by Fiona Maazel
Mother has been casting runes for years. She is much moved by the story of Odin, who, in order to gain knowledge of the runes, hung from the world tree Yggdrasil for nine days, impaled on his own spear. Mastery of the word is a quest for power. And Mother, she gets off on this.
“Guide my hand, guide my mind, guide my soul as I take these meanings into my life. What will tonight hold for us?”
She draws ansuz, mannaz, and hagall, which is supposed to give us an overview, course of action, and outcome. Ansuz is my favorite rune. It’s about inspired speech. Oratory. The death rattle. Essentially any sound that communicates poignantly. Mannaz is the mortality rune. Man is but augmented earth. He comes, he goes. As for hagall, I don’t know. It means hail. And something about change. But when Mother sees it, she looks upset. And a few of the guests turn away. So I guess it’s bad.
She glosses over the hagall part of the cast and snaps her fingers. The waitress disappears into the kitchen and returns with a box. It looks like a crate those fancy stores use to ship pears at Christmas.
Mother smoothes her palm over the box. She bares teeth. “As you all know, a few years ago, the remains of our revered ancestor were found in the Columbia River.”
Oh, Lord, not this again. The Kennewick Man, you’ve heard it before: Two kids find a skull in the river. They stash it in a bush and go fishing. Later they give it to police. Other bones are found, almost a complete skeleton. Turns out the thing is 9,200 years old.
Mention of the Kennewick Man in certain circles can start a fistfight. Several Native American tribes wanted to bury the bones according to their traditions. Under the Native Graves and Repatriation Act, any remains that predate Columbus are considered Native American. Thing is, the Kennewick Man didn’t look Native American. He had Caucasoid features. You can imagine the maelstrom that followed. People were saying: Maybe ancestors of modern American Indians were not the first to see the New World. Maybe the first came from Scandinavia over the Bering land bridge. Maybe the first were forefather to the Vikings. The Vikings!
Archaeologists, scientists, the Indians, and Asatru Folk Assembly all claimed title to the KM. On the sly, a few tribes were allowed to perform rituals with the bones. The Asatru went nuts. Mother went nuts. They won a ceremony of their own. The legal battles were endless.
“The Kennewick Man,” she says, “is a bridge back to the ascendancy of our culture. And until he is laid to rest, superplague will rage on.”
Ah, yes, the or else. I saw it coming, but I feel stunned just the same. And Dad, if he’s up there, is completely appalled. I look at the box and start to get a bad feeling. ,
Mother was instrumental in getting the Asatru access to the bones. She petitioned just about every government official in the country. Meantime, the court cases got more confusing and bilious. And the bones got trashed. Moved here, moved there. Never mind that the guys who found the skull stuffed it in a bush while they went fishing. I can just imagine their conversation. Dude, check out this skull.
Eventually there was DNA testing, which suggested the KM was related to the Southeast Asian people. The Asatru dropped their claim and Mother got depressed. I thought it was over, but no.
“Many have tried to refuse the Kennewick Man his homecoming. Many have stood in his way. But shall a blessed ancestor be denied? Shall his spirit never rest? The plague is a call to action!”
She opens the box. Everyone leans forward. And then back. Waaay back, except Hannah, who lurches for the bone. Wherever she waves it, people retreat like it’s a torch. Or a gun.
My twelve-year-old sister is armed and drunk.
Mother ventures to talk her down. Since No Face, I never thought I’d hear just give me the bone spoken in this household again. “Is it really nine thousand years old?!” Hannah says. “I bet I can hex people with this thing.” The waving intensifies. Many guests have actually fled the room. I notice commotion at the front door. People are trying to get out. “Give me that,” I say, and grab her ponytail. She frees the bone. It’s a femur. And it puts me in mind to hex some people of my own.
Mother is angry. This is not how she intended the unveiling to pan out. I see Oliver Lentz helping his wife into her coat. “Wonderful party,” she says. “But we really must be going.” I start to feel bad for Isifrid and give her the bone. It’s still intact, no harm done, but she flings it against the wall. I get the perverse idea that maybe we can grind up the pieces and snort the KM, but Aggie has already collected them in a dustbin.
