by Sarah Reith
We’re working, I failed to point out, because it was just as plain as a naked breast, as plain as the fact that we’re all going to die.
MARIANA “PASSED,” AS we call it when we are sick to death of brutal honesty, at 9:27 a.m. on July 6th. It was a Wednesday. Fiona was at her side, cleansing her karma with an etheric weaver. You can purchase sets of etheric weavers on eBay, or you can go directly to the Buddha Maitreya’s website, where you can be sure it has been blessed by a healing infusion of Monadic soul-filled light by Buddha Maitreya Himself, the Christ returned.
Fiona looked radiant. She wearing an Ascending Pyramid Headgear from Shambhala Healing Tools and swinging her little pendulum over the great mountain of flesh that had been Nicki Daniels, Mariana Blanchefleur, or Fraulein von Bingen. No one would ever know, now, who she really was. It had never been any of our business.
I walked across the floor and turned the AC on high. Then I turned on the ceiling fan.
“Smells a bit like dying old lady in here, doesn’t it?” Fiona remarked.
It was the most reasonable thing I had ever heard her say. I had the sense that something crucial had gone all wrong and we could never apologize for it.
The Ascending Pyramid Headgear, incidentally, is exactly what it sounds like: a glistening, crystal-encrusted pyramid, with a chin strap and a frame of heavy copper wire. There are reasons for all of these things: the crystals, the copper, the shape of the headgear. I am not in the mood to explore any of them right now.
I sat down beside Fiona Jones, too broken for Ronald Spence’s nunnery, and looked at the remains of the woman we called Mariana. The mouth was sunken into the face, as black and unmysterious as a pothole in the road. Thank God she’s dead, I thought. And now she’s safe.
“Do you have any plans?” Fiona inquired. I thought I heard a wistful note, like she was already nostalgic for the time we’d had together.
“A friend of mine asked me if I’d help her in the garden,” I said vaguely. “While she’s in Israel.”
Fiona nodded. “Well, if she’s got something going along those lines in a couple of months. Maybe you could put in a good word for me.”
“You smoke?” I asked.
She nodded again. “It’s a meditation tool, really,” she explained, bouncing the etheric weaver like a yo-yo. “I do it to help myself meditate,” she clarified, in case I didn’t know what a meditation tool might be used for. “But if you could keep it under your hat,” she suggested, looking at me quite seriously from underneath the Ascending Pyramid Headgear. “I don’t want people to think . . .”
I wondered if she knew how much pot Mariana’s tenants were growing.
“What about you?” I asked. “Got any plans?”
“Reuben’s going to let me stay here for a while. It’s really quite good of him. It’s not like he paid me shit.” Her accent made this sound like a lady’s condemnation of a gentleman’s etiquette. “Listen. Maybe if you could bear witness to something for me.” My suitcase was packed. My mattress was bare. “Do you remember. What she said. About her wishes.”
I smiled. “She wanted to come back as a flower.”
“No, no. For the house. How she wanted to have like-minded people here. Well, the kitchen isn’t very big, but I’ve lived in a lot smaller places with quite a few people.” Seventeen. I remembered. “And I feel like Mariana would be a kind of guardian spirit,” she concluded, as if this were the best part of her argument. “She was quite spiritual, you know. Behind all that bluster.”
I tried to recall if I had ever seen Madame Blanchefleur blustering, and could not come up with a single instance of it.
“I thought you and I worked quite well together,” she said suddenly, looking into my eyes with an open, appealing expression I had never seen her use before. It took a few heartbeats for me to realize that I had something she wanted. “I’d like to talk to you more sometime. I think people like us, people who don’t have a lot of material possessions and kind of drift, if you know what I mean. People who are sensitive. Well. I think you do know what I mean.” This was a spiritual grope, I realized. She was trying to turn me on by telling me how good I was.
“Why don’t you give me Reuben’s phone number,” I said carefully. It would be a difficult story to tell. “I’ll be sure to give him a call.”
