walk to the hospital. What if you’re on scene at a car accident and they need an AB negative donor, and you have to fall asleep to the obituaries wondering if you could have saved their lives? Everything inside you would be better served nourishing someone else back to life.
It feels very antifeminist, to dress for a faceless concept of a man, but maybe if you smelled like persimmons you’d be able to remember the last time you were intimate with someone, you’d have gotten better tips at the pub, you would feel nourished eating only foods that grow underground.
You pass a billboard larger than a car. You’re wearing perfumed lingerie. You gather this from the lines wisping off your body, your generously enhanced cleavage fairly convincing. You blow a kiss to the camera. Sniff … and be seduced! ScentWear Luxe: For you … and for him …
You wonder who he is. It feels very antifeminist, to dress for a faceless concept of a man, but maybe if you smelled like persimmons you’d be able to remember the last time you were intimate with someone, you’d have gotten better tips at the pub, you would feel nourished eating only foods that grow underground.
In the ER waiting room, you’re on the cover of a pamphlet advertising a multivitamin called VitaMaxPlus5000, arms outstretched in a rainfall of vegetables. You don’t take a multivitamin but you probably should. What if you’re not getting enough B12 or riboflavin? What even is riboflavin and where do you get it? Anya probably knows. Anya almost certainly gets enough riboflavin. They’ll probably tell you you’re deficient in everything and full of microplastics. They’ll say something like, if we gave this blood to a sickly child, it would kill them on the spot.
They bring you to a room split apart by plastic curtains. The nurse’s face is hidden behind her blue-paper scrubs.
“You said there’s a problem with your blood?”
“I don’t know my blood type,” you say. “I need to register as an organ donor.”
“What are your symptoms?”
“I guess I feel lightheaded.”
She notes that down. “Are you on any medications?”
“I’m on birth control, but that’s just to regulate my hormones.”
“Are you experiencing any pain?”
“I want to be good at something. I want to feel at ease. I want to be one of those people who always have smart things to say about pop culture or the environment.”
“I’m going to listen to your heart,” she warns, and presses the stethoscope to your chest. You hadn’t considered this possibility, that you might have something wrong with your heart. A mass in your aorta and six months to live. She pulls the stethoscope away with a soft hum. You don’t know what that means. “Have we met before?”
“No,” you say.
“Oh, you’re the multivitamin girl, right? I started taking those. They really helped my focus. I used to be so jittery.”
“But you’re not anymore?”
She shakes her head, like it’s the first time she’s considered it. Her eyes are damp and open as a lamb’s, but the rest of her face is hidden. Under her scrubs she could be anyone. She could have sat next to you in freshman math class. She could have cut you off as you were trying to cross the street last week. You could have served her cider after a night shift. She could have left without tipping.
You touch your fingers to your cheek. “I am in pain, actually.”
“Where?”
“My face. It hurts when people look at me and when I try to speak. I can’t look at pictures of myself. Even from when I was a child. There’s something in the skin, or the bones. I need it taken out.”
She presses along your cheekbone, her gloved fingers soft, powdery. It has been so long since you’ve felt intimacy like this. She can feel down to the hollows under your skin. Your pulse, tucked behind your eye. “I don’t feel any swelling. I’ll order an X-ray.”
“I just don’t want to be looked at anymore.”
She nods sympathetically. “Let me talk to the surgeon.”
You wake up numb from ear to jaw, light filtered through a thin veil of skin stretched over your eyes. You spend three days recovering in a windowless room, fed from an IV tapped into your wrist. You run your fingertips over your gauze-wrapped face, but the bandages and painkillers are too thick to feel through. There is no television to watch, no music to listen to, but they provide a white noise machine so you lay in the half-dark room, whale song and tropical rain smothering the sound of footsteps down the hall.
On the third day, the surgeon untucks the bandages from the base of your chin and unwinds and unwinds and unwinds.
“Wow, this may be the best one I’ve ever done. Can I take a picture?”
You nod mechanically as he hands you a mirror. Your unwashed hair, and a blank oval of skin. No eyes, no nose, no mouth.
Behind the smoothness, you can feel the inner workings of your sinuses: run your tongue over your teeth, sniffle your nose. When you speak, you feel your skin stretched over your mouth, your words muffled in a distant, laryngitic way.
They send you home with a pamphlet detailing the recovery process and a month’s supply of nutrition injections. You carefully prod the incisions: one scythes your jaw, another zips down the centre, two gill-like slits open and swollen behind your ears. Behind the smoothness, you can feel the inner workings of your sinuses: run your tongue over your teeth, sniffle your nose. When you speak, you feel your skin stretched over your mouth, your words muffled in a distant, laryngitic way. Where your eyes used to be, there are only two faint divots in the skin, but it still hurts, your eyes tucked under the film. The world appears distant, fuzzy, everything blurred into vagueness. It feels like having allergies, or a cold, or a cotton pillowcase over your head.
You ask Anya to teach you how to meditate and she talks the entire way through, but you do feel calmer. A space has opened between your ribs. You sleep in. You don’t even remember your dreams. You sit by the open window and photosynthesize. A violinist busks down the street, sweet music under the shriek of brakes from the metro station right below you.
