The Elementals (26 page)

“I don’t want to upset you.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” I said. “How to help her.”

She looked different, my mother. She was better, her hair had grown back, but sometimes her eyes would get a faraway look that I didn’t want to think too much about.

“You know, I didn’t want you to go back there. To Berkeley. But in some ways I think it might help you to come to terms with what happened.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“It’s weird,” she said. “I didn’t ever believe in these things before, but since I’ve been sick … I had a dream. She was in it. She was asking you to come back.”

That night I dreamed, too.

*   *   *

A girl rose up from out of the water. Her hair looked green, woven with seaweed and shells. She was naked, with perfect tiny white breasts, but her eyes were ravaged.

A man happened by. He was an unassuming man with a paunch, and balding. You wouldn’t have looked at him twice on the street. You wouldn’t have suspected him.

The girl pointed her finger in his direction and opened her mouth in a silent scream.

*   *   *

The girl lay asleep in a nest of straw and feathers under a blanket of green foliage. Her hair was wild, a tangle of leaves, twigs and flowers. She was sleeping peacefully but around her neck was tied a rope.

A man came by. His eyes were red-shot. His hair shone like it was metal-made. He bent down and pulled. Rope. Taut.

*   *   *

The girl wore a wreath of flowers and a long white dress. She danced among the stalks of grain under the fullest moon. A man arrived. He was a tall man, too tall, and there was something terribly wrong with his eyes. The eyes of a zealot. Or worse.

The girl smiled at him and beckoned.

Dawn came, lighting up the field as if it had caught fire. Conflagration. Immolation.

A boy walking there saw something in the dirt and picked it up, then threw it down, his whole body convulsing with disgust.

It was a severed hand, ragged at the edges and rubbery-white like the kind you find in a Halloween store. But real.

Other parts were strewn across the field. Bloody parts. Body parts. Rendered.

The boy heard a voice like wind, blowing through the stalks of grain. A woman’s voice.

Laughing.

*   *   *

This dream, combined with the revelation of my mom’s, was what made me decide, finally.

I had to go back up north; I had to find out. Something, at least. I’d failed Jeni long enough.

Part III

Junior Year

29. A woman? Was I that?

I could have called John when I got back; I had his phone number and even his address—he was living in a hostel on Piedmont. But I wasn’t ready to see him. I purposely avoided that street when I arrived with my parents at the end of the summer but I couldn’t help turning my head after every tall, dark-haired man who hurried by.

My parents and I looked at a lot of places for me to live in that first semester of my junior year. There was a corpulent guy who interviewed me while clipping his toenails. He kept pet rats and explained that I had to be very quiet at all hours so as not to disturb them. An entomologist and his girlfriend kept bugs in their refrigerator and told me, while eyeing me up and down, that I wasn’t exactly what they were looking for; I assumed they meant something besides my skills as a housemate. There was a slim, tawny, red-haired girl who lived by herself in a two-story Tudor-style house and was offering me the filthy garage for almost two thousand dollars a month if I also agreed to clean for her; I guess she was in pretty high demand. There were three punk rock guys living in a dilapidated house with graffiti all over the walls; they were renting a room the size of a closet and painted black; it was cleaner-looking than the beautiful girl’s garage but smelled of piss. One guy lived in a beautiful house in the hills, but besides the fact that it was in too close a proximity to the house I wanted to avoid, he told me he made “erotic films, well, some call them porn but whatevs,” and asked me if I minded naked women lying around the yard.

And then, while my parents went for lunch, I met Pierrette, who liked to be called Pierre, a tall Swiss woman with a smoky voice and smokier blue eyes who came gliding out to meet me, a batik sarong tied around her hips.

