Furiosa
1.
In the weeks after my father dies, we attempt normality, but my life spins off into speculative fiction. Going to see Furiosa alone in the theater soon after losing him, and with the world on fire, is shattering. I feel the rumble of this woman warrior inside me until I think maybe the movie theater’s exploding. I wonder often how I’ll handle this city if it becomes a war zone, of my role as writer-cook and History Woman—in the terms of the Mad Max universe—in post-apocalyptic Brooklyn. Since my daughter is sad to start school again after the loss, I tell her that it’s looking for magic in the day that creates it. I hope for all our sake’s this is true. These are the sorts of lies we often tell as parents, ones we hope to make true. Or maybe that’s the ultimate speculative fiction.
2.
Violence permeates everything. Yesterday, right in front of my door, with my children sleeping inside, cops tried to break this man’s windows with batons, as the car backed as hard as it could into the cars in front, behind. There’s a Virgin Mary statue in front of the church on the corner, who watched as he then drove on the sidewalk until he could turn into oncoming traffic, the cops in pursuit. I watched, too, but I’m not a virgin, which is why the kids were asleep in my home at the time instead of never having been born, it could be said. The History Man narrates Furiosa. The books were burned after the fall, and these history men tattooed the past onto their skin to remember. He is the poet and storyteller, the only one Dementus keeps around who’s not a warrior. He wants to teach Furiosa his ways so she may become indispensable.
3.
The History Man does end up leaving Dementus in the end. When he sees Furiosa heading off in her vehicle made of discarded parts that she has reconfigured, he calls her, The Darkest of Angels, The Fifth Rider of the Apocalypse. I hallucinate myself as Furiosa—even Dementus if only to be in hot pursuit, driving a chariot of motorcycles through the Wasteland—but I know I’ll more likely be one of the war boys. Ideally, Guitar Guy, who plays the flame-throwing electric guitar, vibrating on the front of the tank. In Miller’s interpretation of the story, Guitar Guy sought out work in the mines because he was born blind, taking his guitar with him underground until Immortan Joe’s henchmen heard his music and made him a bad guy. The actor who plays Guitar Guy created his own Texas Chainsaw-worthy backstory for his character, viewing him as having been seized by Immortan Joe’s men while holding onto his mother’s decapitated head, and then using her face to make the mask he wears, a gory tribute.
4.
But I’m none of those characters. Back in this reality, I sit on the toilet while my daughter attempts to braid my bangs, the whole bathroom shaking not with battle but with the forever construction that’s been taking place on my Brooklyn block since we moved in five years ago. I imagine they’re constructing a secret other city beneath this one, and I will be its first citizen if my son fires one more videogame shotgun while living in that second body. In Fortnite they call it a skin. I figure they’re building this other city as a kind of do-over and this one will be less violent. My daughter’s telling me what’s most important to her right now concerning her future, and it’s that she’s not required to join the army because she doesn’t want to wear a ponytail. I laugh loudly when she says this, but I’m also forced to see how she has armies on the mind, during Israel-Palestine, Ukraine-Russia and the current civil war in our country that even a Hollywood movie has to acknowledge.
5.
What I like about death in movies is that the dead people are played by actors. They get up afterwards, joke around, get something to eat, maybe even do another take, dying over and over. Death in Furiosa involves a flame-throwing electric-guitar player. Death in real life is not as fun. There’s no getting up after. That we know of. After my father dies, I go to the movies a lot to escape into virtual worlds, at least partly because I’m hoping to catch a glimpse of him onscreen, feel comforted that he’s found an entertaining virtual world to inhabit, one where I can come and see him any time, maybe even share some popcorn through the screen, extra butter always.
6.
When I go to the movies, some other universe opens inside me and I’m everyone at once. My heart beats so fast I’m afraid it will have an attack. I want to grab everyone in the theater and yell, spittle-close to their faces, just raining down on them, isn’t this such a spectacle? How could anyone ever think this is just normal? While the movie plays, I am lost in the darkness and motion of light, the sonics, such that I leave Brooklyn, literally enter the movie world. One time they couldn’t find me afterwards for weeks. They combed the screen but only came away with sticky pink stuff on their hands that my son later identified as me by the smell alone—Aqua di Gio and desperation.
7.
I often compose my writing in my head at the theater, and sometimes I use the little light they have under the tables at Nitehawk to scribble in my notebook. I’m not enough of a jerk to take out my phone during the movie and write in my Notes app. I do have some boundaries. It’s not just the movie theater that does this to me. I feel over-excited pretty much all the time. I want to grab people, even during faculty meetings, and holler about how we’ll all die someday, but we’re alive right now in the same room, and isn’t that bloody unbelievable? Since my father has passed, I also want to ask them what they think will happen to their bodies after a nurse puts the fuchsia bracelet on them, turns their screen fuchsia? I truly want to know, but I do have some social grace, so I don’t ask. Instead, I inquire if they’re taking the F or the G train home and make a joke about running for the G every time like it’s some sort of social experiment. As usual, I halve myself to live. I consider it a real friend when I can just throw my guts against the wall, and they don’t flinch, they’re like, I can read that.
8.
