I'm Not Going Anywhere I Haven't Already Been by Elsie Platzer

               ​Dan Keck CC



I’M NOT GOING ANYWHERE I HAVEN’T AlREADY BEEN



   I’m thinking about the day Azora first came into my life and saved me from being caged up forever. That day was a bad day for our community, the day that Lexi Edelman’s nudes leaked on a skeevy website and spread to every corner of the internet. Some people tried to argue it wasn’t her, but I checked, and it was Lexi for sure, with her long hair and whole body lying flat and open on the bed, like a book with a cracked spine. 
   Lexi Edelman wasn’t my friend but I knew her because she went to our synagogue. She was nice to me in a passing kind of way. She wore Nike jackets and trendy sandals with gold straps. She played on the volleyball team at our Jewish Community Center. Seeing the photos of her online reminded me that she played on the volleyball team: you could notice dips of muscles in her arm, you could see the moon shape of her calf muscles sticking out.
   “Makes sense,” Mom said when she heard the news, while we were stuck in traffic on the Main Street Bridge. “I used to be on the Sisterhood board with Beth Edelman. You know what they say about people like her in my country? Es una vaca, if she fell down she’d eat grass. That woman is out to lunch. No wonder her daughter ended up doing child porn.” 
   I wanted to yell at her, Don’t say that! But I knew it was a waste. Mom was somewhere far away, behind a harsh wall. Maybe still on a hacienda in Puerto Rico, watching the mists roll down from the mountains. 
   “It’s not child porn,” I said finally. “Probably they were pictures for a boyfriend.”  
  “Who cares? I’m not saying it’s her fault; she’s just a kid. Kids are idiots and you have to keep your eye on them. That’s what I call Good Parenting. If you always keep your eye on your kids they don’t get a chance to do stupid shit.”  
   She tried to make eye contact in the rearview mirror. I didn’t want to look back at her—it felt like a Medusa game, the not-looking. If I looked at her it would turn me into a person who agreed with her. Instead I kept staring out the window at the skyline of Jacksonville, breaching from the water like a long metal whale, at what used to be the Modas building which became the EverBank building which was now the Wells Fargo building but was still the same building, coming out like a spike from the back of the city.
   “You know I would beat you down if I caught you taking naked pictures of yourself.”
   “I know.” 
   “Good. Now you won’t do it. You see?” 
   Maybe I will do it, I thought about saying. Maybe I will upload a nude photo of me, even with my non-volleyball calves, and let everyone pass it around, just to prove you wrong. 
   I imagined saying things like that all the time to Mom. I had a lot of fantasies which never came true before Azora. 
   Anyway, it had been a long day and I was tired. I was always tired back then but especially summertime. The days were so hot, they
sucked all the energy out of me. It was a get-home-go-straight-into-the-shower-do-not-collect-200-dollars day. We parked in the garage to keep the car clean from pollen. I went to shower in the green bathroom while Mom went to shower in the blue bathroom. 
   In the green bathroom, I stripped the soaked layers stuck to me, skirt shirt bra underwear, letting them fall like wreckage all over the counter, draping the vase of plastic flowers, the jumbo tub of Vaseline, the calendar-notebook Mom kept by the toilet to track her periods. There I was, naked in the mirror, with my stomach poking out, my stick arms and bumpy skin, scars from old pimples I had dug out with my nails. Out of nowhere I started to cry. It was just a few drops, I still don’t know why, maybe for Lexi Edelman. It had been a long time since I cried. My eyes clouded over and in the mirror my body blurred into milk. I braced against the wall to stay upright and the palm tree wallpaper felt mealy and damp, like it was about to give way under my hand

   and then the wall split open, ruptured, exploded with water. The water knocked me down onto the tile, gurgled over my back, stung my eyes blind. I was drowning inside the long reaches of the current when I felt the reverberations of something, some alien body moving, rushing towards me

   and then there was another mind in my mind, heavy, a string of thoughts and feelings unraveling fast and dense, have you ever put cheese inside a cheesecloth and squeezed the liquid out so the cheese is dry and crumbly? My brain the cheese in this case, little and limited, water leaking out leaking out from every membrane, and I screamed HELP I screamed MY SELF IS
                                                                                                               LEAKING OUT

                                                                                                                 someone said
                                                                                                        can you hear me? oh no

   and then all of it stopped, except for the sound of my breathing. Luckily, luckily, I was still breathing. 
   But they were still in there too.

