Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Hand to the Doorknob” by Elise Gorzela. Elise is an essayist from New England currently teaching at Worcester State University. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University in '23. Her work can also be found in DIAGRAM and in March Danceness 2024.
Disclaimer: do not read the endnotes unless you want to know the answers.
On Anthony’s roof, we told riddles. We crawled out his bedroom window to sit on the rubber roof, his Google speaker wedged in the window playing Janis Joplin, Sam Cooke, or the Violent Femmes. Anthony refused any hints. He’d ask me to repeat them, listening carefully. The language of a riddle is important. Something slips in past the rhyme of the question, in all the little contradictions. There is a secret, waiting to be uncovered. He would think it over for almost an hour before giving in. I’d watch the sky darken. I had nowhere to be. Sometimes a six-pack sat between us, cigarette butts slipping through their long empty necks. I tried to recall the riddles told in the dark by Gollum and Bilbo’s answers.
What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes?
And yet never grows?1
The book—with a gilded dragon surrounded by treasure on its cover—had glittered on the top shelf of a display at the public library in my hometown. As a kid, I wanted to read anything set in another world, preferably someone bored with daily life that got swept out in a tidal wave to a magical land. I used my very own library card to check out The Hobbit. I read it within a week. I loved the dwarves, a towering greying wizard, a dragon curled up deep in a mountain and the fuzzy-footed hobbit at the center outsmarting trolls. When Bilbo got separated from the rest of his company, alone in a wet dark cave, I felt fear of Gollum. Gollum, a being that no one could name and who was cold like a fish, was hungry and angry to tear at someone with his dirty fingernails.
Bilbo and Gollum play a game. Bilbo must answer each riddle correctly, or Gollum will eat him. If Bilbo wins, Gollum must show him the way out of the mountain’s caves.
I reread each riddle, trying to solve them on my own before reading on. I was Bilbo in the cave trying to scratch my way to the sun.
I couldn’t solve one riddle. I knew the answer even then: Gollum would’ve eaten me alive.
Voicelessness it cries,
Wingless flutters,
Toothless bites,
Mouthless mutters.[i]
Anthony and I met working at the TV Studio on UMass Lowell’s campus. That fall semester, our first big task working together was spending a whole day cleaning out the equipment closet. The TV Studio was filled with computers set up with the Adobe editing suite and manuals that the department head recommended we read, but we never did. Soundproof glass separated the computer lab from the studio space wrapped in green screen walls, wire cables hanging down like garlands, and in the center, a heavy desk with the UMass Lowell logo on it.
Early that morning, I walked into the editing room as Anthony unlocked the equipment closet, which used to be a bathroom evidenced by the tub drain in the floor, and we began yanking everything out. We sorted through lenses and battery packs, tripods, mics, costumes, props, and trash that had been stuffed into crevices, even finding someone’s business proposal for an app. We put on the 1920s pinstripe gangster suit costumes, and I talked about famous crime boss Al Capone dying from syphilis when it was very treatable at the time. It probably took years of him ignoring open sores on his body for it to eventually kill him in the infirmary on Alcatraz.
“Years!” I yelled. “Can you imagine?”
How long can something be ignored until it needs to be dealt with, we wondered.
We covered the floor in sorted piles of items in various states of labeling. We talked about movies and classes we were taking; I was in writing workshops, Anthony in music theory. We sang to Taylor Swift playing from the lab computers.
Anthony said, “Taylor Swift is the love of my life.”
I said, “I think we’re bonding.”
It was easy becoming Anthony’s friend. He can listen to a song once and know the exact place to put his fingers on the neck of a guitar to remake the chords. When there was a lull in students renting out cameras or asking editing questions, we walked to the school’s café and got sandwiches and coffee. We watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show on the lab computers and drew cartoons on the whiteboard. Anthony brought in playing cards, and we learned how to play Slapjack on the benches in the hallway, which started such an intense rivalry that no one else wanted to play with us.
I invited Anthony to Write Club on Tuesday nights when people came over to my apartment I shared with my boyfriend at the time, X. Write Club was mostly an excuse for people to drink and pass around spliffs. If someone brought over a short story or poem, we sat around on the floor and couch arguing about whether fantasy worlds would use the metric system or not. People commented on our lack of a bathroom door. X and I told them the apartment was already like that, which was why rent was so cheap. We hung up a sheet around the door frame. They thought it was funny. I laughed too.
I began spending more time in the TV studio than I was scheduled for even if no one else was there. I only went back to the apartment to sleep and maybe eat. Some days X would walk by the TV Studio, waiting. Someone would ask him if he wanted to join us and he’d say no, waiting in the hallway. I’d say bye to everyone in the TV Studio and drive home with X.
