Magnificent Vibration

by Rick Springfield

  He:

  “I can have friends.”

  She:

  “I told her I was your wife and demanded to know why she was calling . . .

  He:

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  She:

  “Don’t talk like that to me.”

  He:

  “Damnit, Julia.”

  She:

  “And she said she had no idea you were married.”

  He:

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  I move further into the entryway by a few steps. He sounds culpable even to my untrained ear.

  She:

  “I need to know what this woman means to you.”

  He:

  “She’s no one.”

  She:

  “She didn’t sound like she was no one. I know you’re lying. You just said you didn’t know who she was.”

  The volume is going up. I move closer, unsure if I should let them know I’m here and get involved or stay hidden and stay out of it.

  She:

  “You said that other woman was the last one. I can’t take this anymore. What must my people at church think?”

  He:

  “I don’t give a shit about ‘your people’ at the church. This is my—”

  She:

  “Don’t swear.”

  There is the jarring sound of a dinner plate being thrown into the kitchen sink with great force. It smashes to pieces as silverware clatters around the tile floor and my mother cries out in anguish.

  He:

  “. . . THIS IS MY LIFE! . . . and . . . you want to know who this woman is? DO YOU?”

  I sense this would be a good time to show myself or this is going to get even uglier. I appear at the kitchen entrance.

  Me:

  “Will you guys stop yelling and breaking stuff! You’re upsetting Josie! She doesn’t need to hear all this!”

  They both look like stunned rabbits on a railroad track as the train bears down.

  “Horatio,” is all my mother says, and she bursts into tears.

  My father brushes past me without a word, knocking me into the wall, and exits the house. I run after him, unsure why I am doing it exactly. Somewhere in me I know he is only adding to my mother’s pain by leaving. But he has driven away before I even make it outside.

  At their bedroom door I can hear my mother inside, sobbing softly. I know there is a photo by her vanity mirror of them when they first married, and it flashes into view in my anxious mind. She looks happy. He looks sullen. I don’t realize until years later that she is trying her best to conceal a slightly Rubenesque pooch to her belly that is my dear and distressed older sister in the very early stages of her life.

  I lean against my mother’s closed bedroom door for a minute or two, listening to her snuffle against a pillow. I have nothing to say. I’m a kid and I have no words. There is the clink of a bottle as wine is poured into a glass.

  I think I hear Josephine crying as well, in the room across the hall. I’m sure she’s heard the battle. I tap on my sister’s bedroom door but there is no answer. I call her name so she’ll know it’s me but she still doesn’t reply, so I crack the door. She is sitting, slumped over on the edge of her bed, her once beautiful auburn hair a dull, tangled mess covering her face, used tissues scattered around her small, delicate feet.

  “Josie, are you okay?” I try tentatively.

  Nothing.

  “They’re not going to argue anymore. Dad left the house.”

  Still nothing.

  “Do you want dinner? Have you had any yet?”

  “Don’ wan’ dinner,” she answers. Her voice sounds thick and slurred. I know she doesn’t drink, so this puzzles me.

  I enter her room, sit next to her on the bed and put my arm around her slender shoulders. Usually when I do this she rests her head on me and we just sit until she feels a little better. But now her head only falls further forward.

  She sniffs unhappily, takes a labored breath and begins to slowly talk.

  “I know this’ll never leave me . . . I’ll have this crap for the res’ of my life. I can’t live on Luvox or Zolof’ and I’m not going into any . . . fucking men’al hospital . . .”

  “I know, babe,” I reply, and I realize her unhappiness is not from the overheard argument. But there is really nothing I can say that will help when she is this low.

  “. . . and I’ll never have a boyfrien’ or get married. Never have kids . . . all I ever wanted since I was li’l was to be . . . mommy . . .” her voice is heavier-sounding. I pull back to look at her but her face is still covered by her disheveled hair.

  Her neck and arms feel clammy to me.

  “I’m going to make coffee, do you want some?” I say to her.

  “. . . coffee won’ help . . . took too many . . .”

  “Took too many what?” I feel like I’ve missed something.

  “. . . don’t worry . . .” Her voice is barely audible now. She is slowly falling forward. I pull her back upright. Her breathing is shallow.