   Hello? Can you understand me? Is this better? Lighter? Less? They were talking with something more than a voice, moving like a wave. They had access to the alphabet that was stuffed inside my brain and they were tapping the letters they needed in order, buttons lighting up one by one. Are you OK?
   Yes, I said. I was OK. I didn’t even think I was crying anymore. But the room was dark around me. What happened to my eyes?
   Sorry! Right away I could see again, the mirror, palm trees printed on wallpaper, all the familiar bathroom things. The wall was solid, sealed and dry. The only puddles on the floor were from the small stressed drippings of my sweat.
   Who are you? I asked. 
   I won’t know until you open your mouth and tell me. 
   What do you mean, I was going to say. But I opened my mouth and what came out was a strange bundle of sounds. 
   “Azora,” I said. 
   So it is. Azora brightened in my head. By that I mean they caused a shimmer of light to move over me, making me feel a sharp sweet goodness from top to bottom. They were happy, I realized. You know a name. If there’s a name, there’s a latch. If there’s a latch, that means I fit. If I fit, it means I can claim you as my carrier, if you’ll have me. 
   I was tired. I was confused. I didn’t understand what was going on. I don’t know how to carry you, I said finally. It seems like a lot of responsibility. I think I will probably ruin it. 
   There is no way for you to ruin it, Azora said, when it has already happened. 

                                                                                                                                 *
   Azora is from somewhere else. In their world, which rubs up against our world, air weighs less. Sometimes our air gets especially heavy (Jacksonville summer afternoons before a thunderstorm). That’s when the border between us bursts, like a salty cell immersed in fresh water, and Azora shoots through. 
   It seems inconvenient, I said to them. We were at Publix with Mom, trying to buy cassava. Publix did not carry cassava anymore, the produce man told her. Or ñame or yucca. Even the plantains were tiny and deformed. “Stay here while I find the manager,” Mom said. 
   We’re more transitory than your kind. As long as there is a latch nearby there is no trouble. The latch is the part of the mind that I can access, like exposed wire. Once I find the latch I drop a name like a bead into your consciousness. Speaking that name, you accept my ride, for however long I can make a home inside you. It goes quickly, since I can’t be very long in this air without a carrier.
   I didn’t like the sound of that; it sounded like drowning, like Jack in Titanic grabbing for the nearest flotation device. I started walking up the aisle, squeezing at the fruits, rubbing my palms against the kiwis’ short beards. I was a little offended, to be honest. I didn’t want to be Azora’s airplane seat life jacket. 
   Is that what worries you? If it helps to know, as soon as I latched you, I liked you. Some minds gape, but your thoughts are very well netted. I know I won’t be dislodged so easily. 
   OK then, Azora the enzyme. We have a different word for thoughts that tangle, a word for the finger-shaped dents I was making on kiwi skin. That word is ANXIETY. 
   Oh, very funny. 
   And I felt Azora smile, or the closest to smiling they could, a lovely buttery feeling that slathered me inside and out. But then Mom came back and said, “Where did you go? I told you to stay right there,” and I had to forget about it for the time being.
   It seemed unfair that Azora had traveled across dimensions just to end up on my little street, where nothing was interesting. I did my best to look through the window and point things out to them anyway. There is the live oak that smashed Moti Klein’s roof during Hurricane Irene. There are the kids Razor scootering in the cul-de-sac. There is the toxic retention pond behind Rabbi Solevak’s house. There are the fat ladies lining up in the Village Inn parking lot for Pie Rush Wednesday. When our house got too hot even with the AC on full blast, I would move to the floor and stretch out on cool tile, listening to the oceany sound of the cars passing over the Buckman Bridge on their way to I-95 South or going north on JTB. People crossing and re-crossing the St. John’s River in figure eights. In Jacksonville you could drive for 50 minutes and still be in Jacksonville. In Jacksonville you could spend half your day in the car without getting to your destination. 
   I could get you out of this place, Azora whispered from inside the curve of my ear. 
   Kind and generous Azora, you don’t understand. Jacksonville is a knot of arteries, a land without a gate. Nobody ever really leaves. 

