Margaret Atwood has been channeling the goddess for some time. The goddess is a just-audible synth pad in the background of our weekly calls. Maybe a Jupiter-8? I’ve almost stopped noticing.
Margaret Atwood is my therapist and the questions she asks are riddles in Aramaic. Therapy is best when you can’t understand it: it’s more like a real relationship then. Obscurantic analysis is an especially helpful modality for me because I’m still on the run from the army and can't always speak frankly.
Margaret Atwood calls me for our sessions on my work phone. Her first message after finding me on Tryst was hey :-D She learned to use a colon and a dash and a capital D to make the smiley face from a 1994 Toronto Sun article on netiquette. The article is still on her fridge, she told me, because without it, she can never remember which way to tilt to see the face. The article said you could use :-D or :-). Margaret Atwood likes :-D more than :-). Lips make the face less skull. More girl.
A message like hey :-D is probably not a serious inquiry. I wouldn’t have written back, but her email signature… The three-paragraph Rilke quote… Is this the Margaret Atwood who writes, I wrote. She wrote obviously, here I am writing. She said she was reaching out for research, and I believe that’s what she believed, but I know her well enough by now: all her work is driven by yearnings she won’t allow herself to place.
Today would be the natural day to inject the hulk serum antagonist inhibitor, with the armed forces closing in. Two tank battalions, an aircraft carrier. I adore the sound of crumpling war machines, and I’d prefer to be invulnerable to airstrikes, but there are still people at the controls, for now, and everyone has parts that are delicate. I have this expensive compulsion to preserve the world’s last vulnerabilities. The skull has five sacred security flaws: the eye sockets, the nostrils, the neck, the external acoustic meatuses, the jaw hinge. These make a skull deserve love. I don’t know if I can be a hulk in love.
But my friend Juliet! Juliet loves hulking and loves while hulking. Juliet is so beautiful when she hulks. I wish I hulked like Juliet. In Juliet, rage and disdain twist in a perfect soft-serve. Smashing is my schtick, like a toddler. I’m a bitter lonely deadly child. I overeat, mostly people. It's socially dysphoric for me to become an angel of endings and feast on human flesh without distinguishing the meats. Juliet’s violence is so much more grown-up, all stride and glare. She leaves the men alive—they’re always men in the containment divisions—but she eviscerates their illusions of themselves, dangles the men over the sides of quarries and skyscrapers and aircraft carriers planted stern-up in beach sand, holds the men by the skin at the base of their skulls, in a pinch like a dirty tissue, tells them to get toilet-trained you baby, makes them beg for their lives so hard that they spring a geyser of ego, like a sneeze or easy emesis or giving in to a fainting spell thinking nothingness is all a sweet downhill, and from then on they hunger to be abased, they long to curl fetal under weighted blankets of squalor and shame. If you think Juliet attacks their masculinity, you're mistaken; she leverages its ordinary function. Masculinity is the pressure that keeps the firework in until someone needs it pasted over the night.
Juliet being Juliet lets me remain afraid and sentimental and unsullied by the levers of power.
Margaret Atwood calls with a riddle in Aramaic, but before I answer her, I ask her about mass violence. Could we un-invent it? "War does exist in the natural world," she tells me. "Not in chickens, though chickens and other ground fowl do murder each other for sport. But in werewolves, dolphins, all the social primates, anywhere there’s the neurology for collectivity. In any sentient creature that can make corporations—which I mean literally, a corporation being any body brought to being without birth. It takes incorporation to go to war." I learn so much in therapy! Like: by bringing myself into being I made it possible to go to war.
I lose reception in the wyrmways but my hour with Margaret Atwood continues to tick. I need to get back on the line. She’s paying me the difference between my rate and hers, but I really want her to keep leaving good reviews—they’re so well-written. I race home and ask my sister if I can have the room to myself, just for the rest of therapy, but she only imitates what I say. Stop it! I say. Stop it! she says. She fake-cries when I cry and daubs ketchup on her annoyingly short philtrum when my nose starts bleeding from my stupid attempt to tell Margaret Atwood I’ll be there in just a minute via telepathy. Toronto is always further away than you’d think. I asked for this thing my sister is doing, in a way: it’s almost the attunement I’ve always wanted to have with her. I’m grateful for the small bespoke cruelties that prove others realize they share a world with me. I take a centering breath and try to ignore my sister and sink into the couch and take out my work phone, hoping she won't notice it's not the same as my civilian phone, but maybe also a little bit hoping she does notice and tails me in a station wagon and buys a telephoto lens and learns everything I keep secret, without me having to say it.
I call Margaret Atwood back. The goddess is subtly more insistent, more saw-like than before. I answer Margaret Atwood’s riddle in the Sumerian women’s vernacular. I have no idea what the words mean.
