A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

  “Are you lonely?” Amy wonders, uncertain. She’s an ethnographer and Raven is her subject.

  “Lonely?” her mother repeats. “I have two friends. New Mexico and Bob Dylan. He wrote the soundtrack for my life. When he dies, I’ll be a widow.”

  Amy wakes at noon. Raven has assembled sleeping bags, a tent, stacks of camping equipment and a variety of canvas bags under the awning in front of the tiny yellow trailer.

  “Let’s rock and roll.” Raven is enthusiastic. “Mesa Verde. I feel a spiritual experience coming.”

  This woman has absolutely no sense of irony, Amy thinks. She inhabits an era of oral tradition, intuition and omens. The constellations aren’t named. One worships flint and thunder, bargains with stars and drums in solitude.

  They drive north, Raven taking the curves too fast. Amy assembles a random list of what she hates about the Southwest. How everyone is making jewelry and searching for shrines. Santa Fe is an outdoor theme mall. Silver is a wound that gleams. It’s a cancer. It lays itself out in strands of necklaces and belts, a glare of dead worms, obscene. The entire Navajo nation is home in a stupor, smoking chiva and crack and watching TV while numbly pounding out conches and squash blossoms. It’s sickening.

  Amy remembers a town on the way to Las Cruces. Shacks where she sees lava mountains out a broken window. Her real father is coming down from the reservation to see her. He’s out of prison. Amy hasn’t met him. Big Ed or Big Jeb are buying pot. Or maybe selling it. The adults are eating peyote.

  Her mother and a woman she doesn’t recognize sit on the floor in the lotus position, stringing necklaces and laughing. The TV is on maximum volume, picture and sound wavering, ghosted and distorted. She became dizzy, and perhaps she fainted. She is carried to a car. It’s a special day. She is certain. Yes, it’s her thirteenth birthday and her father doesn’t come down from the reservation to see her after all. Later, the woman reaches through the car window, dangling necklaces. She offers her beads, silver and turquoise. Amy shakes her head no.

  “Mesa Verde is a revelation,” Raven reveals. “The Buddha must have built it.”

  “Didn’t extraterrestrials do the construction?” Amy asks. “Aliens from Roswell with green blood and implants in their necks.”

  Raven smokes a joint. Amy Gold turns away, angry. She rejects the concept that enlightenment can be geographically pinpointed, that one can chart a route, follow a map, drive there, and purchase a ticket. Spirituality has been reduced to another commodity. Can’t Raven comprehend that? Probably not.

  Amy experiences a disappointment so overwhelming it erases the possibility of speech. She drinks from her vodka bottle surreptitiously, leaning against the car window while afternoon falls in green and blue pieces against her face. The time space continuum is fluid and it’s flowing across her skin. It’s breaking across her flesh in a series of glass splinters.

  They spend the afternoon in Indian ruins, peering through holes and slots implying windows. They climb reconstructed steps and wood ladders into the cliff dwellings. The repetition of identical ceremonial rooms is relentless. She feels sullen and futile.

  “You’re still a bitter child,” Raven says, voice soft. It’s not an accusation. “You have a one word vocabulary. All you say is no.”

  “You’re the queen of yes. What did it get you?”

  Silence. Amy is wondering what the Anasazi did, how they lived. They smoked pot, no doubt, and strung beads, got drunk, hunted and gathered herbs. In between, they engaged in acts of domestic violence and child abuse. Now a slap, then a torn hymen. Human nature hasn’t changed. In 641, a pope decreed that a man could have only a single wife. But there’s no evolutionary adaptation to support that opinion.

  Amy wants to discuss this with her mother. But Raven doesn’t have the attention span. They crawl through a tunnel, dust settling across her forehead like another coating of adobe or clay, a decorative filigree. They stand on the rim of the canyon, their shoulders brushing. It begins to rain; thunder echoes off rock and the ground shakes. It’s like being in a shooting range.

  Raven is out of breath. “It’s the ancient ones talking,” she manages.

  “Christ,” Amy says. “You’ll end up a tour guide.”

  “Big Red’s a guide in Bandolier. He’s got a uniform and a pension,” Raven tells her with a rare edge. Is she jealous?

