by Edie Meidav
She returned to these questions, south of that suicidal cliff, during her walk with Dirk in the first moments of courtship, trying hard to zone into what he was saying.
Years ago, Dirk had been in costume because of Vic Mahler. Starting in 1960, Vic Mahler had written about neuroethology and the bioethics of possibility within the brain in such a visionary way that a whole generation woke to feverish new thoughts about the mind and perception, a generation happy to scramble his message into acts undertaken on behalf of their own drive toward free love and pharmacology. Eventually the scrambling of his message swayed Vic, too, who started issuing what most readers took as edicts, statutes, challenges: if a scientist replaced every one of your neurons with a micromachine replica, would you then feel any less your own self?
On the coastal walk she listens to this potential beau Dirk, the way he sucks ocean air deep into his lungs talking of Vic, and she gets that no matter what she tells, if she ends up with this guy, she will essentially be uploading another bit of Vic Mahler karma onto her truck. Had she ever asked for such karma? Nosirreebob, as she’d trained the twins to say. And it wasn’t that everyone these days knew about Vic: his consignment to the past shocks her, one example being that the ostensible father to her children seems never to have heard about the groundbreaking work of Vic Mahler in creating one of those disciplines credible only in a state with its rocks constantly on the move.
In Yalina, her woolly north coast, before she met Dirk, she had been trying to keep it simple. You could hole up for years, stabbing toward normalcy by using kid-feeding rituals and odd jobs, everything to keep you from the existential brink. About this brink she could have written a user’s manual, knowing that her life and its mainstay job at the government-cheese supermarket, where she loved the happy numbness of passing food stamps over a scanner, had become one easy beep!
True that after her fiancé left—that was how she had to think of it, that he left, that he had not killed himself—she had hated living with her inlaws. Nor had she ever been a fan of the hardship of making ends meet: she would not have signed up willingly for the fun of being a single mom supporting two sons. She had done what she could to survive and stay away from all brinks, using sacraments such as the spectacular hygiene of her boys’ teeth and the wearing of her hair in two penitential braids. According to Vic, however, any brain with holes—he had accused her, too, of having such holes, due to brain trauma after a bad crib fall when she was a baby—could correct itself only so much, and was doomed to pathology, nymphomania, borderline sociopathy, aggression, psychosis, who knew what else?
If Vic was right and her seedbed or fate were that dire, she thought she had been doing pretty well.
I’m a regular success story, she tells this pleased fellow Dirk as they continue to wind their way along the Yalina cliffs. She halfway means it: by her own lights she is a success. She then chooses to tell Dirk the stories that open the portal, hers a generous act, a recognition that the drumroll of intimacy has begun, the stories that serve as opening ceremonies in the potlatch of love. Someone must be the first to start giving up stories.
And to match, his tone a thick fruity soup, he starts speaking of his past as a follower. He’d spent an era of his life in costume and she cannot tell if he speaks with endearing embarrassment or in ancient, rebellious identification with a cult figure.
Until finally she gets the relevance.
“No way!” she shouts. “You were the guy in white?” She must stop walking the cliffs: disbelief makes her savor the weirdness. “You’re the polar-bear guy!”
“I was.” But he grants her an autograph: his smile.
If not the weirdest shaggy, certainly Dirk in his prior mutation dwelled toward the weirder end of the spectrum, barred from the title of weirdest only by the rasta whose Hindu self-mutilation—long steel spike through scanty shoulder flesh—failed to impair a tai chi practice requiring the rasta, sunrise and sunset, to perform his martial art wearing a leather loincloth on the Mahler driveway. The neighbors had protested all the gutterside urination, begging Mary for an electric fence or at least lawnside cayenne-sprinkling.
One hundred and fifty miles north of her old Berkeley home, only one mile south of the dead-daisy-chain spot marking where her fiancé’s car had caromed off the cliffs, Dirk divulges that he had been Hermes. The fact redoubles before her.
