Little Deaths, page 46
I made no reply, unable to deny the truth in what he had said, yet at the same time unwilling to accept it, and I looked away from his stare. On every side were glass cases filled with figurines, bottled herbs, amulets, charm sacks; above our heads hung strings of painted bean pods and gourds, and the walls were decorated with vivid representations of the santeria pantheon, beautiful, powerful-looking black men and women contemplating or wielding the staffs and spears and mirrors that were their arcana. But for all the exotic clutter there was an air of peacefulness about the place that seemed at odds with the drum-beating passion and savagery I associated with the religion.
‘Very well,’ Beltran said. ‘We will begin. Things will go badly at first. Prepare yourself for that. You will see the woman less and less during the weeks to come. But there are measures you can take. You must persevere in them. If you do, at the end, in what seems the final moment, you will succeed in your purpose.’
I maintained my silence and he asked what I was thinking.
‘All this makes me a little nervous,’ I said. ‘I’m not comfortable with things I don’t understand.’
‘I would imagine you are often uncomfortable.’ He gave a snort of disdainful laughter. ‘The only way you will ever understand the orishas,’ he gestured at the paintings of the gods on the walls, ‘will be to slice your wrists and let all that white blood drain out.’
I ignored this and asked about payment.
‘There are certain purchases you must make. You will buy these things from me and from shops whose addresses I will supply. And once the woman is yours, you will bring flowers and food for a month to my altar for my santos.’
The following day Beltran performed a despojo, a cleansing designed to drive away the evil spirits that he claimed had gathered about me. He passed bundles of herbs over various portions of my body, lashed me with a tied-up bunch of long grasses, all the while singing with convincing occult passion in Spanish. Afterward he provided me with a foul-smelling herbal potion that he called an omiero and instructed me to drink it every day; he also gave me another, less noxious potion that I was to slip into Kathleen’s food whenever I could manage it. For $86 he sold me two ceramic figurines, one depicting the goddess of beauty and female sensuality, Oshun, a voluptuous, brown-skinned woman clad in bright African dress, and the other an image of Shango, the god of fire and lightning, of male potency, a powerfully built black man wearing a straw hat and carrying a bloody spear. He then commanded me to construct an altar for the figurines in my home and to make daily sacrifices of flowers, fruit, rice, and candles, some of which I was to buy from him and the rest from merchants who apparently had been stamped with the Santeria seal of approval.
When I left the botanica that day with my merchandise in hand, I had no faith in anything that had transpired, nor in the future of my association with Beltran; but over the weeks, as Kathleen fell further away from me, even as Beltran had predicted, I began if not to believe in santeria, then at least to fixate upon it, especially upon the altar I had built: a coffee table draped in a red cloth, surmounted by the figurines and, at all-times, an assortment of wilting flowers, plates of rotting food, and burning candles. Fruit flies made a faint haze above it, and sometimes the haze gave the figurines the illusion of a nonceramic vitality, making it appear that they were wavering, just beaming in from another plane. Though they bore not the slightest resemblance to Kathleen and me, I came to see in their exaggerated forms, in Oshun’s torpedo-like breasts and earth-mother hips, in Shango’s muscled chest and bloody spear, the equally exaggerated forms of our sexuality, the archetypal roles we assumed in sexual congress; and I would imagine our souls embedded in those timy ceramic skulls and invent conversations between the figurines that Kathleen and I might have engaged in had we been such divine primitives. Once I actually thought I saw them fucking, saw them shimmer and grow real and make it in the cusp of a watermelon rind (during an abstracted moment I had eaten part of that day’s sacrifice), aping Kathleen’s-and-my lovemaking in style and fervour, the artful gleams supplied by the ceramic glaze slipping along their limbs as they moved, Oshun’s robe draped over a rotten pear and Shango’s spear stuck quivering in a slice of pineapple. I did not place much stock in this hallucinatory interlude, but neither did I reject it out of hand. The brightness of those dark bodies captivated me. They were brightening further, I thought, gaining vitality with every passing second, drawing energy from the room, an impression that gained in credibility whenever I looked at the area about them, an expanse of worn brown rug given ruinous perspective by a litter of Chinese food cartons, crumpled beer cans, balled-up sheets of paper, a mummified steak still encased in its shrinkwrapping, scatters of useless coins, dead shoes, a crippled pair of trousers, a guitar that played nothing but dirges, all the sour relics of my ex-life. No, there was no doubt about it, Shango and Oshun were increasing in strength, acquiring the vigour of the real, more than could be said for their ribbed originals.