  “Took too many what, Jo?” I’m starting to get concerned.

  “Mom’s osson . . .” she is slurring heavily.

  “Mom’s what??!”

  “Os . . . ossonn . . . ossa . . . ossaconen . . .” she can’t form words now. I look around and finally see the wineglass and beside it an empty prescription bottle. Alarmed now, I lay my sister down on her bed and grab the orange plastic container. OxyContin.

  “Shit, Josie!!!!

  I scream for our mother as I run to the phone, but I already know I’m too late.

  Bobby

  My groin tickles. I feel a momentary surge of panic, thinking I could be peeing myself, such is the late hour. I look down to see if my crotch is dark with urine but it isn’t. It’s bright blue with modern technology. I meant to turn the damn cell phone off.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” asks Alice.

  I hesitate, then retrieve the infernal machine and look at the caller ID. This ordinary cell phone has taken on extraordinary properties of late.

  “It’s Doug.” I’m relieved to see it’s not Yahweh. “I’ll call him back. He’s a friend of mine. He should know better, I’m usually asleep by now.”

  I look at the girl sitting next to me at the bar. It’s just not physically phucking feasible that she’s a nun. I begin trying to mentally picture her in a black-and-white habit, a small Bible, a crucifix, and prayer beads clutched tightly, reverently in her soft white hands. She’s a nun, for Chrissakes. A nun! Can we please stop where this is going? I imagine her in her robe, cincture, and scapular—I know all the sacred and appropriate terms. She wears a wimple, as torrid beads of sweat begin to pop out and encircle her flushed and almost flawless face. She’s on her knees groaning in ecstasy, her dark tunic hiked up over firm, round, pale buttocks. I am also on my knees, taking her from behind as Woody and I penetrate her untouched, unspoiled, extremely holy places and make her glad she’s a woman. Oh, my God, that’s terrible! I turn off the fantasy in my mind as though it were a brilliant, award winning, super-cool, highly watchable, 3D TV show. Click!

  “I think we should go somewhere a little less crowded and noisy where we can talk, do you agree?” I suggest, trying not to sound like a mass-murdering wingnut cannibal.

  “Okay. I’m open to that,” answers Alice, grabbing her purse off the bar and standing. She is long-limbed and slender but with curves and a pleasant fullness. She is actually wearing a dress that displays her attributes. I am even more perplexed, intrigued and yes, seriously turned on, Bobdamnit!!!

  We leave the bar/club/pickup joint where I didn’t get the pizza I so seriously craved and head off into the well-lit metropolis.

  Out in the relative sanity of the city streets I see she is wearing fairly sensible flat shoes. If she’d been strapped up in high heels I would have had to rethink the whole “nun” thing. She carries herself with a calm confidence and appears completely unaware of her beauty. So that’s
a point in favor of her whole story—and then I realize: Who am I to doubt her? I told her I’ve been chatting with the Almighty . . . the Almighty Whack Job, I’m beginning to suspect.

  “That’s quite a pick-up joint, that bar. You must have been hit on fairly regularly tonight,” I begin, still trying to drag my reeling imagination out of the cesspool of lust and longing in which it seems happiest to abase itself: it’s always been a difficult task.

  “The ‘nun’ word usually quashes any interest,” she smiles. “Although it seemed to have had the opposite effect on you.”

  I color with the rush of blood to my cheeks.

  “Not really,” I lie. “I felt like I had to talk to someone, and you seemed open to the insane possibility that God had my cell number.” This part is very true, I realize as I say it. “I don’t even know where to begin,” I offer. “Me having a most bizarre conversation with Jehovah, or you, Sister-Inmate-Escaping-Over-the-Barbed-Wire-Encrusted-Convent-Wall as the Mother Superior releases the hounds and busts open the shotgun rack.”

  She smiles at this but says nothing.

  A couple of young guys walk by and toss out a few lewd comments from the safety of the group at this holy, burning-hot bride of Christ, and I think we are all going to hell, we men. Alice hears them but says nothing.

  “Well, let’s start with me, since there’s probably a little less to my story than there is to yours,” she says.

