Joan and her thoughts on "good people"
A short story about a girl who has kaleidoscopic visions
Today is the final installment of my one-story-a-week series. We will now shift to several different series, which I will be excited to announce to you next week. Check out the other installments in this series and don’t forget to subscribe for more of my work!
I have started to have these kaleidoscopic visions. I pass out wherever I am, in the middle of whatever I am doing, as my mind is lost in a void of geometric forms. I say “void” intentionally because the “forms” I see are somehow also “void.” There is something truly sacred about them but, don’t worry, I’m not going to make a big hullabaloo about them. I am not here to present myself as a prophet. I simply want to share my experience with you, along with some of my thoughts.
The responsible thing for me to do would be to have my mom take me to a doctor. After all, these visions do come at inopportune times. I’ve had them at work before, when I smashed a whole rack of coffee mugs I was carrying. It is only a matter of time before I really hurt myself. But still I refuse to tell people about it, with a few exceptions that I will get to. The fact of the matter is that if I tell people, they will make a big deal about it in stereotypical human fashion and I simply cannot bear to hear their stupid thoughts about what the visions “mean.” The only reason I’m telling you is because you’re a reader and you cannot speak back to me— unless you want to go hunt down my address and spew your thoughts to me like some sort of freak.
I did try to indirectly broach the topic with my boyfriend, Peter. We were in his bedroom on a Saturday, which is when we usually do nothing important all day. He was reading one of his philosophy books on the bed. I was on his desktop leaving mean comments on a variety of social media platforms just to get a reaction out of people. Suddenly, I started thinking about the visions and I turned to him and said, “Have you ever heard of people having visions? Like visions that look like a kaleidoscope?”
“You mean like ayahuasca?”
“No, nothing from drugs. Just visions.”
“Who told you about this?”
“A woman at the bookstore.”
He stood up and came closer to me. “She must be some sort of crazy person.” He rubbed my arm, which I should have expected. Whenever I talked to him, he would try to have sex. We were both virgins. I let him kiss my cheek and neck but when he started feeling my jeans I pushed him away. “What’s wrong?” he asked me.
“I don’t want to do that right now.”
“Why not?”
“I wanna watch a movie.”
“Okay. Come to the bed then.”
We got into his bed and he turned on the TV with the remote. One of the first movies that was advertised was something called Wormwood Street. “Ohhh!” Peter said, “They got Wormwood Street.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s by one of my favorite directors. It’s supposed to be horrifying.”
The image the TV featured was of a man bound to a folding chair in a white room. Another man stood over him and his face turned just enough so you could see it. A ghastly face with dark eyes and white skin.
“He looks like you,” I said.
He laughed. “Like me? What about him looks like me?”
“He’s pale.”
“I’m not as pale as that.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Oh come on. I’m not like that.”
“You are like that. It’s best to just accept it.”
He didn’t know what to say to me then so he just asked, “Can we watch it?”
“Okay.”
And so he played it. The opening was very dark and rainy. Some cookie cutter detective arrives at the scene of a murder where the killer has carved a symbol into the victim’s back. As it goes on, more bodies are discovered, and you learn that the killer fancies himself to be the devil. More bodies, more leads that go nowhere, until the detective finally he thinks he knows exactly where the killer is going to conduct his next murder. When he arrives, he is suddenly trapped in the white room from the featured image. The killer enters and reveals that the detective’s wife is in a nearby room. He presses a remote and we hear her scream. He then proceeds to torture the detective in gruesome detail until the detective will finally agree so say what the killer wants him to say: “Kill my wife, please, I don’t care about her.” It was really sadistic and it was the only part of the movie where I felt myself glued to the screen.
That was despite the fact that Peter was constantly clawing at my chest. Apparently, he was more interested in my womanly body than the film from a director he purported to admire. It was classic Peter, fantasizing about himself as an intellectual but really just being a dumb horny guy like everyone else. I kept brushing him away the entire movie. When it was finally over, he was eager to do something. I said I was tired and went home.
A few days later, I was biking to work along the Los Angeles river. I thought about that scene again— the man’s screams, the killer’s delight, the hair-raising torture of fingernails.
I passed out and toppled over my bike.
My mind dropped into visions.
