TELE-PARABLIZING:
Morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots: "That's just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses!"
Q F D: Quelle fucking drag. "Jamie got stuck at Rome airport for thirty-six hours and it was, like, totally QFD."
QFM: Quelle fashion mistake. "It was really QFM, I mean painter pants? That's 1979 beyond belief."
break. (Date Rapes, Chemotherapies, Headless Prom Queens—who invents these things?)
The evening's dress code is bedtime story outfits: Claire in her flannel housecoat trimmed with a lace of cigarette burn holes, Dag in his "Lord Tyrone" burgundy rayon pyjamas with "regal" simugold drawstrings, and me in a limp plaid shirt with long Johns. We look hodgepodge, rainy day and silly. "We really must get our fashion act together," Claire says.
"After the revolution, Claire. After the revolution," replies Dag. Claire puts scientifically enhanced popcorn in the microwave oven. "I never feel like I'm putting food in one of these things," she then says, entering with beeps, the time-set into the LED, "it feels more like I'm inserting fuel rods into a core." She slams the door hard. "Hey, watch it," I call.
"Sorry, Andy. But I'm upset. You just have no idea how hard it is for me to find same-sex friends. My friends have always been guys. Girls are always so froufrou. They always see me as a threat. I finally find a decent friend here in town and she leaves on the same day as my life's grand obsession ditches me. Just bear with me, okay?"
"And that's why you were so draggy at the pool today?" "Yes. She told me to keep the news of her going a secret. She detests goodbyes."
Dag seems preoccupied about the nunnery. "It'll never work," he says, "It's too Madonna/whore. 1 don't buy it."
"It's not something you buy, Dag. You sound like Tobias when you talk like that. And she's hardly making a vocation of 'nunning'—slop being so negative. Give her a chance." Claire resumes her perch on the stool. "Besides, would you rather she was still here in Palm Springs doing whatever it was she was doing? Would you like to go down to Vons supermarket and buy needle bleach with her in a year or so? Or play matchmaker, perhaps—fix her up with a dental conventioneer so she can become a Palo Alto homemaker?"
The first kernel pops and it dawns on me that Dag is not only feeling rebuffed by Elvissa, but he's envious of her decision to change and reduce her life as well.
"She's renounced all of her worldly goods, I take it then," says Dag.
"I guess her roommates will filch most of her possessions she's
leaving beind here in Palm Springs, poor things. VSTP: very severe taste problem, that lady. Snoopy lamps and decoupage, mostly." "I give her three months."
Under a fusillade of popping kernels, Claire raises her voice: "I'm not going to harp on about this, Dag, but cliche or doomed as her impulse for self-betterment may be, you just can't mock it. You of all people. Good Lord. You should understand what it means to try and get rid of all the crap in your life. But Elvissa's gone one further than you, now, hasn't she? She's at the next level. You're hanging on still, even though your job-job and the big city are gone —hanging on to your car and your cigarettes and your long distance phone calls and the cocktails and the attitude. You still want control. What she's doing is no sillier than your going into a monastery, and Lord knows we've listened to your talk about that enough times."
The corn appropriately stops popping, and Dag stares at his feet. He gazes at them like they were two keys on a key chain but he can't remember what locks they belong to. "God. You're right. I don't believe myself. You know what I feel like? I feel like I'm twelve years old and back in Ontario and I've just sloshed gasoline all over the car and my clothing again—I feel like such a total dirt bag."
"Don't be a dirt bag, Bellinghausen. Just close your eyes," Claire says. "Close your eyes and look closely at what you've spilled. Smell the future."
The red light bulb was fun but tiring. We head into my room now for bedtime stories. The fireplace is lit, with the dogs snogging away blissfully atop their oval braid rug. On top of my bed's Hudson Bay blankets we eat the popcorn and feel a rare coziness amid the beeswax yellow shadows that oscillate on the wooden walls that are hung with my objects: fishing lures, sun hats , a violin, date fronds, yellowing newspapers, bead belts, rope, oxford shoes, and maps. Simple objects for a noncomplex life.
