“Either.”
There it is again, recognition rippling through him at the sound of her voice, the movement of her hand. He touches his hair, pulling a curl between two fingers. Pulling at something he can’t quite access. What moments were left out? he thinks, searching back to that room where the many pieces of him were put back in.
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” she says absently.
“I guess so.”
She picks a petal from the dried arrangement beside the fireplace and flicks it into the flames. Then she blows on her tea. Lucien’s eyes linger on the tea string delicately looped under her finger until he notices where one of the bandages on her arm is missing; tight, raised skin flickers across the inside of her wrist.
She must feel his eyes on the marks because she jerks her arm away.
The tea spills and she gasps at the burn. Lucien gets up to find napkins at the nearby coffee cart, but when he turns she is another beige figure disappearing down the hallway.
He wonders if she remembers him, if she knows she is not meant to. Or is her reticence just a symptom of this place, where no one is meant to share much of anything?
Alone in their isolation, together.
This feeling could be a false recognition, his body readjusting to stimulus, however sparse. Or simply remembering the feeling of someone new, the excitement of a pretty face. His mind searching for something to grasp on to, for some victory that might kick-start the recovery those at the Center keep promising.
* * *
He wanders over to the farthest glass wall, where a quiet mist blurs the beach into a tan cloud. The man in the wheelchair who’d first sat beside him in the circle is facing the ocean, his hands resting in his lap. His eyes appear focused. Unlike the others here, who often seem frantic, this man has a sense of calm that draws Lucien to him. If he is distracted, it is only by his own peace.
Lucien follows his gaze out to the water, past where the waves break, and watches. Just before he thinks to give up, a spray of white erupts from the glassy ocean. The man’s face softens for a moment, and his lips stretch into a slight smile.
“They come in groups,” he says without turning. “There’ll be another.”
“A whale?”
“Gray whale, or could be a humpback. Now, that’d be something.”
As predicted, another spray appears a short distance from the first. Then the splash of a large dark mass.
“She’s breaching!”
Lucien feels a purity of joy coming off the man’s enthusiasm; he has not felt it in quite some time. The intrusion of nature on such a pristine, controlled environment. He thinks he sees a hand rise out of the corner of his eye, possibly to wipe away a tear, but now Lucien cannot move his eyes from that spot on the sea either. A wide, flat tail flips up and creates the biggest splash yet, disappearing again behind the froth.
“Fuck,” says Lucien. “I could watch this all day.”
The man looks over, as surprised by Lucien’s enthusiasm as he is.
“I do.”
The man holds out a hand and Lucien takes it, though neither of them do the thing that happens next, the courtesy of giving the other a name by which to call them.
What no one mentions is that a name is a place in your memory, nothing more. Like a label for the filing cabinet, it keeps things tidy. And it recognizes that there will be a folder. We say we are “committing someone’s name to memory,” but that isn’t it. We’re committing to the fact that they will have a place in our memory, and that place is marked by their name. Lucien always thought himself bad with names, even resented the embarrassments and unintentional insults forgetting them results in. But how he misses them now.
“Whole thing’s a bit awkward,” says the man.
“You said it.”
“I tell you what, what I like to do is this. We shake, and we look at each other’s eyes.”
He takes Lucien’s hand in his again, then places his other hand over it. His hands are warm. Then he stares into Lucien’s eyes, deeper than Lucien feels comfortable, yet he lets him. There is a kindness here, in being seen.
“Now you remember something about me—and you name it.”
Lucien opens his mouth, but the man interrupts.
“Don’t say it,” he says with a grin. “Save it, that’s yours. That’s me for you. I’ve got mine. I’ve got you now.”
The man taps his temple, then looks back out to the ocean. Lucien watches with him for what must only be another few minutes, but he is not yet trained in this act of waiting that the man seems to have mastered. He will not tell him this, but Lucien committed not a name but a snapshot to memory. A visual label. The man’s eyes, opening against his smile. A squinting kindness.
