I have eaten dinner on Super Bowl Sunday in the most expensive restaurants in Detroit, Atlanta, San Diego and Tampa Bay.
Interview in LAT with someone who just resurfaced after thirteen years underground: “I never defined myself as a fugitive. I defined myself as a human being. Human beings have things they have to deal with. Because I was Weather Underground, being a fugitive was something I had to deal with, but it wasn’t a definition of me.” What mean??? If a fugitive is what you are, how does it change the situation to define yourself as a “human being”?
I fled Him down the nights and down the days I fled Him down the arches of the years
The most terrifying verse I know: merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.
DREAM, the next two entries nonetheless begin.
I go to my mother’s house in Laguna, crying. Ward’s daughter Belinda is also there. Catherine has been kidnapped, I tell my mother. “I thought she came to tell you she was having Christmas dinner at Chasen’s,” Belinda says.
A party in a house that seems to be this one. Wynn and Catherine and I live in it but so do my mother and father. The party is in progress and I go out on the beach for a little quiet. When I come back my father is waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Catherine is either drunk or drugged, he says. He can hear her vomiting upstairs but doesn’t want to intrude. I run up and notice that the upstairs has been painted. This is a little disturbing: how much time exactly has passed?
The last entry in this notebook, not a dream, was actually not one but six notes, each made in a different pen and on a different page but all apparently made in response to the daily regimen Catherine had described in her eighth-grade autobiographical essay as “radiation zapping following the exsishun [sic] of a stage 1 good prognose [sic] breast lesion”:
The linear accelerator, the mevatron, the bevatron.
“Just ask for R.O., it’s in the tunnel.”
“A week before you finish you’ll go on the mevatron to get your electrons. Now you’re getting your photons.”
Photons? Or “protons”???
Waiting for the beam after the technician goes and the laser light finds the place.
The sensation of vibration when the beam comes. The stunning silent bombardment, the entire electromagnetic field rearranged.
“You don’t feel anything,” Arnie Stine said. “The beam doesn’t feel like anything.”
“Just between us nobody who hasn’t been on that table has any idea what the beam feels like,” the technician said.
The beam is my alpha and my omega
I finished this morning
How I feel is excluded, banished, deprived of the beam
Alcestis, back from the tunnel and half in love with death
3
Of course we would not need those last six notes to know what Elena’s dreams were about.
Elena’s dreams were about dying.
Elena’s dreams were about getting old.
Nobody here has not had (will not have) Elena’s dreams.
We all know that.
The point is that Elena didn’t.
The point is that Elena remained remote most of all to herself, a clandestine agent who had so successfully compartmentalized her operation as to have lost access to her own cut-outs.
The last entry in this notebook is dated April 27 1982.
It would have been not quite four months later, August 1982, when Elena McMahon left Wynn Janklow.
Relocated to the East Coast, as she put it.
It would have been some three months after that, late November 1982, when she returned for the first time to California.
She had flown out from Washington on the morning flight to interview a Czech dissident then teaching at UCLA and rumored to be short-listed for a Nobel Prize in literature. She had meant to do the interview and go straight to the airport and turn in the rental car and take the next flight back, but when she left UCLA she had driven not to the airport but up the Pacific Coast Highway. Just as she would make no conscious decision to walk off the 1984 campaign, just as she would make no conscious decision to ask for a flight to Miami instead of to Washington, she had made no conscious decision to do this. She was unaware even that the decision had been made until she found herself parking the rental car in the lot outside the market where she used to shop. She had gone into the drugstore and said hello to the pharmacist and picked up a couple of surfing magazines for Catherine and a jar of aloe gel for herself, a kind she had been unable to locate in Washington. The pharmacist asked if she had been away, he hadn’t seen her in a while. She said that she had been away, yes. She said the same thing to the checkout clerk in the market, where she bought corn tortillas and serrano chiles, something else she had been unable to locate in Washington.
She had been away, yes.
Always good to get back, right.
With weather this dry they were lucky to have gotten through Thanksgiving without a fire, yes.
No way she was ready to start dealing with Christmas, no.
She had sat then in the rental car in the parking lot, almost deserted at four in the afternoon. Four in the afternoon was not the time of day when women who lived here shopped. Women who lived here shopped in the morning, before tennis, after working out. If she still lived here she would not be sitting in a rental car in the parking lot at four in the afternoon. One of the high school boys who worked in the market after school was stringing Christmas lights on the board advertising the day’s specials. Another was rounding up carts, jamming the carts into long trains and propelling each train into the rack with a single extended finger. By the time the last light dropped behind Point Dume the carts were all racked and the Christmas lights were blinking red and green and she had stopped crying.
“What was that about,” Treat Morrison said when she mentioned this to him.
“It was about my not belonging there anymore,” she said.
“Where did you ever belong,” Treat Morrison said.
Let me clarify something.
When I said that Elena McMahon and Treat Morrison were equally remote I was shortcutting, jumping ahead to the core dislocation in the personality, overlooking the clearly different ways in which each had learned to deal with that dislocation.
Elena’s apparently impenetrable performances in the various roles assigned her were achieved (I see now) only with considerable effort and at considerable cost. All that reinvention, all those fast walks and clean starts, all that had cost something. It had cost something to grow up watching her father come and go and do his deals without ever noticing what it was he dealt. Father’s Occupation: Investor. It had cost something to talk to Melissa Simon on Westlake Career Day when all her attention was focused on the beam. You don’t feel anything, Arnie Stine said. The beam doesn’t feel like anything. Just between us nobody who hasn’t been on that table has any idea what the beam feels like, the technician said. It had cost something to remember the Fourth of July her father’s friend brought fireworks up from the border and to confine the picture to the fat little sizzler rockets she had not liked and the sparklers that made fireflies in the hot desert twilight.