Her Body and Other Parties

  “FAT”: “Just one more bite,” Stabler begs his oldest daughter. “Just one, baby. Just one carrot. Let’s start with one carrot.” He sees her being carved away, the way the wind shapes a dune into nothing. “One. Just one.”

  “WEB”: Benson googles. > > > > > > > For months, the ads in her browser try to sell her: brass bell sets, ghost-hunting equipment, video cameras, CDs of bell choirs, dolls, shovels.

  “INFLUENCE”: The new police commissioner looks up from his blotter. Across from him, Abler and Henson are not taking notes. They have perfect memories. “Make it so,” says the new police commissioner. “Make it so.”

  SEASON 8

  “INFORMED”: Benson is sure that her smartphone is smarter than she is, and she finds it deeply upsetting. When it gives her information, she puts it close to her face, says, “NO,” and does the opposite.

  “CLOCK”: The DA watches the hour and minute hands pinching time between them. When the judge asks her if she has any questions for the witness, she shakes her head. At home, Henson is waiting for her, curled up on the couch with a copy of Madame Bovary, chewing on a piece of hair, laughing at all the right places. They make dinner together. They watch the rain.

  “RECALL”: A story is delivered over and over again on the twenty-four-hour news channels. Tainted vegetables, they say. Bok choy, broccoli, celery, brussels sprouts, all dirty, bad, wrong. Benson catches the tail end of a report as she forks stir-fry straight out of the pan. “Return produce to your local stores for a full refund,” the reporter says, looking grave. Benson looks down at the pan. She finishes every scrap of green. She goes to her fridge and begins to prepare more.

  “UNCLE”: “Dad,” says Stabler’s youngest, “who is Uncle E?” He looks up from his newspaper. “Uncle E?” “Yes,” she says. “A man came up to me after school today. He said his name was Uncle E and that he was my uncle.” Stabler hasn’t spoken to his younger brother, Oliver, in ten years. He’s pretty sure Oliver still lives in Switzerland. He doesn’t even know if Oliver knows he’s an uncle.

  “CONFRONTATION”: At the courthouse, Stabler looks up from the bathroom sink and sees Abler standing behind him. Abler smirks. Stabler swings around, half-soaped fists raised. The bathroom is empty.

  “INFILTRATED”: “Look, Benson,” Henson says from the other end of the line. Her voice sounds tinny and far away, as if she is standing over Benson’s body while Benson dies. “The thing is, you are suffering. You don’t want to suffer anymore, do you?” Benson leans the earpiece harder against her shoulder, and the plastic casing slips along the grease of her unwashed face. She does not answer. “It’s just that,” Henson continues, “we could make this all stop, you know. The girls. The sounds. The wanting.” Benson looks up. Stabler is shuffling through a stack of folders, absently scratching his jaw, humming under his breath. “All you have to do is bring him to us. Bring him to us, and we can all call a truce.”

  “UNDERBELLY”: Benson traces the call to a warehouse in Chelsea. Once there, she and Stabler use bolt cutters to get inside. The hallway is dark. A single light bulb, the filament struggling to burn, hangs from the ceiling. Benson and Stabler pull out their guns. They grope along the walls with their free hands until they reach another door. A big room, now, big as an airplane hangar, empty. Their footsteps echo. Benson sees another door on the other side of the room. It looks different. The strip beneath it glows red. She can feel her heart knocking loudly in her chest. Dum-dum. Dum-dum. Dum-dum. She realizes that the sound is bigger than she is, that it is coming from outside of her, around her. She looks at Stabler, panicked, and he looks confused. “Are you all right?” he asks her. She shakes her head. “We have to go. We have to go now.” He gestures to the door on the other side of the room. “Let’s check out that door.” “No.” “But Benson—” “No!” She grabs his arm, and pulls him. They erupt into the sunshine.

  “CAGE”: The rapist is raped. The raped are rapists. “Some days,” the prison doctor says to a resident as they stitch up another torn rectum, “I wonder if the bars make the monsters, and not the other way around.”

  “CHOREOGRAPHED”: The courtroom. A hallway. Six doors. In and out of each set—detectives, police officers, lawyers, judges, the damned. People go in one set of doors and come out another. Benson and Stabler miss Henson and Abler every single time.

