[Fam, I turned the kaleidoscope and these flakes fell into place. Dr. Acteon’s lecture is adapted in part from one delivered at Millsaps College by Professor Ted Ammon, early 1990s. This story is part of The Sanguine Experiment, but not about any of the same characters.]
Call me Diotima.
A long time ago, before she had any reason to trust me with her secrets, my colleague Jethra began giving me letters each containing a single, folded sheet of thick, home-made paper. I don’t think she made the paper herself. I suspect she picked it up for ridiculous prices at local arts fairs.
Imbecile. She had an infant back then. She should have been spending money on Pampers.
I didn’t care what she put on her brat’s butt, but social workers do tend to notice these wee details. You spent your money on what?
She never gave them to me by hand. Just dropped them off on my desk, or hid them in my calendar, or my Rolodex, or my mail cubby. When I opened the envelope and unfolded the piece of paper I found a semi-symmetrical splotch of of reddish, homemade ink. Rust, I thought, or —
I didn’t know what. But they were clearly Rorschach patterns. Splatted butterfly or shattered wineglass? I’ll take the 1988 pinot noir —
Each card had a date on it: day, month, year. I recognized Jethra’s hashmark across the stems of her sevens.
I leaned an elbow on the edge of her cubicle. “Jethro, do you really need to share your mad art projects with the group?” She was named Jethra, as I’ve said, but she had a square build and wore these little pixie cuts, not much more than butch cuts, she got at the Snip-N-Save. Broad shoulders, biceps straining the arms of her pink or lavender polo shirts. Violations of the gender binary — as the cool kids say nowadays — have always offended my sense of order. So I called her Jethro just to see her wince.
We were less — how shall I say it — politically correct in 1996. Yes. That’s how they said woke back then.
Jethra was pretty solid, though. It was hard to make her squirm. And she had the advantage just now: I was leaning on her cubicle wall, not she on mine. I had shown my hand a little by making the effort. I really was curious. She looked steadily up at me. “No, Tim, just you.”
“Well, good, you’re only humiliating yourself in front of one colleague.”
But she gave me this strange look. She had dark blue eyes, wide-set, almost violet, and now she just took me in with her gaze. She rested her chin on her fist.
She said, “You really haven’t been paying attention.”
[Handwritten notes]
Jan. 29, 1992
Philosophy 101
Prof. Edmund Acteon (“Call me Ned” Young guy, has a long beard) Office hours M/W 1-3
Lecture: What good is philosophy?
My wife and I (details about miscarriages and in-vitro in utro in utero fertilization — she’s finally preggers). In December that year I finished my dissertation and was invited to read from the first published chapter at a conference in Cincinnati (?). Julia was still working on her dissertation in Comparative Religion. She was about four months along. She wanted to stay home and write, but I didn’t want to leave her alone, so we went together.
We didn’t know anyone in Cincinatti.
I gave my presentation and received some good questions. She started bleeding during my lecture but didn’t tell me. My big moment. (He quotes something about categorical impar imperative.)
That evening we went back to the hotel and in the night she started having contractions. We had experienced this before, though not so far along. She was losing a lot of blood and went to sit on the toilet. I went to look in the phone book for a clinic.
I heard it fall into the toilet. I can’t really have heard it, from the other room near the window and the rattling heater. But I heard (missed what he said, a student stood up and left through the side entrance & the fire door crashed).
We were kneeling on either side of the toilet where the miscarriage was. We held hands. We looked at each other. Neither of us cried. You don’t always cry. And not one of our advanced degrees in religion and theology could tell us this:
Which one of us should flush the toilet?
“No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society, that we know of to this point, that has not been abused.”
— Edward Snowden, interview with Alan Rusbridger and Ewen MacAskill for The Guardian, 2018
A grand jury in Ohio is considering whether to indict a woman who miscarried a nonviable fetus at home and has been charged with abuse of a corpse in what experts say is an extremely rare interpretation of a state law.
The woman … was arrested in October after passing a fetus in her bathroom and trying to flush the remains down the toilet.
—Remy Tumin, The New York Times, 2024
Item. A 4-month-old fetus may be 6 inches long.
Item. Jethra routinely passes blood clots 6 inches at the longest point of their rather shaggy and ovoid diameter. Or she did, before she was lost.
