by Jeff Zentner
“The world is a difficult place for artists.”
“Yeah. But Hiro loved his job because his parents died in a car accident when he was really young. They rear-ended a truck on an icy road. He wanted to prevent that from happening to anybody else. So he designed a safety system for cars where there was a pair of mechanical white wings—a crane’s wings—folded underneath the car. And there was—a radar sensor or something on the front of the car, and if you were coming up on an obstacle too fast, the wings would open and start beating and lift the car over the obstacle. It would glide for a while and you could still steer in the air by using your steering wheel. Until you got to a place where you could land safely.”
Dr. Mendez looks genuinely absorbed in the story. “The year 2001. You were very specific about that.”
“So Hiro took the idea to his boss. The idea was to start putting it in 2002 Nissans. But his boss was furious. ‘Takasagawa, do you have any idea how much this will cost?’ He screamed. ‘But it works,’ Hiro said. ‘I built a prototype and tested it. What are people’s lives worth?’ And the boss is like ‘You idiot! We’re running a business here. You wasted time and money with this?! You’re fired!’ ” I’m getting into the story. I’m doing different voices for Hiro and the boss.
“What’s the boss’s name?” Dr. Mendez asks.
“Yoshikazu Hanawa. CEO of Nissan in 2001. Looked it up.”
“Good,” Dr. Mendez says quietly. “Very good. Sorry. Please.” He gestures for me to continue.
I take a deep breath. “So Hiro leaves Hanawa’s office and he’s devastated. He thinks he failed his parents and brought dishonor to himself. So he goes and gets in his car and drives away. He intends to commit suicide. He tries to drive into the side of a building, but at the last second, a pair of gleaming white crane’s wings unfurls from beneath his car. And the thing is, he wasn’t driving his prototype. These just appear. They carry him up, up, over the building, into the sky. And he never comes down. He’s still soaring on those wings.”
There’s a long pause before Dr. Mendez says: “And Mars drove—”
“A 2002 Nissan Maxima.”
“Unequipped with Hiro’s wings.”
“It would have been too expensive.”
“But if Mr. Hanawa had approved Hiro’s idea—”
“Then even though Mars was texting, the wings would have carried him up over the truck.”
“Billy Scruggs’s truck.”
“Right.”
“No matter what you did or didn’t do.”
“Right.”
“How did it feel to tell that story?”
“Like I’m still lying to myself and trying to blame someone else.”
“Why?”
“Because. Hiro’s story didn’t really happen.”
Dr. Mendez tilts his head with a gleam in his eye and I see the question.
“Fine,” I mutter. “I don’t know.”
Dr. Mendez smiles broadly. “So. How are you?”
I chew on the inside of my lip. “I talked with the cops the other day about the accident. Well. I sat in a room with cops while they asked questions that my attorney said I wouldn’t answer.”
“I’m not used to praising my clients for refusing to talk, but good job.”
“Why good job?”
“Do you remember what we discussed last visit? How we seek causality where there may be none?”
“You don’t think I should accept blame for this right now.”
“What I think doesn’t matter. What matters is what you think. I’m trying to help you do your best thinking. Before you take a step that could have drastic consequences, I want to make sure you’ve considered other perspectives.”
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“Going to jail.”
“I can imagine.” His brow furrows.
I slump in my chair. “Would it sound weird if I told you that I’m also scared of not going to jail?”
“Do you know why you’re afraid of that?”
“Not completely.”
“Is it partly because you feel it would rob you of an opportunity to atone if you weren’t imprisoned?”
“Maybe.”
Dr. Mendez says nothing, but his expression tells me that I should keep running down this path.
“Speaking of atoning,” I say, “I’m doing another goodbye day. With Eli’s parents.”
“You said the experience with Blake’s grandmother was valuable.”
“It was.”
“Having lived with that experience for a little while now, do you have any new reflections on it?”
I stare at the bookshelf behind Dr. Mendez, as if a book’s spine holds the answer to his question. “It…made me wish even more that I’d appreciated the time I had with them more while I had it.”
“That’s a very normal regret to have. You don’t want to live like you’re constantly in the shadow of death, but unless you do that, there’ll almost always be things that went unsaid or unappreciated fully. If you found the goodbye-day experience to be more therapeutic than not, I say go for it with Eli’s parents.”
“Yeah.”
He gives me the look that precedes when he’s about to reach inside my head. “But you have qualms.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because Eli’s family is way different from Blake’s grandma.”
“How so?”
“Like…philosophically, I guess. Their world is a lot more complicated. They’re both way educated. With Blake’s grandma, there’s God and heaven and hell and that’s it. Eli’s parents—I doubt they believe they’ll ever see Eli again the way Blake’s grandma has faith she’s going to see Blake again. They’re definitely not churchgoers. Also, Eli has a twin. Adair. She blames me.”
“Mmmm.”
“I’m not as sure where Eli’s parents stand on the blaming-me thing.”
“I assume, if they held you responsible, they wouldn’t be amenable to the idea and that would be that.”
“I guess. Another thing is that I’ve gotten really close with Jesmyn, Eli’s girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. Widow-girlfriend. Whatever you call what she is.”
