Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, what’s going to happen?”

  “You’re going to go nuts for a few hours, and it’s going to be fun,” I said. “That’s all.” She nodded. Hallucinogens require you to relinquish control, which, I explained, is half their appeal. “Just completely losing your mind, because the thing is, you’ll always get it back. It’s temporary insanity, the only good kind.”

  Temporary insanity. In the ER, it all sounded like self-serving BS. Thinking you could eat mushrooms and a few hours later drive the chilling hairpin turns of the rugged Northern Coast Range? That was insanity. That and dating me.

  If we made it back to Tucson, I assumed she would never hike again. That seemed tragic. It was just a few welts. Stings seemed a fair price for a memorable experience, and the point of taking roadtrips is having memorable experiences. This was college. I firmly believed that experience was the net sum of your youth, one of the few things that remained after time and your body betrayed you, the interest you accrued to survive the lean years beyond your forties. Like Christmas every year, I saw it coming: adulthood and responsibility, the twin headlights of death’s approaching train. So like Nigel in Spinal Tap, I turned up my amp past ten, to eleven, believing that these were the last days—last days of fun, last days of freedom, last of the interesting stuff—believing that fun receded like a tide following graduation. That’s how little I knew about anything. I thought that when our joints ached and blood pressure ran high, when we were tied to bleak office jobs to finance thankless offspring, all we would have to look forward to was what we could look back on. That to endure this grim future, all a person could do besides run away and start over was relive golden moments, moments like this, and find comfort that yes, we may be old, but the Earth is a big fascinating place, and we at least experienced a bit of it. What was the alternative: we sure watched some great television? Hell no. Go down the rabbit hole.

  My ass felt wedged in that hole.

  This made me think of Alice and the White Rabbit, of Alice and the Queen of Hearts. And that tea party scene, my God. All those characters with the big heads and exaggerated features. What colors! And why did the Mad Hatter keep that “10/6” card in his hat band anyway? 10/6 of what, his mind lost to mercury poisoning? Or was that just his little trademark?

  It made me wish I had a trademark. Not rainbow suspenders over a shirtless chest. Definitely not a cane with a skull handle and fake ruby eyes. But something, some signature look. I looked like a homeless skateboarder who just stumbled into town after three days lost eating bark in the woods, a total dirtbag. Or that’s how I felt. How were you supposed to feel when you nearly kill the most important person in your life?

  Kari laid in the bed without moving. With her eyes on the ceiling, she looked dead.

  Tick.

  I thought I heard the big black arm of the wall clock move.

  Tick.

  I was pretty sure that was it. What else in this morgue room had moving parts?

  I held my breath and listened for the tick.

  Nothing.

  Maybe the nurses were standing outside our door listening, straining to hear what would confirm their suspicions. Or watching us through the gap between the frame and the door. Covertly, I redirected my gaze, as if it was a spontaneous act. Nothing.

  Tick.

  Maybe it was just the clock.

  How long were we supposed to stay in here anyway? Ten minutes? Ten hours? No one told me. No one said, “Just wait here until the blotches fade and those Devil red eyes turn white again.” No one said, “Notify us tomorrow if she still can’t feel her big swollen feet.” Or maybe they had and I’d forgotten.

  Tick.

  What if they were holding us until the cops arrived? Seriously. That wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. They could be stalling us while telling officers on the front desk phone, “Yes, they’re in Room 6A, wearing cut-off green army shorts and Converse, no socks. No, the plates say Arizona. Oh yes, we’ll keep them busy.”

  I stood there and planned my speech, how I’d talk to the police as calmly as I’d talked to so many convenience store clerks and all-night Mexican restaurant staff during my late-teens when my friends and I were perpetually stoned.

  After a few seconds of thinking, I couldn’t remember a word.

  What?

  I looked at Kari. Her mouth pinched shut, gaze fixed on the ceiling panels.

