When I stayed at the El Rancho, I sometimes still had sex with Blake, but we were awkward with each other now, and these encounters usually felt sad. His job suspension had been lifted and there had been no further trouble about his employment, but whether or not the Gallup higher-ups knew he had been monitored by a federal agency wasn’t clear.
The deaths of Ruby’s children began to seem unreal, so twice I drove out to El Morro only to discover that both entrances to the Catacombs had been closed off with padlocked metal fences. The second time I parked half a mile away and hiked in, and there it was, a peaceful shabby farmhouse, quiet in its abandonment. Even the yellow crime tape was gone. When I got to the entrance to the hidden area, I discovered that it had been thoroughly boarded up. Heavy fencing had been sunk into a poured concrete base. There wasn’t even a police notice.
I avoided Claudia less than Blake. Her long piece “The Tomb of the Unknown Racist” had been published under her own byline in the Sunday Times Magazine, where it garnered serious attention, and she was now a “special correspondent,” a label she tried to wear lightly. We met several times for lunch. She favored Earl’s, the local comfort-food joint, but I preferred the buffet at the casino. Mostly we talked about the quality of our sobriety. I could admit to Claudia how empty I felt off and on and how hopeless my attempts to find my brother seemed, while she struggled with what is called in AA staying “right-size”—that is, not letting her ego get in the way of her values, which for Claudia translated into something like “truth, justice, and the American way.”
“You make me think of the way a blade of grass can crack a sidewalk,” I said.
“Well, you did hit the sidewalk with a sledgehammer.”
“I suppose I did. Why haven’t you been twisting my arm to see Ruby?”
“Of course, I’d like to see Ruby, and I’m sure you’ll arrange that if you think it’s a good idea. But Ruby’s not really the story anymore, is she? If I do get to talk to her, that would be terrific, but what I’m hoping is you’ll take me with you on one of your find-your-brother junkets.”
We were having lunch in the casino because I needed to be in an environment without windows and clocks. “Sometimes you make me wish I’d gone to Brown. At Duke, I didn’t learn much about clarity. Of course, I did fail out.”
“Your clarity is part of what I admire about you,” she said. “You always stay certain that remaining sober comes first, but you’ve got a lot of courage. Look at what you made happen in South Carolina.”
“That was rashness, not courage. I think Estelle was right about it. All I got was my mother wounded.”
“It doesn’t sound like your mother understood what happened.”
“I, unfortunately, do.”
“I’m still trying to figure out why you’ve so obsessed with finding your brother. What is it you think you can do about him?”
“I’m not sure. Hold him accountable? Make him stop?”
“Why you?”
“He’s my brother.”
“And how exactly will you change your brother? You think you have such great persuasive powers? Doesn’t AA assert that ‘Anger is the dubious luxury of normal people?’”
When I didn’t answer, she said, “Ellen, are we going to have an affair?”
“Jesus Christ, no. Where did that come from?” I put my elbows on the table and held my head in my hands, staring down at my chicken cutlet. “Great. Now I can’t be comfortable around you either.”
“I’m sorry. I just needed to clear the air. I’m not trying to write about you, and I’m not trying to get involved with you that way. I’m really not.”
I was still looking down at my plate, at this cutlet that used to be inside a real chicken going cluck cluck cluck, that lived inside a chicken prison where the birds couldn’t move and had to eat hormones to make their boobs bigger. “Eating meat is so disgusting,” I said, staring at the striations of exposed breast. “Meat of the bird, meat of the human, meat of the pig. Do you know we used to barbecue whole pigs in the yard when I was a teenager? John Tillman’s son shot one of our cows as a protest. Meat of the children, blood going down a drain. They bleed animals after they’re slaughtered, just like they do with people to embalm them.”
When I raised my head, she looked alarmed. “Good. Be scared of me, Claudia Friedman. No, I’m not going to go to bed with you. I’m old enough to be your mother.”
This remark hurt her, but she found it easier to be insulted than hurt. “Is it because I’m not pretty enough?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Wasn’t publishing in the Times with less than a year of sobriety hard enough? Now you’re trying to find a higher cliff?”
“I just asked a question. You don’t have to act this way about it.”
“Yes, I do, damn it.” I stood up. “Listen, I like you, and I think you’re smart, and I’m just trying to help you. Pay the bill. You can afford it.”
When I saw her later that day at the 5:30 AA meeting, she mouthed the word sorry. Afterward, she approached me tentatively. “It’s okay,” I said. “Not a big deal.” But it was a big deal.
I used to joke that if women could marry, I’d have had six or seven wives, I’d have been the Norman Mailer of lesbians, but that wasn’t true. I’d married a man when I was eighteen and left him when I was twenty-five, and of all the women I’ve been with since then, there was only one I would have married. I don’t mean Jordan, the fugitive, or Marina, the professor, or Heidi, the bondage dish, or Alexandra, the other bondage dish, or even Artemis, the artist I thought I would never get over but did. I would have married Meg, the social worker. Soon after I met Meg, I called my mother, still a reasoning being at the time, and told her I’d met someone new. Meg wasn’t like anyone else I’d known. Meg was so quiet I kept falling asleep around her. We’d be sitting somewhere, even in a restaurant, and I’d get so drowsy we’d have to leave.
