• • •
A few years later, when I was desperate and wanted to end my life, I called Robbie’s magician. By then I was living in a rented room in Van Nuys, taking the bus down to Tijuana every month to buy special hormones a doctor had said might balance the situation out a bit. It wasn’t working. On the phone with the magician, I explained my situation. I cried.
I said, “On a good day, every small thing is enchanting. Everything is a miracle. There is no emptiness. There is no need for forgiveness or escape or medicine. I hear only the wind in the trees, and my devils hatching their sacral plans, fusing all the shattered pieces together into a blanket of ice. I have found that it’s under that ice that I can feel I am just another normal person. In the dark and cold, I am at ‘peace.’”
“What is your name?” the magician asked.
So I moved here to Vacaville to be with him. It is good to have someone to turn to late at night, when the voices in my head are loud and there are no drugs to dull them. The magician doesn’t mind my swelling. He blossoms like a tree in front of my eyes, a man of seventy-five years, revitalized by my pain and sadness. It makes me feel good to see him thrive.
THE LOCKED ROOM
Takashi dressed in long black rags, ripped fishnet stockings, and big black boots with long, loose laces that splatted on the floor when he walked. He smelled strongly of old sweat and cigarette smoke, and his face was scabbed from tearing his pimples open and squeezing the pus out with dirty chewed-up fingernails. He covered the scabs with makeup that was too pale for his skin. He used scissors to cut off all his eyelashes. Sometimes he drew a French mustache on with black felt-tip pen. He was very intelligent and preoccupied with death and suffering. He had a way about him I really liked. His hair was long and bleached and dyed rainbow colors. Occasionally he bit into his lip and dribbled blood down his chin. Sometimes he vomited in public just to make a scene. Strangers would rush to his aid, offering handkerchiefs and bottles of water. People even stopped to take his picture when we walked down the street. Takashi’s taste in classical music was just like mine: Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Ravel. He was talented on the violin. He said his instrument was worth more than his father’s car. He chewed licorice gum sometimes, his favorite flavor, but his mouth still tasted like excrement when we kissed each other. Takashi was my first real boyfriend.
Last spring, we got locked in a practice room above the large concert hall at the music school where we both took lessons on Saturday afternoons. This happened during a rehearsal of the youth orchestra, in which Takashi played violin. At first I thought Takashi might have arranged the entrapment to take advantage of me sexually, but that was not the case. How it happened was so funny: We went up a secret spiral staircase behind the concert hall while the orchestra was tuning. We just wanted to explore a bit before Takashi’s rehearsal started. In the practice room, we closed the door behind us and then we couldn’t open it again.
The locked room contained a couch, a radiator, several chairs, and music stands but no piano. As a pianist, I was never part of any orchestra. I was mostly studying composition then, and that kept me from having to perform very often. I was not as outgoing as Takashi. Everything made me nervous, in fact. It was partly why I liked Takashi so much. He seemed fearless, like he could do anything he wanted to do, even if it was disgusting. In the corner of the room was a rack of costumes that I recognized from the student production of Figaro. The opera had been part of the holiday festival in which my first composition for violin and harpsichord had been debuted. Takashi had played the violin part very well. The harpsichord part was so difficult, and I was so nervous, that my piano teacher, Mrs. V, had to fill in for me at the last moment.
We banged on the locked door and yelled but nobody could hear. We heard the conductor shouting, and then the orchestra began to play. I tried picking the lock with one of my barrettes. Takashi had a small knife he carried around for mutilating himself, and we each tried using it as a screwdriver to dismantle the lock or take the door off its hinges, but it was impossible. The other door was a fire door of reinforced steel, bolted shut. Behind that door was another secret staircase that only maintenance workers used, we learned later. The room had one window looking down onto an alleyway. Across the alley was a concrete parking structure. We were on the fifth floor.
“We should knot these costumes together, make a rope, tie one end to the radiator, and throw the other end down to the alley. Then you can climb down and come back up and let me out,” I told Takashi.
