“Mama pow Dudley hour flow Mama pawn bower Body low Mama fawn flood shower.”
“Did you hear that?” I said to Emily. “She said ‘mama.’”
“She like nineteen months now?”
Just this morning, Mrs. Support Stockings told me she was referring Juni for medical and speech. She said it with a studied face, one meant not to convey judgment. “Most of them, they outgrow it,” she says. “But Quincy kids, we’re extra careful. These babies have had hard little lives.”
Sometimes, my counselor had said, there can be a dulled sense of attachment. I have to do the math to answer Emily’s question. “Twenty.”
“She’s getting what she needs here, I think,” says Emily.
It takes me a few beats to make my voice cooperate. “Yes. Yes, I think this is a place where she can grow.”
“Both of you,” says Emily. “I see how hard you’re working. It’s in you, Mellie. Give it time to take root.”
The facility here is new, and it has to be noted that OneLife has poured money into what can’t be a profitable operation. Each suite has its own balcony, two separate bedrooms and a common area/kitchenette. The furnishings are mid-price hotel, lots of ivory and beige. I think it pissed Emily off, when I showed her the in-room washer-dryer. They live pretty minimally at her place in Dorchester; Emily’s still working out her credit six years after getting sober, and her CPA tuition is something she has to pay outright. I can see how Quincy House might feel luxe. Between the OneLife card, whatever it conveys, and Emily’s pleading, I’ve jumped a ten-month waiting list. The other women who are here have fought like hell for their spot.
Not surprisingly, Nancy is the one who pushed the card on me and it’s through her that I know the rough outlines of what they do at the high-end centers. There are these headsets, with rocks fixed into them which are supposed to focus you on an inversion point, a place of branching possibility. A bit, they pass off the flake factor like it’s just a more specific practice of mindfulness—the stones are soothing, are more or less placebo. What the representatives say on Oprah, on their websites, it’s all about cross-references in reputable journals, about outcomes-assessment and best practices. But once you get more deeply into it, the preferred client services, the higher levels of work, the promises OneLife makes become more exaggerated. Money in your pocket! Lovers at your doorstep! All your dreams fulfilled!
There are no rocks at Independence House. A OneLife person comes in weekly and leads us in guided meditations—emptiness is an opening, that sort of nonsense. Most of us sleep. I think about what I know about the yoga centers, the rich people going on these retreats, eating macrobiotic diets. Maybe it’s because of this public partnership that this place pushes science instead of séance. Maybe someone thought women who’ve done time aren’t going to be susceptible to scams. Maybe it’s shittier than that, an assumption about poor people and what they need. It’s around the edges, though, the mystical aspect, in the workbooks and the curriculum. I’ve seen a headset on my counselor’s desk.
But either way, the curriculum or the rocks, they’re more the same than you’d suspect. The fact is, there are only a few things anyone can offer that a junkie wants: the possibility of transformation, a certain means to get there. And whether it’s a stone or a workbook, they all pretend you that eventually, you’ll be whole again.
Now, on the porch, Emily shakes her head. “Is it a load of bullshit? Of course it’s a load of bullshit. If cloud sickness were a memory problem, it wouldn’t bring insight. We know, you and I, what we’ve seen in the cloud. But that doesn’t mean this therapy doesn’t work. Let’s call it a difference at the level of interpretation. There’s a just inherent value in sucking it up. I know, for example, you don’t pray. You know how I started praying? Sank down on my actual knees and said the actual words. I didn’t believe any of it. My heart was full of ash, but I did it, and I got saved.”
“I’m a Jew, Emily. We don’t do saving and we sure as fuck don’t do knees.”
“Junkies need structure, Mellie. You need structure.” She flips through the notebook and can’t help a snicker here and there. But I wouldn’t love her, I wouldn’t trust her if she took every little thing in earnest. I tell her something along these lines, without the love part.
“Precisely,” says Emily. “You don’t have to take it in earnest. You just have to do it. Life, one thing after another.”
“What if I don’t like life?”
