Black Wave (14 page)

After the New York reading, Michelle and Lu had a tremendous fight in front of the beverage table at a party. At the
end of the fight, Michelle agreed to remove Lu from the book. It just wasn't worth it. It kept Lu close to her, she realized, when they had been separate for so long, four years. If the book was ever published she'd have to talk about Lu all the time, what a horror. And it was bad for their respective romantic lives, keeping them linked in this way. At the end of the fight they felt closer, like comrades, and Michelle realized with a sick feeling that this was the same mechanism that had kept them together as lovers all those years. She returned from her trip and deleted Lucretia from the manuscript.

Sometimes It Feels Like A Mental Illness, Michelle said to Quinn. They were seated on the kitchen floor, relaxing against the cabinets. Their knees bumped together in a friendly fashion. Being A Writer. Being This Kind Of Writer. It Feels Compulsive. I Get Sweaty. I Wish I Was A Painter. I Wish The Story Came Out In An Image Of Like A Rotting Eggplant. A Dark, Swirly Rotting Eggplant With Really Thick Ridges Of Oil Paint That Take Months To Dry. And I Could Point At It And Say—That Is Lucretia. That Was Our Relationship. I Could Paint A Cigarette-Smoking Corgi In A Visor And Name The Painting
Mother
. That Would Be Awesome. But It's Not What I Do. I Write Five-Hundred-Page Books About My Life And Then Have To Remove The Main Story Line So People Don't Think Someone Was A Jerk For Being A Jerk.

Well, I bet you were a jerk too,
Quinn said.
I mean, so far in this story you've been pretty unsympathetic.

Thanks, Michelle said. I've Really Tried. I Just Wanted To Write About What Happens To Your Heart And Your Mind When You're In An Oppressive Relationship. I Wanted To Try To Understand How People Stay In Shitty Situations, The Weird Head Fuck Of Love And Anxiety. It's Like Being Electrocuted, It Makes You Cling To The Very Thing Hurting You.

Ooh, that's a good metaphor,
Quinn said.
Why don't you just write a poem about it? No one ever really understands what a poem is about. You could hide all kinds of complaints in there.

It Just Isn't Coming Out That Way.

Quinn understood.
Well, what are you going to do?

I Have To Get Back Into My Story, Michelle said sadly. It was hard being such a mess. She knew what had happened to her in Los Angeles and she was not looking forward to reliving it. I Can't Wait For This Book To Be Over So I Can Be Sober Again.

What's the book even about?
Quinn asked.
If you've removed the main story.

Michelle wasn't sure. Couldn't a book just be about life? Me, My Alcoholism, I Think. The Nineties. Being Poor. The Feeling Of It All.

The nineties,
Quinn said in a dreamy voice, and shook her head with longing. Like everyone, Quinn was younger than Michelle and had rosy feelings about 1990s San Francisco. A place that Quinn would never get to go, and Michelle had lived there. Quinn wasn't alone—lots of younger queers held the decade in this reverent light. It was funny to Michelle. The nineties had been so ugly in so many ways. No one's clothes fit them right. Everyone wearing men's leather jackets, all boxy and awkward. Dog collars as necklaces. So much sexual acting out, like the whole community had been sexually abused and had agreed to purge the trauma by having lots of violent public sex. In fact, just last night, not in this book but in real life, someone had asked Michelle,
Remember that Thanksgiving when I went to your house and wound up getting pierced by Cooper in your bathroom?

Michelle remembered. She'd had to go into the bathroom to retrieve her coat, which for some reason was in the bathtub. She remembered the precision of the pins and the beads of blood shimmering on the girl's solar plexus, the latex-gloved hands of her friend holding the needle. The
nineties. Like a folie à deux shared by an entire community. A sort of sexual mass hysteria.

I Think I Should Make You Go, Michelle told Quinn.

Okay,
Quinn said.
When do we get to hang out again?

Not In This Book, Michelle shook her head sadly. The World Is Going To End In About A Year, Before We Ever Meet Each Other.

Oh.
Quinn nodded.
It's like a metaphor for the end of love.

Breakups Alter Your Brain Chemistry, Michelle said. Everything Is Doomed And Ruined And Horrible. You Used To Be This Beautiful Trusting Thing And You Just Get Used By Thoughtless, Shitty People And Then You're Irreparably Damaged.

Quinn sighed.
Bummer
.

