Stigmata by Proxy

I was eight or maybe nine when my parents took my sister and me to see Agnes of God at the drive-in theater, us two in the backseat. While she fell asleep mid-screening, I watched enthralled as the story unfolded: Agnes, a virgin girl in a nunnery, was pregnant and unexplainable. At some point during the screenplay the word ‘stigmata’ became notable, hot on the mouth. Stig-ma-ta. The word repeated in my mind as the film’s powerful images flashed before me: the terrible tender faces of nuns, Agnes weeping on the floor, the large sweeping land around the nunnery, the sky, tears, blood, stone floors. Stigmata: powerful, the prickly adult connotations, the mysterious overtone. I asked my mother on the way home what stig-ma-ta meant, and she explained to me that it’s when the signs of Jesus’ death appear on the body of a person for unknown reasons. Bloody holes in the hands, ankles, scratches made by thorns. Oh. Oh Jesus. The world that I already knew was magical and bizarre and mysterious had become even more haunted, even more beyond my grasp. What was real? I sat in the backseat of the car as my parents talked, shadows slipping over and over my sister’s pale sleeping face. We drove home with the radio off. I looked at my hands, my palms. I thought of my night terrors, the evils I feared in sleep, and wondered with a sickening rush if I could make those evils real, just by imagining them hard enough. I closed my hands into balled fists, now sweaty.

Don’t think about it!

I have thought about it ever since.

I knew that stories were often told in place of what adults wanted to say, but would not. Movies, books, poems, tall tales and flat-out lies. I thought of the adult world as though it were in a constant state of denial: of pleasure, truth, insanity. For what was clearly insane was accepted as due and what was part and parcel of human life was treated as inane; everywhere around me I watched adults telling the story of their life, then the actual living. The babysitter after my parents left. The parents of my friends in their homes, with no other adults around. The neighbors when my sister and I put on our Big Wheels and rode past their window boxes. Teachers. Principals. Tutors. The lady who scooped ice cream at Thrifty’s. My neighbor’s mother, who took us to the beach — spread out oiled, glossy as a seal and tony with tan overlaid in gold chain — who spent two hours telling her girlfriend all about her affair, her husband, her feelings. We played in and out of the water unwatched for hours.

I lay in bed that night thinking about stig-ma-ta and the sound of it was like a needle, a clean and metallic bite making the teeth ache, sliding easily into blood and leaving a welt where the thing went in. I had always been afraid that monsters were real. I had always known that monsters were real. I had always known monsters. Now I knew what the dark matter of my brain and the matted, clotted caves in my heart could make happen; I knew the worst of it. It sealed my neurotic and childish belief in the power of my own thoughts, held me accountable for the wrongs done to me. At the same age I became fixated on saving the abandoned and damaged things of the world. I wrote an anonymous note to an old lady that lived houses down from our place, her hair white and tall, her back bent, herself only a character in a story that I thought I knew: she had been too mean, and no one loved her anymore. The future I now see I feared for myself. I left the note in her broken mailbox. I wrote words to make her feel better. I took to seeking and taking home animals or insects, broken-winged, foul-smelling, beaks agape, wings torn, antennas bent and useless. I fed them with droppers stolen from our medicine cabinet, dug worms for food, lay towels for beds. Having no Google to use and find their needs, I guessed.

One tiny flustered bird I cared for in a cardboard box with grass and twigs was eating the worms I fed her. Overnight she began to stand and make sweet, vulnerable noises and I found myself turned over to her. I was her protector, her savior, her refuge. The worms left a mealy, rotten smell that stayed in my nose. The bird herself smelled horrible to me, like a thing already dying, but still she brightened overnight and began to take in the first awareness of her little box, twigs, grass. Those glassy dark orbs. Life. I fussed around the garage like a mother in a nursery, humming, dipping my finger in a cup of water and letting fat drops slide into the bird’s gaping beak. The second day of this, I moved to the left of the garage, organizing. I heard a noise. My brain understood the thing before I turned: our cat had crept into the garage and dragged my bird out of her little box. The cat held a paw on her, looking at me, growling. Tears down my face, I ran yelling, and the cat left the bird struggling to live. I was immediately overwhelmed with the responsibility of her pain. Do I let her struggle and die, or do I kill her now, end the agony? I do not remember what I did, or how she died. I do remember weeping for hours at her suffering not once, but twice, just to die anyhow.

