Ray Sparks was half-seated on a nightclub stool.
“Who you looking at ain’t Ray Sparks, it’s the ghost of Ray Sparks. Here it is twenty years later, and I look the same, not like Revancha Lopez and Vermillion Chaney. You’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s a comfort to look like you did when you died on into eternity. They don’t look so good as me but they got to live a lot longer. What people do with their lives is mostly fuck ’em up. Almost no way they could do anything else. I always liked that saying,
Give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself
. Just some folks got themselves a longer rope to hang with.
“People like to blame other people for their own troubles. Even me. One thing I picked up on recently—in eternity, all thoughts and things are recent—is how there is no particular way to avoid what you do or how you do it. It’s like waking up in the middle of the night, hung over, and snoring in the bed next to you is an ugly whore. And you think to yourself, this can’t be me, shacked up with some nasty skank. Me is little Ray, running with my dog down along the river. Seven years old, me and my dog running next to the river and it’s about to rain. Nobody bothering us. But no mistake, it’s you in that bed, feeling like a bomb gone off in your head, and it ain’t no cute puppy lying there. You got to ask yourself why, and then if you got a lick of sense, do something to change your situation. If you never ask yourself the question
Why?
then you ain’t got a chance. You got to be brave.”
“Don’t you be listenin’ to that man!” said Vermillion Chaney, who rolled herself up to Ray in her wheelchair. “Talk like he sang, smooth as silk. Didn’t shoot you on purpose,” she said.
“What do you mean, didn’t do it on purpose?” said Ray. “That was on purpose as possible to be. You shot me three times. Once in the back.”
“Pistol felt light as a feather in my hand.”
“You got to like pulling that trigger.”
“Light as a feather,” said Vermillion.
Revancha walked up to Ray and said, “I didn’t mean to steal your clothes.”
“Only my wallet.”
“Your wallet was up in those clothes somewhere. I would have left it, after I took what was owed me.”
“There is no such thing as an honest whore,” said Ray.
“Man gets violent, what’s a woman to do?” said Vermillion. “God put that gun in my hand, told me to use it.”
“Better leave God out of this,” said Ray.
“When I was a little girl, eight years old,” said Revancha, “Mamacita took me down on Mission Street to La Iglesia Espiritu Santu to pray for my father, who was in the prison hospital. He had got stabbed in the stomach in a fight. We didn’t know it then, but at the same moment we was in the church, he died. I liked lightin’ the candles.
“We was about to leave when a man comes in off the street, wearin’ nothin’ but dirty rags. Had a long beard. I said,
Mama, look it’s Jesus Cristo
! The man started blowin’ out all the candles, then picked ’em up and stuffed as many as he could inside his shirt. He looked up at the cross and shook his fist at it. He shouted,
There’s no hiding place for the damned!
Then he ran out of the church, droppin’ candles as he went.
“When Mama and I got home, we found out my father was dead. I asked Mamacita,
Is Papa damned
?
No se,
she said,
I don’t know
.”
“I heard that after I died,” said Ray, “there was a church created in my name. The Church of Ray Sparks.”
“You coulda been a saint, Ray,” said Vermillion, “but instead you was a fool.”
“I’d like to’ve gone to the Church of Ray Sparks, shown up with nobody knowing I was coming. Got up in front of the choir and sung, ‘He’s My Friend Until the End.’”
“There ain’t no such church,” said Revancha.
“Heard there was.”
“The devil got your ear, son,” said Vermillion, “way he go about flatterin’ folks. He do that. Vain man fallin’ for the devil’s malarkey, all that is.”
“What you had to go smackin’ me around like that for, anyway?” asked Revancha. “Use me so bad.”
“Standin’ in satan’s shoes,” said Vermillion, “even back then.”
“Man spoke the truth,” said Ray.
“What man?” asked Revancha.
“One you saw in church, stole all the candles. No place to hide.”
“John the Baptis’,” said Vermillion.
“I know him, I know that man.”
“How could you?” asked Revancha.
“Look at him, sugar, a child of darkness. All the devil’s children the same. Ask him can he sing, Revancha. Go on.”
“Can you sing, Ray?”
“’Course I can sing.”
“Tell him go ahead and try,” said Vermillion.
“Sing, Ray, sing ‘He’s My Friend Until the End.’”
Ray opened his mouth to sing but no sound came out. He tried again with the same result.
“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.”
BY
K
ATE
B
RAVERMAN
Fisherman’s Wharf
Z
oë 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,” Zoë 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,” Zoë reports.
“What color is the water?” Clarissa asks.
“Last-ditch leukemia IV drip blue,” Zoë decides.
“Half an hour,” Clarissa assures her. “I’m coming.”
Zoë 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,” Zoë 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,” Zoë 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,” Zoë 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,” Zoë said.
It was an earlier autumn on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bluer than Maui, bay studded with cobalt that looked charged, technologically modified. Zoë 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?” Zoë 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 Zoë 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,” Zoë 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,” Zoë says. “I simply leave the country at appropriate junctures.”
Actually, Zoë 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 Zoë 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. Zoë 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 booth facing the bay on three sides. They might drink coffee, perhaps with Dexedrine. Or get drunk on something festive, like White Russians or champagne. Since Zoë is technically in AA, she decides to let Clarissa set the tenor. Clarissa orders Bloody Marys. From a caloric standpoint, it’s the obvious choice.
“You still look like a hippy,” Clarissa observes. She regards her with a smile that is speciously conciliatory, perhaps even condescending. Zoë interprets this as disturbing. Anxiety is inseparable from the air. It’s in the oxygen molecules and how their biochemistry fails to correctly process them. It’s a perpetual uneasy truce.
“It’s my signature classic bohemian style,” Zoë replies. “And I want to formalize our alliance.”
“Do you want to get married?” Clarissa asks.
“I want a document with terms, precise specifications,” Zoë realizes. “And I want a weapons check.”
“Contracts are worthless,” Clarissa points out. “They’re a wish list for Santa.” She’s a lawyer, after all. She knows.
“We could become cousins,” Zoë suggests. This appeals to her.
Survivors of cataclysmic childhoods defined by poverty and isolation compulsively seek validation. They know they lack proper emotional documentation. Cousins evokes a blood connection that would both substantiate and obviate certain complexities, the ebbs and flows, droughts and monsoons of their relationship. Such a device would highlight and justify their erratic and pathologically intense con-junction. In regions of bamboo and sun-rotted petals, wind propels sand like tiny bullets, and there are always too few artifacts. Cousins is an inspiration.
“I could draw up the papers,” Clarissa is expansive. “But adoption is superior.”
Zoë came to San Francisco when she was seven. Her father, Marvin, had terminal cancer. Her mother was mentally ill. They were bankrupt. She used to think heaven was a foster home. If Marvin would just finally die, perhaps she could even get adopted.
“I’ve missed you like a first love,” Zoë says.
“I
was
your first love,” Clarissa reminds her. “And you mine.”
They lean across the faux-wood table etched with knife-gouged gang insignias and logos of metal bands and kiss again. They are both manic this autumn day. Zoë and Clarissa share numerous personality disorders. They are both bipolar 2 with borderline features. Substance abuse is a persistent irritant. Recently, they have both been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome.