A Good Day for Seppuku

WOMEN OF THE PORTS

They meet at irregular intervals at Fisherman’s Wharf. This is the neutral zone, the landscape of perpetual unmolested childhood where the carousel spins in its predictable orbit, and the original primitive neon alphabet does not deviate. Some hieroglyphics are permanent and intelligible in all hemispheres and dialects. No translation is necessary. The carousel doesn’t require calculus, rehab or absolution. No complications with immigration or the IRS. Just buy a token.

She phones Clarissa. “I’m here,” she announces.

“At the wharf?” Clarissa must clarify the conditions.

“Anemic waves and corndogs that give you cancer. Immigrants catching perch so full of mercury, they explode as they reel them in,” she reports.

“What color is the water?” Clarissa asks. “Precisely?”

“Last ditch leukemia IV-drip blue,” she decides.

“Half an hour,” Clarissa assures her. “I’m coming.”

They meet episodically. Conventional friendship, with its narrative of consensual commitments, has proved too intimate and demanding. Between them are houses, husbands dead or divorced, and children known only by anecdote and photograph. Entire strata of their personal history are less than footnotes. Decades passed when they were driftwood to one another, or vessels lost at sea. Or a drowned stranger, perhaps; why bother?

“Our litany of blame is tedious,” she once recognized.

“Human perimeters are background razor wire. We’re too hip for that shit,” Clarissa responded.”

“We’ll bite it off with our teeth,” she offered. “Napalm it. Grenade launchers and M-16s. Tec-9s. We’ll have our own Cultural Revolution. We’ll go post-modern, but fully armed.”

“We’ll invent rituals appropriate for our circumstances. We’ll whisper endearments while strolling the killing fields.” Clarissa was enthusiastic.

“But we’ll abide by the Geneva Convention,” she prompted. “Despite our emotional residue.”

“Directed psychological evolution. It’ll be more brutal than weight training,” Clarissa agreed. “But we’ll become better human beings.”

“We’ll redefine and transcend ourselves,” she said.

It was an earlier autumn on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bluer than Maui, the bay studded with strands of cobalt that looked charged, technologically modified. She had lived two years in a bamboo and chicken wire shack on a nameless river of honey yellow reeds and orchids in the jungle near Hana. She had no electricity. She wasn’t in contact with Clarissa then. Clarissa probably doesn’t know there are seasons in Maui, too. A faint reddening, a moistening that seems a prelude, and sudden stillness as the mosquitoes enter temporary remission.

“I like it conceptually. But let’s go further,” Clarissa suggested. “We’ll be molecular. Just strands of light from one radiance to another.”

“We’ll reject linearity entirely,” she encouraged. “Sporadic moments of illumination in extreme altitudes requiring oxygen masks?”

“Discreet and unpredictable rendezvous with spectacular voltage. We’ll communicate by blowtorch,” Clarissa offered. Her eyes emitted an unnatural gleam suggesting rows of votives in deserted rooms and beaches of mica in white sand.

Their psychiatrists were cautiously optimistic. A process of accommodation and evolution was unlikely but not implausible. True, they had failed the traditional strategies of giving and receiving. But the standard methods by which one registers recognition and regret don’t apply to them. They had a pact, an armistice with the elements of aggressive radical improvisational surgery. Malignant complications were an acceptable risk. Then they had shaken hands.

Now she sees Clarissa exiting a black town car with darkened windows. She’s wearing her usual business outfit — aerobics pants and jacket, oversized Gucci sunglasses and a Giants baseball cap. It’s the popular camouflaged movie star look, designed to create the impression you’re attempting to be incognito. It’s the uniform the narcissistic personality disorder dictates. It’s become a global fashion statement. In the malls of all the capitals, passing women might be gangbangers, housewives or soap stars.

Clarissa is carrying not a gym bag, which would be appropriate and predictable, but a Chanel purse with leather quilting and long gold braided handles. It’s the second decade of war and alliances are ambiguous and brief. We’re polite but alert and suspicious. Vigilant.

They kiss on both cheeks. “You forgot my birthday,” Clarissa begins. She dismisses the car and driver with a hand gesture.

“I didn’t sign on as a soccer mom. I don’t decorate for holidays. I don’t bake or send thank-you cards. I throw away personal mail. You know this,” she reminds Clarissa.

