Fear of Missing Out

by Kate McGovern

33.

  Things I’ll miss when I’m dead (a partial list, continued):

  The smell of the ocean

  Thin cheeseburgers with pickles and onions

  People who know me as well as I know myself

  Kitsch

  Beautiful views

  34.

  On our way toward the middle of the country, we spend hours on very straight roads that cut clean paths through snow-covered meadows in Pennsylvania, and pass the occasional horse-drawn buggy in Amish country. We briefly cross West Virginia, then enter Ohio. As the country speeds by outside, we see almost nothing of note on either side of the highway, just the occasional motel with a covered in-ground pool out front and a blinking neon sign advertising air-conditioning, cable, vacancies. It’s not flashy country, but it’s beautiful in its own way.

  At the end of the twelve-hour driving day, we stop at a diner somewhere in Indiana. It’s a twenty-four-hour kind of place frequented by truckers. The parking lot is mostly empty except for a couple of eighteen-wheelers, which I suspect are driven by the handful of guys sitting solo at the long counter. We take a corner booth, since we have our pick.

  “So, get excited,” Chloe says after we’ve ordered. “Big day tomorrow.”

  “Dare I ask?” Mo says.

  “We are going to the geographic center of the contiguous United States. Think of the photo opportunities!”

  “How far out of our way are we going to hit these interim destinations?” Mo asks. “I mean, not that I really want to know.”

  “Look, we’d be going farther out of our way if we were going to the geographic center of the United States including Alaska and Hawaii, because that’s somewhere in South Dakota. This is barely a detour. Anyway, you knew what you were signing up for here.”

  The waitress brings our food. I slept through a lot of the ride today, but I still feel tired. Bone tired, the kind of tired sleep doesn’t relieve. I push my soup around in the bowl and watch the occasional hunk of chicken float to the surface, then disappear again.

  “You okay?” Chloe asks. She’s usually not the concerned one.

  “Yeah. Just tired.” I muster a smile. “Geographic center of the contiguous United States! Woo!”

  Chloe frowns. “We can skip it and keep driving,” she offers. “It’s not a big deal.”

  But it is a big deal. This is my trip, my closest-thing-I’ll-ever-get-to-a-college-spring-break-road-trip road trip. I’m not missing it because I have a brain tumor.

  “No way, we’re not skipping it.” I gulp down some soup, which is straight-from-the-microwave scorching hot. “I want to see the geographic center of the contiguous United States, dammit!”

  Chloe exchanges a look with Mohit, who shrugs.

  “Okay, if you’re sure,” she says. “It’s going to be really cool, because I was thinking…”

  I tune out as Chloe babbles on about the vlog episode she wants to film once we get there. Under the table, Mohit tickles my knee. I put my hand over his and trace the fingers I know so well. In my mind, I can see the clipped nails in their deep beds, the tiny patches of dark hair on his knuckles, the hardened bump on his left ring finger because of the weird way he holds a pencil.

  I miss him already, too.

  * * *

  We check in to the aptly named Plain View Motel, two nondescript stories just off the interstate with nothing to see from any of its windows, even if it weren’t pitch-black outside. As I climb into bed, I hear the muted sounds of Mo’s saxophone coming from the room next door. I press my cheek to the wall. He’s playing something I don’t recognize, a new piece, probably. I can imagine him playing it at the Regattabar in a couple of months, the lights shining on him in the otherwise darkened club.

  “Mo,” I whisper. Then I repeat it a little louder, almost at normal volume. “Mo.”

  I know he can’t hear me. The walls are thin but not that thin, and whenever he’s playing I have to yell to be heard over his sax anyway, especially when he’s in the world of his music.

  “Mo,” I say again. Of course, still no response. He keeps playing. “I don’t know if I want to do this anymore.”

  “Are you talking to me?” Chloe calls from the bathroom, her mouth full of toothpaste.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  It’s a confession I’m not ready to be held accountable for. Not yet.

  35.

