stolenwriting

[stolenwriting]

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

There is a place in Los Angeles called Venice, where I live. Here the city stops its white cement sprawl, its hunger to engulf the whole earth under tons of trucked-in concrete. Here in the lap of the blind blue-eyed Pacific, Los Angeles is stopped dead by the sheer liquid cliffs of the sea. Here the trail ends. After Death Valley and Donner Pass, there is only this last precarious oasis.

You must hang on here, inches from the sea. This is a land of strange personal mutations. There's a certain pull, an inexplicable force, some as yet uncharted form of gravity. The toes change, growing invisible sharp claws designed to dig in and fight against the slide into pale blue listless waves.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

I study the canals because they have their own unique life cycle. In the early mornings when the sun is still pale and tentative, still wrapped in night haze, the canals are the color of a mirror, a delicate silver. As the sun anchors itself in the center of the sky for the long yellow noon, the canals thicken. This is the yellow of a mouth of sharp, pronged stained teeth, teeth yellow from grinding something unmentionable, something like bone. The water is coated then, somehow greasy and superimposed, not really like water at all.

In the later afternoons, when the sun is fatigued and indifferent, sensing loss and preparing for surrender, the water is clearly liquid again, but pitted with shadows. This is the season of sunset. The sun suddenly regathers itself for the final battle. It forms one perfect red ball and hangs smack above the ocean, a gouged eye, a beach ball dropped down into the slow stirring night waves of hungry fish mouths and darting crepe-thin fins.

At sunset the canals are streaked as the sky, fierce reds and oranges, thick, the color of lava. The canals assume a new texture then, something like boiling metal. I stand stock still.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

Jason's hair looked red in the sun. I wanted him to say he needed me. I wanted him to say, tell me everything, how you grew to your strange adulthood on streets of birches, streets of red fallen leaves clotting the wide lawns of gray stone houses. Tell me about your sled, I wanted Jason to beg. And the snow that fell, the fire with logs smelling of pine and clouds.

I wanted Jason to say, let it rise from ash, mysterious. I wanted him to press tight my swollen forehead and seal the dark and broken. I wanted Jason to say, let the gray shake apart like a shell. Come to me, darling. I will show you how to howl at nightfall and know the moon as our mother and dance the marble tides the sky provides for certain people.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

I glimpsed bodies absolutely white and emaciated. Flesh hung to the bones, pasty, already unnecessary.

Suddenly I thought of fish. The cancer ward was a kind of human aquarium. Here the almost dead lay in their own slow bubbles. So this is how it ends. It dries in silence. It dries in an afternoon the color of a childhood memory of an aquarium. The flesh dries. Finally the flesh is shed.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

The men came and went. They were interchangeable, pushing meaningless pieces of themselves into me, a stab of quartz, glistening disks, a kind of dying alphabet drying without residue. I sent them away. I dismissed them as Jason did his women and felt nothing. I was a tree in winter, half asleep, whittled naked, enduring.

________________

It was Monday afternoon. We left our drinks on the table and made love in the back seat of the car, parked in the hotel's underground parking lot. And I was young again. It was before Jason. It was before Gerald. Before the blank cold silence and bricking up. When I was still half girl. When I had force and grace and a shapeless ambition, joyriding a streamlined concentric July and steaming awake in yellow mornings with blond boys, in back seats and bathtubs, in closets like moths, any door that locked.

_________________

Impasse. A house of mirrors. Quartz tunnels and blind alleys. A maze. A graveyard, perilous abundant web of sharp curves. Sculpture garden of crashed automobiles, scrap metal, hopeless. Box canyons. Hopeless. Sheer cliffs. And the walls and floors are glass. And I am multiplied, exaggerated. And no one is laughing.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

From Fountain Avenue and Vermont the city was revealed. White gouges like white scars leading to the hills. I realized that Los Angeles is a rented city. It was born fully formed from the day-dreams and wet dreams of greedy little men pushing celluloid fantasies. Los Angeles is a Monopoly board with orange trees. There is danger, too distant to be a factor. Earthquakes last only seconds. It is too much to hope for.

