14

IT WAS getting kind of obvious by then that Cassandra and me were rapidly approaching that famous end of the road. We were still sleeping in the same bed, but I wasn’t seeing too much of her otherwise. She was spending more time with Lorraine than she was with me, and one night I detected the fact that Lorraine had just fixed herself in the bathroom and Cass was leaning against the sink and having herself a little SNIFF, just to get a glow on, right? But I didn’t say a thing because Cassandra’s favorite line lately was, “Don’t play daddy with me, Tom,” and I didn’t want to hear it again. She saw that I was watching her and she said, “You ought to give it a try. It’s rather pleasant.” And I thought, PLEASANT. So it’s PLEASANT, is it, you overeducated little fucked-up hillbilly bitch? It kind of shocked me that I’d be thinking about Cassandra like that, but there it was in my head.

All right? And a lot of other dandy things were going down. We’d got together in the first place because it was easy, but it wasn’t easy anymore. We weren’t just wearing away at each other like two pieces of sandpaper, we were having the kind of knock-down drag-out fights where you go for blood. When you’re living with somebody, you can have lots of fights like when the sun comes up in the morning, you clean your teeth and life goes on, but there’s some you never get over.

The way it started out was like this. I’m rapping about Terry and her Tarot cards, and Cassandra says, “You’ll fall for anything, won’t you?”

My first thought is, whoops, she must have FOUND OUT. But then we get into it, and I can see she hasn’t found out, it’s just Terry IN GENERAL that pisses her off. But I start out real careful. “What? What do you mean?”

“That witch business. Christ, Tom, what a crock of –shit.”

“I thought you liked Terry. I mean the way she took care of you when you were sick and all.”

“I do like Terry. I’m not saying she doesn’t have a good heart, man. I know she has a good heart. All I’m saying is she’s full of shit.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you DON’T KNOW? Don’t give me that. That shit she’s laying down . . . you just lap it up like a fucking dog.” And then she runs this imitation of Terry. Cass is great at imitating people, like she’s got a real talent for it. She grabs her left tit and stares off into space and says in this slow heavy voice that sounds EXACTLY like Terry, “I’m a WOMAN. Double you–oh-em-ay-en, say it again. And I’ve got a CUNT, mother–fuckers, and that’s all I need. You better believe it. Whole world come out of my cunt. Make the grass grow and the sun shine with my cunt. ’Cause I’m a WOOOO-MAN!”

She’s got me laughing, but I’m pissed off too. “Shit, Cass, that’s not fair.”

“Oh, Tommy, you’re incredible. You really are. You’ve got this naïve romantic streak in you a mile wide. Like you’d be a sitting duck for anything . . . little-old-lady astrologers, the Hari Krishna boys, whatever’s going. Yeah, you’re like a little kid at the carny show, ‘Come on, DO IT TO ME.’ And when it’s a young pretty GIRL with LONG BLACK HAIR and BIG FUCKING DOE EYES telling you the whole world comes out of her CUNT, well, man, you’re GONE . . . She dyes her hair, by the way.”

We’ve pissed each other off so much by then that neither of us is going to give one little inch, so I’ve got to insist that Terry really is a witch and knows all kinds of heavy shit and Cass has got to insist that Terry is just a fucked-up little girl who don’t know her cunt from a snowdrop. “You know what she is, man,” Cass says, “she’s just Ethan’s house nigger. She makes a religion out of her own slavery.”

Something in my head finally goes CLICK. It wasn’t just Pamela the Great, although Cass and her used to be real tight there for awhile, so maybe Pam was the one who’d started the ball rolling, but where Cassandra had got herself to now, that was HER THING, like that was WHERE SHE WAS AT. “Hey, sweetheart,” I say, “what are you doing . . . turning into one of these crazy women’s libbers on me?”

She goes up like a rocket. “Fuck you, Tommy, you goddamned PLASTIC COWBOY.”

After that any hope I had about holding back on my mouth is GONE. I’m on her about me supporting her, I’m on her about that little hero-worship number she has going on Lorraine—and, while I’m at it, I’ve got to mention that Lorraine is maybe the lamest, most hopeless loser ever to stumble down God’s turnpike—and I’m on her about sniffing doogie and calling it motherfucking PLEASANT, and of course I’m on her about peddling her ass in the bars.

She’s right back at me. “You’re goddamned right I’m PEDDLING MY FUCKING ASS. I was born a girl, right, and that’s what I’m supposed to peddle. And I’m going to get some fucking cash for my goddamned ass. If some limp-dicked drunken asshole in a bar wants to stare at my fucking ass, he’s going to PAY for the privilege, cash on the barrelhead. If he wants me to listen to his miserable sorry stories, he’s going to damned well PAY. And that’s the only kind of fucking honesty there is, man. You know what, Tommy? I’m sick to fucking death of all you goddamned MEN and your goddamned messed-up fucked-over minds, and as far as I’m concerned YOU CAN ALL TAKE YOUR GODAMNED PRICKS AND SHOVE THEM UP A DRAINPIPE.”

