Amor and Psycho: Stories (7 page)

At the airport, he insisted that she not park, but leave him at the curb. “Call me anytime,” he told her. “Call if you need me—and call if you don’t need me.” He kissed her on the mouth and smiled into her eyes. Tears brimmed on her eyelids and she made her eyes swallow them down. They drizzled back into her body as she accelerated onto the freeway, a greedy girl who had gotten at least something of what she wanted and was now free to be no one, nothing, not even human, for anyone.

Cutting made Harald feel alive; the more he cut, the more he felt. He didn’t have a suicidal fantasy. There was nothing he cared about enough to die for. He knew what love was, probably, although it pained him to think of those afternoons in bed with Psycho, her flat chest rubbing against his as she seemed to be moved and swayed by some blast of erotic agony, her narrow face gouged with pain, her small teeth biting the sheets. He refused to die for love. If Psycho or his mom thought he had died for them, even posthumously it would tarnish him. He did not want to think about Psycho because she reminded him that he had betrayed her by falling in love when they’d agreed that love was bourgeois and stupid, what Psycho’s cheerful mother felt when she climbed into bed at night with Psycho’s new fat father—love as a last
resort, love as gratitude, love as filler. Worse, he had fallen in “love” with someone else—a sous-chef at Café Malatesta. He’d deceived Psycho, even though she never asked him to be faithful; she sneered at the claustrophobic virtue of fidelity and agreed with him about the pointlessness of gender.

He sterilized his X-Acto knife—he wasn’t an idiot—and began very high up on his right arm. He made the first cut shallow; the first cut was a test.

He imagined Psycho in the backseat of a car with her little sister, Charity, and her inanely happy mother and her new father, all of them singing feel-good songs in harmony. He wondered whether Psycho, in spite of her Goth / bisexual pretensions, ever got into it. He thought she probably did. (On her first date with her new girlfriend, Psycho asked Harald to come along. That’s how insecure she was. Harald sat in the backseat all night and didn’t say a word. They drove to the beach and walked on the sand in the dark, Harald following a few steps behind, like a ghost. They drank green chlorophyll drinks with antioxidants to prolong the lives they’d talked at length about throwing away. They smoked weed and made out, and Harald took part as much as Harald ever took part in anything.)

He thought of his own sister, Emma, who was twenty and worked in a toy store, where she was a fucking genius. The two of them used to walk home together after school and bake muffins in a toy oven. He used to get into that, especially if he’d been smoking weed, which he had been. In the morning, after his parents left for work, he used to take a
book into their bed and read. His mom had painted the bedroom red and gold—this just before she left his dad, whom everyone called “Bug,” short for Bugman, their last name. It was her last big paint job. The bedroom wasn’t really even a room, just an attached shed his father and he had caulked the brains out of one Saturday afternoon. The shed didn’t have heat—you could see wild mustard and calla lilies and gorse bushes through slivers in the walls—but it had an altar his mother had bought at a flea market in the city and a collection of turquoise Buddhas and those red-gold walls and the warmest down comforter in the house. His mother had a tiny picture of him—of Harald—in a funky gold frame on the nightstand on her side, beside her carafe of water and her amber jar of excellent antidepressants. Harald had cut himself for the first time in his parents’ bed. He felt safe there.

Now he wondered, idly, drawing a line parallel to the first line in his upper arm, whether this bed would be his last. A dramatic thought—Psycho would slap him, sit on him, tickle and humiliate him for it. He knew—they both knew—that the only power they had was not to give a shit. Harald
didn’t
give a shit—though he suspected that Psycho, deep down, did. (He accused her once of secretly believing in God, which she denied, then admitted, which was hot, and they had sex, sort of.)

The difference between them: She had a deep down, whereas he was all exposed and on the surface. Even now he thought he might shoot her an e-mail. He wanted to be sure she remembered him. He drew a more free-form line down
his upper arm with the X-Acto knife and watched the fine line of blood inscribe itself on him, like code.

BABE TRIED
, afterward, to analyze what she’d done, what had happened to her beautiful androgynous boy. He’d come out of her sixteen years ago, a new person, and Babe had given him that big-faced, oar-heaving, hard-drinking Nordic name. She didn’t blame herself for everything. She’d taken steps to maintain her sanity, her dignity and her self-respect—and left her husband, Bug. Her daughter, Emma, lived on her own, but Babe took Harald with her, and moved to a redwood cabin in a town a few miles away. The school was better, or at least different, and Babe had a job managing a B and B in the town. She did what she had to do, she told her best friend, Georgie. Somebody had to be Harald’s mother.

