Broken Sleep

by Bruce Bauman

  “We gotta vote.”

  He reaches for my neck and pulls out the chain with my eye. “Can I kiss it for luck?”

  I nod. He does. “Decide soon.”

  We sign with Kasbah. In no time, the tagline “When the Buzz Becomes a Scream” with pictures of us four, mouths open wide like we was screaming, is plastered all over L.A. In two years we zip from playing for free at family street fairs, beach parties, scuzzy unlicensed bars, and high schools to basketball arenas, to stadiums. When I think back how fast it happened, it’s like the genie granted me three hundred wishes that all came true.

  23

  THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2001)

  What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding?

  At the same moment Moses was in the throes of his reverie, Alchemy and his driver in his vintage 1963 Jaguar (refitted with an experimental biodiesel engine) rolled down Gracie Allen Drive. Alchemy caught sight of Jay’s long-legged, determined gait, with a slight hitch to her swaying shoulders. He asked the driver to pull over and he called to her as he stepped out of the car. Feeling ambushed, Jay took off her sunglasses and placed them in the breast pocket of her jean jacket, which gave her time to regain her bearings. “He’s still not ready. Call first.” She quickly added “please,” but there was no question that she was issuing an order.

  Alchemy tapped the hood and signaled the driver to hang on. “Sure, of course. Call me later and let me know how he is doing and when I can come. But um …” He paused.

  “Alchemy, what? Moses is waiting.”

  “We should talk, about you know, I guess.” Mr. Savoirfaire sounded uncharacteristically maladroit. She nodded. “In here?” He pointed to the limo and they slid inside.

  “So, talk.” Jay’s tone was brusque.

  “When I walked into the doctor’s office and I saw you holding Mose’s hand. Whoa. Incredible coincidence.”

  “I’d say incomprehensible karma trumps all other interpretations.”

  “I’d say coincidence and karma are different words for the same thing.”

  “I have no time for this.” Jay put her hand on the door handle, ready to get out.

  “Hold on. It’s nothing like the path you have to negotiate, but it’s tricky for me, too. Besides, I was never proud of the way things ended with us.”

  “Ended? With us? There was no ‘us.’ We had a few dates strung out over a few months until I met someone else.”

  “Was it Mose?”

  “If I cared enough, I would’ve called you.” She paused, allowing Alchemy to reevaluate the idea that he’d had her, rather than she had him.

  “Jay, okay.” He stared right into her eyes. “It can’t be undone. The most important issue now is Moses. We need to protect him.”

  “Too late.”

  “You told him? Jay, why?” Vexed, he continued, “How much?”

  “Very little but enough. He always says the cover-up is worse than the crime. I won’t lie to him. I’m not ashamed. I wasn’t a nun. He knows that. He won’t ask any more questions. I know him.” She paused as if to emphasize and you don’t. Not telling Moses about their affair would be, to her mind, unjust. Unlike Moses, for whom truth was subjective and mercurial, or for Alchemy, for whom truth was situational but potentially knowable and informationally advantageous, Jay held fast to a belief in her objective, knowable, and universal truth. Once she admitted the affair, there was no lie. Jay believed that withholding certain information was never more inflammatory than a blatant lie, and saying little about a meaningless affair was more truthful than trying to explain it as meaningless.

  “Alchemy, you and I can never be seen alone together, or he will drive himself mad. He may be forty-three and imagines himself a cynic, but he doesn’t really live cynically. I can’t bear the thought of hurting him anymore. Do you understand?” She drilled her stare into Alchemy’s round gold-flecked brown eyes, the same eyes that had entranced her years before but now seemed impenetrable.

  “No. Not totally. But mum’s the word. He worships you.”

  Jay’s tone and attitude remained arch. “One piece of advice: Watch yourself with Hannah. When it comes to Moses, she may not be his mother, but she is his mom.”

  “Thanks for the tip.” He gave her a subtle yet visible once-over. “I’m sorry you’re having a tough time now. You’re wearing it well. You look as good as the night we met at the Dresden.”