  I mean, should we just expect that nurses will eventually come in and tell us when to go? Or were we waiting for some fancy medicine to counteract the bee venom? Someone should have told us how long that chemical reaction takes; we can’t just putz around patchouli-stink Eureka all day. While Kari was clearly no longer in danger of death, my metabolic mushroom clock was ticking. In another hour, I’d be peaking like her, and then who knows what would happen. I might start hanging tongue depressors from my lips to impersonate a gopher, or find myself staring into a mirror cackling at the lunar landscape of pores on my face, wondering how I ever thought I looked like Luke Skywalker as a kid, with Mark Hamill’s deep butt-chin. I’d probably end up composing lyrics to fictional songs about caveman bowlers to the tune of “Like a Rolling Stone,” a song which I hated. I always told myself that I may eat mushrooms, but I’m no hippie. I pictured the nurses administering Kari a bee venom antidote via IV in some cold steel room down the hall—the “Insect Victim Wing.”

  “What medicine’d they give you in there?” I whispered.

  Kari stared at me a moment then said, “I don’t know.”

  Uh oh. If I asked somebody how long we should stay, they might tell me, “We already told you.” Then I’d really look messed up. I stood there thinking, looking at my arms—all long and gangly, like human arms hanging from the furry shoulders of an orangutan. But it was also weird to just stand around here waiting. That seemed crazier than asking someone.

  Kari stared into space, arms at her side. She looked as I had imagined she’d look at her funeral from the bee envenomanation or whatever, before my eyes swelled shut from the beating her brother, sister and parents would give me for killing her.

  I glanced at the wall clock. We’ve only been here five minutes? That can’t be right. I looked at my watch. It showed the same time.

  To get a sense of how much time I had before the mushrooms kicked in, I considered asking a nurse to describe the stages of Kari’s healing. Then I remembered the nurses. They intimidated me. It felt like they were judging me. “Thinking he’s Thoreau,” their eyes seemed to say. “Getting this poor girl stung like that. If that was my man, I’d dump him faster than he could say ‘don’t go.’”

  Dumped. That was my greatest fear. Not rattlesnakes or bear attacks. I had spent the bulk of those past four college years and most of high school single, yearning for connection, assuming love was reserved for other, more mature people. Finally I’d met Kari, this gentle, responsible, smart stable woman with the most loving, maternal streak I’d ever encountered, and when she inevitably found out that I couldn’t give her the life she wanted, she was going to leave me. I knew she’d be happier if she did, but I wasn’t going to admit that and hasten her departure. I needed her. I had long since soiled my innocence and thought it wise to absorb hers. I had convinced myself that opposites attract because people’s differences complement each other, that a coupling of opposites creates two whole individuals. I’d even told myself that although I didn’t want kids now, with enough time and Kari’s example, I might grow to want some. Lies. The desperate pleas of a man thumbing rides on the highway: “Please take me with you,” the hitchhiker screams, “I’m lost! There’s nothing else out here!” Deep down I knew that I wouldn’t care about infants or toddlers at this stage in life. Just the word toddler made me queasy. It sounded like an excretory function, or a verb: “The poop log toddled precariously from the tip of little Mikey’s bottom.” Why voluntarily invite that stuff into your life? Granted, as an outdoorsman, I believed that clean hands and sterile
environments were hugely overrated, but so was parenting. Uninterrupted sleep, meals eaten without onesies and cribs crowding your kitchen table, doing whatever the hell you wanted whenever-the-hell, that was the good life.

  It might be true what that hippie bumper-sticker says, that not all those who wander are lost, but some of them must get lonely. They have to. When I imagined the life Kari and I could have together, I imagined a lifetime of acting like I wanted it. It would be her life we’d be living. Why couldn’t I tell her that? Just be honest and admit it? Instead, when I thought about this, I thought back to how single life felt before I met her, and I hoped that maybe if I hung in there long enough, select parts of her personality might still rub off on me. That maybe Kari’s normalcy could envenom me, that her stability might attach itself like twigs on a shoelace, so that her visions of a future would become my visions. And if Kari wouldn’t stay, then maybe she could fix me before she left.

  She looked at me from the bed. Her eyes were still red, but slowly growing whiter. “Hey red eyes,” I thought. “Can you see that I’m selfish?”

