by Edie Meidav
“Geothermal,” he says to her hesitation. “Hot springs. That’s the ticket. Sorry to speak bluntly. You got to clear your mind for your task.”
“Which?”
“The important one.”
She shrugs.
“Thought you said you were a lawyer.”
“I did.”
“Sorry. Usually never get it wrong. I took you to be one of those anti-death-penalty people.”
Her chin does a slow wag.
“I’ve been wrong before.” Again that dirty smile comes her way. “You know they call this place the local fry zone. Old Parcel heats up, protestors flock. We call them the anti aunties. I was sure—but you didn’t know about the execution?” Now authentically perplexed.
“I came—for vacation.”
“But you said you’re looking for something? Someone?”
“I mean, I did, but not—”
“See, you can’t hide. Vic’s people I always spot a mile off.” He is triumphant. “Your skirt gave you away. Something about black on red, can’t explain. Could write a book on it. Practically a science. Well, want my take, sure, the guy did screwball things in life, none of that gels with his work, whatever, all true, but the guy still deserves a better lawyer. One he has now’s famous for having sent off about seven people. Kaputski.”
“Seven?” She doesn’t will her squeak. “I didn’t know. But you know I don’t practice that kind of death law.”
“You’d be good though. Look like the kind born knowing lots.” He gets up suddenly, their colloquy finished. “Well, welcome. Spa’s just the ticket. Up the dirt road. Tell them Hogan says you get Venusberg, you’ll love it. Great views.” The reptilian coolness of his hands stays in her palm, not unwelcome, the hands of a man who knows how to fix things. As she leaves the coffee shop, uncertain, she feels his crooked smile on the swish of her skirt.
Outside, she stops, deciding, not lonely any longer, excited, almost revealed. No place at the inn but a room in Venusberg. She twirls a strand of her hair, surprised to find it black, as if she had managed to forget a whole phase of her recent life. “Lana,” she says for no real reason, just reorienting internal magnetic fields, no clear sign having appeared yet. A trucker emerges from his driver’s door so all she sees are his square mud-caked toes in flip-flops, his toes waiting while his spit shoots crystalline just past, followed by his pee, an arc sizzling on contact with asphalt. The only literal sign around hangs from the back of his sixteen-wheeler and is addressed to whores: LOT LIZARDS NOT INVITED.
Under a dripping waterpipe lies a child’s mechanical alphabet board, gaudy orange against the shop’s desert-shale, unable to stop its battery gone wild, its bleat hard to make out at first, but which, when she understands it, becomes enough welcome for Rose to accept, played out in the perfection of threes: a tinny, automated Hello! Hello! Hello!
1983 & 2008
Sink of the tattooed and cockringed, of pierced or natural, Asian African Anglo Latino, bellies tight or multiple, breasts tiny or tripled, red brown yellow pink orange white, buttocks furry or denuded. Some bodies belong more to the fourteenth century’s fields, child-bearing and early mortality than our space-age, vitamin-capsule eternity of the twentieth, the twenty-first, but no matter, a representative from every niche has shown up at this roll call.
Vic’s commentary about the place still echoes, a bombardment making Mary say: “You think the rest of us lack eyes?” To which his response had been to talk, much of the time, to his daughter’s little friend Rose, a parlay advertising his ideal of genteel discussion.
Long-testicled, long-clitorised, siliconed or liposuctioned. Those of skin pocked or clear and multitufted, the puffy littoral, the clusternutted. Exercise-addicted, lenient or unfetishized, all bodies here testify to denial or indulgence, to their treatment of time and time’s treatment of them. Bodies parading, rushed through college and meals, cars and bars, through lunchtime walks and ischemia risk, bodies coddled into rock-climbing or Sufi-dancing, into Mommy & Me classes. Bodies displaying tree rings or invisible-ink actuarial charts: when will the angel of death visit?