  Amy touches the emergency pint of vodka inside the rain poncho her mother handed her. When she isn’t watching, Amy finishes the bottle.

  “You don’t have to drink like this,” Raven said. “Pot is easier on the liver. And it’s more enlightening.”

  In a deserted campground, they walk in mud up to their calves. Raven is wearing a stylish leather coat. It simply materialized. It’s like that with her mother, the costume changes, the inexplicable appearance of accessories, the silver belt pulled from a bag, the mantilla that’s both a veil and shawl. Amy is shivering.

  “West and south,” Raven decides. “The first decent hotel where it’s hot.”

  Gallup is a few disappointing blocks of pawnshops and liquor stores that seem to be lingering posthumously. A community center with windows broken, and a tennis court with the pavement ripped. The net has been hacked up with knives. She imagines playing on the court, bits of glass making her footing slippery. She could fall, sprain an ankle, get cut. But that scenario is too simple. The wound she’s searching for, what she’s stalking, is more profound and permanent.

  “The whole infrastructure is going,” Amy notes, glancing at the gutted swimming pool, the brown lawn laced with glass. “It’s not just the cities.”

  “My infrastructure is going. But government pills and AA aren’t my answer.” Raven stops the car. There is a pause.

  “Listen, I had boyfriends,” her mother begins, almost whispering. “When you were 10, I was the same age you are now. But nobody laid a finger on you, Amethyst. You are my jewel. Everybody treated you right. I made sure.”

  Late afternoon is a chasm of shimmering crimson that seems vaguely Egyptian. Raven gets out of the car and hands her the keys. “Your turn,” she says. “Surprise me.”

  Amy drives west across desert. She stops in a liquor store, buys four pints of vodka and hides them. She drinks and drives until Raven wakes up, moaning. They’re almost across Arizona.

  “What’s this?” Raven asks, mildly interested. She rubs her eyes, can’t find her eyeglasses and opens her map. She examines it, concentrating. The map is upside down.

  “Laughlin. It’s a déclassé Vegas on the Arizona-California-Nevada border. Feeds off the retirement dollar. It’s nickel and dime all the way. They let them park their trailers free. Hope they’ll toss a quarter in a slot machine on the way to the john. It’s the collapse of western civilization. The final capitalist terminal. You can watch the empire fall here. Come on. We’ll love it.” Amy is incredibly festive.

  She pauses in the oasis of lobby surrounded by casinos. They’re cavernous. They’re the magic caves where Ali Baba and the 40 thieves hid their gold goblets and chests of coins and rubies.

  It’s oddly familiar, the assault of neon on walls, the leaden clinking machines and spinning wheels. Then the islands of green felt of card and dice tables. She understands this electric palette. The neon ceiling is like a cathedral. The neon-draped walls are layered in birthday cake pink and yellow icing. Come on. Spend a buck. It’s a holiday.

  Here are men in cowboy hats and boots with spurs who recently won a minor event at a second tier rodeo. They have the prize money in their socks. And men who just buried their wives and have ten thousand insurance dollars in their sports jacket pockets. This is what they got for their 30 years, five of it spent going to and from chemo. The money is in a roll with a rubber band around it like another type of ring. This time, they’ll marry fortune.

  Here are women who just sold their mothers’ wedding rings for four hundred dollars, their divorced husband’s bass boat and tool set. Nearly three grand in total. They wear flower print c
otton dresses, and acres of pink and what might be bathrobes. They sit on stools, considering each quarter with deliberation, calculating their possibilities and counting their change. They extract one dime at a time, rationing themselves, and waiting for the right second, the anointed juncture, to spring forward and pull the lever.

  Everyone moves in exaggerated slow motion through the neon drifting from the ceiling and sliding off the slot machines, making the air thicken like cornstarch. All carry coins in plastic cups the size of ice cream sodas, faces devoid of expression. Their limbs are stiff, arthritic. They look jetlagged and confused. They look like they need wheelchairs and want to go home.

  Women on social security in mini skirts and fishnet stockings thread their way between the mock islands, carrying trays of free drinks. Only the dealers are swift, flipping out cards like whirling dervishes. Here come the royals. You’ve barely added up your hand and they’re already reaching across felt and raking the chips back in.

