Lithium for Medea

10

“We hang tough. No matter what, we hang tough,” Francine said.

We were walking down the corridor toward my father’s room. The corridor was long and greenish gray, a kind of tunnel. The world narrowed to a thin channel the color of sheet metal. It might have been underwater. The ward was like a submarine, claustrophobic, gray, locked. There could be no escape.

I was assaulted by the sense of evil in the corridor and small cubicles. The white light was a cool luminous breath. The ward was antiseptic, the sky covered, the stars hidden.

A primitive man would never submit to a hospital. A primitive man would insist on being surrounded by his most magical objects. There would be communal chanting and prayer, the holding of a collective breath. Campfires would blaze into the darkness, spark of cedar logs, air bristling red into black, blood and smoke. There would be amulets, charms, totems. The masks would be repainted. The gourd rattles would be taken from the healer’s hut. There would be dancing, sand paintings and sung re-creations of the tribe’s victories over evil, the close calls and new beginnings, a special kind of ringing.

The healer would beseech the earth. The earth would answer. The sacred bones of the dead sage would gnaw at the red-black night and push off the dirt from the illusionary grave. The dream would bend, and the skeleton talk with real words from a mouth grown lips and tongue again.

The hospital was too blank and uniform. It was a space stripped empty, a waiting room for death. Here the shamans also wore special garb, white masks and white coats. They maintained antiseptic rituals. They communicated in a private ancient language. In their depleted fashion they attempted to preserve the mystery. They adhered to the old forms but lost the substance, the connections to the inexplicable power.

The doctors wore stethoscopes around their necks and communed with machines and it wasn’t enough, not nearly. I wanted antelope horns on their heads, rattles and drums. I wanted some enormous rumbling benediction, magic salts, colored smoke, knees on dirt, stars beacons of prayer.

“He’s stronger, you’ll see,” Francine said, desperate, betraying her lack of conviction. She was walking in front of me, a bright red straw hat balanced on top of her head. All I had to do was stay on my feet and follow the bouncing red straw ball.

Francine veered into a small cubicle near my father’s room. It was a storage room. Francine opened her red canvas carrying bag and began filling it with bars of soap, thermometers, Band-Aids, plastic drinking cups, washcloths and hospital gowns. She moved quickly. No one noticed.

“Five hundred forty bucks a day,” she observed softly. “They owe me something.”

I followed Francine into my father’s room. He was staring at the far wall. His face was a dark scowl between the white gauze. The feeding tube in his nose was red, a kind of tusk. I tried to think of something to say.

WHATS THIS. My father pointed to the oxygen tank.

“It’s oxygen. It’s temporary. They’ll take it out of here tomorrow.”

My father’s eyes were very black. They looked liquid, a kind of ink. His hand rested on top of his writing pad. I noticed the IV bottle was gone.

“See? They’ve already taken away the IV,” I said.

My father seemed to be dozing. He opened his black eyes. He reached for his writing pad.

WHATS THIS.

“Oxygen. It’s temporary.”

“Read him the paper,” Francine suggested. She produced the morning newspaper from her red canvas bag. She had to tape a program in Burbank. She was pacing nervously. Her suit jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a low-cut white silk blouse. I walked Francine into the corridor.

“What are you staring at?” Francine demanded. “My dress? Listen, kid. It cheers him up, believe me.”

Her high-heeled shoes make a hard click, click, click on the green tiled floor. When Francine rounded the corridor to the elevator, I walked back into my father’s room.

“Do you want to hear the news?”

My father is fanatical about the news. He begins each morning with a thorough study of the newspaper, sports section first, then the front page and editorials. He knows what’s going on in Cuba and Korea and Great Britain. He just doesn’t care. Republicans or Democrats? My father would shrug the way he does at a Monday-night baseball game between the Padres and Braves.

“I’m an impartial observer,” he would say, a cigar in his hand. “I just want to see a good fight.”

Now he was lying motionless. His eyes were closed.

“I’ll read you the sports first,” I said.

I began with the race results. I hoped for large Exactas, two-and three-thousand-dollar payoffs that might excite him. When there were only favorites, first and second choices, I invented long shots for him.

WHATS THIS.

“Oxygen, Daddy. Do you hurt? Do you want another shot?” Francine and I always offered my father a shot.

“Five hundred forty bucks a day,” my mother said once. “He deserves a buzz.”

My father was lying very still. A tear fell from his eye. He batted it down awkwardly with his hand, as if it were a terrible insect perched on his cheek. A killer.

NO WORDS, my father wrote on his pad. Then he turned his bandaged face away from me, toward the green enamel wall.

I drove home quickly, west, rushing for the sea, as if I were being pursued. Trucks surged around me like ancient enraged beasts shaking the air, cutting a path through the day, leaving the morning bruised.

It was early, not yet noon. I did what I was supposed to do. I went out collecting Jason’s rents.

I walked carefully. If I walk on any one stretch of street or beach too often, it becomes bleached and dulled. If I am not careful, the world can become composed of papier-mâché buildings dead under a pale blue painted backdrop of sky.

It is essential that each building, each storefront, café and apartment house, retain distinct qualities, now white stucco, now brick, now wood slats or asphalt slabs. I noted each terracotta pot of red geraniums on porches and balconies. The sun numbs and strips my senses. I forced myself to see differences, the shades of gray in shingles and the print in polished cotton curtains.