Authorities lost shards of the KM’s femur a few years ago. There was much scapegoating. The femur is important. Postmortem, it can help establish a person’s size, fortitude, age, ethnic affinity, and composition. So it was pretty bad when it vanished. But since the hunt for the femur fragments availed nothing, the hunt was dropped. How in hell did Mother get one?
I sit on the floor next to her.
“Everyone gone?” she asks.
“How’d you get the bone?”
She shrugs, which means: You forget I am rich.
“You could go to jail.”
“I could.”
“Would you like that?”
“No.”
Seems like a natural segue, so I ask if she’s thought about her drug use lately because I am getting really worried about her. This lunacy with plague and the bone, come on. She slaps me across the face.
The shock makes its way down my whole body and back before I can speak.
“Was that really the Kennewick Man?”
“No. It’s from that chimpanzee who died at the zoo. I just wanted to get some life in this house. It’s so quiet all the time.”
Hannah, who’s been watching us from across the room, throws up in a garbage bag. Aggie complains of chest pain. When she complains again, I call 911.
Fifteen
Why can’t I believe in a higher power? Even as Aggie nearly died—those few days at the hospital were touch and go—I did not pray. Fear is supposed to make converts of us all. Trench faith. But it didn’t happen. And I was plenty scared. I gorged on fast food; I stabbed a bump’s worth of Ketamine into my thigh and stayed in the hole for hours. I watched the Food Network. I wanted a donut. When I still wanted one by nightfall, I made for the church basement.
Because most meetings are held underground, recovery tends to have a certain smell. The Brothel Armpit. I imagine this benefits someone, maybe a gym coach.
Tonight’s speaker is Jimmy. It’s a full house. Dirty Ben’s up front with a tower of Oreos on his knee. He offers me one. I’ve long thought Oreos are the doomsday cookie. They preach the triumph of evil, of darkness over light, and no amount of reversing the colors is gonna change that. I dial the cookie and expose the cream.
Ben asks how I am. I ask about Eric. He asks if we’ve thought about moving to a place where no one’s heard of my dad. I say: Like bunghole Texas? I got it covered. He says this conversation is going nowhere.
Jimmy has someone read a pamphlet of questions. Have drugs ever landed you in jail? Have you tried to substitute one drug for another in an attempt to stop? Have your relations suffered as a result of drugs? I see other people nodding and find myself doing the same. Then I start to pose questions of my own. Do you think you’ll die if you quit drugs? Do you think you can quit? Do you even want to quit?
This last one always gets me. I am ambivalent. I want to stop. I want to stop, later.
Jimmy is talking about Not Me. He says, “Not Me gets things done. Not Me drives the boat.” This is his answer to the problem of God. There are forces out there greater than Jimmy, he doesn’t know what they are or how they work, but it’s enough for him to believe the sum totality of the universe resides elsewhere. I find this logic seductive. Not Me. I should try that.
“Just for today, Not Me has kept me clean. And a clean day is a successful day.”
I wince. There always comes a moment in every person’s share when it leaves me behind. Guy says, “I was miserable, I wanted to die,” and I’m
like yeah, yeah, “and then everything I am and believe went out the window and today I’m grateful.” I don’t mean to belittle the change—not at all. It’s just that I don’t get it. Not in practice. How does a self-hating suicide hopeful wind up thinking a clean day is a successful day? When did the bar drop so low? Or how did Jimmy come to believe that the bar, set thus, is high?
Ben gives me another Oreo. The cream center really is divine.
We put money in the collection basket. All I have is a ten. I wait for the basket to fill with singles, but I am nervous anyway. I am certain I’ll shortchange the basket. Put in ten, take back eleven. Or that someone will think I’m doing that. I let the basket go by, which means now everyone thinks I’m cheap. Blah blah, no one is thinking about me at all, blah blah, I hate this.
