by Cai Emmons
The wind has died down and the humidity has risen. That has helped. But no one can explain the speed with which the Topanga fire has abated. The fire on the eastern side of the city has not been affected the same way; it still rages. What if she really did do something? It’s outrageous, he knows, but what if? What if her charred lawn in New Hampshire is somehow part of this? She was certainly evasive about it on the phone. He has to talk to someone, but Metcalf, his old high school buddy, left before dawn to work as a production assistant on some rom-com. He won’t be back until late tonight.
Matt paces around Metcalf’s two-room apartment tidying up. Metcalf’s a slob. He always was in high school, and ten years out he hasn’t improved much. His apartment is a classic bachelor pad: hardly any furniture, a mattress on the bedroom floor where Metcalf sleeps, the futon in the living room where Matt has been crashing with no sheets only a single blanket, in the kitchen a few mismatched dishes and mugs, plastic cups. The bathroom mirror is covered with toothpaste art, and the sink, gelled with old soap, is on its way to becoming a petri dish. Matt is no paragon of cleanliness and tidiness himself, but he’s nowhere near as bad as Metcalf.
After Bronwyn told him on the phone that she was here, he booked a flight impulsively. She barely heard his explanation about the article—he needs to see her face-to-face. Why not, since no job is keeping him in place. But now that he’s here, the task of finding her seems insane. Locating anyone in this sprawling city is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. He honestly has no idea how to go about it. She said LA, but she didn’t say where in LA.
Metcalf’s refrigerator is empty but for Sriracha and beer. He doesn’t even have milk for coffee. The guy lives on take-out and whatever he gets on the sets of movies. He’s so heavily immersed in Hollywood he’s aware of little else. He reads the trade papers, works on his screenplay, and dreams of becoming a mogul. It seems pretty unrealistic to Matt, but at least Metcalf has a passion and Matt, given his own employment history, has no right to be critical.
Needing a fresh perspective, he heads outside for a walk and groceries. The Venice boardwalk is mobbed with extroverts. The quarreling rhythms of boom boxes, marimbas, the whooping of people serious about their play. Everyone vamps, wanting to be noticed. Everyone but Matt, who is stuck in his own mind. Over and over he sees the clip of the fire in retreat.
A skateboard blares up behind him and veers past, the guy’s arm grazing Matt’s elbow, making him sidestep like a skittish horse. Why is everyone so damn frenetic? Despite the ocean’s proximity, the air is still rancid with smoke and the breeze is negligible. The scrawny palms, their high foliage like tiny heads surveying the mayhem, look as if they’re as deeply skeptical and dislocated as he is.
He visited here about three or four years ago, not long after Metcalf moved in. He remembers it being laid back then, a place he could imagine living, but now it doesn’t feel the least bit relaxing. He passes an area where six male Atlas-style body builders—three white, three black—strike poses, their muscles gleaming with sweat and sunlight. Their bodies are still as museum pieces, their faces solemn, as if engaged in an activity of high purpose. Every thirty seconds or so someone shouts and the poses change. This city is notorious for its population of exhibitionists, but does crisis call forth an extra urge toward exhibitionism, he wonders. If he were still at The Meteor he’d see this place as a treasure trove of stories, but since he’s quit his yen for the next weird story has expired. The oddity of human beings is no longer news to him, and the humor he used to find in human strangeness has dried up.
An eddy of moving air brings the acrid smoky smell to his nostrils again. Everyone else appears to have become inured to this smell, but to him, newly arrived, it’s sickening. He thought he was hungry, but in this bad air he can’t imagine eating.
Back at Metcalf’s Matt reconsiders his presence here. It’s futile. He sees the embarrassing underpinnings of false hope. He emails Buzz, saying he’ll fly to New York the next day, and if Buzz will pick him up there they can resume their original plan of driving to Montana together.
His Twitter feed has gone crazy with more fire news. Lyndon Roos, the actress from those vampire movies, has said some woman came into the woods near her house claiming she intended to put the fire out herself. Roos talked to the woman and has no idea what to believe, but she suggests that human beings are probably capable of more than we know. The responses to her tweets are vehement.
