The Argonauts (15 page)

I came home and hid the “annoying phone call” report in the back of a file drawer, and hoped that was that.

A few days later, after picking up my mail at work, I found a handwritten letter from one of my students in the mix. In it he said he was very sorry to intrude upon my day, but he wanted me to know that a strange man was on campus looking for me. He said the man was stopping people in the cafeteria, in the library, at the security gate, asking if they knew me, and talking obsessively about my aunt’s murder, saying he needed to deliver me an important message. My dean got wind of the situation and whisked me into her office, where I stayed for the next four hours with the doors locked and the blinds drawn while waiting for the police to arrive—an experience that is fast becoming a staple of the American educational scene rather than a disruption of it. After campus security interviewed the student who left me the letter, along with a host of other people on campus with whom the man had spoken, I was left with this description: “a balding, heavyset white man in his early fifties, carrying an attaché case.”

Within forty-eight hours of his visit, as if acting out cinematic shorthand for how to deal with an unexpected, intense stress, I started smoking again—this after over two years of treating my body as a prenatal temple, my vices reduced to a single cup of green tea each morning. Now I sat in the backyard of our new house, a square clump of prickly weeds we felt unable to attend to until we knew how much money the pregnancy adventure was going to cost, inhaling egg-shriveling nicotine in the dark, a cylinder of pepper spray by my side. Other moments of my life may have looked worse, but this one felt like its own kind of bottom: I’d never felt so scared and nihilistic at the same time. I wept for the baby and the life I felt sure would never be ours, no matter how badly I wanted it, and for the violence that the stalker’s presence seemingly confirmed as impossible to outrun.

In the days and weeks that followed, I summoned the strength to call our donor and tell him we’d be skipping the month, and to begin the struggle of hoisting myself back onto the prenatal regime. I tried to return to reflecting on happy-making things, including a happy-making talk about Sedgwick I was due to deliver at my happy-making alma mater, the City University of New York. But the mantras of paranoid thinking—
There must be no bad surprises
and
You can never be paranoid
enough
—had taken root. I couldn’t wait around for some wacko to “deliver me a message”; somehow I needed to get ahead of the situation.

It’s hard to explain, but I have a lot of friends who are private investigators. One of them gave me the number of a local PI, a guy named Andy Lamprey, described on a “total security solutions provider” website as follows: “A detective for the Los Angeles Police Department for more than 29 years, Lamprey investigated numerous crimes, including homicide, and was a senior supervisor to the Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT). He is a court qualified expert in narcotics and vice enforcement and has performed several risk and vulnerability assessments, threat and management assessments and fraud investigations nationwide.”

You never know—there may come a time when you, too, feel the need to call upon an Andy Lamprey.

Lamprey eventually connects me with a guy named Malcolm, another ex-LAPD cop, who will sit, armed, in an unmarked car outside our house through the night, keeping watch over us, if we want. We want. Lamprey says he can negotiate us a reduced rate of $500 per night (LA has unbelievably high rates for “cover,” as I learn it’s called). I call my mother to ask for advice, and also to alert her to the wingnut on the loose, in case he drifts her way; she insists on putting a check in the mail to pay for a night or two of Malcolm. I feel grateful, but also guilty: it was I who had insisted on writing about Jane’s murder, and while I knew intellectually that I wasn’t responsible for this man’s actions any more than Jane was for her murder (as the caller had indicated), my less enlightened self felt sick with a sense of late-breaking comeuppance. I had summoned the horrible thing, and now here he was, attaché case in hand. It wasn’t long before my image of him merged with that of Jared Lee Loughner, the man who, exactly two weeks prior, had walked up to Representative Gabby Giffords in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, and shot her, along with eighteen others. A form letter from Giffords was found in Loughner’s home with the words “Die, Bitch” scrawled on it; Loughner was known for saying that women should not hold positions of power.

It doesn’t matter to me if both of these men are mad. Their voices still have clarity.

In the wake of the Patriot Act, during the second administration of George W., you made a series of small, handheld weapons. The rule was that each weapon had to be assembled from household items within minutes. You’d been gay-bashed before, two black eyes while waiting in line for a burrito (you ran after him, of course). Now you thought, if the government comes for its citizens, we should be prepared, even if our weapons are pathetic. Your art-weapons included a steak knife affixed to a bottle of ranch dressing and mounted on an axe handle, a dirty sock sprouting nails, a wooden stump with a clump of urethane resin stuck to one end with dull bolts protruding from it, and more.

One night during our courtship, I came home to find the stump with bolts lying across the welcome mat of my porch. You had left town, and I had been baffled by your departure. But when I ascended my front steps and saw the weapon, shadowy in the twilight, I knew you loved me. It was a talisman of protection—a means of keeping myself safe while you were gone, a tool to fight off the suitors (had there been any). I’ve kept it by my bedside ever since. Not because I think they’re coming for us per se. But because it makes the brutal tender, which I’ve since learned is one of your principal gifts.

The year my father died, I read a story in school about a little boy who builds ships in the bottoms of bottles. This little boy lived by the maxim that if you could imagine the worst thing that could ever happen, you would never be surprised when it did. Not knowing that this maxim was the very definition of anxiety, as given by Freud (“‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one”), I set to work cultivating it. Already an avid “journaler,” I started penning narratives of horrible things in my school notebook. My first installment was a novella titled “Kidnapped” that featured the abduction and torture of my best friend, Jeanne, and me by a deranged husband-wife team. I was proud of my talismanic opus, even drew an ornate cover page for it. Now Jeanne and I would never be kidnapped and tortured without our having foreseen it! I thus felt confused and saddened when my mother took me out for lunch “to talk about it.” She told me she was disturbed by what I had written, and so was my sixth-grade teacher. In a flash it became clear that my story was not something to be proud of, as either literature or prophylactic.

