by Edie Meidav
“Okay.”
“So I’m saying unless you do more,” Hogan keeps right at her, “more than your deposition, whatever, your dad’s sizzling. Electric chair. Now they got him on suicide watch, you knew that?”
When had she given up the right to be left alone? It would be easier just to exit her skin, exit like the selkie in the stories she tells the boys, the seal-woman who gets to return to the cool friendly seas of childhood and belong to no one. No one’s daughter, mother or friend. Yet Hogan’s spareness spools her in, the eyes’ gloom and dented skull, the blurred tattoo of dots rising from the shirt, a scent of sex or risk making him seem an impatient man holding tight to method. He has stopped shucking to lean forward, eyes stilled. “What I was trying to say before.” He mumbles something that sounds like friends in the governor’s office.
“Look. Sorry.” She tries getting up. “Can’t you guys give me a break?”
“I said we’re not talking we guys.”
Below them, two paths below, rises Rose in broad sun-hat, up from the depths of the tepid pool, holding a ball. Should she go tackle Rose and beg her to go get more pills? Rose waves before faking a quick surprising pass back toward Tee, one that ends up straight for Sedge.
“This is about you getting to meet with someone close to the governor.” Hogan talks tightly, the words coming out from between his teeth. “Rose doesn’t know. Meet with the guy, that’s all. Sounds crazy but it’s how things work. I can tell who you are. Secretly you want to be good.”
“I’m sorry, how do you know this governor person?”
He grins as if this is enough of an answer.
She tries getting up. “It’s not like we all get eternal life.”
“But we do get opportunities.” Getting nothing, he changes tactic. “You have no idea. Your dad did me a favor, ma’am.”
“Oh. You were a shaggy.”
“Sorry?”
“You read his books once. Or saw him somewhere. Now you feel my dad holds a piece of your young self. Like a preservative. The idea of Vic keeps you young. I understand.”
He stands up to help with the crutches. “Way more than that. The guy changed me. It’s not like anyone else. He really spoke to me.”
“Yeah, right.” She looks off toward the hills. “But does that make me responsible for—” finally getting what Vic and his books have spawned, the shaggies like starving little orphan bastards, asymmetrical half-cretins wanting to space-lift her into their custody so they could conduct alien probes. The shaggies. Dirk. Especially Rose. Now Hogan.
“I’m saying, Lana Mahler, I could get you an audience with basically the pope.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s called the favor bank. We had a water situation in the county some years back? We managed to help out. Small things we did here and there. But you know, key electoral zones during the campaign? I mean we can’t share every detail but it came close.”
And she cannot keep from shivering. She doesn’t know what Hogan is talking about, the governor, his lackey or her father, water rights, votes, just that someone is owed something and now she stands in line to receive some payback, ostensibly the good kind.
“The guy’s a wizard. Works at the governor’s office. Behind the scenes like all the best.”
She manages to shrug his hand off, get control of the crutches, move toward the first step down and away.
“It won’t cost a thing. Just meet the guy, no promises. The guy’s a closer. I saw it when we did our desalination.” He follows her and unwillingly, as if hypnotized, she raises her hand to meet his high-five. “You’d be doing a good deed.”
She does not mean to whisper. “For who?”
“Whom.” He smiles as if he himself were some kind of super grammarian so creepy he could have been her very own dad.
TWENTIETH OF DECEMBER, 2008 8:32 P.M.
Lana asking Hogan: “You brought me here?” about this nowhere bar on the lip of nowhere.
“You’ll see. How’s the leg? Let me meet you on the other side.”
She is tired of the solicitude of others, a trait that seems to show up mostly when people need something because, from what she can tell, this is the quid-pro-quo fine print unfurled at the bottom of the social contract.
Right now what is needed is that she meet with some wizard but on the way to the meeting, Hogan has brought her to a bar, or maybe this pit stop is the destination, all recalling that unfortunate rape moment in Greece when two men had saturated her and Rose with ouzo at a pilgrim’s progress of bars until the men turned rageful at the girls’ refusal.
