by Edie Meidav
“Not much.” She shrugs the grit away.
“It’s a gift,” he says. “Can’t take that away from the guy, even if people like to revile him. I ended up in San Miguel de Allende with all these painters and liberation people but when the ’68 uprising was crushed, that’s when I went to Chiapas, you know, wanting to resist the main party. We started our own small group there, built houses in the jungle. Then it all fizzled. Too much infighting. I spent years there, don’t get me wrong, we had high hopes.”
It’s hard when people get older. So much life history to share. Dirk has to use shorthand for entire decades.
“So Vic Mahler—?” she says slowly, drawing it out. It’s odd to say the name, entangling and liberating. She has never said it aloud so casually.
“You know, news travels slowly. Still in my Hermes phase but even before I heard what he did to his wife, I got a sign, gave up everything, cut my hair, went straight. I wanted some answers. I’d spent years under a spell, being a student, Chiapas, drug trips, coming back to stalk Vic as Hermes. Finally I cleaned up. In San Francisco I found contact improv.”
“You started it?”
“No, it was waiting for me, that whole discipline of contact. I refined it.”
“I still don’t get why Mahler was such a big deal in your life.”
“I mean, the guy was my hero. I used to memorize every one of his declarations. Before I went to Mexico, I did meet his wife once. In person, at a faculty party.”
“—Mary?”
“He invited me and then I was a brute, I tried cornering her. Who wouldn’t? Mary Fukuji Guzman Mahler.” He tastes each syllable, making Lana quiver. “Tall, in red silk, you know, like a samurai’s wife? She was part Japanese or something. And always laughing. Who wouldn’t have liked her?” His eyes closed. “Of course she wasn’t interested in some young protégé. Not the kind for real talk. She was used to Vic’s acolytes.”
“You were in your Hermes costume,” she points out.
“Not then. I met her before Mexico. After Mexico I became Hermes. Anyway, I only did that for a while. It’s hard for people to understand but I needed to stalk him. Just a phase. Something I needed to do after I felt he had betrayed me.”
“Oh.” She can’t keep his life straight. “Can we talk about dance?”
By now they have circled the ruins of the burnt hotel enough times. “Hey,” he says, his face bright in the gathering dark. “You were so great on the floor today. Your spirit was wide open. What just happened?”
“Can we not talk about it?”
“Like a shadow.”
It’s not a choice. Not like choosing whether to tell a rape story, a gogo story. How can you live a long life without letting on who you are?
Especially when you can tell your story to someone who will, to speak Dirk’s lexicon, grok what helped make you. He compels it: she wants him to grok her. “You know what?” she says.
Smiling, he leans in, ready for the kiss.
“I’m Mahler’s daughter,” she says.
He steps back. “The missing daughter of Mahler?”
“I’m Lana Mahler.”
“That explains it!” The grokking triumphant. “California! You changed your name from California or Callie—right?”
She nods, recognizing Dirk’s subtype. An ex-shaggy with depth, no shallow surfer over the family mythology but a researcher, a porer over kitchen scraps and paper waste, a savant. Clearly one who had shadowed Mahler enough to know at least one of her parents’ romantic whims. Let’s name her California! On this point, her father had relaxed, letting Mary have her way, giving the little baby the name of the state that had hosted Mary’s parents and Vic and later their own courtship.
What kind of straight-edge parents give their child the name California, a birth-certificate moniker requiring her to endure first-day teasing every year of school? Hey, California! Join my fifty states? Lana had glowered until the students stopped but it took too much effort: she chose to change her name to Lana right before she met Rose, first year of high school.
“But Cal-lie Mahler! Man,” Dirk is saying, sky-rocketed back into that other jargon, exulting in the glory of return.
“You know I’ve been Lana for years.”
“Lana fuckin Mahler,” he says.
