Sophie’s mother cried when she called home with the news. And Sophie cried back, hugging her phone as she sat fully clothed in a bathroom stall during her break.
“What’s up with the group in the bungalow?” says Jonathan. “Think they’ll need more drinks? I want to start tearing down.”
“They’re out cold, the men at least. Hard to tell whether they’re super stingy with their Mem, or their dates are just smarter than them.”
“Damn. How many is that tonight?”
“I lost count.”
“Just because they’re here they think they can do whatever they want.”
“That band coming off their Troubadour show did a line on my check earlier,” Sophie says. “I had to shake it off!”
“Maybe that was your tip?”
Ariel comes up behind Sophie and sets his tray down. “Did you ever make it to Delaney? He asked me about you again. Y’all should get him a fucking pager.”
“I just went.”
“In the past five minutes?”
“Oh, come on!” says Sophie, letting her head fall between her hands on the bar.
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” says Ariel. “Between us, my roommate was a PA on his last movie; lord, the things I’ve heard.”
“Let’s send the new girl,” says Jonathan.
Their eyes travel down the bar to a younger waitress with side-swept bangs, sorting through drink tickets.
“Really nice.”
“What?”
“Just give me their drinks,” Sophie says. “I’m not going to make her do it.”
Jonathan pulls a fry from under the bar and aims it at Sophie’s mouth. She bites at it, but he pulls it away.
“Fuck you,” she says.
“Isn’t she lovely…”
Sophie ruffles Jonathan’s combed-down hair until it stands on end, then plucks a fry with the other hand. The sound of yet another broken glass brings her attention back to table 5. She taps her tray until Jonathan pours the last bourbon on the rocks.
Only a few remaining candles flicker from table to table, lighting up the courtyard like fireflies. As Sophie approaches Ray Delaney’s table with the young starlet and her collection of admirers, she sees the pointed silhouettes of five noses facing straight up. Sophie looks upward, expecting to see the same revelers making a commotion in the hotel room above, but it is dark and dead-quiet behind the closed windows. Only then does she notice the starlet’s limp arms, both manicured hands grazing the ground below, where her broken glass mingles with the moss-covered brick patio, the tiny fractures twinkling like dewdrops.
Chapter 6 TODAY
Lucien sits alone with Dr. Sloane in another room that juts out over the coastline. Two walls of glass, with ocean on both sides. This room is smaller, more intimate. Dr. Sloane sits in a chair, while Lucien fidgets on a firm couch facing the water.
“I’d like to talk about your mother,” says Dr. Sloane.
“My mother?”
“Part of your work here will be talking with me,” she says. “Getting comfortable with that. With whatever might come up. That’s true for our group sessions, too, but I like to start one-on-one, to make sure you’re at ease.”
“All right.”
She waits, but Lucien doesn’t know where to start.
“We can begin elsewhere. Why don’t you tell me a bit about how you came here.”
He wonders just how much was culled from the memories they collected to remake him. What she saw while he was blinded by the bright. Or had she simply read some mundane summary? A list of the things that make it hard to wake up. The abridged version.
“Maybe you could tell me,” he says.
“Well, I know about your mother. That you chose to keep your memories of her in your treatment, as is. You chose to keep everything as is.”
“I did.”
“And why wouldn’t you? You love her.”
“I do.”
“I also know that you blame yourself. I know that’s why you came to Los Angeles.”
Lucien shifts in his seat, but she doesn’t look away.
“I came to Los Angeles to help my grandmother,” Lucien says evenly.
Dr. Sloane’s eyes shift.
“Tell me about your grandmother, then. What do you remember of her?”
“Oh god, not a lot,” Lucien says. “I spent time with her maybe twice that I can remember, but I was so young that those memories are almost gone.”
“Of course,” says Dr. Sloane, studying his face. Then she writes something in her notebook for the first time. “A child’s relationship to the past is often built on two people’s memories; they rely on another’s to plant the very seed that gets remembered as if it were their own. Like with photographs, too.”
“Right, well, we didn’t have those either.”
“Tell me about those times, then.”
“She came to New York once, before my dad left, when I was—”
Lucien remembers wetting the bed a few times, the disorienting dampness and the following shame. His father was either gone or smoldering, and his mother was falling apart. He hasn’t thought of that period in years, but here it is crisp like a freshly developed photograph. Lucien watched his mother then, waiting to see if pieces might actually come undone; things he knew as constants—her smile, her smell—fell away. Even the floor felt unstable. Then one day his grandmother appeared—moreover, existed!—and packed him a bag.
“And how was it, when she came?”
“She took me away and things felt normal again, or like there was another world still working normally outside of ours, which was nice. It was nice, I guess. But yeah, like you said, afterwards I felt like maybe I imagined it because my mother hardly asked, hardly mentioned it. And I didn’t hear from my grandmother again, not until we visited her in LA years later.”