“Don’t you go to bed at Halloween? And not get up until after Valentine’s Day?” Clarissa’s voice is light.

“That was my mother,” she replies, annoyed. “I just leave the country at certain junctures.”

She is fond of Christmas in Southeast Asia — ornately decorated pine trees in air-conditioned hotel lobbies like vestiges from another planet, and bamboo balconies draped in green velvets, antique brocades and holly wreaths. More fetishes. Christmas carols are rendered in versions so mangled by distance and erroneous translation they’re almost tolerable. Rivers smell of rotting vegetables, petrol, wood cooking fires and hunger. Air is layers of decaying prayers like a satellite losing orbit, falling down not as metal but as streams of origami. In Bangkok, in December, it’s 106 degrees.

“Let’s just be here now,” Clarissa says. “We know the rules. It’s play time.” Her mouth glistens with a red lipstick that seems to have small stars encrusted within it. There are implications in the sheen she doesn’t want to consider.

The wharf is almost deserted. It’s mid-day, mid-week in an undifferentiated season. It’s another windswept early November. They walk hand-in-hand down the pier past occasional men fishing and stray teenagers eager for corruption.

“Don’t look,” Clarissa cautions. “They’re contagious. We’ll get a contact psychotic flashback.”

They, too, grew up in tenements designed for transience, and shabby from inception. The rows of apartments like festering sun sores. They were an integral part of the blueprint for the millennial slums in the sun. They were the penciled-in stick figures on the diagrams.

The Last Edge Saloon perches on the furthest side of the wharf. Their reunions begin there. Clarissa sits in a booth facing the bay on three sides. It’s a bold and invitational decision. They’ll order expresso and take amphetamines. Or get drunk on something festive, White Russians or champagne. Since she’s technically still in AA, she lets Clarissa set the tenor. Clarissa orders a pitcher of Bloody Marys. From a caloric standpoint, it’s the obvious selection.

“You still look like a hippy,” Clarissa observes, regarding her with an expression that’s speciously conciliatory, even condescending. She interprets this as disturbing. Anxiety is inseparable from the air. It’s in the oxygen molecules their biochemistry fails to adequately process. There’s a perpetual uneasy truce.

“It’s my signature classic bohemian statement,” she replies quickly. She’s defensive and a bit agitated. “I want to formalize our alliance,” she begins.

“Want to get married?” Clarissa produces an unconvincing partial smile.

“I want a contract with precise specifications,” she replies. “And I want a weapons check.”

“Contracts are worthless,” Clarissa points out. “They’re a wish list for Santa.”

She’s a lawyer, after all. She knows.

“We could become cousins,” Clarissa suggests.

This appeals to her. Survivors of cataclysmic childhoods defined by poverty and isolation compulsively seek validation. They know they lack proper emotional documentation. Cousins evokes a blood connection that would substantiate and obviate certain complexities — the ebbs and flows, droughts and monsoons of their relationship. She wants a device that highlights and justifies their erratic and pathologically intense conjunction. In regions of bamboo and sun-rotted petals, hurricanes are routine and wind propels sand like tiny bullets, and there are too few artifacts. Cousins is an inspiration.

“I could draw up the papers,” Clarissa is expansive. “But adoption is superior.”

She came to San Francisco when she was 7. Her father, Marvin, had terminal cancer. Her mother was mentally ill. They were bankrupt. She thought heaven was a foster home. If Marvin would just finally die, perhaps she could even get adopted.

“I’ve missed you like a first love,” she says.

“I was your first love,” Clarissa reminds her. “And you mine.”

They lean across the faux wood table etched with knife gouged gang insignias and logos of metal bands and kiss again. They are both manic this autumn day. They share numerous personality disorders. They’re both bi-polar 2 with borderline features. Substance abuse is a persistent irritant. Recently, they’ve been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Today’s sun turns the San Francisco Bay the purple of noon irises in country gardens in July. To articulate such facets, to know and chart them is a spasm of thunder inside, a tiny birth the size of a violet’s mouth. If she extracted this entity from her body, she could present it to Clarissa like an infant.

She examines her almost cousin’s eyes. Even through dark sunglasses, they are inordinately bright. Then she senses that she, too, is glowing. Her eyes are brass corridors reflecting fluorescent light. They’re both candles today, unusually in sync, radiant with clarity and energy. Clarissa wears a silk scarf, a vivid purple implying motion and vertical waves.

