Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Lana looks toward the burnt hills across the highway. “You know what? This will make you happy. I am going to try to meet with my dad after all.”

  “Great.” Rose still on automatic. “He’ll love that. But you know it doesn’t matter now.”

  Her friend stares back.

  “What you did. You can’t exactly testify.” With no more to say, having used up all their possibilities. “Actually Lana, keep the book. It should be yours.”

  Lana looks at it, beaming for a second, seemingly glad to feel generous in thrusting it back. “No Rosie, you made it. Come on, take it with you.”

  As Lana watches her friend pull out the driveway, car weighted down, headed toward the southern on-ramp of Highway Five, she hums her own half-fairytale: she’ll be back, she’ll be back.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:14 A.M.

  Sedge is trying to convince Tee of the reality of the need.

  “BON-kers, man,” says Tee, a direct quotation of some adult somebody from TV or not. “That’s straight out wack.”

  Sedge doesn’t point out how direct the mission could be given that it is too important to convince Tee of the main point. His space robot Lestrion has come to Sedge and told him the need. Should the twins falter, they are done for.

  The task is this: aliens have elected them to tie up Dirk. This is the essential part. Tie Dirk up with a length of frayed orange cord marked 200 amp, the one they found yesterday on the refuse pile out behind the reptile cemetery.

  And though Sedge doesn’t really want to let on to Tee the origin of the information he has received, he knows one part of convincing Tee lies in divulging sources. His vision had come just the way that he’d heard adults in hot tubs up north say they get visions on seven-day desert quests when all they get to eat in their tents is a single fig a day. Sedge’s vision, asleep the night of the trance dance, had seen Dirk gagged and bound and their mother liberated of her hobble, rushing with them in a car toward where? A water playland amid this hot desert with slides and pools. After which they’d return to a normal house on a block with fences, lawns, helmets and bikes, convenient playgrounds, monthly menus of the kind of food too long suppressed in their childhoods, both in Yalina and here at Hope, cheeseburgers and popcorn chicken and tacos at a school cafeteria, a paradise of normal.

  On this normalcy question Sedge feels himself one hundred percent aligned with their mother. They’d go somewhere he’d guessed about, have fireman friends, someplace he has glimpsed on verboten television where franks and marshmallows get toasted over perfect campfires. In this place you kick Halloween leaves in thick clusters and a kid gets to be mediocre and play paintball and though he can’t quite say it, he knows his mother has been on the wrong track with the wrong people, especially men. Only he and Lestrion know how to liberate her.

  “If we don’t do this some other guy could capture her,” is what Sedge squeaks now to Tee in his special-agent urgent voice, knowing the force of illogic can trump all.

  Probably it has distressed Sedge more than Tee to see their mother so fallen, taken with someone they know could never be any kind of father, this Dirkster guy, and probably it has distressed his space robot Lestrion even more than Sedge, though Sedge was disturbed for sure. Seeing her fall for huckster Dirk had made him feel as if someone was slowly amputating parts of his body—his neck, his shins—with a cleaver determined to hack apart any real future for their family. This is why binding seems just retribution, better than the other ideas Sedge and Lestrion had entertained. As he had heard the Dirkster tell their mother only two nights ago, bind what you don’t like, release what you do.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:58 P.M.

  In the never-dark of the prison’s incandescence, Vic considers confines and stumbles. The cell’s walls echo the birth into selfhood. There you go, he thought. Leave the dark of the womb and you enter blaring existence, locked into the self’s skin. How much freer to be stripped of skin and cell, to exorcise envy of air, to embrace the protoplasmic, evaporate into ether and enter the easeful embrace.

  He cannot decide whether it is real or not that all night they have been pouring cement into the boundary wall between his otherwise empty cell block and the rest of the world, trying to get him into a crypt and slowly block off his air, the cement made of pulverized dust from native skeletons unearthed by archaeological digs. On the other side of the wall, Javier is having sex with multiple partners and ignoring the simple buzzer request Vic keeps making.

