CADAVER DOGS

In the doctor’s office, the question on the survey asks me, “Have you ever traded sex for something you needed? (Food, shelter, money, drugs, or something else?)” Usually I check no without a second thought, but this time I pause at the affront of only two choices, the absence of an entire spectrum in between. Removed from the direct binary of yes or no, I am reminded of how much of life falls is ambiguity, nuance. Confronted with two blank boxes, I do not know which one to choose.

There will be a time when the answer is clearer, and I will check yes, simply because every week I meet with a man who I call John, who calls me Vanessa, who is not at home with his wife, but with me, wrapped up under the covers at our drafty little motel, where the potent smell of weed saturates the halls that lie beyond this room; our room. When the time comes that I will check yes, I am removed both from the question and my answer, thinking only in fact, not in feeling, of the hundreds of dollars I leave with every time I see him.

But there was a time the transactions weren’t as obvious. Of course there were never tangible lines superimposed upon my line of sight stemming from a person, an animated arrow-pointing extension toward different amenities—a bed or food or drugs. There was no list of decisions with an itemized breakdown explaining the basis of this choice or that and all their projected outcomes. I couldn’t see where I was going when I was on my way there.

I want to ask my doctor what counts and what doesn’t—does it depend on what I did, or what someone did to me; what about what I got from it? For it? I want to ask her, what if I didn’t get anything? I want to ask her about the times I didn’t have sex or even remove my clothes.

What if I opened the door—enthusiastically, excitedly—to one thing, but hiding behind it was another?

There are so many lines that are ill-defined.

What does it mean, exactly, when you return the half-smile to him across the room, take the blunt when he offers it to you, snort a line when he hands you the rolled up dollar bill? What does it mean when he asks you if you want to go home with him, and you say, “yes,” even if only because you have nowhere else to go?

There are so many ways we slump into ambiguous beginnings.

 *

“She fucked a guy for burger king once,” Stephanie flips her hair over her shoulder, one long, greased tress snagging on the edge of a frayed spaghetti strap she adjusts, revealing an indent in paunchy flesh.

She sits at the laptop I bring with me to work, checking her Facebook messages, scrolling through the images of this unnamed girl.

“That’s crazy,” is the thing I say when I do not know what else to say. I shake my head for effect, empty the coffee grounds into the compost bin.

Stephanie does not work here, but is the girlfriend of the barista who works the shift after mine. They go everywhere together, because they have nowhere to go together. Any time Greg comes to work, so does Stephanie. She drags the dusty, tattered suitcase to the back hallway while Greg pushes the shopping cart, high-piled with clothes, plastic bags, plastic bottles. At current, they live under the Washington Street bridge. Tonight, since today is Friday—payday—they will stay in the hotel that will get busted for human trafficking and drugs in two months.

Throughout the years Stephanie’s statement about the unnamed girl will stay with me, and it will take years for me to interrogate what she said. When I do, a memory wavers to the surface.

I am 16, sitting at the drive-thru, my door open instead of a busted window that doesn’t roll down, the growl of my muffler almost as loud as the growl in my stomach.

The cold creeps into my hands, sends up a spike of irritation. “Hey!” I wave a hand in front of the talk-box. “Hey! Hello!” I shout.

I gas my car into a screeching skid, fling her violently into park outside the front door, slam my door and march with eyes set toward the vestibule.

“HEY!” I bang near-frozen fists on the door of McDonald’s, screaming “I’m hungry! I’m fucking hungry!” I do not notice all the lights are off, or that there are no other cars in the parking lot. I seem to scream louder when I realize no one can hear me. “Please! I’m fucking hungry! Please.” When my voice breaks, my words lose their hard-edge of rage. I slope from screaming to sobbing, neck bent against the glass, palms flat against what I can see but not enter.

I walk head-hung back to my car, turn the heat to full blast, sink into the seat. I scroll again through my outgoing call log: Walter, Jack, Dave, Michael, Tim, and on and on and on. I resist the urge to call them again: they have told me if they don’t answer, they are with their wives or children or both.

I look in my backseat, the pile of clothes I will layer myself in tonight when the temperature drops to 30 and I have to turn off my heat to save gas. I blow heat into my cracked hands, reach for my crumpled pack of Smoker’s Choice. The scant three cigarettes lean together almost protectively. I rip one out, turn it over, study it as if it holds an answer.

