He opens his laptop. He needs to write something, anything, to Natasha. Then she might stop calling. He just needs to buy himself more time. He feels so much better today, after just one pill, that he can only imagine how he’ll feel tomorrow, and the next day, if he can get a few more. Enough to take his mind off everything, to get out of his own head. Maybe even to inspire him once again.
But what is there to say? Put simply, he has nothing to show. He needs time, though how much, and for what, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what’s next. He feels stuck, desperate for a new approach, or a new subject. The overlay collage and blurring in his last series had become avoidance, a means of survival. He sees that now; that’s about all he can see. But he can’t send all that, knowing it’s the last thing his art dealer wants to read.
Dear Natasha,
I’m so sorry I’ve been missing your calls—I think I need some time
He deletes it.
Hey! Can’t believe I keep missing your calls—
Again.
I’m sorry. I think I need to reevaluate—
“Lucien—fucking—Bennett!”
Timothy Barber, a classmate from NYU, stands beside his table. Lucien doesn’t understand how he missed him earlier, though he certainly blends in. Timothy motions to an open laptop a few spots down, screenplay aglow. Sophomore year, Timothy had a short story published in the Paris Review that went viral. The story got him an agent and a major book deal pitched on an idea, though as far as Lucien knows, eight years later there’s still no novel.
“You’re the last person I expected to get the LA bug, man,” Timothy says.
“Yeah, well,” Lucien starts, then realizes he has nothing. “You live out here?”
“A few years now. I’ve got this pilot with Hulu, off the story, and an overall coming up at HBO—crazy times, man. I’m stretched so thin, but I love it, you know? How about you, what brings you west? Don’t tell me you’ve got a show opening! I saw that one in Chelsea, I mean, I didn’t make it, obviously, but I saw the photos, major.”
“Here because of my grandmother, actually.” Lucien hears how strange it sounds, the way he fumbles finding the words, even now. “Just helping out for a bit.”
“Wow, right on. Better man than I,” Timothy says. “Hey, I was so sorry to hear about your mom, dude. Damn.”
“Thank you,” says Lucien, back in a conversation he knows well.
“I saw the article in the Times,” Timothy says, pausing to allow Lucien the chance to elaborate, but he doesn’t. “Did Schnabel really come to the funeral?”
“He did.”
“In the silk pajamas?”
“They were good friends.”
Lucien forgets how to leave a conversation, or at least how to steer it. Maybe it’s the pill, still wearing off. Him too content from the wash of it. He wants to counter with his own question. So, when is that novel finally coming out? It’s a voice Lucien never listens to, but others subject him to all the time. The voice that knows trigger points and pushes on anyway.
Timothy puts his earbuds in and holds up a finger.
“Hey, I got this call,” he whispers. “Great seeing you, man, we should get drinks!”
Before Lucien can respond, Timothy is already on the call, rushing to face his laptop screen, talking loudly. Both girls look over at the sound, and Lucien actually thinks they look impressed. He turns back to his computer, the cursor left blinking—I think I need—but he can’t finish it. Especially now. What he didn’t tell Timothy is that one of the reasons he chose Los Angeles was because he had not expected to be seen.
The first time Lucien went to Dinosaur, he parked at a CVS a quarter mile away and decided to walk rather than driving, and parking, again. On his phone it looked close. But during the walk along Sunset Boulevard, the sidewalk disappeared, and he was honked at the entire way. For good reason, no one was walking. Trash whipped at him from the road. Only a few weeks in Los Angeles, and he will now drive from Gelson’s to CVS, even though they share the same large lot.
Lucien can’t remember the last time he felt out of place. His first year at Stuyvesant, sure, he remembers the rush to make new friends, meeting their families. He never felt like his home was different, until seeing theirs. But that was still New York. His life was oriented around the safety of that big anonymous place. Even the two years in New Haven for his MFA never felt like being away from the city, not truly. You could still say the city and everyone knew which one you meant. For undergrad, Lucien chose NYU last-minute over Brown to be close to his mother; he even lived with her at home instead of the dorms when she got worse. By the time he got into Yale, he’d earned a little time away. His mother was doing well then, too; one term she even taught a studio class for the painting MFA—when they would have lunch, the two of them, at the little oyster bar just off campus once a week. Smiling at their luck.