He scratched at the veins on his wrist. “Let’s just stay here forever,” he said. “Anyway, you should be the one to climb down. You’re lighter. You’re the girl.”
We were quiet for a while after that. Then I took a few costumes off their hangers and tried them on. I could see my reflection in the window. I looked like a tiny clown in the big blouse and vest. Takashi found a short gray wig and tried it on.
“You look great in that wig,” I told Takashi. He took it off and held it in his hands, petting it like it was a kitten he loved so much.
I took off my costume and tied all the garments on the rack together with double knots. Takashi held up a blue cotton undershirt, sniffed it, and threw it on the ground. “If we have to pee, we can pee into it,” he said. Luckily, I didn’t have to pee. We tied the makeshift rope to the radiator. We opened the window and threw the rope out. The end of the rope did not reach the ground, but if one of us climbed down to the end of it, the remaining distance to the sidewalk was only one or two stories. I didn’t think it would be a lethal jump.
A thought came into my mind. It was a question: “Do you see this, God?” God seemed like a fly on the wall, like a hidden camera. I mentioned the thought to Takashi. He told me that he was an atheist, but that he believed in hell. I leaned out through the open window and looked down. A homeless man was pushing a shopping cart of garbage up the narrow alleyway.
“Hey!” I shouted. Takashi grabbed my arm and told me to be quiet. “We’re trapped up here!” I squealed. When Takashi clamped his hand over my mouth, it tasted like baby powder from the wig, and excrement.
I bit down on Takashi’s finger, not very hard, but hard enough for him to let me loose. I picked up the blue undershirt for peeing into and threw it out the window, hoping it would get the homeless man’s attention. It simply drifted off to the side of the alley and disappeared behind a Dumpster. I spoke to God in my mind. Please, open the door, I said. I tried both doors again. Of course, they were still locked. And then I felt very stupid.
I tried to express the idea of mind over matter to Takashi. “If you believe something, really and truly, it becomes reality,” I said. “Don’t you think?”
“I believe in death,” was Takashi’s reply. He leaned out and spat blood down into the alleyway. Some blood and spit bubbled down his chin. Then he sat down on the couch and petted the wig again.
I had to try to escape from the locked room. I tugged at the rope. It seemed to be tied securely enough to the radiator. So I wrapped it around my arm and held on and began to step out onto the window ledge. Takashi sat on the couch and picked at the scabs on his face and watched me. I told him that I was not afraid of falling. And for a moment, I wasn’t nervous. Not at all.
What happened next is absolutely true. Once I was all the way out the window, I gripped the rope, lowered myself a little, and put the soles of my shoes flat against the side of the building. Then a car came squealing up the alley. It was copper colored and very shiny. The motor was very loud. The car screeched to a halt below me. I froze. Takashi threw the gray wig past me, out the window. I screamed and pulled myself back up and crouched on the ledge of the window. I looked down, though it made me dizzy. It was windy up there in the sky. A man got out of the car. His movements were violent and angry as he pointed up at me and yelled, “Young lady, you better get back inside this instant!” I’d never seen anyone so angry. Even my mother had never see
med so angry. “Young lady!” the man repeated. He swung his finger up at me, stabbing at the air. In my mind now, I picture him in a black suit and shiny black shoes, but I couldn’t make out his pants or shoes from so high up in the air. I think he was actually wearing a white T-shirt and dark sunglasses. Of course, I did what he told me to do. I grappled with the rope, hoisted myself over the windowsill, and climbed back inside the room. I hid by the couch. It was so warm and quiet inside the room. I could hear my heart pounding. Takashi got up to look out the window. He said he saw the man shake his head and get back in the car. I could hear the door slam and the car drive away.
“We should put the clothes back on the hangers,” Takashi said, lazily pulling up the rope.
