Everyday Psychokillers (3 page)

When Julie slept, you could really see the bruise on her cheekbone, because a streetlight shining through the blind slats lit a strip on her face. You could also see another one on the side of her neck, although it could have been a hickey. Julie had pointed it out as a hickey. It was hard to sleep in such a pink room, but it was okay to be awake, or in a sleeplike state that felt continuous with waking. There was an unexpected reasonableness to it, a kind of logic, the way the lines and lines of little white sailboats that covered the walls in Julie's yellow bathroom held a kind of logic. All night, I felt a kind of depth of sensibility with regard to the sheets and the rose-covered comforter, Julie's breathing, and how she slept in one and then another contortion, each revealing a new angle to her face. In the morning, Julie's dad drove us to school. On the way out to the car he dropped his keys. When he squatted to pick them up, and fumbled for them in the crabgrass, his cut-offs were so short one of his testicles slipped out and then slid back in as he stood up, none of which he appeared to notice.

The morning after the last of the Egyptian lectures, I was the only one at the bus stop. I sat on my French horn on the sidewalk by the road and worried. I didn't know if I should go home. I thought maybe school was cancelled. Maybe the teachers were back on strike. Then, as the bus appeared, the boys all came running from around the side of the building and through the parking lot, swinging their backpacks and spitting. They didn't look at me as they pushed by and onto the bus.

I sat with a boy I knew from a few of my classes. He got out of the seat and let me shove in toward the window with my French horn, and then he sat half into the aisle because I took so much room with it, but he didn't say what they'd all been doing back there. He looked at my face for a long time and I wondered if he was going to tell me, or if he was thinking of asking me to go out with him, but he said, “You have tiny hairs growing on your nose,” and that was it.

So I went to school, and I have no idea what kind of day it was, but at the end of the day the boys were really anxious to get by me on the way off the bus, when usually they were patient enough, amused even, when I had my horn. They pushed past me as soon as my feet hit the sidewalk, and as the bus pulled away, I set my horn down and watched them dash around the side of the building. I almost didn't follow them. I didn't want to drag the horn all the way across the parking lot, making sure I didn't bump it into any cars, just so I could see them being idiots and then turn around and drag it back. I considered leaving it while I ran around the building to see, but that thought lasted only a moment given how easy it would be for anyone driving by to pull over, grab it, and pawn it for thirty bucks. So I dragged the thing with me, between cars and across the parking lot and around the corner of the building to a continuation of the parking lot, where I saw them gathered around a pickup truck parked not far from the dumpsters, its mirrors and chrome bumpers spastic with light.

Alligators are ancient. That morning they'd found a small one, a baby with a green-gray back and a gray-pink belly. It wandered up the canal bank and started across the road toward the bus stop. The boys caught it, and they found some twine in the dumpster, and they bound it up and left it in the bed of the truck that was parked there. It lay lean and still, smaller than a bowling pin, between the ridges in the vast gleaming metal. I thought of the soft slats of streetlamp crossing Julie's bed and body, and I thought of mummies, and that was as far as I got with that, because there is part of me, still, that is against even that much imposition of order in the face of boys like this standing in a circle around an animal that is too raw, too tired and blistered to squirm.

 

 

They say, scientists even, that every thought makes a path through your brain, that your brain is a map of what's happened to it. You think and think and patterns are worn like deer trails through the forest. The deepest marks are the thoughts you repeat. It's that physical. Enough intersecting ideas can make a pit.

A person who is psychotic cannot tell an idea from a memory, an image from an object. The world is both blurred and shattered, unboxed, unbound, and strewn. This terrifies the brain. A terrified brain can make sense of anything.

Joan of Arc began hearing voices when she was thirteen. She named the voices angels. Rumor has it she was raped in prison, yet her virginity had made a pit, and so she named herself the Maid. I can see her, galloping at the head of the Dauphin's army, her brain pitted with madness. It's hard to do anything important without pits. It's hard to move. It's hard to believe you have a body at all. Sometimes I'm afraid I'm invisible.