It was clear. A breeze had pushed the sullen air from rooftops and sidewalks. I understood that the entire world was precisely the same. It was composed of millions of streets with balconies, liquor stores and fruit stands. The earth was simply a matter of liquid blues, sandy places, brown gullies, the green of valleys, white rock, the indeterminate pales of dry brush and gray asphalt. Angles could be elongated. A horizontal plane could be pushed out, a vertical line stretched. But the basic elements remained the same, fixed, a series of almost infinite geometric patterns altering only in proportion and color.

I was surprised and saddened by this knowledge. I saw that the world was simply variation. One could add more. The blue-white of hillsides under snow, perhaps. But the basic elements differed only in arrangement. The combinations were preordained, defined and limited.

I realized my life was also defined. The boundaries of my world were the canals on one side and the ocean on the other. Jason sat squarely in the center.

I shrugged, a piece of the beach brushing against doors. I collected the rent from Mr. Gordon. He’s eighty-four years old and lives alone in a brick building facing the boardwalk. I watched him, arthritic and deaf as he brewed tea for me on his hot plate. The sun beat itself raw against his streaked gray windows. I watched him pour the tea into porcelain cups and slide them expertly into the centers of matched saucers. He was telling me about summer in New York when he was young and played the mandolin on rooftops in a slow dull wet heat. He was speaking without sorrow, as if it had happened to someone else.

Then he remembered the mandolin. He went into his tiny bedroom. I heard him rummaging. I imagined the mandolin, the wood infinitely fine, almost reddish like a stretched heart. I was afraid of the exquisitely carved and polished wood, the row of tight strings, bunched out and still hopeful. If I touched it something terrible would be imparted to me, through my fingers and into my flesh. I stood up quickly, the room spinning, my forehead stinging hot, and left, forgetting the rent.

I often forget the rents. I found myself standing in one of Jason’s wooden cottages. I stared at a woman with gray hair hidden under a red cotton kerchief. She could have stood pounding clothing clean on rocks in a stream in a Polish village with my grandmother and her mother before the whole world changed.

Her eyes were manic, bright blue, knowledgeable, measuring. I was afraid of her history and what she could teach me. All old women have buried husbands who were scholars, men who taught the children in small back rooms in the east side of some city once.

I watched the old woman write a check with trembling hands swollen from disease and age. I glanced at her captured plants in dirty pots and the shelves of books that I knew would leave a brownish clotted dust across my hands. I was afraid of this residue, the sense of an imprint on my flesh, alive like a leech burrowing in.

I could almost hear the old woman’s thoughts. Who could have foreseen this place, this Venice, California? There was no hint of this in the Florida winters, no omen of this far west coast with the painted and ragged young, stumbling drunk or high on drugs at noon, throwing driftwood at stray dogs and meeting in alleys behind her cottage to conduct business of an illicit, perhaps even demonic nature. There was no sense of this isolation and chaos in all the years of ordered Friday-night suppers, Thanksgivings and graduations and all the good seasons without locusts, fires or plagues.

When the old woman talked, her bony hands fluttered at her sides. She could lift out the years as simply as one takes a lipstick from a purse, reach in and hold up ’31 or ’47 or ’66. I was terrified that she would somehow do this. I didn’t want to see the frail dissolving spines of a life. I didn’t want to see the years crack and splinter in the sunlight, become dust before she could even begin to explain.

I knew she was a good old woman, a clean old woman without black whiskers on her chin or a noticeable deformity, a limp or cane, cataracts or plastic devices embedded in the flesh. She was a good old woman, a clean old woman who did not smell. Still, I turned away from her while she pulled sponge cake from her small dirty oven. Magic.

I must be careful.

I forgot the rents. I walked in the sea breeze, the sole inhabitant of an underwater city. The pressure was enormous, each breath a struggle, a battle with individual molecules of air, those invisible clawed cells.

I stood on the bridge near my house. The day turned gray. The air was gray. The boulevard was gray, like an old sick dog.

Soon night would fall. Stripped of the myth of purpose and order, the streets and buildings would return to their true forms, a collection of mud and brick, things dug from the earth and left to rot under drained banks of low rust-red clouds.

Soon it would be the hour of the amulet and magic chant. The moment when man remembers his ancient fear of being alone, separated from the tribe as darkness fell and the predators began to stalk, the leopards crawling out of shadows with their slow torch eyes and claws.

The whole earth seemed to hang at the edge, suspended, not day and not night. A long moment of indecision. Then the battered sun spilled one fine plum-and-coral line into the thinning sky. Gulls ceased shrieking.

I just stood on the bridge, shaking my head as I stared at the blackening water, shaking my head back and forth, back and forth as if trying to pry the dream splinters from their perch in the dead center of my scalp. Then I telephoned Jason.

“I’ve been going over my life,” I began. “One miserable frame at a time. Thinking about how sordid it’s been, how degrading and filled with mutual contempt. I really feel sick.”

“You’re so solipsistic, It’s insufferable,” Jason said. And, softer, “Why don’t you come over?”

“Come over? I don’t think I’ll ever come over again.”

“Oh,” Jason said finally. “If I had known that two hours ago, I could have made plans for tonight.”

“You still can.” I hung up.

For seven years I have lived continually threatened, feeling that a good half of Venice, California, was constantly being auditioned for my position. And a good half of the time I did nothing at all. I lived in my special silence, my world within a world of cold white tiles and ice sheets, and thought, good God, won’t somebody please come and take this walking, breathing, stinking nightmare off my hands?

And someone did.

And I did not speak to Jason for thirteen months. I lived here in the Woman’s House four canals away from Jason and constructed my life in such a fashion that I did not run into him, not once.