Over the next few days one thought came to me over and over—if only he would speak to me, if only I could ask him. The next time he appeared was on a TV commercial. Remember that beer company that used a dog as a mascot? Well, one evening they ran that commercial between a couple of sitcoms and the dog came out with Paul’s face. “Why don’t you talk to me?” I said to the TV. “How am I supposed to know what you want?” But then the commercial ended and he was gone.
The next time was in a fitting room in a department store. The ladies’ fitting room. Paul replaced the elderly woman who counted how many items you were holding and gave you a plastic card with the number on it. Some poor woman noticed his young male face and gave a little shriek, but I paid no attention. “I love you, Paul,” I said. “Please tell me what we should do. Please.” He said nothing, just looked at me, with such sadness I realized that “broken heart” was more than a corny cliché. I hurt, as if my heart had shattered in my chest.
“Did you want to try these on, Miss?” the woman asked, suddenly back in her body. I threw the clothes at her and ran out of the store.
When I phoned Alison at home she thanked me for calling. She hadn’t wanted to push me, she said. She asked if I could come to her office.
“Shall I bring my folks?” I asked.
“If you like. But you might want to hear the terms yourself first.”
I went alone. My folks didn’t expect me for several hours and I had my allowance for the train. When I got to her office she was wearing jeans and a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
She said, “I had a long talk with the government people. Several long talks, to be honest. We came to a tentative agreement. If you and your folks drop the suit, they will publicly admit culpability and pay damages of $750,000. They will also take on the cost of the independent team monitoring your protection.”
“What about Paul?” I said.
“And the Bright Beings have agreed to dissolve Lisa Black Dust 7. Completely dissolve her, as if she never existed.”
“What about Paul?” I repeated.
She was fiddling with something on her desk, a totem of some sort. I realized she didn’t want to look at me. She said, “Paul becomes—if we agree to the settlement—Paul becomes a guardian spirit.”
“Of what? He’s got to be a guardian of something.” I never knew I could talk to her like that.
She sighed. “Elevators,” she said. “The Bright Beings have offered to make Paul the guardian spirit of elevators.”
I started to laugh. It wasn’t funny. I just couldn’t help myself. “Elevators,” I said. “Oh God, Paul. Elevators!”
3
So now you know. When you step into an elevator, that narrow steel pole that stands next to the door—the one with the dots for eyes and an oval for a mouth and strands of nylon at the top for hair—that’s my cousin Paul. Or at least the “husk” as they say at the SDA. The physical chamber for the spirit to inhabit. Do you touch it? Do you rub the steel or touch the mouth for good luck, for protection? If you ride an elevator on the way to a business appointment, do you kiss the pole and say something like, “Blessed Spirit of this vehicle of ascent, carry me to victory with my new client”? Does it make you feel better?
I went to see him the other day. I went back to that building where he used to work, where he did whatever dumb stupid thing he did to attract the interest of Lisa Black Dust 7. I got in an elevator—there’s a whole row but it doesn’t matter which one, he inhabits all of them, in every building—and when it took off, and everyone who’d wanted to had touched the husk and stepped away, I went over to the pole and whispered, “I’m sorry, Paul. I love you. I hope it’s what you wanted.”
I don’t know, but I think the face, the dots and the oval, glowed slightly. Just a little. Just for a moment.
When I got home that evening, I went to my room and dug something out from the back of the cabinet underneath my desk. My framed Time magazine cover of Alison Birkett. For a while I just held it in my hands and looked at it. I should just throw it away, I thought. What’s the point of keeping it there, under my yearbooks and my old report cards? Throw it away. But I didn’t. Instead, I hugged it to my chest and lay down on my bed, with my knees drawn up against my arms. And I cried. I cried for Paul, I cried for Alison. Most of all, I guess, I cried for me.
PART TWO
Benign Adjustments
1
So there it is. Paul and Alison and me. And of course, Lisa Black Dust 7. Last night, I got out that old manuscript. It took me a while to find it. I’d buried it pretty well and for a few minutes I even thought I must have thrown it out. But no, there it was, along with my high school yearbook, the photo from my senior tattoo initiation—and that damn Time magazine cover. Alison Birkett, frozen in time, just like the corpse of Rebecca Rainbow under glass in the New York Stock Exchange.
I sat down and read it through, and I guess I didn’t cringe more than fifty or sixty times. What the hell, like I said back then, I was just a kid, right? Me and Alison. Shit. I can remember it so sharply, sitting there in her office, just about levitating with excitement. When I decided to write all this down, everything that’s just happened, I thought I probably should go back over the old stuff and edit it. Do a little cleaning up with the added wisdom of ten more years stuck on the planet. But now that I’ve read it, I think I’ll just leave it like it is. Somehow, I feel I owe it to Paul not to change anything, to keep the feelings the way they were when I wrote them down. And maybe I also owe it to Alison. I’m not sure about that. I don’t think I’m ever sure of anything when it comes to me and Alison Birkett.
It’s hard to know where to begin. Or maybe I’m just scared. I was going to start with the rally in Miracle Park, but maybe the real beginning was earlier, when Joan Monteil and I went to a Bead Woman for a Speaking at the start of our “relationship”. It was Joan’s idea. After several weeks of Joan hanging around, bringing me cute little toys, inviting me to openings and play readings, telling me how great I looked in whatever I happened to wear (I considered trying on more and more bizarre outfits, such as covering myself in bandages, or Victorian dresses stapled all over with baseball cards, just to see what she would say), when I finally gave in and went to bed with her, she was so overwhelmed she insisted we go see an SDA certified Speaker the very next day.
I didn’t want to tell Joan what I thought of SDA certifications. Or Bead Workers, for that matter. But that was no criticism of her. I didn’t talk about stuff like that with anyone. So there was Joan, sitting on the edge of her wooden chair with red and yellow beads caught in her hair from where the woman poured them over her head, and me doing my best to stare out at 7th Avenue through all the ancestral statues, offering stones and other junk hung in the window, and wishing I could shake out the beads still stuck in my hair, without that SDA certified malpractitioner scolding me for “pruning the Tree of the Ancients” when suddenly the woman grabs my shoulders in her certified hands and kisses me on my forehead and above my heart.