Black Wave (13 page)

See you in the morning
.
Get some sleep
. Quinn crouched beside her crying friend and gave her hair a ruffle. Michelle shrugged it off. Sometimes Michelle felt like everyone else was a poser and she was the only authentic person in
the whole world. She was 100 percent on this. There was nowhere else for her to be, no husband to return to, nothing safe, nothing anywhere. It was a lonely thought. She fell asleep trying to make it feel triumphant.

14

Michelle woke in the morning to the noise of Ziggy hip-chucking the bedroom door open. Layers of paint kept it stuck to the jamb, it required a bit of violence to pop open. The punch of it giving way stirred Michelle, alone on her futon. Her sinuses, clogged with snot and cocaine, had drained into the left side of her head as she slept, and so her face looked lopsided, puffier on that end, like a fun-house mirror or the boy from
Mask
. Ziggy walked into the room with two coffees steaming from their paper cups.
Rise and shine, LA woman.
It was incredible how well Ziggy functioned. Her neck was spotted with hickeys as if with leprosy. Her goggles held her unwashed hair back from her face, which was scrubbed clean. Ziggy used fancy face wash that heated up as it lathered. She smelled like the inside of an Aveda salon. Michelle did not know how she did it. She had been up all night fucking that girl and had arrived exactly on time to awaken Michelle, with coffee. Michelle lowered her face into the steaming cup and let the bitter cloud rouse her.

Your married woman's outside and ready to go,
Ziggy said.
You excited?

Michelle shrugged. Do I Look Like
Mask
? she asked, touching the swollen roll of her face. Like Eric Stoltz In The Movie
Mask
? Where He Has That Disease, You Know, It Makes His Face All Bumpy?

And Cher is his mom?
Ziggy asked.
And she's like a biker and gets him a hooker for his birthday?

Yeah!

I fucking love that movie.
Ziggy pulled a pack of Camels from the ass of her white jeans and lit up in the empty room.

But Do I Look Like That?

Ziggy squinted at her friend.
I don't know,
she said slowly
. I don't think you look like Cher.

No, Do I Look Like The Boy, The Boy In
Mask
!

Oh god!
Ziggy snorted a cloud of smoke from her nose.
No, you don't look like the boy in
Mask
. Why? Because you were crying?

You Can Tell?

Ziggy nodded. Michelle drank her coffee.

You didn't have a great going-away party?

Michelle's finger shot out and poked the mottled skin of Ziggy's neck. You Did.

That girl's crazy,
Ziggy said with a grin. She rubbed her neck and winced.
She bit my fucking throat off.
She drew on her cigarette like an asthmatic sucking on an inhaler and tossed the butt out the window.
I should get back there, I left her outside in her car.

Who? That Girl?

Lelrine, yeah. She's out front with Quinn.

That Girl! That Girl!

Yeah.
Ziggy shrugged.

God, I Fucking Hate That Girl!

Ziggy looked unfazed.
She likes you. She brought your book, she wants you to sign it.

Ugh! Michelle cried and reinserted herself into the futon, sinking her face into the pillow. Ack! Ech! Ziggy kicked her gently with the toe of her motorcycle boot.

Get up,
she said.
Get off that and I'll drag this downstairs for you.

Outside, Lelrine clambered off the hood of her purple Datsun, where she had been perched, flirting with Quinn. She charged toward Michelle bearing a copy of Michelle's book. Michelle autographed it. She inscribed,
To Lelrine, On the day of my departure. I will never forget you
. Lelrine looked different in the daylight, with no makeup on her face or rice in her ass. She was in her walk-of-shame ensemble of satin hot pants, a ratty T-shirt stretched like skin across her intense tits. Michelle would have to find out from Ziggy if they were real. Michelle sort of loved fake tits. It was her favorite part of any strip bar, the girls with the boobs that looked like someone had hurled them onto their chests from across the room, strong as muscles with a little wobble. They fascinated Michelle.

She waved to the pair as they drove off in the little purple car. She sat on her front stoop and thought nostalgically how she would never sit there again. So much had happened on that stoop. She'd cried, of course, over girls who had stopped loving her, and she had smoked many cigarettes, she had drunk beers. She'd written part of her book here, her back against her front door, pen in a notebook, crying over a girl who had stopped loving her while smoking and drinking beer. She wanted to nail a plaque to it, the stoop. There was that one sweet crackhead related to the
woman who lived on the first floor. Michelle would often come down and see the lady sitting on the stairs, nodded out. Michelle would startle her and the lady would swiftly begin sweeping the stoop with her hands, brushing debris into her palm with her fingers.

