I am from Pittsburgh. We have a way of doing things. This does not entail moving our stable and loyal and predictable man to an emotionally unruly place and risking this, that single and infinitely slackened cord connecting our feet to the ground, for a long and tall twenty-two-year-old borderline-autistic Texan with dreams of Hollywood who would leave us for some awful and terrifying nymphet with whom he would share a sad shake of the head over that poor what-was-her-name from grad school who had been pitiable enough to fall in love with him. I wanted to press a hot iron into their faces, and to see him again as soon as possible.
One night during this period, I saw Jason in a dream. Well, not a dream exactly; I had just woken from my normal dreams of trying to escape from some unseen malevolence, and in a semi-lucid state Jason appeared to me, and there was something distinct about this unwelcome apparition: he had wings. But there was something odder still about them—they were not fully feathered wings, but more like the glowing outline of them, as though formed out of neon tubing, and they were crippled, stunted, far too small for his size, and all twisted up, like they had been broken and healed wrong. My heart expanded at the same rate its cage contracted and I was forced to admit it to myself. There was no next room. My love for him was a skyscraper from which I wanted to hurl him off the highest floor.
The next morning I prepared by writing the words I would never speak out loud (I love Jason White) and took a walk, tearing up the page and dropped every piece of it in a different trash can. After that I got a steak. It had been years since I’d eaten meat, but had made one last ditch attempt to convince myself that I wasn’t feeling what I was feeling, I was just anemic. Then I lay on the floor of my apartment listening to obnoxiously angst-ridden music from my adolescence as my stomach was turning on the meat and also the way your whole body will turn on you no matter how old you are when you’re thinking of some boy.
interlude: changeling
It is at this point that this epistle must make an unforgiveable turn for the Dickensian, as the author is forced to excavate her origins, due to their impending intrusion on the narrative:
The girl spent her entire childhood awaiting her mother’s imminent death. This was because Diane Galvan was regularly predicting it. She was chronically afflicted with a series of ailments, falling into three categories. The first was real, and consisted mainly of neck and spinal problems from the physical contortions required of her regular return to the local gentleman’s club main stage when other employment opportunities didn’t pan out. She loved lording this over the girl, that she was literally KILLING HERSELF to put food on their table. But the girl saw past this early on, wondering what nobler instinct exactly was preventing her mother from maintaining a menial job at Applebee’s or GNC, much less why her departure from these jobs so frequently involved her threatening frivolous litigation or a more dignified extended middle finger. Not that the girl ever voiced this; what Diane needed more than anything—and no small factor in her fifteen years on and off the pole—was a stage, and there was no better audience than her daughter, whose suspension of disbelief allowed her to be moved by every performance.
The second category was psychosomatic: most often phantom and undiagnosable nerve pain leading her to postulate the most outlandish conspiracies on the part of the medical community, but sometimes more creative, like the conviction she was losing her sight (confessed with a tearful, “I’m just sorry I won’t be able to see my beautiful daughter anymore”), or African Sleeping Sickness. This last one even the girl lacking the vocabulary for it recognized as clinical depression, and believed to be curable through her own arbitrary magical intervention (“If I can hold my breath under water in the bathtub for this many seconds…” “If I can hop down the stairs on one foot without touching the banister…”) and thus her fault that she failed to make her mother happier.
The third category was pure fantasy: diseases which there was no particular reason to anticipate, but which Diane would point out, with some wistfulness, could strike her at any moment given her run. Cancer was the natural go-to—“Even thinking the word ‘cancer’ makes you more likely to get it,” Diane would assert. Other favorites were STDs transmittable through unhygienic public restrooms (“People are animals, Lee”), multiple sclerosis (“Mummy’s bones could be turning into a wet fart right in front of you and you would never know”), or pretty much whatever the disease of the week happened to be on a given hospital procedural.
