Lithium for Medea

9

“Don’t go up there yet,” Francine said. She was waiting for me in the hospital lobby. “It’s bad.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Of course I’ve been there. I was here at six A.M.” In the hospital light she looked white and shaken. Her smooth face was somehow chipped, creased and broken.

“How bad?”

“Bad.” Francine lit a cigarette. “He’s hooked up to oxygen and IV tubes in his nose and throat. They’re pouring liquids into him like a plant.” Francine took a deep breath. “They had to cut more than they thought.” She let it sit there.

“What did they cut?” I was terrified.

Francine looked down at the floor. “Everything,” she whispered. “The whole throat. Vocal cords. Parts of his mouth and tongue.”

“God,” I began.

“There’s no God, kid. You’ll see that when you go up there.”

We took the elevator to the third floor. The corridors were glistening and dim. The walls were the color of enamel mud. The ward was a damp shadowy green. The corridor opened to identical small green rooms where the Venetian blinds were drawn and the sun fell measured and tamed through their slats.

The sounds were muted. The nurses scraped by in soft shoes. There was the hushed bubbling of fluids moving through nose and throat tubes, the hiss of oxygen and the softer, more insistent humming of the life-support machines.

I glimpsed bodies absolutely white and emaciated. Flesh hung to the bones, pasty, already unnecessary.

Suddenly I thought of fish. The cancer ward was a kind of human aquarium. Here the almost dead lay in their own slow bubbles. So this is how it ends. It dries in silence. It dries in an afternoon the color of a childhood memory of an aquarium. The flesh dries. Finally the flesh is shed.

I kept walking. On each nightstand in each identical pale green room a philodendron sat with a red or pink ribbon wrapped around its green neck, its fat dull leaves blending into the greenish shadows. I thought of algae and sea plants.

My father’s face was terribly swollen. His face looked dark and angry between the layers of white bandaging. The gauze formed a thick collar around his neck. The collar sprouted tubes. He was bleeding. He was draining. He was hooked up to oxygen. My father was curled small in his bed, so small that at first I thought they might also have amputated his legs.

The blinds were drawn shut. My father reached for a writing pad. IV dripped through a needle taped to a vein in his hand.

WHATS THIS. He gestured toward the oxygen hissing through a thick green plastic tube. The tube was attached to a hole they had punched through his throat. A round metal disk was embedded in the center of his throat and hooked up to the green plastic oxygen tube.

“It’s oxygen. It’s temporary. They’re taking it out in a few days,” Francine said.

My father’s eyes filled with tears. He turned his bandaged face away from me and slowly, painfully tugged the edge of the blanket closer to his chest. He closed his eyes.

“He’s dying,” Francine said. She reached across the bed. She searched his wrist for a pulse. I stared at her. I felt an enormous scream building up somewhere inside of me. My lips trembled.

“I’ll get a doctor,” I said after what seemed like a long time. I rushed into the corridor. The green shadows were thick like sheets of greasy oak leaves across my face, a forest collapsing, a green storm, suffocating, blinding.

“Is he going to make it? Ultimately?” Francine asked, her words precise, her eyes amber lights, her breath grazing the doctor’s flesh. The doctor couldn’t inch away. His back was already against the corridor wall.

“There’s no way to say yet. Hemorrhaging and infection are possible. And there’s the matter of motivation.”

“Don’t give me that Marcus Welby shit. Who do you think I am? Some intimidated welfare case?” Francine grabbed his arm. “I’m asking you for the odds.”

The doctor considered his response carefully. “It’s completely undecided,” he said finally. “Fifty-fifty.” The doctor edged away.

We walked back into my father’s room. There was the smell of something terrible, dark and rotten, rancid plant fibers. The smell was thick and black, overpowering. The smell was coming from my father’s flesh. It was the smell of decay, of death.

WHAT TIME. My father inched himself into something like a sitting position. He pointed to his wrist. I could see the white line where he had worn his watch. He held up six fingers.

Did he think it was six o’clock? He must mean six at night. Time to turn on the news. Time for a shot of bourbon and a cigar. Time for day to shut down all around him while he watered the ivy, pruned the peach and apricot trees, the avocado tree, the lemon tree. Time to water the drained brownish backyard grass. Time to pick up a form sheet for the next day. Time for the Dodgers or Lakers on television while waiting for the next ambush, waiting, waiting for the cancer to return, a black swarm.

