A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

  She wants someone to call, “Professor Gold?” Then she can reply, “Not anymore.” Her response will be fierce and laconic. It will deconstruct itself as you watch. Then it will explode in your face.

  Amy Gold shoves U2’s Joshua Tree into the cassette player. She replaces it with a ZZ Top cassette. Yes, it’s an afternoon for the original nasty boys from Texas. They provide a further dimension to the concept of a garage band. After all, you don’t have to just rehearse there. You can throw a mattress on the floor, invite your friends, drink a case of bourbon, shoot coke and orchestrate a gang rape. Maybe she should get down even further. Maybe it’s an afternoon for chainsaws and a massacre.

  She turns onto the freeway, and considers her final encounter with Professor Alfred Baxter Coleman. In instant replay, her knees wobble and she almost falls down. But she doesn’t. She manages to stay on her feet and give Alfred the finger. If she wasn’t having a seizure of vertigo, she would mace him.

  Los Angeles is at her back, a solid sheet of grease that’s not entirely unpleasant. That’s why she’s been able to inhabit this city. Ugliness is a kind of balm. Beauty makes her uncomfortable. She instinctively averts her eyes from a flawless face the way some recoil from a car crash.

  Amy Gold relentlessly attempts to annihilate all certified versions of perfection. The conventionally sanctioned snow-dusted mountains above wild flowers in alpine meadows that look designed to be photographed and sold as posters. She’s repelled by images resembling calendar covers. They’re faux artifacts of what you didn’t actually experience. And she loathes towns with contrived lyrical names that could be the titles of country western songs. They’re an accompaniment for the plastic scorpions tourists buy in stores with moccasins made in China and ceremonial headdresses of dyed turkey feathers.

  That’s why she left Raven the southwest interior of the country. Amy took the coasts and gave her mother everything else. That is their real division of assets. She took abstraction, hierarchy, and systematic knowledge and left Raven the inexpressible, the preliterate, the region of magic chants and herbs. It was a sort of divorce. Her mother could have Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, and she would get her doctorate.

  Raven accepts landscape as her due. She expects and collects it. Raven, staring at a sun setting in a contagion of magenta and irradiated purple. It’s begging to be absolved. Raven nods in acknowledgement, shaking her waist-length black hair as clouds pass in a flotilla above them. She pauses, as if expecting the skies to actually part.

  Raven, wind-blown and barefoot is prepared for the sky to form a tender lavender mouth and confess everything. It’s the third or fourth day of a peyote fast, and her mother is a pueblo priestess, accustomed to tales of routine felonies and unavoidable lies. Transgressions aren’t absolute. They’re a matter of interpretation. Raven takes her form of communion beneath an aggressively streaked sunset the texture of metal. Amy knows the sky is a conventional polite lie. It’s politically correct misdirection. There’s something else behind clouds, a subterfuge of malice.

  Her childhood is incoherent, images that stall stylized and suspect. They might be postcards. That’s curious, she realizes, they didn’t take photographs. Even when her mother married the magazine photographer, there were no cameras, no visual artifacts.

  “You can’t paste this between album pages,” Raven says, standing in a meadow, her bare arms stretched out like twin milk snakes. Her paisley skirt is ripped to her thigh and wind-swirled. This what, precisely, Amy wants to know.

  “Experience can’t be reduced to a 4 by 6 inch still,” her mother says. “People stick their loves in cellophane prisons. They incarcerate images. Then they put these cemeteries on coffee tables. They’re mockeries.”

  Raven is topless on a mesa festooned with pinion and juniper, tilting her face to the sky, memorizing a spectrum of purple that runs from lilac and velvet iris to crushed antique maroon. It’s an alphabet bordered by cobalt and a magenta that’s gone a step too far, and committed itself to red. Amy wonders what can be distilled from such a sequence. You can’t arrange it like paint on a palette, or orchestrate it to sound like flutes or ferry bells. You can’t order it into stanzas or paragraphs. In short, it’s entirely useless.