“You won’t,” says Emily, “not always, but if drugs worked to fix that, we’d both be high right now.”
In the curriculum, as my therapist has explained, you use the workbook to identify the faultline and during guided meditation you navigate new pathways and then you go on these contrived little outings to build in new tracks. For the activities, they encourage you to do something which is relevant to, but not a repetition of your old life. So, if you were homeless, you volunteer in a soup kitchen. If you shot up, you distribute clean needles. But I’ve been trying to explain that there aren’t like volunteer gigs in my industry; I can’t make a pinch pot about it.
“Well,” says Emily, “OK, but how about, your shrink’s idea is it might make sense for you to be in a production? You know, instead of making the thing?”
“No,” I say. “Let me think about it. No. No way. No.”
Emily smokes her cigarette and watches me flounder.
“I can’t act. I don’t act. I mean, what evidence do you need besides I’ve been around cameras for fifteen years and I never once stepped in front of one?”
“Really?” she says. “I thought you did a turn like that.”
“Must be your other sponsee,” I say.
“Anyway, no camera. No acting. That program guy—Isaiah? Some weird name like that—is making an audio documentary? Is that a thing, like an audiobook? Anyway, you know him from Monday meeting.”
“The bald guy? He has some kind of a rep, right?”
Emily shrugs. “Nothing super creepy. There was an injury, I guess, or maybe like a mental thing, result being he does not date. Anyway, he’s been looking for people who used in the early days, in the eighties. He wants to illustrate cloud before the big Clinton bubble; before they came out with all those prescription anti-depressants. I mentioned you—or maybe he asked about you.”
“Why don’t you volunteer?”
“Me? Are you kidding? With my ex’s hearing next week, and his family making noise about custody? I can’t put my voice on the internet saying how much I loved getting high. Plus, my court job, and maybe fingers crossed, having an accounting gig someday. It’s only this year my arrest got officially expunged.”
She exhales over the railing.
“I can’t take the risk,” Emily says.
“But it’s fine for me?”
“Have you Googled yourself recently?”
I shake my head, but I know what kinds of projects I’m credited on. Plus, it’s not like anyone’s going to sue for custody of Juni.
“It doesn’t really matter if we think it’s stupid. It is stupid. So’s a thirty-day medallion. So’s the serenity prayer. Your shrink thinks being interviewed by some guy will map your brain right? Give the interview.”
“Emily,” I say. “One thing we’ve always understood about each other is that down here, in this world, practical stuff intervenes. You can be in recovery, but you still need to take out the garbage and show up at the appointment. I need to get home. I’m on a deadline. A kind of a deadline.”
“This thing with your boss? You figured it out?”
“Almost. If I do this thing, this interview, will you smooth it with my therapist?”
“I don’t make bargains, Mellie. But, it would incline me more, which yes, would incline your counselor.”
There is one other matter on which I have not been entirely straight with Emily or my therapist. It’s a small thing. But when I’d arrived here, that first day, and gone upstairs to change, a handful of scraps had falle
n out of the pocket where I’d shoved them when Emily interrupted me at my desk. I’ve been keeping them folded in my wallet. OD TO 2f, the blurry photograph with the message—Kif-Vesely’e on the back. I haven’t been entirely straight with myself. Those nighttime spells, when I am aching, I trace the letters, repeat them like an incantation. What to make of the old photograph, of a place I know I’ve been, with the words from the driveway man written on the back? How to square that with California? And what if it is keeping them, these little objects, the rememory and rememory, which is burning the broken tracks in my mind? If I let them go, would I launch on some long and virtuous path toward a better future? The video clip, the object in my paperback, there are habits of mind which lead only backwards. And urgently, urgently, I need to go in a different direction now.
Juni is wrapped around the caregiver again, and this time, the woman caves to her tenderer self and hoists Juni onto her hip. You want your child only ever to be looked after by those who love her, and it is the thing which breaks my heart most in the world that I am all she has. I don’t believe a kid needs a dad, per se, but it’s only by the narrowest margin that someone like me could ever become enough for a child with her needs.
