You Are the Everything

by Karen Rivers

  But which one is the lie?

  Your sketchpad burned when the fuel tanks on the crashed plane ignited, sending a fireball ricocheting down the side of the mountain in France.

  Right?

  You have to show it to Dr. McDreamy.

  You have to demand an explanation.

  You will say, “This can’t be real.” You will say it with intent, a word that is quickly losing its meaning to you.

  Intent (n.): intention or purpose; something that is intended, chosen. An act of choice, intention, decision.

  Intent (adj.): the bridge between choice and action.

  Choice, choice, choice.

  Intent is choice.

  Life or death?

  CHOOSE.

  Tears come from both your eyes—a glass eye can, after all, still produce tears. Who knew?

  “Everything is a choice,” you whisper.

  You imagine that Dr. McDreamy will be comforting. He will look at the sketchbook and he will understand. He will say something in his low, dulcet voice: “Touch, feel, see, smell, anchor yourself and you’ll be well.” He’ll take the sketchpad from your hand, holding it in such a way that you can’t see what is inside, what would be impossible to have inside it. He will solve the mystery by erasing the mystery with intent and everything will get better again and you can preserve your happiness, which right now is feeling as fragile as splintering glass, shattering ice.

  “What is your intent?” he’ll say, looking at your eyes. “Believe in your power to intend.”

  “Intend is one of those words that, when repeated, begins to be meaningless,” you’ll say. “I intend to tend the tent with intent.”

  You laugh. Everything is funny. Nothing is funny.

  Something is very wrong here.

  Choose.

  Dr. McDreamy might be a good person to deliver the news to your parents. He has such an understanding face. He’s very good at that. You know he is. You’ve seen it on TV.

  But still, you might not show it to him yet.

  You might not quite be ready.

  “I love you,” you tell Orange Bunny, holding him briefly to your nose. You inhale and hold a breath of him in. “You’re my safe place,” you tell him. “We’ve got this. What’s a little head injury, anyway? Traumatic brain insult. People survive worse.”

  Orange Bunny’s neck flops listlessly to the side.

  You put him carefully back down on the shelf, resting him next to your phone charger, and a pile of books you haven’t touched since you moved in. War and Peace is on the top. But how did it get there already? Wasn’t that just handed out in class today?

  Half of its cover missing. Wa a Pea, you think, frowning. Wa a Pea.

  Your missing eye is hurting, the ghost of the pain that took it.

  A memory struggles to surface, like someone fighting against quicksand, kicking hard to try to get to the surface for just one more gasp of air.

  part three

  27.

  You are riding Midi, hard.

  It’s drizzling rain and a wind is whipping through the stand of birch trees that you’re passing through, the yellowing leaves falling like golden flakes of snow. Midi’s hooves are thundering against the path, which is cut through the knee-deep wild grasses and flowers. The vibration is jarring your teeth in your jaw, making your legs ache and your hips burn, but you keep going. The air is rich with the mulchy smell of fall.

  What month is it?

  You have lost some time.

  How much time have you lost?

  How much time can you lose if you’ve lost all the time that you had?

  “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

  Last night, you stayed up late, Googling “time.” “Time is just a construct,” it said, “that allows us to feel like we have some control over that which we can’t control.” You have no idea what that means but you also do, because you know that you have no control over anything. As if to agree with you, Midi throws his head back, nearly taking you out.

  “Hey,” you say, ineffectively.

  You keep firm hold on the reins but glance down at what you’re wearing: jeans, boots, layers of sweaters, a puffy down jacket. Your socks, peeking out over the top of the boots, are orange and black striped. Halloween? Is it October?

  Have you lost a whole month?

  And anyway, why are you galloping? You feel an impetus to hurry, but why?

