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Pulse by Paul FR Hamilton
Driving to the Border, Late August 1977
It's time, Tanya sings in her best t.v. theme-song voice, for world records. "The longest fingernails were grown in 1972 by Mrs. Eleanor Tayler of Lincoln, Nebraska. She is unable to wash the dishes due to her nail length, instead spending her days trimming and painting her 42-inch talons."
Tanya takes the books everywhere: the dictionary-thick 1976 Guinness Book of World Records following her into the bathroom before they leave for Canada, Ripley's Believe It or Not! with the blue-skinned man leering out on the cover resting between her thighs as the car inches toward the border.
"Carl the Human Skin Bag was born with a rare deformity that causes his flesh to hang off his frame, bunching up into pockets and folds," Tanya reads loudly to Jane who sighs and looks out the window, faking disinterest.
She would skin easily. Tanya's nails mark half-moons up Jane's arms, down her thighs where they'd scratched messages to each other all summer, carving out their names in those smooth chalkboard flats just above the knee. Tanya's mouth drawing blood now, surprised by the metallic smell of it. Sororicide: sister-murder. Parricide: kinsman-killing. As they drive toward the northern border in the red Volkswagen station wagon cramped deep in the way-back, she alternates between watching the crayolas melt into the plastic seat and tearing into Jane. Wife-killing? Uxoricide! Uxoricide! Uxoricide! she shouts them out faster than Jane can grill her. She rolls them around against her gums like sour cherry candies, the greater the distance the root word from the -cided noun the better. Filaricide: the killing of worms. The car tilts to the right before stopping. She always can tell when they're slowing to a stop; since her side is on the left, the seat rises up a bit as the car tilts right. She anticipates the little rise nodding against her butt as Jane's hands pinch her thighs. Those arms sheer and strong as windshield glass, eyes clamped shut for hours on the beach as nails scrape secret messages like engraved Morse code across Tanya's lightly blonded thighs. As the car veers to the right, Tanya's incisors break the surface of Jane's arm. Is human flesh kosher? she asks Rabbi Mike the next Sunday when she sits across from him in his study. Halachically, no; but in modern interpretation, it would depend whether it was take-out or prepared at home.
At home you can't mix milk with meat, eat lobster, or use lipstick made with beetle extract. Actually, you can do anything you want, as long as it's on paper plates. An overlay of paper, the whole house in a disposable smock. "Don't use the good dishes" becomes the law, the traif separated by the
thinnest layer of white paper. Traif is garbage, food crap, pig dirt: unclean. One day their mother decides you can't store the traif in the 'fridge, so garbage begets garbage: a parade of traif and paper used and disposed, the good dishes resting motionless on the shelves as traif buffets dance by.
Back Home a Week Before, Ithaca, N.Y.
Play it slow. They crowd around the amplifier, Jane putting it on 33 rpm, and they wait to hear between love roller coaster and ooh ooh the supposed screams of a strangled girl oooh stretching out to five, six seconds at this speed. Outside the rec room miles of trees weigh heavy with snow, bulging like Dr. Seuss landscapes. It could be a horn, two notes, the first higher-pitched than the grace note fading it out. Or it could not really be there at all. Jane keeps moving the needle back to that last refrain, love roller coaster oooh oooh. Tanya watches deer moving between the trees outside the thick French windows, wondering how Jane discovered the scream. Would sororicide to find out.
Put your hand on it. Jane places Tanya's hand on the back-lit image of the wine bottle, fingers tracing the flat outline on the glossy Sunday Times ad. Jane sketching across the ad copy with Tanya's left index finger as she explains. The egg travels through the fallopian tubes down the slender neck of the Cabernet Sauvignon, which lies for decades in dark oak cellars, waiting for the sperm to pop them open. Jane draws the path of conception carefully across the bottle, ad copy pelted with invisible arrows and letters mapping the sojourn of first sperm, then egg. Tanya's hand dampens against the newsprint, leaving a shiny outline around the bottle. Skipping the when mommy and daddy love each other terribly much rap, Jane cuts to the chase, drawing an eyeless embryo asleep at the bottom of the wine bottle. Tanya nods as Jane sketches and explains, imagining the complicated bottle lodged in her ribs effortlessly growing eyelashes by the sixth week. The ink sticks to her fingers, blue and grey splotches of it unevenly patterning her palms and fingertips. She licks it off slowly, as though the story had permanently candied her hands.