  Her mother exists in a series of indiscriminate moments, each already pre-framed and merely waiting for lighting cues. Raven poses with a canyon lake as a backdrop. Amy half expects afternoon to dissolve into a car commercial. This is what she resists. No to the plateaus of northern New Mexico. No to the vivid orange intrigue of sunsets you could stencil on T-shirts. No to men who spend summers in sleeping bags, backpacks filled with Wild Turkey and kilos of cocaine. No to Raven in August, scented with dope and pinion, sleeping oblivious under lightning and an outrage of stars.

  “I’ve been tattooed,” Raven laughs in the morning, making coffee over a fire of purple sage. “Look.” she angles her face toward the new boyfriend. Her face is tanned peach, without a single line or freckle. Amy possesses a secret accumulation of invisible injuries. They’re the most exquisite. If there’s an entity Raven calls Buddha, it is these clandestine self-inflicted lacerations that attract him.

  “You can live myth or be buried by it. It’s your choice,” Raven says. It’s her cocaine voice, vague and distant and leaking light. “I’ve been more intimate with this canyon than all 5 husbands combined,” she confides. “It’s revealed more. And it’s been more generous.”

  Amy is on the periphery, simultaneously chilled and parched. She is not a team player. The sky is relentlessly alien. Plateaus are layered like a chorus of red mouths that have nothing to say to her.

  Before nightfall and the desert, Amy Gold stops for gas. In a convenience store, fixed in the glare of anonymous waxy light, she decides, on inexplicable impulse, to change her life. She deliberately buys a pack of cigarettes, though she hasn’t smoked in eight years.

  “Vodka,” she says, pointing to a fifth. The two-edged syllables are inordinately pale and mysterious, like something you can’t procure on this planet. I’ve been too long without the traditions, she thinks. Eight years. I’m estranged from my true self. I’m broken off at the root, amputated. I must graft myself back.

  She wonders if she can still score amphetamines in a truck stop. They’re probably just kitchen bennies. White crosses, manufactured in basement labs, and sold as the trucker’s other fuel. Last time she copped roadside speed, she got a two-day stomach-ache and the sensation that a 747 was landing on her head.

  Danger excites her. Once she glided between trucks somewhere near Albuquerque, walking between the enormous cabs oily with bold unapologetic streaks of red and yellow like war paint. There are enemies and rogue bands everywhere. She notes the enormity of the wheels. The truck stop is a metal graveyard not unlike elephant and mastodon burial grounds.

  We know ourselves through architecture and indecipherable charred hieroglyphics. To see the monumental trucks at rest is like watching men when they don’t know they’re being observed. Men in their natural state. Their posture softens, they slap each other on the back, show one another their rings and tattoos, and laugh often and easily.

  She is with Big Jeb. He’s impatient. There’s a new girl in the aluminum trailer behind the restaurant. 15 and a natural blond from Alabama.

  “It’s show time,” he says. He nudges the small of her back. It’s the way a cat rubs against your leg.

  “Got any whites?” she asks in her fake southern accent, leaning into a fierce crimson cab, her lips stretched into a smile that hurts her teeth. And, of course, the driver does.

  “You mad?” Big Jeb asks later.

  Amy translates his question. He means angry. She says no.

  “Well, don’t tell your mother,” he says. His voice is light. It’s not a threat. He’s asking for a favor.

  Amy smokes a cigarette, sips vodka and smiles. She takes another drink. There is no other way to cross the Mojave, she assures herself. At 3 a.m. she turns off the highway, finds a fire road, p
laces her gym bag under her head as a pillow and falls asleep gripping the mace in her right hand.

  She wakes stiff and feverish and drives to Santa Fe, singing with ZZ Top and drinking vodka from an orange juice bottle. Did she learn that from Wade or Gus? Who coached her on the southern accent and how to carry, conceal and shoot a weapon?

  “I did all I could,” he tells Raven. She is leaving for San Diego Pacific Academy. He sounds disappointed. Her mother nods sympathetically.

  Amy is startled to realize that Raven’s boyfriend was serious. Was it Big Jeb or Big Sam, Hawk Man or maybe Wade? Who positioned beer bottles on sand banks with tender precision and showed her how to put bullets in them? Who captured snakes for her to shoot, and bent to demonstrate how to remove the rattles and make them into earrings? Who explained spoor on trails and how to determine what coyotes, raccoons and rabbits had been eating?