  Things I’ll miss when I’m dead (a partial list, continued):

  High school and college and med school graduations

  Making a major discovery in neuroscience research and having it published in a journal

  Fixing people through science

  Science, in general

  36.

  The geographic center of the contiguous United States, turns out, is in Lebanon, Kansas, and it’s marked by a faded blue plaque on a monument near the side of the road. It’s just a pile of rocks, really, a little stack of stones on a frozen, snow-encrusted patch of grass. Nearby, there’s a small white building with a simple cross on the roof, labeled U.S. CENTER CHAPEL. It’s like the tiny house of churches, a chapel made for Stuart Little.

  “Guys, we can stop off for a quick prayer after Chloe’s done filming,” I say. “Do you think this is, like, hallowed ground or something? Did you read about this, Clo? If I leave a drop of my blood on the altar at the geographic center of the contiguous United States, will I be magically cured?”

  “Worth a shot,” Chloe says absently as she sets up her camera.

  “Power of prayer, right?”

  “Oh, stop,” Mo says. He leans against the Tomato, arms crossed over his chest and a wool hat pulled low over his ears. “You can be an atheist and still not be a jerk.”

  “Sorry.” I blow on my hands. It’s hard to believe we’ll be in Arizona after just one more day of driving, where the weather app on my phone tells me it’ll be in the eighties.

  “Also,” Mohit adds, “you’re the one for whom we are driving across the country to visit a cryopreservation facility, I might remind you. Hardly a matter of scientific certainty.”

  “Fine, fine, you win.”

  “Okay.” Chloe points the camera in my general direction while I hop up and down from one foot to the other. “Action.”

  “Hi, everyone. Uh, so, we are here in Lebanon, Kansas, which is the geographic center of the contiguous United States. Sorry, Alaska and Hawaii.”

  “What are we doing here?” Chloe asks from behind the camera.

  I laugh. “I mean, who wouldn’t want to come to the geographic center of the contiguous United States? Are you jealous, yet?” I’m getting more used to talking to this invisible audience, the mystery people on the other side of these videos who will think they know me based on whatever it is I say on camera.

  “We’re seeing the country,” I add. “Not quite coast to coast, but coast to corpsicles, one might say.”

  I stop to think for a moment. We’re on our way to visit the corpsicles, of course. We’re seeing All the Kitsch. But there’s also something else I haven’t quite articulated to my “fans.” Or to myself, for that matter.

  “I guess you could also say that I’m taking control of my life for a minute,” I say. “When you’re sick, you don’t get to choose much. I mean, most people don’t get to choose much in this life, period. But, like, when you’re sick, everything seems to become just an unfolding of events.”

  On the other side of the camera, Chloe is still and silent. I see Mohit look up from the guidebook, paying attention all of a sudden. I try to ignore their reactions and press on.

  “You’re not driving your life—your illness is driving it. So we’re on this trip because, I don’t know, I wanted to drive my life for a minute. Or in this case, have Chloe and Mohit drive, literally. But I’m doing the figurative driving. You know what I mean.”

  I stop there. No one says anything.

  “Can you hear me okay?”

  When Chloe puts down the camera, her face looks all funny, sa
d and twisty in a way Chloe never looks. “Yeah. We heard you,” she says. “Let’s go. It’s cold out here.”

  37.

  As predicted, the country gets warmer and warmer as we move southwest. By the time we cross into Arizona, it’s seventy-five degrees out, and we stop by the side of the road to film me straddling the state line and to stretch our limbs in the sun. I can practically feel the vitamin D seeping into my skin.

  My father’s commune isn’t far from the Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona. I was here before, with Dad and Liam, a few years ago. Dad took us hiking through the park, showed us the fossils the area is known for, especially fallen trees that were apparently alive during the Late Triassic Period, which is like a bajillion years ago (roughly 225 million, in fact). Liam thought it was absurdly cool. I was thirteen, Dad had been living out here for a year or so, and I was mad about the whole situation, so I didn’t want to act impressed—but I was impressed, too.

