Some Feet Not Meant for Shoes

Some Feet

Not Meant

for Shoes

Pamela Klein

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Some FeetNot Meantfor Shoes

Copyright © 2011 Pamela Klein

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-1848-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1849-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1850-5 (e)

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011907621

iUniverse rev. date: 6/21/2011

—For Lily Burk, whose tragic death at the hands of a damaged man was a brutal sacrifice and shows us clearly the work that still needs attending, and for Don Hazen, whose activist life and strong encouragement sent me off to follow my hunches, and above all, my sacred heart.—

Acknowledgments: My deepest gratitude goes to Robert Giacosie, my husband, for his tireless support and assistance. Without his careful planning and belief in me, I could not have sat in the jungle for six years to let the voices come streaming through. He has seen to it that the manuscript got saved during storms and power failures, whatever it took. To my daughter, Maria, I am very sorry for the years I was not paying attention. You are my quartz rock, child, a mighty and powerful source of inspiration. I hope you will understand someday. Miriam Jacobson, your sensitive copy editing and devoted feedback helped me clarify and crystallize concepts that within the text were still imprecise. Your patient editorial contributions to this book are vast. Your friendship is huge too. Falling James, your love of rhythmic language and faith guided me. Lovell Estell, your question catalyzed things: At just the right moment, you asked me, Why do you think you love black people so much? Ellen Swane, your cover, sweat and all, is exquisite and pure art, a gift from God, to be sure. The bond between us is surely ethereal, and has been almost since day one. And to my colleagues at the L.A. Weekly, who for years taught me what excellence and creativity and advocacy in journalism was all about, I can still hear your voices raging in the halls. To care about the world is something quite spectacular, quite contagious. I miss you all still, especially Greg Burk, Kelly Mayfield, Judy Proffer, Kat, Frank, Sharon, Susan and Ron. Your wisdom and your mission permeate my life and my work. To my West Indian angels, my muses scattered across the islands and the continents, my sincere thanks for sticking your necks out and opening up your hearts to me. You have honored me with your secrets and your truths. I hope to have given you something as worthy in return. To my spiritual teacher, Gabriel, your endless hours of instruction gave to me this mystical comprehension, and for that I am eternally indebted. In St. Thomas, where the book fermented, Ivan David is my Christian grace and Rik Van Rensselaer my dignified voice of reason. And finally to my family in Los Angeles, who year after year suffered along with me so that I might create the best manuscript possible, I am truly grateful for your love. I was far away and consumed with this undertaking, could not function very well outside of it. This book is my offering, imperfect as it may be, and if I might have betrayed any confidences, it is for the greater good, for the healing and the justice that will one day surely come.

Contents

Prologue

Seven Days

1 Crack

2 Alchemy

3 Malaise

4 Possibility

5 Wound

6 Suffering

7 Temple

Night Has a Thousand Eyes

8 Casserole

9 Candle

10 Positive

11 Color

12 Barefoot

13 Starburst

14 Atlas

Three-Fifths

15 Gardenia

16 Man

17 Sacred

18 Physiognomy

19 Courage

20 Perfection

21 Incarnadine

Black This and Black That

22 Purple

23 Longing

24 Vein

25 Represent

26 Dirt

27 Agape

28 Controllable

The Bouquet

29 Sacrifice

30 Eternity

31 Iration

32 Roots

33 White

34 Hope

35 Liberation

Afterword

Prologue

The signs of another world are everywhere, all around you, if you are open to them, a Los Angeles metaphysician tells me with a wink. Name your car. Bless it. Drive it like it is your free will on the road that is your destiny. There is a thing behind the thing. That’s what you need to see, but not with your eyes, he explains quite earnestly, cause it ain’t physical, baby. It’s metaphysical. Leonard Cohen he is not but he will do. It is the end of the ‘80s, and L.A. is, after all, the epicenter of the New Age, and in this lot of Scientologists, Wiccans, Witnesses and UFOlogists, I could do worse.

Since I haven’t got traditional religion and I am only mildly suspicious of things divine, since I am restless and can’t feel very much at all, and since he seems to have some concepts that sound quite interesting and reasonable and practical really, I try to open myself up wide for the signs and when I do, I see them clear as Pluto’s moon Charon in a night sky, and just as difficult to come by.

It’s truth to tell that an awakening, it does not happen right away and it is not like a tap on the shoulder and it is not in the head, though it is cerebral and it does take some rigorous discipline, some observation, some contemplation. It is a kind of puzzle, non-linear and in pieces that, at first glance, can be locked together in any number of ways. But when you look closely, though not through a telescope and certainly not through a microscope, there is only one way to fit them together properly. Coincidences, accidents, choice, drive, disposition, talents, strengths and weaknesses–there is accounting for it, every last bit of it. It is all in how you see things with the naked eye, how you spin them with an unrestricted mind. It is confusing and outrageous, like Venus in retrograde, deep and perfect like it too. Of course, Venus doesn’t really move backward…

I go along not unhappy, not particularly inspired, half-awake and half not, half-alive and half something else, something that gnaws at me but doesn’t propel me. This can’t be it. There must be more. The universe is expanding from an ancient cloud of gas. There must be more.

There is, the metaphysician says. There’s magic. And it’s alive, he says. It rocks the boat. And when one boat rocks, so do all the others in the ontological sea.

Oh, I say, across his Echo Park kitchen table in the middle of a summer night. Did I mention that he’s just now writing a Hollywood screenplay? It is about Iron John and the Mythopoetic men’s movement, he tells me. I could do much worse indeed.