We sat on cushions on the floor and talked for about half an hour while her three-year-old son, Michelangelo, ran around, chasing the cat and four kittens that also lived in the Oakland apartment. Michelangelo’s skin was dusky brown and his eyes were sweeter than chocolate. His father was a Rastafarian man Pierre had met in Jamaica but now she was dating an African doctor. She supported herself by making fabrics and jewelry. There was almost no furniture in the apartment that had been part of an old Victorian house, divided into separate units, but the floors were polished wood, the walls were hung with masks from all over the world and the big, clean bay windows let in the sun. Slender columns flanked the front door and in the small garden there was a chicken coop and a vegetable patch.

The tiny room I was offered had lace curtains Pierre had made and an old-fashioned frosted pink glass fixture shaped like a breast, even down to the nipple tip. Right away, I wanted to live there.

“Do you need any references?” I asked her, although I wasn’t sure who I’d ask for one, except maybe Melinda Story, and I hadn’t spoken to her in almost a year.

Pierre said, “You always know when it’s right.”

I didn’t argue with her.

I loved her right away.

It reminded me of how I felt when I met John, Tania and Perry. Except different. This was love without any attachment, therefore without any real risk. I wanted to be near Pierre and Michelangelo but not really involve myself with them. I wanted to feel their quiet presence as they drew on large pieces of paper on the floor of the living room, collected eggs and picked vegetables, ate their omelets and homegrown tomatoes at the kitchen table, sang each other songs at bedtime. In the first few weeks we shared meals and occasionally Pierre and I shopped at the Co-op together. She suggested foods and supplements to add to my diet—like flax oil, probiotics and a green powder to make smoothies with. But often I shopped and ate alone in my room and I was content.

I was taking classes and doing art projects in my spare time. The collages I’d started to make were really all for Jeni. I got large black poster boards from the art supply store and glued on photographs, then decorated them with ripped pieces of fabric from dresses I’d worn, with glitter and dried petals, safety pins, plastic insects and tea sets. I used the collection of greeting cards my mother had given me over the years—paintings of fairies and dancers and angels and flowers and reproductions of great works of art—as well as a few photographs of my mom, of Jeni and of John. With a silver pen I wrote bits of my stories and poetry on paper that I then ripped and scattered over the surface of the collages. In one piece I used matchboxes with tiny white plastic skeletons inside of them and covered the whole thing with black tulle and black glitter. Sometimes Michelangelo came into my room and made collages with me. He covered his black poster board with gobs of glue and then sprinkled on white feathers and silver glitter.

“Angels are stars in the air,” he said.

“Angels are little boys named Michelangelo,” I told him.

I didn’t spend time with anyone besides my roommates and in the first few weeks I rarely even saw the people I’d known from before. But when I felt settled I did go to visit Melinda Story.

During office hours I knocked tentatively on her door. She smiled when she saw me and we hugged. She’d cut off her braid into a short pixie; it made her look even younger than she already did.

“I was so worried about you,” she said. “But I heard you had come back. How are your classes?”

I shrugged. “They seem okay. I’m trying to focus on the writing.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I think you’re so talented.”

“Portman didn’t really.”

She gestured for me to come and sit at her desk. The light through the windows of Wheeler had that familiar dusty glow, making dust particles ignite.

“It can be an old boy’s club around here. They don’t always know how to handle a strong woman.”

A woman? Was I that? A strong woman? “I don’t feel strong. I’ve been afraid to come back but I had to.”

Annie’s picture was behind Melinda on the shelf. I hadn’t noticed it there before, facing outward, completely visible to anyone who came through the door.

“They arrested someone,” I said.

“They found who did it?” Melinda’s eyes looked rounder than usual.

“No. They arrested the teacher who escorted them, on something ‘unrelated.’” I made quotation marks in the air. “Child molestation. But they say he’s innocent.”

“Doesn’t sound clean to me.” As Melinda spoke, Annie’s eyes in the photograph wouldn’t stop watching me. I couldn’t tell if they were challenging or just sad.

I thought of the homeless woman who had spoken to me when I first came here.
You think you’re fine now,
she said.
But just wait. It gets harder. Then you’ll be transformed. Then you’ll be just like us.

No one was sure if Kragen had done it. What if it was someone else? What if I found out what happened to Jeni and lost my own soul in the process? Is that what I had been afraid of all this time?