Claire starts.
LEAVE YOUR BODY
"There was once this poor little rich girl named Linda. She was heiress to a vast family fortune, the seeds of which sprouted in slave trading in Georgia, that propagated into the Yankee textile mills of Massachusetts and Connecticut, dispersed westward into the steel mills of the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania, and ultimately bore sturdy offspring of newspapers, film, and aerospace in California. "But while Linda's family's money always managed to grow and adapt to its times, Linda's family did not. It shrank, the point where all that her mother, Doris. Linda on a rural Delaware esfiled her tax claims out of She hadn't even visited it a socialite; she lived in dwindled, and inbred to remained was Linda and lived in a stone mansion tate, but her mother only the Delaware address. in many years—she was Paris; she was on the jet.
If she had visited, she might have been able to prevent what happened to Linda. "You see, Linda grew up happy as any little rich girl can, an only child in a nursery on the top floor of the stone mansion where her father read stories to her every night as she sat on his lap. Up near the ceiling, dozens of small tame canaries swirled and sang, sometimes descending to sit on their shoulders and always inspecting the lovely foods the maids would deliver. "But one day her father stopped coming and he never returned. For a while, her mother occasionally came to try and read stories, but it was never the same—she had cocktails on her breath; she would cry; she swatted the birds when they came near her and after a while the birds stopped trying.
"Time passed, and in her late teens and early twenties, Linda became a beautiful but desperately unhappy woman, constantly searching for one person, one idea, or one place that could rescue her from her, well, her life. Linda felt charmed but targetless—utterly alone. And she had mixed feelings about her chunky inheritance—guilt at not having struggled but also sometimes feelings of queenliness and entitlement that she knew could only bring bad luck upon her. She flipflopped.
"And like all truly rich and/or beautiful and/or famous people, she was never really sure whether people were responding to the real her, the pinpoint of light trapped within her flesh capsule, or if they were responding merely to the lottery prize she won at birth. She was always on the alert for fakes and leeches, poetasters and quacks.
"I'll add some more about Linda here, too: she was bright. She could discuss particle physics, say—quarks and leptons, bosons and mesons—and she could tell you who really knew about the subject versus someone who had merely read a magazine article on it. She could name most flowers and she could buy all flowers. She attended Williams College and she attended drinks parties with film stars in velveteen Manhattan aeries lit by epileptic flashbulbs. She often traveled alone to Europe. In the medieval walled city of Saint-Malo on the coast of France she lived in a small room that smelled of liqueur bonbons and dust. There she read the works of Balzac and Nancy Mitford, looking for love, looking for an idea, and having sex with Australians while planning her next European destinations.
"In western Africa she visited endless floral quilts of gerbera and oxalis—otherworldly fields where psychedelic zebras chewed tender blossoms that emerged from the barren soil overnight, borne of seeds awakened from decade-long comas by the fickle Congo rains.
"But it was in Asia, finally, where Linda found what she was looking for—high in the Himalayas amid the discarded, rusting oxygen canisters of mountaineers and the vacant, opiated, and damned bodies of Iowa sophomores—it was there she heard the idea that unlocked the mechanisms of her soul.
"She heard of a religious sect of monks and nuns in a small village who had achieved a state of saintliness—ecstasy�
�release—through a strict diet and a period of meditation that lasted for seven years, seven months, seven days, and seven hours. During this period, the saint-intraining was not allowed to speak one word or perform any other acts
save those of eating, sleeping, meditation, and elimination. But it was said that the truth to be found at the end of this ordeal was so invariably wonderful that the suffering and denial was small change compared to the Higher contact achieved at the end.
"Unfortunately on the day of Linda's visit to the small village there was a storm. She was forced to turn back and the next day she then had to return to Delaware for a meeting with her estate lawyers. She was never able to visit the saintly village.
"Shortly thereafter she turned twenty-one. By the terms of her father's will, she then inherited the bulk of his estate. Doris, in a tense moment in a tobacco-smelling Delaware lawyer's office learned that she would only receive a fixed but not unextravagant monthly allowance.
