Slow Funeral Read online

  “I’ve met a man and we’re going camping this weekend.”

  The social worker looked like she wanted to call in huge orderlies but simply nodded and said, “Remember how exploitative men can be of someone as sick as you are. Monday, then.”

  Prolixin, what a technological alternative to being powerful, the voice from Bracken County said inside her brain. The social worker would call the voice thought insertion, a symptom that her illness wasn’t being properly controlled.

  “A friend says the American Psychiatric Association is redefining schizophrenia,” Douglas said Friday at 5:30, as Maude helped him load the car with the two backpacks and a large umbrella tent they’d use if they stayed in a car camping site. “Too many psychiatrists out in the boonies overdiagnose it. He suspects for insurance purposes.”

  Maude was annoyed that Douglas had talked about her to a friend, but then he was concerned. “One can pass as schiz even in cities.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to stop this? I’d rather you ran some magic scam with your wack housemates than be on welfare. If you deny you’re sick, they’ll wear you down until you think you really are sick and then you’ll really be fucked. You ought to see my friend. You have MediCal.” And tell him about the voice calling me home?

  Douglas checked over the equipment, the extra oil, and the bottle of antifreeze. She asked, “Where are we going?”

  “I’ve got maps for the Sierras, for Mount Tamalpais, for Santa Cruz redwood territory. What’s your pleasure?”

  “Something different. I’d like to see the ocean.” In case I have to leave the Pacific behind soon.

  “We could go to Point Reyes. I don’t have maps for that, but it’s pretty hard to get lost with the ocean on both sides.”

  “Point Reyes, then.”

  “The Sierras are wilder.”

  “I haven’t carried such a large pack before.”

  Douglas drove through San Francisco so they could pick up some cannoli and fresh basil and then they crossed the Golden Gate Bridge with the sun setting into the Pacific fog. Maude stared at the landscape, the bridge across it.

  “To me, it’s just another city,” Douglas said. “I grew up in Albany, just up from Berkeley. It’s always interesting seeing it through the eyes of an Easterner.”

  “That’s kinda why I wanted you to come back with me to Virginia.” She felt him stiffen and was sorry for her insistence.

  “Would they think you were crazy back home? Do they know?”

  “They might, to both questions.”

  “Were you diagnosed there?”

  “No. But I’m scared to go back.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t go back.”

  Maude sighed and they were silent for the duration of the sunset. Doug said, “We don’t have enough light to hike anywhere. We could stop at an inn, a motel.”

  “I’d rather not spend your money like that.”

  He looked at her and smiled. “But I’d have to spend my money to go with you to Virginia?”

  “We could drive.” He has a job, fool!

  “What’s the nearest airport?”

  “Roanoke.”

  “Tonight, we’ll stop at a hotel.”

  Maude remembered the Eagles’ song about California hotels where one could never leave. Magic seemed to bring them to a Victorian hotel surrounded by dark bush and whistling fog. A slice of Bracken County right here, Maude thought as Douglas got out of the car and checked in. Probably as Mr. and Mrs. Douglas…

  He came back to the car, followed by a small wiry man who could have been an Aztec. Douglas picked up his pack and the man picked up hers. Maude followed them into the lobby, which was done in holly inlays on a dark wood and red plush. The place seemed ritualistic. Maude saw what was either a Chac Mool or a metate standing on stone legs by the fireplace, its slightly dished top patched where the stone oval had been cracked in half between the legs. Would a woman have a metate that fragile to grind corn on every day?

  “Strange place,” she said to Douglas.

  “I love these little inns up in the hills,” he said. “Just right for getaways.”

  The man walked behind them as silently as if he stalked them. For a moment Maude had forgotten he was there, but when she turned her head to look at Douglas, the man popped up in her peripheral vision. Maybe I am paranoid, Maude thought, or maybe he makes you forget him to seem a more discrete host?

