“No one knows what’s going to happen,” I said, realizing it. “So that’s a neat part about the future.”
She nodded, thanked me, and I departed feeling like an angel. Together Ty and I found Rust in the ballroom beside a catering cart stocked with desserts, an invitation in his hand. Two hundred and fifty dollars per plate, he showed us. The after-party another hundred. Pretty cheap by fundraiser standards, downright laughable in some of the rooms I’d been in, but Ty did a triple-take. “I thought they were supposed to burn their art!”
“You’re such a rube,” I said.
“He’s not a rube,” Rust snapped. “They are supposed to burn their art. They’re supposed to destroy everything! That’s what the burn’s about. It’s about annihilating the ego. It’s not about . . .” He struggled, gesturing finally to the dessert cart before him, the elegantly adorned treats varnished in egg wash, ganached to velvet, whipped and pinwheeled into edible cups and cubes of pastel fondant.
Rust was right. Ty was not the rube. “Come on,” I said. “Burning Man has an airport for private jets.”
“The Valley people bring their own bathrooms,” Ty said, too impressed.
“And air-conditioned yurts and gourmet chefs,” I confirmed.
“Oh really?” Rust asked. “Where did you read that, in The New York Times?”
“Yes actually.”
Ty said, “Elon’s camp has Sherpas. That sounds really nice.”
“Elon,” said Rust, his face pleated in frustration, sorrow even, his hands curled around the handle of the catering cart. It occurred to me that he might flip it. He looked beautiful, but scary. Possibly this was the mushrooms. I wished we were outside and then—voilà!—we were.
We exploded out the back doors of the theater, Rust pushing the cart up the handicap ramp. I suggested we take the desserts to my hotel—I still hadn’t checked in, had left my breast pump in Ty’s car parked by the bookstore—but as we pushed the rattling cart along the river Rust had a better idea.
He led us to the Arlington Avenue bridge and beneath it, to the place where Wingfield Island parts the black waters of the Truckee, a place known locally as the Juggalo bathtub, where we distributed the desserts to the Juggalos and their Juggalo dogs. Someone wondered lamely if that was a good idea, for the dogs. Someone said cave dogs ate carob.
In gratitude the Juggalos offered us swigs from their forties and a trash bag of old popcorn they’d pulled from the dumpster behind the movie theater. We took the trash bag of popcorn across the bridge to the island, beyond the amphitheater and the Port-a-Johns with needles all around. We picnicked at the spot from which we’d once watched a white-water rafting competition, kayakers flipping in the man-made rapids. Sometimes it took them a long time to come up, the kayakers. I reminded Rust and Ty of that day—neither of them remembered the kayaks flipping into the air, the awful, jerky, electrifying bob of them overturned.
My breasts were hard, begging. My teeth seemed serene. In my tote bag I found my iPod. What a wonder this device was! How heavy! How unattached! It accomplished next to nothing—perfect fetish object of the Oregon Trail Generation. Ty and Rust coveted it, then went back to staring at the sky in silence. Receiving messages, I hoped.
The iPod felt amazing, the gummy wheel right where I left it. The tendons of my hand and arm had memorized the faintest ticks of its rotation, and these were still there, a musculoskeletal time capsule. A sonic time capsule too, for I remembered now that the iPod’s offerings dated from the era between another now-lost iPod and one stolen computer, containing not all the music I’d ever owned, as the iPod had come to in my imagination, but in fact only the music from a very narrow era, a microgeneration comprising approximately my last year in Reno.
I decided to do some hardcore time travel.
I wheeled to the Ps. There, between Paul Simon and the Pixies, I found my father, a recording of him ripped from a CD I’d bought that year from a more innocent internet. Its title is “Paul Watkins Reflects, June 1988.”
I put my feet in the river. Maybe this is where he would have ended up anyway, my father, if he’d stayed at home in Sherman Oaks, kept singing and playing music. On my iPod. He could have had a record deal, my mother always bragged, if not for the fire.
