Lithium for Medea

18

The early afternoon was a glassy blue, pale as imitation amethyst. The afternoon was unusually clear.

The full horror was slowly leaking down, the way rain fights to enter blank dry dirt. My father might not live through the night. I thought of my father with his fresh scars burning. My father webbed in white and counting his missing parts. The hollowed out neck and tongue, part of the cheek gone, vocal cords gone, gone. My father sat on the horizon, an undecided exploding red sun.

I sat in the kitchen alcove of Jason’s studio, at the table my father found for me in a used furniture store. A kitchen table, symbolic, a woman’s anchor, a gift for a daughter. The cat Picasso sat on the chair next to me. Jason’s car was gone. I had asked him to wait for me. I told him it was the first thing I had asked of him in a long time, years perhaps. And Jason was gone.

Picasso licked his right front paw. It was simple. If my father could just live through the night the storm would pass, spent and forgotten. Winter would pass. There would be a chorus of erupting blossoms and drugged insects, spring and the possibilities strung fat red and yellow on the vines.

The day turned strangely hot. I heard sirens. I thought, you must not die, Father. Be slowly warmed. The worst is behind you. The singed canyons are spitting new cactus. You have lived through the cruel turn from the sun. Believe me, Father. Winter is over. You have survived it.

The afternoon seemed suspended. The heat increased and turned harsh. Sirens shattered the late afternoon shadows. I heard ambulances and howls. The Santa Ana winds were blasting through the streets, bristling and smelling of desert, of white sunlight, sharp wiry plants and white rock.

The winds had a taste. I thought of scrub brush and the thorns desert plants wear. A hot madness was enclosing the city. It found me. It could inch east to my father’s hospital bed. It could pry him from the oxygen again and the saline stuck in his hand. A small crucifixion. And what if the winds burned their way across the city to him?

Night was sharp and clear and hot. Jason didn’t come back at dusk. I sat in his empty studio. Picasso and I regarded one another. Night was a black trench. The moon hung in the dead center of the window, absolutely round, a mirrory disk embedded in the night’s throat.

Picasso felt the winds ripping at the house. He could sense the full moon’s special heat and how she seemed to call to him with longing, a strange circular lust. He was agitated. He wanted to go outside, wanted to taste moon sheen, that white light substantive as snow. He wanted to brush his claws against the night bodies of conspiring plants. He longed to hunt and make his throat ripple with small growls like small harbor waves. He wanted to draw blood.

I watched him for a while. Then I closed the door leading to the front room. I picked Picasso up. He settled into my lap.

I stroked the cat. I rubbed his back. I noticed his long fur was badly matted. Jason rarely brushed him. Pieces of things were caught in his coat, twigs and leaves and small round oil stains from sitting under cars. His long bushy tail was tangled up around a green vine. I realized that he looked as if he were already growing out of the earth.

I rubbed Picasso under his chin and thought, what retrograde centuries to beach you thus small and inconsequential. Remember when you were predator? When you dreamed bigger than lizard and mouse and blue jay? You knew the way to the jugular, the way through the jungle, the millenniums of yellow wind in yellow grasses.

I pushed at an oil stain on his head with my thumb. The cat purred. The moon seemed oddly and whitely hot. I had the sense of being watched.

I have things to tell you, little one. There is another man. He is my father. He is being held in a white web by a black spider. An enormous spider with a command of technology and history. A black spider who practices the cruel art of knives. He is being slowly eaten. He is being skinned alive. I know you have a certain appreciation for a slow and painful death. I have watched you torture birds, watched your claws dart across a feathery neck. I have seen you intoxicated by blood.

There is another matter. It is a thing called cancer. Hard claws were jammed through my father’s mouth. It took his tongue and throat. They cut the first grooves. Later roots took hold, blood-fed and blood-warmed. They sprouted buds. He was colonized.

Now his face is dark and swollen. Bandages form a thick collar around his gutted neck. They sprout tubes for feeding and bleeding, branches. Why, he’s part tree now. And he always thinks it’s six o’clock, time for the news and a shot of bourbon. Time for a cigar and the next day’s racing form.

I watch his mouth twist and curl. He tries to make sounds that no longer come. I can barely read his scrawled notes. Over and over again I explain the oxygen machine to him. Perhaps he hears it hiss. He points to it and scowls.

Do you see what I’m getting at, cat? There are certain channels, small crevices in life as we pretend to know it. There are places where the hand-painted mural that is the world separates into individual tiles/time/cells. These cracks in the fabric can be lethal.

Hot wind assaulted the house. It was furious, enraged. I rocked Picasso in my arms. He arched his oil-stained head to me and closed his yellow eyes. I stroked the soft white fur on his neck. He purred, a deep humming. And I thought of the humming in the hospital, the fluids slowly oozing, the hiss of oxygen. The humming.

A boundary is crossed. The hand-painted mural that is the world shatters into separate fragments. The sky swirls. Ink rushes like a lava flow between the torn seams. It’s enough to make a strong man drown. And my father is weak, helpless. And the sky caves in. Black chunks fall.

Outside I could feel the wind driving toward the sea, a wide hot spoke. In Philadelphia it was kite season. I was six years old. Daddy was supposed to take me to the park and make my kite windborne. But Daddy couldn’t come that day. Daddy couldn’t come any day. Daddy stayed in bed. When he spoke it was whispery, windy, harsh. He had to lean close to your ear. Had everything become a secret?

