“What happened—what?” I said to Cyn, looking around, and then I had to say it louder. “What?”
“What?” Cyn asked me. Her voice was raw like she hadn’t spoken since the hospital, which was practically true. She was trembling and holding a hand out. “It’s just rain,” she snarled. “Nothing. It’s raining.” She gave me a look of disgust and held her hand out farther. I reached for her but heard the scream again.
It was the Rabbi. Stephen and Ben both had their mouths open, holding their coats together in a tense wet hug and making their muddy way towards us in a monster-movie walk. But Tsouris was the one screaming. He had turned around, his black robe billowing behind him, but even over the trombones—thunder—I could tell that he was the one screaming, screaming and pointing to the wet mass of river raging in front of him. The muddy water was curling with the force of the cloudburst, emerging over the bank like the tip of a cape, or a dark and murky sunrise, or like the arm of something, hoisting itself out of the Ohio.
The Rabbi screamed again, but the sound was cut off by a splash—Tsouris had gone flying into the river like a rag doll. There was a spray of mud and another roll of thunder and for a moment I couldn’t sort anything out. If Tsouris hadn’t fallen in, why was there such a scream, such a splash? But if he had, who was standing on the bank, covered in mud and shaking its fists?
Not who. Not a person. What. It was finished; sometime in the middle of prop-building and bone-aching, Mimi had fashioned a head out of that blank block of clay which had arrived at three in the morning like a nightmare. With Cyn yelling something at me, and the thunder rolling and Stephen coughing and Ben shouting something, the golem’s silence was even scarier than its bulging fists and the way its mute and quivering body seemed to rise up out of the river bank, like it’d been there all along just waiting for someone to make it up. Before I could fully register its presence it had already reached out and grabbed Ben by the flying wet hem of his jacket and yanked him to the ground. His face hit the mud and with a gurgle he slid right into Mimi’s grave.
Stephen had reached me; his face was pale and mud-splattered. “They said it would rain!” he shouted to me. “They said!” I looked at him, smearing the rain away from my eyes. He hadn’t seen it, maybe, or couldn’t talk about it, maybe, or maybe there was nothing to see. But I could see everything: the still-sputtering river, the puddles on the ground pouring into one another, and Ben’s hands on the rim of the grave as he tried to hoist himself out. Behind him was Tsouris, who had somehow found dry land; he was kneeling on the ground, shaking the mud off his arms. I ran to help Ben; I don’t know why. Maybe if I hadn’t helped him—but I didn’t help him, not really. When I reached the mouth of the grave I reached out a hand for him to grab, but my palms were so muddy that he just slipped back down, landing on Mimi’s coffin with a thump. If only my hands were clean and my heart pure! Alas, I have committed many wrongs and left so much undone!
I turned around. Stephen was yelling. The golem had reached them and Cyn was now down on the ground, with the golem kneeling over her with its fists raised, like a timpanist over his dark, loud drum. I ran toward her, each foot slapping the wet ground like a spank. Stephen was looking at me and screaming, over and over, like I was a monster, like the monster was me. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Covered in rain and liver-colored grime, I must have looked like a monster, but it surprised me anyway, and I hesitated. I stopped for just a second, and looked behind me where the Rabbi was helping Ben out of the grave. I stopped just for a second, and in that moment everything was lost.
The golem’s fists came down, one at Cyn’s neck and the other inside her mouth. Her scream became a wet gurgle, and even over the noise I could hear something snap. Bone probably. Stephen screamed, his voice cracking to the highest register, as if puberty had been blurred along with his mud-scarred features. As I looked at him, the monster did, too, and stepped toward him as he screamed louder, wider. Now I was kneeling over Cyn, my arms out wild in the air. Her eyes were closed and her head was turned funny sidewise, with her chin on her shoulder like she’d rather break her neck than look at me. Her legs were bent like they couldn’t be, just snapped sudden and sharp like they couldn’t be bothered to find the knee, just had to bend over, and break. Where was she, the Cyn who had brought me here? Where was the daughter who had brought me into this family, into this whole drama, this opera? There was nothing here to explain this. Anything that could be behind all this misery was impossible to believe, or even to see; the rain grew, pelting down on me even harder, and I couldn’t tell if the golem had reached Stephen or if he had just fallen into the mud. There was nothing to believe here. The librettist, or God, or golem, was nowhere.
