Adventures in Disfellowshipping
Robert Kirvel
But gradually their perceptions dissolved into a blissful confusion and glided imperceptibly into an elastic world, which may well be the most authentic of all worlds, though nothing seems half so irrational. —Halldór Laxness, Independent People
Hers is not merely a dreaming-with-SFX, self-strangulation, Mom-needs-a-head-transplant world with unfiltered proto-romance accents. Each descriptor, though accurate, overlooks the role of self-deception.
Pam is on a mission to escape her lockdown life as it unfolds now. With body bio-timer sprinting toward an imprecise finish line, her mission draws calories from juvenile impulsivity and advances despite the drag Pam feels tugging at her judgment.
Fact. She’d been “seeing”—cue eyeroll skyward at the thought—a dusty dude who started a club he dubbed “Uzis for Jesus” because the tag is so catchy. Not so long ago—only a matter of months—Pam would thrill just thinking about her “dusty dude” and his Jesus outfit, but her estimation swiftly tanked. Today she knows any emotion linking her life as it is now with the rusty-dusty dude or his dubbed club is just dumb.
If you asked, she’d tell you everyone says she’s smart. She’d also add everyone thinks she’s stupid. She would claim she has good “people instincts” but no imagination. None. Pam aggressively defends the opinion that her opinion is as good as anyone’s. In fact, better than anyone else’s.
Like Pam’s opinions? Good for you. Don’t like them? OK, bitch, then just:
“FOAD!”
She does not know her mistaken opinion about opinion-worthiness is common to many, young and old, who confuse the idea of a right to hold an opinion with the validity of an opinion held, but then the youth of today can be forgiven their naïvety, Pam believes. Almost, young Miss Pam might be called a Luddite in revering closely held opinions and guarding against contravening ones, but she would deny the accusation even though she’s never heard of Mr. Ludd. She knows—even flaunts—her familiarity with the definitions of smart words such as “esoteric” and “virtual reality,” but the mythical Ned Ludd or King Ludd or General Ludd, as he’s been called, does not feature in her mental landscape.
Much on Pam’s mind these days, rather than real or mythical dudes, are thoughts about the not-here-just-yet. She envisions a brave and worrying destination straddling the recent past and near future, a place far from home and absent the boy she once embraced but welcomes no more. She is desperate about the one thing and wishes the atmosphere around her would settle, but no one can put a lasso around thin air, so to speak. The one thing is her catchphrase for a mission that might involve escape to a warmer emotional climate with another with whom she can interact genuinely, but she cannot know who the person is yet. Pam imagines—despite denying imagination—the disposition of the other person and the possibility of connecting emotionally through intuition or time travel or actual travel, but those ideas might be as dumb as the name of the Jesus club. More than anything else right now, Pam is a confused 14-year-old with fierce and contradictory opinions who wants—needs—to take a nap and conjure the other person who is not yet part of her life as it is now.
If asked, she’d say she never daydreams. Pam never dreams during sleep either. Never, ever. Nevertheless. Ten. Nine.
Eight.
seven,
six ….
* * *
It is a July afternoon in the year 11 BCE or thereabouts, though the exact year doesn’t have an official number because Jesus isn’t born yet. Livia brings to school a postcard-size drawing that people destroying the earth’s atmosphere in the 21st century might call porno. It might be the year 1 BCE or 11 BCE or 1111, and the image might or might not represent actual porn, but the point is, no one in Livia’s provincia has seen such a construction or knows anything about the subject matter. “Livia” is a name Pam will grow to like because it has nothing to do with her dumb life as it is now. Rather, it’s a fantastic name for a new and nervy person materializing in Pam’s dreamtime.
“OMG!” one kid squeals out in the playground. More accurately, the kid yelps an 11-ish BCE analogue of 21st century net-centric slang, but there’s no adequate translation for the outburst, so OMG will have to do.
All the kids eagerly hand their pocket change to Livia to get a glimpse of what she is flashing until an adult playground monitor plucks the image from Livia’s fingers in mid-flaunt. And just like that, the nervy and much-too-mouthy Ms. Livia is suspended by the Headmistress for ten school days. Compounding Livia’s infraction is the bottle of bootlegged myrrh (or whatever) discovered in her tote bag, plus it’s that super-wicked-strong myrrh all the kids are wild about these days because of its (supposed) aphrodisiac properties (in chocolate brownie form) and efficacy at countering boredom (in vape form). So, ten days suspension then.