Item. Not only could Dr. Ned Acteon not have told his story in 2024 without risking arrest for himself and his wife — I don’t need to finish that sentence, do I? It’s already staggering under negatives. Forget about the public lecture hall. He needs to watch how he uses his social media, what he says on his phone, in case some disgruntled student decides to tell police that Mrs. Julia Acteon, graduate teaching assistant, was pregnant before Christmas break. And the police decide to subpoena his communications in evidence —
Or not even that. If the Acteons are politically involved, a lost pregnancy is already a possible avenue of attack on a young couple, so their digital lives are being monitored in advance —
Now picture the Ned and Julia kneeling on either side of the hotel toilet. It has bluish patches on each side of the seat, sundog-like, where the enamel’s worn off. They are no longer engaged in a silent and complex negotiation — unspoken, but fully mutual — among love, grief, philosophy and action. Dr. Acteon no longer resolves the debate by means of the categorical imperative and reaches for the rattling handle. (He has to flush twice. Then he scoots around and puts his head on his wife’s shoulder. She has straight, silky brown hair. In this light you can’t tell the color of her eyes, but you can see the shadows under them. They take their time before they close the lid.)
No. Now in 2024 they lock eyes. They cannot grieve their baby. They are trying to decide whether they may be found guilty of a crime. They picture the moment through the eyes of unknown watchers. Should they — it is a terrible thought — should they fish that fetus out in its various parts and tissues, furls of what must be uterine lining, put it — where? a Walmart bag? — and carry it to a hospital?
Will they still be charged?
Any other moment, they might say to each other, We are white, we are married, the laws are leveraged against single women of color, not —
But now is not that moment.
Again, they have no need to talk. They are young, literate, sensitive people. Their whole relationship — seven years now — they have talked. Without words, but with all those words behind them, they reach the same conclusion: Having their baby picked apart by police will be worse violation than —
When the toilet fails to flush the first time they are sick with fear.
Their beloved child is now evidence, an enemy, a mangled witness they need to get rid of quick. A furnace, Dr. Acteon thinks frantically, knowing he isn’t making sense, a Dumpster — the plunger —
Julia jerks at the handle.
The toilet flushes.
I must say they bullied her. The Montessori preschool. The Tudor-style house with the two pink dogwoods in front and the miniature playground behind. The safe, smooth sidewalk. The absence of roaches. The laundry machine right off the kitchen. It can’t be good for him being lugged to the laundry mat.
As if she hadn’t been hustling from the moment he was born. Jethra isn’t exactly my favorite person, or in the top 100 — though I can’t imagine liking or even tolerating 100 humans — but she wore herself out for that kid.
“You should have fought.”
She set down the cup of coffee on my desk and plonked the bear-shaped jar of honey beside it. She had a pretty face, triangular, with broad round cheeks and dimples. Her dimples didn’t even disappear when she got mad. But her eyes used to narrow. They were slits just now. “You know all about it, do you?”
“I know this honey cost five ninety-nine.” That was a lot for 1998. “At the very least. I know you take care of your kid. But it’s ridiculous to buy me things that I don’t need and never asked for, again, even though I told you not to, again. You did everything you could for Donovan. But you didn’t do everything you could to hurt his dad’s parents. You should have focused on the fight, not jars of honey and art projects — ”
“I’m gonna fight you if you don’t stop being such a jerk.” Her hands balled up, too. She had heavy forearms and dimpled knuckles. “You’re not the Wicked Witch of the West. A little kindness isn’t going to melt you like a bucket of water.” The rage went out of her face. “And it’s not a distraction. I mean, it is, but it’s a good distraction. Bringing you things is about the only thing that makes me happy — except Donovan. And when I think about Donovan, I cry. But now you’re gonna ruin this, too.”
She ground the heel of her hand into her left eye. Then her right. She was about to bawl in front of my cubicle. They were chest-high, these carpeted partitions, and the accounting business where we worked had dozens of them. Four blocks of six rows by eight columns of workspaces: 192 people at full strength, though we were never full. There were always deserts, gaps, no-mans-lands … The bosses had offices around the perimeter, glass walls and everything, a real panopticon. The shadow falling across the carpeted wall behind Jethra meant Todd the comptroller was leaning in his open door.
In retrospect, I panicked, and I reacted the way I always do when I panic. I eliminated the threat as efficiently as I could.
I said, not loudly, but crisply enough to be heard by anyone who was listening, “Jethra, I’m asking you to stop bringing me things. I’m asking you to leave me alone. And the next time we have this little chat, it’s going to be in the human resources office.”
I had frightened her past tears. She could not afford to get in trouble at work, and she was shocked that I — her accomplice in contempt for management in general and human resources in particular — would betray her. She stood frozen.
I pointed. “Take the honey.”
She took the bear-shaped bottle and went. Later I learned she’d gone home sick that day.
I didn’t give her back all those cards. For one thing, I didn’t want people to see quite how many there were. I had clearly been receiving them without much complaint for two years now, more or less since she came back from maternity leave a couple of weeks after Donovan was born. For another thing, I had started to realize what they were.
