“Find you where?” I insist.
“Dude, you okay?” Ryan asks.
Sarah writes on her arm without erasing. Then shows me: Home.
“Ground control to Major Thomas?” Ryan says.
Sarah takes a step back, then turns, and makes her way behind a wide pine whose lower foliage has gone brown.
“Home,” I say.
“Home?” Ryan asks, while I follow Sarah’s path.
“We write it,” I say.
“Awesome,” he says. “I was hoping you were going to say that.”
As I arrive behind the tree, a hover of clouds turns the entire yard dark. For a moment I can see Sarah’s outline, a fading sparkle on a backdrop of fence. Then she’s gone.
“When do you think you’ll come home, then?” Ryan asks. “And of course, no hurry, with the funeral and whatever else, I just…”
“I’m on my way,” I tell him, as I stand in my parents’ backyard, all alone.
Thirty-Four
The next morning, Dad’s at the kitchen sink, watching the faucet fill and fill and fill the coffee pot. Lost in the gurgle of overflow.
“Dad?” I ask.
“Hmm?” he says, but doesn’t turn or shut off the water.
Already, I can see a difference in him. A sort of slouch, his shoulders softened by the onset of loneliness.
I stand next to him and turn the faucet off. “I think it’s clean,” I say.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I know that.”
I put my right hand on his shoulder and with my left I reach for the coffee pot. Gently, I tip it over and spill out the clear water.
“I need to go home, after all,” I say. I don’t tell him why. How to explain?
“Of course,” he says. “Let me say goodbye to your mother, and we’ll get you to the airport.”
I back away from the sink and watch Dad move into the living room. After a few seconds, I follow to find his fingertips on the top of Mom’s urn. He turns them a little to the left, then to the right.
“It’s not her,” he says. “I know that.”
I don’t know if I should argue it is, or isn’t.
“Will you be okay?”
“Debatable,” he says, and reaches his free hand into his pocket for car keys. “But we’ll see.”
•••
For my flight to SFO, I check in on an automated machine. No, my bag hasn’t been out of my immediate control. Yes, I packed it myself. Yes, I want to change my seat. No, I don’t want to upgrade to Economy Plus for sixty-three dollars. On my way to the bag drop, I take in every face. I’m overwhelmed as I search for Sarah through security, and all the way to my gate.
•••
Once on the plane, my mind drifts to my mother lifting the photo album to her face and kissing the picture of Joshua. I turn to the man in the middle seat and tell him, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I can’t cry.”
“Huh,” he says.
I look down, concerned.
“Well,” he says, searching. “There’s no shame in it.” Then a long pause. “What I’m saying is it’s okay.”
•••
At thirty-seven thousand feet, I pop a single stick of gum into my mouth—a method I learned from my mother to stop my ears from clogging from the pressure.
I flip open United’s in-flight magazine, and according to the world map on page thirty-eight, it’s clear that the Brazil bone used to be connected to the Cameroon bone. That the Morocco bone was, at one time, connected to the District of Columbia bone. Now hear the word of plate tectonics.
I pop another stick of gum and see that there’s a Niger and a Nigeria. That Uruguay doesn’t touch Paraguay. In Iceland, when it’s noon, in the ocean to the immediate west it’s 10:00 a.m.
I swallow, which ignites a crackle and whinny inside my head.
Denmark owns Greenland, France owns Tahiti and Reunion, Morocco owns Western Sahara.
I pop another stick.
There’s a country called Tajikistan, one called Comoros, a Mayotte. Madagascar lives on. There is no Yakutsk.
I slip the magazine back into the net pouch and tuck my wad of gum into my cheek. I try to sleep. To mute the hiss of engine noise, I put on earphones that I don’t plug in. The flight lulls and sways. My mind is nowhere, all at once.
•••
We land safely and softly. At SFO’s baggage claim I’m the last one at the carousel. I wait a long time before I go to the luggage courier.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
I shrug.
“Well, let’s see.” He places a laminated card in front of me with photos of luggage. When I just stare, he uses the eraser end of a pencil to point to the different possibilities. When I don’t react, he asks, “Which one is it?”
I point to a black Samsonite with a Push-Button-Handle and the SmoothRoller® system. “Not that one,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. “Then which?”
A few minutes later, he tells me my bag is on a flight that landed, two hours ago, in Austin.
“How does something like that happen?” I ask.
•••
I hop the BART train into the city. The whole ride I stare off, way off, waiting for Sarah to materialize.
Once I’m off the train and up the escalator, I stand on fractured concrete in bleaching sun. It occurs to me that I’m close enough to run home. Which I’ve never done. Which I’d never do. Until now.
Thirty-Five
Covered in sweat from my sprint home, I huff into my apartment to find Ryan on the couch in pajama pants, playing video-game soccer. He drops the controller and stands immediately at the sight of me, while the game plays on before him.
“Dude,” he says.
“I ran.”
“From the airport?”
On the television, his team of soccer players stand still while the opposition moves swiftly toward his net.
“Incoming,” I say, and lazily point at the screen. Right when he turns to look, his opponent kicks a rocket of a shot that ticks off the inner post, then spins toward the center of the back of the net. The announcer declares, “Goooooooal!”
