Blind Sight

by Meg Howrey

  But after I finished first out of all the runners for the first time, I noticed that I started becoming, well, kind of obsessed with winning. With me, Luke, winning, as opposed to our team winning. I don’t get upset if our team loses, as long as I’m first. I can’t explain it exactly. There’s some particular high that I get going into that chute first. I just really want it. Sara would say that it is Ego, and that’s probably right. And even though I know I should release my Ego, and still run with the same spirit of the guy I was when I was finishing in the bottom third, I can’t help myself. It’s almost like a possessive feeling. I want to own that chute, and have everybody else be the people that came after me.

  My sisters were both at college last year, so they weren’t at meets anymore, and I didn’t sing the Star Wars theme in my head. To be totally honest, what I’m thinking for the last part of a race now is something along the lines of, “MINE, MINE, MINE.”

  I think maybe I could do sort of a humorous essay about running and my secret names, but 50 Successful College Application Essays warns against the humorous essay. Also, it probably wouldn’t get me into Caltech.

  I should really take a shower.

  • • •

  By the time Luke is out of the shower, Mark is home, having only been called in to a short day on the set of The Last. They are now going to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for the Rothko retrospective.

  At the museum, Mark rents headphones so they can listen to the audio lecture, but at a certain point they agree that the lecturer’s voice is annoying and they want to stop listening and just look at the paintings.

  “These,” Mark says, “are really great paintings.”

  “These,” Luke agrees, “are now my favorite paintings.”

  They sit down on a bench in front of the last piece and look at it for awhile: an orange square floating in a larger yellow rectangle, the edges of the paint faintly blurred and thin. There seems to be an additional rectangle floating on top of the orange one, but the yellow has mostly swallowed this.

  “I feel like I’m watching it,” Mark says. “Do you know what I mean? Like I’m not just looking at it.”

  “Like you are observing it. Like it’s happening right now.”

  “Exactly,” Mark says. “Would this be, like, a Zen moment we are having?”

  Luke laughs.

  “I don’t think so. People think of any peaceful moment as being Zen, and Buddhism as being all passive and gentle, but that’s not always the case. It was Buddhist monks that convinced the kamikaze pilots in World War II to sacrifice themselves.”

  “I love the Nana stuff you wrote, by the way. So your Nana is really Christian and your mom is …?”

  “She would call herself a Pantheist,” Luke says. “Pearl calls her the Sony Cineplex of belief.”

  “Does it offend you that I swear?” Mark asks.

  “Oh, no,” Luke laughs. “Everybody swears.”

  “You don’t,” Mark says. “I don’t think I’ve heard you swear yet.”

  “Well, I swear mostly in extreme situations,” Luke answers. “Or just in my head. But I have no problem with it. It’s more that I’ve grown up with this emphasis on words, and word choice, so …”

  “No, it’s good,” Mark says. “You speak like a gentleman.”

  “I say ‘yeah,’ though,” Luke points out. “Nana hates that. It should be ‘yes,’ not ‘yeah.’ ”

  Mark and Luke turn back to the Rothko painting.

  “But you never got saved, or born again, or anything like that?” Mark asks, after a moment.

  “Well, actually,” Luke begins, and then pauses. The gallery is beginning to get more crowded, and Luke thinks that the couple off to their left has recognized Mark. This turns out to be the case, and Mark autographs the couple’s museum map.

  “Let’s go walk around outside,” Mark suggests. “The La Brea Tar Pits are next door.”

  It is possible to wander around cordoned areas of tar pits. Luke is intrigued by their smell, and the proximity of thirty-thousand-year-old Ice Age fossils still unexcavated lying so close to Wilshire Avenue, where you can get Mexican fast food, and office supplies.

  “You were saying?” Mark asks, after they talk about the smell. “About getting saved?”

  “Well, a weird thing happened to me once,” Luke says, slowly. “When I was at Assembly. I was just sitting there, kind of thinking my own thoughts, and I don’t know why, but I flipped open my Bible and put my finger down, you know, randomly, just to see what it would land on?”

