Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

I’d tragically miscalculated. She was right to have given me away, to stay away from me, and now, from Alchemy. Hilda and Dad had wanted me, raised me, and yes, we infuriated each other, but we always loved each other. And Hilda adored Alchemy. I don’t think Greta loved anyone, not even herself.

Sitting there, I understood that Greta was not a narcissist. It wasn’t that she was too big for real life, but much too small. And it scared me that my mother’s machinelike detachment could become me, was the her in me. I hate that about myself, but it’s never changed. I still can’t control the on/off switch to my emotions. Even now, I prefer pain to numbness, to be too emotional than to be inert.

As Greta took an interminably long sip, swoosh, and gulp of her wine, my On switch snapped.

“Fuck this. If you won’t, talk I will. This sleeping little child is your grandson. Do you care to meet him? To know him?”

At last her lips parted into that exquisitely doomed smile that hid, well, nothing. “Yes, but I cannot.”

“Okay, I’m going. You’re not human. You’re not …” Instead of answering, she bent down, and out of her bag she pulled a hat. A red beret. She reached over and tugged it onto my head. “Perfect.” Her face brightened; the gesture pleased her.

Suddenly, I pitied her. “You don’t have to worry. You’ll never see the headline, ‘Garbo’s Daughter Speaks’ in the tabloids.”

“I never thought that I would.”

“I need to ask you one question and then I’m leaving. Who was my father?”

She lowered her eyes, sipped her wine again, and then stared directly at me. I’d hoped to see tears of reflection, the regret of a lost love, or even the flippancy of a one-night stand that ended with me. She sat there, unmoved.

“A man, a woman, a child … He once said I was like a glass rose and he was like a fossilized rose. You think you know the lovers in your life, but truly not.” A slight sense of whimsy had slipped into her voice, but it quickly disappeared. “He’s dead now. So it is impossible for a meeting, you see? There is no reason you need to be preoccupied with him or who he was.”

I could think of a few reasons, more than reasons — my right . But I knew — never was she going to violate her personal philosophy of ultimate restraint.

I stood up and took off the beret and tried to hand it to her. She rebuffed me. “No, no, it is a gift.”

I didn’t want it. Yet I felt impelled by some outside force to take it. I struggled to put on my poncho as Raul rushed over to help. Alchemy, at last, opened his eyes and I kissed him on his head. I bent down so she could see him. Her eyes veered away. I moved closer. I tried to feel an odor beyond the faux essences of her makeup and perfume, to find her soulsmell. Again, nothing.

I placed my lips on hers. She neither kissed me nor pulled back. I whispered in her ear, “We could’ve loved you and made you less alone.” I stood up, strode toward the door, and didn’t look back. I regret now that I didn’t turn around to see her face.

She was about seventy. She lived another twenty years. I could’ve gone to see her, but I never did. To me, she was already dead.

I was incarcerated here and heavily sedated at the time that she physically died. One day, perhaps a year or more after she passed, Ruggles squirreled his way toward my little chambre d’enfer , gnawing at his knuckles outside my door.

“Good Morning, Doctor,” I greeted him. He had weaned me off the worst of the drugs by then. “Hmmm. You smell like you have a question. My olfactory senses are especially keen this morning. Your unpleasant question has the textured odor of the burned plastic of cheap shoes.”

“Salome, you are right. I wondered, after our session yesterday, if you remember the time we discussed your mother’s passing.”

I didn’t recall that session. But I had read about Greta’s death later, in the papers.

Ruggles’s face said he was appalled by my lack of reaction.

“Am I supposed to care? I don’t.” Unlike when Dad or Hilda or Nathaniel passed away and the weight felt like it was severing my heart from my body, I felt nothing.

It is no profound revelation to posit that we experience days or weeks or months in our lives that we remember as if they took place five minutes before. There are years that meld and dissolve as the memories race over us in seconds. Perhaps they stay fresh because we continually relive and reinterpret them. What is bewildering, often frightening, are the moments that we relive like cancerous lesions on the unconscious that turn a dream to a nightmare, or strike capriciously while lolling down the street. One would think that it was Alchemy’s selfless act that Moses would remember most fondly or most distressingly from those first few months of their initial meeting. But no, it was not that at all.

Moses immediately got swept up as another passenger on the juggernaut that was Alchemy’s life from the moment the Insatiables became an essential phrase in the cultural grammar in 1994. A ride that Moses would jump off and on for many years hence.

The fiery speed at which Alchemy lived his life was antithetical to Moses’s contemplative nature and slow dialectic of reason, where he could spend hours deliberating whether to give a student an A or A—. Even though he had long accepted chaos and uncontrollability as the determining forces thwarting one’s will and intentions, he always did his best to foresee the vicissitudes of life. The cloistered safety of a tenured job perfectly fit his self-image. Unlike too many denizens of the academy, he accepted that he was, at best, a concubine to the central culture. Even with the looming imminence of death, Moses speculated his worldview might change under the optimistic sway of Alchemy, of Alchemy’s lightning-fast processes of both calculation and instinct. Could he rediscover the momentary, youthful adventurousness that had once led him to Israel?

As the Focus passed through Albuquerque and sped west along I40, Alchemy began assessing and planning the days ahead. “I have to call my managers.” Moses dialed the number and handed Alchemy the phone. “Hey, Sue, I’m out … No, it wasn’t exactly jail … Listen, I’m coming to L.A. tomorrow … No, to my brother’s … Yes, brother … No, he doesn’t want money.”

They glanced at each other, smiling, while Alchemy held the phone in one hand and the wheel in the other.

“Not a cent,” Moses said.

“Just my blood … Yes, I am sure. He’s a professor. Sue, any change on Nathaniel?… Tell him to stop worrying and I’ll either take him or go to the WTO protests for him … Sue, fuck my image … Yes, time meditating made me want to be more active … I’ll see Nathaniel as soon as I can, but he can’t tell my mom I’m out … I don’t care about anyone else’s e-mails or calls. Tell no one else for now.” Moses flinched as the car swerved to the right. Alchemy didn’t stop talking. “Right, not Ambitious or Lux. I can’t deal until we fix up my bro here. Later.” He hung up. “I assume it’s okay to stay at your place in L.A. One night. If I go anywhere near my home, a snapping finger of stalkertude will be nearby.”

“Of course. Um, I’m a little tired.”

“No problem. Take a nap.”

Moses tilted the seat back and gazed out the window. He regretted having spent so little time excavating the history of this part of the country. He envisioned a scene directed by John Ford, written by John Steinbeck, scored to Woody Guthrie, and photographed by Walker Evans — his mix of western myths conjoined into a false majesty. The true director of the early twentieth-century West was not John but Henry Ford, and the real producers were Harry Chandler and William Randolph Hearst. Maybe one day he’d even write an essay about this mix of myth and history, Moses thought.