You’ve been in the movies too long.
Movies are not life, Lyndon Roos.
People are not gods! Get real!
Back off and listen to the woman. Don’t judge before you know the whole story.
Matt scrolls through, reading everything, his breath catching, adrenaline shooting through all his appendages. Can it be? Maybe, maybe not, but he has to find out.
He dashes off a text to Buzz. Change of plans. Sorry to be so fickle. Will be in touch.
33
They sit outside in late summer twilight, sunset’s scarves of rosy orange light in slow-twirling flux; seagulls yawping over the cove; a mourning dove regaling them with thoughtful poetry from the eaves; the silhouette of a lone schooner, all its sails trimmed, scudding toward harbor to beat the onset of night. One of her favorite meals is laid on the table before them: crab cakes, minty tabouli, arugula salad, a crusty baguette, along with her favorite chardonnay. Joe has even brought out cloth napkins and citronella candles and a fleece throw for her lap in case a chill comes up after dark. Not a single external element could be tweaked to make this occasion more perfect, but Diane can only see beneath the veneer of perfection, to the shambles her life has recently become.
It began with Bronwyn’s ludicrous pronouncement and since then Bronwyn has not gotten back in touch, not tried to excuse or explain herself, offered no apology for her angry departure. On one level Diane would like to say Bronwyn has “gone off the deep end,” or “had a nervous breakdown.” But Bronwyn’s behavior spoke otherwise. She was not acting like a person who was breaking down. In fact, she seemed unusually sure of herself, more confident than Diane has ever seen her. That does not diminish Diane’s feeling that she has been rejected and discarded and is very possibly past her prime.
Joe keeps saying it’s not the end of the story. He believes Bronwyn will return to the academic, scientific fold and eventually make good on the things Diane has taught her. To Diane that is wishful thinking. Joe wasn’t there to witness Bronwyn’s defiant, ungrateful exit, an exit that spoke loudly of a deep rift and a permanent departure.
So Bronwyn’s aberrant behavior and sudden rejection is one reason Diane has been losing sleep, but there’s something else that was set in motion that day of Bronwyn’s visit, something just as worrisome, maybe more so. Diane has not been able to focus at all. Past and present are occasionally indistinguishable. Her brain feels soggy as a mushroom on the verge of decay. She tests herself by reciting various facts that have always been reliably stored in her memory bank—the periodic table, for example—and she can’t get through it. She pictures the mosaic of her brain, which she has always seen as a satisfying arrangement of tessellated, neuron-rich pleats and cavities, and she now sees only a wasteland of dead cells, entire lagoons of hard-won knowledge lost forever.
Joe has been insistent—her condition is a psychological one, not an organic one. She has been worrying too much and worry is well-known for interfering with memory. The meeting with Bronwyn has destabilized her temporarily, but she’ll recover. She should get a brain scan, he says, which will confirm nothing is wrong.
Diane is much too terrified to get a brain scan. What if something did turn out to be wrong? She has always drawn her identity from having a reliable, even superior, problem-solving brain, and if some test were to diagnose an anomaly—early onset dementia, for example—everything about her life and work and self would be called into question.
Diane gulps her wine and rips into a piece of crusty baguette, homemade by Joe
. “I’m too vain, I guess. I’m the first to admit I wanted her to go and do something that would reflect well on me.”
“Of course. Who wouldn’t want that?”
“So many times when she was in the program I defended her when others wondered what kind of a scientist she would be. Now—well . . .” She floats an idea she hopes Joe will refute, “Maybe they were right and I was wrong.”
Joe pours her more wine. He isn’t refuting her. Maybe he’s fed up with her belly-aching. His sun-burned nose looks fiery in the angled light.
“You’re trying to get me drunk,” she says.
“You need to relax.”
They fall silent. Diane eats out of habit, but fails to taste. “It’s good,” she says.
“I’ve been thinking about her too, you know,” Joe says. “And I keep thinking—what if she’s right? What if she was telling you the truth?”
“You mean what if she really can stop storms, or whatever?”
“Yes. What if?”