Also I Couldn't Figure Out How To End The Book, Michelle explained. With Memoirs The Story Just Keeps Going. You're Supposed To Wrap It Up All Nicely But It's Real Life. It's Hard. So I Think I'm Just Going To Have The World Explode.

Quinn nodded.
Okay, so—what should I do? To leave?

You Don't Have To Do Anything, Michelle said. I'll Do It.

She hit save and closed her computer.

2

Where did your own story end and other people's begin? Michelle wrestled with this question. After her first book came out she'd been invited to give some lectures and teach some workshops, and always the people who came were females, females who wanted to tell their stories. Their stories being female stories, there was a lot of hurt inside them—abuse, betrayals, injustices, feelings. They were all worried about getting in trouble for writing the truth. They didn't want people to be mad at them. It's Your Story, Michelle would insist.

She wanted to free them all, all the girl writers. Girls needed to tell the truth about what the fuck was going on in this world. It was bad. It was brave of the girls to let themselves stay so raw, though Michelle worried that some of them had had to conjure personality disorders in order to cope. Sometimes the girls were too much even for her, Michelle wondered if she could handle another piece of writing about sexual abuse or sex work. But it seemed that this was to be her job upon the earth. If you don't
tell your story, who will? It was important. Our stories are important.

Then Michelle started hanging out at the Zen Center too much. What was a story if you didn't even exist? Michelle observed the way she told the same stories about herself, thereby cementing this false idea of self harder and harder in her psyche. It was all ego. There was no Michelle, so how could there be her memoir? It seemed to Michelle, sitting on a straw floor in a wide room, her legs folded atop each other, eyes half-mast, that being a writer of memoir was one of the most violent and anti-Buddhist things a person could do with their life. She thought of her fight with Lu. It was her story fighting with Lu's story. If neither of them even existed, why bother fighting? No self, no story. Michelle felt the ache and burn of her ego hurling itself against such thoughts as she sat down at her computer in Los Angeles.

Michelle would begin the story with her nonexistent self smoking crack in a van in San Francisco. Alone, so as not to stomp on anyone's right to privacy: Her friends' right to smoke crack with a recent ex-con, the ex-con's right to procure crack cocaine for a bunch of dykes and then play with their tits. Everyone's inalienable rights would be upheld within the text of her book. She would write only about herself, and she would make it Buddhist and universal.

The more Michelle stared at the glow of the screen the more she noticed it had its own pulse, seemed strangely alive. She recalled that people who'd done certain psychedelic drugs claimed that in their heightened state they'd understood that electricity was alive. Michelle thought about it, this invisible force that strung her world together. What was electricity? Maybe it was God, the universe she prayed to. She prayed to God, the universe, electricity, and
her computer to please help her write another book. She had written one already, why was it still so hard? In most occupations the tasks become easier with practice, the worker grows confident. Michelle thought of her mother Wendy, able to insert a catheter, administer a shot, execute her nursely duties with a swiftness and élan her patients were grateful for.
I had to push a woman's rectum in,
she told Michelle on a recent phone call.

What Are You Talking About? Michelle asked, terrified to learn. Each woman was in her respective kitchen, smoking her respective cigarettes. Michelle's kitchen was awash with carcinogenic sunlight, making the kitschy yellow table she'd thrifted in North Hollywood look especially cheerful. Michelle thought the table had magical properties, was a shade of yellow that corresponded to positive neural pathways in her brain. Daily she awoke in the dingy gray of her bedroom and pulled herself to the kitchen to stare down at the table like meditating. After a minute of flooding her eyes with that hue she was able to smoke, make coffee, kill the cockroaches scurrying along her countertops.

Her rectum fell out and I pushed it back in,
Michelle's mother repeated. There was a stiff pride in her voice. She knew she had been brave, had accepted an experience few would be able to handle. Michelle could hear her take a dry drag off her cigarette and it inspired Michelle to do the same.

I Still Don't Understand What You're Talking About, Michelle said, fearing her mother was trying to dramatically draw the story out. Michelle hated when people did that. She feared she actually did it all the time, was possibly doing it right now, as she typed the story of her mother and the fallen rectum onto her computer. She stubbed out her Camel in the empty ashtray then flung it out the window.

She strained and it fell out,
Wendy said.
She's an old lady. She's been living there since she was, I don't know, before I started. I don't even think she was crazy when they brought her in but she's crazy now. Thirty, forty years she's been there.

