Pretty

by Jillian Lauren

  With this the doctor gets up. He’s been conscientious and patient and now he’s moving on. “I’ll let you see your brother briefly now. Please keep your visit short. It’ll be better if he doesn’t get overexcited.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” I say to his square, white back as he strides off.

  I turn in my chair, watch the entrance of the hallway where the doctor appeared, and wait for Jake. I feel like I’m going to puke again but it’s not uncontrollable this time, just vague and hovering.

  I know it’s contrary to what the doctor says, but I can’t stop thinking that if I can just reach the Jake that I know is always there, always whole, always sane—if I can speak to that part of him I can tell him to come back.

  Jake rounds the corner and he looks wrong. He’s not wearing any hat, which he normally always does, and his hair sticks up in little tufts. He wears a T-shirt and thin hospital pajama pants and he looks spotless white clean, like I’ve never seen him. There are usually smears of grease and paint and grass stains, the colors of his messy life, all over him.

  He stands with bare feet and looks at me from across the room as if he isn’t sure who I am. I get up and decisively go to hug him. He kind of hugs back, but the hug is limp and uncoordinated. The electricity I feel off his skin is strange and staticky, like it’s discharging some internal lightning. I take him by the arm just above his wrist and lead him to the sage green sofa.

  We sit facing each other silently for a moment and although his arms hang oddly at his sides as if he feels dead in the body, I see immediately that he is alive, on fire, in the eyes. A torrent of rage swirls behind them. He looks like he’s listening to something but it isn’t the puzzle guy and it isn’t the TV; it’s something else. He’s looking at me but looking past me. He’s listening to something I can’t hear. I take both of his hands between both of mine, how he always does with me. I’m hoping for the magic words.

  “Are you okay in here?”

  “This is a church. This is my house.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “You come so far and this is what you ask? Okay means nothing. I am the reincarnation of the Son and I see what the others can’t see or they wouldn’t have let you pass. I see that you have the eye. My wife and the living embodiment of the mother-father continuum. It’s the woman that is the body. The man, the man, the man is never the shifting sands of the time woman body. The man is the spear, is the rock.”

  Jake looks me right between the eyes.

  “The eye of the angel. It glows, but it’s crossed. Uncross it and it will glow with the light of a thousand suns from the center of your forehead. You are most welcome here.”

  His posture is emphatic, his body totally still except for the twitch by his left eye that is more pronounced than usual. I try to remember if when I met him it was this bad. At the treatment center he told me he was Jesus and said that I was his wife. His mother and his wife. I thought it was the drugs. All those intravenous psychedelics he did. Now I see that I didn’t understand at all. I feel like the world’s biggest fool.

  “Jake, I love you.” Those worn words, an embarrassment. They’re the best I can come up with. Somewhere in me they’re true. And somewhere else they’re not true at all.

  “I am the reincarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. I am reborn forty times. Forty camels and forty cars and forty machines. I am the first living soul. I am born again and working toward your second redemption. This is the house of God but they don’t know it. This my house; I am here,” he says, looking around to make sure no one is listening. He speaks in a whisper, leaning in so close to me that I can smell his breath like chemicals, like poisons, rising out of him.

  “They are gods, too, but they are empty gods. They are empty pretenders attempting to control me through electronic and chemical means. This morning already they implanted seventeen thoughts into my brain. This is an institution known for its brainwashing, but I have no wish to be a zombie. Even if it means admission into the zombie life with its many rewards. Still, they are empty rewards granted by empty gods. I have no interest, do you understand? I will not be made their zombie slave. I will die first and all the world, including the empty god and their machines, will die with me. They will not believe that I only keep them alive by not looking behind me and to the left, where death sits.”

  He begins to get angry and little flicks of spit spray onto my face.

  “Can you try to come back?” I stare hard into his eyes, trying to will him into a second of clarity. I press my hands into his and I beg him. I get it now. I get it. But even so, there’s the possibility of a miracle, right? Althea says that enlightenment can happen in a single moment.