There is mention of self-centered fear, addiction to television and pornography. One woman says her left breast is smaller than the right.
Mark waves his hand. He really wants to talk. And he wants to talk plague. He is flipping out. His neck is scarred from a bullet that passed through his esophagus; when he gets worked up, it turns purple. He is asking what’s the point of sobriety when we’re all gonna die. I think everyone is wishing he’d shut up. Denial is the only way to deal with this. The Minnesota Man, now dubbed the Primary, has caused six deaths not including his own. The entire hospital has been quarantined, though until today, no one has enforced it because no one wanted to be that close. Now they’ve got guys in moon suits manning every door. There is rumor of a Chinese takeout delivery boy who escaped. As a result, three Chinese neighborhoods have been targeted with hate crimes.
“I can’t sleep,” Mark says. “Everyone looks like a killer! A guy with a cold coughed in my face the other day. I nearly broke his neck.” He stands up abruptly and says he needs some air.
We take a break. We speculate. Who is behind this? Could be Al-Qaeda, could be your mom. No one seems to have a clue, except the conspiracy theorists who think the government needed a pretext for more warmongering in the Middle East. Retaliation does presume the moral high ground. But retaliation for what? Used to be any affront to our principles would suffice. Operation Just Cause; Operation Restoring Democracy. These days, a principle offended just will not do. No one wants to die for a principle. But to vanquish a plague epidemic! Sign me up.
Aggie and I hashed it out at the hospital. She is of about six minds. Concedes it’s possible the government helped facilitate 9/11 and now this plague thing, but also that even the most nefarious regime doesn’t kill its own people at random. On the one hand, our government is too stupid. On the other, stupidity is just what’s needed to bungle a plague spread so that instead of killing six, it kills six million. Most likely it’s someone from within. A save-the-whales crusader. But with knowledge of aerosolized plague? So maybe it’s a scientist. But what scientist would unleash deadly plague? So maybe it’s a martyring scientist. But what sort of martyr works in secret? Where’s the glory in that? So maybe it’s Al-Qaeda after all.
The doctors said we were upsetting the other patients. One has pancreatitis, toxic shock, and adenoid cancer. Another’s got renal failure. But it’s the plague that gets them down.
We brought Aggie home three nights after the von List social. She’s got blockages in two arteries and a bad valve. Surgery is out—she is eighty-four—which means we pin our hopes on blood thinners and diet.
I decide to share about her condition. Not because I think it will help, but maybe so that I can feel more a part of things. I have shredded a napkin to peas. There’s about twenty people here, but the peas are my audience.
I say, “My grandmother might die soon. She believes in reincarnation, so I guess she’s not too depressed. But I’m depressed. And I don’t know how to deal with depression except by taking drugs.”
Meanwhile, the subtext: I’m tired. Being a drug addict is the hardest job I have ever had. I should give up. I’m confused, I’m stuck, and I want. I want the person I love to love me back. I want to be a good member of society or, that failing, to not give a fuck. I want the courage to start from scratch in a place where I can walk outside and be happy. I want to not want any of these things because the instant I stop wanting is the instant I am free. I want a profession. I want a life.
“Also, at the end of a meeting the other day, someone told me to stop reading so much Kurt Vonnegut. What does that mean? I have no idea what that means. Thanks for letting me share.”
After, me and Ben, Phil, and Fran go out for dessert. Fran used to be a hooker in Cleveland. When she was still a minor, her parents had her tubes tied. I’m certain this is illegal, but then God knows what goes down in Cleveland. Ever since that river caught fire, the jury’s out, and frankly, I can think of few things more dissolute than a river so toxic it explodes.
The purpose of these outings, especially on a Friday night, is to recreate without drugs. To prove it can be done. We shuffle into a café and order two desserts each. This is vulgar in the extreme, but we are addicts, we cannot stop. Tonight we are destined for heartburn and nausea. I’m not even hungry.