  Amy didn’t encounter men with multi-syllabic names until boarding school. She was stunned when strangers voluntarily offered their last names. It hadn’t occurred to her that people reveal this information. When asked, she automatically provided an alias. Marguerite.

  Amy Gold checks into a new hotel near the plaza in Santa Fe. She’s disoriented. Everything is some manifestation of adobe, cement and mud. Buildings are a tainted orange and degraded pink. Houses are set behind walls like African compounds. The walls are designed to keep the inhabitants in. They’re ubiquitous, as if mandated. Here dirt and all its forms are not only obligatory, they’re deified.

  She’s erased clay in all its permutations from her repertoire. In the millennium, we survive by aliases, photo shop and selective amnesia. It’s a new spiritual expression. It’s the first global mantra. We reclaim ourselves so that we can discard and bury them. Our AOL and Yahoo versions were insipid squalid forays into the wilderness within. We know better now.

  In her senior year at San Diego Pacific Academy, her elective choices were pottery studio or wood world. She chose the later. The boys built a two-story house with a graceful staircase and balconies. She made small boxes and glued sequins and chipped tiles on them. Her latches fall off. She says they’re jewelry boxes. She defends herself. She’s a clerk with ambitions and no, they don’t have to close. They’re conceptual. The wood master wants to flunk her. But she already has a scholarship to Stanford.

  The swimming pool is deserted. Everyone must be buying necklaces of plastic dyed to mimic turquoise and fringed jackets made in Thailand. Or else they’re stumbling up Canyon Road in their new boots that don’t fit. Canyon Road, with it’s 2,000 galleries, features what you’ve already seen. You know what’s on the walls and pedestals before you walk in. Tourists find the familiar reassuring.

  It’s landscapes of Rio Grand gorges rendered in O’Keefe reds that look like lacerations. Then the heads of Indians in bronze. And bronze horses. And bronze Indians on bronze horses. It’s the third or fourth derivative generation. Still lifes of vagina sunflowers. And landscapes reiterating their original psychedelic palette. Now they’re actually spraying them with glitter.

  Amy stands at the edge of the swimming pool. The water reminds her of Hawaii. The blues are so vivid and unadulterated, the elements seem participant.

  As a child, she lived in Maui for three years. Her mother was married to Jerry Garcia’s photographer. Ed. Big Ed. The ocean beyond their lanai possessed a clarity only certain sunlight, strained and purified by currents and anointed cloud configurations, can impart.

  The swimming pool is the turquoise of traditional Indian jewelry. There’s an enticement to this blue, with its suggestion of revelation and sacrament, of opening an enormous chamber into the world as it once was, into thunder and stone and sacrifices designed to engender an incandescent intelligence. It’s the turquoise of time travel, camouflaged salt flats at dusk, and prayer.

  This terrain renders ideas and artifacts inconsequential. That’s why everyone was moving here, the ones who hadn’t migrated to Hawaii or Mexico. But she has no interest in this obvious and generic surrender. Such a seduction would admit the squalor of her ambitions and what they imply, namely the incontrovertible value of acquiring systemic knowledge. Amy swims three hundred laps. It does not clear her head.

  She sits on the bandstand in the plaza. Late afternoon is the adobe of dust and apricots. The sky is a swarm of storm clouds and two rainbows appear in precise twin arches. As they break into Cubist fragments, Amy realizes they’re the DNA of the sky. Then she looks across the plaza, directly at her mother.

  “Amethyst,” her mother calls, already moving towards her, awkward and determined. They embrace and Raven smells unexpectedly sweet, like vanilla ice cream and spring grass.

  Raven’s hair is entirely white and tied into a ponytail with a piece of rawhide.

  Raven in dusty black jeans. Her Saturday night end of the trail outfit. And she’s profoundly tanned. It’s not a skin coloration one can receive through ordinary daily living. It’s clearly a statement, no doubt the result of pronouncing the diminishing ozone layer an establishment rumor that has nothing to do with her.

  “Too many tourists,” Raven says, talking out the side of her mouth. “Let’s go.”

  Amy follows her mother’s jeep along the highway toward Taos, and then off and onto a road so sudden and narrow it seems hallucinatory. They wind up a dirt road of sharp curves and loose gravel. Her mother parks alongside a tiny yellow trailer.