  I was never one for telling him I loved him. He would say it and I would say things like, “That’s sweet.” I said, “I love hanging out with you.” I said, “You’re funny.” But I never said, “I love you,” because I thought it was bad luck. A bad omen. That’s how much I understand about omens.

  “I know you are not a clone against me. I know that you are my wife but you also have seven other names of which

  I only know three and some of them are empty. And I look at you and see that you are here under an empty and false name. You have showed me a false birth certificate and I have been true with you because mine says Jesus Christ and I am compelled to tell truth and live truth from now until I judge. And I tell you that you are a house. Every man is a house. Some move clockwise and some move counterclockwise and some are ranches and some are crumbling and some are palaces on fire and some are bare to the pegs.”

  The puzzle guy interjects, “Fucking cocksucker.”

  “Jake, you have to take your meds and try. You have to get better and come home, okay?”

  Jake rears up out of his physical frozenness. “Do not ride the horse of the empty gods and come to me with their instructional manuals. I have respect for the empty gods in spite of their attempts to brainwash me and I have respect for the devil himself in his place but not for you. Not for you. I pity you because you were misguided by the deeds of a false father who was not the fault of your twenty and six rebirths but who did hurt you nonetheless and I have nothing if I have not compassion.”

  He grabs me so hard by the neck that I know it will bruise and he starts shrieking, his voice crackling with crazy. “You now look to a false god and for that you are at fault. Pull your veil. Uncross your fire eye, mother of God.”

  The nurse is on his way running across the room but not fast enough. Jake winds up with his right arm and with the knobby backside of his hand he belts me so hard across the face that he knocks me off the sofa to my knees. The impact disorients me and the thud of it echoes through my bones. I kneel there with my hand to my face and my eyes closed. I don’t watch them restrain him and drag him back down the hallway where he came from. I open my eyes again when his shouting grows dim.

  I look around after a moment and, except for the statue in the wheelchair, all the other patients are staring at me with their mouths slack. The puzzle guy laughs. The accountant extracts a pair of glasses from his pocket and a bunch of change clinks dully to the linoleum, as well as a few Q-tips and some wads of paper. The rest of them look at me and I look back.

  Marcia Brady squats down next to me and puts her hand on my shoulder. She moves my hand away from my face and looks at where he slapped me.

  “Looks like he gave you a good whack. Probably have a bruise tomorrow but I think you’ll be all right,” she says, helping me to my feet. “He’s a wild one. Needs a while to settle down. Try coming back in a week or so when his medication has a chance to balance him out a bit.”

  I walk past the old black man and then I stop and go back. I stand in front of his view of the TV and after a minute he looks up at me with a tilt of his eyes so slight it is almost imperceptible.

  “Here,” I say. I take Milla’s Kitty Hawk out of my purse and remove her little wings, which are torn and crumpled by now anyway. I guide his dry hand and wrap it arou
nd the plastic doll, holding it there until he takes the cue and grips it himself.

  They buzz me out the first door and I am stuck in the dingy, off-white box between the doors for a heartbeat before the second one buzzes and I move through it and into the hallway, where I am free to go.

  Rhythmic throbbing in my head from where Jake slapped me replaces all thought. I take a step with every two throbs. Every step gets me closer to the car. There is nothing more to it than that. I swallowed a tennis ball and it is stuck in my throat. Something tugs at my stomach from behind.

  When I reach the car, I change into my school uniform. The clock reads 11:11. Time still to make it back to school so that I can clock in after lunch.

  Jesus is glaring off my windshield. Jesus is in the crumbs on my seat. Jesus is in the edges of my teeth.

  Nineteen

  I 584 hours down. 16 hours left to go.

  It’s been a week and my bruise has faded to a purpleedged army green.

  I sit rolling wet set number one hundred and ninetyseven of the two hundred that are required. Three more wet sets left to go. Two more heads of finger waves. One set of acrylic tips. I’m nearly there. Eyes on the prize, Bebe.