“WTF?” Livia’s parents complain. (Again, think BCE equivalent, in Latin, of an impolite “initialism” along the lines, whiskey tango foxtrot.) To Livia’s parents’ way of thinking, the school’s administrative staff is guilty of (I) sullying their family’s good (ha!) name and (II) besmirching their daughter’s fine (!) reputation, though it might be reasoned (III) the two complaints are subclasses of one.
School is just so totally, totally dumb. Period.
“You can interpret my decision (regarding Livia’s two-week suspension) as a warning or a blessing,” the Headmistress tells Livia’s parents who mumble something into Pam’s ear. The woman purses lips, folds arms atop a spotless linen toga, and waits, but what the Headmistress implies is all too familiar to Livia, an alley-cat kid who will get knocked up sure as shootin’—as they used to say—if she doesn’t shape up and learn to follow the strictures of decency. Rules, which are so, so dumb.
* * *
Back on her feet in America-Is-The-Greatest-GD-Country-On-Earth, and after the DNA work is completed, the adults in Pam’s actual waking life are notified of the lab results. Duplicate analyses confirm a 99.9997% likelihood that Pam (in the here-and-now AD) is genetically related to both her presumptive dad and mom (and possibly young Livia in dreamland BCE as well). Well, theoretically confirms the connection to Southern European ancestry at any rate, if one were to retrogress through umpteen generations on Pam’s mother’s side of the family and way back to 11 BCE, give or take some BCE years. A rare genetic marker seals the deal and nails shut a metaphorical consanguineous coffin, Pam would tell you, but why would a 14-year-old kid living and nap-dreaming in today’s semi-rural USA, just outside Toledo, Ohio, need to undergo DNA testing in the first place only to discover evidence of Southern European-ish ancestry in her salivary biodata? (And why does Pam know the word “consanguineous” means kin?)
Don’t ask, Pam’s grandpa “GeePee” would advise. Don’t bring up that family business again. Please!
But if pressed, GeePee might concede that Pam’s home lives are not merely dumb but disasters. Lives and disasters, plural, because Pam inhabits 2.5 homes—two of which are total crap. “Crap” is the modifier Pam herself favors when feeling uncharacteristically mellow between bouts of septal rage. Is Pam a spontaneous combustible these days because of her fractured home life, with (formerly) questionable bloodlines, and a great imagination despite what she tells you? Is she a maelstrom of alter egos? A wrecking ball of reason though marginally fluent in intro Latin and terribly clever with words? Check, ditto, and double ditto per lab-sequenced and cross-validated double-helical data. So what, exactly, is going on here?
First thing. About the rage.
Blood boils in Pam’s teenage temples, and the urge to pummel someone—alternately suppressed and expressed—does not win allies. If asked, she’d say she is not addicted to dreams of any kind. No way because naps and dreams are for losers. She stomps around with a sour puss, and shitty things issue from her plum-painted lips when reflecting that she can never aspire to the cruel illusion of normalcy depicted on TV sitcoms or conjured in her fantasies. She paints her eyelashes inky black and longs for a spider tattoo on her backside and tries to ignore the anger-generator in her noggin but is too pissed to allow herself the privilege of distraction. Instead, the more she mulls, the more furious Pam becomes until, “Quit!” she yells at the idiot loudmouth resident between her ears. But she is unequal to the challenge of quitting anything and feels she alone has invented the dumb condition that stupid know-it-alls call teenage angst.
The days Pam spends at House A with her mother vacillate between extended periods of silence and thundering tantrums. For shelter, Pam often crawls under a blanket on a cat-piss-stained couch. Sometimes, while stumbling through the double-wide she needs to pick from the soles of her bare feet glass shards from broken beer bottles while at least two emotional truths fracture her psyche: (1) life isn’t fair around here, and (2) adults stink.
