Psycho wrote in the morning—a rant about giving some bald guy head in the bathroom of the gas station at dawn, something she hadn’t actually done lately—then she walked into the park and paced the playground for an hour, riffing. Hyperarticulate self-revelation was Psycho’s talent. She illuminated experiences other people would avoid, repress or hide. Poetry was a blood sport in our foggy little town, attracting dropouts and misfits, theater freaks hungry for a solo, and a few of the angry college-bound. Twice a year, poets faced off in the meeting hall of the Caballeros de Colombo, and the top scorer got a chance—a chance no one had ever taken—to unravel her shitty life at the Grand Slam Finals in San Francisco at the Warfield.
Freestyling was how Psycho elevated her consciousness. Our whole team aspired to this condition, but Psycho had the most confidence in our dumbfuck lives as material. She came out to her mother, for example, at a slam. Psycho wasn’t actually gay; she was bi; she was whatever. She came out at every slam; she came out, really of her own mouth, kissing Heather in front of Boz Blacks’s Store, where ten-year-olds bought cigarettes—but everything she said was true, or became retroactively inevitable. Psycho was the first girl I ever heard use the word “incested” as a verb. This turned out to be the least original thing about her. “When I speak my shit,” she said, “I want you to see the beautiful ugliness of the world, like a cathedral made of tin foil gum wrappers, dead cigarettes, condoms and bright-colored suckers.”
WE WATCHED in awe during Harald Bugman’s memorial service at the Odd Fellows Hall as Psycho killed it:
My teeth chatter at death like pecked letters. Read them in the fog at dawn / down by the river that runs under the concrete bridge / where someone has painted in urgent red / writing: Harald Bugman was here.
On that terrible occasion we trusted Psycho to shine a light on the darkness; hers was the voice we most needed. We’d already heard a loose cannon, Jane Jones, go off about some cousin of hers who had committed suicide while taking meds for anxiety and acne. As if this had anything to do with Harald, as if the point of the story was the overmedication of the mentally ill in America. Jane droned on about how parapsychotic schizophrenia was a disease registered in the DSM, an amazing book; the library should get a copy of the fourth edition so the whole town could benefit from this diagnostic tool, used constantly by all mental-health professionals. Harald’s mother, Babe Bugman, looked, at this point, literally breakable, practically shattered already. While nobody expected the memorial to turn into a celebration of Harald’s life, exactly—his death at nineteen was tragic, stupid—it shouldn’t turn, either, into a recitation of everybody’s story about their mentally ill relatives and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex.
Then Psycho stood up, creating a frisson of expectation: Now any drama could be narrated. She spoke intimately to everyone at the same time and burned with a secret energy. Her voice seemed to come from a deep place, like a funnel or a sinkhole.
Harald Bugman had made a permanent mark, like blood or hazardous waste, a wild scribble that lived. The very name—Harald—in Psycho’s mouth made everyone proud, made everyone weirdly hungry. In the magic way of memorials, three trestle tables in the hall filled up with free-range meatballs, logs of fresh goat cheese and homemade bread, and salads of baby lettuce with bright orange nasturtium petals and blue borage flowers out of which earwigs and small spiders crawled. Pat Estevez made pupusas to order on her little hot plate; somebody roasted a pig out back, and the locavores formed an important knot around the fire to discuss its provenance. The beer, wine, weed and apple pies were locally sourced; our town began to love itself again. The only flaw: Harald was dead and his mother, Babe Bugman, looked startled and destroyed, her visage ravaged. Her visage ravaged, her ravaged visage! No matter the level of suffering, Psycho turned everything into language. She couldn’t help herself; she was a bard. Besides eating and drinking and Psycho, there was so little (Babe Bugman’s ravaged visage and the bizarre RC wall hangings belonging to the Odd Fellows with their occult symbolism and vividly bleeding hearts) to make Harald’s death real. Because Harald had died violently, there was no body to focus on, no coffin, and, for the immediate family at least, no God.
ALL PSYCHO ASKED FOR was the chance to stare freely, and free-associate. Olivia’s striped hat, Amit’s nose ring, the wings of Heroine’s blue eye shadow, Roy’s admirable eyebrow and the star tattooed behind her left ear. She wanted to remember the last pure time she wore sneakers, lace-up ones. White Keds, with a blue line around the rubber.
It happened freshman year—that she became Psycho. Before, she was just Psyche—a given, hippie name. In the eighth grade, the magic powers of witchy girls came on like ecstasy, filled us up like fresh air, except it wasn’t fresh. It was old. All the girls hated on Psyche because she was fairly sexually advanced, so everybody called her a ho and said she was a hellaslut. Psyche went into the den of girls; down by the taqueria they pulled each other’s hair.
She came out the other side re-created as Psycho. No one could get to her then, except Harald. No one but him was more whacked and brilliant than her.
WHEN SHE FREESTYLED, Psycho just stood there spouting out of some necessary instinct, changing the words around so they sounded right but didn’t quite make sense, or said something she hadn’t known before: Glowering noun or souring gown or flowering town.