  The room had its own fireplace and a huge double canopied bed. A stained sink with two taps marred the room, no, jolted Maude out of the Victorian seductions of the rest of the room. “The toilet is in the hall,” the small man said. He sounded like the owner, not a bellhop. Douglas fished in his trouser pocket, but the man frowned slightly and left.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Douglas said. Maude almost asked if he’d brought women here often, but she realized he hadn’t seen this particular inn before, much less the room. She nodded. He went on to say, “But the sink is an anachronism.”

  “Better than a well and wood stove.”

  “When I was in college, I used to piss in sinks. I outgrew that.” He went to the door and looked both ways, another sign that he hadn’t been here before. Maude feared how the Aztec would treat her if he knew they weren’t married. Douglas spotted the toilet sign and went down the hall.

  Maude looked around the room. It seemed to look back. “You’re very pretty,” Maude said to it, “but what do you do?”

  Seductions. The room didn’t mind Douglas’s engineering. Here wasn’t logical. Maude knew there were other magics on the continent, but this place felt like Bracken County.

  Bring us the head of an engineer.

  Douglas came back and said, “The toilet is an old water closet. The chain is brass and the pull is wood.”

  “And no steel at all,” Maude said. She looked around the room and noticed that the room was plastered, the sink faucets also brass. Magic didn’t like iron because what humans did with it cut magic’s power.

  But then Maude saw that the floor was nailed and she relaxed, even though she knew magic and steel weren’t utter enemies. She opened her bags and found her bathrobe and towels and went to the bathroom herself.

  The shower was completely tiled with shower heads not just overhead but along the wall, three of them at shoulder, waist, and knee heights. The water control device was contemporary—pull out and turn the pointer to the mix of hot and cold—but the brass shower heads themselves seemed older. Did the Cretans at Knossos have showers along with their running water? Maude wondered as she soaped her body with the hotel soap.

  She rinsed and turned off the spray, knowing she’d have to leave Berkeley now. The identity she borrowed from the dead Ohio baby was compromised. Maude looked in the mirror, almost afraid she’d see something other than herself looking back at her.

  The mirror was fogged. Maude didn’t wipe it off but went back to her room.

  Douglas’s eyes were huge, the pupils dilated as though belladonna worked on them. He said, “The bed has real linen sheets.”

  Maude felt her cunt grow heavy. Seductions. She told herself that she needed an outsider to come back with her to Bracken County. The soap, the sheets. Rosemary branches as large as Maude’s forearm burned in the fireplace.

  Douglas rolled a condom over his cock.

  Good, Maude thought. She then wondered why; the first night he hadn’t. Or had he? “Why?” she asked.

  “Sorry, but I’m not drunk now.”

  Oh, yes, you are.

  Her cunt pulled his condom off. He rolled off her and stared at the ceiling, breathing very hard.

  Maude shuddered and pulled the condom out.

  “I’ll trust you,” he said.

  Don’t, she almost said as she fell asleep. They both woke up in the dark and screwed again, fiercely. Maude felt her magic stirring.

  In the morning, they were almost shy with each other. He turned his back to her as he pulled on a robe and went to shower. When he came back
, he said, “If you don’t mind, let’s just do a day hike and come back here tonight.” As they packed rucksacks, Maude sensed that he was almost afraid of her body, glancing at her hips when she wasn’t looking. They left the heavy packs and tents behind in the room.

  “I really like this hotel,” Douglas said on the stairs. “I hope you aren’t disappointed that we’re not going camping.”

  Whatever, Maude thought, we’re out beyond America now. She wondered if the hotel was built directly over the fault, electric effects from rock against rock responsible for the feel of the place. Or was it geomancy, rock with powers of its own?

  The Aztec was sweeping when they came down the stairs. He smiled when Douglas said they’d be back that night.

  They got in Douglas’s car and drove onto Point Reyes’s ancient granite. Douglas said, “It’s old granite, like the Farallons, that won’t erode away like most sedimentary rocks.” The road crossed a cow barrier and Maude saw holsteins watching them through the fog.

  “Like the Blue Ridge,” Maude said. The mountains could almost be this foggy.

  They parked the car at Drake’s Beach. Maude saw seals swimming parallel to the shore. “After the sun’s been up longer, we’ll come back and look for jadeite,” Douglas said.

