“Something terrible has happened,” I began. It was very hard to talk.
“It’s always terrible for you,” Jason said, talking much too fast. “The sky’s falling. The ground’s cracking. The moon is sending you messages. Look.” Jason decided to change his tack. “Could we take this from the top tomorrow?”
After a moment I said sure.
Outside, the sea breeze was rising, brisk and curled up like a wave. Everything felt black — the wind, the air, the inside of my body. I was cold. My bones ached. My bones felt chilled at their centers as if the blood was somehow leaking into them.
6
The operation took seven hours. The doctor, paunchy and optimistic, smiled at us at noon. He looked like a man on his way to a tennis court. When he pushed through the operating room doors at seven P.M. there was sweat on his forehead. His hands were shaking.
Francine and I had waited together. We sat at a Formica table in the hospital cafeteria while surgeons in green smocks munched between cuttings. Delicate Filipino nurses scraped by softly in their special padded shoes. The light was very white.
“I can’t bear this,” Francine kept saying, over and over. She was slumped in her chair, her elbows pressing hard against the hard Formica tabletop.
My mind wasn’t working. My mind had shut down. I had gone on vacation and left my shell behind, some hollow facsimile that slowly, dully kept dragging along.
Francine suddenly stiffened. She looked like someone who has just realized that what she is smelling is smoke. Her eyes went wide.
“He’s hemorrhaging,” she screamed. “His heart’s stopped!” Francine leaped up. She rushed into the corridor.
Everything was moving too fast. The room seemed composed of separate pieces, like a shattered mural. I picked up my mother’s coat and pocketbook. I ran into the corridor. I was riding on a train at night, hurtling past cities, harbors, junkyard, graveyards. Buildings and bridges snaked and danced in the center of the train window. The landscape was smeared, a smoky magnetic ruin, part hallucination and mirage. Nothing was certain.
I found Francine in the doctors’ lounge. “This is fascinating,” she was saying. She glanced at me and smiled. “Dr. Harris plays chess, too.” She indicated the dark-haired man on her left. He seemed to nod encouragement.
I walked out of the room, still holding her coat and pocketbook. I sat down on a curb in the hospital parking lot. A phrase began repeating itself in my head.
Fear is merely a condition of the mind, a condition of the mind. Isn’t it? Fear is merely a condition of the mind, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
And the mind? The mind is a warm black pit. The mind is a kind of web, a nest where things hatch, things breed and grow, flutter, float and stab out with sharp impossible wings.
In the beginning, Gerald believed the mind could be described by the neurological model. I thought he was wrong, anchoring himself to an abstraction in flux. Every year the blackboard was erased clean and a new foundation laid. They called it the obsolescence of knowledge. They called it breakthroughs and progress. They had an almost infinite number of labels and designations for their system, their process, all subject to revision and annihilation on a yearly basis. Why bother learning them at all?
Gerald thought it was a matter of mapping synapses. He thought it had something to do with placing pleasure electrodes in cat brains and shoving lights at glistening dazed worms. In his scheme of things, rats and mice running starved and terrified through mazes heralded a new era.
I knew the mind was soft and filled with waves like the ocean, dark at night, ebbing and flowing. The mind was connected to the moon, to currents and tides. It had nothing to do with the hard evidence.
“You’re too whimsical,” Gerald would say.
Were we arguing the nature of the mind? One point of view led to a commitment to technology. One side led to elitism and ultimately, unavoidably, fascism. One side denied, as true science mustn’t, the evidence of alternative modes, the collective unconsciousness, the intangibles. It was a complicated argument with branching and forking side paths erupting everywhere. The whole world was like that then. Gerald was studying psychology in Berkeley. It was 1968.
Gerald’s face was square, even and pale. It was the legacy left to him by generations of struggling shopkeepers and tavern owners, squinting over pennies by candlelight and voting without fail or principle for prosperity.
I would watch him walk toward me, up the steep path near my father’s balding backyard ivy, and think, but he isn’t yellow enough! Surely the one who will come to love me must be distinguished in some way. If it is to be this paleness, then let it be white, white as the side of a star, white as a sea-spit shell lying in sand, white belly up to a full white moon.
There was an unformed quality about Gerald. Later I would think he looked as if he had been created by a manufacturer of android astronauts. Not that Gerald looked like an astronaut. Rather, he was a reflection of that type. He was the stuff toy models were made from. He was like the perfectly detailed and non-functioning gadgetry attached to plastic ship decks, the miniature machine guns on glued-together airplanes. It looked fine but nothing worked, nothing.
Los Angeles spread out in all directions, a wound in soft flesh, impossible to contain. My world was bounded by the ocean, the slow arc of Santa Monica Bay gray and dying behind the breakwater. To the north, flat dull hills arched like clubs. Somewhere the desert sat, hot and blank into Nevada.
What did I expect to emerge from the smog, the greasy numb boulevards? Gerald was a pale stain, August blond and blank as the sunbaked streets, a man like the anemic palm fronds and listless spokes of drained yellow day lilies.
I married him in Las Vegas, two days after we shared a mescaline picnic in a Colorado blizzard. We climbed partway up a hill blanketed by new soft snow before the drug overwhelmed us and we collapsed laughing on the cold white ground. Snow fell like arrows shooting down, like meteors, gorged flowers, mandalas with mirrory eyes. Our laughter shook the stiff mountainside. Our footprints were like craters in the snow.
“I want to marry him,” I had told my father.
My father was watering his peach tree in the backyard. He was smoking a cigar and evaluating something in the pastel distance. In the dusk the houses were simply pinkish and yellowish boxes. The strips of yard between them were pale green ribbons. And the pink-tinged dusk was draining, sickening. The whole world looked like papier-mâché stage sets, artificial, lifeless and absurd.
“He’s a jerk,” my father said. He gave the hose a yank and wrapped it around the trunk of the apricot tree. “O.K.,” he amended when I began crying, crying. I was always crying then. “He’s a nice guy. But he’s not for you. He’s got no balls. He’s a shy retiring professor type. He doesn’t know shit about sports.”
“Sports? Is that a criterion?” I screamed into the pastel patch of backyard surrounded by a twenty-foot-high bamboo fence, a yellowish wall in which stalks of banana and rubber plants and wild black grapes were imprisoned. And it was always pinkish, always summerish, and nothing seemed to change, nothing.
My father pulled the hose to the back of the yard. He sent a stream of water across the strawlike stalks that would open into bird-of-paradise, that stiff orange and purple flawed flower in the shape of a bird. And paradise was mindless and hard.
“You’d be surprised,” my father said. “You think it’s nothing?” He looked somewhere into the pinkish layer of night air above the tops of the pale yellow houses on the other side of the street. Houses on their own small mounds of green hill on a street where the neighbors never spoke to us and said our shouting made the dogs bark and twice they called police. And my mother and father were shouting at each other, were throwing glass ashtrays through the glass windowpanes, were packing suitcases at midnight, were fighting on the curb below the house in the soft white arc of a streetlamp and I was getting tired of it, tired of it.