I was pretty shaken up. I wanted to talk about the man with Takashi, but Takashi wouldn’t look at me. I helped pull the rope back in, and we untied the garments and put them back on the rack. I wanted Takashi to tell me that he was happy I was safe inside the room, and that he’d have been sorry if I’d died. I wanted to discuss the angry man. I wanted to say I believed in guardian angels, but I was scared Takashi would roll his eyes. He blew his nose into a white dress shirt and pinched a pimple on his neck. We sat on the floor with our backs against the couch and watched the sky darken behind the parking structure across the alleyway. The orchestra rehearsal had ended hours since. I knew my mother would be angry that I wasn’t home in time for dinner. Takashi pulled a cigarette from his purse and lit it. We passed it back and forth, blowing the smoke at the sliver of moon visible from where we sat on the floor by the window. Finally, Takashi told me his theory about the man in the car. “He was a hallucination. We’re in a vortex. We’re in a black hole. We’ve always been in it. Nothing we’ve ever seen has been real. Only this room is real.” He ashed his cigarette onto his tongue. “You shouldn’t have thrown that blue shirt out the window,” he said. “Now our reality has been punctured. And I have to pee.”
“You shouldn’t have thrown out that gray wig,” I said. My heart raced again when I thought of how that gray wig had flown past me, a tiny kitten pawing through the air. I don’t know what happened to that gray wig. Maybe the man in the car caught it and brought it home.
I told Takashi I didn’t want to be his girlfriend anymore. He said nothing.
I felt very depressed after that. All of eternity seemed to be laid out in front of me, and there was nothing but the couch and chairs and music stands, the wrinkled costumes, the radiator, and Takashi. That was hell there, in that locked room. When the cigarette was finished, Takashi tried to kiss me. I just turned my head away.
Not long after, a janitor came and let us out. “I smelled smoke,” he said, eyeing the crust of blood around Takashi’s chapped lips.
I cried as we walked down the secret staircase and through the dark, quiet hallways of the music school. Takashi found his violin and I found my composition notebook in the place we’d left them, under a table in the concert hall where the orchestra had rehearsed.
Outside it was a warm and pleasant evening, like nothing was wrong. Takashi waved good-bye at the bus stop and I walked to the tram. At home, I sat in the kitchen and my mother gave me a cold boiled potato, black instant coffee, and a small container of diet yogurt.
“You should try harder to please me,” she said. “For your own good.”
“I’ll try harder,” I told her. “I promise.”
But I never did try very hard to please my mother. In fact, I never tried hard to please anybody at all after that day in the locked room. Now I only try hard to please myself. That is all that matters here. That is the secret thing I found.
A BETTER PLACE
I come from some other place. It’s not like a real place on Earth or something I could point to on a map, if I even had a map of this other place, which I don’t. There’s no map because the place isn’t a place like something to be near or in or at. It’s not somewhere or anywhere, but it’s not nowhere either. There is no where about it. I don’t know what it is. But it certainly isn’t this place, here on Earth, with all you silly people. I wish I knew what it was, not because I think it would be great to tell you about it; I just miss it so much. If I knew what it was, maybe I could make something like it here on Earth. Waldemar says it’s impossible. The only way to get there is to go.
“Waldemar,” I say to my brother. “How do we get back to the place, to the thing, whatever?”
“Oh, you have to die. Or you have to kill the right person.”
That’s his answer now. For a long time he thought only the first part was true, but over time he’s thought long and hard and figured out that there is a second way. The second way is much harder. I don’t know how he figured it out, but thank God for Waldemar, who is so much wiser than me, though only a day older. I took some extra time to come out of the woman. I had doubts, even so early on, about this place here on Earth with all the dumb things everywhere. It was Waldemar who persuaded me to come out finally. I could hear his cries and feel his little fists poking through the woman’s skin. He is my best friend. Everything he does, it seems, he does because he loves me. He is the best brother ever, of all brothers here on Earth. I love him so much.
“Well, I don’t want to die,” I tell him. “Not yet. Not here.”
