Prologue
Suffocating, can’t breathe, beneath, darkness, can’t see, hands clenching, can’t grab, can’t hold, choking, gasping, neck throbbing, heart pounding, grabbed at, can’t get away, can’t get through, must keep pushing, straining, getting somewhere, getting through and breathing easier and there is sunlight and tinkling bells and peace and cooling breezes, yet again the knives and claws bleed me, nip at me, push me under, dust and water and smother, pursued by my heart, chased by my eyes, black jewel eyes shining, the plummeting and the nothingness and the beneath, and I can’t, I can’t, just can’t do anything about — It’s coming at me!
Startled awake, her breath coming in gasps that she could not yet control, she at least knew that she was alive, and that she was Sue-Ellen Blair McNaughton, and knew where she was, in her Brooklyn apartment-share, and that it was the middle of the night of January 25, 2017.
Ell lay on the cracked leather sofa, her feet on the coffee table. A breeze coming from the ajar window on the airshaft met her damp sweatiness and gave her a sudden chill, so she got up and shut the window.
Okay! She had accomplished something today! Which was more than she had done on previous days after The Dream had come for her, days so troubled by visions every time she blinked as to make social interaction difficult and trying to write impossible. One such day she had binged on television talk shows, hoping their inane chatter would soothe her brain. She would never do that again.
She searched for her iPhone, buried somewhere beneath the junk mail, restaurant flyers, and old El Diarios covering the beveled glass top of the coffee table, whose base was the old McNaughton-family steamer trunk. Locating the phone, she tried to will it to display an incoming from Jacob Morris Isinglass, her boyfriend of thirty-one months. In the past thirteen days there had been from him not a single text, email, or voicemail. Jake’s ghosting throbbed through her like a hangover.
Turn on shower. Let it heat up while you take off sweaty clothes. Step in.
Under the hot water, attempting not to think about Jake, her thoughts drifted back to The Dream. It wasn’t completely a nightmare, since it contained moments of exhilaration. But it was exhausting enough to require time to recuperate from it.
Finishing up in the shower, she donned her bathrobe and began blow-drying her shoulder-length hair. That took long enough for the creep upstairs to bang on the radiator pipe as a complaint about undue noise at an early hour. Her hair was still damp, but to be polite she shut off the dryer.
Then she was annoyed at herself for giving in to his pressure.
Coffee would be a big help right now, but in the apartment there was none that she could abide. That was because her absentee roommate, Larisa Narváez, Broadway chorine, loved flavored coffees, which Ell hated as distortions of the strong, unadulterated café negro that had won her affection in Barcelona during her junior year abroad. The apartment-coffee disconnect was symptomatic of her and Larisa’s relationship. Eighteen months ago, upon Ell’s finishing her MFA in Philadelphia, she had searched for places in Brooklyn near Jake’s, and found in the El Diario classifieds this “one bedroom share.” It was more like an expanded studio, but it came with an intriguing deal: On the many nights when Larisa was either staying with her boyfriend Jacinto or out of town with a Cats road show, Ell could sleep in the bedroom; and on the few nights when Larisa was home, Ell would take the sofa. Not a great arrangement, but within Ell’s limited budget, and it had mostly worked out, except twice when Larisa had not sent her rent check promptly and Ell had to hit up her father for a loan.
Her iPhone came jarringly alive. A text!
Not from Jake, though, as it was in Spanish.
From Popo, her great-grandfather on her mother’s side. “Poco, ahora por favor” was his message. She had forever been Poco to his Popo. He was one of the few people in her life — belay that, the only one! — who never criticized her. To communicate better with him, during her junior year at Fox Lane High she switched from studying French to Spanish, and then at Bryn Mawr she had taken more advanced Spanish courses and pushed to spend her junior year in Barcelona.
Now ninety-six, Popo lived in a VA facility in Sheepshead Bay. Having outlasted his sister, his wife, his son and his daughter, he wanted attention now and then from what remained of his family, which Ell was pleased to offer, even though her mother and Popo’s few other relatives kept their distance — in her view, because they didn’t want to be associated with his dark-skinned Mexican-ness.
Atlantic Bay Terraces was on the B subway line, a half-hour trip if she made her connections. She had a few rides left on her Metrocard. Dressing warmly, she walked to the entrance near the apartment.
In mid-morning, at the treetop-level Sheepshead Bay station only a few passengers detrained with her. They rushed ahead to the stairs while she lingered, allowing a glimpse of the Bay beyond and the scent of the salt-tinged breeze to slow her and waft away her cares.