  “You all right?” Mo asks as we roll through Apache County. The land is flat and arid, with a huge, nearly cloudless sky. I nod vaguely. It’s been over a year since I saw my father, and I’m not sure what I’ll say when we get there, since the last time I talked to him he indicated that I’d pretty much brought my cancer on myself. I guess I’ll figure it out when we get there.

  * * *

  The Ranch itself looks like the kind of summer camp I never went to because I dislike woods and tents and things buzzing around my head. We pass through a tall wooden gate—which Mo has to get out and open, then close behind us, per the instructions on the sign hanging from it—and then follow the length of driveway that winds through a wide, open field. At the end of the driveway, there’s the main lodge, where Dad takes his phone calls and where the group shares their meals and whatever else they do. As we pull up, I note new solar panels on the lodge roof.

  Beyond the lodge, narrow and mostly unpaved roads curve around the land, with turnoffs at a series of tiny houses. Each comes with its own patch of scrappy lawn out front and what look like various accoutrements for capturing water. Less summer camp, more retirement community for the kind of people who aren’t registered to vote but complain a lot about the government, I guess.

  There are no house numbers, but each structure has a name. Dad’s is called “Bliss’d Out.” I’m not sure which drives me more nuts, the use of the outdated slang or the dropped “e.” The house is white, like all the other houses, with green shutters and windowboxes filled with tiny purple flowers and a range of herbs. There’s a garden and a well, and two bicycles lean against the side of the house, each with a wicker basket and a bell.

  My father steps outside just as we pull up to the front door. He plasters a grin over his face, blocks his eyes from the late-afternoon sun with a callused hand. His skin is more wrinkled than I remember it, more tanned, and he looks like he hasn’t shaved in a while.

  “You made it!”

  I climb out of the Tomato. “Hi, Dad.”

  “We’ll be back in an hour?” Mohit asks, leaning out the Tomato’s open door. “Unless you want us here?”

  I shake my head. “That’s all right. Go find a Friendly’s or something. This won’t take that long.”

  “We’re in Arizona, Astrid,” Chloe says. “No Friendly’s.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “All right, well, Chili’s, then. McDonald’s. Any establishment that sells french fries.”

  Dad waves and approaches the vehicle. “Mo-heat, hi there!”

  “It’s Mohit,” I say under my breath.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing, Dad.”

  “Hi, Mr. Ayeroff. Good to see you again,” Mo says. Then he closes the Tomato’s door, and Chloe wrestles a three-point turn and maneuvers them back along the narrow path. I watch its dusty red rear waddle around the corner, and then they’re gone.

  “They didn’t want to come in? They could’ve joined us.” Dad ushers me into the tiny house, where he’s got a tiny fire burning in the tiny woodstove, even though it’s hot as hell.

  “It’s okay. They’ll go get lunch or something.”

  “Mo-heat couldn’t take the heat, huh? Didn’t want to have a one-on-one with your old man?”

  I ignore him, and survey the empty room. There’s a miniature kitchen that takes up one wall, with a wooden ladder climbing up to a loft bed overhead, a bathroom with a composting toilet. The decor is what I can only describe as generically spiritual: a small bronze Buddha in one corner, textiles that look like the kind of faux–Native American prints sold at Urban Outfitters, a framed scroll with Chinese lettering that probably means something completely nonsensical.

  “Where’s Suzanne?”

  “She’ll be here. She’s at the acupuncturist. How about a walk?”

  I don’t really want to go for a walk—my whole body hurts, and a headache creeps in behind my eyes—but I don’t feel like spelling out my various ailments for my father, so I shrug noncommittally and let him take it as a yes.

  We set off on a narrow footpath along the edge of an expanse of land they call the Sweetmeadow. Dad walks faster than I can keep up with, but the path is only wide enough to walk single file anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

  “It’s good to see you, my girl. I’ve missed you, you know,” he says as he tromps ahead of me, talking to the air.

  “Have you?” I can’t get out much more than a couple of words at a time, with all my energy focused just on putting one foot in front of the other.

  “It’s not easy to get to Boston. It’s a long haul, and we don’t own a car, so. You know how it is.”