“And that worries you because?”
“I don’t want to look like I’m trying to take anything from Eli. I’m not. There are already rumors at school. I suspect Adair started them.”
“This is the same Jesmyn who would have rightly taken me to task for my unfortunate sexist joke last visit?”
“Exactly. Nice remembering.”
Dr. Mendez makes a triangle with his fingers in front of his mouth. “From the little you’ve told me of her, she wouldn’t acquiesce in the giving or taking of her.”
“Oh, definitely not.”
“So whatever you or Eli’s parents think about your relationship with her is irrelevant. She would never allow herself to be in a relationship that she didn’t want. Fair to say?”
“Definitely. But we’re just friends.” It always sounds wrong to say that. Boners notwithstanding (let’s be honest: a Kmart lingerie ad can get things moving under the right circumstances), I don’t think we’re anything but friends. Yet we’ve shared an emotional intimacy that I’ve never had with a friend before, so I’m not sure if “just friends” totally describes what we have.
“I understand.”
“I talk with her about this whole deal more than with my parents.”
“Are your parents available to listen?”
“Yeah. But I’m not a big talker with my parents. I have a hard time being vulnerable with them. It’s nothing they’ve done. I guess…I don’t want to disappoint them or something? I just want to be independent? I like my space? Maybe I’m weird, I don’t know.”
Dr. Mendez shakes his head. “No, not at all. Look, I’m trained to talk to people and still, my son, Ruben—he’s a little older than you—doesn’t often talk to me. It doesn’t make you weird.”
A few moments
pass.
“Allowing yourself to be vulnerable with your parents and open up to them is something we could work on,” Dr. Mendez says.
“Yeah. But I have enough to deal with right now.”
“I know. For the future.”
“Will I ever be okay again?” I ask.
“I expect so. It’ll take time and work. But someday your world will be put right. I’ve never found it to be a matter of purging yourself of feeling, but rather of coming to live with it. Making it a part of you that doesn’t hurt so badly. You know how oysters make pearls?”
I nod.
“Like that,” he says. “Our memories of our loved ones are the pearl that we form around the grain of grief that causes us pain.”
I reflect on this for a while before speaking again. “I remembered something funny and random.”
“I like funny and random.”
“Jesmyn’s dad works for Nissan. Like Hiro. That’s why they moved here.”
Dr. Mendez just smiles.
Nana Betsy sells her house in a matter of weeks. She gets enough to cover some new little place and Blake’s funeral. I hope there’s a little left over for Mitzi’s, which didn’t sound far off.
I spend a day, along with her sons, helping her move. We throw away more than we load into her rented U-Haul. Jesmyn comes by after she’s done teaching and helps us with odds and ends.
When we’re finished, Nana Betsy’s sons start driving the U-Haul to Greeneville. She’ll follow behind in her car. Jesmyn goes home to practice. Nana Betsy and I sit on her front steps once more in the cool of the burning-leaves-scented, indigo October twilight. For fifteen minutes or so. She needs to head out. But we say goodbye to each other.
She tells me the police came to talk to her about the Accident. She says she didn’t tell them anything I told her and never would.
I thank her. And my stomach opens with a dank emptiness as I think about how I’ve made her a liar before her God. As I think about how I’m living under a spreading shadow.
She asks me to go with her to lay flowers on Blake’s grave when she returns for Memorial Day.
I tell her I will.
She asks me to have a good and happy life, full of laughter, love, and friendship.
I tell her I’ll try.
Two months after the Accident and I’m already getting to the point where I suspect my brain of creating false memories of them. Sauce Crew fan fiction. Where you can’t remember if it’s something you dreamed or something that actually happened. You believe dreams.
I have this persistent “memory” now of all of us hanging at a school playground on some temperate afternoon—perhaps during the closing days of school when spring is yielding to summer.
For some reason, one of us has a portable stereo you can hook up to an iPod. We sit on the playground equipment, listening to music. That’s all. I remember nothing else.
I can’t imagine when or why this would’ve happened. I don’t remember any other occasion besides this once that we did this. I don’t remember any other details.
But my brain is convinced that it did happen.
If my brain wants to manufacture new memories of them, I’ll accept it and I won’t ask too many questions.
Jesmyn and I trade few words as we sit in front of Eli’s house, waiting to go in.
“Is Adair coming?” Jesmyn asks.
“Let’s pray she doesn’t.” I start to open my door.
Jesmyn laughs to herself.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s not really funny. I just realized that because Eli only ever saw me in the summer, he never once saw me wearing a jacket. I love jackets. It reminded me how little time we knew each other. One season.”
She’s wearing a gray wool belted motorcycle jacket, with a slightly diagonal row of buttons instead of a zipper.
“He would’ve dug that jacket. It looks good on you.”
She gives me an anxious smile. “Let’s do this.”
“I’m nervous too.”
“At least you’ve done one of these.”
“Still.”
“I only knew him for a couple of months. I’m sure I’ll still have parts of his story that you and his parents don’t, but I don’t want to be a disappointment.”
“I doubt you’ll be.”
