Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “It’s beautiful. There’s life everywhere. In the morning, when it’s still dark, the birds start chirping, and they fill the air with singing, so that when you walk around your ears feel full. Everyone sleeps in these tiny houses or tents. You know when it’s time to wake up because the air has a morning smell and it sneaks in through the littlest cracks in the doors and windows. One of the people here has a donkey, and I watch it standing outside in the sun with its eyes closed. I brush the flies off its belly with a long piece of hay I found in the barn. I think it likes that.” Nora pauses expectantly. “Life is a wonder,” she adds.

  “What does Mom do? Where is she now?” Patrick asks.

  “She’s mourning,” says Nora, abstractly. He can tell that she’s looking at something off in the distance, he’s losing her attention.

  “Wait, Nora. This is very important. What does that mean? Are you two safe?”

  “Of course we are,” says Nora, confused now. “Are you safe?”

  “What?” Patrick replies.

  “Dad, you sound scared. Are you in trouble? Where are you?”

  “I’m nowhere,” Patrick says, flustered, “I’m just fine.”

  “No, really, Dad, you have to tell me. What’s wrong? Where are you right now? Is there someone there listening, is that why you can’t say?”

  Nora’s voice was annoyingly like Alison’s, precise and concerned, careful, like the handwriting on a get-well card. He wondered sometimes whether Nora was really as precocious as she seemed, or whether she only imitated her mother’s mannerisms. How, for example, had she learned to flip his concern for her on its axis, so that he was now the one scrambling to assemble a reassuring answer? And what kind of answer could he give without revealing how unmoored he was, how little he understood? He was somewhere in Azusa or just south of it, somewhere in the eastern middle of the sprawl, an hour-plus to the studio, an hour-plus to the airport. There were no exact places in this city, and too much space. Somehow, it took an hour to get anywhere.

  “I’m in a parking lot. Near a big grocery store. Completely normal.”

  “What’s happening around you? Are you lost? You sound like I felt when I got lost in the hay maze. When I was six. You remember?” Silence on the phone as she waits patiently for an answer.

  Patrick looks around him at the parking lot, incoherently strewn with cars. He sees the thin islands of diluted nature that break the lot into discrete clusters of parking spaces, each strip sown with a few square feet of sod and another sad new tree. The sky overhead is such a deep, pale blue that you could fall right into it. Then, against the background of repeated shapes, strip mall after strip mall, he notices the green van.

  A man in a khaki jumpsuit, an employee maybe, is sliding the cargo door open. He leans into the dark interior, and then he’s helping an old woman out and onto the asphalt. The woman wears an electric-green sweat suit that matches the van, its color vibrant against the gray-black of the parking lot. Then the man helps another person out, a middle-aged man, and another, a younger woman, all in the same green clothing. Standing near the vehicle, the three are pliant, quiescent. They stare out blankly into the distance at nothing in particular, each in their own, separate direction. The man in the jumpsuit continues unloading passengers: a gray-haired woman, a teenage boy. As they climb out of the van, he wraps an arm around each midsection to help them safely onto the ground—their healthy-looking bodies move with the extreme care and fragility of the very old or the very young. When all nine passengers are unloaded, the driver slams the doors shut. One passenger falls to the asphalt in the shock of the noise and just lies there until the driver lifts her back up to her feet. Patrick realizes with surprise that some of the people in green are young—in their twenties or thirties, not yet his age. The man in the jumpsuit fetches a rope from the trunk of the van. He moves from one person to the next, wrapping their left hands around the rope so that they look, if anything, like they are playing tug-of-war, on the same team, against nobody. He wraps the end of the rope around his own hand securely. Then he leads them all across the vast parking lot, toward the grocery store in the distance.

  “Dad?” comes Nora’s voice. “Are you still there?”

  A retirement home for all ages, he wonders to himself. Or a psychiatric facility on a field trip? The way they cluster, unashamed to be undifferentiated, points to some shared weakness. But the group contains so many different kinds of people, with nothing visibly wrong to tie them together. He can’t name what he sees, and it troubles him.