“Go write a novel about that. It’s not real life, Joe, and you know it.”
“But what if it is real life?” he insists.
The sun drops below the horizon and the entire landscape loses its red-spectrum tint and takes on the quieter hues of blue and gray. A few mosquitoes whine up as if they’ve just been hatched. One lands on Diane’s bare forearm and instead of brushing it away she watches it settle in for a long suck. Suck on, she thinks, make way for new blood. Across the cove a gong sounds, a mother rounding up her kids. Joe’s features soften in the twilight. Diane feels unexpectedly calmer than she’s felt for a few days.
“There was a guy who used to teach at Princeton, he’s retired now. He was an engineer, a specialist in rocketry. But at some point he became interested in the effect that the thinking of researchers, their actual thought, had on their experiments. I’m not sure what got him started on that, but he founded an institute, PEAR, it was called—Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research. They were researching psychokinesis, right there at Princeton.” She shakes her head.
“What did they learn?”
“They didn’t come up with much, as far as I know, although they published some books and articles. But he, this guy Robert Jahn, was an embarrassment to a lot of the scientists there. He eventually resigned as Dean of Engineering and they closed the institute. But he wasn’t fired. He kept on teaching.”
“And—?”
“And what?”
“Why are you telling me this? What’s your point?”
“I have no point. I was just thinking about how there are a lot of people with strange ideas out there. It’s just kind of shocking when scientists turn that way.”
“Diane—” Joe stops himself.
“What?”
He shakes his head, obviously irritated, and begins loading the dirty plates and glasses onto the tray which he carries inside. She’s been relying too heavily on his good nature of late, shared too much of her addled state of mind and pushed him past his limit. It’s probably time for her to act as if her brain is perfectly normal, and head back to Cambridge to try to get some work done, leave Joe alone to finish his novel without distraction. A little time apart.
The blue dusk presses in against her. On the slope leading down to the water the pine trees have become still dark silhouettes, measuring the slow march of the tide as it moves into the cove. The tide will be high at 2:00 a.m. and when she wakes tomorrow it will be low again. How comforting and reliable these ancient rhythms are, though she knows they won’t always be this way, knows they’re in continual flux, infinitesimal but measurable. A day will come, long after human extinction, when the sun will expand to a red giant and will engulf the Earth. But how impossible it is to sit here in the beauty of now and fully imagine a time when Earth won’t exist.
The memory comes to her now, wafting in on the evening’s indigo light. It is always evening when this memory arrives. It isn’t something she talks about—she hasn’t even told Joe, she wouldn’t have the words—but now and then she turns it over in the privacy of her own mind.
She and her ex-husband Chuck, the molecular biologist, were on a rare vacation in Mexico. It was late afternoon and they had just had coffee, sitting in an outdoor café, stroked by the golden light which made art of the narrow cobblestone streets. As they ambled back to their hotel Diane kept darting into small shops to admire the silver jewelry and the colorful woven rebozos. Invariably that led to enthusiastic chatting with the shopkeepers, Diane shaving the rust off her under-used Spanish. She could feel Chuck chafing. He was hot and wanted to get back to the hotel to shower and change before their dinner date with another American couple.
“You go,” she kept telling him. “I’ll meet you there. We’re on vacation and I’m having fun.”
But he wouldn’t leave, claiming she wouldn’t be safe alone. Eventually his glowering and eye-rolling ruined her enjoyment, and she consented to return with him to the hotel. They emerged from the side street onto a main thoroughfare, a noisy wilderness of scooters and taxis and haranguing street vendors, everyone’s intransigence and ire on display. Despite the clamor, the scene—with its long-angled, dust-filtered light; the polyphony of Spanish; and a chaos that was uniquely Mexican—felt picturesque, even as she understood the flaw in that perception.
They rounded the corner and wove around a thick knot of pedestrians. As they arrived at the intersection where they were to turn onto a side street that would take them to their hotel, a child darted into the street, a small boy not more than two years old, sturdy but not entirely in command of his legs. He had a thatch of black hair that caught the sunlight and glistened whitely. She sees it all so clearly even now, though it happened so long ago and so quickly she cannot help but question her memory. The high-pitched screams. The vehicle brakes slamming like angry curses. A battered white van swerving and toppling onto its side, landing on the child.
