Lithium for Medea

12

I found myself assembling the evidence from my life with Jason, mementoes from my isolation, my worlds of silence. All at once I wanted to see it separately, deprived of that lie context and simply objects in a small pile at my feet, a kind of still life.

It was the middle of a cold night, and glistening, like the wet hide of a black shark. I felt wide awake, wired, my nerves on fire.

I removed one of Jason’s canvases from my living room wall. I studied the painting. The impression was stark and strangely cold. The room seemed inordinately small, squeezed together and encased in a permanent chill. Without realizing it, Jason had included a suggestion of the broken back windows and wind rising, whipping across the dull slumbering harbor.

“I’m a mirror,” Jason said, squeezing more red onto his square glass palette. “You see what you want to see. I simply am.”

I was quiet and still. I was posing. I was a lemon, a basket of apples, a beer can, a patch of sand. Jason was painting me. I could feel the brush stroking my new canvas flesh.

“Don’t you like what you see?” Jason asked. He was painting a red crevice into the thick orange shadow on the wall behind my shoulder.

“I can be any fantasy. Pleasure?”

He let the word hang in the air like a perfect plumed bird. Then he put his paintbrush down. Then he crossed the room and the floor was against my back and Jason pressing in, pressing in.

“We’ll do a white painting,” Jason told me. “You all in white. Everything feeling white.”

White. Yes. White. Yes. I practically ran to Jason’s studio. Cocaine was the collected white star shine of all the orbits of all the stars since the start of time, since the first bell, the first white explosion, the first white stirring in that first blank void.

Jason was sitting at his old kitchen table. The curtains were closed. He was cutting the white powder with a razor blade. His movements were slow and exact. We were still precise then. There were still edges and warning signals. Jason could still set up his easel, squeeze his paints onto his palette and make his brush sail across the white canvas. We still had hands.

Later there would be no fine distinguishing lines. Later we would use the small needle, use it even after the point was dulled almost useless. Later there would be no night or day. Later there would be only the needle and the shadows, the hot dark swirl, the walls with wings, my arms canvas sails, the floor itself churning, a kind of tide pool.

Later the world would collapse under the sheer white weight of white starlight. My laughter was white. My teeth and tongue were coated with enamel. I was a star. I was a sea shell perfected by the churning of waves and the turning in circles of that maniac, that cold-hearted, one-white-eyed bitch, the moon.

Jason worked on the painting all night. Someone walked to a sink. Water ran. Powder was ground up with a razor blade. The needle entered the vein effortlessly, like a knife into soft butter. And I felt white as an orchid, as a starched linen tablecloth, as a bride in an ankle-length white silk gown.

I closed my eyes. I was draped in white silk. I walked down a white aisle past pillars burdened by white bouquets, white lilies, white carnations and white roses. I stood somewhere with a white bundle in my arms, a baby wrapped in a soft white blanket. I lived in a white house behind a freshly painted white picket fence.

“Let’s get married,” I said, laughing, my tongue and teeth and lungs a sparkling glistening white.

“No way,” Jason said.

He stood at his easel, smiling. I tried to imagine a time, any time, when I did not love him.

I was living in Francine’s Westwood duplex. It was the slow gray of night and day passing imperceptibly without residue, drained. Jason came to paint me. He arrived precisely on time, just as the bells from the nearby church chimed six, six. Jason stood on the other side of the door. He was carrying his big brown wood paint box. The brushes looked stiff and sharp, a kind of finger. It was an important moment. The church bells rang, six, six. I looked at Jason. It was the last moment I was free.

I picked up the canvases and leaned them near the front door. Suddenly I didn’t want them anymore.

It was almost dawn. I wanted anything but the silence in my house, anything but the vision of my father in the hospital hooked up to an oxygen machine. My father terrified, with tears falling through the thick white webbing of bandages. My father lying wide-eyed and horrified with his throat gone and his tongue cut and the curse of the centuries boiling in his useless mouth. My father, the wild river impossibly dammed, damned. My father locked in a strangling silence, words exploding in the centers of his eyes and tears spilling down between the gauze.

I wandered through my house. The Woman’s House. Had it ever been my house? Who hung the mirror above the bed? What predecessor pasted yellow tile in the kitchen? Blue tile above the bathtub? Who planted the bed of purple and yellow pansies, their smooth petals the pattern of a healing bruise?

