Free Sex and Death in the American Novel by Sarah Martinez Page B

would be right weighed me down. I hadn't been into my email for over a month. I opened the laptop and started it up.
    My inbox was indeed crowded. Much sympathy on the death of my brother. I made a folder in my email program and moved all of these in there.
    Eric sent me a dozen links to articles about what was going on around town, as well as links to a few songs he thought would cheer me up. This was what I needed—diversion. I finished sorting the emails and closed everything down. I called Eric and he came over an hour later.
    I drank and fucked my way through the next year. I was so tired of dragging Tristan's memory around with me, but I couldn't let him go either. I continued to write, caffeine- and nicotine-fueled sessions inspired by my nighttime antics. Of all the men from that year, not one can I say was especially memorable. In the end, neither sex, nor alcohol, nor even dancing pulled me out of the depths of my grief, or wiped away the hateful thoughts, the anxious dread, the knowledge that it was a matter of time before I also self-destructed. No man was big enough, or cocky enough, or mean enough to totally distract me from the voices in my head.
    What pulled me back to the land of the living was a goddam tabloid rag. I was standing in line at Safeway and saw the headline:
    Little girl Alice missing ten years, freed from life in a box.
Read her horrifying story here!
    I bought a copy of the magazine and hurried home. It was a four-page article, complete with color photos of the room; a cheaply paneled affair with gray carpeting and bent blinds on the windows. There was a photo of the bed, messed up, a dark-blue blanket and white sheets with light-green flowers on them. Then there was the box itself, a long wooden rectangle with a screen placed in it a few inches from one end. Another photo showed the box opened, a thin strip of material lining the bottom.
    For a long time I stared at the magazine, stared at my book, Tropic of Cancer , open on the coffee table to hold my place, the brown and purple cover inset with a photo of couples dancing. I couldn't figure out what bothered me for the longest time. I flashed to all my random hookups and wondered if I'd ever come close to something like this myself. A sick part of me wondered if being kept as a slave would finally erase the guilt and tortured thoughts from my mind. Probably not. I would only have more time to think about how I failed my brother, and how I wasn't important enough to him for him to stick it out. Locked up tight under some stinky old man's bed. Now her mind was broken in places she was not even aware of.
    “Fuck me,” I said, low under my breath, satisfied by the way my voice sounded in the room. Something needed to be said, but words couldn't begin to cover it. I thought about the voice of the narrator—Ol’ Hank—I'd been reading. He would note the risk of police involvement, the responsibility ofkeeping a woman like that, especially challenging would be dealing with the “monthlies.” A different sort of energy came with making the connections, with turning my horror and hatred of this awful brutality toward Henry Miller himself, toward all the ways he talked about women, and I set aside the parts of him I admired, the free mind, the creative flow, the endless capacity for adventure, to stoke the fires of an emotion I didn't know I was capable of.
    In Henry Miller, in the Marquis de Sade, in various Victorian works, women existed only for the purposes of men's enjoyment. I related as a reader on some strange plane where I unhooked my own feelings and either put myself in the perpetrator's shoes, imagining the freedom that came with this power over another, or wondered if there wasn't a certain freedom in existing purely for the pleasure of another with no thought for one's own feeling as did Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The context was escape, oblivion, release.
    Here, reading about this woman and how her life had been destroyed, and