Jessica Hudson

The Rapture

We begin with a woman in a box.

To be clear: when I say “a woman in a box,” I do not mean a metaphorical woman in a metaphorical box constructed of gender constraints and assumptions about femininity and topped with a solid glass ceiling.

No, when I say a woman in a box, I mean a flesh-and-blood, tooth-and-nails woman who is smiling and moving in a hollow wood-and-concrete box constructed precisely for her, and this woman who is smiling and moving around in this box is dressed in yards of flowing white chiffon, unhindered by the cloth swirling around her long limbs as she swoops around this box, which is actually a bedroom, a man’s bedroom, and the woman may not be metaphorical in this instance but she is a dream, the man’s dream, hovering inches above his sleeping face, her chiffon dress more translucent than white in the darkness of the box, I mean the bedroom (an important distinction) where the man lies unconscious as the smiling woman glides over the sofa, twirls between the bed posts, leaps from wall to wall, and yet the smiling woman’s feet haven’t touched the ground once, nor does she seem to be breathless from her ballet, and then a slight string of bubbles rises from her smile and still she is smiling and moving, touching the man’s face, holding, floating, her bare toes never brushing the hardwood floor because if she is not flying, she must be underwater.

though we know it’s coming, no one knows

exactly what the rapture will look like[1]

I do not know what my grandmother ate for breakfast, alone in her apartment encircled by pines. What did she eat to keep down the coffee? She always smelled like burnt beans, the bottom of the pot crusted brown with too much heart—no, I meant to type heat. Yesterday, my husband brought home a bag of coffee beans called LOVE BUZZ, the packaging as red as a sun-warmed can of Coca-Cola. I learn online that the original Coke tasted like coffee. In 2006, the company launched a variation of the coffee-cola romance. Blak bubbled for a mere 2 years before the scythe of low sales caught up with it. 13 years later, Coke is giving this fling another change.

The only meals I remember eating with Gram were fast-food. McDonald’s served coffee, so McDonald’s served her. Burger King was an entire category in her tilted food pyramid. I don’t remember what we ordered to eat, but no doubt she ordered a Diet Coke, a staple in her diet since some time in the 1980s, her way of staving off the lure of the other red & white, the addiction I never knew about until high school when Mom told me about the day she found the bottles hidden in Gram’s closet upstairs, behind the jumpers and mustard-plaid jackets, how she hurled the bottles down the carpeted stairs.

~

According to Merriam-Webster, the first time the phrase rapture of the deep was seen in print was 1953, four years after the woman in the box experienced that euphoric calm while filming underwater in Hollywood. Other words that debuted this year include ballpoint pen, bleep, bubble chamber, director’s chair, drip-dry, fish stick, free diver, overqualified, road trip, stiletto heel, sunblock, and videotape.

An online search for “rapture scuba diving” offers a link to a YouTube video titled, “The female diver that went too deep [Scuba peril].” The search engine shows part of the video’s description: “In this video we have a female scuba diver that dives really deep...too deep. She get's the rapture of the deep (nitrogen narcosis) and starts to loose contr…”

Maybe it’s my GenY lack of sensitivity to disturbing online content or the fact that I’ve never seen someone die in person, but I am warily intrigued by this description. Mostly it is that ellipsis between “really deep” and “too deep.” Those three dots offer more than a mere pause; they account for true depth. The kind of depth that can leave us feeling untouchable, at peace. The kind that switches ranks without us noticing, then leaves us behind.

My fingers hover over the touchpad, ready to swipe up and close the new page at a moment’s sensation. When I arrive at the YouTube page, I find: “This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.”

now still,

like the rapture[2]

The word rapture has its roots in the post-classical Latin raptura, meaning “poaching, rape.” Definitions have spanned from sexual violation or ravishing, abduction or the act of carrying off a woman by force, carrying onward as a force of movement, and a state of intense delight or enthusiasm.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists several compounds with the word rapture from the 18th and 19th centuries: rapture-bound, rapture-bursting, rapture-lightened, rapture-rising, rapture-smitten, rapture-touched, rapture-trembling, rapture-breathing, rapture-giving, rapture-moving, rapture-speaking. Etymology.com’s entry on rapture claims, “The earliest attested use in English is with women as objects.”

~

In a matter of minutes, you will become the woman in the box.

Pete the prop man has tested the room himself, so today you begin shooting the underwater ballet sequence. You memorized the sequence weeks ago, but have yet to practice in the underwater bedroom set created specifically for this scene. In the scene, you are a sleeping man’s dream of the real woman you play in the rest of the film, but you don’t have time to consider the Freudian complexities of this cinematic situation as Pete hands you through the trapdoor in the ceiling.

In order to be a vision, first you must be seen. Your white chiffon dress, chosen to stand out against the black walls of the box, soaks quickly, pulls at your torso, shoulders, upper arms, like a friend. “Come in,” it says, “the water’s fine!” In reality, the water is chilly and dark. Holding the edges of the opening in the ceiling, you move your bare feet through the chilly water, the layers of chiffon swirling, tightening around your shaved legs, then freeing themselves. Caress, release. Caress, release. Action! You inhale a few minutes’ worth of air and let the chiffon pull you down into fifteen feet of enclosed water. Pete gives you a thumbs up before closing the trapdoor above you.