“It’s noon.” It was the first thing I had said to my father. He had been staring at Francine. Now he looked at me, squinting, trying to focus on me, recognize me.

WHATS THIS. He pointed to the oxygen tube.

“It’s temporary. Oxygen,” Francine told him. “It’s only temporary.”

How did she know that? I stared at her. She was biting her lip.

My father pulled on the transparent green tube running from the metal tank to his throat. With the blinds drawn, there was no time in the room, no seasons, no standard divisions. Everything was one long unbroken morphine afternoon, a dream without motion or direction.

“Sit down near him,” Francine directed.

I sat down lightly on the edge of my father’s bed. I reached for his hand and ran my fingertips gently across the skin, around the IV needle. The smell was like poisonous fumes. It filled my mouth and lungs. I could taste it on my tongue.

“Does it hurt?” I asked, softly. “Do you want a shot?”

“You can have morphine whenever you want it,” Francine told my father. “I read your chart.”

My father seemed to nod his head. Then he closed his eyes. His breath was soft, slow, a mere rustle. We watched him doze.

“It’s worse than before,” Francine assured me. We were walking toward the elevator. She was very pale. “You better prepare yourself. I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

I stopped walking. I stared at her, hard. “We don’t know that. It’s still fifty-fifty.”

Francine said nothing. We got into the elevator. We walked past the emergency room and into the hospital parking lot.

“Now you know,” Francine said. “I was twenty-seven. Precisely the age you are now. Only I was all alone. With a husband dying and a child to support.”

Slowly a haze parted. I glimpsed the world as it must have appeared to Francine. She had been stripped naked. The vultures had picked her clean.

“They sent him to California to die,” my mother said. “They said he wouldn’t last the winter in the East. Can you imagine what it was like for me? Holding him in my arms at night. Not knowing if he would just die at my side.” Francine lit a cigarette. “You’ve always hated me, blamed me. I was in a strange city. Alone, no friends, no family, a child, broke, an invalid husband in bed.”

I glimpsed Francine standing on the strange bleached Southern California plain with her back to the sea and the cruel sun going berserk, turning to blood above her head, above the flat white meaningless streets, above the stunted anemic palm fronds slatted and thick, the landscape itself strange and unreasonable. Now I was standing there with the sea opening its spiked gray mouth and the black vultures circling hungry just above me.

The wheel had spun. Twenty years passed. Now it was my turn. The first time I had been six years old. I remembered the world as black and white, before and after. One day it was precisely as it had always been. My mother had iron pots for hands. Soup was steaming. Snow fell but I was never cold. The old gray stone house was the perfect shell. There were no violations. My father left each morning in his special work clothes with the painting stains on the pant legs. My father carried his big brown toolbox. He was going to build another house. My mother was making things steam in the kitchen. She was humming. She met me at the curb where the school bus stopped. She was smiling.

When my mother baked, I baked, too. I had special tiny pie tins. My father would study the big pie and the little pie and eat mine. When my mother ironed, I ironed, too. I had a special miniature ironing board. My mother gave me the napkins to iron while she ironed my father’s shirts. The seasons spilled around us gently. We were undamaged. We were waiting on the gray stone porch for Daddy to come home from work. My mother had taken a bath and put on lipstick. The pies were cooling. Soon we would see Daddy’s car.

Overnight the world was torn apart, torn inside out, irrevocably stained. The stain spread out and became a dark spot I wore embedded in the center of my head.

“Do you understand?” Francine asked. Her face was very close. Her eyes seemed like beacons, iridescent and haunted, enormous yellow globes.

Did I have the power of absolution? Was I being asked for a blessing, a dispensation?

“You did well, Mother,” I said.

We embraced awkwardly. Her body felt very warm, too warm, almost feverish. I walked quickly to my car.

It was late afternoon. I stood on the porch of the Woman’s House. I could hear the slow drugged humming of insects sliding from one red plateau of geraniums to another, red patches scattered across the city like landing strips. There was a sense of frenzied insects leaping.

I sat down on the side of the canal. Yellow wildflowers rose in thick rows across the vacant field near my house. I sat very still, a part of the landscape, like a rock. In time, the edges of the canals would grind down and the vacant field reach out and push over me. Wild black grapes would grow in my arms. Vines would wrap around my ankles and dirt lick my thighs. In time, I would become a mound on a hill, a place for insects to rest their too thin veined wings.