When Iggy first came home from the hospital, in that ecstatic, disarranged week of almost no sleep, my intense happiness was sometimes punctured in the dead of night by the image of him with a half scissor sticking out of his precious newborn head. Perhaps I had put it there, or perhaps he had slipped and fallen into it. For whatever reason, this image seemed the very worst thing I could imagine. It came to me when I was trying to fall asleep, after many hours—sometimes many nights—of not sleeping. We were up so often that we put a red lightbulb in the living room lamp and kept it on all the time, so that there were periods of sun followed by periods of red, no real night. Once, while wandering in the red soup, I told Harry I was worried I was having a postpartum crash, as I was having bad thoughts about the baby. I couldn’t tell him about the half scissor.

I can’t remember now the connection between the little boy’s building of ships in the bottles (
Argo
’s?) and his commitment to paranoid anxiety, but I’m sure there was one. Nor can I find the original story. I wish that I could find it, as I’m pretty sure its moral wasn’t that all good comes from repeatedly imagining the worst things that could ever happen. Likely a wise old crinkly grandpa drifts into the tale and disabuses his grandson of his rotten notion by taking him to see some wild birds flying over a hillside. But now I think I’m mixing and matching.

That wise old crinkly grandparent has not yet waltzed into my life. Instead I have my mother, who lives and breathes the gospel of prophylactic anxiety. When I tell her that it would be easier for me if she could keep her anxieties about my newborn to herself, rather than have her e-mail me to tell me that she’s having trouble sleeping for fear of bad things happening to him (and to everyone else she loves), she snaps: “They’re not all irrational anxieties, you know.”

My mother thinks that people don’t really know what they’re in for in this life—what the
risks
are. How could there be such a thing as an irrational peril, if anything unexpected or horrific that has ever happened could happen again? Last February a sinkhole opened up under a man’s bedroom near Tampa, Florida, while he was sleeping; his body will never be found. When Iggy was six months old, he was stricken by a potentially fatal nerve toxin that afflicts about 150 babies of the 4 million+ born in the United States each year.

Recently my mother visited the Killing Fields in Cambodia. After she returned, she sat in our living room showing me her trip photos while Iggy motored around the shaggy white rug, doing “tummy time.”
I barely want to tell you about this, because
of the baby
, she said, nodding in his direction,
but there was a tree there, an oak tree, called the Killing Tree, against which the Khmer Rouge would kill babies by bashing their skulls. Thousands and thousands of babies, their brains smashed out against this tree
. I get the point, I say.
I’m sorry
, she says,
I really shouldn’t be telling you this
.

A few weeks later, talking about her trip again on the phone, she says,
Now, there’s something I shouldn’t really mention, because of the baby, but they had this tree there, at the Killing Fields, called the Killing Tree
…

I know my mother well enough by now to recognize, in her baby-killing-tree Tourette’s, her desire to install in me an outer parameter of horror of what could happen to a baby human on this planet. I don’t know why she needs to feel sure I have this parameter in mind, but I have come to accept that she feels it necessary. She needs me to know that she’s stood before the Killing Tree.

For the week after the man’s visit to my work, campus security will assign an officer to stand outside the door of my classroom while I teach, in case he returns. On one of these days, I teach Alice Notley’s grouchy epic poem
Disobedience
. A student complains,
Notley says she wants a dailiness that is free and beautiful, but she’s fixated on all the things she hates and fears the most, and then smashes her face and ours in them for four hundred pages. Why bother?

Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining. That’s what you kept telling me when we first met—that in a real, material sense,
what
is made from
where
. I didn’t have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see you burned for it. I wanted to be near that burning. I still don’t understand, but at least now my fingers ride the lip.

Notley knows all this; it’s what tears her up. It’s why she’s a mystic, why she locks herself in a dark closet, why she knocks herself out to have visions. Can she help it if the unconscious is a sewer? At least my student had unwittingly backed us into a crucial paradox, which helps to explain the work of any number of artists:
it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices
.

In Annie Sprinkle’s performance piece
100 Blow Jobs
, Sprinkle—who worked for many years as a prostitute—kneels down on the ground and gives head to several dildos nailed to a board in front of her, while recorded male voices yell degrading things like “Suck it, bitch.” (Sprinkle has said that out of the approximately 3,500 customers she had as a sex worker, there were about 100 bad ones; the sound track to
100 Blow Jobs
derives from the bad ones.) She sucks and sucks, she chokes and gags. But just when someone might be thinking,
This is exactly what I imagined sex work to be like—haunting, woman-hating, traumatizing
—Sprinkle gets up, pulls herself together, gives herself an Aphrodite Award for sexual service to the community, and performs a cleansing masturbatory ritual.

Sprinkle is a many-gendered mother of the heart. And many-gendered mothers of the heart say:
Just because you have enemies does not mean you have to be paranoid
. They insist, no matter the evidence marshaled against their insistence:
There is nothing
you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy
.

The realization that I could incorporate the stalker into my talk about Sedgwick eventually became an incitement for me to get back to work.
Yes, get back to work
. It even became a source of comfort, as if bringing such an episode into the orbit of Eve would neutralize its negative force.

Not everyone believes in the magical powers of such an approach. When I told my mother that I was thinking of including the stalker in a public talk, for example, she said, “Oh honey, are you sure that’s a good idea?”—meaning that she didn’t think it was a good idea at all. Who could blame her? She’s spent over forty years warding off the specter of wingnuts with attaché cases who tell women they deserve their violent deaths before they occasion them. Why give them any more attention than they deserve?