When Veronica got there, I was requested to help with her adaptation period by telling everybody she was my mother. We pulled some all-nighters coming up with some backstory, me filling her in on the information I already had on my mother and teaching her the Boston accent. We decided she’d moved up here because my father, Mitchell, had died, and she wanted to be close to family. For a while, we had to pretend to mourn Mitchell.
That was also the time when she decided to investigate and track the fugitive who’d been inconveniencing her by herself, ultimately drawing his attention. Veronica then lost her Internet privileges, and she cried and cried about not being able to see her grandchildren grow up. I just wanted her to act like my mother, because I missed having a mother around, and she was not making it any easier. If I went home, Veronica would go nuts. I was the only person she could maybe, kind of, talk to about herself.
“She’ll be fine,” Officer Lemon said. “She’ll be a little unstable without you, but she’ll get through it. Everything else… can be managed.”
“But it will make no sense if I move. I mean, if she moved up here to be with me…”
“We’ll come up with something. That’s not your problem anymore.”
“Well, I’m just saying, you know…If you need me to stick around until her thing is done, that’s no problem,” I told him.
Now, mid-tea, he was positively intrigued, a position that any decent detective should find themselves in eventually in their life of investigation:
“Tell me, Sally… Do you not want to go back home? I have never delivered news such as this before, but usually when I give prisoners the option of going, they don’t offer to stick around.”
“It’s just…bad timing. I might get a promotion at the rink. I was supposed to go on a date on Friday. I even have friends… Everyone in L.A. has probably moved on, as well. I can’t just go back like I woke up from a coma. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Well, if you like it here, you can still stay here. Of course you’ll have to leave the house, but you are free to live wherever you want.”
“Can I keep the name?”
“Sally? No, they’ll burn your Sally documents.”
“Then it’s no use staying here.”
“You could legally change your name.”
“That would involve acknowledging that my name is not really Sally. It would make a fraud out of me.”
“I don’t follow. Isn’t Sally a fraud already?”
“Going back would make all of this meaningless.”
“Didn’t coming here make all of that meaningless?”
“No, it actually made a lot of sense. Everything before I came here seemed meaningless. But this is the right place for me to be, I think.”
“Well, you talk this through with your priest or rabbi or spiritual advisor. I’m just the messenger.”
Sally did believe in God. Jill, not so much. Jill was always afraid of believing in stuff. That’s why her life was stagnant and made out of stretched-out time.
That last day I was Jill, that had been the last drop. I was feeling like smoke, smoke from the all make-believe or just plain old reality, which didn’t matter, so it might as well be make-believe.
Jill had a sense that no matter where she went, she would always be stuck; and in the end, she’d realize she’d never left it at all. Being Jill was virtually the same as being stuck.
And see, I thought I’d never have to be Jill again; I never thought they’d catch the guy.
But dread keeps sneaking up on you. Just when you think you’re rid of it, it takes over your body, and it hurts that annoying pain you get when you sleep all twisted. That pain hurts all over like a faraway buzz from another room. And the people on the other room are talking shit about you, and how weird you’ve been acting lately when you should just be happy to be back home.
~~~
Mom’s got new boobs; that is after the last time she got new boobs. Those were too big for her and she couldn’t get used to them, so finally, she had them changed; and she felt so much better. How much did that say about feminism? The doctor almost had her convinced that she was only worth as much as her bra size. She’d fired that doctor and gotten a new one, who understood the social pressure on older women to look younger and younger every year, and how damaging that was for us, as a society.
She’d missed me very much. I was so pale from all the ice in that place— where was that, anyway? Doesn’t matter. She couldn’t ask; she knew that. Tyler was getting married. Did I know that? He was very glad now, very glad I/Jill could make it. She didn’t like the bride; her face was weird. Tyler liked her, though, that’s what mattered. You know who else got married? Jill’s best friend Jane. She had new friends now, of course. The FBI had told everybody that Jill had gone on a journey of self-discovery to Nepal, so I/Jill better act as though I was in Nepal! We should buy a couple souvenirs. What do they have there? Buddhism? Chinese food? We can’t just buy Chinese food and say you brought it with you.
“Maybe we could just tell them the truth, now that it’s all over,” I managed to intervene during one of her monologues.
“Oh, you’re right. I guess we could. Hadn’t thought about it that way. Ha! Funny.”
Veronica never did this kind of thing. She was a bit crazy, yes, but she was able to make correlations in silence. Being with Jill’s mom got me feeling out of place. Jill’s mom did not cook, and she didn’t like tea, and she cursed a lot. I felt an adolescent shame walking with her; her speaking loudly and pointing at people. Did she do this before? I couldn’t remember. Sally despised these sorts of people who keep calling attention to themselves; that was the sort of person Sally was primarily programed not to be.
What bothered her, actually, was how grotesque Jill’s mother seemed to her. Wasn’t that also her mother? Her mother was Veronica. Veronica was somebody else’s mother, actually. She had another name and another life. This was Sally’s other life, and there was no place for her there.
This mother, she seemed like the repulsive side-character on a theatrical satire about California. And so did Jill, in a way; pill-popping, binge-smoker Jill who wanted to play in a band even though she couldn’t stand other people. Jill who really never knew what she wanted, and so was happy to want the impossible because that was easier.
Sally was so much simpler. There were things she liked, such as ice-skating and non-fiction books and ice-cream; and things she didn’t like, such as Twitter, volleyball and those movies you can’t understand unless you’ve watched the previous hundred in the franchise. Sally did the things she liked and avoided those she didn’t. Jill had never really gotten to that point.
And now that I was back to being Jill, the shoes didn’t fit. I wasn’t sure what I was anymore, both or none; and I was afraid to look in the mirror and not find my reflection.
I was like a snake trying to put her dead skin back on. But now that her current skin was dying and dying, there was no way she was able to produce more in time. So you sew and you sew the dead skin despite its putrid smell and memories inside that smell, and you patch it up so you don’t die or whatever happens to snakes when this happens. They probably die, too. You can’t die metaphorically, though. Many have tried, but they always reincarnate into someone else. I had no one else to be.
My flight to California had been disconcerting. I had my Jill documents with me. I wondered where my real ones were, the Sally ones. Such a nice picture on that passport! It wasn’t even a year old!
Not one hour into the flight, I was already feeling that old, shapeless despair blooming inside her body, or mine. I couldn’t really tell. Maybe the body was vacant, and that is why there was despair. All that time sitting on a plane, constipated and reddish, on the verge of an aneurysm from all the dams being broken in my brain at the same time…
It was hard for me to organize my thoughts, mostly because there was Jill, trying to break into them, and Sally, fighting off the parasite. In the end they were really both parasites. Or, rather, cells attacking their own, like an auto-immune disease. But that is such a Jill analogy—the self-destructive, ever-struggling Jill, who was so much like an auto-immune disease that she couldn’t move forward.
About Beatriz Seelaender
