Surrender

Here now, a revelry well within your control: a fancy breakfast. Archie Horn sat at this touristy diner, near empty at the moment (not the season), and half-heartedly picked at the overpriced eggs in front of him. In his attempt to create an anodyne facsimile of such as a "good morning," he wondered whether he should've gotten a newspaper on the way to this diner, the diner that does not look full of life and joy, nothing like the image he had in his head, none of the bristling energy, cold and hollow, lacking rhyme. He himself was not too rhythmic, not too musical — like most lives, his did not comprise of much. In lieu of a newspaper, naturally, he pulled out his phone.

Luna Meld, born Natalie Moskowitz, star of The Organization, Every Angel a Terror, and New Kind of Fear, dead at 32.

"The Organization," he thought, "now that was a movie." Seeing it in theaters was one of the few unmuddied highlights of what he had with his daughter's mother. Whatever happened to Sonya's mother since he last saw her about seven years ago — in and out of mental institutions, rehabs, regular ol hospitals, county jails, whatever else you got — he hasn't a clue. Sonya doesn't seem to care much herself anymore and does not ask any questions. Does she assume her mother is dead? Or is she used to her familial configuration and doesn't feel that there's something missing? She is now nine years old, and he's a good father by most metrics, completely sober for the past seven years of her life too.

You will have a moment... call it love, call it God, whatever you want to call it, when you will feel something true, something all-encompassing and inexplicable, something that you cannot reason with, but it will be that, a moment, and then what? will you be enlightened? will you spend the rest of your days chasing that high? will you act like it didn't happen and find power in spite and resentment? Gambler sat at the blackjack table. Hit. Hit. Hit. Blackjack! He insisted on another hit. He insisted. Croupier kept going. Hit. Hit. Hit. This went on until closing time, at which point the gambler had to be forcibly removed from the premises.

"Here's your house of being then, a little room exposed to all, come-come-come, don't bother wiping your feet, what's the use at this point, what little control do you exert, and what control is exerted over little you? what will you tell them, "non serviam"? don't be silly now; lashes, those fluttering and those that tear the skin; limitations; the powers that be making Tough Choices; arriving at a point where the best one hopes for is to keep head above water, an insurmountable amount of effort to just barely keep head above water; temperance, imposed," said Doc Afrika, Archie's sponsor, to which Archie muttured "Doc I really can't deal with this shit right now," which was left dangling, as Doc went on, "Keep pouring your heart out in spaces that don't warrant it, didn't ask for it, don't need it."

Doc Afrika is a white man about a decade Archie's junior. Once they had their shitty coffee, they walked down the streets. They saw a seagull bellowed among the crows, then picked up a dead ravaged headless pigeon. Doc talked about the novel he just read. While the book is recent, and supposedly takes place in the present, "people just don't live like that anymore," he said. "How do people live?", asked Archie, and Doc either didn't feel like launching into another tirade or maybe just didn't hear him over the rain. They saw the National Guard harass a homeless man at the foot of a temple. They said their goodbyes and Archie really wanted a drink.

In her final days, Luna struggled with a scene. She ran across the football field at night, well lit. She ran and a large man followed her, gained on her, got to her. Slapped her, tore her dress, held her wrists — the problem is, at this moment, she kept cracking up. Every time that happened, she started laughing. Once again she heard "CUT! CUT!", the man got up, sighing, thinking "she's supposed to be a professional" but keeping up a tired smile, not ready to cuss out the star of the whole production, and through laughter and tears she went "sorry, sorry, give me a moment." The director called a break and took Luna to her trailer. They drank, they did a bump, and another in a moment.

He told her that she got where she is by being a believable victim — whether pure innocence dragged down into the muck with the rest of us, or a towering figure of confident femininity, depending on the part, she embodied particular degradations and indignities that scared some and excited others, but no one could ignore it. She listened and pretended to care. Violence did not elicit a reaction in her anymore. "Everything counts and none of it matters," she thought. As the director kept talking at her—oh here's something about Dietrich—she thought of non-human creatures with human eyes (dogs then?), she thought of all the creatures defined by cruelty and their politics so far from the divine, she thought that anima mundi is disgusted with her and the feeling is mutual—oh he's talking about Norma Jean now, get a grip—she thought of a long-dispersed gentle dawn, the cursed sun, everything well-lit and everything a mess. As he talked about Sherilyn Fenn wrapped up in the American flag, she thought that tonight she'll die of overdose, and that that's just not that big of a deal.

Little Sonya was looking for refuge. She's at her grandmother's house. Her father is drunk again. Unsupervised, in the middle of the night, she's alone watching cable, which currently runs all those Luna movies, punctuated with ads for, and mostly featuring, old people. In the penultimate scene of Every Angel a Terror, Luna's murderer holds her dying body and whispers, "here’s your kingdom then, dearest, forever it is still."