Damned

IX

Last winter, if you must know, I found myself alone at boarding school during the holiday break. It goes without saying that I'm recounting an event from my past life. Christmas occurred to my parents as just another ordinary day, and the rest of my classmates were leaving for ski vacations or Greek islands, so, for my part, there was nothing to do except put on a game face and assure them, girl by girl, that my own family would be along at any moment to collect me. That final day of autumn term, the residence hall emptied out. The dining hall shut down. As did the lecture halls. Even the faculty departed the campus with their packed bags, leaving me in almost complete solitude.

I say "almost" because a night watchman, possibly a team of them, continued to prowl the school grounds, checking locked doors and turning down thermostats, their flashlight beams occasionally sweeping the landscape at night like searchlights in an old prison movie.

A month previous, my parents had adopted Goran, he of the haunted eyes and heavy Count Dracula accent. Although he was only one year older than me, Goran's forehead was already etched with wrinkles. His cheeks, hollowed. His eyebrows grew as wild and tangled as the forested slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, so matted and bristling that if you looked too closely among the hairs you'd expect to see marauding packs of wolves, ruined castles, and stooped Gypsy women gathering firewood. Even at the age of fourteen, Goran's eyes, his voice pitched deep as a foghorn, it all gave the impression that he'd witnessed his entire extended family tortured to death as slave labor in the salt mines of some remote gulag, bloodhounds baying after them across ice floes, and leather whips cracking at their backs.

Ah… Goran. No Heathcliff nor Rhett Butler was ever so swarthy nor rudely fashioned. He seemed to exist in his own permanent isolation, insulated by some terrible history of hardship and deprivation, and I envied him that. I did so, so long to be tortured.

Next to Goran, even adult men sounded silly and chatty and insignificant. Even my father. Especially my father.

Lying in bed, alone in a Swiss residence hall built to house three hundred girls, in temperatures barely warm enough to prevent the pipes from freezing, I pictured Goran, the way blue veins branched under the transparent skin of his temples. How his hair grew so thick it wouldn't comb down, the stand-up kind of hair you'd cultivate while studying Marxist philosophy over tiny cups of bitter espresso in smoke-filled coffeehouses, awaiting your perfect opportunity to lob a burning dynamite stick into the open touring car of some Austrian archduke and ignite a world war.

My mom and dad were doubtless introducing poor Goran to the assembled media outlets represented at Park City, Utah; or Cannes; or the Venice Film Festival, while I was hiding out beneath six blankets surviving on hoarded Fig Newtons and Vichy water—avec gaz.

No, it's not fair, but I was clearly getting the better part of the arrangement.

My family assumed I was aboard a yacht, among giggling friends. My mom and dad assumed I had friends. The school assumed me to be with my parents and Goran. For two glorious weeks all I had to do was read the Brontes, evade the occasional security guards, and wander about— naked.

In all my thirteen years I'd never even slept in the nude. Of course, my parents paraded unclothed constantly, exposing themselves around the house and on the more exclusive beaches of the French Riviera and the Maldives, but I perennially felt too flat in some places, too fat in some, too skinny in others, simultaneously gawky and plump, too old and too young. It was clearly in violation of the school's rules of deportment, but alone one night, I pulled off my nightgown and slipped into bed, naked.

My mother had never hesitated to suggest I attend this or that weekend retreat focusing on genital awareness and mastering control of one's own pleasure centers, the usual assortment of celebrity mothers and daughters idling in a remote grotto, squatting over hand mirrors and marveling at the infinite pink moods of the cervix, but their sort of workshopped… empowerment seemed so clinical. It wasn't a frank, honest workshopping of my sexuality that I wanted. It was Goran I wanted, someone ruddy and moody. Pirates and tightly laced bodices. Masked highwaymen and kidnapped wenches.

The second night I slept alone, I awoke needing to pee. The toilets were down the hall, shared by all the girls on each floor, but I was almost certainly alone in the residence building. So, despite the sacrosanct rules, I peered out of my room, naked and barefooted, checking the dark hallway for a patrolling guard. I ran the cold steps to the bathroom and did my business, all in the dim moonlight filtering through the windows, my breath steaming in the cold air. The third night, I visited the bathroom, again naked, but strolled en route, taking a detour on my return trip to visit the first-floor lounge and sit unclothed on the chilly leather sofas which faced the blank dark mirror of the television screen. My nude reflection in the glass, wan as a pudgy ghost.

