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CW: violence and bodily harm.
Let me tell you how I learned to capsize.
• • • •
When I was eight years old, two things happened to me: I realized I wanted to hurt my cousin, and in that same moment God or the Devil or some other force in the universe kicked my consciousness out of my human body and into a fly that circled and alighted on her jam sandwich, circled and alighted, circled and alighted, tasting in the tentative way that flies taste. I felt its soul pushed out to make room for me. I wanted to scream: My vision was suddenly fractal, the sense of my own smallness and lightness breathtaking. But I knew it was a mercy because I watched myself, in my old body, calm, vacant, eating my cookies with a smile on my face, not bunching my cousin’s ginger curls in my fist and pushing her face into the mud until she stopped breathing.
Those few moments saved her life. I flew, and the sensation of air thrumming beneath my wings was as loud as a chainsaw. It was so glorious. We ate our food and washed our hands and mouths and I followed us indoors, fly-bodied, and when the impulse passed, I leapt out of the fly and back into my boy-body and wiped lingering soapsuds from my cousin’s mouth, smiling at her with peace in my heart, no longer wanting to close her throat with my fingers until those pink, chewing lips turned blue.
In the days that followed I tried again, so hard, to leave my body. (I called it “leaping,” then, when I didn’t know any better). The phenomenon made sense; one of my earliest memories as a toddler was of looking down at my body, at the world around me, at the sky, even, and then imagining the world entire as one lonely globe in infinite space and thinking is this it? This cannot be it. And it isn’t.
But what I called “leaping” didn’t happen again for a long time. Elementary school became middle school became high school and my body, my own body, grew. I was neither popular nor bullied. If I had to pick a word, it would be “unnoticed.” I didn’t attract negative or positive attention. I was just there. When I hit puberty, I grew tall, the muscles thin on my bones. It was fun to keep my hair long and shaggy, like a wolf. Some days I would part it in the middle and sweep it back, like girls do, just to see how people would react. No one ever really reacted.
Except one day someone did: a quiet boy, Lewis, another of the unnoticed.
“You have the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen,” he said to me one day when we were sitting cross-legged in the corner of the school field, partially hidden by benches of weathered wood that crackled like bones. Then: “Can I kiss you?”
“Sure,” I said, and he leaned in, and I saw his face close-up (the freckles, the slight sheen of oil on his epidermis, the lightness of his lashes) and felt nothing—but when our lips touched I became leviathan and imagined I had not a mouth but jaws, and went to bite off as much of his face as I could—
And then I was out. Not a fly, this time, nor even a living thing. A stone on the ground by his feet. I became suddenly ancient: a thing seeing centuries, and in that displacement the realization of a peace so almighty it brought tears to the eyes of my human body. I “saw” Lewis pull away, moved by what he thought I was feeling. “It feels good, doesn’t it,” he said, and it did, but not for the reasons I could ever describe to him. I stayed in the rock watching the two bodies kiss until the ecstasy of my violent ideation faded like a dream and then something told me it was time to come out, something nudged me out, and I was back in my body.
I walked away from Lewis to my class, weeping at the returning softness of my human anatomy. The stone I took with me. It was so much easier than leaping into a living thing. The stone was a lifeline in my pocket, and I resolved to make it my refuge whenever the leviathan rose again.
• • • •
You don’t need to know the rest of my boring and uneventful life, so I’ll skip to the good part. I was telling you about capsizing, remember?
Here are the boring and uneventful things:
- I finished high school without killing anyone.
- I met a girl in college (she was a Music major, I was in Econ) and we dated, and then we married.
- I never kissed another man again after Lewis and never even wanted to, but I don’t regret that experience, because I found the stone.
- The stone kept everyone around me safe. The stone was there, a refuge, when I got my wife pregnant and she gave birth to a daughter, a gorgeous little girl with green eyes like mine, and her mother’s supple skin, the stench of human processes ripe in her little body.
Here comes the good part.
