by Edie Meidav
“You have nowhere to go,” he states back, bureaucratic tone shading reflective. “No friends? Family?”
Worry tickles her throat, a fringe preventing her from swallowing. She shouldn’t have left Rose, she realizes, Rose would have been able to deal. She would have grabbed Lana’s hand, brought her somewhere, shaken her back to the best that could be done. While this guy is telling her that, far as he knows, Vic is being held in the famous penitentiary until the trial date. Already she can hear her father’s mockery, the way he had mocked Mary, Rose, everyone: what, Lana, you wanted to ride in on a white horse and save me?
Once she had gone, together with Rose and Vic, three dayfarers on the Alcatraz ferry to the island prison just for them to make clever, secretly awed remarks about the graffiti in cells, the scratching of cartoonish naked women, the attempts at bison by latterday cavemen, and as they’d taken the ferry back, the trio had remarked on the desperation of prisoners who had dared escaping in the cold Pacific. “At least those who stayed in prison got time to think,” Vic had said.
For the fleetest of seconds, standing on Spruce Street before their old home, Lana does envy Vic his cell, a place to gather the pieces, and while the oily police guy talks, her solution comes. Rather than go to the prison, she will use the credit card of a condemned man, go and book herself into the Montrepose Hotel, the pale hotel with its crenellated walls and fancy pool and tennis club to which her parents, for all their dinner-table socialist ideals, belonged.
Alone at the hotel buffet overlooking the bay, she will stay as Lana Mahler, nibbling on biscotti and crab cakes and signing her name on credit slips as if no one will ever bother following her trail. In the gift shop she will find a fluffy boa to wear as she paces down the halls while eyeing lonely travelers. She will spend a few mornings simmering in the hot tub listening to the lucre-laden gossip of local therapists only to retire in the afternoons to her cell to watch cop shows. How many days can she go on like this?
Third day of exile in the luxury of Montrepose, she gives up and calls a cab, asking the scarred driver to go across the bay and leave her at the gates. On the bridge the driver tries to get her to talk, saying he’s only driving while getting his real gig going since what he truly believes in is the future of California, the poetry of real estate. “You know I served time in the pen too once,” he tells her, looking disappointed when she makes no inquiry. Only then does he ask who she’s going to see, a question she ignores until they get to the gates when she dares stumble over the name: Victor Mahler.
The cabbie whistles an appreciation. “Brave girl!”
“More like stupid girl.”
“Want to get the guy’s autograph for me?” says the cabbie, probably not meaning it, handing over his night phone number on a card and leaving before she can tip him. She stares at the dollars she meant to offer, damp in her hand. It must be blaringly clear how much she needs everyone’s mercy.
Inside prison gates, unless you’re a prisoner, there’s no possibility of slacking. So go through with it, she wills her legs, walk forward, you got here, go on. As soon as the first gate clicks shut behind, she sees that once officialdom begins, you can’t break what you’ve started without the tracer of your ghost exiting videocams and logbooks, your hand stamped with invisible ink numbers in unwashable memory. At multiple stations, freezing from an air-conditioning system gone supersonic, she tells guards with brilliant eyes, again and again, in total humility, that the person she has come to see, whom she would like to see, her status writ officially, is Victor Mahler.
Lana Mahler, visitor, wishes to see Victor Mahler.
Having to write his name above hers is such a horrible confession of need, far more than she had ever confessed.
