Little GhostBy Danny Judge
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My first impression of the abortion doctor is that he’s handsome, young, and well-dressed: dressed to kill, as it were.
I can trace this equivocal need to hunt to my immediate past. It began with a doll my sister’s daughter--niece, if I must be an aunt—carries always and carried two weeks ago as we gathered for Easter dinner at our mother’s stucco ranch. At first glance, the doll was a toy. Then, closer: a molded embryo, scaled to size. Instead of a tiny plaything, a symbolic manifestation of the physical consequences of an emotional choice, one clearly meant for the eyes of desperate new mothers. A tiny little faceless (almost) fetus, swaddled latex in loving four-inch felt, its room temperature “flesh” used, by my own sister no less, as a little tool like phonics to teach a lesson straight and early about the insidious sin of the big goddamned A-word—to teach a child, a little six-year-old who strokes it lovingly with no adult sense whatsoever of its ulterior significance. Of course all this means nothing to me. I’ll never choose.
I know my mind (said every loony ever). But listen: I’m pretty sure I have it pegged. I’ve been paying attention. More often than not, it’s a cumbersome habit, the constant double-checking and stocktaking, the obsessive internal compulsion to scrape clean every corner of consciousness, no matter how grim the goop. And this, this sudden obsession with the doll? This is an issue of transference, this hunt I’ve undertaken. The eerie repose of the little “toy” embedded within me a freshly gnawing knowledge of my exclusion from “choice.” I long to experience in essence the power of decision, as a woman should. Essence. I need to know there are moral stakes to physical actions; I need to feel danger, to mainline like an emaciated addict the molten risk to my immortal soul—to fear wrong and do it regardless, to battle the guilt my little niece’s doll was molded to impart—in those that can actually muster up a fleshy doppelganger, of course…but I’m making do. I’m hunting a surrogate decision behind the cool barrel of my feminine impotence.
***
So I apply lip liner; I rouge my cheeks; I thicken and straighten my lashes; I dress with an audience of bare walls in my modest apartment—a temporary apartment, I’m sure. I love the color, the soft, tranquil gray. To be clear, I have the framed photos and girly hangings; I unpacked them weeks ago. But I’ve neglected to hang them. I look for my earrings and contemplate choice—do I choose what I wear or is he choosing for me? Do I bring my own voice or supply a conduit for the good doctor’s purposeful line of clinical questioning? I love the way I run from detail by embracing it wholeheartedly. Morals and visceral id can never coexist. Truthfully? I was repulsed when I saw the thing. It is what I am, that heartburning repulsion; so far from the reaction intended, it outpaces disgust with my sister and whoever gave it to her to give to her child et al. Yes, my nasty little imp of an id snarled its angry teeth but simultaneously embarked upon a trail of visceral urge encroached on all sides by an overgrowth of associative stimuli, sniffing around my unconscious first, curious and then hungry, and almost immediately a perverse longing was born—the longing for consequences, for what I do with my body to matter like it does for other girls, girls who have a stake in the little blue-swaddled doll, who feel the disgust of its implications in their fecund uteri.
Ugh. And my teachers said I was too smart for my own good. Well, the teachers with children said I overthought things…too analytical, they cried, their mouths full of sticky caramel fertility…the old childless cat ladies loved me. Bad omen. Hope their cats were tabbies…omens enough: too smart…right…fuck karmic cats I don’t own one if I did, however, (fuck karma, that is), I wouldn’t have to fuss with PlannedP or PlanB—I would make him wrap it: karma plays dirty, no telling where he’s been…no baby worries though what’s the Marley song? “No Egg No Cry?” No…no “Woman”…ah, but to me, for me, me…interchangeable, aren’t they?
What do I wear? How do I talk? So different from a typical date. How do I make sure he wants more, that he doesn’t say goodnight and run? I can’t choose if he wants no part of me. Then, the choice: Can I, Will I? And oh god if I do (if I choose to before the night ends) let it not be a rebellion against heart and mind, lest I lose myself to this pervasive little imp. Let it be because I want it. Let it be a mistake made in the heat of wanton dereliction.
How to start: Do we shake hands or hug like old friends? Why have I hung nothing in here, unpacked every box but hung nothing? Is a skirt appropriate? I remind myself again This is My choice My body My life and the doctor knocks on time.
His handwriting, for chrissakes, must be perfect.