Then. This is the part she strains to remember better, the actions of that man, the father, the presumed father, who arrived on the scene almost magically. He began working his heft beneath the van’s wheel well, face bulging and reddening under the strain, arms, thick and bare, laboring like fork lifts, raising the van—could it be?—and tilting it upright. Upright. Fully upright! He dove for his son, cradled him for a moment against his shoulder, and bolted to the far side of the street, disappearing down an alley.
The stupefied hush lasted a millisecond, no more. Then the drivers who had spilled from their cars returned to their vehicles and sped off, the diners and shoppers who had gathered to rubberneck turned back to their dining and shopping. Chuck, too, began walking again, as if this incident they’d just witnessed was commonplace.
Diane hurried to catch up. “Did you see that?”
Chuck didn’t respond. Perhaps her question was lost in the street’s chaos.
“Chuck! Did you see what that man did?”
Again, no reaction.
“He lifted that van. I can’t believe he lifted that van!”
“He didn’t lift the van,” Chuck said.
“Then you tell me what happened—you saw.”
“I have no idea. I wasn’t close enough. You know as well as I do that the testimony of eye witnesses is notoriously inaccurate.”
Back at the hotel he stonewalled her. He wouldn’t discuss the incident further. And when she tried to describe it to their friends at dinner, Chuck’s laughter dismissed her. She silenced herself. She knew what she’d seen. Or she thought she knew what she’d seen: a man, terrified for his son, had brought the entire force of his being to the task of lifting a vehicle, a vehicle that had to weigh at least a ton, possibly much more. The man had been so intent on saving his child, so ready to give every dram of energy to the effort, that he had accomplished the impossible—he lifted an absurdly heavy van. She saw that. She thinks she saw that. She’s quite sure she saw that. It’s history now, impossible to know, and yet her mind holds the imprint of the boy’s glistening hair
, the father’s brawny arms and back, the tender impassioned way the father cradled the boy afterwards, soldering him to his shoulder. And she remembers the way he fled, as if he was being pursued. So often she has wondered where he went. Did the child survive? She likes to think so.
Joe is clattering around in the kitchen. She should go in and help him, apologize for being such a whiner of late. But he’s already coming back out, carrying a smaller tray with mugs of tea, and a plate of figs and dark chocolate. The sight of him shames her.
“Here’s the thing,” he says as he sets down the tray. “You’re always investigating things to find out if something is true or not. So why aren’t you interested in investigating this thing? You’re letting something get in the way of your natural curiosity.”
She nibbles a square of chocolate. He’s half right. She is an investigator. But it is also true that she has been a human being for over fifty years and in those years she has learned, empirically, what human beings can and can’t do. No other human being has ever done what Bronwyn claims she can do. There is no precedent here, nothing that warrants investigation.
“You could study her, couldn’t you? I mean ask to see what she does and go from there?”
Diane grunts, sips her tea, wonders if Bronwyn would consent to further contact. “She stalked out in a fury. I doubt if she’d let me study her.”
“Where’s your curiosity?”
“Are you mad at me?” Diane asks. “I could hear you were rattling the dishes in there.”
“No. Not exactly. But I’m confounded. You adore this girl and now, just when things, for my money, are getting interesting, you seem to be dropping her.”
“She dropped me!”
“Well, you have to go to the next level.”
“But what is the next level?”
“I guess you have to figure that out.”
34
She hears music, a single oneiric tone flowing over the dry landscape like water. Like blood. She wonders if she might be dead, then thinks not. A wash of pale light paints her vision. A blade of brittle brown grass, the dusty crust beneath her shoulder, the gritty air itself. Each spur of thought is fleeting, it can’t be grasped or coaxed to stay. Then, the aperture of her vision sharpens to reveal a squamous slab of tan rock and the eyes of a blinking creature, encircled by fur. She sees nothing else of the creature, just the curious brown eyes set in stillness. Investigating. She isn’t afraid. Take your time. Look all you want.
