This nice little game lasted four years, and this was the end of it. My father and I drove up to my house in the ’81 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. I looked up and out the windshield. A thunderous crash shocked me as we passed from light to shadow and pulled into the garage.
The Cutlass came to a halt before his rainbow skiers — he hand-painted them. They dashed downhill across his white cabinets. Their scarves flew freely in the wind.
Nick clicked the gear over the steering wheel into park. He didn’t appear to hear the crashing. I fell out of the car to a frightful stillness, punched to hell with a jolt — I couldn’t explain it, couldn’t place what it was. It hooked me, even, speechless. I ducked. I froze. It sounded like, not a cup broke, but heaven above me. The air cracked, it was thick. Around his classic cars, I floated through a world I could not see without the ability to think.
I passed Nick’s workshop. He had painted a shade of blue inspired by the Blue Grotto in Naples, Italy. He had it specially mixed.
The angle at which sunlight enters the cave off the island of Capri creates an effect of pure magic. The water glows an otherworldly blue out of a cartoon. It’s impossible, couldn’t be real, just like this story. But we live in a cosmic universe where “anything can happen” where the ingredients can mix just right. I never understood what people believed in.
I don’t know how to talk about it because I absorbed way too much disbelief when I should have suggested that they read a book. Might be a touch touchy, sharp, but it was the quality to have, I just didn’t want to be on the receiving end. Telling this story was an obstacle, so do I erase these lines that weren’t really mine, or do I leave them to communicate the degree to which I absorbed the opinions of others? I suppose I couldn’t believe my parents were real, for real, because they weren’t. But the anger that drove my investigation was an understanding I was not the only one. That there was worse, even…
Into his office, my eyes were wide. An ethereal blue wrapped around the wall and up the flight of stairs towards a gold doorknob as if I really came from a fairytale, but sometimes real life doesn’t feel real, that isn’t exactly novel as a sensation, but people I spoke to still linger in the fabric of this memory as I weave meaning. People told me that I looked like I stepped out of a fairytale. Dr. J most certainly appeared to belong in one. My father too —outdated, not the same one, but my schoolmates thought he was the Fonz from the TV show Happy Days. It was unreal to them.
I turned to him as another wave of destruction crashed through his neat office. He just took a seat in his leather chair. He didn’t even look at me.
I crept up the blue/grey carpeted stairs that matched his Mont Blanc pen and Cutlass Supreme. I had no legs, no body, no mind. Nothing had — SMASH—changed in his ancient world. A poster of the Fountain of Trevi. Vincent Van Gogh’s Café at Night, Picasso’s drawing of a woman’s back, and Etruscan figures framed in gold leaf. I stood on the other side of the door, calm and staring. The cracking grew louder. Dr. J got herself a new house. We had to undo all this. The carpet had been vacuumed; the house serene.
Turning the corner, I faced the corridor where her teacup sets once trailed on their own pedestals towards a glass panel of amber waves of light like the song about America. I saw so much of it in Dr. J: American culture, consumerism, The Society of Spectacle. Even Angelica. She stood there four years earlier and lived to regret it, but not as much as I did. She was from Brazil. She, too, is from America. People could get confused.
I floated down the hall in that same light. The curves of the waves glittered hot white. I couldn’t think, feel. I sailed over clouds. The cracking sent fractures through the air, as if the house were breaking apart on an invisible plane. Around the next staircase, a shattering of glass smacked me across the face. It sounded like a car was getting crunched.
“Filing a tax return can be terrifying…” the LATIMES began.
Once upon a time, the articles published about Dr. J led the way up the stairs to her ghostly greatness, praising her valiant fight in a red wig that a person had the right to fall apart. All that was left of them were frames of dust. The carpet was gold, a dirty shade of it.
“Out of the 10 to 15 new clients she accepts each week…”
For a while, remembering the cracks on the stairs that I learned to maneuver around, the door opened all day. People rushed up the stairs to see the doctor, but Angelica was the only person who stopped. “She has all the right credentials and something more: a determination to salvage the lives of people she calls ‘tax victims.’”
