(When the light is on, she wakes to find bread and water; when the lights go out, she sleeps; these routines seem beyond her control)

When the table appeared, it was quite a shock. It had been days since anything new had happened and I was frankly used to the routine. It felt safe. At first, I prowled around that table as if it might explode. Odder still, my bread and water had been left on the floor in the same place as they’d always been. If not for my food, then why the table? It was as though a man had travelled far, running from his worst fears, finally safe where now no horror hounds him, and the simplest object, a table, for example, is more terrible than anything he might have imagined could roar out of his past, barking and growling and biting at his heels. I don’t like dogs.

If I could say to the table, write this in your own words, what story would it tell? For the table was witness to my prowling and to more. I touched its rough surface, put my bread and water on it, spilled a bit of water and wrote my name with it on the top of the table. I stood by it and ate. If I knelt, I could hardly reach the top. I know, I tried it that way too. There was no chair. How strange that in a place where there had been no table and no thought of a table, suddenly there was a need for a chair. Power has consequences; one object imagining another, until they proliferate in a fury of desire.

So, the table became a kind of lover. I curled up under it and imagined that I was safe. I held two of the legs in my hands and tried to reach the other two with my feet. I dreamed that these legs could bend inward and caress me. I thought: “they shall be driven to reconciliation.” I lay splayed beneath the table on my stomach and tried to curl inward still touching the legs. The wood resisted until I had to let go. I curled up into a fetal position and cried for hours. I never woke up under the table, although I spent whole days there, hoping that it would shelter me.

The table had a soft surface, so I tried to scratch it with my nails. I wrote my name repeatedly. Although I knew that there is no obligation for proof of the reality of any object, I insisted on testing the table. I wrote my name so that I could remember it, see it myself. I would wake up and read my name and think, I’m still alive. There is a knife that cuts a letter of hope above the heart. I had only the nails of my fingers that had grown long. I wanted most of all to cut bleeding trails along his back, to wound him when he least expected it.

I thought that if I could injure the table, tear it apart limb by limb, he would never come back. But I also knew that it was impossible for me to commit a suicide of that type. If I destroyed him, who would feed me? I had given up any thought of escape.

So, I cared for the table as if nothing else mattered. I kept it clean, brushed off bits of bread, leaned on it when I was weary, even sat on it from time to time. I washed off my sweat with a portion of my water. I surveyed the table, measured it, noted pertinent details. My only object, it made me think about the possibilities of the physical world, of objects outside my own body. For that I was grateful.

One day, as I was sitting on the table, it occurred to me that I could lie down. I hadn’t done that before. I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling. At first, I felt a sort of calm. But a word like “calm” seems to pull other words behind it, like “anesthetic” and I felt I was going under. I was in a trance, as though the white walls of my cell had been transformed into the walls of an operating room. I was a person who has nothing and whom nothing holds stable. I was naked to the knife.

I wanted the table to be a bed, a hard bed, but not a floor. I wrenched myself from the dream of the hospital and tried to remember a wrought iron bed, warm under a white down quilt. On top of that, a light quilt with embroidery, in each square something wonderful: a house, a pretty girl, a cat with a ribbon, the word “REST”. I tried to drive through all languages to access that memory, to hold it. But “rest”, led to “lie back” and the piles of white pillows dissolved. My legs were pushed up into the stirrups of the gynecologist’s examining table. He said: “we shall be witnesses to the penetrations of language.” My legs fell open to receive his hands, which probed me, deep inside, until I fainted with the effort of expelling him.

I thought of entering a poolhall. How many women remember that rape as if it happened to them? I was naked on the pool table, vulnerable through beauty. I was naked on the bar. The horror of that rape turned to memories of my own lust. At home, he took me in the kitchen as though I were a meal. And on the hard polished mahogany table, in a long sexual surrender. And the picnic table, how could I ever forget: rushing through the woods in a panic of lust. Passing ridiculous yellow happy faces hanging on the trees. A children’s camp of some sort. And again, I was lying on my back on that picnic table, wanting him so badly I would have done anything, done it anywhere, without caring who saw, who might stumble into us in the forest, who might see what was between my legs and what it wanted, that place that wanted with a passion that had no boundaries.

Were they watching me then. I shudder to remember it. I lay on the table in my prison, without that hard shared lust, without that man to protect me if anyone else came along. With no friends. And I wanted him, wanted all men, wanted my own hands between my legs, and all women too. I bargained trust against trust and came up empty. The erotic powers of the body were renewed. I had to get down from that table, yet I was frozen to the spot. I had created my vulnerability with thoughts only and alone I had to conquer it. Or give in to it. Who knew what would be the better course.

Can you imagine it, where you, tranquil now, perhaps with someone’s head in your lap as you read this, see me lying spread out naked on my table? Yes, my table and his table. The one he had provided for my exposure. I suddenly felt shame. I could no longer touch myself. I feared the eye of the ceiling, the surface of the table, the walls. All had witnessed something so private – not a pornographic episode, no, that wasn’t what it was at all. Don’t accuse me of that. It was a sudden deep awareness of my naked body, open.

And as if you have benefitted from the betrayal of unworthy secrets, you read this and want to enter me, to enter my sealed room, to lie on top of my body, to push something between my legs and feel around inside, to examine the evidence, to solve the crime, to gather all the clues and smell them on your hand afterwards. I’m not talking to my captors only, I’m talking to you. Can I ever get out of this cycle of pornographic repetition, my own dear sexual fantasies? And I thought, as I lay on that table, that I had never been so afraid. Not even when I first woke in the room. For now they had me, open. For you are what divides you, these four walls. But I had lost a sense of who this “you” was, and I rolled off the table, falling with a crash.

My bruises lasted for days. I know that harder days are coming, but I remember when the table first arrived.