On the stinky couch, an image is forming again in Pam’s drowsy head. It has to do with her grandparents doing drugs or something, plus she likes to imagine a girl close to her own age with whom maybe she could carry on an actual, civilized conversation for once. The girl’s name is Livia. Pam smirks at her kick-ass imagination, or whatever you call those pictures that blossom behind eyelids because she does not believe in imagination. At all. Period.
And about that other home-sweet-home of Pam’s? House 2.0? It’s down the road a mile from Ma’s House A. Pam’s dad calls House B—which is a half-below-ground, cement bunker—Ground Zero within which the head-of-household wears stained shorts and muddy flip-flops while toying with the notion of extracting himself from the Stratolounger to take a hatchet to “them weeds out back.” Motivationally impaired since childhood, Pam’s dad has been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, PTSD, Hep A (or B or C, what’s the difference?), diabetes, and delusional thinking, but the man rarely takes his prescribed medications because … well … what do them specialists know anyways?
House B sets Pam’s fingernails to clawing walls when she sleeps over, and once, after locking herself in the bathroom to protest not getting her way, the cops were called to save Pam from “choking herself to death with her own bare hands,” according to the police report. Can a person choke to death playing Space Monkey? Who knows, but the fact is that the police have been summoned to Pam’s dad’s bunker time after ad nauseum time for disturbances reportedly involving (i) a butcher knife, (ii) pipe bomb, (iii) threats to “blow the ears off” the neighbor lady, one very nosey Mrs. Shiff, and (v though vii) overdoses of … well, you get the picture.
Pam interprets advice from adults—i.e., anyone older than 16—as “garbage.” A psychiatrist appointed by the court to evaluate the mental health and well-being of Pam in the context of her failing grades and chronic truancy and family’s rap sheets and questionable parental guardianship returns the opinion that Pam would be better off moving in with her DNA-validated grandparents. A court-assigned social worker doesn’t suggest the daughter should never spend another moment with her biological parents, but such is the worker’s legally nonbinding conviction.
But. Big Question here: are these people her actual biological parents? Pam’s presumptive kinfolk scream contradictory opinions at each other about in-and-out-of-wedlockedness, so the court orders DNA tests, and the answer is, Roger. Pam’s ma and pa are really Ma and Pa. Who knew?
Pam has a nasty way with badinage but a knack for poetry. Thus, on the Thursday night before Easter vacation, she posts her latest effort on social media.
Totally
Just Don’t Start
Don’t look at me
Don’t touch me
Don’t say it
Don’t talk to me
Don’t lecture me
Don’t mess with me
Don’t hate me
I
Don’t want to
Don’t need that
Don’t like it
Don’t believe it
Don’t trust you
Don’t think so
Don’t matter
Don’t care
You
Don’t know me
Don’t listen
Don’t believe me
Don’t understand
Don’t see me
Don’t like me
Don’t get it
Don’t love me
Just stop it and shut the fuck up.
Just hate me.
Just kill me. Just stop
* * *
Pam is so drained in body and mind she can barely drag her spider-tattoo-less ass anywhere after school. On Good Friday afternoon, she just wants to take a nap, but where is that even possible when House A stinks more than usual and the idea of House B makes her nauseous?
Potential solution: GeeMee and GeePee are Pam’s kin of most rational resort. They lead the boring lives of octogenarians except for a single indulgence. Sometimes Pam likes to think her grandparents conceal a spectacular secret: they are spies for a communist Eastern European country somewhere or maybe drug traffickers for a Mexican cartel. Other times, she envisions them as hackers working undercover from their basement for some classified government bureau plotting to topple a third-world dictator. Little does Pam know that her 60s-era GParents are into no-holds-barred self-medication-assisted self-actualization.
Pam decides anywhere is okay, so long as it’s away from Ma and Pa. “Shit, what’s to lose?”
She tosses several summer tops and crummy bottoms into paper bags, phones her grandPs, and tells them she wants to shack out with them at House 0.5 on a trial basis. OK? Maybe she will stay for a while. Or not. “OK?”
OK.