  “SCHEHERAZADE!”: “Let me tell you a story,” Henson whispers to the DA as they curl up in her bed, the air heavy with the smell of sex. “When it’s over, I’ll tell you what you want to know about Benson, about Stabler, about all of it. Even about the sounds.” The DA mumbles her assent, feeling drowsy. “The first story,” Henson whispers, “is about a queen and her castle. A queen, her castle, and a hungry beast that lives below.”

  “BURNED”: Father Jones senses the demon, though he cannot see it. From his bed, he smells sulfur, he feels the evil sitting on his chest. “What do you want?” he asks. “Why are you here?”

  “OUTSIDER”: The forensic psychologist is asked to come in on a case involving a serial rapist and murderer who dismembers his victims as if they are middle school frog dissections. “It makes more sense to him than you might think,” he says evenly as he watches the man laugh from the other side of the two-way mirror. Stabler frowns. He distrusts the psychologist’s judgment.

  “LOOPHOLE”: Benson buys a thousand bells and removes their hammers. She tries to give them to the girls-with-bells-for-eyes, but the hammers don’t take. She tries drawing them on a piece of paper, but the ink runs when pressed into their faces. The girls crowd into her kitchen, so many of them, and so bright that the neighbor who spies on Benson with his telescope is certain that her apartment is on fire, and calls the fire department. Benson sits in her wicker chair, her hands resting on her knees. “All right,” she says. “Come in.” And they do. They walk into her, one at a time, and once they are inside she can feel them, hear them. They take turns with her vocal cords. “Hello,” Benson says. “Hello!” Benson says. “This feels really good,” Benson says. “What should we do first?” Benson says. “Now, wait,” Benson says. “I’m still me.” “Yes,” Benson says, “but you are legion, too.” In the distance, sirens tear up the night.

  “DEPENDENT”: “Did you know that Evan was kidnapped?” Benson asks the captain. He taps his sobriety coin on the varnished wood. “Who’s Evan?” “The intern! The intern. The intern who used to sit at that desk!” She points at Lucy, who is weeping softly in her rolling chair. Every sniffle pushes her back a millimeter until she is almost in the hall.

  “HAYSTACK”: Benson promises Lucy that she will look for Evan. She visits all of his normal haunts. The girls crowd in her head, talk to her. “He’s not here,” they say. “He’s Elsewhere. He’s swallowed.” When Benson tells Stabler about her search, he sighs deeply. “He’ll get spit up somewhere,” he says knowingly. “Just not here.”

  “PHILADELPHIA”: Evan the intern was annoying everyone in hell, so the demon sent him back. He overshot his target, though, and accidentally deposited him in Pennsylvania. Evan decides to stay. He never liked New York, anyway. Too expensive. Too sad.

  “SIN”: Father Jones absolves the blooming trees and flowers. As their pollen is carried off, and begins to clog people’s lungs, Father Jones smiles. The coughs of redemption.

  “RESPONSIBLE”: Lucy the intern looks down at the slip of paper in her hand, where Benson had scribbled Father Jones’s address. When she looks up again, the front door opens, and Father Jones leans against the frame, looking exhausted. “Come in, child,” he says. “It seems we have a lot to talk about.”

  “FLORIDA”: Over the course of three weeks, five different people catch and cut open five different gators in the Everglades. Inside each belly, an identical left arm—sparkling purple jelly bracelet, chipped green polish, thin white scar where the pinky meet
s the palm. When they run the prints, they trace the arm back to a missing girl in New York. The medical examiner looks at the five arms lined up next to each other. Spooked, she discards four of them. “Remaining body unrecovered,” she writes in her notes. “Victim presumed deceased.”

  “ANNIHILATED”: Benson finally sits down and counts. She goes through files, paper and computer. She tallies, hatch marks in groups of five, and covers pages and pages and pages. She goes home, flipping the blade out of her pocketknife as soon as the door closes behind her. She begins to dig into the kitchen table, the edges of the cupboards, counting, counting, counting, losing count, finding it again.

  “PRETEND”: Stabler pushes open Benson’s door. She is lying on the kitchen floor, arms outspread, facing the ceiling. Around her, the chairs and tables and footstool are all chewed to pieces. “There are so many of them,” Benson whispers. Stabler kneels down next to her. He strokes her hair gently. “It will be okay,” he says. “It will be okay.”