“I guess in some ways I’m scared to know,” I said. “I almost want it to be him so I can just let it rest.”

“I get it,” Melinda said. “But it’s better to know. No matter what, it’s better.”

If I lost my soul in this so-far fruitless searching, perhaps it would be for the best. Who else deserved it but my Jennifer, my friend?

*   *   *

One day Lauren Barnes came up to me, suppressing an embarrassed smile.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked. “We were worried.” She only looked curious; I had been elevated to the level of prime gossip material.

“Lauren,” I said calmly. “I’ve just been through what could be described as a fucking nightmare and I’m just now trying to come back here and have a life again.”

“Wow,” she said. “Chillax. What’s all the attitude?”

But I went on, ignoring her. “There is no reason for you to treat people the way you do except because of some serious and fucked-up personality disorder. I am hoping that you will refrain from speaking to me again, unless you have something sincerely kind to say. Otherwise I may be forced to hit you in the face.”

She took a step back and put up her hands but by then I was walking away.

*   *   *

There was one other person from the past that I saw sometimes: Tommy Leeds. He was in my modern art history class. We never said hello but one day he sat next to me for the lecture. He wore eyeliner and his hair was spiked. The plugs in his ears had stretched.

“Hey,” he said.

I thought of John Graves and the way he greeted me.

“Greetings.”

Tommy gave me a split-second squint of
what the fuck
and then asked, “How’s it going?”

I wondered why he wasn’t avoiding me.

“Okay.”

“Heard you were in L.A. for a while.”

I nodded.

“I’m playing with my band in the city this weekend if you want me to put you on the list,” he said.

“I thought you thought I was a freak.”

He grinned. “Do. But I also get that you went through some pretty bad shit with all that.”

I shrugged. I realized then how desperate I still was for any show of sympathy, anyone who would recognize what I had been through. I accepted his invitation.

*   *   *

Pierre asked me where I was going.

“You look good,” she told me while she stirred the spaghetti sauce.

I was wearing eyeliner and lipstick, which I usually avoided now. I’d also had my nose pierced on Telegraph by a jewelry vendor and I’d just switched out the original sterile silver stud for a tiny diamond chip. I thanked Pierre and told her about Tommy.

“But that’s not who you are really thinking about it, is it?” she said in her dusky voice. I hadn’t told Pierre about John but she’d seen photographs of him in the collages I’d been making.

“The man with the dark hair, in your art?”

“Yes.”

Her gaze was gas-flame blue. “May I ask who he is?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Perhaps you need to find out.”

*   *   *

As I headed for BART I saw the man with the dreads.

“I was once like you, my friend,” he said. “You could become me easy, walk out into the street covered in hair and filth and people would look at you with disgust, sister, and think you were born like that, that you never were a little child, clean as a small tree, quick as water, bright in the mind and breathing sweetly. When you walk as long as I have you’ll see too much, things you don’t want to see. They can kill your mind, yes they can, kill it dead. I hope I can teach you by who I am. You’ll go like me if you don’t watch your back. Those souls, they keep coming no matter what we do and you will always have to hear them until you or someone, some damn thing else takes your life, but you don’t have to let them make you ill in the in-between.”

He moved his hands in the air so the dirty red poncho he wore gave him a winged look. His eyes were rolled up in his head. “There is a sickness, child. You must put it out.”

I took BART into the city and came to the club where I’d first met John Graves. I almost wanted to turn back; I hadn’t realized how it would affect me, dizzy me, to be there.

A sign on a trash bin read:
DO NOT PLAY ON OR AROUND.
Like a warning about everything.

Just as I was standing there, beneath the marquee, deciding what to do, I felt a hand on the small of my back and gasped.

It was Tommy.

“Hey, come in with us,” he said.

I followed him through the back entrance into the green room, where the rest of the band was milling around drinking beers.

“Glad you made it out,” Tommy said.

I tried to smile at him but the muscles in my face felt weak, unused.