The Myth of Osiris, Civilizer of the Earth

Mr. Freedman didn't mention this part in his lectures—he was interested in science, not mythology—but when Osiris became king of Egypt he married his sister Isis, which made her queen. Then he decided to civilize Egypt. Osiris abolished cannibalism and he taught the art of agriculture, which meant planting along the Nile, along the river and its marshes of black soil, among crocodiles and snakes, and alongside swimming fishes and fishing birds. He erected temples and made laws. His name, in one or more of its incarnations, means Good One.

After civilizing Egypt, he left Isis to rule while he went to civilize the earth. He combed it, raked it, drained it, stuffed it with corridors and pipes, shoved it into grids. Then, when he'd civilized the earth, Osiris returned.

His brother Set arranged an extravagant banquet to celebrate the reunion of his siblings. The family and their fancy friends feasted in the highest room of the palace, at a great long gleaming table, and at the foot of the table, a window looked over the Nile, the stretching fields, the multitudes of slaves, and the abundant pastures of the new civilization. Dozens of scented dancing girls swooped and flitted around the table and as each passed the window, became silhouetted.

When the royal family had filled themselves round with feasting, Set called for a final presentation, and six naked serving boys entered, and among the strewn, gleaming bones and the ornate dishes, they placed a magnificent coffin. The coffin was made of expensive woods, cedar from Lebanon and ebony from Punt. He'd imported the wood because Egypt had no wood of its own, only the useless and spongy palm. Standing there at the banquet table, presenting the coffin, Set's square ears twitched and seemed to cause his snout to stretch and curve. The room grew silent and the dancing girls stopped dancing and clasped hands, oohing and aahing at the coffin and at how impressive Set had become in its presence.

“Whoever fits this coffin gets this coffin,” Set said, much as, you remember, the Charming Prince later spoke of the glass slipper. If you think of that slipper as a kind of coffin. Ominous like that.

So when Osiris climbed in, Set nailed the coffin shut, bang, bang, bang; he'd been ready with his hammer and nails, hidden them in his robes and under the napkin on his lap, for he'd had the coffin made precisely to fit Osiris' dimensions and his taste.

The family, lazy with food and woozy with wine, slumped, stunned, in their carved and gilded chairs, listening as the ringing of Set's hammer ceased and gave way to the muted thumping of Osiris pounding from inside with the heels of his hands. They heard it like distant drumming, the way sometimes at night you can hear crickets humming, and they'll sound like a field of celebrating people from all the way across town, buried as they are in the grass and brush in the dark. The family and the naked servers and the motionless girls in their translucent dresses gaped as Set gave the coffin a shove and the coffin slid with unexpected speed down the polished banquet table, knocking away ribcages from eaten animals and the cores and pits of fruit like marbles, then taking flight out the window like, if you can imagine, a skier off a cliff, and arcing out of the palace and into the river, entering like an arrow, and emerging like a long black crocodile a mile away in the slow current and reeds. One, two, three, as in tale after tale thereafter.

I looked things up later, somewhere between then and now, around when I started worrying that something was missing and no one seemed to be noticing, at moments of quiet that appeared among accumulating doubts and disappointments. I looked into Isis, remembering a television cartoon of her, or perhaps it was one of those live action bionic-wonder-woman spin-offs. 3-d or 2d, I remember Isis spinning and spinning, and the jeweled neckline of her white desert dress. Turn, turn, and turn into a magical creature.

I didn't know about Osiris. I looked into it and it made me wonder about him, the great father, the good civilizer. How he and his people are drawn flat, in words and pictures, how he comes off like a paper cutout in these odd, handed-down and warmed-over translations. If you don't pay attention, you might never think of how it must have been for him. You have to wonder about him, floating down the Nile in his exquisite coffin, custom-made. If you wonder, you can feel the way he's trapped. He's buried alive, but in water. He's dead in the water, he's sent down the river. It's a form of death. But even if it's the river that's moving, if it's the river carrying the coffin, there is no denying that the river means life, especially for Osiris, with all his agriculture. So even if it's the river that's running, there's a way that it's like Osiris is escaping, like he's running away.