  “SCREWED”: The DA calls in sick, again. “The sixty-fifth story,” Henson whispers into her ear, “is about a world that watches you and me and everyone. Watches our suffering like it is a game. Can’t stop. Can’t tear themselves away. If they could stop, we could stop, but they won’t, so we can’t.”

  SEASON 9

  “ALTERNATE”: On a Tuesday, Stabler’s wife returns from the store to find a man sitting on the stoop. He turns out his palms apologetically. “I lost my keys,” he says. She sets down the sack of groceries on the ground, fumbles for her own. She watches him out of the corner of her eye. He looks just like Stabler. His smile leaves the same tiny indent to the left of his mouth. But something in her brain is screaming: he is not my husband. The door swings open. Inside, her youngest comes out of her bedroom and wipes sleep from her eyes. She points to the man. “That’s Uncle E!” she shouts.

  Stabler’s wife grabs a heavy vase from the side table and whirls around, but he is already out the door, down the street, running full speed, and then gone.

  “AVATAR”: In the back row of the movie theater, Henson’s arm creeps over the DA’s shoulder. The DA looks at Henson’s face in the flickering half dark. Here, more than anywhere, she looks just like Benson. She kisses her mouth.

  “IMPULSIVE”: In the cop bar, Wilson Phillips plays. Stabler looks annoyed, but Benson grins at the memory from her adolescence. She mouths the words while training her eyes on her beer. She bobs her head at every mention of “reckless” and “kiss.”

  “SAVANT”: The boy turns out lists and lists of the missing, dating back to before his birth, chronologically by the date of their disappearances. He draws thick black lines through most of them, though not all. His mother doesn’t understand the names, or the lines, and burns the lists on the grill in their backyard.

  “HARM”: When Stabler’s wife tells him about Uncle E, he instructs her to take the kids and go to her mother’s house in New Jersey. He sits on the stoop and waits for Abler to come back. He fantasizes about taking a brick to Abler’s head. His cell phone rings. “You think I’d ever visit the same place twice?” Abler purrs. Stabler tries to think, hard, about where Abler and Henson will be. But has no idea.

  “SVENGALI”: The DA kisses Henson, their twelfth hour of fucking, sleep, fucking, sleep. She hums promises into her ear. Father Jones shows Lucy how to keep demons away. Stabler stalks New York, searching for Abler, tense as piano wire, vibrating with rage. Benson takes herself and the girls inside her out on the town for dancing, for sweaty bottles of beer, to show them a good time.

  “BLINDED”: Benson dreams that Henson and Abler seize her eyeballs and pull them out slowly, the nerve bundles stretching and drooping like Silly Putty.

  “FIGHT”: Stabler would just straight-up challenge them, but he doesn’t even know where to throw down his gloves.

  “PATERNITY”: The dirty truth is, Benson doesn’t have a father.

  “SNITCH”: Without the interns to do their nefarious bidding, the gods turn to other tricks.

  “STREETWISE”: All Benson knows is that she’s sure the street is breathing. The girls tell her what she needs to know. She is right to be afraid.

  “SIGNATURE”: Full of girls, Benson finds scrawling her own name to be almost impossible.

  “UNORTHODOX”: “I don’t care what the evidence says,” the judge chuckles. “You’re obviously innocent. Obviously! Get out of here, you. Say hi to your dad for me.”

  “INCONCEIVABLE”: Stabler goes and visits his wife and kids at his mother-in-law’s. They watch The Princess Bride, and fall asleep before the end. Together on the couch, piled high with pillows, dark but for the glow of the screen, Stabler and his wife look at what they have made.

  “UNDERCOVER”: “What have you learned?” the new police commissioner asks Henson and Abler. He is not a religious man, but the expressions on their faces so unnerve him that he crosses himself, which he has not done since he was a child.

  “CLOSET”: The DA steps out into the sunshine, blinking, shielding her face. She almost bumps into Benson, who is strolling down the sidewalk. Benson smiles at her. “Haven’t seen you around in a while. Have you been sick?” The DA blinks and reflexively wipes her mouth, catching the smear of lipstick that doesn’t belong to her. “Yes,” she says. “No. Well, yes, a little.”