Or now here, depending on how you look at it. I looked behind me and Ben was screaming, shaking his arms at me like a drummer, but the Rabbi was saying something, something definite but inaudible as the thunder rolled. But when the sound passed I caught a few words of Hebrew, some traditional Jewish incantation I wouldn’t have thought Tsouris could get through without stumbling. And he didn’t: with a wet slap he fell to the gushing earth, but raised himself up on his elbows and kept shouting something, just as the earth hit me.
I was knocked to the ground, and when I blinked back the mud I saw the clay figure standing silently over me. It was unbelievable, literally, something I could not believe, something I was unable to inquire about. The golem raised its arms just as the Rabbi completed whatever he was saying, and another burst of rain poured down on the figure. Its arms, towering over me like something unreachable, wavered and then stopped in the onslaught. The golem shifted, its legs moving like they shouldn’t, and in a few seconds it was unrecognizable in the river. Ben reached me and pulled me up, still shouting, looking past me at his daughter, his lover, his son’s lover and my girlfriend, all of them splayed out and dead on the ground. Stephen grabbed my other arm, his face all rage and earth. They were shouting at me. The Rabbi reached us and, with a cry, knelt by Cyn and started something all over again. The golem was nothing, or was gone; it was just the rain and the rest of this family.
I spat some gob of the golem’s fist out of my mouth and looked up at the late-summer downpour. There was so much sound I couldn’t sort anything out, couldn’t bear any of it. I opened my mouth in a sheer roar which is the last sung note of the opera. How could it be anything else? As one last loud T.U.D. underscores Joseph’s sustained note of anguish, the story has played itself out; with the love destroyed, the revenge exacted, there is nothing left here for tonight’s audience, already pulling their coats off the backs of their chairs to beat the rush to the lobby, because if there’s one thing they can’t stand, having already run a mad rush to the theater from work, it’s getting trapped when they’re on their way out. A lover, a family, a monster: they’ve all done their part in creating something not just interesting but fascinating, mesmerizing, to transcend all the stress about whether to change or where to have dinner or parking or whatever, and really hear the music. That’s what opera’s for . The opera—see the curtain come down—is over for them, and for the orchestra and all the people ready to mop up all this rain. But not for me. That’s why I was screaming, because I knew it wasn’t over, just as you, reading this, can feel the thick weight of unread book in your right hand even as the audience exits. There’s more. Feeling the water seeping through my funeral clothes I knew I wasn’t dead, that some story, if not this one, was still carrying me along like an engorged river. Rivers run someplace, as I would. Something more would happen to me, something more was waiting to happen to me now. Something more was already lurking in the angry depths of the river. Immerse yourself with me, as I struggle to see what’s beyond the drenching rain and the thick fog of dry ice: More? How can there be more? How can there be a second part?
Part Two
“Substitutions are possible for the underlined words in this subject area. For example: ‘Migration paths of the trumpet swan’ may be changed to som
e other bird or animal, provided the change is interesting and appropriate. (Remember, some animals and birds don’t migrate.)”
—KATHRYN LAMM,
10,000 Ideas for Term Papers, Projects and Reports
So what next? Exactly. Exactly how I felt. A few nights in the hospital: the smudgy window of television, snipped off by the nurses when the news came on. Shock, and even in all that rain, dehydration: surprising to me but, somebody explained, not at all unusual in even the wettest of disasters. Survivors of shipwrecks, say. Adrift, at loose ends, and by court order locked out of the house, I wanted to skip this part. I dreamed of skipping this part. Inspired even by the agile commercials on latenight television, glimpsed through the prefab inertia of whatever dripped through my IVs, I could imagine skipping this part, the weightless freedom of each leg bending at the knee and skipping, skipping, skipping. Skipping this part. Skipping ahead even, but to where? There I woke up. Discharged like a halfhearted orgasm, I put on my shoes and signed papers saying I’d pay later. But what then? What next?
