The Paper Wasp

by Lauren Acampora

  In the daytime, the darkness in me deepened. I was repelled by the riot of sound in the campus mailroom, the pinched faces of my peers, milling at their mailboxes in aggressively puffy jackets. They all pushed into me. My head thundered, and my chest knotted. I felt my head drift up above the crowd. I tried to believe I’d become truly absent, that I was in the mailroom spectrally, a disembodied mind.

  A professor needed me to do research over the Christmas holiday, I told my parents, and because they didn’t know what questions to ask, they had to believe me. The dorms closed, and leftover students—those without families, those too poor to buy plane tickets—moved into discounted rooms at the Red Roof Inn. It might have been a cozy arrangement, an orphanage of sorts, but I couldn’t pay even the discounted rate, so I swapped cat sitting for shelter in a grad-student complex off campus. I brought my clip-on lamp, my backrest, my blanket and bourbon, and closed the drapes. The sun didn’t try to penetrate the cloud cover, which was a shroud of white felt. The felt turned to gray in the afternoon, then to charcoal, then black. Overhead, a fluorescent light rattled like a pit viper.

  Christmas came, a weak faraway jingle. The new year slid in. One of Perren’s older films was playing at the art house cinema. I went by myself, one of five people in the audience. I’d never seen Perren in a theater, on such a grand scale, and I was in such a fragile state that it pulled me deeper into the darkness. The film soundtrack was a dissonant roar, a haunting melody trickling beneath—and that melody, that incessant drip-drop, wouldn’t leave me for days. The Perrenian spell, the black magic I’d always welcomed, had this time been cast at a lethal angle.

  In the morning, the newspaper. An earthquake had shaken the other half of the world, followed by a tsunami, removing 200,000 human lives from the planet. An “undersea megathrust” in the circum-Pacific belt, the Ring of Fire. Tectonic plates shifting to get comfortable. I stared at the word EARTHQUAKE in the enlarged headline font, the letter Q with its fanciful tail. I stared at the number—200,000—and at the photographs. A mound of waterlogged bodies. A child’s hand thrust out from under the rubble.

  The last cord holding me together snapped. All I remember after that was the underside of my synthetic down comforter, the clip-on lamp craning to leer at me in bed, the padded backrest like a headless torso. And then, the cold. The sky, yawning open. The stars’ sharp crystals. The buildings across the bridge, paper cutouts. And me, a roving shadow with no birth, death, or knowledge, following the sidewalk onto the bridge. My feet, bare in the snow, the Huron River half-frozen beneath. Then, the leap into the milieu. Like Deleuze, I felt the grip of gravity, that authority. The plunge. The crack of the ice, the multiple entryways, the frigid water. Spirituality, physicality. Life, death.

  Then, all at once, I was home.

  I’d dreamed of the bridge ever since. The dream was always the same. Again and again, I walked barefoot in the snow. I looked down at myself and recognized my pajama top from Ann Arbor, the falling snowflakes layering the flannel. I saw the Christmas decorations. I heard the roar in my head, like radio interference, and the scrape of my breath. I felt the numbness in my feet, more hot than cold. I watched my hands unbutton my pajama top, exposing the valley between my breasts to the street. Again and again, I stepped onto the bridge and saw the headlights approach. Again and again, I leaped, and awoke with thunder in my ears.

  Now, in your library in Malibu, I put my face to the pages of a book about mythology, and inhaled. I was alive, not dead in the river. I was holding a book. I’d survived. You were reading, too, on the patio. You’d showed me your paperback copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It was about the desert, you said, all the weirdness that happens out there. You wore a sun hat, a crocheted top that bared your shoulders, and a pair of cropped cigarette pants—and as you pulled on your big black sunglasses in a dismissive motion, you were the simulacrum of a young Joan Didion.