How can I trust you or
organized pustule
Blown man or wingspan or
spring ham
If you can’t escape
Create chaos.
My frontal cortex. It’s a city I built with cardboard and the
X-Acto knife my boyfriend Harald used to cut his wrists.
And then, famously, Harald cut his wrists, enhancing her reputation. But Psycho remained humble.
Words appeared like reverse graffiti, bleached and burned onto the dirty canvas of my mind—spilled, bleeding. My voice is not me. It’s a stick in a desert, writing in dirt.
After Harald, then after Heather, Psycho’s next lover was a man named Mr. Avery, very adult, very skilled, she said. He was a total secret—forty-two, forty-five—and lived two towns away with his wife. We laughed too loudly when Psycho said “skilled.” Sex still made us nervous. Not that we minded sexual talk, sexual jokes, sexual innuendo, sexual confidences—and like anybody else we released sexual tension by laughing.
In the afternoons, Psycho sat on the big wooden bench on the cliff overlooking the beach like the nymph Psyche on her rock or crag, waiting for her mythical lover, Amor. Psycho sat there waiting for Mr. Avery. Only she wasn’t waiting. She was writing. We could see her lips move.
Every year, a cliff crumbled, carrying someone down; young lovers were particularly vulnerable. One day, Mr. Avery didn’t come, and Psycho turned his tragic drama into the stuff she turned everything into.
Even though the Averys’ baby was born dead, Mrs. Avery insisted the baby was still born. If you’re still long enough, we could accuse you of being still still, a redundant condition like life itself. Imagine all the bores who have still been born.
In preparation for the Grand Slam Finals, Psycho went downtown to the bathroom at the gas station—the headquarters of her early bold gestures—and cut off all her hair. Then at the throwdown on Saturday night, she rapped about her hair—pretty, pretty hair—she wanted it gone, and now it was. Beauty was ugly, et cetera. She did a freestyle called “My Mom Looks Like Hell—in a Good Way.” It was just Psycho up onstage, basically bald, rocking it, and her mom in the blackened theater, taking it:
Sometimes Mom looked like a wind-wrecked face / at the front of a ship, a mythic beast / or made of snakes, her face a mess of ess / -shaped lines, or came covered in mud, green and cracked / Sunglasses on the whole year she fucked Stan / O, black-eyed beauty! / Stirred her drink with a finger and sucked it off / Once she saw what she’d done to that deer she backed up the car and hit it again.
Psycho’s mom left the throwdown that afternoon—or maybe it was another afternoon; Psycho adjusted facts for realistic effect—and drove into a baby, a three-year-old, at a crosswalk. It could have been the lithium, and—face it—a helpless baby shouldn’t be out on the street on its own at dusk. Still. Psycho told the truth before it happened. Her mom flattened like a cartoon character, as if she’d run over herself.
Empathy isn’t real. It’s chemical, like endorphins when you run. When I stopped touching my mother, her empathy dried up. Now she has emotional eczema. This year she hit a baby with her car. Now she takes even more medication. The baby will live; it’s a miracle baby. Even now, it’s suing her ass.
Psycho’s enemies complained to the school board: “Girls who talk dirty and dress skanky shouldn’t be allowed to work with kids.” But Psycho loved her community service, teaching fourth graders to speak up and shout out. She taught them spoken word, hip-hop. Corrupting youth was the best and purest thing in her life, she said. She loved their innocence, their depravity, their potential. She pushed her students to dig deeper than they thought they wanted to; she made them sound stranger and more interesting than they were.
AS A JOKE, Psycho went out for baseball. Those girls like Greek heroes, ropy legs and broad shoulders, their attitudes of power as they held their iPods and baseball bats—Psycho became one of them. This happened in the spring, before Harald died, the season of the new rope swing going up at the swimming hole, the season of strapless prom dresses, high heels, asparagus and apricots. Softball took her—to Wineland Valley, Strawberryville—even Hawk Park and River City. After Maria Cabeza went down with her pregnancy, Psycho became the pitcher. She pitched like she freestyled, taking a stance, throwing herself out there. She took the title at the County-Wide Throwdown with a freestyle on the dual nature of balls so mesmerizing, no one remembered two words of it the minute it was over.
Psycho’s dad couldn’t watch her play, or help with driving. Her mom drove to every game, a hundred miles down the 28, or the 116, or the 1.
PSYCHO MADE THE CUT—we knew she would—for the Grand Slam Finals at the Warfield. Our team went in the van to watch. Psycho’s mom drove; she had a new paper license. Even Psycho’s dad came. First we waited in a line halfway down Market Street, where a bunch of thugs tried halfheartedly to threaten us. Then we were in, up in the second balcony. The lights went down, and the grand master pumped the crowd. A chica read a poem in Spanish, her voice riding like a Lexus over the awkward tangle of vowels and consonants, and it sounded so fluent—how could she speak so quickly?—and so wise. Then she translated the poem and it was the same old bullshit they feed all the Catholic girls: Love is everything, love fills the soul, love is our highest purpose, life pales and I am nothing without love.
