A Good Day for Seppuku by Kate Braverman

Author:Kate Braverman [Braverman, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WOMEN OF THE PORTS

They meet at irregular intervals at Fisherman’s Wharf. This is the neutral zone, the landscape of perpetual unmolested childhood where the carousel spins in its predictable orbit, and the original primitive neon alphabet does not deviate. Some hieroglyphics are permanent and intelligible in all hemispheres and dialects. No translation is necessary. The carousel doesn’t require calculus, rehab or absolution. No complications with immigration or the IRS. Just buy a token.

She phones Clarissa. “I’m here,” she announces.

“At the wharf?” Clarissa must clarify the conditions.

“Anemic waves and corndogs that give you cancer. Immigrants catching perch so full of mercury, they explode as they reel them in,” she reports.

“What color is the water?” Clarissa asks. “Precisely?”

“Last ditch leukemia IV-drip blue,” she decides.

“Half an hour,” Clarissa assures her. “I’m coming.”

They meet episodically. Conventional friendship, with its narrative of consensual commitments, has proved too intimate and demanding. Between them are houses, husbands dead or divorced, and children known only by anecdote and photograph. Entire strata of their personal history are less than footnotes. Decades passed when they were driftwood to one another, or vessels lost at sea. Or a drowned stranger, perhaps; why bother?

“Our litany of blame is tedious,” she once recognized.

“Human perimeters are background razor wire. We’re too hip for that shit,” Clarissa responded.”

“We’ll bite it off with our teeth,” she offered. “Napalm it. Grenade launchers and M-16s. Tec-9s. We’ll have our own Cultural Revolution. We’ll go post-modern, but fully armed.”

“We’ll invent rituals appropriate for our circumstances. We’ll whisper endearments while strolling the killing fields.” Clarissa was enthusiastic.

“But we’ll abide by the Geneva Convention,” she prompted. “Despite our emotional residue.”

“Directed psychological evolution. It’ll be more brutal than weight training,” Clarissa agreed. “But we’ll become better human beings.”

“We’ll redefine and transcend ourselves,” she said.

It was an earlier autumn on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bluer than Maui, the bay studded with strands of cobalt that looked charged, technologically modified. She had lived two years in a bamboo and chicken wire shack on a nameless river of honey yellow reeds and orchids in the jungle near Hana. She had no electricity. She wasn’t in contact with Clarissa then. Clarissa probably doesn’t know there are seasons in Maui, too. A faint reddening, a moistening that seems a prelude, and sudden stillness as the mosquitoes enter temporary remission.

“I like it conceptually. But let’s go further,” Clarissa suggested. “We’ll be molecular. Just strands of light from one radiance to another.”

“We’ll reject linearity entirely,” she encouraged. “Sporadic moments of illumination in extreme altitudes requiring oxygen masks?”

“Discreet and unpredictable rendezvous with spectacular voltage. We’ll communicate by blowtorch,” Clarissa offered. Her eyes emitted an unnatural gleam suggesting rows of votives in deserted rooms and beaches of mica in white sand.

Their psychiatrists were cautiously optimistic. A process of accommodation and evolution was unlikely but not implausible. True, they had failed the traditional strategies of giving and receiving. But the standard methods by which one registers recognition and regret don’t apply to them. They had a pact, an armistice with the elements of aggressive radical improvisational surgery.

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