                                                                                                                                *
   Every day in the summer the girls in our community would go to the rabbi’s house for lessons on Torah, me and Sarah and Simcha, and Lexi before, but not now. We’d eat lemon cake from Entemann's and read commentaries by famous sages. Like a lot of things, class was easier now with Azora, who liked to listen and fill the boring minutes with their own conversation.
   “In the beginning, the universe was filled with God’s light,” the rabbi was saying. “Pure, divine...and overwhelming. No mortal being could survive in its presence. To make room for living things, Hashem shrank Himself down, withdrawing from the physical universe. The Hebrew word for this is tzimtzum, ‘making space.’ In place of His essence He left the void, tohu-va-vohu. So who can tell me, what is the nature of this void?”
   “It’s where we live, the human world,” said Sarah. 
   Oh really? Azora said. 
   “Good,” said the rabbi. “So everything that’s human is outside the presence of God, everything we make and do is distant from Him. Now you might say, that’s so sad, Rabbi! I don’t want to be distant from Hashem! But it’s up to us to choose what we put into the void: we can add holy things or not-so-holy things. If we choose holy things, we bring God closer into our world. If we choose not-so-holy, if we indulge our bodily cravings and our inappropriate desires, then we push God even farther away.” 
   Rabbi Solevak paused for a second. That’s a strategy when you do lectures, I know. A little tzimtzum of your voice to let the audience add their own meaning. I knew that everyone was thinking of the same thing, Lexi Edelman on that bed, and suddenly I couldn’t stand to be in the room anymore, with a rabbi who thought he was righteous and wise and the other girls who thought they could be righteous and wise too. I raised my hand. “Can I use the restroom?” I asked.
   “Of course, Elsie.” 
   I meant to head to the bathroom, I did, but I ended up on the rabbi’s patio, looking out at the retention pond behind his house. An old chain link fence surrounded the skim milk water. The fence was to keep kids from tumbling down the steep sides, but there was a gate you could push open if you wanted sit on the bank. Why not push it open and sit on the bank? Why put another fence around something? Why did everyone seem to always be saying stop, this is forbidden? I sat down by the water’s edge and I was shaking, my hands were shaking, my breath so fast my heart so fast. Azora, oh, I’m angry. I forgot this feeling.
   Spit. Azora said. Into the pond. Do it! 
   I was confused but I spit into the pond, one, twice. Spit harder! I spat hard and made some water splatter. Foamy blobs on the surface with a greenish tinge, like mold scuzzing over a piece of bread. It felt good to release like that. Like my throat was throwing a punch. 
   Within the human body anger is dissolved in water, Azora said. When you give up your water you lose your anger also, so cry, spit, and juice yourself like a fruit.  
   It was true. I wasn’t as angry anymore, but I felt stronger, alone below the lip line of the retention pond, where no one would come find me. I controlled the whole world underneath that edge, I had conquered it for myself. I took off my underwear and flung it onto the mucky ground, hoisted up my skirt and spread my legs wide, and started to pee, right into the pond in the backyard of the same rabbi who had announced my birth to our whole congregation on the second day of the Shavuos holiday, one June in 1998. I peed hot and yellow, aimed perfectly, spilling not one drop on myself, then shaking out my wetness for good measure. I had no idea that there was this much water inside of me. 
   Look at you, Azora said. With the water gone I feel your stone hard core. You are more solid than anything.
   You think so?
   Of course.
   I had to get back to lessons, I realized. I ran inside to find Sarah and Simcha gone, only Mom loitering in the living room. It was time to go home.
   “Sorry for making you wait,” I said. “I had to use the bathroom.” 
    Mom looked at me funny. Maybe she could sense it, that something new had put its roots in me. But all she said was, “You took so long in there. I thought something must have happened to you.” 

