Something New Under the Sun Page 10
“What did she say?” asks Horseshoe.
“She said to leave her alone, because she was at the beach.”
“What does that even mean? Was she high?”
“She kept saying the same thing: ‘I’m just trying to get a little sun, it’s a public beach, I’m allowed to be here.’ She sounded pretty normal, or what I mean is, she would have sounded normal if she were on a beach. She was using that authoritative white-lady voice, like my mom when she’s trying to return things without a receipt.”
“It’s a voice of extreme reason, where reason begins to tip over into irrationality,” says Horseshoe, nodding. “I used to assist this woman in Echo Park who was starting a line of homemade soaps….”
“Did they arrest her?” asks Patrick, uneasily.
“No,” responds the Arm, staring off. “They called a Green Van, and it picked her up. They told me it was a very humane solution, to get her some treatment. But I don’t know, you know? They wouldn’t have listened to me, and I wouldn’t have known what to say, but I still feel like I should have argued with them about it. Or at least got it on video on my phone. Something.”
The three of them stare off at the set, where Cassidy is examining the ladder, her hand on a rung, jostling it to see if it’ll tip. Horseshoe is chewing dully, crunching pocket candy between his young, straight teeth.
“I saw a Green Van last week,” Patrick says suddenly, uncertainly. Last week feels years old. “It pulled up in front of me, and out came a whole herd of people, a random assortment. None of them seemed to know where they were or what was going on. They had to be led around on a rope, like kindergartners on a school trip.”
“We call them ROADies,” says Horseshoe helpfully.
“Roadies?” Patrick asks.
“They have some new kind of dementia. My mom sent me an article about it.”
“Dementia is for the old,” Patrick replies. “Some of these were middle-aged people, people in their thirties. One of them looked even younger, a teenager.”
“The new dementia is for everybody,” Horseshoe says. “In the article, they interviewed a child who had it. She couldn’t remember what age she was. My mom thinks metals have something to do with it—every couple of days, she warns me not to drink from aluminum cans. When she and my dad visit my place, they’ll spend the whole time emptying beers from the cans into a big pitcher. My roommate was pissed.”
As the two of them talk, they begin to notice that the Arm is not joining in at all. He stares off into the middle distance, toward the remnants of a beverage cart, but doesn’t seem to be looking at anything at all. When the Arm finally speaks, he sounds haunted:
“There was something really special about that girl. I feel like we connected in some major, deep, past-lives way. I only saw her the one time, for maybe five minutes tops, but I have all these images in my head of her from different angles, in different outfits. Wearing an old-fashioned blouse, like something out of a Western. The detail is completely different from a fantasy, more like a crisp, clear memory of some tiny fragment of childhood.” Wetness stirs in his eyes, catches the glint of the overhead lights. “I can’t help feeling that maybe, just maybe, she was The One?”
Against the supersaturated background, its color like toxic slime, Cassidy Carter climbs halfway up the ladder, pauses, dismounts. She looks at the thing, puzzled and serious, like she’s trying to figure out a particularly complex math problem. She drapes her arms around it uneasily, she closes her eyes, smiles a peaceful smile, then opens them, looking up wide-eyed at the empty space, the studio nothingness. Then she begins her climb again, slower this time, and with a labored quality, readjusting her grip, sliding the hand around the underside of the flat wooden plank, registering the unseen roundness of the machine-worked slats of severed wood. Her body stretches up, out, overmapping the width of the thing, tasting its texture with the palm of her hand, pulling herself up with a smooth release of breath, of tension, of effort. Patrick realizes that she is climbing the ladder as if it were a tree. Like the sound of electricity coursing through an overhead wire, or the scent of gasoline once it’s exceeded the threshold of awareness, the tree becomes real to him with this thought, a map of holds and roughness that her body navigates with skill and grace and a measure of authentic strain.