Dr. J knew “the symptoms” such as depression and paranoia. She called herself in print, the Mother Teresa of the Tax Industry, the Dear Abby of the Tax World, the self-proclaimed “Tax Therapist.” Dr. J was saving the world even ambitiously at 200 an hour in 1988. That’s over 400 dollars today. Not bad.
I remembered the snap of the thread when she got her wigs sewn in upstairs, the curve of her blue eyes the shade of sky a total mystery to me. It sounded like someone took a bat and smashed a wall of glass. I crept up the stairs, in a blank state.
A genius, a prodigy; these were interchangeable terms. She was licensed to practice all the way up to the Supreme Court. She taught at USC Graduate School. She was a senior agent for twenty years. I couldn’t believe it, at four. I demanded to be taken at once! My little legs ran down the hall at USC, tugged on his pants, nose against the glass. No way Dr. J could teach a subject! At USC Graduate School of Accounting? I mean, I was blown away at four. If she was a genius, why was she so stupid? She acted like a complete idiot. And it would be imperative that I speak like this, to myself, this woman was a complete idiot! Rage saved me.
She spoke of her genius as if it were the ultimate truth, with some vague undertone of having suffered an insurmountable set of obstacles to get here. No one ever thought “Mama,” she’d refer to herself in the third person to me…sort of little girl, showgirl, suggestive. She was never normal, didn’t want to be. “No one ever thought Mama would ever amount to anything…” on the crack of laughter and tears. But she succeeded in the world, by the time I was four, which provoked another set of questions about her… she was not a housewife. She was practically un-house trained. Home was some gross jungle. But, strangely, up the steps, the civilized man turns out to be the most savage…? She was a societal creature, somehow…?
What was her PhD in? Depends.
In an LA Times article, her PhD was in “The History of Tax Law.” On the back of her book about VAT: “Doctorate in the Arts.” Once she said, “Economics.” And I cannot help but laugh, because this woman wrapped me up in a sex scandal. Made me wonder, remembering all these articles, or her “achievements” I called them, whether you should believe what you read and hear, and yet, everyone does. I saw Dr. J in everyone and everything.
It’s not to say that she didn’t have a PhD. She probably did, I don’t know, she had a slippery grasp on words, on solid matter. The truth was a flimsy enterprise, even a joke. It didn’t matter. And the more I look around, the truer that feels. We manipulate material, even in taking our work experience and framing to glitter a little. I saw her in everyone and everything in a sense.
She had more academic degrees than anyone. 13, 15, 18, 21 degrees. She just kept “going back to school.” She’d list them all, “a special girl,” on her taut fingers… “English, music, law…” I couldn’t help but laugh at Dr. J. She was a ridiculous person. Already, she appeared like the buffoon of our obsession with genius, even. “Genius.” Everyone is saying it. She’s still counting her degrees. “Chinese…”
“Yugoslavian…” and I say that because she claimed to “speak Gallic,” as “an Irish person.” I interrogated her young, early, “do you speak Irish?” I was four, again, I didn’t know what that meant. Of course she did. “Gallic.” “Say something,” I requested at four, in the church bathroom. She said some words…
My favorite article was at the top—the last one before a client would turn to face her universe. I would find it later in my father’s file cabinet downstairs, so I have this one: Executive Style in Neiman Marcus Magazine. It was one of her hotspots in Beverly Hills. An upscale department store. A fashionista, Dr. J. She had a closet of kimonos downstairs. Her white mink coat was a signature piece of hers, the lushest.
In a terribly chic emerald green Krizia suit, she was the epitome of “Executive Style.” A professional musician once upon a time, a prodigal pianist and organist, her hands floated over a sleek chrome railing and gingerly held her timeless alligator briefcase.
“My first client,” she stated, in this magazine, “is typically about to go to jail…”
“Criminals,” my father put it. “They made up the bulk of her clientele.”
With her eyes as blue as the sky, where she really came from, I could picture her assuring a journalist along this wake. “I screen out people who have been dishonest. The only thing I have going for me with the IRS is my credibility, so I won’t go in with a crook.” I could picture her hand pat pat the air. She would wave that away, “no,” she’d say. She was the sincerest human being to the point of performance, mocking it. Pure artifice.