  “AUTHORITY”: Alone in his family’s house, Stabler drinks five old-fashioneds. He is disturbed by how easy it is. He thinks about his children, his wife. His brother, suddenly, his baby brother. He struggles to remember his baby brother, who flits through his synapses like a sketch. Suddenly certain of something, Stabler runs out into the street and stares up at the sky. “Stop,” he begs. “Stop reading. I don’t like this. Something is wrong. I don’t like this.”

  “TRADE”: In a graveyard, Benson begins to dig. Her spine aches and her muscles freeze and twitch and burn. She digs up the first girl, then the second, then the third, then the fourth. She slides one coffin left, one coffin right, one coffin up, one coffin down. She drops them under their correct, respective names. Inside of her, four girls speak. “Thank you,” Benson says. “Yes, thank you,” Benson says. Her mind clears a fraction. She breathes. It is easier.

  “COLD”: Stabler meets Benson in her apartment. She is sitting in a pile of wood chips that used to be her kitchen table. She takes a long, languorous swallow of beer and smiles a watery smile. “My theory,” she says. “Our theory. Our theory is that there is a god, and he is hungry.”

  SEASON 10

  “TRIALS”: “I am so tired,” the DA confesses to her boss. “I’m tired of losing cases. I’m tired of turning rapists back out onto the street. I’m tired of winning, too. I’m tired of justice. Justice is exhausting. I am a one-woman justice machine. It’s too much to ask of me. Can we stage my death? Or something?” She does not tell the truth: she wants to see what Benson will do at her funeral.

  “CONFESSION”: Stabler and his wife go for a walk, in New Jersey. They walk along a dirty beach—with shoes, so as not to cut their feet on broken bottles. “He locked me in the room,” she says to him. “He turned the lock and smiled at me. I couldn’t move. He hadn’t tied me up, but I couldn’t move. That’s the worst part. No excuse. You fight to put names on all of your dead, but not every victim wants to be known. Not all of us can deal with the illumination that comes with justice.” She dips her head, and he remembers the first time he met her. “Also,” she says softly, “you should know that Benson loves you.”

  “SWING”: Stabler pushes his youngest higher and higher. He thinks about what his wife said. “Off, Daddy! I said off!” He realizes she is shrieking at the top of her lungs. She, his daughter, not his wife. And certainly not Benson. Definitely not Benson.

  “LUNACY”: Benson doesn’t think about the moon very often, but when she does, she always undoes her top four buttons, tilts her throat up to the sky.

  “RETRO”: An old woman kills a local deli owner. She tells Benson and Stabler that he raped her when they were
teenagers. They don’t have the heart to tell her that he was a twin.

  “BABES”: All of the Hooters waitresses get pregnant at once. No one will say why. “This is not really a case,” Benson says, exasperated. Stabler doodles on his pad—a picture of a tree. Or maybe it’s a tooth?

  “WILDLIFE”: Deer, raccoons, rats, mice, cockroaches, flies, squirrels, birds, spiders, all of them, gone. Scientists take notice immediately. The state pours money into research. Where did they go? What does it mean that they are missing? What would it take for their return?

  “PERSONA”: Benson likes her date, but the girls inside her screw it up by referring to themselves in the collective. “It’s the royal ‘we’!” she howls after his retreating back.

  “PTSD”: Every night, Benson dreams about the girls’ deaths. She slips in and out of stabbings and shootings and stranglings and poisonings and gags and ropes and No, no, nos, all lucid, and cut with Benson’s normal dreams: sex with Stabler, apocalypses, teeth falling out, teeth falling out of Benson onto Stabler while they fuck on a boat as the Flood wipes everything away.

  “SMUT”: The DA watches the twenty-four-hour news networks for twenty-four hours.

  “STRANGER”: “What do you mean?” Stabler breathes into the phone. “Three birth certificates to Joanna Stabler in that ten-year stretch,” the clerk says. “Oliver, you, and an Eli.” “I don’t have a brother Eli,” Stabler says. “According to this, you do,” she says, sucking noisily on a large wad of gum. Stabler hates it when people chew gum.