Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “Why is he coming back now?” Nora asks.

  “He’s your father,” Alison replies. “He can come back anytime he wants.”

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “There’s nothing to know. He went to work a job, he was always going to come back, and now he’s coming back. Case closed.”

  “The last time I called him, it didn’t sound like he was planning to come back. Did he get fired?”

  Alison sighs. “I honestly don’t know, honey.”

  “Do you think Dad will like it here?” Nora asks, her gaze intent. She’s still a child, but to Alison it seems as though she sits unnaturally tall, almost at the eye level of an adult.

  “He’ll learn to,” she says with a confidence that extends only an inch or so below the surface, not all the way through. “You know he always said he wanted to get a country house, someplace where he could park the car unwashed and not feel judged.”

  “Because,” Nora continues as though her mother hadn’t spoken, “I don’t think he would fit in. He doesn’t like to be told what to do. He wouldn’t want to sit through the chore raffle. He wouldn’t like Vegan Pizza Night. The Mourning Report would be like a punishment to him.”

  They sit chewing in silence. In the empty corner of the cafeteria, someone starts playing a didgeridoo. A minute later, someone else joins in with a tambourine.

  “I saw you talking with your friends today, in the pollinator garden. Are you feeling settled here? Are you happy we’re going to be here for a while longer?”

  Her daughter glances down into her lentils. “Well,” she says with precision, “I think I used to feel like it was immoral to live here as if living here was doing something to help the planet or the other people who are still out there trying to live. It felt like we were abandoning them. It felt selfish. But I see it a little differently now, I guess.” She doesn’t say more, and Alison doesn’t pry. When Nora sees some of her new friends standing by the muffin table, her face lights up. Alison tells her to go ahead and join them.

  Walking back to the bunkhouse, she hears the phone ringing outside the woodworking barn. She walks toward it, alone in the hush of the summer darkness, the chiming of the phone just slightly out of time with the pulsing song of the insects. When she picks up the phone, it seems at first that there’s no one on the line: she hears the shuffle of air across the input, a sound in the background like cars driving past. And then a girlish voice saying, “Oh my god. You tell her. I’m not telling her.”

  “Hello?” she asks into the empty phone, the unknown nowhere.

  “Alison,” says the voice, Patrick’s voice, dry and cracked almost beyond recognition. “I can’t do it.”

  “You can’t do what?” she says slowly. Dread has a taste in the back of her mouth, like pennies.

  “I can’t get on the plane,” he says. “I can’t. I’ll never land. I need the ground, I need to feel it. It’s the only thing I have. I’m not sure of anything anymore, I can’t know that it’s there if I don’t have my hand on it.” And now she hears him weeping like a little kid, weeping as she’s never heard before. “I can’t go thirty thousand feet up in the air; there’s no reality up there, and I’ll never find my way back. I’ll be lost forever.”

  At first she doesn’t speak, and then, when she does, it’s with fanatical, deliberate calmness. She wants to will this feeling into him. “Patrick, it’s perfectly safe to fly. And you’ve never been afraid of flying in the past, so I don’t understand why this is happening. Are you okay? Did something happen to you? If you don’t want to come home, just say it.”

  The phone rustles, and then it’s Cassidy on the line.

  “Mrs. Hamlin? It’s Cassidy. I don’t think he can explain his situation himself.”

  “Cassidy. You have to put him on the plane, I don’t care what he says.”

  “I know, and I wish I could, but they wouldn’t let him on like this, he’s screaming and crying. I thought I could drug him, but then what would I do, push him through the security line? He’d never be able to board on his own.” She covers the microphone and says something to him, then gets back on. “There’s something huge happening here. People are getting this sort of dementia—they can be any age. There are twelve-year-olds who have it, ninety-year-olds who have it. It comes from drinking WAT-R, from something about the WAT-R or in it, and everyone drinks WAT-R. I don’t, but everyone else does. So it’s going to get a lot worse.”

  “That sounds completely insane,” Alison says.

