She said her daily prayers. She liked private compartments on trains, men in their fifties, iconoclasm. She liked fucked-up pigeon feet; she liked pointing them out to her companions; she liked reading explanations of the phenomenon; she liked that, no matter where in the world you went, you could count on seeing fucked-up pigeon feet there. She liked endangered creatures. Smoked meat. To leave the lights on in her house, to drive with the roof down even when it was cold, to watch postwar films where nothing, absolutely nothing, went wrong. To scream when no one was there: in her blue ballroom, underwater in her pool, facing mountains on her porch. She liked strong flavors: espresso, bourbon, hot sauce, horseradish, Dijon, wasabi. She always let the tea steep too long. Her favorite meal was her mother’s corned beef and cabbage, and one of her greatest regrets was that she failed to record the recipe before her mother died. She liked to trash all the expired and disappointing food in her fridge; she liked her radiant absence of guilt.
She loved Zorn automobiles, liked to park all four of hers side by side in the garage, liked to call it her stable. Loved the metal falcons perched on the hoods with their eyes narrowed and their wings outstretched. Loved to watch a man named Dominic clean and wax the perfect metal bodies of her Zorns, loved to feel the sponge slipping down her own skin as she observed him. She loved the look of her yellow 1932 Presidential Coupe the best. For novelty: the red 1924 Duplex Phaeton. For speed: the emerald 1959 Torpedo Hawk. But for driving, she favored her 1951 Commander Stardust Zorn. A bullet-nose convertible with a pontoon body, an exterior the color of cream, a V-8 engine, and a face that looked like a missile. Whiskey leather upholstery. Brass detailing. Orange steering wheel. If freedom had a smell, Elsie found it inside her Zorns. Three of her best orgasms took place in the Commander Stardust Convertible. High-voltage orgasms that brought her back to life when she was otherwise entombed in despair. When she drove the convertible, she felt that it understood her, felt that their bodies were two halves of one machine.
By the time she was thirty, she had constructed her life around her preferences; she presciently invested in likes well before the internet did. The likes she possessed and the likes she received. She didn’t care who or what she broke as she reached for the pleasure on the top shelf.
In the actress’s religion, pregnancy was heretical.
Like all of the people with whom the actress had sex, the father of the baby was vast and transient. He was a little bit royal; they agreed to keep it a secret. Elsie liked keeping the secrets of powerful men—it made the patriarchy more inclusive, palatable, and funny. The actress was a genius at attracting company, but she had no idea how to sustain it and didn’t see the appeal. She’d received an abortion before. Had no qualms about doing it again. She took the test on her annual Blitz of July party, at her mid-century modern house in Malibu, where there was an abundance of glass and a crisis of privacy. She was already drunk. If the minute is even, she thought, I will keep the baby. She checked the clock around her neck.
Immediately, the fetus proved itself to be a resourceful parasite, with no equal in the natural world. The animal inside the actress had no interest in her preferences, and it had a vendetta against her pleasure. He liberated her from menstruation for nine months, but in its place, he inflicted a new program of anatomical hell. Room by room, he demolished her body and rebuilt it into his own. It seemed to be his mission to expose, over and over, the barbarism of female corporeality. The actress expected pregnancy to add weight, deplete her energy, and harden her breasts. She expected morning sickness and cravings. She expected to leak. She could cope with these taxes, but she was ill-prepared to cope with the rest. Nobody—not her friends or her mother, not doctors or books or television—had warned her about the rest.
One day, she stopped being a soprano. Her skin tightened. Her bones felt . . . loose. Her brain delayed and stuttered as though it had aged decades in weeks. It was like she had picked up a virus at summer camp: she was always sneezing, itching, overheating, forgetting, sweating. She could no longer dance. She developed bad breath that could not be controlled. All pipes of her internal plumbing malfunctioned. The veins on her breasts began to resemble the veins on bovine udders. Pregnancy ravaged her skin, separated her pelvic bone, sprouted hairs from her chest, doubled her blood volume, ballooned her joints, gave her acne and melasma and migraines and nausea and prophecies. It darkened her belly button. Her vagina turned blue.
