The News (A Manifesto)

So today, yet another Guyanese will try to run the border dressed in a dead housewife’s hair—all they’ve recovered since her disappearance in a downtown shopping mall. An “incident,” the paper says. Another “routine occurrence”— wresting my trust from the publicans assigned to keeping us safe, whole. Rather: vow to stay vigilant against the maiming that waits in each landscape, even in this mundane procession of muddy spring days. To see the tenacity of rooted hair for what it is: an illusion as fleeting as courage. To keep the meat between one’s ribs from being torn, to keep the hard marble of the cranium covered with its own skin. To stay vigilant. To watch the signs of violence stirring even in one's own machine. To keep both breasts attached and undiseased. To keep the womb empty; and yet to keep the organs living there from shriveling like uneaten fruit, from turning black and dropping. And not to mistake the danger for a simple matter of whether to put the body on the streets, of walking or of staying home—; there are household cleansers that can scar a woman deeper than a blade or dumdum bullets. The kitchen drawers are full of tools that lie unchaperoned. Even with the doors and windows bolted, in the safety of my bed, I am haunted by the sound of him (her, it, them) stalking the hallway, his long tongue already primed with Pavlovian drool. Or him waiting in the urine-soaked garages of this city's leading department stores, waiting to deliver up the kiss of a gunshot, the blunted kiss of a simple length of pipe. But of course I mean a larger fear: the kiss of amputation, the therapeutic kiss of cobalt. The kiss of a deformed child. Of briefcase efficiency and the forty-hour workweek. Of the tract home: the kiss of automatic garage-door openers that despite the dropped eyelid of their descent do nothing to bar a terror needing no window for entry: it resides within. And where do we turn for protection from our selves? My mother, for example, recommends marriage— to a physician or some other wealthy healer. Of course it’s him, leering from his station behind her shoulder, who’s making her say such things: the witch doctor, headhunter, the corporate shaman, his scalpel drawn & ready, my scalp his ticket out.