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What no one would guess about this woman who is having intercourse with a thousand men: She is afraid of men. Her father was an ineffectual man who was enraged by his own weakness, so his daughter grew up surrounded by his silent, humiliated rage. Her mother smothered her own strength in order to make her father look strong; that didn't work, so the girl grew up with her mother's rage too. She had no way to put male and
female together inside herself without rage. This is the core of her fear. Her fear is so great that she cannot afford to
recognize it. It is so great that it has taken on a thrilling sexual charge. Because the woman is courageous by nature, she has always gone directly toward what she most fears. When she began to have sex with boys, it was as if she was picking up a doll marked 'girl' and a doll marked 'boy' and banging them together, hoping to unite herself. As she grew older, the woman inside her became more insatiable and the man became more angry. He became angry enough to kill.
Because this woman is decent, she will not kill. But in deep sleep, she dreams of terrible men. In the worst of these dreams, a killer with magic power came to her childhood home. He bewitched her mother so that she let him in. He turned her father into a dog chained to a post. He carved his name on the girl's face. He butchered her mother like a cow.
This dream was so terrible that the girl forgot it before she woke. It is still inside the woman. He is part of her, the male who would kill. The female he wants to kill is part of her too. Deep inside, she is still trying to bring them together. And for one moment, down a special trapdoor, she has found a way. If the murderer who appeared on the talk show had been fucking the marathon woman at this moment, he might've had a feeling of subconscious unease — for she has entered the deep place of sex and it is not a place the killer wants to be. This is a place without form or time. There can be no grid here. Even the shape of his heart will no longer hold; it will be forced to open. Sorrow, terror, hate, love, pity, joy: all human feeling will come in and he will be unable to bear it. He will break. His killing nature will be stripped to abstract movement, a bursting surge overtaking the weaker prey, the principle of pouncing and eating. In this place, all pouncing and eating is contained, because this place contains everything. This place is her ovaries and her eggs, bejeweled with moisture, the coarse, tough flowers sprouting in her abdomen, the royal, fleshy padding of her cunt. Some people say that nature is like a machine. But this is not a machine. This is something else.
When male turtles fuck, they thrust deep inside their mates, they stretch out their necks, they throw back their heads and they scream. They don't have to drop through trap doors or travel down layers. They are already there. Animals want to live because they are supposed to. But they know death better than a human killer. Life and death are in them all the time.
The marathon woman is more than halfway through, and she is tired. You are tired too, just from thinking about it. The theme from Chariots of Fire is on the sound system, but you are hearing a very old song from the Industrial Age called "John Henry." It is about a steel driver of great strength who outperformed the machine invented to replace him. He won, but in doing so, he died. The song ends "He lay down his hammer and he died." This song is not about sex or about women. The marathon woman is not going to die, nor is she going to win. She has no hammer to lay down. But she is like John Henry anyway because she is making herself into a machine. But she is not a machine. She is something else.
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©2000 Mary Gaitskill and Nerve.com, Inc.
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