The weirdest thing about that fight was that we managed to go on living together. We even managed to stay halfway friendly most of the time, even managed to sleep in the same bed and get a fuck in now and then, but nothing was ever the same after that, and we both knew it.

• • •

THE RULES were Pamela’s. She had dictated them, and he had written them down, and they followed them to the letter. John had to get up when she got up because he had to watch to make sure that she didn’t cheat. She had to be naked. She had to pee so her urine wouldn’t be counted as part of her body weight. She wasn’t allowed to move the scale from its fixed position, not even by a fraction of an inch. She had to step on and off until the same number appeared three times, and then John could write her weight into a log book. If her weight had gone up, she was allowed to eat—or not eat—anything she wanted. If her weight was unchanged, she had to eat two small extra meals that John gave her during the day. If her weight had gone down, she lost her privileges and she had to eat anything John gave her.

According to the contract she’d signed with her doctor, she should have been in the hospital a month ago, but she and John were reproducing the regimen of the hospital. That made him her doctor—or her nurse, or her keeper, or her prison guard, or at any rate some heavy-duty authority figure. He hadn’t volunteered for the job, and he knew damn well that he was the wrong person for it, but he seemed to be stuck with it. As long as they were playing by her rules, he was in the hospital right along with her; the only way to get himself out was to get her out—to feed her until her body generated the round perfect number, 100. He’d never before hated an inanimate object the way he hated her smartass, grinning, bland, white, little know-it-all bathroom scale.

He consulted with Terry the Witch. He fed Pam a tea brewed from ginger root, milk thistle, red clover, dandelion, and peppermint. (He tasted it himself, and it wasn’t half bad.) He fed her tofu and eggs, yogurt and oatmeal. He fed her fruit and steamed vegetables. He fed her raw wheat germ and brewer’s yeast, blackstrap molasses and fish oil, tons of vitamin C, and as much brown rice as he could stuff down her. It took her forever to eat anything. She would sit at the table, staring straight ahead; she’d take a tiny bite and chew—and then she’d take another tiny bite and chew, and then another, and then another. She wouldn’t get out of bed except to eat, and she wouldn’t talk. “I just can’t right now, OK?”

He’d loved her for her words, had learned to read her heart by interpreting that constant flow of glittering words, and now he couldn’t find any way in. She was wrapped in silence and clothes. Surely she had to be getting warm—she was eating again, for Christ’s sake—but she lay in bed wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt and thick wool socks. Sometimes she did nothing but stare into space, but most of the time she read. She pulled old books off her shelf, ones she’d obviously read before, and read them through again from beginning to end. She read her undergrad anthropology textbooks. She read Ruth Benedict and Margaret Meade and Jules Henry. He tried to imagine what she was thinking. Was she planning to work more anthropology into The Critique, or was she simply making the time pass?

She didn’t want to go anywhere or talk to anyone. He made her call the Collective so they’d know that she hadn’t been arrested or kidnapped by Weatherman. He heard her say that she had a bad case of the flu, and she might as well have had the flu—or double pneumonia, or sleeping sickness, or the plague—because she was no company at all. He was playing Ethan’s stiff old Stella so much that he had to smooth out the calluses on his fingertips with an emery board. When he couldn’t stand to be trapped a minute longer inside the small white box with his silent patient, he walked.

Checking out the real—constantly, obsessively—so he wouldn’t be taken by surprise by pigs, agents, or foaming-at-the-mouth Weathermen, he walked along the Charles River and longed for the Ohio. Somewhere back along the track—from the acid, the constant paranoia, the collapse of the Left, the Harvard Square riot, Pam’s breakdown, the general motherfucking craziness, or all of the above—he’d cracked. He didn’t know how much longer he could go on holding the broken pieces of himself together, and he didn’t know what it would look like if he allowed himself to fall apart. But he couldn’t fall apart. She’d gone away and left him in charge. He kept trying to talk to her. “The Boston Globe says we fought fiercely with the police.”

She looked up from her book, met his eyes. “Well, we did,” she said.

She hadn’t washed her face lately; she was looking at him from pale, strange, shining, distant, alarmingly beautiful eyes surrounded by thick oily black smears. It was a day when she’d “lost her privileges,” whatever the hell that meant. She’d never fully defined it, but maybe it meant that he could tell her what to do. “For fuck’s sake,” he said, “wash off your makeup.” She looked at him a moment longer, then laid her book aside, went into the bathroom—leaving the door ajar so he could watch her—and washed her face.

He couldn’t believe it. Was it really that simple? “While you’re in there, take a bath,” he told her. She did that too, and he finally flashed on the obvious. It was worse than being in charge of a mental patient; it was like having a child. He didn’t know if she wanted to be a child, or, if she did, how much of a child she wanted to be. But maybe she didn’t have any choice. Maybe she was wandering through some chilly inhuman landscape like the one where he’d been lost after his acid trip.