Ain’t nothing random about it, nothin’ left to chance, nothin’ out of whack, no victims or perpetrators, though some will try to argue the opposite, he says, convincingly.

Life was all a whim to me, a whim you see, nothing more. Save the world? For what? It’s going to end sometime very soon anyway, in about 5 billion years to be precise. Looking for answers? More like, looking for questions?

Get the stable guy and marry him. Have a kid, then another, buy a house, buy another one someplace else. Trade up and up and up. Then what? I never thought to ask.

Sin? Are you kidding me?

So what have I got to say for myself anyway? Well, come to think of it, nothing. Nothing.

A whim, like I said, plain and simple, and a reckless one at that.

Well sure, in some vague way I knew that there were good people and some bad ones too. I preferred the bad ones and the dark ones, the depressed ones, the sad ones, the lonely ones, the dispossessed ones, the laconic ones, the wounded ones. I felt a need to work on them until they turned around light. That’s karma, says the metaphysician. Karma, I say, well I’ll be darned. Is that why some people are like rocks? Rocks and other things, he tells me. Oh.

Goodness is tough, he says. It requires intention, consciousness, focus. The idea of being a good person myself, well it simply never occurred to me. Being girlie, sexy enough to be in Playboy, now that was important once, now that was powerful. If a guy winked, well then I was alive and everything was cool. Isn’t that kind of like language without words?

That’s flesh, he tells me, you got the two confused.

Do I?

It happens, he says, as though to explain it simply and for all time. Flesh is a place for askin’ questions that don’t live in the head.

He puts his scrappy cowboy boots back on, grabs his worn Levi jacket and takes me outside into the darkness. We pass an altar; the lighted candles on it flicker. A radical cat, Jesus, especially during his lost years, he says. It is 2 a.m. I haven’t stayed up this late in ages.

Well what’s your story? I ask him. I find a wooden bench and sit down, wait for something.

It’s a long one, baby. It happened in the desert years ago, near Vegas. Everything was alive–the tumbleweeds, the palms, even the sand was crawlin’.

He lights a match, then takes it to the wick of a Jesus candle that sits on a round plastic table. He lights another that says Faith, Hope and Charity. He blows out the match and puts it in his mouth. It sticks out at the corner of his lips. The thing to get is a sort of wake-up call, he says. Some become spiritual warriors and even learn to donate their energy.

Imagine that, I say, bewildered. What did I know about such things? Last time I was in the desert, it was to play a round of charitable golf on some pricey Robert Trent Jones Jr. course, itself a temple of dunes. I have a very big swing, the strength of a man in it, you see. Well that’s something energetic to be thankful for, isn’t it? I wander around his courtyard garden some, hoping to grow. There will be a little sprout–too small yet for me to notice though.

Yo, Norah. I am standing with my back to him, facing the window that looks inside his living room. There are lots of brightly colored Jesus icons on the walls, some aluminum, some wooden, some painted with streaks of silver and gold. They are just now shining beneath the soft light from the wall sconces. Yo.

He startles me, and I turn suddenly. Afterimages of Jesus dazzle behind my blinking eyes. The metaphysician’s hat is down, covering his expression. I’d guess it was a serious one from his foot-wide aura. You wouldn’t joke about such matters.

You do want to be holy, now don’t you? he asks, sucking on that match.

Well of course I do. I bet you even play the Spanish guitar.

He’d given it up years ago, but yes in fact, he can play it. And recite Lorca as well, he so proudly tells me. Broodingly enigmatic, he is, and completely original, close and distant both and could be about the most exciting, the most magnetic person I have ever met. He’d even been to one of Robert Bly’s workshops for men and hung out at the Great Mother Conference.

I inhale the jasmine that grows in his courtyard, a stone courtyard filled with palm trees that cast reflections on the night. I might think this moment sacred if I’d only known then what sacred meant.

The world is full of angels, he tells me. Could be you trip among them. It is a chosen few who get to see them, who are called to stand up among them and assist them with their work. Work? I ask. Yeah, oh yeah, he assures me, as in God’s, as in the highest kind of labor one can do. And you could be doin’ it in the post office or in the check-out line at the grocery store. You could be doin’ it fixin’ broken sink pipes or noisy truck engines. I flash on my mechanic, on how very proud he is of his rebuilt trannies, on how he carefully explains each and every task he undertakes. And my Armenian plumber’s accounts of the Turkish genocide, all that agony running through my old copper pipes. So many big jobs that pay so little, the metaphysician says, smiling as though he knows just exactly what it is that I am picturing.

Carl Jung revealed the pain of growing consciousness, he explains. It’s Jungian to take the hurt and let it guide you toward divinity. Awareness is somethin’ like compost, he tells me. Ya got to have a pile of hefty garbage to build it up. And it’s got to stink, no doubt about it. How does he know all this? I wonder. My heart beats fast in spasms. He inspires me to suppose that anything is truly possible, like when you eat acid and the walls, the floor, the ceiling become liquid, and you believe you might swim through this world and into the next and then beyond that, only without the fear and the dizziness, without the gripe in the waist.

I so want to witness the angels, but you’ve got to have faith for that, don’t you? I have always needed proof, you see. And to let the aching guide you, well wouldn’t you have to admit first to being sore? I don’t even let a broken ankle stop me from playing tennis. I hardly feel aches. In fact, I hardly feel anything at all. It is kind of like I am invisible even to myself, especially to myself.

So what do I do? I ask him, hoping he glimpses something distinct in me that I do not yet know about in myself. Rather giddy to have his attention and yearning for this certain kind of intimacy, I’d do just about anything. After all, I had done just about everything before and had no high left to show for it, nowhere higher left to go.

Pray, he says, kissing my hand with moistened lips and then tipping his hat back so that I might see his eyes. There is nothing funny in them, nothing funny at all. Pray.

They say that when the student is ready, the teacher suddenly appears. Oh I wish that I’d been ready on this very night and that I’d really listened. For you see, if only I’d listened I might have quick come of age, and perhaps the things in pieces would still be unbroken, the damage not quite so severe.

I pass the magic along as I would the most beautiful secret garden, a wild, tropical place overgrown with loveliness, strange exotic fruits, poisonous flowers and bittersweet despair. There is lots of shade and long shadows from the moon and the sun that fall across veiled paths of hallucinatory lavande, tabac zombie, bouton blanc. In fact, it might be considered the oldest and richest collection of vegetation on earth, containing the ancestors of virtually every plant, every bush, every tree. And with every plant, every bush, every tree, there is a healing remedy for something. "Tout hazié sé rimèd." That’s Kwéyòl, a language you will soon come to find that I spoke once upon a time. And yes, oh yes, there is hope in this garden. It grows there in the rich black soil like bothersome weeds you only want to yank.

What’s offered here are the signs and the things they signify, given somewhat disorderly and somewhat disconcertingly, and not just by me, the very same way they came into knowing. For to clean them up, to package them too neatly and too conventionally would be artificial and misleading, like a fairy tale. No, I am not knocking fairy tales, only saying right off what this story isn’t. I am Norah, a white, godless Angeleno for much of this life, compelled to reach, to stretch, to imagine as I have never done before. It is, quite frankly, the least that I can do, the least that I can do, considering what I have done.

Seven Days

1 Crack

Norah, 1991, Los Angeles

I KNOW THE icy cold splash of something fluid that resembles water, can testify to it in a voice that is a bit like my own. It is a rational voice in an irrational moment, one that strikes me on a Friday evening on the very first day of February. I hear on the car radio, on the local NPR affiliate, KCRW, that there has been a plane crash at Los Angeles International Airport. I question straight off if it has been sabotage, a terrorist’s bomb punishing America for its involvement in the Persian Gulf War or, rather, for its blind support of a Zionist Israel, and then I hear that a big USAir jet has apparently landed atop a little Sky West commuter plane that was already on the ground. Many people are presumed dead but none yet confirmed. Families at the airport are panicked from all that is apparently happening, that I hear in language over the airwaves. I flick the ashes from my long, skinny brown cigarette into the ashtray and maneuver my way among stop-and-go traffic, south down Highland Avenue, a wide street full of swanky old brick mansions with tennis courts in the backyards and palm trees that never get kicked around much in the wind.

Work wasn’t particularly tough today. It hardly ever is. It’s a low-paying, creative job that I am rather fortunate to have for a Hollywood rag that’s still gritty, still feisty, an independent island of somewhat intimidating culture vultures on a subversive mission. Fight the mass media conglomerates, challenge the palliating entertainments factories, strike up your own band. I am an outsider yet, a chorus girl among the twinkling white stars, and even after three years there, it is where I will remain, my lot so to speak. I can’t banter as they do, and heady with a capital H is something I don’t much long to be. I got my politics from the Palestinians and the Lebanese, but none of the radicalism. That is home-brewed, you see. I try and pretend though, try and call it up in myself, and I do it quite okay at times.

To what do I aspire? Well I haven’t yet got a clue about that. I am not quite 30 and have already started lying about it too. If I wrote a book just now I’d have nothing to say in it. I look out the car window on the way to somewhere and think about nothing, same as the blank book. And I am always letting the man drive, see, so I have got a lot of time to think about nothing, to leave the book wholly empty.

At the rag is where I met the metaphysician with the long, black ponytail who quite honestly looks a lot like Jesus, the white version anyway. There is energy between us, some kind of energy, but who knows what kind. It is just that when he saunters by my desk, when he struts and drags his too-long jeans across the beat-up linoleum floor, when he puffs deep and long on that cigarette, the world gets suddenly exalted and vast like a purple sunset teetering upon the edge of a glistening sea. Thinking about something when he walks by, on page one of the book, I am, heading toward a gateway.

My gold Concord watch says 6:30 p.m. on the nose. At least it isn’t an American Airlines plane, I tell myself, downshifting into second gear, since I am planning my honeymoon on Guadeloupe to visit some French West Indians whom I met there last year. And when I travel to the Caribbean I always fly American. The plane that crashed was coming from Washington, D.C., I hear KCRW’s Ruth Seymour say. My brother lives in D.C., a med student at George Washington University, although he’s on his way to Australia. He will do his final rotation in Sydney with a renowned AIDS specialist there. The doctor is a woman, I believe. I try to figure out exactly when it was that he left D.C. for Australia. Was it yesterday, I wonder, frustrated that I had not paid much attention to the logistics of his very ambitious plan when we spoke on the phone the other night. I heard his goal though very clearly, to become an internist with a specialty in AIDS. He’s a clever young gay man with heart. My father knows about the heart, and the clever, says his son gets it from him, he just doesn’t know about the other part. Genes are not everything, I tell you. In fact, they are hardly anything in the much bigger story. The rush hour traffic clears a bit as the arteries to and from the city open up.

I shift into third gear. The car races ahead. I suddenly remember that it is Friday and that Dark Shadows will be on television shortly. Downshift. I wonder why I love vampire stories so much as I blow smoke out the window in a slow, steady stream that nearly reaches the open window of the car in the lane beside me. The passenger coughs melodramatically. Yo, he says, thanks, bitch, for the gift. Cough cough cough. Shiny brown hands with polished white nails fly out the window for emphasis. Pretty, I notice, that red-brown color, those rowdy hands.