  “What did it land on?” Mark asks.

  “ ‘For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again,’ ” Luke quotes.

  Mark asks him to repeat it, which Luke does.

  “So that’s, like, you get what you give, right?” Mark asks.

  “Yes,” Luke says. “And, well, I read it over a couple of times and then I got this really weird feeling, almost like the feeling you get when you are getting the flu. Like your bones and joints ache and you feel about a half step removed from everything around you?”

  “Okay,” Mark says. “Interesting. Go on.”

  “It was exactly like what a lot of people describe as a moment of getting saved, but in reverse,” Luke explains. “Because you are supposed to have, like, an overwhelming feeling of radiance, or love, or maybe even something happens, and you see something or do something. I mean it doesn’t have to be huge, like you lift up a car or anything like that. But your whole body is supposed to respond very intensely and you just KNOW that the moment has come.”

  “But you’re saying that it happened in reverse for you?”

  “Well … I mean I didn’t feel any radiance or light or anything like that. I felt heavy, and tired, but also … detached. I felt a certainty, but not the kind of certainty that I was supposed to feel.”

  Mark and Luke are no longer walking at this point, but standing at the southern end of the tar pits, where a giant fiberglass family of mammoths has been erected in a reenactment scenario: a mother mammoth flounders in the tar as her mate and baby look on from the safety of dry land. An explanatory placard describes the “helplessness” of the father and baby mammoth. The baby appears especially distressed: its fiberglass trunk is lifted in panic.

  “You know how if you say a word over and over, a bunch of times, it loses its meaning and starts sounding incredibly weird?” Luke asks.

  “Yeah, for sure,” Mark says. “It was like that?”

  “Well, in a way it was. I read that one verse over and over and I just moved farther and farther away from it, and I thought, ‘Well, this is all just nonsense.’ I guess it finally really occurred to me that everybody else around me, they actually believed all this stuff. I mean, really, really believed it. And then I knew that I wasn’t going to give anything to God, and so I wasn’t going to get anything back. I couldn’t give anything to God. I didn’t believe in God. And it wasn’t just a part of me that felt that, or the rational part of me, or the skeptic part of me. It was all of me. My body didn’t believe. My body was like, rejecting the whole thing. Not just the idea of religion, or organized religion, or Christianity, but the entire idea of God, of anything separate from myself. Of belief in belief without evidence.”

  Luke is clutching the fence of the tar pits now, in an effort to find the right words.

  “But you meditate,” Mark says. “And you do yoga. You seem like a spiritual guy.”

  “I meditate for mental and physical discipline,” Luke says. “I contemplate my thoughts. I don’t pray. I don’t ask anything of anything. I don’t believe there’s anything out there to ask. I don’t think there is a special point to existence, or that there is any plan or purpose beyond what we invent for ourselves. I know … I know I’m supposed to respect other people’s beliefs, but some people believe we are descendants of alien lizards. All of these things that Nana believes, and Sara believes? I think it’s all made up. So why should I respect that more
than alien lizards? And, and, even if you just think of religion as a metaphor it doesn’t mean anything to me. Because for spirituality to mean something you have to believe you have a spirit. And I don’t. I don’t think I have a soul.”

  Mark and Luke stand side by side. The fiberglass mammoths look at each other, with fiberglass dismay.

  “I haven’t ever told anybody that,” Luke says. “Maybe it doesn’t seem like such a big secret, or anything, but I haven’t even told my sisters.”

  Mark does not say anything to this, but he puts his hand on Luke’s back, in between his scapula. Luke releases the railing.

  “The joke part is,” Luke continues, “that passage I read? It was from the Book of Luke.”

  “Holy shit,” Mark says. Luke and Mark laugh. Then they leave the tar pits, the hidden remains of animals, the helpless fake mammoths, the painted floating rectangles and squares. On their way home, they pick up Mexican takeout.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A car from the studio arrived at five in the morning today to take us to the Mojave Desert, where The Last shoots most of its exteriors. This is the final day for the show before they go on hiatus. On Sunday, Mark is taking me to the “wrap” party.

