Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

“There’s no room for that crap,” Jason said from time to time.

Later I began to unpack the boxes. I hung my dresses in the bedroom closet. I put dishes away. Jason appeared from the bedroom, outraged, a clump of my clothing in his hand. He threw my dresses on the floor.

“Wrong,” he said.

“Wrong?”

“You hung them in the wrong closet. Keep your clothes in the hall closet. Clothes are impersonal.” He made it sound like an immutable law of nature.

“Jason,” I began slowly. “Is this my house or not? Because after carrying in all those damn boxes all day, I—”

“Rents are due the first of the month. That means get off your ass and collect them the first.” Jason walked out of the house.

I sat down startled, frightened, angry. I was filled with something burgundy red, thick and overwhelming. The air was liquid. What was happening? I was a holy shrine, ancient, perfected. Now suddenly I was besieged by vandals. There were vulgarities written on my elegant time-smoothed walls. They stole from the poorbox. They were monsters. Something horrible was happening, random, beyond imagination.

Jason came back at midnight. He got into bed and turned his body away from me, facing the wall.

“What’s going on? Please tell me,” I whispered. My head was collapsing into a black mass. I could feel individual atoms crumbling.

Jason said nothing.

“You act like you don’t want me here. You seem to be imposing stipulations on my life here. I feel tentative and—”

Within the darkness I could feel Jason smile. The night between us thickened. Jason laughed. He was beginning to feel better, lighter. The cardboard boxes had frightened him. I had frightened him, standing at the edges of his rooms, violating his routine, his painting schedule, his very existence, with the meaningless clutter of my life.

I covered my face with my hands. I pressed my face, trying to shake my head, my skin, my cells clear. The darkness was strangling. Debris was spilling fast and unpatterned.

“Jason.” I touched his shoulder. I felt him tense beneath my fingertips.

“Leave me alone. I’m tired.”

“I need you,” I whispered, words intoned, a kind of prayer. I was a shrine, old and holy. I was the silence of candlelight and bells. Why the hell was Jason tired? I carried all the boxes.

“You always need something,” Jason said. “You’re a goddamned bottomless pit. Go to sleep.”

“What’s wrong?” I could barely breathe.

“I said shut up. Stop interrogating me. All you do is make it worse for yourself.”

Worse for myself? Was I on trial? Was my demeanor having an adverse effect on the case? And what precisely were the charges against me?

“What the hell are you talking about?” I yelled.

Jason jumped forward then. He pressed his hand over my mouth, hard. His face was contorted through the layers of darkness. The neon light glanced off his teeth. He began shaking my head. I felt his thumb pinching into my lip.

“You want to play another midnight round of Name That Problem?” He was still shaking my head, picking my head up off the mattress like a cantaloupe and throwing me back down. “You hum a few bars and I’m supposed to guess what’s eating your guts and driving you crazy?”

I was frozen. Part of me wanted to run, wanted to run down the three porch steps, down to my car, to the sleeping city, anywhere. That was the real me. The rest of me was a shell, lying quietly, obediently, wide-eyed and amazed.

“Sleep it off, bitch,” Jason said, angry.

Part of me was running down the stairs. Part of me had reached Venice Boulevard. Part of me ran flushed and hot under a full summer moon, silently repeating a chant, slowly, over and over, hypnotically.

Oh, God, it’s a mistake, a mistake, a mistake, I kept repeating. It’s a mistake, a mistake, a terrible mistake. The chant in my head was hopeless, over and over it fell through me like big drops of dirty city rain banging down on trash cans in an alley.

I woke up with a sense of purpose and clarity. Jason was gone. The morning was white and quiet. I would have to go somewhere and think. I would have to find a new place to live.

I edged into the kitchen. Jason was reading the newspaper. I filled a pot with water.

“Always use the white pot for boiling water,” Jason told me. He was working the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. He didn’t look at me.

“Here’s the way it is,” Jason began. He lit a cigarette. “I wake up. I want complete silence. No good mornings. No breakfast discussion. Nothing. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I eat. Then I go to work. I go back to my house and paint. I paint seven days a week. I begin as soon as I wake up. When I’m painting, which is every day, you forget I’m here. I don’t exist. I disappear. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Because I’m fucking tired of the marriage trip,” Jason said. “You take care of your shit. I’ll take care of mine. Are you hearing me?”

“I hear you.”

“Good,” he said. “Just accept it. This is a timeless moment.” Jason looked out the kitchen window at the plants near the side gate. A stalk of yellow canna, the petals thick and hard, waved gently in the early morning sea breeze. The canals were the color of a mirror.

Jason crossed the room. He paused in the doorway. He glanced back at the plants along the side gate.

“It’s going to be a lovely day,” Jason pronounced. Then he opened the front door and walked out.

I had lived with Jason for twenty-four hours. I realized I had a tremendous amount to learn. And I realized that I would never learn it fast enough.

“We hang tough. No matter what, we hang tough,” Francine said.

We were walking down the corridor toward my father’s room. The corridor was long and greenish gray, a kind of tunnel. The world narrowed to a thin channel the color of sheet metal. It might have been underwater. The ward was like a submarine, claustrophobic, gray, locked. There could be no escape.

I was assaulted by the sense of evil in the corridor and small cubicles. The white light was a cool luminous breath. The ward was antiseptic, the sky covered, the stars hidden.

A primitive man would never submit to a hospital. A primitive man would insist on being surrounded by his most magical objects. There would be communal chanting and prayer, the holding of a collective breath. Campfires would blaze into the darkness, spark of cedar logs, air bristling red into black, blood and smoke. There would be amulets, charms, totems. The masks would be repainted. The gourd rattles would be taken from the healer’s hut. There would be dancing, sand paintings and sung re-creations of the tribe’s victories over evil, the close calls and new beginnings, a special kind of ringing.

The healer would beseech the earth. The earth would answer. The sacred bones of the dead sage would gnaw at the red-black night and push off the dirt from the illusionary grave. The dream would bend, and the skeleton talk with real words from a mouth grown lips and tongue again.

The hospital was too blank and uniform. It was a space stripped empty, a waiting room for death. Here the shamans also wore special garb, white masks and white coats. They maintained antiseptic rituals. They communicated in a private ancient language. In their depleted fashion they attempted to preserve the mystery. They adhered to the old forms but lost the substance, the connections to the inexplicable power.

The doctors wore stethoscopes around their necks and communed with machines and it wasn’t enough, not nearly. I wanted antelope horns on their heads, rattles and drums. I wanted some enormous rumbling benediction, magic salts, colored smoke, knees on dirt, stars beacons of prayer.