O Persephone, if you could only sing for me and I for you …
BOOK TWO
At evening she leads him on to the graves of the longest lived of the House of Lament, the sibyls and warners
21 THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2001)
De-lirious, Di-laudid, De-lusionary
The swirls of the ashen apocalypse at dusk, the eyes of unseen assassins, the ferric pyres, and the incandescent collapse of a great American edifice: eternal images from that inconsolable September day. In that stark moment of communal suffering and rage, Moses hoped that he would be forgiven for his small exaltations. The doctors proclaimed Phase One of the operation a success.
Waking up in his bed in Cedars’ Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, his mind bathed in morphine, Moses wondered if the events of the previous weeks — discovering the truth about Hannah and Salome, Alchemy and Jay, and the Trade Center tragedy — were some kind of drug-addled mirage. But when his mom and Jay rushed into the room for the first time after he was released from isolation, his aching heart told him it was no illusion.
He remembered that first morning at Dr. Fielding’s office, after he and Alchemy returned from their road trip. Fearing that any memory of Jay had been lost in Alchemy’s cascade of conquests, Moses quickly introduced them. “You remember Jay from when she worked for the Sheiks at Kasbah.”
Alchemy’s eyes opened wide, and for a split second he froze in place. Almost immediately, his expression became unreadable. “Great to see you again. Though not under these circumstances.” He turned to Moses. “Your wife tried her best to get the Sheiks to buy real art. They bought posters.” Thankfully, the nurse came out and escorted them into Dr. Fielding’s office.
In the days before the operation, after the HLA test had confirmed him as a match, Alchemy behaved blithely confident that the transplant would be a formality and its happy result a fait accompli. Moses, Hannah, and Jay blamed the palpable tension on the seemingly interminable wait and the twenty-five percent chance that Moses would not survive the operation.
Hannah often paced, smoking or imitating the motions of smoking without actually lighting up, desperately wanting to ask about Salome but holding her tongue. Like her son, or he like her, she preferred ignominious ignorance to confrontation and finding her fears confirmed. The unspoken social contracts among them, between husband and wife and mom and son, remained in force.
Alchemy’s marrow was harvested as an outpatient. Moses underwent three more days of chemo, and four days of cleansing after the surgery was performed. Afterward, Moses spent just over three weeks in complete isolation to protect him from infection, receiving blood transfusions and waiting for the marrow to be accepted and take hold, or be rejected.
Moses languished in his solitude, contemplating his belief in one universal truth: The past, present, and future are fixed and ever recurring, inextricable and singular, and always, always at once, dead and alive. And from this very alive past came two vital questions: Was Jay screwing Alchemy while she was seeing me? and Why didn’t Hannah push harder and so much sooner to find out about Salome’s existence and whereabouts?
In the abstract, he accepted that the answers didn’t matter. His wife and mom loved him now. Only, this acceptance was compromised by derision — to hell with abstract notions of fairness and morality! His mind revved into overdrive: Am I a fool? Am I, at my core, just a pseudoliberal, antihedonist with a latent strain of puritanism?
Moses tried and tried to extinguish these negative, soul-depleting thoughts. He wanted to confess his shame. He wished for a pill that could vacate his memories, erase the spiteful thoughts and primitive urges, the guilt that engorged his empathy and compassion.
No mythical memory-erasing pill arrived. Instead, here arose a daymare from the depths of his postoperative miasma. A vision ascended not from his unconscious but from elsewhere, from outside:
A plaguelike mix of rain, hail, and vicious winds obscure the last rays of sunset while two hundred cultists glossolate a mocking serenade, countering the braying of drunken Roman guards singing, “99 Jews on the cross / 99 Jews / if one of them we happen to toss / 98 Jews on the cross.”
A horde of sadistic voyeurs cheers the luridness of the drip-by-bloody-drip of his slow death. I think, I am a stranger in the strangest land. A ferocious wind scatters his blood and pieces of his torn flesh into the crowd. A woman draped in soaking white robes, bearing spices and carrying a torch, approaches me. She daubs my cheek with a dampened shroud and then speaks.
— Moses.
— You know me?
— I have watched you.
— And you are?
— Shalom.
— Shalom, the shaman and dybbuk?
— I prefer “healer.”
— As he claimed as well.
— You have forsaken those who love you.
— Forsaken? Who? How?
— Moses, you will have another chance.
— Chance to do what?
— To heal the future …
The aging sibyl sprinkles me with spices and touches my forehead with her torch. I feel no burn. There is no scar.
The daymare ended. Moses felt himself in his hospital bed, bathed in sweat and staring through the window bank toward the San Gabriel Mountains. He closed his eyes and awaited the arrival of his wife, mother, and brother.
22 MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
Merchants of Venice, 1992 — 1994
Falstaffa begged Alchemy to give Marty another chance. ’Cause Alchemy loves Falstaffa, he does, and they become our roadies. Sue Warfield, who swooshed her Malibu manse booty, starts unofficially managing us. She cracked me up. She says, “If I am there, I make the scene. And you want to be seen at MY scene so you make the scene.” That’s why Alchy gives her the nickname Trendy Sue. We showed up at the Viper Room, Tatou, the Sanitarium, 924 Gilman in Berkeley, SOMA in San Diego. My antennae is on high alert ’cause I’m inkling that Alchemy is doing the mystery dance with Sue and not exclusive, which worries me. I am wrong and right. ’Cause Sue’s preference is other women. She scored us our first gig at the Troubadour. Soon she partnered with Andrew Pullham-Large, this upper-crusty English wanker who was in love with Alchy, and they started Surface-to-Air with us as their first client.
Alchy set up a rehearsal sked for six to sixteen hours every damn day. He comes off so Yo, Bro nonchalant, Let It Be, baby. What horseshit. Lux got so mad at him once he typed a list of everything he did in the day from brushing his teeth to taking a piss and presented it to “the micromanaging Generalissimo Alchemyo Savanto.” Alchy laughed, but I ain’t sure he thinks it as funny as the rest of us. He always had a plan. No, lots of plans. One day he asks for a list from each of us for songs to cover. He’s nodding and smiling at Absurda’s list, which is all chick shit, and Lux’s list, which is a mix of funk and punk. He scans mine, which has lots of heavy metal, and don’t say shit. So I says, “Fuck you. What?”