A TREATISE ON MADNESS WHILE THE LIGHT STILL SHINES

I.

In typical Thomas fashion, the will arrived piecemeal. He couldn’t settle on a lawyer, so he had consulted with eight; he’d overpromised parts of the estate that were long pawned off in tougher economic winters or given as wedding gifts to cloying cousins still suckling at the teat of Thomas’ early success. Four years after the funeral, when the balance sheet for the eight competing lawyers was finally settled by a ninth party and paid for in fatty company stakes—I finally received several electronic contracts in my email. I had inherited the house upstate as promised. This came as a pleasant surprise.

I was less surprised, and far less delighted, however, to arrive at the house to find a sealed envelope on the dust-crusted dining table, inside of which were written instructions in my deceased father’s tremulous handwriting: Contact your sister Bella. I would like you to divide the Ojai Grove forty-sixty. I called the ninth lawyer to verify the validity of this request. He told me the orange grove had always been in my name. “By the way,” he said, “you’re looking at a pretty steep tax payment on that property. Maybe you should sell the upstate place.”

The orange grove was the real pain. It was not the laborious death of our indecisive father whom we had all mourned appropriately while he was on his terrible, slow way out. It was this place in California, the hell that was scarcely mentioned, a blight on the semi-truce our family had made silently in the final decade, that would puncture the opalescent platitudes we’d used to comfort each other in those long months, in which each of us had suffered in ways we secretly felt deeper and more meaningful than the other.

I tried to pawn the Ojai property off on the ninth lawyer for the cheapest price I could think of (“a dollar,” I said. “Please.”) and he laughed. Just the insurance on that shithole was unconciounable—no, impossible. “That place isn’t worth saving,” he said. “Plus your dad grew some really shitty oranges.” While alive, Thomas had brought gift baskets of the fruit to the various legal entities with whom he dealt. All of them—all eight sparring firms—felt compelled to warn the ninth not to get involved. “He must have poisoned them or something,” Nine chortled over speakerphone. “They taste like acid reflux.”

Nine was correct. With unlimited cashflow and what seemed, back then, to be unlimited time, Thomas had developed a peculiar fascination with inbreeding plants, cross-pollinating and underwatering and pesticide-spraying to the degree that the majority of his grove, save for a select few sunflowers, had died long before he did. He was hermetic in his obsession; leaving the country on the eve of my college graduation, calling me to wish me well from the Emirates, to inform me that, yes, he’d finally found the cutting he’d been looking for but it wouldn’t fly on commercial flights—did I think he should charter a plane? Thomas’ goal, as we all understood it, was to make something so futile we would leave him alone. His Terrestrial Paradise full of poison, all the fruits from the trees and the flowers from the ground and the grasses on the property shiny and robust, full of horrific juices strong enough to incite a shock to the immune system so great that the consumer would perish upon that singular, perfect bite, the fruits revealing themselves at the moment of puncture to be truly, horrifically, ugly.

I think—I know now, in my bones—that there was death on his mind. Maybe he wanted to kill himself, before the pain was too excruciating and the intubations became too frequent. But the obsession began so early, the diagnosis came many seasons after the first couple of waves of fruit crops (all of which were delightfully tangy, real miracles of cross pollination, well-matched with gin or prosecco). It was nauseating to think about it all—that he had started this project and pursued it with malicious intent; that there was an end goal he seemed to pursue so doggedly he wanted to sever ties with us; wanted to create some ostensibly dangerous piece of fruit that had the capacity to kill. 

The worst part of it all is that thinking about this experiment cracked something open inside of me. It was his greatest, most obsessive passion. He didn’t finish the project he began. Thomas, my father, passed into the light surrounded by his hangers-on family in the private ward of Mount Sinai in New York City, several years and several thousands of miles removed from that orange grove. On that perfect spring day, while we cried together in that room, each child and wife clutching different parts of his emaciated limbs as if we ripped off the largest piece he could belong to the winner, the fruits fell from those trees, still tracibly edible.

II.

I sold the house upstate to Bella. 

Over market price, at the time, which paid off the Ojai debt, and then she sold it for far less when the developers wanted the land, and then she squandered her money investing in something dastardly technological, so she moved into the adjacent room in the grove and we became business partners and then friends, cohabitors of our father’s ideological graveyard. And the less we talked about the oranges and the fields of pungent flowers, the sweeter, the more edible, the more beautiful they became—it was nice, I think, for the two of us to know that when kept unchecked, the light would prevail. All became less horrid as the seasons changed.  As the years went by, we would occasionally have bitter orange juice at breakfasts, or fix a salad sprinkled with wild tart strawberries, clutching an EpiPen in our laps. 

This rhapsodic period came to a halt on the last Thursday afternoon in the July of my fifty-first year. I guess I got to thinking about Thomas while walking the property, and the coloring of the sun on the green leaves was particularly wistful that evening and the breeze moved the dry grasses in the gentlest way—I guess I came to realize that all of it would exist long after me. I felt a growing sense of despair creep in and it made me keel into the dirt. It wasn’t fair, it occurred to me, that all of this beauty on this land would exist for eons and that nobody would know that I let it live, that I was the one to save it from extinction. Nobody would ever know that Thomas tried to make it his. Were we not entitled to something for us, just for us?

Whatever had been cracked open inside of me that long ago broke then and there; I wanted to feel the pure lonesomeness that he felt with his garden, I wanted to be alone with him to ask if he was angry with me for letting it go, I wanted to feel close to him, I wanted to know him. I wanted to know him. I wanted to know him.

And so here I sit, now, so many seasons removed from that gentle evening and I think that I am close. 

I believe that I purified everything for myself. I liquidated my business with Bella, and she eventually moved away because she never shared what me and Thomas had. Have. I pruned and sprayed and pollinated and studied and now everything on this land will die with me; those who venture here to try to taste this beauty will perish with it too. 

Tonight I have prepared a decadent feast for myself and it smells so delicious. 

I can no longer resist just one little bite. 

I’ve saved Thomas a seat at my table.

BLIND AND SQUEEZE AND CHOKE

I.

In the summer I spent with my uncle Aaron, the vast majority of evenings were wasted on the backside of his condominium patio, which overlooked the gravel road that plunged steeply into the lake. Aaron was my uncle by definition and an older brother by age, his sister having given birth to me shortly after his mother birthed her miracle menopause child. We did not grow up together, and we fought frequently at Christmases and Easters by proximity and generally thought the other selfish.

Then it was my nineteenth year and my mother moved and there was still a vast four months before I was supposed to attend college, and Aaron got a condo from his accounting job and I was tasked to practice being around people I didn’t know or like very much. So I took Aaron’s spare room in his monk-like bachelor pad that was forty five minutes away from anything that actually mattered to me, and we would come home and the sun would set behind the condo, so we’d watch the darkness encroach from the treeline and we’d laugh, occasionally, at the bulky pickup trucks who would fuck up the launch and retrieval of their dinghys. 

After Aaron got in the accident my mother asked me to talk about memories from the summer we spent together in the eulogy. She thought it would add an intimate touch; something in the brotherly vein as his coworkers were generally uninteresting and his college buddies couldn’t fly out in time and his girlfriend died too. 

So, I spent two days thinking about that summer, the spastic ways the muddy water moved behind the boats, the stale flat pack of seltzers kept on the back porch for the sake of convenience, the cans halfheartedly crumpled in the pile in the corner, and all I could think about was the wet air and the heat that choked the two of us on those nights where nothing true was exchanged. It was hard to eke beauty from those months, even though we’d generally stopped the fighting, because what was left of the memory was the screech of cicadas by the lake brush, the nakedness of the patio upon which Aaron had thrown two meager lawn chairs.

II.

The story I landed on at the funeral was this: on one of the nights in late summer, after we’d exhausted the flat pack of seltzers, Aaron thought he saw a girl drowning near the slip. He’d leaped from the second story of the deck, landed on the hill, and took off toward the lake at full speed only to realize, when we were all the way down there with our pants half off, that she’d been taking a piss in the water with her friends crouching in the pebbles nearby.

My voice did not shake when I said this. I talked about how we’d doubled over with laughter and by then everything was that sepia hue, we couldn’t stop laughing about his false sense of valor, and we all took off our clothes and joined her in the shallows; how we’d told the girl that I was the uncle, that he was the nephew, and how it was so hilarious to us that we’d built a story to her friends, hysterical to the point of tears, telling the girls childhood stories from the other’s perspective. I, as the uncle, had espoused idiotic fatherly advice to someone only two years younger than myself—wasn’t I horrible? He, as the nephew, had stolen the uncle’s rightful spot as the family baby since we were children—wasn’t he horrible? 

We laughed and laughed with the girls and became honest with each other, for the first time, under the cloak of that paltry darkness. After I said this at the funeral everyone was smiling, so I followed it with something morbid that quelled everyone’s laughter. Something like, of course if we were actually switched, if I were actually the uncle and he the nephew, I wouldn’t have gotten into the car with my beautiful girlfriend last weekend and totaled it by crashing into a semi. It was in bad taste to end the story this way, but it was better than the actual story, which was as such:

It is true about Aaron jumping down from the second story to save the girl, that part is true, but in reality during the two story leap he’d landed funny on his knee and messed it up pretty badly. By the time I safely descended the stairs from the other side of the building and walked around to the back, he was crying a little, which I found pathetic, and I told him it was fine if we just left the girl to drown if he wanted to go to the ER, which pissed him off even more, so I carried him down to the lakeshore on my back and the girl really was just fine, and I was feeling wicked and told her my nephew thought she was drowning so he made me carry him to the lake. She really did think it was funny. Aaron didn’t, so he said, as the nephew I’ve always been weak. My uncle always pays for me, or lets me stay at his house for free when my mommy moves away because I can’t do anything by myself, I get to go to college debt free because my family loves me oh so much. And we built the story this way, laughing for the sake of our damsel in distress, each taking increasingly gut-wrenching digs at the other under the guise of this joke, getting more angry than we ever had been back in the presence of our parents. And as the night got thicker it was still so hot, and we kept playing this game with each other, even when the girls left. I don’t recall, now, when they left, or if they delivered us limp excuses and gracefully bowed out as the audience, but I do remember that eventually, we were alone. 

