Inappropriation Read online

  “It’s true,” says Ruth, clearly fighting back a smile. “For all we know plants might be our enemies. In a way, climate change is nature trying to murder us.”

  The masseuse doesn’t appear to find this amusing. She digs into Ruth’s lower spine. “I can’t even eat zem anymore.”

  “You’re not eating plants?” Ruth is aghast. “That’s ridiculous, Mitzi. All this misdirected anxiety about plants and animals. It’s like nature is the new Palestinians.”

  The masseuse takes a moment to consider this. “You’re right, you’re right. People get too sensitive in Byron Bay.” She gives her sweet, snaggletoothed smile. “I’ll start again with ze lettuces. I just find it hard sometimes to eat zose big leafy greens.”

  While the women discuss various ethical eating habits, Ziggy thinks about the masseuse’s story. She imagines the little vegetal cyborgs singing as their stems soaked and shriveled. The story, of course, feels personal. Technology failed to enhance their lives; worse, it caused the plants to commit suicide. Ziggy is suddenly aware of a dim pain at the nape of her neck and is glad to get a break from the GoPro.

  While she massages Ziggy, the masseuse gossips with Ruth about a German man whom they both knew at the ashram. She calls him Shunya Gerhard and then explains that all the disciples were addressed with the Sanskrit word for void before each of their Christian appellations. Ziggy wonders if this is the good void that Tessa talked about, the one that comes with a neutral acceptance of people like Cate Lansell-Jones. Ziggy learns that Gerhard had been Shuni’s personal tantra teacher and now holds sexual awakening workshops for women in his tree house. As she listens, certain details of Gerhard’s biography afflict Ziggy with a confusing pleasure. German aristocracy; fathered six children in Scandinavia. When the masseuse elbows up onto Ziggy’s shoulders, she pretends the deep needling is the German’s powerful tantric hands. Her feet inexplicably tingle. Ziggy imagines the tantra master can make your ankles come.

  In the car after the massage, she feels anxious. Ziggy doesn’t understand her own arousal. How she could be turned on by the story of a womanizing German baby boomer who has probably had sex with her mum. But Ziggy has promised herself not to think about gender this weekend. She is feeling shaky and raw—always on the achy brink of tears. When Hitler Youth inform her that attraction to Gerhard means Ziggy must be a homosexual boy, she cries; just to make a neutralizing point about female hormones.

  That night, Ziggy’s mother takes her to a rooftop party in town. The masseuse greets them under a canopy of fairy lights. She kisses mother and daughter hot on the lips and then leads them to a large blond man picking pistachios from a bowl in his lap. When Gerhard looks up, Ziggy is surprised by his handsomeness. And horrified to feel the quick thrum of her heart. His fringe has a boyish flop (an enigmatic detail on a fifty-year-old man), and the corners of his mouth sag in what looks like long-term dissatisfaction.

  “What’s that thing on your head?” he asks her.

  “I love Germans,” giggles the masseuse. “So frank.”

  “What is it?” Gerhard’s voice has the dull slap of a paddle.

  “A GoPro,” Ziggy seems to be apologizing.

  “You shouldn’t be filming here.”

  Ziggy could get angry. She could tell him that the camera is part of her body, and if he makes her remove it, he is stripping away her identity, denying her a basic human right. But she feels herself nodding and blushing and loosening the hot strap with her fingers.

  He points at her lens. “Please. You are shitting in the space.”

  Ziggy whips the camera off over her head. The action is so swift, it takes her a moment to realize she has done it. Ruth makes a quiet little gasp.

  “Would you like a glass of wine, sweetheart?”

  Ziggy nods. Her heart pounds loudly in her ears.

  Ruth and the masseuse leave for the bar, and Ziggy perches on a chair a few feet from Gerhard. He peels and eats three pistachios before addressing her. The third one he spits back into his hand.

  “You like psychedelics?” Gerhard’s voice drives hoarsely from his throat. Ziggy imagines he has a rough, forceful tongue. A mouth that has loofah’d the feet of a thousand febrile women.

  “I’ve only tried pot.”

