by Jean Hegland
She’d longed for her father to know what happened next, too, though there was a lot she couldn’t really recall, and much of what she did remember confused or disgusted her. She wanted him to help her sort among those splintered memories to find the explanation for what had happened. But she was too embarrassed, still too distraught to try to fit those moments into words.
Even now she feels an inward shudder at the memory of the awful hotel or hostel or dorm room where she’d ended up. Despite all her bravado, she’d been so young. When the room began to spin and a heavy blackness kept threatening to suffocate her, the blond foreign student who’d been so attentive earlier in the evening helped her to lie down, and she’d actually believed even then that he was taking care of her.
“Is nice? You like?” he asked when he began to kiss her, and although it seemed strange to kiss a man so deeply while his friends were in the room, she’d been pleased that he’d asked for her opinion.
And it had been nice—at least at first—and she did like, and besides, she was in a foreign country where, she knew, people did things differently. Even the beer they’d drunk earlier that evening had been different, more like syrup than the stuff she’d tried with her friends that time in Tijuana. In the pub, she’d wanted to match her new acquaintances pint for pint, and they had seemed impressed by her prowess, nodding their heads solemnly and exchanging meaning-laden looks when, at the end of the first round, she’d banged her empty glass down along with theirs.
But sprawled on that spinning bed, she found it hard to remember back that far, impossible to recall whether she’d had another pint or not, impossible to recollect which direction they’d walked when they left the pub, or the buses they’d taken, or the dark streets they’d gone down since, and still the blond man kept kissing her, and still his hands were so insistent on her breasts, suddenly so insinuating between her legs.
She wished he would stop, or at least slow down until they got to know each other better. But she was afraid that if she said so, he might not like her anymore, afraid that his friends would laugh, that they wouldn’t help her get back to the hotel. She didn’t want to disappoint anyone, didn’t want to reveal her own uncertainties, or embarrass herself by sounding like one of those unsophisticated American students that Freya was always ridiculing. And besides, the bed kept tilting so that she had to cling to the man beside her just to keep from falling on the floor.
“It happened so fast,” she blurted into the phone, shaking her head to try to clear the memories.
“Not really,” Sally answered, her voice so mild it took a second for Randi to register the implication of her words. “They say the average length of time between diagnosis and death is seven years,” Sally continued a moment later. “So he’s maybe a little more than halfway there—not that I’ve ever known John to be average,” she added with a rueful half-laugh. “He has his good days and his bad days. But in general, it’s only getting worse. If you think you’d like to visit him, you probably shouldn’t wait too long.”
“Visit?” Randi echoed, while a montage of visits with her father played in her head—the corny Disney movies, the awkward dinners at empty pizza parlors, the tense or boring walks along the beach. Visitations, her father used to call them, and even at the time it had seemed he was weighting the word with irony, using it to signal all that was forced or flat or wrong about their meetings. But hidden among the false expectations and genuine disappointments, there’d been moments of pleasure or even joy. Brief as the carnival rides they’d taken on the boardwalk, unexpected as the school of dolphins they’d once watched frolicking in the ocean, their pearl-gray flanks shining in the sunset’s rosy light, they were memories that moved her even now.
“I couldn’t keep him at home any longer,” Sally explained. “It got to where it wasn’t safe for me to even leave the house. He kept leaving the burners on, or incinerating stuff in the microwave. Once I got home to find the bathtub overflowing. And then, a couple of weeks ago, he was … just gone. I had to call the police. They found him eighteen hours later, in the San Francisco public library. It was a nightmare. He had no idea where he was or how he’d gotten there. After that, I didn’t have a choice.”
I didn’t have a choice. Randi heard her father’s voice echo down the years, cold with suppressed rage, his voice saying those very words, and adding, We can’t possibly take you to Spain with us now. I’ve booked a flight to send you home. Pack your things. The cab will be here in an hour.
