Equivocality

by Ava di Luna
Winner of the 2005 Writer’s Travel Scholarship

Disease.

 

It’s coming up like a vinesong, a blue chord working through the vein.

 

I know I am in the white box, this invisible gate populated by the growing chorus of spirits.

I am hearing the ancestral songs now for a reason.

They are coming to bring me on through.

 

That it could be so short, and so much, and like the inside of a flame, clear blue. There’s only so long you can lean against the magic wall of a magic house tripping and claiming purity just because of the objects you hold. If medicine were water. If medicine were a clear quartz crystal, turning in my hand. If mind medicine were all that mattered.

I saw it, saw my life, just a detail in a round globe. Were there suitcases old enough for Africa, and if so, where would I begin. Were there suitcases old enough for Africa, and if so, where would my life end and the spirit world begin. They are coming up in lines, asking to be storied. They are winding up in vinesongs, this procession of wounded and awake and flute-playing ancestors riding the riddle of my skin. They call me with their music, the gentlest of seductions. They tell me I am the story of the never-dying Earth.

 

 

Due east of the objects you hold. A suitcase, an etched skin of rivers. Intricate descriptions of an energy working through you, not your own. In the longing for something to claim you you were seduced by a band of kokopelli and dark fire. Your father will weep. You knew it that day you sat in the bathroom and asked your fingers to point you where. The globe a leftover prop from Theater Internal’s performance piece The Other Side of Fire. You’d done the set design, scouring thrift stores for fabric remnants, constructing a 20-by-20 model of the cosmic web and hanging it high up above the action on the floor below. I.X. gave you the globe afterwards as you were loading up the vans in the parking lot; his crooked teeth shone like happy slivers of moons. He tossed it playfully, and you caught, arms ready, something close to love in your throat. Baby, I want to give you the world.

You’d put it in the bathroom, beneath the giant aloe, and sitting on the toilet sometimes you’d spin it on its axis, watch the continents twirl and reveal themselves from behind the smooth green spears. That day, you spun, and asked your fingers to point you where. You’ve followed a shoestring thread through a maze before. Just that now, here, in this closet-sized bathroom in San Francisco on a ruthlessly windy gray late winter day, you feel like you’re the one who made up the maze, and the shoestring. What else is there to do? There’s nothing else left to do. So you spin.

Even then the voice rumbling in the background, murmuring fear in a language so ancient it can’t entirely be your own. You have to admit it asks a good question: in trying to make this crossing, are you pulling through patterns knit from connections that don’t actually exist?

Kenya. That’s where it landed. And you thought, what a story it would be if you went to Africa because you yourself had the disease. What if you yourself went to Africa, this place you’d never been, but somehow already knew inside your skin. What if you went to Africa, died there into the soil like so many others, wove with them beneath the darkness in the blue room, linked hands to form the lattice, danced your way down together as the compost for a healed Earth.

 

 

These rubber and metal paths walk you, so that it’s not necessary to move your legs at all. Bodies rush and talk against the press of heavy silence. Modernity. Everyone’s a stick figure in the map of your life. Somehow a bird’s gotten loose into the airport, and she cries and flutters close to the glass, catching the wind-current of the walkway’s hum. She’ll have to find her own way out. There’s nothing you can do for her now.

And you wonder, if in saving you a thousand steps, this path you’ve chosen will grant you a thousand more steps later on, some small gift of time before the hourglass flips in the blue light, in the universal hand.

There’s no one there at final boarding. It’s clear you will make this crossing yourself. You return the smile of the airport worker who whisks your boarding pass through the machine. Everyone’s got secrets under their skin. To know this makes it easy, for the moment, to be kind. Yet there is a tinge in you already, that later you know this kindness will be harder to cough up, once you are coughing up your own self into the emptiness and laying face to face in a sickroom with the choices you’d chosen to make.

 

 

Loneliness is a portal. I wanted to plunge on through to where the colors and the feathered ones lived. I wanted to know wholeness in my body, own the spaces I moved in, become the territory and the map. I wanted my alphabet to be mimicked. I wanted to be lusted for, spiritualized, honored. I never trusted that my gifts alone were enough to make me loved. I wanted to win.

I.X. was a mirror, and a dirty one at that. Rattle around inside California culture long enough and you’ll find him, the one whose spiritual predator shakes in that ancient rhythm we’ve come to call sex. Watch him assess your level of intelligence. Watch him carve holes in the glass-bottomed boat of your integrity. Watch him light one match, then two. The third is a fire you’ll never be able to put out, not even from your home at the bottom of the fluid sea.

You saw him at parties. You know, the kind where enlightened folk hang out. Your level of participation in the culture measured by the number of adornments your body can bear. Neo-tribalism all right, except there were no elders there to carve the rules. In such way did it become an ego game, its pure veneer tarnished by the dirty politics operating underneath. But you tried not to blame them, blame yourself. You understood we don’t live in an intact culture. There are no rituals left. Some of us were trying the best we could to invent our own, cobbled from travels and studies and movies, anecdotes and legends and trusts. Some of us believed in birth.

Convinced there remained a shard of a 21-year-old’s neo-utopian future in there, you crawled the clubs for nine years looking for a way out, a wholeness, a sense that it wasn’t only yourself who would enable you to survive. Nights laid on pillows in a haze of disillusionment. Nights lay like pillows where you had found the clear light of understanding. These cushioned your days like dreams do. There was a progression in the sequence. Daily you woke to reveal the layers of shame built up around sharing your consciousness. Predator material.

You were a writer and a therapist, as if anybody cared, as if anybody knew. You worked four nights a week at a suicide hotline in a third-story flat on Geary and Polk, and once a week in a garden on Russian Hill. Wednesdays you went to a Buddhist meditation group. These were what you held on to, as the remainder of your life in California seemed lost under this night-fabric. This night-fabric that repulsed, then seduced you, with its text of awakening, spiritual manifestation, and sex. In part the story repulsed you because you had to share it, because it wasn’t merely your own.

