Truly Like Lightning Page 4

  The last two years of #MeToo had brought a strange sense of empowered powerlessness to a young woman in Maya’s line of work. She could feel the eyes of the men shifting to her nervously during conversations to make sure she wasn’t miffed, while at the same time wanting to be acknowledged, desiring credit for checking in. Even when talk turned to something as neutral as the Lakers or the Dodgers, she could feel the men longing for her to join in and give her blessing to the suspiciously and traditionally masculine workplace topics. Because of what her mother had suffered at the hands of motherfuckers, and her mother’s mother, and all the mothers dating back to Lilith, Maya now had the power to destroy men’s lives with a wave of her hand and a couple of words. She had the nuclear codes. Would she be a righteous or a capricious Shiva? The boys did not know, so they were always on their toes. And though they liked her, they hated her for it. She was an impossible thing, both slave and master.

  And it wasn’t only about matters sexist or misogynist that she was the token voice of authority—by some transitive law of oppression, though she was white, cisgendered, and straight (okay, she’d tongue kissed a girl sophomore year at a frat party, but that didn’t really count), she was now the one turned to if a discussion suddenly veered in tone to possible racism or homophobia. That was not a job, arbiter of all social injustice, she had signed up for. Hell, she wasn’t even an expert on women. She was twenty-seven. It was exhausting. And boring. And deeply dishonest. She knew all she needed was an even playing field to win. All she wanted was a fair shake.

  She thought the workplace sea change was generally superpositive and a long time in coming, but she also sensed in its long-repressed vehemence a psychosocial overcorrection, as in the stock or real estate market, and that things would, in time, swing back slightly to a way better place than before, and even a better place than now, a new normal, eventually. She sensed that mighty pendulum would be swinging back soon, and it would crush some heads as it did. In her bones, she feared the reactionary momentum of potential male vengeance as it tracked back from this moment. Those were the claws out for Roe v. Wade, as well as for the innocent woman on the street.

  In the meantime, she didn’t want to overinvest in her newfound and what she felt to be inflated, illusory, and largely negative power. So now she was the one who brought up tit size/authenticity, dick size, cock sucking, pussy hair, asses, and orgasms; she was the one who fired the first innuendo—clearing the way, opening the gate, and waving the boys forward into the breach; the cool, fun gal giving the okay for the men to indulge nostalgically in some good old-fashioned misogyny lite and twentieth-century sexual banter and shenanigans. Yet another role she didn’t really want, but there it was.

  Her office door was always left open when a colleague visited her. An insurance policy, a literal transparency against litigation. Through that open door now, Malouf popped his turtle-ish, leathery bald head, while gently tapping like a shy schoolboy wishing an audience with a superior. “How can I help?” he asked, stooping in the entryway as tall men will even when they have no reason to.

  “I got it, Boss.”

  Malouf smiled. “I hear—actually, I have heard nothing about you going to Joshua Tree this weekend with the Young Turks.”

  “Yeah, I want in on all that nonsense. I mean I don’t.”

  “Well, if I’d heard anything about it, which I haven’t, I’d advise you not to, that mostly bad things happen in the desert, which I won’t ’cause I’m not even aware that it’s happening.”

  “Copy that.”

  “And if you were to ignore my suggestion, and go to the desert, I would in no way be impressed when I heard later that you outpartied, outingested, outgunned, and outfucked all those callow pups and pretenders.”

  “Of course not.”

  Maya had the sense of all these lines of communication crossing between them—flirting, exhibition, inhibition, resentment, age, sadism, dominance, submission—a twisted mess, like when you live under humming power wires and hope the wind doesn’t blow too hard, and even if those Gordian braids never blow down and destroy your house, just living under that dark vibration over time could give you cancer.

  Even with your newfound power, Malouf seemed to be saying, you are but a plaything to me. She could hear him hissing underneath his purr—it’s not about sex; it’s about money. Money will always beat pussy. Money outspends outrage. She didn’t disagree and wondered if he knew she was on his team. She’d only been playing this game a few years, but she was a natural. They smiled harmlessly at each other, and Maya remembered something she’d read about the social origins of the smile—the baring of the sharp teeth in friendship, not anger, the display of weaponry in a cold war show of peace.