When Lucien starts to say goodbye, the man’s eyes are closed, and Lucien thinks he sees one of his feet twitching from deep in sleep. He wonders how long he’s been in there; at the Center but also in his chair. What memories circulate behind his eyes? Lucien thinks how, depending on the present, memory can be an escape—or torture.
Running, walking, jumping, when all you can do now is wait.
Chapter 7 BEFORE
Here are a few things Lucien knows. You can be someplace and gone at the same time. Sitting with his grandmother feels no closer than being across the country all these years. Holding her hand will not shock her back to clarity. And lineage is not a superpower.
Here’s another thing. Los Angeles is lonely if you’re alone.
New York should be, but it isn’t. Lucien walked through and out of his loneliness countless times in New York. He always felt held by the city. Perhaps it was the height, though the same was true in Manhattan or Brooklyn, on a busy avenue or a low-lying cobblestone block. Even in his lowest moments—his mother sick, friends not getting it—Lucien appreciated the community of strangers. Everyone in Los Angeles seems to begrudge everyone else for being here at all. For contributing to the traffic. In New York the people were the place.
As he lies on the new mattress in this new apartment—the first place he’s ever had to himself, paid for by loss—his mind is back in New York, staring at both past and present, imagining where else he could be in this same moment. What else could have been? His life and apartment here in Los Angeles feel like someone else’s. None of its smells are yet his own.
The other day Liv from the juice store–slash-café below his apartment invited him to a Halloween party. God knows why she asked him, beaming with an energy that actually made him smile. If he was unsure of going to a stranger’s house party, at the invitation of someone he barely knows, he is more unsure of who he will be at the end of another week spent alone in his apartment. Lucien is tired of waiting for his life to resume. He’s tired of giving up, over and over again. Tired of finding himself in a place that feels entirely wrong, yet doing nothing to change.
* * *
From his car Lucien squints against the darkness descending on Beachwood Canyon as every turn takes him higher into the hills. The streets twist like coiled rope, getting narrower and more overgrown until even the curbs become nonexistent. Around one sharp curve, the backlit HOLLYWOOD sign reemerges from behind the landscape, freshly typed across the night sky. Houses appear up and down from each treacherous bend, with glowing pumpkins on doorsteps lighting the way. A few more turns and Lucien’s navigation cuts out. He guesses the next, one after another, until he is suddenly descending, and the same fairy-tale stone gates he had passed moments earlier announce that he is leaving Historic Hollywoodland—the storied neighborhood where, true to its vintage, all cell phone reception seems to vanish.
A missed call from moments ago lights up his screen. Natasha, his dealer, again.
A car honks and speeds around him. Lucien creeps right onto Cheremoya Avenue, wondering where he went wrong. One more try and then I give up, he tells himself, soothed by the idea of bailing. He turns around, then heads back toward the stone gate. He taps to resume the navigation while he still
has service, his car once more pitched to climb.
Lucien doesn’t even like Halloween. The last time he really dressed up, he must’ve been five. He remembers standing on the sidewalk, his ears turning numb where they stuck out from his cowboy hat, as he kicked his boots through the piles of leaves filling the spaces between tightly parked cars. Kissing, as his mother liked to describe their bumpers. He remembers the sight of his parents that night, illuminated behind the giant stained-glass window on the first floor of their castle-like walk-up that looked so out of place in Prospect Heights, with its tiled roof and bright blue door among rows of uniform brownstones. Its stained glass like lace laid over thick amber. The beauty of that window was simple; it obscured people on the inside. The curve of its decorative lines detached heads from necks, warped familiar figures into funny shapes, even made it hard to discern laughter from tears, or struggle from embrace.
Even now, twenty-some years later and across the country, Lucien could trace that window’s delicate lines in his memory. This window, his mother told him one day after his father left, was left over from a princess who used to live here long ago, before there was even a city, or anything but this house. She stared out of it, too, wondering what was next. Back when it was ten times the size of what’s left here now. This little piece that’s ours to look after. Isn’t it exciting, to have something to look after?