My junkie heart gasps, arches its bloody back off the stained silk sheets of my barren chest cavity as an adrenaline rush purges my blood of doubt—I make a choice but it’s too late and far too rude to call it off now, and the id is laughing. She holds my leash, for now. The doctor’s arrival, at the very least, punctuates the mounting inanity of my thoughts. No use reaching for it now--where was I? why am I doing this? Distracted, blissfully occupied. The impish id retreats while I appraise him, silent until I’m comfortable enough to look ahead.
He’s supposed to be this evil baby-killer, an evil effigy of a man with rubber gloves and glass eyes, but on my doorstep he’s a nice young man, my age. He’s slicked his hair back and sidelong ala Dean Martin—a classic, tone-deaf but pragmatic sense of style that somehow means he is free of tattoos, piercings and frivolity, that he sips wine socially, knows where to grasp the glass without knowing the year by smell or bouquet, or even what “bouquet” means. Even worse (because it relaxes me and draws me closer before a word is spoken), he looks as nervous as I feel.
“Hi. Rachel?”
And so the night becomes an exercise in redolent discovery.
Without flashing all the way back I can trace myself, my present predicament, if not me-myself in the Whitmanian sense, to a Saturday in September eleven years ago in the foyer of my mother and father’s stucco ranch, to my bold introduction of a nervous, half-Jewish, half-black boy from a neighboring school to my Methodist parents, who practically asphyxiated themselves in a fit of white restraint. I can step far enough back to the shameful satisfaction I gleaned from their discomfort and no further. I’ve forgotten Allen’s face. Alec? Alvin? Of course, I remember the looks on theirs with photographic clarity, and why that should be and whom, if anyone, should shoulder the blame, if not me, is an issue for the dream journal I keep by my bed for this exact purpose—to unburden my conscious conscience of sleepy relics of the buried other.
Though I’ve never hunted, I imagine the adrenal cocktail that first time out must feel like this: a slow emotional descent into vigilant patience, leading to a keener taste of the wind and a sharpening awareness: the focus needed to track little side-swept twigs, all the while suspecting deep down that the biggest rush is lurking close by or just ahead, your glands ready to thrust you into manic slow-motion at the slightest provocation. I suppose out of necessity they tape their…well, “themselves” down to dispel the discomfort of the unceasing erection that this state of pure expectation must inevitably breed, for how else can they manage the excruciating tightness of that imminent, incendiary, inevitable choice—pull the trigger or let him go? My father was a hunter before he died, and the stucco ranch became my mother’s empty box--goddamn, my dream journal is underqualified.
And all I want is to be a woman: all I want is to make a mistake with this man that involves sex. Simple transference. I’m not all that complex, am I? I’m not a Judy Bloom character. I’m not that fucked up—looking at you, Margaret.
So like the tree-born hunter I tuck away my tension and observe the details informing my imminent choice: his pupils like flecked pollen, here and for an instant fluttering there; his Adam’s apple bedded by a subtle, V-shaped slope of white cotton where his cornflower blue tie unites his firm collar, the cartilage unobtrusively proportionate within a network of flesh-eclipsed muscle; his confident yet deferential bearing and the fine hair on the back of his hands, thin enough, thick enough; and I know he’s waiting as well, watching and listening, appraising me with his clinical eye, perhaps the slope of my breasts or evocative bitten lip I affect quite shamelessly, knowing full well what I’ve done.
In the interest of deferring with optimism to what I already recognize as an embryonic physical attraction, I think only fleetingly of the details missing from the latex form of my niece’s toy ghost, hold their absence only for an instant against the tapestry of his thirty years of fine tuning, and even now I do this reflexively, for I’ve aged thirteen Acura turns since I feared my dubious id and the portent of my juvenile rebellion and, already, for better or worse, I detect a human element beneath the veil of cognitive murk that polluted my expectations. With the land so sprawling, what can the hunter do but document what proximity demands he must, if for no other reason than to retain the holy illusion of agency—and, of course, suppress the tightly wound imp that lurks still, because the id never recuses herself. Six lefts and seven rights, tracking my path through a forest of latent chaos, because, simply put, I see myself fucking the doctor, so checking his speed and the suspicious loiterer shrinking in the side-view mirror keeps me aware, keeps me divorced from my seesawing whims.