Lying in bed with her made him sad, made him remember how it used to be—how she’d say wonderful things when they were going to sleep, really interesting things—in the dark, from her side of the mandatory one foot of space. “We’ve got an article due for Zygote,” he said. “I don’t know what to write about.”

She didn’t say anything, and, by now, that didn’t surprise him. But he had to keep trying. “Should I write a critique of the Harvard Square riot?”

“Oh, fuck no.”

“We’ve got to say something. We could say, yeah, it’s raising the level of chaos, making it harder to conduct the war, but it’s a thin line . . . like between what’s going to help bring the war to an end and what’s going to bring down the repression. We could say that it’s only a matter of time until somebody gets killed.”

“That’s fucking obvious, man. Everybody knows that.”

He was almost asleep when she said, “I’ll tell you what to write about. Write about how we’ve come to the point where it’s damned near impossible to believe anything. Write about how we’ve lost trust in damned near everybody. Write about how anybody could be lying.”

• • •

PAM WAS waking up earlier and earlier, so—bound by her rules—he had to get up right along with her. One morning she set the record for sheer pointless pain-in-the-ass craziness: four fucking forty-three AM. After the weigh-in—she was 92.5 pounds—she went back to bed with Margaret Meade’s Male and Female. Groggy, resentful— thoroughly pissed-off, as a matter of fact—John brewed coffee and drank it. He’d been carrying her words around for days, hadn’t known what to do with them, but now he found that something resembling a coherent statement had congealed in his mind. It surprised him because it wasn’t about the Harvard Square riot; it wasn’t about the Movement at all—at least not directly. He was coming at things from a queer sideways angle, but it felt like the only way to do it. He used her Olympia to write the beginning:

• • •

Everybody knows by now that anybody could be lying. Those who are supposed to be speaking with authority--government officials, scholars, or journalists--could be lying, but so could anyone in the Movement. The flip side of total skepticism is a readiness to believe almost anything. Lately we’ve begun to collect strange underground stories we’ve been hearing with ominous frequency. They are based upon no verifiable evidence whatsoever, and don’t have to be, because no one any longer believes that anything can be verified.

One of these stories has achieved mythic proportions. We’ve heard three accounts of it told with complete sincerity and conviction. Of course it really happened, man (in Wyoming, in Georgia, in New York City); it was a friend of so-and-so. He was hitchhiking, picked up by the cops who found traces of grass in his pockets. They held him for weeks without charging him or allowing his one phone call. Every day they beat him on the head with billy clubs until he was reduced to a vegetable.

For those of us who live in the east, California has become a demonic land where anything can happen. Here are a few California stories. Among the jaded Hollywood hip-drug set, favorite party games now feature ritual whipping, rape, castration, and murder. If you have enough money, you can buy snuff films and get to see girls beheaded for real, or, better yet, you can have still-warm corpses delivered to your parties. The Manson Family was only a tiny corner of a vast conspiracy involving top government officials and the CIA.

You’ve probably heard some of these stories too. The United States did not land on the moon; the event was staged in Hollywood. Nixon (in another version it’s J. Edgar Hoover) has been dead for years; he’s been replaced by an actor. One of the Beatles is dead; if you play parts of the White Album backwards, you’ll find out all about it. The drug trade is now run entirely by the CIA; they’re trying out weird new drugs, using hippies and street kids as experimental animals; they’re perfecting a super drug designed to keep everybody totally whacked out and harmless. Blacks in Roxbury (or the paramilitary Right in the South, or the Weathermen, or whoever you’re feeling most paranoid about at the moment) are buying vast quantities of weapons--including tanks, machine guns, grenades, and rockets--and are storing them in secret warehouses. A radical women’s liberation group in New York (or San Francisco or wherever) has taken to murdering men at random. An organized male-supremacist group has taken to murdering women’s liberationists at random. The government has quietly sealed off the border with Canada. All left-wing groups are now run by CIA agents-provocateurs. Within a few months, all of us--freaks and politicos both--will be rounded up and put in concentration camps. The Vietnam War is about to be extended again, with full-scale operations in Cambodia and Laos, and this time they’re going to use tactical nuclear weapons. The Vietnam War is really over, but the news media, controlled by the government, won’t tell us.

The most terrifying thing about these stories is not the possibility that some of them might be true--as indeed some of them might be--but rather that we’re living in a social climate that makes all of them sound so goddamned plausible.

He was afraid she wouldn’t read it, but she did. “You’ve got it,” she said. “Right on.”

“Thanks. But you’ll notice I said ‘we.’ It’s our piece. That’s just the beginning. Adam’s looking for positive alternatives . . . OK, so how’s it going to end? Where the fuck are you?”

Of course she didn’t answer him. Hours later, as they were lying side by side on the bed again—ruined by getting up in the fucking middle of the night, cat-napping their way through the interminable afternoon, careful, as always, not to touch each other—she said, “You’re right. It’s got to have an ending. Nihilism just lets the old world in through the back door.”