Not to mention men with penises that are tiny surprises resting on crepuscular sacks. Or those of corporate girth who follow bellies around in bewilderment, their heads distinguished and well groomed, or the older women with eyes glittery, noses narrow, buttocks smooth and self-aware, labia Brazilian, rucked, speaking to young men with honest eyes and handlebar mustaches. Pierced noses and equipment everywhere. The hermaphroditic, paganist, or transgendered, the hunched and erect, males or females with friendly clumps of beard, hair afloat, bodies scarred or blemish-free, all crying out the story to anyone who will listen: leisurely self-fulfillment or slow martyrdom.
Every breed of homo sapiens comes to Hope to be shed of shields like coffee-cup sleeves, kids’ doctor appointments, making a living. They reject ailments, annoying colleagues, portable music players, chamber music subscriptions, aging parents, the new black or the old gray, free themselves from nepotism, cronyism, bad politics. They come to abandon their helplessness in the claws of syndromes, carpal tunnel, overworked mother, acquired immunity, finally liberated from powerful housemates and gauche, controlling neighbors. Ostensibly free from race and class, from absentee mates or alcoholic parents, but never fully from gender: gender stands alone.
Mary saying: “Vic, let’s just be together somewhere? Or next time I pack duct tape for our mouths?”
“Someone’s mouth, maybe.” Vic shooting back his most winsome grin.
“You know some people seem to have taped up their hearing.”
“But I’m listening, my dear,” pulling his lobes long, turning on her his most wolfish smile. “Whatever you want to say. I’m all ears.”
Cowboy heritage continues in the Hope Springs oasis in that peekaboo showers with swinging saloon doors tease the viewer, revealing shampooed heads and, below, bare legs, while more contemporary plein-air showers let you see everything. Mirrors in warm light reflect back loveliness but in starker light make people shrink. Everything gets seen. Between pools, some people wear towels or bathrobes, naïfs taking on the sophisticate’s effacement. Usually, however, big, small, fat, thin or thinner yet, people wear nudity covered over by bliss or focus, two useful veils over intermediate layers of solipsism or narcissism. Some people, younger women and older men, tend to wear shame or its cousin brazenness as a cloak over all other affects. Some stare at everyone else, a preemptive strike against being looked at.
But nothing really hides. People may pretend not to look but bodies—a rainbow, a cornucopia—are seen that beg surveillance, bodies never depicted in any magazine or Renaissance painting or African sculpture or specialist porn.
Mary saying: “Honestly. You said we’d have a getaway. You think I care that much what you think about other people’s bodies? How you’re acting, you just made me turn 360 degrees in the space of twenty-four hours.”
Vic turning his most charming look on her: “So that gets us back where we started?” Clearly hearing some inaudible knell, sensing his charm waning, he rises from his lounge chair then, sacrificially upsetting all papers to go kneel by her chair, to be a good husband embracing his wife in a bear hug, to muffle her qualms. “Come on, Mary,” says Vic, “Mary honey,” and after that, Rose is embarrassed to keep lying nearby, unsure as usual whether any Mahler cares if she hangs about, their little noiseless mothgirl Rose, or if in some secret way they need her, as if the presence of Rose helps them keep the peace, their daughterlike moth making up their best audience yet.
Beyond how to manage grief (Witnessing Your Emotions, Hope Springs workshop #89, led by Omkari Rigatonne), there is no perfect evacuation scenario at Hope and no convincing earthquake survival scenario either. December thirteenth, 2008, the plan is to account for this soon and post more signs.
Liquid lavender-scented soap (made from flowers grown in the surrounding meadows and crushed near the cob-bale temple) flows out from opaque teats stationed at
the sinks and showers around Hope Springs and because of this, everyone starts to smell the same, a combination of lavender and the earthgut sulfur and iron piped into the hot pool where the pyroxene filter keeps the whole thing clean, fifteen hundred gallons of water pumped through daily, catching any inorganic material, allowing only H20, Na, S, Pb, Fe.
Lavender interestingly brings out the low notes of sulfur and the high of iron, while also efficiently tranquilizing the amygdala, the brain’s efficient center for both trauma and pleasure. Water flows from the hot pool into the warm pool so a special hot oasis happens near the stairs, an arsenic footbath near the entry to the warm pool, though the catalogue promises that the arsenic flows in trace amounts, not at all poisonous.