“I found a good place,” Sally was saying on the other end of the line. “He’ll get good care. We’re moving him tomorrow. But they say he needs some time to adjust to being there before I go to visit him. Otherwise, he’ll just want to come back home with me when I have to leave. They say it will just make his transition harder if I come too soon. It’s …” Sally interrupted herself with such a quavering sigh that for a moment Randi feared that she was crying. But when she continued speaking, her voice was strong again. “In the meantime, I’m sure he would appreciate some company.”
So that’s it—Randi thought, suddenly as stiff with resentment as if she were still sixteen—she had finally become useful again, as some company for her father. As though Sally were another character to be developed for her college application, an image of the stepmother she’d never met began to take shape in her mind. She envisioned an enameled woman, dressed and made-up as precisely as Freya had always been, slim and remote and smelling of some expensive, musky perfume, a scent that always caught like a cough in Randi’s throat.
“This isn’t easy,” Sally continued, “but I do have to say that in one way it will be a relief, him being there. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in months.”
Another memory shot into Randi’s awareness—how her father had waited until after the constables closed the door of the hotel suite and the sound of their voices receded down the hall before he turned on her, the fury in his face a thing she’d never seen before, so shocking that for a moment she’d truly thought her real father had somehow been supplanted by an impostor. “I haven’t slept for two days,” he’d said, his voice coiled tight. “Where the hell have you been?”
She’d yearned to answer him, but she’d been too proud and too ashamed, too aware of her unwashed body and stinking breath to do more than glare back at him. Besides, what could she say? She’d been numb, naive, no doubt still stoned. It was only years later that she’d managed to piece those splinters into a story that explained both her innocence and her culpability.
Sally said, “I know you and your dad haven’t been in touch for quite a while, but he still talks about you sometimes. I know he would appreciate a visit.”
Why? Randi longed to ask. Instead, she blurted, “Would he know me?” Pressing the phone to her ear with both hands, she tried to force herself into a reality in which her father was both back in her life and so utterly gone, tried to prevent herself from asking what he said when he talked about her. Still. Sometimes.
“I’d say there’s a good chance he’ll recognize you—especially if you go soon. It’s not that he doesn’t remember anything,” Sally went on. “It’s more that his memories won’t line up. He’s still smart. Sometimes he can actually remember quite a bit, especially if it’s something he’s studied, or something that happened long ago. It’s more like he can’t keep anything straight, or find the right thought when he needs it. I keep thinking his mind is like a broken necklace—some beads are lost forever while the rest are just scattered everywhere.”
A phrase from her late-night studying rose into Randi’s mind: string of pearls, to describe the kind of narrative that leads to only a single outcome. String of pearls, she’d paused to muse, like the way a story unfolds in a film or a book, where how things happen and the way they fit together is preordained, the pearls arranged according to someone else’s plan so that a viewer or a reader is always only an observer, simply moving down the strand one pearl at a time. But video games allowed for other structures, t
he author explained, complex forms that had yet to be entirely explored—branching narratives, he called them, or amusement park, sandbox, or building block designs, structures that let new stories emerge each time the game was played—stories that even the games’ designers might never have imagined.
That’s what she wanted to do, she’d thought, lifting her eyes from the screen to gaze at her desires. She wanted to help make the games that would enable those new stories. Computer games were on the cusp of something revolutionary, she was sure of that, with graphics so astounding, worlds so varied, narratives so packed with challenges, heartbreaks, and delights that they would have been unimaginable even a few years before.
There were games set in lands so immense a solo player might literally spend years exploring and still not visit every forest or city—much less each temple, tavern, dungeon, marketplace, or mountaintop—they contained. There were games in which guilds of strangers from real-world backgrounds nearly as varied as their avatars’ were—at that very moment—forging lifelong friendships as they embarked on quests in ways no one else had ever envisioned.
