I put my hand on her waist, an attempt to wrest control, to slow our spin, to dampen this dance.
“No, no,” she says. “I’m the man.” She moves my hands from her waist to her shoulders, and with her hands on the sides of my pelvis, she rocks me in a melodic sway and says, “You have women’s hips.”
“Thank you. How much longer?” I clomp, clomp, clomp my feet beside hers.
“Your dancing is so terrible, Cockring, you’re ruining my manic high.”
“You’re welcome.”
Kathi stops suddenly, then reverses our spin in the middle of her closet.
“Wait.”
“No. I lead,” she insists. “Remember, I’m the man!” Her legs move fast, wide. She steps sideways and my chest follows her, angling as if we’re about to coast across a ballroom floor. “Don’t fuck this up,” she says, dancing me out of the closet and down her hallway, the music growing faint as the orchestra enters a quieter part of the melody, settling, preparing for their next burst from the phone around Kathi’s neck.
Step, step, step we go, down the hall, together, chest to chest, heart to heart.
“The gay gene doesn’t include dancing, eh?” she asks as my feet clutter around hers.
“I had a bad experience dancing when I was a kid,” I say.
We reach the end of the hallway, our feet stomping upon each other’s, our arms growing sore from being outstretched. Just outside the red room, Kathi looks at me. “Now we go back,” she says, changing our positions and pulling me back toward her closet.
Step, step, step.
We move slower this time, our pace matching the increasingly gentle lulls, the tempo coming to an end. I’m not sure if we’re moving slowly to match the pace of the music, for Kathi to stretch out this moment, or maybe both. Maybe we’re all, finally, getting in sync.
As we return to her closet, Kathi releases my arms, removes her hands from my waist, and looks me in the eyes. “Thanks, Cock,” she says, turning from me and muting her phone, ending the song without regard to its final seconds. She retreats to her bedroom as I head to my stash of her meds in my desk, fishing out some of what’s needed.
I bring her a soda and a few Seroquel. She’s standing by her bedroom window, looking out at her backyard, shaking her butt, still in dance to the music now only in her head.
“Time for rest,” I say, guiding her to bed.
“But…”
“No,” I say. I hand her the soda and pills, and she grumpily sits on her bed and takes them as promised and then finishes off the soda.
“You’re no fun, Cockring,” she says.
“I know.”
Assistant Bible Verse 6: Never let them get away with murder. Or spit food at you. Or throw things at your face.
“You really are a B-plus assistant.” Kathi hands me her now-empty glass of soda. I put it on her nightstand.
“Am I? Are you sure? You seem under duress today.”
“True,” she says. “We will have to reconsider your grade when my mind is back home with itself.”
“I can live with that,” I say, making my way across the room to sit in a side chair.
“Thank you for the lovely dance, Cockring.”
“You’re welcome.”
Assistant Bible Verse 7: Always make time to dance.
I look at Kathi, but she looks away.
“You know,” she says, “the mania is great. It’s the coming down that sucks.” And in the quiet moment that follows we’re in sync yet again, dancing a careful emotional dance, where she has space to make her moves. And I start to have space to make mine.
And now it’s me who looks away. “I’m sorry if the pill mix-up was my fault.”
Kathi pulls her blankets tight again, urging them from the tucking between the mattress and box spring, and lies back down on her pillows.
She says, “Don’t worry about it.”
“How often do you have manic episodes like that?”
She says, “They’re very rare.”
She says, “They’re very fun.”
Kathi pulls the bedding up to her chin. She holds her phone over her face so she can continue looking at it—texting, reading news, I have no idea.
I watch her fondly. I’m thinking, B-plus, I can live with that.
I put my hand in my pocket, its home base, my left fingers finding my key ring, and I guess where each key fits—her front door, her shed, her pool house. Then my fingers find the locket. I remove the keys from my jeans and take a look. That aging empty locket, the places it has been, the years it has traveled until this very moment, bearing witness to me caring for my beloved Priestess Talara. I slowly unwind it from the key ring, freeing it at last, after its long journey from a Perris basement to this Beverly Hills mansion.
As I hold it up to marvel at its survival over the years, the dangling locket looks awkward without a key ring, naked, precarious—like a dog with no collar.
“Hey,” I say, the impulse arising within me and spitting itself out like its own living being, like the thought is an exorcised demon with a great personality. “I have something for you,” I say.
Kathi jolts up in bed. “A prostitute?!”
“No.” I stand at her bedside and she turns to look at me. It feels like a scene at a hospital bed, that familiar scene in almost every movie where there’s even the slightest injury and someone ends up laid out under emergency care. The powerless patient looks up at the adoring visitor, but here, instead of beeping machines and the smell of pee, I’m dazzled by the fog of Beethoven from a cell phone and Tom Ford Amber Absolute.
I open my mother’s locket and say a silent goodbye, looking at my reflection in its surface, definitely not the face of young Charlie.
Kathi squints to identify the object in my hand. “What’s that?”
“It’s yours now,” I say. “It’s a gift.” I dangle the locket in front of her.
“Did you steal it?”
“No!”
“You stole it and now you’re planting it on me so I’ll go to jail for you?”
“No. It belonged to someone special. And now I’m giving it to someone special.” I hold it out to her.
The locket, swaying between my fingers, starts to reflect the colors and lights in Kathi’s wizard-ish bedroom, absorbing the enchantment, suddenly and dazzlingly at home in her world, free from the beige of mine. It seems to like her, as if maybe Mom does, too.
“Okay. Give it to me,” Kathi says, her hand reaching to receive it.
“No.” I pull it back, having second thoughts about putting it in the hands of someone in mental crisis.
“What?! You just gave it to me! It’s mine! I want to hold it and see how long I can clutch it before I lose it or break it!”
“Exactly,” I say, turning from her.
“Where are you going, Cockring?”
“Bathroom.”
“I’m learning your pooping schedule after all,” she says.
I grimace at the thought, but kinder feelings flow within me. I walk into Kathi’s bathroom and close the door. I walk to her purse, unzipped on the counter. I reach in and take out her key ring—her collection of jagged metal bits that are less functioning keys and more an archive of her past lives, past residences, old cars. Kathi Kannon’s purse—like my mother’s—is a graveyard.