Inhabited

by Charlie Quimby

  She turned the car around at Dinosaur Hill and placed the eye in Pandora’s hand. “Put it out there as far as you can.”

  The girl cranked her seat upright as the car rolled down the hill. This time, they could see the dark river as they approached the bridge. Pandora flicked her arm hard toward the water. The eye might have been a bottle cap, gone in a blink. Meg powered up the windows. They peered at each other in the car’s confessional darkness.

  “Why?” Pandora said.

  “It wasn’t mine to keep.” True enough, but say something truer. “I hate being reminded of loss.”

  Pandora pressed her forehead against the glass. After a moment she said, “Then what’s left to remember?”

  Ahead, the garish truck plaza lights presided over the duel of generic gasoline brands—yellow-and-red versus yellow-orange-and-red.

  “Can we pull off here?” Pandora said.

  “Are you not feeling okay?” Of course she wasn’t. She’d hardly had time to process the breakup. Even cutting loose a bad boyfriend wasn’t pure relief.

  “Did you notice? The station on the north side—Loves. One says Pilot, the other one says Loves.”

  The names of the companies were everywhere. On the fuel price signs. The pump canopies. The building façades. Meg headed for the orange and yellow with red hearts, a citrus bowl of Love.

  “The truck driver said hitchhikers can’t be choosers. I thought he was being an asshole passing up the earlier exit but maybe coming here was a sign,” Pandora said. “Pilot and Loves. It’s sort of like Jesus loves or God is my co-pilot.”

  “That heart is supposed to be an apostrophe,” Meg said. “It makes the Love possessive.”

  She eased the car under the bright lights illuminating the concrete pad. Trucks idling. Air brakes releasing. Diesel exhaust. Hamburger grease. Gasoline vapors. Hot rubber. The atmosphere saturated with depletion.

  Pandora said, “You’ve been so awesome to me.”

  “It’s nothing. It’s a pleasure to help.”

  “It’s like having a big sister all of a sudden. I’ve learned so much from you in just a few days.”

  Just wait. You’re only getting started.

  “What you said to Cody, about trying to fix your mistakes before you know the person you’re trying to be...”

  Is that what I said?

  “How life’s about the way you go forward and you shouldn’t try to undo the past.”

  But we just undid it. We’re free.

  “I know you were saying that to me, too. But I’m not like you. Music...music isn’t about being in charge. I mean, you have to work and practice and pay your dues but then you release it and you have no more control over it. The music does what it does and it’s different for everyone. All the singer does is find the spirit of it so someone else hears something they never heard before. Or maybe they won’t feel so alone. Thanks for the ride. Thank you for all you’ve done.”

  It’s barely a start.

  “Going on to Las Vegas is what I should’ve done in the first place instead of thinking I could come home.”

  Your things, back at the house.

  “Before he came, I’d already packed the gym bag to go. And now I have Cody’s cash with me.”

  A thousand at most. It won’t last very long.

  “My friends in Las Vegas said I could stay with them. I know playing in a casino sounds gross but it might be fun.”

  Pandora opened the door and stepped out. “I wrote a song last night called ‘Purple Shoes.’ It’s not finished, though. Listen for it someday on the radio.”

  The porch light was on as she’d left it. She drove past the house and through the subdivision on the lookout for Cody’s pickup before returning to open the garage door. Casting lights ahead of her, she disarmed the beeping security system, stared hard at the panel and rearmed it in Stay mode for the first time in her life. Shrapnel from the house phone lay scattered on the kitchen tiles. Green gum wrappers. She took a boning knife from the block and placed it on the counter, then swept up the pieces, listening past the hiss of broom and plastic. She dumped the remains of the orange juice carton into the sink and picked up the knife. Seeing the stockade wall of books in the living room somehow fortified her. The house was substantial in a good neighborhood. She was not some vulnerable girl. She checked the front entry. Cody’s phony polar bear clipboard was still in the corner where he had flung it. Venturing down the hallway, she regretted for the first time its low-intensity lighting, although tonight a searchlight would not have swept away her apprehension.