  You grit your teeth, clench your jaw, try to find your way to where you are. Your thinking is getting murkier, that’s the problem. It’s all confusion and you don’t know what to do about it. Up ahead through the trees, you see another rider on a horse, galloping fast. Thundering, you think. A boy, you can tell from the shape of him, so it must be Josh Harris. Loving Josh Harris is the one thing that you are sure of, even when everything else is slipping away. You watch as the horse clears a fallen tree gracefully.

  “But Josh Harris doesn’t ride,” you say to Midi. “Josh Harris is afraid of horses.”

  A hazy image swims into view, but this isn’t your memory, it’s his, a story that he read out loud in English class, Before: a county fair, riding a pony, the pony throwing him and then rearing, his front hoof coming down inches from Josh Harris’s neck.

  When you asked him if he’d ride with you now, he said, “I can’t trust an animal who is that large and yet so totally submissive to people sitting on him and kicking him in the side.”

  “You allow me to sit on you,” you’d said, and then you’d done just that.

  Then you didn’t need to talk any more.

  Lips like velvet. What would Kath say now?

  “I wouldn’t say anything, duh. For one thing, that would be the most awkward thing of all time, talking to you while you’re actively making out. For another thing, I’m running out of things to say on the topic of Just Josh.”

  Midi slows, bucking, and arches his back. “Whoa,” you say. “Whoa there.”

  You rub his neck, easing him up. He slows to a trot. He’s out of breath, but so are you. Riding is more work than it looks.

  “Take it easy,” you whisper to yourself, to him. Gradually, he stops flicking his ears, and he settles into a walk. You feel your own pulse slow to match his stride. In the trees, small birds are whistling and chirping. Every once in a while, one flutters from one branch to the next, disappearing into the foliage, the sudden flurry of his wings startling you.

  Midi’s sides gradually stop heaving. He’s sweating. You wipe his damp neck. Now that you’ve slowed down, your hands are instantly cold, the ache from the chill cutting into your joints as swiftly as blades. Why aren’t you wearing gloves? Your skin is red and looks chapped from the chill and the wind. A manicure is mostly chipped away, but looks like it was dark blue.

  There is a ringing in your ears.

  You are on a narrow, cobbled street in Paris. A manicurist on the corner, a row of women leaning over small tables, painting the nails of casually sophisticated French women and a couple of obvious American tourists. “Let’s do it,” said Kath. “My treat.”

  Once inside, you’re nearly overwhelmed by the smell of chemicals. The manicurist soaks your hand in a hot bath and massages your knuckles. It’s heaven, like your wax bath at home, but better. Paris is so damp and the junky idiotic pain tries to cling on to you like a crab with claws, but her firm stroke gently eases it away. Kath chooses the color for you. It’s called “Schoolboy Blazer,” you remember that. “I don’t know why, but I feel like you’d like a schoolboy in a blazer, a private school fancy guy with all those extra manners and who wears a tie.”

  “I’d consider it if Josh Harris was the boy in question,” you say.

  “Your loyalty is totally adorable. Not sure he’s worthy of it, but whatever. You do you.”

  The polish
is blue.

  Dark blue.

  Your hands are holding the reins of a white horse and you are in the woods and the wind is pushing the leaves this way and that and the path is gravel and dust is kicked up by the horse’s hooves in clouds and you’re coughing and coughing.

  Why are your nails still Schoolboy Blazer blue?

  When did you—?

  You drop the reins, letting Midi take you wherever he wants to go, stuffing your hands into your sleeves so you can’t see your nails, hoping to warm your throbbing knuckles. You pass a tree hung with shoes but then when you look closer this time, you realize it’s a flock of crows, rising into the sky, loudly.

  You try to organize your thoughts or at least get hold of them, which is like trying to grab a handful of fish out of the sea: They keep slipping through your fingers, silvering away in the beams of sunlight coming through the surface. You look up at the sun. It’s sitting high in the sky, mostly behind veils of damp gray clouds, but still white-bright, starlight, trying to burn through. You guess that it is afternoon. It must be a weekend. So say it’s a weekend in October then.

  What have you missed?

  Who is that boy?