Ah, those glory days when I still had an earthly reflection…

Really, Satan, please. You have to swear that you won't breathe a word of this.

By my fifth night alone I'd ventured naked to the chemistry lab, sat naked in my usual desk in the Romance Languages classroom, and stood naked on the dais at the head of the dining hall, where the senior faculty normally sat for their meals.

And, yes, while I admit to being dead and having a poor body image and a suppressed sense of my own personal value, I am well aware of my risky, late-night exhibitionism and yen for Goran as symptoms of my budding sexuality. The night air against my skin… all of my skin and nipples, and the texture of so many ordinary objects: wooden desks, stairway carpets, tiled hallways — without the usual intervening layers of silk or nylon — it all felt glorious. Around any corner seemed to lurk a possible guard, some strange man wearing a uniform, his boots polished. I imagined each guard with a polished badge, wearing a gun strapped to his belt. Most likely, it would be somebody's Swiss father or grandfather with a mustache, but I pictured Goran. Goran, carrying handcuffs. Goran, his brooding eyes behind dark totalitarian sunglasses. At any moment, the beam of a flashlight might reveal me, the parts of myself I had always kept hidden. I'd be reported and expelled. Everyone would find out.

In my nude ramblings I lingered among the leather-smelling stacks in the library, perusing the books as I walked barefoot over the chill marble floors. I swam unclothed in the pool complex. With only the moonlight to see by, I sneaked into the stainless-steel kitchens and sat cross-legged on the concrete floor, eating chocolate ice cream until my body shook with the accumulated cold. As lithe as an animal… a sprite… a savage… I strode into the chapel and presented my fleshy self to the altar. There, the paintings and statues of the Virgin Mary were always so heavily robed and veiled, crowned and burdened with jewelry. Depictions of the Christ seldom wore more than a thorny halo and a way-tiny loincloth. Sitting on the front pew, I felt the gentle suction of my bare thighs against the polished wood.

By my second week alone, I was sleeping through the days and wandering sans apparel all night. I'd been naked in almost every room, wandered all the hallways and steam tunnels, entered every space with an unlocked door; however, I had yet to venture outside. Beyond the windows, snow fell, layering over everything and bouncing the moonlight inside. Now, the buildings themselves felt like too much clothing. At this point I slept naked. I walked and ate and read naked so often that the thrill had evaporated. Even while reading Forever Amber with my tits out… I'd lost that special forbidden feeling. The only way to renew it would be to go out-of-doors and stand unclothed under the stars or masked in the falling snowflakes, leaving my bare footprints in the drifts.

Other girls I know, they shoplifted to generate this same prepubescent high. Other girls told lies or cut themselves with razors.

No, it's not fair, but one minute you can be wading through clean snow, your feet sinking ankle-deep into the perfect wastelands of snowdrifts which surround a private girls' school near Locarno, and mere days later you can be slogging through the morass of countless discarded fingernail clippings, cast forever into fiery Hell.

That Christmas break which I spent alone, as I first stepped out of the residence hall, entering the snowy night, my skin felt the touch of every snowflake. The cold air made my hair stand up from the roots the way my nipples stood erect, every follicle on my arms and legs becoming a tiny clitoris, and every cell of me awake and alert at rigid attention. Walking, I held my arms straight out in front of myself, mimicking the way ancient Egyptian mummies walk when rising from their stony tombs in old horror films. My hands turned palms-down, my fingers dangled the way Frankenstein's monster shambles when brought to life in black-and-white Universal movies. This was my fallback excuse: that I was sleepwalking. My parasomniac defense. So I walked, step by step, farther into the falling snow, into the darkness as cold as chocolate ice cream, my arms outstretched in the manner of sleepwalking cartoon characters, only naked. Pelted with ice crystals and pretending to be asleep, but more awake than I had ever felt. Every hair and cell of me alert, aching, afraid. Alive.

All of me felt the thrill of being touched at that same instant. You see, I wanted to be discovered. I wanted to be seen at the very height of my prepubescent power, my tits-out, bare-fanny, legally off-limits kiddie-porn Lolita power.

