Crux

by Jean Guerrero

  I stared out the window at the black shapes in the dark valley, wondering if I now had an STD. Crickets chirped from invisible horizons.

  You’re not going to go and tell anyone I, like, raped you, are you, babe?

  FAIRY-TALE NEURONS

  I decided to pursue journalism. Both writing and riding gave me a sense of control. But while in riding that sense was limited to the horse, in narrative nonfiction it was all-encompassing. Narrative nonfiction felt like a superpower. I could lasso the whole wild world into paragraphs, cage it up in language. When I got into the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, I decided to continue riding only as a hobby, borrowing horses on the USC equestrian team. We sold Aspen. My mother bought me a blue Toyota Yaris for my new life in Los Angeles. Papi came back from the dead for my high school graduation. I was thrilled to see him again. I didn’t care that he had criticized me with such loathing before vanishing; once more, I felt I had deserved his disdain. But now I was different. I believed I had truly become like him: fearless, detached, antisocial. He brought me a brown dress with threaded floral patterns and his copy of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth—the first presents I recall receiving from him. I read the novel through my graduation ceremony, ignoring angry glances from administrators.

  On my first Tuesday in a general-education class, Foundations of Western Art, I scanned the hall for a place to sit and saw a tall boy with his nose inside a print issue of the New York Times. I plopped down beside him, wearing the brown dress from my father. He was pale and freckled all over, with moss-green eyes. You’re reading an actual newspaper? That’s cute, I said, with amusement. He blushed.

  Alex aspired to become a writer of political speeches, ideally for the president of the United States. He was a Democrat from Texas, with a slightly nasal voice that charmed me. He used gorgeous words I had never before heard in conversation. He seemed to contemplate everything I said, probing me with catalytic questions. He quoted works like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance. He gave me his copy of Virgil’s Aeneid: “The descent into the Underworld is easy. Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air—there the struggle, there the labor lies.” When he looked at me, I felt he was swimming inside my head. He sought my thoughts and motivations, and helped me clarify them. We lived one floor apart in the same dormitory. He invited me on evening walks. We ate lunch together after every art history class.

  One day, after examining nude Greek statues at the Getty, we were driving home on the Pacific Highway when Alex took my hand in his. I pulled away. My appetite was for dangerous men with dark circles under their eyes. He knew that. Alex was wholesome and white. I said, I’m sorry, Alex. I just don’t think of you that way.

  He informed me that if we couldn’t be romantic, we couldn’t be friends, either. His feelings had become too powerful to ignore. We’ve reached an impasse, he said. Alex was my favorite person. He was funny and brilliant and, in his own way, handsome. I just couldn’t imagine anything sexual with him. In my mind, he was akin to an extraterrestrial or a different species. I explained this. He asked: Who said anything about sex? I’m a virgin, and plan to be until marriage. I laughed. He didn’t. It wasn’t a joke.

  We ate lunch on opposite sides of the cafeteria. I watched him with his friends. I sat alone. I hadn’t had a real friend since middle school. Listening to the vapid conversations of my classmates filled me with contempt. I had just read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. I fancied myself a female version of the antisocial narrator—hateful of others due to mental superiority: “To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease….One is not to blame in being a scoundrel.” Alex was the only person I liked. After suffering his absence for a week, I took a deep breath, walked upstairs and pounded on his door. He emerged, disheveled and perplexed. Okay, I said. I’ll be your girlfriend. I kissed him. An attraction flared up inside me the instant I touched him. My eyes opened to his attractiveness: to his broad chest, the subtle reddish tinge in his hair, his strong hands, his wheat-colored eyelashes.

  A week after I took his virginity, I cheated on him during an intoxicated weekend excursion in Mexico. I confessed the sin I had committed. I had few ethical codes back then, but transparency was one. I don’t know why I did it. The guy was disgusting, I said, sobbing with confusing guilt. Maybe it’s because I’m dying to feel something, anything, I’m so numb all the time. Alex listened calmly. When I finished, he put a hand on my shoulder and stared deep into my eyes with a sad smile. He couldn’t stay with me, he said, but he forgave me. I stared at him in awe and confusion. A few weeks later, he agreed to take me back. I had to promise never to cheat on him again. I swore I would not, but in my online journal, I wrote: Did I mean it? I never know if I’m going to do something until I do it.