Picture the moment in families through history. You come home from school. Daddy is there with Mom at the kitchen table. You're given the news: the job is lost, the money is gone, the marriage is over, your dog is dead, the jig is up. The world doesn't love you and you thought it did. You fool. You run. In a more minor moment you might run to your room and slam the door, but this one is big, and you know that even your bed will turn against you, because you suddenly know that the house is a cage. You thought it was keeping you safe, but it's faking it. A frightening world is not locked out, it's locked in. You feel this and you're out the nearest window, running in any direction down any road, and wide and dead as the pavement may be, it feels close as any enchanted wood.

I mean Osiris just found out, really, that his brother is Evil. So it's a death, but it's a liberating death. The kind of death that has an afterlife. You might disappear from all who knew you, you might want to become dead to them, at least for a while, at least until you figure things out, if you ever can, if you ever do.

In the aftermath of the feast, Set took his place on Osiris' throne, and the moment he did, silhouetted in the window where she'd rushed as if to catch the coffin when it flew, Isis began to spin. She twirled and spun until she'd spun herself into flight, and in the shape of a vulture, Isis winged her way out the window and away.

Years, years. She flew. She searched. Found his body far away. Pried open the coffin with a crowbar of some sort. Brought him back in a boat made of papyrus. Hid him in the marsh, beyond the palace gate, docking him there in the reeds. Went off with her sister, errands to run, canopic jars to buy.

But Set, some days, liked to crawl into the body of a dead crocodile and swim around, looking through its eyes, swimming with its limbs, disguised. He'd been doing just that and he'd spied her there with their half-dead, all-dead, good-as-dead brother, knee-deep in the Nile. When Isis kissed her fingertips and pressed them to her brother's head, and waded out of the river and out of sight, Set emerged, flung the crocodile carcass off like a cape, and tore the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces with his savage wild-pig teeth, scattering them throughout the marsh.

When Isis returned, she wept in her paper boat, and then she gathered herself together, and searched the Nile a second time. She collected thirteen pieces, found all but one, and she bandaged them together.

When you're a child on a tour in your local museum, sitting on the linoleum floor, in a semicircle with your group from school, on your knees in front of the glass case with reproductions of thirteen action-figure-sized Egyptian gods, they don't tell the part of the story about how the fourteenth piece was his genitals, and that the reason Isis couldn't find them is they were eaten in the reeds by impious fishes. Isis the wife, the sister, the mother, the scavenging vulture. Isis the magician, the physician, the disemboweler, and embalmer. And the thing about Osiris is that while he's all about death and constantly dying he's never completely dead and gone. Which is how, when Isis bound his parts together, she beat her wings and fanned breath into him, and he breathed just enough to be breathing as she conjured his genitals, and as the last wisp of breath from her wings cruised through his body, Isis impregnated herself with his likeness. Osiris, great fragmented father of civilization. Horus was born bent on vengeance, and history went on from there.

Life passes through air, through bodies that are somehow incidental and sacred at once. If you took the museum at its word, you'd never know.

In the museum, one wall away from the Egyptian gods, in a glass case where they don't stop on tours with schoolchildren, there are ancient Greek urns, and on them men are running after women with their enormous cocks before them like swords, just as Aubrey Beardsley drew them so much later. The women run from them around the urns with their arms outstretched, wearing gowns of fish scales, in order, I suppose, to expose their femininity. Of course crocks are round, so who's chasing who is part of it. Fishes gobbling gonads, men grabbing at girls dressed as fish.

Now, I wasn't in that school system the year they did local history, but along the way, years later, I got curious and looked it up, wondering what I was missing. Some car-racing guy from Indianapolis came and civilized the Everglades, draining it so he could build Miami Beach, all very much as Osiris civilized Egypt so long ago. In fact, the car-racing man was the first to apply circus promotion tactics to the sale of real estate. Elephants and hot-air balloons. And even before that, the Calusa People from the Ten Thousand Islands steered the water in the marshes, engineering slow flows in certain directions so that fish would pile up in predictable places. They'd mapped in their memories the way rivers moved through the massive, reedy, puddlelike land, which you can't call an ocean, because for acres and miles it'll be only inches deep, and you can't call land, because if you stand still for too long you'll sink. For a thousand or thousands of years the Calusas steered their canoes along, shifted the flow of things, kind of wore it away, the way, as I mentioned, repeated ideas mark the map of your mind.