Touched By An Angel
My name is Bambi. It’s a nice name, isn’t it? Maybe you are picturing that I am an adorable, svelte white girl with a pretty hair colour and rosy cheeks and startlingly memorable methods of seduction. Well, I’m not. I’m ethnically Filipino, but I don’t want to get into it because I have too many other things I am thinking about and no one can bear to hear even 0.01% of it.
People say to me that I have no idea how to tell things and that I get distracted explaining details that are irrelevant which confuses them as to my point or how they should react to it. For a while, I thought, why so much complaining? I am always confused, but you do not hear me asking the universe to change tack. Recently, however, I have decided to embark on a journey of self-improvement, because I am beginning to suspect that my inability to express myself is the core of all my problems and my original wound. By this I mean that had I been left to my own devices, I would be mute and happy. My paradise lost is not Eden, but the throat-clearing passage, that formless, empty place with darkness over the surface of the deep. But since I could open my eyes, everything and everyone has been violently signalling ‘I bid thee, speak!’ I cannot pass a rock or a tree or an elderly person at a bus stop without them subliminally harassing me to make myself legible. I guess I am an animist and if things had worked out differently, I might have been a shaman and I would have hated my life in an esoteric way. But here I am, and I must learn how to express myself or I will end up like the Jōmon of the Japanese archipelago. No one will know who I was or why I did anything.
The first thing you need to realise is that my whole life, I have had only female friends, all of whom despise me. Is that unusual? When a girl gets close enough to me, she starts saying things like, ‘that hair makes you look like a fifty-year-old tita,’ and ‘you act like you’re some kind of PhD candidate to try and make people think you’re smarter than you are,’ and ‘you have this habit of slurping your oatmeal and I have told everyone about it and they said that if they heard you do that, they would tell you to shut the fuck up and kill yourself.’ I believe that if someone is honest, you cannot be angry with them because it is unethical to try and control their truth. Still, when a girl says such things to me, I am so bamboozled by pain that I do not know what to do. All that being bidden to speak and what comes out of me? ‘Oh … right.’ So I sustain injury after injury, limping around as gamely as I can until the friendship tapers off, usually because the girl has obtained a boyfriend.
My closest friend is a girl named Salome. Salome is a worse person than I am in every way except morally. Morally, we are even, because she is a pacifist and never gossips but she uses AliExpress to buy her clothes and affects a British accent. We met at our single-sex high school which was much like a psych ward with everyone having breakdowns all over the show because of things they were experiencing that were unspeakable, both because they were horrifying and because everyone else was going through their own private nightmare par excellence and did not wish to hear any whinging. Salome’s lot was, I’d say, mild-bad. She lived alone with her father who was a truck driver and rarely at home, so there was hardly any food around for her and she could not use the heater in winter because if she did, when her father came back he would scream at her and smash things around until she cried, which was hard for her to do because she had become so bored of low grade violence. There used to be an ad about how you should not shake babies. If there was a follow-up ad, it would feature Salome. She stands 5”8, weighs, I think, 45kgs and often dresses like a child going to their confirmation but in a troubling, sexy way. This girl was shaken, the ad would announce, gravely. Overall, my lot was medium-good. Of course, some disgusting things happened to me, but they were only slightly worse than usual for a girl.
I suppose I must sound not quite nubile going on about my friends and school and all that. No, I am 24 years old, but I am deficient. Despite my age and highly desirable gender, I have never had a boyfriend. I am not a virgin. I have had plenty of types of sex and am proficient in all of the classics and a couple of deep cuts too, but none of the people I performed these acts with ever agreed to go steady with me. Boys seem to dislike me even more than girls do. Once, I mentioned to a boy that I’d had a shower and then air dried in my room because it had been a hot week. He said, ‘uhhh … okay … ’ And when I asked him if I had done something wrong, he revealed that I was being inappropriate talking about being naked, then he un-added me on every social media, including Linkedin. I was just trying to answer his question, ‘What did you get up to yesterday?’ Surely if you are a really sensitive young man, you should not go around asking such invasive questions.
While walking around the Queensgate, I announced to Salome the solution I had reached regarding my romantic loneliness.
‘How is it I have never had a boyfriend?’ I asked her, academically.
She stopped in front of the Dotti window and pointed at a red dress with a balloon skirt.
‘That looks like a medical problem I had once,’ she said.
‘It is because whenever I open my mouth, what comes out is disagreeable to others for reasons I cannot discern.’
The Dotti employee on the other side of the window stopped to glare at us. She was someone we went to school with. Unlike her, I was at university and almost finished with my honours degree. I was doing better than her according to certain metrics, but the way her lanyard dangled against her sternum made her seem authoritative, like a zookeeper. She was totally superior to me.
‘I think that’s true, you are annoying, but it’s obvious why. It’s because you only know how to talk in a complaining, dramatic way that makes you seem maudlin, self-obsessed and desperate. However, you do have positive traits. For example, you are idiotically loyal,’ said Salome.
‘Oh … right,’ I said.