                                                                                                                                  *
   That night, I snuck out of the house for the first time in my life. It was the kind of night that felt like its own place, a beautiful mosquitoey black, and I wanted to take Azora to Mandarin Park. Mom and I used to go there a lot when I was younger to throw bread chunks to turtles from the dock, or watch the Jewish boys in our neighborhood play pickup basketball, shirtless except for their vests of tzitzit. Of course, after dark it was different, somehow emptier and fuller at the same time. We could hear frogs doing their peepy mating calls, bugs zinging against the pale streetlamps. We could hear the St. Johns River rushing below us like a highway that doesn’t know how to stop.
   Do you like it? I asked Azora. 
   They were full of the incredible smooth feeling that meant yes. Yes. I wanted to spend all my time inside Azora’s yes. But then they turned my head to the left, quickly, saying Someone’s here for you. 
   It was a girl, waiting in the grass. She stood facing away from me in the low light, but I could recognize her wide calves, the shape of being strong. She was completely naked, just like in the photos, but something was different—her skin was covered with tiny cut marks all over, especially on her hip bones, where the lines were so thick they looked like the white wakes whale pods leave behind them when they swim together in dark water.
   “Lexi?” 
   She turned around and her face was so happy. I don’t know if anyone has ever been so happy to see me. “There you are,” she said.
   She was holding something glinting and bright. A razor blade, I realized, the kind that you could fish out of your shaver. She put the sharp edge against her chest and began to press press press so that her skin opened up, and immediately blood began slopping out, a whole waterfall worth of blood. There was no time to think. I tried to grab for her arm to make her stop but suddenly I couldn’t move, Azora was using their whole self to mash down on me, Azora please get off so I can save her!
   “It’s OK,” Lexi said, watching me struggle, still smiling. “I almost forgot how to do this right.” 
   At the same time, a sensation was building up at the sides of my hips, underneath my pants. I couldn’t stand to have clothes on anymore. I pulled off my sleep shorts and saw my skin exploding with pebbled bumps, pimples that weren’t ready for popping yet, spreading out from the hip bone in both directions, covering my stomach, my arms, my thighs. They bubbled to the surface as she shoved the razor deeper and deeper in, until the cut in her chest became a wide red flapping canyon and you couldn’t see the metal anymore at all. 
   And then Lexi was gone. She had exploded into mist. The particles of her scattered, landed on me, and the lumps in my skin burst open, not with pus, but with little red berries in the shape of water drops, dangling from stems. My whole body was heavy and glowing with fruit.
   Eat them, Azora said. 
   I hesitated. Are you sure? Is it safe? I thought of Rabbi Solevak and Mom, how many things were dangerous to them. But they couldn’t see me from the inside; only Azora could. Azora lived there now, in my contours. They would tell me where the poisons were. They wouldn’t lie to me. 
   I picked a berry and bit in and it was delicious, fresh, a morning taste, a sun on green things taste. I ate and ate, plucking from every inch of me until the berries were gone, and when I was done, I began to realize—to understand. I saw Shakespeare, stars, polyprotic acids, the way things are made and unmade and remade in an endless way. Instead of being crushed by Azora, I was expanding to meet them, full capacity. I knew more and more and more, until I knew so much I was knowing my way back down the coiled Jacksonville streets through brain alone, stretching back and back to my house, my bed, my body, my home. I closed my eyes and waited for morning to come.

