Solange looked around her. She was in her safe bedroom, with its warm peachy-beige walls and reassuring art deco prints. Bunny May had confiscated all the covers and was sleeping, completely intact. The cat’s oblivious snoring gave Solange a sense of well-being. Thank God these things are only dreams, she thought. She stretched, and felt tingling pricks in her head and arms as oxygen moved once again through her system. Now. What to take. Valium was a good choice, and although it wasn’t the prescription of choice in the twenty-first century, she couldn’t knock it. It was Valium that got her through Paul-Michel’s funeral. It was Valium that kept her upright as she walked into the small Lubbock, Texas church. Everyone had watched her. She was the widow, dressed in a black dress Paul-Michel had given her as a gift four years earlier. All eyes on the widow as she sat in the pew, listening to the preacher despite the fog in her head, hoping he might know something useful. No one knew better than Solange how life-saving it was to be able to take a pill and sit there and wait for it to kick in -- knowing, even through her despair, that within forty-five minutes her body would loosen up, the tears would slow down, her lungs would begin the taking in of oxygen again, and her voice would come down off its three-octave tightrope. The problem occurred when the Valium wore off, and her husband was still dead. But finally, at fifty-two, the pharmaceutical industry came up with something that got in your blood and stayed there. Prozac was a gift from God, although Solange grieved the loss of the high. Prozac didn’t make her high. But at least it allowed her to breathe, speak coherently, and practice her forty-seven string Lyon and Healy pedal harp every day, which is what she decided to do for a living after Paul-Michel died. She decided to leave her job as a voice teacher and go out and learn an instrument and get a gig.
“You’re not euphoric, are you?” Dr. Stone had asked with concern during Solange’s first med check visit after starting the Prozac. Solange realized from the tone of his voice that euphoric was bad, and although she did feel like she was right on the edge of a post-crisis bliss, she knew that to preserve that, she’d have to deny any ounce of euphoria. “Oh, no euphoria,” Solange answered in the overly casual tone she had learned over her younger years of having to feign sanity in order to get the Valium. “I feel alright. Able to work, clean house, drive responsibly.” For good measure, if there was any hesitation from the doctor, “I’m a grandmother, you know.” Men liked to hear that their female patients were now able to clean house. Solange had figured out long ago, back in the days of Elavil, that you have to go to a male doctor because only men will prescribe anything you want if it makes you a better housekeeper and keeps you from shrieking at your husband. Female doctors were much more hip. “Deal with it,” one of them told Solange, and she was right of course, but Solange never went back to her. Solange could only deal with stuff small bits at a time. The stuff itself came at her in larger quantities than she could manage, so there was the discrepancy. What to take, what to take? It was noon-ish.
Solange had read Tarot cards on the Seer’s Network line until 4:30 a.m. That would be 5:30 on the east coast, which meant no one would call from there any more, and although it was only 2:30 in L.A., the pace still slowed. Still in her nightgown, a burgundy cowlick standing straight up on the back of her shoulder length hair, she staggered over to the harp and began tuning. Soon, harp scales filled her cozy bedroom in her residential corner of Austin, Texas. Bud and LaVinia never seemed to mind, although they had mentioned the midnight vacuuming. After a half-hour of scales, an hour of wedding repertoire, an hour of assisted living repertoire, and a half-hour of glissandos in various keys, she realized once again that while she had been doing this since Paul-Michel had passed away ten years ago, she was still quite awful at it. The decision was made. Coffee and an Ativan. Everything was going to be fine.
Scene 7: Night Needles Dream: I am taken to a place beneath the earth, underneath everywhere. A place of karma and retribution. Most people are completely unaware that this landscape exists. I had never seen it before; never even conceived of its possibility. But this dream is vivid and detailed. Like I am there, not dreaming. You have to protect yourself. It’s an alternate world, but it manufactures events and situations that affect the waking world. There is daylight there, and it’s barren, lots of desert, but no wind. A man with a drum. A snake. He’s smiling. The events are outside of our control. Yet we only take them on during our vulnerable times. Back on the dirt side of earth, in the big wooden dreamscape house, we’re preparing for the battle. It is to be a major attack. There’s a lot of military equipment. Suddenly the guns begin. It is violent and harsh, as automatic and semiautomatic weapons fire. Bullets fly over our heads. Some of us are killed. We are close to total annihilation. I am tense and upset, but not terrified like I would be if, say, there were cockroaches dripping down.