‘Anyway, you sound like you’ve made one of your tedious resolutions.’
‘I have decided to stop speaking altogether.’
‘Why?’ She sighed.
‘If I stop speaking, I will cease to be confounding and irritating and will then obtain a real boyfriend which will make me legible to others and therefore more likeable.’
We continued towards The Warehouse where Salome was planning on lifting some laxatives. The linoleum in the mall was bright, smooth, artificial, and truly perfect for walking. I was not someone who believed that what was natural was also good.
‘I think your plan is fine,’ Salome said with resignation in The Warehouse as she slipped a box of laxatives into the fanny pack she was wearing under her dress.
Back at my flat that evening, I told my flatmate Sarah about my imminent vow of silence.
‘Okay, and how long will you be silent for?’ She asked.
‘I think nine months, as long as it takes to make a baby. When it’s over, I will be dumb, like a newborn, and forced to relearn.’
She furrowed her brow in irritation.
‘Right, well before you do Paris, Texas, the real issue is that you don’t listen. You talk to people but think only about yourself even when they’re replying. You don’t try to understand what’s going on beneath what they’ve plainly verbalised, so you miss their real point. Maybe you should read a fucking book that isn’t fanfic about Blur. That might improve your theory of mind as well as your conversation skills. Then you should get out more. Way more.’
Sarah said all of this as she competently scrubbed the burned edges on the stove top. She was an English major who had done a year of psych before deciding it was not for her. Her lover lived in Auckland and came down bi-monthly to have lengthy, muffled sex with her on her double bed before going for a jog up Mt Vic. It was apparent that he would marry her if she wanted. Sarah knew what she was talking about. Their real point, I thought, how mysterious.
‘Oh … right,’ I laughed.
The next day, my silence began. Upon Sarah’s suggestion, I went to the library to pick up some books. I considered which nation’s literature might best teach me how to express myself normally in the 21st century, and settled on global superpower, the United States of America. I read several pages of The Grapes of Wrath, The Call of The Wild, and To Kill A Mockingbird. What I learned was that the most normal way to tell something was to begin with your family and the town you grew up in. The town you grew up in needed to be very tired and have at least two types of weather. It had be a dead-end place where either nothing happened or what happened was modernity. I decided that I could not, at the end of my nine months, speak this way. If someone asked me how my week was and I began, ‘Wellington is a town that creaks from the sharp winds blowing in from the south,’ they would march into the sea.
I returned to my flat then Salome video-called me. She was in the bath tub with the steam misting up her screen. I could hear the ceiling fan her father smashed rattling.
‘I have considered your issue and it seems to me that you think that your problem is a formal one and that the specific behaviours and thoughts that constitute your life are ordinary.’
I nodded.
‘But they aren’t ordinary. To this day, you still shed genuine tears reading Blur fanfic. How exactly,’ she sat up in the bath and showed her stunningly pink nipples to me, ‘do you think being mute will fix the real problem, which is that your inner world is riddled with regressive thought patterns and fantasies?’
I shrugged.
‘You know, if you really wanted, I would date you. I would fuck you in a non-evil way until you were sick of love. It’s actually quite dull even if it is the only thing worth being alive for, I should know. But I don’t think you want real romance. You prefer observing it in a petri dish, like a fucking pervert.’
I was touched that Salome would admit her willingness to date and have sex with me. Why could no one else do that? I stared at myself in the front-facing video. My hair only kind of made me resemble a fifty-year-old tita. Salome, depleted from her ranting, was falling asleep and sliding into the water. Why was this cruel girl who was always trying to die the only person willing to date me?
I typed out a message, asking her to join me at a party on the weekend.
‘Mhm, anything for you,’ she mumbled tenderly.
The party was being hosted by a boy named Ben from my honours class. He was doing his thesis on Lee Kuan Yew and loved surfing, skateboarding, and American History X. Once he got mad at me in the elevator because I asked him whether he had managed to get an assignment in on time. ‘Why do you care so much?’ He snapped. Then he started sitting next to me in tutorials and telling me how he ranked each girl in our class based on attractiveness. ‘You’re usually in the middle, but you could do better,’ he reassured me. Last week, after our final hand-in, he invited everyone to a ‘shindig’ at his flat. It was a chill party and anyone could come, even me.
The party was at a house on Dixon Street that used to have live-in servants. It had lots of misshapen, oddly sized rooms that were once for servant work, like laundry and kneading. Ben’s eight flatmates were sulky and aloof yet they appeared to have hundreds of friends. There were so many people at the party that I had seen before, in supermarket aisles and lecture halls, in waiting rooms and in Chemist Warehouse, and now I had an opportunity to endear myself to them. In the past, my talking had not helped to this end, so I was fine with being silent. I smiled among the people I knew from my honours cohort with Salome standing beside me in her tiny white smock dress and bloomers.
‘Where did you get your outfit from?’ asked one of the girls from 416.
‘Etsy. It’s vintage Edwardian children’s underwear,’ lied Salome.