Several days before Kathleen ended it I was sitting by the altar, thinking about love. During that period I often lapsed into drugged reveries in front of the altar, and love—its nature, whither?, and so forth—was often the subject of those reveries: oddly enough I still had something akin to a romantic attitude toward the whole business, though I perceived it now to be a moment of perfect possibility, of absolute sweetness and mutual clarity, that could never be sustained. I was in bad though not unusually bad shape, working behind most of an eight-ball of cocaine. My heart stuttered, my sinuses throbbed and whined, my joints ached, my lungs made sucking noises. Eventually I drifted off into a state just east of sleep, but once my eyes closed I saw the pages of TV Guide unscrolling on the backs of my lids, and when I began to be able to read the programme notes, the weird shit that was on, a primetime documentary on roach calling and robot sitcoms and a rerun of The John Gacy Show, and a call-in programme entitled You And Your Police State, I became interested, and that woke me up enough to want to do some more coke. I was groping around for my baggie when I spotted Kathleen standing a few feet away, butt-naked and grinning hugely, like a mean, toothy fish, with one hip cocked and her hands behind her head so as to show off her freckly little tits.
On second glance I realized it wasn’t Kathleen after all. Kathleen, if I recalled correctly, had never been prone to billow like a sail in a light breeze, nor had there ever been, as was the case with the apparition, filmy stuff like angel hair trailing from her extremities. And I was certain that she did not have rips where her eyes and her pussy should have been, rips that opened onto flames and black gears turned by bone spindles. Otherwise the figure before me was her spitting image. Real or not, she was a lot more reality than I had been getting from Kathleen, and so when the figure said something I couldn’t quite make out, I told her I loved her. ‘I love you’ was something I said often in those days, mostly when no one else was about, telling it to the walls, the light, responding to a disturbance in the air or a sudden longing or something I saw on TV that caused an emotional surge, even to noises that startled me, because there was so much unspent love inside me, I was like a man trying not to come, it only took a touch, a word, a dream, to bring it all out of me.
The woman-thing’s grin got a slice wider and nastier, reminding me of the zoned expressions of the painted gods on the walls of the botanica, and that caused me to think she might be a visitation of some sort, one sent to punish me for my slipshod faith in the orishas. I was so tired and stoned, I felt more annoyance than fear, and I gave an inarticulate shout and flung out my arm at her in gesture of dismissal; but when I saw the same filmy, opaque stuff that frilled her fingers and elbows and sides trailing from my fingers, I was shocked from my stupor. At first I believed that the filmy stuff was an optical illusion. Tracers, I thought. Those afterimages of motion one sees when one is under the influence of a psychotropic drug and waves one’s hand back and forth. But on examining my fingers I found that the stuff was palpable, slightly greasy and slick to the touch, like the unhealed skin beneath a scab. A feeling of horror washed over me. I pulled at one of the strands and felt a sharp pain where it connected with my hand. I shook the hand, hoping to rid myself of the fringe, which was—I realize—growing longer, thickening; but that did no good. My Swiss Army knife was lying on the arm of the sofa beside me, and I reached for it, intending to learn if the shit could be cut away; but as my hand closed about it, the fringe faded from view, like an icy rime melting, and when I looked up I found that the woman, or whatever she was—hallucination, fever, horrid dream—had vanished as well.
My heart was hammering, my breath labored. ‘Fuck!’ I said. ‘What the fuck!’ I got to my feet, thinking I should go to the botanica and consult with Beltran. But then I thought, No, un-unh, no way I want to deal with Beltran’s smirks and insinuations about my manhood and snide comments on my cocaine habit. And that was all it had been, I decided. The coke firing a couple of weird synapses, the old CNS rendering a complaint, saying, Stop or else … Time to cut back. Order some food, get some sleep, take a walk in the morning, do some breathe-in, breathe-out kind of things. You’ll be a better man for it.