I.X. fought with you incessantly over who-was-more-enlightened. It was a game you had little patience to play. For obviously, the answer was clear: yourself. In the ancient battle between two negligent spiritual practitioners, obviously the puritan beats out the hedonist anyday. I mean, I.X. spent his days constructing puppets, and his nights eating fire. You at least had a job.

Loneliness is a portal. Cultural rules: that every day be a rite of creation. Cultural rules: that getting high and polyamory sit in the high altar. Cultural rules: don’t ask anybody else to take care of you. Handle your own trip.

And so it went. The sea of faces. The disillusionment carving an arc under the surface. I buried myself in my garden, where the exchange of nurturance seemed clearer. The nasturtiums returned and returned, year after year, no matter how many I pulled. The cosmos, annuals, decided to perennialize. I shaped the stones into a harmonious arrangement. It was the people who came and went, lacking a sense of permanence or direction. Admitted: I lacked a sense of permanence and direction myself. Yet I stayed, tethered down by my dream I had made like a bargain to myself in some night-market crossing. I had paid the shadowy figure lurking in the corner, and he had vanished thru the doorway before I could tell him hey, that potion wasn’t what I really wanted after all.

Nights in a market crossing. The commodity being our souls. Nights spent pecking at liberation, the Mother bird hoping for the baby to hatch. Nights drifting in and out of mythological scenes. My ancientness began to grow populated. Stones spoke. Little figures danced in lines of chi in my hands. The wind whispered her secrets to me. Yet there was no one to tell them to. Loneliness is a portal.

I.X.’s eyes were green marbles floating in a face that was the promise of a child. I.X. was there dancing in the club beside you when you had opened your eyes after a prayer that the Mother send you divine love. I.X. showed up one day on your front stoop, the neighbor’s cat twining figure-eights contentedly around his black boots while he fanned feathers and sage over your roommate’s open hands.I.X. talked of indigenous tribes, of travelling the globe spinning fireI.X. wordlessly buried with you the baby garter snake you’d found stuck in the backyard iron drainage grate, seemingly understanding how grave this situation was to you.

You were looking for your ticket out of here.

And this ticket took you all the way to Africa. All the way to every shadowy corner of your soul. All the way to death, and the resulting test of how much space you were able to carve out in the remainder of your journey for Love.

 

 

“Jason saw I.X. at the park today.” My roommate Raeza dropped her words as casually as she dropped her red suede yarn-fringed coat on the barstool, without thought and en route to something else. She opened the refrigerator; rummaged around with her head in and her ass out, and emerged with a Corona, a lime, and a dead-on look for me in the eye. “He was hanging out at the junkie fountain.”

Jason was a horticulturist. He was currently doing grunt work for the park, riding a little green scooter around the grounds, doing what he called “border patrol”. He said it cleared his head being in open spaces and working alone, and fuck the fact that a PhD in plant biology ended you up in a research center. He was for the people, you know? He’d said it laughingly as he licked Raeza’s cheek and grinned. They wrestled a bit on the couch. I felt happy for them. They also made me feel completely alone.

I imagined Jason trimming hedges, cutting back succulents, while the boomboxes and roller skates and shopping carts made a wildlife of their own around the fountain, the greening bronze horse-and-rider spewing out water and coins like some kind of salvation, the men slumped and reclining on the granite benches, slack-jawed against the glistening, repetitive light.

Raeza popped the top on her Corona, sliced a shard of lime, and mashed it down into the bottle. She swigged. Thwunk it went back down onto the butcher block counter. She dropped her elbows down and put her chin on her hands. “Honestly, Page, I don’t know why you hang out with that boy. I tell you, he’s bad news.”

Yeah, and you were the one who introduced me to him, I thought, but said nothing. I shrugged. “Yeah, well, everyone has their moments.”

“Everyone has their moments? Page, this is heroin we’re talking about.”

“Well, I’m just trying to defend him. I mean, just because he was there doesn’t mean he was shooting up. He could have been doing a show or something. Or just hanging out by that fountain. I mean, I like that fountain.”

One of Raeza’s eyebrows went up and her mouth twisted to the opposite side. She held that look on me.

“I’m just sick of everyone saying what a shit I.X. is, how he’s bad news, et cetera. Come on, Raeze, you know him. You know he can be really sweet. And talented. And aware. And kind.”

“And also one of the most self-centered people running around this city, and that’s saying a lot,” Raeza said. She took another sip. “Yeah, I get it about I.X. The whole boyish charm thing. The vulnerability. The whole magic world of creativity. Plus, let’s face it, he’s just plain hot. But look, Page, do you really think I.X. is going to do it for you? What’s he giving you, besides his own little egocentric theater of one? Plus, he livesin that nightworld. And you know that nightworld doesn’t make you happy.”

I fiddled with the crushed beer bottle top, pressing the corrugated edges over and over again into the wood of the counter. Pressing the sharpness of the words into the wood. I looked down. Raeza drew in a big breath, and let it out in a sigh. I could tell she was figuring out if it was OK to say what she wanted to me.

After a pause, she put her hand on top of my free hand, the one that wasn’t fiddling with the bottle cap. “Look, Page, I know you’re a sad one,” she said. “Just— I’m watching you get so….dreamy, lately. You gotta hold your own center, y’know? And I don’t want you to get hurt over I.X. He’s not worth it.”

She pressed down on my hand, then released. “I’m not sure what to say, except: Why don’t you start asking yourself what you really want?” Our eyes met for a second. My extremely aware, strong, burlesque dancer, ex-dominatrix roommate. She picked up her coat and exited the kitchen.