I also don’t ask the people at the faculty meeting if sometimes reading the news and thinking too closely about the state of things almost breaks them, makes them imagine their communities as post-apocalyptic Mad Max wastelands. George Miller was torn between calling it Mad Max: Fury Road and Mad Max: Furiosa. At first Furiosa was going to refer to the land around Fury Road, so she had from the beginning geographical proportions, her veins the roots of the story always. My daughter, too, is of geographical proportions (I’m entirely unbiased, speaking as her mother of course). I’ve recently cut her thicket of curls, which used to almost graze her waist, into a bob. She holds back the whole hedge maze with the sparkly rainbow headband I got her. As I brush it for her, I find the paint I always find, even though I force showers on them at seven-thirty every night, because she’s always making something. Last night at my mom’s house, she disappeared for a while, and we came to the field to find a whole sculptural stick village. She’d made a special little hut where her dead grandfather could read his heavy books even if, as she put it, he’s only in the clouds now.
9.
I stand in front of the mirror to put my contacts in, trying to do normal things to avoid losing my mind in a world that has, like the Fortnite game blaring outside the battalion of my bathroom door, decidedly jumped the shark. My daughter gets on her step stool beside me, our two faces different paths one face could take. She’s lifting her lid, too, because I am. I get confused for a second and think I’m looking at my younger self in the mirror, another form of time travel. Before lifting my other lid, I bury my face in what remains of her curls, knowing I will find more paint there; I’d be disappointed if I didn’t. When I do this, my shoulders drop temporarily from their raised state of bracing for the next shock, where they always seem to be lately. I even wake from sleep to find my back sore, right where the wings would be, as though I secretly fly around all night, only to land back in my bed. What a waste of a magical nocturnal skill. What I really hope I’m doing with all this flying around is being heroic in some way, protecting the hurting citizens of the world with…what skills exactly? I’ll have to think about that. What’s worthwhile for people anymore? This: my head in my daughter’s hair.
10.
When she was little, she always wanted to be in a carrier, which means I wore her like a baby kangaroo every minute I was awake. Our body heat, one person’s doubled, was unimaginable. This was heightened when I wore her while cooking, accidentally dribbling olive oil on her head as I bit into the garlic bread to test it. She would look up at me, as I showered her with food driblets, with a knowing expression, like, of course you’ve done this again, it’s so you. Then she would make this obscene squirrel-eating-a-nut motion with her mouth and tiny hands, ghost-consuming along with me the solid food she didn’t yet have the hardware to manage, until I ugly-laughed so hard I would have dropped her if she weren’t in a carrier. I see now that this was an act of imagination on her part. My relationship with my daughter remains pretty much the same now that she is seven.
11.
Yet, as I brush my teeth, she tells me about her Lenape diorama project I will see when I go to the school later and, since I’m a History Woman of the Mad Max universe, I wonder if the children know what really happened to the Lenape people so that they could have this life here in Brooklyn. How to tell them the real stories that hover behind their cheerfully constructed world? I try and she nods at me wisely like she has known all along that the Disney castles were secretly upheld by the forced labor of dolphins. She’s what they used to call an old soul. Later, she will take me on a tour of her diorama, pointing at the cardboard Lenape people, and noting that they are all dead now because colonialization.
12.
My daughter’s diorama is yet another virtual world I’ve passed through today. Writing has always been a way of coping with difficult realities and even trying to transform them. Tomi Adeyemi wrote Children of Blood and Bone as a way of dealing with the unexperienceable experience of turning on the news and hearing that another unarmed black person had been killed by the police. She knew she couldn’t solve the complex problem with one book, but she thought reaching even one reader was something. Some say it’s escapist to deal with these real-world issues in fantasy lands, but this coming at it slant is how people can hear it. At any rate, telling people directly is not yet working.
13.
Five minutes later, more virtual words spring up and our apartment is a war zone. Minecraft now blaring from my son’s room as my daughter’s Magic School Bus audiobook reveals Mrs. Frizzle and the kids to be lost in space. My daughter and I do our morning routine where we sit, holding handfuls of birdseed out the window. Because a bird once sat in my hand when I did that, and now my daughter thinks I’m an avian-whispering sorceress. I don’t correct her because who else will ever think this about me? Since my mom left the city, her life is just one long unlikely-animal-friends video, and I’m jealous over here as we watch angry city pigeons fight over an ancient piece of bagel. But today we sit with hands outstretched and a bird does in fact come. It’s a pigeon, but still. Its claws grasping onto my hand feel like esoteric messages. My daughter looks at me like I’ve conjured the pigeon. Again, I don’t correct this. Her eyes are enormous as she tries to put her hand underneath mine to take over, but does so too quickly, and the bird flies away. But her gesture causes our birdless hands to be holding.
Caroline Hagood (https://www.carolinehagood.com/) is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, where she also teaches in the creative writing MFA program. She is the author of two poetry books; the essay collections, Ways of Looking at a Woman and Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster; and the novels, Ghosts of America and Filthy Creation. Her speculative memoir, Goblin Mode, will be published by Santa Fe Writers Project in Fall 2025. Her work has appeared in publications including Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and Elle. Christopher Zedano photo.
Come see Caroline read on day two of the Welcome to Boog City 18 Arts Festival on Sat. Sept. 21 at 4:10 p.m. at Block Hill Station in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Details here:
https://wordpress.boogcity.com/2024/09/05/welcome-to-boog-city-18-arts-festival-day-2/