I turned onto Vermont Avenue. I was facing the blank brown backs of the hills. What am I doing? And the voice within me answered, You're waiting, kid. That's what you're doing. Waiting. Don't you understand yet? Los Angeles is the great waiting room of the world. Wait to get discovered. Wait for your social security check. Wait for the cancer to come back. Wait for the break, the earthquake. Wait for the crisp white words that say the man you call father is dead. Wait with your small life leaking out into a white haze of a hot white afternoon.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

It was almost dawn. I wanted anything but the silence in my house, anything but the vision of my father in the hospital hooked up to an oxygen machine. My father terrified, with tears falling through the thick white webbing of bandages. My father lying wide-eyed and horrified with his throat gone and his tongue cut and the curse of the centuries boiling in his useless mouth. My father, the wild river impossibly dammed, damned. My father locked in a strangling silence, words exploding in the centers of his eyes and tears spilling down between the gauze.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

"Fred is something special," Francine whispered. "I'm in the Polo Lounge waiting for him. He had a meeting at Warner's this afternoon." Francine sucked in her breath. "I think this guy is it." She thought each man was it. They were intelligent, vital and alive. They had whole histories packed solid with immutable hard evidence like Harvard and town houses and Panamanian bank accounts. Then they failed her. The well ran unexpectedly dry. Winds began howling again. And suddenly she was sitting alone on the stoops in front of a row of identical dark brick buildings where it was always winter and she never had a key.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

Our history unwinds in slow pieces like a bolt of wine-red velvet then in fashion at the Czar's court. They were peasants, Rachel. They were the poorest kind of farmers. They were rootless and ignorant, arrogant and despised. They knew better than bowing down to the North Star to ensure the fertility of their goats and cows—but barely. Their religion had become portable and abstract. They were confused by and simultaneously proud of their sheer alienness, their undecipherable manuscripts and haircuts. They burrowed, isolated and dark as the poor shubbery, the monstrous skies pouring always too much or not enough.

The original landscape did something to our eyes. I believe people grow the organs they need. Our eyes are enormous, eyes stained by Polish skies, eyes of the ghetto and suspicion. We have the mutant eyes able to see the periphery, to detect disasters waiting in shadows—Cossacks, droughts, pogroms, floods, and the idiosyncrasies of kings.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

"Let's get high," I said.

The alcohol and cotton were already on the nightstand. I sat on the floor. Jason held my arm balanced against his knee. Blood jumped into the needle.

Suddenly wild moths were beating my eyes wide. I was the candle and the arc of light. Jason had found my fragile blue pulse. The room was inordinately yellow. I smelled alcohol. The room was filled with ripening lemons. Even the light bulb was a glistening yellow metal, as a captured moon might be. And I was sailing the warm water of a tropical harbor and swimming above darting black sharks to a cove with a waterfall choked by ferns spilling down moss-smooth rock.

I sighed. I was arctic white. The sea opened her icy lip. My path edged avalanches and albino seals. I was white under a white skull of sky in my own white season. It was a kind of permanent childhood Christmas. I stood in a room with tables covered by white linen. There were big white boxes tied up with white silk ribbons. I unwrapped knee-length white lace-up leather skates. I skated down pavement white with snow. There was ice. I didn't skid.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

"There's so much you don't know," Francine was saying. "Your father taught me. All we have is the moment. It can be snatched away at any time. I learned late. But I learned. Don't you see?" My mother brought her face very close to mine. "Each second is important. See him struggle just for a chance to keep living? Where is your sense of life?"

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

Just today I stood in the morphine alcove just now and put the bottles back. I'll never be a small white star again. I'll never dance draped in moon hide again. Or feel a Santa Ana wind slam through my lungs and know myself as young, naked, my navel filled with platinum. I'll never drift past the last reefs draped in white garlands, eating grapes, the sea a glazed blue eye unblinking.

I cried a long time. I waited for the kindly woman. I would tell her about Jason and my seven years of paralysis and suffering. I sensed feet passing near me. I heard steps. I caught a glimpse of pant legs, a brush of white skirts. The hospital doors snapped open and shut, open and shut. A cold gray mouth.

I waited for something to happen. No one stopped. No one said a single word to me.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

"But at least I move. You just drag your ass. You're a walking nervous breakdown. Year after year. You introjected my personality minus the guts. Look at your father up there," my mother cried. "That's guts. He's struggling just to live a few more months. You squandered your life." My mother stood up. "You better loosen up. Be eclectic. Get off that edge you're hanging on to. Do you follow me? I mean shit or get off the pot." I watched my mother walk out of the room.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

My father seemed to sigh. He was granite. He was the mountain with rocks falling down. He was lessening, chipped. Then he began to cry.

"What do you want?" I asked, my voice soft, a mere rustle.

I handed my father his pad. His pen had fallen to the gray enamel floor. I picked it up. I was his issue, both more and less than chattel. I was his necessity, his step into unborn generations, the first rung on the ladder to the millennium. I was the moment forced into form, the passion of his manhood, an intrinsic and overwhelming measurement.

WANT IT ALL BACK. YOUTH. DREAMS. CIGARS. WOMEN. HORSES. START OVER.

"Doesn't everybody?" I asked. I realized that I did. Maybe everyone wanted it all back. Maybe the only difference was that a few really had a chance. And maybe once someone realized that, it gave a certain edge. I am twenty-seven years old and a pine tree my age knows more. Still, with some equipment changes, the blinders off, the long rest, and a lot less weight ...

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

I stood near the bridge over Eastern Canal. I was thinking if I stood there long enough, my entire life would drift by. The toys from childhood would pop up, pulled by a slow tugging current. Miniature pie tins and starched pink smocks with the ribbons at the collar Mommy always ironed. Roller skates and sled. And peaches eaten at seven in a Philadelphia August, wet and hot and Daddy upstairs in bed coughing red stuff and shivering under woolen blankets. Brass lamps and new china plates strangers took away from Mommy. And what's that sodden mass of cotton? My rag doll, the one Mommy sewed red spots on when I had measles. And look, there they are. Near the light green, lime green algae, there near the shadowy bridge spokes brushing beer cans and big black and brown ducks. All is returned, returned.

I looked across the canal. Spring was an undeniable eruption. I felt a sudden clarity. A light wind nipped at new branches, tasted buds, pronounced them in order and moved on, moved on. Yards exploded with pink lilies, stalks of lust and perfect tongues repeated in the water. And clusters of agapanthus, bushy-faced carnations, crepe-thin poppies, new strawberries crawling slow and pink on threadlike vines. A hummingbird churning in place, treading the air forever. Sunflowers nodded swollen balloon heads.

#Kate Braverman

[stolenwriting]

Lithium for Medea

I was by madness wooed. I pretended there was a mystery. I called myself an explorer. It gave me the illusion of purpose and movement. I lived on the banks of a swollen river. I could watch the restless water inch closer. I piled sandbags in neat little rows. It gave me something to do. It even seemed important.

You took my girlhood as simply as one lifts back a sheet, revealing the naked longing and inadequacy. There wasn't much to take. But you took it. I accepted this. I thought birth is historically a scream, a curse, a burst of blood and the long torture of sun and solitude. And you taught me. I tunneled parched ground while winds howled and stars scratched my face before the first intimation of jade banks erupting with shade trees. In a way you made me strong. The clay began to breathe. I didn't mind being a prop. I lacked all reference points. You were a kind of compass. I learned which way led down. I learned which way broke. Understand. It is not without a certain gratitude I wish you slowly drawn and quartered.

#Kate Braverman