“Where are you in there?”
“All over the place probably,” Trina responds.
He sits back on his heels, and takes his grandmother’s thin, wrinkled hand into his.
“For Alzheimer’s treatment like your grandmother’s, they don’t choose certain memories to put in each pill. They pull a wide assortment from her whole life to run by her, flooding her brain with them, really. Sometimes not even a full memory makes it intact among the shuffle. Sometimes it does. You never know what will trigger the synapses that are still there, or what’s left uncovered by plaque that we can stimulate. Think of it like heating them up using her memories, melting the plaque away. Running them like an engine, turning it over until it catches.”
“Ah, a car metaphor,” says Lucien. “Now I get it.”
“Sorry.”
“No, I’m just joking,” he says. “I appreciate it, really. But is it unpleasant? Flooding someone with memories?”
“Oh no, it’s not unpleasant at all. And just to be sure, there’s a mild sedative in each pill to make sure she stays relaxed and doesn’t come out of it prematurely. She’s cruising in there. Who knows, she might even be with you.”
Lucien likes the thought of his younger self keeping her company, helping even if he can’t. A better self, at that.
“Would she recognize me?”
“Of course,” says Trina. “It’s not like playing old family videos or showing her photographs. The memories in her Memoroxin carry her consciousness—all her thoughts and feelings from the moments themselves, and like I said, there’s a little something to suppress whatever’s going on now, too, so she doesn’t get confused.”
Florence mumbles softly, the corners of her mouth turning up. Lucien squeezes her hand, encouraged by the idea that it might be him making her smile. She murmurs something again, and reopens her eyes.
She looks at him startled, then angry. She pulls back her hand.
“No,” she says, her voice hard. “Not you! I don’t want to see you!”
“It’s me, it’s Lucien.”
“After what you’ve done?” she says, her voice stretched thin and tight, on the brink of cracking. “You ruined everything!”
“It’s Lucien,” he repeats, but she doesn’t hear him. His mind races. She must know then, he thinks. What he did. What he didn’t do. He feels it in the way she studies him, his eyes, his face. Finally, the blame he deserves.
“Florence,” Trina interrupts calmly. “This is your grandson. All the way from New York to visit you.”
“Never,” his grandmother continues, certain. “And you’ll never see my daughter, do you understand me, Conrad? Never.”
Lucien gets up, knocking the stool over, and he stumbles to fix it. Meanwhile Trina steps in front of him, beside his grandmother.
“Calm breaths, Florence,” she says, stroking her hair. “This is my friend, you don’t know him, okay? He wanted to meet you. Look at those handsome green eyes.”
Florence looks ready to protest, but her eyelids begin to blink, opening more slowly each time, until they don’t.
“That’s right, let it happen. Good girl.”
Lucien’s hands are shaking, and he shoves them into his pockets. Conrad? So she wasn’t really seeing him, or talking to him. But how does she know about his mother, her daughter? Why would she say that, if not to him? When he looks over at Trina, she’s typing into the tablet at the nursing console. His grandmother’s eyes are closed. Only a flicker under her eyelashes.
“Sorry,” Trina says as she places down the tablet. “Just wanted to get that down. We keep a transcript of the names and things your grandmother says, both awake—which are a bit more limited—and under Memoroxin. In the off chance something surfaces. It’s standard to keep track of them to measure progress, to see if any memories are resonating, or if she recalls them later.”
“Can I take a look?”
“We aren’t allowed to share it with family; it can be overwhelming, I guess. But your mother gave us a list of names, places, and terms to look out for. So if Florence hits on any we’ll let you know.”
The word mother strikes him before he even realizes it; how he longs for her to be as alive as the word is without her. He cringes at Trina’s assumption that she is.
“If—that means there’s been nothing yet? How about Conrad?”
“Not yet,” says Trina. “Conrad does come up a lot, but he isn’t in here.”
“How many names did my mother give?” says Lucien.
“Eighty-nine,” Trina says. “And that’s a good number, right within our ideal range, so we’ve got lots to go off. Lucien, it’s not that she doesn’t say things, she says plenty of things. We just need to make sure they’re coherent. She might call me Isabel, but that doesn’t mean—”
“I get it.”
“Your mother was very thorough,” Trina says.
His mother wasn’t thorough. Maybe that is the thing prickling under his skin. Her mind was so often elsewhere, constructing canvases and cross-referencing poets and sculptor friends she would later send letters to, and all this had made her endlessly special, sure, but no one would ever say she was thorough. She forgot birthdays. She lost her keys once a week.
“I should get going,” he says, his hands still shaking.
He thinks to kiss his grandmother’s forehead, as he often does before leaving, but decides against it. With a nod to Trina, he grabs his backpack and walks toward the living room. His grandmother’s house has the same stale smell as yesterday, the wall-to-wall carpeting once fresh now fetid. The sage-green paint on the walls, nearly faded to white from the sunlight, holds the shadow of what once hung in its original hue. The entire house has been stripped of most of her things—probably to keep it clean, he thinks, to simplify things for the nurses. Somehow the dust remains.