  For hours, I read by the window. I learned that the Egyptians thought the spirit—a bird with a human head—left the body during sleep and received revelatory messages. They believed that dreams were the siblings of death, and yet their term for “dream” was synonymous with “waking,” represented by a hieroglyphic of an open eye. Some dreams were deceptive and some were true, depending on whether they came through a gate of ivory or horn. A full moon was a sign of forgiveness; a large cat meant a good harvest. There was an oddly common dream of eating feces. And my heart caught when I came to this: “Immersion into cold water is considered a sign of absolution for all ills.”

  In the section on the Greeks, I found a reference to Hesperia, the ancient land of the west, at the farthest edge of the world. I read about the river nymph Hesperia, dead from a snakebite while fleeing Aesacus, who loved her. In grief, Aesacus threw himself from a cliff into the sea, but was transformed into a bird before hitting water. His suicidal wish has been perpetuated forever after by seabirds diving into the water again and again.

  Together, we drove out to the Mojave so that you could absorb some essence of Joan. On the way there, you told me about her life, how she’d spent much of it in Malibu with her husband and daughter. Both were tragically gone now. But the time they’d spent together had been so beautiful, you said. She and her husband had written their books independently but collaborated on screenplays. You handed me your phone, showing a photograph of the family on their deck overlooking the ocean. I couldn’t stop looking at it. The cigarette between two fingers, the drink balanced on the weathered wooden railing. The sideways glance—the ephemerality and permanence of a moment caught on film—this delicate triumvirate perched between land and sea. I wanted a photograph of us like that someday. I hoped that you and I would be collaborating, too, before long, and I’d be looking at the camera head-on, asserting myself as your partner.

  “It’s hard to imagine ever being like that,” you said quietly. “So much at home, with Rafael, or anyone.”

  “Just because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” I said, ever the supportive friend. What I didn’t say was that if you failed to imagine it, this was only because your imagination was chronically lacking. I had enough imagination for both of us.

  We stopped at a café near Joshua Tree, where an old California flag hung on the wall over the counter—the lumbering brown bear forever in search of sustenance. We sat together at a little table by the window and drank coffee, the way you thought Joan might do. You quietly watched the passing cars in a way that was probably meant to be ruminative. I sat there until you were done with whatever you were doing. After that, we kept driving west, into blank space, past hopping gnatcatchers and creosote, jumbles of ancient rock.

  As we drove, I remembered the dream I’d had the previous night, about a woman who goes for a swim in her backyard pool and stays there. Her husband tries to lure her out, but she won’t leave the water. She spends the night and the rest of the week submerged. I’d drawn it out on paper before we left that morning. Already, I could see it as a film, with you in the starring role.

  “I have a story for you,” I began, in the passenger seat.

  You glanced at me from behind your sunglasses and said, “Sorry. I’m trying to be in character right now. If you don’t mind, it would be great to just be quiet for a while.”

  I sat silent after that, peering over the dashboard. I didn’t want to look at you, for fear of betraying my irritation or, worse, appearing to need attention. I also didn’t want to see your face right now, as you pretended to be in character. It would only repel me.

  Somewhere along Route 62, we got out of the car and walked into the desert, in different directions. The sun was ruthless, impressing a sense of danger with each step I took away from the road. The heat was primordial, baking through my skin, drying my muscle and bones, desiccating everything but my darkest, wettest core. A tawny lizard darted past, feeling the air with its tongue, then froze and faded into the surrounding rubble until it was only a blinking eyelid. I’d seen this same liza
rd in a dream, I believed. It had darted and frozen before me, in just the same way. I’d walked over this same ground before. My eye traveled ahead and lit upon the dark spot on the ground, just where I sensed it would be. I lifted the stone, which was elaborately notched and almost too hot to touch. I knew this rock, and knew it was a meteorite placed here for me. I put it in my pocket and went back to the car.

