Hey, Shorty, Eric said. Did you hurt yourself?
Amy looked up. Blood was streaming down her chin. She could feel it.
Oh, said Elodie. I’ll go get your parents. She ran off down the hill, bracelets clattering.
I called after you, but you didn’t stop, said Eric.
I didn’t know you were here. I thought it was him. What are you doing here, anyway? asked Amy.
Eric took off his T-shirt. He was so skinny she could see his ribs against the dark fur of his chest hair. He was wearing some of Elodie’s dumb love beads. We decided to get dim sum, he said. We thought you might want to come with. He kneeled next to her. Here, he said, press this against your chin.
Are you sure? she said. It’ll wreck it.
I’m sure, said Eric.
Amy decided to run across the mall. There were trees there and probably it was shadier and maybe she wouldn’t have to run on cement. Maybe she could run on dirt. That’s when she turned without looking and she heard a guy call: Heads up! He was on a bike; he was whooshing right toward her. Amy froze. The heads-up made her freeze. The biker came to the world’s shortest stop. Whoa! he said. Oh, my, said Amy. I’m sorry; I got in your way. That’s okay, he said. He hopped back up on his bike and took off again. Over his shoulder he called out, Have a good day.
I’m trying, thought Amy.
Amy flew through the air like she was a graduate of Clown College. As she fell onto the sidewalk, Theo stopped running to laugh at her. He thought it was all a game. He was only a little boy. He walked over to her, where she lay flat and bleeding. She pushed herself up onto her bloody knees and palms. She spat the blood out that was pooling inside her mouth.
Theo said, Mama? Like he was scared.
Amy looked up, and sat on her heels. She opened her arms and Theo ran into her warm embrace.
Her mouth was in the dirt. It tasted green. She could feel her chin bleeding into the grass and she licked it. That fine iron taste of soil and blood and grass rolled on her tongue. The sun hit her bare legs below her cutoff shorts. It filtered through the back of her T-shirt. It felt so good on her arms that she thought, Please, God, let me die now. I’ll believe in you if you just let me die now. The sun feels so good and Michael hasn’t found me yet.
Found you, said Michael.
Heads up! A guy called.
She ran right straight into him.
He was on his bike and he fell off, and she fell down, and he and his bike fell down on top of her.
It took a moment. They were in a pretzel. But he untangled them. His leg from her leg, her arm from within the bike’s wheel.
He stood the bike up and leaned it on its kickstand.
He said, Are you okay? I’m Dan, he said.
I’m pregnant, she said.
His eyes opened wider with a start. Then he looked at her arm. He said, Let’s walk you to the first-aid station; I just passed it on my bike.
She started to laugh.
He said, Why are you laughing? He said, You must be in shock.
I’m sorry, Amy said, but I can’t, I can’t stop laughing.
He looked at her hard. He was awfully cute. A little older than she was, with dark brown hair. He looked concerned.
Okay, he said.
She nodded but she kept laughing. It all seemed so funny. The whole world was funny. So far this was the funniest part of the funniest day of her life.
He put one arm around her and the other around his bike. They started to walk. When she tripped a little on a stone, or from laughing, or because she was in shock as he said, life had shocked her, he held her tighter.
I got you, he said.
* * *
Amy pulled off her cardboard glasses. She felt like she was going to throw up.
“You look like you’re going to hurl,” said Donny.
At the suggestion, she began to heave and he got his wastepaper basket underneath her just in time.
“Eeww,” said Donny.
“Sorry,” said Amy. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “Sorry,” she said. “But not. How could you?”
“I think it will be better with the hair dryer,” said Donny.
“What?” said Amy.
“You know, the hair dryer apparatus. I told you about it already. The cone.”
“I don’t care,” said Amy. “None of that happened, except for some of it. All of it was wrong.”
“What? What was wrong with it?” asked Donny.
“Are you kidding? Everything. Everything. How dare you show me something where Theo is hit by a car? That day, when I yelled, he stopped running and climbed into the stroller. That’s all, that’s all. Now how am I supposed to unsee the horror that I just saw?”