I hated being left alone in the kitchen. It was better to exit first. Otherwise it was like you suddenly became a dead person, inhabiting a space that was supposed to be full of life. I stared at the fruit in its hanging basket. I stared at the pink neon clock shaped like a hula girl. I stared at the blue filigree spade-shapes in the tile. Raeza didn’t mince it. It was part of why we’d been able to live together for four years. She was right. I had to get my shit together. But I just didn’t want to deal with it right now.

I kept staring at things, my mind gone underwater, thought processes happening somewhere I couldn’t yet reach, my consciousness instead looking at shapes, textures, the gold of the couch, the pale wet green of the philodendron’s next leaf unfurling. All I could think of was that I wanted sex.

Absentmindedly, I got up and walked out of the kitchen. I was almost at the end of the long, narrow hallway when something twisted in my side like a knife. It leaned me against the wainscoting, sunk me down to the hardwood floor, stared me up at the bare bulb’s garish light. I.X. was at the junkie fountain? What kind of world was I sinking into? When did it seem like most everyone I knew had crossed that line from connecting with their spirit to just repeatedly getting high? Myself included. I breathed into the sharpness and exhaled it. About half of it went away.

I felt lost. That’s what I felt. Lost in my own fucking hallway, like San Francisco was a maze, a labyrinth, an onion; bottomless, so many layers, no core, nothing to hold you. It used to be that the city was a stranger, a pink and white world just slightly out of touch with what I knew inside me. I’d walk around in her good graces, surfing the alienation I felt and holding on to the promises I’d hear on the wind. I’d felt alone, but growing, and alive, and I talked to the city when I got lonely, shared my secrets with her. And then I’d found my way to my first party at Third Street. I could still feel the essence of that luminous color blue I’d seen everywhere, a clarity that etched itself into my skin with its possibilities. The music had synched in with my thoughts and I opened to it, moving and then standing still on the dance floor. My body broke open into gratitude, gratitude for everything I’d experienced in life. I walked to the altar and pressed my forehead against the giant quartz crystal, felt heaviness fly out of me like feathers. When I raised up my head a beautiful boy with blue dreadlocks was there, offering me an apple. We ate the shiny red flesh together like it was a jewel, a sacrament, its sweet juices turning into laughter. He kissed me on the cheek. I loved everybody. I’d been swallowed by the secret heart of the night.

There was innocence then. It was gone now.

Somehow, in the last year, I’d been growing an unfamiliarity inside me as I’d sunk into an external comfort zone. Transformations were routine—I had the same San Francisco city map as everyone else did. But they never happened anymore. I felt lost. Lost from myself. Lost from the idealist inside, the girl who just wanted to grow up and have goats, drive a pickup, restore an old farmhouse and live in it with friends, loves, kids. I wasn’t grafting an apple orchard. I was buying platform boots at thrift stores and considering it a good night when I lost myself on the dance floor, felt my body move in new ways to the cyclic pattern of self-centered thoughts. When I broke out for a moment from the prison of my own head and opened my heart. Except I was thirty-three. No one I knew was interested in living from their heart any more.

I spaced out for I don’t know how many minutes, picking at a loose thread of stitchery from the calf of my boot and watching the patterns of brightness on the nineteen or so layers of paint this hallway’d seen. Jimi Hendrix was in your house, I.X. had said one night while we were making out against the inside of the front door. I can feel it, he’d said, sliding his hands up under my skirt. I remember thinking, Why does he need to be so fucking cheesy? Why am I even with him? Being totally turned off for a second, and then deciding to let it go. Something else in me wanted what he was feeding, two hands on my ass and then a finger inside me. Maybe Jimi Hendrix was inside my house. Like I said, I let it go.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The sounds from the street seemed more invasive than usual, and though I knew it was ridiculous, the shadows of my potted plants were even bothering me. I went into the hall of the building and plucked at the dirty, flat pink roses spun into the carpet’s red threads. I stood on the balcony and looked at the quarter moon and its reflection off the dark iron grate on the coffee shop across the street below. The view of downtown and the Bay Bridge just seemed like so much visual noise, entrapment, too many lights. I sighed. I was tired of San Francisco.

I woke at four to sirens. In my dream I’d been asking Raeza what I should wear to a party. She’d laid something out for me on my bed. I’d looked away, and when I looked back, my bed had turned into a grassy field, the costume into a bloody, dead coyote’s skin. He stared at me with glassy eyes. Warning.

 

 

I.X. lived in his workshop, which was really a garage. It was about 30 by 30, a tan corrugated metal outbuilding in a vacant lot behind an autobody shop. Ryce, who ran the shop, was a long, reedy guy with tattooed eyebrows and arms and multiple piercings, including an ivory bone through his nose. He let I.X. live there for free.

I.X. had given me the combo to the lock on the chain-link: 18-36-34. I fiddled with it in the half-light, weeds and vines pushing up though the sidewalk like they always did in San Francisco. I loved unlocking the gate. It was like after all these years, I’d been given the secret combination to the real city. Going inside was like going inside a magic place, a wild, hidden corner of the human heart.

I found I.X. out back behind the building, next to the small thick granite fountain, dry except for rainwater and a few scuddy brown leaves. It was December, and although the day had been sunny, I still shivered and pulled my vest tighter around me as I squatted down next to him in the last half-hour before dark. A little stone Buddha and several retired puppets and puppet parts surrounded the fountain, limbs woven into the chain-link, crawled over and under by dormant honeysuckle and trumpet vine. “Hey,” I said cautiously. Even after three months of being I.X.’s lover, there was still a substantial place inside that didn’t trust, that wondered how he’d receive me.

I.X. didn’t look up, just rocked a bit with his knees drawn up. “My show at La Fortunata got cancelled,” he said between deep drags on his cigarette. “An aerial theater act from L.A.’s coming up, and they know the producer. So I got bounced.”

