Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  After he did this, their big lion breathing, they tied the kerchief around the eyes and roped his hands and legs, Sedge mumbling to himself to recall his best knots: over and under for the clove hitch and cuckold’s neck, loop through for the manrope, tight for the clinch.

  “How long you want me to do this for?” Dirk asked, keeping his part of the bargain, eyes closed.

  Then they stuffed the silk from one of his mandalas into his mouth, Tee swift in tying it at the back of his neck. “It’s important not to talk,” Sedge had intoned, echoing Dirk’s timbre of voice from one of his workshops.

  “Ooo. Look, gross, his wiener just went up,” Tee whispered into Sedge’s ear. It was true but Sedge did not let the sight sway him from the mission.

  “Now do what you can to breathe in freedom,” Sedge had said, unperturbed.

  “Yeah. Through the nose. Just like Houdini.”

  Something about the mention of Houdini was the first misbegotten word from Tee in the whole enterprise. Hearing it made Dirk start to strain, first with a few subtle caterpillar movements to make sure he could get free of two nine-year-old boys’ hijinks. Then Dirk had gotten mad, crimson flush under his brown skin, neck veins bulging, still doing his best to keep some kind of meditative cadence to his burbling.

  Being cautious, the boys tiptoed around their would-be stepfather, taking especial care to blow out all the candles in the red yurt, whispering quick commands to each other in the dark.

  Lucky that no early supplicant roamed outside or at least none knocked at the locked door. With Dirk secured, Sedge leaned over and whispered something about Lestrion into the captive’s ear but Tee couldn’t hear that part, already thinking of the next step. He brought Sedge out to the small stairs where they barred the yurt from the outside, placing in front of it a sign that Sedge with superior word powers had made saying: no darshan with dirk until next week.

  Happy boys, sweaty in jubilation, having tied up an adult man, they shine what Hogan calls their most shit-eating smile toward a supplicant they pass coming up the path, ready for Dirk’s blessing before the big evening. The boys can tell who the lady supplicants are because they wear long white dresses as if trying out for the part of Halloween ghosts, wearing garlands of lavender or big rocks around their neck, scented with some hippie version of old-lady perfume, not like their mom who always smells delicious.

  As they pass the first clump of supplicants, Tee asks, “Now what?”

  “Lestrion was strict, said not to say.”

  “Aw come on. Be serious.”

  “He says wait. The first part of our mission is accomplished.”

  Tee grabs his twin’s fist in his and gives it a happy pump. “You’re crazy.”

  Sedge shoots back a secret smile. “Tell me you’re not.”

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:44 P.M.

  Hogan is getting up before the crowd, which he hates to do, saying: “Look, folks, thanks for coming. Dirk should be here soon.”

  Restless, the crowd stirs, hungering to be released of all hungers.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:46 P.M.

  Vic in a head that sees everything with a bit too much pain since at least lunch is listening intently to Javier talk about his day to another guard down the hall. There is some kind of stoppage along Highway Five, which everyone calls the interstate. “Excuse me,” shouts Vic. The color of the sky through the slit at the top of his cell is like tapioca, bland, everywhere and unreachable. “Jesus, Joseph and Mary!”

  When that doesn’t work, he hits the call button.

  Javier had confided in him that he had to be put on suicide watch—or is this another mind twister? Whatever the case, Vic has been granted this special, direct-hit call button: does it beep only at Javier or does the signal sing forth on magical invisible electrical waves to the Commissioner of Prisons, buzzing the governor and then finally his daughter?

  When the corrections officers—not Javier—installed it, they said they trusted he wouldn’t abuse it.

  “You left me here,” says Vic to his guard’s face once it appears, slotted vertically so it looks like something a person could buy, an intriguingly wrapped plastic parcel of humanity. “I was calling your name. There was this commotion and no one heard. Why do they all want me to lie here and die in my own waste?” He is crying now. “I have some things.” He is struggling to even form the words. “Some things I need to tell you.”

  “You want to change that paper you signed?”

  “No.” Vic waves this away, impatient. “It’s about the flagellation of Jesus and how it links with the question of longing for the father. I have some interesting theories.”

