The Life of the Mind

by Christine Smallwood

  Dorothy patted Elyse’s hand. “You’re not a bad person,” she said.

  “I don’t think I’m a bad person,” said Elyse. “And I know that anyone I sleep with is going to have slept with other people. I just don’t want to know who those other people are.”

  “What other people have doesn’t take away from what you have,” Dorothy said, saying what she knew was the right thing to say, the helpful thing, even if she didn’t think it was true. “You had your own special thing with him.”

  “The truth is I want them both for myself,” said Elyse. “And I don’t have either.”

  Elyse opened her purse and said she had forgotten her wallet. She apologized too many times, making the situation worse by exaggerating the hardship she was inflicting; the pity she felt for Dorothy was palpable. Dorothy put down her credit card and went to the bathroom. Nothing. No blood on the paper. There was no evidence of the clot from earlier in the day. Maybe it had been a hysterical symptom. The idea of a hysterical symptom, she thought as she rinsed her hands in the sink, was the sort of thing that she could never bring up with Rog, who would accuse her of self-hatred, when all she was, was curious, and eager to assign some signification to what on another level she knew was brute and meaningless physiology.

  She started talking as soon as she had a hand on the barstool.

  “It’s scary to think, That could have been me,” she said. “That’s what the story is about, isn’t it? Contingency? You could be Alexandra, and she could be you?”

  Elyse looked up from her phone with fearful eyes. Maybe it was the confusion of alcohol, but a person suffering a temporary amnesia might also look as Elyse did now, smiling vacantly to buy a few more seconds, opening her mouth and closing it without speaking. Dorothy thought about the ravages of age, dementia, Alzheimer’s, introducing yourself every day to the person you know best in the world, who knows you not at all.

  “It’s Dorothy,” Dorothy said, and watched as Elyse, like a sleepwalker shaken to consciousness, resettled into her usual expression of dreamy half-amusement.

  “Oh god,” she said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with my brain, but when I looked up at you I thought you were Alexandra, and that you had overheard our whole conversation. Which is crazy, ’cause I know Alexandra isn’t at this conference. She’s visiting her mother. Her mother has ovarian cancer.”

  “Jesus,” said Dorothy.

  “I know,” Elyse said.

  She added, “It was like there was a scrim between your face and my brain, or like I had clicked on the wrong file.”

  Dorothy said that that was exactly what Elyse’s story had been about, someone who clicked on the wrong file and revealed an image that had changed everything. They parted with hugs and kisses.

  “Good luck with job stuff in the fall” was the last thing Elyse said, “let me know how it goes,” and with this reference to Dorothy’s lowly status and the market’s vicissitudes, whatever bonds had formed in their time together separated and curdled. Dorothy stayed up late in the hotel bed, ragefully clicking around her phone, reading the headlines, “liking” new pictures of her friends and their vacations, their kids, their pets, the signs and vanity license plates they photographed because they were funny, their cats in costumes, their dinners, their beautiful plants, glossy with green health.

  * * *

  —

  At five o’clock in the morning Dorothy, idling in the lobby, opened the ride-hailing app and selected the shared-ride option, because, after spending fifty dollars on her slot card and treating Elyse to dinner, she had decided to live as deliberately as possible, at least for a day or two. She watched the icon of the car make its crawling digital approach and went outside to see it, life-size, roll along to the side entrance of Harrah’s. She took the seat behind the passenger seat and slammed the door.

  “Just getting one person after you,” said the driver, who resembled a volcano, dark-jacketed and pyramidal, topped with a red fedora. They headed south on the Strip.

