Vacation

by Jeremy C. Shipp

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  With gnawed fingernails, she wrestles a little white worm out of the already-popped blemish. “Have you considered the idea that you might be going nuts?”

  I’m not crazy and I tell her that.

  She laughs in annoying honks, like cousin Sara. “That’s way typical. It doesn’t matter what happens here, ‘cause as long as it’s a dream, you’re not crazy.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “Of course not. We, like, get to decide what’s crazy and what isn’t, don’t we? A guy who hears voices in his head, he’s crazy, but a guy who reads books and hears the voices in his head, he’s not crazy. Think you know what God’s thinking, you’re crazy. Think you know what God’s thinking and get enough people to believe you, you’re not. It’s all so clear and so convenient.”

  So yeah, I don’t believe my own excuse about reading all her tidbits of information beforehand. But I’m not fucking crazy. After a long pause, which may last hours in real time, hell if I know, I say, “Are you a ghost?”

  “Ghost?” She looks at me sideways with those bulging eyes. “I thought Americans don’t, like, believe in ghosts.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “You want an answer? Okay, we don’t believe in ghosts because that would mean our deep dark secrets aren’t really deep dark secrets at all. And we don’t believe in ghosts because that would mean all the terrible things we do to each other, there’s no point to it. And we don’t believe in ghosts because if we did, we wouldn’t be so afraid of life. And if we’re not fearful creatures, then no one could use that fear against us.”

  I watch her pick at a mole on her neck. I say, “If you won’t tell me what you are, at least tell me why you’re doing this.”

  “Hmm. There are, like, a lot of answers to that question. If you play your cards right…or wrong, depending on how you choose to look at it, one day you’ll get some of those answers. But right now, I really just want to give you one. So the answer to your question is, I’m talking to you because I like talking to you. Where I am, it’s easy to get lonely. And homesick.”

  The mole starts to bleed.

  “Are you really my sister?”

  “For now.”

  Spend a month in New Zealand, kayaking, surfing, sand dune riding, mounting biking, white water rafting, bungee jumping, skydiving, horse riding, jet boating, hot air ballooning, paragliding, sandboarding, snorkeling with seals, hiking through ancient rainforest and glaciers, vineyard touring (engendered adventurous with the inevitable sampling of the merchandise), and then try to sit still on a plastic tarp splattered with cherry blossom at a festival in Ueno Park, Tokyo that Jack calls Sakura Matsuri. Your body feels like a soda can in a paint shaker without a diabetic finger nearby to pull your tab. But you don’t want to be pulled. You like how you feel.

  And how you don’t.

  Krow collects fallen petals onto her palm, gentle, the way you’d pick up broken glass. Once she’s happy with the mound, she brings them close to her orange nose and inhales. Yeah, she’s orange now, imitating a not-so-popular fashion style in Tokyo called Ganguro. White streaks circle her mouth and eyes, and she wears a blond wig. None of this surprises me. In New Zealand she wore a flax dress with shark-tooth earrings, and Maori tattoos decorated the right side of her face. The right side, she told me, would traditionally represent her mother’s history. The left, the father.

  I take another bite of raw tuna or octopus or lobster penis, doesn’t really matter anymore. I’m a fucking adventurer.

  “Jack said there are more than a thousand trees here,” Krow says. “But their scent’s overpowered by the venders and their fish. I have a funny feeling the blossoms are yet another excuse for people to get together and party.”

  Maybe too quiet for her to hear, I say, “A beautiful excuse.” And at this point, I don’t think I’m talking about the flowers.

  “If you want to hold onto these experiences, you should smell everything you can.” She holds out the pile of petals and I indulge. “Out of all the sensory memories, odor lasts the longest. Smells can help you recall memories that you might not otherwise remember. It’s called the Proust Effect. Oh, and years ago, scientists conducted an experiment on human subjects where they injected the volunteers with insulin while they smelled a specific odor. Like you’d expect, their blood glucose level dropped. But then, days later, they just smelled the odor without the injection, and their blood glucose level still dropped.”

