Who is the Realer Healer?

Techniques tracked:
-point of view
-theme (as reinforced by point of view)

In “The Healer” by Aimee Bender, from her short-story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998), the first-person narrator describes going to school with “two mutant girls,” one who has a hand of fire and the other a hand of ice. These two were friends briefly in elementary school, when they would hold each other’s fire and ice hands and the fire and ice would be “equalized,” but at one point the ice girl doesn’t want to do that anymore. The narrator, Lisa, fantasizes about the one boy who’s left their small town that people rarely leave because it’s “ringed by a circle of hills,” imagining that he (“J.”), who left to be a speechwriter, gives speeches about her. In high school, the fire and ice girls are both mostly outcasts, and when Lisa has a science class with them her senior year, she attempts to befriend the fire girl but not the ice girl after witnessing the ice girl snub the fire girl’s efforts to do the equalizing hand trick again. The fire girl starts hanging out with Roy, a boy whom Lisa once caught in the bathroom cutting himself, and Lisa sees the fire girl routinely burn Roy for his pleasure, and notices that this arrangement makes both of them happier the rest of the time. But when another family sees the fire girl burning Roy, the fire girl is perceived as a threat and thrown in jail despite Roy’s protests that she was not hurting him. Lisa goes to get the ice girl from the hospital, where she uses her ice water to help soothe and heal people, wanting to see if her powers can help soothe the fire girl. Once the ice girl arrives at the jail, Lisa forcibly connects the fire and ice girls’ hands through the bars, which the fire girl finds soothing but the ice girl doesn’t. The ice girl suggests the fire girl cut off her hand if it causes her so much pain, and they send Lisa to retrieve a knife. When the fire girl uses it to cut off her hand, the fire is not extinguished; instead the stump of her wrist ends up on fire like her hand was–except even more so. The fire girl is released from jail a week later and the ice girl ends up leaving town, which everyone blames the fire girl for until someone discovers the ice girl left a bunch of her healing water behind in a hospital fridge. Some of the people who are unable to get this water (it goes for high prices) go to the fire girl for her to burn them, which they tell Lisa hurts but feels “somehow wonderful.” The End.

The narrative’s chronic tension could be read as Lisa’s desire to leave the town, as well as Lisa’s idolizing/idealizing the powers of the ice girl and fire girl, while the acute tension is technically the appearance of Roy: “…the fire girl met Roy. And that’s when everything changed.” The story’s main actions consists of Roy’s misinterpreted interactions with the fire girl leading to her being thrown in jail and deciding to cut off her hand. One could also identify a broader chronic tension for the town in its static nature and apparently being affronted/offended by violations of what they conceive of as “normal.” 

This is a “magical realism” story, with the opening line establishing a sort of fable-like feel:

There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice.

The story appears to focus on the fates of these two binary characters while positioning its first-person narrator Lisa as an observer, but we the readers see that Lisa is integral to the action between and the fates of these characters–making her more mediator than observer–after the acute escalation of the fire girl being jailed: Lisa brings the ice girl to the jail, and then forcibly connects the ice girl’s and fire girl’s hands through the bars, and then retrieves the knife the fire girl uses to cut off her hand. Before this, Lisa also happens to be positioned to have a different interpretation of the events that lead to the fire girl’s imprisonment; when the fire girl is caught burning Roy, she’s jailed because the townspeople take her burning of him to means “[s]he’s a danger,” but Lisa knows that Roy cuts himself and that the fire girl was burning him for his own consensual pleasure, not in a malicious non-consensual way that would render her a “danger” that should be imprisoned. 

The story invites the reader to see the limitations of Lisa’s perspective, as Lisa’s interpretation of certain things seems skewed, like when she doesn’t want the fire girl to cut off her hand when the fire girl clearly finds it a source of pain, with Lisa thinking the fire hand is a “beautiful thing, it’s a wonderful thing” when the fire girl is clearly tormented by it: “It’s awful, the fire girl said…. I want to burn everything. I want to burn everything.” The one time the fire hand can induce pleasure, because Roy finds pain pleasurable, ends up leading to more torment for the fire girl when she’s jailed for it.

This point-of-view trick led me to implement a particular exercise when I read this story with the PVA underclassmen in a mini-elective on “close reading”: write one of the events in the story from a different point of view. This point of view could be the fire girl’s or the ice girl’s, or anyone else who is referenced in the story. I think my favorites were a description from the science teacher’s point of view who has the fire girl sitting in the back of his class burning things and one from J. hearing about the events in the story in a letter from his mother, but they all ended up underscoring in various ways things the reader could infer that Lisa herself did not.