Next came a poet with a big red flower in her ear, and a case number—#389214B—written across her T-shirt in Sharpie. She riffed about how she was going to be released from the welfare system the day she turned eighteen. She had sixty-five days left of high school, plans for college. But without her group home, she’d be homeless. Her caseworker said that if she dropped out of school or got pregnant, she’d qualify for help. “You think I should get pregnant?” “I’m just giving you the information.” Then came a dude whose family came from the hills of China, via Laos, Vietnam and Thailand to Oakland. What are you? people asked. What are you? What are you?
“Marry me,” someone screamed from the floor.
Somebody said, “Where’s Psycho?” And then there she was, onstage for the first round, and our team went crazy. We went crazy screaming her name until the whole Warfield went quiet, waiting.
IN THE STORY of Amor and Psyche, the young maid is cursed, through no fault of her own. Her parents, obedient to fate, set their daughter out in the elements upon a rock crag to be ravished and used. Psyche waits. A black hole surrounds her, the sky darkens, a wind kicks up, and she is blown upward and wafted into the valley below. Amor, whose job it is to transport the vulnerable and valuable virgin into the hoariest arms possible, instead takes Psyche for himself, not revealing his true identity. Psyche, who has been led to expect a miserable and oppressed existence, feels slightly relieved, sexually; her lover is sweet-smelling, soft-skinned and reasonably tender; her situation could be worse. In this way, she begins to understand the possibility of desire. And yet she can’t see her lover; the condition of her marginal happiness is total ignorance. And, really, how long can that last?
Those girls were like the dumb sheep who lived next to the garage. / The lamb down with her elbows in the mud / sucking on her mother’s tits while the big sheep peed upon her head. / The girls at school said they were glad there was no more boy-on-girl sex / only natural interaction between beings. / They were, it turned out, the majorettes of the future / dressed up, bold-faced with boiled teeth / and padded bras, carrying sticks.
After Psycho, more poets came on. They spat rhymes about police brutality and street violence, about nickel nines and Wendy’s parking lot, about Oscar Grant III being shot in the back on a BART train by the Oakland police while lying facedown, unarmed. The gesture—arms floating up and down like birds’ wings, the back crumpling inward—kept returning in poems about the streets, as if it were the universal gesture of innocence. Kids troped toward and veered from suicide. Palestine and the effects of white phosphorous shimmered in the foreground, and a Sikh kid forced the audience to point at him and shout out “Sick! Sick!” to duplicate the judgment that rained down every day on the turban he couldn’t wear to school. We listened, our mouths hanging open. The Warfield filled with the popping sound of silence breaking. Psycho’s two estranged parents sat vibrating together in the second balcony, but Psycho didn’t come back for the second round. She didn’t even place.
Georgie looked in the mirror and realized that without hair she had no face. She had only a head, a globe turning on the axis of her neck. Eyes, mouth, nose—but no face. Her face was history.
She looked gorgeous and irresistible without hair, her new boyfriend, Ralph, said wildly. She looked so intense and theatrical, he could no longer bear to sleep with her. He said he felt weak, cowardly and defective. Georgie agreed.
Ralph’s mother sent her a reusable barf bag. Georgie had never even met Ralph’s mother—but they were sisters in cancer! The barf bag, like all the other accoutrements of this disease, came in pink. A joke that was not a joke, like all jokes. A barf bag! Mouth spray! A toothbrush! What more thoughtful gifts could you give somebody getting chemotherapy?
What Georgie wanted, really, was sex—vigorous human sex with a reasonable person, preferably of the other gender. When she divorced, several women she knew called with offers. She said she would think about it—and she did think about it. Who wouldn’t?
* * *
THE BAD NEWS STARTED on election night. Georgie had some friends over, and they ate lamb and drank cold rosé from Spain and watched on television as the evening went as badly as possible for their side. Their candidate lacked charisma, but they had tried to believe in him. After the results came in, they read their fortunes on Georgie’s Chinese sticks, and Georgie’s said something like “You will know illness before old age.”
“No fair,” her friend Babe said. “I took two. I took yours.”
This was true—greedy Babe.
“It doesn’t matter,” Georgie said.
“Take another.”
Georgie’s second fortune read: “What you ask for is unreasonable and you will not get your wish.”
BEFORE HER FIRST CHEMO, everyone said Georgie was lucky to have had experience with psychotropic drugs, because nuclear medicine tripped you out. It was trippy, and afterward she felt poisoned, as advertised; the Popsicle red medicine turned her pee red. She spent the night in a little hotel just a few blocks from the Cancer Center. In the morning, she tried to give the doorman three dollars for carrying her bag. He pulled his hand back from hers as if she were on fire or poisonous and said, “No, no, no!”