Anthony and I ranted about impossible hours and demands for reshoots, reedits, rerecording, about students that blamed us for their bad grades on their projects. No one knew how to roll up an XLR cable properly.
“You got to feel where the cable wants to go!” Anthony would yell from on top of a ladder.
Through the year, Anthony and I, and then Emilee when she began working with us, became increasingly frustrated with the students. We were constantly pointing out obvious things to them. “This mouse has no left click,” a student once said to me. I stared at him, at the smooth white dome of the Apple mouse.
I reached over and said, “Click on the left side of the mouse. That’s the left click.”
Another student once approached me asking if I wanted to be in their short film. Their pitch began, “It’s not porn, but…” I walked away.
Winter came. As I was walking on campus with a gash beginning to scab above my eyebrow, my professor stopped me to ask about it. I told some story of how I’d try to fix my apartment’s front steps and the claw end of the hammer had bounced back up into my face. He said, “Oh, I’ve done that same thing.”
I smiled and nodded.
*
Don’t ask me to say it outright. I’ll circle around it, the back of my hand to the doorknob, ready to run if it’s warm.
I’ll tell you this: as the snow thawed that spring, I finished moving out my stuff from the apartment I shared with X. The last words X said to me as I placed boxes into my car were, “Promise you won’t tell anyone about me.”
I said, “I promise.”
*
Graduation—sweating in the Tsongas Stadium on the paneled-over hockey rink while people passed around flasks of whiskey to each other — ended Anthony’s and my job at the TV Studio. While the rest of our friends were at their jobs serving at restaurants and bagging milk and eggs at grocery stores, Anthony and I found ways to fill time walking the streets, melting tar sliding under our sneakers. We were both looking for jobs, applications pending on Indeed, rejection emails piling up in our inboxes.
Days stretched and shrunk. That whole summer after graduating was like an elastic band around my forehead. I would wake up, maybe on the lumpy futon in my parents’ apartment I’d moved into after the breakup with X, in a room I shared with my brother while he was home from college, maybe hungover and reeking, and get in my car. I couldn’t sit still too long; it would mean I’d have to think about things I didn’t want to.
At Anthony’s house, his five roommates played Mario Cart or Wizard Staff — stacking Busch Light beer cans they’d drank to reach above their heads, quoting Gandalf before passing out on the couch with Taco Bell wrappers on their chests. Strangers filtered in and out buying weed from one of the roommates. Once it was dark, we’d wander to different parties and basement shows. One night X sat in his car across the street from a party and stared at us on the porch. When someone asked, “Who the hell is that guy watching us?” I said nothing.
Anthony’s roommates taught me to play poker and cheered when I won my first game. I’d sat cross-legged on the floor confused, not realizing the hand I’d spread across the coffee table. We played Bridge. There were ping pong matches on their tilted table, and Trivia Murder Party answering the quiz’s questions on our phones. We hoped our guesses were correct so we wouldn’t have to choose which finger of our avatar we’d have to cut off.
One roommate explained to me the world he and Anthony were creating: a fantasy that incorporated our world history with other timelines. They showed me the outlines, drawings, the messy notes that peripherally connected to the rest, spread across the table. They wanted their world to be all-encompassing.
I think I could feel the edges of what we didn’t want to talk about and never pushed it. Looking back, I see people in grief, people that can’t sit too long with their thoughts fearing what that would mean. Anthony’s mother had died a few years earlier. His roommate’s mother was sick with cancer and dying. I had moved out of the apartment with X after our breakup, crawled out of some cave, jumpy at shadows, unrecognizable to myself with scars I didn’t want to explain.
But at the time, I couldn’t see why we were so willing to hollow ourselves out to fill up with Dominos cheesy bread, fantasy worlds, and beer. I never wondered why we didn’t ask each other questions.
*
Anthony and I searched out the local bands, punk boys swaying at the corner of parties holding PBR tallboys and told them we were for hire to shoot music videos. We had a camera and tripod, skills learned from the TV Studio job now unused. We needed money. The bands bickered over concepts like if sock puppets in a music video would be ironic enough. One job we got involved being slimy with sweat in bee suits and zooming in on a hive while a boy strummed his guitar and compared his love of a girl to bumblebees. We went into strangers’ homes, tripods and camera bags strapped on our backs, to film them playing under hot multi-colored lights. I walked in the door, introduced myself to the band, “I’m Elise.”
A drummer snapped up from fiddling with the peddles, a Black and Mild stuck to his bottom lip. “You’re the police?!”
At one popular basement venue by campus, The Tip, I saw amid the other graffiti on the concrete walls the phrase “Elise Smells 2016.” I laughed, took a photo and posted it on Instagram with the caption: “My reputation precedes me.” Someone commented to tell me they knew it was about a different Elise, not me. Everything felt like a sign, a cipher to be solved. Everything meant something else.