I remember the dumpster at the Felpausch down the road, the English muffins and loaves of bread I found last time. I light my cardboard cigarette, put my car in reverse, then pull into traffic. Smoke tusking from my nostrils, I drive like everyone else drives: I have somewhere to be.

I do not even bother to wipe the goo of old bananas and shrimp tails off the bag of bagels I find. My dirty fingernails tear through the plastic, my shaking hands find purchase in the dense wheat. I rip it to shreds with my teeth, allow my salivation to permeate its staleness, and swallow. The dumpster lid still flipped open, my stomach bloating with empty calories, fullness. Standing in the middle of the parking lot, in a pile of trash, I gorge.

On the way back toward the tractor supply store where I will sleep tonight, a hoard of cinnamon raisin, blueberry, and whole wheat in bagged bushels next to me, I furiously mutilate one by mouth, grind it to a seedy pulp in my teeth. I pass the McDonald’s, and see it now, why no one answered the talk box at the one across town. In the twitching, glitching letters, the marquee tells me, “Happy Thanksgiving.”

When I recall this memory, the fantastical part of my brain inserts someone standing outside the McDonald’s, waiting for me as I, resigned momentarily to hunger, make my way back to my car. Tall and imposing, their face is a shadow save for a grin. I imagine them holding warm bags of food. I imagine what I would have done for it. I think I can still hear my stomach growling.

 *

I was never a victim of cultural or systematic oppression. I am a young white woman with privilege, a relatively affluent family, and resources. Although there are more times I care to admit that I have eaten out of the trash, I acknowledge that my hardships never, in any way, remotely or other, were because of the color of my skin.

So when recollections like foraging for food in dumpsters present themselves, I turn them over in my head, inspect them. From where I stand—this place of removal, this space and distance from sixteen—in slippered feet at my sink, sipping coffee while my cat weaves in between my legs; from my designated spot on the couch across from my partner; my reading chair in the corner of our breakfast nook, watching the birds at the feeder in the backyard of my newly purchased home, the more clearly I see threads between Stephanie’s proximal experiences to my own. The further I am from my past, the more defined shape it takes.

There are so many moments I turn over.

There is no mattress, no blanket, no sheet. The plywood is cold and hard against the sharp corners of my drug-dependent, thinned body. My ex-boyfriend’s crucifix hits me in the jaw with each thrust. As he moves, I do not hit, or kick, or scream, or punch, or spit, or yell, or push. I do nothing at all.

Past his shoulder is a crack in the plaster ceiling. As he grunts and heaves, grunts and heaves, I watch the crack split further, and further, and further. He bucks against this exoskeleton of my body, and I let him.

He finishes at some point, how long it takes I am not sure. I lie still, waiting for the red bandana that he will use to mop his brow, that he will then throw at me to wipe my stomach.

I do, then put the bandana aside, watch him dig through his shoe for a sack. Opening it, he dips his pinkie nail in, snorts, then tosses it to me. When he opens the door to go back downstairs, he does not look at me. No matter, because I am not looking at him, either. My face is buried in the bag. Buried in the thing that makes that other thing my choice.

There are so many ways this has been my choice.

“You can stay in the basement. It’s nice and finished and you’ll have your own space,” his voice is raspy, carrying the scent of cheap, watery Milwaukee’s Best. He coughs phlegm into a handkerchief then hangs it back on the shifter. He is bald and short and stocky, a tattoo of a clover on his neck, a Don’t Tread on Me sticker peeling from the dash.

“Can I smoke?” I roll down the window, reaching for my cigarettes. “Young ladies don’t smoke,” he rasps.

If I could rewrite the story, it would not continue with me slightly nodding, a quiet submission, a, “Yes, you’re right, I need to quit,” internally theorizing that because I am now clean and should kick all my bad habits at once. If I could rewrite the story, I would be stronger, defiant, confident in a righteous rebellion.

When he tells me young ladies don’t smoke, I would say, “I fucking do,” from the cigarette in my teeth.

“Young ladies don’t swear, either,” he would snarl.

“I fucking do that, too,” I would flick the lighter.

He would slam on the brakes and I would lurch forward, watch my cigarettes fly to the floor.