I'm Susie's cousin,
she'd say in a stuffed-up voice.
Susie said I could sit here.
She'd dust a little path for Michelle to pass through.

It's Fine, Michelle assured her. Generally Michelle didn't mind if people sat on her stairs. Sometimes gangs of boys with bottles of beer would be intimidating, but they weren't shitty to her and once even helped her upstairs with her laundry. Susie's cousin was very tender and had such a strange, froggy voice. Stitch enjoyed imitating her.

I'm Sooseez cousin
, Stitch would roll her eyes back and pantomime sweeping with her hands.
Sooseee said I could sit here.
Stitch did really good impressions. She did the Susie's cousin imitation to Ekundayo once and it made her hostile. Ekundayo acted like drug addicts were holy and became defensive if you laughed at them, like you were being racist or poking fun at a disabled person.

It's not funny,
she said.

It Actually Is, Michelle said. It's Actually Quite Funny. Stitch also did a killer imitation of a junkie they'd seen nodding off with a bag of chips in his hand at the gas station, but she only did it privately, to Michelle, to make her laugh. People could be really sensitive about drug addicts.

Michelle thought about Stitch, upstairs in her bedroom, her choppy haircut asleep on some strange pillow filled with barley or natural husks. The pillow was horribly uncomfortable but Stitch swore it was good for your neck. Stitch. Michelle's eyes teared. She wasn't going to wake her friend
up, Stitch knew she was leaving. She could have come down and said goodbye. Whatever. This city was stupid. Michelle lifted herself off the stairs and walked slowly toward the U-Haul, where Quinn sat resentfully in the driver's seat.

15

The heat in the truck's cab was grisly. California was on fire and once out of San Francisco the highway shimmered in the windshield like a mirage. The land on the margins was dry, even charred. The farmland decreased as they drove. The water was too ruined for effective farming and the animals were out of whack, the bugs and the birds, the pests and pollinators. They drove past wide plowed fields whose sickly crops had been abandoned. What Do You Think That Was? Michelle asked, staring at the mangled stalks, everything hay colored beneath the brutal sun. Quinn shrugged and kept her eyes on the road.

Michelle hadn't left San Francisco in eight years and Quinn, a native, never had. The ocean was a giant toilet lapping at San Francisco's edges, but mainly things were functioning. On the highway Michelle felt alarmed at all the dead land. These towns were abandoned. A gas station had been torched, blackening everything around it in a wide, ruined circle. Michelle leaned back against the leather
seat, her skin stuck hotly to it, suctioned with sweat. She watched the wasteland glide by on the 405.

Then, the cows. The cities of cows stretched out into the trashed landscape for miles, a pixilated black and white, their spotted backs blurring together until the sight of them all became something else entirely, a surrealist landscape, an M. C. Escher drawing referencing infinity.

The smell was something to complain about for the first twenty minutes. It was as if their faces were being cruelly mashed into a vat of wet shit. The humidity rose as they entered the cow cities, the steam of the animals' sweat and breath and farts, the water systems churning to douse them, all of it changed the air, saturating it, carrying the stench. The sounds, too, the dull bleats and moos. The cows continued alongside them forever.
Cowshwitz,
Quinn spoke. She had heard of this part of the drive. Her husband had warned her of it, gambled she'd become vegetarian by the time they drove out of it.

The lovers tried various things to save them from the smell, such as cupping their hands over their faces and inhaling instead their own rank breath. Michelle lit cigarettes. She held a carton of chocolate milk over her mouth and nose like an oxygen mask, smelled sweetly sour candy before the stink of shit rushed back in. They breathed through their mouths, giving them the disgusting feeling of eating the smell. Their tongues rooted their gums, searching for the taste of cow dung. Eventually they could no longer smell it, despite the bovine landscape shifting toward the horizon, their collective motion like the swells of a gentle tide. It was creepy to know the horrible shit cloud was still with them, entering their bodies. They would try to locate it, pulling air through their noses the way Ziggy smoked her
cigarettes, but they smelled nothing, nothing at all. And so they relaxed, succumbing to their bodies' merciful denial.