You’ll never guess, and it was boring anyway, so I’ll skip ahead here. It was years later, though not too many years. It was years enough that the hit song “Bing Bing Bing” had faded from the radio but worked its way into the lexicon. It was audial shorthand for sudden, electric comprehension: “I was just looking and looking at it,” my boss would say, poring over the inventory list at Bindings “and then, suddenly—bing bing bing—I got it.” It was enough years later that there was pretty much no hope of my ever getting the box of books from Mather College.
There was pretty much no hope. I went to California because it was on the opposite coast from my terrible summer. I settled in the cheapest town I could find, which also happened to be the ugliest, and it could have been called anything. This town loitered outside of San Francisco, but way outside, like there was a restraining order against it. It lurked in the featureless landscape of deep suburbia with perfect geometry: buildings with sharp, shaved corners, parking lots with parallel lines, architecture that tells a calm, symmetrical lie: As you can see, the universe is perfect.
Towns that tell you this lie can be called anything, and this one was called Pittsburg, Pittsburg, California—like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but without an h. One letter and the whole thing is different: arid and open, dry without a hint of soot in the air. There was a flagpole in the downtown area, sagging in the no-wind which blew between the boxy drugstore and the shiny restaurant, one of a kit of restaurants shined up all over the country. At Christmastime, when I arrived, all the windows were caked with the same stale snowbank: that powdery stuff from a can, sprayed on the windows in vague, rolling hills, with a little tower of snowy circles for a snowman like the ones we’d all make at three in the morning, back at Mather, when the real stuff came down. This was California snow, available inside the drugstore next to the candy canes and all the other placid, grinning Gentile paraphernalia. There was a cardboard Santa head taped to the screen door of the ugly apartment I found, third from the left if you stood in the paved courtyard that used to be a motel parking lot until they converted it to apartments because nobody wanted to visit Pittsburg, California, or if they did they didn’t stay in a hotel but just crashed out on the cousin’s couch where they’d watch television after dinner came steaming out of the oven in heaping casserole dishes bought in the strip malls down the highway from my Santa face, which I kept there, the face of Santa, like a stubborn stain. I took a job at Bindings, a boxy building that sold books. I put the apartment’s location on a change-of-address form, in case my box of books ever arrived, and went to work unpacking boxes of books in the back room where a tinny radio played unfashionably-old hit songs: “Crazy Love,” “Tell Your Mother,” “Bing Bing Bing.” When the New Year hit, the pimply high-school students went back to high school and they promoted me to the floor, where I had to wear a tie, available next door at the store catering to tall men, coppery suits lined up along the walls, shiny and on sale and so big they looked like they were made for golems. It was a promotion; they covered an ERIKA nametag with forestgreen tape and a clicking, handheld machine scragged out my name: J-O-S-E-P-space-H.
I thought it was a good idea. I thought I’d skipped ahead. My new town was so boxy I thought nothing would remind me of the curve of Cyn’s hips against my hands as I drank from her. I thought the powdered fake snow on the shop windows would be as different from Pittsburgh’s sooty brick buildings as black and white. I thought the bed would creak differently without her stroking me in it. I thought when I’d lean against the railing of my apartment complex, where in its previous incarnation who knows how many divorced salesmen poured scotch into the second courtesy glass (the first, gaping by the sink, rimmed with the snowy glaze of toothpaste) and gazed out past the thin, windless flagpole and the white and landscaped cylinder of the inexplicable Morrison Lab on the hill, I’d see nothing operatic. But the scarlet sunset looked like a painted backdrop. The Morrison Lab looked like the steel industry. And the back of the cardboard Santa, greeting me crookedly every morning as I left for work, looked like the pools of fluid Cyn would leave me with up in the sweltering attic bedroom before she’d go downstairs and do something I couldn’t quite remember.
