Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

“What kind of tests?”

“Liver. Kidney. I think this is it. Wait by the phone.”

“What about you?”

Francine laughed a harsh wisp. “Me? I was at the hospital at five this morning. I’m working like every other day. Why don’t you go back to doing what you do best? Nothing.” Francine hung up.

Rose studied me as the light faded, as day shredded and fell down beyond the brick. I’ve been waiting for you, my grandmother said. She laughed and the sound was like wind tearing through something dark and wiry, wind ripping scrub brush.

I will tell you more about Rose later. You say you are walking along the ocean. I also live near the sea but this sea is different, shuttered and untouchable. The sea is important, of course, the patterns and salt.

Is lithium a kind of salt? A white powder? Does it open new channels in the sea’s face? Does it help you ride above whitecaps on a gull’s wing? Does it let you sing?

I folded the letter into an envelope. I crossed the bridge over Eastern Canal and mailed it. Somewhere my mother’s twin sister’s daughter was considering the myriad possibilities in a thing called lithium. Somewhere a young girl was learning her personal history. Somewhere my father was sleeping after being skinned and patched.

It was noon. Jason was lying in my bed waiting. I let him wait.

He looked like a racing dog, lean and sleek and infinitely prepared. He was lying on his side, balanced on one elbow, the afternoon draped across him like a sheet. The shadows where curtains pinched sunlight glanced across his skin, small exploding stars. He was wearing a pair of my white lace panties. They were very tight.

The television was loud. Dust danced in the crevice where sunlight bounced against the paler light radiating from the screen.

I sat down on the edge of my bed. The windows were open. I could see the canals below, a pale buttery patch beyond sunflower stalks.

“Tell me you like me in white lace,” Jason demanded. “Tell me.”

He meant tell him a story about sex. He wanted me to spin a fantasy that might excite him. It was something that had evolved after our reconciliation. We discovered a place where we could forget our life was a continual state of war by curling into the soft silvery underbelly of invention.

I might wear a silk dressing robe. I would light candles in my bedroom. Or wash him slowly in a bathtub fat with bubbles and dry his body with warm towels. I massaged his neck and rubbed oil into his back. We found a cherry-flavored cream that turned hot on the skin and still hotter when the cream was rubbed. I poured it on him straight from the bottle.

Jason flipped through a magazine of color photographs showing women making love together while I did this. I licked his ankle and the inside of his thigh. I buried myself in his lap. I was sweating. I was working hard.

“You should buy black garters,” Jason said, looking at the magazine.

“Do something to me,” he said. He closed his eyes. “Tell me a story.”

It was another night. It was raining. Jason lay on his back with his mouth half open. His face was swollen with expectation. In the half-light his legs looked like porcelain.

“A gallery is having an exhibition. The room is empty. I bring you out”—I was watching his face, watching his back dance across the sheet—“on a chain. I lay you down on a platform. You’re the exhibit. A crowd has been invited. Everyone gets to use you.” Jason’s mouth was wide open. I thought he had started shaking.

“Who uses me?”

“Whoever wants to.” I studied his face. “Men use you,” I said softly and watched Jason’s hips rise from the bed. He was pushing himself into the darkness. “Men sit on your face, Jason. You’re tied up. You can’t move. One after another, they sit on you. They push their cocks down your throat. They sit on your face and you push your tongue into their asses. You lick them.”

“Men use me?” Jason whispered. He was moving from side to side on the bed, doing a kind of dance with the darkness.

“They fuck you.”

“No,” Jason cried.

He meant yes.

“Don’t you feel better now? Working out your anger like that?” Jason asked softly.

I thought about it. It was later that night. We were in bed. After a while I said, “No.”

“Tell me about women,” Jason might say, leaning his small body deeper into the mattress and slowly rotating his hips.

And I might tell Jason a story about meeting a young woman at a party, a girl who was younger than I had ever been. I might tell him that I drove her home by accident, expecting nothing. I hadn’t wanted a lover that night. I hadn’t even bothered to bathe. My panties were still damp from his sperm. I would tell him about her young hands slowly sliding my blue jeans down from my hips and her tongue flickering, a moth wing licking me and licking him, his wall of white glue still curled up inside me. And Jason’s hips would be moving from side to side silky and silvery on the white sheets while the neon bulbs in the backyard bathed the whole room in a light like a full moon’s.

“Let’s play,” Jason breathed on the bed beside me. “Tell me you love me in lace.”

On the television a reporter was pointing to a group of starved-looking children lying in a rut at the edge of a thin muddy road. They could have been a stack of old broken boards. The camera came in for a close-up of their wide dazed horrified eyes.

“Do I look like a woman?” Jason asked. He was running his fingertips across the tight white lace panties, across the place where the elastic waistband cut a tiny red groove into his swollen penis.

Yes? You look lovely. I’ll lick you, seduce you. No? You look awful. Do penance, I’ll beat you. Why, I could be sixteen. I could be a man. The captor or victim. We were beyond distinctions. Things danced and snaked sharp and sparkling. Things floated on crisp wings, nameless. It had all become simply a matter of shadow and light, shape and patches of color.

And white. Marble white. Gravestone white. My father in his white crib. My father newly bandaged again, new wounds, more stitches. And white, the tight white lace panties. Jason’s skin a kind of perfect porcelain.

“You’re lovely,” I breathed. “You are my jade and flame breath bitch.”

“Take them off,” he whispered. “Take them off with your mouth.”

I lit a cigarette. “Do they hurt you? Do they cut into you?” Outside it was still noon, unmoving.

Jason moaned. We had done this before. “Oh, yes, yes.” He sounded like a little boy. A little girl?

“They burn,” Jason whispered.

“Good. Think about how much they hurt and burn. I might make you wear them for days.” How could I make Jason do anything? “You know what they would become like?”

“Yes,” Jason whispered.

“Tell me.”

“A diaper.”

“Let’s get high,” I said.

The alcohol and cotton were already on the nightstand. I sat on the floor. Jason held my arm balanced against his knee. Blood jumped into the needle.

Suddenly wild moths were beating my eyes wide. I was the candle and the arc of light. Jason had found my fragile blue pulse. The room was inordinately yellow. I smelled alcohol. The room was filled with ripening lemons. Even the light bulb was a glistening yellow metal, as a captured moon might be. And I was sailing the warm water of a tropical harbor and swimming above darting black sharks to a cove with a waterfall choked by ferns spilling down moss-smooth rock.

I sighed. I was arctic white. The sea opened her icy lip. My path edged avalanches and albino seals. I was white under a white skull of sky in my own white season. It was a kind of permanent childhood Christmas. I stood in a room with tables covered by white linen. There were big white boxes tied up with white silk ribbons. I unwrapped knee-length white lace-up leather skates. I skated down pavement white with snow. There was ice. I didn’t skid.