The mom I had before never came back. Instead, we got Manic Depressive Mom, and she took pills all day long. The mood swings never went away. All the doctors could do was play catch up with higher and higher doses. She gained a grip of weight, went from thin and beautiful to the frumpy crazy lady who talked to herself in the grocery aisles. There at the end, the tardive dyskinesia kicked in. Jane flickers in my mind ten years from now but decades older. Morbidly obese. Her face twitching out of control. Her spine bent backwards.
Angela’s the best person to be with her right now. They might brawl, but she can tolerate Jane’s insanity. She won’t drop her at psych with her Aunt Rose. I feel bad for leaving Angela alone with her, but I just can’t deal with those demons all over again. Everything she does, everything she says, I see my mother’s ghost in all of it.
At home, I try to leave my memories at the door. There is a forty of Old English in the fridge. Half smoked bowl on the table. With both in hand, I sink into the couch and focus on calming my head.
25
(Angela) Demands don’t work with this one.
"I’m fine," she whines. "I took a shower yesterday."
"If you took a shower yesterday, why did I have to open the front door just to be in the same room with you?"
She flashes that evil smirk of hers and hops up to slam the door.
"What the fuck is the matter with you?"
"You wouldn’t understand." She leans back in that stanky nest of blankets her aunt keeps in the corner and laughs. "I’ve had a lot of fun. I’ve done some crazy shit, you know." Then she’s quiet, cocks her head like she’s listening to something. Something in her own head.
Damn it, Julia. How you gonna leave me hanging like this?
Jane’s eyes are redder than I ever seen before. Redder than when we roll blunts. She’s got big purple bags under them like a meth-head too. "When was the last time you slept?"
"Can’t fucking sleep," she complains. "I did lie down and take a rest on top of an old grave, but I haven’t been able to sleep for days, maybe a week."
I offer to draw her a warm bath and roll a joint. "That’ll put you to sleep for sure." I’m surprised when she agrees, but then she refuses to rinse off in the shower first. Soon as she gets in the tub, the water turns brown and a little layer of scum floats on top. I make her get out, and I dry heave a little and rinse out the tub to start all over. Behind me, she bounces up and down, her teeth chattering, water flying all over the place like she’s a wet dog. Soon as I set the plug, she climbs back in the tub.
This is my fault. The sleeplessness. The dirtiness. The nuttiness. It’s all my fault. I never shoulda introduced her to Crystal. And she swore she didn’t even like it! But she still got hooked, probably been tweaking ever since. It’s my job to sober her up now, get her through detox. First I gotta find her stash. Control her doses. Wean her slow. As crazy as she is now, ain’t no way I’m dealing with the wrath of a full come down.
26
Splish splash, take a bath, swim out into the ocean tonight. I drown in the shame of my own existence. Dolphins and sharks and killer whales eat me alive, but surprise! Surprise! The last laugh is mine as I eat them from the inside.
27
(Angela) Thud, thud . . . splash, thud, splash, thud, thud.
Holy shit, what's going on in there? I open the bathroom door to a face-full of filthy bathwater. I clench my jaw, trying to ignore it along with the puddle I just stepped in. "Where is it?"
"Where is what?"
"The shit."
"What shit?" She’s quite the actress today.
"Don’t act stupid, you know what I mean." But she just keeps looking at me, makes me say it out loud. "The crystal, Jane, where is the crystal?"
"Crystal? What crystal?" She looks at me funny, mumbles something about finishing it off, so I guess we’ll be doing this the hard way after all.
28
Why the hell is she going off about some shit we did a week ago? Great, if she has to go to rehab, who is going to lick my pussy and pay my phone bill?
29
(Angela) "Why don’t you get out and dry off while I roll the joint?"
She scrunches up her nose like I always tell her not to ‘cause it makes her look ugly. "I don’t really feel like smoking."