  “Tell me.”

  “First tell me something.”

  “Anything, boss.”

  “Why do they all want to murder me? There is that man, the owner of an important duck farm right behind this wall. He’s in control and wants to buy this place. Could you talk to him about why they want to leave me here to die in my excrement?”

  “You’re right here, in your own cell.”

  “That part I know. There is a good water system here. When I go, please tell my daughter she won’t suffer for lack of water. You and she both just have to be careful if you go on any trip because this place is surrounded by people who can’t hear.”

  “Whenever you need me, Vic, please, use the button. Like you just did.”

  “Why did you leave me?”

  “I’m sorry.” The guard’s hands flutter open, letting free a dove Vic can’t see. “Do you need a wash?”

  “No, what I really need is coffee. Can you ask someone for some coffee?”

  “I will.”

  “Not the motor oil they use to inflame my bowels.” He is trying to ask the guard for a different promise but can’t quite locate it. “Don’t go please. You’re a father.” Now finally it comes to him, how to keep his guard there. He is not sure the words will come though the simultaneity of the picture appears to him in full rainbow, the story he has never before told anyone. Yet—as he always thinks—like their inmates, wouldn’t guards be prone to lapses, drawn to the same mist between good and evil?

  SEVENTEENTH OF FEBRUARY, 1989

  Vic will not start by blaming it on Berkeley. He could but won’t.

  He knows it sounds strange, crypto-religious, but he’d wanted to have a last dinner with his wife. The idea of lastness. To appreciate her, knowing it would be their last before some grand departure. But how many ways can you spell lastness? He was going to tell Mary he would move out of the house.

  But the banality! After years spent putting up with her failings, charred dinners, sacrificial offerings, slights at dinner parties held in his honor. He could list them so easily: her absentminded, poor folding of laundry, the slimy handles on cabinets. A real hypochondriac and germ-phobe, she never replaced a toilet paper roll and had known far too many madcap falls from ladders while changing lightbulbs. She’d painted his office an intolerable eggplant hue and was always getting blocked by someone’s car in driveways, requiring rescue. Many times she couldn’t pull a key from the ignition or had to change everyone’s plans just so she could save some cat, a raccoon, a bird’s nest. A person couldn’t believe what he’d put up with. While what she tolerated seemed minor by comparison: his nail-clippings like shed moons scattered over the bed or his own perpetual tardiness, a proclamation few seemed to hear, as if life had slighted him by deigning to start in his absence.

  Put in a shaker and everything had come to this? Yet the idea of leaving—to leave, to leave behind—had its own life and tentacles, offering specific outcomes related to lastness, an enshrinement. He wanted to take her to dinner, announce the woeful truth of his leaving and in this way enshrine his martyrdom. He wanted to see her prepare for dinner, casting a look of wistful anger toward the hall mirror while he knew it was the last time, il n’y a pas de plus. He wanted all stations of lastness: to watch her chew dinner without tasting it, to see eyebrows grown a bi
t too close, gray and tufted, cherishing all elements because they were final and she’d be wearing that flower-pompom cap that still reminded him of that very first moment he’d spotted her at the university pool, limbs shooting out of a bathing suit from those delicate thin canals at the delta of her thighs, and how she had crowned the outfit with a ridiculous bathing cap sprouting pink floral excrescences, perhaps one of her Japanese customs, to not throw open the wind-gates by removing a cap too often. But the hat habit didn’t seem to keep with her Yokut half which would have had her—do what?

  He had to admit how little he knew about her origins which didn’t mean that, in their worst moments, he hadn’t yelled at her not just mixed but mixed-up! while secretly thinking her hybridity gave her a leg up, so to speak, alluring and untraceable, a trickster-coyote length and strength, the doubled roots denied him by orphanhood. Yet whenever he chose to name it, he could also see her pompom hat as an emblem of the greater problem. She kept her heat too close, not sharing well enough with others (but for the one horrible, notable sharing with which she had scorched his ears).

  Not once in their thirty-four years had he inquired about the hats.