Georgie’s first night home, Babe came over to shear her hair. It would fall out anyway, so why not? They dragged two lounge chairs out onto the lawn and watched the sunset over the ocean as Babe cut the hair down to the stubble of all the colors Georgie had dyed it over the years, a kaleidoscope of color embedded in her follicles. (Her features were still strong, though, Babe said, and her eyes glowed like bonfires.) Georgie realized that what she thought of as “my face” and “my self” enclosed just a small part of something larger. The face was a few planes of flesh stretched over a structure of bones—frontal, temporal, parietal, occipital. Georgie knew this from looking at skeletons; she was a kind of skeleton herself, her body a loose confederation of bones held together by joints and a temporary binding of muscles, enclosed by a skin that marked the boundary between herself and everything not herself. The profound moment of confronting her hairless head made Georgie want to have sex immediately. Dr. Daly had promised the drugs would send her into a fierce and irrevocable menopause; this could be her last egg drop. Lying on her back in the lounge chair and looking up at the sky, she felt like someone waiting to be hit by a train. She watched the sun burn on the horizon before it fell through a hole in the ocean.
A whippoorwill sang. Babe held Georgie’s hand. They drank tea as the moon rose yellow and full, a hunting moon. Owls flew through the air like thrown bricks.
“I feel like a werewolf,” Georgie said, “only my hair falls out instead of growing in.”
They slept outside, under heavy woolen blankets. In the morning, when Georgie got up to make coffee, she saw the moon still hanging above the ocean, as if someone had forgotten to put it away.
HER PUBIC HAIR fell out. Funny, because she’d had bikini waxes for years, and associated pubic hair with the triumphant face of her Russian aesthetician in San Francisco holding up the terrible strips of fabric. Her ex-boyfriend, Ralph, preferred his women “with,” as he put it. Maybe he didn’t say “my women.” But he did say “with,” as if there were only two kinds of women in the world. (Now she shattered the binary with her clumps and bald spots!) Ralph dumped her when she told him what she had, when she first found out. He hugged her; he patted her back and said he wished he could “be there” for her. But he hardly knew her at all.
Her hair fell out; fruit flies emerged. At first, they seemed concentrated around some bananas she kept in a bowl. But then one day she found a feathery cluster of them in the hair by her ear as she read Illness as Metaphor. Was she the fruit they wanted?
GEORGIE FOUND a new lover without too much trouble. The two of them carried on a torrid correspondence by e-mail during the break that followed her last chemotherapy. His profile on the Internet drew her because he wore a black watch cap; she’d also worn a black watch cap since her chemo started and the hair on her head fell out, as well as all the rest of her hair, including her eyelashes and eyebrows.
His screen name: T-Bone. He asked her to call him T.
He wrote in a sensitive way that accepted her as she was (sick), and then she wrote, raveled out a few selected details and asked about his life. He told her about his two kids and how he’d worked as a full-time stay-at-home dad until they were grown, and Georgie wrote back, telling him how much she’d wanted children, at least one child, but by the time her print shop was established, it was too late, or at least too late to start again, and the marriage came apart anyway, and—well, she and T wrote back and forth, revealing certain details and concealing others. Georgie wasn’t exactly new to Internet courtship.
T seemed different. For one thing, he lived in the Midwest—Iowa or Ohio or Nebraska. He offered to fly out to San Francisco on the first day of her radiation to meet her. He didn’t have cancer—just the hat. But he seemed drawn to the specific signal, the cancer beam of Georgie’s black watch cap. “I want to know you for a long time,” he wrote. “But I want to start knowing you now, while you’re still in the thick of this. I want to see you now, without hair. I want to hold you this way, as you are when we meet.”
In a certain kind of vulnerable moment, this seemed plausible and romantic. T’s words made Georgie feel hot and damp all over with a moisture that she felt must be the last of its kind. He wrote that he wanted to make love to her now, bald and nauseated. Even her ex-husband, a generous man, hadn’t offered that.
She wrote back to T and asked if he was kidding. He wrote back with a flight number and a time of arrival and the name of a not-bad hotel where he’d made a reservation, and the name of a restaurant near the infusion center where he would meet her for lunch. She brewed herself a pot of tea to steady her nerves, and wrote: “OK!”
IN THE GOWN ROOM, while savagely ripping tags from her expensive new lingerie, Georgie met a young woman named Linette. Linette had come from Irian Jaya, in Indonesia, and also had cancer in her breast—but a different kind. The cancer had grown on the outside of her skin, and also inside her chest cavity and bones, and it had spread, inoperable. Linette said these things in the words she had been given, the simple declarative sentences that announced her fate like a verdict from a judge. Linette asked Georgie what kind of chemo she’d had, and when Georgie told her, she said her doctors wanted her to do that protocol, too, but she was afraid it would make her even sicker than now. What did Georgie think? How sick had the chemo made Georgie? Did she still feel like herself? Georgie said, “Good question”—she no longer knew who she was. Linette said she just wanted more time to be in her body—but she wanted to be herself. “What would you do if you were me?” Linette asked. Georgie said she didn’t know, that she could only say what the chemo made her feel like—both sick and hungry, not necessarily for food. She felt poisoned by the toxic red junk that turned her toenails black, but also stronger than she had ever known herself, more interested in living. If anyone had asked her five years ago what she would think was important if she had cancer, she would have said nutrition, herbs, affirmations, et cetera. But once the disease took up residence in her, she became a tyrannical landlord, relentless in her struggle to evict. Linette stood before Georgie in her thin gown with its complicated ties—so complicated someone had actually posted a diagram in the gown room showing in detail how to weave all the loose strings together—and said, “What would you do if you were me?” Georgie could not even pretend to say. She took tiny Linette in her arms and for the first time in weeks felt her own body as a solid, as a force. She saw herself as one of the lucky ones, almost at this point a fraud. Now holding Linette, her sister, in the gown room, Georgie caught the odor of something deep: the breath of mortality. Linette’s thin arms held Georgie fiercely. Georgie could feel (through skin and bone) the quick beating of Linette’s heart, like a small bird struggling at a window.