I slow this vehicle down and he slows his. I act like a lady, and he acts like my date, not my doctor, which is great because he isn’t. Won’t be. I just have no need for him in that capacity, which, ironically, is why we’re here together. The restaurant is nice; nevertheless, the rich are procreators too—a child named Cody That’s Enough! in the booth behind us, unseen and never to be seen. He screams bloody shards of glass that tear jagged holes in the heavenly sheen of our public isolation, and not for an instant does the child recall the doll. His pocket square accessorizes his low-key sense of style, and not even then do I connect the silky, virile blue with the four-by-four swaddle that houses my niece’s tactically poignant little latex companion. Later I see it, long after the beast leaps sprinting full throttle from the brush into the great wide open and, as it always does, disappoints at the moment of climax--should I have waited? Just to see how I felt tomorrow?
He tells me things a human tells another human: his grandmother raised him after the death of his parents, the tragic death he mentions only when I press back in time from his nobly undertaken vocational calling. I probe, prod and feel around the id’s clumsy hunger to know and expose: why do you…how does one even…. Because that’s part of the choice, not knowing, wanting to know, not knowing why I have to know and knowing that finding out would ruin everything--
“What do you like to do?” he asks, interrupting the movie I’d been watching, the epic story of us in this place, this ridiculous place.
“I knit.”
I don’t fucking knit. Why--
“What do you knit?” He feigns interest above a glistening trickle of duck sauce, rogue and wild against the clean white porcelain of his sixty-dollar plate.
“Little blue blankets. For babies.”
Jesus. At this point, I’m just along for the ride. My innocence is on autopilot.
“Oh?”
I wouldn’t know what to say to me, either.
***
Later, at home, a half-hour after I’ve chosen.
Without turning on my bedroom light, I remove my earrings, my clothes, my lipstick, and, though I cannot see them, I nevertheless feel the vacuum of my unadorned walls. I can almost hear my ambivalent independence echoing unchecked and purposeless from the clean corners. I slip naked between my blue cotton sheet and my heavy comforter. Soon the satisfied little imp vanishes beneath the thin membrane that separates the deep from my unsatisfied mind.
Put the damn pictures up, I think.
Okay, I think.
I can trace this equivocal need to hunt to my immediate past. It began with a doll my sister’s daughter--niece, if I must be an aunt—carries always and carried two weeks ago as we gathered for Easter dinner at our mother’s stucco ranch. At first glance, the doll was a toy. Then, closer: a molded embryo, scaled to size. Instead of a tiny plaything, a symbolic manifestation of the physical consequences of an emotional choice, one clearly meant for the eyes of desperate new mothers. A tiny little faceless (almost) fetus, swaddled latex in loving four-inch felt, its room temperature “flesh” used, by my own sister no less, as a little tool like phonics to teach a lesson straight and early about the insidious sin of the big goddamned A-word—to teach a child, a little six-year-old who strokes it lovingly with no adult sense whatsoever of its ulterior significance. Of course all this means nothing to me. I’ll never choose.
I know my mind (said every loony ever). But listen: I’m pretty sure I have it pegged. I’ve been paying attention. More often than not, it’s a cumbersome habit, the constant double-checking and stocktaking, the obsessive internal compulsion to scrape clean every corner of consciousness, no matter how grim the goop. And this, this sudden obsession with the doll? This is an issue of transference, this hunt I’ve undertaken. The eerie repose of the little “toy” embedded within me a freshly gnawing knowledge of my exclusion from “choice.” I long to experience in essence the power of decision, as a woman should. Essence. I need to know there are moral stakes to physical actions; I need to feel danger, to mainline like an emaciated addict the molten risk to my immortal soul—to fear wrong and do it regardless, to battle the guilt my little niece’s doll was molded to impart—in those that can actually muster up a fleshy doppelganger, of course…but I’m making do. I’m hunting a surrogate decision behind the cool barrel of my feminine impotence.