He waited to hear the rest of it. He was afraid that there was no rest of it.

“The despair of a critique has to be turned into a critique of despair,” she said—and then, in something like her old hard speedy voice—“Oh, fuck, man, I hate myself sometimes. What a fucking load of crap. It always comes out sounding like pure crap.”

It was a warm day, and he’d opened all the windows to try to get rid of the sick-room stink of the place. He felt the air moving, not strongly enough to call it a bree ze, but a liveness, a quiver. “We’ve got to find something basic,” Pam said, “something simple, something rock solid. Like the one simple truth that lies under everything. The one thing we’re going to believe no matter what.”

“Is that what you’ve been looking for?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

“Have you found it?”

“No. Listen. I mean basic. As basic as basic can be. As basic as ‘Sh’ma Yisrael adonai elohaynu adonai echad.’”

• • •

ONE NIGHT we’re doing our usual number at the Shooting Gallery, a million people falling out of nowhere and you can’t possibly tell how many of them are narks, but what the hell. Some very fine weed for us potheads, and a little acid floating around in case standard-issue reality gets tedious, and, of course, the skagheads lined up for the bathroom. I’m rapping with some people—Lorraine and I don’t know who all—and eventually it filters into the dim recesses of my smoked-out brain that I haven’t caught Cassandra’s act lately. It’s not really bothering me, but I figure I better check it out, so I say to Lorraine, “Hey, you got any idea where Cass went?”

She gives me this real careful look across the table. Like a real junkie’s look. “Oh, she split a couple hours ago.”

“Split?” I say, kind of surprised.

“Yeah, she split with Imhoff.”

“Imhoff? Who the fuck’s Imhoff?”

She says, “You know, the old guy you guys were rapping with.”

“You mean that FUCKING OLD MAN?”

Imhoff was another one of those junkies who didn’t have a first name. Lorraine had known him forever, like he was a friend of her ex-husband Carl’s, and Imhoff was a real old-time old-style junkie from way back. A fairly far-out cat, I’d been thinking there for a while—for somebody the same age as my goddamned FATHER. Bald on top, stringy grey hair, little pointed grey beard, pot gut hanging out over his pants, deep rumbly voice that sounds like it’s coming up from some ten-mile hole way out in the wind-swept desert. And funny? Oh, yeah, rapping to us about THE GOLDEN AGE OF JUNK, and that’s right after he got out of the service, and that’s WW TWO he’s talking about, and Cass was lapping it up with a spoon, like, “Hey, John should be here. He’d just love this shit,” so I was thinking, oh, well, that’s what’s happened. She’s probably gone off with that old dude somewhere because she DIGS HIS MIND.

She never did come back. Well, that’s not right. She never came back that night, but she came creeping in around seven in the morning. I hadn’t been sleeping that great, and I was awake in a flash. “Hey,” I said, you know, kind of casual, “where you been, old buddy?”

She says, “I’ve been laid,” just blank like a wall.

“Oh? How was it?”

“Christ,” she says, “he couldn’t do it with a screwdriver.”

I kept telling myself I should be pissed off, but somehow I couldn’t get there. The thing about Cassandra was she’d always been straight with me, and that was a fuck of a lot more than I’d been with her. And besides, we’d never said we’d be true and faithful to each other or any of that crap, but it bummed me out.

She lays down on the bed with me, and I say, “A fucking old junkie with a pot belly, for Christ’s sake? Old enough to be your father, for Christ’s sake?”

“Shit, man,” she says, “he made me laugh, and that’s kind of rare these days.”

He took her to this little hole-in-the-wall run by some old-time Mafia family, and Cass is a sucker for joints like that, and she loves the grub, and the grub was good. She told me all about it. Like dish by dish.

“You know, Tommy,” she says, “it just seems so pointless sometimes . . . whether you do or you don’t fuck somebody. I mean, what’s the big deal? It’s just skin rubbing together. Well, we ended up back at his place, and it was pathetic, man. He didn’t really want to fuck me, he just wanted a pretty young chick to pay some attention to him. He went through the motions, but shit. And we sat up and rapped half the night, and he laid some bread on me for a cab, and he fixed himself and passed out.”

I didn’t know what to say to that—or God knows, what to do about it. I figured maybe go to sleep is what we should do about it. So I say, “Take your clothes off, babyshake, and come to bed. Like it’s a new day.” So she got undressed and got in bed with me, and she says, “Promise me something, Tommy?”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“That you’ll get the hell out of Boston.”

And I thought, fuck, we’re splitting up. That’s about as clear as it gets. So I told her, yeah, I was going to get the hell out of Boston. Like it was fairly high on my list. “So what are you going to do?” I ask her.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Nothing right away. Is it OK if I stay here for a while?”

“Oh, sure. Hey, Cass, you don’t even have to ASK ME shit like that. Don’t worry about a thing, sweet stuff. We got no problem but the rent, and the rent’s paid.”

