She has nothing to fear from the cock-strokers. They are far away and she is an older, confident woman. When she tires of watching one penis she simply clicks on to the next.
Within moments she’s comfortable with the spectacle. The only thing that manages to surprise her is when she comes across someone who really does just want to chat.
She photographs her screen, some graphic images, some more interested in the quality of the light, the line of the object. Night after night she trolls Chatroulette for the better part of an hour looking for life, hearing the same entreaty, “Show me your tits. Show me your tits.”
That’s a tricky request. She lost her bosom in a double mastectomy years earlier. She never bothered with a reconstruction. It seemed not worth the effort and money, but she recognizes the one-sided nature of her presence on Chatroulette. Getting photographs for free. Giving nothing in return.
One night she lifts her blouse overhead. Her face is hidden while her chest is on display. The double scars of her surgery look like a pair of huge eyes sealed shut forever. The seam of scar tissue. She doesn’t like that idea; still she allows people to look all they want. From beneath her shirt she even recognizes the sound of orgasm once or twice. Eventually the image of the sealed eyelids becomes more than she can bear. “Let me look,” she says from beneath her shirt, imagining her scars opening, letting in the light. “Let me look,” lowering her blouse, her eyes adjusting to the blinding monitor that’s rewired sight all together. “Let me look.” One hand on her camera, her eye. “Let me look. Let me look. Let me look.”
*
What is taking Sam so long to come back to bed?
So much time has passed since he left. I shake off the sheets and covers. I call from the top of the stairs. “Sam?” I rest my hand against the window in the hall and hear that awful sound again. A man outside coughing in the night. “Sam?” Each step down the stairs takes years. I’m frozen by terror. How long has Sam been gone? The photos lining the stairwell don’t anchor me. Pictures of my girls at birthdays, the beach, soccer games. “Sam?” I call to him from the bottom stair. The front doorknob spins against the lock and I cannot move. I forgot the baseball bat, too. Someone is trying to get inside. There is nothing I can do to stop him, the man who has come to chop us into tiny bits. The lock holds, but I am petrified. The man tries the handle again.
“Sam? Where are you?”
“I’m out here.” He spins the locked handle.
“You?” Sam is the man. “How’d you get locked out?” I grab one corner of the kitchen table.
“Are you kidding?” It is Sam at the door. I see him through the glass, coughing, mortal. Sam’s the man who’s come to chop us to bits. No wonder I kicked him out. No wonder I changed the locks. If he cannot stop death, what good is he?
“Open the door. Please. I’m so tired,” he says.
I look at the night that absorbed my life. How am I supposed to know what’s love, what’s fear? “If you’re Sam who am I?”
“I know who you are.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?” Don’t say wife, I think. Don’t say mother. I put my face to the glass, but it’s dark. I don’t reflect. Sam and I watch each other through the window of the kitchen door. He coughs some more.
“I want to come home,” he says. “I want us to be okay. That’s it. Simple. I want to come home and be a family.”
“But I am not simple.” My body’s coursing with secret genes and hormones and proteins. My body made eyeballs and I have no idea how. There’s nothing simple about eyeballs. My body made food to feed those eyeballs. How? And how can I not know or understand the things that happen inside my body? That seems very dangerous. There’s nothing simple here. I’m ruled by elixirs and compounds. I am a chemistry project conducted by a wild child. I am potentially explosive. Maybe I love Sam because hormones say I need a man to kill the coyotes at night, to bring my babies meat. But I don’t want caveman love. I want love that lives outside the body. I want love that lives.
“In what ways are you not simple?”
I think of the women I collected upstairs. They’re inside me. And they are only a small fraction of the catalog. I think of molds, of the sea, the biodiversity of plankton. I think of my dad when he was a boy, when he was a tree bud. “It’s complicated,” I say, and then the things I don’t say yet. Words aren’t going to be the best way here. How to explain something that’s coming into existence?
“I get that now.” His shoulders tremble some. They jerk. He coughs. I have infected him.
“Sam.” We see each other through the glass. We witness each other. That’s something, to be seen by another human, to be seen over all the years. That’s something, too. Love plus time. Love that’s movable, invisible as a liquid or gas, love that finds a way in. Love that leaks.
“Unlock the door,” he says.
“I don’t want to love you because I’m scared.”
“So you imagine bad things about me. You imagine me doing things I’ve never done to get rid of me. Kick me out so you won’t have to worry about me leaving?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Right.” And I’m glad he gets that.
Sam cocks his head the same way a coyote might, a coyote who’s been temporarily confused by a question of biology versus morality.
What’s the difference between living and imagining? What’s the difference between love and security? Coyotes are not moral.
“Unlock the door?” he asks.
This family is an experiment, the biggest I’ve ever been part of, an experiment called: How do you let someone in?
“Unlock the door,” he says again. “Please.”
I release the lock. I open the door. That’s the best definition of love.
Sam comes inside. He turns to shut the door, then stops himself. He stares out into the darkness where he came from. What does he think is out there? What does he know? Or is he scared I’ll kick him out again? That is scary. “What if we just left the door open?” he asks.
“Open.” And more, more things I don’t say about the bodies of women.
“Yeah.”
“What about skunks?” I mean burglars, gangs, evil.
We both peer out into the dark, looking for these scary things. We watch a long while. The night does nothing.
“We could let them in if they want in,” he says, but seems uncertain still.
“Really?”
He draws the door open wider and we leave it that way, looking out at what we can’t see. Unguarded, unafraid, love and loved. We keep the door open as if there are no doors, no walls, no skin, no houses, no difference between us and all the things we think of as the night.
WAMPUM