Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Pen poised, lips working, Vic trembles on his cot. Today his stomach is a glacier. His knees are bent to make a desktop but unfortunately also let him regard the scare of his horned toenails, ten yellow dragonheads poking up from under a scratchy horse blanket. The meds he is on must be freezing his innards but the only thing he can explore is a final solution to an ingrown nail: he will request a hygiene session.

  Today he had received a letter from that girl Rose. She has been asking him to do something and again he tries remembering why it is important but his first hallucination upon waking, maybe due to the new sleeping meds, had been bad, coloring all. A youthful friend had been instructing him how to encapsulate a worm that could destroy all humanity. Though Vic still had one more worm to put into a capsule, his friend had vanished, with Vic lacking final instructions and the worm still writhing in his hand: humanity could be destroyed.

  This second, Vic doesn’t quite have the strength to get up and go across the cell to where Rose’s letter, a distraction, lies on the food tray.

  Javier peeks his head sideways in the food slot. “Legend.”

  “Boss,” says Vic, alert to the possibility of repartee. “Do nails continue to grow after death?” His short-term memory might be shot but by now he could have gotten a degree in how to speak to Javier. Perhaps had he known how to speak in such a joking way on the outside, he would never have landed inside. Jocular, he should have been more jocular, his wife would have been kinder, he would have never done what he did and all would be better.

  “Don’t worry about that stuff. Everything okay?”

  “Could use another blanket,” says Vic. “But I have good news.”

  “Don’t hold back.”

  “Hitler committed suicide.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  The silence is awkward even for Vic. “You are a polite man,” says Vic finally.

  For all that Vic’s mind has forgotten and continues to forget, an inconstant friend, sometimes all too present and then completely unfindable, hidden in fog, he does find it easy to remember the basic contours of Javier who said he had acted out the poetry-loving strain from his mother’s side and who keeps reminding Vic that, early on, Javier had hit night-class books hard enough to get a scholarship to a fancy school in Southern California. After one of his father’s brothers was taken away for graft, he had decided to finish in criminal justice. Poetic justice, Vic had said.

  On days he remembers that Javier has a teenage daughter, Vic finds it hard to believe the guy raises her on his own and when he forgets the details of Javier’s family, which does happen, he remembers to try to disguise it, because he knows this thing, family, is important to Javier, in many ways still a young boy. Vic likes the way this guard chews his lower lip when discussing the philosophy he’d studied in one survey class, drawing Vic out, asking questions like: “So what do you think is the ultimate in personal freedom?”

  Vic sometimes goes with these questions and sometimes must cut to the quick, killing off old-time topics that had interested him by answering with his jailed tongue: “Murder. Murder is the ultimate.”

  And to compensate for memory loss, Vic thinks he has developed x-ray vision into what—because he had never believed in the idea of the soul—he calls people’s intentions. The x-ray vision tells him that however much Javier might use Vic to sharpen his own waylaid promise, something the shaggies used to do, Javier also has pure intentions.

  “Worry is a luxury,” Vic tells the slot where no one stands now.

  He fingers his pen, the kind you can’t chew or take apart. He still prefers the medical defense which is to say that, in committing his bad act, his body, rather than his mind, had failed. Yet does this make him wish to plead insanity as one lawyer had insinuated? No, it does not. He will not do what they want. They will not get him to surrender that much hold.

  Once he had a self, one with the shadow of repute, proof being the letters he gets from oldtime shaggies. He opens these notes fervently, often wishing he could recall the sender’s name. He then reads carelessly before using the letter-paper to sculpt, with slow dabs of water, elaborate figurines, all as if commissioned by some prison Medici. He then sets these figurines on his shelf, beautiful writhing naked paper ladies, bits of handwritten text over them ethereal and veiled. He has even written poems about the ladies he has constructed, lending them names: Medusa, Ophelia, Philomena. Today, however, his ladies leer, their breasts effulgent and impervious and if his pen is in his hand, it has nothing to say, obstinate given that Vic knows the final date is approaching.

  In a pique, Vic throws the offender, his pen, to the ground.

  Some time later, Javier returns, smiling through the food slot’s grille plate, its diamond etchings well memorized. “What happened? You’re okay, boss?”

  “Hokay,” says Vic, speaking prison repartee.

  “You look like you just collapsed on the floor,” says Javier.

  “We’re having a party. Does that go against protocol?” says Vic, the unjoke not for his own benefit since, the more he nears his own end, his intermediate goal has become this wish to relieve others of self-condemnation. Such jokiness could be a penance, a small good performed for Javier who still makes it seem the world might care a little about Vic Mahler.

  “You and I are symbiotic,” says Vic. “No parasites here.”

  “You need help?” asks Javier.

  “Couldn’t be happier,” says Vic from the floor where the cold on his rear pricks him alive. In this second it is true. He is happy that, for this second, he has delayed the cessation of the fluctuation of the senses.