                                                                                                                             *
   How does it feel, to know in this way? Do you wonder that? Well, when I woke up I felt the strands of grass outside glinting in the sun. I felt every ant and worm squiggle in the ground and push aside the sand. I felt squirrels skittering over the roof and termites chewing in the center of trees. Mom was in the kitchen knocking together pans, trying to make breakfast. Every time a pan clinked I felt the sound ripple outwards through the hanging drops of the atmosphere. And my body, my body was blanketed in a million red circles, one for each berry stem, covering my skin like targets. I felt them burning like an afterburn, like when you are scraped. Evidence that I had sprouted. Getting dressed, I put on my turtleneck and my longest skirt to hide the marks.
   When it was time to be dropped off at Rabbi Solevak’s house Mom looked me up and down and said, “It’s too hot out to wear that.”
   “The Rabbi puts his AC up high.” I knew she was suspicious but what could she do? It was the first time in a long time I knew something that Mom didn’t. 
   At the Rabbi’s house everyone was crying about Lexi Edelman. She had done something terrible last night, they told me, and she was in the hospital in a special wing. Sara and Simcha were crying, whimpering “she has to be OK, she has to be OK” over and over again. Why were they worried? I knew that Lexi was where she wanted to be. I closed my eyes and felt her blood moving from far away. A slow and healing heartbeat. But I couldn’t tell them any of that. So when the rabbi said, “Let’s cancel lessons and recite Tehillim, the holy psalms that will help to heal her,” I prayed too. 
    At the end of the day, Mom came to pick me up. “Did you have a good class?”
   “Sure,” I said, getting in the car. 
   “Good. Because now I want to talk about those hickeys you got.”
   Azora and I went very still in the backseat. 
   “You know, those hickeys all over your neck? Oh, you thought you were being slick about it? You think you can come home covered in hickeys and I won’t know? You must have me confused for somebody else.” 
   In the rearview mirror you could see the edge of a red circle peeking out above the turtleneck, and that was enough. Nothing could convince her now. I wished desperately I had saved just one berry to give to her and let her see how it tasted different from every other berry on Earth, let the knowing bloom inside her nodes, let Azora skate across her brain, quick as a weed, present them as a peace offering to her. No! Azora said. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I was just hoping—but it was stupid to hope when I was always going to be untrustworthy, when I had always been a slut-in-waiting, and she knew I would let anything push itself inside me if she wasn’t there to stop it. 
   Mom was still talking, saying: “I wondered this morning, what is she thinking? Does she know she could get teen pregnant or AIDS or worse? I worry so much, it makes me sick. But you don’t care about my feelings, do you? So, fine. I made an appointment with Dr. Zimmerman. If you get the Depo shot at least I know no one can knock you up. And I will deal much, much more with you later.” 
   Elsie, Azora said suddenly. You cannot let them give you the shot. Introducing that chemical into your system changes all sorts of feedback loops and circulation patterns. It may destabilize my latch completely.
   If Azora lost their latch, if Azora was ejected…I could not let it happen. But when I tried to think up an escape, my brain only stumbled, like a fat stone. Where had all my knowing gone?  
   The car was parking, it was parked. “Get out of the car,” Mom said. Don’t get out of the car. What could I do? I got out of the car. Just like that, I went back to being a useless robot who lets things happen. I watched while Mom talked to the receptionist, I went with my own legs into the patient wing, I sat on a chair in front of a woman wearing an outfit like a bag. She was saying, “Depo-Provera prevents unplanned pregnancy for 3 months at a time. So you want to come back after that and get a booster, OK?” She was tying something around my arm. She was slooshing a needle and making it spurt.
   Do not let that thing near you! 
   The nurse tightened the arm strap and my veins popped their green heads up. Plowed lines in the furrow of my skin. And suddenly, I was not in my body anymore, but hovering, looking down at myself in the chair. It was not myself. It was Azora, occupying all my cells. Carrying me the way I had carried them.  
   Without any warning, they spat directly in the nurse’s face, making her drop her syringe on the floor. “STOP!” someone screamed. Azora jumped and ran for the door, dodged one grabbing hand, spun away, no, Azora, go left! They fell into the privacy curtain, got tangled in its blue, and they were caught. They struggled against the hands pinning my body, pushed at the nurse, who had her pager in her hand. 
   “Can we get Jared and Tyrese in here please?” the nurse yelled. “You have to calm down Miss Elsie. Babies will get bigger needles than you today.” 
   “I don’t need the shot,” Azora said with my mouth. “Please. There’s been a misunderstanding.” 
   “Oh honey, don’t worry. Lots of people are scared of shots, but you gotta be brave. Oh thank the Lord, Jared come here. And Mom, can you help hold onto her?”
   Jared was holding my arms and Tyrese was holding my legs and Mom was holding my wrists, so I was trapped, really totally trapped. “Look away,” the nurse said.
   Azora looked away. They looked in the direction of Mom. Their eyes locked with hers, and her gaze filled them up with her concern, her fear, the terrible ingredients of love. The weight and pressure of her eyes. Her long nails gentle against my body’s wrist. It was too much, and they slipped. I slotted back into my body just in time to feel the needle pushing in, pushing pushing pushing pumping me with blank substance like a balloon so that my organs dissolved so that I was a bag of liquid, slippery, with nothing to latch on to--
   I can’t hold! I can’t!