Sex and food are the same, Jane instructs, pushing away the Times ad. Anything that a man wishes to do with his wife, he may, analogously to meat that comes from the shop, the Talmud Nedarim 20 states. It doesn't matter how you "cook" them, but rather whether or not the raw materials are themselves kosher to start with. Tanya nods her head to the rhythm of Jane's voice as she delicately licks the blue, grey, green ink off her own palms. So let's make soup. Jane separates Tanya's lips with her tongue, love roller coaster in the background, ooh ooh coasting past the unhearable scream.
Driving North of Toronto, Route 66
"The world record for polygamy goes to Mr. David 'Dutch' Johnson of New Liberty, Missouri, who bragged he was the 'biggest bigamist.' At age sixty-three when he passed away, he was married to thirty-one women at the same time--believe it or not!" That's trigamy times ten plus bigamy, Tanya calculates as they drive through the country darkness where trees bunch up like black grapes against the sky, miles passing between streetlights. Radio dead, speedometer deader, cigarette lighter out of juice and Quebec is still hours away. Tanya has won the front seat for this leg of the ride, but quickly exhausts the gadgets and stares out the V.W.'s tinted windows. The sh'mah pummeling inside Tanya's brain: Here oh Israel the lord is god the lord is one: everything potentially identified with everything else. Why the need for the distinction, then? she remembers him asking with that slight smirk. The lord could be not-god, not-one? Christianity resolves this doubt by subdividing divinity, allowing redemption through individual identification with any of the three splinters, she recalls Rabbi Mike saying, running his fingers back and forth through his thick black hair laced with oil. Our God cruel god threatens disindividuation if everything is the same, awash in oneness. But Mike, she whispers into the green-tinted night traveling past at god knows what speed, like Christianity, Judaism has its little shortcuts to heaven: forget everything but say the sh'mah each Shabbas and you're still A-OK. Jewish women need only breed and light Shabbas candles. The Messiah will ride into Jerusalem on a white horse or bull or goat when all Jewish women light shabbas candles at once. Eyelids tight against the smoke, fingers passing presto chango over the flame like a magician every Friday. Sh'mah flying through her as the quiet dark of the road blurs by.
Even though it's just a local operation, the motel is fashioned to look like an American Howard Johnson's, everything imprinted with a blue and orange logo, the toilet crossed with a two-tone paper streamer announcing that it is officially sanitized. The girls sleepily open every cabinet, pile through each brochure describing breakfast, lunch, supper, pool facilities. Bouncing on the bed, stealing the covers, they fake sleep until their parents tuck them in. Then Tanya starts. Let's Eskimo kiss, she whispers as her nose finds Jane under the yellowed sheets.
Wanting to suffer under Jane's sweet palms. To cringe as blows pelt like a low-pressure system passing across the brows. Wanting to see stars like Beetle Bailey or Dagwood, POW! red sparklers lighting up beneath those fingers, BLAM! invisible to her attacker. To suffer, bending around the blows and slaps, relaxing in the rhythm of her hands. Make a fist and fit me inside it. Jane above her, suspending her between blows and kisses. Tanya bovine as a cow, placid between the uneven blows. Don't move. Don't breathe. To live on her lap. Sit still. Anchored ass to lap by her otherwise negligible weight in this pumped-up zero hour where her cheeks eagerly catch the blows hard. Porcine: pig-like. She imagines herself skinned and tanned, stretched around Jane like a shawl. Throat webby and thick around Jane's tongue, suspended in a peaceful hesitation between choking and swallowing.