  “Krow.” I smile. “You already told me all this. In New Zealand.”

  “I thought I only thought about telling you.”

  “No, you told me on the plane, when we were waiting our turn. Remember? I asked why you were plugging your nose, and you said you didn’t want any odor associations with what you expected to be the most horrible experience of your life.”

  “Humans aren’t meant to fall through the sky like that.”

  “We’re not meant to ride waves either, but you seemed to enjoy that part of the trip.”

  “Fine. Be mean and point out my hypocrisies. I hope it makes you feel good about yourself.”

  “It does.”

  She laughs at me, but not the way Marvin Blackrow would. “Did I ever tell you that people who lose their sense of smell tend to suffer from depression?”

  I nod. “On the plane ride here.”

  “What about the fact that most astronauts lose their sense of smell? There’s more capillary pressure when a heart doesn’t have to fight against gravity, so their sinuses are flooded with fluid.”

  I nod. “In the rainforest.”

  She sighs. “Alright, I’ve got something new.” The pinkish white canopy above filters the sunset onto her face. And the red-tailed paper lanterns, strung from tree to tree, light up in multicolored stripes. Suffice it to say, she’s no longer orange.

  She’s so much more.

  “My mom died a few years ago,” she says, propped back against her elbows. I’m afraid they’re going to slip on the petal-coated plastic, but they don’t. “She left her house to her church, but I was allowed to take whatever I wanted first. And, looking through her things, I found an old perfume bottle. The moment I sprayed it, all these memories gushed up inside me. Happy memories, of me, dressing up in my mom’s shoes and blouses and church clothes. But, to me, it didn’t feel like dressing up. It felt real. And I felt more content in those childhood memories than I’d ever felt as an adult. That’s when I decided to stop lying to myself. So I got the surgeries.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I pick a petal off my hair.

  “Remember that French scientist I told you about? Gattefosse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that time when he burned his hand and healed it with lavender, it changed his whole life. He devoted himself to studying essential oils and their properties. He’s the one who came up with aromatherapy.” She sits up straight and pulls her velvety box from the picnic basket. “That’s what these are. The oils. They all have their own individual powers, but for the most part they can calm you, and they can open you up. They can bring back memories that you don’t know you have.” She thumbs open the lid. “You want to try?”

  Karaoke and sake surge through the mouths of the crowd. They’re here to forget.

  But I nod.

  So.

  One after another, she positions the tiny vials a range of distances below my nostrils.

  Peppermint, eucalyptus, lemon, rosemary, frankincense, chamomile, jasmine…

  One after another, nothing happens.

  Until something does. Maybe because of the smell. Maybe because I’ve given myself permission to search my memories.

  The bear with pink fur and blue marble eyes, she’s on her knees on the carpet crying tears of honey that she licks the instant they touch her mouth. Mom, you’re there, and you, dad. You’re both standing at my bedside with your arms crossed, and you’re not crying.

  Every night me and Bear
talk and fall asleep, side by furry side. Tonight though, mom, you say, “It’s time to say goodbye, Berny.”

  Dad, you say nothing.

  “No!” I scream. I’m angry. I’m desperate.

  “You’re too old for this, Berny,” you say, mom. “Say goodbye.”

  Dad, you say, “She’s not real.”

  Yeah, that may be true, but Bear doesn’t know that.

  But my parents are my parents, and when they’re standing there, arms like x’s, looking at me like I’m a bad channel on TV that you flip away from the moment I enter the room, well, then, there’s really nothing else I can do except say, “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye who?” you say, mom.

  “Goodbye, Bear.”

  “Good.”

  You leave the room, mom and dad.

  Bear’s gone.

  I’m alone.

  Mom, I know. I know you were doing it for my-own-good. I know I’m picking out a moment of cruelty from a lifetime of affectionate and loving parenthood.