Now a woman, having a flow of blood for twelve years, who had spent all her livelihood on physicians and could not be healed by any, came from behind and touched the border of His garment. And immediately her flow of blood stopped. And Jesus said, “Who touched Me?” When all denied it, Peter and those with him said, “Master, the multitudes throng and press You, and You say, ‘Who touched Me?’”
But Jesus said, “Somebody touched Me, for I perceived power going out of Me.” Now when the woman saw that she was not hidden, she came trembling; and falling down before Him, she declared to Him in the presence of all the people the reason she had touched Him and how she was healed immediately. And He said to her, “Daughter be of good cheer; your faith has made you well. Go in peace.”
— Luke 8:43–48
Our company rented office space in a former shopping mall. We didn’t have our own restrooms; you had to walk down aisles of dozens of cubicles, past the front desk receptionist (and the HR lady’s door looking onto the lobby) and out into the main corridor to restrooms shared by several businesses. You swiped your card to get in — that was to keep the bums from taking cat baths in our sinks, shitting in, or more often near, our toilets, and generally setting up shop in there.
We were divided amongst two contingents. People like Jethra typically held the bathroom doors open for any bag lady who asked. The sane, I-don’t-want-to-have-my-pockets-picked-while-I-take-a-piss contingent, took various measures to counteract that foolishness. There were laminated signs: Restrooms for business tenants only. There were emails (I had an alias on the women’s email list): Please STOP propping the bathroom doors. I found THREE NEEDLES in the floor and someone stole all the toilet paper. AGAIN.
I worked late because I had been promoted to discrepancy analyst and had a lot to do. Jethra worked late because she’d been at the pediatrician’s office, then an appointment with a specialist in child development, all afternoon. At eight p.m. the cloudy skylight reflected the dim security lighting that was building management allowed us after hours. I changed in the restroom stall and stepped out to go on about my evening’s business.
I was striding toward the stairs — big glass stairs from the old mall — when I heard the elevator grind to a halt. The janitor, of course, coming with his cart and mops. I was still holding my card, so I stepped into the nearest, and only possible, alcove. I swiped the card, opened the door to the women’s restroom, and slipped inside.
Someone was sobbing in the far stall. I looked in the mirror and waited for the sounds that meant the janitor had hauled his cart into our office and out of the hallway. He always did the offices first, toilets last. To pass the time, I fished out my eye pencil and added a little more shadow to an already smokey eye.
The person stopped sobbing, but didn’t move. A minute passed.
“Are you all right?”
Jethra’s voice. “Yeah, just bleeding. Need a new pad by the time I get to my car, so I’m just waiting it out. You know how it is.”
Did I, in fact, know how it is? I did not.
After a while I asked, “Do you … need anything?”
“Tim?”
“Yes, sorry, needed to get away from the janitor.”
Now was her chance for revenge in the HR department, but Jethra was chronically, almost suicidally, unable to exercise aggression on her own behalf. She didn’t even think along those lines. She exclaimed, amused to gleefulness, “I always knew this door had your card code.”
“It works the other way, but yes … ”
“You don’t have to wait because of me. I’m fine.”
“No, I’ll … ” I wasn’t sure how to explain I needed to out-wait the janitor, who was now vacuuming the corridor. “Jethra, I’m not exactly angry, but — you’ve been leaving me art projects every day for two months now.”
She’d been trapping them under the windshield wiper of my car, outside HR’s jurisdiction. Almost, in fact, as if daring me to call the police. I don’t know why she decided to trust me, but she was right: I would never call the police.
“I’m sorry … ”
“Don’t worry about sorry, but are you — cutting yourself?”
We were both very young. There was more glamour and less mental health in the 90s, too. People joined vampire cults, or went to places where strangers would bareback us, AIDS be damned, or cut ourselves and made performance art out of it.
“No, I don’t cut myself.”
I heard the toilet flush. I turned around and leaned on the countertop, at least getting my face out of the light. “Then tell me.”
“I haven’t — ” Jethra was fighting tears. “I haven’t stopped having my period since you told me not to talk to you.” She sobbed.
My throat tightened with anger. This was the most disquieting, impertinent kind of blackmail. “That’s not possible.”
But what did I know? Anyhow, I had plenty of evidence in her favor. I took a breath. When I had control of myself, I said, “You come on out here.”
Jethra came out. She gave me a long stare, starting with my dark-auburn, shoulder-length bob and taking in my indigo silk suit and put-your-eye-out heels. Her lips parted.
