“I can’t.”
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” said Vermillion. “You ain’t got no gift left, Mr. Church of Ray Sparks.”
Ray got up and walked away.
“Damn, Miz Chaney,” said Revancha, “that’s hard.”
“He ask for it.”
Revancha began to cry.
“Only time I ever have an orgasm,” she said, “is when I imagine the man doin’ me’s the one dressed in rags come in the church the day my father died.”
“God bless you, girl,” said Vermillion.
“God bless you, too, Miz Chaney.”
PART II.
THE NEUTRAL ZONE BY KATE BRAVERMAN
Zoe and Clarissa meet at irregular intervals at Fisherman’s Wharf. This is the neutral zone. The landscape of perpetual unmolested childhood. The carousel spins in predictable orbits and the original primitive neon alphabet does not deviate. These hieroglyphics are permanent and intelligible in all hemispheres and dialects. No translation is necessary. The carousel does not require calculus, rehab, or absolution. No complications with immigration or the IRS. Just buy a token.
“I’m here,” Zoe says from her cell phone.
“At the wharf?” Clarissa must clarify the conditions.
“Little anemic waves at my feet. Corn dogs that give you cancer. Old men catching perch with so much mercury they explode as they reel them in,” Zoe reports.
“What color is the water?” Clarissa asks.
“Last-ditch leukemia IV drip blue,” Zoe decides.
“Half an hour,” Clarissa assures her. “I’m coming.”
Zoe has no interest in who Clarissa will abandon or strand at a conference table, restaurant, or health club. No callbacks, a medical emergency, cancel everything, Clarissa will inform her staff. It’s a day for experimental time travel.
They meet episodically. Conventional friendship, with its narrative of consensual commitments and behaviors, has proved too intimate and demanding. Between them are houses never seen, husbands dead or divorced, known only by anecdote or photograph. Entire strata of their lives are less than footnotes. Years passed when they did not know one another’s addresses or current last names. Decades when they could have been driftwood to one another, vessels lost at sea. A drowned stranger, perhaps, why bother?
“This litany of blame is becoming tedious,” Zoe once recognized.
“Human perimeters are collective background razor wire. We’re too hip for that shit,” Clarissa responded. “It’s residual static from a Baptist radio broadcast in Mississippi. It’s irrelevant and obsolete.”
“We’ll bite it off with our teeth,” Zoe offered. “Napalm it. Grenade launchers and M-16s. Tec-9s. We’ll have our own Cultural Revolution. We’ll go post-modern, but fully armed.”
“We’ll invent rituals appropriate for our circumstances. We’ll whisper endearments while strolling the killing fields,” Clarissa was enthusiastic. “We’ll crawl our Ho Chi Minh trail, hand-in-hand, trusting each other with our lives.”
“But we’ll abide by the Geneva Convention,” Zoe prompted. “Despite our emotional residue.”
“Directed psychological evolution. It’ll be more brutal than weight training,” Clarissa agreed. “But we’ll become better human beings.”
“We’ll redefine and transcend ourselves,” Zoe said.
It was an earlier autumn on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bluer than Maui, bay studded with cobalt that looked charged, technologically modified. Zoe had lived two years without electricity in a shack on a nameless river of red orchids in the jungle near Hana. She wasn’t in contact with Clarissa then. Clarissa probably didn’t know there were sea-sons in Maui, too. A faint reddening, a moistening, and the mosquitoes went in temporary remission.
“I like it conceptually. But let’s go further,” Clarissa suggested. “We’ll be molecular. Just strands of light from one radiance to another.”
“Should we reject linearity entirely?” Zoe asked. “Sporadic moments of illumination in extreme altitudes requiring oxygen masks?”
“Discreet and unpredictable meetings with spectacular voltage. We’ll communicate by blowtorch,” Clarissa replied. “We’ll wear asbestos jackets.”
A process of accommodation and evolution was plausible, they agreed. True, they had failed the traditional strategies of giving and receiving. But the standard methods by which one registers recognition and regret do not apply to them. They would have a pact, an armistice, like aggressive radical improvisational surgery. Their psychiatrists were cautiously optimistic. The possibility of malignant complications was an acceptable risk. Then they had shaken hands.
Now Zoe sees Clarissa. She is exiting a black Lincoln town car, wearing her standard business outfit-aerobics pants and jacket, Gucci sunglasses and Giants baseball cap. It’s the camouflaged movie star look designed to create the impression that you’re attempting to be incognito. Clarissa is carrying not a gym bag, which would be appropriate and predictable, but a Chanel purse with leather quilting and gold braid handles. It’s the uniform the narcissistic personality disorder dictates.
They kiss on each cheek. “You forgot my birthday,” Clarissa begins. She dismisses the car and driver with a hand gesture.
“I didn’t sign on as a soccer mom. I don’t decorate for holidays. I don’t bake or send thank-you cards. I don’t answer the phone. I throw away personal mail. You know this,” Zoe reminds her.
“Don’t you go to bed before Thanksgiving and not get up until after Valentine’s Day?” Clarissa’s voice is light.
“That was my mother,” Zoe says. “I simply leave the country at appropriate junctures.”
Actually, Zoe is fond of Christmas in Southeast Asia. Ornately decorated pine trees in the air-conditioned hotel lobbies like vestiges from another planet. Bamboo balconies draped in green velvets, antique brocades, and holly wreaths. More fetishes. And Christmas carols rendered in versions so mangled by distance and erroneous translation they’re almost tolerable. Rivers smell of rotting vegetables, petrol, wood cooking fires, and hunger. Air is layers of decaying prayers that remind her of a satellite losing orbit, falling down not as metal but as streams of origami. In Bangkok, in December, it is 103 degrees.
“Let’s just be here now,” Clarissa says. “We know the rules. It’s play time.” Her mouth glistens with a red lipstick that seems to have small stars encrusted within it. There are implications in the sheen Zoe doesn’t want to consider.
The wharf is almost deserted. It’s mid-day, mid-week, in an undifferentiated season. It’s another windswept early November. They walk hand-in-hand down the pier past occasional immigrant men fishing and stray teenagers who appear eager for corruption. Zoe and Clarissa know where they live. They, too, grew up in tenements designed for transience, already shabby decades ago, festering like sun sores. They were an integral part of the blueprint for the millennial slums in the sun. They were the penciled-in stick figures on the diagrams.
“Don’t look,” Clarissa cautions. “They’re contagious. We’ll get a contact psychotic flashback.”
The Last Edge Saloon perches on the furthest border of the pier. Their reunions begin here. They choose a