That said, in this moment it is not uncomfortable to ride in a truck with Hogan: the rebellion feels necessary, a flip of the finger at Rose and her idea about how Lana should behave, as an old friend or daughter, even as a mother, Rose with that particular non-mother vantage, one among the long parade of women who have acted as if Lana’s mothering is supposed to be a constant game of structured bedtimes interrupted only by balloons, ginger snaps and intermittent zenlike perceptions by fascinating, well-coiffed, unsalivating children.
After eight on a Sunday night, her boys are installed in the Hope cinema with Dirk’s supplicants and the judgments of Rose, destroying their minds by watching a movie starring sword-wielding wizards, good for at least three hours of mind occupation until the last phase of the anniversary celebrations starts at the hour determined by the exact second of the moon’s ascension, an auspicious augury that will bless all participants for at least the next thirty-three years.
Who cares about any of that, I really am a bad mother, she tells herself inside Hogan’s truck as he comes around to help her out.
“Sorry, didn’t hear what you said?” he says.
“Nothing really,” annoyed to sound so peevish, childlike. Where’s the wisdom? as Rose had asked her that morning, what do you think you’ve learned since our Lola days?
“Okay.” Hogan’s grin again. “Why so worried?”
“I am?” smiling, as ever, under a fib.
Inside the bar, its sole customer is a man who in profile could have been anyone but who, when facing her, emits either unknowability or fame, somewhat like Vic who had taught her that fame makes someone easiest to enter only through a sideways glance, though Vic himself had stayed best known in a frontal shot, somewhere in his late thirties, taken in a second when he had looked roguelike up from the Spruce Street desk. Perhaps it had been Mary who caught him for posterity, his smile devious, this forelocked image of him staying the favorite likeness of the Mahler mystique, airbrushed like Che, Fidel, Mandela or Marley onto shaggies’ T-shirts and even, she had seen, tattooed onto chests, arms, legs.
Famous or unfamous, in the bar, this bronzed fellow looks straight through her, impenetrable himself. He raises his drink as if for a toast. “Now, Hogan,” he says, mock annoyed. “You never told me your friend’s cute.”
“Jim. This is Mahler’s daughter.”
She watches Hogan, a chameleon, assume a new aspect. People do this, shed skins so rapidly it becomes beautiful, a magic trick you could see as a child and call neat. Hogan’s skin glows under the light, his eye sockets deep bulletholes.
“Office might have been better for us meeting,” says Jim.
“Thought you’d want something less formal. Lana here’s not your everyday gal.”
“I see. Sit by me.” When she complies, Jim’s grin twists. “So. Who’s your favorite team?”
At first she thinks he must be speaking code so tries acing it. “I’m for whatever’s better around the next bend.”
“Then you’re a Cubs girl? Must be a Cubs fan! Those guys haven’t won a World Series in a hundred years!”
“You mean the Cardinals?” says Hogan but the man ignores him.
“So,” smiling, as if going in for a broad Sinatra seduction, the smile one with his cologne, saying: “Think your dad’s crazy?”
“I wouldn’t call him that. Not all the way.”
“But t
he governor should pull the plug?”
“That’s my decision?”
“This one’s a tough nut.” The man looks over at Hogan, coughs. “You’re really his daughter? Why’d you come anyway?” he asks, not waiting. “You know, I’d like to—”
“Hogan said I should.” She tries to find a more important answer and locks weirdly into her asylum self, a sincere young girl. “He said you’re important. That you could help.”
This man stares before pushing her to have a Sunset, the drink so sweet it makes her gag but in her new mood she is dutiful in sucking it down. When the man gets up to use the men’s room, Hogan nudges her. “Why hold back so much?”
“You want me to tell this guy the truth?”
Hogan rolls water around in his mouth, appreciative as if it were fine wine. “What would you say anyway? What would your friend Rose advise you to do?”
“She’d say whatever she keeps saying. I mean I can barely keep her from making it on some prison cot with my dad.”
“Ouch. Drink makes you mean?”