  She took pleasure in his remembering the party where they first met, and his compliment, which she refused to acknowledge with even the wisp of a smile. She wanted to believe that Alchemy wasn’t being a cad, that he wasn’t coming on to her, that he was genuinely concerned and was being open and penitent. With him, she decided, one could never be sure. She closeted her ego. “Never, never say that or anything like it again. You call the hospital in two hours to talk to him, and he will give you a time to visit. This conversation never happened.” With that, Jay stepped out of the Jag.

  Ten minutes later, after a quick stop in the cafeteria for coffee, Jay arrived in Moses’s room, unusually harried. She tied her hair back in a ponytail and donned the necessary masks over her mouth and nostrils. At his bedside, she explained that his mom was taking the day to rest. Moses nodded, relieved, because in no way could he describe his Visitation in front of his mother. “Jay, I was there. I felt, smelled, tasted the air. The blood. The rain. Heard the screams. And that woman Shalom, freaking eerie.”

  Normally, when he told her of his daymares, Jay was sympathetic, if overly analytical in her dissection of their meaning. (She called them nightmares and Moses stopped correcting her because, although she denied it, the idea of a waking intrusion on reality unnerved her.) This time her response bordered on the callous. She insisted the nightmare arose from his fear of dying without belief in any salvation. “Maybe you should convert and be saved.”

  “Jay, don’t go snippy on me now.”

  “Come on, Moses, you’re still high from the drugs.”

  Later, as they held hands, he in bed and she sitting in a chair beside him, watching Idiot’s Delight on AMC, she turned to him. She said, almost apologetically, “I have another interpretation of your dream.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You’re absorbing the fact you’re like me, only half Jewish. Now you sweat and you schvitz.” Jay was needling Moses’s belief in this cultural or perhaps glandular difference that means WASPs, if they perspired at all, sweat. Jews schvitz.

  “I’m not sure, but possible,” Moses conceded, for the sake of avoiding a debate. He acknowledged the discovery meant he was not a full-fledged Jew, but he paid no heed to that. He didn’t suddenly become born again or a believer, or doubt his true religious identity. His father was a Holocaust survivor and Hannah had raised him as a Jew. He’d been bar mitzvahed. He still felt Jewish. Besides, he knew well that from the Inquisition to the pogroms to the Nazis, those goyim would have invited him to be a main course at one of their lovely human desecrations.

  Perhaps the greatest implication of the vision, to Moses, was his new obsession over losing his grip on his sanity, a paranoia that was heightened by knowledge of Salome’s psychosis. He continually questioned the rightness of meeting his father, who had disinherited him in every way, yet from whom (he now worried) he had inherited a perhaps sociopathic ability to emotionally disconnect. These fears propelled him into a world where the pain of the past overwhelms. He sometimes lost perspective, forgetting what history had taught him: Only a fool believes that the future is not at the mercy of the past.

  Dr. Fielding recommended resuming psychotherapy as a necessary component of healing after the operation. The therapist Moses had begun seeing after his initial cancer diagnosis visited him at home. Moses did not care to talk about his illness, his mortality, or even Jay’s affair. He couldn’t repress the unshakable images from his daymare and the implications of his new mother being “crazy.”

  “Yes, if indeed your biological mother is schizophrenic, that could increase the
chances. At your age, it probably would’ve happened already.”

  This almost amateur bit of diagnosis didn’t serve as the mind-settling sedative answer he wanted to hear. Instead the doctor suggested “the new apple, an antidepressant a day keeps the demons away,” which Moses rejected.

  Fearful that he could one day he could wake up inside Collier Layne beside his mother, whenever he thought about confiding this Visitation to anyone else, he stopped himself. He recalled a passage he remembered from his college days:

  Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what.

  24

  THE SONGS OF SALOME

  When You Wish upon a Star

  I’m feeling better today, though somewhat melancholic. I want to get on with my story before my corporeal disintegration renders me voiceless.

  My first “vacation” years, from ’76 through ’79, were fraught with bouts of insulin therapy. I was drawn and quartered while the hotwire singed my synapses and rearranged my molecules. It caused the opposite effect of its intentions, made me heavier and deepened my Gravity Disease. My body was a blizzard of glassy windblown snowflakes scudding aimlessly. I feared I would melt to the ground and dissolve into the universe. The world inside me smelled like a decomposing cat picked clean by the buzzards of the art world and the witch doctors that first “treated” me here.