• • • •
I didn’t need any friends, but my wife did, you know how women are. So, one weekend, it was late summer (I remember the way the leaves were falling from the trees and beginning to stink on the ground in that bitter New England way), she decided to arrange a camping trip with her friend Shelley and Shelley’s new boyfriend.
(If I tell you the boyfriend’s name it’ll give the game away, because Shelley’s now ex-boyfriend is quite infamous these days, and I don’t want to ruin the surprise for you).
By some stroke of bad luck—probably God again, or the Devil, or some other force in the universe—Shelley had a severe case of food poisoning the night before our trip and had to cancel. I naturally assumed the whole thing was off.
“Oh no,” my wife said, grimacing as she got off the phone with her friend. “She wants us to go with her boyfriend anyway. And we already booked the babysitter.”
I was annoyed at that idea.
“Really? You want to go camping with me and a guy we don’t even know that well?”
I turned the stone, that old friend, in my pocket with one hand.
“We already booked the babysitter,” she repeated. The cool of the stone against my palm was a tether.
“All right.”
We picked up Shelley’s boyfriend the next morning. He appeared in the doorway like a ghost, wrapped from head to toe in a gigantic waterproof garment so huge about his frame it was almost comical. The hood was drawn tight around his face, which was just this pinched pink thing staring out from a mass of plastic. His eyes were dark, the pupils huge. I remember that vividly. I kept meeting his gaze in the rearview mirror as I drove us up the 91, through the flat fields of Connecticut and up into mountain country.
My wife tried to make conversation with him, forcing joviality, but he was monosyllabic. She reached across to my thigh and squeezed it. I knew the gesture was as much to comfort herself as me. Her skin was cool, so cool I felt it through the fabric.
There’s no need to worry my dear, I wanted to tell her. I’ll protect you from anything.
She scrolled on her phone for a bit, and then she fell asleep.
I looked up into the mirror again as the sun faded and tall umber striations of trees began to rear around us, the sun struggling through the mess of vegetation. The sky was lurid. I saw that Shelley’s boyfriend was watching me.
“Have you been camping before?” I asked.
“No.” He replied quickly, and loudly: a stark contrast to his gruntings in answer to my wife’s conversational nonstarters. “Have you?”
“No.” I grinned in the mirror. He grinned back. His lips were very thin, almost to the point of nonexistence. “You know you can take your hood down. It’s not raining in the car.”
“I’m good.” Something tingled in my stomach at his expression. Then, he offered: “Your wife is really welcoming.”
“She is.” I looked to the road. Gray asphalt, potholed. Darkening trees.
“Very, um . . .” he paused so long I wondered if he had lost his train of thought entirely. “. . . persuasive.”
The tingle in my stomach turned into a spike.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Persuasive.”
He didn’t say anything after that, and I didn’t ask him to elaborate. It was pleasant to drive without chatter, with only the rustle of his waterproof and my wife’s gentle snoring as background noise. I mulled over what he had said.
We got to the campsite with a miraculous sliver of daylight remaining and assembled the tent: a vast, two-room monstrosity that my wife had put on her credit card. The inside was like the interior of a living thing, flaps and membranes making a sham of privacy for its inhabitants.
After we grilled burgers outside and listened to my wife make some facile but charming comments about the stars, she told us that she was turning in for the night. Shelley’s boyfriend said he would stay out to do some sketching, and I said I would keep him company. He offered no protest.
“Don’t stay up too late, boys!” my wife said brightly, and then, leaning in to kiss my cheek, whispered with breath that tasted of cooked meat, “thank you, honey. He could do with some male company.”
But the boyfriend in honesty ignored me. As soon as my wife left, he took out a sketchbook from one giant pocket of his raincoat and began to draw, furiously, with a charcoal pencil. I sat and watched him do it. The campsite was quite empty apart from us, the season turning too cold for most, and my wife was right: The stars were, indeed, brilliant. Starlight and firelight evidently allowed him to see clearly enough to do his art.
Or maybe it was his huge pupils, the way they absorbed light.
Soon I, too, started to feel the heaviness of exhaustion. My back ached from the driving and my head felt too thick for my shoulders. I stood up with the pretense of clearing something from the fire and peered at his sketchbook page.
