Lumen is just one name for vagina. There are others, many of them crude, which I would not utter but which pulse in my brain and have their own linguistic heartbeats. But Lumen is the best of them all. It makes you think of moons and astronomy and the comforting light of science.
Actually, a lumen is just a tube. It refers to any number of tubes in your body. Your throat is a lumen. And your ears and nose. Your arteries and veins. Your lungs are filled with branching lumens like the roots of a tree growing in your chest. You are made of tubes, and through your body of tubes pass fluids and gases and ephemeral magics that can’t be named or quantified.
Our bodies are factories. Food is put in at one end of a tube, it is processed over time, and it is ejected at the other end of the same tube. When it comes out it is something else. Also, the vaginal lumen. A boy puts himself in you. Your body accepts that offering and performs magic on it. Nine months later, out of the same lumen, a miniature human is disgorged.
My name is a processing function.
No. More to the point, a lumen is not the tube itself but rather the space within the tube. That’s important. Don’t you see how important that is?
That space is the lumen.
So I am Lumen. I am light, and I am space. I am emptiness. I am all the holes of the world. I am hallways and passageways. I am open doors. I am deep, dank wells. Maybe even gaps in time. Maybe I am the empty hiatus between day and night, the held breath of dusk. Or the excruciating nonmoment between an action and its consequence. I am the hiccup on the telephone line when someone delivers tragic news.
I am empty space, and I am the light that illuminates that space.
I am that furious lacuna between prolonged girlhood and the womanhood that refuses to come—when your breasts don’t bud and your limbs stay bony and your blood won’t come.
I sometimes grow tired of myself. I grow hateful.
I have been in love with punishable things.
*
I must have slept, but I don’t know for how long. The sun was low on the horizon when I woke. Blackhat Roy sat in the corner. He was looking intently at the cover of the book I brought him, but when he noticed I was awake he tossed it aside.
He said nothing, just watched me while I shifted my clothes back into place. My skin was pinched, my joints aching, my body on humiliating display. All I wanted was to get out of there as quickly as I could, but when I was about to leave, he came over and stood before me.
“Hey,” he said.
“What?”
“Just…”
He reached out, and at first I thought he was going to seize me again—but this was something new, something gentle. He moved himself against me, and it was a full moment before I realized he was embracing me.
Feeling bitten, I recoiled and pushed him away.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Lumen, I—” And he moved forward again.
“Don’t you dare,” I said and backed away. “Don’t touch me.”
He looked at me, confused, then down at his own hands as if to discover some unintentional threat there.
I didn’t want to explain. I was revolted by tenderness. I simply didn’t want to be loved by Blackhat Roy. The idea was unacceptable to me.
He came toward me again, and I clenched up.
“No,” I said. “Don’t.”
“Goddamn it, Lumen,” he said, exasperated, “I’m just trying to—is it this?” He gestured all around him, at his broken-down house, his meager life. “I’m just trying—”
He came at me again, more forcefully this time, trying to bind me in his arms. I fought against him, but the more I struggled, the tighter his hold got.
“Stop it,” he said. “Lumen, just stop—I’m not doing anything wrong.”
And when I finally wrenched myself free of him, my body swung backward, spiraling out of control, my face catching the edge of a plywood shelf, and I fell to the ground.
At first I was numb, dizzy, and then my hand went up to the sudden searing pain on my cheek and came back covered in blood.
“Lumen,” Roy said. “I’m sorry. I—”
“Shut up,” I said. “Just be quiet for a minute.”
I looked at myself in a mirror hanging on his wall, and I was surprised. There was a girl, a long gash on the side of her face, bleeding fluently, something unfocused in her eyes. That was me.
“Goddamn it,” Roy was saying behind me, and when I turned I found he wasn’t speaking to me at all. He was pacing the floor, his fists pressed tight against his eyes. “Goddamn it,” he said again. “I don’t know how. I don’t know how.” He took one of his fists and rapped his knuckles hard against his skull. “She shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I hurt her. I broke her.”
And there was nothing pretty about it, nothing dramatic. This had nothing to do with the rituals of our little town, nothing to do with breaching or the cycles of the moon. This was something different, horrible in its plainness. His rage, my bloodied face, his fists, my shame. These were not the primal forces of the earth working through our polluted souls, not the bright clamor of youth in the stark urban fields of the modern age. It was just small and ugly and wrong.
The hospital was closer than my house, so I rode there, my bicycle serpentining across the road in my dizziness. I wasn’t sure if I would make it. By the time I got there, the front of my shirt was soaked and sticky with blood. I told them I fell. They treated me immediately, calling my father, giving me six stitches. A plastic surgeon was called in, since the wound was on my face. Everyone was very concerned.
The hospital was tidy and clean. It reminded me of civilized places. Places I didn’t belong. Places I was too ashamed to go back to.
*
After the stitches, I asked the nurse if I could use the bathroom. I felt funny, and in the bathroom I discovered blood on the insides of my thighs. At first I thought that maybe Roy had injured me—but then I realized what it was. I wasn’t amenorrheic anymore.
It hadn’t been a very long time since I had incanted magic words to romance my blood into flowing. But now it seemed like I had traveled a great distance from those fancies. I had grown accustomed to blood of all kinds. This was just a period.
*