Kamikaze Lust (9 page)

“Dylan Thomas?” said the A.D.

“Dylan Bob.”

“
The times they are a’changing,
” I said.

“Precisely,” Alexis said. “Anyway, we’ve got to run.”

A short goodbye, and I was left standing in front of Zipless Pictures, my arms stuffed with tapes and the draft of an autobiographical essay Alexis was writing for a snappy feminist journal called
Good Witch.
As I skimmed the piece in the shifting rays of sun, the world of Alexis Calyx spurted into my veins. Curiosity, once peaked, was my favorite high. Some reporters got off on the rush of breaking a hot story, and yes, I had to admit it was trippy knowing that people sitting down to their morning coffee would gawk a
holy shit!
gaze over your words. But I was a process junky, more excited by travel than the final destination. By the time I finished a story I was already tracking down the next; rarely did I read my own work in print. One might say I suffered from fear of little death syndrome.

And what of its cure? Years cavorting with post-Freudians—the Kleinian or Lacanian crowd—at one hundred fifty dollars a forty-five minute hour? I don’t think so. I simply went on believing that each story might be the one that stopped me dead in my tracks. Forever waiting for the big O.

A few days later, on a crisp Halloween morning, I drove out to Bay Ridge with the
Docudeath
tape and a brand new television set. It was an early Chanukah gift for Aunt Lorraine, a big, fancy model with a built-in VCR. Over the years, after I’d moved to Miami and started making money, I occasionally bought Aunt Lorraine and Mom expensive gifts to assuage my guilt for leaving. I wasn’t about to let the strike break me of this habit, at least not while I still had credit cards and Aunt Lorraine was stuck with a set so old the figures swelled and released as if they were controlled by invisible sound waves. Aunt Lorraine said she didn’t mind, that she felt as if she were watching life through a kaleidoscope. That was when she could still make it downstairs for anything important, cop shows or
Press Talk.

I paid two boys who lived across the street five dollars each to carry the set inside and up to Aunt Lorraine’s bedroom. Rowdy followed silently behind, eyeing them nervously as they dragged the set across the rug and over to the foot of Aunt Lorraine’s bed.

“Wow!” The smaller boy jumped back upon noticing Aunt Lorraine, who was asleep with a dry, white tongue hanging against her lower lip, and her eyelids twitching. “How’d her face get so puffy?”

“Cancer,” I said.

“Oh,” he nodded sagely, as if he should have known from her greenish skin tone and the IV tube plugged into her arm. He nudged his brother out of the room, and I realized it was the tube that sent jitters so deep inside my stomach I couldn’t eat for hours after I’d been here.

Aunt Lorraine had once been the most vibrant woman I knew: always reading and talking and asking questions long before Alexis Calyx had even left Bensonhurst. Who was the greatest American president? Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Why did so many Nazis flee to Argentina? Because that’s where the Jews were hiding. Until recently, I always knew the answers she wanted to hear.

Apparently, she’d had a feeling about the cancer for some time but kept it to herself. Only when the lump in her breast grew as big as a golf ball did she acquiesce to seeing a doctor, who turned her over to an oncologist. Both of her breasts were removed; she underwent chemotherapy. But it was too late. About a month ago, they found that the cancer had infiltrated her bones.

Mom said Aunt Lorraine’s bedroom was starting to smell like a nursing home, a peculiar statement coming from a woman who never stepped foot inside of a nursing home. When her own mother lay dying at Sunset Estates, and I sent her plane tickets to come to Miami, each time Mom succumbed to one of her fainting spells and was unable to visit. Death, Mom said. She knew its scent and it made her nervous. It also gave her cause to tap a mother lode of anti-depressants and spa in New Jersey with her gentleman friend, Hyman Hogan. Thankfully, Rowdy was around to clean Aunt Lorraine’s commode and change her IV unit or bandages when the nurse wasn’t there.

Looking at him sitting on the edge of Aunt Lorraine’s bed with his clammy face and those big yellow stains under the arms of his T-shirt, I thought it odd that at the age of forty my balding, dim-witted brother had become Florence Nightingale.