  I decided to minor in neuroscience after an introductory general-education course hooked me. I thought I could understand my father (and myself) by scrutinizing dendrites and action potentials. I suspected I had narcissistic personality disorder; its main symptoms were a lack of empathy and an inflated sense of self-importance. But instead of seeking to remedy my illness, I relished it. Flipping through Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina on Alex’s bed, I expressed admiration for its immoral characters as Alex tried to reason with me from his desk. I told him virtue and vulnerability were weaknesses tied to ignorance. He argued they were necessary for human connection. I became angry and left the room. Although I could talk to Alex for hours, I detested his wholesomeness, his heartfelt defense of humanity. Once, he called me, panicking; a stranger had robbed him at knifepoint on the street. I told him to grow some testicles. I thought it was good for him to suffer. In my view, he had led a sheltered life and needed to toughen up. Somehow, I was blind to my own privilege as a private-school-attending American who had at one point owned a horse.

  I told Alex I had a genetic predisposition toward insanity and could not control my thoughts or actions. An ambient song whined from my laptop. I was curled up in my bed, barefoot, having neither washed nor shaved any part of my body in days. If you love me, you’ll just have to accept I’m a sick person, I said. It’s not my fault I’m Schizophrenic.

  Alex blinked. Have you ever heard of “earning your dialogue”?

  I raised an eyebrow, showing a modicum of interest.

  You can’t talk like you’re in a movie all the time just ’cause you feel like it, he said. He stepped toward my laptop and closed it. My music stopped. It’s this soundtrack that puts you in a constant mood. You know what I think? I think you wish you were crazy.

  I felt naked in the sudden silence. With feigned indignation, I said: You think I want to end up in a mental institution?

  If you were “like your father,” he said, making air quotes with his fingers, eyes locked on mine, you’d have an excuse for never growing up.

  And yet, if ever I showed up outside his door, drunk and sobbing about Schizophrenia, he would pick me up, place me on his bed and play the song “Bang Bang” by Dispatch on his guitar, singing: “She woke me up with a bang bang, looking over cross-eyed, had a big hunch that the world was a big lie.” Alex knew how to abandon his pride while maintaining his integrity—something I was clueless about. You are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen, he would say, and I would respond that his freckles were like the stars. He had three aligned freckles on the back of his left hand, like Orion’s belt.

  I dumped him and took him back with callous caprice. Alex allowed himself to be broken again and again. He wanted to save me from myself. But eventually he realized he could not. I had let the wound of my father’s absence displace me. The emptiness stretched more than a hundred miles—from Los Angeles to an old house in Paradise Hills, where a backyard was bloated with bodies. I could no longer tell what I dreaded from what I desired.

&nbs
p; At the start of sophomore year, I met a former heroin addict with cockroach tattoos on his arms. I cheated on Alex a second time. Alex came over to break up with me in person. I lived on the fifteenth floor of the school’s newest dorm, with a view of the downtown skyscrapers, the Hollywood sign and snowcapped mountains beyond—the perfect setting for a tragedy. Someday, Jean, you are going to be the girl of my dreams, he said. But I can’t sit around waiting for you to become her. A new immunity shone in his eyes. He backed away, barricaded. I realized I had lost my grip. I had to do something. I stumbled to my Yaris in a blur of tears and sped to a nearby liquor store and bought a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice with a fake ID. Then I drove to the ocean. On the boardwalk in Santa Monica, I smashed a bottle and picked up a jagged-edged shard. I ran to the water and sat near the shore, carving three crooked lines on my wrist. Blood seeped out in satisfying black lines. The sea grasped and gasped soothingly. I sent Alex a text message: I just butchered my wrist at the Santa Monica pier. Come save me. I sprawled out on the sand. The moon was a corpse’s face, swollen and yellow. I waited. Alex did not come. I wrapped my sweater around my wrist and returned to my Yaris, shivering. I had a neuroscience exam the next morning and needed to sleep.