The next day, to my surprise, I actually did as I had promised myself I would and went on a health kick. Orange juice, brisk walks, and greaseless food. And not a single line of cocaine. During the next three days I began to feel stronger than I had in months, strong enough mentally to field an eerie, distracted phone call from Kathleen and not let it depress me to the extent that I fell off the wagon. She told me, among other things, that she didn’t know what she wanted anymore, that she wasn’t happy, that she missed me; she seemed in essence to be saying I’m leaving, I’m staying, I think I’ve got a cold. I asked what her therapist had been saying, and she replied that the therapist hadn’t said much of anything, because she—Kathleen—had been lying to her lately. I did my best to ignore what she said after that. After I hung up, refusing to slip into my usual post-call analysis-and-depression mode, I rode the subway into Manhattan and caught some Brazilian music at SOBs. I was beginning-to feel a bit like my old self. But then on the morning of the fourth day, Kathleen called to tell me she had made her decision.
There was, I discovered, a kind of liberation in being dumped, a sense of relief, almost of exaltation that came when the axe finally fell. As I listened to Kathleen explain herself, saying that she loved me more than she did Darryl, much more, but that love wasn’t the only criteria you used in determining what was best for yourself, blithering on in some sort of New Age speak that she might have lifted from one of Darryl’s witling books, How To Achieve Denial And Self-Deception … as I listened I wanted to say, What a crock! Rationalize things however you want, all you’re doing is surrendering to fear, choosing the insipid, the secure, and the manipulable over a life of possibility. But that sense of relief, the sudden removal of pressure after all those long months, it was so overwhelming I could only sit there and gaze out my window at the new spring leaves on the branches, at the friated brick and tarred roofs of the buildings across the street. My face grew flushed, numb with heat; my chest ached; my heart seemed to have become huge and heavy, transformed into a chunk of cement. Nerves fluttered in my jaw, my arms. The poisons of grief and desperation began conjuring little sicknesses in every part of my body. Yet I made no response, remaining silent even after she had finished speaking, amazed by the buoyancy that accompanied these sensations, by the infirm lightness that had pervaded my limbs.
‘Are you okay?’ Kathleen asked, bewildered.
She must have expected a fight, an argument, certainly not silence. In picturing this moment, dreading it, I had expected much the same, but the fight had been drained out of me, and I felt at a remove from her, from everything.
‘Michael?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said hoarsely. There was something in my throat, some obstruction warm as blood. The receiver was inordinately hot, thrumming against my hand.
After a pause Kathleen said, ‘I’m sorry.’
The inadequacy of the phrase kindled a bitter amusement in me, but the thing was, the terribly sad, terribly desolating thing, she was sorry, truly sorry, for herself as well as him, because no one was getting what they wanted, not even Darryl, who would never have love from her, only a feeble loyalty informed by her lack of self-confidence.
‘Listen,’ I said, surfacing angrily from these thoughts, feeling the need to give anger a voice, to make a pronouncement; then I realized that I had nothing to say. Something, a bird, a black one, landed with a rustle among the leaves on the branch outside the window; I watched it hop and preen.
‘What is it?’ Kathleen asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘You were going to say something.’
I started to deny it, but then I remembered our bargain. ‘I’ll make some reservations,’ I said. ‘For next Friday. Not this weekend, but the one after.’
There was another, longer pause. Finally she said, ‘I can’t.’
‘That was the deal,’ I said flatly.
‘I know. But things are different now.’
‘Yeah, some things. Not this.’
‘It won’t do you any good. I won’t change my mind.’
‘That’s not the point!’ I said, growing angry again. ‘I’ve been waiting out here for … Jesus! Nine fucking months! Hanging on by my fucking fingernails, wandering around like a zombie. Now there’s this phone call saying, “Gee, I’m sorry, I can’t make it.” And …’
‘I didn’t ask you to wait that long!’
‘The hell you didn’t! You asked all right. And you knew I’d be going crazy, because you were going crazy, too. We made love, we wrote letters, we talked, we kept on planning a life together. You weren’t giving your marriage a real try, you were just hanging out there, using the goddamn apartment!’ I realized I’d gone too far, that I had shifted the emphasis away from enlisting her emotions to accusing her, and so had lost the advantage; but when she started to object I talked through her. ‘The only reason you’re making this decision is you’re tired of not being able to make one. You’re worn out with all this. Hell, you admitted as much the other day. And I can relate, you know. I’m worn out, too. I’m fucking exhausted.’ I let out a sharp breath. ‘It doesn’t matter. None of it matters anymore. You’ve decided. I accept that. But I’ve lived all these months believing I’d have one last time with you. Counting on it.’ Here I injected a note of sternness into my words, the slightest hint of menace. ‘I want what we agreed on.’