  But.

  I’m making a point.

  I’m trying.

  You think, because Aubrey died before I was born, I had it easy.

  You think, I didn’t have to grieve, so it didn’t affect me.

  Grieving is a terrible feeling, but at least it makes sense. Someone you love dies so your heart shatters.

  But what I feel, it doesn’t make sense.

  Here’s a trauma I own, but don’t know how to feel.

  Years later your little boy is in a big body and he’s passed out blotto in his bathtub, and his sister says, “So those statue things, the maoi, they were, like, magic to the people who built them.” She smells like manure, and she flosses her teeth as she speaks. The yellow stones point out of her gums in all directions, compacted, so the floss snaps at her each time, and she flinches with every hit. “Eventually, these same people started breaking the statues. Now some people think they did this ‘cause of tribal competition. Whoever has the most magic wins, right?” The floss smacks her gums especially hard and she yelps. “But there’s another theory that the tribes broke their own statues. The people were tired of their religious leaders like obsessing over who had more magic. They got sick of focusing their whole lives on building the stupid heads. So one day they said, ‘Forget this crap,’ and busted all the magic right out of their lives.” She twirls the globby red string around her finger. “Personally, I like this theory best. Because, sometimes, what you think is magic in your life is actually poison. And other times, what people say is a poison, is actually magic.”

  And, what you don’t know, what I never told you, is an imaginary bear isn’t always an imaginary bear.

  Sometimes she’s an imaginary sister.

  “Remember anything?” Krow says.

  I think about how much she’s shared with me, and how much I want to share with her, but still I say, “No.”

  Part 5

  The only asymmetrical part of the Taj Mahal, Jack tells us, is the casket of Shah Jahan, who built the mausoleum for his second wife Mumtaz Mahal. Jack says that Jahan wanted to construct a replica of the Taj out of black marble, where he could be buried, and the two buildings would be linked by a bridge across the Jumna River. But, Jack says, Jahan battled with his son Aurungzeb for the throne, and lost, and so the replica was never made.

  However, the night before, before we even visit the Taj, Aubrey says, “Anyone that knows anything about Islamic law, knows that bodies are supposed to be buried with their heads pointing toward Mecca. And the husbands are supposed to be buried on the right side of their wives. So the notion that he was, like, gonna build another Taj Mahal, is stupid.”

  The white marble of the Taj Mahal, Jack says, changes color from milky to pinkish to golden depending on the time of day or night, in order to reflect the various moods of women.

  However, Aubrey says, “Seriously though, the Shah probably didn’t even build the thing. Most of the evidence shows that the building was actually an ancient Shiva Temple, which the Shah took and used as a tomb. It’s pretty obvious really. The whole thing is way Hindu style. Go look at the outer wall of the sanctum sanctorum, and you’ll see the Hindu letter OM carved there. There’ve even been carbon 14 tests done that totally prove it’s a lot older than the Shah. But this isn’t the common belief, is it? Love sells a whole lot better than conquest.”

  Jack keeps talking, and the voice in my head keeps talking back, so I decide to tune them both out and turn to Krow.

  She’s wrapped in nine yards of gold now, a silk sari. She also wears dozens of bracelets (which she calls bangles), necklaces, finger rings, toe rings, earrings, anklets, and a nose pin. Much of it gold-plated. Gold, she tells me, is typically worn against the skin, because it has the power to purify what it touches. A red sindoor also dots her forehead. The sindoor, she says, covers the sixth chakra point called agna, which means command. She says it’s the point of intuition and perception. She says it’s the third eye.

  And then, right next to us, Pumpkin Head kisses a Horse Face woman.

  I glance around and notice that this is not an uncommon occurrence among the tour groups.

  Krow bites her lip. “I read somewhere that certain animals can only smell one thing. Know what it is?”

  “Food?”

  She shakes her head. “The opposite sex. So to them, the world—the entire world, no matter where they go or what they do—either smells like the opposite sex, or nothing at all.”