“Do you remember where she took you?”
“Disney World, if you can believe it.”
“In California, it’s Disneyland.”
“She took me to Florida.”
Dr. Sloane blinks, unmoved.
“I guess it’s only funny if you knew my mom. I’m not convinced my grandmother hated it any less, but it was probably the nicest thing you could do for a kid. She gave me this Mickey Mouse stuffed animal from Animal Kingdom that I slept with every night until my mom found it and I think threw it away. One day it was just gone.”
“That sounds hurtful, to lose something you cherished.”
“You have to understand something about her, my mother; she kept out all these things, but there was so much in their place. Disney, she thought, was the commodification of childhood, a funneling of our collective values. So—there was no Disney in our house. But one rainy day, she papered the walls of our living room and then painted this underwater scene with fish and sharks and coral for me to play in. She left it up for months, we built a cardboard submarine. She was against some things because she could do them better. I had an incredible childhood.”
“But you were also facing things like an adult might. The loss of your father.”
The irony was that Lucien’s father leaving gave his mother the success she’d been working toward for years. She buried herself in painting and never really stopped. She translated her pain into brilliance. Lucien never took it personally, that just the two of them translated to a loneliness she could only see out of if facing a canvas. He was proud of her; he felt like fuel to her fire. He chose to.
“I never felt like a kid, I guess. Even when I was little, I was encouraged to think. I hung out with her friends. I don’t think that was a bad thing. If the alternative is being sat in front of cartoon movies with princesses whose only dream is to be saved.”
“And yet you said that toy was your favorite.”
“I’m sorry, do you get extra points for every time my mother is at fault? She did her best. What does it matter what some stupid stuffed toy meant to me as a kid? I also would’ve liked to eat Sour Patch Kids ti
ll my tongue fell off, but I couldn’t do that either.”
“You’re very protective of her. It’s clear you loved her, you’re grateful to her. But you can still talk about her freely, here with me.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Fine. What does it feel like here, then? To be without your name, without all the things she gave you?”
“I still have a name. You probably know it. You can say it.”
“It’s important that we don’t. You exist in this time, free to rebuild and reconstitute what makes you, without those things that have been put on you. Only one of them is a name.”
“Honestly, those things that have been put on me are one reason I’m anxious to get out of here. I moved to help my grandmother, yet here I am.”
Again, Dr. Sloane writes something in her book.
“What was it like, then, to see your grandmother as an adult?”
“Different,” he says easily. “Like I said, I visited her one other time, when I was twelve or something, but otherwise our relationship was pretty limited. Even so, I always felt a connection with her. She and my mom were so alike they almost couldn’t stand each other. I got the sense that it made my grandmother proud. Not sad. I dunno.”
“Was it helpful, being with her again?”
Now Dr. Sloane looks like she’s searching for something he won’t give her.
“I came to help her.”
“Have you?”
“Not yet.”
Again, another note. Another glance.
“Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve done much at all. I actually tried… No, never mind.”
“Go on.”
“When I first got to LA, I tried to find a stuffed animal like the one she gave me years ago. I think that’s why I thought of that trip just now. I hoped seeing it again might help her remember something, too. Maybe even me.”
“And did it?”
He pictures his grandmother’s alert but blank stare looking back at him. Hard plastic.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s interesting that you went there.”
A moving mosaic of tiny heads, all different hair colors and textures, shuffled around the Disney Store, their hands tugging at shirts and pant legs, while the parents, nannies, and chaperones squinted at their phones. Everything about it struck Lucien as failure. Children, occupied with cute capitalism, while their parents wanted to be anywhere else. His mother understood; what children need is to be included, not a pyramid of rabid-looking plush fish. Giant eyes and smiles lined with white felt.
Dr. Sloane writes again in her notebook.
“Do you think about New York?” she asks without looking up.
“I try not to. I find it hard. After my mother—well, even the way the air was just starting to turn colder, the leaves of the maple on our old block turning red—I couldn’t take it. How everything was proceeding just the same.”
“And here?”
“Here at least nothing is the same.”
Dr. Sloane licks her finger and swipes a few pages back in her notebook.
“Perhaps you weren’t aware of how precise we can be, in your treatment. How we could have removed that last bit; kept your mother minus the guilt. That burden you carry. The how.”
“I am aware.”
“But you chose not to change a single thing. I think that says a lot.”
“I guess I don’t think we get to choose what happens to us,” he says. “What we carry.”
“And you’d be right—until recently. You see, we do get to choose.”
“I think you’re confusing my words,” Lucien says. “I don’t doubt that you have the ability. I don’t think it’s ours to choose.”
