That she thought someplace like this would be good for him—for a little cocksucking sissy, was how she meant it—made him want to leave. He thought of living his life here, of going to schools where they stressed what they called tolerance, where the teachers warned them how you love who you love. It made his eyes burn. Somehow she’d figured him out and now she wanted to move away from everything they knew, too ashamed to let anyone see her son grow up all wrong. He was my last hope, he imagined her telling Shannon over coffee. Colin would graduate, go to college, marry Chelsea, have babies. Where’d I go wrong, Shan? Dead husband, dropout daughter, both boys total dead ends. Colin was grinding his teeth in the shower. Don’t ever have kids, his mother would tell Shannon. The water was starting to cool and his skin felt wrapped in wet leather. As he dried off and styled his hair he tested various lies, new ways to convince her he wasn’t ruined, that he could grow up how she wanted. At every conversation with the mother in his head he grew angrier. When he stepped into the room she was on the balcony, ashing into the parking lot. He slammed the hotel door and shouted how it was too cold, how she didn’t care about him, how she only thought of herself, and when she didn’t knock right away he sat fuming on his bed until, unable to stand it any longer, he wrenched open the door and heaved a bottle of shampoo over the railing. He stood trembling in the doorway, nothing left to say.
It was over when she pulled his head against her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and he wished, as she led him back inside, that he was still small enough to be carried.
It was a little after six when Diane left the motel. As the morning pierced the room’s dark funk of sleep, she told Colin, who rolled over with a groan, that she’d be back by noon. On her way downstairs she smiled at everything a person could accomplish, or even enjoy, in an entire morning. The sun had been up a half hour and she could believe she knew her way around and had lived there for years. There was a dry cleaner’s on the corner and she took note, as though someday she’d drop off a coat or a comforter. Halfway down that block she saw a blue mailbox sandwiched between two palms. A little farther, a store that sold Mexican produce. In this other life, she would shop for groceries at little stores like these, green peppers here and the beef to stuff them from a nearby butcher. Here she was, walking by everything she’d ever need.
She wouldn’t miss home. As she walked by a gate of flowering vines, behind which she could see Latino boys setting tables for breakfast, she knew she would never think back to Minnesota and ask herself why she left. Except you’ll never see your grandchild, she thought, and the very word—grandchild—filled her with terror, as if the entire globe would fracture at any second and they’d all drift off into space.
A maid at the motel had told her about the doughnut shop. Diane was glad to see it was everything she wanted: a store on the corner, booths along one wall, huge windows hiding under blue awnings. Out front there was a plastic newspaper stand and she bought a copy of the LA Times. She tried to make small talk with the barista but the line was too long and she felt self-conscious. It was still early and she was surprised to find it so busy. In her booth, right up against the sunniest window, she laid the paper out in front of her. None of the headlines made sense to her, all follow-ups from stories earlier in the week—controversies she hadn’t yet heard about, names of victims in unfamiliar shootings, political uproar that everyone, the article said, was already aware of. She pushed the news section away and thumbed for the arts. For a half hour she skimmed movie and play reviews, none of which made her want to spend money. It was only when she began searching again, looking for the travel section, that she realized it was Friday. Her coffee was cold and she wrinkled her face at the last gritty sip. They were expecting her at work on Monday morning.
If they left now—if they shoved everything in their suitcases and headed for the nearest highway—they might be able to make it. She’d driven overnight before, when Heather got sick on a Girl Scout trip, out in the Badlands. Ten years ago, she thought, and it sounded made up, as though someone had told her the folds of her brain uncoiled could circle the earth, or that whales have hearts as big as cars. There was no way she could make it home. Not as the only driver, not at this point in her life. She went to the counter and ordered another cup. The café had filled up and she was alone at her giant booth. She gathered up her paper and sat at the counter, next to an old woman who’d brought her sewing.