“Look, you little cunt. I don’t know what kind of world you think you live in, but you just got bailed out of jail by an old man who just wants some company, who is willing to help your little bratty ass out. Maybe show a little gratitude, a little respect, and try not to be such a spoiled little bitch,” he would say.

But in either scenario we would still pull into the driveway of a small, run-down house, and there would still be a beat-up truck in the yard, the weeds overgrown against the house, a NO TRESPASSING sign hanging lopsided on a rickety fence, the windows dirty and dark.

“I don’t wanna hear any lip from you tomorrow,” I imagine him saying had I allowed myself an outburst. But he would still tell me, “If you’re good, I’ll take you to go get your car,” then, “If not, you’ll have to wash me when I shower,” he would still laugh himself into coughing, slapping my leg as he climbs out of the truck.

He would still jam the key into the lock, grunt as he works it open, and despite the rank greeting of mildew and cigarettes and beer, I would follow.

There are so many times I could have turned around.

*

Stephanie’s comment about the unnamed girl still brings the same image to my mind that it did the first time. The girl sits on some faceless man’s couch, her chin down, eyebrow cocked, smiling coyly. Her legs are crossed, foot bouncing as if some electric current runs through her. She wears too-tight jeans scuffed at a hem lined with salt from the wintery, slushy streets and sports a pink baby tee, the fabric pilled, the color faded. Two bags of food sit between her and the man I cannot see.

“If you give me head I’ll give you some fries,” he half-jokes, laughs as he snatches a bag. Upon opening it, the room fills with the scent of fried food, her mouth waters, stomach turns in on itself. He chews with an open mouth.

Or maybe she starts: “I’ll give you some head if you give me some food,” she taunts, maybe waggles a tongue ring, smiling.

I consider what actually happened may be much different. But if it was or it wasn’t, which box would she check? Yes or no?

I want to ask my PCP: What if sex is just kind of what happened—even though I didn’t plan on doing anything with anyone for anything? Even though I didn’t want to?

I want to ask, what if I knew it would just be easier to just lie down?

If I said to her, Listen, lady, I can make a sky out of any ceiling, would she know what I mean?

There is so much that looks so different; through new lenses, new verbiage.

I have reached a place where words like whore, slut, tramp, hooker, prostitute, and hoe, or stripper, (if referring to the industry with live entertainment), are ones I no longer hear. In all the widely varied meanings of those words, I know their origins are connected. Etymologically, I know my genesis. I feel it, still, more than any wave of progression. The words used now: sex worker, escort, entertainer, are the more politically correct, libertarian-charged meaning of the words from which they came. These new words are softer than the ones that were used to describe me. Because of this, they do not fit.

There are many ways to embody etymology. It survives, because it is capable of evolution.

When my PCP asks me about the boxes unchecked on the survey, her questions sharpen into interrogation. We contrast accordingly: her in the spotless white of her lab-coat to my black hoodie; my dingy combat boots to her shiny pumps, reflecting light. Her definitions are monolithic; untranslatable within the context of my lived experience. Whatever answer I give becomes hard-edged and definite, with surgical precision. So exact, so sure, I cannot possibly say yes or no and have it mean what it is supposed to.

There are so many middle places between an answer. The half-second hesitation, the breath before the head nods or shakes, the throat-clearing before disclosure, or clenching shut around the word, “No.” The brink of tears we breach, the memories where we linger, trying to mold slippery subjects out of some yes or no. My interpretations of my actions are formulaic, drawn at the intersection of need and resignation, calculated by the mass of one over the volume of another.

There was never an outright verbal trade agreement or hard, black-and-white contractual plain text, rather, through the evolving medium of language and lifestyle. No one ever said it out loud; there was no declaration of what we were exchanging. Maybe we didn’t even realize it. There was just an overlap in our lives; transients that were in the same place at the same time, taking and giving. Within the parameters of our lives— the mainstream we were cut off from and the margins we were exiled to— we drifted. Only equipped with primal instincts, answering to compulsions, hard-wired and hell-bent on getting our needs met, this is just how we existed.

 *

My heart does not break when I am diagnosed with cancer. It does not even stop. The words, “I’m so sorry,” and, “presence of malignant cells,” and “you have breast cancer,” do not upend my world. They do not lacerate the air with a tearing sound as a bullet on its way to its target. They do not fall like a bird shot out of the sky, they do not knock the breath from my lungs. They do not startle. Rather, they settle. Inside me, something grounds.