  Someone inside his chest is talking about choice. Saying that choosing to die would outwit everyone else’s game and would be understood in the right way, not as an adolescent rebellion against a system that had swindled him, not as a case study of a psyche gone wrong but as a true declaration of independence.

  And yet could there be a devil working the world, someone who would insert such a charter in his head, who with private lapses had dreamed up the Christmas cookies offered in the max-security prison, leaving for other devils tricks of refinement: the panopticon and chicken-wire, the bullhorn and shower, solitary confinement relieved only by an hour a day in the dog-pen, the insidious libertine luxury of prisoner Web sites, the alarms during which he must drop to one knee.

  Has Vic not relied on at least one constant? His self or that habitual selfish way of seeing the world, the constancy a granter of the mortal, satisfying illusion of permanence, letting a person vault over any irregularities whether they be orphanhood or emigrancy, success or imprisonment.

  A flash of his daughter and her friend: once on horseback for Lana’s birthday on the beach they had answered, after he riddled them about whether they showed the customary female streak of competition that they lacked selfishness in their friendship because they were in it together and for the long haul, linked in endless generosity of the spirit.

  It doesn’t matter where she ends and I begin, his daughter had said, this is one thing I know for sure, we’re together forever.

  And he might have wished he could have known at least once in life something like this friendship but also thinks such an ideal might have been born of the Romantics if not the Sufis before them, all of it dying in a blaze near the middle of the twentieth century, somewhere within the troika sustained by the war, Stalin, McCarthy, that precious foolish period when cars became smooth as women and he had come to America hoping foolishly for perfect union, the possibility of his self transcending all its prior cages, a Lebensraum for his one self, giving him rope enough to hang himself.

  The twenty-first century, lost in it, that’s what keeps him pressing the buzzer, it would be wonderful to talk any of this over with Javier if only the guard could be pried loose from the clawlike, sore-ridden legs of multiple sex partners, Vic’s guard and ally engaging in twenty-first-century coitus in a nation thinking itself a copulative empire in a state the coital apotheosis of the American dream in the coital zone of the state that is itself the coital zenith of coitus trying to annex everything while Vic must lie stationed in a solitary anticoital cell which stands for all the ways prisoner #4267 or whatever his number is, he can’t recall, has been tricked by everyone else’s peaks. Too dark. At the peak you topple. This may be Vic’s first truly clear thought in at least half an hour or maybe a day and night.

  As a surfer, he used to wait for the ocean’s strength to return.

  You wait and it comes back so that next morning his strength comes back tidal, leaving him a clear-thinking man again. Javier has been able to undo the cement wall and has showered all the love juice off.

  “Sure you want to do this?” Javier asks, hair oiled slick.

  “I’m not the one making the choice.” Vic’s pen over the form, signing for NO APPEAL, NO STAY.

  “Your lawyer will want to talk to you about this.”

  “Please. That joke. Don’t I have only a couple of days left anyway? Whatever the appeal is, it’s out of my control. If it’s going to fail, which may be the case, I’d rather spend my last days not bei
ng uncertain. Three more days on my own say-so with carte blanche to think whatever I want.”

  “Five.”

  “Fine. Please allow me to go lawyerless into the masses. I need wider berth.”

  When Javier presses him on this, Vic wants to explain but again his tongue falls dead, a slug. It is that he wants the saltwater wash that will induce ultimate conductivity, the electric calipers a surrender of the charades everyone likes to play. No more letters sent to various helpers and lawyers. No more attempts to get a college degree by studying old pre-college exambooks:

  blood is to life as

  a) rules

  b) edicts

  c) legacy

  is to institution

  And might there not be an ecstasy at the exact border between life and non-life when the self gets to release into the great vacuity, or the great buckwheaty as Vic’s Bolivian mentor from old surfing days used to call it?

  The mind as it had been constituted encounters the mind that cannot be and finally gets the ultimate chance at freedom.