Lucien went in the opposite direction of his MFA classmates and took a job afterward, working with Max Yorn, one of those photographers whose name had practically become a brand, who had launched his own fashion magazine, and who was recognizable enough to engage any room he entered. Lucien worked either alongside him at parties or, in the last two years, covering entire events for him. Those years held a duality; daytime Lucien was a dutiful son—the nightlife job freed his days for helping his mother with whatever she needed. The perks were not lost on him, either. Lucien knew everyone and no one at all. Models would call his name as he walked through Nolita, grabbing a bagel on his way to his mother at the hospital. Only he knew the disconnect between his reality and his gig. He decided what and who would be remembered at those parties. People wanted him around because he made them feel seen. And with the camera in front of his face, he disappeared.
Caring for his mother became an identity that stood in for his own; it even informed his work. Lucien built a practice from his despair. His first solo show was in a tiny gallery on the Lower East Side. It was a night of worlds colliding; friends from high school, NYU, and Yale all came. There were the requisites: an open bar, someone to document the Who’s Who Wearing Who, the type of job Lucien had done countless times. Even Max Yorn came, kind of him though Lucien knew it made the guy look better. His protégé, an artist in his own right. It was the type of opening where people were looking around more than at the art. It was a success.
The show was a collection of his own photographs stretched and obscured and painted over, of his mother in varying degrees of illness and recovery. In most of them, he offset the images with a wash of color and thick, effusive white clouds. But the standout piece was a blown-up black-and-white, taken in the moment between sleep and wake. His mother looked regal yet ethereal. Lucien painted over it with bright colors and metallics to re-create the look of a relic, the Virgin Mary, grace herself. The piece sold immediately and covered a year of rent. The entire night was a mix of elation and humiliation; deep down Lucien knew the reason for the show was his mother’s name and—most important—her illness.
His success cemented in his mother’s pain.
The show got him representation. Natasha, a buzzy art dealer with a gallery off the High Line. That was a year ago. Lucien has yet to show her new work. At least before if he was stuck, or too busy to work on his own art, he was still shooting for his job. Still behind the camera. His camera was like an appendage, another set of eyes to make sense of the world. Now it feels awkward in his hands, and anything he looks at dries up in front of him. He’s dealt with his own creative pressure before—the difficulty in reconciling what you imagined and what you made. Since his mother’s death every photo he’s developed looks dull, incomplete. The thing died the second it was born.
Art is an act of hope, whatever shape it takes. The impulse to make the thing, the faith that lets you listen to it. To try and create something that might speak to those you may never meet. That was all blind hope. His pieces featuring his mother were aggressions of hope, an attempt to make her permanent in the face of
his fear. Now, across the country and cut off from everything and everyone he knows, Lucien sees like he has lost his vision, forgotten his eye. Moments pass him before they register. And he is all out of hope.
* * *
When Lucien arrives at his grandmother’s, no one is in the front room to greet him. She must be awake, he thinks, but when he gets to the den, he sees otherwise. She lies fully reclined in a medical bed, with two machines humming next to her.
“Lucien,” Trina says. “We tried to call you last night.”
“Sorry, my phone must’ve been off.” He thinks of it, buried somewhere between his sheets, while he slipped back and forth through time. “What’s going on? What is all this?”
“Florence started having trouble chewing, swallowing,” Trina says carefully. “It’s a new development, obviously, but not one that’s entirely unexpected.”
“I don’t understand, she was fine yesterday.”