These animals were my obsession and their care-taking a thing of pride and terrible beauty. The cats with their bent whiskers and lopsided eyes, the dogs with bloody nail beds and raggedy collars with half faded addresses, rabbits twitching toward death in the middle of the asphalt. I loved them, I feared them, I understood them, I matched my wild wound to their wild wound like blood sisters and felt less alone in the world. I am an animal, surrounded by other animals, I thought, in the suburban boxes and open garages of town.

I began to imagine myself slinking behind the jasmine bushes and palm trees and hucklesuckle flowers of my neighborhood, a gash across my freckled face, my right arm bent angrily and held in the left, blood dripping from some undetermined area down toward my bare feet, which stepped firmly and unafraid through the grass, twigs, rocks, leaves, across the concrete, toward better hiding places. Someone would find me, I hoped, find me and gasp in horror! And take me in, arrange me on warm blankets in their garage, feed me with a dropper. I would be recognized as wounded.

It was in tenth grade that I began experimenting with cutting. I had a small, ferociously tight knit group of friends that included three boys — ages fifteen and two others seventeen — and one girl, my best friend, the same best friend I had begun finding wounded animals with in the edges of the canyon that lapped up against her cul-de-sac. We were smoking pot and drinking, we were young and wild and angry and fighting from a cage of curfews and anti-drugs and labels like ‘adolescent angst’ and we were mouthy and pompous and rude and terrified and full of self-hatred. We both had glossy blonde hair, blue eyes, freckles and long thin legs stuffed into tight Levi’s. We attracted everything and feared them all as they encroached our mighty facade: older men, hard drugs, stealing liquor, breaking into houses. We kept our boy band around us for protection, and they adored us and watched us and prayed that we would sleep with each one. I was a virgin. I began cutting into my arm late at night and bled.

After my first time cutting, a middle aged Yard Dog — what we called the volunteers who paroled the high school — saw the giant welt on the inside of my left arm and gasped in delighted horror. Oh honey, she said meanly, sensing my otherness, what is that? I was triumphant, sick to my stomach, and then, cleanly and neatly and suddenly like a drug through a needle, I felt the great and terrible nothingness that was my desire: I have been seen, I have sent my message out to sea, and now I am responsible for nothing, because I am a child, and someone else must help me.

I cut SLOP into my left arm, gently. This stood for Smoke Lots Of Pot, our group motto. I liked it so much I carved it again the next day, gently, and then being struck by a brilliant idea, carved it again the next day, and the next, until, I hoped, it would permanently scar into my arm, raised and white and puffy as a grave. Every day I walked through the world with my flannel rolled up enough for the wound to be seen, and every widened eye, look of fear, anger, worry was another validation that this was the righteous path. Everything in, come out.

My dog Percy died a year later. He was too young to die but did so anyhow; he was my sole confidant and the one who nuzzled my face and licked the tears away when I cried in my room at night. One morning he woke and when my mother found him he was unable to stand, trembling spasmodically with miserable, hot red eyes. He died before we got him to the vet. I found out when I came home and wept a clean and heartbroken cry that felt as if it would never end. I could feel the welts and tears on my arms burning and a tail of blood curled outward into my palm. I held the blood in a cup and looked at it with a great satisfaction. Stigmata. Now I understood. We buried Percy and I rubbed the hot pain of my arm with a thumb.

I am an adult now, and if I look very, very hard at my left inner arm, I still cannot see where those four letters were. This is unjust. I worked very hard to memorialize that pain, and while it has not left — though it has been curated carefully, and tamed — the marker has. The world refuses me as a martyr.