One of the many ironies she considers during a wait long enough to make any visitor reconsider intention is how the Mahlers have never been a greeting-card family. Though Mary always kept careful records of her daughter’s illnesses, pages tabbed and highlighted—ear infection 1974, strep 1978, mono 1980—she had never taught Lana the protocol of writing happy birthday to anyone. When the officials make Lana wait, she sees the other visitors as if they are a flock of greeting-card homing pigeons, little groups of people thrust into an inhospitable milieu who all appear to be clutching greeting cards, as if these alone could wing them home to the dynasty of happy sentiment, a bubbled and italicized world of births or anniversaries. Kids and tired mothers and girlfriends alike all hold these cards aloft. The proximity of these happy-birthday families and their tiny flags of normalcy makes Lana’s skin crawl. She had not asked for intimacy with people unable to help their proclivities toward celebration, people with not just cards but also buckets of fried chicken, fingering messes of tiny bones and amber skin onto white tables, their backdrop a paralyzed line-up of singletons, lone mates or parents, seated against walls as if delegated to hold them up, viewing this pageant of kinfolk with resignation or disgust. Between these two groups, the greeting-card flock or the singletons, Lana does not know where to sit but finds the corridor no better, made up of a bank of pay phones and nicotine-scented girls in tight jeans pacing, skinny from anxiety and dragging infants along for the ride.
Near the fried-chicken gaggle then, Lana finally tries settling onto a plastic chair designed by a mauve-favoring sadist, closing her eyes and willing herself not to think what will happen when her number appears on the screen and shoots her out of her purgatory.
She will say to Vic that now at least she can find him more easily. Or anything to get the dividend of his smile, the one recognizing irony as their shared birthright, scorn being an aspect of her family Lana truly misses, craving it as if you could bite into wit like the pica that makes pregnant women devour mud. Back before Lana lost the promise of her promise, the family’s jokes had kept them together, promising a family indivisible against the greater world’s banality or lesser intelligence. For one sharp second Lana thinks of Rose, considering that maybe this humor was what Rose had coveted too, a derision promising to redeem tribulation by making all slick, nothing sticky.
The person Lana will not think of is Mary. Cannot and should not, as in the old fairytale her mother used to read about a lost bunny. Cannot and will not, certainly not in this greeting-card territory. She will not admit the desire to know. Though of course a question pulses. Why more than how, though maybe the why acts as an asymptote slouching toward the how. How does a person do this to a loved one? How can a tower of thought justify any part of this badness? The why and how blend while an acid starts to eat out her insides. Why would you do this to any of us? On the ride in, the cabbie prattling on, Lana had sworn silently not to ask Vic: let him come forth.
And when they finally bring her to sit in the chair where he too will be brought in, this trapezoidal visitation room that makes all entrants infants, its interior walls so white they make her caffeinated brain scream, she sees the scene from outside her body, aware of herself as the prisoner’s clean-faced fresh-skinned daughter, hair pulled tight. Sometimes Mary used to call Lana a daddy’s girl or a papa’s girl, the kind of comment that leaves a daughter no exit. Whatever form Lana’s refusals have taken, Mary is right in this claim as she has been right in so much, Lana unable to exit being Vic’s little girl, even now while waiting for him to appear wishing he will still find her his funny, lucky, pretty, smart or just plain good daughter, the one who at Me & Me was enough to give him reason to live.
When they do lead him in, Vic shaven and in green scrubs, so real and yet also a thousand layers removed, the urge comes over her to bite through layers and kiss his neck, to find papa by actually smelling him.
Though he doesn’t take her hands and doesn’t lean in for a hug; does intimacy flout regulations? His grin lopsided as if prison has already chomped off half and if it weren’t for his eyes she would almost think this oddity an impostor. Already these few days inside have undone some of Vic. “Hey,” she says, softly, nothing better at hand.
“Great to see you!
” he says, tone a mockery.
She wants to aim for a semblance of a common language. “Mahlers and institutions—” The choke of the thought. Eight days ago there were three Mahlers. Eight days ago her mother was alive and now Lana sits across from a father dressed as a prisoner with a peevish smile and eyes asking why bother? Better to be wholly inside his skin or flee than have to look upon this new intolerable shard of Mahlerdom.
Yet she need take no lead because Vic does what he always does, taking her unawares, continuing as if they had just rounded some turn in a long-standing conversation. “When you were born,” he says, leaning forward, hands clasped as if in conclusion, inappropriate as usual. “You had in your body all the eggs of your future kids.”
“What’s the point of that?”
Just like that they are back to their usual sparring: such return could be almost reassuring and help erase these walls.