The front room had been pristine and eclectic, with velvet couches, and shells in all shapes and sizes scattering the shelves. Stepping inside it was a like entering a tiny boutique museum. Now it looks vacated in a hurry. He looks hard, as though searching for inspiration in this place where he remembers wanting to capture everything. Until recently, capturing a moment before it was over, from his particular perspective and experience and position, was the driving force to his days. The desire to explore subjectivity, how by showing one perspective you could reveal the others missing. The sense of his limitations, the beauty of a certain angle.
Now he sees only a deserted home, dated and decaying from too much sun. Lucien sees nothing but moments passing. He lets them slip through his fingers and feels no regret. No impulse to catch them. He remembers the Polaroid camera and walks to the built-in shelf along the far wall to check its drawers. But when he opens one, and then another, he finds them empty.
A large painting is leaned backward against the bookshelf, its bare canvas with a few scribbles exposed on the other side. He pulls it back expecting to see one of his mother’s paintings. Preparing himself for her long horizons of surprising colors and grids.
His chest tightens.
A turquoise and mustard-yellow de Kooning faces him upside down. The broad swatches of intense color make him dizzy as he releases the thin, maple frame. It balances for a moment on its side, in the carpet. He wipes his hands on his pants, then lifts it gently again using the back edge of its frame and carries the painting away from the open, northern exposure. He feels the stickiness of the stale air on its thick paint.
“You shouldn’t worry about that,” Trina says from across the room.
Lucien points to the de Kooning.
“What is it doing like this, on the floor? On the carpet?”
“I meant your grandmother,” Trina says. “Her reaction wasn’t about you; the Memoroxin destabilizes her sense of reality as she falls into her dose. She could’ve been thinking of anyone. Just last week, she accused me of stealing her mail. Her checks. There was no reasoning with her. Then moments later, I was nobody again. Back to blank.”
“This can’t be stored like this,” he says. “Do you even realize—”
“You’re right,” she says, moving closer and reaching out a hand.
“Don’t touch it.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I wasn’t here when this came down. Is it one of your mother’s?”
“An old friend of hers.”
“You should take it, then,” says Trina. “No one will notice.”
“Shouldn’t there be a process? Beyond some random pillaging? Who’s to stop anyone from coming in here and taking what they want?”
“No one’s taking anything,” Trina says. “But if it’s valuable to you, you should take it.”
Lucien faces the canvas again, its frantic sweeps of color. He never could really see this one, despite his MFA, despite his mother’s love for it. He just couldn’t see it. But he recognized its value. The work should be in climate-controlled storage, on the walls of MoMA, the Whitney, LACMA. De Kooning was a mentor to his mother, through their network of artists in Southampton. The old Hamptons as they were slipping away. His mother always said the de Koonings were a lesson in how to be. It would kill her—again—to see the painting, a gift she gave away, like this.
“I shouldn’t have it either,” he says.
“Just to be clear, the majority of your grandmother’s things are all in storage. No one has pillaged anything. Maybe this one was going to be moved there, too, and got left behind.”
“We’re trying to make her remember, right? Wouldn’t that be easier if she could actually see her life around?”
“I thought the same thing when I started, but part of the therapy relies on a certain purity of the present, as they say. A blank, negative space means the memories she’s given might be more likely to trigger something clean. She’s all mixed-up in the present. None of this is any use to her. I do show her photos, sometimes. I recognized you, didn’t I?”
Lucien nods, unconvinced.
“For most Memoroxin therapy, patients go into centers, into treatment rooms; this Alzheimer’s outpatient therapy is just a test. But your being here, it’s incredibly generous of you. Your grandmother is a lucky woman, to be so loved.”
He could tell Trina how little he’d thought of his grandmother until he was left with nothing, no one. How only through his own selfishness did he even consider her. All those years, he never once visited again. Sure, Lucien’s mother was partly to blame, but at some point he became an adult. He could have afforded a flight out here; he could have afforded a phone call. And now he is here not because it is the right thing to do, but to right the greatest wrong. One he can no longer bear alone.
“I have to say, your mother was very smart to sign Florence up for this. Florence has a full-time nursing staff; all her needs are being met.”
He places his hand on the painting.
“Will she be coming, too, your mother?”
The hole Lucien has been tiptoeing around widens before him, its edges crumpling in. A single rock loosens, then plummets, spiraling into the darkness. Vertigo, right there in the empty living room.
“She passed away recently,” he says as flatly as he can.
Before he looks up to face Trina, she smushes herself into his chest.
“I’m so sorry, I knew she’d been sick, but—I thought she was doing better.”
“She was.”
“Here I go making it about me,” Trina says. “Making you rehash it.”
“It was the end of a long battle,” he says. “That’s what they say, isn’t it?”
“It’s all bullshit,” she says. “Cancer is bullshit.”
“Total shit,” he says, grateful for that. “Florence is the only family I have. I thought at least I could help her—for my mother.”
“Look, I’m being one hundred percent straight with you when I say this treatment has the potential to bring her back.”