Transition narratives are the rather tiresome idiom of this century, and anyhow I don’t want to derail what is Jethra’s story. My tribute to her, I suppose. My offering. In the 1990s and early 2000s, when I looked like Jennifer Connelly en femme, I dressed. After about 2010 I looked more like Quinten Crisp, so I stopped, except a few private touches. It was a vanity project from start to end. As a young man I coddled my vanity a good bit; I no longer do so.
But in that moment, as she took me in with that violet gaze, no change in the adoration with which she always favored me — much to my exasperation any other time — I felt as if I was falling upward into a sky full of stars.
I supposed no one I knew in my daytime life ever saw me dressed. Probably it was no more than that. Tears flowed out of my eyes.
Jethra rolled across the floor —did I tell you she played rugby? — and seized me in arms of plush and stone.
“Don’t cry,” she said, “don’t cry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“You didn’t.” Reluctantly I got out of her hug. It took a little work. “It’s over now.” I got out my makeup bag. “I’m going to have to fix my eyes.”
She washed her hands, then hung on the countertop to watch me. “You’re beautiful.”
Beautiful —
“What do I call you? Are you a drag queen?”
We didn’t have the same language then; apart from drag queen I suppose the polite options were transvestite or — for someone who had surgery — transexual. In my mind I never used any words at all.
“No, I don’t think so?”
“No. You’re not a woman like a drag queen, you’re a woman like me.” She looked at me a while longer. “But prettier. I wish I could be pretty like you. I’ve always wanted to be beautiful. I don’t think I’m vain, but I’ve always imagined things might be easier … ”
She wasn’t wrong. The world, in my observation, is much kinder to pretty women.
“And you don’t get your period — do you?”
I didn’t laugh at her. It was, after all, a lot to take in.
“No.”
“I’ve always thought — ” She looked at her scarred-up knuckles. “I’ve always thought the universe grieves through blood, through women’s bodies. Endless sorrow, for ever and ever.”
“That’s the art you make?”
“I wanted you to understand … ”
I did understand, though, I suppose, only in part.
“I kept thinking you knew.” I came close again. Tim would never take up with a rugby-playing single mom, but now I had other feelings. They weren’t love-feelings, exactly, but they made my chest ache in the strangest way, as if my heart was swelling and cracking open. “I thought you were casting spells to make me be a girl. I didn’t know whether they were hostility or encouragement.”
She shook her head. “But I’m glad it helped — did it help?” She looked at me, lifting her lovely eyelids and short, thick lashes.
Idiot Jethra, ready to put her entire emotional well-being into my hands even as she was still bleeding — I suppose it must have been true — from my last assault.
Maybe I shouldn’t have encouraged her. “Yes, it did help.”
She walked me down the glass stairs and out of the building. I had planned to attend a private party where — but I won’t bore you with the details. Jethra and I went to an all-night Greek diner and shared chocolate cheesecake. Good God, the amount of sugar I could consume in 1998 …
She told me every detail about Donovan, his custody situation, the words he could say — I don’t remember what else. She had grown her hair out by then. She had fine, silky dark-brown hair that clustered around her head like a toddler’s. Under strong emotion, her head sweated and her ringlets clung together — you’ve seen the pictures of children staring around after a nap as if they’re seeing the world for the first time? Red cheeks, dewy curls?
After that we were friends again, though I had to paddle pretty hard to keep from drowning sometimes. Luckily Donovan’s asshole grandparents and the demands of being a single mom, even a disenfranchised single mom, kept her busy, or at least kept our conversation focused mostly on the kid, not us. Having got custody, you understand, the grandparents were glad for Donovan to spend all his screams-for-hours, bangs-his-head-on-walls time with with Jethra. She did the work while they made the decisions. And she paid them child support. To keep up their delusion of magnanimity, I suppose, they had him over a couple nights a week.
One of those evenings — the night we watched Fight Club on VHS — she said, “You need a name.”
“A girl’s name?”
“Mm-hm.”
“You have a suggestion to propose to the board?”
Jethra had been a double major, philosophy and athletic training, for two years before the frat boy with the rich parents got her pregnant, stole the kid, and more or less forced her out of college.
“Diotima,” she said.
“Socrates’ mistress?”
She dimpled at the error, which she knew was deliberate. That’s about as close as we ever got to flirting. “That’s the one. And it has Tim in it.”
“So it does.”
“Do you like it?”
I lay back on the pillows piled on her futon. “I like it.”
But it was all, you know, a little much.
The country was roiling after 9/11, too, and that decided it. I turned 30 in January. Around the first of the year I took a commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Force. I didn’t hear anything else about Jethra for more than 20 years.
“You may experience a prolonged period — up to three weeks — followed by cessation of menstruation for the duration of basic training. Both are a normal response to extreme physical and psychological stress. They are not reason to go to sick call, though you can schedule an appointment with a provider when you get to your training school — ”