The bathroom door was open. It was pink. It was supposed to be mine. Coca-Cola, milk, and T-Bones, that’s all she ate, and a gnarled T-Bone steak on the counter, that’s all she left. Raw garlic cloves were “her candy,” she said. A witch, a real witch, Dr. J. And, once upon a time, in Salem, Massachusetts, my speech would have silenced the ecclesiastic authorities. “Garlic is her candy, hear me, please.” She would have been hanged, quick, real quick. Witchcraft, Satan, paranoia, it’s not exactly uncommon to come up with outrageous, insane ideas in the realm of fantasy. Dr. J belonged here. I saw her everywhere. She was so much more common than people tended to see. I tried to describe her, over the years, a mad king, even, they’ve existed.
I tried to wrap my head around a person who would leave only this behind, as if I were a dog. Men panted and strained and thick glass broke to pieces A shard of mirror flew into the view in the frame, the corner of my eye. It flashed a hot white light before crashing into a bin, clanking against shards. Mirror framed the bathroom door like an arch tucked into the wall with black horizontal stripes. A bit boudoir, my mother, I don’t know. An oriental decorative vase once stood in the corner with some stem shooting from it, maybe peacock. She had that hat. She had many many hats, Dr. J.
I felt like a fool not knowing what the sound was. A real fool.
*
Mirror mirror mirrors on the walls, to begin. Dr. J came out of a fairytale by Jean Baudrillard, even; the most unreal human being that even dazzled in sequins. She covered her tax law office walls in mirrors, and I had seen Snow White already, when I was four, so I made a basic connection—there’s a mirror on the wall, but there’s more than just one now. I met the field of psychology in this way, in these mirrors. She was kinda like this. It was a symbol of hers that began in little round suggestions on her wedding ball gown with an antebellum cut, and took over. She said they made the rooms look bigger, which struck a chord when I heard Thomas Huxley’s warning to the USA, that size is not grandeur and territory does not make a nation.
These mirrors reflected one another. Space multiplied, fanned out like an accordion. They produced an illusion of depth but, in fact, it was shallow. The imagination appeared like a real place, in a way. Dr. J appeared to have stepped out of it.
With her wrists like a flimsy hanky, she tapped the teacup sets on pedestals, real and reflected, that trailed through these rooms in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose, naming their country of origin.
“England, Japan, China…”
She was an American — that general wash of a word— mythic creature, the accountant at the Mad Hatter tea party in Alice in Wonderland, another cartoon. She acted, seriously, as if she were literally on Mercury. These mirrors reflected the first computers, a fax machine, stacks of black and white tax returns, bright highlighters, and also tea cup sets…this mad fashionista was at the helm, a businesswoman. What a strange development. Was there a white rabbit… I lost track of?
And now, the walls cracked at angles deep and dark like a canyon, as if a natural disaster had struck the house, an otherwise peaceful universe.
I stood at the top of the steps facing her main space, the larger of the two, no door. Four were smashing the mirrors off the tax law office walls in two rooms. They kicked their feet up onto the wall, sweating and panting. It took real effort, the kind you can’t fake, to dismantle mirrors. It was physical, difficult, a labor. They dove picks into them — stabbed them, dug behind the eyeball, just trying, muscles bulging, to break them off the walls. An ordeal.
Flashing like cameras—broken shards of mirrors reflected the light wildly. It was the TV meets the broken whole on billions of screens.
They cracked, broke, smashed. They pulled—with all their might— to dislodge an unspeakable weapon that drew blood in my mind, just the edges. In sheets, they even stepped on them, to keep cracking them down, down down. Nothing was solid. Everything was reflective and flashing in broken jagged sheets. Just the sound, the crack in my ear, as if it were breaking. A monster in their hands, reflecting light, they held them over their heads and cast them down against the rim of industrial sized trash cans, crash, and again, they kept breaking them down, down, down, until they could throw them away as if they meant nothing at all. Smash, crack, break, crunch, clanking. The light went dim.