For a moment, Lucien thinks she means his mother.
* * *
Los Feliz Boulevard is lined with all sorts of trees. Palm trees, of course, but also oaks, pines, and even cedar, all spilling down from Griffith Park. Driving after dusk Lucien has seen coyote eyes lit up red in the headlights. It is a bad sign when they start descending into neighborhoods, he heard a young mother say at Dinosaur Coffee the other day, hugging her baby a little tighter against her chest. It means the drought is pervasive, their food supply waning. There’s nothing more dangerous than desperation.
The de Kooning sits sturdily wedged against the console of his mother’s sedan. A couple loose T-shirts Lucien found in the trunk are draped over it, should he get pulled over for grand theft before making it home. Not that anyone would know what to make of it, apparently.
Each time Lucien leaves his grandmother’s he changes his route home. Crisscrossing the city feels closer to walking, a series of turns where he could happen upon something new. He needs to happen upon something soon, anything that might spark a new idea. That was the point, after all. Come to Los Angeles and work while being here to help his grandmother. And yet he feels blind here, in all the ways that matter.
When would he not see everything in terms of his mother, of his loss? Will there ever be a time when her death is no longer the frame? Lucien hardly remembers what gave him direction before. If not avoiding this pain, what was he doing? What was the point? And what does it mean if the thought of moving past this actually scares him more? Finally letting go, finding some other purpose, some other frame. As if he deserves it. As if he could ever, again.
The only thing Lucien is certain his mother would want is for him to create, to never stop. To use this pain and work with it, turn it into something. And yet—only in her death is he truly able to disappoint her. Had she shown disappointment in him during her life, he would be more equipped to deal with his fear of it now.
If only there were more tasks left that he could mindlessly finish and check off a list, like closing her estate, selling the house, or planning the funeral, but she had taken care of most everything else in advance, especially in the days before. She even spared him from having to pack up the house, her things, having organized that—a single phone call—two days before. She lived a full two days in the aftermath of her planned departure. But what he cannot stop thinking is, what if she was just waiting for him to prove her wrong? So that when someone showed up to take her things, she would wave them away from the front stoop.
But maybe after all those years, she finally felt like a burden. Maybe he let her. Had he not left her alone those last days, maybe she would not have done what she did; if he had only been there, in plain sight, she never could have done it so discreetly. She could not have convinced herself that this would be better for him, too. She would have seen how her choice would hurt him, more than any slow death.
He remembers the phone ringing. Tanner, high as shit, grabbing his phone, saying, Oh fuck off without looking at who was calling. Those words will stay with him forever. The way they lingered in the air, that smoke-filled emptiness of the afternoon, even then. Lucien knew, without looking, who it was. He had no idea what had happened on the other end, but now he can imagine. He will spend the rest of his life imagining. Maybe he did, finally, make her feel like a burden. Like something he would like to shed. One feels sorry for people gathered in hospital rooms, hands clasped in prayer, but they should not be the ones we pity; they have the opportunity to say goodbye and to begin letting go. Lucien and his mother were fighting her cancer so long that he forgot losing her was even an option. Her illness had become their life.
* * *
Back at his apartment, Lucien sprawls across his bed, his feet hanging off the end as they
always do. He kicks off his shoes. He turns facedown on his pillow and lies that way for a moment, finding it hard to breathe and holding that sensation. Just before he can’t bear it any longer, he feels something poking his chest, and remembers—the pill.
He flips back over and pulls it from his pocket. The oval pill is even smaller than he remembers and shimmers in the late afternoon light stretching across his apartment. He holds it, his grandmother’s life between two fingers. He is sad for Florence, so trapped inside her body. Her life lost while still alive. But he is also jealous. She disappears into moments where his mother still lives, and where he exists, before all this. What could be the harm, in seeing what she sees? What damage would it do her to share?
He needs to see her again. Just once would be enough.
He lets the pill rest on his tongue and closes his mouth. Careful not to swallow, he sucks it like a hard candy, slowly dissolving into her.
Yellow paint inside a sunny room.
The unmistakable sense of his grandmother washes over him, and the many moments of her life unfold so fast at first that Lucien hardly catches anything more than their raw emotions. Waves of warmth and fear, pride and dignity. Some waves he’s never ridden. Love. This must be what Trina meant by flooding his grandmother with memories, he thinks, amazed at his ability to remember himself with her consciousness wafting in and out.
Trying to distinguish between the incoming memories is like focusing on a single card in the deck while someone shuffles; as soon as Lucien thinks he sees something familiar, it is replaced by the next. He sucks the pill harder. The memories come in clearer, more fully formed, and Lucien finds himself adapting to Florence’s consciousness, his mind working faster, his eyes becoming sharper. The more memories that pass through him, the more of her he understands for the next, and the next, until soon Lucien recognizes those he has never met before, understanding their relationships and his grandmother’s feelings for them at that time, implicitly, for within her consciousness is laced a lifetime. Fleur, they call her when she’s younger, and it feels right. Fleur.
The Shimmering State Page 14