  “You really have me worried, Dad,” she says.

  “No, don’t worry, honeybee,” says Patrick in a lighthearted way. “I’m just a little dehydrated, that’s all. And California’s not what I expected it to be. Everyone out here’s a little crazy. You get the sense that what’s in their head is more real to them than what’s out there in the world.”

  He can almost hear Nora, on the other end of the line, thinking through what he’s just said. “Okay,” she says solemnly. “Just remember, it’s not your fault if you don’t strike it rich out there. I learned that during the Gold Rush everyone thought it would be easy to find gold in California just by showing up, but most of the easy gold was gone in the first four years, by about 1852. People kept moving there because they heard you could reach into the river and pick up a gold nugget, but there wasn’t any gold in the river anymore. There was only gold for the people who did hydraulic mining, where they blasted the rock with water to root out all the valuable metal, but it was bad for the rock and for the water and for everyone there who had to drink the water.”

  “Well, the film industry isn’t like the Gold Rush, for about a million different reasons,” Patrick responds.

  “I’m just saying that you can always come to Earthbridge to be with us. I told Mom you might like it here, and she said maybe you wouldn’t feel welcome. I thought that you would feel welcome in any place where we both are, but I guess I don’t know,” says Nora in a breezy voice. “I have to go now. They’re about to start a tutorial on how to shear a sheep. Okay, Dad? They’re starting right now.”

  “Okay, honey. Bye,” he says. He thinks of Nora as a toddler, so helpless and so pure, staggering around the little New York City apartment where they had once lived in her bloomers, grasping at loose objects on the coffee table—a drinking glass, a TV remote—and uttering lone syllables in that baby voice still yearning to form itself. When he would pick something up off the high surfaces and hand it to her, she would regard it with an expression of pure, undiluted wonder. In those days, her brown eyes were still hazel, like Alison’s.

  “Oh no, wait, Nora, I need to talk to your mother—” he says, but she’s already hung up.

  In the dry swelter of the parking lot, Patrick stares at the green van. Such a calming color, he thinks. Like the emerald hills of Ireland, if someone plugged them into an electrical socket. He feels empty and light and a little hopeless. It occurs to him that Cassidy Carter would know what to do right now, would know exactly how to proceed. But not the real Cassidy Carter—the spunky one from those saccharine but strangely affecting movies. What had happened to the sunny, exuberant girl from all of these films? Had she been destroyed by whatever had come later in her career, or was she still lodged somewhere within, imprisoned and pleading to be set free? What was it President Rousseau Sinclair had said in her filibuster before Congress in Happy Birthday, Miss Teen President!—that speech about national unity? “Every one of us leads a double life,” she said. “A life of the individual, and a life of the citizen. It is our lives as individuals that bring us so much trouble and so much strife—in that life, we feel ourselves alone, at odds with those around us, troubled by the dreams and desires that feel so essential to us but fail and fail again to find their footing on the steep cliffs of fortune. But there is another life within us, a life in which we are indelibly connected to one another, where our fel
low citizens’ well-being is tied to our own by a golden thread that I call America. Imagine a shining thread tied to your wrist, a thread that extends to that of your neighbor, and from his to that of his neighbor. And from time to time you feel a tug upon it, a tug from far away, and if you look far off into the distance you know your countryman is there, somewhere, in need of your help. I may only be fourteen going on fifteen, but I know that my life as a citizen connects me to each and every one of you sitting in this room today, and I am proud to call each of you my friend….” It was drivel, of course, but even so there was something to it.