Pam tosses the paper bags onto a chair in her grandparents’ upstairs guest bedroom and flops on the bed, shoes and all. Problem is, GeeMee won’t leave her alone and insists on making “Her Princess” some tea (OMG, FFS: tea!). Pam is totally noddy, and the sheets smell so clean, and it feels like 100 degrees in the room, so she motions OK while GeeMee unties Pam’s shoes and makes the tea, which tastes minty-funny going down like somebody is anesthetizing part of somebody’s mouth. Pam is exhausted in biology and spirit as her mind sprouts a mixed-metaphorical bouquet of hormonally generated images chasing one another like painted horses on a cortical carousel while she drifts off. In real life, Pam’s elderly grandparents are just flawed human beings who mix their metaphors too—and drugs as well— but in Pam’s fuzzy head right now, the old folks are merry-go-round creatures who can assume wonderful shapes at random. Pam thinks it impossible to zone out in the sweaty-hot guest bedroom, but the house is so quiet, and the bed is comfy, and tea is kicking in, and the carousel
slows
to
a
crawl.
* * *
An hour or so later, in dream-o’clock time, Pam awakens. Or not. Although it appears to be dark outside, through the wizardry of multi-sensory, audio-visual-olfactory anti-reality, courtesy of GeeMee’s special “tea,” Pam makes a wonderful discovery. It is possible while lying perfectly still in Mee’s bed not only to float forward or backward in space and time, but also to reproduce the experience of electro-self-execution without physically killing anybody. Pam wants to execute her ego and disconnect whatever remains from her torso, but opts merely to watch the mental motion picture play out in her noggin as a passive spectator.
Pam is a fan of virtual reality, and a thought movie right here, right now, in bed, feels just right to take the edge off. It even seems possible to forget for a moment the atrocity that is her actual life. Or if not an atrocity, then a big fat heap of idiot-crap mistakes piled on one another. If only she could….
Redo. Something. In. The. Past.
If only she could re-construct her life. If only Pam could molt into a more manageable world.
But of course, a few dreamtime tics later, somebody interrupts her reverie by pounding on the door downstairs, and Pam looks down through cracks in the floorboards to see GeePee accepting a crate from a guy dressed in a UPS uniform. GeePee examines the crate and then opens the lid to find a metal case inside. Through the floorboards, Pam can see something that appears to be all buttons and dials and switches. Something seriously expensive.
Pee giggles to Mee about how their new special-delivery plaything features virtual travel backward in time. So he sets the dials on the console, double-checks everything as if he and his mate are commander and co-pilot on a starship—Roger this and Roger that, and they doff headgear and goggles, join hands, and agree to a test run for no longer than an hour.
One hour at most. Or two. What could it hurt?
Pee presses the Start button, and they’re off. Taking Pam along emotionally. Except nothing happens.
Then in a flash, it’s as if Pam rockets from home turf to a distant world fitted out with all the familiar furnishings of home yet vastly more splendid. Colors look so bright! And hey? What’s up with the living room wallpaper? Textures convey odors, and sounds play on the epidermis as itchy or silken. It’s sort of like that time Pam inhaled some dope laughing gas at the dentist, only better. When Pee stares into Pam’s face, his skin makes her think of cooked parchment paper scented with the odor of wet puppy, but she loves the old coot anyway.
Right off the bat, the old-timers venture off to investigate nooks and crannies of the house they’ve occupied for 50 years. Upstairs in a spare closet, Mee yanks a string dangling from a naked light bulb and pulls out a suitcase that hasn’t seen the light of day in ages. It’s the suitcase they used during all those summer visits to Mee’s aunt and uncle who lived in the Finger Lakes district of New York State. When Mee opens the lid, the universe inside the closet of Pam’s head has another spasm.
The smell. Oh, that smell! So familiar! So sweet.
It’s Aux de Finger Lakes, where Mee’s long-deceased aunt and uncle of Canandaigua, New York used to live as if they are standing right here, right now. Except they are decades-long dead people rendered in high-definition and 3D Technicolor, complete with surround sound. How is it possible?
Thank you, P’s gadget. Or could it be something about the endogenous hormones circulating in Pam’s raging mind-body? Or brain fever? Or that special “herbal” ingredient in granny’s “tea?”
Now the old grandfather clock downstairs ticks the tocks of real time, yet neither Mee nor Pee—nor Pam—who are all time-warped back to 1960s innerspace, can hear it ticking. The house might be on fire, and they wouldn’t smell a thing. Triggered by olfactory molecules of an outdated suitcase, the blended consciousness of Pam-Mee and Pam-Pee opens wide to become what is now the “real” and present world of Canandaigua, New York, in the 1960s.