  You recognize the path as the one that leads up the side of the mountain. From the uppermost part of the trail, you can branch right to go to the lake or left to go to a viewing spot where you can see the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport. You know that, but you don’t know what month it is, you don’t know who is on the other horse, you don’t really remember anything beyond the first days of school, getting into your dad’s car to go see Dr. McDreamy, your sketchbook stuffed into your bag, just in case.

  “When are you going to start driving that shiny red truck?” he’d said.

  You didn’t know how to tell him that you couldn’t, just in case you forgot how when you were pulling out onto the highway, the river of cars drowning you while you sat, stalled, unsure of how to make it go.

  “There you are!” A boy’s voice pulls you out of your reverie. He pulls his horse up. He’s panting and his horse’s sides are heaving. The horse is gray, dappled, a longer dark mane. He looks like a living version of a plastic horse that used to sit on your windowsill when you were little.

  “Oh, he’s so beautiful,” you say.

  “Yes, well. He is rather nice, I know. But what happened to you, Pixie? Thought you were a good enough rider to keep up.”

  “And I thought you didn’t ride.”

  “Why would you think that? That’s a bit mad. We do this every weekend. Ohhhh, wait a minute. This is one of those things, right? Where you glitch. Traumatic head injury. Don’t worry. It happens.”

  “Oh,” you say. “I—”

  “Do I have to explain the whole thing again, about how you and I are secretly in love, although you persist in seeing that terribly good-looking Josh-person and acting as though our love is just a figment of my imagination?”

  You roll your eyes. “I’m so sure that’s an accurate portrayal of the reason why we are riding horses up the mountain and freezing to death in the process.”

  “I told you to wear gloves,” he says.

  “Well, if you did, I don’t remember, so it doesn’t matter, I’m still cold. Let’s go back.”

  “But you promised to show me the mysterious Jupe landing strip! Where all those poor, displaced Jupiterians decide that Wyoming is the only place they can go, after an asteroid smashed into their own planet in, what did you say? 1994? Taking their bloody time getting here, aren’t they?”

  “Do you always talk in paragraphs? It’s exhausting.”

  “Yes, I do, and you like it. Hmmm. I rather enjoy this, actually, you not remembering. Makes things easier.”

  “That sounded both incredibly creepy and incredibly threatening. Nice combination. You should consider selling that as a marketing campaign to McDonald’s or something. Big Mac: Now both creepy AND threatening. Enjoy one today!” You turn Midi around. “I think we’ll go ahead and turn back.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t be like that. I was just taking the piss,” he says.

  “Do English people really say that? Of all the things that came from England, that’s one of the worst. That word. Ugh.”

  “Which word? Taking? Terrible, isn’t it? Can’t think why I get away with it.”

  “Oh, ha ha. You’re very funny. So funny, I forgot to laugh. Which, by the way, isn’t something I’ve said since I was nine. You bring out the nine-year-old in me, and that is not a good thing.” You feel in your back pocket for your phone. Not there. You pat your coat pockets, finding a granola bar and a bottle of water, but still no phone. You unwrap the granola bar and eat it. It tastes stale. You rewrap the remainder and put it back in your pocket. You wonder if the jacket is even yours. You’re not sure it looks like something you would choose. On the other hand, it does look like something someone in Wyoming would wear. Or someone in an ad for L.L.Bean.

  “Oh pleeeeeeeeeease take me to the Jupiter Airport. I promise that if a spaceship lands, I’ll get directly on it and be gone on the next shuttle to the homeland.”

  “England?”

  “No, silly, play along. I meant Jupiter. Now let’s go to the creek and let these poor horses drink before they drop dead.”

  You follow him, rubbing Midi’s neck. The horses wade right into the creek, which is more like a river than when you last saw it. The water rushes around their knees.

  “Now this is more like it, Pixie,” says Benedict Cumberbatch. “Ideal. A pretty girl. A pretty river. Pretty fall colors, et cetera. Very pretty, all of it.”