“I don’t think it’s a real bug in the algorithm,” said Donny. “I’d term it a ‘code smell.’ I’m sure I can correct for it. All I have to do is stare at it for a couple of hours. It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“It is a problem, Donny. It’s already in my head. I spend so much time running that shit out of my mind and there you are repopulating my brain with stuff I don’t even have to worry about.”
“Like Eric?” said Donny. “I have to admit I’m a little surprised you didn’t ask me to multiverse Eric.”
Amy closed her eyes. Her hands clenched into little fists. It was all she could do not to slug him.
“Do you know how many years and how much money I’ve spent on therapy to drive out the Eric fantasies? Eric died in Italy. It was a nightmare and he died and he is dead. Nothing else matters. I don’t want to think about him maybe being alive anymore. It just hurts too fucking much.”
It was hard for Amy to breathe then.
“Please, Donny. Please. Never again. Never again make me think of Eric not dead. I don’t think I can take that.” She took a deep conscious breath. “And . . . And that’s not how I met Dan. I met him at a party in a loft on West Twelfth near the Meatpacking District. It was one great big space and the people who lived there lived in five different teepees. Plus, wasn’t this whole stupid thing supposed to be about my choices? I thought this was about me choosing what to look at. About me choosing to find out what I want to know.”
“The ride will be smoother when I build my own instrument,” said Donny.
“Are you serious?” said Amy. “How could I ever trust you or it again? None of this ever happened anyway.” She was crying now, for real.
Donny handed her the towel hanging on his closet door. She held it to her face. It still stank and it was still wet. She blew her nose in it, because she had to and for revenge.
“It happened in different multiverses,” said Donny.
“Fuck different multiverses,” said Amy.
“You say that now, but I can fine-tune, you know?”
“Donny,” said Amy. “What the hell?”
“The hair dryer idea? The big cone? It will help it feel more real.”
“Real I don’t want,” said Amy. “I wanted her.”
“I’ll get you her,” said Donny. “I promise.”
Amy was still crying. Donny put his hand on her shoulder. He wanted to comfort, maybe. But it was too late. Because of him, there was even more now to unlive, to pack away and forget. He was going to have to find himself another guinea pig. Amy and The Furrier were over.
Part Two
DAN WAS JEALOUS.
Maryam had engaged with almost everyone they had encountered during their long flight across the silver-scaled skin of the Pacific, and almost to a person, they’d responded to her. This amazed Dan—not only the unfolding lengths of her billowing inquiries but also the ease with which strangers so readily disclosed to her. There was something about Maryam, her compassion, her intensity maybe, her focused attention on her subjects absolutely, that got them to confide. She was a natural-born interlocutor. Too bad she hadn’t thought to shine her bright light on him.
Often Dan had been left out of these conversations, which made him feel lonely, of course, and a
little relieved as well (he did not have her stamina). These seemingly antithetical sentiments led him to mull over the definition of “extrovert” that he carried around in his mind’s back pocket (someone who draws energy from the presence of others), and his own forced introversion on their journey (the state of being recharged by time alone). He spent many hours quietly thinking these thoughts, plus others—could one be a good man and still forsake one’s family? Was it selfish to feel this irresistible pull toward wildness and weightiness? Might there be a way to live more rapturously without resorting to the cheap thrills of hard drugs?—all while staring out the airplane window at the ocean’s miraculously luminescent surface, as if it were tightly dressed undulating muscle instead of water, like sequins corseting a mermaid’s tail. He’d never flown west from California before, straight into the sun.
Maryam chatted with the driver on the morning SuperShuttle from Stanford to the San Francisco airport. She was resplendent in a black tunic and leggings, cinnabar bangles clattering up her right arm when she gesticulated as she talked, Dan’s favorite metallic sandals gracing her feet. She was far more elegant on this weekday morning than the other passengers in the van: the smattering of sweatshirt- and Polartec-wearing students, perhaps heading home for a long weekend? The California-casual women in loose sweaters and mom jeans, probably professors, Dan thought, their male counterparts in warm-up or golf jackets, everyone in running shoes. Both genders presumably jetting off to some think tank or conference to lecture on effective global governance or else to see the grandkids. The campus was lousy with Nobel Prize winners, also Pulitzer recipients and former political powerhouses, even war criminals; Condoleezza Rice, for example, a Hoover fellow. Dan saw her from time to time at the Palo Alto Creamery delicately eating her hash brown pie and two eggs, same as him. But whether they leaned left or right, these many unwitting models of “acting basic”—a millennial term for wearing practical, unobtrusive, supra-normal clothing (Jack and Kevin used it)—disguised themselves as boring old people.