  “Too insane to make up,” she replies.

  “Then shouldn’t he come back here?” She feels the phone shaking against her cheek, but then she realizes it’s her hands, trembling in the cold. “He needs a doctor. He needs his family.”

  “I know.” Cassidy sighs. “I told him that, and I promised I’d get him home. But he’s lying on the sidewalk outside the terminal, and he won’t get up. He’s terrified. I think he’s seeing things that I don’t see, and sometimes I think that he sees only a little bit of what’s actually there. He has trouble walking on his own, he runs into things.” Now Alison hears a waver in her voice, slight, like an error in the connection. “He’s so scared. I mean, he’s terrified.” She pauses. “When someone’s this scared, you don’t think they’re crazy. You think they know something you don’t.”

  Alison stares out into the empty meadow and tries to blink the tears away. Up above her head, the insects dive over and over into the glass shielding the old enameled lantern, blinded by the light and mistaking it for the moon.

  “Can you get him somewhere until it clears up? If he just had some time,” she says in a begging way, “maybe he could get used to the idea of flying. We can get another ticket.”

  “I think so,” Cassidy says. “I said I wouldn’t ditch him.” She hesitates. “I’m fucking scared. I’ve never taken care of someone before. I never had to.”

  “It’s frightening, I know,” Alison replies. She remembers newborn Nora, curled red and warm and slightly sticky in her arms. The terror of attaching, the hot, liquid feeling, like tentacles coming out of your chest and wrapping around the little being. “Do you have some family you could stay with? Somewhere you could go that’s out of town?”

  Now Cassidy’s sobs are audible, short and angry and muffled through the connection. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know one single person who would definitely want to see me. I don’t know my dad, I don’t have a mom. I haven’t talked to my sister in three years. What kind of person has nobody they can call to be with at the end of the world?”

  “Listen,” Alison says. Through the phone she hears a siren, growing near and then far away again. “If you want to find her, you should. She’ll want to see you, I know it. Even if you’re angry with each other, there are layers below that that are there, just waiting for a reason to feel something good. Trust me.” She pauses, reaching for something that’ll make it real to the person on the other end of the line. “For months, I’ve been here at Earthbridge, and I thought I didn’t want Patrick to join us. I was afraid he’d ruin this place for me; it’s not perfect, but it’s better than home. I wanted us to be a family together, and at the same time I wanted him to stay away. But those are just layers. Now that he needs us, all I want is to be there for him.”

  “Oh my god,” Cassidy says.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He’s trying to run away from the airport. He’s crawling on the strip of grass in the traffic median. He’s going to run straight into all the cars. This fucking maniac.”

  “Go,” says Alison. “Please, take care of him. And take care of yourself. Your life is precious. Your life makes a difference.”

  But Cassidy doesn’t hear her: she’s already hung up, and the line’s gone dark, dead, the object in her hand just a lump of plastic, molded to hold a voice.

  * * *
/>   —

  Back in the bunkhouse, she finds Nora asleep, her sleek hair shining in the dim light of an electric lantern. In the other beds, some women are turned toward the wall and sleeping, others are pulling off clothing and changing into loose nightclothes. The room smells like warm bread and incense, and though nobody is talking, it feels crowded and loud with bodies. Alison undresses to her inner layers and climbs into the single-person bed, wrapping her arms around herself and hugging tight, as if she were two separate people and not one person all alone—one person with something to give, and one with the ability to receive. She holds herself tightly enough to keep any sounds of distress from escaping into the hushed room. Her breathing is heavy. When she used to have trouble sleeping, Patrick would peel the shirt from his back and from hers and press their naked upper halves together beneath the covers. Front to front, she could feel his heart beating against her skin, the quick life solid and evident to the touch, the absolute presence of someone who knew her. She’s not willing to cry surrounded by sleeping women, all of them still essentially strangers to her. She imagines the tears she’s not crying forcing themselves out the opposite way, sliding down her throat, through her chest, filling her stomach with sorrow.