Lisa’s “limited” first-person point of view emphasizes one of the major themes of the story, the variability of interpretation on both individual and community levels. Lisa likes to simultaneously consider herself important but not too important: she has the unique perspective of knowing that the fire girl was not hurting Roy but emphasizes that she (Lisa) is not to blame for the fire girl’s imprisonment because she’s not the one to reveal what’s going on. But the reader might notice that, unlike her interventions between the fire and ice girls, Lisa does not try to intervene when the community misinterprets the interaction between the fire girl and Roy:

The· fire girl is hurting people! they announced, and Roy tried to explain but his arms and thighs were pocked with fingerprint scars and it said OUCH in writing on his thigh and no one believed him, they believed the written word instead, and placed him in a foster home. (emphasis mine)

The “written word” in this context is shown by the narrative to be irrefutably incorrect, thematically calling into question the veracity of the written word generally in a way that calls attention to its interpretive variability, which is why I started the close-reading lesson with one of my favorite Saturday Night Live Sketches, “The Library” with Ru Paul (February 8, 2020), which highlights the variability of the concept of “reading” to reinforce the theme of how each reader has the potential to interpret a written text differently based on their own individual viewpoint that’s been necessarily conditioned by their experiences and community. The sketch reinforces this theme with the point-of-view-emphasizing prop of the individually distinctive reading glasses (with differing colors, frames, and “themes”) that Ru Paul passes out:

This theme is also reinforced by the title of Bender’s story, which encodes the variability of who the healer is, the fire girl or the ice girl, by the ambiguity inherent in the term itself: the “healer” is the one who administers/causes healing to happen, but could also be the one who is healing from a wound/injury/illness, expressing a kind of variability across healer as subject (one enacting healing) and object (the one receiving healing) that expresses the inextricability of these two seemingly opposed positions.

The role of the “written word” (appearing embedded in skin: the written word as literal wound) is critical to the main action in leading to the fire girl being jailed, and is echoed in the interpretive possibility of the means to end the fire girl’s suffering by cutting off her hand: the means to potentially end suffering ends up achieving the opposite, increasing that suffering. It seems important that it’s not the “written word” that’s really to blame for what happens to the fire girl, but rather the interpretation of it.

Which brings me to the larger thematic question at play here re: who’s really the healer–the reader of the written word, or the writer of it?

Of course, these are not mutually exclusive.

Since I have another blog dedicated (exclusively) to the work of Stephen King, this concept called to my mind his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000)–specifically the concluding section where King describes writing as part of his own healing process after the infamous 1999 accident that came very close to killing him; the relevant excerpt appeared in The New Yorker here, accompanied by an image that evokes the healing power of writing via pens-as-crutches:

But Bender’s story also recalled a different part of On Writing, King’s metaphor for the reader-writer relationship, in which his answer to the chapter-heading question of “What Writing Is” is: “Telepathy of course.” As an example to demonstrate how this “meeting of the minds” works between writer and reader, he describes a specific image to be telegraphed (or telepathed) into the reader’s mind: a rabbit in a cage with the number “8” on its back. King emphasizes that the writer’s description of this image does not require much detail to be conjured by the reader’s mind, and that this minimalism “leaves quite a lot of room for individual interpretation”:

It’s easy to become careless when making rough comparisons, but the alternative is a prissy attention to detail that takes all the fun out of writing.

King maintains that while individuals might see different variations in the image’s components if you stick to the level of “rough comparisons,” the overall effect on the reader is ultimately the same:

The paragraph also doesn’t tell us what sort of material the cage is made of—wire mesh? steel rods? glass?—but does it really matter? We all understand the cage is a see-through medium; beyond that, we don’t care. The most interesting thing here isn’t even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It’s an eight. This is what we’re looking at, and we all see it.

But do we all see this? King almost seems to undermine his own point here by choosing the number “8”; I think the point could stand (or appear to stand) with the number “4,” but with “8,” while most of us will probably see a “number,” some of us might see a sideways infinity sign.

A version of King’s telepathy metaphor is dramatized more concretely in Bender’s story via the gesture the fire girl and ice girl holding hands so that each of their defining characteristics (reinforced by their lack of proper names) cancel each other out–but we find out later that the feelings induced by this gesture are not “equal”: what’s soothing for one of these parties is painful for the other.