I.X. looked the way he always did when he got bummed out—like a pouting, five-year-old child, kicking his feet absentmindedly against the chipped concrete, hiding under his curls—except he happened to be a five-year-old child who also enjoyed smoking.

I didn’t say anything. I honestly didn’t think it was a big deal. Two weekends out of four you could find I.X. doing something under stage lights—puppets, Theater Internal, spinning fire. Here was that gap where I didn’t get him, where I thought he was babyish, self-centered, orbiting as a star in a very small and repetitive universe. So why was there that other piece of me that envied him?

“Well, no one cancelled the suicide hotline this weekend,” I said. I looked at him. He didn’t seem to respond to my attempt at humor. I brushed my cheek against his shoulder the way a cat might. “I’m sorry, I.X..”

My fingers crumbled dry leaves that were scuttling around the lot. The sun caught strong for a moment from behind the oncoming curtain of fog, and I.X.’s hand and face glowed a beautiful, luminous peach. I wanted to touch him. Weirdly, when I.X. got sad, I liked him more. Tenderness suited him. I could see the hurts, the fuel behind the fire.

“Page,” he started suddenly, and looked up and sideways into my eyes. He looked wounded, vulnerable, intensely longing. “Don’t leave me,” he said, and then pulled back like a wild animal would pull back, into his own space, flicking ash at the feet of the Buddha.

I stared out over the former factories, now design studios and expensive lofts, and caught the last strong streak of pink in the sky. The city caught like a lump in my throat. Was she still trying to love me?

I fished around in the rhythms of traffic sounds and car lights and wind for something to say. Finally I heard myself speaking, carefully crafting words for him, for myself, for the sky.

“I’m not leaving you, I.X.,” I said. “I want to be with you. Don’t get upset about the show. It’s just other people’s ego trips. You’re a really good puppeteer. There’s space for all of us. I don’t know why there has to be this vibe amongst artists like love’s so tenuous, so scarce.”

“Page,” he said again, looking into me with one eye, his head cocked in the other direction. “You see through everything,” he said. “You see through everything, and you’re still here.” He turned to face me, squatting on his haunches. His hand reached out and touched my face. “You’re like, telling the world its heart’s already broken, and it’s like you’re waiting; it’s like…you’re just waiting for the real show to start…” He was growing manic now, excited, “And the thing is, the real show’s inside of you, Page.” He leapt up, energized, and plucked a plastic rose from the lapel of a headless puppet hanging in the fence. He knelt before me. “I love you, Page. I want to make love to you.”

Wordlessly we got to our feet. I let his hand lead me inside.

I.X. lit candles and incense while I wandered the periphery of his loft. He’d left his wallet flipped open on the low bedside table, and his license showed thru the transparent plastic of the pocket window inside. Paul Arthur Chapman, it read, DOB 11/13/71. I remembered the first time we were in bed together, when I.X. lay smoking and I snuggled into the warm nest of pheromones we’d coated the room with. My hand ran through his coarse black curls. Wiry whites were beginning to come in, and they gave an effect like his hair was turning smoky, like he was growing out a head full of ash. What’s I.X. stand for? I’d asked him from my rest on his ribs.

Internal Xamination, he’d said. It came to me on an acid trip in Thailand. He paused, in that kind of super-grandiose-ask-me-more-because-I’m-so-fascinating way I would later come to expect from him. “Cool,” I said.

I was spinning fire at this beach party at dawn, and as I looked out over the waves I thought, That’s what life is. That’s who I am. That’s who we all are, you know? Internal Xamination. So that’s what I named myself. And I.X. sounded better than I.E. He dragged long and slow on his cigarette. Baby, you got an ashtray?

“Just do it in the plant,” I said, even though I didn’t usually let anyone smoke in my room. Even then, I’d had that same reaction: Cheesy! but also there was part of me that resonated, that knew it was true. Life was an inner examination, after all. I fit myself back in to the warm crest of his underarm. So what if you lacked a certain subtlety in conveying that depth. And besides, I.X. was a cool-sounding name.

Now he came up behind me and led me to his altar. He lit two candles and handed me the lighter to do the third. I could feel desire coating the insides of my underwear already, warm clear liquid pulsing out of me and fuzzy vibrations raising up my centerline. We knelt and faced each other. I.X. took one of the candles and circled it in the air between us. He returned it to the altar and leaned forward, stared into my eyes. He bent forward and kissed the top of my head. I closed my eyes and bathed in waves of sweet and generous. Now a kiss lapped each of my closed eyelids, and then his hands were on my breasts. My breath quickened. He was moving faster now, intensity sliding my t-shirt up over my head as we knocked back onto the floor. I.X. licked the sides of my neck and my ears as I pulled the shirt off his back. Page, he sighed into my ear, and my belly was on fire. I.X.’s smooth brown skin was stroking mine, belly to belly, his hard-on pressing between my legs. We slid this way over towards his bed, inching closer to the forest green velour blanket until we reached the mattress on the floor. His mouth met mine and we moaned together, everything transferring between our lips like a wet, formless fire, round and shaped and intensely throbbing. I rubbed my rock-hard breasts against his chest as we worked each other’s pants off. I flipped him over so I was on top.

He flipped under me and splayed himself out in a back-arch, ribs towards the ceiling, waiting for me to come down on him.

There were holes in his arms.

Everything in me went stock still. I blinked and looked again. All the sexual energy built up inside me turned into a liquid, nauseating wave that consumed and then fled. “Baby, don’t stop,” I could hear him say, and then he, too, after a second, sat up and looked at me. “What’s wrong?” he asked, concerned, childlike, cocking his head from side to side like a bird.

I sad nothing, just became intensely aware of how orange the room was getting, the candlelight growing as the sky darkened outside. A black hole on an orange elbow in the orange light in a black room. Like a palindrome of perception, an equation that made sense. My hand was over my mouth. Finally I pointed.