Why hadn’t Colin told her it was Friday? This was the kind of thing that would get him worked up and anxious. Instead, he’d never seemed more relaxed. She thought of him back at Nipton, lying in the sun or playing solitaire on the porch. Life must be so hard for him, she thought, and the fact that her son too was suffering made her want to sever every tie to their old life. The thought of going home, dropping their bags in the foyer, turning on all the lights, cranking up the air-conditioning, and trying to pick up where they left off made her chest feel crushed. Having to live—for many years to come—above that room full of his notebooks, his bullets, and the leftover electricity of the incurable hatred he’d felt for his family, seemed worse than pitching tents in the desert and letting it all go to bill collectors, neighbors, and whoever else wandered into the abandoned house where that man, they’d heard, had shot himself in the head. Where that woman, they’d heard, went crazy and ran off to live in the wild. She pictured her house full of birds and squirrels, the walls varicose with veins of moss and mold. “You have no idea,” she whispered out loud, and coughed like it hadn’t happened.
“No, I don’t,” said the old woman. Diane pretended not to hear and read about new rocks on Mars that indicated running water. It was one of those stories Alan would’ve collected and transcribed, no date or source in the margin. Just a story to blend in with the others, real or made up. Last night I watched my wife sleep, she thought, and wanted to cry at the cruelty of knowing she’d never know. Had he or hadn’t he? What was left of him, falling apart in the ground, that she could beat her fists against? On what could she inflict pain? How much of her future had he imagined? How far ahead had he looked to see if she’d make it?
Would she make it?
She didn’t want to know. She shut off all of that, the world deep inside her. Here she was, in a room with other people. Turning pages, phones clicking and beeping, coffee gurgling in its percolator, waxed paper crinkling beneath the wet slap of falling-apart doughnuts. This was real and she forced herself to pay attention. She tried to have her morning.
In life, she rarely met anyone. The man who asked for the sports section was attractive but she tried to ignore it. I’m trying to live here, she thought. “This paper’s mine, actually.” She winced at her words. “I mean I bought it. But I’m definitely”—she thumbed through the sections again—“I definitely won’t be reading sports. It’s all yours.” She smiled as she handed it over. Long ago, she lost whatever ability she once had to talk to men, to charm them on the spot. He took a small table near the window and popped the lid off his cup. He’d ordered one of those foamy drinks, and—after his first sip—licked his lips in a way that, she convinced herself, would one day irritate her.
Every year, in the Peruvian Andes, locals gather in the small, steep-sloped mountain town of Coyllurqui to celebrate the Blood Festival. The living symbol of tying a wild condor to a furious, full-grown bull could date back centuries, long before the Spanish genocide, but is more likely an expression of resistance against colonial rule: the sacred Andean condor left with no choice but to peck to death the Spanish bull beneath its talons. The birds are captured a month in advance and fed a diet of entrails. If victorious, they are forced to drink chicha—a type of beer made from corn—before they’re taken to the mountainside at the edge of town and cut loose in a gesture of freedom, whether or not they’re still able to fly. That’s awful, Diane thought. But so was the urge, coming to her without warning, to cut the story from that morning’s paper and transcribe it in a notebook.
It was just before
eight when she went over and sat across from him. She pulled the chair closer to the table, wincing as its legs scraped against the linoleum. The Times was folded under her arm and when it fell to the floor, next to her chair, she made it look intentional. “It’s a strange morning,” she said. He hadn’t put down his paper—only peered over it as she acted out her little play.
“Strange, yeah?”
“For me, yes.” She cocked her head to the side and read a headline on the outside cover, something about football helmets and dementia. “Strange morning in a strange city.”
“You come to collect your paper? I was almost done but if you need to go it’s all yours.” As he began to fold it up she put out both hands and shook her head, wrinkling her nose.
“No, no—God no. I’ll never look at sports. I mean, it’s not my thing. Nobody in my—I just never got into it. Too many rules.” She inched forward in her chair. “You know when you’re watching something? A game on TV? None of it makes sense to me. All those guys start running around like you unpaused a movie, and then they blow a whistle and they all stop. I never know where the whistle comes from—why they stop the clock or anything.” She was fidgeting, she realized, and she ran her hands through her hair and down the back of her neck before she let them come together at her throat. “It’s all Greek to me.”