And that’s when
that’s 
Azora

                                                                                                                                   *
   The car ride back was quiet. I had a Band-Aid covering the dot where Depo-Provera had entered me. I had a bloodstream sloshing with Depo-Provera. But I did not have Azora. Mom said nothing the whole way; maybe she knew she didn’t have to. As soon as we got home I went to the green bathroom and began to sob.
   From far away, I could hear them. Keep crying, they said. It’s all that’s keeping me conduited to you, the flavor of your water. I’m holding on tight. I’m going to try to get back in. 
   It was the first time I heard Azora from outside. They sounded tinny and distant and horrible. I focused on pushing out more tears, crying for minutes and minutes, but nothing changed. 
   It’s not working, they said, frustrated. It’s not the latch that’s the problem. There’s not enough room for me to fit! 
   How was there no room? I was completely empty without Azora. My body was ringing with the lack of Azora.  
   You are NOT empty, they insisted. You have to make space. The tzimtzum. You have to let something out! 
   But what could I let out? I had nothing. I was going to have to go back to before, falling asleep in synagogue a docile animal, the huge bolt lock squatting over our front door, in the car we pass Old St. Augustine Junction parked full with Megabuses in waiting, the tickets online aren’t even expensive, add to cart, close browser window, delete history, pretend it never happened—pretend I don’t burn for leaving, that I have no desire—but I do, I do, that’s what I can empty out for you, Azora, the weight of my desires--
   The notebook lying on the bathroom counter. Latch. I grabbed it and I knew I had to write, but didn’t know how to write besides being honest, just saying what I meant to say. So I wrote I’m thinking about the day Azora first came into my life and turns out it was easy to confess, to erupt with true thoughts. I kept writing, kept writing, kept spilling it out, and as I was writing I saw the miraculous edge of a rope started to poke through from the tip of the pen, a rope like one you pull out of a magician’s hat, gorgeous, endless, many colors, and you have to keep pulling and pulling and pulling the rope as if the hat is bottomless, and you can’t stop, because what you are doing isn’t just an offloading, but a transit, moving things from one world to another. You can’t fuck it up. You have to reach your destination. So I wrote and I pulled and I wrote and I pulled and when I eventually came to the end of this rope of words, I had written down everything there was to say. I had made it all the way back to where I was, in this house in this city where I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. 
   I put my pen down, my body cleaned out and whistling with a total empty calmness.  
   Well? What do you think? 
  You are so powerful you make my heart shake, Azora said. You are perfect for me. And then they put themselves through me like a hole puncher.
​

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ELSIE PLATZER is a writer-ecologist originally from Jacksonville, Florida. Her work appears or is forthcoming in EcoTheo Collective, Crack the Spine, and Glass Kite Anthology. She kvetches at @jewonlyliveonce on Twitter.

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