"Now, from her husband's estate Doris had wanted a meal; she got a snack. She was livid, and it was over this money that an irreparable rift between Linda and Doris opened up. Doris untethered herself. She became a well-upholstered, glossily lacquered citizen of money's secret world. Life became a bayeux of British health hydros, purchased Venetian bellboys who plucked the jewels from her handbag, fruitless Andean UFO trace hunts, Lake Geneva sanatoriums and Antarctic cruises, where she would shamelessly flatter emirate princes against a backdrop of the pale blue ice of Queen Maud Land.
"And so Linda was left alone to make her decisions, and in the absence of nay-sayers, she decided to try for herself the spiritual release of the seven-year—seven-month—seven-day method.
"But in order to do this, she had to take precautions to ensure that the outside world did not impinge on her efforts. She fortified the walls of her estate, making them taller and armed with laser alarms, fearful not of robbery, but of possible interruptions. Legal documents were drawn up whic h ensured that such issues as taxes would be taken care of. These documents also stated the nature of her mission in advance and sat there ready to be brandished in the event that Linda's sanity might be questioned.
"Her servants she discharged, save for one retainer named Charlotte. Cars were banned from the property and the yards and gardens
ME-ISM: A search by an
individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a
personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a
nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-foreye attitudes.
were let to run wild to spare the annoyances of lawn mowers. Security guards were placed on constant guard around her estate's perimeter, and another security system was hired to monitor the security guards, to prevent them from becoming lax. Nothing was to interrupt her sixteen hours a day of silent meditation.
"And thus one early March, her period of silence began. "Immediately the yard began to return to the wild. The harsh Kentucky Blue monoculture of the lawn quickly became laced with gentler, indigenous flowers and weeds and grasses. Black-eyed Susans, forgetme-nots, cow parsley, and New Zealand flax joined the grasses that began to reclaim, soften, and punctuate the pebbled driveways and paths. The gangly, luxurious, and painful forms of roses, thorns and their hips overtook the gazebo; wisteria strangled the porch; pyrocanthus and ivies spilled over the rockeries like soups boiling over. Small creatures moved into the yard in abundance. In summer the tips of the grass became permanently covered in a mist of sunlight sprinkled with silent, imbecilic, and amniotic butterflies, moths, and midges. Hungry raucous jays and orioles would swoop and penetrate this airy liquid. And this was Linda's world. She overlooked it from dawn to dusk from her mat on the outdoor patio, saying nothing, sharing nothing, revealing nothing.
"When fall came she would wear wool blankets given to her by Charlotte until it became too cold. Then she continued to watch her world from inside the tall glass doors of her bedroom. In winter she observed the world's dormancy; in spring she saw its renewal, and again each summer she watched its almost smothering richness of life. "And this carried on for seven years, in which time her hair turned gray, she ceased menstruating, her skin became like a leather pulled tightly over her bones, and her voice box atrophied, making her unable to speak, even were she to want to do so.
"One day near the end of Linda's period of meditation, far away on the other side of the world in the Himalayas, a priest named Laski was reading a copy of the German magazine Stern, left in the local village by visiting mountaineers. In it he came across a fuzzy telephoto of a female figure, Linda, meditating in what looked to be a wild and rich PAPER RABIES: garden. Reading the caption underneath, which described the efforts Hypersensitivity to littering. of a wealthy American heiress gone New Age, Laski felt his pulse
quicken. "Within one day Laski was on a Japan Air Lines flight into
JFK airport, filled with anxiety and looking a strange sight with his
steamer trunk and his robe, battling the late afternoon crowds of
Eurotrash being deposited at customs by the discount airlines and
hoping that the airport limousine would take him to Linda's estate in
time. So little time!
"Laski stood outside the steely gate of Linda's estate, and from within
the guard's house, he heard a party in progress. Tonight, as he had
correctly interpreted from the small curiosity article on Linda in the
Stern, was to be her last night of meditation—the guards were to be
released from duty and were celebrating. They were sloppy. Laski,
leaving his steamer trunk outside the gate, slipped in quietly, and without
any interruption, strolled down the sunset lit remains of the driveway.