The caregiver said it was the irregular breathing that alerted her, that there is a hitch in my baby’s breath she has seen before. And the thing with the nonsense.
“It’s not nonsense,” I said. Again.
“It can be hard for parents to distinguish between vocalizations and actual language,” she said. “How long has it been going on? Has she ever had an episode where she couldn’t get a breath? There’s a correlation between the symptoms, the speech problems, the breathing irregularities and full-blown CBS. That’s what the experts need to determine.”
Now, Emily taps the cigarette on the railing and her ash falls and breaks on a holly bush still bright with winter berries. It feels like spring is coming late this year. There are the pale yellow stalks of daffodils, the green shoots of tulips, but the snap of winter lingers in the air.
In Cloud Baby Syndrome, not enough oxygen reaches the brain. Early intervention, to some extent, can correct for the damage. To some extent. I will air into her lungs. And, as if in answer, she speaks. Her words to me are so lovely, carry so much in them, I cannot accept that they are signs of deficiency. It feels like an incantation, like she’s calling something down for me. I know I cannot risk it.
“Good tow Mama pod low Mama flower.”
OD TO: I must repeat it out loud sometimes. I know that occasionally I’ll roll it around in my mouth like a dwindling piece of butterscotch. Which must be how she picked it up, my Juni. OD TO.
“Shod fruit mama would tong Mama fraud glow.”
Emily stubs the cigarette, and tucks the butt in her pocket. “This audio thing. You don’t need to commit. Take the meeting. The guy, Isaiah, Immanuel, he makes it nice. He’s booked a conference room near the Monday meeting. The one with the towers? What’s it called? Like the tennis tournament? Wimbledon? Lawn something? Green Lawn?”
“Longwood,” I say. “Longwood Towers.” There’s a flash of heat, a melting sensation, a starburst of light behind an enormous building.
“Right,” says Emily. “Fun. I’ll sign off, and then your counselor will make the appointment. What’s that you’re writing?”
OD TO, I write, Would tong. Fraud glow. LongwoOD TOwers. OD TO.
Four
New York City
1993
Paul has slept in my dorm room for six straight nights, though it seems wrong to measure time now in the same units as before his arrival. Nights with him pass like time borrowed from another physics. An hour lasts an afternoon, an evening six minutes. We lie in the park, watching darkness thicken; we eat ice cream at breakfast time. We sit in my dorm room and it fills with smoke and the smoke dissipates and it is late afternoon and Paul is still downtown at rehearsal. We are not even in the same universe as before. I have a secret I am keeping from him. Christ. I can barely hold it inside my mouth.
When I call Nancy at the retreat center, a man picks up.
I can’t place how long it’s been since we’ve actually talked but there’s a conversation I’ve been having with her. It’s in my head, but I can’t help feeling like she is listening, even despite the distractions. I am distracted, too.
“I’m calling for Nancy?” I say. “Or Andi?”
The man grunts and then sets down the receiver, presumably to find my friend. In the background, I make out a high, uneven sound which might be a kitten’s cry or a woman’s wail.
There have been developments, I gather from Nancy’s collection of emails and voice messages. It was a kitchen guy who identified Andi’s source. He’d witnessed some exchange in the goat barn, apparently, and so now it was pretty clear who had been getting Andi loaded. Nancy got in the leader lady’s face. This was not how you taper someone down, she’d said. This was fucking all-you-can-eat and no amount of lentil fasting was going to make up for that. Now, the problem was Andi, that Andi was still defending the woman, still seemingly getting high. Nancy has an idea to fix things, and it’s definitely a bad one, but she’ll probably go through with it anyway.
“Nancy?” I say when someone picks up.
The voice on the phone is Nancy’s, I’m almost sure, but she is whispering. “Listen,” she says. “Someone needs to get her out of here and I don’t think there’s anyone else who can convince her.”
Then the sound of the kitten becomes the sound of the wailing, and the line goes dead.