Gangsta rap blasts huge from a very good stereo that the driver just now adjusts. I can’t make out the words, but oh do I feel the rhythm. It pulses seductively from that car to this one. Cute, I note, the both of them, in a rough ‘hood kind of way. Bald heads, goatees, Ray-Bans, white Calvin undershirts, hairy chests, muscular arms. I smile back respectfully but that is all. I am very much a proper feminist and a grad student gypsy with plenty of serious, scholarly stuff to ponder over. The Sandanista Revolution, for one. Radio Martí in Cuba, for another. I would consider joining the Peace Corps and going to Nicaragua for the literacy campaign, but it’s a little dangerous, a little real for what was brewed in my home. I wear baggy clothes of dark-printed cotton gauze from India, gold wire-rim glasses and turquoise, lots of turquoise with silver, all of it a phase, and I am growing older by the hour. That’s how it is in L.A. Our women role models are very somber, very one-size-fits-all, dripping with silver as though it were a badge of honor among feminists, silver feathers, silver bows, silver coyotes that howl at the moon to match their naturally silver hair that represents letting it all go.

Unless you include Madonna, which I cannot bring myself to do, not just yet anyway. Obsessed with sex and girlie, she is, with pointed tits and garter belts and black lace and bleached blonde hair, and I am good and done with that. I am very very preoccupied now, a coffee-table version of myself, into Allende, Biko, Ché, Mandela and Ortega, into nuns getting killed for land reform and liberation theology, that’s Jesus in the trenches. I wear old-lady shoes now, black ones that lace up to the ankle and provide a solid, firm base. I got them from my grandmother. So like I was saying, I am good and done with that.

And as you might well imagine, I don’t flirt. The guys in the car next to me are black, street black, rough black, cool black, macho black, Prince black and not on my white-girl-intellectual radar screen for sexy males. They are not delicious, have entirely no food value, in other words. I haven’t got a sense about my color yet, even though I did just recently go to Jamaica and, for the very first time ever, feel my whiteness. Feel my whiteness, I did, oh yes, quite clear, one of maybe 200 of us in a roughneck Sunsplash crowd of a few thousand black West Indians. It didn’t seem to stick though, this white sensibility and all that goes along with it. Those things we learn early they just never do. There are prerequisites, see, and first things first.

As it stands right now, flirting with black boys is just not the sisterly thing to do, not the politically correct thing to do either, and I am seriously into that. There are only a few good brothers left, and I should leave them for the sisters, is how that goes. No problem. No interest. I puff hard on the cigarette and stare straight ahead. Cool, I think. Cold, they might think. Oh well. They called me a bitch, might as well act like one. The light changes to yellow. My car’s European brakes gasp and wheeze. I exhale smoke into the windshield where it gathers and hangs there like an icy fog that just doesn’t want to lift.

The light goes green, and I am about ready to slide a Gregory Isaacs tape into the deck when Seymour says on the radio that the big plane, which landed right on top of a smaller one, has crashed into a building and caught fire. Everybody in the small plane has been killed, she says over the radio in the most solemn tone. And some people from the big plane are still unaccounted for. I blow more smoke out the window and downshift. The car pulls back. Another signal up ahead at Third Street; the traffic slows again to a crawl.

Something truly like dread tries to cut in front of me, but I don’t let it into the lane as of yet. Instead, I honk and speed up a bit, rev up the engine some. It’s Friday night, after all, and there’s a man waiting for me. If I am 10 minutes late, he will stop waiting and he will begin pacing.

I will very soon despise this car. I will soon despise how much effort it is to drive, the shifting, the clutching, the timing, the traffic. I will soon feel very unsafe in it as though it is a toy among tanks. I will soon feel very unsafe anywhere I go, in the car or out. Life is banalities, movement to and from, daily routine, a bleak kind of sameness that lends itself well to forgetting, and then, suddenly, it is not.

I turn my key to unlock the white, colonial-style door to the west side condominium of the man I am about to marry, Vincent, throw my denim jacket on the mahogany-stained table, put my keys into my purse and it into the corner on the gray tile floor. He rushes down wooden stairs in his flip-flops, greets me with a memorized kiss. It is like this every other evening when I come to see him. He closes his eyes, cocks his head a certain way, parts his lips just a little, the same distance every time and smiles with a kind of pride as he bends over to peck. He’s a good man, perhaps too good, and sweet like a marshmallow. He is the kind who, in his premature grayness, will happily see to it that I have the right amount of car insurance and proper health care and that I eat more sensibly than just hard Italian salami and CornNuts. Dependable and stable, you might say. And predictable, unlike the last one, and while he collects and lays down wine he doesn’t much care for drink, unlike the last one. Can keep his hands to himself and his fly up, unlike the last one. A geology professor he is, at a nonexclusive private university, with tenure to boot. A middle-of-the-road scholar, not so very ambitious, not too irreverent, into the study of rocks for the minerals they bear.

Properties, yes he is all about them, as are most Western men these days. And he is about to show himself to me in a way that will bond him to me solidly, with something like an iron ring around my neck. It is to be an exceptionally unexceptional way of life, in fits and starts that I seem to create, and then, as now, it turns. Of course, the metaphysician, he warned me that it would.

Did you hear about the plane crash at LAX? he asks, taking my briefcase and setting it on the floor beside the bed. Deadline, I tell him. He knows what I mean from the heaviness of the bag and shakes his head side to side at what? The competition, I imagine. For as far as I can tell, anything at all that preoccupies me is a thorn in his side. No problem here since not much preoccupies me.

It’s a New Mexico-style coverlet there on the water bed, a terra-cotta brown, with greens and oranges to match the signed Native American prints on the Navaho-white walls. The Sony big-screen is tuned to the Channel 2 news, and there’s some kind of chaos happening at the airport. Fire engines, ambulances, haz-mat vehicles, police, National Guard, news trucks, women screaming, children crying, families clutching on to each other tight. It is the kind of here and now you could gather up into a ball, watch it roll down a steep hill. At the bottom of the hill it is a bigger ball, too heavy to toss around, too heavy to pick up. Find a nail and pop it, the ball. That’s the only way.

Yes, I tell him. I heard about it sitting in traffic. I rest on the edge of the bed and watch the terror on people’s faces as they learn that the passengers for whom they have been waiting are not among those accounted for. It is the triumph of the news people that they can capture so easily and so publicly such a private moment. Intrusive, yes it is, but I am sitting here in the comfort of a designer condominium painted in tones of aquamarine and worth half a million bucks watching somebody else’s tragedy. I rather like their intrusion; reality TV, before the fact. Of course I want to watch. I am from a nation of watchers.

Yet since it is now time for Dark Shadows, I pick up the remote, hand it over to Vincent and ask him to change the channel. Can we just get some Mexican take-out after the show? I ask him. Certainly, he answers, drawing me into his arms in his kind of sheltering way, in his kind of suffocating way. A Kodak moment? Hardly. It just seems so. Put the slide down, however, on a light table and you can see a whole lot better.

We are sitting together propped up by four bed pillows with our shoes off, watching a show about blood, about thirst and passion, about the darkest of darkness. I am addicted to this series and to all things vampire the same way some are addicted to all things Star Trek.

After about 20 minutes into the hour-long program, the phone rings. It’s my mother, who I figure right now is on the road to San Francisco for a wedding. I imagine this strong and hard, see it in my head, the road, the car, the hills in the distance. I am listening to her voice, but what I am hearing is not believable to me. It is like I have left the room, like I am a ghost, unable to grasp what is becoming increasingly more unbearable as the minutes pass. My mother, you see, she is hysterical. Your sister is at the airport. It was your brother’s plane that crashed.

No no no, I scream, my heart pounding hard and fast. Yes, she says, he was on USAir, the one that caught fire. It will jump out of my chest, this heart.

He was scheduled to take a later flight, but he called your sister this morning to ask her if she would meet him for dinner. He changed his flight to have some time with Anne. Changed his flight, oh my goodness, did I hear this right, Mother, Mother, did I hear this right? His original reservation was due in at 9:30 p.m.

My sister had called the bride-to-be’s family in San Francisco, left a message. The message was waiting at our hotel.

Is he dead? I ask her, my head spinning around and around in waves of panic. It feels as though my heart will stop, as though it will stop beating, and I will choke from the lack of air among the waves. I have never felt such terror in my body. It shakes and jerks on its own. No control. No control.

When one is disconnected from the body, as I was almost all of the time, this will create a brand new yoke. It is like a drug, this terror, infused into this new yoke. It will shake me from my very safe and very firm foothold upon the earth.

I don’t know, she says, through cries. It doesn’t look very good, Norah. Some people walked off the big plane, but some didn’t. It seems that everyone in the small plane is dead. Your sister has been waiting… A knife, twisted in my gut.

I hand the phone to Vincent; he speaks calmly with my mother. When he hangs up the receiver he seems ready to take complete control of things.

He grabs me with both hands, pulls me up from the bed and tells me to get my purse. Just get it, he commands. He is good under pressure, oh quite good. He tells me we are going to the airport, and that I must keep myself together. Keep myself together, yes, I hear him all right. It is like he is calling me from Colorado or Alaska, and I can hardly hear him on the line. Where are you calling from? I want to ask. I want to fall on the floor and cry hysterically. I want to pound on the floor with rage even before I know. I want to heave up the lunch that hasn’t quite set, that will never quite set.

He drives like a maniac, doesn’t speak to me, doesn’t say one single word, holds his jaw steady and firm. He swerves around curves as recklessly as I have ever seen him, ignores yellow and red lights. There’s no macho in this drive, just competency, just intent. We are on Century Boulevard, heading west toward the airport. It is the way we always take to reach the Los Angeles airport, living close to it as we do, but I am utterly lost. I don’t know up from down, or right from left. There are no landmarks to ease the panic. Everything that once stood secure is now blurred, as if the cheap hotels and the $10-a-day, long-term parking lots are obliterated. Poof, like that, despite all the codes and the regulations and the money and the good intentions that seem to hold everything together. Fog moves through the streets like a whisper, covering the neon signs that flash and the traffic lights with gloom. It is eerie, the fog, and thick, a very loud whisper. What are you telling me, I want to scream.

Now, nothing will ever be the same. All my happiness will be gone forever. Or what I assume at this moment is happiness, but is more like blankness, more like repose. Tears cover my face, my arms; they wet my hair and do not stop. Vincent keeps a box of tissues in the car for his allergies, for his asthma, the same way he keeps an extra inhaler. I hold a wad of tissue balled up in my hands. I shake with fear, can hardly catch my breath. Come on, Vincent says sternly inside the parking lot where we are searching up and down every row for a space to leave the car. You don’t know for certain yet. The optimist as ever. Or so I’d thought.

I run as fast as I can down the slippery beige vinyl floors of the USAir corridor, toward the first-class lounge, where they are telling the families and friends of passengers to sit tight and wait. Some news people try to grab me as I run in, but I am incapable of speech and hide from their cameras, from their film at 11. I am inside this channel and cannot be changed. No remote for this channel. No bumper-sticker wisdom to offer up either.

It is a dimly lit room, red velvet chairs, glass coffee tables, air smoky and heavy with sorrow. I see my sister and throw myself into her arms. She holds me close, tightly and she cries softly. I stroke her long yellow-blonde hair with fingers like the teeth of a comb. She likes this, I remember she always liked this. Gather it into a ponytail, braid it, just brush it into a sheen is fine with her. Pull on it hard, oh she’d let you do that as well. She’s a hair person, she likes to say. It’s one of her better features.

The Red Cross is here, so is USAir’s damage control personnel in suits. A big man, a black minister who tells me he is from a neighborhood church in South-Central, he comes very near me, past the space that separates strangers, especially black and white ones. Not that I mind, I am only just noticing how close he is. He clutches my hands tightly and the melodic tone of his words calms me almost at once. It is a bold sound and powerful, English, East Indian, Arabic, African, fragmented, jostling, metered, mumbled somewhat. I have to listen carefully, to hang on to his words. I have to hang on tight.

He prays for me, he does, this big black man. God spare life if life spare, he says, bowing his face, holding his fingers in the air, asking for my brother’s safety, for his strength and for mine, addressing the Father with such passion and lyricism that I am for just a moment swayed. My body. My heart. Even my head is swayed. I’d heard something about these charismatic black ministers before but I’d never actually met one. First time’s a charm, it seems.

He has heard the whole story from my sister so he knows most of the details. My sister is very chatty–it is her religion, I suppose. I have never prayed with a black man. In fact, I have never really prayed. I have pretended to pray, kneeled and mouthed the words, even closed my eyes in prayer, but I have never spoken to God. Not me, oh no, not me. Liberation theology aside, I am more like a traditional Marxist when it comes to religion. The opiate of the masses, and it’s among the masses where Jesus walks, and me, I am not among them. I toss away the calm as though it were a stone that had suddenly rolled across my path. Pick it up, I do, throw it hard with all my might. But I never hear it fall, that stone. Defied gravity, I suppose it did.

There are three girls in my family, and Keith, the boy. My sister Anne phones the youngest of the girls, Lisa, who is at home in Reseda in her bed with a brand-new baby. Fundamentalist Christians, the both of my sisters, they pray together over the telephone. I watch Anne from across the room, perched on the arm of a very low cherry-red vinyl couch with her eyes shut tight. She wraps the curly black phone cord around her elbow and talks up toward the cottage cheese ceiling that glistens some in the low light. There is tranquility in her face, in her voice when she speaks, a softness to her whole countenance. I want to have a little of that, but how, I wonder, if only for an instant. How do you have it though, and keep your head screwed on right?

Vincent calls the hospitals, all of them, those local and not, from the phone at the reception desk. His voice is loud and hostile, demanding, carries above the quiet talk, the pleading and the prayers. We have been told that some passengers were badly burned and rushed to area emergency rooms and trauma centers. I watch Vincent’s face, and with every call there is more and more weariness in it, more and more darkness beneath his deep-set eyes. He tries to hide it from me, but I can sense it. The coroner will interview us, and I will have to call Keith’s friends in D.C. to find out what my brother was wearing when he boarded the plane. His friends will have their worst fears confirmed after 3 in the morning, their time. USAir will handle calling my brother’s dentist. Thank goodness for those X-rays, a woman with very white teeth says to me. I am so far from feeling thankful for anything that I cringe at the very sound of her words, but stare at her straight white teeth nonetheless. I think about the antiseptic smell of the dentist’s hands in my brother’s mouth, about his jaw and his incisors and his silver fillings. My ankles want to collapse, knees with them. I am unraveling fast like yarn knitted carelessly into a sweater. One loose stitch and the whole thing goes.

To calm the panic, I take to practicing what the metaphysician has taught me, force the energy spent on being godless toward some kind of alchemy. I try to reach for the beauty of the night, try to search for the signs that the metaphysician always speaks to me about when we happen to meet in some tight corner, in some quiet space. I am not disconnecting myself but rather reconnecting. I imagine myself a drummer who’s struggling to transcend the strike of fingertips on tightly stretched goat skin. It is the music that I am after, the harmony of the whole, the joining of the sounds that I seek, the pounding from the circle of drummers in the universe, not just the tap tap tap, but the boom boom boom. Where are the messages, from whomever, from whatever? I cannot be alone in this. If you are a questioning sort without God to talk to, it is perhaps the only way to take this all in, the only way indeed.

Or you could be angry and outraged like Vincent, ready to bite the head off of the messenger, ignoring the message. I sit here at this laminated table on the very edge of the chair and imagine myself inside a circle of drumming. I close my eyes and move my whole being in a kind of swoon to the rhythm in my head, try to tap tap tap into something larger than this first-class lounge in which first class no longer matters. It is a kind of earthy meditation the metaphysician once told me about, with imagery for dealing with fear. Could be a protective circle of Native Americans drumming, could be Zulu warriors, could be just passing thoughts in one huge infinite mind. At least it’s not God, I am thinking. At least. Not a gentle New Age waterfall either, at least.

