It’s nine o’clock and Bobby’s seated on our loveseat. He’s sitting next to Marshal, who’s brought his bong and a bud of hydroponic weed. I’ve indulged, which I rarely do. Just as well. We’re watching an incredibly stupid movie, Dumb and Dumber. Sober, I’d be long gone. But now we’re laughing our heads off, me and the boys. There’s an open box of pastries lying on the seat of the wooden chair we’re using for a coffee table. An empty bottle of low-end Korbel champagne sits in the sink, awaiting a quick rinse. I’m at our little table, sorting laundry. Ours and Bobby’s.
I should be pissed because it’s bad enough that I have to clean up after my sisters. True, Bobby’s paying for much of the food we eat. True, he bought the champagne and the pastries. Tough shit. We need to reach an understanding of just who and what he is to us. Because now that I’ve had a chance to think it over, he’s become a mystery once again. Did Bobby protect us? Or was he, like his partner, merely unable to establish probable cause for an arrest?
Eleni won’t care, Kirk either. But Serena, who continues to embrace the good in all of us, will surely want resolution. Likewise Victoria, despite having taken him to bed. Victoria is eternally wary, eternally pessimistic. Our sky is always falling. And there’s real danger in embracing a lifestyle we can never afford on our own.
We’re watching the scene where Jim Carrey is ripped off by an old lady on a motorized cart. I’m now seeing each scene as self-contained. Scene following scene like railroad cars with no bumpers between them. Story of our lives, right?
Or maybe not. For the last five hours I’ve been returning to Bobby’s speech, which I’m sure was carefully calculated. A matter of a cop’s instinct never to show his whole hand. How convenient, Serena being at home when Greco knocked on the door. Totally ignorant Serena, who could tell him nothing. And me, in that hotel exactly when I was needed. Because the cop was right. Tina could remember to bring the knife and the Temazepam. And, yes, she could drive that knife into his heart with all the force at her command. But the aftermath belonged to me. And it’s only through blind luck that I found a cleaning cart standing in the hall. That I was able, no matter how repulsed, to cleanse my dead father’s flesh. I remember fighting an urge to vomit as I gathered the sheets and my daddy’s semen-stained underwear. As I dumped both, along with the knife, in an industrial dumpster half full of construction debris. I climbed into that dumpster, dug down almost to the bottom, buried the evidence in something too slimy to think about. And when I finally got home, I stood in the shower until my skin began to peel away.
There’s Victoria, too, at the review board hearing. Appropriately dressed Victoria with her always-appropriate demeaner. How convenient. And how convenient her visits to the many agencies when we first applied for benefits. And wasn’t it demure Victoria who kept our first appointment with Halberstam? Wasn’t it Victoria who sat for those job interviews? Saying all the right things? Smiling in all the right places?
Bobby’s outside, asleep on the couch. I’m lying in bed, listening to the bass line from some moronic rap tune. Courtesy of a giant SUV double-parked across the street. Bum, bum, bum, pause. Bum, bum, bum, pause. Over and over again. Loud enough to vibrate the hairs on the back of my neck. Just now, I’m hoping for a drive-by.
I’m wearing my usual bedtime gear, boxer shorts and a sleeveless white T-shirt. I raise my knees and stare for a moment at my thighs. They’re Eleni’s thighs, Serena’s thighs, even Kirk’s thighs. I find myself asking a series of questions asked by every therapist unfortunate enough to have us for a patient. Where do I go when I’m not in control of our body? Who am I when I live in a realm called oblivion? Where was I before I came back?
Most of all, who or what chooses?
I walk into the bathroom, stand before the mirror and stare into my own eyes. Trying, maybe, to see into my brain.
No, that’s wrong. To see into our brain, like our thighs, our teeth, our fucking toenails. But somewhere behind my eyes, somewhere in that brain, a collection of neurons decides our moment-to-moment fate.
The other options? Possession by a demon from the spirit world? Space aliens from the dark side of the moon?
Tucked into some dark corner of our brain and surrounded by the billions of neurons that control every bodily function, those few neurons aren’t about to wave hello. But it occurs to me as I raise my fingers to trace the lines of my face, that maybe they aren’t unthinking. Maybe they can detect ongoing threats. Maybe, like children, they know when to stop fooling around, to get serious, to survive. Maybe they argue among themselves before they reach a decision. Maybe they debate when to make a change, who to put in charge, the whys and wherefores of the particular abyss at our feet.
If I’m not real, how can I want so much to simply live? If I pinch myself, do I hurt, do we hurt, or does only Carolyn Grand hurt? Then I fart and instantly feel my sisters surround me. Kirk, Eleni, Serena, Victoria holding a nose she doesn’t have. Somehow, I expect them to comfort me. Instead they’re laughing.
Kirk’s telling me about an after-hours bar where desperate housewives pursue the perverted desires they’ve held at bay throughout their lives. Eleni’s more direct. She’s already spoken to Bobby. If I want, he’ll find a woman, bring her home and spend the night at his own apartment. Serena’s humming a tuneless tune that could only have been composed in the Far East. She strokes my hair, a touch I both can and can’t feel. Victoria’s demanding that I suck it up the way Serena sucked it up when Greco came calling. Even Bobby chimes in. From his bed on the couch, he begins to snore.
I walk up to our single bedroom window, pull back the curtain and stare at the Escalade parked across the street. At the greedy hands reaching through its windows. Then I’m laughing, roaring, holding my sides, maybe for the first time in the half-life that defines my existence. Every therapist, the good and the bad, wanted to heal us, to remake us in their image. And now I’m thinking that at least it won’t hurt. When the remake finally happens. One day I’ll leave the body, believing myself secure, and never return. But at least it won’t hurt.