  “Come back from the desert with the biggest fish,” he said, smiling or grimacing benevolently; it was hard to tell the difference with him. His face was unique, yet hard to pin down, hard to remember when you were away from him. Maya had often thought there was an uncanny aspect of pareidolia to Malouf—she’d had to google stuff like “seeing faces in things” before finding that term, for the psychological phenomenon that causes one to “see patterns in random stimuli,” sometimes leading to “assigning human characteristics to objects.” She’d once tried to relate what she meant to a friend as “looking at my boss is like seeing a face on a piece of toast or Jesus Christ in a potato chip—it’s like, I know he’s not an inanimate object, but his face looks like the face of an inanimate object if an inanimate object could have a face.” It was hard to explain.

  That’s what she was getting lost in when he added his other favorite rallying cry, “Bring me a unicorn.”

  “A whole herd. That’s the plan. Or a black swan.” She winked.

  “Attagirl, any of those endangered species. I’m glad we never talked.”

  “Me too.”

  “What?” Malouf asked in mock horror, and put his right index and left middle fingers forward like a crucifix, which made him seem, paradoxically, like a nine-fingered Dracula himself invoking the power of the Cross while simultaneously flipping the bird. They both forced a laugh. He left the office with the door wide open behind him.

  3.

  BY THE TIME BRONSON had returned from his unsuccessful predawn petitioning to his God, prayers had been spoken and the Powers family breakfast was in full swing. A couple dozen eggs had been gathered from the coops by the youngest children—Joseph aka Little Joe (~5) and Lovina aka Lovina Love or Lovey (~6)—and the three loaves of bread had been baked by Yalulah aka Yaya, his second partner. Hyrum (~11), Ephraim aka Effy (~10), the twins, Deuce and Pearl (~17), Alvin aka Little Big Al (~7), Palmyra (~11), Solomona (~12), and Beautiful (~13) had slopped the pigs, milked the cows, hayed the horses, tended to the ostriches, and were just now washed and sitting down with the appetite of those who have already done a full day’s work. Later, after breakfast, the middle kids, Palmyra, Solomona, and Beautiful, would tend to the gardens and the irrigated fruit trees. Bronson and Yalulah, because she’d graduated with a literature degree, would then conduct the classroom for five to six hours, with a deep assist in visual and musical artists from his other partner, Mary. As such, without outside influence or events, or even news of outside events, each day had an insulated but flexible sameness to it.

  There had been a third sister-wife and mother, Jackie, who died of cancer years ago. She hadn’t sought treatment, would not leave the grounds of the compound, forbade Bronson from bringing any painkillers or even aspirin back from civilization, and her death was protracted, painful, and macabre. Jackie would accept pain relief and medicine only from the immediate surroundings—learning and teaching about native remedies for fatigue and swollen limbs—the ocotillo and the globe mallow for her weeping sores, and California poppy for the anxiety. She would be healed by the desert or not healed at all.

  Bronson had been in awe of Jackie’s stubbornness, faith, and genius for pain. She had said, “Suffering is the Guru. Let my suffering teach the children.” Wh
at it taught them was hard to say; that fruit was yet to ripen. Her own children, Deuce and Pearl, had found it hard, by the end, to look at her or to keep from retching in her presence, her tumors so hideous, her smell so rank. Half dead, covered and colonized by spreading tumors, she lingered in bed for almost two years, seemingly unable to die, like in some obscure Greek myth. Bronson dwelled nightly upon ending her misery by suffocating her with a pillow, but dared not contravene God’s mysterious plan for his wife. Her will, her holy masochism, was infinite, saintly. Bronson had loved her deeply as a man loves a woman, but now she became a martyr in his eyes, and his love for her became a thing of transcendence. When the end finally, mercifully came, Bronson built and carved an exquisite coffin with his own hands, and the entire family dug a hole for her far out there in the anonymous dirt of the endless desert, an area Bronson had visited that morning and which served as the family’s natural, sacred temple.