How best to depict that in script form? Some moments in her life felt so filmic that they demanded she think them out as scenes. In her imagined subway-platform moment, to visually heighten the contrast between her deliberate slowing and the haste of the other passengers, she would need to show many more of them rushing by, and to have them passing her on the stairs rather than on the platform.
Another such scene could be at The Terrace’s reception desk, where the visitor won a smile from the bored receptionist by greeting her in Spanish, an exchange that on screen would convey the visitor’s familiarity with the institution and her ability to mask her roiled feelings when in public.
The elevator took Ell to the third floor, reserved for veterans able to do some self-care but not enough of it to live independently. She was fashioning the next screenplay scene, of greeting the old man, but had to scrub it when she caught sight of an unfamiliar name on the nameplate of 343, ‘Pedro Villahermosa.’
The door was open and there sat Popo in his recliner, same as ever. Spotting her, he intently pushed the controller button to raise the chair’s level. She bent to kiss his cheek as it rose. They conversed in Spanish.
“My Popo, you’ve changed your name?”
“I’m born a Villahermosa, y’know, my little one,” he said, his mother tongue laced with American-English slang.
“No, I did not know that.”
“Yes, yes. My father makes us ‘Herman’ when we come to Florida, and I go from Pedro to Peter. Now I change it back, so I die with my right name on.”
“Villahermosa — I like it. The name of a city in Mexico, isn’t it?”
“I was born there.”
“You changed your name back because you want to be a Villahermosa when you die. You’re not planning to die soon, are you?
“No, no, Poco.” That seemed probable, because Popo seemed to have stopped aging, at ninety-six appearing no different than at his ninetieth birthday party, “still here and still okay,” as he liked to put it, despite his left arm not moving much and his left eye not seeing a thing. He claimed to hardly use his four-tipped cane on his corridor strolls, but when napping in the recliner he often forgot to take off his sunglasses and well-worn USS Pennsylvania cap. Today he was not wearing the associated medals, won for service in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. On a “good day,” at his dictation she had jotted down their titles, descriptions, and display positions, so that on a “not so hot” day he could be guided to properly pin them on.
Ell nodded her regards and respects to La Persistencia de la Memoria, the Salvador Dali print that hung on the wall. Its surreal melting clocks, scorched bleak landscape, and inverted human body parts spoke to her and to Popo, which was why she had bought the print at the Dali birthplace museum in Figueres, as a present for him. Sometimes Popo teased her by deliberately misstating its title as La Insistencia de la Memoria, a name that she also liked because it echoed her belief that this image, once seen, could not be unseen.
Certainly not by her. And even though Dali’s dreamscape was less frighteningly lifelike than her Dream. It was unnerving just to recall in the painting’s presence how The Dream had seized her a few hours earlier.
Don’t go there, Ell.
“Still chasing the aides?” she asked Popo.
“They like it when I serenade them.”
“I’ll bet! But my Popo, you worry me with this ‘getting ready to die’ stuff. That why you wanted me to come right away?”
“Belay that! — I think you have a problem. I follow Jake on Twitter, and for a couple weeks he don’t post ‘we did this’ or ‘we did that.’ So I wonder what’s up.”
Ell shook her head in bemusement that her great-grandfather was so with it as to be following her boyfriend online, and so sensitive as to infer trouble for her from Jake’s lack of coupledom references.
“This why you never bring this Jake guy to see me?”
“Well, we were in Philadelphia for a year. And then after I graduated and we’re both in Brooklyn, I felt that he was always so busy with his fin-tech start-up, so I told myself …. Well, belay that! — it doesn’t matter what I told myself: I’m being ghosted and I think I’ve already been dumped.”
“You ‘think’? Not one-hundred-percent sure?”
“After thirteen days I am sure, yes; I just don’t like admitting it.”
“Say it, then. Say, ‘I’ve been dumped!’ So what, Ellie? Happened to my sister, down in Pensacola. Bawled her eyes out. She’s so sad, my mother says to her, ‘Men are like buses — you miss one, just wait, because another’ll be along in a few minutes.’ You’re twenty-five; you’re not too thin, not too fat; you got the blue eyes, and the sunlight hair, and the good brain, and you’re a nice girl, and you know how to laugh — there’ll be plenty of buses.”
“What a flatterer! No wonder the ladies like you.”