‘You into that kind of thing, are you,’ said Ben.
‘Yes, I like looking like it would be very problematic for someone to want to have sex with me. I have a lot of trauma around that kind of thing.’
‘Okay,’ said the girl from 416.
I could tell they were not enjoying this conversation but no one could rescue them, especially not me.
‘So, Bambi, how’d it go with that last 419 paper?’ Ben asked.
I gave him the thumbs up. I had written a research paper on how T.O.P best represents the Lacanian perversion of baby boomers.
An hour passed. Boys began arguing about American politics. Had I been talking, I would have said: Ignore those guys, they can’t even write a decent book. But I could not, so I nodded and refilled my drink and let strangers use my vape. To my delight, being silent was already working. No one had said a mean thing to me all evening, and people were hanging around me voluntarily. I could not determine anyone’s real point but I realised simply laughing was enough. It seemed that the white fencing surrounding the yard was the teeth of something’s mouth that we were all happy to be inside of.
Salome pulled me into the kitchen where an older man in skinny jeans and a hoodie smoked a real cigarette by the window.
‘You know, people are only hanging out with you because you keep letting them use your vape,’ she said, yanking open a drawer.
The butter knives were all burned from being used for spots.
‘Need help finding something?’ The man asked Salome.
‘Piss off.’
‘You friend is a real character,’ he said, turning to me.
‘Don’t bother with the idiot. She’s taken a vow of silence.’
Salome heaved open the refrigerator.
‘Oh, why?’ he asked.
‘She theorises that it will compel someone to date and have non-evil sex with her, which will make her more comprehensible, and therefore more likeable, as a young woman in the 21st century.’
She shut the refrigerator.
‘That’ll be difficult. All sex is evil,’ he said, staring at me.
‘Maybe for you,’ Salome replied in a sing-song voice, knife in one hand, apple in another.
She mouthed let’s go, and exited the kitchen, leaving me with the man. We studied one another. He was a composite image of all men, with a neutral, forgettable face that conveyed and elicited nothing.
‘Your friend likes speaking for you, doesn’t she? I would guess she’s in love with you,’ he said.
With just the nondescript man to see, I felt no need to feign a reaction. I was aware that Salome was in love with me, it was why I let her treat me so poorly.
‘Do you like her much? I think you’re only with her because she’s so unfortunate. She isn’t enjoying herself tonight, but you are, and she’s holding you back.’
It occurred to me that I might be a hateful person. Every night before sleeping, I recalled what I had observed that day, and it made me utterly sick. Benign things, like a father hugging his child, or people singing happy birthday, upset my stomach. Music gave me convulsions. When someone kissed me, I suspected them of morbid paraphilia. It was impossible to know if my feelings were unique or if others just expressed themselves differently.
‘Would you like to see something?’ asked the man.
He led me out of the kitchen to the bottom floor where there was a sprawling bathroom with a spa and chequered black and white tiles. I shut the door and he stood at the opposite end of the room.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
I nodded and he unzipped his pants. There was nothing there. He zipped his fly up.
‘What if I told you I’m this way because I’m an angel sent to give you an important message? You wouldn’t believe me, and it wouldn’t matter. I’d still be stuck down here with you fuckheads,’ he said, about to weep.
The lamp in the ceiling emitted a soothing buzz. The man’s sobs, echoing against the old tiles, were like a merry church bell. I opened the door and walked slowly down the hall, up the stairs and out onto the porch. In the yard, many faces greeted me. They offered me profoundly warm smiles and nods, as though they had been quietly waiting for me while holding hands. I thought I saw Salome, but it was just the white picket fence. Ben and the girl from 416 emerged from the shadows. Ben put his arm around my shoulders and the girl yapped nonsensically about something Salome had done that was insane, that involved an attempted stabbing and choking on a bit of apple. Where was Salome now, I wanted to ask, did they let her run away? When she doesn’t have any money of her own and she’s terrified of busy roads and unlit windows?
Someone said, ‘Let’s dance.’
Ben took me back inside where everyone was moving hideously to a pointless slow remix of ‘I Follow Rivers.’
‘Your friend Salome is weird,’ he said, holding me close. ‘You shouldn’t hang out with her so much. She’s possessive. Anyway, do you want to get a drink? Some other night, I mean.’
I nodded and pictured getting married to Ben and salting the fields of the earth. I saw us drinking a cocktail at Crumpet and acquaintances recognising us from the street. I imagined us buying a house and spilling gallons of black oil into azure oceans. Oh, to have a baby then burn the forests of the Amazon! To retire with 500k in savings and set our dog loose on endangered birds! What a miracle it would be to see my first grandchild born and devour her fresh out of the womb. I didn’t feel better thinking any of this, and I didn’t feel worse. Ben kissed me. Where was Salome? She left me here! With these fuckheads!
Mikee Sto Domingo is a Filipino-New Zealander currently living and working in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara. She has a BA in English Literature from Victoria University and an MA from the IIML. Her work has been published in Turbine | Kapohau, Salient, and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand.