Truly Like Lightning

by David Duchovny

  Rather than the new constellation as a traditional couple at the head of this rather untraditional household driving them closer together in deeper levels of working intimacy, Yalulah felt Bronson drifting ever further from her. Alone and lonely, Yalulah found herself driven more and more to her original ways of thinking and processing for succor. More at home with the simple psychology and the terms of therapy she had learned as a child of wealth, privilege, and private education, Yalulah reverted back to a pre-Mormon, younger version of herself, and diagnosed Bronson to herself as an obsessive-compulsive (his rage for order), addictive personality (hadn’t he traded drugs for God?), depressed, even bipolar, held down and blue in a tightening spiral of self-recrimination and unresolved childhood shame, an old wound that had been reopened by their world being torn asunder. He had known how to live and feel with a tight rein over his little kingdom, and the loss of control to him must have felt like a failure of character. It wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t, but did he? To think of him in these terms was painful, but really comfort food for her. She liked things tidy and in boxes. Words and terms made it all seem manageable. She was a script supervisor, after all.

  She wanted to release him from his self-made hell, but didn’t quite know how. He had a short attention span for psychoanalysis and its cocksure, seemingly rigorous, postbiblical terminology, and she feared driving him further within himself by using that rarefied language. Nonetheless, she kept going back at him to look at his life that way. He refused to acknowledge the mid-twentieth-century psychological map of the brain or the existence of an ego, an id, or a superego. “Show me where they are and I’ll believe you. Show me this ego on an X-ray like I can see my spine and I’ll believe.”

  “It’s not like that,” Yalulah said, “you just have to have faith.”

  “Aha!” he said. “Faith. Then it’s just another religion, and a false one at that. I have the true religion, and I don’t need another, and neither do you. The truth is hiding right there in the word, Yaya—psychoanalysis—feels like I’m getting dry-fucked in the ass by some Austrian dude.” She didn’t laugh. He referred to psychology as, loosely quoting Karl Kraus, “the disease for which it purports to be the cure.” He would mutter things like “I’m not gonna blame my father for everything. What good does that Oedipal shit do anyone? I’m a fifty-five-year-old man whining about his mommy? Disgusting.”

  “I’ll listen if you want to whine about your mommy,” Yalulah offered.

  “No, thank you.”

  He had never talked about his mother to her, never. Yalulah didn’t even know the woman’s name. That was okay. Yalulah herself had worked so hard to distance herself from her own Yankee origins, she would not judge Bronson’s palimpsest of a past. But maybe Mom and Dad were holding the key? How do you tell a desert prophet you think he’s having a run-of-the-mill midlife crisis? If Bronson believed there was an ego, that would surely be a blow to it. She didn’t know how to begin that conversation with him and, shorthanded as they were, there was so much new work to be done that she was asleep before her head hit the pillow shortly after sundown each day.

  Bronson seemed to get worse as the months passed. He grew darker and less communicative. He continued to appear lost to her, or as a man who had lost something, some part of himself, and needed time and guidance to adjust to that loss. He was often cold and distant when he wasn’t working the land or tinkering on the house. He slept alone more and more, said and laughed less, and spent more time in the desert away from her and the kids. He seemed to have regressed in a way, seemed more like the short-tempered rule breaker she’d met in Hollywood so many years ago, and less like the patient rule maker he’d become. He’d survived as a rule breaker, and he’d thrived as a rule maker, but could he survive and thrive as both at the same time? Or would those dual, warring identities paralyze him?

  Yalulah was truly scared for him now, and of him; and with no Mary there to run interference or confide in, she felt a panic sewn in her heart like the crops they planted—watered daily by doubt, a whirlwind of discord to be reaped. It was not even Christmas yet. Only three months into the test with six to go. Six more months of this anxious sleepwalking? She felt like running away.

  16.

  LESS THAN A HUNDRED MILES from her insomniac sister-wife Yalulah, Mary, consumed with worry about Hyrum, could not sleep either. The kid had spent the first two weeks of the school year indoors like a caged animal. She tried to coax him outside, but he would say, “Outside isn’t even outside. It’s all inside.” He missed his wild outdoors like a severed limb. Those two weeks he sat numbly and dumbly in front of the TV, at least she knew where he was.

  She prodded him to try out for a sports team, maybe that would speak to the competitive thrill and independence he was missing, maybe even fold him into the camaraderie of a team, make some friends, but he’d never heard of any of these games—football, soccer, basketball—let alone knew the rules or how to play. The kids today were so specialized and so deeply coached, Mary found out, after talking to the eighth-grade basketball coach at school, that it was very hard to be a beginner, even at as young an age as Hyrum. Mary mentioned Hyrum was an excellent archer and sniper. At the word sniper, the coach had recoiled and looked at her strangely, and said those were no longer considered sports. The coach promised to keep an eye out for him, saying that he looked athletic and maybe wrestling or track and field in the spring would be an easier fit, find a sport where his natural athleticism could get him over the finer-motor-skills hump.

  That was the first two weeks. At first all he watched was the Discovery Channel and Naked and Afraid, but soon graduated to The Walking Dead and Stranger Things and Black Mirror. He mostly liked animated stuff—Rick and Morty, Family Guy, and The Simpsons. Mary couldn’t believe The Simpsons was still on the air. It had been on when she went to the desert with Bronson, two two-term presidents ago. She never got the humor of it, even back then—thought the irony was like sugar, or a synthetic sugar substitute, went down easy, but nothing about it sustained her, and it left an inorganic aftertaste.

  Watching Family Guy with Hyrum, she felt even worse after laughing at Peter’s Boston accent and horrific, surreal shenanigans. Aside from not knowing most of the people they were making fun of on the show, she felt slimed by an overall sense of meanness and smugness, making her feel inferior about feeling superior. And as for the culture in general—so mean, and crafted for teenagers. She felt old and afraid, like she’d lost the mother tongue; she didn’t even know how to defend herself in this new world. She left Hyrum alone in front of his cartoons; she figured knowing this new language was a luxury for a dinosaur like her, but for Hyrum it was a necessity. In that dark room he was getting an education, and Hyrum had never been a student of books—his faith was in action, in movement, in the animal joy of boyhood. Mary prayed that that joy was being ministered to in some way through electronic adventure.

  Then came a sea change, and one Mary could barely recognize or fathom. Hyrum started wearing his pants low and baggy, and began cursing a lot—trying out the “N-word” and, more harmlessly, “D’oh,” whenever he could; gone was the innocence and innovation of the expletive “Cucamonga!” Even as he spent more time in front of the TV, he stopped watching programming. He was playing a game called Fortnite, had become obsessed with it, spoke of it ceaselessly. And Mary, happy that the kid was showing a lively interest in anything, anything at all, encouraged it—well, not encouraged, but at least didn’t try to curtail his time on it or make him feel shitty about it.

  She knew he wasn’t praying, but he’d never much been one for sitting still. She wondered about how he felt about his religion in general, until one day he came up to her and said, “Hey, Mom, what do you get when you take away an ‘m’ away from a Mormon?”

  “I don’t know, Hyrum, what?”

  “A moron.” He walked away and Mary knew where he stood. The kid hid nothing.

  In a panic about the video-game violence, Mary called Jan
et Bergram and Janet told her she expected as much and not to squash the kid’s interests, but to meet his enthusiasms, however strange to her, with a hands-off respect. Janet said that in the “olden days,” kids used to be able to go out in the backyard to be alone, or into the “woods,” but now the woods were gone, and modern parents were too afraid to let their kids out of their sight anyway, so these games were the only adventurous places a young boy could be alone. What appears to be an unhealthy act is answering a very healthy call in a pubescent boy—the male need for blood, victory, and solitude in a world without women. Janet had laughed. “Wait until women become part of the equation.”

  “Olden days?” Mary wondered—not olden to that boy. Just a couple months ago, Hyrum was spending days alone in the desert having real adventures and getting up to god knows what, and now he sits on his ass in a darkened room killing time and virtual people, talking with strangers, some of whom are probably predatory adults and pervs. Mary didn’t like it, but she understood what Janet was getting at. The desert was full of dangers that Hyrum knew, the streets were full of dangers, namely humans, he did not. And after all, Mary reasoned, he was talking to people, imagined predators aside, the other gamers online. He was making invisible friends, but he was making friends.

  For her part, Mary was spending the school hours at the gym, the local Equinox. She found it a refuge, like a church, almost womb-like. She could move anonymously from Stairmaster to stationary bike to steam room and then take a yoga or Zumba class, have a drink at the juice bar—a self-contained world—and be home by 3 p.m. She couldn’t believe that her years in the desert had transformed her from a scrappy, Venice Boardwalk sword swallower into this gym rat afraid to go out into big bad suburbia. Well, she told herself, I know myself, and if I stay out of the situations, I won’t get into any situations. This is a safe place. I feel good here. Her abs reappeared. She met some people, parents like her, some older, some younger, and remembered half of their names. She met a couple Mormons even. She made plans to get together for dinner and tea and talk about the kids, but she never followed through. At least it was a potential social life that passed for a social life.

  She missed Yaya. Missed her body and her scent, her companionship, and felt somewhat of a relief to be in the presence of all the women in the locker room. Not that she was tempted to make a move, but she couldn’t help noticing that everybody shaved their pussies. She noticed women staring at her down there like she was a wild beast or something, like a prehistoric woolly mammoth. She became self-conscious about her natural, so she trimmed.

  She stayed away from the too-clear intimacy of the sauna, but after years of dry heat in the desert, the wet steam was a new and welcome feeling. She would eavesdrop in the steam room, hiding within a cloak of mist; sometimes the other ladies didn’t even know she was in there, listening and learning. Much of the girl talk in this cavernous, hissing, eucalyptus-scented cocoon was the same as it ever was, boring and wonderful sisterhood. Same old concerns, different manifestations in the modern-day sweat lodge. Instead of weed being the bogeyman for children, it was Adderall. A prescription drug that the kids apparently sold and abused on a black market. She heard the term ADHD for the first time. She made a note to ask Janet Bergram about it.

  One early afternoon, finding herself alone in the steam, Mary suddenly had the urge to pray. She hadn’t felt like it, aside from the obligatory group prayers over meals with the kids, in months. Prayer had never come naturally to her; it always seemed too needy, like begging or showing off her piety to Bronson. But deep down, she knew prayer was really a way of speaking to yourself, of slowing down enough to make your own unspoken thoughts known to yourself. That’s probably the real reason she hadn’t done it in a while. She didn’t want to know her hidden thoughts.

  Unable to see more than three inches ahead through the thick steam, she was reminded of the anonymity of the confessional from when she was a child. “Father,” she whispered, “thank Thee for this body, and this life.” And then she stopped. She felt false. She was full of shit. She didn’t feel grateful. This was a bad beginning. Maybe she couldn’t pray, but she could speak to her God, and that was prayer, wasn’t it?

  “I feel discouraged,” she confessed. “I am so angry and confused at Thee. I don’t even know what to ask for, or who to ask forgiveness from or for.” She paused. She could feel herself slowing down, centering, getting more real. She’d been terrified for months, alone, running blind. She breathed the steam deeply into her lungs and imagined it enveloping her heart in a loving white cloud. “I guess I just want to know—if I’m a … if I’ve been … a bad mother.” Saying it out loud lifted the unspoken, ever-present weight for a moment. But almost immediately, the heaviness and confusion settled back down upon her. She groaned.

  Within the steam, a woman’s voice came to her from across the room. “We all think we’re bad mothers. Only the bad mothers don’t think that.”

  Mary jerked back from the shock of the sound, her naked ass slipping a bit along the slick tiled bench. “Oh! I thought I was alone. Oh God, you scared me. I can’t see you. I thought I was alone.”

  “We are alone. Mormon, huh?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “The ‘Thee’ is a dead giveaway. Thee, thou, thine: Mormon, Mormon, and … Mormon.”

  “Of course,” Mary confessed, lifting Hyrum’s joke. “I feel more like a moron … moron … moron … these days.”

  “You’re discouraged, you said? I seem to recall the prophet said something about never being discouraged. ‘If I were sunk in the lowest pits of Nova Scotia, with the Rocky Mountains piled on me, I would hang on, exercise faith, and keep good courage, and I would come out on top.’”

  “Thank you. That’s helpful. My name is Mary.” Mary kept peering into the steam to make out a figure, but it was way too thick.

