I was in the van with my mother. We were going to the hospital. Mom was saying, “Part of this is difficult for me. The way Daniel…what brought it on…” My mother sometimes revealed startling information to me when she was driving. I knew when it was coming because of a shift in her expression. She looked at the road as if she were paying strict attention to something she would have to later describe to the authorities who guard eternity. Her diction, circumspect. I had already learned that when she was fishing for words, I wouldn’t want to hear them.
“When I found him,” she said.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“He was lying on the bed.”
“You don’t have to tell me. I don’t want to know.”
She looked from the road to me and back. She didn’t tell me.
* * *
—
Missy was moping around the trailer, or the store, waiting for a voice that never called her. No whistles or exhortations to sing. After dinner, my mother said, “Missy, where’s your dolly?” and Missy looked at her as if wondering whether Mom thought she was an idiot or something.
* * *
—
In the emergency room waiting area, my mother talked about the last time she’d seen Daniel at the store. They’d fought. He had gone home. She knew something was wrong when Missy came back, acting strangely, so she went to the trailer and found him. She called the paramedics but she “fixed him up” first. They had led separate lives sexually since long before he tested positive…and she was grateful that he never put it in her face…he was always discreet…but this time…so, when she found him—
I stopped her.
* * *
—
Daniel’s mother appeared. I have a vague memory of a small, determined woman with dyed black hair who seemed used to taking charge of chaotic situations. My mother disliked her because she hadn’t been there for Daniel through much of his life. Apparently she had only come now after learning that, should Daniel survive, SSI would pay thirty-five hundred dollars a month to a full-time caregiver. As a registered nurse, she would do well if the court awarded her custody.
He was in the intensive care ward. My mother, Daniel’s mother, and I went to the foot of his bed, where he lay nude under a sheet that covered him to his navel. His hair had been shaven by his right temple and a cone-shaped monitor had been inserted under his scalp, wires running to a machine by his side. There were electrodes on his chest, on either side of an amateur Playboy bunny tattoo.
He didn’t look asleep. His face was straining, as if he had become paralyzed mid-flinch. Because I felt embarrassed to look at him, I looked away. There was a mirror by him, under which my mother had put a dozen PayDay candy bars, his favorite. She had taped to the mirror a piece of paper that read “Love is the Answer.”
I looked at the machines. One breathed for him fourteen times a minute. Another monitored heart and brain activity. There were three IV bags, with potassium, saline, and morphine. A bag at the end of the bed was half-filled with urine.
My mother and his mother were talking to him. It was a strange competition between them. Who could make him come back? I read his charts. I couldn’t find where it said he was HIV positive. I looked straight at him. I tried to feel glad that he was almost dead, but all I could feel was a cheated kind of emptiness. His head was lolling, his legs were braced in some unnatural position, frequently changed to keep the blood from pooling. His penis was outlined in a hump under the sheet. His privacy had already died.
Because Daniel’s mother was a nurse, she knew how to make him do something eerie.
“Daniel. Daniel? Daniel? Daniel!” When she got it just right, demanding an answer, his brain monitor started pumping out square waves and he jerked and his eyes opened. Spasmodic twitching in his arms; then he flopped back onto the bed.
His eyes had met mine. I had seen him see me.
My mother, unnerved and now insecure, announced that when she had brought him a small, stuffed dog and told him it was Missy, he had done the same thing.
This disturbed me. “I thought his arms and legs were paralyzed.”
“He might recover,” his mother said.
I was horrified. If there was any chance for Daniel to come back, he would. He would make a partial recovery and my mother would fight tooth and claw to be his full-time nurse for the next twenty years.
Daniel’s mother said we should all talk to him, to bring him out of the coma. She lectured him in a nurse’s voice, telling him to be a good boy and that she loved him. Then my mother took over, telling him Missy was here and needed someone to play with her dolly. The store needed to open. He’d bought the winning lottery ticket. There was no response, and my mother looked like she was feeling inadequate.
They wanted me to talk to him. While they consulted with a doctor, I looked at the shaved part of his head, the tattoo, the clench to the brow that had only deepened when his mother called him back.
I said, “Daniel, you’re going to live forever.”
* * *
—
On the way back from the hospital, Mom stopped for ice cream, which we ate in the baking fall afternoon shadows. She brought up Daniel’s terrible mother, then fell silent.
She asked me if she’d ever taught me to do certain things, bits of common sense and wisdom that she couldn’t remember if she imparted. “Did I ever teach you to dry between your toes after you get out of the shower?”
“That explains the mushrooms,” I said.
She looked puzzled.
“Between my toes.”
She laughed. I did, too. I’m not sure we were laughing the same way but maybe we were.
* * *
—
A week after he went into his coma, Daniel was taken off his respirator. The doctors felt he wasn’t strong enough to breathe on his own and that death would be almost instantaneous. Disconnecting the machine was a humanitarian gesture.
