“Okay,” she said, closing the subject, breaking into a big, wide smile. “Good. Let’s finish Batwoman.”
Zap! Pow! Bof!—Take that, you giggling loon!—Ow! Unfair! Why is everyone against me? Owww! It’s a fix! Everybody’s a liar! Only the clown tells the truth!—Blam!—Ow.
One night not long after D Golden’s suicide in the Gardens, an event that put a dark hole in Paradise for us all, Riya Zachariassen, known as Riya Z, woke up from a dream of horror to find that she had lost her grip on her picture of the world. She couldn’t remember the whole dream but she was almost sure she had been carrying a very valuable painting in a great museum and then she dropped it and the frame broke and the glass shattered and she somehow managed to put a foot through the canvas itself, but maybe that was just something she remembered from a movie, dreams were slippery as eels. As she came awake the dream itself stopped being important but she understood that the picture was the one containing everything she thought about the way things were, it was her reality, and now it was broken and somebody would come looking for her in a minute and blame her for breaking it and then she would be fired.
It is hard for a person of no faith like myself to comprehend the moment when faith dies in the human heart. The kneeling believer who suddenly understands that there is no reason to pray because nobody’s listening. Or simply the slow erosion of certainty until doubt becomes more powerful than hope: you keep walking by the river as a drought dries it up until one day there’s a dry riverbed and no water to nourish you in time of thirst. I can picture it but I can’t feel it, except perhaps as the end of love. You wake up one morning and look at the person sleeping in the bed beside you, softly snoring his familiar and until now well-loved snore, and you think, I don’t love you or your snore anymore. The scales that fall from Saul’s eyes in the Acts of the Apostles—or the things like scales, “there fell from his eyes as it had been scales,” the King James Bible says—were the scales of unbelief, after which he saw clearly and was immediately baptized. But the image also works the other way around. The somethings-like-scales fell from Riya’s eyes and she saw clearly that her reality had been an illusion, that it had been false. That’s as close as I can get.
She lay very still next to the empty space where her lover had been. She had always hated the Birkenstocks in which, in spite of her protests, D insisted on sheathing [his] feet when they were at home; but now she couldn’t move the sandals from their place on that side of the bed. They were old-fashioned enough to have, still, a landline phone, a phone that never rang. It was D’s voice on the voicemail—“It’s Riya and D, and now over to thee”—and she couldn’t bring herself to delete it. If she stayed very still and did not think, she could almost believe he would walk in from the bathroom and climb back into the bed. But she couldn’t stop thinking, so she knew that wouldn’t happen. What had happened was that she no longer thought what she had thought she thought. So she had no idea what to think.
In the gravity of her mourning solemn Riya reminded me somehow of Winona Ryder, not the wacky teenage Goth Winona of Beetlejuice, dancing in the air to a fine Belafonte calypso, shaking her body line, but rather Age of Innocence Winona, tightly controlled and less innocent than she looked. In the Scorsese movie—I confess I haven’t read the Edith Wharton novel—it’s Michelle Pfeiffer who is the unconventional one, the one who embraces a new, modern way of being and suffers terribly for it and is finally defeated by Winona Ryder’s serene conservative maneuvering. But suppose the Winona character had been the one in the grip of the new, and that one day she lost her hold on her sense of how things were and should be. That Winona could have been in this movie. That was Riya; my rewritten Winona, more lost and devastated than the original ever was, at sea without a life belt.
It is hard for new ideas to come into the world. The new ideas about men and women and how many human beings were somewhere in between those two words and needed new vocabularies to describe them and give them the feeling of being seen, of being possible and permissible, were ideas that many good people had developed and put out there for the best of reasons. And other fine people, brilliant people like Riya Z, had embraced the new thinking and made it their own and worked hard to put it into practice and make it part of a new way for the world to work.
But then one night Riya opened her eyes and realized that she had changed her mind.
DRAFT LETTERS OF RESIGNATION FROM RIYA ZACHARIASSEN TO THE MUSEUM OF IDENTITY (UNSENT)
Dear insert name of employer, This is to inform you that in accordance with and whereas and inasmuch and as per my contractual obligations and in full discharge of my responsibilities and regarding a final date and after unused days of allocated vacation time have been deducted. And loose ends and efficient handover and with gratitude for and in appreciation of and in the hope that and so on. Owing to a radical reevaluation of and evolution of thought leading to the incompatibility of my present position with the values of. Therefore the interests of the Museum are better served by my departure. Yours sincerely, the end.
Or,
When I was a young girl in Minnesota and beginning to be concerned with living an ethical life, I thought about India, such an important part of my own heritage, and I asked myself, who in India suffers the most injustice, and the answer I came up with, aged eight, was, goats. Cows were sacred but goats got slaughtered for meat and nobody cared. I decided I would dedicate my life to the care and protection of those unloved bleating creatures. Then I grew up and changed my mind of course but it has remained my way to find the thing that needs my passion and then to dedicate myself to it without holding back. After goats there were other early obsessions: birth control, autoimmune diseases, eating disorders, water scarcity. My adulthood coincided with the dawning of the Age of Identity, and the discussions and issues and innovations in and around this subject convinced me that I had found my calling, and when the opportunity to work at the Museum offered itself it was like a dream come true and so it has seemed every day until now. I confess to you however a weakness of the passionate-obsessive cast of mind. It can happen that one day one wakes up to find that, you know what, I don’t care so much about this anymore. This is no longer for me. Previously adored goats, condoms, bulimia, water, you’re just not my thing any longer. So it is now with me and identity. I’m over it. Goodbye.
Or,
I need to think and the city is full of noise.
Or,