In November, Anna and I went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which has nothing to do with the Jurassic period and could only in the loosest of definitions be considered a “museum.” Really, it’s a converted home full of a rich dude’s oddities with seemingly unrelated quotes from poets and philosophers lining the walls. In the foyer, I ran my hand over the floral wallpaper beside an exhibit of miniature houses and said to Anna, “This place is haunted.” Los Angeles makes you believe in so many things, the supernatural inevitably follows.
In the spirit of weird haunted energy, I suggested we get our Tarot read by the nearest psychic. So after a quick Google search and call, we knocked on a second-story apartment and the psychic named Ginger said to come in. She was on the couch, doing her nails. “One at a time,” she said, looking between us. Anna and I agreed that I’d go first.
She sat me down and I asked to charge my phone. She plugged it in on the kitchen counter and walked back to me. “Now don’t be mad at me if I tell you something you don’t want to hear,” she said. “I’m just the messenger. My mother was a psychic, and my grandmother was a psychic, so I’m a third-generation psychic.” That’s generally how three generations work, I thought.
She laid down metallic-colored cards across the table, each one overlapping. “Diabetes runs in your family.” She said, looking at me. I briefly considered lying to make her feel better then decided against it. “No.” “High blood pressure?” “Yes,” I said. 1-1.
“We’re delving into your past now. You’ve lost people.” She looked at me, waiting. I didn’t reply. “A long time ago?” “Yes,” I said, unimpressed. “On your mother’s side?” Not bad, I thought, but considering there’s a fifty-fifty chance—1.5-1.
“She misses you very much. Your grandmother.” At that, all credibility went down the drain. My mother’s mother barely gave a shit about me before the Alzheimer’s and certainly not after. I’m certain she’s still haunting the Evanston house, complaining about how they tore down the screened-in patio and gave away her milk glass collection. And anyway, she’d never be caught dead or alive anywhere near Culver City.
Ginger read my love lines and said I’d be married, have four children, and be wildly successful. “All boys,” she said. I don’t know the future, but if I’m ever willing to subject myself to four births, just know I’m not mentally well and somebody should institutionalize me immediately. I thanked her, paid the sixty bucks, and sent Anna up.
I half-hoped I’d have a spiritual experience, tap into the unseen world of California. Live here long enough and you’ll likely encounter one perfect psychic, one perfect reading that makes you cry and reaffirms your faith in life. “Most are just salesman,” they say. “But there are a handful of real ones.”
In Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, Joyce depicts Stephen in the throes of God. “Gradually, as his soul was enriched with spiritual knowledge, he saw the whole world forming one vast symmetrical expression of God’s power and love. Life became a divine gift for every moment and sensation of which, were it even the sight of a single leaf hanging on the twig of a tree, his soul should praise and thank the Giver… So entire and unquestionable was this sense of the divine meaning in all nature granted to his soul that he could scarcely understand why it was in any way necessary that he should continue to live.”
For years, I’ve tried to relive the feeling I had at thirteen being baptized in a kiddy pool and wearing a silver ring naming God as my husband. Or at six when I saw fairies in dancing leaves, back when it didn’t feel so silly to believe in magic. But no dogma or scripture or Christian rock or psychics can make me feel how I did at thirteen or six. To live fully is to push heaven aside, but if belief in an idea is strong enough, does it become real?
In Quakeland, the protagonist dreams of a tsunami so a tsunami comes. She dreams her best friend dies and so she does. I dream the world will end long after my children are dead. Does this mean it will? I dream of my mother in Ixtapa, hair shorn to her temple, diving off the rocks into the ocean. I dream of her beside the Cadillac, round glasses perched on a symmetrical face. Somewhere in my dreamworld, the Cadillac is growing stag horns.
Sometimes my dreams are perfect reconstructions of the real thing. Like my father’s convertible idling in the Northbrook driveway, hydrangeas glued to the body from the rain. Or my childhood best friend from five doors down racing down that driveway in the middle of the night, having just escaped her father and left her mother in the path of soaring chairs. The dream usually ends there.
It’s only in the morning that I go through the whole thing—how I took my friend to my room and we played with the stuffed animals under covers. How we told ourselves a flood was coming while the police retrieved her brother and sister from the home. At the time, I wasn’t able to picture the chairs hitting anyone, just flying through the air in slow-motion gravity. Sometimes I still dream of dining chairs floating into space.
Last year, I tried to devote myself to only sharing “pure” writing—the kind made by and out of love, but limiting my public practice to palatable emotions has felt restrictive and frequently dishonest. I don’t want to pretend I’ve curated my mind into some haven of artistic purity.
Blake and Siken might have written about love and God, but what about hate? Where is hate supposed to go? When I say my hate runs deep, do you understand? Sometimes it presses one spot of my mind, luxuriously reverberating like screams in some sick bacchanal—my hate is frequently dramatic, sometimes violent. Do you understand why I sometimes need it like a lover?
After learning the ex who liked to hit me was engaged, vivid dreams (nightmares) started up. I’ve been told she’s a musician and he now dresses like a middle-class Christian undergrad and frequents Rock Rose in The Domain. “Does she know?” I thought. The whole thing still makes me burn with hate—hate how he could turn out so normal. Hate that he could become so fucking ordinary and happy.
I can’t bring myself to picture him like that. Even in my dreams, he can’t help but look sickeningly beautiful, exactly how he was when I loved him.
It begins in a dive bar in Glendale. I’m nursing a drink, talking to faceless bodies, when I look across the room and see him. Time slows and something in me goes cold. I’m frozen but somehow moving, suddenly beside him. Without knowing what I’m doing, I crack my beer over the bar and stick the shard into his neck. He sees me, then—a look of recognition, surprise? He falls into my arms, reeking of iron and cigarettes. I press down, holding the wound together. Red gurgles. I should have washed my hands, I think. Somebody somewhere screams.
I hold him together, everything slippery and thick. I am not crying. I’m keeping you alive, I think. Stay alive. Somehow he hears this thought. He hears me and looks up, afraid and pleading. Like this, it’s just us. Nothing is forgiven and I wake up as sirens approach. Love is big, I thought after the first dream, but so is hate.
Triangles form—dreams, memory, and? God, hell, and? Me, him, and? Seventeen and twenty-five, and? Girl, person, and? Yesterday, now, and? The past used to seem so amorphous, fuzzy and dark. Emotion leaked memory everywhere but I see it all so clearly now. I don’t understand how it took me so long. I see it now in startling clarity—I never had to stop hating at all.
In one of Lord Byron’s more honest moments, he wrote about his sister Augusta: “I loved her and destroyed her.” When I’m the most lucid, the most like myself, I can regard power and my fist doesn’t twitch to close around it. In my best moments, I don’t feel tempted to play God, but those aren’t often. Hate, love, and? And?
I have to believe it was love. I have to. I can be anything you want, but never ask me to write a damn thing. Baby, where the fuck have you been?