I am the one he never—
Never what? Never had: the thought is crazy, qualifying as what she in her own institution time never called hallucinations but halloos. She sits motherless in an institution. Until this exact second she had been a child watching the balloon slip out of her grasp and float away, believing it could bounce back.
The guard she hadn’t fully noticed, a surly beef hock of a man leaning against the wall behind Vic, informs them that at lunch the inmate must decertify to the refectory with Cell Block A. The visit will have to clock shut in less than ten minutes.
“Fewer,” mutters Vic. “Fewer than ten minutes. Not less.”
The guard shrugs. Lana has fewer than ten minutes for her to notice for the first time the vertical symmetry of the gouged cleft in Vic’s chin and above his lip, her vision blurring so the clefts become two eyes winking vertically. Lacking any other pleasantry, the two of them staring at each other with no map, she tells her father she’d never noticed those marks.
“Cleft in chin, devil within. You never saw it? I always had a deep frenulum. But when you get down to it, no one ever sees anyone truly. Tell me I’m wrong,” says her father. Then he whispers: “How’d you get—” tripping and almost saying home “—here?”
The guard interrupts: less than five minutes before mess.
“Fewer!” Vic barks at him before turning back to Lana. “If you came at the right time, they would have given us an hour,” says Vic, for the first time showing desperation, the tensility of a wire about to snap, the most intolerable thing she has seen yet.
Once Vic had opined that need blinds people and hence it is important to love without need. Was it from him that she had inherited the repulsion? Need blinds people and hearing his need she calms the itch in her feet so ready to run, already knowing how good the coastal wind will taste outside, her minutes in an ammoniac room a lifetime too long, her temples starting to pound to the rhythm of I-didn’t-ask-for-this, the grandeur of a headache rolling in from the sides.
For want of anything else she asks: “Your room’s okay?” immediately tuning out whatever he says next. Lips moving, shorn head angled, he offers a simulacrum of a conversation to which she is deafened, given how the instant bloats into nausea: she has become too important to Vic.
She drums fingers on the soft plastic rimming the edge of the table, seeing grime pressed into its veins along with crescent moons from all the fingernails that have dug in. Signatures of the rueful, angry or hopeless among the visitors and as her milk-and-fish time in the sanitarium had taught her, isn’t there something horribly satisfying about what an institution knows? Such places know human need, their intelligent design good at predicting that fingernails will dig into soft polyurethane, showing brilliance in how they soften edges or set up bedtimes, feeding troughs, liquid nourishment, punishments, visiting hours, all with a higher daddy-logic than any daddy can muster. She wants to say some of this but all she can do is drum, things she might say clotting her throat.
“They might move me,” he says. “Old Parcel. Who knows.”
“You’d rather stay here,” she says, gentle as can be, making herself say “Papa?” and taking his shiver as yes. There is little to tell him but if she doesn’t click to it, their time together will have sped on with nothing real having left her mouth. True that a why sticks in her throat but there will be no leaning into anyone here as she has done on a few memorable occasions, no crying on papa’s stiff wooden shoulder. On the taxi ride in, the driver yammering on, she had worried over Vic, believing in some secret cranny she might come as a savior, the same child to have pressed soothing cloths to papa’s fevered forehead.
Now she cannot find the ingenuity of that child. Nor can she, with time ticking down, keep from asking. “I was just wondering,” she begins, starting again. “What, I mean—?”
At which he, as always, knows everything. Now he grants the other half of his smile, broad enough to chill. All of him smiles, shrewd, his shorn head and undimmed eyes smiling as if he were the free one coming to see her in a cage. Maybe he can sense the tiger stirring her skin, aching for escape, and though later she will do what she can to forget it, his smile will hover, a hungry ghost in the coffer of her chest.
Smiling, he leans in before bestowing that one curse.
“My dear,” he says. “No need to ask why. You already know why.”
“Sorry?”
“Ask your little friend Rose. Your sweet Rosie-anna.”
“What?” Now Lana can’t help but speak stridently since a loud drill has started up, grinding deep but perhaps only into her head.
