“I forgot that completely.” Clarissa doesn’t sound surprised. “That was Anna. We don’t speak anymore. I don’t know where she lives. A guy with the name of a reptile, Snake or Scorpion, took her away on a Harley to Arizona.”
Zoe takes the postcard back. She is convinced their reunions are conceptually well-intentioned. But leaches and bloodletting were considered purifying and curative. Also barbequing women at the stake. And garlic for vampire protection.
There is a long pause during which she considers radium poisoning, Madame Curie, and the extent of her fatigue. Then Zoe says, “You still doing the venture capital thing? Private jets? Yachts to beaches too chic to be on a map? Everybody loses but you?”
“When the Israeli money dried up, I thought I was through. Then the Persians. No sensibility and billions, all liquid. An entire race with an innate passion for schlock. Payday.” Clarissa is more alert. “Then detente. Russian mafia money poured in. Cossacks with unlimited cash. Who would have thought?” Clarissa places the strip of photographs in her Chanel purse. And as an afterthought, asks, “What about you?”
“I’m getting married,” Zoe says. “I’m moving to Pennsylvania.”
“Jesus. The grand finale. OD in a barn with a woodstove? Twenty below without the wind chill? Your half- way-house skirts in a broom closet? What now? Another alcoholic painter fighting his way back to the Whitney? Or a seething genius with a great novel and a small narcotics problem?” Clarissa extracts her cell phone.
“Fuck you.” Zoe is incensed.
“I apologize. That was completely inappropriate,” Clarissa says immediately. “Forgive me, please. It’s separation anxiety. We have extreme difficulty individuating. Partings are turbulent. The overlay and resonances. It’s unspeakable. But Brillstein says we’re improving.”
“You’re still with Brillstein? Jerry’s psychiatrist? The Freudian with the high colonics and weekend mud baths?” Zoe stares at her, so startled she’s almost sober.
“He’s eclectic, I know. But it’s like a family plan. I’m grandfathered in at the original price,” Clarissa says.
The stylish phone opens, the keyboard glows like the panels on an airplane. It’s the millennium and we have cockpits on our wrists and in our pockets. Clarissa’s phone is voice-activated. She says, “Driver.” Then, “Pier 39. Now.”
“Does your arm hurt?” Zoe wonders. Her shoulder feels like it’s on fire.
“No pain, no gain. My dear cousin,” Clarissa smiles, “keep your finger on the trigger. We must soldier on. The cause is just.”
Zoe realizes Clarissa has already moved on. The conference is over. The documents will be studied. Further discussions to be scheduled. My people will calendar with yours. We’ll synchronize by palm pilot.
Suddenly Zoe feels she is on a borderless layover. It’s last Christmas in India again. She began in a broken taxi five hours from Goa. Then the six-hour delay in the airport and the run across the tarmac for the last and totally unscheduled miraculous flight to Bombay. A day room for seven hours. The flight to Frankfurt and another day room and delay. Finally the fourteen-hour flight to New York. Seventy hours of continual travel and she was just finding her rhythm. She could continue for weeks or months, in a perpetual montage of stalled entrances and exits, corridors and steps, tunnels and lobbies of vertigo in free fall where no time zones apply.
Clarissa and Zoe no longer hold hands. A distance of texture and intention forms between them. The geometry is calculated. Not even their shadows collide.
“Another bittersweet reunion barely survived,” Clarissa says. “My beloved cousin.”
“And you, my first and greatest love,” Zoe says. “Another high-risk foray we deserve purple hearts for.”
“We’ll get red hearts around our names next time. Our next tattoo,” Clarissa smiles.
They kiss on both cheeks. The glitter has departed from their eyes. They have slid into an interminable foreign film neither of them has interest or affection for. She knows the name of Clarissa’s lipstick now. It’s called Khmer Rouge.
There is a certain pause just before sunset, when the bay is veiled in azure.
It’s the moment of redemption or drowning. Inland, cyclone-fenced freeways carve cement scars beside bungalows with miniature balconies where parched geraniums decay in air soiled from the fumes of manufacturing and human wounds. The bay is a muted defeated blue, subjugated and contained. At night, they pump the antidepressants in. Or maybe there’s enough Prozac and beer already in the sewage. Pollution turns the setting sun into strata of brandy and lurid claret, smears of curry and iodine. It looks like a massacre.
“My car can take you where you’re going,” Clarissa offers.
Clarissa’s driver has short hair, a thick neck, sunglasses with an ear attachment she imagines CIA field operatives employ. Clarissa indicates the car door. It is open like a dark mouth with the teeth knocked out. And she’s waving the purple scarf like a banner. Zoe refuses to admit that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She turns away and starts walking. If those are words issuing from Clarissa’s mouth, which needs immediate surgical attention, Zoe can’t hear them. There are shadows along the boardwalk now, in the alleys and sides of residential streets with ridiculous, insipid seaside names. Bay Street. Marine Drive. North Point View. Who do they think they’re kidding?
Keep walking and shadows find you. They are the distilled essence of all harbors and bays. Such shadows taste like a wounded sherry you can drink or pour on your cuts. Use them for bath oil and become immune to infection. Shadows are graceful and do not require explanations. They know you are more dangerous than they imagine. They cannot fill in your blanks. Simply surrender and they do everything.
There are no neutral zones. They’re an illusion, a delu-sionary construct, like movie and real-estate contracts. Satellites map each zip code and tap every telephone. Cities are enclaves between combat arenas. We are born with weapons of mass destruction. They’re in our genes, passed down the generations, like poisonous heirlooms. It’s ground zero now and forever. Zoe senses the car moving behind and away from her, and she is grateful. She never wants to see Clarissa again.
LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR BY ALVIN LU
– Victor Segalen
T
Three years out of Princeton, Michael had thrown in with the revolution. He had turned his back on a life of privilege, by any standard, and left his home in Illinois for the West Coast.
He worked as a postman in the East Bay, inside a stretch of black neighborhoods, and organized there. Recently he had been coming across the bridge to discuss tactics with another postal organizer, Francis Chao. Organization was effective in the post office. The P.O. had a high percentage of black workers, who in those days were highly politicized.
Meeting Francis in Chinatown, coming from the East Bay, was an abrupt transition. Walking routes in West Oakland, Michael felt he had miraculously made the great leap from one world to another; his role as deliverer of welfare checks afforded him access to ordinary black lives few white men experienced. But Chinatown was different. There were a few of the cadre there, both American- and foreign-born, who could move, not always with ease, through that underground world, an entirely other country only two blocks wide extending from Bush to Broadway, and they offered Michael glimpses of how it worked. Francis was one of them.
The struggle for Chinatown’s soul between Kuomintang and CPC (Communist Party of China) sympathizers was then at its peak. IWK and Wei Min She (literally, the “Serve the People” Association) opened storefronts in the
