They meet at irregular intervals at Fisherman’s Wharf. This is the neutral zone, the landscape of perpetual unmolested childhood where the carousel spins in its predictable orbit, and the original primitive neon alphabet does not deviate. Some hieroglyphics are permanent and intelligible in all hemispheres and dialects. No translation is necessary. The carousel doesn’t require calculus, rehab or absolution. No complications with immigration or the IRS. Just buy a token.
She phones Clarissa. “I’m here,” she announces.
“At the wharf?” Clarissa must clarify the conditions.
“Anemic waves and corndogs that give you cancer. Immigrants catching perch so full of mercury, they explode as they reel them in,” she reports.
“What color is the water?” Clarissa asks. “Precisely?”
“Last ditch leukemia IV-drip blue,” she decides.
“Half an hour,” Clarissa assures her. “I’m coming.”
They meet episodically. Conventional friendship, with its narrative of consensual commitments, has proved too intimate and demanding. Between them are houses, husbands dead or divorced, and children known only by anecdote and photograph. Entire strata of their personal history are less than footnotes. Decades passed when they were driftwood to one another, or vessels lost at sea. Or a drowned stranger, perhaps; why bother?
“Our litany of blame is tedious,” she once recognized.
“Human perimeters are background razor wire. We’re too hip for that shit,” Clarissa responded.”
“We’ll bite it off with our teeth,” she offered. “Napalm it. Grenade launchers and M-16s. Tec-9s. We’ll have our own Cultural Revolution. We’ll go post-modern, but fully armed.”
“We’ll invent rituals appropriate for our circumstances. We’ll whisper endearments while strolling the killing fields.” Clarissa was enthusiastic.
“But we’ll abide by the Geneva Convention,” she prompted. “Despite our emotional residue.”
“Directed psychological evolution. It’ll be more brutal than weight training,” Clarissa agreed. “But we’ll become better human beings.”
“We’ll redefine and transcend ourselves,” she said.
It was an earlier autumn on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bluer than Maui, the bay studded with strands of cobalt that looked charged, technologically modified. She had lived two years in a bamboo and chicken wire shack on a nameless river of honey yellow reeds and orchids in the jungle near Hana. She had no electricity. She wasn’t in contact with Clarissa then. Clarissa probably doesn’t know there are seasons in Maui, too. A faint reddening, a moistening that seems a prelude, and sudden stillness as the mosquitoes enter temporary remission.
“I like it conceptually. But let’s go further,” Clarissa suggested. “We’ll be molecular. Just strands of light from one radiance to another.”
“We’ll reject linearity entirely,” she encouraged. “Sporadic moments of illumination in extreme altitudes requiring oxygen masks?”
“Discreet and unpredictable rendezvous with spectacular voltage. We’ll communicate by blowtorch,” Clarissa offered. Her eyes emitted an unnatural gleam suggesting rows of votives in deserted rooms and beaches of mica in white sand.
Their psychiatrists were cautiously optimistic. A process of accommodation and evolution was unlikely but not implausible. True, they had failed the traditional strategies of giving and receiving. But the standard methods by which one registers recognition and regret don’t apply to them. They had a pact, an armistice with the elements of aggressive radical improvisational surgery. Malignant complications were an acceptable risk. Then they had shaken hands.
Now she sees Clarissa exiting a black town car with darkened windows. She’s wearing her usual business outfit — aerobics pants and jacket, oversized Gucci sunglasses and a Giants baseball cap. It’s the popular camouflaged movie star look, designed to create the impression you’re attempting to be incognito. It’s the uniform the narcissistic personality disorder dictates. It’s become a global fashion statement. In the malls of all the capitals, passing women might be gangbangers, housewives or soap stars.
Clarissa is carrying not a gym bag, which would be appropriate and predictable, but a Chanel purse with leather quilting and long gold braided handles. It’s the second decade of war and alliances are ambiguous and brief. We’re polite but alert and suspicious. Vigilant.
They kiss on both cheeks. “You forgot my birthday,” Clarissa begins. She dismisses the car and driver with a hand gesture.
“I didn’t sign on as a soccer mom. I don’t decorate for holidays. I don’t bake or send thank-you cards. I throw away personal mail. You know this,” she reminds Clarissa.
“Don’t you go to bed at Halloween? And not get up until after Valentine’s Day?” Clarissa’s voice is light.
“That was my mother,” she replies, annoyed. “I just leave the country at certain junctures.”
She is fond of Christmas in Southeast Asia — ornately decorated pine trees in air-conditioned hotel lobbies like vestiges from another planet, and bamboo balconies draped in green velvets, antique brocades and holly wreaths. More fetishes. Christmas carols are rendered in versions so mangled by distance and erroneous translation they’re almost tolerable. Rivers smell of rotting vegetables, petrol, wood cooking fires and hunger. Air is layers of decaying prayers like a satellite losing orbit, falling down not as metal but as streams of origami. In Bangkok, in December, it’s 106 degrees.
“Let’s just be here now,” Clarissa says. “We know the rules. It’s play time.” Her mouth glistens with a red lipstick that seems to have small stars encrusted within it. There are implications in the sheen she doesn’t want to consider.
The wharf is almost deserted. It’s mid-day, mid-week in an undifferentiated season. It’s another windswept early November. They walk hand-in-hand down the pier past occasional men fishing and stray teenagers eager for corruption.
“Don’t look,” Clarissa cautions. “They’re contagious. We’ll get a contact psychotic flashback.”
They, too, grew up in tenements designed for transience, and shabby from inception. The rows of apartments like festering sun sores. They were an integral part of the blueprint for the millennial slums in the sun. They were the penciled-in stick figures on the diagrams.
The Last Edge Saloon perches on the furthest side of the wharf. Their reunions begin there. Clarissa sits in a booth facing the bay on three sides. It’s a bold and invitational decision. They’ll order expresso and take amphetamines. Or get drunk on something festive, White Russians or champagne. Since she’s technically still in AA, she lets Clarissa set the tenor. Clarissa orders a pitcher of Bloody Marys. From a caloric standpoint, it’s the obvious selection.
“You still look like a hippy,” Clarissa observes, regarding her with an expression that’s speciously conciliatory, even condescending. She interprets this as disturbing. Anxiety is inseparable from the air. It’s in the oxygen molecules their biochemistry fails to adequately process. There’s a perpetual uneasy truce.
“It’s my signature classic bohemian statement,” she replies quickly. She’s defensive and a bit agitated. “I want to formalize our alliance,” she begins.
“Want to get married?” Clarissa produces an unconvincing partial smile.
“I want a contract with precise specifications,” she replies. “And I want a weapons check.”
“Contracts are worthless,” Clarissa points out. “They’re a wish list for Santa.”
She’s a lawyer, after all. She knows.
“We could become cousins,” Clarissa suggests.
This appeals to her. Survivors of cataclysmic childhoods defined by poverty and isolation compulsively seek validation. They know they lack proper emotional documentation. Cousins evokes a blood connection that would substantiate and obviate certain complexities — the ebbs and flows, droughts and monsoons of their relationship. She wants a device that highlights and justifies their erratic and pathologically intense conjunction. In regions of bamboo and sun-rotted petals, hurricanes are routine and wind propels sand like tiny bullets, and there are too few artifacts. Cousins is an inspiration.