  “It’s temporary,” Raven says, indicating the frail structure with a dismissive flutter of her left hand. “Like life.”

  “Right,” Amy answers. They are proto-humans, banging on stones. Language has barely been invented. They communicate by drums and smoke singles. She follows her mother, climbs three stairs into the trailer, and pauses, all at once listless and exhausted.

  “Old hippies don’t die. They just quit drinking, take their milk thistle and liver enzyme counts.” Raven offers an unconvincing smile.

  “Liver enzymes?” Amy wonders.

  “Hep C,” Raven says.

  “You have hepatitis C?” Amy is startled.

  “We all do,” her mother replies, flat and off-hand. “I hope to live long enough to get Medicare.”

  “Medicare?” Amy repeats.

  “Medicare is just a word, like democracy and justice. It barely exists,” Raven says.

  Her mother sits cross-legged on the floor at a low table, a child’s table, rolling a joint. When she offers it to her, Amy takes it. She left AA at the border. And half her IQ. Wasn’t that the deal?

  The trailer is so minimal it seems unoccupied. There’s a tape deck that runs on batteries, a plate in what must be the kitchen and a bowl of bananas, strawberries and two onions. What’s become of the Navajo rugs, the carved oak furniture, the Mescalero Apache tribal wall hangings, Hopi baskets and masks? And where is the Santa Clara pottery?

  She remembers the era they called the Harmonic Divergence. The commune dwindled. It dried up overnight like creeks in summer. First AIDS. Then the crisis no one anticipated. Their foundation was the exploration of human consciousness. Insidiously and inexorably, their beliefs were culturally degraded, marginalized and then outlawed.

  They were a band of conceptual renegades, biochemical pioneers in an aesthetic frontier that was abruptly fenced. Suddenly, satellites provided surveillance. They were shorn of legitimacy. There’s no glamour in being a designated leper. Criminals have no justification. But there were treatments for their aberrant inclinations. Antidepressants. Rehab. AA. Support groups and disability payments. Everyone took the cure.

  “I’m too old for this,” one of the Big Bobs or Big Jebs said. “I’m not taking a dump in mud in winter. Not at 45.”

  There was attrition. Drugs were now controlled by men with computers in Nassau and Houston. Big Wade and Big Jake had arthritis and diabetes and the wrong skillset for the emerging global market place. They dispersed, took their medications for depression, and meditated in shacks on canyon rims, proclaiming themselves Zen masters. The
y had tape decks and bags of Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Metformin. And shelves of SSRis and Tricyclics. Nothing worked, but it was free. Some found apartments in town with electricity and watched CNN on 16 inch black and white televisions.

  The Espanola property accrued to Raven. She was the last one left, keeping the faith in derelict rooms lit by kerosene lamps, incense and candles. Rooms collapsed around her. The roof fell down in chunks and walls disintegrated into powder. That’s why she purchased the trailer. And what was that green square outside? Was Raven growing marijuana?

  “Corn.” Raven is amused. “Subsistence economy. Tomatoes. Squash. I put seeds in the ground. I eat the plants. A simple life. Much too boring for a professor like you. But you always thought me dull.”

  Not dull, Amy wants to correct, just affected, predictable, and formulaic. The trailer reminds her of a boat, ingenuously compact, deceptively pulling in or out of the miniature closets and cabinets. They had a boat in Maui, she remembers later, when winds rise and batter the metal sides in a sudden squall with lightning.

  They are laying side by side on twin cots like berths, rocking. The trailer sways and Amy thinks, We are floating through metaphors and into symbolic oceans, clutching our charred text as life preservers. We make a telephone call. Or stand in the glaring light of a liquor store on the edge of the Mohave and the course of our life is changed.

  Once during the thunderstorm, Amy sits bolt upright and for an inconclusive moment, thinks she sees Raven standing naked at the tiny window, weeping. Her mother by moonlight, whitened, whittled.

  “I’m a moon crone,” Raven says, directly to the night.

  Her mother has sensed her movement, her intake of breath. “I’m 52 and haven’t had a period in years. I’m on hormones and I’m still burning up.” Raven turns toward her and speaks into the darkness. “You don’t have to fear me anymore. I’m not a competitor. You removed my 9 heads. Hydra is gone. You beheaded me. See me as I am.”