Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

I guess to put it bluntly you would have to say I became a star, but what I want you to know is what I do is work, and it is a craft. Think about it — you show up in the morning, and maybe the person — him or her — the person you’re working with, if you’re unlucky, isn’t into it, they hate it, hate themselves, or they’re just bored or tired, so now you have to carry the scene. Then there are the lights, hot and headache-making. If they’re going to move the camera you sit there and then you have to start again, maybe the guy’s losing his hard, the fluff girl’s working away on him but it’s going, so then you have to revive him. After all this it’s got to work, at least for me it does, I take pride in my art, and it does work, after all there’s the flesh, shiny and soft under the arcs, the room fading away, a still, lovely concentration even with the director’s voice from behind the camera.

So I did it for years. The first real film I did, credits and all, the producer said, honey do you want to use your real name. I told him I’d think about it. That night I sat in my apartment and thought about it. My real name — never mind what it was — didn’t seem real to me anymore, and maybe it never had. I thought of myself hiding in a bathroom, skin damp from steam, and outside the thin atmosphere of Mother’s house, the climate of temperate reason we lived in, and I knew my name had never been mine. So I cast about for another one, I flipped through the books on my walls, walked about from window to window. Finally I threw on a coat and went outside, north — I lived in Manhattan then, on Columbus. It was late now, winter, and the streets glittered with ice. I walked, and I could hear the voices of carolers, clear and sharp as blades in the crisp air. I turned a corner, and St. John’s loomed, I stood facing the huge black shell. As it hung over me I waited, waited for it to tell me something, waited to ask a question that trembled half-formed in me. But finally I turned away, nothing said, nothing remembered.

The next morning I had a call from a doctor at Bishop’s: Mother had been brought into the emergency room after a collapse at work. The symptoms were of acute starvation. When I got to the hospital, the doctor (after his moment of startled recognition, I was getting used to those) told me that she had been suffering from long and unrelenting constipation, and it seemed that rather than suffer the abdominal pain, the headaches, the mixtures and pills, the indignity of straining morning after morning, she had stopped eating. She was asleep, and I looked through the glass window on the door of the room, preferring not to go in, scared of waking her up. They had an IV in her arm, a tube in her nose.

“We’re feeding her,” the doctor said.

Her hands were curled up in two tiny fists on her chest.

“How long didn’t she eat?”

“Two weeks, it looks like.”

“How long is she going to be in here?”

“A week, maybe ten days. Her insurance should cover it, don’t worry. At least this time.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

It wasn’t. What I was thinking of was how dark her body looked against the white of the hospital sheets, her rage when she would awaken and find herself defeated. In the parking lot the tears froze quickly on my face, and my head was filled with a single word, a memory perhaps from some late late movie of childhood, or perhaps I had heard it lifting toward me from the hospital chapel. That afternoon, I paused from tonguing a breast, from sucking its perfect nipple, and I raised up and said to nobody in particular, “Kyrie. That’s my new name, Kyrie.”

They kept Mother in the hospital for three weeks, for treatment and psychiatric observation. She refused to answer the shrink’s questions, and refused to see me: “I don’t want any of her filthy money either.” They released her on Christmas eve, and I watched her from my car as she strode out confidently into the haze of snow that hung over the city. She walked away and I watched, for a long time, the lights glowing dimly and far away, listened to the silence. They had her back at Emergency the next morning, throwing up violently and in pain — she had gone home and gorged on food, on thick slabs of ham, whole cakes of butter, game hens, pie. When they took off her clothes her stomach bulged, its circumference weirdly translucent and webbed with black veins. This time they kept her for a month, and had her looked at by teams of nutritionists and psychologists. Hesitating but reluctant to keep her in the hospital — she seemed so damn healthy — they released her to the care of a live-in nurse and a smart young doctor out of Harvard. But now, even though she ate regularly and carefully, under the eye of the nurse, her body seemed to starve. The food disappeared into her, and then vanished altogether — she grew weaker and weaker until she couldn’t get out of bed. Her hair fell out, and she took on the appearance of a famine-ridden child, the swollen belly, the huge hurt eyes. She slipped silently in and out of sleep, then into a coma, but then suddenly she awoke and asked for steak. They gave her some sort of soft gray nutritive slop instead, but by next morning she was sitting up in bed eating huge quantities of scrambled eggs and asking for more. They swore, afterwards, that they had seen her flesh fill up with muscle minute by minute. So she lived for the next few years in alternative two-month cycles of hunger and gluttony, of control and terror, surrounded by her models of Voyager I and, later, the space shuttle.

Meanwhile, I lived. I made a deal with her insurance company, so I could pay most of her bills without her knowing about it. I was working almost every day — at first I made five hundred a day, then eight, then a grand, then two, then more. I became known, and I was able to buy a house on Long Island. I filled it with books, old ones, mostly, and, for some reason, rocks. I don’t know why, but to see an octavo of The ecuyell of the Histories of Troy in full limp vellum, next to a cracked and jagged piece of gneiss, gave me pleasure. I had a television for a while but finally I had to throw it out, because watching it late at night, seeing all those beautiful people, those beer commercials and ads for jeans in which they wafted toward each other, never quite fucking but always with a hint of it, all this gave me a quite unbearable feeling of loneliness, I mean the kind of loneliness which makes you hate yourself and talks to you about death, which makes your own home unfamiliar and waking up tomorrow impossible. So I threw it out. But mostly my life was ordinary and very good. I worked, I had friends, I had lovers. I came home in the evenings and made myself a cup of hot chocolate, and sat on my porch and read. When it grew dark I ate, usually healthy stuff, salad and artichokes and things. I invested in General Motors, two startup agricultural products companies, a bank, and so on. I had a live-in boyfriend for a while, for five years actually, a porno actor too, his name was George. We broke up because of the usual couple stuff, growing apart and all that, but not jealousy as you might think. I’ve had other girlfriends and boyfriends after that, some for longer than others, and a couple of times I’ve thought of marriage but didn’t really do it. I mean all in all my life was quite average and almost boring, except I went and sexed people for a living, which is good. It was good. But I’ve also seen people flame and crash, flame on some drug or some furious anger that drove them to the life, to the desperate affair with guilt and rejection that was mostly the meaning of Joyland. I saw some flirt with the hard guys and chicks who appeared like hyenas on the edge of the particular ghetto that I lived in, and these friends disappeared into the long black maw of justice. Some of these appeared later on talk shows to participate in the daily circuses of guilt and victimhood, to play the preening lambs who owned up to transgression, who bore the holy anger of America, and then returned gratefully, weeping and sometimes clutching a book contract, to the fold of righteousness.