Mysterious ways, p.1
Mysterious Ways, page 1
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For Gregg and Cadence, my reasons for being
Prologue
Dear Diary (insert upside down smiley face emoji),
Amy asked me to reflect on my origins in order to try to understand who I am and how to move forward. I keep telling her I don’t have an origin story. We don’t live in the Marvel Universe, Amy. I don’t have a magic hammer forged by the dwarves of Norse mythology or anything.
I mean, since I was born from my mother and born with this condition, I can only assume it comes from her, and let’s face it, she is kind of a “queen” herself in common parlance. I must also assume it comes from my mother because she’s the only being I cannot know everything about. My readings on her are fuzzy and erratic. Sometimes she comes through loud and clear, and kind of scary, actually, and other times, like when I try to know anything about her past, it’s murky at best.
FACTS: None of us (including me) can fully know our mothers, and we secretly like it that way. We’re not super curious about our mothers’ personhoods as long as we are getting our needs met, right? And since I can’t know Stacy, I can’t confirm it comes from her, and I can’t know what powers she has and what powers she hides. It’s probably a recessive gene, which means Glen has it, too. Surprise, surprise.
It’s getting stronger, whatever it is, gnawing at me like a constant nagging itch. It wants to grow, but I tamp it down, keep it small and local, because in the past, it’s only ever gotten me in trouble. There are limits to it, too. In monotheistic religions, “god” is supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. But that has never truly been the case, right? God has never been “all-powerful.” Because it’s never been in god’s wheelhouse to prevent us from destroying each other. So if god exists, god has obvious limits to their power and benevolence that no one ever talks about.
Anyway. Maybe there have always been girls like me. Girls with elusive powerful magic they can’t fully understand or unleash, because the patriarchy is stronger than god and much more insidious.
Grippy Sock Vacation
Of the many ways one could choose to spend their six-week stay in the psych hospital, reading the Bible was not something Maya expected to top the list. But there were Bibles lying around. And she had always meant to look at one.
She bent the book and let the gilded pages flutter past her thumb like the wings of a moth, butterfly kisses, before stopping at a random spot. Right off the bat, she discovered some thing interesting. Genesis, chapter 6, verse 5. The reason God flooded the earth the first time:
And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
A page or so later, He, or She, or They (you couldn’t pretend to know God’s preferred pronouns) promised never to do it again, flood the earth … but Maya was suspicious. Even gods could break promises, right? Because according to the most recent drastic flooding reports from climatologists everywhere, it seemed that God must once again have become discontented. (Insert lightning bolt emoji.) And the thoughts in people’s hearts must, once again, have become: Only. Evil. Continually.
There was evidence of this, Maya knew. Just look at the headlines:
Report: Hate Crimes in the US Rise to Highest Level in More than a Decade / Flooding Death Toll Soars to 11,300 in Libya’s Coastal City of Derna
US Man Charged for Shooting Black Teen Who Ap proached Wrong House / Floods in Turkey Kill 13 People in Earthquake-Affected Provinces
Texas Man Pleads Guilty to Setting Fire to Synagogue / Huge Southeast Texas Sinkhole Suddenly Starts Expanding
Montana Man Convicted of Shooting to Rid Community of the Lesbian and Gay Members / Thousands Forced from Their Homes amid Southern Malaysia Floods
Hate Crimes Rose 44% Last Year in Study of Major Cities / Flooding and Heavy Rains Rise 50% Worldwide in a Decade, Figures Show
Sus.
But was the evil causing the flood?
Even though the flood was inevitable (we’d waited too long to stop it!), and even though the evil was continuous (and the wickedness of man, great!), there was no evidence, yet, that one thing caused the other. Correlation, you eventually learn in your first statistics class, does not imply Causation.
In other words, it might be just a coincidence that people had become awful, hateful trolls at the exact same time in history that the ice caps were melting, unleashing not only their regular watery potential for destruction but also the thawed-out deadly pathogens of yesteryear—bubonic plague, Spanish flu, polio, smallpox—that would kill the rest of those who’d fled for higher ground. It might be just a coincidence.
The wickedness of man was great in the earth, though. Maya knew this for sure. Which begged the question, would you save it? The world? If you could? Was it even worth it? Or would you leave it to its watery, fiery fate? She spun a pencil over the Bible in her lap and thought about illuminating the book in the margins.
This was the ultimatum of their generation, she thought. The ultimate ultimatum. If they didn’t do something, they would die young, likely clutching their small children to their breasts in some kind of cataclysmic war or weather or, like, cannibal event. 2050. Everyone had envisioned it, in part because it was already happening, except maybe for the cannibals. Cannibalism was still a little ways down the road, after people realized they couldn’t get enough nutrition from bugs and lichens. And this dim version of the future was the core anxiety of her z-generation, aside from trying to become relevant on social media. It pulsed beneath everything, ruining their youths, when on the surface, all they really wanted to do was have a good time.