The black minister brings me some scotch. Did I ask him for scotch? I don’t remember. I drink it down quick like a shot of tequila. It cuts nothing. More, I ask him. He smiles warm, his cheeks flush. Medicine, it is, at least that’s what my ex taught me. Drink until you don’t feel a thing. There, there, he says, rubbing the curve of my back until I am relaxed enough from his touch and the scotch to lean back in the chair. He speaks tenderly to me, soothes me, and when I comment on it, calls it well-brought-upsy. My skirt, my boots, my earrings, he likes it all. And where I work, he likes that as well. Follows the restaurant reviews, he says, and the film reviews. Reads the sports page, for the runners and the rowers and the wrestlers who push the meaning of sport. God is like a vitamin, he says. We take it and we soar.

He moves so close beside me now that I can hear him breathe, which he does slowly and decidedly like he means to be alive. A breath can’t lie any more than a body can lie. Have you been to the Caribbean Tree House in Inglewood? he asks. Your paper wrote it up. His voice is like a half-heard growl, raspy, with this song of an accent. Trinidadian, he tells me, like the owner of the Tree House restaurant. His breath smells of chewed tobacco with some kind of berries to it. I inhale deeply as though it is a good strong opiate. Raspberry, it seems, with maybe a hint of tamarind.

There is sweetness in his manner, lightness in the way he moves his hands, in his gestures, the way he reaches up for something palpable that he snatches from the atmosphere. A big black man, could be 250 pounds, barrel-chested and with a heavy grayish beard that curls up a bit around his jaw, his face is flushed and his eyes are wide open and full of fervor. He’s wearing dark green sweats and clunky white Nikes. If I saw him somewhere else, in an alley, maybe, or on some deserted street or in a desolate parking garage, I might fear him for his bulk, for his blackness, from what America has led me to believe about danger, but here, now, he is the only man I want to be close to. Everyone else could simply disappear but him. I bury my face in the space beneath his bearded chin and fleshy shoulder under his sweatshirt and find such warmth, such comfort. He laughs from his belly loud, without any scotch, without any jokes. I can’t tell jokes, distraught or otherwise, but he must have found something funny. When he laughs he lights candles, 100 of them in that laugh.

It is like being in the eye of the storm now. My sobbing has stopped, and my nose is dry, for the moment my body is solid, no longer trembling. Vincent is a wreck, pacing to and from the front door, talking to other families in the same shoes as ours. He is no help to me at all, really, although he sincerely tries to be, finding comfort for me in the misery of others and then bringing it on over to me. I don’t want to hear it, that there are several other young doctors among the missing, among those thought to be dead, so I send him away. Please, please, I say. Just let me be.

There must be a Burger King somewhere nearby, he says, untying the orange pullover from around his shoulders and putting it on over his head. He straightens up his khaki shirt collar, takes out his pocket comb, fixes his hair and checks himself in the wall mirror across the room. I’ll go get chicken sandwiches, he says to his own reflection, presuming, I suppose, that I’d hear him.

Fine, go, I say, but not to him. To him I just wave as though I couldn’t be bothered with food. Vincent, he can eat under any circumstances. Can cook under any circumstances too. Having nerves of steel, though, it is not the same as having calm. Steel reinforces concrete and calm seeps like water right through its cracks. Oh to have understood energy, back then.

How old is your daughter? I ask the minister, who strokes my forearm beneath my sleeve. She’s in college, studying to be a teacher. And my son, he’s in high school. A jock you see. I help coach his football team. We were preparing for a big game next Friday night. That’s what I was doing when I got the call, he says, pouring me more scotch, the bottle of which is in the center of the table. He left Trinidad over 15 years ago, he tells me. Why? It is what God asked of him, he answers, using his raised-up black and gray eyebrows for explanation. I’ve heard of that before, you know, of people claiming God has called them to distances, but I can’t say that I’ve met anyone like this before. He seems so earnest, I say to myself, so for real.

I tell him about Jean-Michel and Sylvia, and about Guadeloupe and the French West Indies, and this very strange, immediate bond. He smiles like he knows what I mean, as though he can certainly understand it. There are no bonds that are strange, he says, only ones that you can’t explain away. When you feel afraid, when you be getting forward, tell me straight off, and we’ll pray. Spun it right around, he did, that pain, that fear, and gave the heavy hours wings.

It is near midnight and still no word. The big plane hasn’t even been boarded yet. There is toxic smoke and gas and a feeling that the thing could blow. It’s just sitting there on the runway, smoking still, seething, a temporary morgue of dreams and desires and bitterness, chronicles of many lifetimes. If I went near the big window I could see it. If I watched the television screen above the bar, I might catch a glimpse of the ambulances and the fire engines ready and waiting. But I am frozen still, and what little heart I have is broken clean in two. If there was ever a flake of hope in my brother walking off that plane or being found burned and without identification in some emergency room, it’s gone now, finished. At least the Johnnie Walker Black is not.

But drunk I never see, not that night. And next week, when my brother’s body is finally identified by the coroner from his dental records, when I discover that his fingertips were burnt beyond recognition, and that he died from the smoke, gasping, choking, crawling along the carpet beside the exit, I will be unable to handle even the simplest of chores. The bank, the market, even the gas station will each become overwhelming tasks that will take all my effort of will, all my concentration. And when that fails me, there will always be Vincent for the pep talks and the Taco Bell drive-thrus. He is awfully good at hand-holding, at being the strong one. Older professors, they usually are. And then there will be those Cats tickets and those Evita seats and those jazzy Wednesday nights in a box at the Hollywood Bowl to soak up the blahs. He’ll even put chocolate-covered strawberries into the picnic basket, and a yellow-checked tablecloth with matching napkins.