  “Yeah. I know. Long bike ride, I guess.” I stop and put my hands to my knees, bending over to steady myself. The earth sways a little bit beneath me, and bright dots cloud my vision.

  Dad stops and turns. When I straighten up, Dad’s furrowing his tanned brow at me, concerned. “You seem weaker than the last time I saw you. You all right?”

  The dots, little satellites made by my tumor of stars, scatter slowly to the edges of my sight lines and then dissipate. “Besides the recurrence of my brain tumor? Sure. Peachy.”

  My father blinks several times. His hair has gotten longer, and he’s got it tucked back in a man bun that seems particularly sad—sadder even than a normal man bun, and those are sad enough—because it’s gone fully gray. The lenses in his glasses are thicker than I remember, and he’s gained weight; even living here, “off the earth,” he’s grown a gut that pokes at his moth-eaten sweater.

  “I love you, Astrid. I’m sorry this is happening to you.”

  I swallow. There’s nothing to say. Dad takes his glasses off and wipes a hand over his eyes, though they look dry.

  “And this … cryopreservation facility you’re visiting. You think this has real potential?”

  I haven’t talked to him about our final destination, so Mom must have filled him in.

  “I don’t know, Dad. It’s a long shot. It’s just something I’m curious about.”

  “Well, I guess that makes sense. You always did love your science.”

  It gives me a pang of longing in my gut, the way he says it, a reminder that he is in fact my father and was part of my everyday life for my first twelve years. He did know me, even if it doesn’t feel like that anymore.

  “Remember that science fair project where we built the roller coaster?” he says. “That was a good one.”

  Sixth grade, just when things were starting to go off the rails for my parents but before he left. He must’ve already been feeling guilty about what he knew he was going to do, because he spent an inordinate amount of time working with me on an elaborate loop-the-loop roller coaster, complete with little cardboard people strapped into the car.

  “I did not think that was going to work,” I say.

  “Nor did I, my girl. Nor did I. We made a good team, though. Anyway, Astrid.” He takes a step closer to me on the path and touches my arm. “I’m just sor
ry that I couldn’t—you know, I couldn’t do anything about your illness myself. To stop this from happening to you. I mean, your mother—”

  Just like that, resentment creeps back in, ruining the moments before. “Come on, Dad. Don’t ‘your mother’ this again, please. You should know better.”

  “I’m not blaming her. I just wish she had been more open to this lifestyle. To letting go of attachments, and toxins. I think it would’ve helped her in her own life, too. And I’m not sure you would’ve ended up like this. That’s all I’m saying.”

  I’ve heard it before. “I know, Dad. I get it. You think Mom and I manufactured a cancer by living with electricity and indoor plumbing. I’ve heard.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Dad, I’m exhausted. I’ve had a headache for months now. I don’t feel like arguing about what happened to make me sick, or what you can or cannot do about it. Let’s just go.”

  He doesn’t say anything. Then he nods back toward the way we’ve come.

  I don’t expect to see Suzanne when I push the door open, but suddenly she’s right there, filling almost the entire room. She’s in the middle of changing her shirt, her bare back facing me.

  “Oh god, sorry!” I back up out the door, but she just laughs. Her laugh is like a small child’s, the peals of a tiny bell. A moment later, she appears in the doorway, clothed now (barely), with a thin, almost translucent white tank top stretched over what I can now see is a hugely pregnant belly.

  I do a double take.

  Suzanne smiles at my reaction. “I guess your father didn’t tell you?”

  Dad clears his throat awkwardly. “We, uh. We hadn’t quite gotten there yet.”

  “We were so excited to tell you in person! You’re going to have a brother. Well, or a sister. I think it’s a boy, but we won’t know until the birth, of course.”

  I look at Dad. He didn’t seem that excited to tell me, to be honest. If he had been, he might’ve mentioned it. Now his blue eyes shift from Suzanne to me and back.

  “I have a brother,” I say.

  “Of course,” Suzanne says. “I meant, you know, another brother.”