6 A.M. The Next Morning
Silently poking in the back seat. Staring straight ahead, some unwriteable rule not permitting any mommy she's poking again. Jane jabs Tanya in the ribs like she's drilling through to the other side. Face deadpan, serious, ignoring Tanya's wince. Tanya waits until Jane is staring out the window again. Takes the left index finger with the ragged nibbled nail and carves into the side of Jane's thigh where the flesh meets her shorts. The nail scrapes back and forth over the same spot, each time gouging in deeper. Entering Province du Quebec! Girls, we're almost there!! Jane hums an impromptu Canada song, oh we're here in Canada yeah yeah not watching the blood trickling maps across her thigh. Tanya opens Matthew 1:3 with her other hand and reads that Jesus says eat shit and die.
He says, nothing which entereth into a man's mouth defiles him.
He says, I am the resurrection.
Anyone who believes in me even though he dies he will live.
Two A.M., Quebec
Jane is training Tanya to love total darkness. To love the way each sound magnifies in the black. To loll in Jane's voice under the covers. The first night in the fake Howard Johnson's, Jane forbids the use of the bathroom light after ten. I'm scared, Tanya whimpers.
Soon you'll hate light at night, Jane says on the second night as she unplugs the night light.
At first Tanya cries. See, says Jane, in the dark your cries are larger, more operatic. In spite of herself Tanya listens carefully to the rhythm of her own cries. They have stanza breaks, or meter, or something; there's the hint of a pause every five or so sobs, as if she's listening for a cue, a hint as to how these tears are playing for the audience. She stops crying and suddenly must pee right now, slides off the bed onto the uncarpeted cold of the floor and feels her way towards where the bathroom was. She imagines Jesus the shit-eater leading her way, miraculously lighting her path towards the bathroom.
2 P.M., The Next Day, At Aunt Leah's
Tanya looks at her hands floating green-white in the chlorinated sea of blue. Embryos must wrinkle in their briny pool, flesh puckering and peeling as cells divide and fingernails harden. "Marco!" Jane yells across the water, eyes tightly shut. "Polo!" Tanya yells automatically. Feticide: fetus-murder. Or, more politely, aborticide. Years after a limb is lost you can feel it still, extending past the scabbed-over stub. The word for it escapes her, teasingly near to her dry chlorinated tongue. So if you lost your right leg and went swimming for too long and your skin started to wrinkle up, could you feel the skin on your former right leg wrinkle, too? Her hand twitches under her gaze like a fish at the moment it notices it's no longer in water, has to think to breathe. "Marco!" Jane yells harder, her arms outstretched. Silently Tanya pulls herself out of the pool and backs into the half-open kitchen porch door, watching as Jane stumbles forward blind, waist-high in water, her Marcos echoing across the yard.
The basement covers everything in a veil of moisture. As Tanya clicks on the tape, she feels its surface dampen under her fingers. She swallows her giggles as she spreads open Ripley's Believe it or Not! with the bluish man on the cover between her knees. No one should know about the basement. No one has forbidden them to play down there; certainly not Aunt Leah, who spends her days smoking long cigarettes by the pool, talking past the children to their bronzing mother. They've set up an old card table down in the basement and dug up high heels and tape recorders and old board games. Jane gives Tanya a double nod secret signal when it's time to sneak down. But now Tanya is down there first, crouching underneath the card table, playing with her toes, waiting for Jane to discover her. She holds her breath, counting the seconds one mississippi two missippi until Jane's flat feet pad down the stairs.
The tabletop is patterned with a map of North America. No one knows and no one will know: they agreed from the first trip to Aunt Leah's three, maybe four years ago about the rules of the basement. Jane is tracing around Canada with her finger, never before having ascribed a definite shape to the area above the U.S.' defining border. It's time, she sings, time for world records.