  Before they go to sleep, Earthbridge encourages them all to say the Four Earthbound Tenets out loud to guide their sleep along peaceful and harmonious paths. When she read about the community from her home in New Jersey, these little practices seemed to Alison like miracles that had the chance to heal her, fix her once and for all. Now she sometimes wonders whether their real role is not to pay tribute to all this planetary loss, but to sort and codify it, keeping it contained within a series of habits, sayings, rituals. To keep the end within sight, but make it feel livable. Still, what was there to do instead? She doesn’t have any better words, or any better ideas. The alternatives were—what?—to chain herself to a bulldozer or to slink back to the suburbs, admitting that its hypocrisy was the one true hypocrisy, for ever and ever, amen?

  Alison stares up into the plywood underbelly of the top bunk and closes her eyes to lessen the feeling of emptiness. To fill her throat, she mouths the words silently to herself. I want to live in the world, not upon it. I want to live in reciprocity, not exchange. I want to give without keeping a ledger. I want to love the earth like I love the person I love the most. Like a person who will never leave me, like a person whose love is always holding me up unseen from beneath my feet. She knows that it’s ridiculous, a grown woman saying silent prayers in a room full of amateur mystics, so she’s surprised when a true, tangible peace settles upon her—so sudden that she notices only after it’s already happened, so deep that she wonders for a moment whether she took a pill earlier that night and had just forgotten all about it.

  The last lights turn out in the bunkhouse, and suddenly there’s nothing to see: just the sound of slow, deep breath shuttling in and out around her, and the crickets outside. She thinks of the lake in the dark reflecting the broken form of the moon, the ovaloid shape of the lake man-made and too neat to be real, but full nevertheless of real, teeming life. A lake that does not exist, will not exist, a lake that no longer holds water. What did Nora mean when she said that people weren’t the future? What did the other children mean when they nodded back? What was it her daughter had said, sitting out there in the middle of the field? “The dogs of the faraway future are ten feet tall and hairless, with long, sleek jaws that would reach from the elbow of a full-grown woman down to the tips of her manicured fingers. A soft, saggy muzzle covers a doubled row of teeth, the tail wagging randomly with no memory of what the gesture used to mean. Impassive and unowned, they lope through the regrown forests for days at a time without seeing another creature, they hunt in the naked daylight and dig in the cool creekside cliffs and sleep where they want, sleep without anger or fear.”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Eyes slip open, and light pours in. Everything before him has the faded appearance of a magazine that’s been left out too long in the sun: the sky weakly blue with a runny thinness, a landscape viewed through white gauze. The short concrete walls lining the side of the highway are pallid and hot, baking beneath the sun. In the driver’s seat, Cassidy is wearing an enormous black straw hat. She guns the engine, deletes the distance between their van and the laggard sedan just ahead, then shifts quickly into the right lane to pass. It would be disorienting enough on its own, but at this moment Patrick can feel even the wobble of the earth on its axis, a fact he learned about in high-school physics, as a sort of deep-nested vertigo twisting in his bones. The white van lurches, listing to the east on a writhing curve. When he closes his eyes, everything he knows tips forward into darkness. His inner ear quivers. He sweats and freezes at the same time, caught between the heat of the sun beating down through the windshield and the refrigerated cool oozing from the vents.