But she wanted to take gaming even further. She was convinced that beyond the juvenile dialogue, clunky cut scenes, and silly back stories of even the best new games, a whole new art form was still waiting to emerge, some mix of game playing, role making, and story shaping that had the potential to transform—or even transcend—them all.
That was why she was willing to learn all the math and programming that even the writers on a game team had to know, why she was willing to leave Mink behind in Santa Cruz for four years while she lived in some dull and rainy backwater nearly one thousand miles north, where her peers would be eighteen-year-old nerds and her professors genius geeks who would expect her to work a hundred hours a week.
She couldn’t afford it. Tuition alone for a single semester cost nearly what she made in a year, and when she tried to imagine how she would pay for an entire four-year degree, she felt as hot and dizzy and confused as if she’d just been caught breaking some kind of law. But other than Mink, she had never before been so smitten with anything, never so obsessed that everything she encountered in her daily life seemed only to add to the conversation about that subject that was ongoing in her head.
Not since that triumphant moment when she’d first found Trafalgar Square had she allowed herself to imagine a future larger than her present. She’d survived her father’s rejection, her mother’s tantrums, and even London and its awful aftermath by keeping herself contained, making sure her goals were near and small. But ever since Mink had convinced her that she should ignore the cost and apply to ArtTech anyway, she’d felt as if she were in a branching narrative of her own. In one way it was as if she were suddenly already freed, no longer simply plodding endlessly toward yet another weekend or puny promotion. But in another way she felt more trapped than ever as she waited to see which version of her future she would get to play—the one in which she could go to college to become the person she wanted to believe she was meant to be, or the one in which that person still languished inside her head.
“It’s a little hit and miss,” Sally said, “but usually you can still have a conversation with him—or at least part of one—before he gets entirely derailed.”
When Randi did not respond, Sally went on, “I know I don’t know the whole story about what caused you two to fall out of touch, but I do know that John has been unhappy about it. I can’t promise anything, but I’d like to think you might be able to find a way to resolve things, even now.”
“I’ll think about it,” Randi answered more feebly than she would have liked.
“That’s all I can ask. But if you do decide to visit him,” Sally warned, “you really shouldn’t wait too long.”
Randi hadn’t waited. She’d gone on her next day off. Though now, as her cigarette empties its filigree of smoke into the still hot air, she wishes she hadn’t bothered. She’d made her peace with all that confusion and all that pain. Why had she ever thought she should stir that pot again?
“Got a light?”
She jerks from her reverie to see a man approaching down the sidewalk, brandishing an unlit cigarette. His dark hair compressed beneath a hairnet, he wears a large white apron spotted with cooking stains.
“Sure.” She finds her lighter, snaps a flame, lifts the pale feather of fire to the cigarette he sets between his lips.
“Thanks,” he nods, exhaling a plume of spent smoke.
“No worries.”
“It’s a warm one,” he observes.
Randi nods. Americano, she thinks. Room for cream. Keep the change. The woman inside—that nurse—she would order something sweet and frothy. A mocha frappe, maybe. Nonfat milk and extra whip. She’d be pleasant enough, though it would never occur to her to leave anything in the tip jar. And her father—what would he drink? A shot of espresso? A vanilla latte? She wonders if she’d ever known him well enough to guess.
“You apply?” the man asks, eying her through the smoke that trails from his cigarette.
“What?”
“For cook’s assistant. It’d be my shift,” he adds, studying her with friendly curiosity.
“What? Oh no.” Exhaling, she shakes her head so that the smoke describes a zigzag in the air in front of her. “I have a job. I wasn’t applying for anything.”
“Then?”
“I was just visiting.” With a toss of her head she indicates the building behind them. “My dad’s in there.”
“He’s a resident?”
She nods. “He moved in a couple days ago.”
“Most of the people whose parents are here, they’re a lot older than you. I’d of taken you for a granddaughter.”
“Nope,” she says with clipped forced cheer. “I’m a daughter.”