Cassidy grunts as she heaves herself to the top of the ladder, and pauses to take in the view. She looks at the shelter of slendering boughs and branches overhead, then out into the distance, at something far away, far past the soundstage walls. She tilts her perfectly hewn chin into the inferable breeze. As she watches, her eyes narrow, her face becomes more delicate, calm, engrossed. The feeling of reality drains from his body, and all that’s left is a chill beneath the skin, even in the stifling heat of the soundstage. With a shiver, Patrick realizes that it’s possible for a person to believe wholly, completely, in something that’s not even there.
* * *
—
To avoid the clogged red arteries in his navigation app, Patrick detours through the San Fernando Valley, past the brickish, brownish roofs of Santa Clarita subdivisions, cutting back down onto a smaller highway steeply bounded by strips of dust-sided cliff. Some combination of heat, stress, and cheap, mass-prepared food has altered the moisture balance of his body: he feels the loss of saliva every time he breathes in the stiff, hot air inside the van, invisibly tinged with the smoke of the wildfire still gnawing at the dry flank of Thousand Oaks, Agoura Hills, Topanga Canyon. A thin slick of life evaporates from him with each breath. There’s a bloom of drab smoke to his left, and a river somewhere in that direction too—he can see it on the little map on his phone, twisting and turning in miniature as he takes the curves of the road. Somewhere beyond view, the brush is burning in the bright daylight, orange scraps of flame dulled by the sunlight. The sound of small life fleeing from the fire, scurrying toward more fire elsewhere.
Terrible, definitely. But it’s not really an emergency, he thinks, putting on his signal and shifting into the fast lane, if you can drive around it. An emergency would be everywhere you looked, inescapable; some long-submerged animal intelligence would recognize it with fierce instinct. In an emergency, the mind would not drift aimlessly from daydream to distraction as his did now, in search of something to grasp. He attempts to conjure the image of his wife and daughter, but it won’t hold firm: their bodies bent close together have an unreal waver, and with their backs turned toward his longing gaze, he can’t make out their faces, the faces he should know so well. They’re in the garden, bent together over the same spot, pushing soil into a mound with their bare, pale hands, but he can’t see what they’re seeing, he’s missing the most important part. The background flickers, subsumed by a blankness with no color. How can he miss them, his family, if he can’t even remember them clearly?
It’s easier to picture Cassidy Carter, her face an amalgamation of different angles and poses gleaned from the search engine, her image animated by fresh, hot resentment and a tinge of admiration. She certainly gets what she wants, at least in his limited experience. He can almost see her—a child, aged whatever—with limbs gangly and thin, walking along dust-stricken pavement and dreaming of her future. Head down and arms out, balancing, she sets one foot in front of the other in a narrow line, her golden hair catching fire in the sunlight. As he daydreams, his foot sinks into the pedal, pushing the speed up past sixty-five, seventy, eighty, until the sound of a cassette tape rattling in the player cuts through his mind-fog and he realizes the entire van is quaking. He lifts his foot and the rattling subsides.
It reminds him of nights when Nora was still an infant—a grub of love, more animal than person, her sounds creaturely but full of sweet, unsculpted emotion. She was a fussy sleeper, and the only thing that lulled her was a late-night drive. He and Alison would pick up the pliant, astonishingly heavy body, lower it into a plastic car-seat in the back of their
sedan, guide the plump legs through the straps of the seatbelt, and fasten the latch with reverence. Wordlessly, fervently, like two medieval monks working side by side, one would push shut the car door and slip into the front passenger seat as the other took the wheel; the engine sighed as key turned in ignition. The car slid into reverse with a soft moan and backed out of the driveway onto the abandoned street, and then they were crawling around the neighborhood at ten miles per hour, slow enough that the engine never crept above an idle. They drove in circles past the quiet, half-lit houses until they sensed Nora’s slumber in the inky depth of her silence. Then Patrick would swivel around in his seat to peer into the darkened space and wait for gasps of streetlight to illuminate Nora’s round, socked feet in the darkened space. Soft white and edgeless, they looked like sightless cartoon worms, docile and incapable of harm.