Ryan picks up the remote and turns off the TV. Then looks at me, gauging what to say or do next. A look of concern drifts across his face.
“Where’s your luggage?”
“Lost.”
“Shit. Come sit.”
I walk over and drop onto the couch. Everything feels slow like it’s happening underwater. Ryan sits, a cushion’s width between us, and faces me.
“We can talk,” Ryan says. “Or we can just do nothing.”
I ease low into the couch, nearly on my back, and stare at the play of late-afternoon light climbing across the ceiling.
“The night she died, my mother sat next to me, showing me old photos. She told me her life story, an entire history I didn’t know existed. The way she was remembering—it was like her entire past was right in front of her. Like if she reached out, she expected to touch it.” I fold my hands so my thumbs meet at the bottom of my sternum. “It was like all these mysteries of my past, all these little uncertainties and mild confusions that I’d mostly dismissed or forgotten about, were answered all at once.”
“That’s good then, yeah?”
I give a light shrug. I want to tell him that I have to find Sarah. But I don’t want to argue. So I keep it to myself.
We sit quiet for what feels like a very long time. I breathe in and out and try to count the number of times I blink before Ryan breaks the silence. I lose track around fifteen.
“Do you want some water?” he asks.
I nod, and he gets up and heads to the kitchen. He returns with a liter-sized bottle of Poland Springs. He hands it to me after he twists off the cap. I take a long drink th
at goes down cold.
“Crisp,” I say.
•••
Still on the couch a few hours later, Ryan sets a bowl of pasta down on the coffee table for me. Cavatelli, my favorite.
“Little hollows,” I say. There’s spinach mixed in, and it’s topped with chopped tomato.
Ryan sits and looks at me, serious, while I eat. He says, “I think maybe it’s time for me to move out.”
So this is how everything falls to zero. I drop the fork into the bowl with a clang and stop eating.
“I’ve just been here a long time, and right now I’m not sure if me being around will do any good.”
I hold up the bowl of cavatelli he’s made me—an argument against him leaving; a show that he’s doing good.
“Okay, sorry,” he says. “But only if you’re sure.”
As I lower the bowl, the fork squeals along the edge, then stills. I stab it into the noodles.
“I’m sure,” I say, with my mouth full.
“I can’t tell you how good it is to have you back here,” he says.
I tell him, “I can’t tell you how it feels to be home.”
Thirty-Six
The next morning, a Sunday, Ryan’s still asleep when I place my laptop on the kitchen table. I open it for the first time in five days, and as it powers on, I feel a shortness of breath, afraid I’m denying the potency of this larger moment. Reality is, I’m unready to reengage with the wider world via type and text. So when I see my email inbox has sixty-two new messages—a mix of invitations for contract work and complaints that I’m unresponsive—I ignore them all and shut my computer down.
I head to the cafe down the street where Ryan and I have gone every morning to hash out Elvis ideas over coffee. On my walk over, I wonder if Sarah will be there, waiting. But she’s isn’t. The late-morning sun’s white heat reaches through the high windows and the same barista who’s here five days a week, with his bushy beard and tattoo of an anchor on his forearm, says, “Hey, dude, where you guys been?”
I put up a quick wall between me and these last days, so I can’t see, then tell him, “The moon.” He laughs, but because there’s no one behind me in line, and the people at tables are out of earshot, and because he’s been kind to me in the past, I volunteer, “Actually, I went home to see my mother after way too long.”
“I feel you.”
For whatever reason, I expect him to ask if we were close. He doesn’t, but I answer anyway. “Were we?” I say aloud. “We absolutely were.”
In response to his puzzled expression, I ask for an iced tea and the last blueberry muffin. Then I sit where Ryan and I usually sit. Because today is any other day. Because everything is just fine.
•••
I’m standing outside the cafe with nowhere to be when a taxi stops in front of me, and out comes a family of four. The father gets the kids—a boy and a girl, both no older than eight—to the sidewalk, while the mother pays. She leaves the rear door open and tells me, “All yours.”
Maybe this is how I find Sarah?
I get in, pull the door shut.
“Where to, my man?” the driver says. A black guy wearing a military-style olive hat.
“No idea.”
“Top of the Mark it is,” he says, certain.
“Fine,” I say, and off we go.
We climb and dip through the rolling streets, and after a few blocks he asks, “You know how it got its name?”
“Who?”
“The Top of the Mark.”
“I don’t.”
“Back in thirty-nine, a hotelier turned the penthouse of the Mark Hopkins Hotel into a cocktail lounge. Told a friend, ‘I don’t know what to call the top of the Mark.’ And his friend said, ‘Well, that’s it.’ The hotelier didn’t get it. ‘What’s it?’ he asked, and his friend said, ‘Top of the Mark!’ You believe that shit?”
I laugh an obligatory laugh, then look outside and glance at faces that aren’t Sarah as we pass yellow and baby-blue and red-painted homes. When we turn roughly onto Market Street, I ask him, “What else you got?”
“That’s why I’m takin’ you there. That’s all I know. Plus, you can have a drink to celebrate.”