Although the girl had her doubts about the intolerable offenses that kept her mother from maintaining a job with all her clothes on, intrinsic narcissistic superstition made her take the hypochondria more seriously. Suppose the fact of her doubt was what caused this affliction to be the mortal one? It was said she was born with one foot in this world and one in the next. It was not impossible. Once when she was six or seven, she had a dream that her mother had cracked like an egg and that the girl cradled her helplessly as viscous stuff drained from the crack. Upon waking from this dream the girl crawled into her mother’s bed—Diane was not home from work, but it smelled like her—and shook and shook. She tried imagining what her life would be like without her mother, but it was like imagining the sun falling from the sky, there was no such thing as life after that. She did, however, imagine grown-ups at the funeral whispering to each other how pretty she looked in her grieving (as with her fantasy of entering a convent, a common theme of her young imaginary life was the observation of her prettiness within a context of some highly ritualized grieving).
Diane Galvan: textbook white trash drama queen, though no queen was more contemptuous to waiters or cab drivers or anyone in a position of servitude. She cackled at the misfortunes of others as though at the plot turns of a potboiler—divorce, miscarriage, bankruptcy, death, any currency of suffering would suffice—while making opulent displays of public sympathy, believing herself to be indispensable to the healing process, that her indispensability was something noticed and discussed with equal importance as the tragic event which had befallen. For her, gift giving was a supreme opportunity for veiled insult: aerobics videos, a guide to dating success, Neutrogena anti-wrinkle cream. There was no story she couldn’t top, whether from her own repertoire or whatever her grandiosity decided was true in the moment, no gossip too malicious to repeat (or invent), no incident she couldn’t relate back to the materia prima (herself), no dispute she couldn’t manipulate to her advantage by deploying her flying monkeys of obfuscation, rage, and pity. There was no display too brazen as long as there was an audience, no audience more captive than her own child.
Where was the father in all this? Of course, keeping his distance. John Kelly possessed a Mensa-level IQ and Thoreau-level ambition—which is to say his justification for his lack of ambition was having read Thoreau in graduate school. He taught psychology at a local community college, where the relaxed competition for tenure, and, more relevantly, convenient campus parking, were more congenial to his disposition. In truth, he was cursed with a demon named DISTRACTION. He could complete the Cryptoquip without the use of a pen and his at-home Jeopardy score was nearly always higher than the episode’s winner, but something always came along to distract him from this article or that book idea or whatever application of his potential might elevate his station in life. The great DISTRACTION of his life was Diane Galvan. Combining Eve’s milky flesh with the heart of the serpent, if Diane appeared in a private eye’s office, face streaked with mascara tears, you could safely turn off the movie right there—did you really need to see how this ended? She had recently returned from Hollywood (the Valley) where her acting career had failed to take off, and had enrolled in his community extension course under the belief this would deepen her understanding of her craft. No Galvan had ever completed college, and she held his role as educator in almost mystical esteem. She liked his talent for words and dark wit, the promise it contained of more expansive realms of darkness over which she could gain sovereig
nty. He was also already married, which sealed the deal.
John Kelly, for his part, was going through one of his regular periods of despair, in the grand tradition of analytical Irishman congenitally incapable of applying his skillset to making himself happy. He was spending more time at the bar and less with his wife who was barely hiding her resentment at his inability to conceive. He thought Diane was a sorceress. She made him feel like a man again, which is to say she made him feel like a boy again, which is to say she made him hard again. She asked him why a powerful man had married such a MEDIOCRE woman.
Before long both mistress and wife were pregnant, and reaping the consequences of this potency boom, John responded in time-honored fashion by calling his mistress a whore and denying paternity of her unborn child.
Thus denied her previous revenue stream or any financial support, Diane found herself evicted from her apartment and living out of her car when one night, a summer night when the barometric pressure was low and the air sweet with a storm that never arrived, Diane woke and saw a mysterious shimmering in the sky. Curious, she got out. The shimmering descended in a parabola in her direction, and as it did, resolved into clear shapes: orbs of pale blue light. These lights, baseball-size more or less, sought her out with intentional grace and orbited her pregnant stomach several times. There was no sound she could hear but the hairs of her arms detected a vibratory hum that she knew was the singing of the lights, the lights singing to her womb. Then they re-formed into a line and ascended back to the mysterious sphere where they belonged.