  Pearl and Deuce, who came so young to Bronson when Jackie followed his promises into the desert, had vague memories of the world outside. Their sleep was haunted by tall buildings, highways, and asphalt jungles densely populated, magical, glowing, multicolored boxes full of friendly faces, and roaring, blue-green horizontal walls of water—images that were indeed dreamlike to them, and surreal. They really were not sure from where these nostalgic/futuristic thought-pictures came. The youngest seven kids, sired by Bronson, were desert tabula rasa—all they knew of the modern world, except for the thundering metal birds/sharks flying overhead, was this patch of dry earth and what they read and saw in the books their parents taught them. They “knew” about planes in the way the rest of the world “knows” about Martians. You might call them deprived, but you would not call them unhappy. They were too busy to entertain the blues.

  The lack of outside stimulation caused an equal and opposite lack of discontentment in the younger ones. But a teenager is a teenager, whether on the surface streets of Hollywood or the surface of the moon, and those hormones know no master. Bronson knew this. It troubled him, kept him up at night like any father—how do I prepare my children for a world I have forsaken? The initial project, as Bronson, Jackie, Mary, and Yalulah had formulated it, was to create a generation of spiritual revolutionaries who could see through the status quo bullshit of the world at large. A brood of Joseph Smiths. When the time came, and that time was coming soon for Deuce and Pearl, the children, nurtured in the hothouse of the desert brain factory, would be unleashed upon the world to make it a better place.

  That was their version of a Mormon Mission—their children. The four parents, the teachers, concluded when they came to the desert that they themselves were hopelessly blinkered and injured by the way they, and all children in present-day America, had been raised, and that, try as they might to remove the blinders from their own eyes, they were always drawn back to illusory and imprisoning thought systems and chimerical hierarchies by the unconscious patterning of their early, even preverbal years. The adults were helpless against the invisible bars. This would not be the case for their children. Their children would be free, and would, when the time came, then teach their contemporaries how to be free.

  But, as the day to set loose his eldest kids approached, many nights Bronson lay awake, his mind tumbling with these questions that might send him riding out in the darkness looking for answers. Especially one question he could not even name that appeared to him only as a dark cloud, more like an interrogating omen than a question. He could not even put words on it. He would peer into that cloud, looking for shapes or words, and then turn away in fear to repeat the more traditional lines of parental anxiety—when are the children ready to leave home? Will they venture out into the world as soft innocents and get corrupted? Were they going to go to college? But then he would argue with himself that society itself is the sickness. Can they learn of and cure that sickness without being infected by it? Is there an inoculation for the incurable mental disease that infects every participant in the civilization? Can they be in the world one day but not of it?

  As the children grew, these questions grew more pressing with each day. He still had no answers, but the day was fast approaching when the answers would be demanded by time and fate. These were the running conversations he had with his wives. These were the arguments. And though Bronson was the only man of the house and there were two sister-wives, theirs was a working democracy, a small village. The wives had strong, singular voices, and if they voted in a bloc against Bronson on an issue and he lost, as he had with the planting of avocado trees, which he deemed decadent water whores, he would go sulking off to camp in the desert for a few days, burying the debated issue in the middle of nowhere in the sacred spot he had buried and baptized his two dead infants, asking their spirits for guidance and perspective, and then return reborn himself, cleansed of resentment. And a year or two later, he would be the one planting more avocado trees for his beloved wives. If he and Jackie were the original visionaries, the ones with eyes to see, all the adults were equals, prime movers, and he was, he knew, not whole without them.

  After breakfast had been consumed and the kitchen cleared and cleaned, the family moved into the “schoolroom.” It was the largest room in this house that had been designed by Bronson, and built and furnished with the help of union set designers, scenic painters, welders, and carpenters that he’d befriended over his years spent employed and bullshitting on sets and partying after work. The men who helped him build his very real house had been constructing sturdy sets for decades—fake rooms and false worlds—from the back patio of The Brady Bunch to the hallways of Versailles.