The bedroom is entirely silent and dark. The bedroom is so dark, you can hardly see the props, but you’ve practiced the routine many times in the big pool. In the water, your body does not need light or sound to see. Through the floor-to-ceiling window that makes up one wall, you can see the male crew in position behind cameras and script-strewn tables, and right in the middle, the male director giving you a thumbs up from his raised chair. So you begin:

first, always, smile / hover a sleeping- man’s-height over the bed / push off

the wall & somersault in front of the fake window / twirl around the

column in the center of the room / keep smiling / glide over to the sofa,

spin above it & back to the center of the room / now rise up, the chiffon

swirling so gently around your waist, your legs, your arms, your hands /

feel for the trapdoor / not there / kick forward, reach up, the chiffon

clinging, pulling, now / glance at the window, a handful of men, lips

pursed around cigarettes, slurping coffee, laughing at each other, not you /

this isn’t by far your first go-round / underwater / keep treading, pushing,

holding, hoping, why does your heart pound so much louder against your

ribcage than your fist against the seamless ceiling / don’t / stop smiling

After Pete opens the trapdoor and hauls you up gasping for air, you realize this is the second time in two years you have almost died because a man chose to stop watching you. When you come back the next morning to finish the number, the ceiling with the one-sided trapdoor is gone.

the immediacy of human expression,

caught between physical agony

and a perverse calm bordering on rapture[3]

The scientific term for “the rapture of the deep” is nitrogen narcosis, from the Greek word narkosis, meaning “the act of making numb.” Scuba divers know it to be a potentially-fatal form of underwater intoxication. This is why deep-sea divers must breathe helium-based oxygen rather than the nitrogen-based oxygen we breathe out of water. If the body does not receive the proper amount or type of oxygen while underwater, the basic motor-functions begin to shut down. This can cause tunnel vision, loss of strength, delayed responses to aural and visual stimuli, impaired judgment, uncontrolled ascent, euphoria, sleepiness, and death.

~

I’m trying my best to remember my grandmother as she was. The mother of my mother who asked me to remind her how to play Freecell every time I visited, who never printed her name, who lived on fast food and Diet Coke for the penultimate decade of her life before she moved into the nursing home where she slept on her back, mouth open like an infant. I’m trying my best.

I text my mother to ask when she died: May 2017.

I text my older sister: Can you send me a list of everything you could find in the trunk of her car?

[screenshot] Women’s Reebok Princess Sneakers in Black

[screenshot] Women’s Reebok Classic Leather Sneakers in Black

and in her later years, it was sometimes all black canvas keds.

They always smelled horrible, cause she never wore socks.

She also had extra pairs of black heels (both high and low

pumps). And in these she always wore the thin foam insoles

and most had holes in the ball of the foot, cause she wore them

so hard. Of course multiple 2liters of warm Coca Cola

were rolling around back there…it is…strangely comforting

[screenshot] Sam Edelman Women’s Hazel Pump

[screenshot] Dr. Scholl’s DOUBLE AIR-PILLO Insoles

~

My youngest niece stays within arm’s reach of the shallow end wall. Her torso-floaty keeps her upright and her face clear of the water bubbling between us. When her older sister jumps in near us, quickly bobbing to the surface, wet braids flapping against her face, the younger girl squints and squeals unhappily as water splashes her face. Like me, she is suspicious of anything she doesn’t control. After demanding a towel from her mom, she turns to me with dry eyes and a serious expression. “I don’t go underwater,” she explains, “because I will swallow water.”

As she says this, I am balancing on the tips of my flukes, knees bent as if I am sitting in a chair. Occasionally, she glances down at my green tail and grins, as though she’d already forgotten I was wearing it. Later, after an unexpected tumble over the edge, she will sit on the wall and throw purple diving rings that I retrieve and hang on her narrow wrists. Before throwing them again, she will place one on her dry head and the other on mine and crown us “Queens of the Pool.”

“But even if you get water in your mouth,” I tell her as we watch her older sister, smaller yet fearless, swim into the deeper end accompanied only by her floaty, “you don’t have to swallow. Watch this.” I sink into the water until my chin and mouth are submerged. Watching her watching me, I open and close my mouth underwater several times, then come up, smiling, “See?”

Her expression hasn’t changed. Apparently, my brief performance did not prove anything. She repeats the same sentence as before but slower this time, as if I am the child, “I don’t go underwater because I will swallow water.” Inches from my face, chin lifted to avoid that perilous dip, her high-pitched voice sounds louder than usual. I didn’t realize until now how I stand closer, speak closer, listen closer to other people when I’m in the water.

Maybe this is why I feel like I’m part of a lineage when I hear my mother’s voice, the subtle lingering on long vowels, the bubbly laugh that flows through most of my memories, the sudden spurt of damn! after a glass slipped out of her soapy rubber gloves and shattered in the kitchen sink, the pause when I asked when she and my dad first made love. My mother’s voice was the first sound I heard before I knew anything other than liquid.

After our swim, my niece picks up my tail, lying limp and soaked on the deck, and hefts the fabric-covered monofin onto her shoulder with an earnest oof! Does making sound make our burdens lighter, I wonder, as she heads for the locker room. The fabric tail, heavy with water, falls and slaps onto the pavement, painting a dark trail behind her.

~

The woman in the box feels “the rapture of the deep” only once in her lifetime. When the glassy calm settled over her body, she wanted more than anything to lie down inside the giant clam set piece, hard pearl for a pillow, and fall asleep. Through the newly-installed underwater speakers, she heard a man’s voice telling her to swim into the light, recalling her from the rapture.

~

Gram never seemed to enjoy driving, hugging the wheel every time another car approached. Quiet now, she’d say, light from the setting sun ricocheting off the paved hill that led home. We’d be pierced by gold. The road before us would disappear. It was dangerous to stop there, surrounded by woods and blind corners, yet inevitably she would brake. The Cokes cavorting in the trunk. Fifty-cents-worth of black coffee sloshing in a paper cup without a lid in the armrest between us. Both of us, glowing, and still we could not see.

[1] Piper J. Daniels, Ladies Lazarus

[2] T. Fleischmann, Syzygy, Beauty

[3] Jericho Parms, “A Theory of Substance”

Jacob Hibbard