  Dorothy looked out the window. I am leaving Las Vegas, she said to herself. That was a movie she had never seen. She thought of the book Learning from Las Vegas; she owned it, of course, but she had never read it. It was just another false start, another purchase toward the identity of a person she had turned out not to be. The sky was blue-dark but the streets were flooded with light from the casino signs. The late-night/early-bird walkers were wobbling in big groups; some looked confused, some wretched. Gigantic half-naked women flashed by on buses and taxi roofs, hurrying to get home. These advertisements, which had seemed so trashy and garish in the daytime, melted into the pre-dawn and left no trace. Dorothy felt peaceful, like she was being driven briskly and efficiently in a submarine through hell. She thought again of John, of his vision on the Island of Patmos. So many afternoons as a child she had hidden under her bed, reading and rereading Revelation. It seemed impossible now that hell would be so grotesquely baroque. It must be barren.

  She prepared herself for her final glimpses of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, hoping that whatever had been unsatisfying and dull about her encounter with the jumbled array of kitsch earlier in the trip would be resolved, that as they speeded away she would look behind her and come to a more complete understanding of what Las Vegas was and had been for her. Then she heard the clicking of the turn signal and the car glided onto the highway, leaving the Strip behind. She looked at her phone and realized they had been going north, not south.

  Dorothy’s sense of direction was not good. She and Rog used GPS whenever they rented a car; neither of them trusted her to navigate.

  Then, as quickly as the car had gotten onto the highway it was off again. As it turned into a casino driveway, it began to dawn on Dorothy that a shared ride was literally shared—that someone else was going to get into the back seat next to her, a stranger who was not, like her, soberly on their way to the airport to get the cheapest available flight, but a stranger who had been out all night drinking or fondling strippers, activities which were not in themselves necessarily wrong but that would introduce a new element into the car ride, and more specifically into the area directly adjacent to herself—when a white boy in an orange polo shirt with a blurry round face who looked to be no more than fourteen bounced into the front passenger seat and slammed the door. The smell of beer emanated from him; if he had been a cartoon character, the artist would have drawn him with x’d out eyes and smell lines to indicate the stench.

  “Sup,” he said to the volcano, who responded with a languid “sir” in his direction, and asked how he was. Through chattering teeth the boy said he was “Amazing.”

  He was in “Vegas” for a long weekend with his fraternity, he said, from the University of Kansas. Dorothy always hated meeting anyone from Kansas. They always had to say something about her name. But the boy didn’t turn around and introduce himself, and she didn’t reach through the seats to extend a hand. The hair on the back of his head looked clean and soft. Dorothy wondered what had happened to his jacket. Or did the fraternity have some rule forbidding sleeves? Vegas was weird, he said. He spoke with the slow emphasis of someone who is afraid that if they aren’t careful the slur of their words will get stuck together and never again come apart.

  The car pulled away from the casino. Traffic was light at this hour. There was a park, and parking garages. Dorothy remembered that the airport was close; they couldn’t be more than a few minutes away. Then they made a right and were back on the Strip. They passed a house-size pedestal and Dorothy craned her neck up as the Statue of Liberty vanished out of view. She was now thoroughly disoriented and had missed her opportunity to take in the replica statue as an aesthetic experience or form any coherent impression of it. It was behind her. To say her impression was in pieces would imply it was broken, when in fact, it had never been assembled.

  “I have to tell you,” the boy said out
his window, his accent flat as the fields of his ancestral home, “I’ve seen some things.”

  There were boys like this in Dorothy’s classes, and when she thought about what they did over the weekend, her imagination ran to predatory drunkenness thick and slow, but she pictured it contained in basements or dorm rooms, rather than out loose in the world. There was something about encountering this kind of collegiate drunkenness out loose in the world that made it feel less threatening and more pure of heart. The boy, she could tell, was exceedingly pure of heart. There was something tender and vulnerable about him and she longed to protect it. But that made him worse, more sordid and contemptible. This naïve boy had driven across the country with his teenage brethren on a mission to drink until puking—these were all assumptions, that they had driven, that they were underage, that someone had thrown up, if not him then one of his friends, and she felt justified in making them—in order to issue solemn proclamations on what was weird, on what had been seen. This was the problem with America. This boy’s innocence, which was his privilege. And why was he alone? Had he been abandoned by his group? Whatever happened to brotherhood?