Everything. Nothing. Form and void simultaneously. There are shapes and you have a sense that they are complete shapes but you can never wrap your mind around any individual shape. You know there was a line that connected one side of a shape to another but by the time you look to that corner the line has already evaporated and a new shape is forming. And every complete-but-incomplete shape drifts into one another to explode into more complete-but-incomplete shapes that are changing before you can even fathom them. And I haven’t even gotten to the colors yet. Bold, arresting colors. Reds. Ultraviolet blues. Hypnotic greens. There are colors I cannot even describe to you because they don’t exist. And yet I remember them vividly. I have a crystal clear sense of them without really remembering what they looked like— the way you might remember you had very vivid dreams last night but you cannot remember a single detail about them.
And while I’ve painted a very detailed picture for you, it cannot even come close to the actual experience, because you might start to think that I am actually seeing shapes and forms and colors. And yet when I’m in it, when I behold this spectacular display, I also know with absolute certainty that I am not seeing anything at all. Everything is there and not there at the same time and there is no contradiction between these two ideas.
Sometime later, I woke to the bright daylight on my face. Something blocked the sun, which I soon realized was the head of a homeless man hunched over me. “What are you doing?” I asked.
He was startled and shuffled away towards his shopping cart.
“You just fell, just like that,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Just like Lucy. You just fell.”
“Who’s Lucy?”
He turned, wild-eyed. “Crazy woman. Like a mystic. Says she sees things. We all see things.” He went on to his shopping cart, muttering. “We all see things!” He laughed hysterically. “Lucy thinks we don’t see things?! Of course!” He bent over, wheezing. “Of course we wall see things!” He moved things around in his cart.
I sat up and rubbed my temple, finding blood, which I wiped away on my jeans. The sun hurt my eyes, so I dug through my backpack for my sunglasses, finding that they had gone crooked in the fall. I put them on anyway. Then I untangled myself from my bike and walked it over to the homeless man.
“Can you take me to her?”
He gave me that wild-eyed stare of his and then started laughing hysterically, continuing to move things around in his bags. “She wants to see Lucy! Anyone can see Lucy. But Lucy doesn’t care. Lucy doesn’t see anyone. Lucy can’t see anyone because—” He laughed. “Because she says she sees things! Too busy seeing things, can’t see people.”
“There’s five dollars in it for you,” I said.
He turned to me, still smiling. “Why do you want to see Lucy? She doesn’t care. Lucy is crazy.”
“It doesn’t matter. I want to and I’m sure you want five bucks.”
He eyed the five in my hands. “If I take you, you must give me the money. But Lucy won’t talk. You’ll see. Lucy won’t talk.”
“Let’s just get a move on it.”
We started trundling along the bike path by the river, me with my bike and him with his shopping cart. He continued to mutter to himself all the while as if I weren’t there. What I could hear didn’t make sense, his sentences being incomplete or referring to things only he knew about. Along the way, a fit black cyclist passed us by in full cycling uniform, complete with rearview mirrors attached to his helmet. He stopped and looked back at me. “All good?” He asked.
“All good.”
He went on.
We came upon a small riverside park in Studio City. You were supposed to be able to pass under Coldwater through a small path but the way was blocked by temporary housing.
“Lucy!” The man hissed. I was surprised by his tone. “Lucy!” He said again. He flipped open a tarp. There was the brassy-haired Lucy sitting cross legged on the ground with sleeping bags nested around her. Her sunburnt face looked startled.
“Lucyyy!” The man’s voice had shifted to a sing-songy, yoo-hoo tone. “You have a visitor Lucy!”
She clutched her wiry hair and began wailing as she fell to the side.
“Give me the money,” the man hissed at me. “I told you she wouldn’t want to talk.”
I gave him the five and he trundled off to back where we came.
I held the tarp open and waited for Lucy to calm down. In between her ramblings, she spoke words that made little more sense than the man’s. “It’s all crooked. It’s all tipping. It’s all turning. Oh, crooked face. Evil crooked. Crooked is evil and everything is crooked. Crooked and tipping and turning.”
I realized that my crooked glasses might have been scaring her so I took them off and folded them back into my bag. Her eyes were still squinted shut so I figured if I waited a little longer for her to open them, she would see my glassless face and be at ease. There was a smell of moss and sleep and smoke in the tent. Among the remains of fast-food bags there were countless tiny dropper bottles that I realized were from Covid tests.