The sun rose slowly and heavily, somehow uncertain, a convalescent taking the first strained steps. I kept moving. I ran cold water on my face. I still couldn’t wake up. The real me was sleeping while someone else, a clever impostor, continued the show. The real me was still sleeping under a quilt and three wool blankets in the gray stone house in Philadelphia. The real me was sleeping in a room with bright yellow curtains. The real me was waiting for morning, for Mommy to call. I would come down the curving brown wood stairs to hot cereal while Daddy drank his coffee, while Daddy read his newspaper and pulled on his denim painting overalls, grabbed his big brown wool coat and pushed through all the thick-piled snow.

I began to drive toward the hospital. I gripped the wheel uncertainly, punched in the face by sun. The commercial buildings along Venice Boulevard and the patches of lawn in front of small stucco houses stuck and forgotten between factory buildings and warehouses whirled and spun red. Red cannas waved arms, red arms like a man on flame. A lemon tree pushed blooms, blooms like poisoned tongues. The sun stalled, a pus yellow and hot, hot enough to make a sane man hang himself.

What am I doing? What am I doing? And a voice answered with a soft chalky white laugh, Why, you’re cutting new paths to the hospital. That’s what you’re doing. Cutting at the city like a surgeon cutting at someone’s father’s throat. North to Olympic Boulevard. East to Highland Avenue. You’re discovering the subtlety of Arlington Avenue, how it curves around once and becomes Wilton Place. You’re learning how to strip a city naked, to gouge its flesh as if holding a scalpel. Pico to Vermont. And see how white it is? The pavement, your skin, the asphalt all white, white as the picked bones of dead prospectors. The end of the trail.

But what am I doing? Doing? You’re breathing the gray glue between hospital visits. You’re living suspended, exhausted, silent and dulled. These are the long numbing preparations for finality. See death lick the flesh? See what a horrible pointed tongue he has? See death reaching over, that foul-smelling pervert? See him licking Daddy’s poor scarred skin?

And what if I can’t face it? Not face it? the voice inside me repeated, a dull thud, an empty beer can kicked into the night canals, the water the color and texture of black metal, air rising damp as if from a deep well. The voice within me was a kind of mirror. Not face it? Not face it? Not drive the car? Not stop at red lights? Not walk down the quiet corridors with their shadows and bubbles, quiet corridors that are a minefield? Not crisscross the city to the hospital sitting hunched on Vermont near Sunset Boulevard in the gutted ruined heart of Hollywood?

The city stretched on all sides, ripe with my intangible past. Not simply street corners but distinct places, invisible doors into other eras. The spot where I met Gerald, met Jason. The apartments where I have lived, loved, vomited, stuck needles in my arms, passed out and howled. Always malformed buds strangled on wiry bushes, twisted by noise and dust. Always residential side streets pushed up rows of stucco bungalows like sun sores, the world blistered.

The morning had the quality of steam. Gulls screeched in the shallow empty clouds. I realized that if these blocks and cement gouges were the alphabet of the future, then we lived at the edge of history. Los Angeles sits white and half dead, already after the fact, already somehow gasping for breath, slowly strangling.

From Fountain Avenue and Vermont the city was revealed. White gouges like white scars leading to the hills. I realized that Los Angeles is a rented city. It was born fully formed from the day-dreams and wet dreams of greedy little men pushing celluloid fantasies. Los Angeles is a Monopoly board with orange trees. There is danger, too distant to be a factor. Earthquakes last only seconds. It is too much to hope for.

I turned onto Vermont Avenue. I was facing the blank brown backs of the hills. What am I doing? And the voice within me answered, You’re waiting, kid. That’s what you’re doing. Waiting. Don’t you understand yet? Los Angeles is the great waiting room of the world. Wait to get discovered. Wait for your social security check. Wait for the cancer to come back. Wait for the break, the earthquake. Wait for the crisp white words that say the man you call father is dead. Wait with your small life leaking out into a white haze of a hot white afternoon.

I parked my car. Everything seemed to be humming. The traffic on Vermont Avenue hummed. The sun seemed to hum. The slow drugged insects hummed. The air hummed in the cubicles and corridors of the intensive care unit. I suddenly realized that Los Angeles is the terminal ward of the world.

The parking lot attendant smiled at me. He seemed to know me, my dusty car, my face white, parking in the hot sun every day for a week. Nurses smiled at me, still hopeful. Everyone smiled, still hopeful.

I walked into the hospital lobby. Francine was leaning against a cigarette machine. I willed my legs to carry me forward. My steps were wooden, uneven. It seemed the air had finally turned liquid, been transmuted and flowed like a poison, flowed like a creek suddenly erupting its banks and reaching up for the low hills and reaching up farther, reaching up for the pale drained useless sky.