In the early 1990s, ironically, Dan had written a story on Yucca Mountain, a proposed geological repository for high-level nuclear waste located just about eighty miles outside Vegas. Twenty years later, the Department of Energy was still considering dumping about 150 million pounds of radioactive spent fuel there, material they otherwise did not know what to do with, even though the recommended location was close to a major city and geologically active. At the time, the DOE’s complimentary bus tours of the site had proved bizarrely popular, and Dan’s editor thought it might make a funny travel story. But the majority of those nuclear tourists turned out to be gray-haired retirees trying to stretch their Social Security payments (Dan was just a freelancer, there hadn’t been a gray hair anywhere on his head back then; honestly, truly, he had really believed he was congenitally exempt from aging) and appeared to have taken the ride for the coffee, doughnuts, and free lunch. The others, he discovered, were nuclear watchdogs and reporters like himself. But it had been hard to tell one from the other. Most of the writers and the retirees on that bus had looked like the inhabitants of this van. Note to self, Dan remembered thinking—in his torn jeans and Ramones T-shirt he’d stuck out like a sore thumb—dress like everybody else. It was advice he’d taken to heart. On this very day, the day of his great escape, he was wearing the unobtrusive green fleece Jack had absconded with, or vice versa, and purposefully blended in. Dan didn’t want anyone in the van to notice or remember him. Apparently, Maryam hadn’t received the memo.
Parked in a single seat ahead of Dan and behind the driver, Maryam introduced herself warmly to the woman at the wheel. “We are the only two brown people on the bus,” she said. The driver’s name was Marisol Medina. “A full pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Medina,” said Maryam.
Mrs. Medina was a mother of five: her eldest was a doctor, the next a physician’s assistant influenced by his love and respect for his older brother; the middle son was a yoga teacher, her youngest boy still in high school; and her daughter, her only girl, was lost, lost to drugs, but Mrs. Medina prayed every day and night that her baby would find her way back home to her. Even though Maryam had eschewed the Christian faith she had been raised in by her father while facing the cruelties of her own youth, she remembered her mother’s early teachings. The mother had been a lapsed Muslim herself, a lapsed person in every way, Maryam told Dan later. “Ommy spent much of her life lying on the couch willing herself to get up,” but she had taught Maryam the Surah al-Asr, the 103rd Surah in the Quran, “We need each other,” as a guiding principle. (Ommy had called her only son Mika, which in Arabic meant “intelligent, beautiful, like God”; his father had called him Michael. She had named herself Maryam, because it sounded lovely, she said, and meant “bitter,” which at that time in her life she was.) So, Maryam honored Mrs. Medina’s needs and prayed with her.
“Where is home?” Maryam asked as soon as she deemed their shared moment of silence over, but when pressed, Mrs. Medina had demurred. She wasn’t the type to call attention to herself or to complain, but Maryam drew it out of her, with kindheartedness and great skill, at least that is how it appeared to Dan, sitting directly behind her. (The van had a row of cushioned, blue-plush single seats behind the driver, an aisle, and then another row of three similar seats fused together on the right, like on an airplane. It was packed solid.) At times he tried to eavesdrop—he’d felt abandoned by Maryam when she’d plopped down in front solo—but mostly he found himself staring out the window at the rolling hills that surrounded 101 North, which looked a whole hell of a lot like Italy, with its scrubby greens and gold pitches and rises—he still thought this after some twenty years living out west, he was still comparing his adopted home to a place he had visited the summer of his sophomore year in college, the curse of youth, the indelible, lasting impressions of all those random firsts—wondering what the hell he was thinking, running away from home like a small child?
