One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses Page 4

  “You want to meet them?” said the nurse, still holding out her spiral notebook.

  “I need to go to deal with my period,” I said. “I’ll take Armand.”

  Honestly, I know that in some cultures girls are supposed to feel shame over their period, and it’s not like I feel anyone should be ashamed of what they are, but if you’re like, “Oh, the flow of my blood, the essence of my womanhood,” well, that is just stupid and disgusting. There I am with my responsible-looking pants on the handbag hook in the stall, standing in my socks and, oh yeah, my naked ass, at the counter wiping blood off my crash-appropriate underwear with a paper towel. What, then, is least disgusting: put your underwear back on all damp and horrific, put your underwear on inside out so the damp part rubs up on your favorite and nicest pants, put them back on and stuff them with toilet paper that might fall down your leg at any second, don’t put them back on and hope you don’t leak again until you can get more underwear and perhaps a panty liner which why didn’t your mother fucking suggest this ever, and why have you never seen any panty liners in the house? Perhaps it is your mother that is disgusting. And even then where do you put your underwear, in your pocket or what? Because you left your bag in the car because you wanted your hands free for picking out your madman. Not to mention I thought this place was so well equipped, and hasn’t anyone ever noticed that girls who are on the first day of their first period and don’t know what they’re doing come here all the time? So where’s looking that in the eyes and understanding it? So also, as Carrie would say, none of your beeswax about what is least disgusting in my worldview.

  Outside the bathroom the nurse was waiting for me, leaning on the wall like she’s from the ’50s.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Armand, still? You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled, then, a 100 percent genuine smile which there’s no faking. I know, because I have watched myself in the mirror and tried.

  So his name was Armand, and in that way my madman transformed from a madman to the name of a man, which is only a little different but counts at least some. The nurse pushed back through one set of double doors to go get him ready, and I pushed through another, into the waiting room with a pile of forms and my vacant parents who were staring at posters on opposite ends as if they were looking out portholes in a ship. Where their heads weren’t blocking, I could see that one poster was a phrenology diagram, and the other was a color-coded brain scan. Were they even looking at what they were looking at? Twinges in my belly were either anxiety or cramps or both. I didn’t know anyone who’d just picked a name from a list on advice from a psychiatric/psychotic-looking nurse. But I know you can never pick exactly right. There’d be a whole other batch any other day. One day you could walk in and it’s your old friend Bitsy from second grade wearing a rag and picking her butt and looking at you and the space next to you like it’s the same thing. Which maybe it is. I didn’t throw a dart, but the way I chose my madman had very little magic in it, and what should I learn from that?

  Well, it had a little magic, like a pebble in a setting forged for a diamond.

  Oh, Armand, I thought. My own little pebble. The phrase came back to me: coloboma of the iris, and it sounded like a lullaby.

  Meanwhile, I handed some forms to my dad and we sat as if peacefully doing paperwork while all the weight in the room slid toward the black hole created by my mother as she ignored us both. I’d missed something, something between them, and probably something with the nurse, as well. I asked my dad, I guess to break the ice, “Why do so many of them have sticks?” because all I knew about my madman was, according to the nurse, he was not going to leave his behind and I should be okay with that. And his cloak.

  “Staffs,” my father said, considering. “Shepherds used to carry crooks. Madmen have traditions.”

  “What they have,” my mother said, still focused on the phrenology poster, “is a brain disorder.”

  I pictured sheep like marbles, always wandering off, pictured a madman named Armand on a grassy hill, his marbles rolling away, trying to pull them back with his crook, useless. How far he must have traveled, hiking back roads and mountain trails, fording creeks with it, balancing with three legs. I pictured that. How he might have speared a fish with it, or clubbed a rabbit over the head to eat, or slayed an enemy in the night. Or used it for a wand, to turn seawater potable, to ward off evil, to punish his tormentors. Or the stick was bifurcated. It split. In order to represent his brain.

