Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

The afternoon was leaking out, white blood into white air. And I was white beyond reason. The poisonous shoreline disappeared, singed pure as old shells, their white wormy grooves scorched crepelike, thin as wings. Fat white gulls shrieked in a thick white lull.

I closed my eyes. In the beginning a white sun. In the beginning white amino acids strung together with white ribbon. And I am white marble. No. I am white gravestones. No. I am wearing white bandages around my face. I am tongueless. My mouth is sewed shut. Small white hairs push out in the empty places between gauze and feeding tubes. No.

I sat up. It was better. Yes. I was freshly painted white fence spokes and ivory piano keys. I was giving a piano recital. I had white smooth flesh and a perfect smile. I wore the most expensive white rose. I tossed on whitecaps. I knew the true depths of sea water. I drifted past the last reefs naked in pale silk stockings. My lungs unfurled white canvas on whitecaps while I sailed, sailed.

The telephone rang. I watched my white arm float from my pure white side. “Hello?” I said. And when my mouth opened I drank in clouds.

“He’s in bad pain,” Francine said.

“What?” I was a whitecap, a slice taken from a star. I was untarnished, afraid of nothing.

“He can’t tolerate anything in the tubes. Not even water. Wait. I see the doctor. I’ll call you back.”

I looked out the bedroom window. The canals were an ink. And I was an empty gray corridor. A dull wind blew.

“You want to play now?” Jason asked, resting his hand lightly on my bare back. He had taken the tight white lace panties off.

Silence. Silence of ice sheets. White sheets. Hospital sheets. Marble. Gravestones. A white eulogy. Everyone polite. We did the best we could. Life’s a grab bag. There are no guarantees. I felt like screaming.

“Let’s pretend that you love me,” I began. “I’m your wife. You’ve been gone a long time. But now you’re back.”

“Shit.” Jason yawned. “But we do one of mine later.”

I closed my eyes. Jason was licking the hollows my bones form in my neck. “I’ll never leave you again,” Jason managed with real feeling. He breathed into me, a May wind, strawberries sticking up new pink tongues along hillsides. A pink fluttering. “Let me show you how much I missed you,” Jason breathed into me.

My back was pressing cooling sheets and Jason was whispering into my neck and my eyes were closed and I was digging my long fingernails into the small of his back. I was tumbling, floating, falling down moss-green channels. Night was a kind of silky tunnel. Night rustled and glowed and opened arms of black feathers. The heat was incredible, searing and intense. And I was willing to believe anything, everything, all over again.

“You better get here fast.” Francine’s voice was tight and absolutely sober. I was seized by a sense of horror. The horror was a pile of enormous bricks. The bricks were falling on my head.

“Tell me.” I was already looking on the floor for my jeans. I willed my legs to keep moving, just keep moving while I paced the small hallway in front of my bedroom. Morning was a blank haze. I had gray pebbles for eyes. I didn’t think I was going to make it. The cliff ended, a sheer drop.

“He’s in terrible pain. Terrible. They can’t even pour water into him. He’s crazy from the pain.” Francine paused. Then she said, “They put him in a strait jacket.”

I felt something like an electrical shock. It began at my toes and surged through my entire body. A cold rush. A mainlining of ice. A sensation of small things crawling and hopping in my bloodstream. Goose bumps appeared in a sudden flush across my arms. I felt my hair rising from my scalp. Then I screamed. The scream began somewhere in the blank hazy distance. It took a long time to weave from my toes and finally tumble out black from my mouth. After a while I realized I had dropped the telephone. I picked it up.

All I said was, “What?”

“They don’t know what the pain is from. But he pulled out the tubes. Yanked them out. They found him in the middle of the night. He was shadowboxing in the corridor.” Francine lowered her voice. She took a deep breath. “It took four nurses to put him back in bed. In restraints.”

Dogs were barking on Howland Canal. I heard a man shouting, “Did you hear it? Some lady screaming?”

Francine began to cry. “It’s horrible. He’s slipping. He’s dying. Help me, please.”

“I’m coming.”

Jason was sitting up in my bed. “I demand an explanation,” he said, angry and still half asleep.

I was looking for my car keys. I moved towels and skirts from one corner of the floor to another with my foot. I was pulling on a blouse. I realized that somewhere along the line I must have lost my incentive for keeping a house neat and sparkling clean. I found my car keys on the floor under my shoes. My shoes were under a beach towel and an overturned ashtray. I paused in the bedroom doorway.

“I need you tonight. I haven’t asked you for anything in a long time. Wait for me at your place. Promise me.”

Jason stared at the sheet over his feet. “Give me an explanation first.”

“I can’t now. Just be there.” I looked directly at him.

Then I was walking into the blank early morning haze. The grass in the front yards along Eastern Canal seemed damp. The air was pale and thin. Not the air of earth at all but some other, smaller world with an ancient decaying sun. A world where it was always a stripped dawn. A woman stood on a porch near the alley. “You hear that screaming?” she asked me.

I shook my head no and walked to my car. The rush hour traffic engulfed me like a cold gray wave.

The hospital loomed enormous, five stories of neo-Spanish grayish walls poked into the blank morning. The building itself looked cold. The morning seemed fragile, somehow slippery.

Francine met me in the parking lot. She was sheet white. Her hands trembled. I suddenly realized that the woman who was my mother smelled somehow old, vaguely dusty, musky. Beyond the flush of youth a sense of something else, a kind of ripening. Or more. A sense of decay?

“He was shadowboxing in the corridor,” Francine began. She stopped. “This is the worst thing that’s happened to me since the mice fell on my head. I lived in a foster home where they locked the refrigerator. I was only allowed in the kitchen to clean. I slept in a room where I knew there were mice. I could hear them in the sewing machine. Then one night the ceiling fell down on me. Pieces of plaster and mice. Mice running all over my head, the bed. I wasn’t really surprised.” Francine smiled. “I knew all along there were mice in that room.”

We were riding in the elevator. We were walking down the gray expanse of narrow corridor on the third floor past the portals where the dying lay in fine greenish layers of shadow while the fluids slowly bubbled and oozed and the sunlight fell slow and measured through Venetian blinds and the philodendrons dreamed dark green dreams on the nightstands, dreams of impossible stalks, vines winding into cloud, the sky green, green.

“He says he can’t go on. The tubes. The pain. He told me, wrote me on his pad, he was going to jump off the balcony.”

I noticed a certain chill in the corridor, something cool clinging to the tiles and enamel walls. I shivered.

It was important to be precise. “What did the doctor say?”

“He’s staying pat. Says the skin graft is going to work.”

“What about now?”

“We give him the will to go on,” Francine answered immediately.

She stopped near my father’s room. The door was closed. A sign had been taped to the wood: no visitors. I had seen that sign on the doors of the half-dead, the pasty skeletons curled in greenish shadows while their life ebbed. I saw the no visitors sign tacked to doors just before the chaplain came. Just before the whole family suddenly appeared out of nowhere with the last bouquets, enormous arrangements featuring carnations and roses. Just before families appeared laden with grotesque baskets of fruit and boxes of chocolates. My mother’s hands were shaking.