“Thanks. You’re a good man, Tommy, despite your appalling idiosyncrasies. I just need to cool out for a while before I make my next jump. I’m kind of fried around the edges, you know what I mean?”

Yeah, I did know what she meant. I was getting a little crisp there myself.

Then just about the time I was drifting off asleep, she says, “Hey, man, we’ve had a great run. I’m glad I got to know you.”

I told her it was mutual, and then, with both of us beat to shit like two old dogs, and right after she’d just been fucking somebody else, we made love. No, I did not just fuck her. Yeah, I meant it exactly how I just said it. WE MADE LOVE. And after it was over, I thought, shit, if that’s the way it had been all along, I never would have looked twice at silly-ass Margaret Teresa Flaherty.

• • •

THE SEETHING swamp of their bed was beginning to drive John nuts. He couldn’t understand how Pam could stand it. She’d always been so clean. “Get up,” he told her.

“I don’t want to.” She didn’t even look up from her book. Her hair—lank and stringy and unbrushed—was hanging in her face. He was damned well sick of her. “I don’t care what you want,” he said. “Get up anyway.”

She got up and retreated to the far side of the room. He stripped the bed while she waited, standing, her book in her hand, marking her place with a finger, and watched him with no expression on her face at all. “Get dressed,” he told her.

“Fuck you, man.”

“We’re going out. We’re going to the laundromat.”

“I don’t want to go out.”

Try reasonable, he told himself. There’s got to be a reasonable person still in there somewhere. “If you were in the hospital, they wouldn’t just let you lie around in bed all day, would they? They’d make you do something, wouldn’t they?”

“No, they wouldn’t. Not if they saw how motherfucking depressed I was.” That flash of anger was the first sign of real feeling he’d seen from her in days.

“You’ve lost your privileges,” he said. “Get dressed.”

It was so warm that some of the Cliffies were wearing shorts, but Pam had put on jeans, a t-shirt, a shirt, a sweater, her Levi jacket, and even gloves—another prissy kid-leather pair, tight and girlish and pale beige. He knew that she wasn’t ready to drive a car, so they walked, each carrying a laundry bag. He felt as though they were getting the evil eye from a million directions. He had to keep reminding himself that the pigs still had at least some legal restraints placed on them, that they hadn’t got to the point yet where they were busting people for simply looking bizarre.

In the laundromat she threw herself onto a chair, sat huddled up there, hugging herself, and watched him like a hostile cat. “Put some bleach in the white load,” she said.

I’ll bleach you, he thought—but then, considering it, he took it for a good sign. On some level, she still gave a shit.

He separated the whites from the colors, used two machines, put bleach in with the white load, and sat down next to her. She must have been waiting for him to sit down—must have been drafting the statement in her head, twisting it around this way or that, polishing it until it came out short and simple: “Refusing to eat is not a political act. Refusing to eat is masochistic and stupid.”

“Yeah?”

She was staring at the washing machine directly in front of her as though she’d never seen one before. “It’s bad enough they’re trying to kill us, but they’ve also trained us to try to kill ourselves.”

“But we don’t have to cooperate,” he said.

She met his eyes a moment, then looked away.

“Listen,” he said, “when you told me the story, about the hospital and everything . . . You told me the story like you’d been cured.”

“Cured? Fuck, man. It’s like a drug addiction. You’re never cured. All you can ask is that you’re not doing it.”

He waited for her to tell him more about it, but she didn’t. When their laundry was clean, he dumped it into a dryer. She made no move to help him. “Hey, man, I’m sorry.” she said. “Like I know I’m a stone drag, but . . . Like I am depressed. Like textbook. It’s no fucking joke. They used to bring the medical students in to look at me.”

He probably should have said something encouraging, but he couldn’t find a goddamned thing—and he was tired of trying to coax words out of her. He was tired of everything. They watched the laundry go round.

“I’m not sorry I burned the police car,” she said.

“Oh, yeah? You scared the shit out of me.”

“I scared the shit out of me too. I’m sorry that . . . The only thing I’m really sorry about is you. When I think about it, it makes me sick. I risked your ass. You could have been hurt . . . like badly hurt. You could have got busted. And, I’m sorry about . . . Shit. I hate putting you through this, man. I’m so ashamed. I fucking hate myself.”

She hadn’t taken her gloves off. He took her hand, felt the bones under the smooth expensive leather. She let him hold her hand a moment, then, with a squeeze, pushed him away. Her eyes sent him a sad message, an apology. “What have you been thinking about?” he asked her.

“I can’t talk about it. It’s like . . . I don’t know . . . It’s just too big an effort. It all seems hopeless anyway.”

They carried the clean laundry back to the apartment. Without being asked, she helped him fold it and put it away, helped him make the bed. Then she went into the bathroom and shut the door firmly behind her.