  He could have. A cuckold could do lots of things. A cuckold could also ignore any hunger for the finality of a last meal. A cuckold could suggest the pair go, borrowing the lexicon of self-help books, rediscover each other. But such rediscovery was insuperably foreign to Vic. What he wanted was a graceful last dinner, a parachute out, all termini announced by him.

  First they would sit. In a perfunctory manner she would ask about work, this courtesy her vestige of courtship. He would sink back into his usual silence. Then he would say I’m leaving, just like that, so he could watch her face fall, knowing he’d never see her and her silent recriminations again.

  Leave, he would just leave—because what held him to Berkeley? Not her, not their almost-grown daughter with her talent for still prickling his heart, not the vestiges of his students. Students! What had he ever taught them? He’d rather live in a damp thatched hut on a lonely Irish moor or speak philosophy over sangria with lined ancients after midnight in the white-plastered caves of Granada. If he returned to being not a teacher but a learner, no one would trace him. Of its own his reputation could revive and he could thrive or moulder in the reds and greens of a life he alone had chosen.

  This craving for lastness struck after a bad day in his decades-old office, filled with the sediment of papers, dust suturing pages together, grayed rubber-bands gone brittle, stripped of tensility. Where was his new thought? What did he have to say given that the neural network theory had been toppled?

  This soul is a penis. The hero of the dream is a phallic double, or phallic personification of the whole body. Having a soul, the hero with a thousand faces, is the same as having genital organization—to take the penis as the “narcissistic representative of the whole personality.”

  He used to be in favor of the exponents of the brain-as-spark model, the experimenters who liked ripping out sensory-input portions to steal input from the cortical map. Later he had been a proponent of the brain-as-soup theory and even later the parallel-processor theory but what did it matter when all his most favored thinkers were now considered outmoded, ancien régime, only antique William James bandied about these days as the pioneer in conceptualizations of the brain, a predecessor leaving Vic feeling superannuated.

  Better to be an astronaut who sends commode contents off onto a garbage satellite circling the earth in an ignored but dangerous vessel or better to stay landbound and contribute paperwork directly to the recycling heap. That must be the ticket! Go directly to recycling without stopping at any ink-on-page intervention. At least one could later say one was cited in the logbooks of some eco-virtue station. How easy to be rendered irrelevant, how simple to see the slow decline in the life of emeritus. Does it get any lonelier? Could you make an anagram of erstwhile out of emeritus? And how weak was his mind to wonder that?

  Vic still had the occasional homeless man who sought him out, especially a strange last shaggy with his arcane sign how many babies are you going to stuff into your soup can and sell to texas? And still occasionally encountered the odd student on a special project of exhumation. Each year when Vic taught his one lecture course, on the first day he still packed the halls, the students coming not, to use their lexicon, for content provision but out of reverence for his reputation, youth using his twilight as high romantic backdrop, a creep and droop to gloss their own vitality as if he were the backdrop in a Caspar David Friedrich painting and they could turn their backs on him since what they came for was fame no matter how erstwhile, for the shamanic aura of fame this old man could bestow upon the lucky. Fame to them seemed to mean the love of the many, a delicious concept, a multiheaded idol of celebrity with which they could copulate rather than with the staidness of any single idea.

  So much so that students now had the rude habit of sidling out mid-lecture, mid-sentence, going to great lengths to climb over the pylons of stuffed backpacks and letting the door slam behind to echo in the hall like a verdict. For this generation with its flea-circus attention span, Vic Mahler turned out to be but a glyph on their screen. Once he spoke a single sentence, they already sighted his fame down to its micromeme, absorbing its absolute value, needing then to scurry out to obey the pressing needs of their id while leaving Vic suspended. The Age of Rude Entitlement indeed (cf. Mahler, 1987, a prescient work). How could he blame them given that youth of all eras made haste to find a better mirror for longings primarily hormonal in origin (cf. Mahler, “Perennials of Socialization,” 1963).

  Sure, he too had taken on habits he would have mocked had he been young. For one, whenever he saw protocol was not being followed, he could not keep from swearing. And yet he had a right to be angry, didn’t he? In the shadow-realm of his reign, his contributions—not to mention all those committee meetings, my god!—were not adequately recognized. He had cleaved to the centerline of virtue, had not been an alcoholic and in the main had not seduced female youth, having tried to the best of his ability to ignore concupiscence, all the soft cups offered up.

