The Barefooted Women in White Robes
By: John Oliver Hodges
The O-ring in the ceiling in the front room is sturdy. I’ve tested it. I’ve got some rope I found in the dumpster that is perfect for this, but wouldn’t it be better to do it outside somewhere? I know of a chin-up bar in the Hawk’s Claw Reservation; the bar is secured high between two trees. I could use that. Or use the bridge on Gloomfield Avenue in Tahopei, the one crossing the stream. Best do it naked. Then, whatever comes out of my body will fall into the stream and float away. Besides, makes sense to leave the world wearing what you wore when you entered it.
The bathtub is an option. Why not go like photographer Diane Arbus? Climb into a tub of hot water and slit away. Cuts from razor blades are not so painful, as I know from experience, but the process is gross. How will I even start? Will I buy razor blades from Duane Reade? Do they even sell the old-style blades anymore? I picture myself using a butter knife to peel one out from my Gillette Mach 3 shaving cartridge.
Slitting my throat may be the least painful and most certain, but who on the planet has the gumption for that?
I consider what might happen if I swallow fifty of my chemo pills.
Or I could jump off a building like Francesca Woodman the photographer did when she was twenty-two, so young and achingly beautiful. Seems like the easiest way to go, but no, stop thinking these thoughts you idiot! It’s scary and won’t my sort-of girlfriend be the one to find me? Yes, it will be her. My sort-of girlfriend will be the one to deal with my mess. She will be the one to suffer.
I don’t know what to do, so I do like I always do when I don’t know what to do—I do nothing, not yet.
No longer do I pray. Been there done that. I’ve prayed so many useless prayers—forget it. Instead, I practice Image Therapy. As I lie in bed in the dark I see a hole in the middle of a sunlit field. I watch a dozen longhaired barefooted women in white robes cross the field and slip down into the hole where my tumor is. The women place hands on my tumor, causing it to glow blue. This blue light is a sign that the tumor is being reduced in size.
After getting diagnosed I knew I would be dead soon, so I thought, “I’d best start getting my affairs in order.” The number one piece of business was to throw stuff away. I needed to slim out my belongings, but had all these papers—old manuscripts, schoolwork, magazines in which my photography and stories had appeared. I had dozens of notebooks and legal pads filled with my Korean language study materials, sheathes of poems and stories I’d never gotten around to transferring onto the computer. Unrecycled student essays were stacked up here and there, and then there were the photocopies of pictures I took of beautiful naked women—my ex-wife and girlfriends. I ripped the images and mixed them around. If someone pulled them from the trash they’d find an ankle and foot over here, an arm there, a head, a pair of breasts or pudendum with thigh—they were jigsaw puzzles of women’s naked parts.
The photographer Ren Hang did not hang himself. Like Francesca Woodman, Hang used gravity to accomplish the task, outdoing Woodman by five floors.
In going through so many papers, I came across old Christmas and birthday cards, letters from people I’d known who, judging by their words, had really cared about me, stuff like, “You ghost-called me last Friday and it was nice to see your name on the old iPhone—and to hear the shuffling noises on the other end, too!” A five-page hand-written letter from Goldie, whom I’d known only casually after high school. She signed the letter off with “WE’D LOVE TO SEE YOU. STAY COOL.” There seemed to be dozens of letters like this, from different people—from Hong Kong, South Korea, Alaska—and there were even fan mail items that I couldn’t recall having read before. Most of it I had already put on the throwaway pile, but as I started to read, I changed my mind about throwing the stuff away. Here was evidence that people had cared about me. I cried a little because the person they were writing to sounded like a nice guy. It was a guy I may never have recognized myself, not because I didn’t think I was nice, but because I was me, so what was the point in thinking about me? What I knew for sure was that I loved this world so much. I loved the people in this world, and did not want to leave them, not ever!
So I hired a guy from Ecuador, one of the hardworking men who stand outside Home Depot looking to pick up work. He carried stuff down the stairs for me—furniture, an air-conditioner, an exercise machine and so many bags of dumpster food that I never ate—pounds of sugar, brown sugar, rice, frozen chickens and vegetable oils, stuffing, bags of flour and boxes of Jell-O and so on and so forth—and piled it up in a heap for the garbage men to carry off to the landfill. My sort-of girlfriend even loaned me her car, which had more space in it than my car, and the Ecuadorian packed it with my valuables, my boxes of archivally processed vintage photographs, and boxes of books that I thought good enough to save for the time being. This was after meeting with the surgeon who’d made it seem like I would live. The surgeon measured my tumor, which was not 8 centimeters, as originally indicated by the doctor who performed the colonoscopy, but 5.8 centimeters. This was after having the barefooted women in white robes enter my body every night for several weeks, and put hands on my tumor, causing it to pulsate bluely.
In the middle of all this I found a tiny mouse stumbling around all sickly in my kitchen. I put him in a box with sticks and leaves and water and things to nibble.
The Ecuadorian loaded the car with my suit jackets and a bag of shoes, a banjo, a violin, a negative scanner and various items that might come in handy later. My buddy Blake came over. We drove across town to my sort-of girlfriend’s new house in South Mango, and put the stuff in her basement because she had talked me into moving in with her and her daughter, expecting that I would become completely incapacitated, that I wouldn’t be able to get up and down my stairs even, let alone make it to the kitchen to feed myself once the chemo and radiation treatments began. It seemed like a good idea. Even though there wasn’t enough room for me, we decided to try and make it work, but one evening while in bed over there, feeling physically weak and lousy, the screaming began.
The screams of my sort-of girlfriend’s daughter are a force of nature. The words that go with her screams, like, “One more chance!” and “No! No! No! No!” are equally impressive. They commandeer one’s attention and energy, which I am happy to give. I like to be helpful and feel useful, so it wasn’t the screams that created the fight or flight response that drove me away. It was another thing altogether, call it verbal oppression, the repression of expression, a willful allowance for objectification or the agony of a conditioning in self-negation. I have learned not to fight it so without fail fly from it. What was clear—and would that it were different—was we three as a harmonious family stood small chance for survival. That is why I am here in my apartment tonight, alone with my O-ring and the beautiful barefooted women in white robes.
Tonight the healing women enter my entrails, not through a hole in the ground, but a small cave from which a stream flows over rocks. Before entering the cave, the women remove their robes, which they leave in the dry grass. They carefully make their way over the slippery rocks, crawling and ducking down even more to enter my body. They find my tumor and lay on it naked and it begins to glow. The blue light can be seen from the mouth of the cave. It pulsates and shines all so hypnotically as my mouse in the other room shivers in a curled-up ball. I don’t think my mouse will make it. He’s been unsteady on his feet and doesn’t eat. It’s like he’s plagued. I just hope I don’t wake up tomorrow and find him dead.
John Oliver Hodges lives in New Jersey. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, StoryQuarterly, New World Writing, The Cream City, Chattahoochee, and the Literary and Texas reviews. His collection of stories, The Love Box, won the Tartt First Fiction Award. Currently, he has two full-length memoirs forthcoming: Our Dad the Commie (Frayed Edge Press) and Kill the Punks (Panhandle Punk Productions), as well as a chapbook called Eating My Name (Wordrunner Press).X I Website