Gala held up the newspaper next to her face. “I know, right? Did you see the news? It gets even better. What I did with that shadow-pope douchebag?” She made a chef’s-kiss gesture. “I fully realize that I should be more responsible in the future . . . But seriously . . . Tamara Clugston. Just Google her . . . please?”
“That’s not the problem.” Mildred snatched away the paper and took a honking hit off her inhaler, then tried to strike a more informal posture, the just-us-gals act Gala’s mother used when she was about to throw her out again. “I just feel like . . . if God chose a vessel to enact his will on Earth, it’d be someone a little more . . . I don’t know . . . even-tempered? I can see this is upsetting you, so let me put it this way. You’re the kind of person who stubs her toe on a rock and goes, ‘Down with rocks!’ No thought about how anyone else might feel, or what they need.”
“Maybe you’re right. I mean, sometimes, rocks are good. But some people need to be hit in the head with one to make them see that it hurts. Do you think God picked Joan of Arc because she was super level-headed?”
“Gala, just let it go . . . ”
“Well, either she was schizophrenic or God really told her to go lead an army, but the king of France was totally cool with it, until he found out she was a girl.”
“Oh, here we go.” Mildred had no patience for this. “Just between us girls . . . People like you are dangerous enough without power. Look at you, crowning yourself the Queen of All Everything when you’re not even queen of yourself. That’s why I worry that at best, you could be leading us into heresy . . . ”
“Heresy? Seriously?”
“And at worst, if there is some agency acting through you, it may well be the exact opposite of a higher power. We don’t make judgments here, but this kind of thing . . . I think even you’ll agree, it’s dangerous.” Lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, she added, “Satan doesn’t tell you, ‘Believe in me.’ He urges you to believe in yourself. Anyway, there’s only one sure way to deal with it.”
“So . . . exorcism? Cool. Lay it on me.”
“No . . . We’re not living in the Dark Ages, now.” Mildred took another hit off her inhaler and slurped her tea. She looked like she was having a panic attack.
“Are you kicking me out?” She stood up, brushing flea powder off her bathrobe. “Fine . . . Well, I guess I’ll just go . . . get my things . . . ”
“No . . . I’m sorry, but . . . ” Mildred didn’t meet her gaze. Kept her tiny eyes fixed on the desk until two men in white smocks barged into the office without knocking.
Gala backed up against a bookshelf. “You’re fucking kidding, right? Who are these assholes?”
One of the goons asked her not to resist as he bent her right arm behind her back until her fingers touched her shoulder blades.
“Oh my God, are you having me committed?” Gala grabbed the arms of her chair. “I quit. I’m—”
The goon expressed regret that she insisted on resisting. He elbowed her facedown on the desk as the other one injected liquid nitrogen into her neck with a bicycle pump.
Gala wasn’t resisting at all, until the needle in her neck. It was like a tranquilizer dart and made her see that all along, she’d just been a defective sex doll until someone pricked her, and now all the pink mist was leaking out. She tried to stand and break free, but all she could do was deflate and collapse across Mother Mildred’s desk, spilling her tea.
9
There are times in life when you cling to the things you love, when they nurture and sustain the truth of who you are and the light you’re carrying, even when you just want the world to snuff it out. But there are also times when the pain is so raw that you know your cherished security blankets will only be stained by the memory of the pain.
Right now was one of the latter category.
Someone had taken all of her things from her cell at Sister Candy’s and transplanted them here, in this room so white that she couldn’t see the corners where wall met floor or ceiling; and in the blinding light that seemed to come from everywhere, her clothes and music and the unidentifiable stuffed animal she’d slept with all her life looked like muddy roadside junk.
Worse, someone had jacked her most downbeat, wrist-slitting playlist into the ancient public address system. Maybe it was intended to give her an anchor, but it only itemized the pathetic tokens collected in a waste of a lonely little life, and the strains of Nirvana’s “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle” made her nervous system want to climb out of her skin and slap somebody.
