Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation

Maybe I, too, was splashing around in other people's pain just to avoid drowning in my own. Maybe I was only trying to help them because nobody helped me.

I felt a little bit like crying and instead ate more cheese.

When people are ashamed, they cover their faces. The face is where shame lives.

Nothing's more comforting than the sound of rain when you're not in it.

If I didn't tell someone everything, maybe I didn't exist.

Most Division I universities pay more for one football player than for a tenured professor’s salary.

But no jagged simile, no disjointed paragraph can come close to describing real pain. Pain is its own language. Each description feels false, decorative, like I'm pouring watercolors into the crater of a bomb site (see, I'm failing even now).

People always rely on the incompetent idiot defense—it doesn’t hurt them. Look at Iran-Contra. They named an airport after that guy.

We clung to each other in the steaming

Trauma breaks your brain—makes it atrophy forever. The damage is not metaphorical but physical. The most severely affected tissue is the left superior parietal lobule, associated with memory, language, and the ability to orient oneself in the world. The lobule shrinks.

Harvard professor Elaine Scarry said torture “unmakes” the victim’s world, destroying all ordinary meaning. Torture facilities in the Philippines, Syria, and Greece used domestic furniture to hurt people—smash a head with a refrigerator door, break a hand with a filing cabinet. Weaponized, the refrigerator is no longer a refrigerator; the filing cabinet is no longer a filing cabinet. Objects lose their meaning, and with them, meaning loses meaning. Scarry said it’s why our Holocaust awareness particularly attaches to domestic objects: ovens, showers, lampshades, soap. Home is no longer home. The world is unmade.

Married couples actually do begin to look alike, even developing similar facial lines from a lifetime of mimicking each other’s expressions. Adult children catch their own parental impersonations, to their dismay: “I look just like my mother” or “I sound just like my dad.” People born deaf even subconsciously and accurately copy the regional accents of people they’re lip-reading, accents they’ve never heard before. Primate see, primate do. Studies show that the more empathetic you are, the better a mimic you are.

It was what Raymond Chandler would have called “a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

It was like opening a sealed jar with a tight lid. You have to apply heat, push your breasts aside, and lean your weight into it, wondering the whole time if it’s stuck for good, until suddenly there’s movement, the suction releases, and the lid comes off in your hand.

rat can survive being flushed down the toilet and will eventually swim back and reemerge from the bowl like a wet phoenix. You can drop a rat from a height of fifty feet and it will still walk away. You can deprive it of sleep for twenty days. A rat can recognize the scent of an unfamiliar poison from rumor alone. A rat can change its shape entirely, collapsing its skeleton to fit into small holes. Rats have traveled in space. Rats dream. There is one rat per person in the world. You are never more than ten feet from a rat.

In fifth grade we did animal reports in science class, and I chose the naked mole-rat. They are nearly immortal. They live underground in African deserts and can hold their breath for eighteen minutes. To survive underground, the nearly hairless rats have become almost completely cold-blooded, only mammals via technicality, like platypuses. They die, of course, but not because they age. They die of the same things as any rat—they’re killed, they wither from disease or infection, they starve or die of thirst. But they can’t get cancer. They don’t feel pain, even when immersed in acid. They live by half-lives like radioactive material. Their remaining life spans split by increments, never reaching zero. They’re as likely to die at age three as they are at age three hundred. They reproduce forever.

Raymond Chandler said, “There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art, science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science, art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.

I wonder which is preferable—to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin—everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone—and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?—Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin