Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “I’m Ashley,” says Ashley.

  “Hi, Ashley,” Cassidy says, smiling. “I love this.” She reaches forward and lays one pale fingertip on the girl’s nose. “I just think it’s so cute when I meet one of my nose siblings out in the real world. We’re like a little family.”

  Patrick coughs, and they both turn to look at him. “Sorry to interrupt, but I told Cassidy that you’d be able to tell her a little about this facility, what you guys are doing here. She’s researching a role. She’s supposed to be playing an inmate.”

  “An inmate?” Ashley asks innocently.

  “Well, a sort of patient, someone with an illness,” Cassidy says quickly. “It’s tricky. It’s one of these roles where if you’re good there’s awards chatter, and if you’re bad they publish a bunch of pieces saying your career is over.”

  “Your career could never be over,” Ashley replies beatifically.

  “Awww,” Cassidy says. “Do you think you could give me a little tour? I’m so enchanted by this place and by what you do. I think helping people is the greatest thing anyone can do with their life.”

  “I think,” Ashley says, “that would be possible. But maybe I should call my manager and confirm it’s okay?”

  “Oh sure,” Cassidy replies quickly, “whatever you need to do. But, like, from my end, from the perspective of the project, it’s so important that word doesn’t get out too early. Can you trust your manager to keep this completely under wraps?”

  “Completely?” Ashley repeats, with an anxious smile. Patrick watches as Cassidy whispers something in her ear; the two of them giggle at each other. Ashley exits and is back a couple moments later with the keys, motioning for them to follow.

  She leads them down the long hallway to the left, the same dark and flickering space that Patrick found himself in on his last visit. This time, she turns on all the hall lights, and the narrow space shivers with brightness, every detail gratingly visible, from the television-static pattern of the carpeting to the small geometric confetti print on the walls. She points out the intake room, where potential patients come when they’ve been referred to the facility. There’s an examination table, several spiral-bound booklets, and a series of colorful objects—a red ball, a blue pyramid, a green cylinder—that resemble dead-end toys, toys from which all the fun has been wrung out. Next she shows them the dressing room, where patients who’ve passed through the intake process go to leave their personal clothing and put on the facility-issued green sweat suit. She pops open one of the lockers so that they can see the sneakers and slacks stacked up neatly inside. On top of the little stack is a brown wallet, a set of keys, and a bottle of WAT-R Extra. “I actually have to clear that one out later today,” she says, moving on quickly.

  “Can I ask,” Patrick says, “what you treat here?”

  “Sure, I guess that’s common knowledge,” Ashley says slowly. “Even if not a lot of people know it.” Her face takes on a professional expression, though he can see her look briefly around her, searching for someone to hand the question off to. “We specialize in Random-Onset Acute Dementia. So…it’s a degenerative mental disease that affects a different demographic from Alzheimer’s or vascular dementia. Actually, it affects all demographics. It can basically happen to anyone. We have all kinds of people here, doctors and retirees and personal trainers and even some high-school students. We even have a Golden Globe winner.”

  “And what do they do all day?” Cassidy asks. “Can I meet some of them?”

  “All of our patients are on a twenty-four-hour treatment cycle,” Ashley replies, looking uncomfortable, “so they can’t really be disturbed. But we can look in on them through the window. There’s a lot you can see through the window.”

  She takes them up a flight of stairs to a long viewing window that opens up onto a sort of playroom. More colorful geometric blocks, sports equipment, human figurines of different sizes and styles, all laid out on rubberized gymnasium flooring. Some adult-sized domestic play sets are lined up alongside of the wall, a fake kitchen with appliances made out of wood with real, turnable knobs, and a fake living room with a real TV. Two women in their twenties sit in the model living room, watching an amateur ninja competition on the vivid, extraordinarily detailed screen. In the model kitchen, an elderly man with a mournful face stirs the imagined contents of a wooden pot with a Barbie doll. Sitting on a folding chair facing the chalkboard is a heavier-set man whom Patrick thinks he might recognize. The beard, the short fingers, the small and compact mouth—it could be Sam Sackler, the director Brenda and Jay suddenly replaced. Sam had seemed perfectly fine just a couple weeks ago, but a couple weeks were like months these days. Or does he mean years? He looks to Cassidy to see if she’s recognized him too, but she’s absorbed in Ashley’s diligent explanation of the different treatment cycles.

  “The tricky thing about ROAD is that it’s a little different for each person depending on where their forgetting begins first, and it’s hard to give twenty different people with twenty different kinds of sick the right treatment all at the same time. Some people lose old memories, some people forget who they are, some people forget what things are called, others forget how to use the stuff in their house. Some get weird obsessions, they fall in love, they say they’re swimming in a lake when they’ve been sitting in a chair all day. There are hallucinations, but most of them are pretty boring—a guy will see a bird flying overhead when there is no bird, or they’ll start yapping about the sea when it has nothing to do with anything. So many people think they can see the ocean or smell it. Our pamphlets say it’s because of primeval ancestral memories lodged in our deep memory, but I think maybe it’s just because a lot of good times that you’d want to remember happen on a beach,” Ashley says quietly, moving them along to another area. “There’s just one hallucination they all have in common. I mean, not that I know, since I don’t have ROAD, but it’s what a lot of patients report.”

  “What is it?” Cassidy asks, her voice hot and curious.

  “It gives me the heebie-jeebies,” Ashley says, and shudders.

  “Tell me,” Cassidy says, like it’s a tasty bit of gossip about a girl they both know.

  “They see a guy. A guy in a gray suit.”

  “A gray suit?”

  “They all say gray.”

  “What’s so scary about a guy in a gray suit?”

  “Just that he’s not there,” Ashley says, and they look at each other silently.

  The next window opens onto an empty room, a sort of classroom: a rectangular space with an erasable whiteboard at one end and rows of long tables with chairs lined up all around. On the walls, posters showing farm animals and some, but not all, of the letters of the alphabet.

  “Do they forget the alphabet?” Cassidy asks, a serious expression on her face.

  “Well”—Ashley hesitates—“it’s hard to tell what they forget or remember sometimes. We try to give them a better life, provide them with things to think about or remember. If we can’t push them in the recovery direction, we try to make their descent smooth and pleasant. We mostly focus on trying to get them to share reality with us, to see what we see. Or that’s what other people focus on: I focus on answering the phones.”

  “What do you mean,” says Patrick, “by descent?”

  Ashley looks intently at his face, like she’s trying to remember something. It occurs to him that she may not recall meeting him the other day.

  “Well, the disease is progressive,” she says matter-of-factly. “It starts with the memories that are like thoughts. Then it takes your memories of what you are—how to eat, how to swallow, how to blink. At the end, they forget how to breathe. It starts shallow and goes deep. That’s when people need us the most. Nobody wants to squirt eye drops in their family member’s eye every fifteen minutes, but if you don’t, they really dry up.”

  “What about,” Pa
trick says, “some sort of tiled room where the patients are waiting? What’s that room for?

  “Is there…” he begins, and then stops. He tries to remember what he saw, how to describe it, but the words edge away from him as he tries to grasp them. “A green room. Long. Lights. Tiles everywhere with their cold feel. Men and women with these destroyed expressions on their faces. A window too, as big as a tank at the aquarium, like looking straight into the water. But the water is air. What do you use that for?”

  Both Cassidy and Ashley are staring at him.

  “Wait, can you slow down and say that again? It got a little blurry,” Ashley says, looking toward Cassidy for clarification, or confirmation. He feels something rise in him, some reddening feeling, frustration or indignation. It occurs to him, suddenly, that he doesn’t know how he looks or sounds, doesn’t know whether he’s giving off angry or weak or disjointed. Ashley moves toward him with an open hand that she tries to press to his forehead, but he lurches back, out of her reach.

  “Patrick?” asks Cassidy with genuine bewilderment. When he looks at her face, he realizes that she is worried about him, worried with no sarcasm, irony, or spin. The surprise of her genuine concern is almost enough to make him feel located again, like a person who knows his place in the world.

  Just then, the phone starts buzzing in the pocket of his chinos, frightening him. He pulls it out, and for a moment he doesn’t know what to expect, he knows nothing at all. Then he sees the Earthbridge pay-phone number lighting up the face of his phone and feels a rush of gratitude, knowing that it must be someone who knows him, someone who loves him, someone who can tell him he’s not crazy. “I have to take this call,” he says sharply, and stalks off toward where he thinks he remembers the exit once was.

  On the phone, Nora’s voice pours through with the liquid clarity of a wind chime.

  “Dad? Are you there?”

  “Yes, honey,” he says, relieved to be free from the stickiness of concern, relieved to be in control again. “I’m here, little bug. You know I’m always here to help you, don’t you, even if I’m on the other side of the country. No matter what you need. And I’m so glad you called.”

  There’s a pause.

  “Um, is that you, Dad? You sound different.”

  “Never mind,” Patrick says. “Tell me how you’re doing. Are you shearing some sheep? Are you, you know, mourning and praying?”

  “We finished shearing all the sheep a few weeks ago. Once you shear them, it’s months before you can shear them again. But I’ve been doing vermiculture instead. I have my own vermiculture bin, and now I teach other kids how to do it.”

  “What sort of bin?” Patrick asks. The word tangles in his ear, he can’t seem to straighten it out long enough to decipher it.

  “It’s a worm farm,” Nora replies. “I feed them and turn the soil every day. Last week I noticed a lot of flies, so I put a carnivorous plant nearby. Worms are the heartbeat of the earth. That’s what I realized last month.”

  “Okay, Nora,” he says absently, squinting into the half-dim corridor. “Just remember to wash your hands.” The path he’s taking looked familiar at first, but now he realizes that the building looks the same everywhere, each hallway, each stairwell an allusion to the ones that have come before. The design is constricting, he thinks; it closes tight around him, mazelike and intestinal.

  “That’s not what I called about anyway. Dad, I wanted to tell you something. You were in one of my visions, I saw you.”

  “A vision?” he says, turning, trying to remember which door he had come from.

  “Yes. I saw you in the driver’s seat of a white car, a convertible, with the top down. It was California, I think, with brown hills on all sides and tough little bushes clinging to the slopes. There was a blond woman next to you. You two were coming up the road fast, with the dust billowing out behind you, and suddenly you hit the brakes. The car stops in the haze, and both of you are just staring forward with this surprised expression on your face, looking right at me. Does this sound like anything to you? The woman was pretty.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” says Patrick, the kindness he wants to project blurred by distraction. In fact, the question annoys him: He never minded being roused in the middle of the night to soothe his daughter when she was tormented by dreams that had become too lifelike; even before he had become a father, this was one of the things he imagined himself doing with pride, with gladness. But in practice, talking Nora out of her fears was laborious and time-consuming, and after a couple rounds of debate he always felt crabby, worried about how the missing sleep would affect his writing the next day.

  “Are you sure, Dad? The scene doesn’t remind you of anything? The vision was so clear in my mind, I could even smell the grass and the trees and something burning far off in the distance. You don’t know who the woman could be or what she might represent?”

  “I think she represents your imagination listening to your mother talk about my life here, working with Cassidy Carter,” he replies, patiently. “It’s probably your subconscious telling you that you miss your dad and wish you could be here with me. Honey, you call these visions, and I know they feel real and important to you, but they’re mirages. They’re imaginings of what you wish you could see, guided by what your heart misses or fears.”

  When Nora responds, her speech is measured, careful.

  “But my visions aren’t things I want to see or things I wish for, most of the time I don’t even know what they are or whether they’re supposed to be things from the past or from the future. I don’t want them, I just write them down so they don’t crowd my head. And also, when you see a mirage, other people can see it just like you do, if they’re standing where you are. It’s not something you imagine, it’s an optical illusion that happens when light is refracting a special way. You can take a photo of a mirage.”

  “You can’t take a photo of a mirage, Nora, that’s ridiculous.”

  “And I don’t even know if it’s true that I want to be in California with you,” says Nora’s wispy voice over the phone. “It feels like something bad is happening there. You were in our mourning memorial today, the fires that are happening right near you. Linden read this whole report: Forty-seven thousand acres burned so far. Loss of hundreds of homes, thousands and thousands of animals. There are horses that fled the fire and had to run all the way to the beach, and now they’re trapped down there, with no fresh water to drink. Can you imagine what it’s like to be that thirsty when your body’s that big?”

  “Honey,” Patrick says, looking around him for the emergency exit, “I wouldn’t worry about that. They have all the best people working on it, and Los Angeles is a major city. Major cities just don’t get destroyed by fire.”

  “Do you have a source for that information?” Nora asks, sounding interested.

  “No,” he says, “just my forty-six years of life on this planet.”

  “Oh,” she says, disappointed. “Okay.”

  “Is your mom worried about me?” Patrick asks, climbing down the rickety metal stairs to the safe, familiar asphalt of the parking lot.

  “I know she is. She wants you to come here.”

  “Well, honey, adults often disagree on important things. And in the end, it’s only time that can prove one of them right and the other one wrong.” He turns and sees Cassidy and Ashley coming out of the building. They’re laughing and hugging, and their hair is incandescent in the sun. He can hear Cassidy asking how Ashley started working here, whether she’s trained as a nurse or something, and Ashley telling her that actually she just volunteered at a retirement home during high school, doing the weekly bingo night.

  “Dad, will you come here if the fires get so bad that they cancel your movie?”

  Patrick watches as Cassidy and Ashley exchange a goodbye hug, and then another one. They release each other, and Cassidy begin
s to walk across the lot toward the white van.

  “Dad? Are you there? Are you listening?”

  He hears the letdown in her voice.

  “No, not that I recall. Sweetie, I have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “But tomorrow I’ll be doing the beekeeping training all day, so that I can work with the hives.” She sounds confused, an unfamiliar tone in her voice—his daughter, usually so preternaturally, frustratingly composed.

  “Okay, honey, then the day after that. No problem. Kiss-kiss.” Patrick hangs up the phone and walks toward Cassidy. She makes a face that he can’t quite decipher—it’s either a “What the fuck” or a “I have something big to tell you.” And suddenly they both turn to see Ashley calling out, running toward them, holding a large silver briefcase.

  “Oh god, you guys, I almost forgot. I know it’s a couple days early for Brenda’s pickup, but when I got back to the desk I realized it was all packed up and ready, so I thought I would save you a drive up here. I know you’re so busy, Cassidy, with your filming schedule and the research for that new role.” Ashley smiles a big, toothy smile. Her nose crinkles adorably.

  “Ashley, I love you,” Cassidy says, engulfing her in a hug and holding it, wriggling both of their bodies back and forth and back and forth. “Thanks so much, girl. And remember: burgers next month, when all this filming is done. Don’t forget. I’m counting on you. Nose sisters!” She takes the case from Ashley’s hand and blows her a kiss, and then, together, she and Patrick walk toward the big white van, pure and bright against the dull sky.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  The entire left side of the mountain is engulfed in flames, the smoke rising straight into the sky like a tower, like a signal received by no one. Far from any major road, the witnesses are small-bodied, furry or scaled, their eyes close to the ground. Their tiny limbs carry them through the underbrush as they look for a hole or hollow: a place to wait out the burning, or an unburned place where the air still slips easily into the lungs. In the midday sky, islands of pale blue are visible between the moving, shifting layers of smoke. A dark bird cuts through the shimmering air and disappears around the bend.