Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

I knew she was a good old woman, a clean old woman without black whiskers on her chin or a noticeable deformity, a limp or cane, cataracts or plastic devices embedded in the flesh. She was a good old woman, a clean old woman who did not smell. Still, I turned away from her while she pulled sponge cake from her small dirty oven. Magic.

I must be careful.

I forgot the rents. I walked in the sea breeze, the sole inhabitant of an underwater city. The pressure was enormous, each breath a struggle, a battle with individual molecules of air, those invisible clawed cells.

I stood on the bridge near my house. The day turned gray. The air was gray. The boulevard was gray, like an old sick dog.

Soon night would fall. Stripped of the myth of purpose and order, the streets and buildings would return to their true forms, a collection of mud and brick, things dug from the earth and left to rot under drained banks of low rust-red clouds.

Soon it would be the hour of the amulet and magic chant. The moment when man remembers his ancient fear of being alone, separated from the tribe as darkness fell and the predators began to stalk, the leopards crawling out of shadows with their slow torch eyes and claws.

The whole earth seemed to hang at the edge, suspended, not day and not night. A long moment of indecision. Then the battered sun spilled one fine plum-and-coral line into the thinning sky. Gulls ceased shrieking.

I just stood on the bridge, shaking my head as I stared at the blackening water, shaking my head back and forth, back and forth as if trying to pry the dream splinters from their perch in the dead center of my scalp. Then I telephoned Jason.

“I’ve been going over my life,” I began. “One miserable frame at a time. Thinking about how sordid it’s been, how degrading and filled with mutual contempt. I really feel sick.”

“You’re so solipsistic, It’s insufferable,” Jason said. And, softer, “Why don’t you come over?”

“Come over? I don’t think I’ll ever come over again.”

“Oh,” Jason said finally. “If I had known that two hours ago, I could have made plans for tonight.”

“You still can.” I hung up.

For seven years I have lived continually threatened, feeling that a good half of Venice, California, was constantly being auditioned for my position. And a good half of the time I did nothing at all. I lived in my special silence, my world within a world of cold white tiles and ice sheets, and thought, good God, won’t somebody please come and take this walking, breathing, stinking nightmare off my hands?

And someone did.

And I did not speak to Jason for thirteen months. I lived here in the Woman’s House four canals away from Jason and constructed my life in such a fashion that I did not run into him, not once.

We reconciled. It was that simple.

I met Jason for a drink. After all, it had been thirteen months without him. I had spent two months traveling through Mexico and Northern California with another man. Later I decorated a second man’s Christmas tree. I attached neon bulbs and strips of silver tinsel to fir branches with fingers that were not my own, dead fingers, inanimate and oddly frozen, another layer of decoration.

Nothing touched me. Jason clung to everything. I went with another man to Mexico City. I tried to forget him under a gouged white tequila sun while bells rang. I felt stalked by the cathedrals festering like abscesses on wide cobbled plazas where women squatted by stacks of Chiclets piled into holy pyramids. Jason haunted me.

The men came and went. They were interchangeable, pushing meaningless pieces of themselves into me, a stab of quartz, glistening disks, a kind of dying alphabet drying without residue. I sent them away. I dismissed them as Jason did his women and felt nothing. I was a tree in winter, half asleep, whittled naked, enduring.

Jason called on his birthday. I knew he would. I had been waiting all day.

“It’s my birthday.” Jason breathed black warm into the telephone, black with night and expectation, black and warm through the wires, black over the black metal webbing of canals. Jason, a black hawk strutting. Jason with his whole black bag of tricks.

“I’m thirty today,” Jason said, as if those were the magic words and everything would be forgiven.

“So?” It was the first thing I had said to him in four months.

“So I thought we could get together.”

“Your girlfriend busy?”

“I’ve got no girlfriend.”

“Too bad.” I hung up.

My hands were shaking. I could still feel his voice brushing my face. Sealed parts of me breathed again, stretching awake, hungry.

It was dangerous to speak to him. His words echoed through my head and body like a kind of summer wind. The Santa Ana winds, perhaps, that blow fierce and uncontrollable. The sudden desert winds. The city captured, singed nightly. The crime rate rises. There is violence, confusion, a strange burning.

Jason telephoned on the Fourth of July. “I’m all alone,” he said miserably. He made it sound almost like a crime. “I’m not surprised.” I was also alone.

“Let’s just get one drink. Celebrate our illusion of freedom with the other enslaved jerks. Get some almost bicentennial maya. White maya,” Jason offered.

I bit my lip. I remembered Jason tying up my arm with his bathrobe belt, my heart racing, my hand pumping. And hitting. The sigh and transformation into arctic white, enamel white, cloud chips, the white sea opening icy white lips.

I lit a cigarette. I was sweating. “Your timing is terrible. You should have hustled somebody last week. Everybody loves you for three or four days.”

“Do you love me?”

“No.” I hung up.

For the first time I considered the possibility that I might actually see him again. And if I did see Jason again things would be very different, very different indeed.

Jason telephoned at Christmas. He was drunk. Music played loud in the background. He shouted above it. “Sorry to bother you. Nostalgia. Just wanted to hear your voice.”

“You always want what you don’t have, Jason. That’s your private hell.”

“I hurt you. I was stupid,” Jason said quickly. “Could we get together? As friends?”

“We’re not friends. I don’t even like you,” I said. My heart was pushing black torpedoes through my veins. They exploded. It rained and the drops were gigantic yellow moths. Parachutes with red and magenta folds were opening, billowing down. A choir was singing.

“Could you just see me out of pity?”

I thought about it. Then I said no.

Jason telephoned on my birthday. I was surprised. I didn’t know Jason knew when my birthday was. He had ignored the occasion for three consecutive years. I was caught off balance. I was alone. I agreed to meet him for a drink.

At first I didn’t recognize him. He was standing near me wearing a black cowboy shirt and a big black cowboy hat. He looked thin and pale and miserable, vaguely unhealthy, as if he had spent the entire year subsisting on beer and potato chips.

When Jason sat down at the small round table he brushed his leg against mine. I tried not to look at him, to look instead at the city below. The ocean was a solid blue haze. The streets were a simple collection of horizontal and vertical lines now elongated, now fattening into a wide blank gully of freeway.

Jason stared at his beer. “I thought you might have forgiven me.”

He reached for my arm. His hand circled my wrist. His hand was hot, was lava, metal, a kind of girdle, a goddamn wedding band. And I was breathing in the texture of his skin, the pressure of his hand, his closeness. In a rush I began to remember, began to tremble.