  And at that moment, I don’t feel like an adventurer anymore. All the things I’ve done on this Vacation, all that daredevil stuff, doesn’t mean shit. I’m a coward, and I’ve always been a coward. I do everything I’m told to do. And that’s why I hated Marvin. Why I feared him. Because he had the balls that I didn’t.

  Krow may not have those same balls anymore, but I think, initially, I was attracted to her because of the courage I remembered in Marvin. I didn’t want Marvin. I wanted to be Marvin.

  But it’s more than that now, isn’t it?

  “Krow,” I say.

  She looks away from Jack. “Hmm?”

  “You don’t have to call me Mr. Johnson,” I say.

  “Okay.” She scrunches up her forehead, and her third eye squints. “I just realized, I don’t know your first name.”

  “Bernard.”

  She smiles. “Bernard.”

  I smile back, the way Marvin would.

  Aubrey isn’t so ugly anymore. No, that’s not it. She’s ugly, but she isn’t as annoying. Instead of twitching and jerking and scratching and sniffling, she sits behind the counter with her hands folded together. And she must have taken a shower recently, because I can’t smell her from where I’m standing. Or am I sitting? It doesn’t matter.

  “This is it, bro,” she says. “The end of the line. India’s as far as we go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No more friendly conversations. No more fun facts. The nature of our relationship is about to change. At this point, there’s really nothing either of us can do about it.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Aubrey.”

  “Then let me make things clearer. In a very short time, you’re going to find yourself hating me.”

  “That won’t happen. It can’t.”

  She laughs, and this time it’s not a honk. “It doesn’t end there. Someone you know is responsible for these communications of ours. You’ll find yourself hating that person as well.”

  “Responsible? How can someone be responsible for a dream?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not an expert in that field, and honestly, there’s no point in delving into the details now, but let’s just say someone fed you something.”

  I think about Krow and the peanuts she gave me. One of them tasted bitter. Was that real-life foreshadowing? And isn’t it a little too coincidental that a past student of mine and me would choose to Vacation at exactly the same time, and end up in exactly the same Tour?

  Is it possible that
Krow’s somehow responsible for all this?

  Or do I just want her to be?

  Aubrey says, “What I’m really here to tell you is, I’m sorry.”

  The first thing I notice is that I’m lying in a white bed in a white room. The second thing I notice is that I can’t leave the white bed or the white room, because I can’t move. The notion that I’m paralyzed ravages my mind, but I tell myself that I’m probably tied down. The binds are simply under the covers where I can’t see them. Probably.

  “Excuse me,” I try to say.

  Either I’m currently unable to speak or I’m deaf.

  Once again, I choose to believe the lesser of two horrors.

  Here I am, alone in the corner.

  Until Jack saves me.

  “You alright, Bernard?” He lends his hand to my shoulder. “Feeling alright?”

  I try to speak, and this time, crackly succeed. “I can’t move.”

  He nods. “The nurse strapped you down.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I ordered her to.” He takes his hand off me. “It’s a necessary evil I’m afraid.”

  I’m wondering if this would make more sense if I wasn’t so drowsy. “Am I sick?” Johnsonitis? My head does feel heavier.

  “This hospital isn’t for sick people.” He smiles, then shakes his head. “No, let me rephrase that. Everyone here is sick to some extent, but this isn’t the reason for your admission.”

  After another fruitless struggle to budge, I say, “Please…let me go.”

  He takes a seat at my bedside, where only his head peeks up above the covers. “A lot of people went a lot of trouble getting you here, myself included. In other words, no way, José.”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “I’m going to inject you with a little something, and then I’ll be done with you. The others will take over from there.”

  “Are they going to kill me?”

  He laughs. “Trust me when I tell you this, Bernard. I could answer all your questions and by the end of the session you’d still feel the same way you do now. So, let’s change the subject to something you’re more familiar with. Namely, yourself.”