Jane Jervis-Read

response to writers' workshop

TODAY..

Sausage I am sausage
my fragmented heartbeat/
the spattered fault line
i imagine
it creates/
my heartbeat
it dangles
at the end of a line/

LAST WEEK..

I am looking, am I looking? It is hard to be certain, of anything. This black and white world of bastards and facts has rejected me suspended me in no fact no truth in uterine jelly without edges. I don't know one day from the next.

ONE YEAR AGO..

I was in my workpod. I was researching. I can't account for this time I spend, tracing the heat of his steps.

TEN YEARS AGO..

Lounging on the couch licking a red wine drop from the edge of a glass. Darin is in view, he is cooking, cooking for me. Three year anniversary. The last one. The smell of oregano. A windowed wall, the city from a great height. I am barely alive, I have barely begun to feel. After dinner he rolls me out on the course woolen rug over his bed and presses his wet tongue into my mouth. Garlic.

I hook myself up like a carcass on a wall and the girls around me their heads are hanging with great long strings of drool like catgut trailing to the floor.

I am hooking up.

It’s mandatory for me. Mandatory for me but not for everyone. Prostitutes and sex offenders. Everyone else just pops a pill, for a while it was optional.

I am hooking up.

They know what we need. I take what they give me. I slide the cool metal into the poor puckered vein of my arm and I wait to see if anyone’s going to miss me.

Afterwards my eyes will be rolling back in my head and my feet won’t walk one in front of the other. They know what I need and for a long time I take what they give me.

They have all our information. They have it on our Start Cards. The data is there in black and white and there isn’t anyone to argue with.

I clock on, hook up, don’t meet anyone. If I don’t clock on every two weeks they come to meet me.

You can try to call. You can try but you’ll be redirected and redirected, you’ll be put on hold

…and even then you’ll have to press buttons to categorise your query but my query didn’t fit into the options they gave me.

Everything meant the same.

They removed me.

#

Compulsory additives were introduced to the drugs we take, clothed in different names; Maldendiocin in contraceptive pills, Pelcin 4 or Disrodexin in antidepressants. They break down resistance, these additives, that was how it began.

People worked long hours and bought a lot of stuff. The world functioned well.

Only the army was a problem. It was easy to recruit, to conscript, conscientious objectors were few and far between. But the army needed to advance aggressively, to slaughter, shed guilt like a reptile. They needed to win. So the additives were changed. And the soldiers were changed. They were frightening people. The armed forces of the Trade Nations of America could blow up a dog from three thousand meters, could break a neck with a strand of their hair, but they couldn’t get a half decent erection between them. Can you imagine what that does to an entire army? So the Cold War hasn’t resulted in face-to-face combat yet. We’re in a state of emergency until the soldiers can get it up.

#

Listen to me. Listen to me! (aggressively)

Eight Executive Members. They all jack off online. It’s a known fact. There’s a lawyer, a general, a financial advisor, a shrink, the ex-president of the United States of America, an IT man, a robot and

(pause)

Father Nicholson O’Brien of the Evangelical Church of America. Someone designs their fantasies for them. Skin and hair little boys and little girls opium dens and hot breathed animals all made of ones and zeros. You’d never know the difference. It’s much safer for them that way.

But I wanted
I wanted
I wanted
to lick the prayer from your face.

your face

your face

f face f

(MITNIK IS SEIZED AS IF BEING SHAKEN VIOLENTLY)

Listen to me!

#

When you take their pills you bleed when they tell you to. Just like clockwork on the Wednesday pill, once a month for five days exactly. So efficient they could bake an egg on you. It makes women feel comfortable, to menstruate, there’s no reason for it, but it makes them feel comfortable.

You take their sugar pills
and you bleed their sugar blood
out into the drain ways.

#

To begin with I don’t take the pills. The choice is mine. The pills exist to soothe a headache, to regulate menstrual cycles. The pills exist to normalise any imbalances, like not being able to get up in the morning or wishing your mother wasn’t dead or having two sick days in a month or acne or feeling like your ears are stuffed with cotton or forgetting to wipe your shit off the side of the bowl.

But I have a passion. Not like those on the pills. I have a passion. I watched his face in the yellow light of his bathroom window when he got up to pee. I watched him fold the scarf around his neck on an autumn morning as he crossed through the park.

