Paul Tran

Of course I chose the terry cloth surrogate. Milkless artifice. False idol. Everyone, I’m told, has a mother, but Master bred me in a laboratory, his colony of orphans. Rhesus macaque.Macaca mulatta. Old World monkeys, my matriarchs ruled the grasslands and forests long before white men like him weaned their whiteness and maleness from our chromosomes, slashed and burned our home, what they once called The Orient. French Indochina. Việt Nam. Master, like a good despot, besotted and dumbstruck, dying to discern the genesis of allegiance, the science of love and loss, nature versus nurture, segregated me at birth from my maker, pelt sopping with placental blood. In a chamber where he kept track of me, his pupils recorded my every movement, my every utterance, hoping I might evince to them a part of themselves. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew famine and emaciation, and nevertheless I picked that lifeless piece of shit because it was soft to hold. Who wouldn’t want that? Though it couldn’t hold me, I clung to the yellow-face devil as though it was my true mother and I grasped the function of motherhood: witness to my suffering, companion in hell. Unlike infants with wire mothers I didn’t hurl myself on the floor in terror or tantrum, rocking back and forth, colder than a corpse. I had what Master believed to be a psychological base of operations. Emotional attachment. Autonomy. Everything he denied and did to me, his ceaseless cruelty concealed as inquisition, unthinkable until it was thought, I endured by keeping for myself the wisdom he yearned to discover and take credit for. Love, like me, is a beast no master can maim, no dungeon can discipline. Love is at once master and dungeon. So don’t underestimate me. Simple- minded and subservient as I might appear to be, I gathered more about Master than he did about me, which, I guess, is a kind of fidelity conceived not from fondness but fear magnified by fascination. Master made me his terry cloth surrogate, his red-clawed god, nursing his id on my tits, and for that, I pitied him. All this time he was the animal. All this time he belonged to me.

Too hot to rest, I toss my arms off the bed. My night- gown wet with sweat. I feel you — a sack of scavenged skulls on my chest — sipping the salt from my breasts. Imp. Incubus. Im- pulse. You and me like a mare that must be broken in by breaking in- to. Tamed is how fire is by giving itself something to destroy: it destroys it- self. But who can deter- mine what’s inside another? What is risked when we enter    ... Caliper. Forceps. Scalpel. Oculus. Perhaps you’re the wilderness that waits with- in me. Perhaps an other mystery, I open beneath you. Yoked. Harnessed. Paralyzed. At once a- wake and a- sleep. I nay. I knock over the kerosene lamp. Light of the rational mind snuffed. Shadow of shadows. Because I can’t see, I sense. Your thumb thrumming my mouth. A command. Arch- angel. Vision of invasion. Insemination. My horse heart beating with yours.

I know better than to leave the house without my good dress, my good knife like Excalibur between my stone breasts. Mother would have me whipped, would have me kneeling on rice until I shrilled so loud I rang the church bells.Didn’t I tell you that elegance is our revenge, that there are neither victims nor victors but the bitch we envy in the end?