  “Okay, geniuses, perhaps it’s not a brain disorder,” my mother said, as if anyone had said anything. “He’s been emasculated by his madness. In fact, it’s a dick. Let him have it. It makes him feel better.” Unsurprisingly, this seemed to hurt my father’s feelings. It also appeared that while she was not yet talking to me, she wanted me to know she was there, so that was a good sign.

  The nurse materialized in the nurses’ station and I met her in the window. I gave her the paperwork and she gave me a SMTWTFS pillbox, a chart that showed how it was set up, and a bag of meds. She gave me the number of a psychopharmacologist named Dr. Sandy and said this is who to call for refills or if Armand seemed too down for too long, or too excited over nothing, or not sleeping, or having trouble talking or moving, or not making sense when he talked, or violent. She must have seen the look in my eyes because she said, “Just call the number if something doesn’t seem right. Trust your instincts.” It felt good for her to say that, although I wondered about the boy with the cowlick and if he should trust his instincts, too, if everyone, no matter how dumb, young, or crazy, should be trusting instincts. The rosy woman with her adventures, the nurse with her crazy eyes and her white uniform. There were instincts all over the place. I looked up to see my mother leaving the building. A length of toilet paper struggled to escape from her jacket pocket.

  My dad said, “She sees you growing up and she’s afraid of losing you.”

  “She said that?”

  “Not exactly.”

  In the parking lot our car and truck were staring straight ahead like they weren’t ready to talk, either. My mom’s head was a rock hovering impossibly over her steering wheel. I decided to ride home with my dad because at least he was normal. I felt bad for about three seconds, putting the madman in the back for our first ride, but I enjoyed horrifying my mother by doing it. She glared at me from behind the window while she felt through her purse for her phone. Receipts, her falling-apart checkbook, an extra ring of like forty keys and I don’t know if there’s been forty things in her life that had locks, a separate falling-apart wallet for pictures, open dirty lifesavers and all kinds of crap that why doesn’t she just throw away, like a manual for our Mister Mixer, for god’s sake I’ve seen it in there, all these things I knew were bulging out of her purse and spilling into the car and I’m sure slid under the seat without her noticing because she was so busy glaring at me. I just hopped into the back of the truck, and my dad helped me fit my madman into his harness, which fit perfectly from what I could tell with him enveloped in his cloak. I clipped him to the tarp-ties and hopped into the cab. By that time, her car was gone. And my bag was still in there, too. I made peace with the possibility that I would sacrifice my best pants to my big day.

  At first, my madman didn’t seem sure how to position himself and he wouldn’t put his staff down. I watched by using the mirrors so he wouldn’t feel self-conscious. He definitely wobbled while we were backing up but then sat leaning against the cab and held the staff in his lap. He’d been quiet but helpful while we were fitting his harness on. I was so distracted I wasn’t taking it all in, and again, I felt bad about that, but he was helping in this very gentle/unobtrusive way, letting a hand creep out from his cloak and taking a strap and then passing it back through the other side. He didn’t say a thing or make a sound. I should have just put her out of my mind and really taken this opportunity, I mean it was our first impression, and as soon as we got going I felt so
bad I wanted to cry for wasting it, but the thing about madmen is most of their memories are fucked up, so you never know when anything you do or don’t do will stick, and they’ve been through so much that you kind of can’t go wrong anyway, as long as you’re not overall abusive or evil. As a group, they really know how to let things go, or else they’d be dead already. The truck had one of those sliding panels in the back window, so I could poke my head out every so often and see the top of his head, still hidden in his cloak, and the fabric blowing around him like a ghost but in reverse, heavy and black instead of filmy white, but still moving around as if there wasn’t anyone in there when of course there was.

  Then I watched my dad’s head bobbing along the strip of landscape. His cheek looked really soft, even with a not-great shaving job. The plan was we’d go home and let the madman just be by himself or rest in the shed while we had dinner as a family to celebrate. Then I would bring him his plate and I guess get to know him? That’s the part I hadn’t done so much imagining in anticipation. I was also having my doubts about being greeted at the house with any lasagna.