Ahh. Lovely. Simply lovely.
It’s so very pleasant. Here is the kind of experience Pam has been seeking: not death and destruction, not oblivion, not some lame excuse for escape, but this! A trip down a mid-century memory lane and into the heart and soul of the yesteryear’s innocence. What fun to revisit a more lovely time! What joy to breathe freely with no worries in the world. Like listening to music at a bandstand. Like a summer concert at an old bandstand down by the lake in slaphappy cotton-candy summertime.
But as Pam hears a rustling sound far away, it occurs to Pee that something is off-kilter in the old-timey music scene in the park. Mee picks up the nervous vibe from Pee and telegraphs her shared unease. The imagery ripples into something upsetting, a dreamscape turning sour.
Pee tries to hum a little music from the good-old-days to get things back on track, but the melody line skedaddles from its moorings. It’s mid-century-ish, rural New York State to be sure, but a whitewashed town where something unexpected is a-brewing.
Out of left field, Pam feels it coming. Pee catches a glimpse as well. All three brace. A teenage kid wearing a red baseball cap and extra-large tee shirt with “Uzis for Jesus” printed in big letters on the front is running straight at Pam. He makes a sudden turn toward Pee. What’s this then: a hijacking back to contemporary America?
The boy is white as a ghost and mad as the dickens. Why is he heading straight for the old couple? And why is the fully automatic rifle in his hands leveled at Pee’s midsection?
Concussive shocks compress air molecules as rounds reduce the bandstand to splinters. Pam’s grandparents would duck for cover, but wood chips make for crappy flak jackets. As he drops to a knee, Pee wonders why he can’t stand up any more let alone run for safety. Pam sees her Pee put a hand where his abdomen used to be and reach out with the other arm to shield Mee, but the old woman is clutching something rubbery she wants to give back to her mate. It appears to be a bloody sausage connected by a wet strand to Pee’s midsection, but whatever it is—or was—gets mangled by another round of ammo.
Is it true that people don’t feel what tears them apart when chunks of anatomy are reduced to hamburger by a fully automatic weapon? Pam has wondered about that during those weekly school-shooter drills. Do extremities chill as blood rushes from the periphery to rescue heart and lungs and liver from oxygen deprivation? Mee and Pee attempt to touch hands before they both hit the ground face-first in a ballet that recapitulates the synchrony of a first kiss, or the slo-mo death scene from that old Bonny and Clyde flick on a TV rerun Pam caught last Saturday night. Time loses meaning along with any notion of what death is and is not.
As for life? How brief.
What would the old folks have done with their remaining years, had they lived? And did they remember to feed the cat? What can anyone do in times like these?
Scouting the smoky trail of unconscious yearning for a simulated world of safety and comfort lived on her own terms with decent people (really, was it too much to ask?), Pam experiences instead of the solace she craves the static of a million frayed nerve endings attempting to alert via neurotransmitters the prefrontal cortex with a message about anxiety. About terror. About truth. Her truth. Her biology that will express itself one way or another.
In lieu of happy endings, Pam’s delirium advances with a mind of its own. Amber fluid flavored with Vermont maple syrup gushes gash-wise from Pee’s left nipple to groin and rivers onto the ground where Mee’s embroidered apron absorbs the expanding puddle of goo but can’t keep up with the flow. Pam remembers seeing magazine images of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge pushing earth-stuffing outward from the crust and fancies herself drifting apart from her dying grandparents aboard a raft of Second Amendment guarantees, only slightly troubled by the mental stream of recurring metaphors.
Frankly, it’s too much excitement. Too much thinking. Or maybe it’s more to do with Pam’s nap-time physiology. Who’s to say?
* * *
Pam would swear she is wide awake and weeping now, but both cheeks remain dry to the touch. Throwing covers from the bed, she watches a sheet hang in mid-air before sailing down to neatly embrace the mattress near her feet, and her body drifts—because she cannot move her feet—into a hallway leading to her grandparents’ bedroom. A door swings open, and Pam finds herself floating to the foot of her grandparents’ bed where two bodies lie in state in the half dark. Two bodies. Not breathing. Unmoving.
