I lay there on the couch thinking about dreams and dreaming of ideas. Theon was there with me trying to distract my train of thought. He was grumbling that I wasn’t paying attention. My hands and feet were swollen and I said, “Give me a break, man. I’m trying to let you go.”
There were debt collectors sitting across from the sofa, each with a briefcase full of bills that they wanted me to pay; each hiding an erection in his pants, as interest — these two words, erection and interest, hung in the air unrealized and definite.
I was lying there in the darkness but I could see everything quite clearly. I was attempting to trace my steps backward from the parking lot just south of Hollywood Boulevard where I gave blow jobs for fifteen dollars and was just about to meet Theon. I was trying to back into the life with my mother and brothers, my stepsister and long-ago friends Maxine, Oura, Maryanne, and Juan.
I was walking backward, away from the smelly john’s car, down La Cienega Boulevard, past the vice squad police cars headed up toward the avenue. I was going backward in time but everything else was going forward. It was very awkward, moving in reverse through life, but I kept it up because I couldn’t live on the path I’d already traveled. I got all the way back to my mother’s house, my childhood home.
I walked backward through the front door. In the entranceway Cornell had a baseball in his hand but decided not to throw it at me. He looked confused and I smiled at him, moving past him in time and space, avoiding his tortures.
I made it all the way to the living room. There I stopped and found myself once again on the sleeping sofa in Delilah’s house almost twenty years later. The front door banged open and my father staggered in, bleeding from the bullet wound in his chest. The debt collectors scattered. Theon stopped complaining.
“Daddy!” I screamed, and he fell on me, bleeding and choking on the blood.
I came awake in the dark room no longer able to see through the gloom. I was panting, a prayer fragment in my mind. “... and protect Mama and Daddy from harm.”
My red phone showed me that it was four twenty-six in the morning. I stood up, feeling dizzy and weak. I sat down and thirty minutes passed in what felt like an instant. I stood up again and dressed.
It was six-oh-one when I got to Anna Karin’s gray door that morning. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been late for an appointment.
Anna smiled when she opened the door and moved her body in such a way as to invite me in.
I went to the brown leather seat as she sat in the straight-backed maple chair.
“I’ve been thinking of suicide every other minute since I left yesterday morning,” I said.
“Really? Are you seriously considering it?”
“No,” I lied, “not really. It’s just in my mind after we talked about it. Why do you think that is?”
“What do you think?”
“I think that the power over death and life is the greatest strength that any person can have. It trumps sex and wealth. If I’m willing to die no one can master me.”
“Do you feel that people are trying to control you?”
“Dead people,” I agreed. “Theon and my father mainly. They have a hold on my heart. I can’t seem to get away from them no matter what I do.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t try to pull away,” Anna said. “Maybe you should face their deaths and come to terms with the reality.”
“The reality is that I’m more a part of them than I am a part of anything in this world. I went to see my son, Edison, last night. He was so happy. He wants to be with me, but I know that he’d be better off with Delilah.”
“But you’re his mother.”
“And what do I say to him when he sees me doing a gangbang scene with three guys inside me at the same time? What can I do for him when his friends laugh and call his mother a whore?”
“You love him and tell him that you made mistakes. You tell him the truth and he will understand. Maybe not at first. But a boy will love his mother no matter what.”
“I just don’t feel like I belong,” I said. “I thought when I had that orgasm on the set that that was the moment I could let go. I mean, I felt what it was like to be just a regular girl even through all that I’d done. But then I got home and Theon was dead and all our money was gone. I tried to go home but even there I didn’t really fit. My mother feels guilty and even my brother Newland made me feel like some kind of alien.”
“But I thought you two got along so well,” Anna said.
“Yeah. He loves me but the life he’s living has nothing to do with where I come from. We don’t have anything in common.
“It’s really only my brother Cornell whom I have any sympathy with. I understand why he hates me. I know in my heart that he’d feel better if I were dead. You can see it in the way he looks at me and in the way I look at myself in the mirror.
“I’m just fucked-up and there’s no way I can undo it. There’s no going back and I can’t move ahead.
“You know how people say, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s missing’?”
“Yes.”
“The few friends I have would miss me if I was gone but they don’t know me. They look at me and see something they need or want. They see somebody that they would rather be but I’m not even that woman. They’d miss me but they don’t know who I am.”
With that I had finished my truth telling for that morning.
While Anna was digesting the words I noticed a huge vulturelike bird perched on the roof of the office building across the street. At first I thought that it might be a statue, some kind of public art piece, but then it shifted.
I worried that maybe the bird was a hallucination, that if I pointed it out it might give Anna reason to have me committed. I couldn’t allow that — not when I was so close to understanding.
I glanced at the kind woman. She gave me a quizzical look. She realized that I was looking out the window. The bird, whatever it was (or wasn’t), decided at that moment to spread its great wings and leap from the rooftop. It seemed to bounce on an invisible current of air. Anna turned to look but before she could the creature lifted up beyond our line of sight.
It was gone.
“What were you looking at?” the therapist asked.
“Nothing,” I said, “just the empty roof.”
“Were you thinking of jumping off?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“A big bird,” I said, “might be on its way somewhere. It could have stopped there to rest and then gone on. That building wasn’t put there for birds to rest on. It’s civilized and humanized but the bird doesn’t know any of that. She just knew she was tired and had to rest for a little while before going on to where her instincts told her.”
“I’m worried about you, Sandra.”
“You shouldn’t be, Anna. I’m on my way. I’ve been places I don’t belong and now I’m just moving on.”
“I’d like to prescribe an antidepressant for you,” she replied.
“If you think I need it — sure.”
My acquiescence seemed to soothe her worry. From there we talked about my father again and how bereft my whole family was at his death.
“It was like a bomb went off in the living room,” I said, “and we were all suffering from shell shock from then on.”
“Does Theon’s death bring up these memories of your father?”
This question was simple and seemingly unobtrusive — at first. I considered it. Theon was an outlaw too, in his own way. I had loved him as women love men in the beginning.
But did his death compare to my father’s? Was his stupid demise an echo of Aldo Peel’s reckless existence?