  “But you’re not really a Mormon, are you?” the woman asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not a Mormon born. What happens to a woman when her justifications outweigh her foundations?”

  “What? What does that mean?” Mary thought it meant something profound, but she wasn’t sure.

  “Wanda Barzee.”

  “Nice to meet you, Wanda.”

  But Mary thought she knew that name, Wanda Barzee, from long ago. Another name floated to her in the mist—Brian David Mitchell. It was a big news story. A crazy Mormon polygamist who’d criticized modern chemical approaches to illness and gone off his meds. Aided by one wife, Wanda Barzee, he’d kidnapped some beautiful young girl to make her another one of his wives. She couldn’t remember the young girl’s name.

  “Elizabeth Smart,” the other woman said, as if reading Mary’s mind.

  “Oh yeah,” Mary said. “God, what a nightmare. I hope she’s okay.” Mary was talking like this was a normal steam room conversation, but this woman across from her was claiming to be Wanda Barzee, an infamous figure, one of that species of sad, co-dependent criminals, women who aid and abet men in hurting other women.

  “You hope she’s okay? She ain’t okay,” the steam woman said. “Nobody is ever ‘okay’ after that. Elizabeth Smart. Wanda Barzee. Brian David Mitchell. Ammon Bundy. Bronson Powers.”

  Even in the heavy wet, Mary could feel the hairs on the back of her neck stand up now. “What?”

  So many scenarios flashed through her mind about this woman across from her. Was she sent by a local Mormon church to test her faith? Was she sent by the Praetorian people to fuck with her, to weaken her? Was she a local mother who had somehow heard about the yearlong school experiment and was appalled by it? Mary didn’t want to say another word until she figured out who this adversary was and what her agenda might be. But the woman kept speaking, “Who were you before you were Mary Castiglione? Jackie Young. Pearl Young Powers. Not a one of them okay.”

  Mary stood up quickly and got lightheaded. She’d been in the steam too long. Her legs were weak. This was getting too weird too fast. �
�Who do you think you are?” she demanded.

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth? You’re Elizabeth Smart?”

  “Wanda Barzee.”

  “You’re Wanda Barzee?”

  “Pearl Powers.”

  “You got a hell of a fucking nerve.”

  “I am what I am. I’m every woman, like the song goes,” the woman continued. “Chaka Khan. I’m you.”

  “What?”

  Mary moved slowly toward the origin of the voice, her hands held straight out in front like a woman walking in dark woods, like she might strangle someone. “Who the fuck are you?” she asked. “What’s your name?” Mary thought she might kick this woman’s ass right here, right now in the hot white cloud.

  Mary got to the other side of the steam room, but there was no one there. She felt around with her hands and even her feet, trying to make contact with anything human. Was this crazy lady crouching, hiding? But there was no one else. She was totally alone in the steam room. This woman must’ve slipped out. But no, Mary would’ve noticed the door opening, felt the rush of cold air. Mary opened the glass door and looked around to see if anyone was close and wet and sweaty, a suspect. There was no one. The locker room was virtually empty, and the few women there were in street clothes and dry. She kept the door open to let enough steam out so she could see the entire room. There was no one in there. Mary’s hands were shaking again as they had when she was young.

  Spooked, Mary fled to her locker and was dressing quickly when a woman she had superficially befriended in the Equinox manner a few weeks earlier, named Frankie, came hobbling by on crutches. She’d had a car accident and was recovering from a broken leg. She was just gonna do arms and abs today. Having worked as a stuntwoman, Mary was quite knowledgeable about how to recover from bangs, breaks, and bruises. Frankie was appreciative for all the professional insight. Mary warned her about the Percocet she was taking for the pain, said she should throw it away, that the body had its own healing system if you let it be, and natural painkillers called endorphins, and that she could bring her local homeopathic remedies naturally available in the desert. Frankie reluctantly, then enthusiastically, agreed, and tossed it, wiping her hands clean of the devil’s Big Pharma drugs. The two women high-fived. After Frankie walked out of the locker room grimacing on her crutches with nothing to dull her pain, Mary retrieved the bottle from the trash. It was almost full. She brought the pills home.