She slowly opened her eyes and peered at me.
“See?” I said. “No glasses. Everything’s fine.”
“Who… who are you?” She said, still on the verge of tears.
“My name’s Joanie. That man told me you see things sometimes. I do too.”
“That man?” She squinted again and fell deeper into her sleeping bag. “Oh you’re gonna hurt me. You and Daniel are gonna hurt me and it’s gonna be forever.” She suddenly screamed and cut herself short. Then she was just silent, no longer even squinting, just laying there.
I wondered if maybe she had passed out just like I do. Maybe she was lost in that infinite world of planes, hexagons, heptagons, and dodecahedrons combining and changing and sucking deeper into some invisible point they would never reach. I thought to myself, shit, is this where I’m gonna end up? Some crazy woman who lives under a bridge? And then I thought no, I’m not gonna end up like this woman. I’m better than this.
She woke up again.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She leapt to her feet and ran at me, screaming. I scrambled away and she flew right past me, struggling over the railing to get to the waterway. When she was over, she stumbled down the slope and ran through the shallow water, screaming all the while.
I just walked my bike away. I wasn’t going to deal with that.
So then I got to work and of all days, this was the day my boss decided to give me shit for being late. I was chaining my bike by the back door, through which he saw me. “Hello Joanie,” he said.
“Hi Andrew. I’m sorry I’m late again. I had another bike accident.”
“How is it that you have these accidents so frequently?”
“I don’t know. It’s just LA, I guess.”
“David rides his bike and he never seems to get into accidents. Are you taking safe routes?”
“As safe as I can be. But the bike paths by the river are all screwed up.”
“Sure, I guess that’s true. But Joanie,” I could tell he was scared to go on and I knew he should be. “It can’t continue like this where you’re late so frequently. I need to know you’re gonna be here on time so that I have a complete team and I can cover breaks and all that. So if you—”
“I’m hurt, Andrew. Maybe you didn’t notice. I didn’t want to be late.”
“Of course, of course, but maybe it would be better if someone gave you a ride or—”
“Nobody needs to give me a ride. I guess I’ll just get better at riding a bike.”
I started to unchain my bike again.
“No, Joanie, where are you going?”
“I’m not doing this today. I’m hurt.”
“Come on, Joanie."
You will say that he was reasonable and that I shouldn’t have left. I will tell you that I don’t care if he was reasonable. I don’t care about “reason.” I was hurt and he wasn’t going to care for me so I didn’t want to be there.
And as I rode away along the Los Angeles river, my mind was full of all the hatred I had for him. He was always telling me what to do, trying to “improve” me as an employee, trying to make the restaurant “better.” It was all so stupid because I’m a teenager. How the hell do you think you’re going to get me to do something that I don’t want to do?
I was riding past low branches that I had to duck under to pass. My hatred for Andrew spilled over into hatred for everything— and then suddenly it all narrowed down onto that homeless woman. How the hell is that a way to act towards someone? Not saying anything and just screaming whenever someone tries to talk to you? Am I supposed to feel bad for her? She did everything to herself and maybe there’s some sort of socio-economic considerations I’m supposed to take into account to cut her a little bit of slack but at the end of the day that is just who she is and she ruined her own life all by herself. I imagined what it would be like to slap her, try to wake her from her insane stupidity, tell her to get a grip and get on her feet. And then I imagined slapping her again, this time just for myself.
And then I passed out.
I saw my visions. Everything. Nothing.
Waking, once again, on the side of the Los Angeles river with fresh blood pouring out of my skull, yet again, I hardly registered the pain. Once I got my bearings and thought through what had happened, the pattern immediately became clear to me.
It was violence. That was what was triggering these visions. I think of violence, I pass out. And it was not in the way you might intellectually think about the concept of violence but actually imagining violence, fantasizing about it. In a way it is almost like you are guilty of doing something wrong when you are even just seduced by the idea of violence. And when that happens to me, something changes within me, and there come the visions.
I hopped on my bike and all but raced to Peter’s house.
When I arrived, he was smoking a joint on a lounge chair in his backyard, reading some old paperback that no one else has read and apparently sunning his deathly pale torso. He was startled to see me come through the side gate.