A few minutes later, Georgie dressed and hurried from the building. What a ridiculous schedule she had laid out for herself: radiation, followed by lunch with a stranger, and then, if all went well, sex in T’s hotel room. Later, she could, if she wanted, go up Divisadero to her friend Katya’s house, where Katya would feed her some delicate broth and a glass of wine. Georgie swore off meat and sugar and liquor after the diagnosis, but when she saw the amount of poison coursing through her body, she relented, or rather protested, and ate and drank small portions of anything that gave her pleasure—roast chicken, a moderate pour of Sancerre, even an organic burrito with a dollop of sour cream.
Cabs circled around Oncology—like hawks, Georgie thought as she stepped into one. She could have walked to the restaurant to meet T, but that was an unrealistic plan if she hoped even to consider sex in the afternoon. Already she felt curled in at the edges. Yet here lay the secret gift of the disease—the heightening, the sharpening. She felt alive; she’d never been so constantly aware of it. After she gave her destination to the driver and settled into the cab, Georgie closed her eyes and concentrated on meeting T, on building appetite.
He didn’t disappoint, exactly. Although almost from the first it was clear that although he seemed a good person in every way—not the serial killer creep Katya had warned her about—T was not, under the usual circumstances, her kind of guy. But the usual circumstances had been fed eight doses of tamoxifen and then irradiated. She felt, with this man who had flown from Ohio or Iowa or Nebraska to meet her, a lightness and ease, the oppressive weights of history and the future lifted. In many ways, the disease cured the worst afflictions of this sick capitalist society: It dissipated materialist impulses, lifted the tiny burdens that tied people Gulliver-like to earth and made one more aware of the small hot fire burning inside. T seemed smart enough, attractive enough. They recognized each other immediately; under the black watch caps, they wore the same shadowy bristle.
They drank green tea and ate bowls of fresh fruit, and although Georgie tasted only a little, she felt the vitamins and moisture penetrate her tired cells. Her tissues waxed and swelled, her blood sped up and, yes, her body buzzed!
T also consumed eggs and bacon and home fries and toast—they’d starved him on the plane. Although she had to keep her eyes averted from the food, his hunger roused Georgie’s. The fruit in her bowl smelled decadent, alcoholic, and she pushed it to one side while T ate and told her how out of character it was for him to fly across the country to meet a woman—but, yes, he had done it before.
He took her hands across the table and kissed them and looked into her eyes.
“I’m glad you let me come,” he said.
Georgie reached out and touched the indentation beneath his right ear. A slight electric charge ran up her arm.
At the hotel, a sudden weakness came over her. In the excitement of meeting T, she had not stopped to wash her hands before she ate. Her hands, her clothes smelled of Linette; she tasted Linette on the end of her tongue. Georgie opened the windows in T’s room and let in the city sounds. Suddenly a tear fell out of her eye like a stone and landed on the carpet.
“I’d like to take a bath,” she told him, and he went to the closet and pulled out the hotel’s leopard-print robe for her to use. She found his razor and his toothbrush and a carefully rolled tube of toothpaste on the sink. A faux-leather ditty bag. All this effort, this human vanity. She had to struggle to be part of it.
In the bath, she pressed the soap to her nose and breathed in. She’d brought her essential oils, and with all the strength in her arm she shook droplets into the water. The familiar aromas of cloves and roses and ylang ylang came up, the smell she thought of as herself.
She reappeared wearing the leopard robe and let it fall. T lay in the bed already, slipped between the sheets like a dinner mint. His ardor was touching; he was almost too gentle. His hand on her breast smelled of Linette, his tongue in her mouth, his fingers inside her. He came inside her, too—why the hell not?
It all went well enough—it went very well. Apart from the smell of death in her nose, Georgie felt light and alive. His body next to hers felt good. He did not go to sleep immediately, but caressed her skin with his palms. Two hours later, though, she was burning up from the inside. She had to call the emergency room doctor, even though she knew the symptoms of infection. She and T dressed and walked to Walgreens at 4:00 a.m. to pick up her prescription; he wrapped a wing of his bulky midwestern coat around her. In the morning, she vomited in the bathroom while he looked at the New York Times over free coffee in the lobby. She brushed her teeth with her pink toothbrush; then they took a walk on Ocean Beach before she drove him to the airport. The wind seemed to sweep the smell from her; she blew her nose bloodily into a tissue and afterward felt better.