“No,” lying again, numbness filtering in over remorseful meanness, branches of seaweed atop her skin, rubbing her bones, “it’s not drink, just I lost my old optimism, you know?”
When the man gets back to their table she aims for politeness again. “Must be great to have the state, I mean all the laws, behind you.”
“It has its days.” The man’s smile boyish, almost a smirk.
“You feel you know the lives of the people? The ones you govern, I mean you feel you’re looking down at a big anthill?” She wants to understand something about this smooth cowboy and smoother man-lizard, make at least some meaning from this night, because maybe something here could move and someone’s pain could be eased, though probably too late for much easing of anything, not when she had already made too many mistakes, coming tonight one of them, wishing instead she could exit like the bad witch through a hole in the floor.
“Lady, who do I know? Not even this thug over here,” waving at Hogan. “He’s okay. But who ever knows anyone?” When the idea lands with a thud, he seeks some rectification. “Glad to meet you though. The Mahler case is closing. In a matter of minutes. Days.”
“But why does everyone care how little time Vic Mahler has left?” Her palm sweeps Hogan’s glass off the table, making him duck down to mop up the spill. “Just does anyone even care how long, for example, my mom has been gone?” It is as if Lana is talking about herself as a lifelong orphan: tears come forth at the idea of a girl entering the world motherless. She wishes, right then, that someone would still call her Jinga.
“So what you want,” and the bronze wizard too caroms one hand off the other, a vertical slippage, “is for everything to go?” The slide of his hands echoes in her head, an eidetic blur: go go go.
“Not like I believe in taking anyone’s life.”
The man looks back, face so smooth all contact slides off, his eyes unblinking. “You and I should have met in some other zone. We could have said lots to each other.”
“You think?” bobbing her head into the second drink he has ordered.
“Plus you blush and raise your eyebrows like a French girl does.”
Now she knows things will work out whichever way she chooses, just as she is capable of seeing energy moving in a basketball game and predicting its end, just as her boys play with trains and with exquisite knowledge can switch tracks right as the other’s engine tumbles down the ramp.
The sword hangs over her and she could choose for or against Vic. Tonight Mary feels so present that her very hands seem to belong to her mother. She waves them before her, long brown hands, trying to keep from total dissociation, some coquettish laugh not her own slipping out.
By evening’s end she manages to avoid speaking one way or another about Vic. Even when Hogan presses, glaring, she says nothing decisive about Vic’s insanity or her willingness to come forward or anything that would lube whatever Hogan wants her to lube. All of them seem lined up before her, the governor, the wizard, the pope, all the lackeys of the world awaiting the nod that will let them go with easy conscience into Vic’s camp.
As they back out, Hogan takes one minute exactly to explain how thoroughly Lana has failed before he tries making a deeper point before sinking into a silence of pure frustration. Though he can’t hold back. Once on the highway, he talks about the new legislation coming up, the referendum and how much she could have done. “I don’t get you. It’s like you beg to be housebroken or god knows.”
“What do you mean?” Despite herself she is interested in some new form of torture opening up.
“You act as if you’re hiding something.”
“Did you ever really stop to ask whether I wanted this thing?” she says. And when the after-ripple makes no sense she adds: “I just can’t take it.”
Twenty miles later she tells him he’s the one who needs to be housebroken, what, how could he expect her to be happy about all this?
“Well,” he grumbles. “You’ll get to go to that anniversary celebration at Hope anyway.”
“I don’t know.”
“Your guy’s leading it. Dirk. His trance bit.”
“You’re going?”
“You’d never catch me there. But it could be just the thing. Help ease your conscience. Sorry. But I think I should check out of you Mahlers now. For the most part I mean.” He smiles in the half-dark. “I mean you’re cool, I can tell you are, all that, but for now maybe I’ll just leave everything to your friend Rosie. Now that lady, she is dynamite. Unstoppable.”
TWENTIETH OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:27 P.M.