“You are not just his mother,” Georgie told her. “You are a human being. You have a
responsibility
to have a life.”

Georgie threw a dinner party for Babe and Bug, to acknowledge the change in their lives. Babe’s daughter, Emma, came, and so did Harald and his then girlfriend, Psycho. Georgie kept stirring more sugar into a pitcher of bitter Brazilian caipirinhas. She also made a special dish that had been her Syrian grandmother’s. She wrung ground lamb with water through her hands until pink water ran into the deep blue bowl, which looked good against the lamb. For the first time, Babe realized, really, what “meat” was—the
tender mash of it purified by its water bath. Georgie held out a dime-size bite on a spoon—and Babe ate it.

The Bugmans, a loose confederation of four, gathered as a family for the last time. Georgie fed them a beautiful dinner, then had them all draw Chinese sticks from a beautiful wooden tub. (Everything Georgie owned was beautiful, or turned beautiful in her possession.)

Babe’s fortune said she would get an unusual inheritance from a relative, that everything she achieved would come through her work—and she would get her wish. Greedily, Babe chose another Chinese stick, which said a strange dream would come true. Bug’s stick read that he would be granted two wishes. He wished for new rotors for his Subaru—and for world peace. Even Harald and Psycho (who didn’t reveal their wishes) seemed content with what they got. Georgie read her own stick last. It said, “You will suffer an illness before old age, and only part of your wish will come true.”

“Put it back,” said Babe. “Take another.”

HARALD SLEPT
sixteen hours a day. Babe tried to wake him gently for school before she went to work, played classical music on the radio, brought him orange juice, built a fire—but nothing helped. He lied about his meds, hid pills in his socks or saved and took them all at once for a more devastating impact. Maybe she should have done more to give him continuity after the divorce. What should she have done? She’d kept his spaceman sheets.

Their funky handmade cabin in the woods off the 609 was temporary—its most potent charm. Even the outbuilding Babe used as a bedroom had torn slightly away from the hillside. One wall angled obliquely from the floor—six degrees, gauged Harald, a precise and mathematical person. The doors rattled like loose teeth, but Babe slept well here, at first, when she knew her son slept nearby, drugged and safe.

She felt almost happy this way, without anything she wanted. Then she began to have visual hallucinations. Once she thought she awakened to find a Japanese man dressed in a yellow wet suit holding out a mirror. When she looked at her reflection, she found her head covered with eggs—big white chicken eggs. She tried to pull the eggs off her head before they hatched, but they clung to her hair with glue they’d secreted. The Japanese man returned; this time, he wore a blue wet suit. He spoke urgently to Babe in a bubbly, submerged voice she could not understand, but he pulled the eggs from her hair with a tiny red plunger.

Babe believed in work. She’d always worked toward things she wanted. She’d worked on her house, the toy store, her relationship with Bug—all lost now. She used to stay up at night after the children went to bed and paint rooms, work on taxes, read the grand jury report. Even making love with Bug, she’d tick off items on an imaginary list: relieve stress, reconnect, keep balanced. She served her famous marrow jellies to the children, and felt she was building something—bones, muscles, nerve.

Now she lived with Harald, her depressed son, in a
whacked cabin whose water smelled of sulfur and stained all the porcelain black. But the morning fog felt clean. She had a job in town where the owners told her every day how indispensable she was—so indispensable, they didn’t give her a day off for four months. Finally, Babe quit, and Aisha, the female partner, responded furiously and refused to pay Babe’s back wages.

“How could you do this to us? We depended on you. We
trusted
you,” Aisha said. “Now you’re stealing the most valuable property we have: our trade secrets.”

Aisha glanced at the heavy kerosene ball of the fire lighter by the stone hearth. “If I hear of any other B and B using my cardamom-cinnamon bun recipe, you’ll never work in this county again.”

Babe said, “If you hit me over the head with that iron ball, I’ll come back and haunt you. I’ll interfere with the bookings and terrify the guests.”

Aisha’s gaze wavered. Her weakness: ADHD.

“Call the police, get a restraining order,” Aisha told her husband. “Write down the threats she just made.” Babe realized that Aisha always took this peremptory tone with him, and wondered what was wrong with the husband, why he stood it.