It was pitch black, the water so dark, the night entered my nose and coated my tongue and tasted like bile, and in that darkness there was a real fear. I couldn’t see Aaron, even in the bleak glow cast by the condominium on the hill above. I heard him, though, his weight shifting, his limp leg grinding the pebbles closer and closer to me, and I imagined a stone clutched in his fist. He wouldn’t do anything to actually hurt me, would he? Would he? Would he?

 “Aaron,” I said, softly. “Uncle Aaron?” The grinding of the pebbles, closer still.

So I ran, faster than I ever have and likely ever will, up the hill towards that dry rotted patio, that humming porch light.

PROMISES ARE QUITE EASY TO KEEP

I.

“You’re making me feel like an invalid,” my mother once said to me in broad daylight at the checkout counter at Victoria’s Secret. I couldn’t even hush her because I knew she’d revel in it—she’d shoot a knowing look at the hapless teenage cashier who had, just moments ago, fondled both of our breasts, and she’d utter the word “muzzle’ while jabbing her thumb in my direction. From the way she interacted with me in public, you’d think I was her abusive caretaker, which I wasn’t, or her warden, which I technically was, due to the fact that she was on bedrest and the insurance had threatened us multiple times over that things only got more expensive the more she insisted on defying her own path to care. I am happy, I suppose, that she got to make people as uncomfortable as possible before she disappeared.

Yes, disappeared. This was somewhat of an inside joke between the two of us, as two women with not much to do but shop for bras and try out each other’s pills and pretend one didn’t come out of the other’s womb. Won’t it make you feel so much lighter, she used to giggle when I picked up prescriptions or walked her to her door or carried the groceries in, things that a daughter should, when I disappear? 

She was actually quite ill, I knew that and was frequently reminded of it when there were accidents, like when she crumpled in a wrinkled naked pile of flesh in the shower and trembled, wet and waterboarded, for hours before the nurse who took the nightshift lifted her out, or when her eyes turned sallow yellow for a month, or when her room stank of rot as I rifled through her jewelry chest to try on the things I would inherit when she disappeared.

But mostly, she milked the diagnosis and I was the primary beneficiary and victim. I knew that she acted sicker in public than she felt, knew that the sympathetic gaze of others filled her with a bloated sense of glee, knew that she faked a tremor when signing receipts so the waitress didn’t roll her eyes at the meager 10% she tended to leave when she felt like being pitied. She’d put on a dramatic hobble around cars parked in took the handicap spot; she used to play tricks on me, hiding behind the front door when I arrived so when I called her name to no answer, and felt that familiar tightness in the throat as I wracked the house for blue lifeless limbs, she’d jump from behind a corner: “NOT GONE YET!” she’d cackle. “YOU WISH!” Her disappearance had something to do with the theatrics, I know. And something to do with the jewelry.

It was our backup plan, always the glorious backup plan, that in that rotted chest of drawers sat our fortune if things got too terrible or if she disappeared and I needed to keep myself afloat for a couple of years. The jewels; the threats of disappearance; the careless ways in which my mother treated her body and my love were locked in a precarious pas de trois. One could not exist without the other two. She could not exist without me. I wouldn’t exist without her. 

II.

And then, I came to the house one morning and she’d actually done it, and the worst part is that I knew from the moment I entered the house that she’d done it, but I had to playact like I didn’t. I crept around the dining room. “Mom?” I asked of the empty house, peering behind the weather-worn couch, slowly opening all of the doors and checking twice in case she’d suddenly become paper thin and could manifest into existence again. “Mom?” I was peacocking, performing a thorough examination in the case that she was still there, monitoring my reaction to the final act. I checked inside the microwave, under the dining table, inside of each drawer. It took hours—one doesn’t realize how many nooks can be opened and shut in a two bedroom home until they’re forced to do so—hours to make it to the bedroom, and even there I knew that I would encounter nothing, not even those purpled limbs that I’d so feared for the decades she’d spent lying in wait. At least she’d spared me that. “Mom?” 

I had been skirting an event horizon and when I crossed into the threshold of that damp bedroom that still stank of her sickness, I was enveloped by the darkness that had waited for me. In the miasmic quiet, I knew that she had disappeared, and because my mother had disappeared so too had the jewels upon which I was stupid enough to always rely.

But I had to look anyway. 

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Photographed by Isabella Behraven

Styled by Audrey Taylor

Written by Annie Bush

Lighting: Juliet Lambert

Location: Sungold Studio

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