  “I have a boyfriend. I haven’t forgotten that.”

  “Right, right, I know. He’s very tall. And you’d never consider me to be a contender anyway, because, how did you put it, I’m too snively? Did you say snively? That doesn’t sound like a very American thing to say.”

  “I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I never said you were snively. I don’t even know what it means. That your nose is drippy? You are a bit of a drip. Maybe I said you were drippy, but even that seems more like something you would say than something I would say.”

  “Benedict Cumberbatch looks like a snively weasel. It’s one hundred percent implausible that Emma Stone would fall for him so exuberantly. She is a kick-ass woman and he is a worm.”

  “I may have said wormy,” you say.

  “Drippy is definitely an English thing. And, compared to wormy—which is terribly rude, by the way, unless you’re talking about a dog—it’s downright complimentary. I’ll take drippy.” He wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Although I’m also snively right now. We also say wet. If you were English, you’d say that you can’t fall in love with me because I’m too wet.”

  You look at him, dubiously. “Are you wet?”

  “No, I’m not even damp. See what I did there? You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “Not even a little bit. I’m faking it. I’m confused, mostly. But as you know, I had a head injury. Dr. . . .” Your brain goes blank again on the name, but you forge ahead. “Dr. McDreamy says that when you have a traumatic brain insult, your memories are in files and you have to, you have to, you have to . . . Oh, forget it. I don’t know right now. Sometimes things get . . . hazy.”

  “I hate to say it, but ‘hazy’ sounds concerning. Have you told your doctor? Very odd name, he has, by the way. Not sure that’s a real name. He might be a fraud.”

  “I don’t know,” you say, suddenly starting to laugh. “I don’t remember if I’ve told him or not.”

  He laughs, too. “Of course you don’t.”

  You laugh and laugh and laugh for so long that your belly aches and tears streak down your cheeks. It feels so good to laugh like that. It feels like the point. It makes you think of Kath. You don’t even know any girls in Wyoming, except Poppy, you guess, but she is neither funny nor your f
riend. Just thinking about her makes you feel queasy in a Pavlovian way.

  Something about her once made you throw up.

  A rush of saliva fills your mouth.

  “Okay, you’re laughing. Good. That’s good. But does it mean you’ll show me where the aliens will land when they arrive?” he says.

  “Fine, fine,” you say. “Yes. You’ve won me over with the laughing. But not in an ‘I want to make out with you’ way. Only in a ‘we are sort of friends, I guess’ way. So don’t get excited.”

  “Too late. I am already ninety-two percent excited.”

  “Well, settle down to something in the low forties. Let’s ride.”

  He nudges his horse into a slow walk and you keep talking. “Did I ever tell you that somewhere in these mountains, they found mummies of tiny people? Like, a foot tall. They weren’t babies, they were actual adult humans. Maybe they built the Jupiter landing strip here because the Jupes were already here! Little tiny Jupes.” You snort with laughter.

  “Hmm, what was that Dr. McDreamy said? Traumatic brain insult?”

  You have to give Midi a kick to get him going. “No, I’m serious! Before the crash, I did a huge project about Wyoming. It was called: Wyoming: Weird and Wild. I think I even won some kind of prize for it. I remember a slide show and having to talk in front of the school. Anyway, it had all these fun facts.” You close your eyes, remembering. Midi keeps walking, following Dwayne’s horse. You can remember exactly what you were wearing: a hoodie that said, Wyoming: The Equality State. Their motto is actually “Equal rights,” which, now that you think about it, is why you picked it in the first place. “I can’t remember what I did last Monday, but I can remember that tiny mummies were found in the San Pedro Mountains and that they were called ‘the little people’ but now that I’ve said that out loud, I’m wondering if I’m remembering wrong, because wouldn’t that be a huge deal?”

  “Uh, yeah. Tiny mummy people? Def a huge deal.”

  “Right, so maybe I’m wrong. But I think I’m not wrong. I’m pretty sure I remember it.”