He and Alison had perfected this ritual—the careful insertion and hushed removal, the soundless transfer of weighty flesh from plastic receptacle to crib—but one day the town tore the street up to be repaved. For months, the surface was strewn with gravel and large, chassis-rattling rocks, making it impossible to drive silently at any speed. Instead of sneaking through the darkness in the hush of the engine thrum, they clung to the steering wheel or dashboard as the car rattled around them. They placed a hand, when they could, on the trembling seat. Nora never slept so well ever again, and soon Patrick returned to spending nights in his office, working on his second book—an epic novella taking place entirely during the approximately nine hours it took George Washington to cross the Delaware River. Over fifty different points of view were used, from the teenage cook preoccupied with the untimely spillage of twenty pounds of dried peas to the free, indirect musings of a muskrat downwind who could scent the laboring humans but not see them. He called it Hard Crossing, and it was for a brief period of time optioned by a television studio in Denmark as “a daring metaphor for the relation of the individual’s struggle to that of the nation,” though it never made it to development.
As Nora grew older, they tried different strategies to manage her insomnia: hot milk scented with cardamom, mossy-tasting herbs ground and encased in gelatin capsules, a rigid timeline of meals and rest generated by an ad-supported mindfulness app. Inevitably, she was alert until late in the night and helplessly drowsy in the day, falling asleep at her school desk in the small, dark nest of her arms. But Patrick blamed Alison for the new phase of Nora’s sleeplessness: after the incident with the neighbor’s lawn, which cost them both so many hours of apologetic planting and resodding, knocking on the doors of every house on the block and explaining that Alison was absolutely back to normal now, Nora had stayed awake for five days straight, writing an unsettling document that she claimed was “a description of what I would have been dreaming if I hadn’t decided to stay awake.” In the handwritten text, ninety pages long, volcanic eruptions blotted out the sun, and strange spiny fishes starved in cold seas, sunk and dissolved in the soft mud. Scaly-headed birds self-birthed from thick eggs staggered toward the shadows, huge lizards crushed the bodies of lizards that were merely large between wickedly equipped jaws. Where there were people, they were blurrily seen, minuscule figures crossing the landscape on foot before being devoured by overgrown rodents with teeth like tusks.
Clearly, Patrick explained to Alison, their daughter was acting out the residue of her mother’s trauma, distilling and concentrating her doomsday attitude in an effort to earn approval and possibly even make Alison happy once again. “Don’t you see,” he said, “our daughter telling you, ‘Yes, I too see the world the way that you do. Can we please go back to normal now?’ ” In class, the teacher’s report noted that Nora was “excessively interested in the iconography of the mushroom cloud,” and a classmate’s mother called to demand that Alison make her daughter stop talking about asteroids colliding with the earth, it was giving her child ominous dreams. Meanwhile, Nora wrote through the night and sometimes during the day as well, the margins of her loose-leaf cluttered with brief odes to destruction. It was only when Alison built a planting box in the backyard and assigned her the task of seeding a small garden that Nora began to fall asleep again at night—though she continued to write long apocalyptic screeds, hiding them around her room in places that they discovered when cleaning, and probably also in places that they never found at all. For his own part, Patrick was uncomfortable reading the texts or hearing about them secondhand from Alison, who devoured them all with tense, puzzled fascination. Not only were they depressing, the narratives—though they involved some overlapping, recurrent imagery—were to him largely incoherent. If there was some greater message or insight there into his daughter’s mind, he was definitely not equipped to decode it. When he thinks about Alison off in her hippie sanctuary, the thing that drives him crazy is not the notion that she’s making love to some shirtless, smooth-chested Woofer, but the idea of her telling some stranger all about him, all the little mistakes that misrepresent him and ought to be forgotten, poking holes in the story of their life.