  I looked away at the walls. Pastels. The kind of ice cream social colors you put in a baby’s room. Which was another thing that made me queasy: the way people always probed into your parenting instincts. If you told them you don’t have any, they thought probing deeper would reveal the truth.

  “Don’t you want to create life?” they’d say.

  “I’m already creating one,” I’d say, “my own. One free of pediatrician appointments and crying in the night.”

  “Come on,” they’d say, “what about preserving your family lineage?”

  And I’d say, “My four half-brothers are preserving it already.”

  “Okay,” they’d say, “as a naturalist, what about preserving the species?”

  “The earth does not need one more successful copulater.”

  What sort of parent would I make anyway? My girlfriend was covered in spots. Two shriveled house plants slumped in my apartment. I didn’t have a credit card, couldn’t balance my checkbook. Sometimes I turned in my school work late. When I was sixteen, I didn’t know you had to put oil in your car, and one hungover morning after hearing some pings, my engine locked up. My first car, my first six months of driving, and I was already on my second engine. How many marriages would I have to ruin, how many times would I have to lose my kids in a national park, or get them stung by scorpions while camping, before people accepted what I told them?

  I should have fessed up, told Kari right there: “You deserve a better man.”

  She would figure it out eventually. She could see how restless I often got watching TV with her on sunny Saturday afternoons, the way I suggested we do something other than see a movie each Friday night, my complete lack of parenting fantasies. She was smart. She noticed more than she let on. So why bring it up. I was a land speculator in the land of the lonely. I refused to rush back to my old vacant lot.

  The wall clocked ticked.

  My eyes burned and stings itched.

  Where were those nurses? Waitresses at Denny’s at least visit your table every few minutes to refill your water.

  “Pssst,” I said to Kari. “Hey.” She looked over. “Onth you fleel up to it, we’ll haul ath through the Coathst Range. It’th still early enough. We can make it to Thacramento, maybe flurther.” Words wiggled like snakes from my mouth. My tongue stuck to the roof of it, lips stuck together. To speak, I had to peel my mouth apart, sealed as it was by what felt like plaster. Licking didn’t help. Were they shellacked gooey white? I started to ask but thought better of it. We both needed to believe everything was under control.

  I smeared my lips with Chapstick. It tasted like medicated surfboard wax, cherry plus preservatives plus plastic plus fat. I took a sniff. Took a lick. Then I ran my teeth across the top to shave off a bite. It tasted just as bad on my tongue.

  “What are you doing?” Kari said.

  “Oh just—I don’t know. You feeling better?” Her skin was slowly darkening to its Sunbelt bronze. She said she was, though her feet still tingled and the welts itched and the room was really, really bright. I started to feel the countless points of pain on my body. They combined into one unbearable accumulating burn that throbbed like the walls of our room. For the first time I thoroughly surveyed my damage. Swollen red pyramids, tons of them, ran up and down my arms, ankles, wrists and legs. I poked them. Scratched them. Rubbed my shirt across them hoping the rough cotton would provide more relief than my nails. Nothing worked. I wanted to see the welts on my eyebrows and ears, but I feared things would spiral if I saw myself in a mirror.

  I said, “Let me go get some Calamine for us.”

  “Wait,” Kari said. “Don’t leave me alone.”

  Leave her? This hadn’t occurred to me. I was the one leaving our room’s quiet shelter. I was the one who had to ask the staff questions then try to sift through the answers, or at least nod a lot. One time this kid in college told me how he took a leak while peaking on acid, and he made the mistake of peering into the bowl. “I flushed the toilet,” he said, “and it was like my whole life went down with the pee. My sanity, my future, my—just everything, it all flushed down the bowl at once.” He snickered when he said it, but the shock of acquired wisdom hadn’t dulled through the years. “It scared me to death,” he said. I felt the same way.

  “I’ll be right outside,” I said. “Close your eyes and think happy things.”

  I stepped into the hall.

  We had been in that room nearly two hours.

  A nurse stood by the front door, her arms crossed, staring through the glass at my red pickup and the green world beyond. When I asked about leaving, she fetched the doctor.