  Good days were rare. Mostly, I was alone. When Anaïs Nin passed, Xtine brought me some copies of Nin’s diaries and I made three penis and three vagina papier-mâché sculptures from them. Then we burned one of each in her honor. I gave two to Xtine and two to Gibbon, who claimed that because of me, Lively had sicced the IRS on him.

  Shockula was the bastard in chief before Ruggles arrived. With his batlike ears, simian head, corpulent ego, he celebrated like a sadistic vulgarian who got a rush every time he pushed the button on his zapper. I will forever be grateful to Bickley Sr. for halting the treatment. I’m sure Billy Jr. would’ve gladly ratcheted open my cortex like a coconut. He and Shockula won over Hilda with their Latinate shrink-speak. The first time she visited here, she broke down and pleaded, “Why, Salome, why?” I had no answer that would appease her.

  It was many months before I was allowed to see Alchemy. I tried to convince myself he’d thrive living with Hilda, but I didn’t believe it. Hilda acted as if she’d received a dispensation and could raise him away from me and my wanton ways. Her voice had frowned at me because I’d serve him dinner at 11 P.M. and cursed in front of him. Now, she gave him “structure.” Just another name for control.

  I lived for Alchemy’s drawings and letters at first written in crayon, then black pen. I started sending him drawings of Petra Sansluv, Pearl Diver by the Black Sea, which I’d started again when he was a baby. He would do his own drawings of her and send them back to me.

  I waited eagerly for Nathaniel’s letters, with his bold script so much more macho than his persona but as sturdy and pure as his soulsmell. I’ve always distrusted e-mail, IMs, twits, p-mail. Any and all of the always-new cypherworld slango. These nanocommunications arrive without the demure or sexy dress code of an envelope, the personal saliva of a licked stamp, the revelations in words flowing from brain to hand to paper, with their swirls and curves of febrile emotions. They do not fulfill the beautiful agony of waiting … Waiting. I love getting letters, real letters. I don’t get many of them now. I wait for them from Persephone. I know this seems odd coming from me because I can be so impulsive. But these nanomessages—their words never get to simmer and boil through the winding routes of the night. No wonderment and pain in when they’ll be read. No imagining the delight or disappointment in shaking hands of the reader.

  Even at his bleakest, Nathaniel searched for the possibility in new innovations. He exclaimed how e-mails got millions of people reading and writing again. He had a point. Only not enough of one to persuade me.

  Alchemy understood. He always wrote me letters, even when we lived in the same house. Sometimes he slipped them under my door or mailed them.

  They didn’t bring him to these grounds that first time. Instead we met at the B&B chocolate factory. His hair trim and tidy. His eyes, which had been so agog at the world’s sensations, were now dulling, bereft of their dreaminess. He was suffering the first dollops of Gravity Disease.

  We both beamed with joy when we kissed. “Mom!” he yelled. “Alchemy!” I shouted back.

  As I hugged him, Hilda said, “We call him Scott now.” Before he was born, to placate her, I told her I might name him Scott.

  “Not in my presence, you don’t.” Drug-shocked and feeling impotent, I wanted to reassert my authority. “Alchemy, what do you prefer I call you?”

  “Scott, you don’t have to answer that,” Hilda commanded.

  He answered anyway. “Alchemy.”

  Years later, just as he was being crowned the new Prince of Pop Culture, we were sitting on the deck of the first house he’d bought, in the hills of Los Feliz, sharing a midnight joint, listening to Dietrich peddle her “illusions.” I’d played that for him often when he was a child. “Mom, sometimes I wonder if all of this isn’t some form of illusion.” I heard a kernel of self-doubt, which he rarely expressed to anyone but me.

  “Of course it is. We are all living under the spell of illusions. Even you. As artists, we are illusionists. This house, all of this, is transient. But your music is eternal and it is perfection. Alchemy, you are my purest creation.”

  “You remember that day when I came to visit you outside the B&B factory?”

  “Yes … Why?”