Paul appears at odd hours, swallows the world, then evaporates again. It is easy to lose track of things like Saturday, like exams and the closing of the dorms. At Yankee Muffin, I am somewhere between probation and fired. I have been here forever, always listening to the dial tone, always waiting for Paul while he rehearses downtown. Each episode is without sequence or precedent.
I decide: I can’t wait another second. I hang up and catch the downtown train. In the standard way of reckoning, six days has been long enough for me to establish myself as a presence at the St. Mark’s Theater. I’ve made myself into something of a mascot. Today, I bring a tray of Yankee Muffins, one of which I hand off to the girl at the ticket office as she waves me through to the fifty-seat black box. Nadine, the actress with the tits and the bush, is onstage, making her way through an impossible snowstorm to go and plead with the trolls in their forest homeland to save her people. The other members of the company, Paul included, stay half wreathed in shadow, moving in and out of the ambient light. In production, they’ll have the soap flakes which will catch the stage lights and produce what Paul assures me is a magical effect, but for now, they don’t want to waste material, so they rehearse with empty buckets. The actors hold them limply, seem to have forgotten they are meant to be sprinkling pixie snow. In the ecosystem of New York, Paul’s play is small potatoes, is the upstairs cabaret at a downtown theater, but it’s also not amateur, has attracted some unlikely halo of interest. At the previous night’s preview, some people of significance had shown. One woman in particular, according to Davos, is relevant, is a young and talented critic for The Voice. Now the cast are all trying to float on mustered faith. She’ll write a review. It will be positive. The audience will come. I can’t help watching the buckets, which make this look like a play about janitors instead of magical beautiful children.
“We are not creatures who can winter over,” says Nadine to Paul the ice boy, to the empty chairs. “We cannot hibernate or still ourselves. The hunger will persist even after everything else of us is gone.”
Plays like this, the story of them, isn’t really what the audience watches. A lot of the plot, you have to feel, exists only in the mind of the writer; maybe, in the mind of the actors and director, too. The events, the cause-and-effect, they aren’t the point, Paul tells me. So, what is? Paul shakes his head like I’ve just demanded evidence of G-d. In Europe, Davos was known for his explorations of Observational Dramatics, of Direct Theat
er, his assertion that raw and fragmentary aesthetic of reality-based art could be deployed around fantastical plots. He’d done a Snow White with methadone patients and mounted a Midsummer at a defunct nuclear reactor. He wanted things to be jagged and surreal, dreamy and harsh.
I work with artists at my internship and one thing I have discovered about them is that they never provide complete explanations. A filmmaker can pitch you a three-hour film in thirty seconds, but ask him what it means and he’ll become incoherent, or list the ideas of others. Fear, obviously, that someone will expose how little they understand themselves, that the questioning will unmask some sentimental platitude at the heart of their avant-garde work. You break them down, these experimental pieces, and there will be something like: things are more complicated than they appear on the surface! Or: it’s important to be kind! Or: you can hurt people, even when you have good intentions! This is what I hear when Paul mimics Davos. Beauty is a burden. Beauty is necessary; beauty is fickle. Something like that.
And who cares about beauty, about the difference between the blond boy’s universal attractions and Paul’s cigarette-smoking loveliness? I do. I look at Paul, and I wish he were uglier and I know I wouldn’t have my secret if he were.
“Stop,” says the director. “Stop. Stop. Stop. First of all, you walk like a bunch of bankers. Move your hips into it, give me a little ass. Feel it. Don’t carry yourself as if you were in line to pay a parking ticket.”
Nadine heaves herself across the stage, waggling her behind.
Davos is young, charismatic in that dick way that college boys seem susceptible to. He’s handsome, standardly, strong jaw bone, though not tall. Apparently it is taboo to observe this. Davos is handsome, but short. He smokes constantly, constantly wears a bandana. If, on the journey across Siberia, the troupe had gone collectively crazy, it is Davos who ushered the lunacy in. Paul said it was a game, or an experiment, but I watch the director order the cast about, and I wonder how calculated it all was, if he was trying to extract a performance, or simply amusing himself on a long, slow journey at the expense of these young and vulnerable people.
The Likely World Page 18