Hermes-Dirk had been one more character whose primary purpose seemed to come from stalking her father. Thus Dirk must be older than he looked. During preliminary intake, first seconds of courtship, Lana had gotten him wrong, mistaking Dirk for one of those California men who, burdened by too much motherlove, gets confounded by life extension and ends up some kind of exercise-nut, a user of embalming sunscreens, the kind who can never wash mama or their yen for eternity off their faces.
This is the kind of puer—as Vic liked to call such a man—whose primary vow is to undergo only slight erosion, men focused on outwitting actuarial odds by their faithfulness to California protocols: ease, cheekbones, the low glycemic index of their diet, fire-trail hikes, cardiovascular gestures, wealth, Tuscan vegetables, phytonutrients, heart-benefiting and cancer-fighting volunteerism, the kind who into their fifties remain manboys, pursuing life-risking activities without ever wiping off that constant smile. If misfortune happens to such men, a hemorrhaging bank account or loss of an actual limb, such men call it process or a learning experience, ready to die before admitting failure, failure bad as a hairweave, a condition practically requiring surrender of the state’s driving license.
What matters to such men—and despite having heard her father preach so often against these puers, Lana has known a Cecil B. DeMille legion of them, as they tend to like her long legs—is the smile. The manboys’ smile advertises their soft-pocket hedonism, suggesting that riches and goodness have flowed toward all luminaries elected by grace.
So this man courting her, this smiling Dirk, used to be phallus-carrying polar-bear Hermes! Part puer, part shaggy, part something unguessable, this man grins, far from the province of guessing he speaks with the actual daughter of Victor Mahler.
Lana may have stories to tell but in all the years since she heard the news about her parents, she had never told anyone who her dad was. True, foolish as the gesture was, she has kept her first name; the name forms her being. And at times she has grown sloppy, occasionally needing to revivify her mother and so letting herself use one of her mother’s last names, Fukuji or Guzman, instead of the alias of Lana Wagner.
Yet once Lana realizes Dirk had been the polar-bear Hermes, she wonders how wise it would be to unclothe herself and blind him with patrimony. It is clear to her that if Dirk knows he is talking to Lana Mahler, daughter of famous Vic, all that synchronicity will just about swing the vote.
Along evening cliffs they walk to where the most historic hotel in the region had burned down, to where you still smell ash, like a friendly hint of campfires gone by. Three spindly stone monoliths rise in judgment upon the landlocked, hundreds of feet below in the surf. In such a place, the ocean borrows land and returns nothing, leaving only craggy monoliths staring like stern church fathers. The whole moment’s spareness could dare two walkers to throw themselves into the Pacific because who would care?
Since Lana’s first arrival in Yalina, she has seen how the wildness of the northern ocean sharpens memory even as it renders it irrelevant. The individual takes on risk as an easy substitute for the social: you walk and the sandstone would happily let you crumble hundreds of feet down. She never wishes to recall Vic—he colonizes whole unwilling swaths of her brain—but all too easy up in Yalina to remember Vic’s frequent citation of what he called the danger/beauty study in which experimenters showed men pictures of female subjects. Half the men, made to walk a tightrope before seeing the picture, found the post-tightrope pictures more attractive than those in the control group who had walked on an open road. Danger increases appreciation, as Vic liked telling her, citing this study all the time
, once using it to warn her away from going hang-gliding with a beau, to which she tried telling her father that riskloving itself might be attractive though she knew, she always knew, that anytime she bothered stating an opinion she baited his usual response, which was to scoff at her teen grasp on knowledge.
Either a risklover or else just deeply invested in appearing gallant, Dirk makes a big show about walking the ocean side of the path, keeping Lana inland as if chivalry alone could protect a woman from sandstone, missteps, earthquakes.
“I used to love doomlovers,” she says.
He looks up out of his derring-do. “Some women do,” says Dirk, voice uncertain about where this might lead, jolted out of being a knight into something less savory.
“Could be evolution.” She wants to explain further, get him into the exact precinct from which she speaks, but he is too busy now trying to bushwhack toward an inland fork.