“It’s her muscle memory failing now,” Trina says. “It’s all faster than we’d have hoped, for sure, but these things progress quickly, seemingly out of nowhere. This is when we really need the treatment to start taking, or she might need to be hospitalized, for more assistance than we can offer. We have every reason to think the treatment may still work; it takes up to six months for patients her age to show progress, and she’s only at about three.”
“And what—those signs of progress would be coming off the tubes, but she still might not remember anything, or be herself?”
“If she starts to regain her motor skills, it’s a good indication that her memory will come back, too; we forget how much of the physical body is built on memory. It’ll be a sign the treatment is working. And then it’s just time.”
Lucien looks down at his grandmother, the papery skin on her neck crinkled. He strokes her hair, trying to adjust her to be more comfortable, but she stays sleeping. Beside her, he feels her memories resurfacing—the faces he had known, surrounded by the feelings they stir in her.
“Fleur,” he says softly.
“Fleur?” repeats Trina, as if hearing it for the first time. Lucien feels a shock of recognition at the name, and then fear. “How beautiful. I like that.”
“It’s what her friends called her.”
“Well, she’s on a heavier dose today,” Trina says. “She probably won’t be awake for several hours, if you want to come back later.”
“I’ll stay anyway.”
He feels guilty. His unspeakable violation, all that he now knows without permission. But then there’s his mother—available to him, alive again at any moment, in all ages. He cannot bear that those moments are being wasted on someone who doesn’t even remember her daughter enough to miss her in the present. That those moments, the last trace of his mother left alive, should disappear in the faulty memory of another.
“Since you’re here, I’m going to grab my book,” Trina says. “I’ll be back in a minute!”
He nods, listening for Trina’s footsteps to fade before opening the bottle and shaking a few more pills from its abundant glow. His mother feels so close, her presence so tangible. Here it is, an alternate reality, preserved before everything went wrong. He would feel more guilt if he had any choice.
* * *
Lucien parks one street over from Laguna Avenue so Liv won’t see his car. He is too good at this for someone who has never been deceptive in his life. He had too much freedom to sneak around; even as a teenager in the city, his mother only asked for details, to tell her a good story. Well, wouldn’t this be one?
Back in his apartment, Lucien scatters the pills across the kitchen counter. He sets one full pill aside and then cuts the rest in half to stretch his supply. When they break, their pearlescent dust coats the laminate. Suddenly—footsteps on the stairs—Lucien crouches to the floor, waiting. He holds his breath until the footsteps turn toward the apartment across the hall.
What is he doing, hiding in his own apartment? Stealing from his grandmother? This, this is him helping? He grabs a bag of coffee from the cupboard and slides the shimmering halves over the edge of the countertop into the bag. When he looks inside, her pills seem to sparkle even in the dark. The nutty, caramel smell of the grounds rises up and into the back of his throat.
Lucien pinches the single remaining pill left on the counter and lets it roll along the lines of his palm. Which one speaks to fate, which to family? Why read palms, when the answers are distilled so neatly here? Seeing his mother, in all the ages he never knew, feels like extra time with her. Not just memories, but a little more life. He pushes the pill between his lips and sucks water from the kitchen sink.
He walks over to his bed and flops down, waiting for the sedative to set in. He is more desperate than ever to leave his own guilt. As he feels the sense of Florence return, he is finally no longer alone. Maybe Los Angeles isn’t so bad when you have someone, he thinks. Even if they wait, captive, inside a bag of coffee grounds.
Lucien laughs, then can’t remember why, and then his laugh is Fleur’s—
and everyone else is laughing, too.
Chapter 16 TODAY
Dr. Sloane’s absence hangs over the Center, a space already defined by what it lacks. Lucien has heard murmurs of a family emergency. He thinks of the daughter, the voice he knows only from the expression on Dr. Sloane’s face. Concern displacing her careful insistence of calm. For a moment she opened up to him. She, who stares as if looking for his seams, had pulled at her own strings and almost come undone.