And where were the fine crisp white words saying the man is dead. The man no longer breathes. The man lay in his small white bed. Life ebbed from him as he slept.

I picked up my mail. One letter, handwritten. I read the letter slowly. The paper was very white and thin in my hands. Near me, the ducks grew quiet, preparing to squawk their twilight pastel prayers of gratitude while the water beneath them browned. I read the letter again. It was from my cousin Rachel. She was in a Maine mental hospital. We had never met.

Suddenly it seemed to make perfect sense that she contact me. It was another proof that the wheel was indeed spinning. The evidence was piling up. It was my turn.

March 3

Dear Rachel,

You ask, did Medea take lithium?

The implications are legion. I know nothing about lithium.

You say you jumped off a bridge? You say the ground called to you, wanted you, arched its spine to you hungry? You ask if I think you are crazy.

I don’t know what crazy is any more. I know our family harbors a manic-depressive streak. It runs like a stain through this family. There isn’t even an undercurrent of stigma attached to it. After all, the kings of Europe were hemophiliacs. Is it so remarkable that their shopkeepers, moneychangers, outcast bankers and rag traders should also have a small dark anomaly? In our case, a certain inability to securely anchor a sense of proportion, a perspective lasting more than twenty minutes. Let me try to explain, although I must caution you, I no longer believe in explanations.

I do not think it “odd” that you would turn to me in your crisis, turn to me as the world you know tumbles and day itself collapses. You have heard stories about me? Your mother suggested this? Perhaps you both think because I am ten years older than you I have learned something of value. You’ll have to judge that for yourself.

We share the same blood. There are blood truths. I am certain of that. There exist connections of awesome power and subtlety more ancient and virulent than you might at this point imagine.

Have you thought of me often? I ask simply because I feel the presence of things, a kind of chorus. I’ve felt it all winter.

I understand when you say your mother is difficult beyond normal expectation, beyond even the bounds of that antiquated concept some men once called decency. I have an appreciation for your situation. Aren’t our mothers identical twins?

You ask why they scorn each other. I think it is simply that they cannot bear the undeniable stain. They must deny it. It is necessary for them that they despise each other. They have not even spoken in twenty-five years. They nest on opposite shores of this country as if the three thousand miles between them was a tangible demonstration of free will. I don’t think anything is free.

Is your mother bleaching you clean of Poland? Of horse paths through the firs? Ritual baths and superstition? Of course she is difficult to communicate with. Her Ph.D. in sociology protects her from the root-truths. Doesn’t she realize her doctorate is simply a modern piece of witchcraft?

My mother also denied me our exquisite and painful history. I believed I had a holy right to our shared past. I knew it wouldn’t be given. I took it.

How will you take it, you wonder? There are no maps for this, no dress rehearsal. One empties the self of past latitudes. The arms can become sails. The self is the projectile. Do you follow me?

What do you know of our terrible shared history? The rot they do not speak about? Even now with their names clean and Anglo-Saxon, certain truths are sealed shut in their mouths, too dangerous, too dark and taloned to utter. In their way, they are still spitting the evil eye in claustrophobic dark Sabbath rooms.

You know by now (your mother has told you?) they were not orphans. Our grandmother still lives. That’s where I saw your photograph. Our mothers pretend that she is dead. It is easier for them to believe this than to bear the simple truth of her alive, crippled (and have you heard it said demented?), in a Bronx tenement, living in her self-imposed hell, still punishing herself for the one terrible indiscretion. I am talking about the one virgin night she spent with the man, the infidel, the Christian who took her girlhood and left her pregnant with the twin curse that is our mothers.

Our grandmother named them Frieda and Fay. Later and separately, as they created new lives for themselves, they became Francine and the Felicity you know well.

Our grandfather was named Edward. I hired a private detective for this. Edward Geoffrey Richmond, though the name is meaningless and he is dead. He died a wealthy man in Houston, Texas, in 1964. I saw his grave.

He was married five times legally. There’s no way to count the liaisons he had. His pattern was always the same. He was attracted to very young women of what was then called the lower classes. Our grandmother wasn’t the first. She was simply one so deprived, so impoverished and terrified in this raw country of factories and sweatshops, of trolley cars and gray skyscrapers blotting out the clouds, that she had no recourse at all.

Edward Geoffrey Richmond probably never even knew his seed beat with life. (Two lives, in fact.) He has sets of bastards scattered across America. The detective said there could be as many as twelve children.