Sometimes white flakes of calcium precipitate form on the surface of the warm pool, alarming pilgrims whose imaginations and self-awareness already tend toward hypochondriacal arousal. Yet such flakes just mean that many humans have crowded the pool and that the spa works its wonders, each person having acted as a human ice cube, cooling the earth’s magma-warmed waters: the calcium is sugar condensing in cooled tea.
“You manage to see everything but me,” Mary hissing to Vic, their hug having spanned the mere second-long blaze of noon.
This sameness of nudity and scent makes sex a greater plausibility. How many veils are there between your floating member and someone else’s hole, your wet hole and someone else’s member? Thus, people’s faces work to hold up new veils by the minute: the all-time favorite is dignity, as is the visage of sex-transcending enlightenment, a new kind of spiritual chastity armature. Bliss always works. A naked couple will seem clothed by virtue of a pride in the mate’s naked body when displayed to cold air and hot water, faces singing out a courtship story and continued attraction, making the discrete nature of their bodies evanesce.
The men’s dormitory flanks the women’s dormitory. You can get private rooms with shared or half or full bath, you can try dorm life or even tent-camp, out in the meadow past the half-constructed cob-bale temple still awaiting the right nudist or aquaphilic donor to complete Hope’s most ambitious project yet.
There is also the sauna. No matter the lavender soap used as a disinfectant, the sauna never stops smelling of the sweat of thirty-five years of wet and prone bodies. Oak soaked with a sweat gone archival, a legion of Finns and Swedes and everyone else having shed toxins so deep into the wood that no one’s new sweat has a fighting chance. One breathes in the heated old sweat and at the same time history, the Hope Springs into which one humbly enters one’s own body as a worldly petitioner, a stressed-out nutcake, a beggar for the rite of cleansing and healing, as close to immortality as one can get in this life, longing for youth and renewal sans mildew.
Some song plays on the radio in the guard station: dream of Cali-forni-cation.
Statistics would state that clever conversation doesn’t occur much at Hope Springs and that political conversation is barely tolerated. What does unfold, no matter the residents, is a curatorial discussion re: choices and the consumption of regimes ecological, psychological, moral or digestive, career-minded or habitat-specific. A parade of bruises brings on a parade of cures. Sacred sexuality as a weekend practice combined with being a Web site manager and renovating condos? The conversation consumes all: ways to overcome trauma by holding versus selling. The benefits of Pilates versus yoga versus NIA or Gestalt versus transpersonal versus meditation, or zen versus Vipassana versus Mahayana versus surfing. Stay in the relationship or leave? Twelve steps versus transcending the literalism of the step? Committing to Amerikkka instead of leaving for Asia or Europe or Latin America? No matter their ostensible import, all conversations can be reduced to this: the attainment of greater health whether in one’s muscles, mood, karmic plane or colonic hygiene.
From the brochure:
Get over grief.
Get over loss.
Find yourself anew.
Be not the root, digging deep toward the molten magma center of the earth.
Be the high branches.
Better yet, the leaf, free to wave in the wind, reaching high up toward the sun.
December fourteenth, 2008, day four of the anniversary, day one of the Surrendering Grief workshop and the beginning of the EnlightenBreath experience. At the break between these last two, a clump of men sunbathe on the cramped spot of sun on the deck. They lie on their sides, of womanish hip, their stomachs sliding a bit, reading, not lazy, doing leg lifts and abdominals, their sex falling this way and that way, Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-duck, childishly vulnerable, pierceable, blushing, a confession of boyhood. Some may be ex-felons or even feds—but who cares? One innocence under the sun. To each individual let there be all over again the simple birthright of body.
FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:01 A.M.
At the tail end of a Yoga of the Heart class, Rose listens to the female instructor—every inch of her revealed belly self-aware, its notches a form of invested capital—as she has students finish the last stretch so they can lie like corpses or napping kindergartners awaiting the fairy-wand that will wake them into a better future. Rose lies prone and breathing, knowing some weepy stage of life has gathered her up. Everyone else is lost in trance while she fights tears: the dorm had given her one lonely night.