“What? Oh, my arm,” I.X. said. “Yeah—well—So—-yeah,” he said, going from apologetic to defensive in one sentenceless sentence. “So what?” he said. “So I shot up.”

“‘SO WHAT’, I.X.? Are you fucking INSANE?”

I’m out of here. I should get out of here. I should so get out of here, my head went, until finally I was disentangling my feet from the green blanket, finding my t-shirt, putting my head in first to flip it right-side-to.

“I never told you this, Page, but I kind of got into heroin for a bit in like ’98, and it was only for a little while, like six months, but I kicked it, and I’ve been clean ever since. Ryce too. That’s part of the deal of why Ryce lets me stay here,” I.X. said. “He keeps clean, I keep clean, we keep each other clean, y’know?”

“Yeah, but you’re NOT keeping clean, I.X., I said. That’s the point here.”

Something shifted in him, from apology to fury. It amazed me how fast he could shift. If you blinked, you might miss it.

“You know Page, you think you’re all down with the scene and everything, but you can be so goddamn closeminded sometimes,” he spat out, searching around the blankets for his jeans. He found them, shook them out violently, and grabbed the pack of cigarettes as it fell from the pocket.

I reeled, shocked. Was I that transparent? Was it that apparent to everybody that I was an impostor to the scene? Was I closedminded? And why, at thirty-three years old, should I even care? And wait, wasn’t this supposed to be about I.X. and heroin, and how had he managed to turn it around on me? Was I that insecure?

“I thought you were supposed to be all spiritual, Page,” I.X. said. “Where’s your compassion? Where’s your forgiveness?” He lit up, inhaled, exhaled. It seemed to calm him. A new expression flipped over his face, the nostrils widening slightly, a flicker: animal to animal, sizing me up. “Too bad you’re so upset, baby. I could still get hard for you again, you know.” And he slid his hand down the crease between his belly and his thigh, and let it linger there. “But if you want to leave, I get it, I understand. I mean, the sex between us was actually pretty hot, surprisingly enough. I mean, you don’t look like it would be all that hot, but hey…”

It stung. Malicious, inhumane. Tears welled up and I clenched around them, angry. When you no longer know who someone is, you don’t want them to see you cry. Too late.

“That’s all it is to you, I.X., huh? A fuck. Right. Makes sense. I guess I should stop trying to pretend it’s anything else myself.”

Then: “No, Page,” pleadingly, “don’t…..No… Page, Page, come here. Page, I love you. I’m sorry. I was angry. You’re very special to me, Page. You understand me. Most people don’t. And I swear, the junk was only a couple times, and now I’m done. I just had to check in there, you know?”

Heartsickness flooded up through me and then drained back out, an ocean of possibility leaching into the bare wooden floor. Confused cords inside my belly, open to him, shut, open and shut, open and shut. He was yanking and pulling and somehow always coming up in control. Puppeteering. Right. But I knew it was done. I looked around the dirty room: unkempt, chaotic, alive. Where was I? How had I gotten here? And how had I possibly deluded myself into thinking something in here was love?

I grabbed onto anger and pulled it tight around me, used it to consolidate myself together. “I just can’t be with someone who would be that disrespectful, to themselves and to me, as their partner,” I said, fishing around for the button on my pants. “I can’t,” I said.

By this point, I.X. had smoked about a third of his cigarette down. He ashed onto the floor next to his bed. “Fine,” he said, and retreated into a place I knew that even if I wanted to, I could never, never access. He took a long drag and contemplated the cigarette as if it was the most unusual, fascinating item he’d ever seen. Not looking at me.

“Then don’t.”

He stared up deliberately, penetratingly, for about thirty seconds. I was a deer in the headlights who finally, when he looked away again, understood that she had been dismissed. “Fuck you, I.X.,” was all I could manage to come up with as I searched around in the candlelight for my coat. I banged down the ladder past the puppets, out the workshop door and into a blast of cold night.

 

 

The letter about my unpaid parking tickets came in March. Irritated, I stuck it back in the wicker mail basket in the hallway. Raeza went on a housecleaning rampage a few weeks later. “Hey Page,” she called down the hallway. “Do you know if you don’t pay your parking tickets by tomorrow, you’ll owe them four-hundred and fifty-six dollars?”

I was about to take a shower. “How much is it now?” I asked sticking my head out of the bathroom doorway.

“Two seventy-seven,” she said.

“Crap,” I muttered, and pulled my jeans back on. “I’m never good at taking care of this kind of thing.”

I had a couple of hours before work. I could go pay the tickets and then walk around for an hour. I’d started walking a lot in the last couple months, wandering through the city and sometimes, if it was sunny, out on the coast. I’d even walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, something I’d never done in nine years.

“I’m just going to go now, Raeze,” I said. “Thanks for finding that.”

“No prob,” she singsonged.

 

 

As usual, there was no parking in the section of town by the transportation office, and I had to park about four blocks over, on a side street next to a free clinic. I looked up at the sign as I put my dimes and quarters in the meter. La Clinica de los Santos, it read. Free HIV Testing and Counseling, the smaller sign in the window read.

My mind flashed to I.X. I’d spent a lot of time alone in the last four months. I’d stopped going out so much. I’d given up on trying to mitigate the loneliness. I went to work, went to my garden, hung out at home. I read more books than usual. I considered moving, like I always did when things got that isolated feel around the edges. And I was walking, walking and asking San Francisco what was left for me here. Occasionally I would think of I.X. and panic, wondering if I should get tested. But I always put it out of my mind. Still, it plagued me, popping up at odd times until I suppressed it again.

I thought about it all the way to the parking office and back. Just do it, Page, I said to myself. Clear your mind. Put I.X. behind you. Move on. Know you’re OK. I got back to my car and inserted a few more quarters into the tiny slots. I went inside.