Lucien still hears her voice in his head. He shakes her away. Passing home after home, lit up from inside, it occurs to him that if he returns to theirs in Brooklyn, he will see another family, their privacy now protected by its warm amber veil.
The thought of his childhood home, empty then filled with another family, hollows him. Could they have settled in enough by now to feel it their own? To forget that they are new to its history as they clear out all that it was? Before he loses himself entirely in that aching, the navigation sounds again, announcing the destination, and Liv’s smile pops into his head. The way her pale blue eyes nearly disappear behind it; the golden fleck that dances behind them. The way seeing her makes him feel less like himself, and isn’t that something?
* * *
Cars line the streets in all directions. The only other sign of a party is the roar of voices over music and what sounds like water splashing. Lucien barely makes out a door in the tall wooden gate that stretches an entire overgrown block. He checks the address again, then finds its skinny silver letters reflected in the glow of passing headlights. Hardly the backyard barbecue he was expecting. Lucien tucks the case of Red Stripe he brought under the passenger seat and smooths his hair.
Liv is the first person he sees once through the gate. She stands by the front door of the house with several people all in costume. The momentary relief of being in the right place quickly passes, as Lucien realizes she and her friends now have to watch him as he makes his way down the landscaped path toward the house. Is it too soon to wave? He smiles at his feet, convincing himself he’s laughing at something funny that must have just happened.
“You came!” she says.
Liv leans in to give him a hug. She is wearing a blood-soaked prom dress, with handprints smearing the thick red paste across one of her cheeks and into her blond hair. The deep red color looks pretty, the same way red lipstick shocks a face into focus. Lucien scans the guys’ faces to say hello, but neither looks his way.
“I know, Carrie—so cliché, right?” She fluffs her tulle skirt. “This is beet pulp though, so I like to think I made it my own.”
Lucien smiles and nods, unsure of what else to say with the audience of strangers that refuse to look in his direction; unsure why he is still nodding. He now wishes he’d taken his own costume, a half-assed riff on a BuzzFeed meme, more seriously. He can’t even look down at the dumb DIY T-shirt. At least the rest of it is still tucked in his back pocket. Maybe no one will ask.
“Hey, guys, look alive,” Liv says pointedly. “This is Lucien, my new friend.”
“Mark,” says the shorter one dressed as Don Johnson, like he hadn’t seen him before. He extends a pack of cigarettes in place of a handshake. “Fucking LA, man.”
All right, here we go, Lucien thinks as he takes a cigarette.
“People don’t even let you smoke on their decks anymore,” continues Don Johnson, talking with the looseness and entitlement of someone with a few drinks in their blood. Unless that’s just an LA thing. Fucking LA, man. “It’s one thing inside the house, but half of this place is open-air. Like, smoke diffuses and shit.”
Lucien takes a long drag, longing for that six-pack in his car.
“Now we’re relegated to the front steps like fucking intruders or something.” Don stamps out his cigarette. “I gotta get out of this place, man.”
“Where are you from?” asks Lucien.
“Pacific Palisades.”
Lucien laughs, then conceals it into a cough.
“But I live in Silver Lake.”
Lucien turns to the other guy, dressed as the Dude from The Big Lebowski—bathrobe open over a white tee and loose pajama pants. It feels grossly intimate, for a first meeting.
“How about you?” Lucien asks.
“Silver Lake,” says Lebowski under his breath.
“I’m not far from you guys, Echo Park.”
Both of them start laughing. Don Johnson puffs on his cigarette, then watches the smoke curl from his mouth. “Dude, it’s so over.”
“It was over five years ago,” says Lebowski. “But where do we even go?”
“Montecito Heights? Even Highland Park, man.”
“Fuck that noise, Highland Park is too far. I don’t want to drive twenty-five minutes on the 110 just to get decent Thai. There, I said it.”
“Dude, I hadn’t even thought about that.”