“Greek indeed.” He tapped the newspaper, a photo of a baseball player squinting up at the sun. “It’s just something we did, in my family. Dad put us all through sports—even the girls. But to me it’s just…” His eyes went white as he looked out the window. The sun was everywhere and had bleached the sidewalk into the street, the street into the storefronts on the other side. “Just for comfort. Something I might watch or read about to empty my head. Like how some people do yoga. It’s like my yoga, or my meditation maybe.”
Diane nodded. She wanted to make a joke but there was nothing there, nothing in her head. She blushed and looked away. “Never mind. Sorry to have bothered—”
“You are having a strange morning.” He sipped his coffee. “But strange is good. Strange is real.” There was another faint line of foam on his lip and she wanted, maybe too motherly, to wipe it away. Instead she gestured to her own lip. “Strange,” he went on, “in this city…you’d be surprised how hard ‘strange’ is to come by. Even the weirdest people”—he nodded out the window—“they just do it for attention. To get noticed.”
“You have a little—some—” She touched her lip again. “A mustache.”
He licked it away and wiped his hand over his mouth. “Thanks,” he said. That he blushed made her feel like she was getting somewhere. “To be honest, I only asked for the sports section when I saw you wrapped up in A&E. Thought I’d give you a chance to finish up with it. If you want to know the truth…” His skin was still dappled with little flushes of red. He wasn’t a young man. This wasn’t Daniel Cartwright from Accounting. He had to be halfway through his forties, she realized, maybe fifty, and could still smile with reserve. He was searching for the right word, which she could tell meant a lot to him.
“The truth,” she said. “Always. I love the truth.”
“If you want to know the truth, I had plans. I was going to let you finish reading, but not finish your coffee. I was going to get up when you were near the bottom of your cup—you can tell by how people hold it when they sip. I was going to ask for the arts section. In the nicest way.” He buried his smile in his coffee cup, where again he came away with that stupid foam mustache she’d already fallen in love with—that made the blood in her veins bubble like soda from a just-opened bottle. This wasn’t at all what she had in mind when she got out of bed, and for the first time in years she was grateful for the stupid, desperate voice deep inside her.
They talked about art after that, or at least he did. She said she was only visiting and he pretended not to have known, not to have recognized her accent. He began to learn her story: divorced, two kids, looking to move somewhere more…more…“Cultured,” he offered, and she smiled. “If it’s culture you want,” he said, “we’ll start today,” and by ten o’clock they’d whittled a list of six museums down to three, all along Wilshire Boulevard. She was in town for another week, she explained. There was nothing she could miss.
“It’s a way for us to see the consequences of our actions on paper,” the boisterous one explains to the kid with the backpack. This after their introductions, their stroll—they call it—down memory lane. The coffee shop is emptier now but they’ve lowered their voices. It’s hard to hear anyone but the one man who wants to be heard. “Sorry”—he shakes his head—“the potential consequences. If you choose to give in to the voice in your head. Anyway, my disaster scenario begins with a phone call.” He reads aloud from his future—a possible future. Disaster scenario: a way to calculate, from whatever if you’re afraid of, the hell that will unravel.
For years I went back to that library, Colin’s father had written. I haven’t seen them since, he’d written. Colin set the notebook aside and exchanged it for the other one, the secret one he’d hidden in his luggage, and savored the details of his father’s possible hell.