“Don’t bother,” Babe said. “I’ll go.”

She drove home feeling virtuous and free. On the hill outside town, a new couple had brought in African animals—gazelles, elands and zebras. Babe almost hit another car head-on from craning her neck to look at their rare beauty.
The antlers on the elands looked hand-carved. Somebody else must have been distracted, too, because just a few hundred yards up the road, three turkey vultures rose reluctantly from the parallel yellow lines, hovered heavily before her windshield and then moved to the side, revealing the carcass of a fox whose face they’d licked clean as a spoon. She smelled rain and eucalyptus on the air, and rushed home. Maybe she’d bake those cardamom-cinnamon buns for Harald, fill the house with a rich, comforting atmosphere. When she arrived, though, she found—literally—a dark cloud over her house. Sometimes life’s perverse, Babe thought. You find yourself, which means someone else gets lost.

HARALD WROTE
his name in blood on his arm, then drank three-quarters of a bottle of white rum and e-mailed his ex-girlfriend Psycho a long, guilt-tripping letter about his meaningless life. Although he didn’t confess exactly what he’d done, the letter was so long and rambling, she put two and two together and called the sheriff, and an hour later the deputy came. Harald, unconscious, did not respond. The deputy opened the front door (unlocked) and found Harald lying quietly on his back, bleeding hard from both arms into the bedding. The deputy said it looked like a murder scene.

The paramedics bandaged Harald’s arms and head. (He’d fallen and gouged his temple; at first, the gouge seemed more serious than the slashed arms and the alcohol poisoning.) The ambulance drove him two and a half hours
to a psychiatric hospital, which someone called “the Bug House.” Babe almost laughed when she heard that—“the Bug House.” Not that it was funny.

She felt afraid to visit her son there, afraid of seeing him for what he was—a scar. His arms were marked so that he would never again have real privacy around his body; any stranger could read on his arms what he’d done. He didn’t want to see her anyway. He felt, the head nurse said stiffly, “quite violent about it.” So Babe drove home. A black widow spider lived in the jamb of the front door; she had to open the door carefully or she would kill it.

Her eyes wouldn’t close when she lay down, so she had a lot of time to clean. The cabin sparkled pointlessly. She hung up kitschy stuff, Madonna night-lights, a portrait Harald had done in high school of Christ represented as a gopher on a cross. She carried wood and kindling, split logs, swept pine needles off the little decks, made altars out of pinecones and broken necklaces. When she finished this work, she started on the stones. She moved one up from the ravine onto the deck. It was an unusual stone—larger than most, smoother, whiter. It had holes bored into it that certain mollusks make. Then she found another stone, and then another; it was like finding mushrooms—once you knew how to look, you saw them everywhere.

She brought stones inside and put them away. Moving stones made her tired, and after she worked she slept.

*   *   *

IN ONE OF
her vivid reveries, Babe met a rock star as he drove toward the highway in a low-slung sports car, a vintage Corvette. Babe walked along the road, gathering stones, and the rock star pulled up alongside her and rolled his window down. “I have a cabin,” he told her. “I hardly ever use it. Go down there whenever you want and hang loose.”

Babe walked farther down the road. Immediately the landscape changed and became wild. Vultures circled overhead. Sharp rocks jutted up fifty feet into a sky that glowed yellow, like the moon. A small reptilian animal chased her, baring its sharp teeth. Babe knew that the animal would attack, and it did: It charged and bit her hand. The wound left a trail of blood behind her, but now the terrible thing Babe had known would happen had happened, and she could relax. The mad animal seemed calmer, too. They walked down the road together like old friends, but no cabin waited at the end where Babe could hang loose.

SOME EVENINGS
, she carried only three or four stones up the ravine. She piled them on the fireplace or used one to hold down a stack of bills on a table. Other times, she gathered more and stored them around the house. One day, she filled the whole fireplace with stones. Then—because she could use the outdoor shower—she filled the bathtub. Sometimes she couldn’t help herself. Sometimes she felt ashamed. She carried stones into her house the way people drank or did junk. She thought about not doing it; sometimes she
stopped for a few hours or a day and began to feel calm and free. But then the day darkened and she went outside, imagining herself simply going out to gather firewood, knowing that a fire was impossible. Just the weight of the stones in her hands, in her house, comforted her. From the void of black space where she lived (in her body), they brought her, even, to the edge of bliss.