  A tiara sparkling in the flicker of the fluorescents perches on the edge of my station. I plan to wear it to graduation tomorrow. Javier and Violet each have slightly different ones. Javi bought them for us downtown. Mine has a heart at its peak, with a giant rhinestone shaped like a teardrop hanging at the center of it.

  “Girl, you haven’t cracked so much as a smile in an entire week. This is no bueno for the bambina. You can’t give her only sad food to eat. So what her papa’s loco? So raise her with your nice lezzy friends. Little Bebe Jr. can have three mommies. Come on, now.”

  “When did you turn into my Mexican grandmother?”

  “I am Guatemalan, honey, not Mexican. The rest of this continent isn’t just all one country.”

  “Thank you for the geography lesson.”

  But he’s right. This flat fog is no good for the baby or for me or for anyone but I can’t shake it. Someone has kicked out the prop that was holding me up and now I can’t straighten my spine. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact I stopped my medication and something to do with this incessant nausea and more to do with my life. There’s a blanket over my head all the time, one of those army blankets. I can smell it like moldy wool. Everything looks distorted like clouds blowing through my eyes. And my hands. My wrecked hands weigh a hundred pounds each, my scars itchy and stiff. I’m catatonic and slack jawed and lost. I’m nearly at this graduation I worked all year for and I should be feeling celebratory. And here I am with shit all complicated as usual.

  I thought about getting rid of it the day after Jake belted me. I called and made the appointment for the consultation, but when the time came I pulled right up next to a parking spot right in front of the clinic, and I couldn’t back into it. It wasn’t even a decision. I kept the car in drive and pushed my foot down on the accelerator and moved forward. I even went around the block again, but I didn’t try it a third time. I’m not sure if it was some weird guilt that stopped me or if it was the fact that I’ve had it with losing everything I’ve ever had.

  I roll Kitty’s wet, limp hair methodically but sloppily. It’ll be a shitty hairdo, but they’ll give me the point. I only need three more points. One roller behind the other. One foot in front of the other. I want a cigarette. I want a vodka martini.

  Jesus is in this pin curl. Jesus is sparkling out of Vera’s navel ring. Jesus is in my latte.

  I don’t know why I play this Jesus game. It meant something maybe a long time ago. I can’t remember.

  Javier styles his doll head with a look of intense concentration on his face that’s not brow-furrowed and strained but rather is remarkably calm and almost beatific. He’s been working on this hairdo since yesterday. As for Kitty, her hair is now an even brighter shade of candy-apple red than usual. He did the same color on my head. It was meant to cheer me up.

  I haven’t tried to get in touch with Jake. I think I won’t for a while. Some things are hard to go back to.

  Javier takes the tiara off the end of his station and places it as a final touch on Kitty’s head, then turns her in my direction and presents her to me with a Price Is Right gesture. “This is my vision for you, darling. This is how I see you tomorrow. We’ll spend our final hours here making each other fabulous for our momentous occasion. Paul is home baking his famous cupcakes right now. And my sister is bringing a blender for the margaritas, though yours will have to be a virgin, I’m afraid.”

  The hair is beautiful. With the tiara on, I’ll look like a Miss America 1962, except less slim, less graceful, less pretty.

  Violet is working on her look for tomorrow, which is sadly a bit off the mark. Her doll head has festive green streaks, but the updo looks like something a girl from back in Toledo would wear to the prom: a big bubble with sausage curls hanging from it like streamers.

  I wander back to my locker to pull out some extra rollers and the phone buzzes in my pocket.

  DON’T ANSWER.

  But I do. I do answer.

  “Baby! You picked up.”

  I get a feeling of crazy relief hearing his voice, as if I found something I lost. But I don’t let on.

  “Apparently.”

  “I miss you, Baby. We have so much to talk about.”

  “Like?”

  Billy gives me some whole line of shit about apologies to be made and explanations and responsibility and not having any future until we straighten out our past. And I don’t know why I agree to go to dinner with him other than the fact that I want to keep hearing his voice.