  The house had gone up in a matter of months, and though built by men who constructed fakes for a living, was made to withstand whatever the desert heat and cold and wind could hurl at it daily. Much of the furniture came from huge warehouses on the back lots of Warner Bros., Universal, Fox, Paramount, and Sony. Pieces, even an old trampoline, that had been used in films and then stored away for possible future use, were pilfered and then recycled in this hidden desert home. It was quite possible that this or that chair, bed, or table had been seen in a famous movie or TV show. While cleaning up a couple years ago, Bronson had pulled a tag off the underside of a couch that identified it as “Bev Hills 90210/Walsh House.” Bronson threw away the tag, and kept the couch.

  So these Powers kids, most of whom had never seen a movie or even a TV set, were living on and among pieces of showbiz paraphernalia that might drive fans and niche collectors insane with envy. Bronson would have enjoyed the irony, if he were a man who habitually enjoyed irony. Instead, he thought the pervasive irony of the culture he left was evidence of its decay, impotence, and lack of original energy, that it could find sense and pleasure only in flotsam and jetsam, and indirect, passive-aggressive, “funny” attacks against an entrenched status quo.

  He was a man who took almost sensual pleasure in efficiency, lack of waste, and poetic justice—nobody was using this real/fake furniture, it had already been bought and its makers compensated. Perfectly good, well-made things just gathering dust—it would approach sin not to take them so they could be used, not to give them life again. And it jibed with the tenor of a worldview, formed by the Mormon Baptism of the Dead as Bronson understood it, and its vision of souls in the prelife and the afterlife—like a huge warehouse for souls, waiting to be reused. There was no need for God to make more of anything; it was for man to figure out how best to use what God, and the IATSE Local 33 stagehands, had already made.

  If his interior decoration was out of style, or indeed, had no style at all, Bronson didn’t care. To him, “style” was only skin deep, merely capitalism’s way of getting you to buy new stuff. God was a recycler. Souls and plastics and armchairs must be reused. This was the type of associative thought-flow he tried to model for and engender in his children during school hours. He wanted to teach them what to think, sure, but more important, how to think, and how to think about thinking. He had not been taught how to think, for which
he blamed a broken father and a broken American pedagogy, and he was determined that his kids not suffer the same retardation. In this educational endeavor, he was blessed that his wives had areas of expertise to impart that far exceeded his own. The schoolroom was conceived with no set schedule, with “learning centers” where the kids could gravitate depending on their whim and curiosity. Something like a Montessori classroom is how Yalulah envisioned it. There was a science corner, a math center, painting, engineering, chemistry, music, literature, and history nooks—with a “teacher” standing by or nearby in each. Bronson taught history and religion. Mother Mary taught visual arts and music, and Yaya took the rest.

  Mother Mary was raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey; adopted at eleven months old into the Castigliones, a sprawling Italian family with eight other siblings. Free-spirited, misfit Mary quit high school her junior year to hitchhike west till she ran out of road and ended up sleeping on Venice Beach for a couple months, where she had to use her capable fists more than once. She ate very little, did and sold drugs, and turned a couple tricks when necessary, but in a few years, by the mid-’90s, she had transformed herself from an underage vagrant with no skills and no money into a transgressive street performer (combining sword swallowing, fire eating, and contortion on the Venice Boardwalk), graffiti artist, skateboarder, and out loud, proud bisexual. Small, boyish, and muscular with thick, wavy dark hair she dyed sometimes purple, sometimes green, smooth olive skin, and yellow-brown eyes that seemed to glow in the dark, she had a seemingly unbreakable constitution and would put any drug or any person in her mouth.

  Mary could never sit still, neither her body nor her mind, and was ever in search of a big system, the Answer, to explain the madness of her existence. She had read Marianne Williamson’s gooey A Return to Love: A Reflection on the Principles of A Course in Miracles (almost thirty years before her unlikely and quirky presidential bid) and dug it for a spell (i.e., thought Williamson was sexy), but drifted away from the gauzy, soft-focus, witchy love babble. She was a functioning drug addict and drinker; had been through all of the 12 Steps four times. Forty-eight steps for Mary, and counting.