Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

“Go on,” Gerald said from the hallway. “Whore. I’ve seen the devil. Big deal. He opened an import shop on Telegraph Avenue. He’s got a backpack and smokes hash. Go on, whore.”

Then night exploded, a tunnel collapsing in. And I was running into the night barefoot with the car keys.

I had rarely driven the car. Gerald said my manual dexterity and peripheral vision were inadequate. Now I pushed the car into darkness and let the night swallow me. I crossed the bridge into San Francisco feeling heady, letting myself glide down to the coves of flickering light. I parked the car in North Beach and began walking down Broadway.

The streets were crowded with summer night life. I walked quickly, as if I were meeting someone. I walked so fast I did not see the posters of naked women on the walls and doors of burlesque clubs. I felt the jostle of shirt-sleeved men and women, felt the imprint of their arms and legs as they passed. I felt the obsidian I had swallowed. I felt it turn inside, cutting new blood grooves. Something was moving through the empty corridors I imagined myself to be. Something was growing legs and a spine. Something was breathing. Soon it would start kicking down all the fine identical rows of pale gray locked doors.

I went with the first man who asked me. I was asked more than once, but in the beginning I didn’t quite understand, didn’t hear. Now I said yes, said yes before I clearly noted the man’s features. I had walked nearly a block with him before I realized he was a sailor and young, maybe younger than I. He was chewing gum.

“Where’s your place?” He had a Southern accent.

“Place?” I repeated, looking carefully at him for the first time.

“Room? Hotel?” He stared at me.

I was speechless. Perhaps I was not satisfactory. Perhaps he would not want me when he saw me, saw me as Gerald did. Maybe it wasn’t Gerald at all. Maybe I was the source of the terrible lack. It was my failure. I looked down at my legs. They were clearly outlined under the thin cotton skirt. Perhaps even the dark hairs showed, a blacker smudge in the night.

“I’ve got a car,” I suddenly remembered. We were walking slower now, retracing my route, wandering parallel to Broadway, looking for the car.

“I haven’t done it in a car since I left home,” the man said.

I handed him the car keys. I leaned back against the seat, into the seat, and let the city reach out silvery neon spokes at my face.

We were winding down along the bay, down a long cliff. He parked the car on a cement strip above the ocean. I could see the white line of the curling breakers below us.

“You ain’t what I planned on,” the man said.

I had let the skirt bunch up around my knees. My legs looked long and white. I turned my ankle toward the light, slowly.

“I can be what you want,” I said. The words seemed odd to my ears. I had no idea where they came from. I felt my nipples stiffen.

“You ain’t Chinese.” The man laughed. “Come to Frisco, I want a real Chinese whore.” The man looked down at the water. “Or a real secretary. High-heeled shoes and all kinds of leg.”

I flexed my ankle in the darkness. I was disappointing this man, this stranger. I was filled with a sense of failure.

“You shy?”

He was pulling me across the seat toward him. I let myself be pulled. My head rested on his lap. I felt him stir under me. Not certain what to do, I patted him gently, the way one does when reassuring a child.

The man arched himself toward me, toward my mouth. He had unbuttoned himself. He steered his hard cock toward my face. I opened my mouth. I could taste the man as I drove back across the bridge alone, could still feel his thick white fluid filling my tongue and lungs. It was like clams and sawdust, some kind of white glue. I shivered.

Gerald was sitting in his same position at the kitchen table. He was reading Rollo May. He did not look at me.

Heat burned the city. The day felt thick and old even early in the morning. June struggled to become July. Everything seemed out of focus, too liquid and burdensome.

Gerald began playing the guitar. He only played scales. He played the same scales over and over. He had been playing the same scales since May.

Gerald realized that the mind contained a musical component. The parallels between music and mathematics staggered him. Notes and numbers. Harmonies and equations. Language and sound. I had already slept with the bartender at work by then. That had been different. He had an apartment. I had lain in bed with him. He had kissed me. He had not seemed disappointed.

“You hate my guitar, don’t you?” Gerald asked, not looking at me. His fingers kept moving on the strings. His fingers had become calloused, cut with deep black grooves at the tips.

“Don’t you understand?” Gerald was staring at me now. “Pulsars are simply another type of flute. The universe is an orchestra.”

It was late afternoon. Gerald had sat on his straw mat in front of the television since early morning. Now he watched old black-and-white movies, grainy from age, about radiation monsters and magnetic monsters that looked like vacuum cleaners. Giant reptiles stepped over miniature cardboard Londons and Tokyos, breathing fire like mythological dragons. An American town was held in the hypnotic grip of aliens, things hatched from eggs or born from large seed pods.

“It’s a metaphor,” Gerald said. “Science fiction is our modern mythology. It’s industrial man’s creation myth.”

I would lie in the thick heat half listening to the birth and death of monsters in the living room. The voices seemed muted and scratchy, like the poor old grainy prints. Always, in the end, a gleeful but subdued and momentarily humbled population smiled from the ruins of London or Chicago while the monster burned, while the monster was reduced to a big puddle of ash, while the monster was chained or hacked or drowned.

“It’s an allegory about human nature,” Gerald said. “Don’t you understand the importance of this?”

It was Freudian, of course. It was Jungian. It had to do with the musical scales he was playing. It was night. I wasn’t working. I had already slept with the history graduate student who lived in the apartment directly below ours.

Somewhere, Kirk stared into what looked like a small flashlight. “Are they intelligent?” he asked.

Somewhere, Spock stared into what appeared to be a fancy toothbrush. “They do seem to have a highly organized, efficient system of government. They have roads, monuments, scientific institutions, peace, prosperity, compassion, justice.”

“Yes, but are they intelligent?” Kirk asked. “Have they got motels and car washes? Do they have Pepsi and credit ratings?”

“You hate my playing the guitar,” Gerald accused.

He was watching television. Two men with walkie-talkies gestured wildly in the direction of a smoking ruin. Over the top of the rubble an immense humanoid head appeared. The mouth opened and a stream of fire engulfed the men with the walkie-talkies. The ground made a kind of sucking sound.

“You hate it when I have fun,” Gerald said, not looking at me.

I walked over to his straw mat then. Gently, I pried the guitar from his lap. I walked into the hallway and swung the guitar at the doorjamb like a baseball bat. I beat the wood against the wall until the strings popped out and the guitar was simply a collection of wooden splinters.

Gerald began to cry. That’s when I got the knife. I stabbed the brown Naugahyde sofa. Then I tore the white guts from the three oversized pillows Gerald always said we never needed.

“You’re crazy,” Gerald screamed. His pale gray eyes widened.

Suddenly, as if released from a terrible burden, he sprang awake. He was packing. We didn’t have any suitcases. I was lying down in bed again, with the knife on the sheet next to my thigh. Gerald was running through the house, throwing his clothing and books into pillowcases. There were bits of feathers everywhere, on his shirt, on the floor, on my hands.