  “Never ayahuasca?”

  “What’s ayahuasca?”

  “A plant. It interacts with human DNA so that you access the deepest parts of the universal unconscious.” Gerhard throws back two pistachios in quick succession. “Last week I was Tutankhamen.”

  “Cool.” Ziggy looks down and jabs her hand into the pistachio bowl at the same time Gerhard does. Their fingers touch.

  “It’s not recreational,” he says bluntly. “It’s medicinal.”

  Ziggy doesn’t want to speak with all the nut shards moving around inside her mouth. “Sounds interesting,” she mumbles. As Gerhard’s eyes move over her face, Ziggy feels a bright burn like sudden sunshine.

  “Then there’s San Pedro,” he continues. “That’s the grandmother.”

  Gerhard brings his large hands up to her cheeks and frames her face. Ziggy stops breathing.

  “Ayahuasca is the mother,” he says, jiggling her cranium. “She takes your head and shoves it deep in the shit.”

  Ziggy’s skull feels huge and unstable, like Gerhard might be holding it there. When he slides one muscular hand to the nape of her neck, Ziggy’s head bobbles.

  “But San Pedro,” Gerhard goes on, “puts its arm over your shoulder and shows you the world.”

  Now he squints intensely into her eyes. Ziggy senses that she is supposed to cry or else orgasm, but she can only grin in a strangely pleasant state of paralysis. The German turns her shoulders toward the valley, and pinches her neck hard and slow as they stare together into the darkness. Ziggy wonders if this is it: clarity or enlightenment or whatever happens when the Magnetic Poles merge.

  The masseuse is walking back toward them. Gerhard springs his hand from Ziggy’s neck and the skin there goes cold. The tiny woman drags Gerhard up and tries to lure Ziggy with a curly, equestrian samba. When she sees Ruth’s face brighten, a little pink with heat and wine, Ziggy obliges.

  The dance floor is a stomping hive of leathery limbs and bulging harem pants. The DJ is playing some type of hardcore trance music that all the Aryan-looking men seem to be enjoying. The women punch and yip, and make sporadic primal grunting sounds. The roof scene reminds Ziggy of a movement class Ruth made them attend on Saturday mornings when her and Jacob were kids. Lots of scrappy middle-aged people rolling their torsos sensually; a few pretty-boy professional dancers pirouetting around, avoiding eye contact, and eventually collapsing into the pillowy arms of an Earth Mother; always some ancient person curled on the floor in fetal position like a dried crustacean. It was a frightening place for a child, a sea of unbounded adult emotion. Her mother would be prancing around the room, holding meaningful eye contact with various men and women, occasionally clasping their hands (afterward in the lobby, everyone was introduced as “aunty this” and “uncle that”). But Ziggy’s dad stuck with her and Jacob. He was worried they might get trampled by the toady men with thrusting pot bellies and angry stamping stick legs. Or the obese woman who bowled herself across the room, fresh from a bout of tearful rocking in the corner. Jeff would kneel beside Ziggy and Jacob on the wood floor—she loved this dark, shellacked surface, like a pool you could walk on—and float his hands over their heads, bringing all the chaos of the room into sharp focus, distilled to the two wonderful, hairy snakes of his arms. He twirled and twisted his limbs above them, holding their attention so that they wouldn’t wander off into the path of someone’s violent catharsis. She isn’t sure what to call her father’s dance moves. Feminine or masculine or some sort of folkloric, serpentine hermaphrodite. Whatever it was, it had kept Jake and Ziggy alive.

  Later in the evening, there are fireworks. Everyone clumps together, gaping up gleefully. After each explosion, a few of them say “ooh!” or “ahh!” or give a
little cracker of applause. Ziggy is sick of fireworks and doesn’t understand why adults find them so amazing. Staring up at the usual gaudy bouquets and predictable configurations, Ziggy rolls the word around in her mouth: ayahuasca. She likes the idea that you can be anything, even an ancient Egyptian. Ziggy pictures Gerhard in a loincloth, guiding her through the Red Sea’s parted curtains and into a desert oasis. When he lays her down on a bed of palm fronds, Ziggy’s face flushes and she glances around to make sure no one is watching. Now she sees that Gerhard is standing at the far end of the rooftop, actively ignoring the fireworks. Ziggy wanders indirectly toward him. She walks beside the railing, pretending to be transfixed by the dark field beyond.