  The location we were going to, Mark told me, is popular with film and television companies because of the dry and cracked lake bed, which is very unusual looking. Parts of the area, Mark explained, are designated for off-highway recreational sports like motorcycling or light aircraft flying. He asked if I was interested in trying any of those things. He had warned me that there would be a fair amount of sitting around, waiting, and I should bring things to do. I brought my laptop.

  “Maybe not today,” Mark added. “But sometime this summer. Whenever. I’ve been making a list of stuff we could do. You know, suggestions.” Mark pulled out his BlackBerry, flipped through it, and handed it over to me. I read:

  Ideas

  Mexico or Hawaii (Bahamas?)

  Camping (Sequoia National Park?)

  Road trip up Highway 101 (Redwoods?)

  Adventure: Sky diving, parasailing, motorcycling, etc.

  Surfing lessons

  “I realize it’s kind of a physically oriented list,” Mark said. “I wanted to put down some more intellectual-type activities. And we could go to concerts, too. We could go to the Hollywood Bowl. The opera. Theater. Anything you want.”

  “This,” I said to him, “is a really great list.”

  “Maybe you could rank the ideas,” he suggested. “In order of interest. Oh, and I wanted to ask you, because I was thinking … well, I thought maybe we could go visit my mom. Just a quick trip. A few days.”

  “Your mom?” I asked, totally surprised.

  “My mom,” he said. “Your grandmother. She lives in Grover, Illinois. That’s where I grew up. It’s a completely boring place but I haven’t been to see her in awhile, and I thought that maybe you’d want to meet your grandmother. Your other grandmother, I mean. She wants to meet you. What do you think?”

  “I’m putting ‘Visiting Mom/Grandmother’ in the number-one slot,” I said, and Mark smiled.

  “It should be fun today,” he told me. “It’s like the last day of school for us.”

  Arriving at the set, Mark was quickly herded off to hair and makeup, and I was shown to my father’s trailer, where I found Kati blending Mark’s special protein-powder drink.

  “Oh, hey,” I said. “Why didn’t you ride with us?”

  “I came early with the crew,” Kati shouted, over the noise of the blender. “So I could hand out gifts he got people. Plus your dad enjoys having alone time with you.”

  I checked out the books Mark had on the small coffee table. I didn’t know that Mark likes to do crosswords.

  Kati explained that normally the show had all its exteriors wrapped before June, when the temperature can get up to 120 degrees and the winds set in, but a last-minute script change had brought them all here for the day. Also, she told me, there has been a lot of talk lately about a possible writers’ strike, and they wanted to make sure they had everything done.

  “Well, it works out for me,” I said. “I’m glad I get to see what our planet looks like after a nuclear holocaust.” I stepped outside the trailer to take a look around.

  Before, I visited Mark on a soundstage at the studio lot. They use that for “interiors,” the various semi-destroyed shelters that James and the other survivors of The Last take refuge in. I had been surprised that day to see how what looked like really fake sets in real life suddenly appeared totally real on the monitors, from the camera’s point of view. Like, artifice was constructed out of real things, but only achieved the appearance of reality by artificial means.

  I took a deep breath. It was so arid I could practically feel my gums drying. A short distance from the trailers, crew members were setting up equipment under tarps, running cables, shouting directions. The lake bed was incredible. I shut my eyes, tried to imagine it covered with water, but instead I got this image of a giant prehistoric snake, struck by lightning, left to petrify and decompose, flattening under the sun and trampling feet of people shooting car commercials and television shows. I took a few pictures with my phone of the Joshua trees to send to my sisters. Kati came out of the trailer wearing a headset.

  “I’m taking Luke to craft services,” she said into it.