  The guest room door was ajar. Pandora had removed the linens and mounded them at the foot of the bed. Crowning the peak, two flip-flops propped upright like stone tablets freshly inscribed:

  Meg set down the knife and felt the room pass back into her hands. Life’s about the way you go forward, she had advised, as if Pandora needed to be told. And the kid seemed to know the rest, too. Half the purpose of making plans was to gather courage to take the leap. You write the song and release it and then the music does what it does.

  Curious how Pandora’s brief occupancy had recharged the space. Though the room had never been a shrine, it would be good to complete the transformation—redecorate, donate the furniture and mix Helen’s books in with hers.

  Meg felt transported to that long ago instant when Hel’s flight plucked Madge off the wall. To that flash of shock before they floated as one and tumbled, uproarious in the sand. To this moment when she knew that Helen’s picture of the leaping sisters was gone.

  Which factors have contributed to your homeless situation?

  —Vulnerability Index Prescreen for Single Adults

  His mother sat in front of the house as he wheeled up. Isaac didn’t remember a chair outside before and now there were two. He walked his bike the last fifty yards of the driveway because he knew she’d want to finish her cigarette. Her shortened drags came closer together as she converted his pace into the number of puffs remaining. She had always been cancer-thin and her smoking made a point of it. Her yellow dress hung loose from her coat hanger collarbone. The tendons in her neck strained as if to keep her face moored to the jawbone.

  He gently lowered his bicycle to the gravel rimming the entry. The bird he’d left under the bush was gone. Would a coyote eat a dead bird or had his mother buried it? He kept the question to himself. After his meltdown at Carl’s funeral, burials might still be a sore topic between them. She ground out her cigarette, plucked the ashtray from the chair and cleared him a seat with a flutter of her free hand. No one bothered with hello in his family.

  “You are doing better now. I can see it,” she said, her voice brown around the edges. “Did you have a nice ride?”

  As if he pedaled for recreation. It was his fault for riding out here the first time looking for sympathy. All he’d done was open up the past and now she had an excuse to rub his nose in it. “It was great—except for the speeding ticket.”

  “I know you’re teasing,” she said. “Joe told me you’ve been through a rough stretch and now you’re pulling things together.”

  No, the rough still stretched before him and things were not together, he simply had fewer things to pull. Isaac thanked his brother for the spin. He was not going to butter her up or troll for pity. He’d overheard too many drunks hitting up their mothers for money, acting solicitous before ratcheting up tales of woe into demands that turned into the same old argument. Nobody, even mothers, liked supporting losers.

  “Once I get my replacement ID I can look for work again. Then I can buy a new computer and find a place to get indoors for the winter.”

  “Shelly told me you just got a computer.”

  “Somebody stole it.”

  His mother looked at him hard, as if she could still see his bruises.

  “So,” she said and let hang the most terrifying word in the Samson language, with ten meanings depending on the inflection. This was not the insouciant so that comes with a question mar
k; not the exclamatory one; not the conclusive, ergo sum so or the inconclusive one that dangles at the end of a conversation. It was closer to the declarative yet elliptical so; a portentous, oxygen-sucking so that pitched him trembling into the ensuing silence to contemplate which of his sins was about to be chewed over. The Chinese would know what he was talking about.

  “What did you ever think you were going to do with those mush melons?”

  At least she wasn’t going to beat him up over the computer. “They were cantaloupe.”

  “Thank you. Cantaloupes. It was quite a shock.”