  “You found me,” says the German.

  Mortified, Ziggy blurts the first thing she can think of.

  “I forgot to ask if you had any Egyptian DNA?”

  “You’ve misunderstood.” Gerhard clears his throat, rhetorically. “Ayahuasca disables the thought mechanisms that erect the barrier of time. So that everything that has ever happened is happening to you right now.”

  “Even the Holocaust?”

  “Especially the Holocaust.”

  “That sounds bad.”

  “It is at first, and then you start to see all the concepts disintegrating. Nazi. Torture. You.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “Nothing.” Gerhard blinks out at the field. “What you understand when you take ayahuasca is that you don’t understand anything. And that there is nothing to understand.”

  Ziggy feels deliciously light-headed. As if she is receiving a consensual lobotomy.

  “And then,” Gerhard continues, “the only thing left is Being.”

  “What exactly is that?”

  “You already know what it is.” His voice is cooler. “But you won’t remember until you let go of all the social illusions.”

  “Which social illusions?”

  “All of them. Nationality, race, gender, class . . .”

  Ziggy presses the expression deep into her brain. Social illusions.

  “Well,” says Gerhard. “I have an early morning client. But you and your mother should come visit me if you have time. It’s the tree house at the end of the creek.” With that, the German tantra master bows his head and walks off across the rooftop, disappearing down the darkened stairwell.

  All night, Ziggy replays the feeling of Gerhard’s fingers pinching her neck, how her neck felt delicate and feminine and orgasmic when he touched it. She pictures him standing above her—a broad shadow in uniform. Her mind’s eye obscures the specifics of this uniform, but the woods are definitely Central European. She hears distant gunfire and a river panting through the trees; the German squeezing her tightly to his chest, pressing hard against her. Against what? ask Hitler Youth. Ziggy-So-Flat-the-Berlin-Wall-Is-Jealous-Klein? Her second glass of wine helps alleviate the Nazis.

  IN THE MORNING, ZIGGY TAKES A BATH. Jets on and legs akimbo, Gerhard grips her thighs with his huge, rough hands. He wears a gold proscenium-shaped headpiece with a cobra flared out over his forehead. Gerhard is the Pharaoh and Ziggy is his Israelite and the entire kingdom watches as their leader positions his slave against the pyramid wall. He hoists her legs like the handles of a wheelbarrow, tilting up her pelvis. Ziggy likes how simple this feels, her body an object and yet still, somehow, hers. She pictures his eyes—widening as he takes her in, then narrowing with pleasure. His desire is bigger than hers, bigger than her. It starts as a spasm in her gut, coiling up in little ribbony twists, higher and higher . . . until a dense heat surges up the length of her body, like another body crashing through her own. Ziggy turns off the jets and lies back, feeling penetrated. And bloated. And suddenly crampy. She wraps herself in a robe and leans over the basin, but the steam makes her feel faint. Out in the living room, her mother is playing world music. Ziggy tries to sneak past to the bedroom, but Ruth sees her and does a huge, loony hip-swivel.

  “Come and have a dance!”

  “Barf.”

  “Come on, Ziggy.”

  Ruth raises her hands and twinkles her fingers. “Ziggy-wiggy . . .”

  “Don’t.”

  “Just move to the music.”

  “No.”

  “Just move a little bit.” Ruth rotates her pelvis, huffing her nostrils wide like a water buffalo.

  “You look weird,” says Ziggy.

  “So do you.”

  Ziggy tugs her robe around tighter.

  “Feet,” says Ruth, pointing at her daughter’s toes.

  Ziggy raises a foot, then plonks it down. And the other one. Every smidge of movement is a monumental, life-draining effort.

  “That’s it!” says Ruth. “Now your hips.”

  Ziggy sways with passive-aggressively infinitesimal momentum.

  “Do you feel more open?”