“Celebrate?”
“Always something to celebrate,” he says. “And if you’re flying low, then drink to being alive. No small miracle in that.”
•••
Out of the elevator at The Top of the Mark, I exit on to soft, reddish carpet with yellow flowers. It’s a 360-degree view, and I go right up to one of the windows—facing west—and look out over the daylit city, the whites so crisp they sparkle. A waitress asks, “Can I get you anything?”
“A drink to celebrate,” I say.
“Oh,” she says, and switches course by tucking away the food menu, and holding open a menu that tells me they have over one hundred different types of martinis.
I ask her favorite.
“The opening page shows the ten most popular.”
“But yours?” I say.
“I usually just close my eyes and point,” she says, a strained smile.
When I look at the menu, flip a few pages, she excuses herself, tells me she’ll be right back. Inside I find a Sunsplash and the Key Lime and the Vanillatini. All of them identically priced: fourteen dollars.
When the waitress returns and asks, “What can I get you?” I look down at the tops of my shoes, at the lush carpet.
“I guess I’m afraid that if I drink I could miss some surprise pain. Or wash away some notion or moment,” I say.
“Okay,” she says slow, with a frown, and goes back on her heels.
“Conversely, if I drink, I risk amplifying those same elements to the point where they’ll deafen.” I check my watch. “Since it’s only eleven in the morning, let me wander. Maybe I’ll come back.”
Her eyebrows furrow and she forces a smile when I hand her the menu. I head toward the elevator. It’s nearly all the way closed when I arrive, so I stick my hand in. The twin doors, decorated in what appear to be black beads, separate. I take a step back, preparing for Sarah. But inside, alone, is a woman who’s maybe thirty, wearing a black sweater over a red dress covered in white circles.
I wave an apology as I enter, and she smiles with pursed lips and looks down. The dark wooden walls of the elevator are accented by lighter-brown ropelike decorations. There’s a green number embedded in a black box above the door. It starts to count down from eighteen.
“This elevator’s so nice,” I say, as the number turns to four. “Have you been in it before?”
I look at her, and she looks back surprised. Like I wasn’t seriously asking. “Excuse me?” she says, finally.
“My mom would have loved it.”
We come to the ground-floor stop. I wait so she’ll exit before me. Her strapless heels clap against the floor. “Bye,” I say.
She turns with a closed-mouth smile, then tells me, “Bye.”
Thirty-Seven
Back home from Top of the Mark, Ryan’s talking into a headset, staring at his smartphone’s screen with great focus. “I’m looking at it,” he tells whomever he’s talking to. “I keep hitting refresh because I’m convinced it’s fake.”
I drop my keys on the couch-side table with a metallic clatter, and when Ryan hangs up, he holds up his phone for me to see.
“Look,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. Like, I really cannot believe it.”
I look at his phone to see a page on Variety.com about the new, scripted shows that Netflix is considering for pilots in advance of the new fall season.
“Scroll down,” he says. Amidst eight other descriptors I find:
Pilot
Written by Ryan Ahearn
“Post-modernist irony touches down”
This zany sitcom follows the lives of four div
erse and disparate personalities angling to advance their collective careers by conjuring up the perfect reality television show. This quartet of thirty-somethings engage in audacious episode-to-episode exploits that eventually serve as fodder for their varied and often surreal television pilot ideas. If the network TV execs ever get on board with this ensemble cast’s vision of the future of television, their careers will take flight!
When I’m done reading, I look up at Ryan wide-eyed and tell him, “That’s you.”
“It’s nuts, right!?” he says. “We all get time to do rewrites with a director, then Netflix picks their three favorites to make into pilots. Oh, my god, I’m freaking out.”
“Wow,” I say, quiet.
“This is huge!” he says. “But there’s a catch.”
I wait.
“I have to go to LA,” he says, cringing for my benefit. “But it should only be two weeks. Though maybe three? I’ll basically just bury myself in rewrites.”
I nod.
“Which means you’d have to write Attack on Graceland’s first pass on your own.”
I nod, again.
“But that’s a tall task, considering you’ve never written a script before.”
I nod one more time.
“Or we could postpone,” he says. “But as we’re first-time feature writers, and Hollywood is fickle as fuck, that feels like a risk.”
I stare at him, blinking.
“But I think you can do it,” he says. “Don’t you?”
I nod. My thinking is: if we get me jump-started by cracking into it first thing tomorrow, and if we work on it until he leaves, I should be okay.
“You sure?”
I nod again, now certain.
“I leave tomorrow, early,” he says. “A meeting with the director first thing after I land, then writing sessions that’ll go hard all week. And tonight I need to read it over and jot down notes upon notes.”
Now, I’m triply unsure.
“But I’ll be back,” Ryan says, hands out to put me at peace. “Sooner than later.” He grabs me by the shoulders, a ball of excitability. “I can’t believe this is all happening at once!” He lets go and heads to the kitchen. I stay put. He shouts so I can hear him. “And while Anarchy money’s not coming in for a few months, I’ve got rent covered! So you can ignore job offers, and hunker down to focus on Elvis!”
Collision Theory Page 11