A lightning crack neons the sky while you walk home. It has only been a week since you’ve started leaving the house. Your incisions have paled, the sutures dissolving into your skin. You spend a lot of time walking, no destination in mind. You have adjusted to this new way of seeing the world. You forget what it felt like to see with clarity. You like to observe the blue hour: the yellow restaurant windows, the streetlamps like a row of lanterns. Rain thick enough to hurt blitzes your shoulders and skull. You turn into the nearest building, the front entrance of a glass-mouthed department store. The floors are reflective and smooth as ice. It smells like polyester, industrial cleaner.
At the perfume counter, a poster of your old face—skin air-brushed, lips parted and eyes winged in gold pen—with the dewy bottle pressed to your cheek. Obliviòn by Alchémie.
“Would you like a sample?” the saleswoman asks.
“No thank you.”
“It has notes of fig and patchouli. Someone of your condition must prioritize smelling good.”
“I’m allergic.”
You pass counters that sell anti-aging cream, nail polish, body scrub. In every iteration you are smooth, flawless, seductive. You walk slowly through the rows of lingerie, denim, business wear, athleisure, into the centre vein of the mall. Four storeys high, a puzzle of escalators you can’t make sense of, bright as an operating theatre. Dozens of people: bogged down by shopping bags, rain-drenched, taking phone calls, sipping food court lattes. Their shoes squeak with each step.
You walk past a big box tech store, an aromatherapy shop, home goods, tween clothing, makeup. Organic bamboo bedsheets. Hand lotion made with sea kelp. A smart watch. You are in the windows wearing a chic pink and green snowsuit, holding a skateboard under your arm, standing on a wind-blown beach in a bikini. A group of three teenage girls observe the poster. Your hair is crimped into salty waves, the body they’d photoshopped onto you lean and plush.
“God she’s so hot,” one of them says, with distain rather than admiration. The other takes her gum out of her mouth and flicks it onto the poster, where it sticks right onto your left eye.
Anya invites you dancing. She says you need to get out more. You’re so depressing to be around. You’ve never gone dancing, but you like the idea of so many strangers moving in time, like a pack of animals led only by instinct, tangled together like a rat king.
You wear the nicest clothes you have, the heels and tube skirt from your old waitress job, even though they make you walk like a foal. The club lights swivel like a purple meteor shower. You can hardly think over the music, hardly see through the haze, all the lights diffused by the skin pulled over your eyes. Anya says she wants a mint julep so you follow her to the bar.
The bartender pings Anya’s drink in front of her and lifts her head to look right at you. She has the same face you’ve seen plastered through the mall, a dewy perfume bottle against her unmarred face. The same face you’ve seen in ThinkZoo pamphlets and the Ice Brew ad in the metro. A face you saw so often the only way to escape it was to claw it off. Peel yourself into nothingness.
She is the girl wearing sandalwood scented underwear, the girl with her arms open to god, the girl trying to hide her yeast infection at a family dinner.
You want to cough or scream or throw up but you can’t. The bartender’s gaze drifts past you—you are unremarkable. There is nothing left of you to observe. A woman dancing alone in a circle of strangers has your face. The DJ standing in a disco-ball kaleidoscope has your face. She is everyone. She is the girl wearing sandalwood scented underwear, the girl with her arms open to god, the girl trying to hide her yeast infection at a family dinner. She donates blood. She takes multivitamins. Men bury her in quicksand and she doesn’t even resist.
You push through the crowd and a girl with that same face hovers above the stage, her hips bedazzled as she swings around the stripper pole with more grace than you have ever felt. You want to tear your mouth open; you want to ask her name; you want to move with that same effortless flight. You want to take them out for coffee, all of them, ask them where they were born and how they soothe themselves at three in the morning. You want to hold their hands and start a book club and prank each other’s families. You could laugh together; nothing would ever be embarrassing. You want to ask about their first heartbreaks and that bully from middle school and if they think life exists on other planets.
You elbow through the bathroom line. Inside it is hospital-bright, the music muffled like your own voice now. You brace your hands against the sink, not wanting to look in the mirror. A janitor cleans one of the stalls, her back to you. You press your fingertips to your cheeks, try to feel through your skin, feel the bones that have been shaved down and patched over. You’re still swollen from the surgery and it hurts to press, even just a little bit.
The janitor turns and her gaze meets yours in the mirror. She wears that face, the one hidden and crushed below the surface of your skin. You used to eat peaches with that mouth. You used to whisper song lyrics to yourself as you walked home.
Only her eyes are different, galactic and alert. You want to be jealous of her, you want to be angry at her, but really, all you want is for her to take your hand, sit across from you in an empty 24-hour diner, and ask you about survival. About loneliness. About tranquility. You want her to ask you what it felt like to have your seams ripped open. You could talk until sunrise about all the things that make us human, how it feels to walk past someone on the street unsure if they are a stranger or an old friend. You want to ask her parents’ names, her favourite food, her greatest fears. You want to watch her laugh, just one more time, please, but she leaves you alone under the sickly-white lights without even recognizing you. Maybe she goes outside to smoke a cigarette. Maybe she drives to another city. Maybe she goes home to sleep, her spine tucked against someone else’s chest. She could take a knife, carve your mouth back open, open your eyes, whittle you back into yourself. You could go to the rooftop together and scream until your voices became one.