  I thought that maybe today I should work on forging some kind of relationship with Kati. She might be more of a permanent fixture in my father’s life than Aimee. Kati always carries a very large and heavy-looking purse.

  “Cool, right?” she asked, waving around at the landscape.

  “Very cool,” I agreed. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  We started walking and Kati pointed out people and told me who they were, and what their function was on the set. Whenever we passed someone who was not talking into their own headset, Kati either introduced them to me (“This is Mark’s son, Luke”) or reminded them who I am (“You remember Mark’s son, Luke”). When we had moved on, Kati said things like, “That was one of the producers,” or “He’s the second AD.” I’m learning film jargon, who does what and what they are called.

  “The wrap party is going to be great,” Kati told me. “They’re doing this whole carnival thing on the beach.”

  After assembling a plate of food, we threaded our way back to Mark’s trailer.

  “You can watch TV if you want.” Kati handed me a remote control. She sat down at a small table and opened up her laptop. Kati treats me like a kid, but I don’t think she’s much older than I am. I put the remote down and opened up my own laptop.

  “So, what are you going to do this summer?” I asked her. “Are you going on vacation?”

  “Well, there are still things to do. We’re hoping for another Emmy nomination for Mark in July. I’ve been sort of acting as your dad’s publicist, you know. I wear a lot of hats.”

  “Oh. So will he have to do more interviews and stuff?”

  “Don’t worry,” Kati said. “You’re his number-one priority. I won’t interrupt your plans unless it’s totally necessary.”

  “Well,” I said, “you should get some time off. You work really hard.”

  “I’ve got the best job in LA. I am the envy of personal assistants everywhere. No two a.m. phone calls. No bizarre requests for things nobody has ever heard of. No screaming tantrums. No drugs. No hookers. No messed-up chil—”

  Kati stopped.

  “That’s good,” I said. “I’m glad he’s not a tyrant. And that he doesn’t have any ‘messed-up chil.’ Let me know if he steps out of line. I’ve got your back.”

  That’s pretty much as close to flirting with Kati as I’ve actually gotten. I tried to think of a way to ask her if she has a boyfriend.

  Mark came into the trailer then, wearing a dirty T-shirt and dark military-style pants, the remnants of the uniform James Knox was wearing when he was sent on the mission to Earth that failed so spectacularly and set the whole ball rollin
g on The Last. Mark’s hair was scraped back at the sides, there was a faint bruise underneath one eye, and a realistic-looking cut above one ear. I think I’ve been around actual real-life Mark long enough now that I see the clothes as a costume, and him as an actor dressed up to play a part. When I visited him before, on the studio set, I hadn’t really known the difference between what James Knox looked like and what my father actually did.

  “Do you need to practice your lines or something like that now?” I asked, since Mark was carrying a script.

  “Here are my lines.” Mark handed the pages over to me. I looked down and saw three chunks of writing highlighted in yellow in between descriptions of action and another character’s dialogue. Sort of like this:

  JAMES

  You can’t change human nature. You should know that better than anyone, Doc.

  JAMES

  (his eyes sweeping the landscape)

  Take a look at what men do.

  JAMES

  (level, he means it)

  Don’t.

  “I think I’ve got ’em covered,” Mark laughed. “Want to play some Scrabble?”

  We set up the board.

  “ ‘You can’t change human nature,’ ” Mark said. “What do you think, Luke? Is that true?”

  “I think so.” I selected tiles. “The brain has a lot of plasticity, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to learn anything. But we can’t change who we are as a species, only how we behave, maybe. And we can’t change our genes, although our genes can change themselves. They can mutate.”

  “We’ve got some mutating genes this season.” Mark pointed at the script. “Although I’m not sure the science on the show is one hundred percent accurate.”

  “Hey Kati,” I said. “Want to play with us?”

  “I’ll be the judge,” Kati said. “In case there’s any dispute, I’ve got wordfinder.com right here.”

  So we played Scrabble and started up a running joke for Kati’s benefit about what we are going to do when The Last goes on hiatus.