What belongs to you, but other people use it more than you? [ii]
That summer on Facebook, #MeToo testimonies were filling feeds with stories of assault and abuse perpetrated by local band members and people that hung around at shows in the Lowell music scene. There were next day announcements of the person being kicked out of the band or banned from venues. The remaining band members championed that they believed all survivors and victims. That this will not be tolerated. That Lowell is a safe space for everyone and has no room for abusers. Everyone reposted, recycling into the internet their support.
When people talked about it, sitting around at parties discussing these people that we knew of, some of them close friends of others, people discussed what they wanted to be done. I also wanted answers. I’d been wading in alcohol-numbing mud all summer after the breakup with X. I had been trying to make money making music videos for people who had testimonies of them online. I’d been unpacking my boxes in my parent’s apartment and ignoring true things, turning off that part in my brain that attempted at deciphering. I didn’t want to sift through the aftermath to determine what had happened to me.
I didn’t trust that anyone in the Lowell music scene actually wanted to know the truth in those Facebook posts voicing support, that they wanted to do anything with it.
If you have one, you don’t share it. If you share it, you don’t have it. What is it? [iii]
Anthony asked me to punch him in the face because he had never been in a fight before. We were day drinking on his porch, something people do when there’s nothing to do, when you’d rather eat up a hot summer day with the world fuzzy and warm rather than deal with your shit.
I said no, but he insisted that he wanted to know what it felt like.
I had been hit before. I had been slapped and punched and held down and grabbed and pinched and my chest sat on until I couldn’t breathe. But I had never punched someone before. I had slapped at people, had playfully punched into the meat of my brother’s or a friend’s arm.
I hit him. I can’t speak to what Anthony was looking for, what he thought he’d gain from knowing what being punched in the face felt like. But I know I felt good doing it. It felt good to punch a man in the face. Until I felt immediate guilt. I was surprised at the pain in my wrist. Anthony laughed, hand on his cheek as he looked at me.
“Oh my god, are you okay?”
We turned, scared to see a kid on a bike in front of Anthony’s house looking shocked.
“Yes. Sorry. I’m fine,” Anthony said.
“Sorry,” I said. To the boy, to Anthony, to anyone.
I was surprised someone was paying attention. I hadn’t realized how easy it was to feel invisible among our violences. That it was so easy to ignore it. On Facebook, people acted surprised at stories of abuse and violence, but we all knew it. We knew which people to stay away from. We knew the rumors. Stories of abuse and violence are not surprising to those that listen. Almost everyone I know has a story they only tell late at night, in the dark, on someone’s porch.
But this kid had looked and had witnessed it. They had asked the simplest of questions: Are you okay?
*
The Google speaker on Anthony’s roof had a game of riddles we requested to play. Google’s bodiless voice—monotoned and bordering on condescension—welcomed us to a haunted house. There are twelve riddles that must be answered correctly to get out.
Sparrows passed by overhead as we argued over the answers. Riddles turn around on themselves, up and over. Hold all the ideas at once. Siphon out the tricks. Somewhere in the mess is a secret, a hidden thing, an answer. Google waited, patient and silent for us to give an answer. If the answer was wrong, we were stuck in the room with Google’s voice.
“Incorrect,” said Google.
I had forgotten we weren’t really trapped.
*
If I tell a secret, what does it become? Some uncontrollable mass unfurling over the sky? And even once released, written in long posts on the internet, people still find ways to ignore it. I’ve made a promise, but what would really happen if I broke it?
By the summer after graduation, I had been living two years with secrets. Why I couldn’t hang out with friends anymore. Why my family rarely heard from me. Why there were holes in the apartment wall. Why there was a gash on my forehead.
I became friends with Anthony when the webbing holding these secrets in place was beginning to fall apart. It was on Anthony’s roof late in the summer when I told someone for the first time what happened in that apartment without a bathroom door, at least what I remembered. When it began, birds flying overhead, and us sweating in the small amount of shade sliding over the roof, I felt I couldn’t stop. The whole story was a big, jumbled mess turning around on itself to explain something unexplainable. Anthony stared at the clouds turning pink and listened, saying nothing. Neither of us said the answer. Sometimes there isn’t one.
1 A mountain: something too big to comprehend in full up close, where gold is hoarded, where dragons live, where things hide in the dark.
[i] Wind: it is there even if it cannot be seen.
[ii] Your name: called across a room, a bar, a basement, the street, whispered by a shadow in your sleep, someone searching for you.
[iii] A secret: But what do you call a secret that everyone knows?
Fuuuuck me that was bloody brilliant.
Incredible, Elise.