Part 96: Bobby / Mrs. Brixton
That evening, Bobby Melrose was lying on that same hotel bed, obsessively watching news coverage of himself. As soon as one channel started talking about something else - the war, the weather - he would flip to another, and they would just be starting their coverage. For any lulls, he still had the comments of Cicero’s article to peruse, pre-loaded on his Blackberry. The magic from the morning hadn’t faded yet. Everything was still lining up perfectly.
Bobby gloated; he basked. He had earned this. For all his talk of money, this was his real payment, this moment of perfect satisfaction. Somehow he had solved the puzzle - the most complex of his career - but he had done it. He had maneuvered all the pieces into place, and now it was running on its own. Like a machine, like the watch of a Deist god. The TV-watching public was learning to hate him for what he had done to Britttni, the internet-browsing public for what he had done to Xander, and most importantly, somewhere, Xander was writing.
A chess game, after all, where all he had to do to win was sacrifice his queen. Himself.
Like all answers, it seemed painfully obvious now that he had found it.
As he listened to them call him an opportunist, an exploiter, a slave-driver; compare him to Joe Jackson, Machiavelli, and (for the pedants, who saw it as a Frankenstein’s-monster situation) Machiavelli’s prince - he visualized himself as an actor, in one of those old Kabuki-mask type plays. The audience rushed him, surrounded him, held him down, yanked off the mask, danced around a fire in some sort of tribal glee. (His fantasy mixed cultures blithely, like an elementary school holiday concert.)
But what they missed in their exaltation was that all they had revealed was another mask.
And when they did notice, as they inevitably would, and pull that one off, too - there would be another mask, and another, and another, like the scarves up a magician’s sleeve.
Right now, he was being demonized. After he was fully demonized, then he could be humanized; then perhaps reclaimed; then complicated. A constant, perpetual cycle of different masks. Beautiful. Like a Hindu reincarnated as a rat, a lion, an elephant, a man, except without the inconvenience of having to die every time. He’d die only once, like a proper American, and his death would kickstart a new wave of the cycle, but he’d get to live a hundred different times before that.
Britttni was taken care of; Xander was taken care of. The next project was his mother. Since their last phone call, it seemed that gay no longer had the power it used to. It was being absorbed into their world. He needed something new - or, rather, she did - some new designation to explain why he couldn’t just come home and be her son.
Well, that was a question for tomorrow. A new game to play. A reason to get out of bed. Well, that and the thought that with every moment that passed, more and more kids were sending their parents’ money in to support Real Artists, to support Women, to support Speaking Truth to Power. To cast their vote for their favorite mask.
*
The tumor made her fall asleep again.
And either it, or the nap it caused, had also erased a whole chunk of time from her life. She didn’t remember driving home. Logic said she must have, but the last image she had was dropping Victoria off in front of Hannah’s house - not even seeing her go inside, just opening the car door - and then she was here, lying on her bed, fully clothed. The interim was not black, not gray - just not there. A preview of death.
She was dead already, really. She had resigned herself to it, accepted it, skipped to the end of the stages of grief, and now it was just a matter of waiting for her body to catch up. As always, the body lagged behind the mind.
Mrs. Brixton rose and looked in the mirror in the evening light. She tried to imagine herself as a corpse. Would she look old or young? Would they say “she looks so good” or “we ought to remember how how she really looked?” Would people cry? Well, no matter. She wouldn’t be there to hear it. Her consciousness did, sadly, depend upon this arrangement of matter to sustain it, and that matter was never going to hang together permanently. All gave way to entropy, eventually. That’s why it was so important to create order when you could.
A pile of loose change on the counter: she arranged it into piles. Just as she had done a child. She remembered stacking pennies, sorting pens and pencils, organizing her socks by color. Putting like with like. That was how you kept entropy at bay. Not with words, whether spoken or written - they were too slippery - but by actions. That was how you ought to measure a life.
And what had she done? She had taken three little girls who would have grown up in chaos and given them stability. Catherine, a success. Elizabeth, a failure. Victoria - it all hung on Victoria. Whether she won or lost at life, it all depended on who Victoria turned out to be. Right now, she was hanging in suspended animation, but someday soon she would have the day where she decided who she was.
She could even be having it right now, at Hannah’s house, deciding whether to keep her word or break it, whether to smoke a cigarette or refuse, whether to remain a follower or to become her own person.
Before she died officially, for the last time, she needed to know the score.