At the airport, he insisted that she not park, but leave him at the curb. “Call me anytime,” he told her. “Call if you need me—and call if you don’t need me.” He kissed her on the mouth and smiled into her eyes. Tears brimmed on her eyelids and she made her eyes swallow them down. They drizzled back into her body as she accelerated onto the freeway, a greedy girl who had gotten at least something of what she wanted and was now free to be no one, nothing, not even human, for anyone.
Cutting made Harald feel alive; the more he cut, the more he felt. He didn’t have a suicidal fantasy. There was nothing he cared about enough to die for. He knew what love was, probably, although it pained him to think of those afternoons in bed with Psycho, her flat chest rubbing against his as she seemed to be moved and swayed by some blast of erotic agony, her narrow face gouged with pain, her small teeth biting the sheets. He refused to die for love. If Psycho or his mom thought he had died for them, even posthumously it would tarnish him. He did not want to think about Psycho because she reminded him that he had betrayed her by falling in love when they’d agreed that love was bourgeois and stupid, what Psycho’s cheerful mother felt when she climbed into bed at night with Psycho’s new fat father—love as a last resort, love as gratitude, love as filler. Worse, he had fallen in “love” with someone else—a sous-chef at Café Malatesta. He’d deceived Psycho, even though she never asked him to be faithful; she sneered at the claustrophobic virtue of fidelity and agreed with him about the pointlessness of gender.
He sterilized his X-Acto knife—he wasn’t an idiot—and began very high up on his right arm. He made the first cut shallow; the first cut was a test.
He imagined Psycho in the backseat of a car with her little sister, Charity, and her inanely happy mother and her new father, all of them singing feel-good songs in harmony. He wondered whether Psycho, in spite of her Goth / bisexual pretensions, ever got into it. He thought she probably did. (On her first date with her new girlfriend, Psycho asked Harald to come along. That’s how insecure she was. Harald sat in the backseat all night and didn’t say a word. They drove to the beach and walked on the sand in the dark, Harald following a few steps behind, like a ghost. They drank green chlorophyll drinks with antioxidants to prolong the lives they’d talked at length about throwing away. They smoked weed and made out, and Harald took part as much as Harald ever took part in anything.)
He thought of his own sister, Emma, who was twenty and worked in a toy store, where she was a fucking genius. The two of them used to walk home together after school and bake muffins in a toy oven. He used to get into that, especially if he’d been smoking weed, which he had been. In the morning, after his parents left for work, he used to take a book into their bed and read. His mom had painted the bedroom red and gold—this just before she left his dad, whom everyone called “Bug,” short for Bugman, their last name. It was her last big paint job. The bedroom wasn’t really even a room, just an attached shed his father and he had caulked the brains out of one Saturday afternoon. The shed didn’t have heat—you could see wild mustard and calla lilies and gorse bushes through slivers in the walls—but it had an altar his mother had bought at a flea market in the city and a collection of turquoise Buddhas and those red-gold walls and the warmest down comforter in the house. His mother had a tiny picture of him—of Harald—in a funky gold frame on the nightstand on her side, beside her carafe of water and her amber jar of excellent antidepressants. Harald had cut himself for the first time in his parents’ bed. He felt safe there.
Now he wondered, idly, drawing a line parallel to the first line in his upper arm, whether this bed would be his last. A dramatic thought—Psycho would slap him, sit on him, tickle and humiliate him for it. He knew—they both knew—that the only power they had was not to give a shit. Harald didn’t give a shit—though he suspected that Psycho, deep down, did. (He accused her once of secretly believing in God, which she denied, then admitted, which was hot, and they had sex, sort of.)
The difference between them: She had a deep down, whereas he was all exposed and on the surface. Even now he thought he might shoot her an e-mail. He wanted to be sure she remembered him. He drew a more free-form line down his upper arm with the X-Acto knife and watched the fine line of blood inscribe itself on him, like code.
BABE TRIED, afterward, to analyze what she’d done, what had happened to her beautiful androgynous boy. He’d come out of her sixteen years ago, a new person, and Babe had given him that big-faced, oar-heaving, hard-drinking Nordic name. She didn’t blame herself for everything. She’d taken steps to maintain her sanity, her dignity and her self-respect—and left her husband, Bug. Her daughter, Emma, lived on her own, but Babe took Harald with her, and moved to a redwood cabin in a town a few miles away. The school was better, or at least different, and Babe had a job managing a B and B in the town. She did what she had to do, she told her best friend, Georgie. Somebody had to be Harald’s mother.
“You are not just his mother,” Georgie told her. “You are a human being. You have a responsibility to have a life.”
Georgie threw a dinner party for Babe and Bug, to acknowledge the change in their lives. Babe’s daughter, Emma, came, and so did Harald and his then girlfriend, Psycho. Georgie kept stirring more sugar into a pitcher of bitter Brazilian caipirinhas. She also made a special dish that had been her Syrian grandmother’s. She wrung ground lamb with water through her hands until pink water ran into the deep blue bowl, which looked good against the lamb. For the first time, Babe realized, really, what “meat” was—the tender mash of it purified by its water bath. Georgie held out a dime-size bite on a spoon—and Babe ate it.
