Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

2. Marriage.

3. Birth.

4. Death.

5. Contact with evil force, place or person. Also contact with evil spells sometimes called concepts, art, science and history.

6. Contact with holy forces sometimes called miracles or luck.

7. Rebirth.

8. Physical torture.

9. Blood sacrifice, exorcism, etc.

10. Other. (Specify.)

Francine telephoned at precisely nine. Nine, I thought, looking at the clock. Nine, a kind of chime.

“His heart stopped last night,” she said. “Then it started again. I wasn’t here when it happened. I just found out. Actually, he looks considerably better today.” She sounded surprised. It was the first energy I had heard in her voice in weeks. Was it weeks? Her voice had a new dimension, some rumbling of a white mania to come, one suspicious perfect white cloud.

My body was weaving, secretly drunk. Your father’s heart stopped she said and my heart stopped and I felt the blood empty from my face, felt the chill, the cells within collapsing. But it started again. His heart started again she said. And I realized that he wasn’t dead. No, of course not. She was talking. I was twenty-seven when he got it the first time. Now you’re twenty-seven. The wheel spins she was saying. Or was she?

“He looks terrible. Gray. Like hell. But somehow better. For the first time I feel he has a chance,” Francine said.

The Santa Ana winds had disappeared. The day was warm and clear. I found Francine in the hospital cafeteria. She was wearing a white tennis skirt. She seemed rejuvenated. An intern passed our table carrying a tray of fried chicken. Francine watched him walk. “You look lousy,” she said to me.

I shrugged. I was holding a white styrofoam cup. It might have been a small warm white rock.

“Listen, kid. You think I’m ridiculous, obscene? Forty-six with a tennis racket? If I drop dead tomorrow, and I might, just tell them I was here, alive, trying. Are you following me? I haven’t given up. I’m still in there punching. Just like your father.”

But no, Francine wasn’t saying that at all. She was smiling. She was sipping coffee from a white cup. She was saying, “He looks so much better today. They’re going to make him walk tomorrow. The skin graft looks good. The pain has stopped. I’m taking the whole day off. Let’s go shopping in Beverly Hills.”

“I don’t think so,” I said carefully.

“Come on,” Francine said, almost gay. “We’ll start on Rodeo. I’ll buy you a milk shake.” I shook my head no.

“No. No,” she screamed, banging her fist on the table. “That’s all you know how to say. No. No. And you’re getting older. You’re almost thirty. And you’re missing it all.”

I didn’t say anything. Francine was wearing a white blouse over her tennis dress. She looked as if she were wearing a pale pair of wings.

“You’ll never give me a break, will you?” Francine demanded.

Yes/no/maybe. All of the above. None of the above. Are there gradations? Can you use an attached sheet? No?

“There’s so much you don’t know,” Francine was saying. “Your father taught me. All we have is the moment. It can be snatched away at any time. I learned late. But I learned. Don’t you see?” My mother brought her face very close to mine. “Each second is important. See him struggle just for a chance to keep living? Where is your sense of life?”

Gone, I thought, like everything else. The impulse was finite, meager from the beginning. It was chipped into. Francine had taken pieces of it. My father. Somewhere Gerald sneered at me and in that special darkness took a piece. Jason came with a shovel. He dug out pieces of me by the cartful, the truckful. I had a paper kite in a bird’s shape. It broke. Everything broke.

Francine was staring at the girl in the chair. She was examining her/me. “Don’t let your father down,” she said after a while. “I mean it,” she added. Her words were sharp white splinters.

My father’s bed had been raised to a sitting position. He was reading Esquire magazine. His eyeglasses were stuck through the gauze near his ears. He heard my footsteps. He let the magazine fall to the floor.

AM DOOMED.

I sat down carefully near his legs. I could see the bandages on his thighs through the sheet. I was staring at his eyeglasses stuck into the head bandage. In the beginning my father had refused to even touch his glasses. He said he would never need them again. He would never read again.

AM DOOMED.

“What do you mean, doomed?” Was that me talking? CANCER 2X NOW.

“You beat the rap twice. You’re way ahead,” somebody said.

LOOKED IN MIRROR. MUTILATION HORRIBLE.

“There are many different kinds of scars,” I began. Scars of childhood. Francine’s scars of sitting on the cold stoops of brick buildings in winter. Houses where the refrigerator was always locked. Houses where the ceiling collapsed and mice ran across her head and she wasn’t really surprised, she knew they were there. And scars of the first footprints and tire tracks in the new snow. And scars in the neck, scars across the throat. And scars like an invisible web fallen across Gerald’s lap, a kind of glue in his lap where nothing stirred. “There are physical scars, Daddy. And mental scars, emotional scars.”

I HAVE THEM ALL. I HAVE A 3 HORSE PARLAY GOING.

I sat very still. The blinds were partially open. I could see the new white flowers poking star-shaped through thick-looking vines. The morning was still clear.

SAD SAD SAD. A tear slid down my father’s cheek.

SURGERY MISTAKE. SUCKER BET. My father threw his writing pad on the floor.

I reached for his hand. It felt almost lifeless, brittle, a severed leaf. “Daddy,” I began softly, very softly. I had noticed that loud noises made him nervous and angry. “What are you afraid of? The skin graft is working. They’re going to take out the feeding tube soon. You’ll go home. You’re beating this one.”

My father nodded his head. He seemed to be listening.

“Are you afraid the cancer will come back?” Sprout new branches? Grow more tumbleweed in another place, your lungs perhaps?” I handed my father his writing pad.

INSIDIOUS DISEASE. ALWAYS COMES BACK.

“Doesn’t everything come back in a way?” I said. I wasn’t thinking about the cancer. I was thinking about Venice Beach, the way the waves came up and embraced Picasso. I realized if one stood on Venice Beach long enough the sea would be revealed absolutely. If one stood there long enough sooner or later everything would wash up on shore. The sea’s dead returned as rows of coughed-up white bone. Old beer cans, pieces of galley ships and a strangled long-haired orange and white cat.

WANT 2 DIE.

My father wrote that note in a heavy black scrawl. I pretended not to notice.

AM DYING.

“Nobody knows that,” I said. “It’s a photo finish. I wouldn’t throw away my ticket.”

YOUR TRACK ANALOGIES STINK.

I stared at my father. There was a tiny spark in the center of his too dark eyes. I thought he might be smiling.

The telephone was ringing as I walked into my house. It was Jason, warm and apologetic. Was I angry he didn’t come back last night?

“No,” I said. It occurred to me that a person needed hope to be angry. Anger implied expectations and violations. I wasn’t angry.

“Picasso’s gone. I came back this morning and he was gone,” Jason told me. “You know he always waits for me in the morning.”

Was I supposed to say something? Silence. The quiet space was a whirlpool, some kind of vacuum sucking all the air in, swooshing, eating it all up. In the silence black waves wrapped black ropes around a throat of cracked bones.

“Yeah, old Picasso’s gone. I guess he packed his bags and hit the road.” Jason laughed.