So easily Rose could tap someone’s wrist and just confess what she is seeking.
“Let thoughts come and go,” says the instructor. “Don’t chase. Your breath is the wind, your thoughts clouds blowing away. Call your practice a ladder up and your detachment the ability to pull the ladder after yourself.”
But detachment proves ornery: why must one person always be designated to become the vessel of memory?
Lana running in front of her on one of the paths. The hushed arguments Mary and Vic had. The married pair seated at a table—they always kept their bathing suits on—in the shade, lost in journals or arguing, interrupted when Lana came asking for lemonade money. Jane Polsby had started saying to Lana and Rose: “Let’s not bother Lana’s parents. Let’s just use money my mom gave me. Let’s leave them alone.” The friends accepted Jane’s money with false promises of repayment, one more example of the bad faith they showed others’ deficits and the tenderness showed only each other.
On first talking with that odd Hogan, Rose had kept much of her goal in coming to Hope concealed. Later that evening, she had leaned onto a fence made of rickety desert sticks, strung with Christmas lights, listening to Johnny Cash blasting from the loudspeakers, the bass line a low itch, finding herself dangerous and unbounded, lips full, throat parched, so restless she felt ready for any random man who might press up behind. She had looked out at the valley falling into dusk, watching preparations for the anniversary theater presentation about the founding of Hope. How humid the actors became, returned to play-acting their former selves or heroes, only rarely breaking into hilarity.
Hogan had come by then, surprising her by asking in his flat tone if everything had been to her satisfaction so far, and Rose had pinched the flesh between her thumb and index finger to keep herself from begging him to locate one person among the three hundred milling about. Only when he left did she let herself exhale, again, the name she has for years tried not voicing: Lana!
In the yoga class this morning following, breathing in rosemary burning from a smudge stick, Rose is being undone and tries not to cry. “Identify with your potential to change. Not with the old self you keep toting around. Identify with the harmony that could be yours,” says the instructor. “Because you are spirit in body form! Consider the expanse of this! Your body is on loan. Everything you believe to be solid will be taken away. Everything you believe is you will vanish. Think how free that makes your choices right now.” Rose must have made some pact with a devil to end up here alone; she won’t find Lana; or she will and it will make her hunger greater. Somewhere she had made a wrong decision if at the right fork or had mislaid her life, since everyone else seemed to know better how to live. As a kid, Ro
se had worried that if she voiced certain words in the wrong sequence or even said murder, unknown to her, someone across the world could die. You could do wrong without ever knowing it, not to mention all the wrong you had already done and could not forget.
“Rise up slowly. We have time for a little sharing,” says the yoga instructor. “Feel your body. We’re going around the room to share which characters inhabit you. I’m asking you to name parts of your body where these characters are most alive.”
The spa crowd has come to unload and needs little prodding: one man with a smooth face confesses that a girlie dancer lives in his chest. One large freckled woman with frank, fleshy arms admits she has a mother and kittens frolicking around her knee area. A Hawaiian woman wearing a lei says an aboriginal goddess lives at each wrist.
Finally, the instructor points a long beringed finger at Rose while gazing down an aquiline nose, her slight accent presumably real as she repeats her question with grave patronization before Rose truly hears. “And who are the characters in your body?”
To which Rose manages a stammer.
“Too hard to talk right now?” the instructor asks.
“A wizard holds my throat tight.”
The instructor acts interested. “What’s the wizard doing?”
“Cackling. Holding a whip. Down my throat, there’s a scared beaten-down hamster.”
“What’s the message of the wizard?”
“If you want to survive, figure out what other people want.”
“Can the hamster change?” the yoga instructor asks.
“No, it’s too guilty, too beaten down.” The words speak her. “It always has to strategize and pretend. It works for the wizard. It survives by working.” There can be no looking around as she says any of this. “The hamster has no voice. But it does have invisible antennae that help it know what others need.”