But that was where they overplayed their hand. If the music selection wasn’t so gratingly obvious, she would just go on hating herself and being a proper patient, assuming she was in some kind of mental hospital and not abducted by aliens, who would probably have more sensitivity to a probing victim’s aesthetic needs.
She was in a bed. She couldn’t tell if she was strapped down or so medicated that she couldn’t get out of it, or if her brains had been scooped out and decanted into a counterfeit body of latex and balsa wood. A nurse came in every so often but moved so fast, she was a white blur amid the static blur-scape of the room, in and out and needles in her arm, pills down her throat before she could resist.
Her thoughts were pebbles of regret that ripped through the gummy residue of her brain like cranial gallstones, pulses of ugly truth that left her fragile self-image in agonized shreds.
Looking back, it was all so obvious . . .
She’d always thought she must be slightly insane because the world seemed insane and there was no place for her in it, and the whole world couldn’t be insane, could it? Eating itself, beating itself and stomping around in its own ashes, pumping its fists and shooting selfies while everything good burned and rotted and fell away.
No, it must be her, because she couldn’t get with the program, couldn’t strap on a bib and compete in the pie-eating contest of eternal misery.
But now, with the help of industrial strength anti-psychotics and oh-god-no-not-John-Prine-too coming out of the tarnished brass speaker like heartbreakingly slow electroshock therapy, she realized that she had truly snapped when she seemed to find her power. She bottomed out when she had locked into this bonkers delusion that she could leave her body and punish sinners like an avenging atheist angel.
She looked forward to being cured, to wanting to go into real estate and binge Netflix and let the Internet judge her appearance, to strap on that bib and start eating ashes with the oblivious gusto of a self-loathing champion.
She just wanted to make the world better, and in the creeps and crooks peddling false hope and hateful dogma, she saw the dam that needed to be blown to let real change, real love, flow. She could go after corporate evildoers every night for a century and never get through to one. She’d have to kill them all, but worse ones would always be waiting to take their places.
Why didn’t she just use her powers for good? Set all the animals free and infect everyone on Earth with that tick virus that makes humans allergic to red meat, or just share vegetarian recipes that actually taste good, put heart-nourishing playlists on everybody’s iPhones and urge stupid men to get their significant others flowers once in a while so they don’t end up alone and heartbroken and trying to destroy the world?
There you go, talking crazy again, no wonder they locked you up. She couldn’t even help the figments of her imagination. Sorry, Tamara.
She wasn’t going to get better until she let go of this absurd notion that she could change anything, and she wanted to get better, yes please. She wanted to listen to influencers and share memes and take personality surveys to find out which Transformer she was, she wanted more than anything to want what the world wanted her to want, and nothing more.
“I’m all better now!” she called out, and though only a feeble croak emitted from her parched throat, the echoes of it rebounded off the walls of white light until she couldn’t hear John Prine mourn Sam Stone anymore, at least. “I’m cured!
Hooray . . . science . . . ”
Someone came in, moving almost slow enough to be perceived with the naked eye. A white tornado hovered over her, shining a penlight into her eyes to measure pupil dilation, taking her pulse and reading her vital statistics, then whipped out a syringe the size of a caulking gun.
She focused and stared hard enough to read the legend embroidered on the breast of the white coat—Larkspur Cloisters—and she mumbled, “Hey, isn’t this where Jerry Garcia died?”
She tried to ward off the incoming needle, but there was no stopping it. She could only watch helplessly as it descended towards her neck and wonder at the mysteries of life as it detoured to insert itself into the nurse’s own arm.
The nurse slowed down from a cyclone to a snowstorm, then merely a sad-looking Asian woman with dark circles under her eyes and chapped lips that kept whispering the same thing over and over again, so faint and so low that Gala had to lean in close enough to smell the minty-toothpaste-and-lung-cancer smell of her breath to make it out.
“You have to hurry.”