He caught me staring at him. “How’d you know about Beta site anyway?”

“The what?” I squinted as if focusing on him might give me some insight into his world.

“See it’s got the test scanner on it.” He walked over to me and pointed to the panel of buttons on the television set. “You know like in the supermarket how they got those scanners, right? Well, a lot of people don’t know this, but they can read your brain with them, but only if you got implants. They started with dogs, and then they moved on to people, prisoners first. That’s where I got mine. In prison.”

“Do I have one?”

“Nah, only people who been down by the government,” he said. He walked back to the bed and sat down, bugging his eyes back and forth between Aunt Lorraine and me. “It’s going to blow up when she sleeps,” he said.

“Don’t worry, I know how to hook up a TV.” Despite the various instruction manuals and stray wires all over the floor, I knew what I was doing. It was an ego thing that I had a handle on technology. My father was the autodidactic electrician, after all.

Rowdy laughed hysterically, his mouth open so wide I could see all of his missing teeth. “No, I mean Aunt Lorraine.” He held both of his hands over his stomach. “Her face blows up when she sleeps.” I had to laugh along with him. “Then, she starts shrinking and by the end of the day she’s a skeleton like the faces they got in the drug store, you know, for Halloween. Oh man, she’s so sick…” his voice tapered off, and I watched a tear drip from the corner of his eye.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No way, man. You don’t know.” His voice was getting contentious.

“Please. Let’s not fight about it.”

“I’m the one who takes care of her,” he cried. “You don’t know nothing!”

“What’s it she don’t know that you think you know?” Mom said. I had no idea how long she’d been standing in the doorway watching me hook up the television set.

“Hello, Mom,” I said.

She smiled slyly beneath her creamy brown bouffant and walked toward me, turning her cheek for me to kiss it. She smelled sickly sweet, like Poison or Opium. “And what’s this?” she said.

“It’s a television.”

Rowdy was flustered. “Both of you don’t know dogshit, I’m the one who’s here all the time.”

Mom ignored him. She’d been jealous of Rowdy since he became a credentialed schizophrenic, robbing her of the family’s Most Mentally Ill title. I thought she had it all wrong; his illness, if anything, gave credence to her own.

“I know
what
it is,” Mom said. “How did it get here?”

“I bought it for Aunt Lorraine.”

“Rachel’s some big spender now. No job, but she’s buying TVs and you, what do you care? You’re off in Atlantic City—”

“Shut up, Rowdy.”

“Atlantic City?” I said. “I thought you hated gambling.”

“We’re not talking about me.”

“They go for that Merv Griffin stuff. You know, Ma likes the shows.”

“Look, there’s nothing wrong with me spending some time with my boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend,” I said. “You’re almost sixty-five years old, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Maybe she’s jealous,” Rowdy said. I ignored him this time.

“Look, don’t you blame me that you can’t keep a man,” Mom said. “I’m sick of all your projecting.”

“What do mean, projecting? I don’t project!”

Just then, Aunt Lorraine’s eyes opened. I jumped up onto the bed with her and took her hand. Though frail and bony, it felt like one of Ethan’s suits, cut from the most expensive silk. “How’s the patient?”

“Lousy. They’ve got me on more pills than…look at them…” she motioned to a tray of plastic containers on the side table, “red, yellow, blue, I’ll tell you something. I stopped taking them.”

“She thinks she’s her own doctor already,” Rowdy said.

“You really should take your pills.”

“I’m sick of being a Jell-O head,” she said, then looked over my shoulder. “What the heck is that thing?”

“She says it’s a television set,” Mom said.

“I can see, but why? I liked my old TV.”

I let go of her hand and huffed. “Forget it, I’m leaving—”

“No no, honey, I love it.” Aunt Lorraine winked at me, eyes glistening like the old days. “Come, come, did you bring my tape?”

I nodded, standing up to get the tape out of my bag.

“What’s it she’s got there?” Mom asked.

“Oh, you know, it’s the death video I wanted to see,” Aunt Lorraine said.

“The what!” Mom arched her eyebrows, Gloria Swansonlike as usual.