After half an hour, he began to wonder what she could possibly be doing in there. He hadn’t heard the toilet flush, didn’t hear water running. It was none of his business—or was it? Depressed? He’d been nuts to leave her alone so long. Maybe she was cutting her wrists or doing some other strange weird sick thing in there. Frightened, feeling like a fool, he jerked the door open. She was standing, motionless, staring at herself in the mirror. She’d obviously heard him come bursting in, but her eyes never left the mirror. “How could you let me go out on the street looking like this?” she said in the voice of a hurt angry betrayed little girl. “I look like motherfucking death.”

• • •

THE RAINBOW of nutrients John had been stuffing into Pam seemed to be working. Her weight gain was averaging just under half a pound a day, and she was talking again. Not the way she used to—non-stop, frantically, morning till night—but in short bursts. “Don’t let me stay in bed,” she told him, and he finally got it. He wasn’t in charge of her life; she was still in charge of it, but in some occult way she’d been using him as an intermediary. It was a comforting thought.

“Get up, Pamela,” he said every day, and she got up and got dressed. Sometimes she even sat at her desk and tapped out words. She wasn’t writing, she said; she was making notes. He didn’t understand the distinction, but it seemed important to her.

He no longer had to tell her to take a bath or wash her hair or clean her teeth or change her underwear. She put on makeup every day—not her old Sylphide eyes but something new, a different kind of makeup for a different purpose. She dumped everything out of her old plastic makeup bag, arranged it neatly on the bathroom counter, and did an old-fashioned Vogue production, beginning with foundation and ending with blush and powder and pale pink lipstick. A trace of her old sense of humor was coming back: “After this,” she said, “I can always get a job doing the makeup in a mortuary.”

She really did seem to be rethinking everything, revising herself. “History has demonstrated that our analysis was incorrect, comrade,” she said.

“Incorrect how, comrade?” he said, playing along with her bleak joke.

“Straight male sexuality is not the root of all evil. That’s not what the State needs to reproduce itself. Violent, oppressive, murderous sexuality is what the State needs to reproduce itself, and that kind of sexuality has long been associated with men in our culture, but it is not exclusively male.”

In her new incarnation, she was obsessed with words and definitions. “The ability to define is the ability to control,” she said, quoting somebody or other, Franz Fanon maybe. She kept chewing on the word lesbian. “Deb and I used to have these terrible arguments. We were lovers. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said, keeping his voice neutral. “I didn’t think about it.” But of course he’d known it. He just hadn’t wanted to think about it.

“We weren’t together that long. We spent more time on the dialectic than we did in bed. She kept telling me that I had to declare myself . . . like it was politically important, and I’d say, ‘Sure, I’ll call myself a lesbian in public if you want, but just between you and me, babe, that’s not everything I am,’ and she’d say, ‘For Christ’s sake, Pamela, your first sexual experience was with a woman, all your sexual partners are women, what the hell else could you possibly be?’ And I didn’t have any answer to that. Usually I do what my head tells me, but I was going on my guts. I hadn’t discovered androgyny yet. The main thing I knew was that I didn’t want to be defined.”

He took her out of the apartment once a day. He guessed that she saved her most personal transmissions for when they were walking— maybe so she could talk to him without having to look at him. “Hey, John, I’m sorry about our sex life, man. But it’s just . . . When I get too thin, I don’t just get androgynous, I get neutered. Like I don’t want to be touched . . . and the way I look, you probably don’t feel much like touching me.”

There was nothing he could say to that. She was making an effort now, but—makeup or no makeup—she was still so thin she freaked him out. He loved her, but, no, he didn’t want to touch her. He was glad that he’d found that limit in himself. He was glad that she didn’t turn him on when she was sick.

• • •

NOTHING WAS tying them into the real, and it scared the shit out of him. She wouldn’t go to the Zygote office, wouldn’t go to Collective meetings, wouldn’t see any of their friends, wouldn’t talk on the telephone. She was talking to him now, but he knew damned well that he was hearing only a fraction of what she was thinking, and he could sense a depth of convoluted mind-stuff lurking underneath that he couldn’t begin to touch. Lying in her bed, staring into the dark, he flashed on the full intensity of his fear—just who the hell was this weird scary freaky incomprehensible alien sleeping next to him? She couldn’t have been any stranger if he’d found her under a mushroom. What if she was genuinely nuts? What if her craziness was resonating with his craziness so eventually he’d end up just as nuts as she was?

