Permission. Saskia Vogel
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MORE PRAISE FOR PERMISSION
‘An intimate study of power within two of the relationships that define us most precisely – that of lover and that of child.’
– Kirkus Reviews
‘In her elegant and compelling debut novel, the American writer Saskia Vogel sets about taking down the patriarchy, the Hollywood dream machine and the prejudices against people who are into BDSM.’
– The Irish Times
‘[Permission] pairs familial love and loss with erotic desire, creating a tempting, quick-paced, emotionally charged novel… The descriptions of sex and desire that follow are also impeccable… Permission layers kink into the human, everyday feelings of desire and loss, normalizing and personifying it.’
– Laura Winnick, Broadly
‘Formidable in its elegance and fierce in its simplicity, Saskia Vogel’s writing leaves the reader stunned and moved and wanting more. Permission is a work of subtle psychological skill that breaks down the negotiations of erotic power; it is also a work of great and surprising tenderness. ’
– Andrea Scrima, author of A Lesser Day
‘Part Day of the Locust, part Story of O, Vogel’s unflinching, tender debut is destined to enter the growing canon of great Los Angeles novels.’
– Ryan Ruby, author of The Zero and the One
‘If Joan Didion had written about the BDSM community in L.A. it may have felt a bit like Permission, Saskia Vogel’s evocative debut novel.’
– John Freeman, LitHub
copyright © Saskia Vogel, 2019
first edition
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Permission / by Saskia Vogel.
Names: Vogel, Saskia, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190052902 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190052910 | ISBN 9781552453803 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770565814 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781770565821 (PDF)
Classification: LCC PS3622.O357 P47 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
Permission is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 581 4 (EPUB), ISBN 978 1 77056 582 1 (PDF)
Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)
‘I am a pornographer. From earliest childhood,
I saw sex suffusing the world.’
– Camille Paglia
Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a drive. I only meant to take a loop around the peninsula, driving up and down the hills, seeing the city to the north, the port to the west, and the Pacific Ocean reaching for the dark horizon. It was just past midnight, so I tuned in to a rock station that had a late-night call-in show about sex and relationships. It had been on the air as long as I could remember, since before I’d thought of doing anything more than holding hands. It was the kind of show that made driving bearable. Once you’ve learned the words to every song on the radio, nothing breaks the boredom of sitting behind the wheel like conversation. Nervous callers made themselves vulnerable to a psychologist who’d heard it all before. He did his best to help, assuring people that they were not alone in fear, confusion, or desire. Whatever it was they wanted, they were allowed, he said, so long as it was safe, sane, and consensual. There was one thing he’d ask that made me bristle. Whenever a girl called in with a problem, he’d start off by asking, ‘Where’s Dad?’ Where’s Dad? As if that were the key to it all.
THE HILLS WERE SLEEPING GIANTS, twitching as they dreamed. Each time they rolled over in their beds, maintenance crews arrived to fix the cracks in the coastal road, and the sea sucked stones from the shore. When the hills caught fire during the dry season, I stood at the cliffs watching helicopters lower their buckets into the water. I’d search for the pilot’s eyes as the chopper rose into the sky, up and over my parents’ house, hoping they were carrying nothing but water. Brush fire and broken roads were everyday dangers, like rattlesnakes and car crashes. I kept a packed suitcase in my closet, should the earth shake or fire jump the road. Even as a child, I knew the landscape would not hold.
The landscape brought other fascinations to my family’s front door. We would watch migrating whales logging or lunging in the coves. We spent the season counting and took our tallies to the interpretive centre, a squat building next to a lighthouse surrounded by a garden of native plants. Through Bakelite handsets, I listened to underwater recordings of whales, their haunted songs, their hearts. In the long silence between each slow beat, I’d take my pulse. I often returned to this quiet space, finding relief in the cocoon of a steady, even bass.
In another room, dioramas depicted centuries of cliff erosion in the area. Fifty feet, one hundred feet, gone. The present-day model showed the cliffs as they were. Nothing had crumbled in a long while, even in the landslide zones. But I knew what that meant. A crumbling was overdue. Before I grew old, the land would claim our bodies and we would rise again as ghosts. Ghosts, like the young woman who haunted the lighthouse. She had thrown herself off these cliffs when she was sure her sailor would never return. She entered oblivion to find him. It was the most romantic story I knew. I liked to imagine love’s oblivion. A yielding of the self to sensation, a sensation that belonged to the nights I fell asleep with my hands cupped between my legs, comforted.
On these nights, I was sure I could hear the lovers’ laughter rising from the waves. Their joy beckoned. Once I followed the sound to the end of the garden, through the fence and to the cliff, crawling under the rail, inching closer and closer, closer to the edge than I’d ever dared. Peering down the wall of sedimentary rock, I discovered a ledge. Huddled figures wrapped in a cloud of something cloying, like roses wilting in a bowl. Laughing as if their rock were the only rock that promised never to fall. Fall, fall, fall, the cliffs whispered. Dear God, If I fall, please let me die on impact. Paralysis would be worse than death, I thought, and it frightened me. I couldn’t imagine myself without this body, even though as a child I sensed its limits, the built-in obsolescence. The call grew louder, and eventually I stopped taking walks along the cliffs.
By the time I was ten, my father had had enough of my living in fear. He said it was not death that awaited me at the foot of the cliffs, but a beach. I could get anywhere, as long as I knew how to navigate my environment. I think he grew to like those cliffs so much because the longer we spent in that house, the less he seemed to be able to keep a grasp on us, especially on my mother, whose refusal to be pleased was a form of tyranny. The cliffs he could handle. Scaling the sedimentary rock, sliding down a steep and sandy path, he taught me about footholds and grips and how to read the stones. The sea at our feet, indifferent to us. It was a rocky beach, not suitable for swimming or sunbathing, most easily accessed by boat. On the shore: tide pools, sunbaked kelp, seal carcasses, cans eaten by the salty air, weather-beaten dirty magazines, traces of fire. I pictured the molten glow of midnight fisherman roasting their catch, wary of the siren’s song. Even the air on the beach was sticky.
I would linger by the spreads of nude women bleaching in the sun. That pleasing tension, the muscular contraction of the sea cucumber, the gentle suction of an anemone’s tentacles when I stuck my finger in the water, pretending I was a clownfish, impervious to its sting.
Rusty kelp beds broke the blue, red markers bobbed above where fisherman laid their traps. Down the crescent of our cove, my father and I scaled the lip of its rocky maw. When low tide turned to high, frothy waves crashed against the throat of the cave, and when they receded, they licked