This is how it is then. Real life forever coming at you. The old folks dead in their own beds.
Then again, from a twitch of Mee’s upper lip and an almost imperceptible rise of his chest, Pam sees her Mee and Pee are only … what? Dozing? Bloody sausages aren’t spilling out of anybody’s guts around here. Old people are like that, Pam scolds herself, scaring the crap out of you after tottering off someplace in the afternoon like a couple of mutts looking for a zombie snooze in the shade.
Pam tries to feel her body by moving her arms and adjusting her legs, but she can’t seem to control anything. Instead, her frame auto-descends the stairs and enters the living room where she stands waiting for something rational to happen. She looks at her finger, her own hand. Pam spins forward—backward?—to land ass-sideways on her grandparents’ mohair couch. From somewhere comes a sprinkle of stars and gurgle of time.
“Damn!”
Warm stones materialize underfoot as someone approaches along a path through stately pine trees. A girl crunches closer through dappled sunlight on gravel, someone about Pam’s age but with hair done up in braids straight out of that old Star Wars flick. Pam’s counterpart Princess is draped shoulder-to-thigh in gauzy fabric tied with a silk cord around the waist. It is Livia. Lovely Livia again. Part of her future self.
It occurs to Pam that “Livia” is a name as precious as history yet more pleasing because no one gives a child a name like that these days, and the sound carries a pleasant rhythm in synch with the other heart beating inside her belly. It occurs to Pam that until now, she’s wanted only to run away from her dump-cluster life, to escape in dreams the monsters and duplicities and bad fortune. To escape her biological self. Until Livia came into her life, she’d swear she had never really seen herself at all. She’d swear she had no imagination until ghosts started populating her hormonal imagination.
Livia touches Pam. Then the Princess in toga and braids and sandals is gone in a blink of blue light.
But it’s Pam’s eyes that are blinking. Blinking for real in the here and now. Pam blinks voluntarily and keeps both eyes open to feel her own hand resting at her navel.
As if arriving from another time, Pam is in Mee’s guest bed with those white sheets again and a dumb-ass blanket covering her feet. She kicks the blanket off and sees through the fading light a black-and-white photo on the nightstand that is a shadow of herself as an infant. The photo always on display in her grandparents’ house.
True, Ma still needs a head transplant and Dad is a jerk, but now you’re all that matters, Pam wants to say alone at dusk in the upstairs bedroom of her grandparents’ home. She touches the photo because the innocent learn by example, and, for once, Pam grants herself permission to say the words out loud she’s been suppressing for weeks.
“I’m going to call you Livia.”
You. Her. Livia.
Pam thinks about a place where untruths and monsters and bullets will not dog her, and honesty might somehow begin to work. She tells herself other blue conceits, knowing she must try to be better now and maybe more real with herself because there is more than her self. She thinks about the need to take the kind of responsibility her parents never mastered. They are thoughts thought in self-defense while cashing in what others call reality for a more desirable mental currency of the imagined. But why not? What’s wrong with imagining something good for a change?
Until now, her life’s been overrun and overruled, but maybe she can do something else for a change? Why not at least imagine a season soon when Pam and her actual other will weather all the not-here-yets and feel no need to imagine more.
She shakes off the remains of her snooze, and Pam can’t remember feeling so famished. Totally starving. The thought of a dusty dude off somewhere polishing his Uzi makes her want to throw up, but she stops herself in mid-thought.
Quit it.
Maybe the old people are up from their 40 winks by now? Maybe they have pickles in the stupid fridge? And some yogurt.
End
Robert D. Kirvel has works appearing in four dozen literary journals or anthologies. Awards include the Steel Toe Books Prize in Prose, Chautauqua Editor’s Prize for nonfiction, Fulton Prize for the Short Story, ArtPrize for creative nonfiction, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and acknowledgement by the National Science and Technology Council of the Executive Office of the President of the U.S. The author has published in the U.S, Canada, U.K, Ireland, New Zealand, and Germany. His novel, Shooting the Wire, was published in 2019 in London. Steel Toe Books published his collection of essays, iWater and Other Convictions, in October 2021.