“I’m going to live to be one hundred and dance at your wedding.”
FUTURE –— INTERIOR –— WEDDING RECEPTION HALL –— CROWD.
In the crowd’s center, YOUNG WOMAN, in exquisite white wedding dress with train, holds champagne flute aloft. Next to her, the VERY OLD MAN, in WWII Navy swabbie uniform, with medals on, does the same with his good arm as the other rests on his cane. They intertwine uplifted arms.
VERY OLD MAN
Arriba! Abajo! El centro!
YOUNG WOMAN
Y pa’dentro!
They drink the flutes empty, to applause and cheers from the CROWD.
Ell tossed the pill-sized paper cups that had held their tequila shots into the toilet, while Popo returned the bottle to his cabinet and exchanged it for a tin of breath mints. He popped a mint and offered her one. She took it.
“How you doing with your movie stuff, my Poco?”
“Total bust, my Popo. Nobody wanted my screenplays and now nobody wants my Dark Triangle documentary. I’ve screened it for a dozen potential buyers — no takers! I’ve run out of all the grant money on it that was keeping me going. I’m so broke I just sold my video camera on Craigslist.”
“You still got food to eat, a place to sleep?”
“For a while, yes,” she admitted.
“Then you’ll figure something out about how to make money — you already did that kids’ book, right?” He opened the cabinet to show her that his inscribed copy of Dog-GONE-It! was close at hand so that it could easily be shown off.
It was such a little book, an illustrated alphabet book for children aged five to eight that was not a simple primer but something a bit more advanced that emphasized and reinforced children’s delight in playing with words. Dog-GONE-It! featured accentuated pronunciations and evocative definitions, such as the “gently humorous” ones cited by reviewers, ‘M is for MUTTS MUCK-ing about in the MUD,’ and ‘T is for TUMM-ees that LIKE to be SCRA-ah-ah-ATCHED.’ Its good reviews — even in publications that usually did not feature such children’s books — were due, Ell was convinced, less to its contents than because it was the first-ever children’s book from a well-respected art-house publisher, Berlucci Imprints, an arm of the international art powerhouse Berlucci Galleries in Manhattan.
For all its good reviews, the book had not done much for her finances, thus deepening her worry that despite now being a legit published author, she was going to have to find a day job. Like tomorrow. And not a low-wage grind akin to that of the CutPrice warehouse where she’d toiled for three long summers and during Christmas season, but a job that properly prostituted her writing talents for big bucks, say, for concocting ads for a water-quality-destroying laundry soap. In the wake of the dog book’s good reviews she had had an overture from an ad agency, but the starting salary was insultingly low and she turned it down, because just then — a few months ago — she still had grant money and some credit left on her credit cards and had reason to expect a sale of Dark Triangle that would rescue her finances. And then the sale hadn’t happened, and the grants ran out.
Since then she hadn’t written a word. Had gone dry. Hit a writer’s block. Stepped into a pothole in the universe.
“I make everybody here read the book,” Popo announced. “They all like it! So then I must explain to them that you use the pen-name Sukie Blair because when you were a baby you were called Sukie.”
“The ‘Sukie Blair’ alias was Jake’s idea. He thought Dog-GONE-It! wasn’t a serious enough project for my grown-up name, and I agreed.” Still do, she thought. Actually, it had been a really good idea of Jake’s, allowing her to reserve her given name for more serious projects.
“Maybe you’ll change it back later, like me. My grandpa would be proud of you — he do some writing too, y’know.”
“No, I did not know that.”
“About the auténticos. I talked to him about ’em when we’re back in Mexico in ‘37. But belay that! — you doing another book?”
“Trying to. A follow-up. CAT-Ah-Log! About cats. Same idea — wacky definitions and pronunciations. Pitched it to the same publisher, and we’re waiting for an answer. But I don’t have a clue what the book’ll say.”
“Cats, y’see …. Well, dogs, they want to be like us, like humans, but cats, they just want to be cats, y’know? To them, they’re perfect.”
“I’m stealing that idea, Popo.”
“You will put in big cats? Lions, jaguars?”
“Like the one that mauled you?”
“Oh, Nama didn’t mean to — she was my baby!”
“Well if that’s the case,” Ell said, the tequila’s buzz emboldening her, “then maybe it’s time you told me that whole story. I know only parts of it from Mom.”