  “Not necessarily,” I suggest. “Now that I’m away from it I’m starting to think I could have just imagined the whole thing.”

  “Okay then, let’s start with you.” She seems fairly affable without any real hint of a hidden agenda, and I’m now pretty much buying into the whole escaping-nun thing. As odd as it seems. But I am hardly the one to talk about odd.

  We pass one of the three thousand coffee bars that crowd each side of the street and I guide her inside, where the warmth and the smell of ground coffee seem to say, “Come on in and have a cozy chat. All your crazy shit will seem much more plausible after a large, skinny, triple-shot, cinnamon dolce latte, served extra hot with whip.”

  We order something simpler and sit in a corner, as far away from the students with their glowing banks of laptops as possible.

  “There were no dogs released or guns drawn when I left the church. In fact it was my Mother Superior who suggested it,” she begins. “She’s a remarkable woman and did something that she could be easily chastised for, letting a neophyte free on her own recognizance for two weeks so she can find herself. It’s not something that’s encouraged within the order. They’d rather have the ones who are struggling or having a crisis of faith hunker down with books and religious instruction from counselors and other sisters. Grace, my Mother Superior, said she didn’t think that I was cut out for the life of a nun and that I might be better suited to doing God’s work living in the outside world. So she suggested I take a short sabbatical and, with God’s help, try to locate my rudder and find my course.”

  “That’s like a scene from The Sound of Music.” I think I’m trying to be funny but I regret it as soon as I’ve spoken. A fairly regular occurrence in my world.

  She smiles anyway and agrees, “Yeah, it does a bit. ‘Locate my rudder?’ I don’t even know where the boat is.”

  “I’m sure the boat is out there somewhere. You just have to find it,” I reply, having no idea at all what I mean by this! After the obligatory uncomfortable silence, I continue.

  “So what were you doing in a bar at one in the morning?”

  “Seeing if the high life was something that still had a hold on me,” is her answer.

  I’m trying to grasp where this is going. “Isn’t that like saying ‘I used to have a heroin addiction so I’m going to do a little heroin now to see if I’m still hooked?’ ”

  “Maybe,” she answers, “but I was thinking I had a grander view of it than that. Maybe not.”

  “You said ‘still’ had a hold on you. What does that mean?” I am possibly probing beyond my capacity to actually help here and maybe doing it for more prurient reasons. I hope not. Stand down, Woody, damn you!!!

  “I was very young and got caught up in something I wasn’t ready for. A group of guys who were supposed to be friends took me away from a pretty messed-up home life. My father was an angry man. He beat my mother—and me occasionally—any time he felt bad. These boys gave me somewhere to feel like I had a place, y’know, where I could belong. They introduced me to alcohol and drugs and the party life. And then one night they gang-raped me. I was sixteen.”

  Silence from me. Mr. Clueless has no idea what to say. Prurient interest is out the fucking window. The longer the silence, the more embarrassed I am at not having said something after my probing. All the possibilities sound lame—“That’s terrible”? “I’m sorry”? “Wow”? “Must have been awful”? Sometimes it’s better just to shut up. In a very short space of time I have learned a stranger’s dark secret because she has entrusted it to me.

  I stumble. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “It’s okay,” she says, and I feel she is being truthful. “I think it’s part of my path to see where I fit into this world I’ve been cloistered away from since I was twenty-two. And of all the pick-up lines I heard tonight, you asking me if I was possibly ‘God’ got my attention, considering where I had come from and what I am looking for,” she finishes.

  Oooooowwweeeeee!!!!! Although I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work on most women, I actually came up with a winning opening line and this burnin’ babe wanted to talk to me over all those other handsome dickheads in that place! In your face! YEAH! . . . Wait, what am I saying? Damnit, Woody, shut the fuck up!!!

  My mind pole-vaults out of the gutter.

  “I’m sure there’s a whole lot more to your story,” I say to her honestly, though I am still uncomfortably aroused, given the proximity. But Alice is apparently done spending time on it for now. Or she senses that my libido has taken a sudden turn to the left.

  She sips her coffee.