The nurse sank to the floor in a boneless heap. Gala levered herself to a sitting position and dangled her long legs off the bed. She rubbed her face, getting lost in the contours and the texture and wondering what she’d do first, fall in love with a chatbot or take an award-winning snapchat of her cafeteria breakfast and medication cup, now that she was cured.
“You have to hurry,” came the voice from the speakers.
She stood up, feeling like a lofty, top-heavy tree in a high wind, uprooting one foot and then the other in the direction of the half-open door. It took her almost the entire duration of Portishead’s “Wandering Star” to step over the snoring nurse and hobble across the endless little room. She reflexively grabbed her tattered stuffed animal on the way out.
Wandering down the hall, it was weird how the whole insane asylum seemed to be grooving on her playlist, how the voice coming over the speakers got louder every time it repeated, “You have to hurry.” By the time Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” had concluded, she had reached the nursing station, where every peaked cap lay on crossed hands beside an empty medication cup. She stepped over doctors and patients lying in pools of drool with glassy, unseeing eyes.
She worried she would shatter when she hit the glass doors and the sunlight looked like a rain of dirt next to the pure, cold white light inside. Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” was almost over before she reached them, and she was still wondering which ex-boyfriend put that tedious junkie on her phone, when they swung open on their own (a miracle!) and she stepped outside.
“You have to hurry,” said the sun.
She tried to hurry, but the sun was sinking lower in the sky and the cars on the road were a continuous scream of plastic and steel and the Cadillac limousine waiting for her in the parking lot with its flashers on, pulsing in time with the voice of the sun, seemed to recede away as fast as she could shamble towards it.
Someone got out of the car and came to take her arm and she moved faster then, almost as fast as glass warps because glass is a liquid, and platypuses fluoresce under UV light and nobody knows why . . .
Things only began to flow at their customary speed once she was sitting in the car and it was moving.
The old woman on the seat across from her said, “I tried to tell you, sweetheart . . . All mortal things will fail you.” She laid a hand on Gala’s knee that smelled of tea rose and lavender. “People too.”
10
Gala never thought of herself as an intellectual; indeed, she wished she was an idiot, because at least idiots were generally happy, and the worse the world got, the happier they seemed to be.
When she rage-quit high school after a teacher rejected her term paper on The War of the Gargantuas as a discourse on the duality of humankind, she told herself she’d somehow blown it by becoming too aware of how everything worked, and now she could never share in the simple joys of prom, professional sports or a Chick-fil-A franchise coming to town.
When all her friends posted pics of themselves in their disposable polyester gowns on their diploma perp walk and all their college acceptance letters, Gala consoled herself with a crazy fantasy that she’d be approached any day now by a representative of some kind of anti-CIA, a radical cabal of super-smart people working behind the scenes to save the world from itself.
And now, five years too late, here they were.
The old woman introduced herself as Esme Rappaport, squeezing Gala’s knee and microwaving her with positive vibes. “I’m so sorry for what they put you through, dear,” she said in a voice like creamy steel wool, offering Gala a cup of orange pekoe tea. “We had no idea they’d go so far, but we should’ve anticipated that your mission would be met with fear and mistrust. We’ve been watching you for quite a while, waiting for you to reach your full potential.”
“You could’ve said something,” Gala muttered into the teacup. Each sip seemed to chip away at the hoar-frost coating her brain and nerves. She could feel her shaking hands sucking the warmth out of the cup, so she slurped it and looked out the window until her mind had thawed out. “You know why kids like the Harry Potter books? It’s not all the magic shit, though that’s pretty cool . . . It’s that every adult tells Harry how important and brave and smart and special he is. Even if it’s a lie, everybody deserves that . . . ”
“Maybe we could have groomed you, but we’ve been doing this for a very long time, and we’ve learned the risks are too great. Think about all the experiences that forced you to grow. Were they pleasant ones? If we spared you the pain, we would have blunted your development. You would have been satisfied with any little demonstration of your special gifts, and never become as powerful as you are.”