  * * *

  •

  Back on campus, I disinfected my wrist, wrapped it in gauze, set my alarm clock, curled up in bed and fell asleep. I awoke to an all-male crowd of LAPD officers, EMTs and campus security around 1:00 a.m. We got a report you were trying to kill yourself, one said. Police are looking for you in Santa Monica. How amusing, I thought. An army of men come to my rescue, yet none were my Prince Charming. Nope, I said, removing my gauze to show them my horizontal cuts. Across the road, not down the street, I said. They stared at one another in confusion. I mean, the ambulance is already outside, someone whispered. Another cleared his throat and said: You’re going to have to come with us.

  As they belted me into a wheelchair, I felt a giddy sense of climax. I had long feared becoming my father. Now I was a mental-illness patient. And Alex had made it happen. At the hospital, the perverse thrill gave way to real anxiety. I needed to be well rested for my neuroscience exam; the minutes were ticking by; the nocturnal anxiety of my childhood gripped me. I required at least eight hours of sleep a night, an obsessive-compulsive inheritance from my mother when she was sleepless and on call. I begged the nurses to let me go. They refused. California law allows the involuntary detainment of anyone deemed a danger to him- or herself. A skinny male nurse said with a giggle: You should have thought about your test before trying to kill yourself, little girl. I trembled with loathing. These ignorant strangers were violating me. They were doing with my body something I did not consent to. It was institutionalized torture. It made me sick with rage. I despised the world’s authority systems, its arbitrary and irrational laws. A woman on a cot beside me had blood seeping out of her stomach. She wept: I’ve been waiting for hours and nobody is helping me! Around four in the morning, I called my mother. She answered with a groggy voice. I just cut myself a little, Mom, because I’m stressed, but they’re acting like it’s a big deal. I’m going to fail my test because of them. She called the front office and demanded that they release me. They refused. My mother told me to walk out of the hospital. I asked to go to the bathroom and was unbelted from the wheelchair. I made my way toward the emergency exit. Opened it. Walked out. Climbed a chain-link fence. And ran into the night of South Central Los Angeles.

  * * *

  •

  I ended up half dragged, half carried back into the hospital. My mother sped a hundred and forty miles from San Diego. She stormed in, shouting: Where is my daughter? In her protective fury, she looked not like Mom or Mommy or Mami, but like all three women melded into one. I felt a surge of love for her. In her rich dimensionality, she looked like a work of art. She took me to breakfast and wrote me a doctor’s note. With sad eyes, she asked to see my wrist. I showed her the mess of cuts on my skin. It was the first time she saw my self-mutilations. Why did you do that to yourself? she asked. I shrugged, promising I wouldn’t do it again. She required nothing else from me—no apologies, no supplications. Just like that, I never cut myself again. We took each other back.

  * * *

  •

  In the fall of 2007, the underground raves of the nineties were making a comeback as massive, mainstream events. They were designed like fairy tales, which intrigued me. With names like Electric Daisy Carnival and Monster Massive, the raves were real-life immersions in landscapes like those that had excited my imagination as a little girl: fire-breathing trees and fields of glowing flowers.

  I decided to enter their worlds when a fellow journalism student, Tim, invited me to take Ecstasy with him and his friends at Nocturnal Wonderland, four stages of DJs in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot. According to my neuroscience textbook, the drug burned holes in brains. Tim assured me he had done MDMA several times without adverse effects. Curious, I gulped down two blue pills stamped with the Apple computer logo.

  At the rave, fairies and goblins on stilts wandered amid thousands of half-naked bodies. Electric lights of every color fluttered everywhere—luminous butterflies. Everyone shared massages, cigarettes, water bottles, glow sticks. My pupils grew to the size of dimes. The moon is ripe for plucking, I observed. It hung low and large, a glowing grapefruit beside million-eyed skyscrapers. Tim and I took turns pretending to pinch it between our fingers. We brought it back to our lips.