  How we got to L.A. was the bus stopped here and Billy got off and without him there was nowhere left to go.

  After a few weeks sleeping head to head on their manager’s sectional, the manager got sick of us and helped to find us a little place—a dark studio with its own entrance around the back of his neighbor’s house right in the center of Hollywood. At that time the band was still hoping that Billy would pull it together and we would be back on the road. Aaron would have a gig again and I could quit work at the Jet Strip and we’d be moving fast to somewhere new.

  Our little room was gray and tiny. Gray walls, gray carpets, gray Venetian blinds. It was so small that you could almost lie in bed and grab a beer from the minifridge without getting up. There wasn’t much room for our stuff so we stacked our clothes in crates. There was a minuscule sink and a toy stove and sometimes I even cooked. Mostly frozen stuff like breaded frozen chicken cutlets, Tater Tots, and string beans, but Aaron never complained even though I know he didn’t come from eating like that. His father had been a different kind of jazz musician than mine, the kind that teaches at Berklee and gets interviewed on NPR. Still, he ate the chicken I made and was careful about not making me ashamed and that seemed like reason enough to wait quietly for things to get better. We ate on the bed or on the floor and set out places like it was a picnic.

  I wasn’t unhappy in that waiting place, waiting for things to change. I danced four nights a week at the club and he practiced or composed or whatever during the day while I made myself invisible. I shrank into something tiny and translucent on the bed, reading and watching his back as he hunched over and played, sitting in one of those fifties kitchen chairs with chrome legs and a padded vinyl seat. It was the only other furniture in the room. He blew a few notes or strummed the guitar, then sighed and jotted things down in a notebook that rested on top of the minifridge. I could have just faded into the comforter and spent forever invisible in that room with him. If I had ever wanted more I’d forgotten about it.

  We went out once in a while to shop or go to the movies. We went to parties at artists’ lofts or downtown clubs. About once a week we started smoking crystal with this couple we met at one of the parties, who lived out in Thousand Oaks. We would drive home through the hills and park at the overlook along Mulholland at five i
n the morning, where we’d look out at the flickering lights studded across the broad plateau of land that rose and fell, rose and fell, like it was breathing. I remember thinking that we were a part of each other and part of the car and the road and part of the whole beautiful ugly city stretched out before us. Every light was like a cell in a big organism that was us, and we were it. And I understood that I was a part of something bigger than us and bigger than Zion or anyplace like it and maybe as big as music or something equally boundless.

  But most nights that I didn’t work we stayed home and Aaron got progressively more despondent about the band. We took more pills, drank more, smoked more dope to keep it all fuzzy and warm, but really I knew, I saw, he was sliding away from me. He lay on the bed, arms behind his head, flat gaze at the TV set. I curled sideways into him, resting my head in the curve of his neck and my hand on his belt buckle. I remember he laid his palm on my head for a heartbeat. I remember he turned his lips to my hair.

  What we were waiting for was for Billy to get right, to get off the junk, to go straight. That or for Aaron to score another gig, but Aaron was so busted up about Billy letting him down that he wasn’t going to any other auditions, so effectively what we were waiting for was for Billy and Billy alone to save us. Billy lived in a guesthouse as dark as ours on a heavily Russian street in West Hollywood. When we went to see him, thick ladies would stare us down as we crossed paths with them on the sidewalk. The air wasn’t friendly.

  Billy called with ideas. Come over right away and listen. He never went out. Half the time when we got there he’d forgotten why he called. He always invited me along as if it was an afterthought, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew I was as much a part of the equation as Aaron was. For a while, when the phone rang and it was Billy, I thought it might be the news that they were going into the studio or that he was booking another tour. But that was never it. It was always some idea he had that he couldn’t tell us until we came over. Or it was an invite to a swanky party, but we had to come over to his house first to get him. There was never any party but we went anyway because it was an unwritten rule of the universe that you showed up when Billy called.