Lydia Millet - Love in Infant Monkeys

Course Kabbalah was something else again. It wasn’t that you deserved to be saved, it was that God was in you . The power of the names of God, the seventy-two names inscribed in figures of light. . what if the bird had tiny eggs in a nest somewhere? She had her own eggs, Lola and Rocco. This thing could be a mother too. Poor little thing. Birds were graceful. She wouldn’t look that good if someone shot her. Bad thought! Knock on wood. She reached out for a thin tree. Did a tree count as wood? I mean yeah, she knew that, but for luck purposes?

Actually, if she was shot in the right place, then well lit, she could look excellent. Kind of a martyr concept. Consider. If not shot, crucified. Good one there.

Now the eggs would die in the abandoned nest, forgotten. But maybe not, if this bird was a man. Rooster, that is. When it came to pheasants, they called them hens and roosters. (Good work, self.) Too bad she couldn’t tell. You couldn’t check between a bird’s legs like with a dog or a horse, nosirree. A male bird had nothing out there bobbing and dangling. Really no way to know. Unless you were, like, a bird-penis specialist. (Kidding, self.) The poor birds had no dicks. Their sex was in the plumage. Any idiot knew that. Different colors, she guessed, but then there were the young ones that all looked the same. Piece in the Mirror had recently called her “an accomplished breeder of pheasant and partridge”—good. Good. In the sense of manager , she managed the breeding. She didn’t sex the things personally — so what? She hired very good gamekeepers. Delegation was key.

She was chosen by God. That was what so many people seemed to completely overlook. What else explained her meteoric rise to stardom? Her continued success? For twenty years now she had basically been a megastar. Try the most famous person in the world, basically. They said her name in the same breath with Elvis and Marilyn . What, because she was pretty? Just because she could dance and had mastered a Casio? (Kidding, self, just kidding!) She had talent, even brilliance, even exceptional brilliance (“brill”—use in moderation), and nothing’s wrong with a Casio anyway. The eighties were the eighties.

But that alone would get you to the corner gas station. (“Petrol.” Good thinking.) True to her name, which was not even a fake one, she had been chosen. Chosen to embody.

Now and then someone, usually a crazed psycho, asked: “Are you the Second Coming?” Because that was what it looked like, if you were literal-minded. Like maybe she was the Mother of God, Mark II. She wouldn’t go that far, of course. There was a reason they called them psychos. But the kind of luck she’d had couldn’t really be called luck anymore. Luck was catching a bus, maybe winning a raffle. Luck was a good parking spot.

You had to keep this kind of knowledge under wraps, though, as a celebrity. You had to keep it a secret between yourself and yourself or you would end up a Tom Cruise. Believing the sun shone out of your sphincter, beaming with the smugness of an All-Knowing Colon.

When all you were, at the end of the day, was a highly paid face.

But she got him, basically, the whole Scientology thing. Not her “cup of tea” (good work, self!) but what the media didn’t get, when they made fun of her and Guy for Kabbalah, or Gere for his Dalai Lama or Cruise for his pyramid scheme or whatever the Dianetics thing was, was that you needed to worship too. The fans worshipped you because they needed something — well, what were you supposed to do? Well, prostrate yourself before the Infinite. Clearly.

OK, granted, sometimes the mirror suggested it: Not your fault if your reflection reminded you of all that was sacred, all that was divine and holy. The world would do it to you. At that point you were the victim. Brainwashing, like with anorexics. Too many magazine covers. But she resisted. She was actually very humble. And of course, it was not wrong to see God in yourself. Anyone could do it. That was where the intellectual part came in. She read the holy books, she read old plays and that. . it helped her, as an artist, to be extremely intelligent. Besides being a savvy businesswoman — she got that a lot, and rightly — and even a genius at the marketing level, she was a seeker. A seeker never gives up.

She was pretty sure she remembered there was some kind of bird that would sit on another bird’s eggs, hatch them and feed them like they were its own. The Mia Farrow of nature. Maybe one of those little mama-birds would come rescue the eggs of the dying one. She hoped so. Other day she’d seen that pigeon she told Vogue was the reincarnation of Cecil Beaton. . The best fags were all English fags. Englishmen were the Ur-faggots, pretty much. All other fags in the world were pale imitations of real English fags. This was the land of homos; even the straight men were fags here. One reason she liked it so much. In the U.S. guys were basically rapists; here they seemed uptight and formal, with their great accents and not showing any emotion, but all the time they were basically daydreaming about nancy boys in sailor suits. Not all of them, of course — I mean, what would a sex goddess like her do without at least a few of the poor “sods” (pat to self!) being genuine heteros but, you know, the default position. (“Benders, bum bandits, ginger beer.” Use in moderation.)

Guy was not gay, of course. But he had an edge of anger to him. The ones that weren’t gay were often angry about it.

It was a trade-off, more or less.

OK. The bird was finally chilling out. Lying there. Effin’ dead.

“Oi. Bag one, then?”

She jumped. He’d snuck up right behind her. It was the red-faced “bloke” from “down the pub,” Guy’s new pet “lager lout.” ( Self! Ex cellent!) Pig, as far as she knew. Gave her the creeps. What Guy saw in these losers from the King John with their saggy beer tits. . Come to think of it, she liked this one even less when he was carrying a gun. A gun was like a cigarette that way: If you already looked good, it made you look better; if you looked crap to begin with, it made you look even worse. This particular “lager boy” had a chip on his shoulder about women with power. It hung on him like a stink. Made him actually dangerous.

Best not to challenge him. Alone here in the middle of the woods.

“I guess, you know — actually, I feel pretty bad. You know? I mean, it was really suffering.”

“Brain the size of a peanut, yeah? How much suffering could there be?”

He was openly contemptuous. Thing about these lager boys of Guy’s was, they gave her a reality check. Like, what would it be like to be a regular person again? They had zero respect for her, for her megastar stature. At this point in her career, most people she met either had to resist an urge to genuflect or got completely tongue-tied. Often their mouths hung open like Down syndrome kids’. (Which was sad. The real retards, that is. Come to think of it, retards were among the few who still acted normal.) Once she had cheek-kissed a journalist — one, two, in the English manner — and he’d fainted and soiled himself all over the place. And that was a guy who was used to famous people; they were his total job. You learned to spot in a second which ones were going to freak out. Point was, the lager louts would have been refreshing if they weren’t such assholes. She was sorry for their wives and girlfriends.

He leaned down to pick it up.

“No! No,” she said, and put out her hand. “Just — thanks, but you can leave it. I want to just leave it there.”

“Defeats the purpose, dunnit.”

“I just want to leave it in peace. I don’t want to desecrate the corpse.”