“How’s that.” He beams at her, face broad under the lantern-light near the burnt jaws of the hotel, intent on his mission of listening.
“Say you’re female, right?”
He smiles, sucking in another breath; his generation would say he was grokking the idea of being female, taking it deep past the pores.
“You avoid female rivals if you couple intensely for a short period with a male doomlover,” she says. “Only your eggs get the seed of someone with enough aggression to, I don’t know, die spearing the bison.”
She may as well have performed an elaborate mating dance, a dance of the spider queen. He stops still.
“I did love a certain type of doomlover when I was growing up,” she persists, realizing he could be one of those men who insists on hearing everything as a come-hither. While she may want him—not sure yet—she does know that the only way to overcome this lothario tendency in a listener is to barrel through and keep talking. Meanwhile, the urge to confess rises like a thirst, as if she wants to take him into her throat. Instead she tells Dirk that as a teenager, she had certain doomlovers’ posters on her walls and that she had a girlfriend with whom she had celebrated doomlovers. “But then the problem is you end up living with doom as your wallpaper.”
“It has a certain half-life,” he says, “girlish romanticism, right? Drives a lot of women off the deep end.” Whether Dirk means to be telepathic or not, he may as well have gone sea-diving and emerged with the right pearl. His prize being that he gets her full smile, not the bitten one she’d turned on him before.
The ostensible father of her children, Kip, had done that, deep-ended her: this is the phrase she likes using. I was deep-ended. Lana still has not told Dirk how in so many countless ways she is a survivor. Nor has she said that she thinks she deserves her widow karma or that she has most recently described herself, to a Pomo fisherman from the rez, as your original black widow mom. But mainly she is not yet answering the what’s-your-name, who’s-your-daddy question just so she and Dirk may linger a bit longer in unspoiled vales of curiosity without having to scale any peaks of confession. For the moment, he probably stays simple in his plans, concocting some idea about bedtime, and guessing this concoction fills her with reciprocal fantasy. She imagines Dirk dandling her boys and the flash comes as it has come with other men: she will move toward him because to move toward Dirk would be like walking on a spit of land toward the light.
Light, she tells herself as he talks, keep it simple. He could be a flush card.
In and out of this flushness he returns to mentioning life choices he has made—a student in Berkeley, a beloved professor, his time in Chiapas, a recanting of such ways.
“Wow,” she repeats herself. Dirk faces inland toward her. “I still can’t believe it. You were the polar-bear guy.”
“Hermes,” he corrects. “Call it a phase. I carried a message to people. I stalked Mahler, basically.” Dirk’s grin a wrinkle of embarrassment. Of course he stalked Vic.
“People need their heroes,” she says, taking cover in blandness.
Now he realizes that Lana had said the polar-bear guy, and that she must have seen him in the Hermes guise. “You were, what, in high school in Berkeley? A beloved cheerleader?”
“So what was it about—that professor, Mahler?”
“I was one of his first real followers.”
“I don’t even get that part. Why so many followed him,” she says with unusual heat.
A reciprocal flare. “They called him the Pied Piper.”
Her expression stays fixed, something he might recall, but she avoids his gaze, watching her feet tamp down seagrass.
Really, what little girl could forget the shaggies camped out on her front lawn? Who could forget her own mother putting out Sunday scones and jam for the followers? Their hippie gratitude for such humane touches, smitten by mother Mary as coeval of the Mahler myth, a transubstantiation for the shaggies since motherly hands that had touched Vic’s privacy had also kneaded and baked scones now offered to dirt-thick fingers.
Back when Lana had been ten or so, suffused with the desire to be a nun in order to heal the world, a quick phase, she had asked Mary: can’t we have the shaggies come and live in our wine cellar? This was a hard request to explain, harder to win. Later Lana saw how absurd her idea had been: the shaggies living in her parents’ house? Flanked by sociological tomes advocating pluralistic societies, her parents would nibble postprandial French cheese above the wine cellar in which a bunch of shaggies knocked heads?
