by Larry Buhl
“And you hit your head?”
“On a tree.”
“With your car?”
“No. I hit my head using my head. I drove to the tree.” He said this like I was an imbecile. But, frankly, his storytelling abilities left much to be desired. He was harder to follow than The Iliad.
“I drove up the hills, except I kind of got lost. But I found a place high up where I could get a good view, except there were no lights up there. So when I get out, I bump into a tree. Then I hit my head on the tree on purpose because I’m so mad at hitting my head by accident. And just then I understand something. I don’t want to be LDS. I want to have a real life, like you.”
“Like me?” I half-snorted.
“You’re going to do all those things at Caltech. Be a scientist and whatnot. And what will I have? I’ll go on a mission for some religion that believes stupid things. You’re right about that.”
“I never said your religion was stupid.” I probably implied it many times.
“You think religions are stupid.”
“I don’t feel like taking the blame because you’re leaving the church and going around hitting your head on trees.”
“Not the blame,” he said. “You deserve thanks. For showing me a different way.”
“What different way?” I was almost laughing now.
He went on about the things his church believed. Some of these were new to me. He said if it hadn’t been for me he would never have seen the world.
“You’ve only seen Pasadena,” I said.
“Yeah but I’m going to see more. And they can’t stop me.”
When our food came, I scraped the mayo from the top bun—I had specified that I didn’t want mayo—and Levi put his hand to his head. I feared he was going to barf. I feared it even more when he said, “I think I’m going to barf.”
He left the table and spent several minutes in the rest room. I used this time to switch out the buns on our sandwiches. They had put no mayo on his. He came back to the table and practically inhaled his California burger, as if nothing was wrong.
“Even if I go to Caltech, that’s no guarantee of a great life,” I said. “It might suck no matter what I do. I might end up in some nursing home. Nobody to visit me. Everything I own in a box, sitting in urine.” We were silent for a minute. Levi swallowed a mouthful of burger and looked up at me. My words surprised me. But they didn’t seem inaccurate. It was the first time I’d said that to anyone. One thing bothered me about what I’d said, besides the possibility that my prediction would turn out to be right. “I mean I’d be sitting in urine, not the box.”
“Why would you be sitting in—?”
“Never mind.”
“That’s kinda grim. You’re depressing me.”
“Yeah. Well. Life can be depressing. Sorry.”
We were quiet for a few minutes, until Levi had an important thought. He talked with food in his mouth, which grossed me out a little. “Did I tell you? I can’t work anymore. The parental units made me quit Covenant Catering. They say they’ll pay for everything I want. Well, what I want, dad, isn’t money.”
“You told him that?”
“No. I do want money, just not his.”
“Okay. You hit your head and had a revelation. What happened to your car?”
“I’m getting to it. Keep your pants on.” I had given no indication I would remove any clothing. “There’s deer up in the hills. So I’m driving and I slow down for this deer standing in the street. You know the saying that someone has a deer in the headlight look? Well in my headlights, this deer looked evil. And he doesn’t run away. He jumps on my hood. And then he does this deer tap dance. He jumps up and down on the hood and kicks the windshield. And then… he takes a piss right on the windshield! I’m just sitting there watching the stream of deer piss cover the glass. Like he was angry with me. But he shouldn’t have been angry, because I stopped for him. That’s the thanks I get.”
“Did you provoke him?”
“Provoke him? No. I honked. That was after he turned my car into a toilet. So, he jumps off once he’s satisfied and runs into the woods. Now my windshield is broken and covered with deer piss. And my wipers aren’t working well, so I can’t see. I’m driving down the hill and I don’t see this car coming.”
“You hit the car?”
“No, I cut the guy off by accident. He honks and flashes his brights and he starts tailgating me. I remember hearing these stories about how when drivers get mad they shoot at you. Now I’m panicking because I think he’s got a gun. I speed up and that’s when I miss the curve and hit a tree. The second time I hit a tree last night.”
Levi’s tale of compounding problems reminded me of a children’s song about a woman who swallowed a fly. She swallowed progressively larger insects, and then animals, to catch whatever she’d just swallowed, until, not surprisingly, she died. She had ingested the fly for no reason. Or maybe it was curiosity or the need for a new experience. The fictional woman reminded me a little bit of my BiMo. If the song were about her, it would have extra verses about her son being in tears as he begged her to stop swallowing things.
Traffic crawled all the way through the Cajon Pass. By the time we reached a high desert town that appeared to be nothing but chain stores hugging the freeway, Levi was having trouble staying in his lane, even more so than usual. I demanded that he pull off. He drifted onto the off ramp and swung lazily into a parking lot. I used my cell phone—I had to admit that thing was coming in handy—to find the nearest clinic. It was at a strip mall at the next exit.
We sat in the waiting room for over an hour. In lieu of a doctor’s diagnosis, I was about to explain how he could have killed himself by hitting his head on the tree. But I was tired of lecturing. He didn’t need any more of my advice.