The Bugmans, a loose confederation of four, gathered as a family for the last time. Georgie fed them a beautiful dinner, then had them all draw Chinese sticks from a beautiful wooden tub. (Everything Georgie owned was beautiful, or turned beautiful in her possession.)
Babe’s fortune said she would get an unusual inheritance from a relative, that everything she achieved would come through her work—and she would get her wish. Greedily, Babe chose another Chinese stick, which said a strange dream would come true. Bug’s stick read that he would be granted two wishes. He wished for new rotors for his Subaru—and for world peace. Even Harald and Psycho (who didn’t reveal their wishes) seemed content with what they got. Georgie read her own stick last. It said, “You will suffer an illness before old age, and only part of your wish will come true.”
“Put it back,” said Babe. “Take another.”
HARALD SLEPT sixteen hours a day. Babe tried to wake him gently for school before she went to work, played classical music on the radio, brought him orange juice, built a fire—but nothing helped. He lied about his meds, hid pills in his socks or saved and took them all at once for a more devastating impact. Maybe she should have done more to give him continuity after the divorce. What should she have done? She’d kept his spaceman sheets.
Their funky handmade cabin in the woods off the 609 was temporary—its most potent charm. Even the outbuilding Babe used as a bedroom had torn slightly away from the hillside. One wall angled obliquely from the floor—six degrees, gauged Harald, a precise and mathematical person. The doors rattled like loose teeth, but Babe slept well here, at first, when she knew her son slept nearby, drugged and safe.
She felt almost happy this way, without anything she wanted. Then she began to have visual hallucinations. Once she thought she awakened to find a Japanese man dressed in a yellow wet suit holding out a mirror. When she looked at her reflection, she found her head covered with eggs—big white chicken eggs. She tried to pull the eggs off her head before they hatched, but they clung to her hair with glue they’d secreted. The Japanese man returned; this time, he wore a blue wet suit. He spoke urgently to Babe in a bubbly, submerged voice she could not understand, but he pulled the eggs from her hair with a tiny red plunger.
Babe believed in work. She’d always worked toward things she wanted. She’d worked on her house, the toy store, her relationship with Bug—all lost now. She used to stay up at night after the children went to bed and paint rooms, work on taxes, read the grand jury report. Even making love with Bug, she’d tick off items on an imaginary list: relieve stress, reconnect, keep balanced. She served her famous marrow jellies to the children, and felt she was building something—bones, muscles, nerve.
Now she lived with Harald, her depressed son, in a whacked cabin whose water smelled of sulfur and stained all the porcelain black. But the morning fog felt clean. She had a job in town where the owners told her every day how indispensable she was—so indispensable, they didn’t give her a day off for four months. Finally, Babe quit, and Aisha, the female partner, responded furiously and refused to pay Babe’s back wages.
“How could you do this to us? We depended on you. We trusted you,” Aisha said. “Now you’re stealing the most valuable property we have: our trade secrets.”
Aisha glanced at the heavy kerosene ball of the fire lighter by the stone hearth. “If I hear of any other B and B using my cardamom-cinnamon bun recipe, you’ll never work in this county again.”
Babe said, “If you hit me over the head with that iron ball, I’ll come back and haunt you. I’ll interfere with the bookings and terrify the guests.”
Aisha’s gaze wavered. Her weakness: ADHD.
“Call the police, get a restraining order,” Aisha told her husband. “Write down the threats she just made.” Babe realized that Aisha always took this peremptory tone with him, and wondered what was wrong with the husband, why he stood it.
“Don’t bother,” Babe said. “I’ll go.”
She drove home feeling virtuous and free. On the hill outside town, a new couple had brought in African animals—gazelles, elands and zebras. Babe almost hit another car head-on from craning her neck to look at their rare beauty. The antlers on the elands looked hand-carved. Somebody else must have been distracted, too, because just a few hundred yards up the road, three turkey vultures rose reluctantly from the parallel yellow lines, hovered heavily before her windshield and then moved to the side, revealing the carcass of a fox whose face they’d licked clean as a spoon. She smelled rain and eucalyptus on the air, and rushed home. Maybe she’d bake those cardamom-cinnamon buns for Harald, fill the house with a rich, comforting atmosphere. When she arrived, though, she found—literally—a dark cloud over her house. Sometimes life’s perverse, Babe thought. You find yourself, which means someone else gets lost.
HARALD WROTE his name in blood on his arm, then drank three-quarters of a bottle of white rum and e-mailed his ex-girlfriend Psycho a long, guilt-tripping letter about his meaningless life. Although he didn’t confess exactly what he’d done, the letter was so long and rambling, she put two and two together and called the sheriff, and an hour later the deputy came. Harald, unconscious, did not respond. The deputy opened the front door (unlocked) and found Harald lying quietly on his back, bleeding hard from both arms into the bedding. The deputy said it looked like a murder scene.
The paramedics bandaged Harald’s arms and head. (He’d fallen and gouged his temple; at first, the gouge seemed more serious than the slashed arms and the alcohol poisoning.) The ambulance drove him two and a half hours to a psychiatric hospital, which someone called “the Bug House.” Babe almost laughed when she heard that—“the Bug House.” Not that it was funny.