  Each stimulus, from the smell of Vicks VapoRub to spinning lasers, acquired tactile dimensions, massaging my molecules down to their mitochondria. The bass of the electronic music—Carl Cox was spinning a remix of Splittr’s “All Alone”—caused every inch of me to vibrate. I had the sensation of breaking open. The whole universe rushed in through every pore of my body, causing me to swell and expand at the speed of light. I felt smothered by space-time itself. For the first time since I was a child, I was feeling it again: the flowering outward into a borderless space. In contrast to my solitary childhood What is nothingness? ritual, I was surrounded by people: tens of thousands of beautiful, dancing humans. I was not only the Milky Way fluids of space, but also the crowd: their sweating limbs, their swirling irises, their warm breath. I was their arteries pumping galaxies, organs encompassing centuries, eyelids curtaining light-years. I realized, suddenly, that every person on the planet embodied the infinite universe. Everything is one thing. Everyone is one thing. I felt explosive love for Tim, for his friends, for everyone. I wanted to throw my arms around every person at the carnival and kiss them.

  I remembered the blank dream of my childhood, the mysterious one about mirrors: Every mind is the universe staring back at itself. Hold a mind before material reality and you have a God, a self-aware universe. Unlike my childhood experience, which lasted seconds, this one lasted hours—through sunrise. I rode the free Ferris wheel and rotating swings, awed by the blooming bodies below, the arterial energies connecting us. Perhaps it was all meaningless—a breathtaking hallucination, nothing more. But one consequence was real: I was able to make friends in the months and years that followed. My social anxiety largely disappeared that night. A few months later, I wrote a letter of apology to Alex: It was you who was right all along.

  * * *

  •

  When I got home from the rave around seven in the morning, I had no desire to sleep. I had never felt so lucid. I went straight to my neuroscience textbook and flipped to the picture of the hole-filled brain, allegedly due to Ecstasy consumption. There was no way the drug I had consumed could do that. I did a Google search of the study and nearly fell from my chair at the top result: a 2003 New York Times article entitled “Research on Ecstasy Is Clouded by Errors.” My 2007 neuroscience textbook was citing a since debunked 2002 study that used brain scans of monkeys given methamphetamine—a wholly different drug—to prove that MDMA burns holes in brains. The study was formally retracted a year after its publication,
with the scientist, George A. Ricaurte, citing a drug sample labeling error. I started a Word document, compiling my astonished questions. Why was my textbook citing a debunked study? Why was MDMA defined as a Schedule I drug, implying a proven high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use, whereas methamphetamine—a drug that had disintegrated my uncles’ teeth—was a Schedule II drug, implying a lower potential for abuse?

  I had recently watched the documentary Zeitgeist, which blames the U.S. government for the 9/11 attacks. It had made me paranoid. I imagined there was a conspiracy to keep people from taking Ecstasy. If MDMA consumption was widespread, I felt, there would be no incentives for war. Everyone would love one another. The military-industrial complex would crumble.

  I spent six months in the campus library, researching and composing a twenty-page essay titled “Empathy Manifesto.” What if certain drugs didn’t cloud perception, but rather expanded it, as Aldous Huxley suggests in The Doors of Perception? Huxley describes taking mescaline and regaining “the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept.” Studies suggest that infants are synesthetes, smelling what they see, hearing what they touch and so on. Their brain cells, far more numerous than in adults, are interlinked and multipurpose until they’re pruned and compartmentalized by experience. Huxley says that as humans age, language petrifies their perceptual capacities. Words have an obvious benefit: they allow the sharing of information over time and across cultures. But they also create mental concepts that strip and subsume stimuli. Language slims the spectrum of the individual mind, literally chaining thoughts to the preconceived. I heard my mother’s voice: You’re Schizophrenic, just like your father.