Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

My father was somewhere smiling. I kissed his lips. He was pointing to something. He was pointing to the door. He made a kind of ripping motion with his fingers.

“You want me to tear off the door?”

My father shook his head violently from side to side. He looked at me as if I were the strangest sort of anomaly. He took a deep breath and pointed to the door again.

I studied the door. He didn’t want me to break off the door. No, of course not. I didn’t even have any tools with me. Just a door. A door with a piece of paper that said no visitors. Yes, of course. He wanted me to remove the sign.

My father motioned for me to come back. I stood near his bed. Then he reached out and grabbed my hand and kissed my palm. I closed my fingers tight into a fist.

I was walking down the corridor past the green cubicles, the death chambers, the humming, the human aquariums. My fist was clenched around my father’s kiss. When I was a child and frightened, my father would kiss my hand. He said if I closed my fingers fast enough, the kiss would be caught inside. My father told me the kiss would stay with me all night. I could put it carefully under my pillow. I could slide it into my pocket. And I would have a piece of him with me always. And the kiss in my hand would warm me. He said it was a magic fire.

I was halfway to the elevator. I knew I could make it. I had a can of tuna fish, a box of crackers, a flashlight, a jumbo can of lima beans, a gold American Express credit card, napkins, an onion and my father’s kiss stored in my change purse, instant fire. It was early afternoon. I got in my car. What more could a woman ask for?

Going, yes, past gray blocks of stone chips called Civic Center rising like cliffs. I tunnel through narrow channels, through sunswirls, liquid yellow whirlpools. I am blurfast past tortuous thin cement gorges, pale scars between concrete slabs and starched hiss of bombardments, asphalt, Minotaurs, cancer, futility. Green chambers scrubbed and waiting for death, human aquariums, fluids oozing, humming. And I am plunging beyond intricacies into the unknown, unpolished, undiminished, also nameless. I am driving. It slips behind me. Cloverleaf interchange of alternative poisonous hissing deadend pathways behind me. Los Angeles, brutal claustrophobic basin of delusion and ripoff, clutter, eerie, sticky, horrible. They came, they saw and went blind. O hallucination of urban gray slabs senseless and rotting behind me. Poor ruined sunsore and sadness for demented City of Angels, of white torment and hideous albino predator birds .

I will awaken .

I will awaken. I will begin again. Anything can be a mantra. Awaken. Begin again. There are precedents: Creation from nothing, water, fire, visionary quests, human sacrifice. I will pick one, invent one. In the beginning, lightning striking a primeval soup and forging amino acids, the original alphabet. In the beginning, black volcanic rock, gneiss, basalt. In the beginning, a Polish village. And out of chaos, ignorance, gangbang lame street follies and ceiling falling down, mice scampering. Something. An inspiration tattooed by lacerations self-inflicted. And Francine, I’m talking about you. Magna Marta, the original, celestial goddess of childbirth and weaving, burials, the unconscious and ancestors. I am surrendering my rage, my sins, contempt and grief. I am beyond and into a greater, older, an impulse, the lashed faces of certain rocks .

I am streaking past pastel boxes, squashed streets with raised chicken feet of television antennas, poultry scratches, sky mutilated by black electronic webs. I am a somnambulist stretching, trying to find the right distance, pushing beyond foundations, the hard evidence. I am released from the familiar grooves and black metal tracks of parallel worlds, insanity, desperation, numb and hot and gutted. And Jason, I tried to make myself small enough for you, kept hobbling and hacking off my limbs, but they kept growing back, growing back. And I am moving, strings cut and winds blowing and going, going. I had a kite in a bird’s shape. It upended in a tree stump and I forgive, I forgive. I am the kite now and terrified as road reaches out fat and gray into a muted unforeseeable distance. Cars weave around me, bumperstickers of CARLSBADCAVERNSPETRIFIEDFORESTSGATORGROVESMAGICMOUNTAINSCRYSTALCAVES. And I am aiming for the arched spine, the fundamental, the bone cradle. Before bedrock and reference points. Before prime and evil. I am windsong, glistening, talking in tongues. The road curves into raw desert, how it stretches, stretches. I am drilling past sand, skimming rocks, gray scorpions and bleached gravel. Yucca waving puffs of white fists. Joshua tree with arms spread in supplication, a sunblinded demented pilgrim .

I will shed intricacies .

I will shed intricacies for the not yet known. I am grace in action and moving fast. I am twenty-seven and a pine tree my age knows more. Rushing into and casting off. I will become lighter, naked. Stone canyons of useless winding steep-sided monster face of ambivalence and indecision behind me. White haze hissing in the city of snakeskin, the rattle at my back, behind me. I am plunging in windtime, bending into the road, the rhythm, the asphalt glistening. Are you listening, Daddy? Clock these times. Inches separate the hero from the bum. I keep going, the heat terrible, scratching my face with fingers of wiry brush. Sure there will be long brutal nights alone, blind into blind and dangerous. But already I sense an other, a morning punctuated by wormsong, ecstatic, exalted. I will run a mile and an eighth. A mile and a half, goddamn it .

Rushing into afternoon, the Mohave opening slightly purple. I will have drums . Boom! Boom! Into black hawks and out the needle’s eye. How I burrowed covert, curled and unnatural. I am shedding the shell, oyster grays and stinging silences, the jars of dried blood unnecessary. I am transformation from molesmall cowering into wind currents, rockchimes, cactus blossoms red and hard and memory is painful. I am streaking through Victorville and I am crazy. I am red driving into walls of red, daze of red. I am Rose. There was struggle, disgrace, failure. I will shed this. I am windborne into airtight crosshatch of coming night, into big feet and drumbeat . Boom! Boom! I will go mad, then, but keep going. I will shed all I have ever known for what is not, what may never. And the sunswirl is behind me. Savage spent hideous sunsore of greed and ruin, Los Angeles most damned. I will shed this. Seventy-three miles from Barstow, last outpost. I won’t stop the car. The road is mine. The wind is mine. I will let it tumble from my lips. I will have cymbals and drums .

I can almost remember .

I was younger. I said this is mine. Big Sur. Berkeley. Mine. Aspen. Mine. I can almost remember. It was before the bayonets and war. Mendocino and Laguna Beach were a strand of exploding jewels I wore. I said this is my town, my land, my country. And I am going, gripping the wheel and not stopping, not stopping. Nineteen miles from Barstow, last littered urban beacon. Clouddance in desert sky, white wings flapping. Hello, clouds. Where are you going? West? Forget it. I’m rushing past Barstow and going. Pass go and keep going. No two hundred? Fuck it. I don’t need it .

I can almost remember .

I was dormant, numb and stupid. I said I never tried to stop a war. I said if it was me, it was some other me, irrelevant. I said I subscribed to absolutely nothing. I said I accepted, submitted, was beaten, utterly broken, willing to slide into the white haze and long white siesta of a race. And I lied. Lied on purpose, yes. Hush of windbreath that I might become and aming, unfamiliar, severed, unique, cut out of time, both the first and the last of the line .