My mother called me to report with pride that Daniel immediately started breathing by himself. It was possible he would recover. One of my mother’s neighbors called me to say it was the only thing the town was talking about. Why was this nice woman so in love with this awful man?
* * *
—
At three o’clock one morning my mother woke up to see Daniel standing at the foot of the bed. He dissolved as she became fully awake. She called the hospital. He’d had a second aneurysm and a stroke, and had died.
She called me, sobbing her heart out. She kept telling me there had been good times, that she wouldn’t have stayed if there weren’t good times.
Later, she put out a flyer thanking the community for their help. She talked about how special Daniel was, and made sure to write Love is the Answer. It was a touching, heartfelt, effective piece of writing.
At the time, I was dismantling my life in Oakland. Darcy and I were looking at apartments in Long Beach, which was halfway between her potential jobs in Hollywood and mine in Irvine. Before we even started to pack, even when we were just having her family over for the first of many goodbyes, my eye would wander over our belongings and I would mentally separate out what was hers from what was mine. I envisioned the unpredictable impact of landing in a new city, and I wondered what could happen that would break us up.
I had watched a woman in love with a person who didn’t deserve it, not even slightly, talk herself into staying because they were soul mates. It was something no one else could understand, by the exclusivity of love’s design. To the end my mother believed she and Daniel had a psychic connection—that appearance at the end of the bed was no hallucination to her.
I had thought I’d loved in opposition to how my mom loved, and yet this was disturbingly familiar to me. Mom was so grief-stricken for weeks that I called my friend Norma to help her. Norma, a counselor for battered wom
en, had been a prostitute and a heroin addict and had seen everything. Mom and Norma talked, and afterward, Norma called me back. My mother had told her I wasn’t supportive, I looked down on her, she blamed me for deserting her. I can’t say that was easy to hear, but it was by then an old story.
“Your mom was upset by something else. You didn’t want to hear what Daniel was doing when he had his aneurysm.”
“That’s right.”
“Well—she told me,” Norma said.
I thought about this. “Not just masturbating, right?”
“No. There’s more.”
“And it’s bad?”
Norma, who once bit a man’s finger off when he was trying to kill her, had a metal plate in her head from when another guy caved in her skull. She said this was pretty bad.
Darcy was dying to know. She bet it had something to do with the dog. I put her on the phone with Norma. I went out on the balcony and listened to traffic. A few minutes later, Darcy came out, eyes wide. She asked me if I wanted to know what Norma had told her. I said no. For most of the night, she tried to bait me into asking. She couldn’t believe I didn’t want to know.
REVELATION
THE GHOST IN YOU
WHEN I WAS TWELVE, I went for the weekend to Lake Tahoe with my mother and some of her more responsible friends. A couple of the men and I took a bait bucket of crawdads into a small fishing boat just before dawn. We motored out onto the lake, and we cut the engine and we sat still in the darkness.
A few minutes later the sun was rising. It illuminated the sapphire blue of the lake, which is famous for its glass-flat tranquility. But then, not so far away, I saw multiple humps on the back of a fish that broke the surface. We all stared, because the displacement was so odd. The fish was leaving a wake. The wake got longer as something looking like a long slender back with fins rode upward. We were looking at something whose length was hard to understand.
It was just the current, my companions thought. They were accomplished fishermen, and they were a little puzzled by what they were seeing. And then a moment later, the humps appeared again, only more distinctly. We weren’t looking just at water moving—within the shimmer of water was a row of darker, defined spines and then, flapping into the air, a tail. There was a thirty-foot animal near our ten-foot boat, but there was still some argument among the adults about it. Were we really seeing it? Or did we just want to see a mystery?
Then it dove under the surface, heading in our direction. The sun was high enough that I could see the blue water beneath us, and then something eel-like approaching. As it passed under us, I could see its form get thicker, then taper, and then it was gone.
The adults saw that, too. Over the course of the morning, we saw it once or twice more, sort of—one or the other of us pointed at a ripple or a wake but I can’t swear something was still there.
I didn’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster. As much as I wanted to believe in things that made the world a more magical place—ESP and ghosts, for instance—the evidence I’d read in my Fortean books seemed pretty cheesy, like Bigfoot, which I also didn’t believe in. But we’d just seen something here that I couldn’t explain.
Someone mentioned that since ancient times there had been stories of a lake monster here. Tahoe was deep and no one knew what was really at its bottom. Maybe it was an unknown dinosaur previously thought extinct. By the time we came back to land, I was bubbling over with excitement—I had to tell the folks who had slept in about this.
When I started talking I was betrayed immediately. The men who’d been with me smiled when asked to corroborate what I was saying. Well, they said, it was dark. And of course one of them had taken mushrooms the night before, so what had happened was, he’d seen something first and then convinced me I’d seen it. Also, I was looking for something to write about. Ha ha ha. Everyone now: Ha ha ha.