I met one, once. The private detective found her for me. She was tall, as we all are. She had the same giddy brilliance. She was vice-president of a bank in Boston. She was the bastard daughter of this man Edward. Her mother had been a fifteen-year-old Russian immigrant, much like our own grandmother Rose. She, too, was deserted in infancy.

She didn’t seem surprised to see me, just as I am not really surprised by your letter. There are forces pushing toward order. I am certain of that now.

This woman, this half-aunt, took me to lunch in a glass citadel with chilled white wine and the city sparkling and fresh as a new-dug grave below us. She sipped her wine slowly, without bitterness.

Rachel, they are such Calvinists. Your mother Felicity with her professorship. My mother Francine. The bastard daughter bank president in Boston. America has ruined them. This half-aunt sipped her wine and spoke without longing or anger about her childhood of cots and poverty. She even offered the hypothesis that early suffering can lead to extraordinary achievements.

I could see that she could not bear the pain of me, my eyes, the something in me she recognized. There seemed little to say. I stood on the street with my half-aunt. The search had, for me, ended.

It was different with our grandmother Rose. I will tell you more about her later. I can give you her address. You can learn from her. She’s a witch, in her way, red-haired as we all are. She would sense in you the dark amber eyes (almost coral, like the buds of certain orchids) and the erratic heartbeat, one of her own.

But you cannot journey in your condition. A serious journey requires preparation. Eat and sleep. You will need strength, no matter what. Perhaps by summer you will be ready. Remember, nothing is promised. Even the ground we walk upon is tentative, a mere approximation of something else.

I await word of your increasing health. We will share the blood-truth. I sense this.

I folded the letter carefully in an envelope. I had to mail it immediately or it would just sit there in my house amid the other remnants and relics of the lives I have led.

I mailed the letter and let myself wander slowly toward the ocean. The waves were gray. And I thought, don’t die, white-haired father, you who have been beaten gray as rock. You are but momentarily becalmed. Winds will rise. The whitecaps will dance again, star haunted. You will mount the stern gray crest again. You will know the liquid mountains. Just keep breathing.

Then the gray sea was lost, engulfed by a gray haze, the first tentative claw of night. Somewhere on the sand a man began singing something like an Arabic prayer. I remembered the day I moved into the Woman’s House.

“I love you,” I whispered in my new darkness.

“Why?” Jason asked.

He was lying on his back, lying on the brand-new flower-print sheets I had bought, lying with his arms raised above his head, resting loosely on the new down pillow. The bedroom curtains were open. It was summer. Jason had strung rows of neon Christmas bulbs outside the window. The bedroom was washed by silver. It always looked like a full moon.

“You are my dark one. My solitary one. You are my longed for and absolute in black marble. You are onyx. We skate down the iris night, one body. We map the black warm flesh openings. Your tongue is moss. You are a flutter of wings and hemp smoke. Your breath is sweet lime. Your sighs are like a drum, a tree falling down. You are my charmer, my fire-eater, my wind-rider. You are the cloud dance.”

“I know,” Jason said. He turned and faced the wall. “I don’t want that much love.”

I willed myself to lie still in the darkness. It was summer. I had watered the backyard garden. I had fluffed the pillows, straightened the bedspread, swept the floor.

“Why does my love terrify?”

“You want so much in return,” Jason said.

I sat up. It was our first night together officially. I wanted to open drawers and find flowers. I wanted to be carried over the threshold. I wanted some tangible demonstration that he wanted me there, some proof, some hard evidence.

“There’s no room for all that junk,” Jason repeated, over and over, while I dragged cardboard cartons up the three front steps, across the porch and into the living room. Jason watched the boxes collect, one on top of the other. He stared at them with a mounting horror, as if he had expected me to enter his life naked, empty of everything, a stretched canvas ready for the brush. I carried boxes and he looked angry. Jason looked betrayed.

“There’s no room for that crap,” Jason said from time to time.

Later I began to unpack the boxes. I hung my dresses in the bedroom closet. I put dishes away. Jason appeared from the bedroom, outraged, a clump of my clothing in his hand. He threw my dresses on the floor.

“Wrong,” he said.

“Wrong?”

“You hung them in the wrong closet. Keep your clothes in the hall closet. Clothes are impersonal.” He made it sound like an immutable law of nature.