  And yet as Javier helps him this morning to the shower block, the light slants with such gorgeous specificity into Cell Block A it almost makes a person want to keep living.

  “Hallelujah,” whispers Vic.

  “Pardon?” asks Javier. “Today you want liquid soap or a bar?”

  Vic will not give them what they need.

  For one, this being one of many topics for which he lacks time enough with Javier to discuss: no one will get the succor of thinking they serve a perfect last meal.

  The hypocrisy galls.

  These are my last hours, he tells the rain of water in autocratic tones, imperial in knowing Javier won’t hear, manning the controls and politely averting his gaze, allowing another male his skinny dignity, interrupting only to ask: what, hotter? You’d like it hotter?

  Somewhere in these few days his peace with a good decision will be marred only by an unsettling video apparition, though he cannot tell whether he has hallucinated Rose Lemm, his daughter’s old friend: he remembered her as having an appealing bruisability and this specter would have softness only between her legs. If this was a waking dream, then so be it, he must be certifiably crazy. If it is real, in the parlance of the few prisoners he has come to know, this is a true mindfuck.

  An odd fellow had come with Rose, a fellow who seems to at least know Javier, producing for him not his daughter but this Rose, a girl who says she has been writing letters and sending science magazines for years. She talks from a remote screen, engineered by Javier, so conceivably could this not all be a cruel hoax? Even Javier might be out to get Vic. Like their inmates, wouldn’t guards be prone to lapses, drawn to the same vaporous line between good and evil?

  Or has Vic forgotten so much? If only he could define the contours of his amnesia, he’d be in the clear.

  To the video apparatus, deciding he has little embarrassment to lose, right before the video shimmers shut, he croaks: “Get me to see my daughter.”

  The jolliest of guards could have the greatest number of secret deals going on. This must be only forty percent Vic’s paranoia, however unverifiable by outside source. Now he debates whether this had in fact been a dream. I just want to see my daughter, he tells his solitary cell walls, lying down between the rough sheets, showered and clean as a lamb.

  A mindfuck indeed. At first he’d taken this twitching apparition named Rose to be his own daughter, his Mopsy.

  Among the vital leftovers colonizing at least a few synapses is his little girl—he cannot remember if his daughter had ever visited him here in this place but what he does remember is Mopsy swinging on a hammock saying something about pineapple. What he wouldn’t give to smell such a fruit.

  Maybe only this last year he’d begun to forget even what ammonia meant when he was first brought here, the scent that used to raise all scents, better and more appealing, even sweat on a guard’s uniform or on a fellow inmate’s body after a basketball game. To combat ammonia Vic used to train his nose to understand degrees of mildew, a spectrum running from the warmth of old underwear all the way toward rained-on cat. And now even ammonia smells friendlier than the acids excreted by his own pill-gagged body, and while his nose deceives him, still his fingers carry the memory of stroking his girl’s little dry elbow, her banana scent, head leaned against his shoulder, her length apparent even back then in her stretched-out bones. He can feel the elbow as if he’d touched it only two hours ago.

  In a parallel universe lives a room of last touches in which he still strokes his daughter’s arm before a father had to start pushing a daughter away.

  In a crypt as in the crib, what you have left is this: embracing nothingness, embracing whatever nothing led to whatever act had led to yet another greater nothing. NO APPEAL, NO STAY fits him better than anyone else’s sentence, the syllables themselves tallying nicely into a Yankee Doodle Dandy he sings, one more attempt at an endlessly self-propulsive lullaby. When has anyone before him ever found the grandeur to proclaim to a lover no appeal?

  If he could just will spontaneous combustion, he would have found an ultimate trick, able to make his life take on perfect annularity, the shape of a marriage ring.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:12 P.M.

  “C’mon, this is our moment,” Sedge tells Tee, earnest, trudging ahead of him on the path, checking the plastic watch shaped like a duckling, one of a pair his mother had once won from a shoot-em-up carnival that had come to town. Tee had long ago lost his duck watch.