 

 

 

I walked fifteen blocks, aimlessly. My feet weren’t walking on the same sidewalk as everyone else. I wasn’t hearing the same sounds or seeing the same colors in the signs, shiny cars, vegetable stalls, backs of birds. Minute textures within paint popped out of the facades and trim on all the Victorians. I was sure time was moving at a different velocity for me. This oppressive dream of a place, San Francisco, where the shine pervaded everything. This peninsula was a beach. Now white light that should have been reflecting off sand was reflecting off pavement, bouncing back hard up into my eyes. Civilization. Progress. I wanted to bury my face in the dunes, bury my self in what was here four hundred years ago. Five thousand years ago. I sent my attention up higher than the wind. I wondered if anyone was listening. In four hundred more years, maybe I’d be listening to some girl wandering these streets in grief. In four hundred years, who knows where I’d be floating, haunting, blessing, dissolved. In four years.

No, I’ve got longer than that.

In fourteen years.

Not so bad, forty-seven. More than half a life. But what
kind of life?

Fourteen years of what, knowing you’re going to die?

Everybody knows they’re going to die.

Yeah, but not so fucking ungracefully.

My feet started kicking loose bits of street rubble down the sidewalk. The tightness in my chest was working its way up, becoming a sore lump in my throat. I put my head down against the wind. My steps quickened. I turned a corner into an alley. Cool brick relief from all the visual noise on Mission mirroring the high volume inside my head. Leaning. Leaning against a wall and breathing. Murals. Eagles. Women with baskets of vegetables on their heads. Cosmos opening. Turning. A whorl of stars.

Why didn’t you protect yourself?

The answers came ugly, came rolling in on each others’ backs like waves in a storm, catching the lips of one another, fighting for the sequence in which they’d spill over first.

Because I don’t believe in myself. Because I don’t see the beauty in myself. Because I don’t love myself. Because I always want to give myself away. Like love and power are someone else’s. Someplace outside, someplace I have to leave myself to reach.

Bullshit, Page, I told myself.

And then the anguish as I realized: This is one lesson you’re learning too late.

I put my hands over my ears and I howled. Howled down an empty alley, sobbed to the open hands and sheaved grain painted in thick bright primary colors, sobbed to the rainbow world of two-dimensional ancestors, their perspective widening out to a round blue sea.

I looked up at the iron grates, the urban doves. Honeysuckle and passionflower cascading down the walls. Unbearable that it was spilling in through these seemingly closed doorways. Unreal this riot of color as viewed through the eyes of a dying girl. Vines and life coming in even then.

 

 

Nasturtiums. In another moment I would have read them as a different kind of sign, an affirmation that the unseen world wanted I.X. and I to be together.

Nasturtiums. I.X. said he could see cuneiforms in the ways their vines twirled. They speak a sacred language, Page. Even then he irritated me. That was the kind of thing you couldn’t just come out and say—you had to hint around it. Otherwise you looked greedy. Like the spirit world was just talking to you. And you also looked like a fool.

All these little rules and regulations I had built up inside me. No one was up to par with me, certainly not I.X. But still I let him play like he had power over me. He did. I wanted to twine up with him like those vines twined. My only problem was that I wanted someone to love me, too.

Now I kicked at the dirty concrete rubbling up around the nasturtium’s yellowing leaves. The toe of my Converse looked good there, a pale blue against dirty white and the orange and yellowy-green of the vines. I briefly wondered how I could still be interested in color composition at a moment like this. Then I stomped them, ground the ball of my foot until the green juices ran and stained, wet papery broken cells, useless veins.

And fuck if I knew how to interpret their sacred language now anyways.

 

 

No, it’s not possible.

Those were the words you got over the face of a Che Guevara puppet. Its master’s hands were doing something to the legs—stitching thick copper wire in an X-pattern down the steel-blue corduroy pant seams. You saw two hands moving as if on their own, and the wooden face of a dead revolutionary. I.X. was kneeling on the ground behind the worktable, surrounded by debris and holding a mouthful of precut lengths of wire. His voice came out funny, disembodied, strained. The puppet could’ve given a better delivery.

It must be someone else.

I haven’t been with anyone else.

Um, Page? Could you please get out of my studio, because I have a lot of work to do?

 

 

Page is walking down the block. Page is straight tight fisted arms. Page is throwing her wallet against a chain-link fence seventeen times and screaming. Page is getting whistled at by four men in a blue low-rider. Page is rustling flocks of pigeons out of the scraggly trumpet vines and screaming at them as they cross the wind towards shelter. Page is all of these things, but you watch it from above. Because Page is certainly not you.

 

 

I.X. was at the party at the Third Street Warehouse, just like I knew he would be.

 

I walked in. The ceiling was dripping with lotuses made from fabric and wire. A giant gold paper-mache dragon lined the east wall. Its eyes were made from broken bits of bike reflectors. The spiral on the floor was there like it always was, painted into the center of the concrete like a trompe-l’oeil, giving you the impression that the floor in that place was actually falling through to another world. How many nights had I spent here in the past five years, following the slow translations of my life through the filter of fast music, watching myself grow and then stagnate and then jade?

I scanned the room for I.X. It was early, only a little after eleven, so he might not be here yet. I felt my body react to the uneasiness of foreign touch as someone hugged me from behind. The hands felt alien, their warmth and willingness to connect out-of-synch with my all-consuming inner world. I closed my eyes and swallowed, willing the hands to go away. Nothing could touch me now.

Greta, a yoga teacher who’d briefly lived at both Third Street and the house on Scott Street, jumped out from behind my body. She had on blue velour yoga pants and a blue and silver woven halter top, and a headdress dangling with bangles. “Hey Page,” she said, all smiles and blond hair. I threw up a quick mask of normalcy to cover my eyes. Those two globes were connecting down somewhere from deep within my bottomless belly. The world was falling through. I smiled.