“I studied with Mahler in undergrad,” Dirk is telling her. “Went to find him in his office, waited with everyone else slumped in the halls. Then I got my shot at the king. Look, I said, I’m starting far behind, because that was my delusion back then, that reading books made you a better person? So I asked how do I get ahead, you know, I’m so far behind? And I swear the guy looked through me. I’m not kidding, hazel eyes like yours.”
“You’re the first to call them hazel.”
“Well, gray, whatever, they’re beautiful. So Mahler told me someone like you, you shouldn’t be in school. He called me a maverick. Said I should just go and live in Mexico cheaply, that I’d learn more.” He waits as if this should be enough but then gets it is not. “He put his hand on mine for a second at the end, way professors used to do, but thing is, it was different, swear it was like getting an electric jolt. The guy could see into me. Anyone would feel naked before that gaze. So you see,” says Dirk, “right, how Mahler set me on a different path?”
She can see. Too easily. Or rather, whether or not Dirk is one more puer, she smells eucalyptus.
In one week men of any Northern Californian denomination can regress and conflate. They turn from studying the bioactivity of mercury to probing the biodynamics of Hacky Sack or start wearing full-tilt training gear to ride high-performance bikes into hills flanked by eucalyptus imported by the British from Australia a long time ago, the tree that had become a quick weed, feathering Northern California’s landscape with long peeling bark, scenting the hills with its aromatic sap, all of it putting everyone at greater risk of fire.
Vic had hated Berkeley’s eucalyptus for many reasons, not least of which was that, to his nose, it smelled like both cat pee and colonialism. Whenever he wished to insult someone who gave no heed to the natural rise and outgrowth of tradition, who believed he was inventing his own traditions, he called his target Eucalyptus Man.
What emerges, as Dirk continues to talk, is not just eucalyptus but also the hurt boy who had been lurking behind his mantle of preternatural enlightenment: she sees that Dirk’s habit of rhapsodizing is how he has survived, a masking of any wound, and this disparity between his superficial and genuine faces does not bother her. In fact, she welcomes it, as such contradiction had lived in her lost fiancé and many other men before him. Her empirical findings have shown that a man whose front—stoic, surly, rapturous—hides a great wound means that inside lives a boy arguing with a grown man. Which means that in bed, the boy and man turn passionate, making her body into a ladder so they can meet in the
middle: by this means, she gets to be a healing nun of sex.
“You know, my background?” says Dirk. “I was one of those guys with a trucker dad.”
“No way.” This guy had his own breed of surprises.
“Almost a pedigree. From a family of truckers. They thought higher education was the biggest privilege you could get. Both hated it and wanted it. I was supposed to be the one who’d get out. My dad told me you got to make better choices than anyone else. And my mom was one of those Bible-thumping Christians who worked for the church all the time and never told me I was adopted.”
“Wow.”
“It screws with your head. You don’t know where you come from. One day I was mowing the lawn and my father blurted it. He said he was shocked that, for a jewboy, I was good with lawns.”
She likes him more. Maybe the potlatch of intimacy is happening faster than she thought. He is offering up good stories, maybe his best. “How old were you?”
“A teenager. We lived near the Nevada border, one of those two-bit towns. My first baby bottle was filled with chocolate milk. After the lawnmowing moment, I came down to sin city. Basically, I got to Berkeley and Mahler stepped into what he kept calling the Jesus-hole in my psyche. I thought the guy saw me.”
She says nothing for a bit. “You followed his advice?”
“Look, he was Vic Mahler. What can you do when someone really knows you?”
He lets the remark stay in the air, seeing the unpremeditated reward, his comment gathering romantic grit he hadn’t intended. In his experience, this kind of woman likes a little slamming; he could crush her bones. She might even let him brand her with his initials mid-thigh, as one girl had, a long time ago, a moment he had never fully recovered from: the scent of burnt human flesh. What can you do when someone really knows you.