THE VALLEY OF death is deep, remember, deep as the cold and deeper than heat. We had assembled there, at the appointed hour of our great catharsis. Tension had mounted. There had been madness and death and slowly dawning horror. The truth had gradually revealed itself. The main character of any proper drama would have seized that stupid pyramid hat and beaten her antagonist even more senseless than she already was. She would have forced a confession. She would have denounced the bitch and told her the sheriff was on his way.
Instead, I called an exasperated nurse and let a dying woman die.
I parked my truck by the side of the road and walked toward the forest. The angle of the sun changed. A silly Englishwoman said, smells a bit like dying old lady in here, doesn’t it? I felt as though the forces of a long-awaited battle had gathered in secret, waited ’til dawn . . . and then wandered off to see if they could get cell phone reception somewhere else. I sat down on a rock.
The angle of the sun changed again. There are, supposedly, cartels that grow vast quantities of pot on public land in Mendocino County. They do not adhere to the principles of organic farming. They feed themselves nightly on cheap beer and pregnant wildlife, caught in the beams of illegal spotlights. I was not at all concerned about whatever savage thing it is that happens to women who sit on rocks in cartel country all night long, waiting for the transformative effects of their experiences to overtake them.
When I started taking psychedelic drugs, my father told me never to forget that the physical laws of the universe are always the same, no matter what exotic compounds are coursing through your system. Physics are unaffected by a twelve-year-old girl who has just swallowed a handful of dried fungus. “You cannot fly,” he catechized me patiently. “You cannot breathe underwater.” There were times when I felt like an amnesiac, reading letters to myself; when the facts about the world refused to play their part convincingly. Phosphorescent nights became fluorescent days, where gravity and oxygen were as alien as items on an android’s packing list.
It turned out that taking lots of drugs with acronyms as unwieldy as the compounds they signified was excellent preparation for what was happening right now. I don’t mean preparation, in the sense that I was prepared to handle adversity. I just mean that I recognized the landmarks, and the sequence of events. The thing that had been happening so fervently had simply stopped, with no regard for rhythm or order or the need for proper endings. It was over, like a drug trip or a dream. Like a brief infatuation or a lifetime of faith in a counterfeit god.
Also, as far as the physical laws of the universe went, I was well and truly fucked. I had no job. I had no money. I had no place to live. I got up and walked back to my truck.
I STAYED IN a converted barn for the long, still days of summer in the season that Fiona Jones and I committed murder. Yes, you say, but she wanted to die. You ask me how much longer she would have lived without the morphine. You comment complacently on the quality of life she would have had, if we had medicated her more stringently. And you who know me well say, Isobel. I wait, because I know what’s coming. But you are relentless. You know the answer, and you ask it anyway.
Isobel, you say. What if it were you? Yes, well. I still say we killed her, and a murder is a murder. Grant me a cold-blooded killer, when I am old and helpless, wearing diapers in the presence of outcasts. I know now why killers confess.
For weeks, I sat in front of my easel, painting very slowly. I was so tired.
My own mortality went around and around in my mind like rocks in a tumbler, the motor so weak and so slow that only the eons would wear down the edges. I must die, I must die, I must die. Around and around it went, but the charge of
my life was so low, I could not get to the shine or the meaning of that cold tough gray exterior. I knew there was a nest of shining crystals in the hollow of the stone, but all I could do was watch as it took another lazy turn around the inside of my mind. I must die, but never penetrate the mystery.
Therefore, I must paint. There was no hurry. But it was more urgent than anything I’d ever done. Because someday, I would die. And if I died in the presence of ineptitude and madness, I wanted to know I’d painted long and well, that each stroke had been made in full awareness of mortality, and the fact that I was not yet dead.