We talk about this from time to time. It’s nothing new.
“Then you’ve got to find the right person to kill. Once you’ve killed the right person, a hole will open up in the Earth and you can just walk straight into the hole. It will lead you through a tunnel back to where we came from. But be careful. If you kill the wrong person, you’ll get into trouble here. It wouldn’t be good. I’d visit you in prison, but chances are slim that the right person will be sitting beside you in your prison cell. And the prisons they have for little girls are the worst. There, the only way to the place would be to die. So you’ve got to be really sure about the person to kill. It’s the hardest thing to do, to be so sure about something like that. I’ve never been sure enough, and that’s why I’m still here. That, and because I’d miss you and I’d worry if I left you all alone.”
“Maybe I’ll just die after all,” I say. I get so tired of it here, thinking of how much better it is back there, in the place we came from. I cry about it often. Waldemar always has to soothe me.
“I could kill you,” he offers. “But I’m not sure you’re the right person. But wouldn’t that be great? If you were?”
“That would be ideal!” I say.
I don’t know what I’d do without my brother. I’d probably cry even more than I do now, and take poisons that make my brain weak and my body tired so I wouldn’t even have the strength to think about the other place. I’d try to poison the place out of my mind. But I doubt that’s even possible. Some nights I hate it here so much I shake and sweat and my brother holds me down so I won’t start kicking the walls or breaking things. When I kick the walls, the woman gets angry. “What’s going on up there, children?” She thinks we’re fighting and threatens to separate us. She doesn’t know about the other place. She’s just a human woman, after all. She gives us food and clothes and everything, as human mothers like to do. My brother says he’s sure the woman is not the person he could kill to get back to the place. I’m not so sure she’s not my person. Sometimes I think she is. But if I killed her and I was wrong, I’d be sorry. Mostly I’d be sorry for Waldemar.
• • •
One morning as we lie in our beds, I say to my brother, “Waldemar, I think I know who my person is.” I don’t really know. I am still sort of dreaming. But then I think up a name to say. “His name is Jarek Jaskolka and I’m going to find him and kill him, mark my words.”
“But are you sure?” my brother asks.
“I think so,” I say. And then, suddenly, I am sure. Jarek Jaskolka is the person I have to kill. I know it in my bones. I am as sure about Jarek Jaskolka as I am about the place, and about me and Waldemar b
eing from there.
“You must be completely sure,” my brother warns me. He rises from his bed and lifts the blanket over his head like an old lady going to the market. His face becomes dark and his voice suddenly low and frightening. “If you aren’t sure, you could get in trouble, you know.”
“You look like a witch, Waldemar. Don’t make me laugh at you,” I say. Waldemar doesn’t like to be ridiculed.
“If you kill the wrong person . . .” he begins.
But I am sure now. I can’t go back and pretend I’m not. I have to return to the place somehow. I miss it too much. My brain hurts and I cry all the time. I don’t want to be here on Earth for one moment longer.
“It’s that damned Jarek Jaskolka!” I cry. It is just a name I’ve made up, but it is the right name, that I am sure of. I jump from my bed. I pull the string to lift the curtains. The room where Waldemar and I sleep looks out into the forest. Outside, soft gray clouds hang between the trees. Some silly birds sing a few nice notes. I miss the other place so much, I want to cry. But I feel brave. “I will find you, Jarek,” I say to the window. “Wherever you are hiding!”
When I look at Waldemar, he has gone back under his covers. I can see his chest rising and falling. My brain hurts too much to try to comfort him. And anyway, there is no comfort here on Earth. There is pretending, there are words, but there is no peace. Nothing is good here. Nothing. Every place you go on Earth, there is more nonsense.
For breakfast the woman gives us bowls of warm fresh yogurt and warm fresh bread and tea with sugar and lemon, and for Waldemar a slice of onion cooked in honey because he has been coughing.
Homesick for Another World Page 21