  “Our moment? What the hell?”

  “I mean carpet dee ’em,” says Sedge.

  “You ripped that off from Hogan.”

  “Carpet!”

  “What’s gotten into you?” asks Tee, following his twin wonderingly, knowing Lestrion could have taken over his twin’s body. At moments Tee can believe in the powers of Lestrion though in grumpier seconds he derides his twin for having invented a babylike imaginary friend.

  “You know it’s cool how mama never made us dress in the same twin clothes,” says Sedge.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I would’ve thought I was you. Too scary.”

  “Okay, give me a chance.”

  They’ve gotten to the top but true dusk holds off, each hilltop bruised by shadows, crowned with a last bright crescent.

  “You’re not scared of lions?” asks Tee.

  “Not anymore,” says Sedge. Until now he has been good at suppressing that memory of this place but at the reminder, Lestrion has to take over and speak for him: “I’m giving you aerial overview for our recon. Look down.”

  Down where the thirty-third anniversary of this place continues: little twinkling Christmas lights, a tribal cry rising over drum-beats.

  “Our target is there—” Sedge has started to talk in what Tee thinks of as robotspeak, his lips stretched in a wide smile, teeth tight as if mission control allows Sedge only the most covert consumption of oxygen. Sedge points to the round yurt, its windows lit red, a glow-bomb. DorAlba, the owners here, have returned but Dirk is using that space. At least this is what Sedge has understood.

  “We’ll make the mission simple. We’re storming.”

  “Tell me again, man?” Tee actually loves his twin’s whole other crazy made-up life though it doesn’t mean he’s above teasing him in a good way.

  “You agree mom’s been hanging out too much with everyone else?” Sedge waits but his brother only shrugs. “With her old friend.”

  “She left this morning.”

  “Rose? You sure?”

  “I saw Rose carrying some bags.”

  “But anyway mom’s been hanging out too much with other people.” Sedge pats Lestrion in his pocket. “This way we get her back.”

  “How?”

  “We get the cord. Hanging outside the red housing. We’re going in. Plan is seize the subject, tie him up—” Sedge must sense Tee’s disbelief is too big a wall. “Tell me we don’t have our reasons?”

 
“Whatever.” This is the thing about twinhood according to Tee. You go along for the ride when it suits you and it doesn’t exactly unsuit Tee to tie up the man who has been sticking parts of himself into their mother, far as he understands that enterprise from the penis page in the dictionary and older boys’ gossip. “I get your mission.”

  “Our mission.”

  “Okay, but I think we should trick him into it.”

  “How?”

  “Let’s call it a meditation.” In full fiendish rapture, both realizing the gift Tee had just summoned, the boys freeze. “A meditation.” Tee cannot help but giggle, relishing his genius. “That part let me talk.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” says Sedge, beckoning, almost slipping backward down the trail. When they get closer, they hear the made-up words of music pounding out the amps:

  Gitchi gitchi gaga yaya!

  It is not hard for Sedge to position his twin right outside the red yurt and go peek around the rear door, half ajar. Past a scarlet curtain the intruder Dirk sits on a round moondisk pillow facing a triangular mandala, sandalwood incense wafting out, their quarry sending smoke signals as he awaits supplicants. “Okay, so is this not a sign?” whispers Sedge to himself, a direct quotation of their mother, cord heating up in his hand.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 5:29 P.M.

  A bit into the act, Sedge thinks this guy could not be weirder: their mother’s suitor is so easily bound.

  “We heard about this new meditation,” Sedge had begun, preempting Tee.

  “Yes?” Dirk had asked, humoring them, well-regulated. “You know I love new meditations.” His impatience visible only around the edges. “It’s nice you boys are interested.”

  “You want us to teach you?” Sedge had gone on. “The meditation?”

  “It has to do with freedom,” Tee had said, inspiration kicking in. “First we have to bind your hands though. The most important thing is keep your eyes closed. And you breathe the whole time. Deeply into the belly.”