  They found a trail and began walking. After a while, Maude heard sea mammals hooting and moaning down below. They were at the cliff face. Douglas said, “Sometimes you see sea elephants, when there’s no fog.”

  The cliff could be undercut, Maude thought, a fear at her spine; the land could move. She moved back and said, “What if we’re here when the earthquake comes?”

  “What ‘the earthquake’? We’ll always have earthquakes here. It’s your first big one that you Easterners think of as ‘the earthquake.’ We Californians…” He stopped as though he just realized she might think he was being rude or bragging. Or perhaps he was thinking about following her to Virginia. Me or my vacuum cleaner cunt.

  He backed away from the cliff as though he felt something. Maude wondered if she was sensitive enough to the earth’s electricity to pick up tension rising between the two plates. He said, “I just realized the cliff face could be undercut and we haven’t had a quake in a while.”

  Maude said, “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  The land seemed unsteady as they walked through it. Shortly after noon, they were back at the beach. Douglas showed Maude a piece of jadeite, a small green lump that looked as though it had been tumbled in a jewelry drum, but not with the final polishing rouge. She bent over the sea wrack and found her own stones. “What are the red ones?” she asked.

  “Jasper.”

  So she picked them all up—jasper, jadeite, and the occasional black stone. Some of them looked like small animal brains.

  “Are you tired?” he asked, meaning, do you want to go back to the hotel and fuck?

  “Maybe there’s a concert somewhere or some musicians who’ll be practicing tonight that we could drop in on,” Maude said, meaning, we can’t spend all the time in bed. She tried to brush the sand off her legs—tiny fragments of jadeite and more common silicates.

  They headed back to the hotel without discussing further what to do next and passed the Aztec who was working in the front flowers. The sand seemed to have left a jadeite grit trail between the beach and the hotel.

  “Jade was a sky stone,” Maude said. “The Chinese made it into flat rings.”

  “This is jadeite and the Mayans liked it,” Douglas said. He laid her back on the bed, swept her shirt open, and dropped pebbles on her belly, watching them bounce.

  “Do you really believe in magic?” she asked, feeling around her for the stones. I don’t want a stone bruise.

  He said, “I haven’t met anyone truly sane and competent who really believed in magic. I wish there was magic, though.”

  Oh, well. “You’d like to bury me in jadeite?”

  “I like to watch them bounce.” He dropped another one. “I’d like to make love to you surrounded by stones.”

  “The reality is they bruise.”

  He stopped and found all the stones, then began to kiss and undress her. Maude felt like the stones were watching, as the seals had watched them looking for stones.

  “The seals,” she said.

  “What?”

  She couldn’t talk right then, and forgot about the seals.

  “What about the seals?” he asked after they’d slept for a moment.

  “I wonder why they watched us so intently.”

  “Probably wondered what we were finding to eat. We probably looked like we were foraging for food.”

  The stones gleamed on the nightstand. The sky beyond the window was clear with half the moon visible.

  Maude wanted to leave the hotel, take Douglas back to his engineering and meticulous kitchen, and go somewhere completely flat, the Midwest, a city like Omaha, with logic and no magic stones, no jadeite, no staurolite stone crosses and Xs.

  “So you don’t really believe in magic?” she said. “What if I said someone put a sex charm on us?”

  “I’d say it was a great metaphor,” he said, stretching his body. “But I have been thinking that maybe I could take a few days off and go with you back to Virginia.”

  Maude sat up on the bed and looked at the stones. One, the size of her first thumb joint, seemed the king stone. She picked it up and said, “Let’s think it over in Berkeley. I’ve got to…” What would he think if he knew she had a safety deposit box with $3000 in cash in it? “I’ll be driving in the MiniCooper.”

  “You could pick me up at your airport later. I’ll just be staying a few days. I could come down for Thanksgiving.” Soap, stones, nakedness, and linen—a trap to catch a man in. “Yes, you could come later after I figure out what’s going on.