In the waiting room, between meeting a team of oncologists I do not remember, two hemispheres of my brain thrash against each other: the blanch of emotion in the right, the analytical of the left.

I tap fake French tips on the arm of a chair while a current jumps through me, jagged lightning I cannot ride because I am in a room that cannot breathe. My ankles bounce away from each other like a reverse Newton’s cradle. My body repels against itself.

My thoughts swirl into the ceiling, a storm of deranged birds lost to orient crashing into each other. Work. Will you be able to work? You have to. You need health insurance. Cancer is expensive. You need money. What happens if you don’t have enough money? John.

John. He’s going to know. I mean, look at you. Look at you, all twitching and torrent, all tornado, all side-gusting and storming—and you’re going to lose your hair, you’re going to blow up on steroids, you’re going to dry up on that menopause. You’re going to be different. You’re going to feel different. He’s going to know.

I jump up, step away from the No Phone Calls sign plastered on the partition between the waiting area and hallway, ensuring I will still be able to hear the nurse call my name.

John answers on the first ring.

“Hey love.” My voice bounces with feigned levity. “Hey, are you okay?” I never call.

“Yes, I’m okay, listen… I’m here at the hospital, because—well, they found something…” I trail off because I cannot say, ‘they found cancer.’

“Oh my gosh… is it…?” He trails off, because he cannot say, ‘cancer.’

I must have said yes, because John’s voice gives way, and he falls straight through. The words do not sit with John like they sit within me. In the fissure I can picture him, sinking against the wall of a courthouse where clerks and legal reps rush past him in high heels and tight suits and manila folders. His right hand trembles with the cellphone at his temple, his left covers his face. His voice breaks when he says my name that is not my name, “Vanessa…”

I hear him shuffling to get somewhere more private. I stop it before it starts.

“Listen, it’s—I’m okay. It’s going to be okay… I just wanted to make sure,” I speak my next words slowly, deliberately, “this doesn’t change anything between us.”

The shuffling stops and the emotions seize, his knuckles against his mouth, his eyes shut tight to the flood they become, his head shaking back and forth. “Of course it doesn’t… of course it doesn’t…”

I hear my real name from behind the partition and wave to the nurse in indication I am here. “Darling, I have to go, but I’ll text you when I leave.”

“Okay, do—do you want me to come over? Maybe I can take you somewhere to get a second opinion? I mean—do you know for sure?”

In my head I scream, and I scream, and I scream again. My fists twitch, itching to pummel something to a pulp. I am knocked back, lightheaded. I slope against the glass, catch my breath. “I um… I’m not sure yet,” I find my footing, make my way toward the nurse. “But I’ll talk to you soon, my love,” I hang up as I breach a sobbing exhaustion. The nurse holds my shaking shoulders. My outbursts implode, incinerate. I am a fire that extinguishes herself.

 *

It won’t be for years after I obtain an undergraduate degree in psychology that I come to reckon with the textbook experiences I am taught about women’s health, abuse, and exploitation, and how much they look like mine.

It won’t be for years after that that I become a state-certified rape crisis counselor, and it won’t be until professional enrichment courses that I will read in plain text the hypothetical scenarios listed under items “defined as”: “prostitution,” “commercial sexual exploitation,” and “human trafficking,” that ultimately, to me, do not feel that hypothetical.

But for every description, I have a discrepancy. I find a loophole, an inconsistency I hyper-fixate upon. I never had a pimp. I never got pregnant. I never got closed-fist-to-the-face-beaten-up by a man I didn’t know. Yes, I was a stripper, but I didn’t do private sessions. Yes, I stayed with Jack, but I was the one who called him. Yes, I slept with different men, but it was because we were seeing each other, and staying the night with them and therefore being intimate with them is normal when you’re seeing someone. I am not programmed to fulfill the needs of men, and so doing it has not, over time nor by proxy, become a need of my own.

When I distill these points of time and interrogate the truth of my own experiences, I do not ask myself what kind of a situation I was in where the only way to get a winter coat was to steal it, and why the best possible person to call was a man over forty years my senior. I do not ask myself whether or not I would have slept with this man at this house or that man at that house if I had a house of my own to sleep in. I never make it that far. Some misfire in my brain stops me short, stalling. I cannot, even retrospectively, step outside of those former realities; imagine any other scenario with any other options.