But even if Gen Z wanted to do something to save the world, they had no power, because: old men. Maya began to lose her cool and put her pencil to the Bible. She drew an angry bearded old man in the margin, waving his fist. The old men stood in the way, she thought. It was the boomer’s last stand. The boomers wanted to go out with a bang and leave nothing behind for future generations. The boomers wanted to doom the zoomers. They were bent on it. And with advances in healthcare, they just kept hobbling to the polls.
And you couldn’t depend on Gen X. Maya shook her head and drew a big blocky X in the bottom margin of the Bible page. The boomers “raised” them, sort of. They berated their Gen X children and left them alone to latch-key-raise themselves while the boomers hightailed it out of their marriages and into sports cars and trophy wives. Gen X was completely traumatized and inept. Maya shook her head. It was up to Gen Z, and maybe the millennials if they learned to curb their whiny overconfidence with the right rhetoric.
So. In conclusion, Maya thought to herself, if Gen Z did nothing, the earth would once again become a deserted hell-scape, relying on tiny future microorganisms to evolve and repopulate it with some unknowable future species. Dragons maybe? She drew a dragon whose tail wound down the side of Genesis. Definitely something reptilian for sure. Or a phoenix. Rising out of the ashes.
But what could Gen Z do? If the evil was causing the flood, how could you make people love one another? How could you make people like people more than they liked money?
She thought about all this ontological bullshit, because, hello? She had landed herself in an institution. She was on a grippy sock vacation, as they say on TikTok (Grippy Sock Vacation being an excellent band name that she added to the notebook of collected band-name ideas she shared with her mother. It was their only mother-daughter pastime.)
Anyway, she was on a grippy sock vacation where she was forced to think about how to proceed as a human girl in the Anthropocene. She was forced to think about it, too, because she had inherited, or acquired, or been afflicted with certain attributes that perhaps made her privy to what god (and everyone) was thinking.
She had certain abilities that sometimes led her to believe that she might actually, kind of, be god?
No one knew about this, obvs. She had never written it down. It didn’t show up on her Myers-Briggs test on career day.
If things like statistics could actually measure people, which they could not, her Myers-Briggs career test results would not have been ENTJ: Possible Careers: Attorney, Psychologist, Entrepreneur; but rather ENTJ: Possible Careers: Bartender, Acrobat, God (?).
Bartender because she had always had a way with those who were down-and-out. And because there were always bartender jobs to be had, which was something the career test did not take into account. It did not consider the economic prospects of the subject taking the test. (Who did they think would foot the bill for law school?)
Acrobat because she was uberflexible and sometimes fantasized about joining a circus. She could stay on the move, the exertion of her muscles working the world’s grief out of her b
And god. Well, god, because of the things she could do.
Pretend Teardrops or Reaganomics
She currently sat in the “all-purpose” room of Whispering Pines (a stupid name for a psych hospital, because if people were apt to hear voices, why surround them with the prospect of talking trees?). Anyway. She sat in the all-purpose room of Whispering Pines where she was forced to stay after the incident (!).
The room buzzed with the thoughts of the humans milling about. I will never have main character energy. Everyone needs to take several!@%& seats. She hates me. I’m so bored. I hate everyone. I only have two vibes: salty and ashamed. I can’t stop letting him live rent-free in my head. I swear this is the last time I (use, cut, binge, etc.).… I can’t believe I (used, cut, binged, etc.) again. I’m useless. I can’t stop choosing drama. Can sixteen-year-olds have heart attacks?
The humans—once trusting toddlers sitting crisscross applesauce at circle time—were now the overgrown, lumbering victims of decades of Reaganomics gone wrong. Meaning that in the seventies, Maya knew (because she just knew all “the things” and didn’t know why she knew them), America was on the right track. The vibes were about “brotherhood” and “equal rights” and “save the earth.” Roe v. Wade passed. Carter put solar panels on the White House. There was beginning to be representation in literature and television. Things were on the love-is-love up-and-up! But then Reagan was elected by a Christian Moral Majority (thanks to Phyllis Schlafly), and unless you were a white male, things got worse for you. But even white males won’t survive the climate apocalypse. And here we are.
As she sat in the all-purpose room of Whispering Pines, Maya was thrust into the depths of Gen Z sadness.
Bobby could not stop crying. His face was splotchy, like pink parchment paper, and every time he tried to stop, exerting the muscles behind his nasal cavity and biting his tongue, a new hot well of tears would bubble up and then spill down his face in two straight streaks, like errant drips of paint.
“Bobby,” Maya whispered. “You have to stop.”
He sniffled next to her and a new tear dropped from his chin to his chest. She had to get his mood stabilized because they—the absolute powers that be—were going to do anything they could (more Zoloft, Zyprexa, Haldol, ECT) to neutralize his emotions, and sometimes they went overboard. It was all a big experiment and Maya wanted to help it along. Because if Bobby refused treatment and fled or checked himself out, his insurance company would not pay for the ten days he’d already been here. His parents would be stuck with the $100,000 bill, forced to drain his entire already insufficient college fund.
