I hadn’t worked on that novel since the interview with the cops.
Canvas covered the chicken wire on the box. The cone measured six feet long and three feet high at its wide end. Like K, I couldn’t stand up.
Today, I sat inside. The walls needed lining so the chicken wire wouldn’t print hexagons on my skin. I hung a quilt over the opening then climbed in again. I’d seal the box with opaque tape and spray-paint the lining flat black. A pinhole camera had to be light-tight.
“Polly” came on, a song about a man torturing a girl. I’d read that the real girl, the one the song was based on, had escaped her captor. The line “she’s just as bored as me” made the rage sound sympathetic and hollow. I could relate.
I nudged the honeycombed foam with my palms, soles, knees, and back. I rolled my face against the wire, pursed my lips and tongued the chromic thread, the spongy give. In here, the panic wound down a notch. I’d touched this calm in a sex shop once when I’d let Jenna belt me into a straitjacket as a gag. When I had the door and lining in place, I could crawl in here and sink into the familiar numbness.
The weekend before the trial started, we went to a wedding at a hippie church in the Ottawa Valley. I was marvelling at the bride’s grey hempen braids when the pastor said, “Through submitting to Adam, Eve is submitting to God.”
The bearded pastor clasped his hands in front of his rainbow-banded robe. Jeans and earth shoes peeked out from beneath the hem.
“While Eve submits to Adam,” he said, “and by submit we mean that she hands him her will and asks him to bend it to God’s ways, she must cultivate her own will that it may be tested through Adam, and that where it is true, she have it shown right back to her and know it to be so. Now I won’t say they submit to each other — Adam, as the man, is next to God — but only that Eve must not give up her self, or her soul. As Adam’s wife, she is part of a holy union made robust because she ministers her own will for the purpose of its submission to Adam, and through Adam, to God.”
I studied the women. The unadorned faces with warty cheeks and unplucked chins. The grey-pink skin and shapeless hair. And the strong, sinless eyes. As if they held no secrets. Or if they did, they defied anyone to wrong them for doing so.
My hand crept over to Alex’s, and he pressed it. For courage or sustenance, I couldn’t tell. Maybe forgiveness. I hoped so.
Earlier in the week, Alex had brought a print of a Japanese silk painting home from a History of Surgery exhibit at the College of Medicine. He’d unrolled it on our living room floor and secured it with art books.
In the foreground, a woman lies serenely in a flowing turquoise and white kimono, head on a red and white bolster, hair tied off her face with a maroon scarf and spilling over her pillow, eyes shut. A man kneels beside her on a bolster, hands on thighs. To his left sits a black lacquer box with an open drawer and a red lacquer teapot with platter and spoon. To his right, a greyhaired geisha in glasses fans the prone woman.
“It dates from the end of the eighteenth century,” Alex said. “That’s Seishu Hanoka using a preparation of datura.”
“Datura. Didn’t Carlos Castaneda?”
“No, not him. That voodoo zombie guy.”
“The Serpent and the Rainbow,” we said in unison. I touched my ring.
Alex continued: “Hanoka used his datura preparation as an anaesthetic agent given by mouth. This print shows Hanoka experimenting on his wife. See that spoon? The teapot? That’s how he administered the preparation.”
The wife is talcum white while the husband and his helper are a healthy olive. The wife lies stark-faced, at rest, arms straight at her sides. Hanoka looks placid, yet keen.
I leaned over the print. A ceremonial knife sits above the tied waist of Hanoka’s pants, its handle obscured by the pattern of the silk.
A slip of paper in the bag said Seishu Hanoka founded the Hanoka School of Surgery in Japan. Even if he’d orchestrated his wife’s surrender, I suspected her sacrifice held pleasure, and intent. After the anaesthesia discovery, such a wife, her will well-tended, would insist her body be subject to further experiment. For her husband’s career, of course, but for her own reasons besides.
The couple stood to take their vows. With Alex, I had submitted by agreeing not to make the relationship official and by showing only a loveable version of myself. I’d handed over nothing in bed, though. I stayed shy there, left his kinky offerings unsampled. Since our fight in the bathroom, I’d thought about my testimony at Ramona’s trial and whether Alex would react more to the fact of my secret or to what it revealed.
I returned his hand-squeeze. A woman strummed guitar and a man played the organ as we all stood and sang “Here Comes the Sun.” Alex and I spent the rest of the ceremony Morse code–pressing each other’s palms, eyes on a life-sized felt hanging of God banishing Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
When the Ramona Hawkes trial started on March 30, 1992, I added the morning news to my routine. Anchor Tad Stiles read highlights of the opening remarks while the screen showed text superimposed on shots of Ramona’s arrest.
The Crown Attorney for Peel County, Ron Laurie, planned to make full use of James Hawkes’s vices. Certain statements rattled me. “Nobody forced Ramona Hawkes to drug and sexually assault anybody.” “Ramona Hawkes was no paralyzed victim.” “She got caught up in a spiralling escalation of paraphilia that ended with her murdering her husband.” I shrank at the term “sexually assault.” Its invasiveness and its stigma. I didn’t see how I’d ever get used to it.
Laurie’s instructions to the jury struck hardest: “Look past the gender of the accused and examine the evidence. Ask yourself, who was in control? Who had the power? Ramona Hawkes wanted to commit crimes with her husband. When she found out he had fallen for someone else, she grew jealous and killed him. This woman before you did not murder out of a subjugated wife’s fear for her life. Rather she acted from a calculating killer’s need to eliminate a threat.”
I scoured the papers but couldn’t find the name of the woman who’d come between Ramona and James. It occurred to me that James, not the other woman, had provoked Ramona’s jealousy, that Ramona did have feelings for her friends. We’d mattered.
Well, one of us had.
By day ten I was tuning in to the morning news as soon as Alex’s tires squelched out of the driveway.
Tad Stiles came on: “Record lows in Alberta. Two home invasions at separate ends of Toronto overnight — and new details about Molly Sumner, today’s sensational witness at the Ramona Hawkes trial. Next on Good Morning Today!”
After the commercials, a shot of Ramona, slate-eyed with a white-blond fringe. I forgot to blink. GMT! liked this photo of her posing in a merry widow for her husband, the victim.
Then Tad Stiles: “The trial of Ramona Hawkes continues today with the first of her teenage friends appearing before Justice Walter Larraby. The Crown lobbied unsuccessfully for her to use a pseudonym. Though she was under eighteen when she knew the Hawkeses, nobody sexually assaulted Molly Sumner.”
Flash on the merry widow, then on GMT!’s favourite. Ramona stands by an unlit campfire, one foot on a log, one fist balled into her hip. The other hand, raised, grips the feet of a jackrabbit carcass. Its ears flop like hair.
“Strange