Phil says his wife is pregnant again. The banter stops. Ben asks if he’s okay for money. He’s not. I ask if he’s okay with having to be responsible for yet another person, isn’t he afraid he’ll just run out on his family, don’t you need to love yourself before you can love a kid, and aren’t you setting yourself up for disaster by presuming the wherewithal to raise a kid when you’re really just a selfish and indolent junkie?
Fran’s an ex-hooker, Dirty Ben has tried, repeatedly, to stab his mother, Phil admits to drinking his own cum, and yet somehow I’m the freak among us. Next person to ask if I’m okay gets the boot.
“You okay?” Fran says.
I thump my forehead against the table.
They decide to leave it at that. Fran has upturned the sugar dispenser over her cup. I have never seen anyone put that much sugar in her coffee. She catches me staring and taps her teeth. They are shockingly white. “All fake,” she says, and winks. “Horrible to see Mark like that,” she says. “I remember keeping it together after 9/11 until Dan Rather lost it on Letterman. Guy’s supposed to be the strength of the nation. And there he was crying. Okay, so it wasn’t during a newscast, but still. I wasn’t afraid until that. And I wasn’t afraid of superplague until Mark.”
Dirty Ben takes the straw from his mouth. “What will we do, anyway? I mean, say this really does get out of hand, what are we supposed to do? Run away? Where?”
These questions are even worse than the fear. Because when you start posing practical questions to which there are no practical answers, you’ve lost your last recourse to sanity. So long as you’re just hyperventilating, you can always get a grip and sort things out. But when you realize you can’t sort things out, panic is all you got left. Panic qua religious fervor. Panic qua drug abuse.
“I’m gonna buy a mobile home,” Fran says. “I’m gonna put a disco ball in there and drive.”
Phil perks up. “I’m going to storm Alcatraz and make it my own. I hear the land out back is good for a vegetable or two.”
“To hell with that,” I say. “I’m gonna shoot, snort, and smoke every drug on the planet.”
“Good point,” Phil says.
The others agree, and for a second we are all lost to every addict’s fantasy, the binge without consequence.
“Course, a mobile disco isn’t bad, either,” I say.
“Who said anything about a disco? Just the ball. All I want is the ball.”
Outside, there’s rain. Or slush. Unseasonably cold is what they’re saying. I suppose the silver lining is that if it’s this cold, the earth can’t be warming at a pace likely to kill off mankind in a thousand years. If we don’t die now, we can be safe in the knowledge that we won’t die then.
Fran is headed uptown. Phil lives on the West Side. Ben and I will just have to hoof it together. We opt for the bus. The bus does not encourage talk, but unfortunately, the bus she
lter does.
“I’m worried about you,” he says.
“Why?”
He gives me a look that means: Even you can’t be this stupid.
“Okay, I’m sorry. But I’m fine.”
He turns away. I don’t know when this started to happen, but it seems the more I try to spare people my unhappiness, the more exasperated they get.
We step into the street to look for the bus. Two seconds in the rain and we’re drenched. “Are you getting out of the house?” he asks. “Are you seeing friends?”
Friends. What friends? I’ve been sleeping a lot. Should I tell him that? “Sure. I mean, sometimes. Movies and stuff.”
“You’re not really going back to the chicken place, are you?”
“Actually, I am. And I’m thinking of bringing Hannah.”
This, it seems, is too much for him. “Are you kidding? Good luck with that,” he says, and shakes his head because really, there’s a limit to what you can do.
Sixteen
“It’s for you,” Eric says, and gives the phone to Kam.
Three in the morning, and I am sad.
“Are you ever going to stop this?” Kam says. “Maybe we should have lunch. To talk it over.” Her voice sounds a little Vivien Leigh, circa 1940, where she can be asking for toast and still mean: I’m dying!
Kam says she’s going to hang up now. She might change her number. That she’s still my friend, but really.
I ask if anyone has contacted her about Alfred’s article. It won’t come out for ages, but maybe Eric finagled a draft.