For nine months, time slowed. And then time happened all at once. Suddenly, the doctors were saying that she needed a Cesarean. “Cesareans are for sissies!” she shrieked at them, then cackled. Or maybe this only transpired in her mind; she couldn’t tell. She was, by then, pain incarnate. In the hospital room, the contractions were the Rotten Truth, and there was nothing beyond or before the Rotten Truth. “Oh, give it to me,” said the actress. Her mother was beside her, wearing a yellow track suit, clutching a rosary. It was like an exorcism. “Give me the fanciest Cesarean you have!”
Afterward, her hair turned curly, and her vision prescription changed. He—the baby—wanted her—the mother—the actress—the mother—to see and be seen as his. He wanted to ruin her for everyone else. Something a charming suitor told her when she was twenty: I want to ruin you for everyone else.
When she got home from the hospital, Elsie stowed the baby in her mansion’s only sunless room and told the nannies to keep language away from him, for now. She didn’t want to deal with the repercussions of language. She needed to gather her wits, her whereabouts, her preferences. She needed to order new contact lenses. And there was the question of feeding. “You know what they say,” said one of the nannies, who was too young, an aspiring actress with gossamer clothing and perfect skin and filthy, filthy shoes. She smiled. “Breast is best.” Elsie fired that nanny, kept the ones in their sixties, but she decided to nurse the baby. She only liked to look at the baby in his room, in the dark, where she could see nothing but an idea. In the abstract, it was an exquisite idea.
“I’m afraid I’m not a very good person.” Moses frowns to the confessional screen.
“Usually, you start by saying, ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned.’ ”
“Oh.” Moses is shivering. “But I’m not sure if I’ve sinned, actually.”
“We’ll get to that in a moment.”
“So what do I say?”
“Oh, let’s skip it. Let’s just make the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen.”
Moses forgets the order—forehead, shoulders, chest?
“Okay, John. How long has it been since your last confession?”
“Uh, forty-five years or so?”
“All right. Go ahead.”
“I think I’m a bad person.”
“But you don’t think you’ve sinned?”
“Well, I think it’s more of an identity thing than a behavioral thing.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You can’t tell anybody any of this, right? It’s like therapy?”
“Right, this remains between you and God. I’m just an interpreter.”
“How do I know you’ll keep it quiet?”
“I’ll be excommunicated otherwise.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“But what if a criminal tells you he’s about to murder someone?” asks Moses.
“All you can do is counsel that person away from sin and toward God.”
“I’m not, by the way. About to murder someone.”
“Happy to hear it.”
“But it seems like a faulty policy,” says Moses. “The total secrecy, when someone’s life is on the line.”
“I don’t make the rules.”
“Well.” Where to begin? “My name’s not John.”
Child-celebrity-turned-pygmy-sloth-preservation-activist Elsie Blitz christened the only child she carried to term Moses Robert Blitz because she met the urban designer Robert Moses at a dinner and found him bewitching. Robert Moses—bewitching! To Moses Robert Blitz, this fact alone evidenced his mother’s derangement. Elsie knew that if she named her only child Robert Moses, the tabloids would have assumed that he was the father. So she flipped it.
“But I won’t tell you my real name,” says Moses.
“Do you want to tell me what compels you to hide it?”
Moses searches for a phrase. “I’m not at liberty to say.”
“All right,” says Father Tim. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I’m missing my mother’s funeral right now.”
A pause.
“I mean, it’s happening right now,” continues Moses in a rush, “and I’m not there, obviously, and I’m glad I’m not there. I don’t feel any regret at all. No guilt. None. Actually, I have no feelings about it whatsoever.”
“Is that true?”
“She was a narcissistic opioid addict who never should have had a child,” says Moses. “She neglected me and everyone else around her. I mean, all she saw when she looked at you was herself. Everybody loved her, but I’m the only one who knew her. If you knew her, you’d hate her.” His heart is pounding. “She’s an actress.”
“Is the funeral in Vacca Vale?”
“No. It’s in Malibu.”
“So what brings you here?”
“Sometimes I cover my entire body with the liquid of broken glow sticks and break into the houses of my enemies,” Moses blurts.
Father Tim pauses again, like a GPS system recalibrating after a wrong turn. “Okay. How many times have you done that?”
“Two so far.”
“And what do you do once you enter the house?”
“I just kind of wiggle around in the dark. I don’t wear any clothes. Just briefs.”
“And you don’t . . . you just leave, after that?” asks Father Tim.
“You think I steal or rape or something?”
“I didn’t think that.”
“You think I murder them, or something?”