  What made cantaloupes shocking, he didn’t know. In a normal family, by this time the story would be a joke: Remember when Isaac hid all those rotten fruits and vegetables in his room? He had been fretting about the threat of global collapse posed by the Y2K software bug, but he was also distressed by the waste at work. The waste of pumping Colorado River water to grow crops in California that would be picked green and shipped back to Colorado, only to overripen and be pulled from the Safeway shelves and fed to pigs. The waste of treatment that used talk and medications to press him into a more sluggish and repressed version of himself. The waste of Johnny Depp’s talents in The Astronaut’s Wife. Petra—the first girl (and last) interested in him—took offense at his critique of Johnny Depp, and abandoned Isaac at the movie theater. How could he explain to his mother those terrible, out-of-body days that followed?

  No one in the family was ever going to laugh at that story.

  She said, “Will you come for a walk with me? I’m not supposed to go wandering off alone.” She slid her arm through his and led him around to the back of the house, leaning into him as they climbed the slope to the canal road. Her tobacco-sweet smell surprised him. It felt strange to be trespassing with his mother. Canal roads were where kids sought escape from parents. Drinking, fighting, making out, canal surfing. For the first time, he conceived of his mother as a rebel.

  The dirt road drew them west on a line scribed between Martian badland and earthling settlement. Where the irrigation water flowed south, greenery sputtered or sprawled according to the property owner’s preferences. Mature cottonwoods shaded farmsteads surrounded by alfalfa; subdivided lots staked saplings against their wills to bluegrass carpets or allowed desert plantings to sip from gravel-covered drip systems. The unobstructed view behind the houses revealed grills, fire pits and meat smokers; dirt bikes, trailers and ATVs; trampolines, batting cages and play structures; dog runs, rabbit hutches and llama pens; spoked wagon wheels, rusty plows and broken-down wheelbarrows; birdbaths, pools and hot tubs. And sheds. Sheds for outdoor gear keeping, plant potting, car restoring, woodworking, junk collecting, pottery firing, RV screening and beer brewing. Sheds were where the owners fled to escape the gravity of those houses, where they were free to fiddle with a shortwave, grow weed, keep a hostage or store bulk food supplies in the event of end times.

  At length, his mother spoke. “That GE business…I hope you’re done with that, too.”

  So she wanted to plow up old history after all. She didn’t understand that his problem was not with GE—not alone. GE was one lone sea monster pulled up from the deep. His problem was that people declared it a freak. They wouldn’t admit that there had to be many other such giants living undisturbed in the depths of the ocean. Others saw a random universe or the hand of God in things, while Isaac, like the boy in the movie who saw dead people, saw systems. The universe was pulsing with them. Someone had to pay attention.

  He began counting his breaths as he had learned to do when his brain sprang this snake of thoughts against him.

  “I don’t think about that any more, Mom.” It was what she wanted to hear.

  “And what about Mr. Garrison—is that all settled?”

  William Garrison had seen promise in Isaac and offered him an interview and they had ruined his chances by not delivering the letter. So, no, that was not all settled. How could it be?

  She read his silence. “Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to keep that letter from you, but what else could we do? It was just an initial phone screening. You were in no shape to be interviewed, let alone take a job. You couldn’t even make it in to Safeway. How would you survive in Maryland where you didn’t know anybody? We were going to show you the letter once your condition improved—to give you some hope things could turn out for the better.”

  She couldn’t possibly understand hope. She had married Carl Samson.

  “That was for me to decide. When I saw it was too late to reply, I could feel you and dad sitting on my chest. I had to get you off.”

  “It was an anxiety attack, sweetie.”

  “No, it was an epiphany. I saw that this consciousness, which was so bright inside my head, was not required for the world to keep going. Like when a light goes out in a room and all the furniture is still there. The light doesn’t matter.”

  He didn’t cry, though he thought for a moment he would.

  “And you thought Mr. Garrison appreciated the light.”

  “I needed to know!”

  “But you never found him.”

  “No, I never did.”

  “But with your master’s degree you could have gotten another job.”

  He hadn’t wanted her to worry. He almost had it. He would have finished, but the system knew he was dangerous. It saw he had hold of the string and it waited. He let go for one second and away it went, all that work, like a helium balloon. He watched it disappear.