“You okay?” The kindness in his voice threatens to conjure her tears.
“Me? Oh, sure.” She gives a brittle laugh. “I mean, it’s just a bit of a shock.”
“This place isn’t so bad. I’ve seen worse. I’ve worked at worse,” he adds with a knowing roll of his eyes.
“Not the place—my dad. The last time I spent any time around him, he was in London, giving some big speech. And now—” She shrugs, and sighs and shakes her head. In the back of her mind she sees the damp, tamped grounds from a shot of espresso—the puck she has to knock out of the porta filter before she fixes another drink—the flavor and the caffeine all extracted, what’s left only good for compost.
Her companion pauses as if to let the weight of her thought settle before he asks, “Now?”
“Now, not so much. I don’t know. He really seemed to lose it, near the end.”
He nods. “Sometimes they can seem normal or even sort of sharp, and then the next minute they’re off in la-la land.”
It is exactly the kind of thing she might say herself, though she feels an unexpected resentment to hear her father lumped with “them,” to hear a stranger describe him as being in la-la land. But she laughs even so, a tight sharp bark. “He got really pissed when he realized I wasn’t going to help him leave.”
The laugh that answers hers is genuine, unconstrained. “Wait till he meets Robert. He’s been planning to dig his way out for months. Only problem is,” he splats his forehead with his free hand as if to shake loose a trapped memory, “no matter how many times he reminds us, none of the staff can ever seem to remember to bring a shovel.”
“It’s like a prison,” Randi says, staring at the wall.
“It’s not,” he answers. “Believe me.”
To me it is a prison, Randi hears a voice saying inside her head. For a moment she wonders where those words came from. They don’t seem quite her own, though they fit her thought so naturally.
“Speaking of prisons, you know what they call a telepathic midget who’s just escaped from jail?” her smoking partner asks.
“Huh?”
“A small medium at large,” he offers, waiting for her grimace and grin befo
re he allows himself to smile. “Robert told me that one.”
“Robert?”
“The guy who wants a shovel. He knows loads of jokes, real collector’s items, too, from back when he was young. It’s fun to swap jokes with him. Plus,” he waits a beat, and then adds in a confessional tone, “it’s easy to recycle your material.”
The smile she offers must not reach all the way to her eyes, because he says, “Lots of stuff’s funny in there, if you can find the right angle. I mean,” he shrugs easily, “what else’re you gonna do?”
Fishing a cell phone from the back pocket of his jeans, he flips it open. Tossing a glance at the screen, he announces, “Break’s over. Back to work. Speaking of prisons. It’s pizza night tonight.
“What does the Buddha say when he orders a pizza?” He watches for Randi’s shrug before he quips, “‘Make me one with everything.’
“And what do they tell the Buddha when he pays for his pizza with a hundred dollar bill and then asks for change?” he goes on.
Smiling helplessly, she shakes her head.
“‘Change comes from within.’ Name’s Tony,” he says, sticking out his hand. “We’ll take good care of your dad, I promise.” As he pushes the stub of his cigarette into the dirty sand of the smoking stand, he adds, “See you next time.”
After he is gone, Randi stares out over the empty lawn while smoke spirals from the end of her cigarette, and Tony’s words echo in her brain. Next time. She tries to imagine what another visit might hold that would persuade her to return, but in that moment she can’t think of anything. She tried, she thinks. She’d given it one last attempt. Now it’s time to cut her losses and get on with her own life. A sickish moisture seems to hover above the green grass, its fragrance an odd mix of chlorophyll and chemical fertilizers. When she stabs her cigarette butt into the sand, she finds an unexpected satisfaction in crushing even that tiny fire.
For the past day or hour or year, John has been watching the little corner of the world he looks out on grow flatter and more subdued while the sky above the wall pales with the waning afternoon. He has been thinking about endings. As the shadows slant toward evening, he has been ruminating on ruin, on waste and costs and casualties, on failure and disgrace.