“I’m glad you didn’t kill yourself,” I said. After about a minute, I said, in an old man voice, “I killed my elf? I don’t have an elf.” Levi didn’t laugh. He hadn’t laughed in a long time. I was starting to miss his stupid rumble-giggle.
The examination took about twelve minutes. He had a concussion. The doctor told him dizziness and blurred vision would subside sometime in the next week. He said Levi shouldn’t drive. I already assumed this.
Driving an old Lincoln was more like commandeering a rolling house. My driver’s ed cars and Carl’s GTI had been like second suits of clothing compared to Levi’s land barge. I stayed in the slow lane of the freeway because the suspension was so loose it made me seasick to make turns. The biggest problem was the windshield. The deer urine was gone, but the spider web cracks provided only a small un-shattered space to the left of the steering wheel. I had to contort my upper body in order to see the road. Every so often I nudged Levi to make sure he wasn’t slipping into a brain-injury induced coma. He reacted with irritation every time.
A few more things can be said about driving a bludgeoned Lincoln through the desert at night. First, I don’t recommend it. Second, it gave me time to think. I no longer envied Levi’s money and stable, if fanatical, family. I felt sorry for him. If this was friendship, then I guess we really were friends.
As we descended into the Vegas valley, I saw the shaft of white light shooting from the Luxor’s pyramid into a cloud. I was glad to be back. It wasn’t exactly home, whatever “home” was, but at least there were people waiting for me.
When I parked in front of Carl and Janet’s, Levi confessed that he was afraid to go home. “They’ll know I wasn’t camping. They’ll find out. They have their ways. Even if they don’t, they’ll know I’m an apostate. Yes I do know what apostate means. I looked it up.”
“You told me you don’t want to be LDS. When are you planning to tell them?”
“I haven’t worked that out yet.”
“You’ll have to tell them sometime. They’ll suspect something when you don’t go on the mission.”
Levi sat back and stared out the cracked windshield. “One kid on my street was acting up a couple of y
ears ago. I don’t know what he was doing. Nobody said. His parents hired these people to take him away to a camp to straighten him out. A van shows up in the night and just takes him. He stayed away a year. A year. And he came back all happy, like they’d wiped away his mind or something. That’s what they’ll do to me.”
It sounded farfetched. But what did I know? I told him he could stay with Carl and Janet for the night.
Carl blew up an air mattress and placed it in my bedroom while I repeatedly assured him Levi was all right. I told Levi to help himself to anything he needed. But there wasn’t anything in my room except a dresser, a desk, a bed, and my Box o’ Crap. He fell asleep immediately.
In the kitchen, Carl asked me about the trip. I made the interview sound better than it really was. He perked up when I told him it probably would have been fun if he had driven me.
“That’s nice to hear,” he said. “I would have enjoyed that too.”
I nuked a Hot Pocket and gave the abridged version of what happened. Janet stormed in as I was explaining how Levi was afraid his parents would have him deprogrammed. She started using swear words in interesting combinations. “It’s hard enough to have one kid and keep him safe, but snake handlers like them squirt out babies by the dozen. And that little boy, Eddie Kim. Where is his mother? Does anybody give a—”
“Mormons don’t handle snakes,” Carl said, calmly.
“Someone handles them!”
“You may be thinking of Pentecostals,” Carl said.
“It’s not important who handles them!”
When it was clear they were not going to chastise me for not calling them back, I excused myself. They were already deep into an argument about how to raise children.
I didn’t have to work that night. Levi was gone when I woke up in the morning. I analyzed the note he left on my desk, looking for clues about where he might have gone or when I might see him. There was not much to decode. Thanks a lot for everything, L. I didn’t like the finality of it.
I recalled the last correspondence I had with my BiMo. The note she left for me the day she went to Thai Me Down was remarkably similar. Hey genius, thanks for being an awesome kid. She hadn’t expected to return alive.
I put Levi’s note on top of my BiMo’s note, deep inside my Box o’ Crap.
TWENTY-ONE
November 20. A list of things I can ask about Carl and Janet’s son:
1. Are those his photos in Carl’s office?
2. Where does he live now?
3. How old is he?
4. Do you have any other kids?
5. Does he know about me?
6. ???
**
Janet drove me to work as usual, and she gave me a delayed scolding for not calling from Pasadena. “Anything can happen when a kid is away.” I apologized, but she kept going on about what kinds of bad things can happen with two teenagers on the road. If I stayed silent, she would keep haranguing me all the way to Colonial Gardens. It was up to me to change the topic. Thanksgiving was coming, so something like, Thanksgiving is a nice holiday would have been a good opener. Or, I read that turkeys are raised in horrible conditions.
Instead, I asked whether their son, Scott, would be coming for Thanksgiving.
She braked hard. My backpack flew into the dashboard. Two cars honked. One car passed and flipped us off. I thought Janet would have cussed him out from the confines of the Lexus. Instead, she calmly accelerated and said nothing.
Around midnight, after nightly rounds, I received a series of text messages from Janet.
First Message: You may be confused and angry. I thought Carl would have explained. But I’m not blaming him. We both dropped the ball.
