As If

by Rowan Tate

Premise: Who is the protagonist? What do they want?

I wake up as a girl, I don’t know who. Woman, woman. The thing we all want is a story to tell. A reason to be the main character in our own lives, for someone to be watching. The thing we all want is an audience.

Exposition: What is in the way of what the protagonist wants?

In a good story, the thing that is frustrated in a character is the sense of self. The conflict is internal, deeply embedded, and then it is splintered, scattered across the outer expanse of the world, kaleidoscopic. The milieu is a mirror. The monsters that must be

Image credit: João Pedro Freitas on Unsplash

vanquished are false or lesser selves, the thing that is suppressed. The thing that comes up, something horrible inside me. I knew the signs, the symptoms, I was aware that I had it all along. I was logical and calm, for once, it was very clear to me. I had caught it. I had been infected. But just to make sure, I called the mind doctor. I was redirected. How may I help you? Hello, I said. Good morning, I said calmly. I am losing my mind. They saw me two days after that. The mind doctor sits me down carefully, as though I might bite him. I have never been to the hospital before, I explain to him, for anything physical. There was the one time with the cooking. But that was my mother. She thought I was crazy. Were you crazy? It depends on who you’re asking. The doctor tells me he will give me an assessment. I sit up straight. There is a little thrill in my stomach. A psychological diagnosis is attractive because it structures internal conflict, it yields a plot that can be easily diagrammed, thick with incidents from which a wound can emerge, a mind-lesion around which the personality might have scabbed. Ideally, you had very little to do with it. The doctor tells me I have a condition some psychiatrists call Extractive Disorder and others call Hysteroid Disorder. Because he is a Freudian, he calls me an “As If” patient, because my behavior mimics that of an ordinary individual, but my internal organization does not. This is temporary, I tell him, I will get over it. I go home and I lay on the lawn because it is dinner time, and my mother might be inside, eating. According to the mind doctor, I am an exposed nerve ending, volatile and erratic, and difficult to cure. I want to peel back my skin and see it for myself.

Rising Action: How does the protagonist face and solve the central problem?

The incident with the cooking has to do with that I can hear the things I am eating. By this, I mean that they talk to me. I put an egg into my mouth, and I am tasting a life. My mother found this very upsetting, on account that it is “absurd.” All phenomena are, at first. I found it difficult to accept her jealousy of me. Given that I could not eat, I became very faint and entered a state I would describe as “ecstatic.” I say this in reference, of course, to the condition the Greeks called ekstasis, meaning literally "standing outside oneself," as is typical of the geniuses, the mad, and the lovers. My mother finds this difficult to understand, given that she tells me things like “if you don’t stop screaming every time I open my mouth to eat, I am going to have to ask you to leave.” I am wounded by hearing her complain into the telephone about my “impaired contact with reality” and “histrionic tendencies.” I feel afraid, suddenly, of giving her ammunition she can use against me. The pain is sharp. I double over. My arms fold over my stomach. I imagine I have severed the nerves, a self-performed lobotomy. I am left with a cavity in my chest, a hole my mother cannot understand. Splayed out on the lawn, I find this increasingly distressing. I roll onto my face and probe with my tongue into the dirt. I can taste it still, the age of the grass. God did this to me. I feel rage, it calcifies over me like some kind of acceptance. I stand up, feeling improved, and spit out the grit. There is nothing wrong with me. I will survive my grief, amen.

Climax: What is the turning point?

I worry everyone can smell it on me. I think I am delusional, one mental illness leads to another. In the future, I will catch myself saying, "When I was psychotic." There it is, I will think, the line between the past and the present. When did I put it there? When did I stop? Did I ever really have it, or was it just another name I was given? My trauma has a name. It sleeps beside me in my bed. It covers my eyes; it holds my hand. It lullabies me to sleep like a mother. I cling to it. I like it, I am not lonely anymore. I am being watched! Followed! Observed! There are eyes everywhere, there are eyes on everything! Someone is listening, always watching. I must speak very quietly, I must not say anything at all, someone is going to hear! I have to hide! I have to hide! I have to hide! Like that. It’s in me, I can't get them out, my body remembers. Over and over again. I lay down. I am nauseous with it. I must gouge myself out of it, make a way out for it in my mind. But I go on pretending. Because it never really happened. No one saw. But I did. But nobody saw. It never really happened.

Falling Action: How does the protagonist change?

She tries to explain, put it into words, walking slowly, sitting, standing, lying down, is she awake or is she asleep, how can she be sure? Why are you doing that? To test. To make sure. That I am not alone in my head. She tries to tell him how she sits in her room, and this is the only part of the world that exists; three days could pass while she looks at the rain. Come here. Sit in my room. This is the only place I exist. And I cease to exist. The whole world is passing me by, they don't know I'm here, but I'm the only one that's here, that actually exists. Do you know how hard it is to be pretending pretending pretending when I'm the only one that exists and the only one that knows all these things that everyone else doesn't. I sit back and watch. Stay there. I am very good, very quiet, I do not disturb them. Meanwhile, her head propped open, a hole in her. Me, here. Sit and suppress it, the urge, my stomach, to rip it out, to rip it out, to show you: slit every tendon, expose every nerve.

Conclusion: Does the protagonist get what they want?

I am still talking while I am in bed, something thuds out of my chest like a dry heave. I am looking at the worm that was in my stomach. That is how it started. I ate an apple, and there was a worm in it. I took a bite and I swallowed the worm. Now it is inside me, talking. Tasting. There are two of us in this body now. I am in a world that expects me to be an individual; I don't know what that means. I have no idea what to call myself. I can't make sense of a name. If I eat a tomato, when does the tomato become a part of me? How much of me is the tomato? I think of all the tomatoes I have absorbed, sitting in my womb, all the tomatoes I am made of. Mother, mother. Every shit is like a birth. They have moved on, but I am stuck in the same place, infatuated, obsessed with my worm as if I were its lover. I put it in the middle of the room. I run laps around it. What are we going to do with you? No one wants you anymore. You are hysterical, overdramatic. Why do you always make this about yourself? Can you help it? You were eaten. Now you must be listened to. There is a worm in my body; I share with it my body. If I say it over and over, maybe you will believe it. How can I make you believe it? I wish I could share your vocabulary. Finish up neatly. Instead. I pick up my soliloquy and talk to my worm. I cannot run away. I cannot pretend. I must approach the monster and touch its face. I must learn to live with it.

***

Rowan Tate

Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.