  Once Javier leaves, Vic considers whether it was just an end he had wanted. An end might be the ultimate in freedom. Though perhaps—the fog creeping in, he cannot quite locate the thought—this might contradict everything he had ever said.

  “You wanted closure,” a banal prison psychologist had once told Vic.

  “No!” Vic had corrected the good doctor. “Not closure. I wanted a tunnel. I wanted to know—after a lifetime of writing—what it means to live in existential untenability.”

  The psychologist had tsked, saying: “Too intellectual, Vic.”

  Then again, wasn’t being a cuckold equivalent to becoming an involuntary mute? No one cares to hear your side as your story undoes their own couplings, sympathy always running secretly toward the adulterer: there must have been a reason for the infidelity, listeners think.

  Someone more metaphysical might say that his foundations had been shaken, both ontological and epistemological. Because hadn’t he known Mary down to every nervous tic, down to her quick glance around the room after she’d made her own kind of joke? When Mary used to serve dinner, he had liked the shine off her cheekbones, a reassurance that mortality would not make vast inroads. When she had relaxed into clean sheets at night, she let out a little sigh. He knew these things about her. No, he had collected them, an archaeologist of matrimony. Her customs would not change and she would keep him constant. Mornings, she arched into a stretch. This knowledge of her he had gained, a baby jealous for footing, each step a claim over the unknown.

  From the letter to the spirit. The hidden meaning of the body is the spirit; but the spirit is not the ghost but life itself; not the soul or psyche but the breath of life, the creator spirit.

  And then it turned out his writing and knowledge was for nothing as none of it helped: her treachery had made him question anything he thought he knew about anything, any person, himself.

  Later, in the folds of time he had to reflect, playing chess, reading, staring, crafting paper women, he recalled that his own writings would have said that the neural track toward tribal affiliation and loyalty had been overwritten, in Mary’s case, by the illusion of choice, but these words felt hollow, more like archaeological crumblings, relics of another Vic who used to believe himself.

  The crucified body, the crucified mind. The norm is not normality but schizophrenia, the split, broken, crucified m
ind. “If we throw a crystal to the ground, it breaks but it does not break haphazard: in accordance with the lines of cleavage it falls into fragments where limits were already determined by the structure of the crystal, although they were invisible. Psychotics are fissured and splintered structures such as these. We cannot deny them a measure of that awe which madmen were regarded by the people of ancient times.” Split the stick and there is Jesus.

  Choice versus birthright: what had he ever had to tell anyone? His enumerations, if you boiled them down, had concerned two ideas. The first had to do with a nuance about the firing threshold in the brain. Vic had been the first to depict choice and birthright as a Krishna and Arjuna doomed to mortal play in the synaptic field, Vic the first to be less deterministic than those who divide the brain into three distinct zones, one of the first to champion neural plasticity and yet also one of the few to have read Freud and Jung as if they were simultaneously folk mythologists and peer scientists, making Vic one of the few scientifically trained citizens of California to speak, in the middle of the twentieth century, of fate, destiny, kismet.

  Heroic individualism is identification with ancestors in a new space and a new time: the new space is the public realm; the new time is history.

  And here he has stepped out onto the stage, lights on, no longer an announcer of battles but his own combatant. What no one understands is that he had fought for his own light. No one would see him as brave but in his penchant for eye-for-eye justice, hadn’t he been trying to grasp some higher truth on the other side of Mary?

  Here is the fall: the distinction between “good” and “bad,” between “mine” and “thine,” between “me” and “thee” (or “it”), come all together—boundaries between persons; boundaries between properties; and the polarity of love and hate.

  What he said in that first court appearance did concern his loyalty. He had told them that, simply, the wrong cluster of neurons had fired.

  Perforce “he,” “Vic,” a ramshackle collection of urge and memory, had carried out a command, one dictated fully by his gut, and there had been no choice, this confession buttressed, at least in part, by his lifetime’s work. He had made an entire career out of telling people that the neural network was a series of pinball levers but that you could merge archetypal determinism with metaphysical choice via physical intention, which his shaggies chose to read as an edict to follow their bliss, whether straight or circumflex, theirs not wholly an incorrect reading given Vic’s contradictory love of neural plasticity, Vic having told them the quest itself could eventually rework the levers and craft new tracks.

  Stretch yourself to the breaking point. It is not true unless it hurts; the evidence is martyrdom. “All truths are bloody truths for me.” We do not know the truth because we repress it; and we repress it because it is painful.

  Make our species wiser, have your choices act as evolutionary selection factors, but never, ever believe you create your reality, the one thought he forever abhorred, calling it a hubristic shame. At least, however, Vic offered this: a person could embrace the reality principle and make strong choices. In his case, the reality principle had appeared one February day as a mixed-up shooting spree of firing neurons.