“Jason,” I began slowly. “Is this my house or not? Because after carrying in all those damn boxes all day, I—”

“Rents are due the first of the month. That means get off your ass and collect them the first.” Jason walked out of the house.

I sat down startled, frightened, angry. I was filled with something burgundy red, thick and overwhelming. The air was liquid. What was happening? I was a holy shrine, ancient, perfected. Now suddenly I was besieged by vandals. There were vulgarities written on my elegant time-smoothed walls. They stole from the poorbox. They were monsters. Something horrible was happening, random, beyond imagination.

Jason came back at midnight. He got into bed and turned his body away from me, facing the wall.

“What’s going on? Please tell me,” I whispered. My head was collapsing into a black mass. I could feel individual atoms crumbling.

Jason said nothing.

“You act like you don’t want me here. You seem to be imposing stipulations on my life here. I feel tentative and—”

Within the darkness I could feel Jason smile. The night between us thickened. Jason laughed. He was beginning to feel better, lighter. The cardboard boxes had frightened him. I had frightened him, standing at the edges of his rooms, violating his routine, his painting schedule, his very existence, with the meaningless clutter of my life.

I covered my face with my hands. I pressed my face, trying to shake my head, my skin, my cells clear. The darkness was strangling. Debris was spilling fast and unpatterned.

“Jason.” I touched his shoulder. I felt him tense beneath my fingertips.

“Leave me alone. I’m tired.”

“I need you,” I whispered, words intoned, a kind of prayer. I was a shrine, old and holy. I was the silence of candlelight and bells. Why the hell was Jason tired? I carried all the boxes.

“You always need something,” Jason said. “You’re a goddamned bottomless pit. Go to sleep.”

“What’s wrong?” I could barely breathe.

“I said shut up. Stop interrogating me. All you do is make it worse for yourself.”

Worse for myself? Was I on trial? Was my demeanor having an adverse effect on the case? And what precisely were the charges against me?

“What the hell are you talking about?” I yelled.

Jason jumped forward then. He pressed his hand over my mouth, hard. His face was contorted through the layers of darkness. The neon light glanced off his teeth. He began shaking my head. I felt his thumb pinching into my lip.

“You want to play another midnight round of Name That Problem?” He was still shaking my head, picking my head up off the mattress like a cantaloupe and throwing me back down. “You hum a few bars and I’m supposed to guess what’s eating your guts and driving you crazy?”

I was frozen. Part of me wanted to run, wanted to run down the three porch steps, down to my car, to the sleeping city, anywhere. That was the real me. The rest of me was a shell, lying quietly, obediently, wide-eyed and amazed.

“Sleep it off, bitch,” Jason said, angry.

Part of me was running down the stairs. Part of me had reached Venice Boulevard. Part of me ran flushed and hot under a full summer moon, silently repeating a chant, slowly, over and over, hypnotically.

Oh, God, it’s a mistake, a mistake, a mistake, I kept repeating. It’s a mistake, a mistake, a terrible mistake. The chant in my head was hopeless, over and over it fell through me like big drops of dirty city rain banging down on trash cans in an alley.

I woke up with a sense of purpose and clarity. Jason was gone. The morning was white and quiet. I would have to go somewhere and think. I would have to find a new place to live.

I edged into the kitchen. Jason was reading the newspaper. I filled a pot with water.

“Always use the white pot for boiling water,” Jason told me. He was working the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. He didn’t look at me.

“Here’s the way it is,” Jason began. He lit a cigarette. “I wake up. I want complete silence. No good mornings. No breakfast discussion. Nothing. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I eat. Then I go to work. I go back to my house and paint. I paint seven days a week. I begin as soon as I wake up. When I’m painting, which is every day, you forget I’m here. I don’t exist. I disappear. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Because I’m fucking tired of the marriage trip,” Jason said. “You take care of your shit. I’ll take care of mine. Are you hearing me?”

“I hear you.”

“Good,” he said. “Just accept it. This is a timeless moment.” Jason looked out the kitchen window at the plants near the side gate. A stalk of yellow canna, the petals thick and hard, waved gently in the early morning sea breeze. The canals were the color of a mirror.

Jason crossed the room. He paused in the doorway. He glanced back at the plants along the side gate.

“It’s going to be a lovely day,” Jason pronounced. Then he opened the front door and walked out.

I had lived with Jason for twenty-four hours. I realized I had a tremendous amount to learn. And I realized that I would never learn it fast enough.