I felt my unhappiness close in on me like a fly-trapping plant. I’d leave Bindings mid-afternoon and find myself purposely brushing up against chubby moms, shopping bags tugging on one arm and sweatshirted kids on the other, craving just a taste of the motherly friction that used to be in my life. The sad songs on the radio were about me and newspaper articles foretold my doom—the Pittsburg Bee stung me full of information which would swell in my skull each night before I turned the radio off to dream of sex and clay. I read an article about a hostage crisis in the bank in the strip mall next door to mine: a woman was, the down-home prose of the Bee said, “minding her own business” when a man held a gun to her back and marched her out into “broad daylight.” She walked by several acquaintances in the parking lot and nobody thought anything was wrong. He forced her to drive to “the house where she lived” and then, the gun “still trained on her” (as she what? made coffee? tied herself to one of the matching chairs? tried to signal the mowing neighbor?), called the major news networks with “an outrageous list of demands.” The police traced the call and the guy was arrested before everybody was home from soccer practice, but for the next few weeks I’d eye pairs of shoppers in the parking lot, wondering which one had the gun. When the drought broke in mid-January there was a story about a mother and father who had driven all the way from the hills into San Francisco for the opera. As Tosca’s troubles multiplied, the thunderstorm made the parched earth into mud; a mudslide swarmed their house during the curtain call, smothering the two children—“a boy, eight, and a girl,”—and the teenage baby-sitter, who was the last to go: as the firemen dug and dug, they heard her screaming for an hour or so, and then nothing. I put the blankets over my head and knew there was something wrong with me.
But I didn’t know I was in CRISIS until they put me in charge of New Age. It was actually more like Self-Help, but Bindings had learned somewhere that people didn’t really want to help themselves, not in the suburbs anyway. I updated the stock and took away the slow sellers, made sure the Age got Newer and Newer with every shopping day. During my lunch break I’d sit in the back room and peruse the customer returns with my tie thrown behind my back like a swashbuckler’s ascot to avoid stains. It was the one called Breaking the SPELL that did it for me. “SPELL” stood for “Sad People’s Emotional Language Legacy,” an acronym I accepted on pure faith. The first part of the book was about all the terrible things that happened to the author, but I skipped ahead. “So far, this has been a book about pain,” the second part started, and I read right to the finish. After work I’d drive to some undeveloped land and sit on my hood and read, sometimes out loud, little parcels of hardcover hope while the sun set on the scraggly fields awaiting perfect new buildings. “Regardless of how you feel abo
ut yourself, you are a strong, creative individual,” the book told me. “You matter.” I felt my body, so arid and loose, strengthen up, like I was cooking in a kiln. I matter. I was matter.
And matter in CRISIS. I turned the page and there it was, another acronym of truth. “Are you in CRISIS? There’s an easy way to find out, and it’s all hidden in the word CRISIS. Go through the word crisis with me, and decide if any of these things have too much control over your life. C—Compulsive behavior. Is compulsive behavior controlling your life?” I thought of my parking-lot rubs, my inability to throw away Santa’s face. “R—rules. Are rules controlling your life?” If I was late three more times they’d take New Age away from me. “I—Idealization of family. Is idealization of family controlling your life?” Each night, I had only the most ideal glimpses of the Glasses: the curve of Mimi’s breasts, the ripe flower of Cyn’s sex contracting against her father’s plump and accusatory fingers, the half-clenched, sweaty moans of Stephen’s erection, and my own, each night, rattling the bed alone. “S—Shame. Is shame controlling your life?” And then, as the wan sun dribbled through my dirty bedroom window, the other glimpses would come: the block of clay, the frightened dog and the forbidden bend of the knee, which I would follow up the leg and beneath the hospital gown. My lust and shame would wrestle one another like siblings until I threw myself out of bed and into the shower to wash all this crisis off me, but the rush of the water would bring it all back, a flash flood: Mimi’s mouth as Ben’s robe opened around me, Stephen’s bare chest, with the hair triangling down like a landing strip, and that scene, over and over, Act I Scene Two, the best sex we ever had, until my orgasm would flower around my spidery hand as I’d seen Stephen’s, around Cyn’s, and I’d stumble out of the steamy bathroom and realize, bing bing bing, I was late for work again. “I—Ideology. Is ideology controlling your life?” I was petrified of rabbis. “S—Social systems. Are social systems controlling your life?” All I had were social systems: converted motels, the painted stripes of parking spaces, boxes of inventory, radio hits, alphabetized overstock, parceled land already leased but not built on. I’d look out into the dark landscape and the constellations of warning lights they put on electric wires, so planes don’t crash, so the perfection of the universe isn’t disrupted here in the town named after the town that led me here, alone, in crisis. I’d mark my place with my fingers, lean back on my windshield and think: Help me.
Watch Your Mouth Page 13