  Though he remained cognizant of the inverse proportionality between youth’s esteem for him and his actual chronological age and though he’d been somewhat capable of reinventing himself for each succeeding generation of students, on this particular day, Valentine’s 1989, he’d known the exact longitude and latitude of his irrelevance.

  Irrelevant to students with mainly mating on the mind. It was a wonder any adolescent read any book at all, given how haywire the hormones went at this age, granting all the youth around him the appearance of Blakean fire for a brief moment before the professionalization of habit and streamlining set harder tracks into the five percent of their brains’ total utilized capacity.

  On the fourteenth of February, 1989, Vic had gone to refill his water decanter down the hall and had spotted that curvy redhead succubus in the green sweater and cowgirl boots who sprang up everywhere on campus. Now she thrust forward those shapely arms, the better to dance with a long-haired boy in a pink shirt, the shirt being a frontal attack, meaning something utterly different than it had back in Vic’s time.

  Your categories are not mine, the shirt screamed at Vic, this boy consenting to tango down the institutional halls with a supple coed, a boy with a shapeless body whose main attributes were his youth and puppydog loyal eyes ready to play, his barrette and clear willingness to forsake traditional gender roles. Why else would a pink puppydog get to tango with a girl you could tell would be a tigress, a girl who would enjoy one’s eyes upon her, a girl who would quickly lose interest, seeking the next conquest to add to her low beltloop under her creamy belly, so that even restlessness formed part of her nympho charm.

  While it was also true that, mostly faithful to Mary, those few times he had strayed, it had been with girls not unlike the redhead cowgirl. Of course, these digressions had occurred back in the days when he’d had more hair on his head, his e
yebrows less ostentatious in telegraphing decrepitude, all the girls an evolutionary obstacle placed in his moral path, some sort of stepping-stone necessary for the teleology of the other side.

  Why did the professor sleep with his student? To get to the other side.

  Valentine’s was clearly a bad day because the students were in their element, on their side of Hades, busy having some school-sponsored sex-positive party down the hall. A party replete with enough childhood elements that everyone could pretend sex was an innocent pleasure. So did they think they had invented the garden of Eden? Did variety of sexual experience matter so much? Did they think they were alone in choosing a few select able-bodied types to participate? O Knowledge! he felt like shouting, a cranky old lion in winter. Go fuck yourselves! occurred to him as well, a phrase all too apt. Because all they wanted was to be released by the laws of their elders to go fuck themselves. Or rather they were energized like reverse magnets away from the law of the elders toward fucking.

  He pondered this: hadn’t society taken a downward turn when fuck turned into an unfortunate transitive, possessing a wholly negative valence? Go fuck yourself: an unfortunate phrase, like Bay of Pigs. What had early colonists said? Go imbibe hemlock? Go fig yourself? Now pink streamers and balloons flanked the hallway leading to the big conference room where the kids joined up—what was the term, hooked?—in a buzz of fig-happy frivolity. Might as well be pigs in pink-streaked mud, hooking. Pairs of international students entered this pleasure-dome with some sheepishness, the open sexuality of the American students making this question live in their gaze: was this the way to go or would it be better to obey the old-world law of one’s elders imploring them to shun Babylon?

  False idols, friends! was what Vic could have shouted at all the tables bearing pagan-pink glitter glue and card-decorating, an exhibition of hot pink sex toys, someone demonstrating massages on a pink table, everything pink pink pink, smoke wafting over the whole scene, sage sticks burning from a tribe with an identity long buried by the sands of fuck-happy New Age kids. In her genteel way his Mary would have been distressed, so easily horrified by an ad showing a tearful Indian watching trash come ashore, by the reiterated booms in turquoise jewelry, the rise in sweat lodges, the cheap polymorphous love shown the idea of the Indian, licked white like a candy cane by heedless pink kids. They want to consume the idea of us, Mary had said. Just past the toddling age, her daughter had listened carefully.