“The one from the television program—Rachel knows that Doctor Kaminsky.”

“She knows him,” Mom said. “You know him, that monster?”

“I was covering him, I told you that.”

“You did not!” Mom said. “And why do we have to watch it, I don’t know which one of you is crazier than the other. Have some respect for the dead, would you?”

Aunt Lorraine shrugged. The
Docudeath
video burned against my fingertips. I’d already seen it once, and though it was tastefully done in a tear-jerking, save-the-children sort of way, there was no doubt that it was a step-by-step guide to suicide.

First, however, we experimented with the television set. I showed Aunt Lorraine how to flip the channels, program the split screen, set the clock and timer. No flashing 12:00 in this bedroom. Excited as Aunt Lorraine was, it was the video she’d been waiting for.

I dropped the tape in the VCR and looked at Mom. “Are you all right?”

She shrugged this time.

“Look, Stella,” Aunt Lorraine said. “If you don’t want to watch, go downstairs.”

“Leave now or forever hold your peace,” Rowdy said.

“I don’t like it at all,” Mom said. She pulled up the chair next to Aunt Lorraine’s bed and sat down.

Aunt Lorraine, clinging to the remote, pressed play, but instead of Ida and Marvin, what appeared on the twenty-five-inch, precision-image screen was a couple of women, one lying naked on a wet, ceramic tile floor, the other, dressed in a French maid’s uniform, caressing with red fingernails the passive woman’s stomach, moving up, and up, and up, following slowly with her mouth until she came to the woman’s nipples, hard as finely cut diamonds, and her tongue wended its way between them, in long, lulling licks that caused the supine woman to scream out above the stringy soundtrack. Off to the side, a tan, mustachioed man sporting button-fly bell-bottoms and a bad haircut watched intently, his dark eyes conveying a sense of longing so real I found myself identifying with him.

“Ida and Marvin must have had some life,” Aunt Lorraine said. Her attention was fixed to the screen.

I jumped up to stop the tape.

“Is this your idea of a joke?” Mom said.

“No, it’s not a joke.” I turned to face her. “And don’t look at me like I’m some kind of pervert. It’s research, for a job. I brought the wrong tape.”

“Matter of opinion,” Aunt Lorraine said. I frantically searched the top of the TV set for the off button. Couldn’t find it.

“What do you mean, work?” Mom said. “What kind of work are you doing?”

“Stop the tape! Where’s the damn remote?”

“She got it,” Rowdy pointed to Aunt Lorraine. He smiled, “Man-O-Manischevitz, Rachel, I never knew you were so cool.”

I rolled my eyes. “You can shut it off, Aunt Lorraine… Aunt Lorraine?”

No use. She was hooked. I continued to search for another off button.

“Man, this is classic,” Rowdy murmured. “Must be at least twenty years old.”

“How do you know that?” I asked him.

“Shit, everyone knows
Sensurround.
”

I took a few steps backward. So this was the infamous
Sensurround,
starring Alexis Calyx and Robbie Rod, her ex-husband, who had also directed the film. It was a parody of those seventies disasters like
Earthquake
and
The Towering Inferno.
I remembered the poster Alexis had hanging on her wall. Then, a fragment from her effusive, confessional essay: “
the sexual choreography runs so close to the apocalypse.
”

With the world crashing to its grand finale, desire reigned supreme. Everything was sex. Raw sex. Desperate sex. Slippery, condomless, big-death/little-death sex. The kind of sex I’d never had. The kind of sex I craved.

On screen, the French maid kissed the naked woman, whom I now recognized to be Alexis. A storm thunderbolted outside the window next to them. The man (Robbie Rod) was naked, too. His penis was absurdly large, the biggest I’d ever seen.

A flash of silver lightning smashed through the window, sending shards of glass sparkling through the air. The music grew somber. Crescendo speeding up with an accent on the horns. The French maid was gone. Alexis and Robbie Rod lay together, his back to the floor and she on top of him. His toes curled against her right knee cap. The gesture seemed too intimate for this kind of movie, for any kind of movie.