  “I think Grandma Hilda never forgave you for asking me about my name and never forgave me for answering ‘Alchemy.’ And you’ve never forgiven me for using Scott when we lived in Virginia.”

  “Yes, I did. As soon as you reverted to Alchemy. And Hilda never forgave me for anything, from the moment I got pregnant and lost the baby.” I’d started telling Alchemy about the babydeath when he was in my womb. “You’re wrong about one thing, Hilda forgave you for everything. She doted on you unconditionally.”

  He finished the joint, lit a cigarette, blew the smoke into the air, and watched it dissipate. “Where did you come up with my name? And none of that bull about how you were sure I’d be a rock star.”

  “Why not? You certainly have used that story to your benefit.” We laughed.

  “True, but your stories do change.”

  “As do yours.”

  “Stop stalling.”

  “Years before, someone had given me some books. I found them again in the house in Orient when I was pregnant with you.”

  “Who gave them to you?”

  “Cigarette, please.” I didn’t smoke much, but I wanted one then. He handed the pack to me. I didn’t light up just yet. “I don’t remember. It was long time ago. Before the hotwire therapy.”

  He asked skeptically, “But you remember what those books had to do with my name?”

  I lit the cigarette and was frozen in my memories for a minute. “They were a gift from the father of your dead brother.”

  “Mom, I didn’t mean … Sorry.”

  “No need.” I took a puff before continuing. “In the midst of a Savant Blue period, I was terrified of losing you. One late afternoon, a beautiful Orient twilight, I climbed to the roof and I began meditating in tandem with the cicadas, whose vibrations entranced like the entreaties of a thousand mantraing monks, and I was deliriously reading Rimbaud’s ‘Alchemy of the Word.’ ” I stopped. I had occasionally intimated our family’s ability with DNA travel, but he, having not experienced it, never responded and only listened. “I had scraped my leg climbing up to the roof, and from my blood there appeared Kyle”—he’d heard about her—“who introduced me to Mary the Jewess, the first female alchemist. We communicated. As it darkened, I inhaled the odors of the full moon when it appears translucent and yellow-white-pink-and-blue like shimmering linen, both gorgeous and foreboding, and at that moment you g
ave a kick in my belly. The cicadas hymned like angels whispering your destiny as ‘Alchemy Savant, mystic of music and moon.’ From that moment on, I knew you’d live to be born.”

  He nodded. My son did not need to question my truths. I asked him, “Would you have preferred I named you Scott?”

  “No. Well, sometimes, when I was a kid and the jerkoffs in Greenport called me Alcrummy and the bullies in Charlottesville kicked my ass. And your solution was to sing Bowie’s ‘Kooks.’ But you prepared me for life with you and life as I am living it. Would Scott Savant have become leader of the Insatiables?”

  He was, like me, an acoustic morphologist. And he understood that his name was filled with music. And we morphologists know that in every language a “rose” is a fragrant mixture of sounds and odors, and that an asp sounds like an asp … even when his name is Lively.

  Ever the conniver, Lively paid me a visit maybe eighteen months after Nathaniel had struck a deal to serve two years in Allenwood and two years on probation. They dropped the drug charge and he pled guilty to obstruction of justice. Which is perfect Lewis Carroll logic, because if he wasn’t guilty of selling drugs (which they knew he wasn’t), he was on the lam, so to speak, for a crime he didn’t commit. Nothing was obstructed but the truth.

  When Shockula informed me of Lively’s impending arrival, I expected some form of retribution. I warned him, “Count Shockula, if Lively’s expecting me to apologize for our incident, he’s going to be waiting ’til Godot finishes brunch.”

  On a sweltering late July afternoon, I swooshed outside wearing a salmon-colored sundress and big-brimmed white cotton hat with peacock feathers hung from its back brim. I sat on a white marble seat at a round table. Shockula came over with Lively and then walked off to the side and spoke with another Collier Layne vacationer. Lively coiled himself in the seat across from me. He seemed rather nervous, his body less domineering, hidden under a loose-fitting pin-striped blue suit that looked like he picked it off the spy rack at the CIA mall. His eyes covered by his unintentionally fashionable FBI ’60s-style drugstore sunglasses.