  “We went to a club tonight,” he said. “I’ll tell you. It was a strip club. Nothing happened. My buddies are gentlemen. But there was this girl, or she said she was a girl, but I don’t think she was a girl.”

  There was a titillated exuberance in his voice. He looked out the window.

  “I don’t think she was a girl,” he said again, like his words had gotten stuck in a groove and would continue to play there until someone came along and nudged the needle to the next track.

  Dorothy waited for the real confession to drop, for him to admit the theft, the assault, the gang rape. But the silence thinned out into nothing. There was no crime, no revelation. There was only wondering misperception.

  “I guess you’re not in Kansas,” said the volcano, and the boy chuckled good-naturedly, and Dorothy pictured her hands wrapped murderously around both of their ignorant throats.

  “Not in Kansas,” the boy said.

  “That’s the truth,” the boy said.

  The boy loved his home state. A lot of people moved away, but he didn’t want to. He had a pickup truck, he said.

  “You probably don’t know anyone with a pickup truck,” he said.

  The volcano remarked that, on the contrary, he knew several people who drove pickup trucks.

  “You do?” said the boy, ecstatic. “Really?”

  Past the Hard Rock Café they turned left, and continued on into the neighborhood around the university. The boy talked about a documentary he had seen about genetically modified crops. He mentioned that the government was keeping information from them, the American citizens. There was a paranoid implication there that reeked of Internet subcultures. There was a betrayed incredulity. The car pulled up at a beige apartment complex where a flag with Greek letters was hanging out the window.

  “This is it,” the boy said, although the gearshift was already in park. “See our flag?”

  “Thanks for the ride,” he said, with deep earnestness, as if it had been a great favor and kindness to pick him up, an effect enhanced by the lack of open commercial transaction, the fee being electronically paid by the credit card company, “thank you so much, you take care, sir,” and Dorothy thought his mother, wherever she was, and however she felt about him being out at the strip club alone until sunrise, would be proud of his manners.

  As he shut the door, he turned his face toward the back of the car, and saw, for the first time, Dorothy sitting there. Her presence passed into his understanding and as it did, the shadow of absolute terror passed over his face. It seemed to happen slowly but it must have taken mere seconds, because the car was already turning away. The look on the boy’s face was something Dorothy had never seen on any human face. It was a little like the look of stricken misrecognition Elyse had given her last night at dinner but in another way it was nothing like it. Elyse had appeared to be bewildered, as if she knew what she was seeing could not be real; she had simply needed help sorting out what she knew on some cognitive level to be a sensory malfunction. The expression of this boy could not be corrected with information because the information would come from too far off the grid of recognizable fact. He had not seen the wrong person; he was seeing someone where there had been no one, a material presence, a ghost, and the ghost was her.

  She lifted a hand and waved and was conscious of a grin working its way into the corners of her mouth. She was conscious that she was finally having fun. The boy’s mouth fell open and his eyes widened and his eyebrows crawled fearfully under his hairline and he stood there, getting smaller, as the car turned back to the road on its way, without any further interruption, to the airport. The boy staggered a little. He did not wave back.

  That was Las Vegas.

  Saturday Night,

  The Next Week

  Gaby was having a party in her apartment, which occupied the third floor of a townhouse by the river. Technically, it wasn’t “hers.” She and Brian were the discounted tenants of her all-seeing parents and the cash investment they had made fifteen years ago. Brian was always talking about moving—he wanted independence, he would say—but he couldn’t deny the advantages of staying put. The baby’s room was the first door on the left, separated from the rest of the apartment by a long hallway, an ideal layout for when Gaby and Brian wanted to sit in the living room talking or watching television, but unideal for visitors, who had to tiptoe, coat in hand, past the danger zone. But tonight the baby was on the Upper East Side with Gaby’s parents, and no one had to worry about noise.