  “God, I am so ready to start filming,” you said as we headed back on Route 10, toward Palm Springs. You were, apparently, no longer in character. “Don’t get me wrong. The prep’s been great, but it’s intense. This film’s so different from the others I’ve done. It demands a lot more. I’ve never been so immersed in a script.” You took your hands off the steering wheel and stretched your arms. “It’s hard to get back into my own skin. It feels like I’m in character all the time. Especially since practically all my Rhizome sessions have been in service of it. But it’s really cool, too, kind of like living through an era I never got to experience.” You glanced at me. “The sixties seem like ancient history now, know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “And the best part is that it’s helped my relationship with Raf.” Your voice dropped. “Seriously, the sex is so amazing right now. I mean, it always was. That’s one of the things I’m addicted to, to be honest.” You laughed. “But it’s gone to a whole other level. Ever since I got this job, it’s been different. Partly because I’m more confident, I think. And I feel like the Rhizome sessions have put me in better tune with my body and cycles. We’ve been using the rhythm method, old-school style, and it’s so much better that way. It’s natural and kind of risky, and just hot.“

  As you spoke, I felt a spiking sensation under my skin. I didn’t want to hear any of it. I tried to tune out your words while I studied the black stone in my hand. I marveled at its weight and warmth. It was solid and eternal, not of this world, burning with the patience of the ages. It would outlast your folly and my pain. It would outlast everything.

  When filming finally began, you spent full days on the set. I loved watching you act. It was a revelation each time you began speaking, your body inhabited by some pliable force, your face alive with someone else’s thoughts. You seemed to physically shrink in size, to become tiny Joan. You were, in fact, gifted. You possessed the uncanny ability to empty yourself at will, to serve as a receptacle for others to fill. Your tools of emulation were built into you, just as the tools of creation were built into people like Perren and me. Yours was the lesser role, but a crucial one, and one for which you were perfectly made.

  I loitered behind the ranks of fatigued production assistants, and from time to time our eyes would meet, as if across a galaxy. After a few days of this, you told me to go home. If you needed me, you’d call. There was enough to do at the house, you said in your Didion voice.

  In truth, there wasn’t enough to do at the house. After food shopping and laundry, I had time to spare. I adopted the role of household chef, creating the midwestern dishes I thought you’d crave, slow-cooker stews and pot pies. I took landscape maintenance upon myself, hydrating the rosebushes and citrus trees within the water-use guidelines for drought. I discovered the names of the plants that you’d never learned. I removed the defunct wasp nest from the downspout, admiring the drab beauty of the fibrous gray swirls, the dark hole that led to hidden pavilions. Of the two of us, I was the observer of the natural world. I was the one who noticed the growth and decay always in flux around us, who perceived so many small noises at night. We were part of it, too, although we liked to consider ourselves superior—evolved and orderly. We liked to believe our consciousness gave us supremacy, but the truth was that we were animals, mysterious to ourselves.

  VIII.

  PAUL, FROM the Vespers after-party, called to ask if I’d been to Topanga. The word struck me as invented, a reference to some science-fiction universe. “I don’t know” seemed like a safe response.

  “Topanga Canyon, just up the coast from where you are. You haven’t heard of it? It’s where I live.”

  We made a plan for him to show me Topanga the next day, when your schedule was clear and you wouldn’t miss me. We met at a coffee shop in Malibu. Paul stood just inside the door in a white polyester shirt with vertical stripes like prison bars. His jeans were a lighter shade than was fashionable, fastened by a silver oval belt buckle. I saw now that he was several years older than I’d thought. He held out a hand to me—unusual in this city of huggers—and I shook it.

  “Do you want to get anything here,” he said. “Or should we just go?” This directness was also unusual, almost rude in contrast with the cosmetic niceties that surrounded most meetings.

  He drove a red Chevy Cavalier with a ribbon of rust along its underside. He told me he’d bought it when he was ready to leave Michigan and that it was the first car he’d learned to drive.

  “When did you leave?” I asked as we wound along Pacific Coast Highway.

  “Ten years ago, when I was twenty-two.”

  “Is your family still in Michigan?”

