Time's Mouth, page 21
“Wait until you sit in it,” he said.
Opal reached for a lock of hair, no longer there, and her hand paused, floating above her scalp. “No way I’m going in there.”
She wasn’t in debate mode anymore. She seemed scared.
“Why not?”
“I know how to breathe, Dad.”
“I never said you didn’t.”
“Still no.”
“What are you afraid of?”
That was Doc’s favorite question, and he had a gift for asking it at the very moment Ray was feeling proud of how loud he was screaming, how hard he was crying. Obviously, his pride was proof he hadn’t truly let go; he couldn’t dive into the dark waters of his soul if he was too busy admiring his reflection. “Scare yourself, Raymond,” Doc would say. “Go ahead. Get scared.”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Opal said. “A box cannot collect energy.” At the last word, she wiggled her fingers around her face, miming a lion’s mane. “I know you’re from Santa Cruz, but do you honestly believe in this life force bullshit?”
“I do,” he said. “I know it’s cool to be skeptical.”
“That isn’t why I’m skeptical. It just, honestly, seems crazy.”
Crazy. The word hung there for a moment.
“Trust me,” he said. “I know it how it sounds, but how can part of you not believe in something like orgonic energy? I feel it. Don’t you?”
She sighed. “Feel what?”
“This,” he said, and held his arms out wide.
He could tell she understood by the way she looked out at the view and then closed her eyes, as if to trap what she’d seen inside. He laughed, and then she did too, and he felt so happy.
Cherry used to say that dads were insignificant. “No one cares if they leave,” she’d said in their past life, back in Ben Lomond. It was nighttime at the creek, and he was drawing circles on her back. At the time he agreed because it was true for them both. But it wasn’t true for Opal. Ray was here for her. He was all she had.
On the drive back to the house, she rolled her window all the way down.
“Why do you need it?” she asked.
What could he say? What could he tell her about why he needed it? He didn’t want her to know that he wanted to be healed. Cured. Of what Cherry did by leaving them. He needed to unblock the bad energy.
He repeated what he told Doc. “I just want to feel good.”
The house came into view and Opal hung her arm out the window to catch the breeze. Cherry used to do that, too, except she’d cup her hand. She would scoop the air like water.
The Orgone Accumulator arrived on a Thursday when Opal was in school. For the first time in weeks, Ray was between jobs and no one was filming at the estate. The land was quiet except for the persistent insect drone of the pumpjacks. That morning, during rush hour, a news helicopter hovered, checking out a car accident on La Cienega heading north, but the tow trucks and cops were long gone, and the roads and skies were clear.
To Ray, it felt like the universe was smiling upon him. He’d taken a chance when he gave the guy in Maine the estate address, which wasn’t to be used for regular mail; they had a P.O. box for that. Just like the mamas, he thought—and tried not to. Large packages could be delivered to the first access gate, but if no one was home when the driver called the house number listed at the keypad, then he was out of luck. Somehow, though, it worked out perfectly. The phone rang just as Ray was getting out of the shower. He was planning to go pick up some lunch, but he was noodling around, in no hurry. It was like the universe wanted him to be home.
The UPS guy agreed to follow his truck all the way to the house, probably out of curiosity, and he even helped Ray carry the long rectangular box to the garage. Unassembled, the Accumulator was about the size of a piece of IKEA furniture, a kitchen table, perhaps. It felt strangely light. The two of them managed it just fine.
Ray wanted to install it in the garage partly because of its dirt floor. Reich believed the machines worked better when buried in soil, Ray didn’t know why.
He wasn’t going to leave the box unopened, even if he was hungry for lunch—to do so would be a desecration. Ray ran back to the house for his toolbox and a banana and returned to the garage. His breath was shallow, and he imagined the bions rising out of the top of his head like cartoon thought bubbles as he peeled the banana and tossed the peel through the open door. He smashed the banana into his mouth and fell to his knees so that he could kneel over the box. He swallowed, throat thick. He was so nervous his hands were shaking.