***
So I apply lip liner; I rouge my cheeks; I thicken and straighten my lashes; I dress with an audience of bare walls in my modest apartment—a temporary apartment, I’m sure. I love the color, the soft, tranquil gray. To be clear, I have the framed photos and girly hangings; I unpacked them weeks ago. But I’ve neglected to hang them. I look for my earrings and contemplate choice—do I choose what I wear or is he choosing for me? Do I bring my own voice or supply a conduit for the good doctor’s purposeful line of clinical questioning? I love the way I run from detail by embracing it wholeheartedly. Morals and visceral id can never coexist. Truthfully? I was repulsed when I saw the thing. It is what I am, that heartburning repulsion; so far from the reaction intended, it outpaces disgust with my sister and whoever gave it to her to give to her child et al. Yes, my nasty little imp of an id snarled its angry teeth but simultaneously embarked upon a trail of visceral urge encroached on all sides by an overgrowth of associative stimuli, sniffing around my unconscious first, curious and then hungry, and almost immediately a perverse longing was born—the longing for consequences, for what I do with my body to matter like it does for other girls, girls who have a stake in the little blue-swaddled doll, who feel the disgust of its implications in their fecund uteri.
Ugh. And my teachers said I was too smart for my own good. Well, the teachers with children said I overthought things…too analytical, they cried, their mouths full of sticky caramel fertility…the old childless cat ladies loved me. Bad omen. Hope their cats were tabbies…omens enough: too smart…right…fuck karmic cats I don’t own one if I did, however, (fuck karma, that is), I wouldn’t have to fuss with PlannedP or PlanB—I would make him wrap it: karma plays dirty, no telling where he’s been…no baby worries though what’s the Marley song? “No Egg No Cry?” No…no “Woman”…ah, but to me, for me, me…interchangeable, aren’t they?
What do I wear? How do I talk? So different from a typical date. How do I make sure he wants more, that he doesn’t say goodnight and run? I can’t choose if he wants no part of me. Then, the choice: Can I, Will I? And oh god if I do (if I choose to before the night ends) let it not be a rebellion against heart and mind, lest I lose myself to this pervasive little imp. Let it be because I want it. Let it be a mistake made in the heat of wanton dereliction.
How to start: Do we shake hands or hug like old friends? Why have I hung nothing in here, unpacked every box but hung nothing? Is a skirt appropriate? I remind myself again This is My choice My body My life and the doctor knocks on time.
His handwriting, for chrissakes, must be perfect.
My junkie heart gasps, arches its bloody back off the stained silk sheets of my barren chest cavity as an adrenaline rush purges my blood of doubt—I make a choice but it’s too late and far too rude to call it off now, and the id is laughing. She holds my leash, for now. The doctor’s arrival, at the very least, punctuates the mounting inanity of my thoughts. No use reaching for it now--where was I? why am I doing this? Distracted, blissfully occupied. The impish id retreats while I appraise him, silent until I’m comfortable enough to look ahead.
He’s supposed to be this evil baby-killer, an evil effigy of a man with rubber gloves and glass eyes, but on my doorstep he’s a nice young man, my age. He’s slicked his hair back and sidelong ala Dean Martin—a classic, tone-deaf but pragmatic sense of style that somehow means he is free of tattoos, piercings and frivolity, that he sips wine socially, knows where to grasp the glass without knowing the year by smell or bouquet, or even what “bouquet” means. Even worse (because it relaxes me and draws me closer before a word is spoken), he looks as nervous as I feel.
“Hi. Rachel?”
And so the night becomes an exercise in redolent discovery.
Without flashing all the way back I can trace myself, my present predicament, if not me-myself in the Whitmanian sense, to a Saturday in September eleven years ago in the foyer of my mother and father’s stucco ranch, to my bold introduction of a nervous, half-Jewish, half-black boy from a neighboring school to my Methodist parents, who practically asphyxiated themselves in a fit of white restraint. I can step far enough back to the shameful satisfaction I gleaned from their discomfort and no further. I’ve forgotten Allen’s face. Alec? Alvin? Of course, I remember the looks on theirs with photographic clarity, and why that should be and whom, if anyone, should shoulder the blame, if not me, is an issue for the dream journal I keep by my bed for this exact purpose—to unburden my conscious conscience of sleepy relics of the buried other.
Though I’ve never hunted, I imagine the adrenal cocktail that first time out must feel like this: a slow emotional descent into vigilant patience, leading to a keener taste of the wind and a sharpening awareness: the focus needed to track little side-swept twigs, all the while suspecting deep down that the biggest rush is lurking close by or just ahead, your glands ready to thrust you into manic slow-motion at the slightest provocation. I suppose out of necessity they tape their…well, “themselves” down to dispel the discomfort of the unceasing erection that this state of pure expectation must inevitably breed, for how else can they manage the excruciating tightness of that imminent, incendiary, inevitable choice—pull the trigger or let him go? My father was a hunter before he died, and the stucco ranch became my mother’s empty box--goddamn, my dream journal is underqualified.
