by David Arnold
“I don’t know where he took you or what happened. The deal was one hour in that library, that’s it. He said that would be enough.”
“He played you, Val.”
“What do you mean?”
“Circuit was never interested in helping me. Probably found out about my back injury, then made up some story about a basketball player’s knee, knowing you’d bite.”
“Why would he do that?” asks Val.
It is time to say this out loud: “Circuit didn’t just hypnotize me.”
* * *
That night, for the first time since waking up in Circuit’s room, I have my recurring dream: it’s a different room, a different bed, but the same blinding brightness, the same letters floating around in the air coming together to spell PECULIAR WAY, and there’s Alan in the corner, dripping wet, and he turns around and lip-synchs “Space Oddity,” and beside the bed a dog tries to bark but cannot.
92 → peculiar way
Early the next morning, Mom walks in without knocking. “Rise and shine, Noah. Time to go.”
I’ve been awake for a while, staring at the ceiling. “I’m not going to school.”
“I’m not talking about school.”
I sit up. “Alan?”
“He’s the same. This is something else. We leave in a half hour,” she says.
“Mom.”
She stops, but doesn’t turn around.
“Is Chicago Grace on the way?” I ask.
“It can be.”
Half an hour later, I gently place Penny’s pink skull suitcase in the backseat of Mom’s Land Rover.
“What’s that for?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Just a bunch of comics Alan left in my room. Figured he might like to see them when he wakes up.”
At Chicago Grace, Mom parks in a visitor’s spot, says she’ll wait for me there. I head inside, suitcase in tow, walking with the confident step of a person who knows where they’re going because they’ve been there before.
Not the kind of confidence you want in the hallways of a hospital.
Only when I get to Alan’s room, I find it empty. At a nearby desk I ask a nurse if they moved him, hoping this might indicate some improvement. “Okay,” he says, looking Alan up in the computer. “Looks like your friend is under eighteen, which puts him in pediatric ICU. We had limited availability there until last night.”
I follow the nurse’s instructions to Alan’s new room, which is basically a replica of his old one: same machines, same smells, same overall gloom, et cetera. The only real difference is the wallpaper, a rainbow backdrop covered in ABCs.
Inside, Val and her dad sit by his bed in silence.
“Noah, how you holding up?” Mr. Rosa-Haas gets up to hug me; as is the fashion trend at the moment, he’s sporting the same clothes he’s had on for days, and giant bags under both eyes.
“I’m okay. You guys?” He shrugs, can’t seem to get anything out, so I change the subject. “Where’s Mrs. Rosa-Haas?”
“Airport to pick up her sister. I told her to go home after. Shower and rest, but we’ll see.” Mr. Rosa-Haas points to the pink skull suitcase. “You moving in?”
“I brought some of Alan’s comics. Thought I might read to him a little bit.”
Mr. Rosa-Haas motions around at the rainbow alphabet wallpaper. “Little kid’s suitcase for a little kid’s room. Fitting.”
I can’t tell if he’s making a joke, or if he really is bitter about Alan being transferred to this room, but he seems pretty unhinged—not that I wouldn’t be. “Do you think it would be okay for me to have a few minutes alone with him?”
Val—who hasn’t said one word since I got here, much less looked me in the eye, which I am 100 percent okay with—jumps in. “We were just talking about breakfast anyway, right, Dad?”
Mr. Rosa-Haas smiles. “Perfect timing.”
After they leave I scoot a chair next to Alan’s bed, have a seat, pull my phone from my pocket, and put “Space Oddity” on repeat. Then, unzipping Penny’s suitcase, I pull out Fluffenburger the Freaking Useless. I wasn’t sure how he’d respond on the ride over, but he is just too legit senile to give a shit about much of anything, and I have to admit: it’s sort of nice having the old grumps back. I set him in my lap, where he might as well be playing dead.