Inside the box were six panels, including the ceiling, floor, and door. When he held them upright they came to his shoulder. He was afraid he was going to need someone’s help and that Opal, teenage attitude flaring, might refuse. But the panels were easier to screw together than he expected. The universe, again. The garage was getting hot—and the heat barely touched him.
In less than fifteen minutes, the Accumulator stood upright, as wide as a refrigerator or a phone booth, if not quite that tall. He was almost finished; it was almost ready. The hairs on his arms stood, his skin brailling with goose bumps. It was time to dig the shallow hole.
The dirt was dry and stubborn, root choked. It took nearly half an hour to get anywhere, and by the end Ray was sweating and cursing, his hand sore from gripping the trowel. His back hurt. Finally, the hole was big enough, and Ray dragged the Accumulator into it. The soil only covered about a foot of the structure. Better than nothing. He dug out the dirt at the front, so that the door could open and shut easily.
He did not even wait to find a chair that would fit inside. Did he really need a chair? Was that part of the—what was the word? The prescription? Ritual?
Only one way to find out.
He stepped inside and shut the door. Inside, it was so dark the world disappeared and then he did too. It was the kind of darkness that swallowed your very body.
What did he hope would happen? He told Doc and Opal he wanted to feel good. That was true, but that wasn’t the only thing. He wanted the Accumulator to heal him, to cure him, as stupid as that sounded. And that word, cure, only began to approach it because he wasn’t sure what was wrong with him in the first place—or what wasn’t wrong. A fucked-up childhood, a father he never knew, a messed-up mother, a beautiful, brilliant daughter whose mother abandoned them both, a loneliness, a wound you couldn’t see, a sense that everything good in his life had come from hoarding lies. Oh, you know, just all that.
He wanted to laugh. Was there a cure for all that?
He closed his eyes and let his breath guide him. In and out. In. Out. The floor of the Accumulator was hard and smooth. His tailbone began to ache but he stayed where he was, breathing. With his eyes closed, he felt unmoored. Floating. He breathed.
In. He was flying through space. Out. He was space.
He didn’t know much time passed before he felt something gentle overtake him. A tenderness. Like a hand, cupping his body. A wave of softness. Were those the bions?
When he opened the door, the deluge of light was almost unbearable. He covered his eyes. When he stood, his legs felt strong. He willed himself to open his eyes. See it.
11
THERE WAS THAT OTHER PART OF REICHIAN THERAPY, the famous part, the part people joked about at parties if you mentioned his name. The function of the orgasm—the saucy parts, as Isla Patricia called them. It wasn’t enough to ejaculate, Reich claimed. Anyone—any man, at least—could do that. You had to surrender fully into the climax, the release. According to Reich, mental health depended on fulfilling one’s orgastic potential. (“Orgastic potential,” he imagined Opal saying. “Aren’t they playing at the Troubadour on Tuesday?”) Unless you were without armor, unless the energy flowed through you freely, you couldn’t let go completely. To be able to do that, you had to be willing to accept love. If you couldn’t accept love, you were mentally ill.
Reich argued that prohibiting children from expressing their feelings, including sexual interest through masturbation, would cause them to repress emotions and build up armor, which would keep them from being free and happy.
That was what Ursa had done. Ray growing from a boy into a man was treated like a betrayal—he felt her and the mamas’ tacit disapproval. Ursa claimed she wanted the kids to be free, and run wild, but the truth was, the children’s needs were too much for her and the other mamas, and so Ray had learned not to have needs. Cherry too.
Or they tried.
Ray knew that, for all his flaws, he was a good father. Opal was the most important person in his life, and he wasn’t afraid to let her know it. He had never told her to stop crying, or that she was eating too much or too little. She’d been affectionate as a kid, and if she wasn’t anymore that seemed natural too—what teenager cuddled with her dad? He didn’t know if she had any interest in guys (or girls, for that matter) or if she had even been kissed. For all her swagger, she was private about certain things. At least with her dad. There was probably a world of stuff she would have confessed to Cherry were she around to listen. Motherless girls kept secrets.