“Like it?” Clarissa asks. “Hermes. Take it. I just stole it on Maiden Lane.”

“You still shoplift?” She holds the scarf. It feels moist and sanctified. It reminds her of the Mohave in December, crossing from the east into an inland ocean of relentless purple and mauve waves. The scarf is an embrace around her neck.

“Theft is like guerilla warfare,” Clarissa explains. They’ve finished their second round of drinks. “A thrill kill requires mental discipline. I put it on and keep walking. I know I’ve had it for years. I bought it on the Champs Elysees. It was raining. I was at the George V. No one could dare question me. And no one does. Let’s ride the carousel.”

They carry their drinks across the stained wooden planks of the pier. The carousel is closed. Clarissa makes a cell phone call and a man appears. She produces three hundred dollar bills. They wait for the right seats, choosing recently painted twin horses, white and intricately decorated like certain antique porcelain plates, and ride for half an hour. Clarissa vomits twice.

She searches her theoretical arsenal. Is it time for a hand grenade? Should she call for a chopper with medics? Then she remembers her mission. “Are you OK?” she manages.

“I understand how children discover bulimia,” Clarissa reports, excited. “It’s an accidental miracle.”

Despite the gym-suit camouflage, it’s obvious Clarissa has gained weight. But even they have taboos. Eating disorders are a forbidden topic. They meet on neutral ground, but there are still no-fly zones, areas of fragmentation and carpet bombs, landmines and IEDs.

Clarissa borrows the purple scarf to wipe her mouth. She’s contaminated the silk, but she still wants it back. She thinks, suddenly, of flower bouquets and their inadequacy. The floral arrangements of her life have been too much and not enough. The petals stained, fragile and insubstantial. They were debris.

“If a contract is insufficient, what can we do?” she wonders.

They stand on the wharf where the carousel is no longer spinning. Gone are the circles they inscribed in the too thin aqua air, engraving midnight blue trails like marks made by fins. Somewhere these etchings floated into a river winding to a bay. More invisible origami.

“We could get a tattoo,” Clarissa proposes. “Our names together in a heart.”

“A tattoo?” she repeats, delighted. “Isn’t it painful and dangerous? The possibility of AIDS and infection?”

“But you love needles.” Clarissa is annoyed. “You’re a professional junky.”

“I’m in remission,” she replies quickly. There’s no doubt anymore. Clarissa is attacking.

In truth, during one particularly virulent carousel rotation, she decided to call a drug dealer in North Beach. It’s walking distance, over a steep sequence of stone steps in a cliff. Then the sudden unexpected gate. Within, a creek is dammed and trapped, the water stalls green with slime and duck excrement.

There’s a bridge to the Victorian house. She knows the grain in every wooden floorboard and the way sunset displays itself through each glass pane in every room. There’s a geometry to how sun impales and dissects the Golden Gate Bridge. If you comprehend this mathematics, you can construct spaceships and time machines with common household appliances. You can turn on the radio and talk to any god.

“You always relapse,” Clarissa observes. “And don’t you already have AIDS?”

She is shocked. She stares at Clarissa. Even with Gucci sunglasses, there’s a distinct softening around her chin, and a loss of definition in her cheeks.

“No. I have hepatitis C.” She is angry. “And you need to get your face done.”

“What part?” Clarissa is concerned.

They’re walking from the wharf toward a tattoo parlor on Columbus Avenue.

Shops offer stacks of cheap plaster statues, saints and children, dwarves and obese laughing frogs. Someone will purchase and paint these objects, display them, or give them as gifts. They pass display windows offering plastic replicas of Alcatraz, and T-shirts saying PRISONER and PSYCHO WARD.

“What part?” she repeats. “It’s not a fucking negotiation. It’s a composition. Just give the guy a blank check. And don’t use a Marin surgeon. You’ll end up looking like a clone. I found an Italian in Pittsburgh.”

“I noticed you finally got your father off your face,” Clarissa slowly admits.

“Well, the police wouldn’t do it,” she says with an edge. “And Mommy was in a locked ward.”

Slow swells are below the wharf. The bay is a liquid representation of fall. It’s in continual transition. All fluid bodies are autumnal and promise betrayal. That’s what leaves signify, flaunting unrepentant criminal reds like vengeance and adultery, and yellows like lanterns and amulets. Fall is about packing and disappearing. It’s the season for divestiture. Time of the severing. That’s the obvious subtext. And it occurs to her that her elation may dissipate. Emotions have their own inexplicable currents and random lightning storms.