"What the . . . since when?" Since she a fucking meth-head now. I roll the joint anyways and hope she changes her mind.
Out of the bathtub and she keeps bouncing around in her towel, flinging water everywhere. She don’t bother trying to dry off like a Normal before she crawls into bed all wet and naked under the covers.
"Actually, come to think of it, I haven’t smoked pot since I set off for Canada . . ." She pauses, a puzzled look on her face. "Weird, I don’t think I’ve ever gone that long, didn’t even really think about it either."
"You should smoke." Cushion that come down. "So when was the last time you smoked the other stuff . . . you know . . . Crystal?"
"I only did it that one time with you . . ." she trails off looking around the room. She sees I’ve gone through her pockets and her purse. Her angry switch flips, and her voice gets loud and deep. "Maybe you didn’t get it, that whole story I told you earlier, but I am fucked up in the head right now. I don’t need any goddamn meth or weed or any-fucking-thing else; this is all au naturel, baby!"
I hang my head, frustrated and shit. Why can’t she just admit it? It’s so obvious; ain’t no doubt about it. Ain’t no point in trying to deny it, but I apologize anyway. "OK, I’m sorry. I guess I just don’t get it. I don’t get it when Cindi cuts her arms up ‘cause she sad; I don’t get it when you run 'round all crazy ‘cause you’re happy. I understand energy OK, I get being hyper, but how the fuck can you be so hyper to stay awake for five days? How is that possible without drugs? I don’t understand, OK? I just don’t fucking understand it!"
"That’s too bad," she sighs.
"Yeah, I know, sorry." I light the joint and try to hand it to her but she refuses. "Ya know, it might help bring you back to Earth."
There's something in her eyes, something scary and far off when she mutters, "Maybe I am not ready to come back just yet."
30
(Julia) Maybe it was wrong to let Angela believe Jane is chasing some sort of habit. But it’s not like I agreed with her. I just didn’t disagree. It’s better this way anyway.
31
Angela can never understand. She has never felt the other side of sanity, and I doubt she will ever graze her fingers against its dirty craw. She is different in her own right and views the world through her own unique, gangster-tinted lenses. But she is still firmly rooted in the laws of reality: gravity does not suspend; duality does not exist; there are no visions or voices that are not based in our dimension. For Angela, I experience both envy and pity—envy because she is so stable, but pity because she does not know the joy of instability.
She lies in bed with me for hours, intermittently taking puffs off the joint and desperate to get me to do the same. Midafternoon, she falls asleep, and I find myself staring at the ceiling. The voices nudge at my consciousness and beg for attention in the silence. They are little more than whispers, and I have to work at it to hear them.
"Don’t be afraid," one says.
Another begs me to stay strong.
Then, clear as day, "Show no mercy."
I nudge Angela with my elbow. "Wake up," I tell her. "Wake the fuck up." The voices go away once she rises. Maybe they are afraid she will overhear them. She rubs her eyes and yawns and stretches, and I tell her that I am hungry, "And I learned a new trick that I want to show you."
"Can I ask you something first? Seriously?" She pauses, lets it sink, and then asks, "If you aren’t on shit, why did you steal my money?"
"I’m sorry," I say, sullen, "But at least I didn’t spend it all. I had a hundred left over. That hundred dollars you took out of my purse . . ."
I try to make it up to her by taking her to a little bistro a few blocks away.
She has always been the one to take me out, so even though technically no money will be exchanged, this has to count for something. "Make sure to sit by the door."
I order off the seafood menu, and Angela has a whole bottle of wine to herself. She tries to convince me to join her, even pours me a glass that she ends up drinking. At the end of our meal, the server steps off of the floor to use the washroom.
"Just stand up and walk out the door, OK?"
Her lips pull back, and she bares her teeth in a laugh that stops short when she sees that I am serious. "Shit. Really?" She tilts her head to the side, just looks at me, like she is thinking, What the fuck is wrong with you?
