DOROTHY: I’m hanging up now . . . Put down that she was a writer . . . Put that she was a research psychologist . . . Put that love is eternal, not death . . .
(Call ended ———)
Bristol Hotel, 56 Mason Street, the Tenderloin, San Francisco, April 25, 1988, the Day of Your Death
The blood flows so slowly through your body. You claw at your breasts, weep and cry out, fumble with the bedding. The hotel sheets are dirty, gray with age, and foul-smelling, urine and vomit and vaginal blood and tears, a golden cloud of pain floating through your mind and gut. Blinding streaks of light in the room, explosions of agony in your skin and lungs, pitching, plunging, blazing. Heat in your arms, fever, abandonment, the stench of dying. Slivers and shards of light still flickering; your hands searching for Dorothy. I hate myself but I do not want to die. I do not want to disappear. I want to go back. I long for someone’s hands, my mother’s hands, a girl’s arms. Or a voice of any kind. Anything but this eclipse of the sun.
Dorothy?
Dorothy?
The desperate screeching of desert animals. The sun burning over Georgia. The desert house with no pictures, books, money, or plans for the future. The swollen pink Ventor sky pressing against the window and everything again blanketed in a coat of merriment, warm, moist. Dorothy has found some singed old dresses in a suitcase and you are probably on your way to the ocean again, to Alligator Reef and endless skies, just the two of you. She twirls in front of the mirror with cigarettes left burning all over the room. In plant pots, on the bedside table, in her powder compact.
VALERIE (chuckles affectionately): You little pyromaniac.
DOROTHY: All these dresses have black marks on the cuffs. Look at this snowy white one. It looks as though it’s been through a nuclear war.
VALERIE: You always were kind of like a nuclear war.
DOROTHY: It’s strange how you can forget one of your favorite dresses. I can’t remember where it came from. I just remember how everything around me was made completely white and scrubbed clean when I was wearing it. The sky, my breath, my teeth . . . Do you remember when I forgot all the candles in the bar and the curtains caught fire?
VALERIE: I remember you setting fire to that old guy’s beard when you were lighting his pipe.
DOROTHY: Do you remember when I set fire to my hair?
VALERIE: You were always doing it and I was always running for water to save you. I remember forever saving you.
DOROTHY: You did.
The glint of skyscrapers and tarmac in the darkness as the airplane continues its circling over Kennedy Airport; factories working, surfers gliding along beaches, fields of cotton, deserts, towns, New York traffic edging slowly forward. Splinters of light and memories glimmering faintly in your consciousness. The dark red-light district outside, neon lights, girls chasing the wind through the streets, skin and sparks of life, seductive smiles and puked-up dreams.
*
And if you did not have to die, you would be Valerie again in your silver coat and Valerie again with your handbag full of manuscripts and your building blocks of theory. And if you did not have to die now, your doctorate would shimmer on the horizon. And it would be that time again, the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, Ventor, Maryland, New York, and that belief in yourself: the writer, the scientist, me. The great hunger and swirling vortex in your heart, the conviction. Slogans echoing between the buildings on Fifth Avenue and the President crouching behind his desk in Washington. There are only happy endings.
A girl can do anything she wants
You know I love you
The shouts die down and the heat evaporates, the smell of New York full-blown and burning. Fifth Avenue is sucked into a blackness, a narrow, foul-smelling underground tunnel, only the sour taste of deadly disease and never-ending porn music. And there is daylight in the Tenderloin with vomit-colored curtains at a smeared window, piles of notes and your bloodied underpants over the back of a chair, and on the bedside table a bottle of rum you will never manage to drink. The itching has taken over your body. It is worse than the pain in your chest and the difficulty breathing and the fact you have long ago lost all sensation in your hands and feet.
*
Mason Street is deserted, no shouts, no traffic, but a short distance away is the real city with real people and sun and trees and girls cycling with books on carrier racks, and farther away the cold ocean still pounding against the shore. The salty breath of the Pacific sweeping over sandy beaches, the sharks’ expectation in the deep. Death by drowning, suffocation, lying on the beach, murdered, raped. April has always been the cruelest month. I wish the daylight would vanish, that someone would hang a blanket in front of the sun and the neon signs, that someone would switch off the porn music and this incurable disease. I do not want to die. I do not want to die alone.
*
There is a flash of Ventor and Dorothy in the room – a strip of burning paper flaring up and dying out in a room that’s completely dark – the desert sand always blowing into your eyes and blurring your sight. The sand turning everything to a sweet, hot mist, a drug that numbs and soothes.
*
It is such a long time since your last visit to the desert and the yellow dive in the middle of nowhere. The porch facing countless hours of sun, a hidden winemaking machine in the corner and one long season of heat and parched grass. A bowl of golden light, a light that was yours until you ran away into the desert and wanted never to come home again.
Do you remember, Dorothy?
Do you remember how we would go to the river together?
The top down and a new guy at the wheel. Your scarf flapping in the wind. Your fair hair, newly washed. The song. You, singing and chattering in the front seat.
You and I beneath the crazy sky.
Bristol Hotel, April 7, 1988, a Few Weeks Before the End
The manifesto has disappeared among the sheets streaked with dirt and brown fluid oozing from your vagina and rectum, a burning, vile-smelling outpouring of loneliness, a seeping humiliation. If there are more ways to humiliate me, bring them on. It’s not like you to lie in a hotel room raving to yourself when you know you are alone, about to die; it is the fever, making you delirious. All you want is to stay in this room, not fall into the darkness and through the smell of forest and lemonade and stagnant river water and sunlight spilling on the picnic blanket, the strong synthetic light of the 1940s.
Valerie, sugar
Time for food now, Valerie
Dorothy shouts from a blanket by the river where the sun’s intensity has turned the grass into withered brown tufts. Behind her, columns of sunlight stand between the trees, and she waves away midges and dragonflies trying to nosedive into the picnic. America has just dropped the atom bomb on Nagasaki and still it is that time, a forgotten age of car rides with the top down and fried chicken sandwiches on the back seat and Louis in shorts with his shirt undone, stretched out on a blanket. An age when nights are deepest blue and crystal clear and little desert holes like Ventor have no electricity for months on end, and it is still alright to drink from the river and Louis drives back and forth to the textile mills to lay cables and you stopped calling him Daddy a lifetime ago.
*
You run under the silver-leaf maples, in your white dress again, the one that is really too thin and too childish and has lucky threads of gold and silver sewn into the petticoat and you only wear it because Dorothy likes it so much. Your feet sweating in your gym shoes and in your mouth the taste of metal and blood and something strange, choking. It is so quiet when you run, all sounds around you muted and only the blinding light cascading from the trees and the fateful dress swirling, far too tight across your chest and shoulders.