“But now, you’re ready to use me.” She’d seen enough of these movies to know how this shit worked. Her last boyfriend, Eoin, the comix troll who lived in an RV in his parents’ driveway, lived for this shit.
The ugly duckling finds out they’re really a mutant super-swan, but in a perennially unexpected and lazy plot twist, the people who awakened the new superheroine turn out to be villains intent on manipulating them for their nefarious scheme, and the superheroine proceeds to tear it all down and defeat an evil doppelganger in a spectacular deluge of expensive graphics.
She stuck around with Eoin longer than she should have for pondering the appeal of this shit, but then she put together how superhero fantasies flattered armchair Wolverines into staying on the couch, affirming their latent specialness with adult-sized Underoos and limited-edition action figures and requiring no real-world superheroics whatsoever.
She’d scoffed at this kind of cheap adult pacifier action then, but hadn’t she always felt it, too? In the still of the night, when it was so quiet she could hear her earbuds and phone-charger cables tying themselves in knots in her messenger bag, had she never felt as if someone were watching over her, shedding a spectral tear over her trials and tribulations and waiting for her to ripen, all the while whispering to themselves, “This one is special”?
Get a journal, Gala.
So anyway . . .
The limousine took them to Tiburon and they drove onto a ferry that didn’t appear to be taking any other passengers. The boat got underway immediately and took less than ten minutes to cross the strait. Esme refilled her cup and lowered the partition to whisper instructions to the driver. Gala wondered if she should be suspicious, or pretend to be.
“Our retreat is on a sequestered parcel of Angel Island,” Esme explained. “We find it helps direct our spiritual energies and screen out impure influences.”
Angel Island: once home to the detention centers where immigrants from Asia waited for months or years to be admitted to America, or sent back home. Aside from some park rangers and tourists, day-hikers and mountain bikers, the island was an uninhabited state park, or so she thought.
“What kind of work? Are you guys like a church?”
Esme nearly spit out her tea. “Heavens n
o, dear! We’re not just a passive vessel of received dogma. We do what you do, and while we’re not nearly so effective, we like to think we’ve made a difference in the world.”
Gala watched the waves, the spouts of spray off the blunt bow of the ferry. When people are dismissive or insulting, it sucks, but you know where you stand. But when they suck up to you, it’s like they bribe you in bills with no numbers on them, and you only find out how much you owe them later.
“I imagine you must have many questions,” Esme went on, “even some doubts. We’ll give you all the answers you need once we’ve reached our retreat. But for now, suffice to say that we sympathize with what you’ve done, and we want to amplify your efforts.”
Speeding off the ferry and onto the narrow paths of the empty park, the limousine went halfway around the island to Point Blunt, where they turned up a shady secret driveway that led to the old Nike missile base.
At the end of a forested box canyon, they stopped before a three-story Victorian house festooned with gable windows, fanciful turrets and fussy gingerbread, all of a spotless, milky pale color, as if freshly cast from white chocolate.
A valet ushered them from the car to the front porch, where another old woman sat on a glider with her legs crossed in a way that would’ve given Gala arthritis, hands steepled in silent meditation or prayer. Gala tiptoed past her, startled when the woman tipped her a wink and jumped up to give her a big, bony bear-hug.
Gala was introduced to way too many old women, as just trying to find a bathroom became a goodwill tour. She remembered none of their names, and they all seemed like variations on the same theme. They reminded her of her old teachers and therapists with their wounded smiles on finely wrinkled faces, mood rings and clanky turquoise bracelets, floral print dresses or smart pantsuits with colorful, wispy scarves in spiritually nourishing sunset colors.
They all greeted her with the same mixture of awe and insecurity of lifelong devotees meeting a prodigy, of priests meeting a prophet. It was silly and weird and she wanted to tell them to mellow out, but maybe they were right to be a little bit afraid.
The Flying None Page 5