Outside, she takes off running and does not stop until we are damn near home.
"First-time jitters, it goes away with practice," I yell after her.
"They’re gonna come looking for us."
"You’re right," I tease. "We both got carded, the waitress might remember our names. Or even my address!"
She stops dead in her tracks. "We can’t go back to your house then." I try not to laugh, but then she goes on, "The cops will show up there. And you are definitely in no condition to be dealing with cops right now."
"You’re the one that is drunk," I laugh on the defense.
"Maybe, but you’re fucking loony! And you know they shoot loonies in this city!"
What, is she my mother now? "Then where are we going to go?"
"Let’s go for a walk. We can see if Julia is still home."
"If we’re going to be gone for a while, I need to stop at the house and get something." She obliges but refuses to come in with me and stands behind a bush instead, ready to run. I hurry to my room and grab the strap-on that she likes to use on me from the bedside table. A whisper tells me that it will come in handy later.
32
(Julia) Knock. Knock.
Maybe if I stay perfectly still, they will go away.
Knock! Knock! KNOCK!
"Open up! We know you’re in there!" I roll my eyes at Angela’s police impression.
Knock! Knock!
"Come on, we saw your car in the parking lot," she yells. "We know you’re home!"
Oh fine. I let them in, presumably so that they can drink my alcohol and smoke my weed. Now I don’t mind sharing, don’t get me wrong. Company is almost always preferable to being alone. Shoot, ask anyone, if I am on my last bowl, I will still call my girls up and offer to smoke it with them. But this, this puts me on edge.
"You got anything to drink." It isn’t really a question, and Angela doesn’t wait for an answer. She crosses my living room to the kitchen. She laughs, loud and boisterous as ever. Pulls out my half gallon of vodka. "Whoah! Can I have some?" she asks, peeking around the corner.
"Yeah, sure," I exhale. If only there were a good reason to say no.
"Jane," she calls from the kitchen. "You want a shot of vodka?"
"I told you I’m good."
Oh, thank god. "I’ll have one," I call. For my nerves.
We chase shots of cheap vodka with squirts from a plastic lime. It burns. My cheeks turn red and warm right away. Angela and I keep taking shots through four or five games of dominoes. Jane doesn’t drink a thing, but she’s still drunk—loud, clumsy, slurred speech, and everything. When they finally leave, she stumbles out just like Angela.
33
There is something about being drunk that makes me feel closer to the gods and something about being close to the gods that makes me feel drunk. Right now, I feel very close to them. Drunk by association? It is not as simple as mirroring the state of those around me; I actually feel as though I have imbibed as much as they have. My vision trails and exists mostly as snapshots scattered amidst a blur. Like a poorly made flipbook, it stalls on abnormal and missing pages. My movements are deliberate; they require thought and effort. Still, my confidence soars, and both my mind and body are stronger than ever.
In spite of everything that has happened this past week, I am not crazy. It is not that easy. I am not my aunt who is my mother. Someone who was my mother is now my aunt. When I was very young and impressionable and still knew her as Mother, she told me a very terrible thing, a very hurtful thing: She told me that I would end up in a mental hospital someday. She told me that I would end up like my aunt who turned out to be my mother. This is the day, for better or worse, that I take that destiny into my own bare hands and carve its twisted premonition into brutal vengeance.
This is the day I outdo crazy.
We leave Julia’s around midnight. Angela has forgotten all about being on the run, so we head for home without any protests on her part. In an alley not far from my own washroom, she decides that she has to take a piss NOW!
"You don’t understand!" she insists. "I drank a whole bottle of wine and took like six shots. I have to piss now or I’m gonna fucking explode! Just stay here; stage fright, OK?"
"OK . . ."
She slips around the corner of an apartment building down a second alley.
34
(Angela) I barely get my pants down in time, almost piss all over myself. I pee forever too. By the time I’m done, my legs are shaking from all that squatting. Feels like they gonna give out from under me while I’m struggling to pull my pants back up.