  Bells are the punctuation, the music of the casino. Bells signaling a payoff and the impending cascade of nickels and dimes. Bells announcing the start of a new keno game. These bells don’t ring with the authority and purpose of churches. Or the promise of thrill like ferry and carnival bells. They don’t mark the hour. They’re designed to keep you from the walking coma you suspect you’re in. They’re like alarm clocks. Then the blast like a siren that doesn’t require translation. Jackpot.

  This is the new American score, Amy thinks. It’s not a house, forty acres with a pond and mule and some stray grass to barbeque on anymore. Medicare is just a word, like democracy and justice. This is the global world of the dwarf dollar and the failure of gods and tradition and language itself. There’s been a mass reduction. Even fantasy is truncated, amputated, stuck in a box in the basement. In this new century, we just want one good weekend.

  They have a suite on the 17th floor with a view of the Dead Mountains, a swath of the Mojave, and the whip-thin blue chalk line of the Colorado River. Millions of women and men are also standing at windows, at this precise instant, realizing their lives are nothing they thought they would be. Sun is a slap across their mouths.

  Amy Gold feels a rising excitement as they ride the elevator back to the lobby. She listens to bells from slot machines and the constant tumbling nickels flowing into steel shells suggesting mouths. Of course, this is what you hear at the end of the world. It isn’t a whimper after all. It has nothing to do with anything human. It’s the sound of symbols in motion. It’s the sound of tin.

  Raven is changing a ten-dollar bill for a foot-high plastic cup of quarters. She’s changed her clothes, too. It must be Act 2. She’s wearing a maroon caftan encrusted with tiny beads that sparkle and gold high heels. She has a canary yellow sash around her waist, bangles on both wrists and oversized sunglasses with gold frames. Two old men stare at her.

  Amy hasn’t had the right accessories for any of the towns or situations of her life. In the lobby of the River’s End in Laughlin, Amy regrets the silver she didn’t buy in Aspen. And the squash blossom in Taos. She should have taken the birthday beads she was offered by a laughing woman on peyote. Or even a turquoise bracelet from a pawnshop in Flagstaff where she saw thousands in rows in display cases. The Navajo nation was divesting itself of its semi-precious stones for beer and crack and it was horrifying. She didn’t want any of it, not even for free.

  Neon drifts like party streams and bolts of crepe paper. Or spun glass in the crimson of the plumes of jungle birds thought to be extinct. They didn’t disappear. They’re here, at the River’s End, in their giant electric aviary.

  She should have acquired a silk shawl somewhere, brass hoop earrings, a skirt in a floral print or a chiffon dress, fall leaf colored and embroidered with flowers, iris and pansies and violets, perhaps. And a straw hat with a flagrant yellow silk flower. She could have made herself into a garden. But she was a professor of no. Maybe she was born this way.

  The tinny bells don’t come from cathedrals or ships. They’re machine proclamations of impending money. And it occurs to her that no accessories could possibly be right for this occasion.

  “Let’s check out the river,” Raven suggests. She’s put on mauve lipstick and a citrus perfume.

  Outside the casino, air cracks against her face. It must be 110, Amy thinks. 115. Heat rolls across her flesh, laminating it. This is how time takes photographs.

  It’s how you get into the eternal line-up. It has nothing to do with Homeland Security or INTERPOL.

  They walk into liquid heat. Huge insects perch on the ground. Clusters of scorpions. And nests of roaches and maggots.

  “Crickets and grasshoppers,” Raven explains. Her skirt is a compendium of all possible shades of purple. Her skirt is wind across dusk mesas. Raven brings her climate with her. She wears sunset around her hips and asks, “Are you OK?”

  OK? Is that a state with borders? Or an emotional concept? Can you drive there, get a suite, break a 20 for buckets of dimes? Should she reply with a flag or a drum? And what is in the arc of light on the side of the parking lot? It’s a confederation of hallucinatory swooping forms, too thin to be birds. They’re creatures from myth. They’ve broken through the fabric, tearing through time with their teeth.

  “Bats,” Raven says. “Can’t you hear them?”