  Patrick requests a rideshare to take him back to the left-hand side of the city. For fourteen minutes, he sits on the curb in the parking lot, watching a pixelated image of a car circumnavigate the surrounding roads, turning toward him and sometimes away from him, stopping at unseen traffic signals, sometimes spinning around in circles and flickering for long moments before stabilizing, pointed in the opposite direction. When the driver shows up, he’s talking to someone through a headset in a throaty, unidentifiable language. With accidents clogging the 210, and reports of protesters on foot causing disruptions on the 10, he switches to local roads south and then westward, curving back up toward Glendale. Winds are low today, and the fires burn in place.

  As they abandon the highway for less-congested local roads, sound-canceling walls give way to strip malls with Spanish signage and residential streets where single-story single-family homes sit square on their lots like the yolk on an over-easy egg. Windows rolled up and air conditioner roaring, he watches the blocks scroll by through glass: families with buckets and sponges out to wash the car with sudsy liquid, tawny-skinned children running barefoot on the yellow lawn. The driver brakes for a thick-braided girl riding her bicycle in loopy figure eights in the middle of the road. In front of almost every house is a bulky plastic WAT-R pod, a sky-blue box the size of a small minivan, positioned close to the road, where it blocks the sidewalk. Once a week, the tanker lumbers down these neighborhood streets, filling the receptacles of families who haven’t yet paid to have WAT-R installed in their homes.

  When the heat bears down, residents of West Covina fill spray bottles from the pod out front and relax beneath a backyard awning with the front door open and the back one open too, inviting the breeze to wander into their homes and out the other side. In the shade of a patio umbrella, the grandchildren take turns holding the bottle and squeezing the trigger, pointing the plastic nozzle at Grandmother’s face, spritzing her with fine, cool mist. With her eyes closed, she lets her mouth fall open in relief, sighing so deeply that she feels the bottom of her lungs on the exhale. The mist settles on the surface of her hot skin, her clothing; it clings to her nostrils and enters the lungs and mouths of the children as they bask in the moisture.

  As the sun sets, they padlock the pod’s plastic spout, safeguarding the week’s water from teenagers on bicycles who cruise the neighborhood after dark, seeking free fill-ups and bashing the plastic tankards with sticks or baseball bats or scavenged rebar, reveling in the slap of the weapon and the way its echo cuts through the peace. Some nights, vandals come with box cutters to cut messages into the thick plastic walls of the pods, inscribing their initials or the name of their girlfriend or the words FUCK and YOU. If they work their patience and muscle all through the night, a blade will chew its way through the thick plastic walls, springing the liquid beneath and letting it drain out onto the dark asphalt. In the morning, the renters phone the 1-800 number on their information packets, but all damages to pods on loan from WAT-R Corp are the responsibility of the podholder, and repairs must be done through WAT-R Corp technicians at podholder expense, and unfortunately there are no repair slots available until next week. The WAT-R pools at the base of the damaged structure, forming a moat that shines like an uncertain mirror. At dawn, the rising sun sends a fragile pink light through semiopaque polyethylene and renders the tanks briefly, fleetingly, sublime.

  * * *

  —

  In the narrow moat of gravel winding its way around the office building, someone has planted bristling mounds of bush, interspersed by squat cacti and tall, feathery grasses. Patrick doesn’t know the names of any of these plants, and it is only in this moment that he realizes how reassuring the soft, fat leaves of East Coast varietals are, their plump shapes a testament to abundance. Alison would know what these are called, Nora too, and he remembers the afternoon he spent planting tomatoes with them just a few weeks ago, in the vegetable garden that Alison started last spring as part of her recovery. Crouching in the wet grass, he jabbed a hole with the trowel his wife had given him, squinted into the dirt at small stones and weird white particles. Nora observed him cautiously, complimenting the width of his holes and suggesting that he dig them deeper to stabilize the floppy young stems. He left them to plant the last few after he felt he had seen everything the process had to offer, and as he walked away he turned back briefly to see them undoing his work, Alison pulling the plants up gently and holding the frenzy of dirt-covered roots suspended as Nora worked her small shovel down into the earth.