“So, hey,” I say. Head down, I gently rub the back of Fluff’s neck—and then I look up at Alan. “Hi. Before you say anything, I know—by far our shittiest Dean and Carlo, right? Good news, though. I checked with the cafeteria, and they agreed to cut the pizza into rectangles for you. Something to look forward to. Oh, also. We’re taking a basket-weaving class when you wake up, followed by a campfire dinner in iron skillets because I am done talking about that shit. It’s high time we took agency in making our dreams come true.” It feels silly talking to someone when they almost certainly can’t hear a thing, but this morning I woke up with a thought and no matter how crazy it seemed, I couldn’t get it out of my head. “Speaking of dreams”—I lean in, lower my voice—“I saw you. In a dream, I mean. You were soaking wet, standing alone in a corner. And there was a dog.” I look down at Fluff. “Always a dog, trying to bark, but never could.” Now take a deep breath like I’m about to dive, look up, and lean in—and go. “I don’t know where you are right now, or if you can hear me, but I’d like to tell you a story if that’s okay,” and just like my mom has done so many times, I whisper a story by the side of a bed, a story about a kid who was afraid of being alone, who felt nothing would change, who mistreated his friends. “And one night this kid goes to a party,” I say, and I give Alan the Concise History of my time Under, and when I’m done, I kiss his motionless hand, and of course it was Alan in my dream: for as long as I’d been Under, he’d been Under too. “I’m so sorry,” I say, and now I’m crying all over him, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,” and that numbness I’ve felt begins to lift, only the reality of what comes after is even worse.
“Listen, Alan. It’s your song, okay?” I turn up the volume as Bowie sings of floating in a most peculiar way. “I woke up to it, and maybe you can too,” and I have to believe in the possibility that everything was born for this, that last night’s dream, and all those that came before, were more premonitory than hallucinatory, “please, just come out of the cave,” and I have to believe there’s a moment when you step back and see purpose and design in what was once thought random and accidental.
“It’s all set up now, Alan. Just like the dream. Listen,” I say, as the song eventually hits its reprise. “Can you hear me?” I ask along with it, and all around us the room comes alive, that alphabet melts off the rainbow wallpaper, those brilliant letters seep and swirl, and all these shattered pieces of my time Under come together right in front of my face: “You’re not alone, Alan.”
Fluff tries to bark, but nothing comes out.
93 → the maze
“I cannot believe you rolled him into that hospital in a suitcase,” says Mom.
Fluff is either sleeping or passed out in the backseat. Honestly, I’d fear the worst if his labored breathing weren’t going toe-to-toe with the Land Rover’s prehistoric diesel engine.
“He did great, actually.”
“And why did you do it again?” asks Mom.
“It’s a long story.”
“Well, it’s a long drive.”
“How far are we going?”
“You’ll see,” says Mom, all coy, but when she pulls onto the highway the GPS on her phone says, “Starting route to . . . Jasper, Indiana,” and tells her to turn left in a couple hundred miles. Mom glares at the phone as if it is both sentient and ornery.
“Indiana?” I say.
“What.”
“What if Alan wakes up? Or what if—I don’t know, what if something goes wrong? And I’m hundreds of miles away?”
“First off, nothing
will go wrong. And second, when he wakes up, you won’t be able to see him immediately anyway.”
“Mom.”
“This is happening, Noah. It’s for you. And this is happening. We’ll be back soon enough.”
I turn and watch the trees speed by in a blur. “So what’s in Jasper, Indiana?”
“Whole lot of wood.”
“What?”
“It’s the Wood Capital of the World, you know,” says Mom.
“Are we in need of wood?”
“Not that I’m aware of, no.”
“So . . . why are we going to Jasper, Indiana?”
“Jasper who?”
“Okay, I get it. The mysterious mom routine. I’ll let you have this moment.”
Two hours later we stop for gas and a bathroom break, and then it’s back on the highway. I try to write a Concise History with pen and paper about the evolution of revision and how back in the day writers like Tolstoy and Thoreau and the Brontës had to write everything longhand, which meant every word on the page contained value, as opposed to the writer hacks of today who have the luxury of trying something, failing, deleting, trying something else, failing, deleting until they have a final product. Those old writers had to focus on the front end, had to know where they were going and why.