She doesn’t really remember what else they talked about that night. Only his face: a riffled pack of cards, calibrating, some cards glowing. He returns to it, the justice of finding Mahler’s daughter here in this nowhere coast town of Yalina. How amazing was that? All signs fit. Dirk had fallen in with a whole Mexican group of liberationists because of Victor Mahler and then the corrections system never would let Dirk visit his hero, but here they are in Nowhere-lina, Ya-whatever-lina and Dirk gets to meet Mahler’s daughter. It must be preordained. But this is mainly coincidence for him, not for her, and as Vic loved saying, people always fail to notice the gross statistical frequency of non-coincidence, noting only the rarer appearance of coincidence. “Today on the dance floor I must have recognized you. That’s it!” He drops her hand, claps his own. “I remember. I tried not watching, you guys were too young, but you and some friend used to rollerskate outside your dad’s office, right?”
“Rose,” says Lana, reluctant to say the name. “Then you saw me when I was about fourteen. Maybe fifteen.”
“You guys wore white shorts,” he says. “That was the thing. You guys were so wholesome. Like bursting fruit. Or a geometric proof.”
“What?”
He starts to irritate her. She wishes she could undo the whole subject.
“You were proof of all Vic Mahler had said.”
“What, that he could pork my mother?” This comes out more scornful than she means. Still, she wants him to quit.
“Wow. You’re angry. Makes sense. Sorry. I can see your parents in your face. For sure. But you ever, you know, go and visit him?”
Her no is a head locked in a shaky elevator.
Nothing fazes him. “You know it’s only your name he keeps on the Permissions list, right? I actually tried getting some higher-up at the Bureau of Prisons to let me override that list but even if I were a lawyer, they wouldn’t let me. Because he’s a special case. A celebrity. No one gets to see him.”
“Probably not.”
“You never went? He must write you, though, right?”
“Want to see my painting studio?” she asks. Mainly because Dirk had been the white-phallus Hermes guy, but also to change the subject. Also because she is tired of semi-caution: she wants to slip down the rabbithole.
“Hey, if I can’t be inside you—” he says, scenting his chance, changing his hunt, incautious in using a line that could boomerang if she happened to be a woman annoyed by directness. “At least I can be inside your mind.”
Later, to her chagrin, she learns Dirk is no fool, he is an empiricist. On many previous occasions, with the right kind of woman, this exact line has worked wonders.
He says it again, this thing about her mind and what he calls pussy: the word dates him while also speaking for some envy of tougher men, becoming almost sexy for its bold weirdness.
By this point, she has brought him to the porch swing, outside the house of her children’s grandparents. “I’m not in touch with Vic,” she says. “Look, my kids are going to wake up.”
He barely digests the fact that she is a mother to kids. “I’ll whisper,” he says. “Anyway.”
Later on her studio futon he sticks fingers in every possible place and it is impossible to ignore the guy’s focus because it feels as if a million slave Lilliputians have gathered around a core, worshipping it, having tied a string around it and only now starting to push a giant stone attached to the string away—slow, tiny but resolute struggles toward freedom—so that when the stone breaks free of the string, it boomerangs enough to liberate all the little slaves. They ramble out in luxurious slowness, spreading through her limbs, ready to enjoy the summer night.
Yet only the previ
ous week, after a few months of less than optimal hookups—one alcoholic logger, one clubfoot crab-potter from the rez, one unkempt computer billionaire—she had made some resolve that she wouldn’t be vulnerable with someone for a while, wouldn’t give herself over to the love craving.
When she makes the decision to go south on Highway Five with Dirk to the Hope Springs oasis, they have known each other a total of four months. Je t’aime jusqu’à la mort plays on the tinny local radio station. Dirk entertains the idea that they will be one of those modern couples beaming out from the advertisement of an alternative-living journal, shiny and smug with connubial delight: we can teach you our relationship secrets. Self-actualize our way!
What he says to convince her to head south is that he’d read somewhere that everyone needed in life three things:
Someone to love
Something to do (right action/meaningful work)
Something to look forward to
or else only two
Belonging
A sense of meaning
She knows he has cribbed most of this from Vic and others but lacks the guts to say so since upon such ideas Dirk is trying to build his own fortress of ideation.