I’ve been surprised this past semester by how the current crop of PVA underclassmen have used King’s work as a reference point. In the student group discussions of how “The Healer” shared connections with other texts they had encountered, one group said that the different interpretations of whether the act of skin-cutting induced pain or pleasure as occurs in “The Healer” reminded them of how Stephen King had shown a pain-inducing version of such cutting in IT when a bully starts to carve his initials into another character’s stomach, but a positive version of skin-cutting in the film Stand by Me (based on King’s novella “The Body”) when some teenagers carve their gang sign into each other’s arms as a sign of solidarity. (I didn’t quibble with this student group at the time, but while it’s true that the cutting in Stand by Me signifies the pleasure of solidarity within that gang so the intent of the cutting becomes benevolent rather than malevolent as it is in IT, this reading might be complicated by the Stand By Me gang being rendered generally villainous in the overall narrative.)

Another time King’s work came up this semester was not in reference to “The Healer,” but since it was related to the deployment of point of view, the connection is relevant here. Lisa’s point of view is not just that of observer but mediator, that of a character who plays a concrete role in the action. The more purely observer first-person point of view, that in which the point-of-view character does not qualify as the story’s “main” character, is typified by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, though I always emphasize that the novel’s observer-narrator, Nick Carraway, is in the narrative demonstrably changed by the events he observes and narrates. When we encountered a workshop story with the more purely observational first-person point of view, the students did not invoke Fitzgerald as the reference point, however. Their reference? The Shawshank Redemption, in which the first-person narrator, Red, describes a fellow prison inmate’s story of escaping from the prison, an effort Red only describes and is not involved in orchestrating himself. I then duly compared the point of view in Shawshank to that in Gatsby, noting the narrating-facilitated changes in both observer-narrators: disillusionment with the wealthy leisure class for Nick Carraway in the latter, the re-institution of the possibility of hope for Red in the former.

And related to Lisa’s point of view in “The Healer,” I was amused when the students really fixated on one of the plot points that is crucial to Lisa having insight into Roy’s interpretation of cutting as pleasurable rather than painful:

…some Saturday when everyone was at a picnic and I was bored, I wandered into the boys’ bathroom and [Roy] was in there and he showed me how he carved letters into his skin. He’d spelled out OUCH on his leg.

This episode provides Lisa the critical insight the town doesn’t have, the evidence that he’s telling the truth that the fire girl was not hurting him. But why, the students wanted to know, would Lisa wander into the boy’s bathroom just because she was “bored”? A fair question, though not one I got hung up on when I first read the story.

We also discussed how the “J.” character is not really a character–never appearing in the story “in the flesh,” so to speak, but ultimately functioning more as a plot device, a mirror for Lisa to see herself-slash-who she would like to be; it is through her fantasy of what J. would say about her in his speeches that we learn her name in the first place, and that she defines herself by the same (if different) attribute of the fire girl and ice girl: “Lisa with the two flesh hands.” It is also the construction of Lisa’s fantasies that indicates a change has taken place in her that constitutes a “reversal,” to use Janet Burroway’s term that reinforces the completion of the narrative arc: Lisa goes from imagining J. giving speeches about her early in the story to, by the end, becoming an active participant in the action of her J.-related fantasy:

He didn’t give speeches about me anymore. Now we stood together in the middle of a busy street, dodging whizzing cars, and I’d pull him tight to me and begin to learn his skin.

The chronic tension for the town itself is also resolved with the conclusion of how those who can’t get the healing ice-hand water turn to the fire girl to burn them. The main action of the story is largely dictated by the town’s inability to conceive of the fire girl as a “healer,” as they do the ice girl, and so it’s another reversal when the fire girl too becomes a healer for the “scar people” who can’t access the ice girl’s water. That the fire girl’s means of healing is painful means that those who turn to it symbolically come to understand a certain perspective, one whose misinterpretation was pivotal earlier–that of Roy, the boy who finds pain pleasurable:

But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close.

This description, the story’s final line, almost explicitly echoes that of Lisa’s fantasy of J. holding her close, figuring Lisa’s journey as a microcosm of the larger community’s and thus ultimately reinforcing the theme that we all exist in relation to one another. The reader and the writer alike contain the potential to be “the healer.”

-SCR