She follows Clarissa into the tattoo parlor. “Let’s rock,” Clarissa says. “Lock and load.”

The Eagles are playing. It’s “Hotel California,” of course. A tanned man with a blond ponytail who looks like a yoga instructor opens a book of designs. Dragons.

Butterflies. Demons. Flowers. Guitars. Spiders. She vaguely remembers negotiations involving a fifth of vodka, and a complicated argument regarding the aesthetic implications of scripts. They selected a gothic font. Then she may have passed out.

She realizes they’re in an arcade on Pier 39. It’s three hours and six Bloody Mary’s later. They have gauze and adhesive tape on their shoulders where their names are carved into their left upper arms in navy blue. They’re leaving the encircling heart in red ink for their next reunion. Banks of garish video games surround them; hip-hop blasts from speakers in the ceilings and floors. Boys who look part Asian or Mexican are armed with laser levers and plastic machine guns. They keep the real Glocks in their pockets.

“This is not the global village I envisioned,” she says.

“That’s politically incorrect enough to get me disbarred,” Clarissa whispers. She places two fingers against her red lacquered lips in a gesture of mock fright.

The photographic booth is on the far side of the arcade. 4 shots. They’ve been taking pictures here since they rode buses and walked from Daly City in 7th grade. It cost a quarter then. Now it takes dollars. The photographic session is a ritual element in each of their meetings. It’s their sacrament. When they leave the booth, they cut the strip in half. She saves her photographs in the shoebox where she keeps her passport and birth certificate. She assumes Clarissa does the same, but in her Swiss jewelry vault. Or perhaps she just throws them away.

The photographs are a necessary component of their liturgy. They can only see one another by laminated representations. It would be too disturbing and intrusive if they actually perceived one another without artificial mediation. They communicate by email, fax and newspaper clippings.

“Marvin’s jowls are definitely gone.” Clarissa examines the thin strip of facial shots. “You have cheekbones. Are those implants? Jesus. You’re gorgeous. You didn’t look this good at sixteen, even. Cosmetic surgery already.”

“We’re breathing on 40.” She is bewildered. Certainly Clarissa comprehends the necessity of proactive facial procedures. This is San Francisco and Clarissa is an entertainment business attorney with a penthouse office above a Chinese bank. Is Clarissa in denial? Are her medications interfering with her functioning on even this rudimentary a level?

“After you psychologically resolve the slap across the face, and its more damaging verbal resonances—” she begins.

“And that takes decades and costs what? A quarter of a million?” Clarissa is still holding the strip of photographs.

“Then the next step is actual surgical removal. It’s a natural progression. It’s how to treat emotional cancer. Keep them,” she decides. “Get some reference points.”

They sit on a bench on the south side of the pier, sun tamed and restrained. The water is agitated, white caps like mouths open, baring teeth. The bay reminds her of a woman in autumn in an imaging office. First the locker, the paper bathrobe, the chatty blond with the clipboard who walks you into the room with the mammogram machines. Then the stasis before the X-rays are read. Yes, the bay is waiting for its results. Poppies encrusted with resins or blood float like prayer offerings in the dangerous toxic waters.

“We used to walk here. What were we? 11, 12?” Clarissa asks. Her mood is also shifting. They’re both still drunk.

They hold hands. Her childhood is a sequence of yellows from trailer park kitchen cabinets and the invisible poisons leaking from fathers undergoing chemotherapy. Take a breath of rancid lemon. You’ve seen the Pacific, reached the end of the trail and don’t linger at the edges. They had a final punctuation for that. It was called the iron lung.

“They hadn’t invented a vocabulary for us yet,” Clarissa says to the waves. “Dysfunctional families. Latchkey children. Remember when I lost my key? What my father did? Jerry tied me up in the carport in pajamas for a week.”

“I brought you a canteen with orange juice.” She recalls. “And a few joints. You were handcuffed. I fed you like a sick bird.”

“How did you get a canteen?” Clarissa asks.

“I took it from the hospital outpatient closet,” she says.