“Fifty-six-plus years ago! 1961! Was Bethany even born then? Well, you’re old enough to understand it. I’d done some wild and crazy things, y’see, but then I went in the Navy, and after the war I had the pet-supply store on Atlantic Ave — running it regular, except I’m stocking some exotics. Had a few there but I kept most of ‘em in the backyard of the Rockaway home. The whole yard was cages and more cages — kids loved that, but my Nancy, your great-grandmother, she hated it.”
“I’ll bet.”
PAST –— 1961 –— EXT. –— BACK YARD OF SMALL FAR ROCKAWAY HOME, FILLED WITH A HALF-DOZEN CAGES OF EXOTIC ANIMALS.
A LATINO MAN of forty, left arm immobile, EMERGES from the screen door carrying a bowl of milk and makes his way to the cages.
VERY OLD MAN (VOICE-OVER)
Our house was near the airport –— y’know, Idlewild that
became JFK --— handy when they catch iguanas and spider
monkeys and all –— and they call me to take ’em off their
hands. I’m selling ’em to zoos and collectors, but those
deals take time, y’see, so I keep‘em in my back yard.
(Pause)
Nama, she’s maybe six months. We like each other.
LATINO MAN APROACHES the cage of a young jaguar. He KNEELS
DOWN with bowl of milk.
V.O.M. (V.O.)
Can’t find a buyer, so she just grows, but to me she’s still
my baby; and one day –— well ….
LATINO MAN reaches his good arm inside the cage with the milk
bowl. Jaguar takes a swipe at his face. Blood! Spilt milk! Screams! Consternation! The LATINO MAN, although badly hurt, manages to
close door of cage, keeping jaguar in, and then COLLAPSES.
“Yes, yes, it was pretty bad. It was in all the papers.”
“You saying it was your fault?”
“Sure! Feds came and took Nama away, and the rest of the exotics. I pay a fine to keep out of jail, and I go down to Veracruz to heal, inside and out — a curandera can do that, y’see, and I had a real good one. Another of my abuleas. I get better, except for the eye.”
“And the arm.”
“Well no; the arm was from the torpedo we took in Okinawa in ’45. Anyway, after I come back from Mexico, Nancy says ‘No more of this or I’m outta here.’ I say ‘Sure!’ and Nancy stays. I calm down and do it regular — there’s plenty business on the legit. I think you were there once. Anyway, some years on, when you was five maybe six, I sell the store and the Atlantic Ave building for good money. Then Nancy gets the cancer and we have to come here — they take spouses, not just vets, y’know. That’s some years ago now.”
“Thank you, my Popo, for telling me about this. I’d wondered about it. But how did you get into dealing exotic animals in the first place?”
“I saw it in my dream. Told me I should care for ‘em and wouldn’t let me be.”
The notion hit Ell in the gut, since her Dream would not leave her be either.
“You got dreams too, my little one? All writers got dreams, right? Scary and terrific at the same time?”
“Popo, how do you know such things?”
“Your Popo, he’s lived a little. Maybe you’re not paying enough attention to your dream. Don’t be blind to your dream!” He laughed at his own joke, laughed so forcefully that it made him cough, which alarmed her as he could not immediately cease coughing. But he motioned for her not to panic or call for help, and shortly his coughing fit did subside. Then he was visibly tired, and they both took that as reason to say hasta mañana.
* * *
Awful though Popo’s mauling-by-jaguar had been, Ell envied him the encounter. Nothing as interesting had ever happened to her. And because it hadn’t, because her life had not been roiled by war, poverty, rape, discrimination, disability, or anything else terribly hurtful or burdensome, she worried that she had nothing of substance to honestly write about. No trauma equals no drama.
Actually, her twenty-five years had been pretty much totally shielded from problems since she was, for the most part, a third-generation privileged WASP -- White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Her mother, nee Bethany Blair, granddaughter of Popo, had taken after the Blair side of her family, not the Herman side. Both her mother, Bethany, and her father, Matthew McNaughton, had grown up fairly cosseted. Matt as an adult earned enough from his managerial job in Manhattan to provide Bethany, Ell, and her brother Andy, four years younger, with a comfortable existence in upscale Mount Kisco, while he commuted daily into the big city. She and Andy had no real complaints about their childhood that could be pinned on their parents. Ell remembered no spankings, just an occasional ‘go-to-your-room-young-lady.’ No mental abuse. No alcoholism in the family, no secret paramours, just plain-vanilla, suburban nuclear family of four. Ell’s and Andy’s worst embarrassments, as children, were not having new clothes to wear each fall and not going on annual family skiing vacations, things enjoyed by many of their classmates. Only in the last year had Ell begun to suspect that some of the things provided for them by their parents, such as expensive summer camps and sweet sixteen parties, put their parents in debt; had she and Andy understood that, they would have willingly foregone the extravagances. But that was hindsight born of an increasing maturity level. We can’t go backwards; however, we can reinterpret what we thought we once knew for a certainty. As for that, she had never really acknowledged how much Mom had helped her by such actions as making sure she had birth control pills before going to Spain for a year, and supporting her decision to go to the Thomas Paine School of Communications for an MFA when her father was not in favor of it. Intent on rebelling, Ell had taken such maternal support for granted rather than as something to celebrate.