“Joanie, hey, what are you doing?”
“I need to tell you something.”
“Are you hurt? Do you need me to get a band-aid?”
“Don’t worry about that, just listen.”
I explained the visions I had been seeing and my theory about how they were connected to fantasizing about violence. He was trying to understand but I could tell that I was losing him by the way he rubbed his eyes and started to pay more attention to his joint than to me.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
“I think that’s… very interesting. I don’t know… I don’t know exactly what it means, per se, but I think it’s… interesting.”
“That’s it? You don’t have any more thoughts than ‘interesting’?”
“I think it would be best if we take care of your cut there before we do any thinking.”
“The cut is fine! Why do you care about the cut?”
“Because I care about you. I wanna make sure you’re alright.”
“Oh I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much.”
I started to walk my bike away.
“Joanie, come on, I’m sorry, can we just— can we talk?”
“I knew it wasn’t a good idea to tell you about this.”
We are arriving at the point of my story where you might begin to judge me (if you haven’t already). And to you I say, first of all, fuck you, and second of all, why do you care? This is a story. You don’t know me. It doesn’t matter to your life. So take your judgement and put it in your pocket and do not bring it out for the remainder of what I have to say.
I was collapsed on the couch in the living room, staring at the TV and absorbing none of it. Even before the visions started coming, I had these bouts of hatred that would seem to consume my whole body until it was like I was physiologically unable to move. My mom was preparing stew for dinner and meanwhile I was stewing with hatred.
It had all shifted over to Peter, my hatred. Here he was, imagining himself to be a precocious intellectual who will one day go on to have great thoughts and he could not even believe the miraculous things that were happening to his own girlfriend right before his eyes. He was someone who valued books over life and it made me sick. The irony was that by losing himself in all these books he was ensuring that he would never go on to have real thoughts. Books are a manicured reality of straight lines and complete sentences. Raw reality is messy and full of violence. Maybe I will never go on to write a book that people will read, like Peter might, but I will always know reality better than him because I can stare it in the face.
I had a sudden yearning to face that true, messy reality more directly. I sat up.
“Dinner’s ready!” my mom said from the kitchen.
“I’m not eating here.”
“Okay sweetie.”
(My mom has always been too scared to discipline me.)
After dressing, brushing my hair, and making sure the wounds of the day were not visible, I took my bike to the Café Culottes. This was a café that had a bar connected to it. On Thursday nights, they played “gypsy jazz.” The music was actually not bad but what was really the draw there was that you didn’t need an ID to get into the café part, at which point it was pretty easy to sneak over to the bar and get a drink.
I entered and bought a croissant, which I ate by the door as I surveyed the people there. A group of disgusting old guys with ponytails, smiling as if it was the best music they had ever heard. Middle aged women who thought they were better at dancing than they really were. And then there were my targets, the handsome young men who danced thoughtfully to the music, enjoying it without taking it too seriously. Cultured men who might even be in the entertainment industry.
When a group of them made their way to the bar, I followed and placed myself right beside them.
“One lychee martini please,” I said to the bartender.
“We don’t have lychee,” she said. “Is passion fruit okay?”
“Passion fruit would be wonderful!”
I had already caught the attention of one of the men with my voice. When my drink came, I sipped it through a tiny straw and watched him. If they look once, they look again when they think you’re not looking. The key is to keep looking.
Finally, he did look at me, and I smiled. “You’re staring at me,” I said.
He scoffed and moved closer to me. “I don’t know about staring.”
“Okay creepy.”
“Creepy? Tell me, what about me is creepy?”
“The way you look at me.”
“Right, right. Look, I don’t think you can blame me for looking at a pretty girl.”
“Oh, am I pretty?”
“You are pretty.”
And just like that, I had him. From there it was really a simple process. I just didn’t leave his side the whole night and kept talking to him. You don’t need to have anything interesting to say with guys like this as long as you stay interested in whatever they’re saying. We danced and I have to say he was a pretty good dancer, able to guide me even though I had no idea how to dance to gypsy jazz. By the time we were done with that, I could tell he was already figuring out how to get me back to his place and into his bed. Sometimes it’s best to give them a push.