Her head is throbbing. She stares at sea swells that are the process by which an autumn forest becomes water. If you understand the bay, it smells of slow burning cedar. Midnight currents are actually leaves brushing the ocean with russet and amber. Waves answer to the moon and immutable laws of spin and fall. They don’t get dinner on the table at the appointed hour. They don’t carpool or pick up the suits on time, or have the cufflinks and invitations ready.

“Only you know,” Clarissa says. She looks like she may vomit again.

She nods. Yes, only I was at ground zero when it happened. This is why we’ve tattooed ourselves. We alone comprehend adolescence in the margins of a hardscrabble town in the conceptual latitudes. The late 50s and their village was subdivided wood frame houses and stucco bungalows nailed in rows like the fruit trees above gashes of alley, oranges and lemons so bitter they burned your mouth.

“We sat next to each other in home room,” she offers.

It was 7th grade and they were learning the history of America, but they couldn’t find their geography or circumstances in literature. Nature was oaks and maples, not a riot of magenta Bougainvillea, not a blaze of red and yellow Canna bursting through bamboo fences sticky with pink Oleander. Families had two parents and pastel houses behind lawns with white picket fences where characters experienced angst rather than hunger and rage. They didn’t sift through trashcans in dusk alleys searching for glass soda bottles redeemable for 2 cents apiece. Gather enough glass and you had bus fare. On a fortunate hunt, you could trap enough coins for lunch.

“Remember digging for bottles for food money?” she wonders.

“I remember what you said.” Clarissa smiles. “You said Holden Caulfield would have taken a taxi.”

She nods. “Remember our black berets? We were trying to meet Ginsberg and Kerouac. We wore those berets every day. We got lice.”

Clarissa shrugs. “We looked for beatniks right here, on this pier. Boys with sketchbooks and guitars. We said we were French. We practiced our accents at recess.”

Recess in the region of broken families, of divorces and single mothers, of stigma and words that could not be spoken out loud. Alcoholism. Cancer. Child abuse. Illegitimacy. Domestic violence. The special yellow smell of Sunday evenings when the mothers who worked as secretaries poured peroxide on their hair. The tiny implications of illumination from the one lamp you were allowed to turn on. Electricity was an extravagance. Their San Francisco was a medieval oasis — ocean at your face, mountains at your back. There were warlords at the utility companies with incomprehensible powers. Phones were instruments of terror. It cost money every time you touched them. Long distance calls were rationed, like chocolate during a war. The world as it was, before hotlines that could put your father in prison.

“I still have nightmares about the apartment in Daly City,” Clarissa reveals. “At every St. Regis and Ritz, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, I wake up shaking. At the Bora Bora Lagoon Resort Hotel. At the Palazzo Sasso in Ravello, for Christ’s sake. The plot complications vary but somehow I’m back there.”

“Remember the neighbors?” she asks. They lived next door, with a cement hall between them. She’s dizzy and her arm burns.

“The wetbacks and hillbillies? The identical blonds with drawls?” Clarissa is unusually bright. “It was still the Depression. I had a friend once. Another friend, not like you. A hillbilly. Jerry found us listening to the radio. It was Elvis. Jerry started yelling, ‘Y∆159ou’re playing colored music? You’re putting colored music in my house?’ He threw the radio at my face. Took out my front tooth. That’s how I discovered caps.”

“That was me,” she corrects, moderately annoyed. “It was Marvin, not Jerry. And he used the ‘n’ word.”

“We had the same father, metamorphically. A barbarian with bad grammar who thought a yarmulke was a ticket to prison. A guy who could plaster and drywall. They were house painters. When they were employed. House painters.” Clarissa stares at the bay.

“Like Hitler,” she points out. Then, “Had your mother run away yet?”

“Rachel? She was on the verge. She was morphing into River or Rainbow or something in secret. Preparing for her first commune. After Jerry, a sleeping bag and a candle was a good time.”

She remembers Clarissa’s mother as a woman sheathed in dark fabrics who sank into shadows, kept her back to the wall, found her own periphery, and rarely spoke. Jerry had pushed her out of a moving car. He kicked in her ribs and put her in a cast. Clarissa’s mother, a bruised woman in the process of metamorphosis. Yes, molting like the Hibiscus and Night Blooming Jasmine beside the alleys, sheathed in long skirts, shawls, and kimonos. She was younger than they are now.