She felt afraid to visit her son there, afraid of seeing him for what he was—a scar. His arms were marked so that he would never again have real privacy around his body; any stranger could read on his arms what he’d done. He didn’t want to see her anyway. He felt, the head nurse said stiffly, “quite violent about it.” So Babe drove home. A black widow spider lived in the jamb of the front door; she had to open the door carefully or she would kill it.
Her eyes wouldn’t close when she lay down, so she had a lot of time to clean. The cabin sparkled pointlessly. She hung up kitschy stuff, Madonna night-lights, a portrait Harald had done in high school of Christ represented as a gopher on a cross. She carried wood and kindling, split logs, swept pine needles off the little decks, made altars out of pinecones and broken necklaces. When she finished this work, she started on the stones. She moved one up from the ravine onto the deck. It was an unusual stone—larger than most, smoother, whiter. It had holes bored into it that certain mollusks make. Then she found another stone, and then another; it was like finding mushrooms—once you knew how to look, you saw them everywhere.
She brought stones inside and put them away. Moving stones made her tired, and after she worked she slept.
* * *
IN ONE OF her vivid reveries, Babe met a rock star as he drove toward the highway in a low-slung sports car, a vintage Corvette. Babe walked along the road, gathering stones, and the rock star pulled up alongside her and rolled his window down. “I have a cabin,” he told her. “I hardly ever use it. Go down there whenever you want and hang loose.”
Babe walked farther down the road. Immediately the landscape changed and became wild. Vultures circled overhead. Sharp rocks jutted up fifty feet into a sky that glowed yellow, like the moon. A small reptilian animal chased her, baring its sharp teeth. Babe knew that the animal would attack, and it did: It charged and bit her hand. The wound left a trail of blood behind her, but now the terrible thing Babe had known would happen had happened, and she could relax. The mad animal seemed calmer, too. They walked down the road together like old friends, but no cabin waited at the end where Babe could hang loose.
SOME EVENINGS, she carried only three or four stones up the ravine. She piled them on the fireplace or used one to hold down a stack of bills on a table. Other times, she gathered more and stored them around the house. One day, she filled the whole fireplace with stones. Then—because she could use the outdoor shower—she filled the bathtub. Sometimes she couldn’t help herself. Sometimes she felt ashamed. She carried stones into her house the way people drank or did junk. She thought about not doing it; sometimes she stopped for a few hours or a day and began to feel calm and free. But then the day darkened and she went outside, imagining herself simply going out to gather firewood, knowing that a fire was impossible. Just the weight of the stones in her hands, in her house, comforted her. From the void of black space where she lived (in her body), they brought her, even, to the edge of bliss.
AS A LITTLE BOY, Harald used to climb into her bed in the evenings to read. Once, when she asked him why, he said, “Because it’s warm.” Babe said, “We haven’t been in bed for fifteen hours!” And Harald shrugged and said, “It’s still warm.”
More recently, Babe remembered his brown eyes looking up at her from over the top of some book—Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre, or The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe, or Pain, Sex and Time, by Gerald Heard, or Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae, by whomever—the humor there, the bit of perversity. He said, “Mom, you should smile more.”
Babe yelled, “Are you kidding? I am the only person in this family who smiles every single day! I smile at customers! I smile at you!”
Harald said, “No, I mean you should smile—for fun.” And he smiled his dazzling rare smile, because he’d caught her shouting, at the end of her rope.
* * *
ONE AFTERNOON, Georgie called and asked how Harald was doing in the hospital. “About as badly as possible,” said Babe. “What else is new?”
Georgie said, “I found out this morning that I have breast cancer.” When Georgie said the words breast cancer, Babe looked at the stone in her hand—a five-pounder. A window closed, leaving just a tiny aperture through which Babe saw her hand and the stone in her hand.
“Left-handed women are more likely to get it,” Georgie went on in a clinical voice. “Something to do with asymmetry in the female, more hormones gathering in vessels on the left side, near the spleen. The left arm acts as a kind of hormone switch, turning the estrogen off and on.”
“Who told you that?” asked Babe.
“I was up all night, reading.”
Babe thought of Georgie’s left hand always in motion, setting type, scissoring a chicken up its back, stirring up a pitcher of caipirinhas. Writing a list, Georgie held her pen in that protective way lefties do. Chopping an onion or writing a letter or deadheading her roses, Georgie switched the chemical sauna on and off.
“What are you going to do?” Babe asked.
“What else can I do? Raw foods, single-malt scotch, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. I’m going to do it all.” Georgie laughed a gutsy, throaty laugh, like an old lounge singer. “Oh, but wait, do you want to hear the best part?”
“Hit me,” said Babe.
“They create the new one while you’re still on the operating table. They use your own love handles, can you believe it? The larger your love handles, the bigger the boobs.”
Georgie sounded tough over the phone, and Babe, scared and horrified, laughed with her. She remembered later how hard and loudly they laughed at how tough they were going to be.