Thrust: A Novel

My beloved Aurora,

I did what you said.

I watched for a gift when I found you gone.

The day your gift arrived, I had risen from a dream in which I wrestled an arm that had no body. Just a giant arm, but the arm was winning. In the dream, the limb was much bigger than I. And yes, I was naked, of course. Though the dream ended without conclusion, it was clear that I had spent myself in every conceivable way.

The day of your delivery, I answered the door in my dressing robes. “What?” I called out with temper at the knock at my door.

When I opened the door, the delivery boy looked a little frightened. He carried a box of the type that usually housed a delivery of long-stemmed roses, and my heart warmed and I smiled a little, as I had just that night been with the ram’s cock, and you know the funny thing about him was his sentimentality. The most sentimental brute I’ve ever known.

I gave the delivery boy more coins than he deserved, closed the door, and took the box to my bed. There was no marking on the box. I lifted the lid, ready to inhale the smell of roses.

Aurora, the box had no roses.

Inside, instead, your leg. The leg I designed for you.

That’s when your words came rushing back to me. “If I am ever gone, look for a gift. An object of importance for us.”

I wept. I felt the gift and the word gone as if they’d been soldered together. I knew I would likely never see you again.

And while I held — not your leg, but the leg I made for you — I noticed something. Paper. A slip of paper, tucked inside the leg. My hands began to shake.

I pulled from the leg your letter.

My cousin. My love — Oh, Frédéric, isn’t there some other word we might use? What an overwrought and emptied thing that word is.

Love. I’ve something to share with you. This parting gift. Inside this beautiful leg is a story.

There are times when I feel my missing leg in my arm — almost always when I am writing to you. “Phantom limb,” as it’s known. Some amputees, I know, feel pain where the limb used to live; others just a sensation of the thing. Many of the children I have harbored for all these years have known the experience. (Yes, children. My wards. Don’t act surprised, my cousin. Surely you can imagine something more surprising in Room 8 other than carnal pleasure.)

That sensation — so difficult to describe. Something like an itch, almost a gesture, in the part of the body nearest the sever. I have read of scientists who believe that the body may be harboring memories once carried in these damaged regions, that even after a given limb is gone, those memories may lurch forward now and again. One doctor of my acquaintance, Silas Weir Mitchell, has posited that the cause may be an irritation in the peripheral nervous system. But what of those who are born without limbs? I asked him once after a particularly intense session in the Room of Ropes. Such patients have been known to experience phantom limb as well. He admitted that such cases remain a mystery.

Sometimes I imagine a Room filled with all our missing limbs. Most people would consider such a vision grotesque, but in my mind’s eye, the Room is unbearably beautiful. The limbs are ornate, like jewelry or crowns or velvet gowns or feathered hats. The limbs are so beautiful, away from their former bodies, that they take on their own identities as objects.

A hand stands in for a face.

When I write to you, cousin, I can feel my leg. It does not feel like a phantom, not like a phantasm; my leg feels present. Many times I have stood up from my desk without my beloved prosthetic and fallen on my face, forgetting that a one-legged woman must work for her balance in the world.

I have chosen this moment to tell you about the depth of my love for you.

When I was recovering in a hospital far away from the one where my leg was murdered and stolen, I was delirious from pain and the medications for pain — so you might say I was in a suspended state of pleasurepain for weeks. My darling, I want you to understand, I went to a real place. The regular world around me, the comings and goings of doctors and nurses in the ward, the white of the sheets, the blue and white of nurses’ uniforms, I saw them as no more than blurry and dreamlike. Sound too was muffled. It was almost like being underwater. Then, one day as I was beginning to make my way back to our shared reality, I looked down at the place where my leg should be, and I saw — your hand.

I understood why this should be: in the muffled coo of their voices, the nurses had told me that you visited me every day. But on this day, I saw your hand resting where my leg should be on the bed. And so I looked at you and said your name aloud and smiled.

That night I dreamed of waves.

The next day, I could hear you in a natural way, and I could see you, and you came in with a long box. You sat down next to me, as always, and you took an object out of the box. The object was a wooden leg with a foot, the wood oiled and glowing. All over the wood, intricate hand-carved roses. On the foot, perfect toes with painted toenails. So delicate. So beautiful.

That leg took my breath away. Took language away.

I wept an ocean after you left that evening. In place of language, all I had were tears of gratitude.

Was this love?

I am a childless unmarried woman whose pleasure and pain have traveled great distances. What do I know about love? It seemed as if it might be love. I have never felt anything like it, before or since.

I created the Room of Vibrations specifically for amputees or anyone who feels a phantom limb experience. There, for a moment, even someone who has lost a breast or a tooth or an eye — or an I, my love — can feel temporarily whole, the vibration standing in for what is missing. Perhaps, for some, standing in for love.

As I write this, I can feel my leg in my hands. But not just that. I feel my face — that idiotic obsessive surface filled with holes and lies and mistaken ideas about beauty and communication — in my hands. Which is to say, I think my entire identity lives in my hands. I thus renounce my face.

When you think of me (Will you think of me, my dove?), do not think of my face.

Ever yours into the everything (or nothing),

Aurora