Isla Patricia thought Ray should sit Opal down for a serious discussion. “One day soon she’ll get pregnant and you’ll wonder where you went wrong.”
“No way,” he said.
“You don’t think she’s going to have sex?”
“I think if she wants to have sex, she’ll get herself on the pill.”
Isla Patricia had to give him that. “I’ve never seen a more self-possessed girl. She’d probably demand an STD test from the guy too.”
Opal was at Fab’s for the weekend. Isla Patricia had invited herself over—this would be their third tryst. As soon as Ray picked her up at the first gate, he felt a fizzing through his whole body, an urge to touch her, even a simple pat on her tan arm. The way she’d waved at him through the window before flinging her duffel into the truck bed, then hadn’t even bothered with the seat belt. Did her body bounce as they made their way through the property? He tried to keep his eyes ahead. He couldn’t. Her thighs touched. She wore construction boots covered in dust from a recent shoot in Vasquez Rocks. Her perm was fading, and her hair was longer without the curl, dark with a few strands of gray. She had lips like pillows, a chipped front tooth (nothing traumatic, she said the last time, when he put a finger to it, she had a grinding problem), and a chin that could cut you—him.
Now they were in jackets to watch the sunset from the porch, the sky a deep purple running into hot pink, the descending sun lighting up the colors from within, the tall palm trees in the distance already flat black cutouts. It was psychedelic. Unreal. Was it really true that pollution was what made LA’s sunsets so good? Or was it Isla Patricia next to him?
The downstairs was still crammed with lights and wires and tape because the shoot had run over; they had more to do on Monday. The producer was an ass, Isla Patricia warned Kim, but the trust wanted money, and Kim got it.
“I hear he gave ten thousand to Ross Perot’s campaign,” Isla Patricia said.
“Was that before or after the ‘you people’ gaffe?”
For dinner, they had heated up Hot Pockets in the upstairs microwave. They were drinking gin and tonics.
“No limes?” she said.
“Home, home on the range,” he began to sing, and she shoved him. All it took was that single touch. What was he, a teenager?
She had come over, ostensibly, to check out the Orgone Accumulator. If he weren’t working again, and such intense hours, he would use it every day. Isla Patricia wanted to try it.
There was, also, the sex they were going to have. It was an unspoken item on their agenda, and Ray was yawning from nerves. She said, “You can’t get tired on me,” and winked.
She was divorced, no kids. She knew that before they started seeing each other it had been a long time since he’d been with a woman. What she didn’t know was that Cherry had been the only one: his first and, before Isla Patricia came along, his only. A lie by omission.
It was funny how the smallest lie can give you all the power.
He let Isla Patricia believe there had been encounters here and there, no one serious enough to introduce to Opal.
“After Cherry left, it seemed too . . . loaded,” he explained the first time they were naked in her bed.
Isla Patricia grinned—as if she were the first woman to pass some test—and he tried to ignore her pride. The truth was, if Opal didn’t already know Isla Patricia, there was no way he would introduce them. Isla Patricia wasn’t his boss anymore (they were on different productions), but he still considered her, if not a mentor, then at least an important professional contact. It wasn’t smart to get involved, especially since she seemed to want more than he did. What was it he wanted?
He’d known Isla Patricia long enough to know he wasn’t in love with her. For starters, she was too bossy. Too nosy. She hated soup, black pepper, large dogs, men in sandals, water with ice, and how some people used the word supermarket when they meant grocery store (“What’s so super about it?”). She couldn’t stand the smell of coffee because it gave her headaches—news she repeated each time she saw him drinking a cup. She popped her gum. She refused to take Santa Monica Boulevard. She slept with an eye-mask like a cartoon princess.
Isla Patricia was what Opal and Fab called an “SDP”—small dose person. Other people, they argued, you could hang out with forever. They had a name for those types too: “Feasts.” Fab had told him, her voice soft and quivery, as if overcome by her own profundity, “One person’s SDP is someone else’s Feast.” Opal nodded, adding, “It’s all about how hungry you are.”