Somehow, when I was only able to think, I must die, and gauge where I was in the progress of a single brushstroke, I became more fully alive than I had ever been before. I was more alive than when I pounded through the Stockton tunnel and exploded into the heart of downtown San Francisco at five o’clock on Friday afternoon. I was more alive than when I sat in the back of that cop car in the shadow of the mountain, calling on the shade of every preacher, con man, fugitive, and whore who ever passed through my bloodline. There, in the aftermath of death, my life became a textured thing. It was real, and it was mine, and all I knew about it was that someday, I would die.
ALIZARIN WAS NOT in Israel. I made that up for the sole purpose of creating an air of second-hand religious legitimacy with a crazy person wearing an Ascending Pyramid Headgear.
We met at the end of the long, treacherous driveway that wound all the way up to the purple door. The orange house looked grubby and sun-worn, like a life preserver that hasn’t been properly stowed. The irises had gone feral, lurking in among the weeds with unkempt leaves gone dry.
“I thought you were mad at me,” she said immediately. “I’m so glad you came.”
Alizarin has always had a serious deception deficit. I’ve seen her talk about growing pot like it was time for all of us felons to come out of the closet and start wearing pride beads. As if growing pot were a civil right.
“I thought you were mad at me,” she said frankly; and waited for the truth. It would take a long time to readjust to the world that was not Mariana’s Hof, where every word had been a counter-strategy.
“I was,” I replied, walking away from the mountain of lies I’d been telling for weeks. I’d told those lies for the rest of someone else’s life. Maybe Fiona had needed honesty, too, like a successful suicide who wanted nothing more than to be told, with great authority, that she is not to take her own life.
“That car had a known mechanical problem,” I went on. I detected the falsehood almost immediately. I knew as well as anyone else about the slave and master cylinders. I took a deep breath. I’d composed so many angry screeds. “I think you were jealous about Morpheus. I think you should know: I never had a thing with him.” It was easier than anything, to just say it. Easy and graceless and uninspired, like taking a survey about the human psyche’s most monumental motives.
Alizarin looked like a woman who already knew what she was going to say. “Well, dearie,” she began; and for some reason, I did not bristle at the endearment. I did not assume that it preceded a belittling reminder of hard-won superior knowledge. “I think it was pretty obvious that Morpheus had a swooning crush on you.” Her honesty, today, was devoid of all brutality. “But I never thought you were actually doing anything. Or even planning it. I just think he could have been a little bit less of an asshole about it. Always going on about how you were a shining example of whatever it was. I mean, please. He’s gone.”
“You put him out of your misery?” I suggested, in a tasteful attempt at womanly sympathy.
She did not appear to notice. “He moved into that little rental we have in town. He said he thought it was more convenient.” She made it sound as contemptible as if he’d relocated to the shade of a manna tree, so he could lie around all day waiting for meals to fall into his mouth.
“I guess everyone is better off,” I observed. Honesty develops a momentum all its own, once it gets started.
She looked aghast. “I’m not better off! He just made a unilateral decision about our marriage, based on his convenience, and took off.” She was furious. Alizarin was going to be fine.
“And speaking of men. Just in case . . . you know.” I did not. “Just to clear things up . . .” She waved an unclarifying hand. It’s soothing when other people are confused and inarticulate. It makes them seem so harmless.
“When I started sleeping with your father. You know he’d been with Eileen, right? On and off, for three or four years?” Would I ever acquire the last piece of information about what sluts my parents were? “Well, he told me. That your mom, you know. So I thought, as long as no one else knew.” She looked at me expectantly, as if she had just said something eminently reasonable and now it was my turn.
I remembered Eileen. Eileen had a weak chin and a flat ass and she lived in a vault with no windows and movie posters all over the walls. She had a fuck-all tawdriness to her, a promise of secret competencies. She reminded me of Janis Joplin. My mother once described her as “the living embodiment of the death drive”; which, for some reason, didn’t seem particularly funny at the time. I don’t think Caitlin had the sense to feel threatened by Eileen; or maybe she knew Eileen had sense enough not to set up housekeeping with a man like Gustave Reinhardt.