“I understand. Then again, let’s say Jane Doe is walking home from work one night. Jane Doe gets assaulted. Now Jane Doe can hardly sleep, let alone walk outside by herself. Does she really deserve a life of fear? Of constant trauma? Does she deserve to carry that forever?”
“No, of course not.”
“And yet, such is her fate. Unless we help her forget.”
“Sure, that seems—well, that only seems fair. To have the option.”
“Exactly,” she says. “The option.”
“Right,” he says. “I’m just saying, not for me.”
Lucien feels like he is getting a hard sell for something already forgone. He made his decision. And he would do anything to avoid repeating that first night after his treatment. The emptiness he felt inside and beside himself.
“Why do you think you’ve had such a hard time letting go?”
“Excuse me?”
“Of your mother.”
“What do you mean? She’s my mother.”
“Was your mother.”
“Is it helpful to be cruel?”
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Sloane says. “Is it cruel to ask you about yourself? To not make this about your mother, but about what you need now, to feel whole?”
“She will always be my mother. I’m not trying to let go of that.”
“And I’m not taking her away. But I’d like to talk about you. So, without talking about her, why might you be having such a hard time letting go?”
Lucien no longer feels he is talking to someone human. How can he be expected to explain why he is sad? The sadness is enough, without opening it up to examine it. Is she doing this to push him? Toward what?
“I don’t have to explain to you why that is hard.”
“Of course it’s normal to grieve the loss of a parent. But need I remind you that here we are, sitting in a rehabilitation center because you needed, so desperately, to escape yourself that you endangered your own life, and so the question I am asking you, is—why?”
“I have no idea.”
“Try.”
“I just—maybe I don’t know who I am without her.”
Dr. Sloane nods.
“Close your eyes, go there. Go inside.”
Lucien closes his eyes and waits.
“Am I meant to be speaking?”
“Sure, whatever comes up,” she says, her voice now noticeably different. Coaxing.
“I spent most of my life feeling both in awe of my mother and paralyzed by her. And I got so used to needing to take care of her. I had to.”
“Why did you need to take care of her, your parent? Was she incapable of caring for you?”
Lucien opens his eyes.
“No, she always took care of me. But when my dad left, I felt like I was all she had. And I could make her so happy. And when she was happy she was so happy. It was… pretty amazing actually. I’ve never met someone who could be like that, so sad but then that much happier than anyone else. It’s addictive, almost, making someone that happy. I think. Especially when you know the alternative is despair.”
Lucien feels he is being led somewhere, but he keeps talking, keeps finding the words to figure it out.
“How did it feel, to be left by your father?”
“Well, not great. I guess I tried to be easy, for my mom.”
“Did you ever feel unwanted?”
“God no,” he says. “Look, I was a kid. It was hard for a little, but we got into a rhythm, and she was the best. She was talented and charismatic. Everybody loved her. Even strangers wanted to be around her. But you know, it’s like—what’s a kid with a parent like that supposed to do?”
Lucien notices Dr. Sloane wince as he talks about his mother, and he wonders if he is so pathetic to her that she cannot hide it. What must he look like from the outside?
“What do you mean by that?”
The more she pushes, the more he wants to crawl inside himself.
“Nothing.”
“Go on, you’ve clearly thought about this.”
“Well, either you hate them and resent them for attracting so much light that there’s nothing left at all, or you’re attached to them for life. You’re a half-person. I became like this other piece of her. And then when she got sick, all t
hat other fun stuff sort of went away. But I was still a piece of her and she was, you know… without. She needed me.”
“And what about what you needed?”
“What did I need? I was just preparing for college when she first got sick. And then better again. Each time we just wanted to get through it, so we did. Whenever the cancer came back, there was nothing else I would have done instead. I was on pause.”
“And now?”
Lucien looks around, his answer in the quiet between the walls, the thick glass keeping out everything but the light.
* * *
As Lucien walks back to the common area, he sees the same girl from yesterday standing alone by the fireplace, another mug in hand, tea string hanging over the rim. The room is scattered with only a few patients; others have gone to their rooms, or to afternoon meditation. But the common area is more open than the rest of the Center, with its walls of glass and infinite ocean. People seem to linger.
Lucien still cannot place her in his memory. More details come back, more memories solidify, but nothing explains this electric feeling around her. She does not seem to notice him approach. Even as he stands nearby, her eyes rest on the flickering flames. She looks so calm in this foreign, blank place that it frightens him.
“I could swear I know you,” he whispers.
She turns, her eyes frantic for an instant.
“You can’t.”
“What—swear, or know you?”
He sits on the stone ledge and turns toward her. Something inside of him rises at the sight of her. Knowing her or not, it feels like hope.
The Shimmering State Page 5