A clattering squeal from somewhere beneath the car, a sound like teeth on metal. Patrick ducks his head down and around, looking for a trace of the thing he’d hit reflected in the van’s large, useless side-view mirrors. He sees only the flat white flank of the van filling the mirrors, and the inexhaustible landscape stretching out behind and before him in blurry shades of ochre and tan, broom-dry and indistinct, like the component strokes of a painting when you stand too close. Up ahead, there’s nothing to look at, nothing to read except the occasional WAT-R billboard, crisp hyperdetailed photographs of WAT-R bottles plunging into crystal-clear WAT-R, sending up intricate splashes in midair pause. The spurts of water resemble transparent phalluses eternally on the verge of decay, bending toward dissolution. Words float across the images, immaterial: REAL, BETTER, RIGHT AT YOUR FINGERTIPS and WATER DONE RIGHT. As he speeds by, short, steep cliffs rear up and recede, the land yawning out next to him in blotches of beige. It occurs to Patrick that it’s strange to advertise WAT-R when the product has no competition. In every gas station, in every grocery store, the variegated bottles of Evian and Dasani you can still buy on the East Coast have been replaced by WAT-R Pure, WAT-R Free, WAT-R Clean. What, then, do the advertisements sell? The idea that buying WAT-R is still a choice rather than a necessity?
On the off-ramp, among soft-drink packaging and leaf litter, a plastic bag weighed down by something heftier inside. Patrick tries to avoid it, but as the van passes over, he feels something burst beneath the tires, and now a sound comes from the engine, a sound like someone being slapped again and again in calm rhythm. One left, one right, and a long cruise down broad asphalt to the address Brenda gave him, a five-digit number at one end of a long road. It’s scrawled on a piece of torn letterhead, two capital “B”s splayed against each other in a butterfly shape, the high-quality paper as supple as cloth. There’s no sign on the building: it’s a stucco box, taller than it is wide, uniformly windowed in wide sheets of mirrored glass that reflect the surrounding buildings and roads in a gasoline rainbow of colors. As he drives through the parking lot, he watches the reflection of the white van gliding past window after window, rippling in the uneven panes, tinted green, then blue, then gold. He knows he’s inside there, someplace, but it’s difficult to pass from knowledge to true acceptance.
He rolls down the windows and stares out at the entrance to the unnamed, unmarked building. He tilts the bottle of WAT-R Lite (“a fat-free beverage”), and the liquid falls out into his mouth. It’s an imperceptible weight on and around his tongue, the bare outline of a substance rolling across the limp, soft muscle, more of a temperature than a taste. The WAT-R slips down his throat before he even has a chance to think about swallowing it, leaving behind the same stale, dry flavor in his maw that he began with: motel syrup, indelible, like a tattoo on the tongue. A dozen bright-green passenger vans are parked outside, each identical to the one he saw in the parking lot. There’s a
message from Cassidy in his inbox, and it reads: Where the f are you??? Time to drive me and my liquid paycheck back home. He feels distraught for no good reason. Maybe it’s because there’s nobody within three thousand miles of his sweaty torso who cares how he feels, nobody alive to miss him back. It’s like the blueness of the air above him: one color in the spectrum of colors, with nowhere to go, nothing to absorb it, so it fills the entire sky. He lifts up the bottle of WAT-R to his lips one more time, but it’s empty.
At the entrance to the building, the glass doors slide open and shut on their own like matter possessed. Inside, there’s a spearmint-colored counter with a plasticky, retro feel and some molded chairs that glisten dully beneath the bright lobby light. A girl behind the desk looks at him and picks up a clipboard. All around him screams a bright manic green, the exact shade of the vans parked out front, or the green screen of the movie set back in Alhambra, where he’s due back, already overdue. Posters on the wall remind him in green text to remain calm and check his pockets for belongings.
“Hi there, how can I help you?” she asks, coming around the side of the wavy, sinuous desk. He takes in her green polo shirt and slacks, the tight blond ponytail—a uniform inspired by food service. Something about the middle of her face is familiar to him, but he can’t quite pin it down. He squints: maybe it’s her nose. She frowns slightly and puts a hand on his elbow.
“Okay, sir. Don’t worry. We’ll get you taken care of. We just need you to answer one question first. Are you ready?” Her voice has turned gentle and false, like she’s speaking to a child, a dog, some soft and moldable mind.