“As long as it was discreet,” Alizarin elaborated at last. “I thought it was fine. He said it was fine. And. Way before anything happened. I used to say to her (to your mom, I mean): why don’t you let Izzy and Jezzie have a slumber party at my house? They could play dress-up. They’d have a great time. You two go out, have fun. But she was like, no. I don’t think so. We don’t go out.” She imitated my mother’s cold, malicious, tight-lipped little smile, the one that makes her look like she is refraining from baring her teeth.
“You know the first thing she said to me when your dad and I moved in together,” she said next, as if anyone ever would have told me that. “She accused me of trying to steal you.” It always feels like a partial confession, to repeat what’s been said about things you have done. “She said I was trying to take you away from her, and that I should just have more kids of my own.” We stood there for a long time, thinking about sexual competition and reproductive success. “Which is really funny, because, of course, I don’t know how long it’s been since you talked to your mother, and, well, here you are.” She grinned. “You should call your mother,” she decided further, as breezily as if we were just a couple of old friends, gossiping in the driveway.
“And now,” she declared, “I am sick to death of standing around outside. Come in and meet the woofer.”
WWOOFer, I learned, is a grammatical invention that is sure to form the cornerstone of the next post-millennial theory on how languages evolve. It is a term that could be classified as a verbish noun with an acronym root, because a WWOOFer is someone who WWOOFs as part of a program called World Wide Opportunities for Organic Farmers. In yet another instance of flagrant disregard for the fact that cultivating marijuana is a felony, Alizarin had signed up with an organization that connects organic farmers with those who aspire to a life of thankless drudgery at the same. WWOOFers will perform almost any agricultural labor in exchange for room, board, and the chance to take part in the food revolution. They do not even object to being called WWOOFers, in spite of the fact that the term sounds like rural hipster slang for some kind of pot-specific infestation or sexual fetish.
Alizarin’s WWOOFer was in the kitchen, grinding meat the color of cartoon carnage: somewhere in between a bloody fluorescent orange and a bloodier neon pink. Little chunks of this alarming matter kept falling onto the floor with a delicate slapping sound, whereupon several dogs darted for it with speed and precision. Every time they did this, the girl would produce a series of musical trills that might have indicated distress. Her name was something or other, and she had eyes like Ingres’ Odalisque, the one whose image always shows up in literature about how women are objectified in Western art. The rest of her fac
e was so stunningly lovely, her shabby clothes and jagged haircut seemed to exist solely as an apology for any hard feelings her beauty might cause. She glowed like an Old Master’s oil painting, tossed into the corner of a grower’s dingy kitchen.
There was no plunger to push the cartoon-colored meat into the grinder, so the Odalisque was pressing it in with one long-fingered hand, the tiny bones articulating as they met resistance from the still-resilient dead flesh. The grinder sporadically puked the meat back out the top, so she kept feeding it back in with quick little jabs, like she thought the machine would be less likely to notice she was taunting it that way.
“Um,” I suggested. “Maybe there’s a pushy-downy thing? So you don’t have to use your hand for that?”
“Oh, that’s okay,” she assured me, and smiled as if she’d never dream of inconveniencing anyone with such a high-maintenance request. “I washed my hands,” she added, still with a beatific smile that I’m sure the original Odalisque never would have offered for free, least of all to another woman.
“It has more to do with this not quite pro-cannibal stance I have,” I explained, a little bewildered by her loveliness. What a fucking idiot, I berated myself. I should have just said anti-cannibal. Or maybe, hey: left the cannibals out of it altogether. How hard is it not to make a fucking cannibal reference? Everyone pretended I hadn’t said anything.
“Did you see the remains of Daphne outside?” Alizarin inquired, changing the subject with masterful ease. In northern California, the topic of dietary morality is fraught with a level of tension normally reserved for general elections, the afterlife, and your co-workers’ take-home pay.