“No way in hell Jitlada will cross the LA River. Daddy needs his khao yam.”
“You know I dated that girl over there for like four months—the model, with the voice.”
“Oh god, I remember her,” Liv says.
“I mean, she had a sick place with a sweet yard and a dog. I still miss that dog. But she always wanted to spend the night over there, and there was nowhere to eat.”
“Right, you’ve got like two options. Maybe three.”
“I need the hills,” Liv says.
“Hills!” echoes Lebowski. “Yes, okay, obviously Liv gets it. Hills are key. They keep out the riffraff.”
Lucien is tempted to turn around and walk right back up the hill, fading into darkness, and he would do it, too, if not for the awkward amount of time it would take to fully disappear.
Liv slaps Lebowski’s bathrobed arm.
“What?” he says. “I’m sorry, but they do. Have you been to Venice lately? Loaded with riffraff. Flat as hell.”
“You’re a terrible person, Mick,” Liv says, laughing.
Lucien watches Liv, considering the weight that such an early interaction holds. She is, maybe, not a great person. She also might have bad taste in people. Look who she invited tonight. Lucien freshly resents having been included. From what she’s seen, he thinks, I’m the worst. I sulk, I don’t appear to work. I’m not friendly. He knows that’s not true, not usually at least. Lately, yes. But not usually. Worse still, is that what she likes about him?
“Look, I don’t mean the homeless.” Lebowski is still talking. “The homeless are the last thing saving Venice from becoming a basic-ass promenade. I’m talking blogger bitches and their dirtbag CrossFit boyfriends. No one in the industry lives in Venice. Nothing good, or at least intellectual, happens west of Fairfax. Tell me I’m wrong! Bel-Air—whatever, if you’ve got the money you can bring the culture to you. Malibu? Sure, why not, but also, like—who wants to fuck with the PCH?”
“Echo Park shoulda been it, man,” says Don Johnson. Lucien feels like reminding them that that’s where this rant first started. “They’ve got hills and it’s still kinda dirty enough to keep out the Insta-models.”
“Almost.”
“You guys
sure like neighborhoods,” Lucien says sharply.
Don and Lebowski look at him with a mix of hatred and respect.
“It’s all the same to me, honestly,” he adds. “I just moved here.”
“From where?”
“New York.”
“Ah, man, well then, yeah.” Lebowski squeezes his shoulder. “How you hanging in, dude? I lived in New York for a couple years.”
“Me too, I did my time,” says Don.
“Cool cool,” Lucien says, amazed at how much conversation can be spent on place.
Moving on, moving on, he thinks, though he is pleasantly surprised by the momentary escape from his own thoughts. To be so completely consumed with pity for these goobers.
“Dude, where were you in New York?” says Lebowski to Don, and Lucien feels the entire conversation about to repeat itself.
He glances at Liv and is relieved when she smiles back knowingly. She flicks her cigarette butt into a patch of succulents.
“Ay!” says Don.
“Relax—they’re like ninety percent water.” Liv holds out her hand and Lucien takes it, following her through the front door.
“I’m surprised you smoke,” he says from behind, into her ear. “With all the juice.”
“I don’t!” She turns, and her hair brushes his cheek. It smells like coconut and palo santo. “Never. Only when I drink.”
The house sprawls beyond what its low, midcentury exterior suggested, with an addition doubling what must have been its original footprint. The interior space features open-air sections connecting the various pieces puzzled into the steep landscape. A large living area in the center is oriented around a hanging metal fireplace and interior landscaping extending out to an expansive deck. The wall of sliding glass is retracted for the party—or all the time, Lucien thinks, remembering where they are.
Beyond the deck is a sheer drop down the hillside. The view stretches past the Hollywood Hills and to the ocean in the distance, recognizable only by the absence of lights. Lucien takes in the vastness of this city, understanding something of those two guys with their need to define themselves within it. With the stars twinkling above and the lights of the city below, it looks like two skies mirrored across the horizon.
The Shimmering State Page 6