Vincent, he will call this night a deathwatch and he will tell the same story over and over like a lecture learned and put to memory and backed up by notes for now and forever; but me, I will come to see it as a life-watch and try never to use the same words twice to describe it. It will evolve inside me, this tragedy, this life and death of my brother, remain solvent and mean one thing next week and another the following one, move from tisk tisk tisk condolence cards and knowing who your friends are to Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, to taking lemons and making lemonade. It will teach me to grieve the loss and celebrate the gain and to sit in wait for the next misfortune. It will force me to be inside the moment rather than preparing for it, to say and do all that I can while I am able. In time, it will come to mean a great deal more than I could ever even imagine as the wife of a scientist. But I am not even married to Vincent yet. So hold on, hold on. I have to get past the thing that by and by I mistake for love.

To this very day, when I go to quiet myself, when there is so much confusion around, so much heaviness, I remember the big black minister from South-Central, the Trinidadian, his gritty voice and the lilting music in it, his lovely hands on my back, and his scratchy beard that caught the tears I cried, that caught the panic, that caught the sleep washed from my eyes by both. I savor this black man in the Caribbean’s thick yellow curry, in the roti with the thin chickpea wrap, smell him raw and sweaty and berrylike in my nightmares and in my dreams. And I remember his prayers, in rhythm as natural as the flow of blood vibrating up to the heart. I can hear them still, his words to God, the Protector and Savior, we call upon you to bless us and guide us, carry them with me in that dark green sweatshirt of his wherever I go.

2 Alchemy

Norah, 1996, Martinique

I AM SUDDENLY forced into this hustle of travelers who shove their way down the ferry ramp onto the crowded dock, along with Jean-Michel and Sylvia, Aurore and Marine, to a place I have been before–once in another decade, and before that, in another century, in another life perhaps. I could be wrong about this, but since it isn’t a game of darts, close will be enough. It is my very destiny to be here, this I will not be wrong about, although at the moment I am not exactly sure what that means. It is just that I feel it, this heaviness of my body, this strong, downward pull, feel it the very second I arrive on land that is Martinique, the French West Indian island known as the Paris of the Caribbean.

It is a kind of eternal tiredness, you see, a kind of slowing down of all things, but not my mind. That is awake, wide awake, spiraling counterclockwise like the fountains of energy, and a bit overwhelmed at that. Dark-skinned Créole men in dirty white T-shirts of fine thin cotton and clean khakis with brown leather belts throw luggage from one to the other in a line, arranging it in neat rows on the dock. They are muscular and lithe as if they do nothing but eat fish and rice and lift heavy things from here to there. There is not an ounce of fat among them, nor is there any symptom of undernourishment. It is a nice balance of strength and agility. My husband hurries to fetch our 70-pound suitcases and our friends’ overstuffed duffel bags before anyone else does. Always suspicious, Vincent is, and strong, but hardly agile.

The children must have their buckets and their shovels and their Barbies, Sylvia tells me, standing in the shade of a three-story building, watching to be certain that Vincent finds all the blue canvas bags.

And I need my dresses.

I know, Sylvia screams against the crowd. If I wore them the way you wear them, Norah, I’d want them as well. Her English is slow, careful, with a Parisian twist, and when she speaks it, all the Créoles, they stare. I have been slighted by blacks in other places, but there’s no sneer now, not here, not from them. No sneer at all.

The ferry’s whistle blows, one, two, three, four times, calling for departing passengers traveling to St. Lucia to board, tout de suite. Taxis line up along the high curbside where gutter water runs fast; the zouk coming from their car stereos is intoxicating, like that second shot of aged rhum. It enters the heels and moves upward fast, into the hips where it lodges itself and stays put. You can see it in the sway of Créole backsides, this rhythm, your mother tongue, an uninhibited sexiness that you have not known before. It is August, the month when French West Indians take their holidays and relax on beaches not in their own backyards. The Martiniquais head to Guadeloupe; the Guadeloupeans come here. The rich fly; the others take the boat. Something different, they like to say. The calm, they call it, before the storms of September, the Middle Passage storms that tumble across the wild sky, across the hot sea, that is.

I have dreamed this day so many times awake in my mid-Wilshire bed that I know its smell, can taste it like a sweet ripe mango dripping yellow pulp juice on my tongue. It is strange, rebirth, transformation, cold and confusing and inexplicable. It begins slowly, as on this day, with a few subtle signs that clarify the moment, and then it speeds so fast you can’t stop it, you can’t catch up with it and you can’t turn back from it. It leaves you helpless, without much will. People try to touch you but they can’t feel you, as though you have got no substance. No core. No core. You hear whispers and you think you are crazy to follow them, to listen to them, the inner voices that argue over just about everything. No peace, only turmoil.

The womb isn’t any better, when you finally start to awaken that is, for it’s dark and frighteningly lonely and you hardly get any rest. You can’t sleep nights, you can’t eat, you can’t even have sex anymore. There is a sense that nothing is right, that nothing is the way it ought to be, that nothing much matters, that you are like Alice, can’t explain yourself because you are becoming not yourself. The thing about destiny is that you are guided, for better or for worse, and it’s the worse that kicks your body until the better sets in. Ask Alice, just ask Alice.

The child that is mine is burning up, listless too, and Jean-Michel’s brother, a doctor I have only just now met but who seems so familiar, takes her from my arms and examines her color, her eyes. She is just short of 12 months and has been traveling some six hours from Guadeloupe on the open ocean, on a ferry that was not air-conditioned. She slept like she was dead and when she woke, tried to crawl around, but the boat was very unstable in the large swells. Jean and all his family used the green seasick bags–mine didn’t need them. Taking his handkerchief from his pocket, the doctor runs toward a pink building for a spigot, drenching the folded yellow linen