It started with an article about jellyfish in
National Geographic. No egos, no brains, no instincts, jellyfish had survived pre-history on reflex and a willingness to drop intention of any kind. Dolores Moynihan decided this was a nice way to live, floating in the tide, and so began a series of Great Jelly Experiments. She would live like the jellyfish.
Great Jelly Experiment #1 (GJE-1): Wherein, 100% wordlessness may be attained and maintained for at least 90 days. It failed decidedly and immediately. She had little issue with not speaking words; she could even sidestep writing them if she narrowed her existence to places that required little to no human interaction. Not hearing or reading them required significant effort but was doable. However, she could not stop thinking in words. She drowned 100 times a day in her own brain chatter. Within hours of initiation, she understood that cognitive literacy was irreversible without significant brain trauma, and therefore ceded GJE-1.
Great Jelly Experiment #2 (GJE-2): Wherein, 100% voicelessness may be attained and maintained for at least 90 days. As discovered during the short-lived GJE-1, Dolores had a tremendous capacity for silence. In fact, this came so easily to her that it started to feel less like an experiment and more like a simple series of observations about how she spent her day. Out of pride and principle, Dolores abandoned GJE-2 after 6 days.
Great Jelly Experiment #3 (GJE-3): Wherein, 100% "I"-lessness may be attained and maintained for at least 90 days. The rub of GJE-3, like GJE-2, lay in her brain's constant dialogue. At the word
go, Dolores looked into the mirror over the bathroom sink and thought, "I will squish you, Ego. I will squish you dead." And so she started again.
Of the trio of GJEs, Dolores decided GJE-3 was likely the most worthwhile. She did not know exactly what would happen, free of
I, but she sensed it was worth figuring. Her childhood, she noted with the clarity of hindsight, had been defined and redefined and redefined again by her mother's own self-obsession, by her mother's ever-present and all-encompassing
I. The weight of Dina Moynihan's
I could have pressed the Grand Canyon deep enough to spill fire from the earth's core. Instead, it killed her.
Her mother had lived in love of her own reflection until the Sunday night she died over the steering wheel with two bullets in her beautiful head. She left a cracked mirror, her purse, and its tight-lipped clues by her car in the parking lot of the studio where she read the broadcast news to Des Moines each night. The mirror and the contents of that purse sat in a Ziploc bag in a Forensics warehouse. Twenty-eight dollars and 42 cents were tucked into a leather wallet along with credit and rewards cards, tampons, 3 tubes of lipstick, 1 used kleenex, rhinestone reading glasses, a comb, another mirror, and an unused can of mace. In addition to these minor personal details, detectives picked from her mother's desk and closet: three journals, a large collection of embarrassing love letters, and unread copies of
Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies Home Journal,
Good Housekeeping, the Sears catalog, and other slick-paged mailings, all with the side notes of her mother scrawled at strange angles in page corners.
Of these contents, Dolores only missed Better Homes and Gardens--the initials R.L. and time "10:30" loosely penned on the corner of the front cover. She did not miss the journals, as she knew without reading that the contents would confirm what she'd known since she was old enough to name thoughts: Dolores had been a burden, neither planned nor wanted. As for the letters, they came from lustful men named Todd and Dave and Reinhart and Demarcus who had wives and girlfriends and children in painted houses on cul de sacs. Her mother had read her each letter, sparing no elicit detail, until Dolores was certain she would never date or marry. Romance was too harrowing, and she could not imagine her body doing the things these men imagined of her mother's.
One letter, however, eluded the detectives, safely tucked inside Dolores's English notebook, yellowed and folded until the creases perforated. Garrison had written it exactly nine months before Dolores was born. Garrison was her father. The penmanship in his letters matched the penmanship of the checks that arrived every month, made out to her mother, and then made out to Dolores after her mother's death. He was a wealthy man, this Garrison, and the zeros multiplied on the checks. Although Dina never confessed, Dolores understood she had loved him.
Her father had three children with his wife, Denise; none of them, including Denise, knew of Dolores, as far as she knew. When it was discovered that Dina had established a will including guardianship of Dolores six months before her death, Dolores considered pounding at their front door in dramatic fashion. Rather than spend the remainder of her dependent youth with her mother's Aunt Regina, whose warmest attribute was her severity, Dolores could force Garrison to take her in, raise her, love her, give her advice, make eggs with her in the morning, and stare down her boyfriends in the evenings. Her nerve buckled. In the end, as it turned out, there were benefits to staying with an old woman who did not care enough to insist on anything but tidiness. Garrison's checks arrived on time, and when she graduated from high school, Dolores took her saved loot and left. Garrison's checks found her everywhere.
In the five years since her mother's death, they were no closer to understanding what had happened so many nights ago in a parking lot on a Sunday as they were from the start. An unnamed calm settled as Dolores learned to float through the empty spaces between answers. She kept her load light and her will in-check. Then, on an indescript Saturday in June, a man with an untucked shirt and his strange son stood across from her library desk. The tide began to twitch and rise.
This is Post #2 of Story #1. To learn more about this project, click HERE.