"You can go ahead and leave those down," a man’s voice booms from a few yards away. He points behind a dumpster. "Lie down over there."
35
Where the fuck is she? Screw her shy bladder, she has been gone forever. I turn the corner to go after her and something whispers.
"Pssch!"
A murmur. Something barely audible; something intrinsic to both myself and that very moment calls to me in its mysterious voice.
"PsssssCH!"
It directs me to a metal pipe leaning so innocent yet so malevolent against a rotten fence. I pick it up: heavy antique plumbing, a straight piece with a slight curve on one end. Something tells me to keep it.
How far could she have gone?
That same something tells me not to call out to her.
Rage-fueled adrenaline floods my bloodstream before my brain can even interpret the scene before me. There is Angela, buttoning her pants and yelling at a menacing figure in front of her to fuck off.
36
(Angela) The movies tell you to lie down and take it. Cry and do what you told. Fuck that. I done fought plenty of men and won.
37
There is not time to think; there is only time to act, so I creep up behind him like a cat: quick and quiet. In silence, I prepare my batter’s stance. With purpose, I aim for his right temple, enough power to knock him out for a while but not enough to bash his head in and leave him dead. He needs to be very much aware of what is about to happen to him.
It all falls together like pieces to a puzzle, almost too convenient to be real. There is a length of rope hanging from the dumpster. I ask Angela to grab it, but she just stares at me like she is in shock. "Snap out of it!" I yell. "He isn’t going to be out forever. Get the rope!"
"Where did you come from?" she asks, coming out of her freeze-frame. She grabs the rope from the dumpster and tosses it to me.
"I need your knife."
"How do you know I have a knife?" she asks, shaking her head and patting her waistband. "I don’t think I have it."
"I put it in your back pocket before we left."
Perplexed, she frowns, "I thought it was weird you were touching my butt." Our laughter billows through the tension, strangely appropriate.
It is a beautiful knife: a hooked six-inch blade, shiny and true to its virginity but thirsty for blood. The handle is imitation jade—pretty yet not overly conceited, brave yet demanding. She cuts off the excess rope. I cut the rope into four pieces and ask Angela to drag the limp rapist behind the dumpster.
Even as I prepare for this truly unholy act, even as I know I am about to soil my conscience beyond this lifetime’s repair, every action feels justified, even meant to be. I rationalize: Did he not earn this w
ith what he intended to do to my friend and what he has no doubt done to others before her? And then I see the pained woman in the Chinatown vestibule, her yellowed eyes. I feel the lesson she taught me billow in my chest. I think of all the horror stories, the one in six. My soul is assaulted by a lifetime of unwelcome torture porn, scene after scene deemed normal for your viewing pleasure by one sick pop culture. It all comes together, the rage of women from the beginning of time evermore, ready to be harnessed and unleashed on his ass, and there is no turning back.
38
(Angela) Crazy-ass look in her eyes. Probably best to do as she says. Still, I have to ask, "What we gonna do with him?"
She don’t answer until I have him in place. "Teach him a lesson."
39
Face down, we quarter his ass: tie his right leg to a wrought-iron fence, his left to a gas main, each of his hands to a dumpster wheel. I pry off his shoes, then one of his socks which I shove in his mouth. I yank off his belt and wrap it around his head, cinching it into place like a ball gag. He stirs a couple of times but does not wake.
Angela does as she is told but looks wary. Has she still not processed what he had in store for her? Where is her anger? Where is her rage? Her eyes go cartoon wide as I pull the bright pink strap-on out of my purse.
"I knew this would serve a purpose, just thought it would be something a little sexier . . ." I wink and smile coyly, but she just looks at me in horror. "Ah come on, Angela, he deserves it, and you know it." I slip one leg after another into the harness and don my rock-hard phallus, harder than any man could ever boast.
Jane. Page 33