World Records
"Mrs. X from Racine, Georgia failed her driver's test for the forty-seventh time, setting the known world's record for driving test failure. Let's go now to the scene of that forty-eighth try! How do you feel, Mrs. X? Tanya stop giggling or I'll slap the living shit out of you. Mrs. X?"
"Well, I'm ready, but I was ready the last forty-six times." Noise of engine, crash. Tanya scrunching tin foil to make a suitably mechanical sound. Jane's hand closing over Tanya's mouth to stop up the giggles.
"Holy mackerel! she's backed into a telephone pole! Well folks, I'm afraid Mrs. X has just broken her own previous world record, failing her driver's test for the forty-eighth time! Do you have anything to say, Mrs. X?" Jane grips the microphone, shoving it right next to Tanya's lips but never relinquishing it.
"Well, I'll just have to practice harder and come back next week and try again!"
Tanya's feet dig into the enormous black stiletto pumps. Her hands grip the microphone away from Jane, pulling it too close to her mouth. Jane grabs the book, furiously turning the pages to their favorite Believe it or Not!
"Next, we go to Fort Tyron, Illinois, to witness the birth of the Stevenson sextuplets! We're at Fort Tyron General Hospital, watching Mrs. Stevenson give birth to six--that's right, six!--baby boys." Jane riding on top of Tanya, OK we have another boy coming out, pulling her hands out of her faded cotton underwear. Jane always the doctor. Tanya beneath her thinking of the big red car barreling out of the fake Howard Johnson's, the road scrambling past. Tanya always all six sextuplets. In the mossy dark, sounds magnify. Without light, the basement looms out borderless, yet she senses the layers of piled-up junk hovering oppressively close. Fist probing in, oh I feel a head, two heads, now push! breathe! push! Jane's pink polished nails scraping in, carving out messages to the unborn. Emergency procedure! The baby's stuck! We'll have to use the scalpel now. Tanya feels Jane's fist unfolding, each finger a separate organism.
"Oh my god! One has two heads! It's stuck up your ass now! I can't get it out! Doctor!" Jane is sweating and barking and the tape is still running. Tanya squeezes her eyes shut. She can feel herself rising up now, can see the double-headed baby popping out, projected like a film on the split-screen of her own enormous white ass. Twisting anxiously around to catch the images curving over the cheeks. In full color, fading like denim, as old film will. Jane and Tanya. And then it slides away, back into the crack.
Suicide: self-murder. Jane gets up suddenly, face looming wet and red. Runs up the stairs. Sin of sins. Tanya hears the splash of Jane bellyflopping off the diving board. For Christians, the sin lies not in harming God's great creation but in the necessary doubt, in failing to believe in redemption. Ripley's lies under Tanya's bare ass now, pages creased past rescue. Doubt, free will, suicide: an unholy trinity snaking around Augustinian Christian belief. John Donne suggests that Jesus was a suicide, she recalls Rabbi Mike saying with the smirk that always accompanies any mention of Jesus. Think of it: My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me? In Judaism, suicide is verboden, considered a violation of one's contract with the community. However, there is no explicit prohibition against suicide in our Bible. In fact, the Biblical passage upon which the traditional Talmudic prohibition is based says only And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it; and at the hand of every man, even at the hand of every man's brother, will I require the life of man.
God wants your hands and blood. God wants your life. The sweat on Jane's body floats on the surface of the pool, each drop containing all of Jane's genetic code. The rewinding whir of the tape recorder grinds into Tanya's ears as she pulls up her bathing suit. Jane swims underwater laps, her sweat swimming above her. And the world record for multiple births goes to Mrs. Y of Fort Tyron, Illinois.