  “I feel dizzy.”

  “Sort of porous?”

  Ziggy cringes at her mother’s word.

  “What’s wrong with porous? You don’t want to be porous? Fine.” Ruth stomps her feet with sensual force. “Just listen to the beat. Feel the rhythm. Where does it live in your body?”

  “Live?”

  “Yes. Where do you feel the bass? In your feet? Your thighs? Your perineum?”

  “Mum.”

  “In your chest?”

  Ziggy feels her spirit leeching out at the sternum. She sags inward and doubles over.

  “Great! In your chest! Or is that the breast of a wild bird? A big bird of prey?”

  Ziggy just wants to lie on the floor. She begins dropping slowly to her knees.

  “Ooh,” says Ruth, her voice dippy with excitement. “What’s happening now?”

  Ziggy lunges onto the carpet. “I’m tired,” she says, and curls up in a ball. “I’m an elderly pigeon dying of natural causes.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Sorry I’m not an eagle.”

  Ruth makes an angry little pivot on her hooves, then stamps over to the other side of the living room. Ziggy is suddenly nauseous. She rises to her knees, then swoons back in pain. It feels like someone is scraping out her guts with a chilled spoon. She clutches her belly, but the harder she clenches, the more it hurts. Ziggy lurches up from the floor and staggers courageously to the bedroom.

  She lies on the mattress in agony. The sun comes shrieking through the window, burning into Ziggy’s temples, and she cowers, whimpering into her hands. Then, in the hot-pink squish of her palms, Ziggy starts to apologize. First, again, to her grandmother. Then to her mother and even, a little bit, to Lex. The holy trinity of female bodies that Ziggy has offended. She begs them to stop the pain, offering all kinds of absurd promises. That she will wear a dress to the formal, that she will cease all fantasies of poisoning Lex and her friends. But the cramp intensifies, and now Ziggy’s prayer gets religious. Help, she thinks into the ether, and then starts to recite the only Hebrew prayer she can remember: Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu melech haolam asher kidishanu bimitz-votav vitzivanoo lihadleek ner shel Shabat. It is the prayer for the lighting of candles—something she learned at school, the one the women say.

  But nothing happens. Ziggy rolls into a ball, wanting to die, wishing Gerhard would save or kill her. Feeling, confusingly, that those are sort of the same thing. She curls in tighter and brings her hands between her thighs. The skin feels wet. Ziggy sends in two exploratory fingers, looks down, and there it is. Red. For years, every time she wipes, Ziggy has pictured this bright smear, imagining the primal horror and strange satisfaction that might accompany the sight of blood seeping from an orifice. And she was right. There is shock. And a deep inward sense of being, somehow, magic. It makes her feel tender and strong in her body. She speaks softly through the pain. “I am bleeding,” she tells Hitler Youth in a powerful sotto voce. “I am bleeding but I am not going to die.”

  Ziggy jumps up, forgetting the cramps, and runs out into the living room. Ruth appears to be dancing a rhino while making a cheese sandwich.
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  “Mum,” Ziggy says, straining for casual. “I need a tampon.”

  Ruth drops her knife and leaps into action. “Pass me the car keys,” she says, pointing at the bundle hanging from the door.

  “It’s okay,” says Ziggy. “I’ll come with you.”

  RUTH IS MANIACALLY CHATTY all the way to the general store. Ziggy sees the blood has left slim brown crescents under her fingernails, like the dark veins of prawn shit. What her grandmother might call “life force.” Ziggy would love to shake a rabbi’s hand right now, but the scrubby back road is not likely to produce one. Then as they pull up in the parking lot, Ziggy senses they are going to have a different kind of religious problem. It might be the glowing Jesus heart in the window or the small elderly woman embroidering a pillow at the counter, but Ziggy knows they will not be leaving with tampons.

  Ruth spots the feminine hygiene section hidden away in the back corner: some dusty old maxi pads beside the adult diapers. Ziggy hobbles along behind her mother. Ruth is angry too: it is a deliberate imposition that they must now walk all the way back to the counter to ask about the tampons. So she doesn’t.