Banshee - Hardcover

Rachel DeWoskin is the author of six books: Blind, Big Girl Small, Foreign Babes in Beijing, Repeat After Me, Someday We Will Fly, and Banshee, which is forthcoming from Dottir Press in June 2019. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times Magazine of London, Teachers and Writers, and numerous anthologies. She spent her twenties in China as the unlikely star of a nighttime soap opera, which became the basis for her memoir. DeWoskin is on the core fiction faculty at the University of Chicago, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Centers for East Asian Studies and Jewish Studies.

It was just two days later—yesterday, November 3rd—that I found myself in a bathtub five floors above University Street, soaping up one of my graduate students.

I don’t mean this as an excuse, since bathing my student was a low I never thought I’d sink to, but I’m certain that I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t just discovered that I was literally coming apart. I don’t mean “found myself” in a spiritual sense or to suggest it wasn’t by my own agency that I took—or, well, Leah took—my clothes off. Or that I didn’t leap into the tub voluntarily, basically singing my consent. I just mean the situation itself gave me a new perspective from which to view my body, which was about to be transformed forever. Demoted, I thought, although I also tried to convince myself I’d be bionic, perky, invincible. They’d clean the terrors out of me, and in my improved body, I would also find myself somebody new.

But fuck the cheerful, hypothetical version of the facts. Suddenly, for the first time in my nicety life, I’d prefer to fillet my own heart than sit through another brunch with Charles’s or my colleagues—than ask or be asked, “What are you working on?”—than cook, write, sleep, teach, think, do what was right, or remain me. In fact, I wanted to crack open my own cage of bones and run straight out of myself. Or, failing that, could I just sleep with my student Leah every second until the doctors knocked me out?

This turn was only surprising because I’d been such a polite pleaser and goody-two-shoes until now. But maybe that life was a dishonest dress rehearsal for this, my actual final performance. Or maybe it was simpler than that—this impulse toward recklessness predated my “condition,” and I just wanted the wreckage of sex with Leah in the way that drinking too much at a party made you want something you already wanted, and if you drank enough, let you do it. Cancer was letting me do this! Thank you, cancer!

Or maybe my case was, in fact, dire, and therefore forgivable? What if I had very little time left to do anything that took place naked? Or, what if the numbers were off, or I was in that small percent of the bad side of the numbers, the two percent of people who didn’t wake up? (I mean, once it happened to you, then the chances were 100 percent, right?) What if I was one of the ones who was going to die on the table, or just after? Then I would have no time to do anything at all, so that was why I had to risk my entire life. Just to identify what that life was. 

Or—let’s say I do survive this. I might still no longer be myself once I’m housed in an altered body. So how can I count on that later self to do anything that might benefit the me I am right now? In fact, what holds a person together at all?