June, 1988, says his sandstone voice from Tecopa. My father is making a tape for someone who’s made one for him, some Nick. In my headphones he says, Hello, Nick. This is Paul, Paul Watkins.
June 1988. He has twenty-five months to live. He thanks Nick for his concern and assures him that his cancer is not an uncomfortable topic because he’s got a good remission going. He is in a victorious position.
This turned out to have a really happy ending, he assures this Nick. I have this old homestead in the desert, with water, trees. I have two wonderful children, little girls, three and four. Claire and Lise. Claire is the four-year-old. Lise is the three-year-old. They’re just delightful. I have a wonderful wife I’m very much in love with, Martha. That’s truly a blessing. It’s truly wonderful. Not that it’s all, how would you say? Daisies and sunbeams, or whatever. But it is, pretty much, much of the time. And getting better all the time.
He says, I have a really good chance of having a really wonderful life.
In two years he’ll be in Malibu. But for now he is in the past tense.
Cancer served me very well. It was as though I got grabbed ahold of by the neck, like God grabbed me by the neck and said, “You want to look at your life and, uh, get it back in the productive mode? You want to really live it, or do you want to continue to rape, pillage and plunder?”
He breathes. I breathe.
Not that I was out raping, pillaging and plundering. But in a sense, yes, there is that element there, the element of subjugating the women in my life, there’s the element of not being able to be happy, of not being able to be happy having children.
I’m reminded that my mother called me once, my last year in Reno, the year of our Lord iPod. She’d just slit her wrists with a steak knife. “I want to say goodbye,” she said. Then, confoundingly, “I miss your dad.”
“Well, you’re not going to join him,” I said. “I mean, if you kill yourself you’re going to hell, right?” We were tired, falling back on a cosmology neither of us believed in.
“Then I’ll see him there,” she said.
“You think Dad’s in hell?”
She laughed. “Sweetheart, he was Charles Manson’s number one procurer of young girls.”
Downstream, two buildings rose on either bank of the Truckee, a parking garage on one side, the courthouse on the other. Maybe six stories each. Somewhere in the parking garage there was a spot where a man once stood and aimed and shot across the river into the courthouse, into the office of the judge who had presided over his divorce. Needless to say, the ex-wife was already dead. All these ghosts were headed to the basin from which no water escapes. That did not seem so bad, the current holding me in its strong arms.
My father said, to this Nick, whoever the fuck he was, There definitely is mystery and magic, and this is a matter of fact. . . . Life is in fact a wonderful and wide, wide thing. I am an avid lover of life. I suppose that’s what’s gotten me into so much trouble.
Rust appeared beside me. I was somehow in water up to my chest, holding the iPod high overhead like the very saddest person. From across the tugging black water a Juggalo called out, “Be careful, you psycho bitch!” I remember slipping on a rock, dropping the iPod, my father saying, There’s nothing wrong with not knowing who you are. Rust grasped my wrist and reached back for Ty, stretched toward us from a high rock. “Get off me,” I guess I said, though I didn’t pull back or hit anyone, as I remember wanting to.
After the iPod fiasco, we walked wet and shivering to a bench. We sat for some time until the free tourist bus called the Spirit picked us up. We were silent, lulled by the bus’s vibrations. I watched
my face in the greasy window and dozed off, the Spirit circuiting the city who knows how many times until Rust nudged me at our stop downtown, at the mouth of the valet loop at one of the big casinos. Mine, I realized, though I’d never checked in. We sat on one of the brass luggage carts parked near the door. The sun was coming up. I was wet and cold but everything felt new. I swelled with love for this grotesque crossing where everything was always open. In Reno there was no emotional last call. A person could completely avoid the black wave at bedtime. Just stay up until you collapse. I missed that. I missed how you were always wanted here, how you never missed anything, how the party didn’t start until you got here. But Reno also felt, for the first time—and possibly this was the drugs—over.