Michelle allowed the incomprehensible landscape to fuck with her mind. The round-backed cows became a sort of sea, she then allowed the sea, emerging beneath the cliffs, to become a menagerie, the lumps of trash beneath the pudding waves taking the shapes of animals she'd seen in books and magazines—a thick gorilla, a wide-eared elephant, the spindly neck of a giraffe. The waves drew back and heaved forward, the nauseated contractions of someone poisoned. Michelle saw real buses and airplanes, shopping carts and the roof of a home. An old telephone pole strung with gunk. She unfocused her eyes and they became dinosaurs, sea monsters. Broken boats bobbed, abandoned, looking like ghostly pirate ships. Perhaps some of them were. Across it all a web of oil stretched, like ebony lace or fishnet stockings.

1

I just can't open my screenplay with a scene of myself smoking crack in Ziggy's van, Michelle thought, and deleted twenty pages of text from her desktop. It felt like she'd deleted her stomach, something vanished in her body—well, that was rash. Too bad. The computer glared at her with its vacant cyclops eye, daring her to try again, to tell a universal story.

Michelle wracked her brain for successful books with prominent crack smokers. The A. M. Homes story where the suburban straight couple smokes it after the kids go away.
Permanent Midnight
, where the guy wrote for
ALF
but was really a total crackhead the whole time—that one got made into a movie, even.

What made those crack stories work? What made them, um, universal? Michelle suspected class. The suburbanites wanted to shake off the strangling yoke of prosperity and good behavior. Michelle imagined if the characters were black or gay the story wouldn't work
as well. The characters wouldn't be able to risk it, their foothold on suburbia tenuous as it was. The reader was having a hard enough time trying to relate to a black person or a gay person without then having to relate to a crackhead. It was too much. Though black and gay suburbanites surely deserved a relaxing hit of crack cocaine more than the couple in the Homes story, they would have to settle for a glass of wine with dinner.

What about the television writer? Well, he was successful, that was crucial. People seemed to enjoy stories in which someone who Has It All almost Throws It All Away, but doesn't. Redemption. For the crack narrative to succeed, the character has to be starting out on top, with a place to fall from. It can begin in suburbia or in the glass-walled office of a television executive. Readers anticipate the rungs descended. Crack wouldn't work for Michelle's character. She's already sort of a loser, really broke, born that way. What the fuck is she doing smoking crack, the reader would want to know. Is she retarded? This is boring. I can read the newspaper for this. For Michelle's story to be universal, it can only go in one direction, and crack does not further that trajectory.

All the writing had exhausted Michelle. She recalled Andy's parting words, a curse, really—
You better not ever write about me!
—is that what she said? Michelle felt bound to it, though she had never agreed, never made such a promise. Still, it would be lousy of her to break Andy's heart and then tell her secrets. It made Michelle's stomach lump. She began a screenplay based on Quinn's relationship with her husband. That was better—a lot of women had husbands. Very relatable. It could be a modern
Belle de Jour
, where the
wife sneaks around with a downwardly spiraling lesbian, snorting heroin. She would have to make Quinn's hair longer. She'd have to be girly for it to work. Otherwise she just seemed like some closeted lesbian married to a man who is maybe a closeted gay himself for having married such a manly woman. People would just be weirded out by that story. Not universal at all.

Michelle opened the film treatment with a shot of Quinn and her husband on the couch watching
The X-Files
. The husband idly played with Quinn's long, luxurious hair. They fed each other popcorn. Michelle tried to imagine what they would say to one another and quickly became bored. Behind her, her knees on the scabby carpet, Quinn glanced at the screen as she packed her duffel bag.

I'd rather you didn't write that,
Quinn said.
The story of my marriage.
Her hands went up to her head and felt around her mop of messy curls, making sure they hadn't morphed into ponytails.
And why would you give me long hair? I have never had long hair. Not even when I was a kid.

Sorry! Michelle was a little defensive. I Was Trying To Make You More Universal. And Plus It's Not Really You. She's Based On You, But She's Different.

I see she's different,
Quinn said.
She has long hair. But that's it. She has a husband who's a glass blower, she works at an art museum, she's having a heroin affair with a lesbian writer. The changed hair doesn't do anything. It's like you just wanted to humiliate me or something. If you're going to write about me at least give me good hair.