I came away from that angry. It hadn’t happened that way. Some people didn’t like to admit they’d seen something that made no sense. They needed to discount it. I came away with two facts: I didn’t believe in lake monsters; I’d seen a lake monster. I now had the ability to believe two contrary things at once. That served me well. Also, I learned the lesson beyond that lesson, which is that people are frightened by what they know they’ve seen.
* * *
—
At the same time that Daniel was dying, I pitched an idea to a local newspaper for their Halloween issue. I would try a few different psychic activities and explain the results, no doubt comic, to their readers. I looked for ghosts, which flushed out charming stories from a hotel and a bookstore. I had a decades-old article from Playboy that I’d saved, folded many times, about how to astral project. It was a multistep process, and it would take at least several weeks to give it a good try, the article explained, so I had to be patient.
The first night I prepared for it by fasting after lunch. At bedtime I wore comfortably loose pajamas and I dozed off imagining myself floating several feet above my own body.
I was in a hotel room with Lindsay. We could not touch fast enough. I tore off her clothes, feeling the snap of her bra strap as I yanked it off her shoulder. It got nasty—I bent her over so her shoulders were to the bed, and noted how the skin and muscles on her back stretched. But also she was miserable. She wanted a fuck to fix it. I hesitated, and my rational brain kicked in, the rest unfolding with the same urgency as if I were watching a soap bubble drift toward a needle.
“Where have you gone?”
“Fuck me,” she said.
“No.” I said, “Where have you gone?”
She said, “I’m getting married. His name is Jack. He’s a good man but I’m frightened. I’m making a mistake. Call me.”
“If you’re frightened, you call me. You have my number.”
“Call me on a Thursday night. He’s not home then.”
“No. I won’t rescue you. Call me.”
“Please call me.”
“You can call me on Thursday.” And then, pop, I was awake.
My heart was pounding and I felt irritated and invaded. More than anything else, I was angry.
Thursday was long enough off that I had time to think. I told the story of that experience to everyone I knew except Darcy. I told my friends, male and female, I told people at work. I told the most rational, skeptical PhD at my job, and like everyone else she melted. “You have to call her.”
“Why?”
“This is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard—call her.”
“I’m not sure it’s real.”
“All you described about what passed between you, and that doesn’t seem real?”
“Well, I kind of believe two things at once,” and I explained how I felt about lake monsters. “I might just be making this up. We wanted to feel special, and that connection might have just been two pretentious assholes agreeing on their imaginary worldview.”
“Call her, Glen.”
I didn’t want to. It felt unfair. At some point I’d become the needy one in the relationship. I’d been the benshi, and I now knew that every time I’d tried to explain how she was feeling, I’d been depriving her of actually saying it. If I called it felt like I’d still be pursuing her. Lindsay could call me. If it was real, and not just my needy brain making something up.
That Thursday, Darcy wasn’t home, so I had the place to myself. There was a time she’d been home every night, but we were drifting apart a bit, or she was just working late and I was pretending it meant we were drifting. I made dinner and I was aware at all moments of where the phone was. I tested it—I had a dial tone.
I turned on the stereo. I had three records to play. First, I put on the second movement of Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Minor. I played it all the way through, recalling—or trying to recall—how I’d seen Lindsay centuries ago while hearing this for the first time. But it was like tr
ying to will a match head alight. Then I put on “When Tomorrow Comes,” and I thought about how she’d once promised to be here forever. It was hard not to feel pathetic. I started to put on “Cuyahoga,” took it off, reconsidered, put it on. I played it once all the way through. I tried not to think too hard. The song ended, and “Hyena” began. I took it off, put it into its sleeve, filed the record away, and finished eating my dinner.
Six months later, I heard from friends that she was married to a man named Jack.
THE WHORE OF IRVINE
AFTER DANIEL DIED, the drama in my mother’s life seemed to subside. She was sixty years old, and regardless of how closely she tended to skate toward the edge, she knew when to pull back. Her life became a little boring. She scraped by with the secondhand business. She didn’t have Daniel’s gift for making deals, but she wasn’t bad at it. For a while she had her own billboard.
She dated, too. She told me she missed sex a little, so she went out with men, but nothing serious. One was a deadbeat dad. His son was born without a rectum. Another was in his eighties and dying of throat cancer. When Mom wished him a Merry Christmas, he burst into tears. Another man flew his own small plane, but she thought he was too much of a daredevil. On an evening she refused to go up with him, he crashed. He survived, running away from the plane, covered in gasoline, into downed power lines, and setting himself on fire. He lingered for weeks before he died.
But those were situations that she observed from a distance. Mom told me she was fine on her own. When men got too close, all she had to do was say Daniel had died of AIDS. She liked doing this. When a new dentist opened his office there, he asked my mother to be his first patient, free. She told him not to ruin his practice before it started.
She wasn’t entirely alone, though. Missy liked how my mother cooked for her, pampered her, played with her doll. My mother had never owned a dog before, but soon they were inseparable. When they went to the park together, Mom teased her, crying, “Squirrel-y, Missy, where’s the squirrel-y?” and Missy went crazy. They really were a good team.
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