And all I want is to be a woman: all I want is to make a mistake with this man that involves sex. Simple transference. I’m not all that complex, am I? I’m not a Judy Bloom character. I’m not that fucked up—looking at you, Margaret.
So like the tree-born hunter I tuck away my tension and observe the details informing my imminent choice: his pupils like flecked pollen, here and for an instant fluttering there; his Adam’s apple bedded by a subtle, V-shaped slope of white cotton where his cornflower blue tie unites his firm collar, the cartilage unobtrusively proportionate within a network of flesh-eclipsed muscle; his confident yet deferential bearing and the fine hair on the back of his hands, thin enough, thick enough; and I know he’s waiting as well, watching and listening, appraising me with his clinical eye, perhaps the slope of my breasts or evocative bitten lip I affect quite shamelessly, knowing full well what I’ve done.
In the interest of deferring with optimism to what I already recognize as an embryonic physical attraction, I think only fleetingly of the details missing from the latex form of my niece’s toy ghost, hold their absence only for an instant against the tapestry of his thirty years of fine tuning, and even now I do this reflexively, for I’ve aged thirteen Acura turns since I feared my dubious id and the portent of my juvenile rebellion and, already, for better or worse, I detect a human element beneath the veil of cognitive murk that polluted my expectations. With the land so sprawling, what can the hunter do but document what proximity demands he must, if for no other reason than to retain the holy illusion of agency—and, of course, suppress the tightly wound imp that lurks still, because the id never recuses herself. Six lefts and seven rights, tracking my path through a forest of latent chaos, because, simply put, I see myself fucking the doctor, so checking his speed and the suspicious loiterer shrinking in the side-view mirror keeps me aware, keeps me divorced from my seesawing whims.
I slow this vehicle down and he slows his. I act like a lady, and he acts like my date, not my doctor, which is great because he isn’t. Won’t be. I just have no need for him in that capacity, which, ironically, is why we’re here together. The restaurant is nice; nevertheless, the rich are procreators too—a child named Cody That’s Enough! in the booth behind us, unseen and never to be seen. He screams bloody shards of glass that tear jagged holes in the heavenly sheen of our public isolation, and not for an instant does the child recall the doll. His pocket square accessorizes his low-key sense of style, and not even then do I connect the silky, virile blue with the four-by-four swaddle that houses my niece’s tactically poignant little latex companion. Later I see it, long after the beast leaps sprinting full throttle from the brush into the great wide open and, as it always does, disappoints at the moment of climax--should I have waited? Just to see how I felt tomorrow?
He tells me things a human tells another human: his grandmother raised him after the death of his parents, the tragic death he mentions only when I press back in time from his nobly undertaken vocational calling. I probe, prod and feel around the id’s clumsy hunger to know and expose: why do you…how does one even…. Because that’s part of the choice, not knowing, wanting to know, not knowing why I have to know and knowing that finding out would ruin everything--
“What do you like to do?” he asks, interrupting the movie I’d been watching, the epic story of us in this place, this ridiculous place.
“I knit.”
I don’t fucking knit. Why--
“What do you knit?” He feigns interest above a glistening trickle of duck sauce, rogue and wild against the clean white porcelain of his sixty-dollar plate.
“Little blue blankets. For babies.”
Jesus. At this point, I’m just along for the ride. My innocence is on autopilot.
“Oh?”
I wouldn’t know what to say to me, either.
***
Later, at home, a half-hour after I’ve chosen.
Without turning on my bedroom light, I remove my earrings, my clothes, my lipstick, and, though I cannot see them, I nevertheless feel the vacuum of my unadorned walls. I can almost hear my ambivalent independence echoing unchecked and purposeless from the clean corners. I slip naked between my blue cotton sheet and my heavy comforter. Soon the satisfied little imp vanishes beneath the thin membrane that separates the deep from my unsatisfied mind.
Put the damn pictures up, I think.
Okay, I think.
Danny Judge’s short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, most recently Twisted Vine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Burningword, and Lunch Ticket, for which he is nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. He is a freelance copywriter and the founding Editor of The Indianola Review, a quarterly print journal.