Stripping

Joyce Carol Oates

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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“I’m currently completing a novel entitled Blood At The Root, in a voice

very unlike my own,“ Joyce Carol Oates tells us. Her next novel—to he
published in the autumn—is The Falls. Although ‘Stripping’ existed in
dreamlike notes in the authors notebooks for some time, she cannot
place its original inspiration…

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Stripping the filthy things off. The stained things. The smells. Onto the floor
with the filthy stripped-off things. Onto the floor with the stained things, the
smells. Beneath the shower’s nozzle. Hot hot as you can bear. How water
streaming over shut eyes. Why h’lo there! H’lo you. Do I know you?
Teasing smile. Taunting smile. Think I do know you don’t I? Stripping off
the smell of her. Onto the floor with the filth and the smell of her. And in the
shower in the rising steam roughly soaping your hair that is strange to you
so greasy, spiky like the coarse fur of a beast. Soaping your torso, armpits.
Your torso an armor of flesh covered in coils of wire. Your armpits bristling
with wire. Washing away the body-smells. And your filthy hands. Scratched
knuckles, wrists. Broken fingernails and dried blood beneath. Draw your
nails hard across the bar of soap, clean out the blood. Soap slipping from
your clumsy hand you stoop to retrieve, grunting, the weight of your head
suddenly heavy and pulses beating in your eyes, hearing her cry out in the
terror of recognition no no why? no let me go! why me, why? why hurt
another person? a riddle to echo in the shower’s steam in the sharp
needles of water erupting from the nozzle turned down-ward into your face.
The soap is luminous-white like an object floating in a dream, you must not
lapse into a dream but must carefully wash scrub cleanse yourself, lather
away the blood and skin-particles beneath your fingernails broken against
her skin repulsive to touch and the smell the sharp piercing cries quivering
eyelids and bleeding mouth gaping like the mouth of a fish drowning in air
No no oh let me go let me—why are you doing this flecks of dead skin
washing away, soapy water tinged with red swirling down the drain faint and
fading and your pow-erful lower body eel-like lathered in soap a
luminous-white gossamer of soap through which the wire-hairs pro-trude. If
the body could speak Yes I am lonely, it is my loneliness that must he
revenged this is why you were born, the simplicity of life-in-the-body
in-the-moment the instincts of the predator cruising rain-washed streets as
a shark might cruise the ocean open-mouthed seeking prey cruising the
night-time city, in the distance the sound of a train whistle melancholy and
fading as the cry of a distant bird. Pleading for her life though such
debased life! Pleading for her life but this is life—No need to force her, on
her knees she sank will-ingly. I know you think I know you hmmm? Her
soul was a frail fluttering butterfly. Her soul was soiled white wings beating.
Her soul was torn wings, beating wings, broken wings bravely beating. Her
soul was a sudden sharp smell of animal terror. Saliva at the corners of the
contorted mouth. In the ruins of the abandoned house. Crumbling bricks,
rotted floorboards. Underfoot lay a child’s mitten stiff with filth. Underfoot a
torn calendar, stained newspapers. Stumbling in the dark laughing dared to
take your hand Come this way You know the way I think you do you
teasing taunting eyes glassy-festive high on methamphetamine picking her
way through the filth to the mattress that was known to her stained
beforehand with her blood or the blood of someone very like her Where’ve
I seen you before have you seen me smiling as if laughing inside where
her soul was filth and it came to you in a wave of disgust like filthy water in
your mouth that maybe she was known to you, in your memory known to
you, in an earlier life you had been a school-teacher until the school was
barred to you, the children’s eyes sharp as beaks pecking, maybe the
woman had been a child once in your classroom in St. Ignatius Middle
School in an earlier life before the school was taken from you and all
seemed clear to you sud-denly Yes I am lonely, it is my loneliness that
feeds me beneath the shower in the sharp-stinging needles of water, such
pleasure, such happiness, now the filthy things have been stripped off, the
stained things and the smells and blood swirling down the drain and gone
and the fragrance of soap in your nostrils the simplicity of the naked body
armored in flesh covered in wire-hairs thrumming with life, with heat My
loneliness I have come to love this is why you were born, strip all else
away and this is it.

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