I did OK, because Greta just seemed to key into something that gave her mild concern. “Page, is everything all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m good. How are you?” I answered. “Have you seen I.X.?”

“Yeah, he’s in the back getting dressed for the ritual,” she said. “You guys aren’t still hanging out, are you?”

I shook my head.

“God, Page, you really look like you need a massage or something,” Greta said. “Hang on; I’ll get Roland. We’ll work on you together.” Roland was Greta’s boyfriend and they liked to co-massage people at parties. “Here, hold my tea,” Greta said. “You can have some if you like.” She winked.

I didn’t feel like getting a massage. I didn’t feel like letting anyone touch me. I wandered the periphery of the warehouse and then walked up the stairs to the loft, continuing my scan for I.X. and drinking some of Greta’s tea. It felt good, warming. I drank the whole cup, and put the empty white paper on an end table by a potted plant in the corner. I sank into the couch and closed my eyes.

Waiting. Human noise stayed in the background, a mixed shuffle hum, occasionally getting close and sharp. When that happened, I’d open my eyes to make sure no one I knew was around, and then I’d sink back into myself again. I listened to my breathing, aware that I was staying on the surface of things, not going too deep inside. I had a lock on that place. I just wanted to be alone, alone and listening the quiet pervading all the external sounds, until I could find I.X. and make him listen to me.

Eventually, I got jostled out of my headspace by Greta’s voice. “There you are, Page!” she exclaimed, and when I opened my eyes she and Roland were standing in front of me holding hands. “Hey, do you mind if we work on you later?” Greta asked. “The ritual’s about to start. Come downstairs and watch it with us.”

“It’s cool, you don’t even have to give me a massage,” I said.

“Oh, no, we definitely will later,” she said, and Roland nodded. “Hey, do you still have my tea?”

“Oh, I drank it all,” I said. “Do you want me to get you another cup?”

“Wow, Page, you’re really gonna be tripping,” Greta said.

“WHAT?” I freaked, and jumped to my feet.

It’s mushroom tea, Greta said.

Holy shit, I whispered, as my hand flew to my eyes that were already forming with tears.

Page, are you all right? Ohmigod, I thought you KNEW it was mushroom teaohmigod, Page, I’m so sorry…

And just like that, I felt them kick, waves of water thick and bottomless inside me.

Greta grabbed my wrist and leaned into my face. I could smell her essential oils and get a closeup on her blue bindi. She looked concerned.

I was having this weird reaction to Greta, like I liked her grip on my wrist—it felt strong, and comforting—an anchor to another person—but her expressions were really bothering me. Too much information, some part of my brain was thinking, too much information in this world. How could you navigate through all these perfumes and dancers, laser shows and hula hoops on fire, drag queens on roller skates and altars dripping with fruit? No wonder I had fucked up.

Greta and Roland led me downstairs with effusive apologies. “It’s all right,” I kept saying, as if from underwater, “It’ll be all right.” I wished they would stop babying me. I cocooned into myself, shrinking, worried that their protective ushering me around would draw attention to us. The last thing I wanted was to have to interact with more people.

By the time we got downstairs the ritual had already begun. Three figures stood silently in the spotlights, arms outstretched at forty-five degree angles, palms open, eyes closed, attuning to the speakers’ low, ominous, building thrum. A fourth ran in from the crowd, stealthily, leaping, caped and masked. He threw the staff he carried unlit up into the air, fell to his knees, caught it, pressed it to his forehead as two women in black lit the ends on fire. It was I.X.

I.X. spun slowly, sensuously, for several minutes, building into a crescendo of utter engagement with the fire. He was beautiful, one of the spinners that let their soul be shown, and that was part of why I’d fallen for him. He was intense concentration to the point where effortlessness began, opening up a realm between worlds. Lithe and deep. Hypnotic. The herald of the end of my life.

And with that thought, his fire began fading, spun itself into smaller concentric circles, the glow vanishing into the blackness. As the last sparks flew, someone shut all the lights in the warehouse out. The music stopped for a microsecond. Terror seized me, adrenaline rushing wildly against my competing, formless thoughts. Then everything came back on. Whistles and claps surrounded me. The switch had gotten flipped. I’d been pulled: somewhere sickening, inescapable, endless like a slow-moving dream.

I.X. removed the mask. I saw someone faceless. He was smeared out, obscured by some more amorphous being, the color of his skin stretching into the hot-flesh-colored spotlights like flames…. I watched with horror as he knelt at the foot of a woman in a long white gown and an ivy laurel, some kind of fertility goddess. She held him to her belly like a lover, like a child, caressing tenderly the crown of his head and his face—How could such a goddess love him, still take him in? How could no one see what he really was? I.X. is a fucking devil….a devil…devil…my mind was racing and looping, so noisily I wondered if I had actually shouted it out loud…devil…while some other part of my brain was going, Stop it, snap out of it Page, he’s not a devil and you know it….devil…

I don’t know why I stood there or why I watched Air being lifted onto their shoulders. She grabbed parallel rings on the rafter above and flipped repeatedly, graceful, white. My heart was thudding. I wiped a cold sweat from my temple. Water came on. His offering was a joke. The way he dispersed the contents of the jug was bordering on malicious.

Fuck these people. Fuck their self-serving spirituality. I.X. had rings of black makeup around his eyes atop a whiteface. He was no more than an animal now, moving slowly and stealthily like something possessed. What rules us? something pressing and curious and oddly innocent asked inside me. And a sinister voice said, “There is no governance here.” Animal to animal, instinct to instinct. It was on the floor, electric and sickening and feathered, and dead. Mask to mask.