He’d woken from one of those dreams that can’t be undreamt. At his new high school, tucked away in a mansion-covered hill, nothing was difficult. It was a special kind of school where there were pairs of boys and pairs of girls, but no pairs of both, and from the way the pairs took care of each other—picking sweater lint from each other’s shoulders, parting one another’s hair—Colin knew this was a sanctuary, a place where you could meet your boyfriend after class and kiss—lightly, chastely—next to your locker. Everyone would tell you things like You guys look so cute together and I can see it’s really love. For a few seconds after he woke it was still real. He was still going there after a shower and his usual bowl of cereal. When the motel came back to him—and with it their drive across the country and the things they’d left behind—he couldn’t do anything but lie there and wonder which, of all the ways, was best to die. Everything he’d learned in life told him he would never be happy. Through the cheap glass in the window he could hear traffic, kids screaming at a nearby playground, people chatting on the street. Lifelong misery was certain; wasn’t it smart to end it now? He spent a long time crying before he got out of bed. But then, the motel room and the world in which it existed seemed changed. As he searched for clean clothes, killing himself was no longer the first thing on his mind. In fact, as he paced from the window to the television, he changed his mind about everything. At first it felt like a great loss, his future family—wife and children—ripped out of him, the house he was supposed to one day own crumbling into rubble. But when it dissipated, he felt welling within him something like air or light. He’d shed weight. He’d cut out a part of his body that never belonged, a vestigial organ infected and sick. He considered running away, then and there. Instead, he decided on a trial run: if it went wrong, he could go back to the way things were. If he pulled it off, he could live on his own. In the shower, he promised himself out loud that he was “washing away the past,” as if someone might record it and hold him accountable.
Only a block from the hotel he bought two sodas from an outdoor vending machine and drank them both. By the time he set foot on Hollywood Boulevard he was thirsty again. Under an awning outside of a store called Star Glass he searched his pockets for more change. He recognized, nestled in the window display, pipes like the one Heather had used, back in some other lifetime. It hadn’t even been two years, but he no longer recognized that stupid kid who swallowed every word of his sister’s bullshit. Even if it hurt to think of Heather, the image of her soft and pregnant and kind—actually, sincerely kind—like a wound. Before he could figure out what to feel, a man with a beard down to his chest came out of the store and shooed him away.
Hollywood hadn’t been like this two days ago. Now, whenever he glanced into a store, the owners told him to keep moving, to “come back when you’re old enough.” Stores full of tangles o
f lace people called underwear, others that sold nothing but bladed weapons. Nobody would let him inside. There were stars on the sidewalk and they had names like “Richard Gere” and “Meryl Streep,” but it wasn’t the Hollywood they wanted you to believe in. Twitchy women asked him for money. Sunburnt homeless men slept on bus stop benches. Colin could feel his heart climbing, as though he might puke. He’d never seen anything like this and he wondered if it was always there—if his mother, standing next to him, created some force field that covered it up, that made it safe. For the first time he felt that if he giggled at someone’s pain he’d get punched or thrown against a wall. If he told a woman she was pretty she might slap him instead of smile. He had climbed down into the pit with the rest of the world.
By one o’clock he was convinced his plan had failed; there wasn’t a world to join. Then, from one block to another, the street changed. The shops still hid themselves under black awnings, and they still had names bent out of neon, but the clothes people wore were brighter, and the people wearing them, even the people in high heels and miniskirts, were men. He walked by store windows lined with magazines wrapped in plastic, with swimsuits smaller than the briefs he was wearing, and with boots as high as his thighs. Here, everyone smiled at him, nodded hello, called him Sweetie and Darling. He wished, right then, that he’d already left his old life behind. He wanted to be carrying everything he owned and he wanted one of these men to take him in. You can work upstairs, he imagined him saying, and he pictured himself at some giant desk where he kept track of papers and files. Running away could fix everything. A life of long bus rides and adventures, of getting work wherever you could, of falling in love with boys like Andy without Andy’s cruelty. You’ll get kidnapped, he thought—this from some part of his brain his mother had put there. He conjured his favorite stories and pictured himself sold into slavery, kept as someone’s pet. The breeze felt suddenly cool and he realized he’d begun to sweat. He backed into the shade. The store behind him didn’t have a name—only a symbol on the door. The male store, he thought, and peered through the glass. Squinting through the glare he could see, along the wall, things his blood reached for, things that took the certainty out of his legs, and when a young man—early twenties, maybe, wearing a vest but no shirt—opened up the door and gave him that you-shouldn’t-be-here look, Colin shuffled off, almost at a run.
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