This morning’s group exercise involves scented sachets, distributed during the circle. Another doctor, no name, mimics Dr. Sloane’s even tone. Each sachet smells different, she explains, specifically designed to activate a patient’s essential memories, so they are advised to hold theirs close. Not to share. These are scents found outside. Baby steps, to their return. Each patient takes turns describing what their sachet evokes. No specifics, only general scenes. When they get to the teen, eyes closed, he keeps saying, Coookies! Coookies!
At first it’s funny, then haunting.
Had Lucien seen this place and its many hollowed faces, would he have taken his grandmother’s pills? He can’t remember the choice, but he must have been desperate. He will never know what he looked like at his low, or what got him there, though he imagines it from what he’s seen—eyes glazed, maybe drool, that terrifying laughter at nothing. The parts of him that curled into themselves, idle on the floor, his smile enjoying every second as someone else.
Doesn’t the body remember, even after the mind has been wiped clean?
Lucien saw plenty of people on drugs growing up. The painter Phillip Ash, always on cocaine, always excited about everything and nothing, frantic with energy and enthusiasm to the point of undermining the thing itself. The best antidrug platform is not showing the temptation and telling someone to say no, but rather showing what happens when you like it. Too much. Where saying yes, over and over, will take you.
After the group session, Lucien and Sophie sit together at the cluster of couches facing the fireplace that grounds all their public conversations. He likes the illusion of a shared purpose, and the ability to watch the flames, even as they speak. Lucien still holds his linen sachet, which looks like something one might place in a drawer of clothing; like something that might smell of lavender or cedar. Sophie holds hers, too.
Her feet are tucked neatly under her, her posture light and perfect. The same feet that, two nights ago, had crawled across her floor, desperate.
He has not stopped thinking about the moment Sophie switched so quickly from being there with him in her room, to someplace else. He knows nothing about where she goes, or what she bears inside. He wants to see her no less, to help her just the same. He wants to tell her that it doesn’t matter to him, how she suffers or what she’s seen.
At least he has finally placed her. Sophie. Though it hardly explains the draw he’s felt here. Theirs was only a casual passing before; Sophie, as he knew her then, was flat. Undefi
ned. He didn’t yet know the curve of her eyebrows, or the way she closes her eyes just before she smiles. The anger she tries to hide. He remembers liking her fine then, too, and maybe he even thought more of Liv for being friends with her, but it’s hard to imagine ever standing beside Sophie without feeling like he could never leave. Like he wanted to stay beside her forever. How did he do it, then? Was it just too inconvenient to see?
Lucien wonders how long it will be until Sophie remembers and if it would be better to tell her first. Unless she already knows. Maybe neither of them wants to say, to make it true. Lucien doesn’t want to hurt Liv, but he also puts her out of his mind, no problem. Could Sophie do the same? As much as he grows tired of waiting here, he dreads leaving the Center, if leaving could mean losing her. At least here there are no names. No Liv. Lucien holds his sachet up to his face and breathes in deeply. Car exhaust, cigarette smoke, alcohol in her perfume covering the clothes in her closet; sour chemicals from the darkroom; the sterilized sanitizer of hospitals, pen in hand as he does homework in the corner, his neck sore from hunching without a desk.
He puts the sachet back in his pocket, wondering why his memories are all chemical. The sensation it evoked lingers, layers unfolding inside of him.
Sophie sniffs her sachet cautiously and closes her eyes. Lucien watches her, wondering where she is. She opens her eyes and smiles as if covering.
“Cut grass.” She shrugs. “So basic.”
Then she wipes away a tear.
Woven baskets scatter the common room. They look like they might hold fruit or seashells, but are full of blackout glasses, disposable like the flimsy ones one might have gotten at a 3D movie years ago. Smaller baskets are full of foam earplugs. Some patients fully tune out, glasses on, earbuds in, for the total experience if they want to go deeper; though most clearly don’t need it. They sit capable of seeing nothing even with their eyes wide open.
The Shimmering State Page 16