It won’t be for thirteen years that I learn to circumnavigate the conversation around sex work back to myself, and years more to understand how sex work is discussed in different spaces.

How it is communicated and performed in different spaces: in the case of Stephanie— marginalized and vulnerable with limited resources, it’s an offhand comment, petty gossip, a flippant smudge on the reputation of a person she does not like. In mine: clinical definitions that dissect; transactions, on a slant. To some: empowerment.

The woman speculated will never look the way she needs to look in order to be worthy of solidarity— not when they were her own choices.

 *

Two months after my diagnosis, I answer the same questions about my sexual activity I am always asked, though this time by a different oncologist. A member of my team who I had not yet met, not yet disclosed to, turns toward me but doesn’t look at me. Her eyes still down at her clipboard, she taps her pen quietly. In her pause I see her thoughts contract and release, twist themselves inside out into words that are as much a question as a challenge in accountability.

“Do you think that’s the best decision given your immune system… from the treatment?”

I touch my head scarf, bring it closer to my brow. If this were last week, I could have told her there are boundaries in place: it’s never an unprotected venture. I could have told her there is always a barrier between he and I, even if only thin and latex. But it is not last week. It is this week, and so, I only shrug. I stay silent. I steep myself in a moment, in a memory, where a fragment of myself still exists.

John smiles at me, and I smile back, but my mouth is dry, and my body is dry. Medically-induced menopause is not good for business. Breast cancer is not good for business. His hands find their way to their usual place behind my neck, and do not startle when they stumble upon the wiry mesh netting of wig against bald head.

He takes my face in his palms. I know what he wants. He wants to abolish the boundary I insist between us; the thin strip that keeps us two separate worlds even while we are one.

And so I lie down, and I let him.

I let him, because I have nothing else to offer him—aside from a listening ear, which used to be enough, that is no longer enough. I let him, because I cannot give him oral pleasure since my mouth has erupted in stinging sores. I let him, because I cannot allow him to pump and huff as hard as he wants as if carving me cavernous, because my body is an arid desert.

I let him, and when he tries, we are not our usual chorus of bathymetric measurements, echoing each other. When he tries, I yelp in pain. When he keeps trying, I quiet.

My palms stay stiff, fingers rigid across the comforter, trying to find the elusive balance that is keeping oneself contained, yet still open to him. But he can feel me clam up, I know it by how he slows, then stops. His soft body leaves mine open, exposed, cold.

My eyes shut against the frustration surely stitched white hot into his gray brow, and I tense as I wait: for the grip on my bicep, the jerking me up and flinging me out, the tumble to the sidewalk where my clothes will be thrown before the slam—but it doesn’t come.

Instead, I stare at the breeze of the blanket fanned out over me. What has always been true of our relationship is still true now: I am always naked, and he is always covering me, yet never like this.

It starts before I can stop it. I try to dam it down, but a woman cannot properly barricade herself while on her back. There is the scrape of shallow breath as it claws its way from my throat. There is the swell, the rise, the tides internal, turning me inside out.

I keep my eyes clamped shut— I cannot see him seeing me like this— but then I feel his weight sink into the mattress, leveling us.

My eyes open, welling up with thousands of things he could never explain. I search him for something like an answer, but when he looks back at me, all I find in his gaze is the same wet, worn-out weariness in mine. We are soaked in the same confusion, in this great, wild unknown.

And I spill at the sides, and over the edge, and I cannot catch myself.

I collapse into his chest with my silent sobs, an ache so deep it cannot surface. My head racks with imploding pressure as I grapple for the slack-jaw line, the seamless neck, the soft place to land.

I am a tree in the forest that falls without a sound, but that is held all the way down.

On my forehead his chin quivers and gives way to his weeping, unbridled, irrepressible. My grief, long and unbroken, unheard under his own.

As he calms, the breeze tosses the curtains, cools the fever break of a hot flash. The chill sends my skin into a flare of goosebumps. The topography of my body changes before me, miniature mountains forming between us. I do not watch John’s hands, trying to smooth my skin back to obedience. I watch my body rise. Standing upright all on its own.