Michelle turned back to her computer, feeling like a petulant child. Okay, she said. Fine. I Won't Write About You. I Won't Write About My Life Because No One Wants To Be In
My Story. I Won't Write About My Family Because They're Fucking Over It. I Should Just Give Up And Get A Job At Taco Bell Then 'Cause This Is It, This Is All I Know How To Do, Write These Glorified Diary Entries And Now I Can't Even Do That Because Everyone Is So Fucking Sensitive.

There was perhaps no way out for Michelle, not at this point. She had taken up documenting her own life with such vengeance, back when it seemed that vengeance was necessary. When she was angry at her moms for not having raised her better, noticed her genius or something, put her in a good school for chrissakes or at least an art program, anything to nurture her creativity, to acknowledge that she was creative at all, that they saw her. What good was having lesbian parents if they didn't bring you to a goddamn art show?

While she railed against the women who birthed her, she decided, of course, to also rail against everyone who had ever slighted her as she trudged the landmine of childhood, adolescence. So many bullies and squares! So many heartbreakers! The heartbreakers continued into adulthood, and writing was a wonderful place to even the score. Michelle could express herself so wonderfully, her pain, their insensitivity. They would read her words and know that they had had this special, smart person in their arms and they had tossed them away, and they would forever regret it. They would never stop being sad.

There had never been a girl like Michelle in literature, of this she was sure. It tinged her writing with a bit of cosmic justice, which assuaged the icky feeling of self-obsession nicely. Someday she would be dead—as would all the people in her books, their petty problems evaporated—but this
book
would exist, the most holy object in the world, a
book. All their dumb lives were elevated for it. Even a book like Michelle's, a small book read by few. It didn't matter. She had rendered them cinematic in their small lives. Really everyone should be grateful.

Except they weren't. Quinn was only the latest to protest her inclusion in Michelle's story—which, basically, felt like protesting their inclusion in Michelle's
life
, which didn't feel great, honestly, and besides, what were they doing there, then? But even this tantrum was but the last gasp of Michelle's bravado. She'd grown weary of feeling like her writing hurt the people closest to her. She'd become more attuned to their feelings. She'd grown older and read wider and had begun to question how singular and important her story even was. Was she a war orphan, a refugee? No. She was a skinny, white, marginally attractive female living in the United States, where even poor people have MTV. What did she think was so important about her pain?

In reality, Quinn and Michelle weren't scheduled to meet one another for over a decade, when a series of flirtatious Gchats led to a brief affair involving diners, karaoke bars, and blanket forts. It was sweet for about five minutes, but then Michelle found herself in possession of a bottle of Vicodin from a bout of oral surgery. Believe it or not, Michelle hadn't ingested drugs or alcohol in eight years. But, being a drug addict, Michelle swiftly began abusing the Vicodin. By the second day on painkillers she had stopped eating in order to increase the chemical's effect.

Michelle wound up sickened with a panic attack outside an In-N-Out Burger in Hercules, California, sending Quinn inside to get her a cheeseburger, animal style, with fries.
When Quinn returned, Michelle was sobbing, terrified she would have to change her sobriety date, awestruck by how quickly she'd become insane. Sober for nearly a decade, all it took was one day on pain pills for Michelle to become obsessed and scheming, starving herself to plump her high.

Quinn didn't believe in the rhetoric of addiction and thus consoled Michelle,
You're just a girl who forgot to eat. You're upsetting yourself by seeing it all through this lens of addiction and AA.

Michelle thought that only people who went to AA understood the true nature of addiction. She didn't hold Quinn's ignorance against her, but she wondered how safe it was for her to date a person who didn't believe in alcoholism. Michelle was nothing if not an alcoholic. More than being queer or a writer, Polish, or even female, it was what had shaped her life.

Quinn couldn't believe that this might be a deal breaker.
Let me get this straight,
Quinn said. They were heaped moodily in a large curving booth in an Italian restaurant in North Beach. The Mafia Booth, the bartender who had seated them called it.
You would break up with me because I don't agree with your definition of alcoholism.
They ate pizza and salad. Michelle still felt off from her pill binge. She'd forgotten how immediate and epic her hangovers were. People talked about this in AA—how your alcoholism continues to worsen even as you abstain, and if you do use again the effect is far worse than it was the last time.

My disease is in the basement, doing push-ups
, Michelle had heard addicts say. And it was true. Two days taking Vicodin as directed, only altering her diet for maximum high, and she was still fragile and teary a week later. She shared her insight with Quinn.