Second message: When Scott was 17, the little boy we raised and cherished began a transformation that we could scarcely comprehend.
Third message: He would be 25 years old if he were still alive. We lost him to a drug overdose six years ago.
Things were beginning to make sense. It was disappointing that someone with a supposedly scientific mind—me—wouldn’t have observed the evidence sooner.
TWENTY-TWO
November 25. Top ten things Carl and Janet have communicated to me in the past two days:
· Are you working on Thanksgiving? (Carl in person)
· Janet will be at her mother’s in San Francisco. (Carl on white board)
· My flight information is on the refrigerator. (Janet in person)
· I sold my last clock, hooray. (Carl in person)
· Fiona says hello. She asked about your school. She likes you. More than she likes me. (Janet in person)
· You didn’t need to hose off the patio, but thank you. (Carl text)
I can’t even list ten comments because we’ve hardly communicated at all. I wouldn’t mind if they asked how I was doing, or even scolded me about something. I would still be annoyed if they said, “smile, it’s not so bad.” They have been spending a lot of time away from the house. It’s like our roles had been reversed, and now they are avoiding me.
I have been working on essays for my fall back schools, but it isn’t any easier than the process for Caltech. It occurred to me that selective colleges might be nothing more than purveyors of propaganda to lure wealthy parents into giving them buckets of money in exchange for the promise of open doors for their precious snowflake children. Still, I would prefer not to have to fall back on UNLV.
**
On Saturday morning I decided to make waffles with real eggs. It was my BiMo, not I, who was allergic to eggs. There was no reason for me to keep treating them like kryptonite. Janet was out. Carl was in the kitchen, sitting at the breakfast nook. A newspaper covered the top third of his body. He didn’t lower it when he heard me come in to root around in the refrigerator.
“How’s your friend doing?”
“Levi? I haven’t heard from him. He won’t let me call.”
“He seems like a good kid.”
“He is.”
“It’s going to be just you and me for Thanksgiving. Janet’s leaving me.”
I dropped an egg.
Carl didn’t even notice me cleaning yolk off the floor. He folded the newspaper and gazed out the window at the bright slice of sunlight on the Hansen’s orange house. The curtains in their window fluttered. Mr. Hansen’s scowling face appeared and then disappeared.
“I sold the GTI and bought a used Sentra,” Carl said. “It’s economical. I hope you’re not disappointed.”
I told him I wasn’t. I waited for him to get back to the Janet issue. I knew they were not spending the holiday together, but Carl’s comment made it sound like a permanent separation.
I decided to heat up frozen waffles. After I watched them not absorb syrup for a minute, I became impatient—not at the waffles, but at Carl. I asked him how long he expected Janet to be away.
“She’s going to stay with her mother for a few weeks. And then we’ll see. Nothing will change for you. No need to worry. You have a lot on your plate.”
What was on my plate, literally, made me want to hurl. I tossed the waffles in the trash and cleaned out the crumbs from the toaster.
I went to my room and worked on essays, but I couldn’t focus. Around one o’clock, I heard some rustling and thumping. A few minutes later there was the click-click-click of heels on the terra cotta floor and the murmur of conversation. I burst out of my room. Janet was in the foyer. There were three suitcases at her feet.
“Oh, Tyler, I’m glad you’re here. My taxi will be here any minute.”
Before she could ask, I picked up all three suitcases—my anger was giving me extra strength—and stormed out to the curb. Janet click-clicked behind me.
“Maybe you shouldn’t carry all those at once.”
I crashed the suitcases onto the sidewalk. She was right. My back already ached.
“I assume Carl told you about us.”
I spun around to her. “Yes. It’s great to have advance warning.” That was my attempt at
sarcasm.
“Nothing will change for you.” They had rehearsed this line, I was sure of it.
A yellow and lime green cab approached but it didn’t stop. Janet turned and waved. The cab kept going. This was peculiar. There was nobody else standing outside with suitcases.
“Were you going to leave for good without telling me?”
“It’s not necessarily permanent,” she said. She was still waving at the receding cab.
“Are you still mad that I didn’t tell you about the emancipation?”
“No. Tyler, our problems are not about—”
“Maybe I should have told you about it. Maybe I should have told you about my suspension—”
“Your what?” The cab had turned. It was moseying back from the other direction. It looked like it would cruise by again. Janet screamed, “Hey!”
“First it’s Scott, and now it’s this. I deserve a little consideration. I’m not some…” Foster child was what I almost said. “Carl goes on and on about how I should stay in Las Vegas, and how you’re going to help me out with college and give me money. But you don’t have any money.”
“We have money,” she said.
“You’ve been selling off furniture.”
The cab drifted lazily to the curb in front of us. The driver got out. He was the hairiest man I’d ever seen. “You going to the airport?”
“No, thanks,” Janet said. “I’m just standing here with suitcases because that’s my hobby.” I might have laughed if I hadn’t been so peeved. Janet watched the driver grab the suitcases and fling them into the cavernous trunk.