I thought maybe since I was writing it longhand, the piece would feel sort of meta-in-the-moment, but no, it doesn’t, it’s just shit writing because I’m a writer hack of today.
* * *
We stop for lunch at Wendy’s, and Mom is all, “Don’t tell your father,” and we both order fries, Frosties, and bacon cheeseburgers with extra bacon, which prompts the guy at the counter to ask if we want our hot food first, to which Mom replies, “No, the amount of time it takes to eat a bacon cheeseburger is the exact amount of time a Frosty needs to get melty,” which makes me wonder how many times Mom has been to Wendy’s without telling anyone.
Sometimes I wonder if I even know my parents at all.
We put a hamburger in the backseat for Fluff, leave the windows cracked, and then choose a table inside. The food is gone in no time, and Mom is right: the Frosties are perfectly melty.
“So how’d the conversation go with Val yesterday?”
“Not good.”
She nods, scoops an enormous bite of Frosty onto her spoon. “Not good how?”
“She lied to me? Manipulated a situation?” I push my unfinished Frosty away, lean back in the chair. “Anyway, none of it matters.”
“Why’s that?”
“Why do you think?”
Mom’s spoon freezes in midair. She nods a little, takes a bite, looks at me, another bite, another look, staring and chewing . . .
“What is it, Mom?”
“What?”
“You’re looking at me like I’m one of your clients.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Fine,” she says. “You know everything, and I know nothing.”
“Don’t be a dope.”
Mom plops her spoon in her empty Frosty cup, sighs heavily. “See, I thought being dope was a good thing.”
“Not if it’s a noun.”
“So it’s like the word ass?”
“In what way is it like ass?”
“You know, like, if you’re being an ass, that’s not good. But if you see, like, a Corvette with those shiny rims on the tires—”
“Oh my God.”
“You would say, That is one cool-ass car. In that case, ass is a good thing.”
An elderly couple in the next booth over gets up and leaves.
“I can’t believe my mom just said ‘ass is a good thing.’”
“What about AF?” asks Mom. “What’s the skinny on that?”
I slowly drop my head to the table. “Mom, please. I’m begging you.”
“Like when someone says dope AF, what is that?”
“I cannot believe I’m having this conversation with you in a Wendy’s.”
“We could relocate. There’s a gas station right next door.”
Head still down, I say, “AF is short for ‘as fuck.’ So like, dope as fuck. Is what that means.”
“Ah, okay. So one might say I’m a pretty dope AF mom, right?”
“Are you done?”
“Your mother is never done being dope AF.”
“Okay.”
“It’s more of a lifestyle, really. Dope AF, too legit to quit, party like it’s 1999.”
I try to hide my smile, but I’m not sure it’s working because now Mom is smiling like we’re in on some secret together. And then she says, “Honey, I know with Alan in the hospital it might seem like nothing else matters, but I assure you that’s not true. If anything, things matter more. I don’t know the extent of Val’s lie, but I know Val. And your relationship with her is more important now than ever.”
“It’s complicated, Mom.”
She cleans off the table with a napkin, puts all our trash on a tray. “My roommate in college used to piss the bed.”
A beat, then: “Okay.”
“Have I told you this story?” she asks.
“I don’t think so.”
Mom shrugs, continues. “Carrie was a big drinker with a tiny bladder. Mornings after parties usually involved a trip to the laundry room. She was a socialite, a serial dater—prettier than me, cooler than me, bigger boobs than me—”
“Mom, gross.”
“Seriously though, they were like—” Mom holds both hands out a couple feet from her chest.
“Mom.”
“Anyway. I was dating this guy Dalton. Or was it Gordon?”
“Who even are you?”
“I was only with the guy a few weeks, tops. The story isn’t really about him, anyway. We’ll just say it was Dalton. And Carrie was going out with this guy from the tumbling squad who had these huge muscles. So one night the four of us are at this bar, when I start feeling sick. Like, really sick. I tell Dalton I have to go, but he can stay if he wants. Obviously, I’m hoping he’ll drive me back to my dorm and dote on me, but he says if I’m sure it’s okay, he’d like to stay, and that he can get a ride back to school with Carrie and what’s-his-face.”