Whatever the nomenclature, it was evident he and Isla Patricia would not last. He didn’t feel for her what he’d felt for Cherry.
And yet.
Isla Patricia, and his desire for her, made him feel normal. Back home with the mamas, he hid his attraction to Cherry because it was gross and wrong for him to have any attraction—to anyone. That he wanted to sleep with Isla Patricia, and that it was okay to want that, was a solace. He was a person. He deserved to be a person.
He didn’t end it, because of Isla Patricia’s body, which he liked very, very much: curvy and compact, her ass big, her breasts perfect, nipples the size of Susan B. Anthony coins, strong legs that she shaved from ankle to crotch. She smelled like jasmine. Her bush was carefully trimmed, a dark moss. He needed her again, and she knew he did, which was how she’d wrangled this invitation. Their attraction was uncomplicated, unfettered. She did not make him feel wrong for desiring her.
But she had already complained twice about the Hot Pocket—it was cold in the middle, what was this sugary taste? She would probably bring up the absence of limes at least once more before the night was over. The entire weekend! He was both thrilled by the prospect and, already, annoyed.
Ray wasn’t being totally fair. He was glad she was there to try the Orgone Accumulator. He wanted someone to feel as he did. To tell him it was working. The bions were filling up, right? That he owned an Accumulator and could use it daily to keep his energy from flagging and his immune system strong was the kind of privilege he wanted acknowledged.
He just hoped they slept together before they went to see the Accumulator. It would be the only way to take the edge off. One offhand remark about how stuffy it was in the garage and he wouldn’t be able to hide his annoyance. He still hadn’t confronted her about telling Opal how much he’d spent on the Accumulator. He probably never would.
Doc thought this relationship, or whatever it was, was good for Ray. He said there was nothing wrong with the setup: they were both consenting adults, and they were friends, comfortable with one another. Doc didn’t know just how pathetic Ray’s sexual history was, although Ray had admitted it had been a long time since he’d been with anyone. “I’m rusty,” was how Ray put it.
“Isla Patricia,” Doc said, again mispronouncing her name, “won’t care.”
“What if it’s . . . what if I’m . . . bad?”
Doc sighed. “Raymond. There will be no report card issued. You’ve been working hard in these sessions. You’re so much less tense than when you started. Your armor is falling away.”
Was it?
“I just feel embarrassed.” Ashamed was the word, but he didn’t use it.
“Just be in your body, let yourself be with hers. Enjoy it.” Here, Doc grinned. “You said it was fun, no?”
It was fun. Better than that. Isla Patricia was sexy because she was confident, easy in her own body. She looked into Ray’s eyes a lot. She smiled. She might bite his shoulder, just a brushing of her teeth against his skin, and then laugh. When it felt good, she said so. When it didn’t, she voiced that too. When he went down on her she lowed like a cow, or like a woman giving birth, but from pleasure, not pain. He could tell by her openness that she wasn’t ashamed: of herself, of being with him.
Tonight, he took her drink out of her hand and said, “Let’s go upstairs.”
“Can’t I see the Orgone Accumulator first?” she asked. She was already standing.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re driving me crazy.”
She took it as a compliment, but he meant it in more ways than one.
He didn’t try to mask his eagerness and he didn’t want to, because to pretend his desire wasn’t about to chew him into pulp would be a lie and he’d told enough of those. If there was a time to strive for honesty it should be now, in his bedroom, with this woman and her body. What was attraction between two people but an urge to turn two into one? They couldn’t do that if he put forward some false self. He wanted her in a way that was mammalian and simple, stupid probably, earnest at least, and pure.
Kissing her, he took off her jacket and then her shirt, and then her bra, the wire in one cup poking through; she had a mark from where it had irritated her skin. He imagined their libidinal energy speeding through them. Her lips were reddish pink. She smiled between kisses.