Alcoholism is not a disease,
Quinn argued.

It's Been Proven, Michelle said. By Science. A Million Times Over.

Really?
Quinn asked skeptically.
Really? Because I don't think that is true. I don't think science has all the answers.
Quinn was also against therapy and the entire concept of
healing
. It was ridiculous for Michelle—whose days were divided between AA meetings, Al-Anon meetings, meditation at the Zen Center, the elliptical machine at 24-Hour Fitness, and sessions with a therapist—to date this person.

Wait, I'm really confused.
Quinn felt a rising panic as she sat there on the carpet of Michelle's studio apartment.
What do you mean we haven't met?
An existential chill ran through the girl. It felt true. Something about this whole connection had felt otherworldly, like Quinn was experiencing everything through a shallow pool of water. Life wavered. She'd thought it was the drugs.

This Is A Story, Michelle gestured at the studio apartment. It was a bleak place enlivened by the brutal constancy of the Southern California sunshine. Michelle had decided against wearing a visor or carrying a sun umbrella. No matter how deadly its rays, the sun always cheered Michelle. It made the spotty white walls of her new studio less depressing. The hard plank of carpet. The sag of the futon on the floor. The strange parade of end-time insects doing their last waltz underneath the kitchen sink.

This, Michelle told Quinn, Is My Memoir.

Memoirs are true,
Quinn, also a writer, pointed out.

This One Is Part True And Part False. All That Stuff I Just Said, About When We Dated, Is True.

God
, Quinn said.
It doesn't make me look very good. Did I tell you you could write about me?

No, Michelle said, But You Didn't Tell Me I Couldn't. The Person I Really Came To Los Angeles With Is Lucretia. I Actually Wrote The Whole Book With Her In It. Our Whole Story. Eight Years, Five Hundred Pages.

Quinn whistled through her teeth.
Eight years! The slam poet from the first part of the book? You were with her for eight years?

I Know, Michelle said. It Was Really Complicated. She Didn't Want Me To Write About Her But Our Breakup Was So Shitty And Awful I Just Really Needed To Tell The Story. You Know How A Story Needs To Get Told?

Quinn did. It was one of the reasons Michelle brought her into the book. Quinn was a poet and knew the feeling of writing bubbling up inside her, like a pot coming to boil. You lunge for a pen before it goes away. You have to capture it. If you let it come, it just pours out. Five hundred pages.

At a bookstore in New York City in the year 2011, more than a decade after the world ends in
Black Wave
, Michelle stood before a microphone and read from that five-hundred-page memoir novel. She read about being there in that very apartment. How it had smelled strongly of the dish soap they used, yellow, purchased at the dollar store. Michelle and Lu had both been delighted to find that all items in the dollar store really were only a dollar. Dollar dinner plates painted with tulips. Dollar juice glasses with elephants and bumble bees. They brought these items back to this little kitchen in Los Angeles and placed them inside the built-in cabinets, at least in the ones that weren't painted shut with gobs of white paint.

In the story she read, Michelle tries to make Lu a bowl of beans. She adds corn and grates cheese into it, she seasons it with cumin and chili powder. All the while Lu is terribly mean to her. Lu has very low blood sugar. She can't find a job because she looks like both a boy and a girl and this makes people uncomfortable, so they tell her they are not hiring even though there are NOW HIRING signs hung all over the place. This makes Lu feel insane. She fights with Michelle, who is only trying to help, until Michelle collapses on the linoleum floor.

Like This, Michelle shows Quinn. They're in the kitchen in Los Angeles. Michelle beats her fists against the floor, then lets her forehead come to rest upon it. Her shoulders shake and heave as if she is sobbing. She raises her head.

Imagine There Are Little Bits Of Saucy Beans Splattered Around Me, Michelle guides her. Because I Just Threw The Wooden Spoon.

Eventually, Lu takes over and cooks the beans and they eat together. Michelle sobs through dinner. She is not yet on psychiatric medication and so once she starts to cry she cannot stop until she retires for the night. She is also not yet sober, so she spends almost every night getting drunk in the kitchen, alone, while Lu tries to sleep, the kitchen light shining on her head. Michelle fills the kitchen with cigarette smoke. Lu is nineteen and Michelle is twenty-eight.