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Chapter 2

LISA

Lisa’s gaze, similar to the soft ephemeral touch of blind fingers, wandered slowly across the familiar outlines, surfaces, silhouettes, brightness and shadows filling the space that was her home. She spent a large part of her days and nights, as well as those strange undefined hours that lie in between, sitting motionless at the big table in her kitchen, smoking cigarettes (much to her closest friends’ consternation), sipping scotch and looking at the outside world through a tall but  narrow window. While she sat there, the seasons, chased by high desert winds, swiftly passed her look-out, already taking leave again by the time she had begun to notice their arrival. Having always lived her bound-less life to the fullest, she remembered being surprised at how easy her acceptance of this new home had been. Equal in natural beauty to the Mediterranean island, where she had lived for eleven years, New Mexico lacked the polished sophistication one could find everywhere in Europe, even in rugged and undeveloped places. This attribute was what she had come to love most about her new world.

Frank’s death had killed her appetite for life’s undiscovered secrets from one day to the next, she mused bitterly. All of a sudden, she had no desire left to perform the necessary maintenance, her physical being expected from her. Food and drink, other than scotch and coffee, showers, combs, toothbrushes, clean clothes, the stuff that makes a human being civilized, as well as nourishes, energizes and maintains its health, none of that was important anymore.

She had not only lost her lover, her best friend and greatest fan, but also her love of life and all its delights. And, if that were not enough, her “condition”, as she called the mental illness she was burdened with, due to an ongoing chain of traumatic events going back to her earliest childhood, was worse than ever before, despite the pills and all other manners of treatment available to her. She felt more isolated each day. During the first couple of months after becoming a widow, friends and neighbors had surely noticed her increasingly strange behavior and her extremely self- destructive ways, but accepted them as symptoms of profound grief. Lately, however, it was becoming obvious that they were less and less accepting of her conduct, when she did not return to the way a “normal person”, grieving or not, ought to behave.

One by one they stopped coming to visit her and, those who occasionally still did, were quickly alienated from the sheer shock of seeing how she was deteriorating. It made them leave as soon as they possibly could, claiming important engagements elsewhere, promising to come back.  Most of them didn’t, and those who did, started to be irritated with her for ignoring all their attempts to advise her how to move on, and get back to what they called “reality’. Her reaction to being patronized and marginalized for her unwillingness to play along, was to drive everyone away by becoming even more outrageous and anti-social, openly demonstrating that she did not give a damn about the rules and regulations “normal” people accepted for themselves and expected others, if they wanted to be part of their group, to adopt and then behave accordingly.

The price Lisa paid for her obstinacy was high. She no longer belonged to the world around her and lived a solitary, exiled existence with her dogs, who loved her the way she was,   unconditionally and fiercely loyal.

After observing and considering her situation for several months, she ended up doubting very much, whether it was possible to transform her inner turmoil into coherent words and phrases, in order to be heard and, truly understood, by others. She kept asking herself, how much time she had spent, appearing quiet and unassuming to the eyes of any chance observer, while really lost in a whirling, nauseated state. Being this way usually reminded her of some kind of frantic activity but she could not remember what it was and kept trying to figure it out.

At first, she found herself comparing it to what happened when, due to loss of signal, her satellite TV picture disassembled into small colored squares, to the point where they just fell apart, tumbling and then stopped making sense altogether, leaving behind either black and silent nothingness, or that maddening “white noise,” when all broadcasting has ceased and been replaced by “black” and “white” having an argument on the screen.

However, after some deliberation it had finally come to her. The frenzied movement in question, resembled the “to and fro” on her computer screen, when it performed the “defrag option” from its toolbox, rearranging a huge amount of files and, thus, re-establishing order. Well, obviously even a computer could not achieve the re-creation of perfect order in a used hard drive, stuffed to the gills with bits, pixels and unprofessional, personal binary overkill. Therefore, her computer’s system tools tried their best to conquer chaos with structure, in numerical and alphabetical order, of course, which was the one thing chaos detested most of all.

There, without realizing it she’d managed to write a number of witty little paragraphs under the pretense of describing the indescribable.

How utterly despicable! Fooling herself into a wishful belief that the issue which tormented her so could be disarmed, or “neutralized”, by applying some clever, and amusing, rhetorical eloquence.

Shame on her! Shame and disgrace and ... and ... well, more of the same!!!

Was it surprising that the climax, or final destination, of so much shame was a violent state of self-loathing? Which tossed her into a dark, frustrated mood, usually accompanied by an ancient, scorching, impotent anger? From there it was only a short distance to utter, ice cold panic, leaving her overwhelmed by the scary conclusion, and not for the first time either, that perhaps she was finally beginning to lose her mind.

The realization that this time it was brutally serious and no longer “cool” to be thought of as eccentric, notorious and, especially at parties, a little crazy, made her feel terribly afraid.

Her life up to this point had never been threatened by her “condition”. Denial, recreational drug-use and living in exotic places full of “eccentric” and “crazy” people had made it possible for her to exist as if she were “normal” after all.

Now, away from all this life of fantasy, the “pixeled”, “defragged”, “binary”, hysterical, self-destructive and manically depressed state she found herself in, also called “Bi-Polar” (the disorderly version) for short, was gaining on her.

Ok, it was not only gaining. It was rapidly catching up with her.

Well, actually, truth be told, it had already caught up with her and established a comfortable residence inside of her.

On top of that, when she decided to enquire as to “Bi-Po-lady’s” plans regarding her departure, she had been laughed at, ridiculed, and rudely informed that “Bi-Po” was not going to leave anytime soon.

Meaning what??

Maybe?

Or probably!?

Nope!

Meaning surely, never ever!

With a deep sigh she looked at those last, five, short lines.

Later , she cried hot tears, began talking to herself and finally started running, up and down, back and forth, like a maniac (hehehe... f.u!! it’s only funny when you’re not the maniac!), until she managed, in a “out of focus” sort of manner, to find her bottles of valium and xanax. She had half a pill each, washed them down with a decent, chilled, local chardonnay she had picked up at a winery near her friend Bosnap’s dental clinic; on the day he had needed a driver to take him home after the extraction of several teeth.

She lit both, a doobie and a cigarette, at the same time, put her feet up on the kitchen table and stared out the window, not really seeing anything. It occurred to her that, once again, she had not slept, nor eaten and suddenly became aware of her body protesting the severe neglect it was being subjected to by its tenant, who did not care if she lived or died.

Asking herself silently if she had come to the end of the road, Lisa looked at one of the framed photographs on the wall next to the dining room window, showing a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, almost completely shrouded by fog, with only parts of the structure visible, making it look like a bridge in the clouds high above. It occurred to her that it might be a good idea to go to San Francisco and stay a few days in the little apartment Frank had bought for them. Maybe being in the city they both had enjoyed so much together would inspire her somehow into finding her way out of the deep state of depression that was overshadowing her life. She picked up the phone from the table and began making preparations for her departure.

“Who knows,” she thought while dialing the number of her house- and dog- sitter.

“In a city the size of San Francisco there might be one person I could explain myself to and be understood....”

© Corinne Wesley