  Chop me up, he told the jury, throw my gut in prison. From the frozen masks the panel turned his way, he saw his faux pas. No one liked his forced humor. Worse, no one recognized the part of him that did wish to be chopped up, to have pure revenge visited on his head so that he might join with Mary, a disassembled pharaoh returned to his queen.

  No, the faces of the jury would grant no reprieve, their neurons those of rigid absolutists, thrilled to doom anyone daring to challenge their categories.

  Self-defense, he said, finally and lamely.

  At this point, no one believed the jokester. And anyway, no punishment they could have given him would have cleansed him of her question, the one that had sprayed him as much as her blood, a defilement.

  In her last moments, she had asked have you taken leave of your senses?

  Exactly right. That was it. He had taken leave.

  His punishment being, now, that little of his prior self remained. His act had orphaned him all over, leaving him with both no sensibility and a legacy hard to locate.

  For years his own self had been up for question and there is little anyone, not even a guard with talents in the field of repartee, can do to shore up a foundering self.

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:04 P.M.

  Vic either wakes from a dream that has pulled him as if he were chattel behind a team of wild horses or else returns to a dream in which he is asking a guard named Javier: “What is the meaning of life?”

  Javier’s face is somber in the half-dark, helping Vic reattach the catheter to his penis. “To appreciate every moment.”

  “But who is it for? Especially when someone’s getting paid to empty my urinal.”

  Javier must have spent enough time in churchly vales for his answers to carry their scent. Vic loves this about the man: he is good at looking at Vic’s eyes before, during and after moments when humiliating security or medical procedures must be followed. He had once told Vic that his training had included a chapter entitled “Preservation of Inmate Dignity,” one stressing the importance and use of eye contact. “How can any one of us know the meaning of life?” the guard says to his inmate now, gaze unflinching.

  “But you know. Or you have something you tell yourself at any rate.”

  “Okay, maybe something about not chasing rainbows?”

  “Don’t get cryptic.”

  “Well, my priest says everything worldly is an illusion.”

  “Even more cryptic. You must be some kind of Buddhist Unitarian?”

  “Catholic.”

  “But you’re a Californian Catholic. You’re throwing religion at me when you know I’m hardly a fan. Plus your priest sounds as if someone mixed him with cornstarch.”

  “What?”

  “Everything gets mixed up here.”

  “What I’m saying is we get older, right?” Javier is sanitizing Vic’s hands with alcohol gel. “Then let’s say you were like, let’s say, I thought I was some big guy on the block, that’s exactly the thing you have to put on the fire. Surrender. My old ideas. Say you thought you were super-dignified. You get older and have to throw your mightiness out the window. Then there’s accepting the unknown.”

  “Now you’re feeding me new age treacle.”

  “No, whatever that is, I’m just saying no one gets to be a war hero all the time. Take my second cousin Daniel. He came home from Iraq and—”

  “But who cares if we get more time? Why bother getting more beads on the necklace? Why care if we die at eighty-one instead of at seventy-seven or forty-two? Who cares if you get three moments instead of just one?”

  “You think there’s no meaning.”

  “In this moment, talking to you, I say we could say there’s meaning. Except for the urinal. But what’s the meaning of meaning?”

  “You were the one who once told me meaning is doubleness. Remember? You said it’s two things rubbing up against each other.”

  Vic has nothing to retort to his old self who seems to have been able to opine more freely so Javier perseveres. “No one else gives someone reason to live. You got to find it yourself.”

  “You know you’re the first person in my life to talk to me?”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “You talk and you have nothing to gain. You’re not trying to get anything from me. Not wanting to patch up some hole in your psyche or get me to tell you you’re great. Sometimes I think I came to prison just to meet you. Did I tell you our talks are better than what I used to share with my wife?”

  Now it is Javier who shivers.

  “I’m saying you surprise me.”

  The guard lets this coast into the deep black next to the cell, a yawning space he always looks toward as if it holds all shreds of conversations not to be followed to their end. “Anythi
ng else I can get you?”

  “On bookshelves are books I’ve written. But I have no purpose.”

  “You have no idea the ripples. You have no idea how your books could help some person. Some lonely kid. Some lady in Idaho. Maybe someone reads something and their life gets a little better.” He waits. “I never told you my story.” No question comes; Vic must be depressed. Javier glances at the camera that watches them always, making a gamble that the other guard, the noontime guy, has the sound down low, but first he must empty the urinal before he can return, this time outside the bars. “You ready for some singing?”

  He begins with the quiet song in Spanish that Vic has told him he likes, the one for which he had once written the words for Vic—de colores, los amores le gustan los colores le gustan a mí—but his charge is in no mood to sing, his breath too weak, throat too sore, only his tongue moving inside that mouth like parrot’s gullet. Though Javier knows Vic likes music because he’d once told Javier that even the most banal song has a longing, the one outside noise he really misses, the way he used to feel when he was, say, pressing grapes, the oak handle callousing his hands during some long-ago, suppressed second on a beach with Mary while watching his daughter play violin—