The man’s drawing was riotous.
A long-haired woman grimaced in the foreground, her form a brutal arrangement of lines, huge black pits in her skull, hair frazzled up behind her like the bride of Frankenstein. The background was even more violent. There were black jags that could have been trees, could have been prison bars, and hastily rendered crouched forms of beasts with tears falling in little perforations from their faces.
“That’s a scary-looking woman,” I said.
He looked up at me with a rageful expression I knew too well and almost shouted in response.
“It’s not a woman.”
I went to ask him who it was and . . . and then I didn’t need to.
“All right. I’m going to bed.”
• • • •
Of course I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t even undress. I slid into the sleeping bag next to my wife, feeling her radiating body heat, and listened for every noise. Each flap of tent fabric was a threat, every rustle of undergrowth a murder. I wasn’t frightened. I was excited. I took the stone out of my pocket and left it at my feet, because something told me I wouldn’t need it.
After some time (perhaps I dozed; I think I dreamed of women crying tears that were razor blades sliding out from under their lower eyelids, carving paths down their faces as they fell), I heard the unmistakeable weight of a man approaching the tent, the zipped entrance unfastening, the heft of his body blundering around the compartment next to us. My eyes had adjusted to the dark so I could see his silhouette: the outline of his form only a plastic membrane away. I remember he was breathing so hard. More unzipping, and his form seemed to shrink as he cast off the waterproof garment. How skinny he seemed underneath all that! His shadow falling across our compartment wall seemed almost skeletal, too unhealthy for a living human.
After some shuffling around—this way and that, like he was uncertain—I saw his silhouette gather at the entrance to our compartment. Slowly, very slowly, he pushed fingertips into the gap near the floor and started, tooth by tooth, to lift the zip. He peeled the door open. The fabric sagged outward, brushing my feet, and I saw his head bob into our chamber.
“Come any further,” I said softly, “and I’ll tear your nose off with my teeth and slit your throat with the bone.”
He froze.
Adrenaline roared through me like a song. I didn’t move. Just give me the opportunity to do this, I said—to who, I couldn’t tell you. Just don’t stop me for once.
He remained frozen, but it was too late to stop the leviathan in me. I leapt forward on my hands and knees and tackled him out of our compartment and into his, where we fell into a crackling tangle of bedding and sketchbook leaves that tore from their bindings as I kicked out. The man remained still and unresisting. Panting, I sat over him and saw the blank expression on his face, the slackness in his muscles. But he was conscious, of that there was no doubt. His eyes followed me.
Are you— the thought came in, impossible, like floodwater pouring under the door of a house. Can you—
“What’s all this noise?”
My wife appeared in the doorway, crouching on all fours.
I remember her breasts hanging low in her nightshirt.
I remember wanting to take them off.
Her breasts and her skin, too, flushing beautifully like braised chicken meat.
No. I had to leap. The stone was too far. Please don’t let me lose this. . . please. . .
Blackness caught my eye, underneath my hands. The other man’s drawings. Mad creations of violence and suffering: howling things, mouth-open things, juvenile trash scratchings of obscene ideations. I leaped into one of those and left my body to peace.
How dark the forest of his mind was! I reveled in the thickness of each slash of charcoal, feeling his power, his determination, the satisfaction of it. What could be better than carbon smeared across a page? I murdered in those drawings, smashing myself into atoms, leaping across his sketched forms, the mounded treasure-piles of cowering women. No one ever screamed or fought back or ran here. I was king and God in this domain. It was glorious.
I don’t know when I came to.
It was daylight, and we were sat around the fire again, and the morning was gray and cold. Shelley’s boyfriend sat opposite me with a cup of coffee in his hands, and I felt warmth, and looked down to see a cup of coffee in my own.
He looked like a different man. Thin, yes, but healthy, his expression kind, his hair soft and fine against his skull. He was dressed in simple jogging bottoms and a comfortable-looking jacket.
“Did you sleep well?” he said, steam curling up into his nostrils.