She brought her coffee, vitamin C, Prozac, socks, and Unlocking the Door to the Other Side channeled by the Pleideans from another dimension, back to bed with her, along with a cold croissant. Bunny May and the dream journal were there, and she found a pink tasseled Pretty Pony pen under a throw pillow, so she gently sank into the warm illusion of feeling alright. She played the RO RO SO SO OFO OFO game for a while, robe on, robe off, socks on, socks off, overhead fan on, overhead fan off. It was Solange’s organic substitute for hormone replacement therapy, and it worked alright if you didn’t mind going crazy.
Scene 8: Phantoms and Nightwalkers Dream: An old white van passes us. I’m in a car with Paul-Michel. Suddenly, from the van, a face looks back at me -- his eyes lit as if from a supernatural, malicious source. In the gleaming eyes, a hint of a smile. His eyes get bigger and the glowing more intense. Paul-Michel quickly turned our car to the right, to get away from him, and said, “What was that?” I knew, but I didn’t say anything. Paul-Michel shouldn’t have to have known. One of his favorite things to do was to feed swans. Solange woke up hyperventilating. When she caught her breath and brought some hot coffee back to bed, she thought about Lighthead-Nettles. The place had killed Paul-Michel. Yes, it was a cancer hospital, a cutting-edge world-leading state-of-the-art hospital that took up umpteen New York City blocks and you couldn’t get parking even while you were dying. Yes, Solange was a New Yorker. Her blood was made of New York blood. But by now she hated the city and was glad to be in Austin. She’d never go back. And after it killed Paul-Michel ten years ago, Solange looked at Lighthead-Nettles not so much as a healing place as a slaughter house. You go in, you get tortured in the most hideous ways, you fight with them about the impending dismemberment of your body and the divvying up of the parts for research and autopsy, and you come out in parts. Walking through the halls at Lighthead-Nettles on the chemo floor, hearing people scream in pain from behind closed doors; seeing people stagger around the halls with burned skin, dragging their drip bags along; the dust, the dirt; the nurses pulling twenty-four hour shifts; the plastic surgical gloves and rubber bands that were used instead of ice blankets for 106 degree fevers. Yes, Paul-Michel had been killed just as viciously in the hospital as if he had been mugged on the street.
Solange picked up a pen, mindless of its silver pom-pom, and wrote: How can I live? That reminds me: She washed down an Ativan with a long, slow sip of the coffee. She wrote more: Actually, I don’t feel so good myself.
~~~
Did you ever start a book which is so alien, so bizarre from anything that has occurred in your life, so far, and you think this is not my type of book, but you just keep on reading, thinking, ah...what is the point of this book? But then words "the lure of Funky Music" heads a page and you decide to keep on reading, knowing that you now realize just why, many years ago, you decided that you would never want to take pills or drink something to the extent that you would not want to know what had happened--and this book proved that you had made the right decision! But you figure, by now, there has to be more to this book, so you just keep on reading...
Seriously, if you read the subtitle of a book and it says: The Midlife Crisis of a Quirky Pharmaceutically-Challenged Harp Player, and the only words that caught your attention was "harp player," then beware, because you have no idea exactly what a midlife crisis really is! And you might be grateful that you never learn! Especially since your mid-life is in the past... But, darn, Harp Music!
I think of some songs that I'd like to hear on the Harp:
The Lord's Prayer
So Solange, our main character goes out, trying to get a job as a harpist... In fact, if you continue reading, like I did, you will see that Solange is really somewhat, shall I say, OBSESSED, with music composition, so much so that everything she does turns into a counting of that activity to music--you know, like if the garbage truck is coming down the street, stopping at each home, there'd be a certain rhythm of the truck stopping and starting, together with the bang, bang, bang of the cans against the moving barrel...stop stop...start...start...bang, bang, OMG, she has me doing it! What fun! I hated counting when I was learning hymns, especially... I wanted to play them as I would sing the song, while my teacher wanted me to count the value of each note...Now I have to ask, just who would be singing this song, while I was playing the piano... Most people at my church were old and sang slowly--they weren't counting the note value, I can tell you!
After past auditions, she had been able to maintain a quasi-zen emotional state -- that is, pretending it didn’t matter if she got the gig. If the gig was cosmically right, she would get it. And if it was cosmically wrong, she would not get it, and that would be correct in a not-knowing-the-bigger-picture-therefore-it-must-be-God’s-plan way. Like if she didn’t get the gig, it would have been bad to have gotten the gig. Still, at fifty-two, she felt an urgent need to get up each noontime and continue her quest to get the better gig. Solange went downstairs to the kitchen and brought back a saucer of milk and Bunny May’s insulin works...
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