“I could draw up the papers,” Clarissa is expansive. “But adoption is superior.”
She came to San Francisco when she was 7. Her father, Marvin, had terminal cancer. Her mother was mentally ill. They were bankrupt. She thought heaven was a foster home. If Marvin would just finally die, perhaps she could even get adopted.
“I’ve missed you like a first love,” she says.
“I was your first love,” Clarissa reminds her. “And you mine.”
They lean across the faux wood table etched with knife gouged gang insignias and logos of metal bands and kiss again. They are both manic this autumn day. They share numerous personality disorders. They’re both bi-polar 2 with borderline features. Substance abuse is a persistent irritant. Recently, they’ve been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Today’s sun turns the San Francisco Bay the purple of noon irises in country gardens in July. To articulate such facets, to know and chart them is a spasm of thunder inside, a tiny birth the size of a violet’s mouth. If she extracted this entity from her body, she could present it to Clarissa like an infant.
She examines her almost cousin’s eyes. Even through dark sunglasses, they are inordinately bright. Then she senses that she, too, is glowing. Her eyes are brass corridors reflecting fluorescent light. They’re both candles today, unusually in sync, radiant with clarity and energy. Clarissa wears a silk scarf, a vivid purple implying motion and vertical waves.
“Like it?” Clarissa asks. “Hermes. Take it. I just stole it on Maiden Lane.”
“You still shoplift?” She holds the scarf. It feels moist and sanctified. It reminds her of the Mohave in December, crossing from the east into an inland ocean of relentless purple and mauve waves. The scarf is an embrace around her neck.
“Theft is like guerilla warfare,” Clarissa explains. They’ve finished their second round of drinks. “A thrill kill requires mental discipline. I put it on and keep walking. I know I’ve had it for years. I bought it on the Champs Elysees. It was raining. I was at the George V. No one could dare question me. And no one does. Let’s ride the carousel.”
They carry their drinks across the stained wooden planks of the pier. The carousel is closed. Clarissa makes a cell phone call and a man appears. She produces three hundred dollar bills. They wait for the right seats, choosing recently painted twin horses, white and intricately decorated like certain antique porcelain plates, and ride for half an hour. Clarissa vomits twice.
She searches her theoretical arsenal. Is it time for a hand grenade? Should she call for a chopper with medics? Then she remembers her mission. “Are you OK?” she manages.
“I understand how children discover bulimia,” Clarissa reports, excited. “It’s an accidental miracle.”
Despite the gym-suit camouflage, it’s obvious Clarissa has gained weight. But even they have taboos. Eating disorders are a forbidden topic. They meet on neutral ground, but there are still no-fly zones, areas of fragmentation and carpet bombs, landmines and IEDs.
Clarissa borrows the purple scarf to wipe her mouth. She’s contaminated the silk, but she still wants it back. She thinks, suddenly, of flower bouquets and their inadequacy. The floral arrangements of her life have been too much and not enough. The petals stained, fragile and insubstantial. They were debris.
“If a contract is insufficient, what can we do?” she wonders.
They stand on the wharf where the carousel is no longer spinning. Gone are the circles they inscribed in the too thin aqua air, engraving midnight blue trails like marks made by fins. Somewhere these etchings floated into a river winding to a bay. More invisible origami.
“We could get a tattoo,” Clarissa proposes. “Our names together in a heart.”
“A tattoo?” she repeats, delighted. “Isn’t it painful and dangerous? The possibility of AIDS and infection?”
“But you love needles.” Clarissa is annoyed. “You’re a professional junky.”
“I’m in remission,” she replies quickly. There’s no doubt anymore. Clarissa is attacking.
In truth, during one particularly virulent carousel rotation, she decided to call a drug dealer in North Beach. It’s walking distance, over a steep sequence of stone steps in a cliff. Then the sudden unexpected gate. Within, a creek is dammed and trapped, the water stalls green with slime and duck excrement.
There’s a bridge to the Victorian house. She knows the grain in every wooden floorboard and the way sunset displays itself through each glass pane in every room. There’s a geometry to how sun impales and dissects the Golden Gate Bridge. If you comprehend this mathematics, you can construct spaceships and time machines with common household appliances. You can turn on the radio and talk to any god.
“You always relapse,” Clarissa observes. “And don’t you already have AIDS?”
She is shocked. She stares at Clarissa. Even with Gucci sunglasses, there’s a distinct softening around her chin, and a loss of definition in her cheeks.
“No. I have hepatitis C.” She is angry. “And you need to get your face done.”
“What part?” Clarissa is concerned.
They’re walking from the wharf toward a tattoo parlor on Columbus Avenue.
Shops offer stacks of cheap plaster statues, saints and children, dwarves and obese laughing frogs. Someone will purchase and paint these objects, display them, or give them as gifts. They pass display windows offering plastic replicas of Alcatraz, and T-shirts saying PRISONER and PSYCHO WARD.
“What part?” she repeats. “It’s not a fucking negotiation. It’s a composition. Just give the guy a blank check. And don’t use a Marin surgeon. You’ll end up looking like a clone. I found an Italian in Pittsburgh.”
“I noticed you finally got your father off your face,” Clarissa slowly admits.
“Well, the police wouldn’t do it,” she says with an edge. “And Mommy was in a locked ward.”
Slow swells are below the wharf. The bay is a liquid representation of fall. It’s in continual transition. All fluid bodies are autumnal and promise betrayal. That’s what leaves signify, flaunting unrepentant criminal reds like vengeance and adultery, and yellows like lanterns and amulets. Fall is about packing and disappearing. It’s the season for divestiture. Time of the severing. That’s the obvious subtext. And it occurs to her that her elation may dissipate. Emotions have their own inexplicable currents and random lightning storms.
She follows Clarissa into the tattoo parlor. “Let’s rock,” Clarissa says. “Lock and load.”
The Eagles are playing. It’s “Hotel California,” of course. A tanned man with a blond ponytail who looks like a yoga instructor opens a book of designs. Dragons.
Butterflies. Demons. Flowers. Guitars. Spiders. She vaguely remembers negotiations involving a fifth of vodka, and a complicated argument regarding the aesthetic implications of scripts. They selected a gothic font. Then she may have passed out.
She realizes they’re in an arcade on Pier 39. It’s three hours and six Bloody Mary’s later. They have gauze and adhesive tape on their shoulders where their names are carved into their left upper arms in navy blue. They’re leaving the encircling heart in red ink for their next reunion. Banks of garish video games surround them; hip-hop blasts from speakers in the ceilings and floors. Boys who look part Asian or Mexican are armed with laser levers and plastic machine guns. They keep the real Glocks in their pockets.