In a whisper, so soft it did not have the strength to fully carry itself rearward to Dan, Mrs. Medina told Maryam she commuted 120 miles every morning from Manteca to Palo Alto and back again at night, because it was the nearest affordable city. (Her marido was discapacitado, multiple sclerosis, he could not travel far and stayed local, working part-time in Medical Records at Kaiser Permanente.) Maryam, playing telephone between her companions, was sympathetic and outraged on her behalf—a two-and-a-half-hour commute dependent on traffic before Mrs. Medina even got behind the wheel of the van? She must live in a perpetual state of exhaustion. It wasn’t safe or even healthy, Maryam surmised. SuperShuttle should help find Mrs. Medina and her family adequate housing.
Dan of course agreed—he was the original lefty in their dyad, a quasi–Red Diaper baby; his mother was always taking the train into the City or down to D.C., waving a banner and marching against something bad, while his dad stayed put in Jersey. Maryam’s father was a Tory, as well as a rat bastard. She’d said as much, and Father Ainsworth probably would never bother to speak to a driver of a van anyway. But even Dan knew SuperShuttle couldn’t do a lot for Mrs. Medina. The City of Palo Alto had to commit to building affordable homes. Stanford University with its $21.4 billion endowment, its eight thousand acres, 60 percent of it open even now, needed to model good citizenship with a little mixed-income lodging for both employees and the greater community. The state had to kick in. The tech industry was obscenely wealthy. (He’d recently read that Bill Gates’s $90 billion fortune was .5 percent of the U.S. GDP.) There was still a federal government out there, no matter how frozen and hobbled by idiocy and partisanship and downright meanness; someone somewhere had to care.
Dan had edited a story, years ago now, about the homeless people who rode the number 22 bus from East San Jose to Palo Alto and back again all night, some unable to make rent even while working full-time jobs. One of the subjects of the article had referred to the bus as “Hotel 22,” which stuck with Dan. He remembered the guy was a father with a school-age daughter. The girl did her h
omework on the bus, and they schlepped bedding and pillows in paper bags for the long ride each and every night. Had the original journo ever written a follow-up? Dan itched to google. He had to literally sit on his hands, which made his wrists hurt. But he’d purposefully turned off and packed his cell phone in his shoulder bag to keep himself from going online on automatic pilot. The thought of reading texts from Amy or the kids right now, all that whiny self-involved innocence, filled him with a shame so painful and deep he could feel its heft sink down into his balls. How would he possibly respond? Instead, with nowhere to cool his psychic jets, his mind ran here, there, and everywhere, although he tried to be supportive and nodded profusely whenever Maryam unbuckled her seat belt to turn to him for confirmation of the inherent righteousness of her outrage throughout the ride. Dan even wagged his finger playfully at her a couple of times, to make sure she buckled back in whenever she was returning to face-forward, tilting closer to Mrs. Medina’s seat to yak, her lustrous blue-black hair a shiny curtain.
At the International Terminal, Maryam held court over several rounds of small-batch craft beers garnished with orange slices and some avocado-edamame hummus at the bar at Cat Cora with three Southeast Asian young male techies watching highlights of a Warriors game on an iPad. When Dan, left out again, expressed surprise at her knowledge about and passion for the game she’d replied, “You think there’s no basketball in Britain, Dan, but you’re thinking is often erroneous. I was a starter since First Form.”
“I thought it was about as popular as snooker,” Dan mumbled, already cranky, guilt-ridden over the injustice he was doing his wife by lying to her, and at that early point in the journey already hungry for Maryam’s attention.
“Dan, you are about as popular as snooker,” said Maryam, laughing, “which by the way is very popular. In the UK and even more so in China.” She gave him a big fat wink. The flutter of those black lashes sent a surprising thrill, like a tiny gust of wind, through the porthole of his pupils and down into the backs of Dan’s knees. Then she shared intimate knowledge of Steph Curry, the greatest shooter in NBA history, that she’d just coaxed out of the three skinny boys in T-shirts sitting next to them.
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