If a guard found me, I'd merely pretend to be ashamed. By then I had a long history of feeling mortified and embarrassed. Reverting back to such feelings would be like second nature. As a guard approached and grabbed my wrist, or threw a blanket over my shoulders to protect my childhood modesty, I'd simply pretend hysterics and insist I had no idea where I was or how I'd come to be there. I'd reject all responsibility for my own actions… play the innocent victim. Over the past two weeks of solitude, something within me had changed, but I could still fake being shocked and fragile and demure.

No, this is not how I came to die. As I've mentioned before I died from smoking an overdose of marijuana. I did not freeze to death.

Nor did a lustful, groping security guard catch me. Darn it.

Arms extended like a somnambulist, I marched around the school grounds, collecting snowflakes in my hair until my feet felt quite numb. Then, fearing frostbite and permanent disfigurement, I sprinted back to the door of my residence hall. As I grasped the steel handle with my damp hands, my fingers and palms froze to the metal. I pulled, but the doors had automatically locked the moment they'd first swung shut, leaving me naked, my hands fixed — frozen— to the handles of a door which wouldn't open, unable to run for help, unable to return to my safe bed, the deadly night piling up around me, ice crystal by ice crystal.

And, yes, I might be a dreamy, romantic, preadolescent girl, but I can recognize a metaphor when one batters me over the head: a young budding lass perched frozen on the threshold between sheltering girlhood and the frigid wasteland of her impending sexual maturation, only a sacrificial layer of her tender, virginal skin holding her captive, blah, blah, blah….

And no, the children of wealthy families, consigned to Swiss boarding schools, are nothing if not wily. It was common knowledge among my peers and myself that a crafty student some years before had stolen a key to the residence hall, a master key, and secreted said key beneath a specific rock near the hall's main door. In the event a wanton little Miss Slutty Slutpants sneaked away for a clandestine tryst or to smoke a cigarette and found herself locked out, rather than face reprimand she had merely to use this key held in common for such sinful emergencies and later return it to the usual hiding place. As convenient as this shared key was, under the rock only a few steps away, with my bare hands frozen to the door handles I had no means to reach it.

My mom would tell you, "This is one of those Hamlet moments." Meaning: You need to make a significant effort to determine whether you're to be or not to be.

If I scream and yell until a night watchman arrives, I'll be mortified, humiliated, but alive. And if I freeze to death I'll save my dignity, but be… well, dead. Probably I'll be a figure of pathos and mystery for future generations of girls at this school. My legacy will be a stringent new set of rules about accounting for every girl. My legacy will be a ghost story which girls my age will tell to scare each other after lights-out. Maybe I'll linger as a naked spirit they glimpse in mirrors, outside windows, at the far end of moonlit corridors. Those future privileged urchins will summon my ghost by repeating: "Maddy Spencer… Maddy Spencer…," three times while gazing into a mirror.

Again, that's a form of power, albeit a fairly impotent form of power.

And, yes, I know the word disassociation.

As much as I fancy that spooky gothic immortality, I start screaming for a guard. Shouting, "Help!" Shouting, "Au sec-ours!" Shouting, "Bitte, helfen sie mir!" The falling rush of snow hushes every sound, dampening the acoustics of the entire midnight world, blocking any echo that might carry my voice very far into the dark.

By this time my hands were the hands of a stranger. I could see my bare, blue feet, but they belonged to someone else. As blue as Goran's veins. In a glass pane of the door, I could see my own face reflected, my image framed by the frost of my breath condensing and freezing on the small window. Yes, we all appear somewhat absurd and mysterious to each other, but that girl I saw was no one to me.

Her pain was not my pain. Here was Catherine Earnshaw's dead face haunting the wintry windows of Wuthering Heights, blah, blah, blah….

That waifish me, reflected in moonlight or streetlight, I watched her pulling her fingers away from the steel handles, her skin peeling away still clinging to the metal, leaving the whorls and palm prints like patterns of frost. Abandoning the wrinkled road map of her lifeline, her love line and heart line, I watched this strange girl, her face grim and resolute, walk on frozen stick legs to retrieve the key and save my life. This girl I didn't know, she pulled open the heavy door, her hands sticking once more, tearing away yet another thin layer of this stranger's fragile skin. Her hands, so frozen they didn't bleed. The metal key froze between her fingers so resolutely she was forced to carry it to bed.

Only in bed, smothered between blankets, drifting to sleep, did her skin thaw and the girl's hands began to bleed quietly into her clean, starched white sheets.