“Because,” he says, tone slow and even, the way he talks to students, unwearied while his listener stumbles over a hard-to-grasp concept. “You too, Lana, are a kind of monster.” He takes her hand across the table for the first time, his so cold she flinches. “You can’t escape it, Lana. You have charisma but you will stay a child. Your ego is monstrous. You happen to be one of those monsters of charisma. You suck everything into you. You can’t help it.”
And surely this smiling patient man would have said more but whatever it is gets lost. Her legs are what propel her out into the hallway and into the hope of never seeing Vic again.
Heart thudding, she leaves the visiting area with the guard, tight-laced in the corridor, her leather purse charged on his credit card in the gift shop slamming her hip like a heavy chain. Once she gets out to wait on a bench for the shuttle back to the ferry, she tries to inhale the cigarette smoke of the other visitors standing around her. But his words keep drumming her just as her fingertips had worked the table. And while her head can understand why need had headlocked him enough that he must punish her, and while one day she will forgive him at least the need, she will never forget the greater sin. On this day he became for the first time the kind of parent who wants to lead his child down the most perilous pathway, a parent who wishes to make a child believe herself nothing but a boomerang, doomed to stay flesh of his flesh.
As a teenager, once, angry at her mother, Lana had locked herself in the bathroom so that with a rusted razor she could work at cutting a tiny swastika into her upper thigh.
Outside the bathroom in the corridor her mother had entreated: “Lana, honey, just tell me you’re okay,” to a girl who wouldn’t interrupt her ecstasy of focus but finally did with a blurt of accusation: “Mary, do I seem okay? You want me to say you’re a good mother to get yourself off the hook?”
While waiting for the prison shuttle, Lana cannot help but recall this moment, evidence summoned to support Vic’s verdict in the kangaroo court playing out in Lana’s mind. The judgment against Lana is horrendous.
Vic is right.
What fact can Lana find to prove she is not of Vic, not a monster? What proves she is anything but selfish? Has she ever truly protected anyone? Has she ever shown caring for anyone but Rose? Is she anything but a monster born of a monster?
Later she will think that if Vic’s past success had partly to do with how well he could rewire people’s associations, his conversation with her stands as the last of his
successes. Locked up, Vic finally managed to brand Lana as a dweller in his realm.
1989
A monster can roam anywhere but belongs nowhere. On the way back from the prison, the drumbeat continues: where is Lana supposed to go when there can be no return? You can’t go home again when it no longer exists. Uncleansed by the salt air, she gets off the ferry in San Francisco wishing to shed her skin but lacking a way to buy a ticket away from Vic. And how blessed are all the passengers lined up, wanting to call someone at the pay phone. Because who can Lana call? Who will instruct her?
One person. Yet Lana does not want that particular voice brimming with sympathy, Rose her last ally. Much better to slash away all need. What of Rose and the Lolas could help now? What exists that at the last moment does not veer into being just one more decree against Lana? What belongs to any moment not made of fantasy? All a chimera as Vic loved to say. What in her life had ever been more than a whimsical hope?
Only now. Now is what she can count on, as much a creed as a truth.
Now will obscure her in anonymity in some place like Bakersfield or Chico. Thinking of such benign places and their amnesia, she walks several long city blocks to get on the first bus in the San Francisco terminal, finding it her own blessing that the bus heads not where she expected but to Los Angeles, a target she considers almost a sign, since she and Rose used to write the city as Ellay, Lana once marking this onto Rose’s sneakers, saying this meant that one day they would end up there singing in a girl band on Sunset Strip, eminently discoverable. Some smidgen of hope—to be seen and discovered—must still live on in her and Ellay can meet it, as much hope as she can summon for any prospect right now.
On the bus ride south, Lana appreciates that each choice she makes appears in retrospect jewel-like and necessary as if crafted by someone unimpeachable far away: she is absent even as she constitutes herself as a person with a small purse whom others could think halfway respectable, a person with purse and satchel who makes choices, a buyer of tickets and a rider of buses, just another humanoid sack of goods getting dropped off in Ellay’s nostalgic downtown station.