“With the muscles.”
Mom nods. “So I leave. Drive back to the dorm and after a few—episodes—I’m straight to bed, dead asleep in no time.” Even when Mom tells a true story, she does it with the same timing and tone she uses when telling those bedtime stories; I’ve heard enough of them by now to know when she’s ramping up. “At some point in the middle of the night, I wake up to the sound of Carrie having sex. Unfortunately, it wasn’t uncommon, and normally I’d just pretend to be asleep, but this time I wake up sick as a dog, and I decide that’s it, I’ve had it. So I flip on the light and I’m about to tell her off when I see Dalton. In bed with her.”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
“Your boyfriend.”
“Yeah.”
“In bed with your roommate. While you were in the room.”
“Dalton’s eyes had that total glazed-over look. I mean, he was just really drunk—”
“Yeah, I know the one.”
Mom pauses, raises an eyebrow.
“I mean, not personally, just—movies and whatnot. So what’d you do?”
“Well, I yelled a lot. Broke up with Dalton, obviously, and stopped speaking to Carrie altogether. She felt awful, kept trying to apologize, and I just . . . wouldn’t listen. And then two weeks later, she was dead.”
Mom and I sit in this sort of weird fast-food silence, and she lets that last line hang in the air.
“What happened?”
“She wrapped her car around a telephone pole. Blood alcohol level off the charts. Plus, we’d had a ton of ice and snow that November.
Dalton was in the car with her. He was injured pretty bad, had this horrible scar on his face the rest of his life, but—”
“Oh.”
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s just”—disheartening? Exhausting? A giant sigh of relief?—“I think you have told me about Carrie before.”
“See, I thought so.”
Okay, yes, some relief. Relief that I hadn’t randomly attached my mother to this horrific act, that I now know the origin story of the scar. But it occurs to me now how drastically I was mistaken: the notion that my time Under was orchestrated by Circuit is not the worst-case scenario; the worst-case scenario is that my time Under was, as Circuit implied, orchestrated by me. Stories told when I was a kid, incidents and conversations long buried in my subconscious had been harvested and scattered all over the place like seeds. In the coming days, weeks, months, years, who knew what latent thoughts or fears might rustle up to the surface, or in what scenarios? If it could happen with my mother in a Wendy’s, it could happen with anyone anywhere.
“I bring it up for a reason.”
I look down at my napkin. “Mom.”
“Not forgiving someone is like a growth. Starts off small, harmless enough—but burrowed in. And if you let it, it will consume you from the inside.”
“You mean Val.”
“I mean you, Noah. I don’t know why, but I think you blame yourself for what happened to Alan. And I’d like to be the one to say it’s not your fault.”
“You don’t know that.”
Mom sets her hand on top of mine, a new urgency in her voice. “It’s like this big maze, see. With fire-breathing dragons and land mines and decoys at every turn. And the maze goes on for hundreds of miles, and just when you think maybe you’ve gotten through—a dead end. Years of wrong turns and mistakes and battles with those dragons, years of bruises, cuts, and burns, but eventually? You make it. You come out the other end of the maze, and you’re a little banged up, but you’re okay. And maybe you meet someone else who was in the maze at the same time, only you didn’t know it. So you talk to this person, compare notes on the maze, and you hear all the ways they made it through that you never thought of, and you tell them all the ways you made it through that they never thought of, and from this shared understanding you grow to love one another. And that love deepens with time. And maybe you and this other person have a child.” Mom starts crying, and so do I. “A perfect, lovely little kid, and you swear you’ll do everything you can to spare your kid from the fire-breathing dragons and the land mines and the decoys. I’ll draw them a map, you think, a detailed map of the maze outlining the quickest routes, pitfalls to avoid, shortcuts that took you years to learn, and maybe this way they won’t end up with bruises and burns like yours.”