I’m such a simp loser, Bobby thought, and because Maya sat next to him, and because she was whatever the heck she was, she had to hear it all. What were my parents thinking, giving birth to me? he lamented. Is wishing you were never born the same as wanting to kill yourself? he wondered. But he didn’t think so, ultimately. Ultimately, he didn’t think he belonged here, quasi-incarcerated, and that added injustice to the many layered reasons why he couldn’t stop crying. He was also crying because he was crying, if that made any sense.
Maya handed him a tissue from the box that was strategically placed on the coffee table shaped like an enormous clothespin turned on its side. A touch of whimsy to delight the delinquents. Strategically, there were no mirrors anywhere.
“Stop,” she urged Bobby again as she took a quick glance at Nurse Abby behind the raised whorl of the nurse’s station. Luckily, she was too preoccupied—rattling out pills into tiny paper cups, preparing to make her rounds with the meds cart—to take notice of Bobby’s “state.” “They’ll take the con stant crying as a sign of worsening depression, Bobby, and they’ll increase your meds, again.”
“Which is why I’m crying,” he said.
“I know. It’s a vicious loop.”
“How can I convince them to stop the meds? They make me feel so weird.” I just want to feel like myself again. The last part he did not speak out loud. She heard him think it.
“‘Yourself’ was really struggling, though, right?” she asked.
“Just for a second! The thought was fleeting. It wasn’t even a full thought, it was a thought-ling. A thought-ino. A tiny baby thought. It was not, like, ideation,” he snuffled. “I don’t need medication. I didn’t, like, have a plan to hurt myself or anything.” He raised his voice and the tears welled up again and the pink splotches on his face glowed like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Maya zoomed into his brain and body and realized this was true; he wouldn’t hurt himself, but she also saw the powerful strangling black vines of self-loathing that were winding their way around his organs.
Come on, she thought at Bobby, and he heard her without realizing she hadn’t spoken.
She hoisted herself out of the foam block chair and led him to the heavy industrial door to the outside grounds. It was risky, but she had to get him to a place where he wasn’t being watched. She heard the humming buzz of the nosy security camera craning its neck toward them and she punched in the codes to deactivate the alarms. She knew the codes because, well. Bartender, Acrobat … She just knew.
Bobby blew his nose and whimpered a little, like a toy poodle, though if you had to compare him to a dog based on his physique, you would choose Bernese Mountain Dog. He had thick, feathery black hair, a block head, and a brisket built for knocking people over on the football field. A large boy-man who’d been wrecked and ravaged by love. As love is wont to do to a person. Especially with one’s first experience of it. And especially when love’s spurned participant is a white boy used to getting what he wants.
She led Bobby across the well-maintained Garden State Jersey grass to the parking lot where they hid behind a tall, boxy black Mercedes SUV.
“Look at me,” she told him. But he was too messy to make eye contact. “Bobby! You need to look at me.”
The twins, Aidan and Jacob, were dressed in their volunteer scrubs and had just disembarked from the douchebag BMW their surgeon father had gotten them for their sixteenth birthday. They were already straight A high school students headed for Harvard Medical School, and for some reason (nepotism), the Whispering Pines administration felt it was copacetic for them to intern at the psych ward where they could lord over their suffering peers. It was difficult to deny them the opportunity. They were already publishing papers about adolescent development in the age of plastic, in which they presented their findings about how all those estrogens in the BPA GladWare containers were destroying the brains of our young people.
So far, Maya and Bobby had avoided them in the cafeteria, but had not avoided them entirely, she knew. Maya glanced at them now for a second. They both had close-cut, looping black curls that clung tightly to their heads and sparsely freck led profiles. She tried to get a reading on them, but their brains were so intertwined, she had trouble sussing it all out. They had trouble forming independent thoughts of their own. They spoke in the language of twins. Cryptophasia. More than one, less than two, Maya thought. Creepy. Aidan started thinking at Jacob, What’s our plan of attack? And Jacob thought back at him, Hot candy striper? Last time I—and Aidan finished, Unbuttoned her cutoffs.
Maya grabbed Bobby’s enormous wrist, where she surreptitiously felt for a scratch, and scurried with him to the other side of the car. “Get down,” she told him and they slid to the hot macadam, one in front of each tire so no one would see them beneath the car’s underbelly. “The twins are here,” Maya whispered to him.
“I’ll never live it down if they see me.”
But Maya suspected they already had seen him and had begun calling him “Cry Bobby.” Bobby had concocted an elaborate cover story, telling everyone he was spending some time at his aunt’s in California, but the twins, or someone?, had blown his cover. They told the whole school his whereabouts and christened him, now and forever, Cry Bobby. He would never live it down. There was even a CryBobby Finsta account dedicated solely to pictures of his pretend teardrops. (Only. Evil. Continually.)