“So are you like some rich guy with a super cool apartment?”
He laughed. “It’s a pretty nice apartment. You wanna see it?”
“I’d love to!”
And yes, we hooked up. It was at his nice apartment on his luxurious California king. Yes, it was my first time and feel free to judge me for that if that’s your thing. It went pretty much how I thought it would until it didn’t. Painful at first and then good, but not quite ecstatically good. He felt much bigger than I had thought but that wasn’t what caught me off guard. It was when he was on top of me and I was looking into his face and I felt so totally connected to him. Our bodies fit right together and that’s when it really felt wonderful and I found myself genuinely smiling. And then all of that shattered in an instant when Peter’s white face flashed through my mind and I thought about his pathetic attempts to get into my pants and about how I had found him suntanning in the backyard all because of what I had said about him being too pale. I thought about how if he could see me now he would be totally heartbroken. He would cry like a baby— literally like an infant. I could imagine him looking exactly like an infant when he cried. This was exactly what I had been looking to do: to hurt Peter and thereby test this theory of mine. And now that I was doing it, I was totally disgusted with myself and everything. And I passed out.
When I woke, the guy was laying next to me, cradling my chest with one arm. Apparently he had finished while I was out. I had seen my usual visions. Yet this time, when I woke up, I didn’t just brush it off and get on with my life. This time, I felt a deep, existential dread at that empty everythingness, that full nothingness, that all-consuming paradox. I had done something horrible to Peter for all the wrong reasons. While I knew it didn’t matter— because nothing matters in the fabric of the universe that I am able to see— I felt so totally, utterly terrible that I began to cry.
The guy noticed and he tried to talk to me. “What’s wrong?” He said so sweetly.
I got out of bed and started fishing for my clothes. He kept trying to ask what was the matter but eventually stopped when he realized I wouldn’t answer. I grabbed my purse and was just about out the door when I turned to him and said, “I’m 17, you fucking asshole,” and I left.
I figured out where I was and started running to Peter’s house, which was only a mile away. It was dark and I was a little drunk but I kept running and felt nothing at all.
When I arrived, I went around the side gate and started slamming on the windows of his room until he woke up. He opened the curtain, saw me, and opened the window.
“Joanie what’s going on?”
“I slept with someone. Like, I had sex with someone.”
“What? Wh- who?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember his name. I met him at the Café Culottes. I’m sorry, Peter, I’m really so sorry.”
“The Café Culottes? Oh no, Joanie, I don’t like this.” I’d never heard his voice like that.
“I know, I know. I’m so sorry. Please.”
“No, I can’t deal with this.” He shook his head, closed the window, and snapped the curtain shut. I leaned against that window and sobbed. The stupidest part of my brain thought that that might actually work to get him to open it and forgive me. But of course, he didn’t, which he was absolutely right not to do, and instead I moped home in the dark, sobbing wildly like some crazy person.
Peter doesn’t talk to me anymore.
Am I a good person? Should I even try to be a good person? It feels so hollow. We follow all of these rules that we imagine a good person is supposed to follow. But does that really mean we are good? We have these horrible, violent lusts within us all, and don’t pretend that you don’t, because that makes you a liar, which is even worse than whatever I am. The Christians say that we are all sinners and we are all forgiven. Christ was brutally tortured by his own father and in that moment on the cross he sucked up all of our sins and forgave them. So then can you even consider what I did to be “bad”? Can you consider me a “bad” person? I am just a sinner and so I am going to sin. But it is all forgiven by “Our Lord”— who literally sacrificed himself bloodily for us— so who are you to say that I’m bad? You say there are commandments. “Thou shall not commit adultery,” and so on. And I’m here to tell you there are no commandments. Moses did not hold up a stone for a man in the sky to write his rules on. There is no man, there are no rules. And I know this because I have seen God. That is what those shapes and figures are. They’re God and you have never seen Him. He is not some being with thoughts and benevolence and rules for you to follow. He is just a blankness. A blankness and a fullness. Nothing and everything. “Good” and “bad” cannot even exist in Him because he just is. There’s no scales. There’s nothing and there is everything all at once. So don’t tell me violence is bad, don’t tell me that cheating on Peter was bad. There is no bad. Just don’t do anything stupid yourself.