  Everything is humming. It’s a corrupted partial darkness, too over-heated and streaked with arrows of red neon to be real night. It’s grazing above the surprisingly cold river. Amy touches it with her hand. The riverbank is studded with abandoned construction sites, iron grids with no walls, roofs or windows. It’s a ghost town.

  They stand on a sort of loading dock. The terrain is increasingly difficult to decode. What is that coming toward them? A sea vessel? Yes, a mock riverboat calling itself a water taxi.

  Raven reaches out her tanned arms, and helps her climb down the stairs. “You’re going to vomit,” her mother whispers. “You’re drinking too much. You could never maintain.”

  The boat motion is nauseating. The water taxi crosses one thin strand of river, disgorges silent passengers who seem already defeated, and takes new ones to the other bank. The water taxi rides back and forth, back and forth, ferrying gamblers from Arizona across the river to Nevada where it is legal. Everyone is somber.

  Amy Gold closes her eyes and counts the rivers she’s been on or in with her mother. The Snake, Arkansas, Rio Grande, Mississippi, Columbia, Missouri and Wailua, and now this ghastly Colorado in July where she doesn’t have the right accessories, not a scarf, bracelet or shawl. And what do they call this? The Styx?

  “You’re not smoking,” Amy realizes.

  “Even bank robbers quit,” Raven replies. “Even guys in the can quit.”

  It’s the last ride of the night. The driver repeats this twice. He’s accustomed to passengers with Alzheimer’s and hearing aids, canes and walkers. And she’s been in the boat for hours, her head in her mother’s lap. She’s finished her emergency pint of vodka. She manages to stand, and pauses on the dock.

  There’s an anomalous movement in the river. Some rustling denting the water the way tuna do in shallow bays. Then the water looks like submerged dogs are running just beneath the surface. Two boys are doing something with white flowers. They toss bouquets into the muddy river and the flowers are instantly, savagely ripped apart.

  Amy is startled by an agitation beneath the surface. Enormous fish circle around the wood planks. They must be four feet long. There are severed palms in the water. People have removed their hands and these grotesque fish are eating them. The hideous dark gray fish. It’s a ritual. They must supplicate themselves.

  “My God,” Amy says, wondering if she should jump in. She’s an excellent swimmer. She learned CPR. She takes a breath.

  “Just carp.” Raven is tired. “Hundreds of large carp.”

  “But what are they eating?” Amy has a pulsing ache that begins in her jaw and runs through the individual nerves of her face. Fine wires are being
pulled through her eyes. Perhaps they’re going to use her for bait.

  “Bread,” her mother says. “Look. Pieces of bread.”

  Yes, of course. Slices of white bread. It is not the amputated hands of virgins. It’s not the orchids the Buddha promised. It’s bread from plastic bags. And we are released. We are reprieved. Enlightenment does not announce itself on the map. It is random, always.

  “Where are you going?” Raven demands. “You’re sick. Let me help you.”

  She is frightened.

  “I’ll come back,” Amy says.

  “You haven’t been back in since San Diego,” Raven says. “You left too soon, Amethyst. Fifteen was too early, baby. And you’re not going anywhere now.”

  Amy Gold is moving through the lobby; she’s running, and she’s way ahead of her mother. She’s been way ahead from the beginning. That’s why her attention wanders. It’s always been too easy, she remembers, finding a path between islands of machines with glittering gutted heads. She possesses the secret of this age. It’s about the geometry of cheap metal. And she knows where the parking lot is and she has the car keys.

  Amy Gold stops, paralyzed. She understands this moment with astounding clarity. No. She’s not going to pack her office at the university. She’s not going to carry books through corridors, one cardboard box, one square casket at a time. We decide the components of our necessities. We design our own ceremonies of loyalty and propitiation. And history fails to explain the significance of accessories. The silk sash around your waist can be a fishing line. Or a noose to hang a man with. Why isn’t this even a footnote?

  Raven is reaching through the garish neon, her palms open, waiting to receive something. Pages from the original Bagavaid Gita? The UFO invasion plan? An Anasazi document inscribed in glyphs on bark in a lime ink unknown for a thousand years?

  “Give me the keys. Give me the booze and cigarettes,” Raven commands. “I’m taking you home.”