  He laughed. “Yes.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “I grew up in a funny place.” He looked at me sideways as he drove.

  “Didn’t we all.”

  “No, really. Do you know Fremont?”

  “I know where it is. My sister lives up near there.”

  “So maybe you know it has a big Amish community. That’s me.” He smiled at the windshield. “Or, I should say, that was me.”

  “You’re Amish?”

  “I was raised Amish, but I never officially joined the church. You have to choose to be baptized as an adult. I ran away to Hollywood instead.”

  I glanced at his profile. The nose was a little too flat, the chin too gibbous. His mouth curled into a grin, either from amusement at his unlikely admission or at the blatant lie he’d just told. “I don’t know whether to believe you.”

  “Why not? We all come from someplace, and not all people decide to stay there. You didn’t. For me, once I decided to leave, I wanted to really leave.”

  “I’m just having a hard time absorbing what you’re telling me,” I said. “I didn’t think the Amish were fond of movies.”

  There was a silence, and I feared I’d offended him. “That’s why I usually don’t tell anyone. People start acting weird. I thought you might be different.”

  “If you tell me it’s true, then I’ll believe you. I just don’t know you very well, and I don’t know if you’re the kind of person who makes things up.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t tell most people, because they have strange preconceptions. There are so many TV shows now, a whole Amish fetish that’s totally off the mark.”

  “What TV shows?”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of them. Breaking Amish, Return to Amish, Amish Mafia. You don’t watch TV?”

  “Not really.”

  “There. I knew you were different.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “I don’t know. I just get a feeling sometimes.”

  I stared at the glove compartment and then at the side-view mirror. It had been an uncharacteristic risk for me to enter this person’s car, knowing nothing but his first name. But maybe I had a sense for people, too. We drove in a silence that was dense but not awkward. I closed my eyes and waited for the shapes to slide in behind my lids.

  “When did you come here?” Paul asked.

  I opened my eyes. We’d turned off PCH and were winding inland. There were tall trees here on either side of the road.

  “About two months ago.”

  “Are you here for good?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know.”

  “Why did you come?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer and was silent.

  “I’m sorry, was that too direct? Sometimes people think I’m too blunt.”

  “Well, English isn’t your first language, right?” I turned to
look at him.

  “No, technically it isn’t.”

  I was quiet for another moment, then said, “I just came to help Elise, mainly.”

  “How are you helping her?”

  “Keeping her company, helping her stay organized. I go with her to appointments and things. She’s the lead in the new Joan Didion movie.”

  Paul nodded. “You’re her assistant?”

  “Yes. But Elise is my friend.”

  A long pause extended.

  “Here we are.” Paul swiveled the Chevy off the road into a parking lot. “It’s a nice hike up here. You get a terrific view.”

  Out of the car, I followed him to the trailhead in my espadrilles. He wasn’t dressed for hiking either, in stiff loafers.

  “So.” He turned back to me as we walked. “What do you think of L.A.?”

  “I like it so far, I guess.”

  “I don’t really like it here, honestly. But it’s where I need to be to make films. I’ve learned everything on the job.” He turned to smile at me, and I saw darkened patches at the underarms of his shirt.

  We continued onward at a slight but steady incline through a muddy stretch of trail. I might have been more careful with my shoes a few weeks prior, but you loved to shop for me, and now any new pair could be mine. My wardrobe had multiplied since I’d arrived with my little suitcase, and the original items had slid to the back of the closet.

  Paul and I didn’t talk for a while, until eventually we reached the peak. Here was a jutting boulder with an arched cave beneath. He stepped out onto the boulder, and I followed. Having never strayed from the flatlands of the Midwest, I wasn’t accustomed to God’s-eye views higher than lake dunes. Now, lording over the miles that stretched to the horizon, I felt I could drag a finger over California’s rough carpet. Paul lowered himself to the rock and crossed his legs. I arranged myself into a side-splayed position beside him on the warm stone as he told me about his documentary.