  He wishes they were here now, to render intelligible the unfamiliar building’s unfamiliar landscaping, to dilute the out-of-place feeling he sometimes has as a lone man in a place where he isn’t certain he belongs. Patrick stares at the arrangement of plants blankly, trying to look absorbed, as Horseshoe—dressed today in a plain chambray button-up—and the Arm head into the building without him. He knows that this first arrival will make an impression in the minds of the producers, director, crew, and he wants to wait outside for a minute or two so that his entrance will register as distinct from that of the production kids, who share his job title but are not at all like him, a creator. It would have been better to enter before them, just a minute before, but the two walk too quickly with their long, lanky limbs. At ground level, small sprinkler heads spurt clear liquid at and around the graveled area, feeding a sea of green, lush grass, expensively maintained and carefully watered, thick and cool to the touch. As he stares at the landscaping, he can’t help but wonder what all these plants mean: how much do they cost, is this studio large, is it small, are its finances in good order, and what aspects of that order can be gleaned from the varieties of plantings by the front door? When Patrick spots a group of five or six entering the building, clustered like high-schoolers, he slips in behind them.

  The room where the reading is taking place is already full, a large square table surrounded by wheeled office chairs. In front of every setting is a bound copy of the script and a bottle of WAT-R. Patrick goes to the table to take the only open chair, but a young woman puts her palm on the seat. “This one is reserved for Cassidy Carter,” she says in a voice that is apologetic, but also proud to be saying the famous name. Patrick looks at Jay and Brenda, set apart from everyone in the room, leaning over some papers that nobody else has. He drags a chair in from the periphery, into a narrow space to the right of a kid in his twenties with a short scruff of beard. His own chair is a bit lower, has no wheels, and is bright green, but he can still see everything going on at the table, including Jay and Brenda, still speaking to each other calmly, quietly, but so intently that something seems wrong. Now someone’s tapping him gently, insistently, on the shoulder.

  “Hey, howdy,” says the kid in a low, private tone. “I’m Dillon. I’m the lead male.”

  He extends a hand, loose and slightly damp. Patrick grabs it too hard, then lets go too quickly.

  “I’m Patrick Hamlin. I’m the writer.”

  “Screenwriter?” asks Dillon.

  “No,” he says, “I wrote the book they’re basing this film on.”

  “Wow, that’s great. You must be a proud papa.”

  “Thanks, I really am. It’s a story that means a lot to me personally, rooted in my experience of family,” Patrick replies.

  “That’s interesting,” says Dillon. “I do a lot of r
ealizing other people’s material—not really making it ‘from scratch,’ as they say. I consider myself a sort of midwife, trying to deliver life rather than create it, and as such the creation process is a beautiful mystery to me. What about this story is so personal for you?”

  “Well,” says Patrick, awkwardly, “I suppose one answer would be that it happened to me. It’s based on my life.”

  Dillon’s handsome, untroubled face takes on a furrowed expression.

  “I didn’t realize it was based on something that actually happened,” he says.

  “Yes, well,” says Patrick, gaining momentum, “you could say the entire novel is a final letter to my father, even though he was no longer with us to receive the message. I began writing the book after he passed away, on my first trip back to my hometown, in Newton, Massachusetts. Massachusetts, as you know, has always been a place where a deep sense of history is imbued in the land, it’s practically everywhere you look, and so I began to think about how his presence might still be lingering around our neighborhood in the same way that those traces or scraps of lost history still seem to live in the buildings and streets. New England is a graveyard, a deeply haunted place; you could say the dead are buried seven layers deep. Native peoples, early settlers, young girls who died in childbirth, men who got their hand chopped off at the wrist for stealing turnips from land that was not their own. In the town I grew up in, you see the same names on the street signs as you do in the oldest cemetery—the old names don’t disappear. That’s the reality, not superstition—and still its inhabitants want to consider themselves ordinary modern Americans living in an ordinary American place. So I asked myself, why does society consider it more egregious to remember those who have gone than to forget them?”

  “It sounds like you went through a crazy experience,” says Dillon politely.