I looked at my old friends, sitting beside me on the shiny luggage cart smudged with fingerprints. I told them, “I’m probably not going to go home.”
Ty spoke first. “But all your stuff is there.”
“I don’t need it,” I said. “I’m burning my life out from the inside like a canoe.”
Ty began, “What about Theo and—”
“I’m unhappy,” I said. “I know happiness is a scam, but . . . unhappiness is real.”
“She’s Gatsbying,” Rust explained. “You’re trying to Gatsby.”
“You’re supposed to get rid of everything that doesn’t spark joy.” I’d read this in a women’s magazine in the waiting room of the pediatric dentist and it had had a profound impact on me.
“Joy?” Ty asked, as if reminded of a charming, antique sentiment he had not thought about for years.
Rust shrugged. “My paper towel dispenser brings me joy.”
“You do have a really great paper towel dispenser,” I said. “I’ll grant you that. But I’m talking about real joy. Elation. I’m talking about uncontrollable laughter of the soul.”
“You don’t feel that?” Ty said.
Against my better judgment I said, “You do?” I pressed the bite bruise on my forearm, liking the pain. “I don’t feel anything. I’m just . . . floating. Like they’re all I have connecting me to land. There’s a lot of pressure on one spit of sand. What with the sea levels rising. Is this making sense? I haven’t laughed in like, a year.”
A valet ambled over from the valet kiosk. “You can’t sit there,” he said. We stood.
“I get it,” said Rust.
“What I get,” said Ty, “is that you’re turning out to be a dirtbag.”
The thought had occurred to me. I said, “I guess I am.”
“She’s not a dirtbag,” said Rust, who’s always known what everyone is and isn’t. “That’s the problem. She’s not a dirtbag, but she wants to be.”
I said I wanted to behave like a man, a slightly bad one.
Ty said I was certainly doing that. Rust said maybe I should get some rest.
“Okay, yeah, see you,” I said, not hugging or touching either of them, heading toward the casino.
“That’s very Oregon Trail,” called Ty. “Not good at goodbyes.”
I turned back, considered trying, but was distracted by a Tesla pulling into the valet rotunda with Morning Edition cranked. A Rotary luncheon type in a peach blazer and a pristine cowboy hat with a seed-bead hatband popped out of the Tesla and said my name.
“You’re being recognized,” said Rust.
“You’re famous,” said Ty, impressed at last.
The Rotarian said, “They told me you were punctual, but wow!” She shook my hand. “And you’re wet!” she said, as if this was some sort of bonus.
This was Wendy, a volunteer with the Nevada Arts and Humanities Council, a daisy chain of words vaguely familiar to me. Wendy was to be my author escort this morning. “We’re headed to Hug High, isn’t that right?” She opened the passenger side door. “Will your friends be joining us?” Without awaiting an answer she said, “That’s wonderful, just wonderful!”
Ty rode shotgun and flirted with Wendy by complimenting her bumper stickers (gravity: just a theory and gravity: it’s the law!) while Rust and I got carsick in the backseat. It no longer surprised me when the person elected to drive me around was a terrible driver. Maybe the pressure of escort service warps an otherwise decent driver into a bad one. Case in point: Wendy, confused, tentative, apologetic, fearful, and hyper-yielding, insisting others take her turn at four-ways, coming to full stops in scenarios requiring a merge, perversely obliged to make conversation all the while. She explained that she had never been to Hug High—“It’s pretty rough, isn’t it?” Funnily enough she actually had no idea where the school was!