That was when everyone was cheering and applauding and the dj came on. I walked towards the first white thing I saw. It was a spotlight, carving a soft oval on the brick wall. Carefully I reached my hand out to see if it would offer me shelter. It agreed. I pressed my cheek to it, right then and there. She was a woman, and she held me. Held me as I slid to the concrete and let me go where I needed to go, watched over me as my being formed into the shape of a tear.

Of course, no one said shit, no one touched me on the shoulder, no one even noticed or knew how to deal with a woman in a white t-shirt and jeans curled up on the floor in a puddle of light. When I came to out of the black, blank moment I’d sunk into, I felt refreshed, awake, re-sensitized. Textures were coming alive, like the fray on the knee of my denim, like the elephant lines of skin on my hand. I felt like myself again. I got up.

Now, is all I thought. You have to take care of it now.

Help, I asked, to any spirit that would listen.

And I closed my eyes and walked, following the thread of lights and presences on the inside of my lids, the smells, the partings of energies that let me walk on through. I walked as a wave walks, pulling at the core of myself, blindly full and knowing it will find the shore. Pink lights, white lights, instinct, intuition. Riding along wherever this white wave was taking me.

When I opened them, he was there.

Dancing. Smoking. Moving. In some place way faster than me.

In the forty-five seconds it took him to notice me, I remembered I could breathe. I breathed.

The raccoon eyes locked mine. They looked away. They locked mine. They looked away. I wasn’t moving.

Finally, I.X. came closer. I could smell his stained smells, nicotine and alcohol and white gas and workshop dust and the undersmell, layers of toxins riding the way, working themselves out towards the surface of his skin. It was the first smell of sickness. Music and motion and voices got swallowed as Grief became the sound of everything. My eyes burned with something way deeper than tears. My belly fled rivulets of chi down to my feet. I had about two minutes before I was going to lose my shit.

What do you want, Page?

You weren’t listening to me today. I.X., you need to hear what I’m saying.

Page, I’m tripping, I.X. said, rather pedantically, leaning in so his eyes inside their stained rings were like marbles, except this time they looked glass, encased, not like whole, floating worlds.

So? I breathed through a tightened jaw. So am I.

Yeah, but I’m on acid, he seethed, as if he was at the end of his rope, exasperated, as if I were a child. As if I didn’t understand. As if I didn’t understand he wanted to be done with me. Of course he did. I was the ice pick to his delusion. And when would I ever get to live in delusion again? I felt like throwing up. My mind compressed itself. I hated I.X.

So? I seethed again. The room had narrowed, shrunk into a four-by-four hot box of orangey-pink light and I felt my chest caving in. The bottomless boat. The boatless bottom. Someone down there threw up these words for me, and I caught them in my throat, let them spill out like soldiers of water. Does that make you more god than me or something?

I stared for a second. It was the last second I had before this scene changed, before I was on to a different chapter and choking on my own heart alone. I looked at him. The agent of my undoing seemed plastic, hardened, someone’s sick joke of a figurine. Close it, someone whispered to me from those depths. And I, having no one better to trust than an anonymous spirit rider in my heart, let that rider navigate for me. I whirled on I.X. and ran down the stairs into the deep blue night street of my grief.

 

 

You ran fifteen blocks and let the city rush by you in a blur. I can outrun this. You exhausted yourself in a shit section of town, junkies and clubbers and sex workers everywhere. So exhausted that you get down onto your knees on the sidewalk, panting and wheezing and eventually sobbing. You notice in the street lights that your tears keep falling onto a clear piece of broken glass. There is first violence, then otherworldly beauty in this.

You hear the song come in from around the corner, a solo human voice, liquid notes lifting and falling on a scale of stars. These sounds: humane and naked, clear and full of praise, are coming to the forefront of your consciousness as you kneel inside this urban wound. You let the music bathe your ears into stillness. Your sobs slow, then cease, as the song grows gently louder, approaches you, and then stops mid-phrase.

Mmm mmm mmmm, the syrupy voice clucks, and you see it belongs to a plump, middle-aged black drag queen, maternal, sympathetic, kind. You need me to call you a cab, sweetheart? You look like you need someone to call you a cab.

You don’t do anything, not even nod, but she’s already there stepping off the curb, one arm raised, her hand stretched serenely towards the few stars visible through the yellowy haze of lights. She closes her eyes and sings again, the same hypnotic lullaby, as you wipe your eyes with your fists. The cab comes like a fish gliding up to a reef, shiny, fluid, right on time. Her big, puffy hand cupping your arm as she helps you to your feet, opens the door.

It’s all a gift, sweetheart, she says softly as you sink into the vinyl. It’s all a gift.

The taxi is playing easy listening and you are grateful for it, so oddly grateful for the twenty blocks of easy listening until you reach home.

 

 

 

Raeza, I wrote in black Sharpie on a ripped-up piece of brown paper bag, I’m gone.

Underneath I wrote: Sell my stuff. Then: I love you. –Page. I lay the note on her bed. Then I folded the roll of hundred dollar bills and tucked the round thousand under the note. I took the red Buddha from the windowsill and placed his fat, smiling body on top of itall like a paperweight. I picked my travel bag up from the floor. One step, two, three into the hallway. I hesitated in there, something catching in my throat as I stood beneath the hanging potted plants. I closed my eyes and shot a prayer towards everything up through the crown of my head. Then I stepped through the door of my apartment into the exterior hall. I was gone. Roses underneath my feet as I made my exit from my apartment building. Roses under my feet until the curb, and then the bright yellow taxi whisking me off towards the airport. You didn’t thinkyou’d leave this way. You thought it’d be moving up north to Mendocino withsomeone you loved, or publishing a book and being asked to teach somewhere, or deciding to spend a year in Southeast Asia, knowing you’d eventually return. San Francisco. Not this way, speeding down 280 as if you were being flown, the taxi’s wheels barely touching the pavement, everything for the last time bathed in that unbearable, shiny white light.