Then Clarissa had a family of subtraction and she envied her. All the neighbors had incomplete families — the brothers in juvenile detention, the sisters who disappeared when they started to show. If Marvin stopped lingering, if he would just die, she could have a similar reduction. She could escape the stucco tenements with torn mesh screen doors and vacant lots behind cyclone fences. And the mothers and aunts who rode buses and worked as file clerks between nervous breakdowns. Even second-hand cars were an aberration. If she was placed in foster care, adoption might follow. She had straight A’s and she won the poetry and science competition. Maybe she could be given a new name with syllables that formed church steeples on your lips, like the women in books. She could be assigned a stay at home mother with a ruffled apron who baked cookies and called her Elizabeth, Margaret or Christine.

“Did you realize we were Jewish?” she suddenly wonders.

“I never revealed that. The hillbillies thought we were Christ killers and owned all the banks,” Clarissa tells her. “And Jerry said they’d deport us. Send us back to Poland.”

“I wanted a bat mitzvah,” she remembers. “Marvin said, ‘You mean a Jew thing? It costs a fortune to get into that club. They inspect you first. You have to shave your head and show them your penis.’”

“Speaking of Marvin’s penis, remember the Polanski scandal? When he sodomized a 13-year-old?” Clarissa asks.

It happened in California. It was front-page news in an era when newspapers were read and discussed. The details were graphic and comprehensive. They were indelible as a personal mutilation.

“Jerry said, ‘I knew that guy in Warsaw. He’s 5’2. He’s got a 3-inch dick.’ Jerry mimed the organ dimensions with his fingers.” Clarissa repeats the demonstration for her. “Then he said, ‘Why is this a headline? What kind of damage can you do with a dick that small?’” Clarissa turns back to the bay.

“Is that when it happened? When you disappeared? The phone was disconnected. I couldn’t find you for a year.” She tries to form a chronology.

“Brillstein says it wasn’t rape. It was an inevitable appropriation. I was chattel. Rachel left and Jerry just moved me into their bedroom. I came home from school and my clothes were in their closet. My pajamas were folded on their bed. Then he found us an apartment in Oakland. He let me pick out curtains,” Clarissa explains. “Hey, I was the first trophy wife on the block. It’s my mother I hate. She knew what would happen. I was expendable.”

“But she came back for you,” she says. “She took you to a commune. You went to college. You got out.”

“Nobody gets out, for Christ’s sake.” Clarissa is angry. “You chance to survive.”

She examines the bay. There’s less agitation, swells are softer and a haze grazes the amethyst surface. The diagnosis has come in. The bay had its biopsy. This stretch of ocean is terminal.

“Didn’t Marvin break your wrist?” Clarissa asks. “You had bandages all summer. You had to stay on the pier, reading.”

“Mommy did it. She was between mental hospitals. Maybe a weekend pass. Her contemptuous glare. It cut right through the chemo and antipsychotics. She ratted me out. She said, ‘Marvin, look, that kid’s talking with her fingers again. Don’t you know only Jews and Gypsies talk with their hands? You think you’re a neurosurgeon? A symphony conductor? You’re not even human.’ Then she seized my hand. I had three fractured fingers but they took her in the ambulance.”

They are quiet. Through haze, sun is lemon yellow on the heavy waters. Accuracy is a necessary component of civilization. Daddy knocked out your tooth. Mommy broke your fingers. There’s an elegant mathematics to this, to these coordinates and their relationship to one another. The accumulation of slights. The weight of insults. The random resurrection of coherence. And the way you are no longer blind, cold, and bereft. Then the indelible vulgarity you finally have the vocabulary to name.

Their fingers are entwined. She notices Clarissa is wearing a platinum set VHS-1 Tiffany diamond of at least 4 carats. And a gold Rolex with the perpetual oyster setting. She withdraws her hand.

“You know how it is,” Clarissa dismisses the implication. “When other women evaluate their black velvets, I consider a cool set of razor blades.”

“So you transcend the genre?” She is enraged.

“What genre would that be? Survivors of squalid adolescences? Best aberration in the most abhorred class?” Clarissa looks at her, hard. Her red lipstick with the embedded stars are like tiny metallic studs or hooks. They help you shred flesh.

She considers their shared childhood; their parents had been disenfranchised for generations. They were pre-urban and unprepared for a remote town perched at the edge of the implausible Pacific. Appliances overwhelmed them. The garbage disposal must never be touched. What if it broke? The refrigerator must be strategically opened and immediately shut. What if it burned out? And their offspring became mute with shock, there in the dirty secret city, deep within a colossus of yellow Hibiscus and magenta Bougainvillea, behind banks of startled red Geraniums and brittle Canna.