  “HELLO,” Gaby shouted every time she opened the door, just because she could. Dorothy had expected Gaby to feel sad or worried about the baby, but Gaby’s eyes were shining with joy, and wine. She had a new haircut and her dress was immodestly short and she reeked with determination to enjoy the night. Rog went into the kitchen to deposit a bag of beer, and Gaby, hopping from foot to foot as if her feet were on fire, dragged Dorothy into the baby’s room. It smelled sweet like baby shit and something else, baby lotion. A mobile of airplanes sentenced to an eternal patrol circled the ceiling above the empty crib.

  “Look at it!” Gaby said triumphantly. “Look! I. Am. Free!”

  There was something haunting about a child’s room with no child in it. It conjured sudden death, hushed voices, tragedy, shoes never worn. But Gaby was hyped up. She twirled a little and jumped up and down on the padded mat of animal faces. She pointed to an unblinking white camera positioned between a blackout curtain and a shelf where a monkey, a dog, a dinosaur, and an elephant crowded in a row, like a bizarre evolutionary experiment waiting to have its mug shot taken.

  “It’s off,” Gaby said of the cyclops on the wall. “When it’s on, I can’t stop watching it. It’s the greatest TV ever. He barks like a seal. But now I get to talk to you. An actual adult.”

  A child’s world was comprised of machines with faces and well-intentioned wild animals. Why were stuffed animals cute and human dolls creepy? Dorothy looked around for the hippopotamus she had bought as a baby gift and didn’t see it. Maybe it was so special that it had gone with Sherman on his grandparents’ sleepover, or maybe Gaby had forgotten who it was from and given it away, or maybe she had remembered and given it away anyway.

  When they were younger, Gaby had smoked cigarettes to have something to do with her hands. She had been an awkward and unattractive smoker, always holding the cigarette too close to her face between short, enthusiastic puffs, which she seemed to take into her lungs not by inhalation but by the reverse; it was a jabbing motion, like smoking was her way of punishing the cigarette for existing. You asked for this was what it looked like. Dorothy was glad when Gaby gave it up, though Gaby had not outgrown the need to always be holding or fondling some security object. That habit had become less obvious since everyone had acquired it vis-à
-vis their phones, but Dorothy still noticed it, perhaps because it was accompanied by the music of the dozen bangles that pharaohnically lined Gaby’s arms: the enthusiastic tinkle of picking up and putting down coasters or hair elastics or shredding napkins, and then, the clunk when she caught herself, briefly folded her hands, girl-like, in her lap. But the hands always broke free again. Currently they were picking up and putting down Sherman’s sheep rattle, getting it into a row with three other rattles, all of which featured heads of different animals on cloth sticks. She was a warlord. She had decapitated the ruling body of a peaceable kingdom and was now getting their heads staked and ready for a victory parade.

  There were too many animals in this room. It was getting on Dorothy’s nerves.

  Gaby looked at Dorothy.

  Dorothy said, “What should we talk about?”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Gaby said, closing the door before taking a cross-legged seat on a large, unnaturally white sheepskin, “but I’m pregnant.”

  “I thought you guys were fighting,” Dorothy heard herself say, looking down at the line of scalp that parted Gaby’s hair. “I thought you weren’t having sex.”

  “We’re fighting but that doesn’t mean we don’t have sex,” Gaby said. She reached an arm up and pulled Dorothy down to her level. “We always have sex. Do you not have sex?”

  Dorothy tried to smile but it felt ghoulish, she could sense that her eyes were not participating, so instead she reached out and started rubbing Gaby’s arm in a way that she hoped communicated camaraderie and joy but that she feared felt slightly lecherous.

  “Of course,” said Dorothy, unsure of whether she had just admitted to Gaby that she did or did not have sex. What did that mean, anyway, to “have sex,” what kind of temporality did that phrase even suggest? It depended how far back and forward you cast the net, it was a question of averages, and there was a season for everything, as it said in the Bible, which meant that in a life of having sex there would be droughts of sexlessness, or would they be rains/reigns of sexlessness, and anyway, Dorothy didn’t think that it was friendly, or tactful, to be so mathematical. This triumph of the quantitative was to be resisted. Wasn’t that the point of literature?