  With her phone propped up on the dashboard, Cassidy argues on speaker with voices he doesn’t recognize as she forces a path through the crawling traffic, riding the dashed line between two highway lanes. Her driving is quick and sharp, with the jagged quality of a person crying alone in an empty room, heaving air through a tightened throat, trying to give space to a feeling bereft of recipient, a feeling with a beginning but no end in sight. It makes him want to hold her in his arms, to rock her back and forth with incredible tenderness. In his subjective experience of the world, Patrick is feeling the violent newness of the present, an inverse déjà vu that causes him to experience the unparalleled singularity of all of it at once, each moment pregnant with firsthood. He notices each item in its individual, distinct nature as though it might be the last of its kind, the last in its series: the last flash of sunlight through the half-empty water bottle, the last flutter of the protein-bar wrapper in the windshield reflection. Everything he sees makes him want to cry, but the eye won’t give it up—the liquid stalled somewhere within, tender ductile tissue inflamed. Outside his window, strange tiered hills rise shelflike above the plane of the highway, resembling a large, sloped staircase. It pricks him: the first and last time he’ll ever lay eyes on whatever that was. The firstness is also a lastness. All of this is enough to bring a tear to his eye, and he tries, but there’s only a rough, sandy feeling in the corner where the ducts should be. Nothing comes out.

  Cassidy instructs her phone to call Toby Olsen, her ex-manager. “I need to find June,” she tells him when he picks up the call, his voice many years older than she had imagined and full of wary expectation. “I heard she moved to the desert after the show got canceled, and I’m headed in that direction now, but I don’t have an address.”

  “What makes you think your old, unceremoniously expunged manager knows where your sister lives?” comes the voice through the speaker. “I’m an aged white man with high blood pressure and sciatica, not the White Pages.”

  “What are White Pages?” Cassidy asks earnestly.

  “Just a long-ago tool for keeping people in touch. A little like your swipe-right/swipe-left dating apps.”

  “I don’t expect you to know where she is, but you’re the kind of nosy old guy who knows the people who might. Who does June stay in touch with?”

  “Well, I can deduce that she’s not in touch with you. You know, not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ve observed that when one person is searching for some hard-to-locate second party, the situation tends to be that the first party is easy to locate, but the second party doesn’t, for whatever reason, want to locate them. All the challenge in the task comes from the fact that you’re trying to find someone who doesn’t want to find you. Are you sure your sister wants to be a part of this search party?”

  “I see what you’re saying,” Cassidy says, mirthless. “I’m a worthless piece of trash and my family doesn’t want to know me.”

  “Hello darkness, my old friend. I’m just saying maybe some critical thinking about your motives and desires may be in order. Y
ou could try Hailey—they got pretty close on set. Hair people and makeup people spend a lot of time together, I think they had some sort of Friday-afternoon sushi lunch routine. A dance that went along with it. Besties, I think you would say, in the parlance of your generation.”

  “June had a best friend on set named Hailey?” she says, and skepticism mingles with envy in her voice.

  “Sure,” says the grainy old voice, “they went for a sushi lunch once or twice a week. They used to bring me back an order of pan-fried gyoza with the sriracha dipping sauce, before I knew about my cholesterol. What a pair of angels.”

  Cassidy is silent. Out on the highway, a torn sofa cushion sits in the middle of the fast lane. Cars swerve around it, slowing briefly, and then accelerating. Small bits of memory foam litter the asphalt like breadcrumbs.

  “Listen. Are you doing okay, kid?”

  “Toby,” she replies with sudden firmness, “nobody is doing okay.”

  “What I mean, Cassie, is, do you have someone to look after you?”

  “Look after me?” she asks blankly. “What is that? Look after me? You mean, like, what, watching someone walk away?”

  * * *

  —

  In three-quarters view, like a medieval painting, the San Gabriel Valley terrain bends and twists to show humans and cars flatly vivid in the foreground, constructions of concrete and asphalt crammed tightly vertical into the faraway plane. Hacienda Heights and Puente Hills, rife with unfinished roofs and bare parking lots, built to be looked at from the ground, for the eyeline of those cruising past strips of retail frontage at thirty-five miles per hour. Constructions vaguely visible through a blue haze that makes everything appear not only spatially but temporally distant—like a photograph of an old motel that was torn down ten years ago and rebuilt as a chain restaurant. In the dry, combustible hills, too steep and too dusty to be worth building on, geometric gardens and sprinkler-fed hedges give way to the sound of lizards moving unseen through the parched grass, their only trace the rustle in the lower branches, a trembling in some dusty stretch of calm.