I Still Don't Understand How Her Rectum Fell Out, Michelle maintained. How A Rectum Falls Out. A Rectum Is A Hole, How Does A Hole Fall Out Of Something, A Hole Is Nothing, It's Negative, It's Like—Michelle waved away her initial comparison of her vagina—It's Like You're Telling Me Someone's Nostril Fell Out And You Pushed It Back In. It's Negative Space, Please Tell Me What You Mean. Michelle shook her pack of cigarettes on the table and lit up a fresh one. Her mother heard the click of the lighter, the familiar crackle.

You smokin'?
Wendy asked, alarmed.
When did you start smokin' again, I thought you quit? Are you stressed out, am I stressing you out?
Wendy's voice was thick with the accent of her region. There were no
R
s and words banged into each other awkwardly, like people not paying attention to their movements on a crowded street.

You Know, Michelle said airily, I Smoke, I Stop, I Smoke, I Stop.

You're lucky
, Wendy said wistfully.
Your mother is like that too. I wish I could pick 'em up and put 'em down.
She heard the familiar click and crackle, a smoker lighting up on the other side of the country. They each exhaled into their telephones.

Anyway. The Rectum.

You don't understand biology,
Wendy said.
The rectum, the muscle around the hole, you strain it from, you know, pushing too hard, it can fall out of the body.

Michelle was glad to have a strong mind, one not prone
to hypochondria, germ-phobia, or anxiety in general. Being raised by a nurse meant you were privy to all the tragedies that could befall a body. As a girl, Michelle would pour through her mother's nursing-school textbooks. Terrible rashes sprawling across skin like a map. Parasites, slender monsters that could live inside your body. Athlete's foot taken to extremes, cleft palates, birth defects. Diseases of the eyeballs and the gums. Mouth cancer. Elephantiasis of the gonads. Hemorrhoids the size of apricots, hung from the anus as if from a tree. Her brother, Kyle, couldn't look at them—he had an anxiety disorder—but young Michelle enjoyed them, much as she enjoyed the B-grade horror movies shown on cable late at night. There was something so unreal about them, so extreme. But the older one becomes, the more it occurs to you that perhaps all these things are inevitable. Michelle felt less welcoming to the idea that one can lose one's rectum. Your body is destined to fall apart, why not in this manner? Why not your rectum falling out? Does the rectum fall out of itself? Michelle still couldn't wrap her mind around it. She imagined a long pink tube with a winking hole at the end sliding from a body, like a grisly penis or one of those water-snake balloon toys kids give hand jobs to. She shuddered.

The CNAs were freaking out about it,
Wendy said
. Oh, call the doctor, call the doctor. I said, for what, that? I'll do it. I just put on some gloves and pushed it back inside. She was fine, the poor thing.

That's Amazing, Michelle said. You Are Amazing. I Hope You Get A Raise For That.

Mom snorted. Michelle imagined dragon gusts of smoke blowing from her nostrils. Oh, don't write that, she thought. Wendy hates looking so smoky in these stories. Michelle
questioned her desire to make her mom look rough. But the woman spent her days returning fallen rectums and smoking cigarettes. I'm not making this up, Michelle pouted.

A raise? Not likely,
Wendy said bitterly.
Not in that shit hole. They give the manager raise after raise and they're hiring these RNs with no experience, these kids.

Why Don't You Go Back To School, Ma?

I'm too old, I can't deal with that. Plus, I don't want to be like them.

Like Who?

The RNs. They all think they're hot shit. My supervisor likes me though. He's nice. Young. Reminds me of your brother.

He's Gay?

Flaming.

Okay, Can You Tell Me What I Have To Do To Make Sure My Rectum Never Falls Out? she asked.

Oh, it only really happens to old people.

Well, I'll Be Old Someday, What Should I Do?

Don't strain. You should never strain anyway, it gives you hemorrhoids.

Didn't Elvis Die From Straining?

He had a heart attack. He was on dope, don't be a dopehead and you'll be fine. How's Los Angeles?

It's Good.

Michelle looked around the apartment. The apartment was too small and smelled weird. The wall-to-wall carpeting was suspiciously stiff, like something had been spilled across it, mashed into the fibers, and allowed to dry into a crunchy board. It felt creepy on her bare feet. It was a charcoal-colored carpet that Michelle feared was supposed to be some other color. Like, white.