At Fox Lane High, Bryn Mawr College, and the graduate Paine School of Communications Ell had never been ruinously belittled by teachers, or bullied to the edge of suicide, or ostracized, or sexually mistreated, or had boyfriends who were total shits — until two weeks ago, Jake had seemed a terrific, deep-pocketed match.
Be tougher on yourself, Ell. Admit to being too needy of those deep pockets, and therefore not shooing Jake away when he gave you good reason to. Now he’s the one telling you to get lost and won’t even give you a reason for it.
Actually, she knew the reasons. They were all down to her rather than to him. The first was The Dream. Six times during their thirty-one months it had seized her in Jake’s presence — the later instances irking Jake to the point of decrying her aftershock helplessness. To placate him she had gone to a psychiatrist; the shrink did no more than prescribe a tranquilizer so powerful that the first pill knocked her out of commission for more than a day; she never took another tranq or kept a follow-up appointment. Probably she should have.
Number Two: The non-sale of her documentary, Dark Triangle, which vaporized Jake’s investment and those of his Wharton MBA pals, which was embarrassing for him, even though the amounts were chump change to those trust-fund babies. She had been too absorbed in the fact that the disaster of a non-sale had completely flushed her own finances.
Number Three was the most nebulous but she felt it had done the most to
fatally compromise their relationship: her refusal to confront the skeleton of the McNaughton family closet, the Civil War era slaveholding, even though she knew about it because she’d seen the evidence when at age eleven she sneaked open the trunk that was then in the Mount Kisco attic. Jake was aware of what she’d found then because she’d told him about it, although she’d never shown it to him — hell, she’d never since opened the trunk again! Her comeuppance for that failure — for all three failures, actually — had occurred at the recent Isinglass Thanksgiving dinner at their Wynnewood home, held in the wake of the presidential election of Donald Trump over their beloved Hillary Clinton.
Between the turkey and the trifle, there arose a discussion of the necessity of “wokeness,” during which Ell said very little — she doubted that any of the Isinglass family, friends, or neighbors at the table had a close Latino or Black relative; and Jake’s mother asked Ell what she knew of the old McNaughton family slaveholding and what she was doing about it. Ell fervently expressed her disgust and shame at her many-times-great grandparents having owned four slaves on a small farm — you couldn’t even call it a plantation! — in Western Virginia during the Civil War, but she did not go further to say what she was doing about it, because she wasn’t doing anything about it. The knowing side-eyes of the guests at the table then conveyed their judgment of her as super-guilty for not seeking out the descendants of her family’s slaves, abjectly apologizing to them, and impoverishing herself to pay them reparations.
She exaggerated, but not by much.
Guilty! Okay! She was very guilty of not really knowing about the slaveholding in detail and making amends for it! But wasn’t it disproportionate of Jake to stop seeing her because of a minor sin of omission? Even when coupled with having to deal with her bad dreams? And her non-sale of the doc? Had that earned her the ghosting and lack of explanation for it? In many ways it was proof of Jake having never treated her as an equal.
Did she want him to start doing so now?
No, she wanted to wring his neck!
However, there was no doubt that her avoidance of knowing the details of the McNaughton family slaveholding was as inexcusable as her inability to deal with her Dream. Even Popo was now implying that it was time for her to address her problems because, in Popo’s words, such dreams need not be avoided because they could be “terrific” in addition to being “scary.”
Okay! Okay! Someday she hoped to really address her Dream, although just now she hadn’t a clue as to how. What seemed more possible to do now — what she must do now, Jake or no Jake — was to open the McNaughton family trunk and confront whatever lay therein.
Hullo, Pandora’s Box!