Ten Years Later, 30,000 Feet Over the Atlantic
On the El Al flight to Tel Aviv the religious gather on the left side of the plane to face Jerusalem as they pray, crowding the aisles as the stewardesses purse their lips and barrel through with plastic containers of orange juice. Tanya feels a little lurch leftwards as she swallows down the acidic juice in one gulp. She imagines Jane in her small bungalow in North Tel Aviv, surrounded by her three children. Tracing ads for Israeli brands of wine to demonstrate conception. Each child having a turn at it, the glossy newsprint sweating into their small fingers. No, that's the wrong picture. Jane's in the hospital now, slowly recovering from miscarrying child number four. Noah saved God. The plane lurches forward. Northerly, according to the map projected against the wall showing a little plane icon inching its way toward Tel Aviv. Saved God, excitable God, our poor Lord stalked by that awful grinding sense of exhaustion and failure that follows the completion of any big project. Jane plumper now, rarely showing her thighs beneath her hausfrau dresses and corporate suits. Jane in charge: barking in Hebrew to her daughters, her husband, her god each shabbas. The stewardesses are shepherding the clump of praying men back to their seats, promising kosher chicken wings within minutes.
Is human flesh kosher? God regretted having made man on earth. Is suddenly hypersensitive to his Creation's little faults. So Noah made the ark, loaded up his two-by-two zoo, to show God that Creation wasn't so bad. But God had his price. I give you everything, he says with a slight smile, with this exception: you must not eat flesh with life, that is to say blood, in it. And God promises to never, ever, have such a terrible tantrum again. Tanya pulls down her tray, graciously accepting her kosher chicken wings with hot sauce. But you know how those promises go. Made in that velvet hour after forgiveness, all kisses and contrition. The plane lurches sideways a bit, even though the religious are all seated now, munching loudly. She reels off the lists, trying to still her mind. Deicide: God-murder. Regicide: king-murder. Vatricide: prophet-killing. Mariticide: spouse-murder, especially of a husband. Love roller coaster, oooh ooh. No English word for the special killing that makes it kosher. Can't remember the Hebrew. Couldn't ask Jane, her mouth and hands unavailable, wrapped in the hospital melodrama of miscarriage. Unaskable.
Tanya thinks of turning to the Orthodox man next to her with his trim beard and black hat who is now carefully wiping the hot sauce off his lips, imagines asking him for that word. But she might get other words, interrogating her clearly shaky relationship to observance, so she remains silent. If only Jane's thighs were here. Jane's blonde thighs, straddling Tanya's, weighing her down as her hands pull Tanya's hair. The weight of the thighs counter-balancing the pulling up of the fingers. Perfectly balanced. The plane icon inches toward Tel Aviv. Jane's sweet thighs upon her, that elegant stillness which comes with fear, that slow cutting off of the circulation. And then Tanya's thighs: stinging, white and bloodless from the pinching, while her hair is pulled to the point of follicle damage. The world record for kosher pinching goes to Miss T of New York.
Jennifer Natalya Fink lives in Brooklyn, New
York. She is the author of the novel, Burn, and has won a variety of other awards for her fiction, including The Dana Award in the Novel, STORY Magazine's
Short Fiction Award, The Georgetown Review's Fiction Award, and the Billy
Heekin Foundation Award. She received her Ph.D. from NYU, and is the
co-editor of Performing Hybridity (Minnesota) and several other anthologies.
She is a professor at Pratt Institute, and also teaches at NYU, Gotham
Writers' Workshops, and Makor. She received artist's residencies from the Saltonstall
Foundation, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and Blue Mountain Foundation for the Arts.
Fink is the Founder
and Executive Director of The Gorilla Press, a non-profit organization
dedicated to promoting children's literacy through
bookmaking. She is listed in the 2002-2003 Who's
Who in America, and serves on the boards of many
other organizations. Currently, she is working on a
collection of short stories and essays, 13 Fugues, and a new
novel, Veronica.
back to the Jennifer Natalya Fink page
email Jennifer Natalya Fink
World Records © 2003 Jennifer Natalya Fink
Pulse © 2003 Paul FR Hamilton
The work featured in this journal is under copyright protection
by the individual authors and artists and may not be duplicated
or reprinted without their permission.
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