  Words came out of my mouth, vocalizations. He looked carefully into my eyes. I imagined a kaleidoscope of color had replaced their natural brown, some swirling of tangerine trees and marmalade skies from a Laugh In set. I pictured my old eyes filled with new fire, bristling crematory flames crackling from the churning furnace of all my mixed intentions. Orange, yellow, red, flickering, and lashing against the expanded black canvas of my dilated pupils. He handed me a square of paper and said, “Get her Benadryl.”

  Benadryl? I thought, or said. Was he messing with me? You can get that stuff anywhere. It’s so benign a compound Pfizer packages the pink pills in pink-and-white boxes. Benadryl. So we don’t even have to be here right now?

  “That’s right,” he said, sending adrenaline through my chest. “Same thing you buy at any drug store. Every time you and Kari go hiking, carry a box with you. That’s all it takes.”

  He smiled. I smiled. He knew.

  Or not.

  “Thanks Doc,” I said. “We’ll go get some right now.”

  From Eureka, I drove us straight through the Coastal Mountains, turned south at Redding and aimed for Arizona, where for the next two and a half years we each carried secrets and secret intentions, holding our cards close to our chests, forever our eyes Devil red.

  ANCIENT HISTORY

  My Uncle Sheldon is infirm, though nobody knows why. Asperger’s? Depression? Social anxiety disorder? “Socially awkward” is my family’s own diagnosis.

  Which of Sheldon’s issues stem from biology, which from conditioning? It’s the old nature versus nurture debate. Being raised in Flushing, Queens among loud-talking Jews might not be listed in the DSM as a medical condition, but it’s certainly a strong enough force to shape personality.

  At the dinner table his mother still tells him: “Slow down.” “Chew your food.” “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  “Fine,” Sheldon says, dropping his fork on the plate with a clink. He turns his head in a huff, his mouth ringed white in salad dressing, then slowly lifts the fork to resume eating. He’s sixty-one years old.

  This has been Sheldon and my grandma’s routine for as long as I can remember. Apparently it’s the same smothering dynamic they brought with them from New York City when they moved to Phoenix in 1969.<
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  Ever since I was a kid, my mom and dad and I have joined my Grandma Silvia and her second, goyische husband Carol for dinner on Christmas, Easter, Chanukah, and Passover, plus regular Sunday meals. Sheldon always attended. He did laundry at their house on Sundays. During the wash cycle, he read my grandparents’ newspaper and watched TV, which conveniently positioned him for free food. After Sheldon quit working at the clothing store his father, my Grandpa Shapiro, owned, his employment became erratic. He worked short stints at odd jobs—as a standardized test grader, a parking lot security guard—each separated by long gaps of unemployment, so he’s always searching for ways to save money. No matter where we eat, a restaurant or someone’s house, he always takes home a doggy bag.

  At Grandma’s we eat at a large rectangular table. It’s a dark, black walnut table set atop the living room’s avocado green carpet. Ever since Grandpa Carol passed, the seating arrangement has remained the same. Grandma sits at one end. Mom, Dad, and Sheldon and I sit along the sides, I’m at Grandma’s right hand, and Sheldon is at her left. And when Sheldon howls his signature non sequiturs about Mexican day laborers, recent art films, and newspaper headlines, Grandma yells: “Sheldon, quiet down.” “Lower your voice.” “Ssshhhh, I’m talking.”

  “Alright already,” Sheldon says, folding his arms. Depending on how much food remains on his plate, he often pushes back his chair and stares at the table. He’s hard of hearing, but he always hears his mother.

  He eats as if he has somewhere else to go. Without concern for courses or taste, he thrusts salad into his mouth, moves to the main dish, usually has more salad as the rest of us are starting the salmon, then he skips dessert. “I’m watching my girlish figure,” he likes to joke before taking a single forkful of cake. He refuses to wear a hearing aid, opting instead to read lips. So I speak in simple sentences and try to enunciate my words. We all do. But he responds at such jarring decibels that everyone shooshes him, everyone but me. I could never shoosh him. It’s too patronizing.