Wendy fiddled with her GPS, refusing Ty’s help with navigation. She had every last little thing under control. We three should sit back and relax, she said, running a red light. I fantasized that we might never make it to Hug, as I had prepared nothing, did not even have a copy of my book on me. Turning in to the high school at last, Wendy became trapped in the bus lane. She would rather not let us disembark and walk to the office, though we could all see clearly from the car the locked front door marked Visitors—she was the escort, after all. She circled the campus three times before accruing the courage to enter the faculty parking lot, where a nervous assistant principal waited. The assistant principal looked me up and down, clearly considering hosting a writer at his school a tremendous favor to the Council, personified in Wendy, who in turn clearly believed the benevolence belonged to the Council for spreading the creative spirit to this underserved school. Meanwhile I of course felt it was I—coming down and still quite damp—who was truly altruistic, despite the fact that I had, as I’ve said, prepared nothing and been paid for that nothing long ago, an honorarium I’d spent on edibles and a cashmere sweater.
The assistant principal noted that I had not responded to any of his secretary’s emails inquiring whether my presentation required audio/visual components.
“Of course it does,” said Ty.
Rust said, “The professor’s presentation is extremely audio/visual.”
“For different learning styles,” I explained, and everyone nodded solemnly.
The assistant principal sat us in front of the guidance office in a row of metal chairs welded together. A counselor came out of her office and said, “The students are so looking forward to your presentation, Professor.” I asked her how many students were expected to attend the assembly. “All of them!” she chirruped. “Though the sophomores have ASVAB today so they will have to miss.” She made a pouty face—for all those black and brown and poor sophomores tossed by the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery into the chum bucket of war, I could only assume. I made a pouty face back. When the guidance counselor returned to her office, I asked my friends in a desperate whisper-scream what the fuck I was going to do.
Ty shrugged. “Do your thing you do when you teach.”
“I teach pass-fail electives at a flagship institution! That’s ten to twelve of our best and brightest who semi want to be there. These kids are gen pop!”
Rust said, “How about that game they play at camp where you make a story together and everyone says a word?”
“Exquisite Corpse,” I said. “That’s what it’s called.”
“See, you’re such a pro!” said Ty.
“Let’s practice!” Rust clasped his hands together like a youth pastor, excited to see me get some purchase on my rumored expertise. I said, “We’ll each say a word . . .”
“I’ll start!” said Rust. “ ‘Once upon.’ Fuck! Harder than it looks. ‘Once.’ ”
“Upon,” I said.
“A,” Ty said.
“Time.”
“There.”
“Was.”
“A.”
“Tall.”
“Lusty.”
“Dild.”
I put my face in my hands. “I can’t do this! With adolescents? In a public school? Fuck. I’m
fucked.” I stood up, thought about running but my butthole winked. I blew it out in the girls’ bathroom, washed my hands and got some water from a drinking fountain. Stu-co painted homecoming posters hung overhead with masking tape. I felt the paper crinkle and it made me feel a little better, as did Rust, who had begged a pack of Post-its and a pen from a pretty secretary and used these to write tiny notes of encouragement and ardor that he was now sliding into the vents of random lockers. This is not a mistake. The cut worm forgives the plow. That sort of thing. He gave me one.
You are not a fuckup.
Just then a tone sounded and the halls coagulated with teens. Lockers slammed. I felt as afraid as I had in my own high school, though it was a more diffuse fear, since it was difficult to discern the social strata that had been so painfully obvious to me as a kid and which I knew determined all life for the students here, so I felt afraid of nearly all of them, minus the ones who were so plainly at the bottom of the pecking order that they made me want to die—real “It gets better” types. I hoped Rust’s notes would find them. The assistant principal reappeared and hustled us to the gymnasium. “Simply plug your device into the source cable on the podium,” he said, showing me the stage. “Push audio mute to get sound, visual mute to get picture. If you want the screen lowered, push the down arrow.”
With the student body minus the sophomores in the gym, the teachers set about silencing their segments of the bleachers. Sit, sit, sit, they said. The assistant principal went to the podium and read a list of small meaningless facts about me written by myself. The audience clapped as required. Ty nudged me and I stood, dizzy. I thought: I might pass out! What a deus ex machina that would be!
But I made it to the podium, the AV hookup waiting like a forked tongue. I shivved my hands into my damp pockets, half expecting the iPod. I found my phone instead, slight and omniscient.
I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness Page 11