We glance at each other and I lean in and hug her. More for my solace than hers. I love nearness to her. Not in a lustful way. In the way I loved rubbing satin between my fingers when I was little. There’s something inexplicably comfortable about it.
We take a collective deep breath and walk up the front steps. It’s the first time I’ve been to Eli’s house since before the Accident. The keen ache of nostalgia entwines my heart.
I look around, awestruck. I’ve always heard that there were nice houses in Hillsboro Village, but I’ve never been in one. It’s filled with books stacked on clean, modern, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They have an exposed-brick wall in their living room, and on it hang several abstract paintings. I’m clueless about art, but I could easily see them in a museum, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they cost more than my house.
On one wall is a huge antique map of London. On another wall a sweeping black-and-white panorama of the New York City skyline. The furniture resembles what I’ve seen at a family trip to Ikea, but more substantial and luxurious.
“Man, cool house,” I say.
“Thanks. I can’t take credit,” Eli says.
“Are your parents, like, artists or architects or something?”
“Naw. My mom is a neurosurgeon at Vanderbilt Hospital. My dad is a history professor at Vanderbilt. He researches the Cold War. You should hear this insane theory he has about the Roswell UFO incident in 1947.”
I laugh. “My dad is an English professor at Belmont. My mom is a physical therapist.”
“No way! We totally have parallel families.”
“I have a sister.”
“Dude, me too. A twin, actually. Adair. She goes to school with us. She’s at dance practice now.”
“Nice.”
“You hungry or thirsty or anything?”
“Always.”
Eli leads me into the kitchen, which is no less impressive than what I’ve already seen. Full of glass, steel, and granite. There’s a huge wine rack, and copper-bottomed pots and pans hang from the ceiling. He opens a cabinet and starts getting out bags of chips, popcorn, and dried fruit and nuts from Trader Joe’s. “Anything you want,” he says.
He goes to the fridge and grabs us a couple of bottles of some cola that I’ve never heard of but that purports to be “handcrafted in small batches.”
“Thanks.” I study the label. “How do you handcraft cola?”
“Weird, huh? I picture some guy wearing a blacksmith’s apron pounding a hammer into a vat of cola.”
“A carpenter sawing his saw into cola.”
We laugh. I grab a bag of dried mandarin oranges. We head to his room.
Here’s the first indication that somebody under forty lives here. The walls are painted dark gray and covered with posters of bands I’ve never heard of—black and death metal bands whose skeletal, twisting-branch logos are mostly illegible. One wall resembles a museum of guitars, with four electrics and two acoustics hanging on it.
Black jeans and black T-shirts with more band names cover the floor.
I step over some. “Musician, huh?”
“How’d you guess? What about you? What’s your jam that got you into NAA?”
“Writing. Fiction.”
“Cool. Wanna be our scribe?”
“Sure.” I pull out my laptop and sit at Eli’s desk.
Eli pulls down an acoustic guitar and sits on the edge of the bed. “You mind? I concentrate better while I’m playing.”
“Go ahead.”
He starts fingerpicking. It’s immediately clear how he got into NAA. “So,” he says. “We have to predict a future technology…”
“And the impact it’ll h
ave on our lives.”
“Dude, I’m glad we got assigned as partners. This might be right up your alley.”
“Too bad I don’t write sci-fi.”
“What do you write?”
“Dark Southern stuff mostly.”
“Nice. I’m into dark.”
“Who’d have guessed?”
He laughs. “Maybe we should collaborate someday. You write lyrics and I’ll do the music.”
“I’m down.”
“Okay. So. In the future. My mom was telling me the other day about how scientists grew a human ear on a mouse’s back. It was in one of her medical journals.”
“What? Creepy.”
“Yeah, but cool.”
“What if someday they grew, like, a full-sized human dick on a mouse?”
And that was that. The next day Eli ate lunch with Blake and me instead of Adair. And every day after that.
Melissa answers the door. She’s dressed for a day outside. Hiking pants, trail-running shoes, a fleece vest. Her curly, dark hair is in a ponytail. I remember Eli telling me she was an avid runner. She has much the same look Nana Betsy had—distant; haunted. “Come in. Good to see you.”
“Hi, Melissa,” I say. It seems wrong to call a neurosurgeon by her first name, but Eli and Adair always called their parents Melissa and Pierce, so…
The house is mostly as I remember. It even smells the same—Eli’s mom loves these candles that smell like a mixture of black tea, tobacco leaves, and leather—opening even more doors of memory.
I see a familiar ache on Jesmyn’s face. “Hey,” I whisper.
“Hey,” she whispers back.
We follow Melissa into the kitchen. An assortment of pastries and croissants towers on a plate. She motions for us to help ourselves. “These are some of Eli’s favorite things from Provence bakery. We used to walk there every Saturday morning that I wasn’t working and if the weather was good. We still go with Adair. Jesmyn, you joined us once, didn’t you?”
She nods. “I had a chocolate croissant.”
“We got some of those,” Melissa says.
Jesmyn and I each take a chocolate croissant and start eating while Melissa wordlessly makes some fresh orange juice and sets a couple of glasses in front of us.