  3

  * * *

  CROSSING THE REAL

  Sunday night in the Karmachila house, Maude and Douglas sat around a table with all the magic groupies while Susan threw coins for an I Ching reading. Douglas smiled as the coins gave Maude’s journey all solid black lines. Susan looked up the hexagram in the paperback manual and said, “First hexagram, powerful but with a minor reservation.”

  Doug didn’t have to look it up, Maude realized. She wondered what divination the jadeite and jasper pebbles would make for Douglas.

  The housemates assumed Maude would be back, would get into farming, would come back with fabulous stories. “A friend of mine lives near there,” one of the boys said.

  Above the quartz vein that kept his kind out of Bracken County, Maude thought. “Give me his address and I’ll look him up.” She handed him her address book.

  “I don’t know if he’s there or on Vashon Island up in Washington,” the boy said, scribbling.

  Doug seemed fascinated by the crystals hung in the windows, the tarot deck by the telephone. Maude asked, “So what are they great metaphors for?”

  “Humans need ritual,” Douglas said.

  “Yeah,” Susan said, hugging him. Maude wondered if he would see Susan after he came back to Berkeley. Maybe he won’t leave Bracken County.

  Douglas stayed the night. The next morning, as Maude went out with him to his car, she saw the older black psychotic, the Reverend Julian Springer, watching her. He looked like a part-time Bracken County preacher in his shabby suit, one of those working-class men called to holiness, fighting the witches with magic almost equally as malignant. Led by possessed ministers, each little church’s ten or so parishioners locked themselves into ideosyncratic views of the divine, convinced they, not the church next door, had the true vision.

  Maude nodded at him. He looked from her to Douglas and back. Maude felt nervous, as though the man would inform on her. So what? Whoring, he’d said. She kissed Doug good-bye for now, his phone number safely in several places.

  The black man’s legs worked in tiny jerks as though he were a robot. He walked one step toward them as Douglas got in his car, then away. Maude looked back but the black m
an had disappeared in a mass of suits commuting to work.

  After Douglas pulled away, Maude took the stones they’d gathered and threw them, stared patterns into them, reading her own mind. She was deeply ambivalent. One way, Douglas linked in with the technological insurgents; the other way, he died. But Maude felt relieved that she couldn’t see him coming back to California. She swept the stones up and gave them to Susan, not wanting a link between Point Reyes and Bracken County.

  As Maude packed the car, she looked for the black man, but couldn’t see him. About now, Maude realized as she looked at a clock, they’re waiting for me to come to group. She looked around at the agaves and rosemary plants, and remembered mountain laurel and rhododendrons. So much for here. She drove to her safety deposit box in Walnut Creek.

  Everything worked so well for her—the sky was sunny, the views from the hills beautiful, the bank clerk who took her back to the safety deposit boxes utterly unsuspicious, no paranoid vibes. The clerk left Maude in a privacy booth. Maude opened the box and saw her money. She counted it, all $3000.

  “I won’t be needing the box any more,” she told the clerk, handing her the key.

  Clear skies and a drive over the Sierras. Maude wondered if the high passes could be snow-blocked this early in October. No, just cold.

  The MiniCooper was crammed. Maude sat down beside her backpack and looked east for a second, then turned the key in the ignition. We’re off to see the wizard…

  Going back into the old world. The superhighway ran up the Sierras by Lake Tahoe, through the forest into scrub. A hundred and fifty years earlier, the crossing killed people. Only freak weather could kill now.

  The Sierras dropped off rapidly to the east, a scarp face from archaic earthquakes off the Richter scale. The air became drier. Nevada and Utah, two human reactions to the vacant lands—grab pleasure or worship an afterlife that promised a franchise in divinity and one’s own planet. At each Nevada gas station, Maude saw a slot machine and a woman who could have been a whore. She stopped at Elko for the night. The slot machines churned in broken randomness, the house odds set. Maude wandered around the hotel’s casino for a while, looking at the big men with holstered guns. She put a quarter in a slot machine and five more quarters dribbled out. Enough, she said to herself, and she went to bed.