The leaves,
the leaves.
You should see the colours they designed for autumn, it’ll blow your mind.

#

In the Trade Nations of America, oranges grow with skins thick for ease in packaging. A calf becomes a cow in a matter of days, udder swelling fat with low fat milk. Shift workers are alert all night, prostitutes want it so bad that they’re biting through their cheeks. The blue collars are being custom made. Everyone is working well. We are advancing together in leaps and bounds. Hand over your Start Card to pay the pharmacist.

By law a corporation must make every decision in the best financial interest of its shareholders… and, well, the technology was there.

#

Like everyone I work from my apartment in a workpod for a big company and a boss I’ve never met. I check in with my card in the morning and I clock off with my card at night. My boss does not exist. I don’t believe his name on the company homepage. I believe he is a sugar pill to make us all feel comfortable.

My research skills are impeccable. My fingers dance the keyboard. I know I can’t account for the hours I spend, tracing the heat of his steps.

(MITNIK STARTS TO STREAM ADENA’S FILM… AGAIN SHE IS PHYSICALLY SEIZED)

Shut up! Shut up! I’m not finished with you.

#

Trains don’t run anymore. The TNA doesn’t invest in public transport. People stay home with their home entertainment. But once. Three years ago. I spotted him in Central Station, pure luck. Follow him underground and onto platform 9. The carriage is crowded. In the crush, I press behind him, unbutton my overcoat. The smell of him, my god… oranges, dust…hair wax… The pitted skin of his cheek. My fingers lace with juice and I smear, along his back a silver trail. I mark him as mine. The train rocks. We rock. My bladder clenches like a fist, sends shots of agony through my body, contracted, against him, the lights flicker and he watches for his station.

#

2017: compulsory contraception is introduced. For everyone. 15 and over. No exceptions.

My desire becomes property of TNA.

‘The pills don’t agree with me,’ I tell the doctor and he says, (patronisingly) ‘how so… exactly?’ I swipe my card at reception when I leave.

#

One small mishap. I flush the pills and it comes flooding back with intensity to make up for lost time. I want to hunt him. One small mishap. One small flout of the law.

It doesn’t make sense to ship people off to high-security bunkers when they mess up as I did. But a psychological nip and tuck, edge off the aggression, the faculty of desire, loosen the long-term memory and put them to work? Well that makes sense. Prison costs but workforce pays. And my research skills are impeccable.

But after that… if you mess up again, then they’ll rip out your brain and feed your body to the police dogs, they’ll rip out your brain and hang it out to dry with their dirty underpants. They’ll never let it die. They’ll never let you sleep. You’ll feel those dogs sinking their canines into your grey matter, licking your frontal lobe til it’s shiny and clean as a hubcap. Oh they’ll never let you sleep, it’s a known fact.

#

So I am relocated, castrated, made to clock into ‘family planning’. Once every two weeks to hook up and be normalised. New apartment much like the old one. No one visits.

They dull me out, slow my heart to the pace of a dead person’s and I can feel the mute buzz of it, like a television in the corner, when I lie down to sleep. For a long time I don’t bleed at all. I don’t dream. I remember wanting him the way I remember a childhood song. I can’t quite get a hold of it. A half fried egg, gone cold. I can function but I cannot fire. My motor skills are fine and polished but my thought processes don’t go beyond the practical.

I work. I work. Like everyone I work from my apartment in a workpod for a big company and a boss I’ve never met… I am employee of the month. I work quickly and well and never bleed and never cry. I am so dry that my thighs are chafing. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I work twenty hour days and my hair falls out. I lose all my weight. No one notices.
No one notices.
I am employee of the month.

#

I stop clocking on. I stop hooking up. I lock the doors of my apartment.

#

It only takes one day. I feel the grind of my reproductive organs working again. The ache of opening, the pull of my own gravity. The first drop of my blood falls and I catch it. I catch it in my hand and they come for me.

#

And now…I know that I had barely begun to want. This full sensory experience of wanting something that I cannot have… adoring something that I cannot touch, it heightens every nuance of feeling in me and it is greater now.

Hello, I am not sure about the new last paragraph. It used to end at the previous paragraph. I mean the sentiment, just not sure it makes for weaker ending? Any suggestions?

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