  I look around the atmospheric room. There are a few other couples (if I may be so bold as to call us a “couple”) as well as the previously mentioned overcaffeinated students prepping for exams, sucking down Adderall and studying last-minute CliffsNotes on their computers. I focus on a guy in the corner. Big. Slightly menacing. Kind of out of place. He glances up and we catch each other’s eye for a second. He breaks the connection and looks down into his coffee mug as Alice speaks.

  “So, Bobby . . . tell me about your phone call.”

  Ronan

  The massive weight of the great Loch pushes against the peeled and faded blue husk of the old wooden boat. His recent stroke has left Ronan Young with a heavy limp and only one working arm, making life considerably more challenging. It is with this good arm that he now steers the Bonnie Bradana. They are heading out into deep water, he and his faithful girl, neither of them really sure of the destination nor the exact reason tonight. Something in Ronan has driven him to make this journey, no doubt inadvisable in his current physical condition and at this late hour, but he has lived by his own rules so far and sees no reason to abandon that path at this point in his life. The Loch is calling. He knows that at some point in their lives, every human being dreams of a great and meaningful end when the time comes. But most of us will spend our last hours in small, antiseptic, windowless rooms, hooked up to beeping machines, attended by a scrubbed impersonal staff, when a good death is all that is really and truly desired. The moon crests above the snow-dusted crags that have watched over the great Loch since she first filled and formed. They have borne witness to the creature that found its way into the then salted sea, before the world changed and shifted and closed. Ronan has learned that there are things on this earth and under the sky that we will never fully understand and he realizes that he now, at this late stage in life, accepts the unacceptable, trusts the impossible, and sees logic in the illogical. He has been schooled by the great creature. She who seems to be
a spirit of this lake as much as she is real flesh and blood. The lapping of waves against the hull and the sleepy purring of his craft’s small motor are the only sounds Ronan hears as the surrounding mountains reflect their faint echoes back into the darkness. It is chilly out here on the lake but Ronan is at peace. His life has been both arduous and enviable. Small successes have been hard won and he has felt at times as though the weight of the great Highlands were strapped across his shoulders. Then again, in the quiet company of his precious Evelyn or travelling the great Loch at the helm of the Bonnie Bradana he has believed he was as blessed as any man on this earth. Now everyone he loved is gone. And he is no longer the man he once was. Life has become painful and exhausting. His mind swims in and around old memories. Meaningful now in their precious distance and the irretrievable moments lost. He thinks of his childhood family. His mother and father who loved and were loved . . . and his brother.

  His elder brother Devin had moved to Glasgow in his early twenties to make his fortune, or so he vowed, and seldom contacted the family nor made his whereabouts known. Devin always loathed this brutal and beautiful land. Was sure he was made for the comforts of the “civilized” world. He had been a brawling, brutal bully of an older brother who seemed to care little for his immediate family and even less for his friends and workmates. His anger would boil over often and cause mayhem for whoever was standing nearby. Ronan frequently took the brunt of Devin’s irrational rage and could never understand where all the fury came from. “I’m just fuckin’ angry is all,” spat out in a hoarse brogue, was the only explanation given to Ronan for the beatings. Devin longed for what he referred to as “the comforts of progress and culture” and swore an oath that he would never come back to the Highlands once he’d made his way and even if he were on his deathbed would not cry out for home or family. And he never did. Such is the power of a vow uttered in passion. Ronan and his kin heard little from Devin after he left. A short, curt letter stating matter-of-factly that he was heading to America to pursue his dream of a better life, believing, he said, that Scotland was no place for a man of ambition and vision like himself. Ronan’s not-overly-maudlin mind still hovers on the outskirts of a memory of his older sibling. At this late stage in his life he wonders about a life missed with a brother he should have known and loved but really barely knew. Visions of the two of them as small children playing at the lakeside a half-century ago that are now reduced to nothing more than a scratchy black-and-white movie stored in his memory. Age-old visions of life as it was meant to be before his brother’s ego, desires, and lunatic imaginings took hold of his soul and drove him away. So much gone so fast. All of it in an eyeblink. Ronan listens to the gentle thrum of the engine and the restful lapping of the waves against Bonnie’s hull. Light is leaving the slate sky. The birds disappear from the air. There is a presence on this great inland sea.