He thinks that at Hope he and Lana might be an exemplary couple. He rhapsodizes: not siblings repulsed by each other in the Freudian house of matrimony, not merely passionate couplers, but a couple above all rise and fall, welt and schmerz, zero and sum.
Half sold, Lana decides to uproot her sons from their beloved scorched earth of Yalina to head south. She will help in Dirk’s role as resident guru and will play her own role, as he says, of pastor’s wife, rebbetzin, an avatar of thriving.
After her decision, she still has to sell the plan big-time to her kids, because those kids know to stay loyal to the myth of their great lost dad Kip, a bursting brilliant flower too great for Lana, according to at least one of the myths sown by their grandparents. For the moment she decides you never fully escape other people’s stories, but you can at least sidestep a few of the nastier ones.
1980–2008
Dirk hadn’t told Lana the exact truth. He had streamlined, as that is how history works, all thirty-year movements cresting into baroque effusion before clarity can emerge, as Mahler once theorized. Dirk had also streamlined because, as Dirk too liked to tell his followers, long before your deathbed it becomes important to think your one life has sprouted more than the merely banal.
One part is true: Dirk had been one of those guys arising with gumption from dust and muck, in his case, Truckee and its mountains and their charismatic cartography, the lure for city drivers who come to peek at snow, all the I-5 offrampers wielding maps like compasses at the convenience store and eyeing him. Dirk had been one more local runt drinking chocolate milk, wearing misbuttoned logger’s shirts and flooding pants, Dirk squeezing by to hang up front, coughing on stubs with other wedlock or shotgun Truckee kids smirking with rotting teeth. His entourage was inbred or, more often, devoid of parents. Those few with both parents probably would have been better off with neither, Dirk and his milieu forming a quaint footnote to the vacationers’ satisfaction of all rustic urges. Having shown promise in high-school chess, after his bad adopted-son lawn-mower incident, Dirk had escaped being another rich person’s local color by throwing chess trophies into a duffel bag and lobbing himself southwest, becoming a student in Berkeley of the seventies.
In the town’s city-country microcosm, one that transforms dwellers into lifers, he had found the noblesse oblige of high ideals. He’d been of a piece with the men’s tanned oiled muscles, what he called chicken-grease legs, liking the simple entitlement of boys and girls who wore both river-guide sandals and floppy mountaineering hats. It was easy for him to understand their embrace of liberal ideals, yurts and hill-climbing, the headiness of a college education studded with wholesome sex and orthodontial perfection. You could conserve and consume simultaneously, all of it subtly evangelical like the barley potash flecked with international greens you were supposed to bring to potlucks.
In his co-op with the other guys, on their day for cooking a late lunch, they would burn cumin lentils and then race shirtless to play congas outside in Sproul Plaza, their chicken-grease legs in happy communion under the sun, good as bronze castings of eternity, honored by at least a few Africans in attendance: at such moments, Dirk felt united in a grand purpose. But what was that purpose exactly?
All the people I know who dedicated themselves to hedonism now are having a bad time, they have health problems or don’t have houses or children or paying jobs you could hear skinny sparky women with hair dyed blue-black confiding to sincere younger suitors in the cafés, women who’d survived heroin habits and pimps and worse. Dirk could have followed this track, becoming one of the overgrown hedonism-loving boys in river-guide sandals the traveler sees upon arrival in the Oakland airport. Instead Dirk caught fire. He would lay aside Frisbee and tai chi, would change the world.
Because he’d had the good fortune of crossing paths with the great Vic Mahler. First, he’d taken every course the teacher had offered, namely, two: Neuroethology and the World, and Motivation on the Level of the Cell.
In their first and last office meeting, the teacher had looked straight into Dirk and had said: I don’t know what you’re doing in school. You have the temperament of a maverick. Where you really belong is on a cooperative in Mexico. Take this book by Freire. Why waste your time with orthodoxy?