“Is she white?” my mother asked. “Does she own her own house? Is she a stripper?”
“She’s Jewish,” I said. “She owns her house. She’s a psychiatric social worker. She works with schizophrenics in long-term treatment.”
“Well, that explains it. She thinks you’re normal.”
“I am normal, Momma. I’m a normal neurotic lesbian feminist.”
“God help us,” she said.
My voice rose an octave. “Meg was the first woman deep-sea diver in the navy, Momma. She was the kind of diver where you wear a full suit and a helmet and go deep and stay connected to the surface by a breathing tube. Like those little bubbling figures they put in aquariums, except the water’s dark down there … She was the first woman ever to pass that training. Their equipment was made for men, and her boots weighed seventeen pounds each.”
When she didn’t reply, I said, “The navy was going to feature her on billboards before they found out she was gay. But they did let her stay in the navy.”
“Well, that’s a blessing,” Momma said, proving that irony was not my exclusive province.
Estelle, it seemed, had cautiously begun to forgive me. She moved some of her things back into Momma’s condo and took over supervising the caregivers again, so I didn’t have to worry about going home for the moment, but we still remained distant with each other on the phone. Neither of us seemed to want to thrash through what had happened with Lucia’s funeral.
If Blake began to seem mildly disgusting, Ruby did too. I had lost, with Ruby, not compassion but something deeper. She had begun to talk of killing herself, and when she did so, it was with the same eeriness she’d exhibited when I brought her the picture of Lucia. Ruby’s conundrum—conundrum was the word she used—continued to be her belief that suicide was a sin, so the sinner would already be dead and couldn’t ask for absolution. She believed Jesus had washed her clean about the children, but suicide might mean she could not enter heaven. “I just want to be with my children again, but I don’t know how.”
“Why do you believe these ideas about suicide, Ruby?”
“Jeremiah taught me, when I became a Christian.”
“The man who kidnapped you? He helped you become a Christian?”
“Well, I do understand now that Jeremiah did not want to be who he was, and I didn’t really escape from him, but I wish he hadn’t lied about being white. And I wish he had been a cleaner person. The smell of his breath was awful.”
Sister Irene continued to urge my visits with Ruby “to improve her spiritual condition.” So, out of respect for The Friendly Nun, I showed up at the prison every week. At night, I barricaded myself away from the cats and studied the maple Jesus that Ruby believed had absolved her. Despite the odor of the cats, which I could still detect faintly, the room also smelled remarkably pure, almost like incense, which Sister Irene assured me she had never burned. “What is it then? The wood paneling? The oil on Jesus?” I finally concluded that Shakti, the life energy that some mystics believe can be accessed by prayer and meditation, had permeated the room. Its source did not seem to be the crucifixion but the bench in front of the bureau. The presence of Shakti was familiar to me from the ashram I’d visited when I went to see the guru Rama. I had been trying to learn to pray because my sponsor kept saying I didn’t know how and the Boston Phoenix agreed to send me to interview him, because at that point Rama was still foolish enough to talk to press. I planned to write something funny and please my sponsor at the same time, but whatever happened at the ashram was too much like Royce’s vision, and I had never told anyone about it except my editor on the phone, who had yelled, “Get out of there! You’re drugged!”
When I first arrived in the ashram’s parking lot, their “press representative” met me. From the farthest structure, I could hear chanting that was so compelling that this woman had to chase me across the parking lot. The sound suddenly stopped. “It’s okay,” she said, out of breath. “We chant all the time.”
“But will it be the same? Will it be like that?”
The next morning, in the sanctuary, the chanting of Rama’s mantra transported me again, and I began to see a lovely blue light whenever my eyes were closed. The sound vibrated inside my chest and spine and in the air surrounding me, and when we broke for lunch, I stumbled around, my face bathed with joy, saying to anyone who would listen, “Everything is perfect just the way it is!” This was embarrassing enough in retrospect, but this altered state lasted for two whole days, and by the end of the second day I could see the blue light at will with my eyes open. It was when I shared the perfection of the world with my editor that she shouted I’d been drugged. But I knew I hadn’t been drugged. This state can have many names, among them grace, transcendence, enlightenment, and insanity.
During my private interview with Rama the last morning, I forgot my clever questions and dropped to my knees, mumbling, “What about nuclear bombs?” I keep a tape recording of that interview to review whenever I need a dose of embarrassment and humility. Rama said simply that if God wanted the bombs to go off, they would, and I did not have to worry about it. “Your thinking is not holding the sky up. What is breathing through you when you are asleep holds the world up. It has breathed you into this world, and some day it will breathe you out.” When Rama left the room, he suddenly turned and hit my forehead with the heel of his hand. I could feel this light blow for months, and, if I lay on my back and turned my neck a certain way, I could sometimes again feel fragments of Rama’s bliss.
Remembering this experience but unable to retrieve any part of it, I turned my head every which way, pondering Sister Irene’s partial Jesus, waiting for a sign. Royce’s vision had led him to evil, and mine had led me to AA and to a search for my personal goodness. If Ruby was my doppelgänger, Royce was my negative shape.