Tír na nÓg 3

Someone holds me back.
The scene goes to loud static:
the horror movie variety, the one that plays when the horror is occurring
And I hate horror movies
But nobody asked me.
Static, then. Piercing and grotesque, wrong decibels. Maybe those are my screams, but I can’t see.
Static pierces then

I am outside in the silent black frigid night in my broken ballet slippers.
Down the drive, Brian’s in his gold Honda with the dome light on. He’s on the phone.
More static. Then I am being left at my father’s apartment with Brian, and we are assigned to sleep there.
I’m told later that my father sleeps in my brother’s bed at the old house. “It still smelled like him.”

Now it is gray-bright through the Wellesley window’s putrid March morning and I am telephoning my producer from my father’s ancient handset.
I have just vomited. I am unsure if I have slept. I am medicated and still shaking violently. There is nothing to hold me to the earth and perhaps some merciful God is working on my departure papers. There is no way he expects me to remain here. My face feels like plastic.
My producer’s wife answers his cell phone. I don’t know what I say to her. But her voice in response breaks through the sedatives and I can’t breathe and I am on the floor.
Sal joins the call at some point, says something dark and low and pitying, and who wouldn’t, but I need strength or life or my brother alive and I get none of these things
I say that I don’t know if I can perform tonight. I hear myself say this and something else from me jumps in and says but I think I want to but I need to ask Charlie

I am parked in Brian’s car next to the tree we’d designated as the family meeting place in case of fire or disaster in the house.
Well.

I am at the end of the driveway
Staring up at the white colonial
Where our cribs were
Where Charles has gone to bed for the last time
My knees buckle and I’m falling
Keith Greenfield is running down the driveway. Someone catches me. I am being held by many people. I am definitely screaming. I am screaming

I am not going in there. I cannot go in there. No. No.

I am on the couch in the dark den and I am swallowing klonopin

I am in the kitchen
Lisa is at the table. I do not know what I say to her. I wonder how she got here so quickly from so far out of town. Who called Lisa?
I will remember later that the change in that Dixie Chicks song where Natalie sings
“Right away, Maryanne flew in from Atlanta on a red-eye midnight flight…”
Was playing in my head then and forever after in the soundtrack of that moment
I will forget to tell her until one night seven years later in a California parking lot when the song comes on and I’ve pulled over to weep. And I call Lisa to tell her this and say thank you and I never knew how you got there but I remember that you. Were. There.
And she will tell me that night that her father had just taken the dogs into his running vehicle and closed the garage door. He somehow woke up when the dogs started barking and called the police on himself. She is on her way to visit him at the psychiatric facility. He’s going to make it.
Timing.

Grammy Shanley is beside me at the kitchen table and she is saying
“I haven’t smoked in forty years”
As she hands me, my mom, and Lisa a cigarette. Grammy Shanley, smoking.
Lest I forget that life as I know it has just exited stage left

I am in the green room. I have walked in late, after soundcheck. I am thick fog. The room is heavy and silent. Two of my cast mates give me terrified tentative hugs.
I mean. What in the world is there even to say?

I am looking in the dressing-room mirror at my swollen slits-for-eyes and I paint them sloppily black. I think that I look like hell. Or am hell. I am in an alternate reality. I am not really here.

I am on stage. Full house, big boisterous crowd. I cannot feel its electricity tonight. It’s not magic; it’s false and absurd. I look down and see Jen and Brian and my dad in the front row.
Making it real. Making sure not even my art will be an escape.

I make it through the first act.
I am back onstage and I am holding my microphone stand as if it were the only thing anchoring me to the earth. It is.
The stage becomes a tilt-a-whirl, that violent carnival ride that produces projectile vomit from its riders. Unyielding til you do and even then. I am holding the mic stand. I am going to fall I am going to fall
I am falling I am in the black wings on my knees
Jen’s face, or my dad’s, is above me and I am in the basement of the theatre.

The recording stops there