He clung to routine like a lifeline—established set times for meals and stuck to them, cooked honest-to-God dinners every day and served them at exactly six o’clock. One evening, as he was chopping vegetables, she got out of bed and joined him in the kitchen—arriving barefoot with no warning, not a word at all, a quiet helpful presence suddenly materializing at his left side. He was blown away, tried not to show it. He’d laid out everything in a row—carrots and potatoes and turnips, onions and celery and garlic and peppers, chard and kale and parsley. Like the other half of the council they used to be, she saw what needed to be done and began doing it—washing the carrots. “Thanks for not giving up on me,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

She presented him with the faintest suggestion of a smile, then curtseyed, lifting an imaginary skirt, and looked away. For an odd, misplaced moment she’d been a shy little girl, and he didn’t know what to do with that image. Of course she hadn’t meant it straight. It had been a gentle parody of a stereotype, but there’d been a flicker of real in it too. Had it been a glimpse of the child he’d been taking care of? And she seemed to know what he was thinking—or something of it. “Fuck, man,” she said quietly, “I’ve got to come back. I can’t just . . . Like if I run it any farther, it’s pure self-indulgence.”

“You are coming back.” She was, in fact, flirting with the magic number, 100. Some days she was there; other days she was 99.5. She said she wanted to see her weight nailed at 100 for seven days straight before she’d believe it. She was looking better too—no longer like a patient mistakenly let out on a day pass from the terminal ward. Now she looked like a malnourished teenager improbably wearing prom makeup. Cliffies sometimes turned to stare at her on the street.

“I know it’s sick and weird putting you in charge of me,” she said “but it’s keeping me out of the hospital. In some ways this has been the worst time . . . I don’t mean physically. When I was seventeen, I damned near died. But this time . . . Shit, it’s hard to talk about. Maybe I could have stopped it . . . No, I couldn’t. I feel so ashamed. Although it’s not my fault. I keep telling myself it’s not my fault. But like my head was just fucking destroyed, man. I’ve got to make an effort now. I know it’s a shlep, but I’ve just got to do it.”

“You can do it,” he said automatically. He hoped she could do it.

“Oh, God, sometimes I think that all I’m doing . . . all I’ve ever been doing . . . is trying to work through endless childhood crap, and if that’s all I’m doing, then how fucking long . . . ? Oy. It’s like my therapist used to tell me all the time, ‘The dreadful has already happened.’ And every time she’d say it, we’d go through the same number. Like we must have done it ten times. She’d attribute it to Laing, and I’d say, ‘No, it’s Heidegger,’ and she’d say, ‘It doesn’t matter a damn who it is, Pamela. Get out of your head.’”

He was laughing. He could see in her eyes that she’d meant him to laugh, and that gave him hope. Yeah, she really was trying to come back. “That’s like what Terry told me,” he said. “Remember that night she read my Tarot, did her heavy witch thing on me? She said, ‘Don’t try to think your way out . . .’”

“Well, of course she’d say that. But it’s like . . . It’s easier for you. It’s sick the way I’m stuck in my head all the time. Like the thing I do with androgyny. For me it’s an organizing principle, almost an abstraction, but for you, it’s straight from your guts.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, it is. Because you’re girl-identified.”

Was that true? Well, it felt at least partially true, but he didn’t like being summed up so neatly—defined—any more than she liked it.

He watched her chop the tops off the carrots. She was doing it with single-minded concentration—as though it was the only thing in the world worth doing. Just who the hell was she? “Pamela? Did you ever have sex with men . . . like before me? I mean really?”

Startled. “Yes. Twice. Did you think I made it up? Hey, I’ve never lied to you. Never. Not about anything.”

No, he thought, but from time to time you’ve sure left some heavy things out. “How was it?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Once it was OK, and once it wasn’t. The OK one was during the Columbia action. We were like . . . just keyed up on the action, and it seemed like the thing to do. It was the thing to do. He was this baby-faced kid, a lot younger than me, like nineteen or twenty. It was nice. Sweet. He was so grateful . . . and the other time . . .

“Oh, fuck. I got manipulated into it. This motherfucking SDS heavy. ‘Come on, baby, why are you so uptight?’ I was repressed, bourgeois, you know, all that crap. And I should have just told him to shove it. It was kind of . . . I felt raped. Felt? Hell, I was raped. And I kept thinking, shit, is this normal, does this schmuck think this is normal? The way Freud thought women are naturally masochistic . . . like, ‘Come on, girls, adjust to rape. It’s your biological lot in life, and you’ll get to like it because it’s normal.’ The male chauvinist asshole. And that’s when I decided I’d never go to bed with a straight man again. Like what the fuck did I think I was doing? Research?

“No birth control either time, oy gevalt. I was lucky. But I was so sure I was going to bed with you, I went on the pill in New York before I even came back here . . . Oh, you’re so weird. Why is that making you cry?”

“Because you wanted me. Because you were so sure.”

“Arrogant is more like it,” she said. “I can be such an asshole sometimes. Come on, baby, don’t cry.”

He felt like he’d been cracked open. He didn’t know why he couldn’t stop crying. “Oh, baby, baby, baby,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

He hadn’t cried that hard when his father had died. He hadn’t cried that hard for years—not since he’d split up with Linda when he’d been eighteen. He couldn’t control it; he kept gasping for breath. He was blinded by tears, choked and silenced. She led him out of the kitchen. They lay down on the bed, and she held him while he cried.