  Marian heard the distant chuff of an air brake that told her the driver from Barclay’s Biffies had arrived at the house. Then the whine of the lift gate. Sound traveled far with nothing to absorb it. The vast landscape served as filter and amplifier both.

  Isaac talked on and on. He could not help himself. He saw a poor cow across the canal and he was off to the races. The only way for that cow to escape the meat grinder system, he said, was to produce more calves. To be a mother of meat.

  “Stop. We’ve gone far enough,” she said.

  Isaac quieted, tucked her arm through his and throttled the jitter in his stride. She did not understand her son. Oh, she gathered him as a general concept, in the way she knew the canal water would flow west and south from here and not in other directions. She knew his mind was crowded, his thoughts consuming, yet somehow he managed to function. Perhaps his library studies had helped him structure a medicating sense of order, and that was enough.

  Nothing she had done to wrap him in safety and comfort had made a difference. Even for normal mothers with normal sons it was difficult to save them from spending too much, from driving like their fathers, from heartache, from getting stuck in the wrong job. They had tried so hard with Isaac, yet he floated between extremes—intelligent and proud, unpredictable and unmanageable. Doctors suggested institutional solutions. Friends advocated for detaching with love and allowing Isaac to hit bottom. Oh, how simple and necessary the advice had sounded. Self-preservation without guilt. The magical healing of neglect. None of it sank in, not until one terrible night when Carl brought his gun to their bedside, just in case, he said, just in case. Finally they looked at the terrifying blank of their son and had no choice but to cry in each other’s arms.

  He was certain the portable toilet hadn’t been standing there when they left the house. It was one of the old blue ones from when his father owned the business, now with a Barclay Biffies label covering Samson Sanitation. Contractors were good at helping old ladies spend their money.

  “What’s wrong with your house?”

  His mother retrieved her Parliaments from a pocket. “Nothing. The biffy is for the shed.”

  There was nothing wrong with the shed, either. After they built the house, Carl’s workshop overwhelmed the garage and he decided he needed a new one. Marian had told him it had better not be unsightly. This miniature country cottage prefab had been his vengeful compliance. He wired the shed with enough outlets to run an appliance store and filled it with power tools and big red Craftsman tool
chests but his father must have felt his balls shrink every time he set foot inside. Outside it still resembled an oversized dollhouse: yellow vinyl clapboard siding, twin imitation casement windows flanked by tan ornamental shutters, two flower boxes and a hipped roof with a gabled dormer centered over the entry. All these features were jammed into fourteen feet of corner-to-corner symmetry with no sense of proportion.

  His mother rapped the cigarette package against her hand. A key slipped from the cellophane. She restored the cigarettes to her pocket and fitted the key in the knob. There was hardly any point in locking the hollow fiberglass door. He peered into a window box, its bottom covered with a whitish crust. No flowers had ever bloomed there.

  “We last used it to store your things. After you took the Winnebago, well, that was it for Carl. It didn’t mean he didn’t love you—that we didn’t… Well, it’s too late now. I’m sorry if any of it was precious to you.”

  She didn’t have to apologize. His parents had freed him to survive without attachment. Now he and his friends lived off the town’s discards and discarded in turn.

  The interior was almost empty. The built-in workbench remained, the wood dinged and scarred and speckled with constellations of drips, rings and crescent moons. A folded card table tucked against a wall. A trunk. A broom stood in the corner. A whiff of Pine-Sol.

  “What do you plan to do with it?” he said.

  “An experiment. All I can offer you right now is shelter. If it works out, we’ll see. If you fill it up with junk or burn it down—at least I’ll know there was nothing more I could do.”

  What about my birth certificate? It was the first of a thousand questions plucking at him and he knew better than to ask any aloud now. Sometimes his mother misspoke. Shelter was not all she offered. Taking in someone was never one thing.