Free Kamikaze Lust by Lauren Sanders Page A

a’changing, ” I said.
    “Precisely,” Alexis said. “Anyway, we’ve got to run.”
    A short goodbye, and I was left standing in front of Zipless Pictures, my arms stuffed with tapes and the draft of an autobiographical essay Alexis was writing for a snappy feminist journal called Good Witch. As I skimmed the piece in the shifting rays of sun, the world of Alexis Calyx spurted into my veins. Curiosity, once peaked, was my favorite high. Some reporters got off on the rush of breaking a hot story, and yes, I had to admit it was trippy knowing that people sitting down to their morning coffee would gawk a holy shit! gaze over your words. But I was a process junky, more excited by travel than the final destination. By the time I finished a story I was already tracking down the next; rarely did I read my own work in print. One might say I suffered from fear of little death syndrome.
    And what of its cure? Years cavorting with post-Freudians—the Kleinian or Lacanian crowd—at one hundred fifty dollars a forty-five minute hour? I don’t think so. I simply went on believing that each story might be the one that stopped me dead in my tracks. Forever waiting for the big O.

    A few days later, on a crisp Halloween morning, I drove out to Bay Ridge with the Docudeath tape and a brand new television set. It was an early Chanukah gift for Aunt Lorraine, a big, fancy model with a built-in VCR. Over the years, after I’d moved to Miami and started making money, I occasionally bought Aunt Lorraine and Mom expensive gifts to assuage my guilt for leaving. I wasn’t about to let the strike break me of this habit, at least not while I still had credit cards and Aunt Lorraine was stuck with a set so old the figures swelled and released as if they were controlled by invisible sound waves. Aunt Lorraine said she didn’t mind, that she felt as if she were watching life through a kaleidoscope. That was when she could still make it downstairs for anything important, cop shows or Press Talk.
    I paid two boys who lived across the street five dollars each to carry the set inside and up to Aunt Lorraine’s bedroom. Rowdy followed silently behind, eyeing them nervously as they dragged the set across the rug and over to the foot of Aunt Lorraine’s bed.
    “Wow!” The smaller boy jumped back upon noticing Aunt Lorraine, who was asleep with a dry, white tongue hanging against her lower lip, and her eyelids twitching. “How’d her face get so puffy?”
    “Cancer,” I said.
    “Oh,” he nodded sagely, as if he should have known from her greenish skin tone and the IV tube plugged into her arm. He nudged his brother out of the room, and I realized it was the tube that sent jitters so deep inside my stomach I couldn’t eat for hours after I’d been here.
    Aunt Lorraine had once been the most vibrant woman I knew: always reading and talking and asking questions long before Alexis Calyx had even left Bensonhurst. Who was the greatest American president? Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Why did so many Nazis flee to Argentina? Because that’s where the Jews were hiding. Until recently, I always knew the answers she wanted to hear.
    Apparently, she’d had a feeling about the cancer for some time but kept it to herself. Only when the lump in her breast grew as big as a golf ball did she acquiesce to seeing a doctor, who turned her over to an oncologist. Both of her breasts were removed; she underwent chemotherapy. But it was too late. About a month ago, they found that the cancer had infiltrated her bones.
    Mom said Aunt Lorraine’s bedroom was starting to smell like a nursing home, a peculiar statement coming from a woman who never stepped foot inside of a nursing home. When her own mother lay dying at Sunset Estates, and I sent her plane tickets to come to Miami, each time Mom succumbed to one of her fainting spells and was unable to visit. Death, Mom said. She knew its scent and it made her nervous. It also gave her cause to tap a mother lode of