I imagined her sitting at her desk, toying with a pencil, downcast, her eyes half-lidded, her lips pursed and petulant. Seeing her so clearly made me subject once again to the power of her body, to the ardour that could possess it, and I was filled with such a clean, powerful longing, I did not think I could continue to manipulate her. Indeed, I wondered if I had been manipulating her at all, if everything I had said, everything we both had said, had not been part of a rote litany, as inevitable in its process as every other element of the relationship had seemed.
‘It’ll hurt too much,’ she said. ‘Being with you again. It’ll just make it hurt more.’
‘Maybe in the short term. But it’ll make us feel better about the way things ended.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said tremulously.
‘Christ, Kathleen! It’s only a weekend.’ I was disgusted by the wheedling tone that seeped into my voice.
‘It’s just I don’t know if I can get away for a whole weekend. I’ve got … we’ve made plans.’
I’ll bet, I said to myself. Now he thinks he’s got her, ol’ Darryl is probably making plans a mile a fucking minute. But maybe, I thought, his plans could work to my advantage. Under the circumstances, a weekend might be too long to spend with Kathleen, it might provide too much time for sadness and recrimination. If I could give her one night, a night without pleas or arguments, just love, maybe even a laugh or two … well, she wouldn’t change her mind, not immediately, but when Darryl fucked up as inevitably he would, the memory of that night be the blade that finally cut the cord.
‘One night, then,’ I said. ‘You can get away for that long. Just tell him you’re going to visit your dad.’
‘He’ll want to come with me.’
‘You can swing it. You’ve done it before.’
She made a noise—of frustration, I thought.
‘That is important, Kathleen.’
‘I’ll try,’ she said weakly.
I listened to the dial tone for a while after she had hung up. All the symptoms of lovesickness had returned with a vengeance: the dull, dead thickness in my head, the pressure in my chest of imminent tears; the heaviness in my limbs.
God, I was sick of feeling that way.
I considered calling friends, going to a bar, seeking sympathy in one way or another; but even then, even after hearing the sentence pronounced from her own lips, I could not give Kathleen up. And so, gathering myself, shaking off the effects of the phone call, I headed for the botanica to see what Senor Beltran could do for me.
5
My doctor has lately allowed me to look at the Autrey file, a voluminous folder crammed with police documents, the results of medical exams, interviews, etc. Nowhere among them is there evidence of anything that smacks of the paranormal, unless one counts the various charms and occult items found in room 429 of the Rahway Hyatt Regency, objects that he would, characterize as evidence of my pathology, nothing more. He hopes that confronted by this massive compilation of bureaucratic rationality, I will begin to question what he considers to be the delusional aspects of my story. I will admit that he has raised a few doubts—given my mental state, how can I maintain with absolute surety that my memories of the last time Kathleen and I were together are accurate? Yet it will take more than a few doubts to neutralize those memories. Delusional or not, they seem unassailable in their nightmarish particularity, and now, now that I must face them once again, I find myself hoping that they are accurate, for if they are then I may be able to take comfort in knowing that I am not entirely to blame, that forces beyond my control, those same forces I sensed close by throughout the affair, were manipulating me for their own malefic purposes. I have asked myself time and again how it could happen that two good people could love one another and have it come to such a terrible conclusion. And we were at heart good people. Despite everything I have written about Kathleen, despite the truth of my words, she did not intend any of the damage she did me, she was simply afraid, insecure, imperfect; and for my own part, God knows I did not want her to be hurt, even though I had sometimes behaved badly and had bitter, vengeful thoughts. All we desired was the sweetness we found together, and yet it was that sweetness, the distracting power we conjured; that in the end worked to destroy us. I can almost believe that love itself is a form of evil, an emotional plague visited upon dreamers with too little life, whose telltale symptom is the possession of one’s will. It may be that Kathleen was right to be afraid … Ah, to hell with it! There’s no sense to the world, no salvation to be found in it. Only fools pretend they understand.
