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"

Perhaps, the psychiatrist says, we just need to tinker with the formula some more.

Maggie fucks just to feel alive. Just to feel real.

Question: How many boys does it take to screw Maggie?

Maggie is vertical but she would rather be horizontal.

Maggie is homeless now Maggie has no home she is sleeping on strangers’ couches. She uses her overcoat as a blanket. It looks like a tent.

But at least Maggie is FREE. She is free from the MAN. She is free from the MACHINE.

She is not free from men in general, just the MAN.

Maggie needs to fuck the men who let her stay with them. She doesn’t have to, but it’s an implied contract.

She wakes from their grimy beds, tousled and confused. She reaches for her pack of smokes. She cannot find her underwear. She doesn’t remember the night before. The smell of tequila. The line of coke on the nightstand table.

Gone, gone, gone. Maggie is gone, gone, gone.

Whispers, whispers, about Maggie. Maggie who is diseased. Maggie who is distressed. SOS. Must not come too close to Maggie. Must not catch what Maggie’s got.

Maggie has gone AWOL. The psychiatrist cannot reach Maggie, the psychiatrist cannot tinker with his mad experiment anymore.

"

—

Kate Zambreno, O Fallen Angel

I’m really interested in the way Zambreno chose to portray both Maggie and Ruth.  They have no introspection, apparently no interiority.  And their respective narrators are pretty mean to them.  But I wonder if that is the only way to talk about a time in your life when you seem to have no power of reflection, and your attempts at introspection just chase around in circles.  There are long stretched of my early twenties that seem grey and blank, where I can’t put thinks together chronologically, have no insight into my decisions, and so I have constructed a narrative out of the available information, like some kind of historical fiction, but I think what Zambreno did is probably more accurate.