An eye: it is a giant glowing human eye. Except that when it blinks, up pop new naked bodies, bathed in a light that turns skin every monochromatic hue from alabaster to dark purple, naked shoulders among shoulders. The eye as organism, made up of bodies of light, some bodies sitting and disappearing in unison, others popping. One group of people patiently, nakedly holding hands around the mass of the pupil, the ringbearers, guardians of the eye and its core, while inside the circle, more bodies continue to pop up only to disappear down, never still, all part of one organism scratching and stretching, the human race in its glory, microbes of light leaping from one outstretched hand to another’s shoulder, all sharing in phosphorescence. At the center stands Dirk, one more naked body directing traffic with his arms, the holy sitters and poppers.
Or this is the vision the girls share, knees hugged close far above the core, two girls seated on a ridge above the cherry-tree platform where the old tree tonight plays witness to the mass of light-covered bodies in the dark.
Someone had given the girls a drink of estorahuasca, the shamanic drink lyric poets must drink from a wooden bowl as the man—the computer millionaire—had intoned with a fake British accent as they looked at each other, giggling with the most delicious sincerity before sipping from the communal bowl. Together they took a plunge, together for the first time since they refound each other, here at midlife going for a leap.
I know this sounds crazy but I know what all those minds are thinking—
—and our awareness is higher than all theirs, Lana finishes her sentence.
Though it doesn’t matter whether they spoke or whether they just share the thought while continuing to gaze at the spectacular vision of some two hundred bodies groping, moving, rising attuned to a drumbeat or whether the girls happen to gaze into one eye or the other in the desert night, since the great eye holds them, unblinking, always moving but also the same shape so who cares if they are special since they are also part of humanity, interdependent, connected with the eye and its bodies, the eye excluding nothing, no bad or good, no special past or future.
Could it be more perfect? Rose doesn’t have to say a thing because between Lana and her lives an understanding sheer and electric.
Next morning, blood thumping, Lana does not remember the exact steps they took that led them to leave watching the great eye-dance though she does remember
hitch-poking with Rose up to the dark of Rose’s room. Sometimes they had been holding hands at point B but then had been still walking back at point A until they got shutter-framed into C, time a full illusion, and then Lana had actually tucked Rose into bed, Rose grateful like a girl-kitten gazing with sleepy love up at her one true mother. In Rose’s room Lana had sat for a long time, rocking while the estorahuasca started to wear off. She rocked in a rustic wooden granny chair so she could watch Rose sleep truly as a mother would, loving the way her friend’s lips parted and her cheeks were so soft, peaceful, Rose’s ease of conscience palpable.
As the drug started to evaporate like tiny particles popping off in morning light, Lana’s shin began to throb and there was only a grease-smeared empty pill bottle to be found in the bottom of her purse. The slackness of Rose’s face became grating enough that Lana wanted to shake her friend, to wake her and talk off every single injustice. Lana could have had more of a right to a normal life and this is partly what she wants to tell Rose though how to start?
2001–2006
In many ways Lana was more imperfect than most.
For one thing, when she came back to her fiancé after nine months away—I went traveling, she said, I worked up north at the organic farm with my friend—when she came back toting twins with her, skin darker than his, she didn’t tell him certain facts.
While she knew Kip was hardly averse to life’s criminal stain, a man with his own attraction to crime, she preferred to bear the secret within. As if it were a substitute for pregnancy, her secret could almost equal an implantation and gestation.
You never told me you were pregnant when you left, said Kip.
And never had she ever told him how much she wanted a baby. Something of her own, sweet and tender with doe eyes. This had started to become a priority. Months prior to her departure she had seduced him. Later as a test of her own fertility, she’d even seduced one of his surfer friends, followed by a treesitter no local knew. To everyone she lied, saying she took the pill, but privately she’d come to the conclusion that all those abortions had rendered her infertile or worse, that during her hospital time, while she’d been under sedation, they had stolen her womb, prime evidence being that it had never again produced any blood and she now had some kind of alien womb, her punishment by an unfair justice, the non-irony being that she noted this bloodlessness just as she turned ready for a life swelling inside, wanting to play mother to some kid.