Somewhere along the track he’d misplaced himself. Not surprising when he was Raymond Lee or Joseph Alfred Minotti or Arthur T. Jones but hardly ever John Dupre. Not surprising when he was an androgyne—whatever the hell that was, however Pam defined it, some mythic creature as grotesque as a griffin, more girl than boy, but never a real girl. Back in the days before the riot, before the townhouse explosion, before the dire visit from Phil Vance, before Pam had decided to starve herself to death, he’d been happy to be something like a girl—but never a man, God forbid, and not even the boy who’d run track, got drunk with his buddies, and gone out with Linda Edmonds, that perfect fifties doll. Maybe he was like one of the primitive people in Pam’s anthropology books; maybe his soul had been stolen in some demonic ritual. Maybe Pam was the one who’d stolen it. He didn’t know how much longer he could stand to be trapped with her in this small white prison.

A part of himself detached, drifted away, and watched him cry—was even finding words to pin on it—weariness, fatigue. Hell, more than that, exhaustion. And despair—yeah, that was another good one, and he heard a voice in his head singing in that old nasal country tenor, “I’d rather be in some dark holler where the sun don’t never shine”—half myth already even when he’d lived there, a bargeload of coal on the river, the sun on the water, view from the sun porch window. He could vanish, become the local fool, that crazy guitar-picker, shaggy and goofy as Han Shan. But, no, the real was real. He could feel it grinding him down, metal on metal, bone on bone. “Oh, baby, baby, baby,” she said. “Things are getting better. I’m getting better. I promise.”

• • •

PAM KEPT gaining weight, crossed the magical divide of 100. That meant, by her own rules, that she was out of the phantom hospital they’d created and John was no longer in charge of her, but she still wanted him there every morning at her weigh-in, still expected him to keep the log book. By the time she’d reached 104, she’d begun to glow with the same eerie inner light that had turned him on when he’d first met her. She was, he thought, looking positively rosy. He knew that she wasn’t able to see herself clearly, but she must have been able to see herself enough to notice her natural color coming back—she was using less makeup. She’d bought herself a new pair of Mary Janes, smooth black leather, to replace her old beat-up navy pair, and she was wearing hair ribbons again. She was beginning to look like a version of the strange girl who’d walked into the Weasel office so long ago. Could she have gone through all this shit just to arrive right back where she’d started?

There was no doubt about her turning him on now, but they still hadn’t made love. Unable to sleep, he lay in bed next to her, separated by the mandatory one foot of space, and thought that it was even worse than being a teenager because this time around he knew exactly what he was missing.

The newly reborn Pamela had decided, she said, to reconnect with ballet. She wasn’t ready to go back to the Collective yet so she couldn’t go to their karate classes, and she had to do something. She thought that ballet might turn out to be as important to her as the guitar was for him—or maybe not, but she wanted to see. Every afternoon she changed into ratty ripped dancewear—all of it a pale pink gone faintly grey with age—set out a kitchen chair to use as a barre, put one of her melancholy violin-mad composers on the stereo, and reacquainted herself with the Cecchetti Method. “It’s all still there in my head, man, every fucking bit of it.”

One afternoon, after she’d been doing her ballet thing for a week, she changed into tights and leotard, and then, instead of putting on her ancient filthy ballet slippers, put on a pair of equally ancient filthy pointe shoes. Feeling like a voyeur, he watched her tie up the ribbons. Mahler or Bruckner or some other Romantic clown was filling up the apartment with audible soapsuds. She began, as she always did, with a series of pliés. As he waited, he had to stop himself from holding his breath. Although she said “Oy!” when she did it, she rose onto pointe easily, deftly. It got to him just the way he’d known it would.

She’d gone through four or five exercises before she glanced over and saw how he was looking at her. “Oh, God,” she said, “pointe. You’re so goddamn predictable.”

He’d been preparing and rehearsing a short speech. “Maybe you’ve been neutered, but I haven’t.”

“Oh, God, I’m not neutered anymore, believe me. It’s just . . . Well, when you were taking care of me, you turned into some version of my father, and I love my father, but I don’t sleep with him, you dig?”

Fully aware of him now, smiling at him from time to time, sending him, he was sure, exactly the same look she’d used from all the way across the room to get her high-school girlfriend wet, she moved through a series of exercises, all of them on pointe. “High femme is about balance,” she said, a lilt in her voice that was a turn-on too. “In our culture, boys are supposed to be planted firmly on the ground, but we make girls fight for balance. Pointe . . . high heels . . . you dig? Hey, man, I can’t figure out what’s turning you on. Do you want to fuck me or do you want to be me?”

“Is that a serious question?”

The record ended. Making it something of a performance, she walked to him, took his hands, and drew him to his feet. She rose onto pointe, her legs pressed together into a tight closed position, bent down, and kissed him. He had to look up. She was taller than he was. “How’s this for ambiguity?” she said and kissed him again, thrusting her tongue into his mouth. “Come on, Alice, make me feel like a boy again.”