"The apple trees were filled with angry crows; blue ground spruce shrub
licked at his feet; exhausted sunflowers rested their heads on broken
necks while the snails gathered below like tricoteuses. Amid this splendor
Laski stood and changed from his pale brown robe into a jacket of
glimmering metal he had removed at the gate and had been carrying with
him. And, after reaching Linda's house, he opened the front door, then
entered the cool, dark silence that spoke to him of opulent rooms rarely
used. Up a wide central staircase layered with carpet the black-red tint
of pomegranate juice, Laski followed a hunch, walked through many
corridors, and ended up in Linda's bedroom. Charlotte, partying with
the guards, was not there to monitor his entrance.
"Then on the patio outside he saw Linda's shrunken figure
gazing at the sun, which was now amber and half-descended below the
horizon. Laski had arrived just in time—Linda's period of silence and
meditation would be over in seconds.
"Laski looked at her body, so young still, but converted to that of an
old crone. And it could almost creak, so it seemed to him, as she
turned around, revealing her face, profoundly emaciated—a terminal
face like a rubber raft that has been deflated, left in the sun too long.
"She raised her body slowly, knobby and spindly, like a child's
spaghetti sculpture of a graceless bird, and she shuffled across the
patio and through the doors into her bedroom like a delicate breeze
entering a closed room.
-"She did not seem surprised to see Laski, agleam in his metal
jacket. Passing by him, she pulled her lip muscles up in a satisfied smile and headed toward her bed. As she laid herself down, Laski could hear the sandpapery noises of a rough military blanket on her dress. She stared at the ceiling and Laski came to stand next to her.
" 'You children from Europe . . . from America . . .' he said, 'you try so hard but y
ou get everything wrong—you and your strange little handcarved religions you make for yourselves. Yes, you were to meditate for seven years and seven months and seven days and seven hours in my religion, but that's in my calendar, not yours. In your calendar the time comes out to just over one year. You went seven times longer than you had to ... you went for far too—' but then Laski fell silent. Linda's eyes became like those he had seen that afternoon at the airport—the eyes of emigrants about to emerge through the sliding doors of customs and finally enter the new world for which they have burned all bridges.
"Yes, Linda had done everything incorrectly, but she had won anyway. It was a strange victory, but a victory nonetheless. Laski realized he had met his superior. He quickly removed the jacket of his priesthood, a jacket well over two thousand years old to which new ornaments were always being added and from which old ornaments continually decayed. Gold and platinum threads woven with yak's wool bore obsidian beads and buttons of jade. There was a ruby from Marco Polo and a 7Up bottle cap given by the first pilot to ever land in Laski's village.
"Laski took this jacket and placed it on Linda's body, now undergoing a supernatural conversion. His gesture was accompanied by the cracking of her ribs and a breathy squeak of ecstasy. 'Poor sweet child,' he whispered as he kissed her on the forehead.
"And with this kiss, Linda's skull caved in like so many fragile green plastic berry baskets, left outside over a winter, crushing in one's hand. Yes, her skull caved in and turned to dust—and the piece of light that was truly Linda vacated her old vessel, then flitted heavenward, where it went to sit—like a small yellow bird that can sing all songs— on the right hand of her god."
GROW FLOWERS
Years ago, after I first started to make a bit of money, I used to go to the local garden center every fall and purchase fifty-two daffodil bulbs. Shortly thereafter, I would then go into my parents' backyard with a deck of fifty-two wax-coated playing cards and hurl the cards across the lawn. Wherever a card fell, I would plant one of the bulbs. Of course, I could have just tossed the bulbs themselves, but the point of the matter is, I didn't. Planting bulbs this way creates a very natural spray effect— the same silent algo torque in a flock of sparpiece of driftwood also formal matter, too. And daffodils and the narcissi cate little haikus to the cold, gentle scent, their rithms that dictate the rows or the gnarl of a dictate success in this come spring, after the have spoken their deli world and spilled their crinkly beige onion pa
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