Homesick for Another World(63)
Once Gigi showed me on a map where the family’s ancestors were from. “My mother’s mother’s father is from this city. Lao Ting’s mother’s father’s mother was born here, on this river. My father’s mother’s mother is from this village. You see that dot? It’s so beautiful there. You know mist? There’s so much mist in that place. It’s like a big ghost, the whole village is one big, happy ghost.”
“I would like to go there sometime,” I said.
“You can go anytime. There are all kinds of magic stuff there. Maybe you can go there and go crazy. You need to go a little crazy sometimes, have a little fun. Sometimes I think you look sad too often. But I think you’re going to be happy soon. Here, let me say a blessing.”
I never told Gigi about my pituitary situation, which was the source of all my sadness. Anytime I had a cold or a rash or an upset stomach, Gigi would make a tincture from Chinese herbs she kept in a locked wooden chest in the master bedroom on the second floor. Each tincture had a different flavor, and it usually made me well again. I am sure that if I’d told Gigi about my situation, she would have made me a special tincture for that, too. And then every day after, she’d be asking, “Is it better? Is the flesh smaller now, or still so swollen? Poor Stephanie Reilly. You are so pretty. We need to get your gah-gah healthy again.”
? ? ?
One night I had a dream that Gigi told me to make a radio program out of the demon voices inside of me. I did so, and when I put the program on the air, the world heard the evil things the demons were saying, and everybody went crazy and killed themselves. In bed, as I dreamed, I became paralyzed. The ceiling opened up and an alien spaceship lasered down a powerful ray of vacuous light and exorcised all the demons out through my chest. It took about ten seconds.
“I wonder if they’re really gone,” I told Gigi. “If they are, I wonder what I’ll do. I wonder if I’ll be different from now on.”
“I had a dream last night, too,” Gigi said. “I met a young woman in a little shop somewhere. It was just a small mom-and-pop, dirty, not very nice. This young woman took a drink from the shelf and broke the bottle on the floor. Then she started eating the little shards of broken glass. I tried to pull her off the floor. ‘Don’t do that, sweet child!’ I was yelling, but she used the shards to cut my arms. Her hair became tangled in her face. She had hair like an African American woman when they get it ironed. It was like ribbons tied in knots across her face. When I woke up from this dream, I was thinking people could try wearing their hair like that, tied in knots across their faces. If it were done well, it could be very decorative and beautiful.” She turned to her daughter, who had long, straight black hair. “Maybe you’ll let me try some designs on you later.” The girl chewed her food and waved her chopsticks back and forth. “No?” said Gigi. “You’ll be sorry.” She laughed. “I hope your demons are gone, sweet Stephanie Reilly. But please don’t change too much. I’d miss you. We would all miss your warm, fragile spirit.”
? ? ?
The demons didn’t leave me, though. They were always there, taunting me, filling my pituitary with poison. One day, after a successful business meeting, I told Robbie about my pituitary situation as we drove back to the complex.
“I can understand your frustration,” he said. “My healer says that the body erupts from the mind. Everything is emotional. Ideas and feelings. Is there some emotion you are storing up in your pituitary, some negative feeling that makes your genitals so big and gross?”
“I guess I have a lot of emotion stored up. But it’s nothing bad. It’s love. It’s just love rotting up inside of me.”
“I’ve never heard of such a problem.”
“That’s it,” I said. “I have too much love, I think, and nobody to give it to.”
“What a conundrum,” Robbie said. “I can give you the number of a magician I know. He converts energies so they can be purged and donated to people in need.”
“It would be nice,” I said, “to help somebody out.”
“When I had tendonitis, he transferred the inflammation onto a dying mosquito, he told me. And then later that day a mosquito bit me. It was wonderful. I don’t know if it was the same mosquito, but my wrist felt better almost instantly.”
“That’s amazing, Robbie,” I said.
“Life is amazing, Stephanie Reilly. We won the jackpot, getting to live on this beautiful Earth. When I can keep that kind of positive attitude, a madman can beat me all he wants. He can break every bone in my body. There is no pain,” said Robbie. “Experiences are just time passing in different ways. Time passes and continues on and on. It has nowhere else to go. Call him.” He wrote down the magician’s phone number on the back of a business card.
? ? ?
“You know what happens when you jump off a bridge?” This was another man I remember. He had a scar across his forehead like a third eye. I found him panhandling outside the liquor store in Saticoy. He was intense and perturbed and smelled like motor oil and vomit, which is what drew me to him. I told him he could sleep on my couch if he promised not to touch me, and I took him home to the loft. He was just a kid, it turned out, only nineteen years old. He’d run away from his home in Nebraska and was thumbing rides down to Venice Beach. “Basically you bleed to death,” he told me. “Your bones turn into knives inside your body when you hit the water. Or your heart explodes under the pressure. And you break your neck. Can I use your bathroom?”