  “Whatever happened to your madman, Dad?” I knew it was a woman madman, and I knew it made him nervous to talk about it, and I knew he felt like he hadn’t always done the right thing. I’d heard all about my mother’s madmen, how she’d had one and then another and they’d both been cured, and she had a box tied with ribbons that had letters from them in it, and a certificate of appreciation from California, and invitations to come work for boards of things. The landscape was blurry and peripheral because I was looking at my dad, and I thought of the schoolhouse with the spinning weathervane out of time with everything else, and tried to remember if we’d passed it already, but I felt turned around trying to anchor myself in the recollection, and immediately after that it seemed irrelevant. Things were different, weren’t they? But for some reason my dad was still hesitating the way he always had about his experiences, and I just had this sudden image of him peeling back his face, revealing his own madness, and crying out: “I’ll tell you what happened to my madman! I married her!”

  Instead, he winced. He said, “Honey, it’s private. And very sad. And this is your big day.”

  I know you don’t show just anyone your madman, like sex, but even people who talk all the time about something that’s supposedly private are covering for something else. The more I was part of the whole adult world, the more turned out as one secret after another. My madman was still just a cloak and a stick, and oh yeah, we call him Armand. But there was my dad, who I’d supposedly known all my life, and what was he?

  If the world looked different so far, the difference was it didn’t look so symbolic. That is not what a girl wants when she comes of age.

  At the house, my mother’s car was in the driveway with its daytime running lights still on and both doors flopped open. Eyes rolled back, limbs splayed.

  “Take Armand to his shed,” said my father.

  He was terrified.

  * * *

  Back in the gallery of madmen, when my mother was yelling because of what I wanted, I looked at her eyes and tried to see them objectively. Their blueness, whiteness, redness. I tried to look at her eyeballs themselves—not the lids or brow or her crow’s feet or the other muscles in her face. I wanted to know how emotion could come shooting from her eyes the way it did. Maybe I couldn’t block out the rest of her face, maybe that was impossible, like pretending I wasn’t her kid would be impossible. Maybe the feelings came from the situation and not her body. Maybe the situation and her body were the same thing or I will never understand because I don’t have enough empathy.

  She said I was romanticizing. She said I’d like anyone if I knew the whole story. She said being free is not being free if you are in pain. She said madness is pain.

  I said, “I have pain.”

  She said, “It’s different for them because it’s more.”

  What do you want to be wearing when your father comes back from checking on your mother and you learn that this time your mother has actually killed herself? This is what I wondered, sitting in the cab of the truck in the driveway, looking at the familiar world, which had become so still. Sweatpants, I thought, because you can sleep in them and be in public in them. Cross-trainers because they have good grip and breathe. Layers on top: a long-sleeved shirt under a short-sleeved shirt because it’s flexible and I’ve seen pictures of her wearing that when I was a baby, also a fleece vest because I might have to sleep in the hospital with air conditioning, or, I kept thinking, you might have to be outside at night. I kept picturing that. Looking for her in the woods behind the house. Which one time I did do. My father was out of town and she had been crying for so many hours, I’d tried being nice, I’d tried leaving her alone, and I threatened to call dad and she said “Go ahead” in a way I took to mean if I called him, she’d finish herself off for sure. I even put my face up to hers and then screamed in a sudden burst like saying “boo!” but as loud and angry as possible and not funny. It freaked me out about myself when I screamed like that. Eventually it was like two in the morning and I was in my bed holding the phone, trying to decide what would be the moment I would call a hospital, trying to decide what the sign would be, and I heard the front door, and looked out the window, and saw her take off running into the woods. One time our cat had gone missing and years later I found her collar and her bones in the woods while I was walking, and then that night we all went into the woods to bury her, with candles, stones we’d chosen, and a baby tree, and it was beautiful. When my mother took off into the woods, I hesitated to follow her. I had this image of a beautiful candlelight thing and then just, I don’t know, peace, being on my own.