Meanwhile John, hearing the news of Diane’s straits, did come around with support—while maintaining public skepticism about parentage—and the child ultimately came into this world in a comfortable hospital birth. (At the same time his wife miscarried—a development he never shook the obscure conviction that Diane had willed into reality.) When delivered into Diane’s arms, the child looked straight into her eyes with an intelligence beyond years, beyond humanity, and spoke in what was no recognizable language but with the obvious syntax and coherence of an alien tongue. It was then Diane knew the girl had been replaced with a changeling, a strange visitor from the land of the lights, though this changeling never again spoke in its native language and it remains a mystery to this day what message she delivered.
If nothing else, one thing could be said of being a child of Diane’s: it was never boring. Whether her mother was beseeching the girl’s absolution that mummy was not a bad person for the latest marriage she was wrecking; or going on vitriolic diatribes against the snobs who shopped at the Ross Park Mall while investing in the latest shortcut to Internet millions or vaguely malevolent self-actualization workshop that wouldn’t let you to get up to pee in order to SHOW THEM WHAT WE’RE MADE OF (the factioning of mother-daughter versus the rest of the world was a consistent theme); or hemming the plaid dress of her school uniform while the other girls had to fold them over at the waist to make them more revealing; or decadent hooky days spent shopping at Plato’s Closet and eating Pittsburgh-style “salads” consisting of wilted romaine lettuce under mounds of French fries and melted cheese, then renting a stack of movies from the Giant Eagle and reenacting favored scenes from Mommy Dearest, Grey Gardens, and All About Eve; or being overtaken by one of her dark spells and verbally attacking her daughter with the viciousness of a cat whose affections had reversed, with the viciousness reserved for attacking a part of yourself (it was to come as some surprise in the girl’s late childhood to learn that the word “cunt” was considered problematic); or looking at her daughter through eyes intoxicated by love and benzos and marvel at where this beautiful spirit, the only light of her life, the only good thing she ever did, could have come from. The girl derived two operative lessons from a mother singularly unsuited for the task. One was survival. Diane’s erratic work schedule and personal affairs forced the girl to adopt a latchkey self-sufficiency, in addition to a high level of adaptability to wildly shifting emotional terrain (her academic excellence a product of both her mother’s class anxiety and the relief of a structure in which the laws of cause and effect were so clearly delineated). The other was that there is no more seductive feeling in the world than to be needed.
When she was fourteen, Diane visited the girl at the prestigious preparatory school she was attending on scholarship (a result of her own aptitude and Diane’s goading). But despite this achievement having been no small part of Diane’s scheme that this was infiltration from the inside, to SHOW THEM WHAT WE’RE MADE OF, this visit gave Diane no happiness and her discomfort with the environment manifested as an exaggerated provincialism: dialing up her Pittsburgh accent, the same accent the girl was giving herself nightly elocution lessons to neutralize; wandering the campus in a doddering shuffle the girl had to command her own legs to keep pace with, because of their own accord they wanted to keep just enough steps ahead they might not be mistaken for the same party; stopping in the open to fish a joint from her purse and take hits with a strained larcenous grin as though she were being riotously entertaining and not as embarrassing as the grin’s flicker suggested she knew was the truth. Previously, Diane’s figure had been her pride—in the dressing room of the club she would flick the rear ends of the girls whose lifestyles were catching up with them saying, What’s that? What’s that? —but by now her looks had gone and her hips had spread, whereas the girl was not far from attaining what were to be her adult measurements. Similarly, her heart attained mature new proportions when a handsome lacrosse player with whom she was to end up drunkenly fumbling before the semester’s end came up to say hello, and Diane’s voice went higher in register and her laugh became a coo and she all but put a strand of her own hair into her mouth. The girl had not known it was possible to feel so much superiority and pity at the same time. After a separation of only weeks, her disbelief had finally suspended, seeing her mother in a new light: weak. Upon her departure Diane hugged her daughter and said, I always knew Mummy wasn’t the only actress in the family. Shortly after that the health of the girl’s philodendron took a sharp turn for the worse. Suspicious, she sniffed the basin of the pot, which was dank and sour with the smell of vodka. Years later Diane nearly compelled the girl to miss her own graduation ceremony: she writhed around on the floor of her hotel room moaning with sudden incapacitating back pain. It was only when John Kelly intervened and called her bluff, offering to stay with her instead, that she believed with a little oxy she could bring herself to make yet one more sacrifice for the sake of her beautiful daughter, the only light in her life, the only good thing she ever did.