I went to the park alone. I had a kite in a bird’s shape. It upended in a tree stump. The sky was a child-eyed blue hung between low hills, grafted onto the day like a patch of blue flesh. Cobalt-blue flesh? The sky was a severed bull’s-eye. “Stop crying,” Mother said, making soup steam. “It’s only paper. I’ll buy you another.” But something happened to Father. Kite season ripped him to pieces. Maybe Daddy was only paper. What happened to the sky? Blue sky with white chipped mouth of clouds was rolled down like a used sail. Big hands packed it away.

Then big hands packed the brass lamps and the new china plates. I sat in strange rooms assigned to me by smiling strangers. Mommy drove the car. And Daddy didn’t talk at all. And we were taking a cab to the train station. Why were we going to the train station? We were going to California. And what was California? It was where the oranges grew and there was no snow. No snow? Then what? Well, just sun and palm trees. And just sit nice and quiet in your seat. Let Daddy try to sleep.

And I am squeezed small and airborne in a hawk’s belly. I nest in a raped oak shell. I break my dolls. I tear their arms off. I burn their almost porcelain faces. I practice invisibility. I lean into shadows and walls, making cold metallic connections. And I scream, I don’t like it here. There’s no sky, no sky. No sky in city apartment inches from a boulevard where Daddy curls small in bed all day. No sky in city apartment glued to a wide gray boulevard where trucks heave and shove. And where is Mommy? Will she stop working soon? No. And Daddy’s lying in bed all the day and the sun is strange, defective. It falls plop into the ocean. It bleeds. And father bleeds. Father has a drawer of special bandages. And Mommy’s gone. Will she come back soon?

Life’s hard all around, Mother says to the mirror. Mommy is making her mouth red. Mommy is making her eyes big. Her teeth are polished sails. If it’s that bad, divorce him. He’s a small soft mound. You don’t need his broken strings, his useless arms. You don’t even have to bury him. Mommy is talking about Gerald. She is saying just go. Maggots will do the rest.

Outside it was very dark and hot. The wind made a sound like a long harsh cough. The air seemed gravelly. The sky looked like a sealed grave. I rubbed the cat’s soft white chest. Sirens cut at the night, black knives. There was a sense of smoke.

Maybe it would have been different if Jason had been there, if he had waited for me, or come back. Maybe it would have been different if the moon weren’t so bright, so clearly gorged on blood.

Maybe if the Santa Ana winds weren’t blowing, tearing at the air, turning the night into a kind of scrub brush. Maybe if the night hadn’t been pitted with sirens, howling dogs, screaming and wails.

I waited for Jason, and night was an avalanche, air molecules insane. I held Picasso on my lap. His purring was a soft hum. And night pressed down a savage fist. The air was pointed and sharp and clearly alive. Picasso was warm and soft on my lap. He was listening to me, hearing my thoughts as if I were reciting a lullaby. Then it occurred to me that the cat might want to sleep.

Picasso nestled against my chest while I crossed Pacific Avenue. He seemed untroubled by the occasional car, the moon full and shrieking, the wind a torture. He trusted me.

My feet touched cold sand. Suddenly I turned around. I stared at the deserted strip of boardwalk behind me. I was afraid someone would see me. My heart was racing. My head was a seething black storm. That’s when I realized for the first time what I was going to do.

I sat down just above the wet sand, Picasso on my lap. I stroked him and he purred, a soft humming. I held him warm against my chest. Our hearts beat together. The waves broke on shore and withdrew, broke on shore and withdrew, a kind of humming.

It was simple. A door opened. A crevice was torn in the fabric. Something entered. It stalked. It was a hunter. It was hungry but mindless as a shark. It would take anything. It was enormous.

And it wouldn’t go back empty-handed, humiliated with no new scalps, no dried hides or skulls. It was rude not to acknowledge its presence, its chill and teeth. Something was required.

Picasso never really struggled. He stared at me, disbelieving, his eyes startled yellow marbles, oddly frozen. And I thought of the certain marbles children call cat’s eyes. I heard sirens behind me. I felt the wind whipping my shoulders, hot breath, desert breath rubbing my flesh. The moon was breathing platinum above me. There was a slow cracking sound.

Picasso took a long time to die. I was surprised. My fingers were stiff and itching at the end, after the bones in his neck broke and he finally went limp. A thin trail of blood slid from the corner of his mouth and drip, drip, dripped down his neck onto my hands.

I let him fall to the wet sand. I let the waves wash the blood from my hand. I dipped my hand into foam and swish, the blood was gone.

Then the waves circled the cat’s dead body. The waves reached out black hands and embraced him. Salt leaked into his wound. He was wrapped in black coiling swirls.

I turned my back to the sea. I felt the power of the waves at my back hurtling and gnawing the shoreline, crashing and withdrawing, a kind of humming. I felt the rhythm, the wind, salt spray, the land groaning while cold black water lapped around my ankles.

I looked up at the sky. Would that blood satisfy? Would it be enough to glue the torn place shut? And something inside me turned incredibly hard.

That night the moon was impossibly full and the yellow of a child’s gold locket. It seemed to follow behind me as I walked back to my house.

I locked my door. I could still sense the moon, feel its special yellow heat. It sat suspended in the center of the sky as if precisely placed there by an engineer. It hung directly above my head, fat and glowing like a terrible promise.

I thought, what is it, anyway, this moon? It’s simply a pinprick, a sliver, a coin glued to a useless black metal sky. The moon is an empty beacon. The moon is a cyst, dead to my curses or, worse, cursed itself, stuck there, abandoned, useless and blind.

The moon was the yellow of a marble. The moon was yellow as Picasso’s eyes after I dug my fingers into his neck until bones broke and blood drip, drip, dripped down on my hands.

I lay very still in my bed. Now things will change, I thought. And from now on, death, you bastard, you deal with me.