  But I did follow her into the woods. It was so dark but I found her curled up on the trail by a fallen mossy log. She was covered in dirt and not crying anymore. She came with me, which I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t, but for some reason I didn’t even have to touch her, she just came with me. At the house she said, “Thank you for saving my life,” and I let her take a bath, even though I was scared of what might happen in there, but I told myself to stop being dramatic, she was my mother and she could take a bath. Maybe I believed that I had saved her life, and that’s what let me go to sleep and next day tell my father a version of it when he came home that was true but unemotional in a way that let him not make a big deal out of it and let me think it wasn’t a big deal after all. But even then I knew it wasn’t me that saved her life. It wasn’t about me. I was just there while she was maybe going to die and maybe not, and then she just didn’t.

  I got out of the truck and stood in the driveway, unhooking Armand’s harness. He scrambled to his feet under his cloak and used his staff of madness to steady himself on the ridged bed. I reached out my hand—the idea was he could take it and walk along to the tailgate—and there was a moment when he seemed to be deciding between dropping his stick to take my hand or not. It was impossible to know for sure with the cloak, but I had the distinct impression that he might have only one arm.

  The sun was starting to set. The house was behind us. He didn’t take my hand, just made his way to the end of the truck, and I lowered the tailgate, and then he sat on it. His legs dangled. I glanced to see if I could see his feet, if they would be in boots, or shoes, or sandals, or rags, or nothing. If he would have feet. But his cloak floated below them, and only the staff poked out. I hopped up onto the tailgate with him, careful not to touch him, and the truck rocked like a boat, and so, like a lookout at the prow of a ship of fools, I put my hand to my forehead and squinted toward the sun into the distance. I could spy with my little eye the roof of the shed, partway down the hill, and sparks like tiny fires in the low water in the creek, and the woods like a curtain with everything beyond darker than ever, sucking up the light. Soon the sun was setting enough that it was past the time when the pieces of the world are sharp and distinct from each other and on to when everything becomes one fuzzy mass. Our ey
es saw and then didn’t see the forms we knew were in there, and then saw again for a second, and then were just making it up. Okay, that’s what my eyes were doing, anyhow. At some point I was going to have to say something to him, and if he had a voice he was probably going to say something back. Maybe something would change then. The sun was so close to set, but it hadn’t set all the way. Instead of saying something, I thought about the weathervane, spinning, because I wanted the moment to last forever.

  GODZILLA VERSUS THE SMOG MONSTER

  Patrick is fourteen, this is earth, it’s dark, it’s cold out, he’s American, he’s white, straight, not everyone has cell phones, he’s sitting on the carpet of the TV room on the third floor holding the remote in both hands in his lap. He’s sitting with one leg tucked under the other on the deep shag oval rug, his back against an enormous ottoman. Other elements of the modular sofa orbit him. It’s a solid, stable position. On the second floor and on the other side of the house, behind a door off the hall that overlooks the living room, his parents sleep in a high walnut bed, under a moss green comforter. A tabby cat curls into his mother’s hair. Patrick has seen his mother asleep with the cat like that, practically suctioned. Against his will, it grosses him out a little.

  In the video, the Smog Monster, a wad of wet-looking gray cotton with static red eyes, has not yet met Godzilla. It hardly matters that it eventually meets Godzilla because in the end all that Patrick will remember about the movie is a scene that’s not actually in the movie. It’s something he figured must be happening offscreen based on the girls in their gym outfits collapsing and four men playing cards, incinerated. He remembers how the toxic, billowing Smog Monster sweeps through the sky and, as it passes between the white-gray sun and the gray-gray earth, its shadow passes over millions of people whose faces are like beads. Flesh blows from the people like sand, leaving millions of skeletons coating the hills, dead faces like the pattern in a printed fabric, a city-sized, TV-sized sheet stretched flat. He’s not Jewish but he’s seen old films on cable of mass Holocaust graves, and the shot he imagines could be lifted from one as a sick, low-budget solution; he pictures the Japanese filmmakers scurrying like the scientists in the movie, but with armfuls of unspooling film instead of fists of sloshing beakers. If he’d been born just a few years later, he might not even know about film. This Holocaust landscape, the bodies making a pattern you could turn into wallpaper, is what he imagines whenever there are reports of genocide coming from the kitchen radio or one of the televisions that dot the house. But later it’s all blended up with this dumb video that moved him in the night.