During that period, her mother married a man named George who had been an on-again, off-again presence throughout the girl’s adolescence. George was grossly overweight and bald, with glasses and a mustache that made him look like the stereotype of a pizza maker, and in fact he managed a chain pizza restaurant. He was a passive, angry man whose few enthusiasms included ham radio and right-wing conspiracies. Diane was continually accusing him of cheating on her with the little whores at his restaurant and once assaulted him with a pair of scissors, cutting off a tuft of the hair from the side of his head with the grin of having collected a scalp. George’s nose would go mottled red and from time to time he would break things, but overall was little fazed by her outbursts. Despite the famed assertion that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, in the blue collar Italian-American community, there is an accepted Kabuki of dysfunction. The girl was bemused by her mother’s accusations, because Diane herself was still fucking her black drug dealer (which, given George’s enlightened views on race and criminality, would cause Diane to say dreamily, I just don’t know what he’d do if he found out…), not to mention the sheer credit it was giving George initiative-wise.
But her stepfather surprised her when she was visiting home over Christmas break her sophomore year of undergraduate. She was asleep in her room one morning when she
felt another body enter the bed. Stirred half-awake she smiled, believing this body to be Mark, with whom she was now involved. But Mark was with his own family, and she realized this incongruity at the same time she recognized the heavy rolling nose breathing. Adrenaline jolted her awake as he put his arm around her in a spoon, and after a tentative pause began grinding his pelvis into her. She was at a loss. She had gone to a prep school with privileged young monsters, she knew what rape felt like, and this was not that. There had been a pause between his entering the bed and putting his arm around her, and another before he started grinding. He was testing the waters, interpreting her nonresistance as consent. Her indecision was half bafflement: though no stranger to the vagaries of her mother’s relationship with reality, she had discounted the marvelous complexity of a brain belonging to a primitive this banal that could convince itself the girl was into this. Even a person so much less interesting than you contains mysteries.
Thankfully a less philosophical sector of her brain stepped in and she heard herself bleat stupidly I have to go to the bathroom, and with jerky haste she propelled herself from the bed and out of the room.
For a few days she pretended nothing had happened, a pretense George was more than happy to collude with, but ultimately the girl wound up drunkenly confiding in a cousin. Of course no Galvan can tolerate a secret dampening a good fireworks display, so shortly enough Diane was informed. George, cornered, did not deny the charge. Instead he claimed he had been tired and gotten mixed up and thought the girl was Diane. This was by any measure insane. Out of necessity Diane was maintaining a job as receptionist at dentist’s office that required her to leave early in the morning, and it was the wrong room, and at this point confusing Diane for her daughter would have been like confusing Laurel for Hardy. The insanity was the point. Had he denied it, rational doubt could have gained purchase, instead this flimsy pretext—the flimsiest perhaps in all of human history—gave Diane’s own insanity something to work with. The relief that the sexual power that had once been her defining quality had not been usurped by the competition: youth, the traitorous nature of flesh. For good measure, she kicked the girl out of the house.
The Lights Page 7