How's your friend?
Michelle's mother extended
the conversation. Michelle couldn't tell if it was cute or made her crazy that her lesbian moms referred to her dates as
friends
. They referred to one another that way, too. Michelle chalked it up to their place and time. It was hard to be mad at her parents for their homophobia when they were gay, too.

My Friend? Michelle asked. Do You Mean Quinn Or Lu?

I don't know,
Wendy laughed nervously.
Not for nothin' I can't keep them straight with you.

Michelle couldn't remember which version of the story she was in. Was It A Teenager Or A Married Woman?

Oh Jesus,
Wendy said.
Are you kiddin' me? Don't you want a real relationship with someone? What are you doing, a teenager? How old? You can get arrested, you know. That's statutory rape and they won't care that you're a lesbian. Lesbians can be rapists too.

She Was Nineteen, Michelle said.

And a married woman! Marriage is a sacrament. You have to think about a person who is not true to her word like that, what kind of character she has.

Ma, Michelle said, You Know You Were Excommunicated From The Church Like A Million Times Over For Being Gay.

It's between me and my god,
Wendy said staunchly.
God doesn't care who we love, only that we keep our promises. What makes you think that woman will keep a promise to you when she didn't keep her promise to her husband?

They're Both Gone Anyway, Michelle said. I Took Them Out Of The Story. I'm Just Going To Be Alone. It's Easier.

Wendy exhaled a worried cloud of smoke.
I don't like you living alone in that city.

Kyle's Here, Michelle said.

Why don't you live with him?
Wendy suggested.

Michelle thought about it on the level of a plot twist. It would be interesting. But having Michelle move in with Kyle would require Michelle to rewrite the last two hundred pages, rather than just edit extensively, and writing was exhausting.

I Don't Think So, Michelle said. I'm Already Here. Paid My First And Last And My Security. The Building Is Fine, People Are Nice, The World Is Going To End In Like A Year Anyway. I Won't Make Anything Bad Happen To Me Before Then, Michelle promised.

The world's gonna end,
Wendy chuckled.
You sound like Kym. That's all she talks about, she's paranoid.

Really? Michelle perked up.

Yes. I told her I can't listen to it anymore, she sounds like a crazy person.

Can I Talk To Her? Michelle asked.

She's sleeping,
Wendy said.
Her illness. You find a job yet?

No.

How come you can't find one, aren't there any jobs in Los Angeles? Can't Kyle get you a job?

No, Ma, Michelle said. People Can't Just Give People Jobs.

Well, why can't you find one? You went to UMass Boston for that year, that should make a difference.

College Only Helps If You Finish, Ma. Otherwise it Doesn't Count.

It still cost you like five thousand dollars, that should count for something.

Well, It Doesn't.

The conversation had entered the danger zone. Wendy's insistence to be helpful coupled with her total inability to help plus Michelle's reluctance to ask her mother to
back off times her determination to endure the conversation equaled the probability of Michelle being cast into a dark mood.

I Basically Have A High School Education, Michelle said with gritted teeth. High School Means Nothing, Nobody Cares About High School, Everyone Goes, It's Meaningless.

You know, your grandfather never went to high school,
Wendy said.
He dropped out and went right into the Navy.

I Know, Ma, Michelle said. She lit a new cigarette from the crushed tip of the old. I Can't Talk About It Anymore.

Oh, I'm stressing you out. I can hear it in your voice. I don't want to stress you out. You know about the stress hormone? When you're stressed out your body makes this hormone and it makes you fat. Watch out.

Okay I Will.

And watch it with the smoking.

Okay, Ma. I Will.

A pause.
You okay?

Yeah, Ma, Of Course. I'm Fine.

Michelle took the bus out to the beach, just to see if the ocean was as bad as in San Francisco. It was both worse and better. The water was clotted, a vast dumpster, but an eerie fog came off it like something out of a Stephen King story. Michelle was sure a chemical reaction was occurring, like when you dump bleach into ammonia and create a murderous steam. Whatever was deadly in the waters had merged with the low-slung Los Angeles smog and a new fatal compound was born. Michelle was afraid to linger by the wreck of it too long, even though artists had built the shore into a trashed fun house. Whimsical sculptures rose from the
mucked sand. Michelle fell in love with a mermaid fashioned from oil drums and rust, her hair a wreath of burned plastic. The mystery mist crawled from the waves to the shore and slipped around the statuary like ghosts.