“We are what coalesced at the end of the trail. After the bandits, cactus and coyotes. We are the indigenous spawn of this saint. His bastards,” she realizes.

“We were spillage,” Clarissa replies. “Don’t romanticize.”

Everything is suspended. The bay is barely breathing. Perhaps it’s just been wheeled back from a fifth round of chemo. Maybe it’s hung-over. Or slipping into a coma. It needs a respirator. Come on. Code blue. It needs CPR.

“The immigrant experience, my ass,” Clarissa adds.

“But we have instincts.” She is exhausted. Her arm with its gauze-bandaged shoulder extends. She can talk with her limbs now. Marvin and her mother are dead. She gestures with her fingers, a motion that includes the bay, an outcropping that is Marin and Sonoma, and a suggestion of something beyond.

“We understand ambushes and unconventional warfare. We’re expert with camouflage,” Clarissa agrees, offering encouragement.

“They’ll never take us by surprise,” she responds. She feels a complete lack of conviction and a sudden intense longing to get a manicure.

Silence. Palms sway, windswept and brazen. Vertical shadows from fronds appear without warning, random spears. One must relentlessly improvise. Holden Caulfield would get knifed in the gut.

“I have to go now,” Clarissa abruptly announces. “But you look stunning. I’m impressed. Have you considered a wardrobe update? Do shmattes prove you’re an artist? Listen, I brought some Prada that were sized wrong. I’d sue if I had time. They’re in my car.”

“That’s OK,” she manages. This is emotional aerobics for the crippled, she thinks. Then, “I appreciate the gesture.”

“I don’t have a generous impulse in my repertoire.” Clarissa is tired. “This is a search and destroy in the triple-tier. But we must keep trying. Let’s end our reunion with a celebratory benediction.”

This is their ritual of conclusion. They exchange tokens of mutual acceptance. It’s how they prove their capacity to transcend themselves. It’s the equivalent of boot camp 5-mile runs in mud and climbing obstacle course ropes in rainstorms.

“I brought a postcard you sent me from Fiji 16 years ago.” She produces it from her backpack. She reads it out loud. “On the beach under green cliffs, I feel God’s breath. I make my daughter smile. She laughs like an orchestra of bells and sea birds fed on fresh fruits. Her hair is moss against my lips. How pink the infant fingernails are. I wish you such sea pearls.” She offers the postcard to Clarissa.

“I forgot that completely.” Clarissa doesn’t take the postcard. “That was Anna. A guy with the name of a reptile, Snake or Scorpion, took her away on a Harley to Arizona. I sent you newspaper clippings.”

“She testified against you,” she tries to remember. “In that divorce.”

“I was accused of witness tampering. I almost lost my license,” Clarissa says, and stands up.

She returns the postcard to her backpack. Their reunions are conceptually well intentioned. But leaches and bloodletting were once considered purifying and curative.

There is a long pause during which she considers radium poisoning, Madam Curie and the extent of her fatigue. Then she asks, “You still doing the venture capital thing? Private jets? Yachts to beaches too chic to be on a map? Everybody loses but you?”

“When the Israeli money dried up, I thought I was through. Then the Persians. No sensibility and billions, all liquid. An entire race with an innate passion for schlock. Payday.” Clarissa is more alert. “Then détente. Russian mafia money poured in. Cossacks with unlimited cash. Who would have thought?” Clarissa places the strip of photographs in her Chanel purse. And, as an afterthought asks, “What about you?”

“I’m getting married,” she says. “I’m moving to Wood’s End, Pennsylvania.”

“Jesus. The grand finale. OD in a barn with a woodstove? Twenty below without the wind chill? Your halfway house skirts in a broom closet? What now? Another alcoholic painter fighting his way back to the Whitney? Or a seething genius with a great novel and a small narcotics problem?” Clarissa extracts her cell phone.

“Fuck you.” She is outraged.

“I apologize. That was completely inappropriate,” Clarissa says immediately. “Forgive me, please. It’s separation anxiety. We have difficulty individuating. Partings are turbulent. The overlay and resonances are unspeakable. But Brillstein says we’re improving.”