Who had ever given Dirk such a name? Maverick, a cattle-wrassler, a Logos capable of branding his soul, making him study the carmine paperback of Paolo Freire only to see the maverick face of God and his own future. He took Mahler’s diktat, surrendered the prospect of a B.A. and made himself into the maverick bachelor of possibility, the next day hitchhiking south along Five until San Miguel. Sure, it did take a few months before he could dislodge himself from its expat comforts and head toward Chiapas, knowing little but his wish to avoid his Truckee past and truckdriver father, but he was earnest and fire-powered enough that he could create a school, nightly reading Freire as if a new covenant upon his doorposts while working daily to follow its commandments, doing what he could to enter into a dialogue with his students without snubbing himself.
At first Chiapas had seemed fruitful: he brought education to the people. Leeches sucked his blood dry in a jungle from which he’d learned to cut whole swaths, swinging his machete while traveling forward on the back of an ass but Dirk was good, trained well in the local ways. Give him a flat stone and masa flour and in less than a minute he could slam together a tortilla. Plus he kept himself away from women local or foreign, letting the pure autoerotic beauty of monkhood fill his skin when he wasn’t in the outhouse bloating or deflating from dysentery and its own autoerotic fascination. The system had been sustainable until the thing had collapsed in some horrible Zeno’s paradox, the peasants so close to achieving the dream of collective empowerment that they turned against the gringo in their midst, calling him inescapably elitist in exactly the lingo he had taught them. He had given them a fishing rod only to become their first fish. Couldn’t you call this a sort of success?
Dirk read Freire—the man cannot give others a sense of their own liberation—and ashamed, he decided to go inward. After a bad ayahuasca trip during which the shaman had gone nasty, incanting you are a gringo, you are a gringo, some wires in his brain had crossed. Dirk saw that his romantic gesture (coming to Mexico) and his overactive brain (distinctions he had learned in Mahler’s classroom) and his mistakes (trying to pretend he wasn’t acting like one more white messiah) came from central fissures in Vic Mahler’s thought.
In Dirk’s post-hallucinogenic clarity, it became imperative to bring the message home to daddy. He would retrace the trail of tears and return to the safety of Berkeley, keeping himself far from the chicken-grease fellows of yore, instead he would turn the town into his own theater, a place to consolidate fragments Vic Mahler had strewn, a theater in which to stage a necessary act and
intervention, urgent to his identity. He would take whiteness to the nth degree.
In an era of discourse about Sun People and Ice People, Dirk manifested himself as a white polar bear, a means of showing that if a man fully embraced his identity, he most powerfully could subvert others. In this guise, Dirk started stalking Victor Mahler. Mahler would sight the polar-bear Hermes on the street and duck into boutiques or homes. While Hermes knew he was being avoided, it didn’t impede his addled purpose, as his brain had ricocheted and he needed to dog the man. Sitting outside the professor’s house in the pre-dawn, Dirk/Hermes hoped to eavesdrop on moments of domestic dispute to prove that Mahler was guilty of whatever rhetorical term tracks the lack of consistency between someone’s being and actions. Ad hominem but also ad absurdum, a necessary gesture, a moment of Theater of the Real, of the Oppressed, of Life, of consistency being the hobgoblin of great beings. His eavesdropping never yielded much but the gesture meant something, since in those days, theater still trumped biology, hands down. Only later would come the triumph of chemistry.
Sometimes Dirk/Hermes ran into one of the chicken-grease guys from the other era, and it was like, okay, they couldn’t understand what he was doing, but that was fine, let everyone coexist, one planet and how long did we have, the earth was at its midlife and we were its crisis, and anyway we’d all soon be blown up by those fuckers in government if we didn’t first get incinerated by some communal death-penalty pact.
In this period he abstained from eating meat and upon awaking every morning performed a ten-minute headstand until his neck gave out.
What really brought him back was when he had read about a special event for Those Coming Home from the Sixties, an event at a place called Hope Springs, just past the abandoned nuclear reactor, in which great musicians from the sixties and seventies and even the eighties were going to play—