“No. I had . . . what did you do? Where is my wife?”
“She’s asleep. I didn’t hurt her.” He took a sip, his eyes never leaving mine. The pupils were small and rodentlike in daylight, drowning in white sclera, the proportions of his eyes seeming to have inverted overnight. “I didn’t sleep well, either.”
A surge of dopamine rattled my body, and the coffee cup wavered in my hands.
Thank God, thank God she was unharmed! The stone—
As if reading my mind, the other man placed his mug on the ground and offered the stone to me.
“It was inside the tent.”
I leaned forward to take it and he withdrew his hand, sharply, unsmiling. This was no act of petty cruelty. This was a lesson.
“Do you know what I do when things get really bad? In my mind.”
Hatred curled my lips. “Let me guess. Draw?”
“No.” He held out his other hand, palm facing upward. “Sometimes it’s all too much, being me, and I . . . capsize.” He rotated his hand so that the palm faced downward. The back of it was papery, the veins prominent. “I just leave my body for a bit. I saw you do it, too, last night.” As best I could, I reverted my expression to neutrality. He wasn’t going to get a single thing from me. “I wouldn’t recommend living things,” he continued “That gets complicated. But objects are usually safe. Something mundane. Immobile. A plastic Tupperware, for instance. An air freshener hanging in a car. A radio knob. Drawings, sure. Or . . . a stone.”
He tossed it at my feet.
“Thank you for the advice,” I said. After the anger subsided, I realized: I meant it.
• • • •
I saw Shelley’s boyfriend one final time.
It was years later (they had broken up, a fact which, it turns out, saved Shelley’s life), and my family and I were watching TV one night, when on the evening news a reporter went into details of a horrific murder that had taken place a few towns away. A man had broken into an all-female college dormitory and tied up and disemboweled all six women, tying their intestines together and fashioning them about himself in an obscene dress. (Yes, the news report went into this detail, because the media knows we love monsters). By some horrid miracle, all but one of the girls survived and were rushed to the nearest hospital for reconstruction. The attacker himself had called the emergency services, wanting to be found in his barbaric costume while the girls writhed in agony around him. The girl who died had had her nose bitten off and her throat cut. The report didn’t say, but I knew it, I knew it viscerally, that he had slit her throat with the cartilage.
“Oh my God,” my wife went rigid with shock. “Isn’t that . . . didn’t we go camping with him once? Jesus, fuck! Jesus!” She kept repeating that word, and our daughters—there were two now—alternated between giggling at her cursing and teetering on the edge of tears, seeing the horrific news report, seeing their mother react like that. I changed the channel as his mugshot appeared on the screen, along with his name.
That night, in his honor, I capsized, turning in the blades of the ceiling fan, looking down at down at my own body, smiling open-eyed in the dark while my wife tossed in nightmares next to me.
• • • •
Later, I saw the footage of him being walked into the courthouse and recognized his absence immediately. There was a blankness in his eyes and a smile on his face that, while menacing to those without our abilities, was just a shell of an expression. Perhaps his consciousness hid in the jangling metal links of handcuffs, or the leather of the police officer’s holster. For all his bragging, for the lexicon he had given me, after all that: He had failed. What do they say? There but for the grace of God go I.
• • • •
My family are in their respective rooms, quite near me now, as I type. I’ve come to learn that writing is another form of capsizing. My wife is asleep in our bed. The two girls, our daughters, are in their bunk beds. Sarah always takes the higher bunk because she can reach up and touch the glow stars we made into galaxies on the ceiling, and Diana prefers the bottom bunk because it’s by the plug socket and she can charge her phone and watch TikToks. I still have the stone, but I don’t need it much these days. When the thought comes to slit their throats and use their blood for my pleasure (or, or, or . . .) I trust that I can capsize, emptying myself into anything: a pair of scales, a shoe, a frond of carpet. A sentence.
But, before you judge me, know this: I capsize less and less now in my middle age, and I’m proud to say that I’ve gone a lifetime without deliberately hurting a single living thing.