“You’re still with Brillstein? Jerry’s psychiatrist? The Freudian with the high colonics and weekend mud baths?” She stares at Clarissa. She’s so startled, she’s almost sober.

“He’s eclectic, I know. But it’s like a family plan. I’m grandfathered in at the original price,” Clarissa says.

The stylish phone opens; the keyboard glows like the panels on an airplane. It’s the millennium and we have cockpits on our wrists. Clarissa’s phone is voice activated. She says, “Driver.” Then, “Pier 39. Now.”

“Does your arm hurt?” she wonders.

“No pain, no gain. My dear cousin,” Clarissa smiles. “Keep your finger on the trigger. We must soldier on. Our cause is just.”

She realizes Clarissa has already moved on. The conference is over. The documents will be studied. Further discussions to be scheduled. My people will calendar with yours. We’ll synchronize by palm pilot.

Suddenly she feels she’s on a borderless layover. It’s last Christmas in India again. She began in a broken taxi 5 hours from Goa. Then a 6-hour delay in the airport and the run across the tarmac for the last and totally unscheduled miraculous flight to Bombay. A day room for 7 hours. The flight to Frankfurt and another day room and delay. Finally, the 14-hour flight to New York. 70 hours of continual travel and she was just finding her rhythm. She could continue for weeks or months, in a perpetual montage of stalled entrances and exits, corridors and steps, tunnels and lobbies all in vertigo, in free fall, where no time zones apply.

They are no longer holding hands. A distance of texture and intention forms between them. The geometry is calculated. Not even their shadows collide.

“Another bittersweet reunion barely survived,” Clarissa says. “My beloved almost cousin.”

“And you, my first and greatest love,” she replies. “Another high risk foray we deserve purple hearts for.”

“We’ll get red hearts next time. Our next tattoo.” Clarissa produces a small false smile. Her lips are stiff beneath the lurid lacquer coating.

They kiss on both cheeks. The glitter has departed from their eyes. They’ve slid into an interminable foreign film they have neither interest nor affection for. But she knows the name of Clarissa’s lipstick now. It’s called Khmer Rouge.

There’s a certain pause just before sunset when the bay is veiled in azure. It’s the moment for redemption or drowning. Inland, cyclone fenced freeways carve cement scars beside bungalows with miniature balconies where parched Geraniums decay in air soiled from the fumes of manufacturing and human wounds. The bay is a muted defeated blue, subjugated and contained. At night, they pump the antidepressants in. Or maybe there’s enough Prozac and beer already in the sewage. Pollution turns the setting sun into strata of brandy and lurid claret, smears of curry and iodine. It looks like a massacre.

“Listen. My car can take you where you’re going,” Clarissa offers.

Clarissa’s driver has short hair, a thick neck, aviator sunglasses and an ear attachment like a Secret Service agent. Clarissa indicates the car door. It is open like a dark mouth with the teeth knocked out. And she’s waving the purple scarf like a banner. She refuses to admit that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She turns away and starts walking.

“Look. The Prada coat that doesn’t fit right,” Clarissa calls, waving a patch of blue silk with both her hands.

She turns away and starts walking. If those are words issuing from Clarissa’s mouth, which needs immediate surgical attention, she can’t hear them. There are shadows along the boardwalk and alleys bordering residential streets with ridiculous insipid seaside names. Bay Street. Marine Drive. North Peninsula View. Who do they think they’re kidding?

Keep walking and shadows find you. They’re the distilled essence of all harbors and bays. They taste like a wounded sherry you can drink or pour on your cuts. Shadows are graceful and do not require explanations. They know you’re more dangerous than they dare imagine. They cannot fill in your blanks. Simply surrender and they do everything.

There are no neutral zones. They’re an illusion, a delusionary construct, like movie and real estate contracts. Satellites map each zip code and tap every telephone. Cities are enclaves between combat arenas. We are born with weapons of mass destruction. They’re within us from inception and we pass them down the generations like poisonous heirlooms. It’s ground zero now and forever. She senses the car moving behind and away from her, and she’s grateful. She hopes Clarissa loses her license and becomes destitute. She should have her hands amputated like any other thief. Then she should get a slow growing undetectable ovarian cancer that metastesizes in her stomach and brain. The Russian Mafia should gang rape her while the Iranians eat caviar and watch. In any event, she never wants to see Clarissa again.