The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik

by David Arnold

  “You okay, No?” asks Val, like out of nowhere, too. A byproduct of the triangle, I guess: near telepathy.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “Doing better, I think.”

  She pushes those huge sunglasses up her forehead. “What?”

  Shit. “Sorry,” I say. “I thought you meant my back.”

  “I meant you zoned out. But . . . now you bring it up, how is your back?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Doing better, you think?” She lets her sunglasses fall back into place, sips her daiquiri, and stares at me. No one does unnerving like Val.

  I climb out of the pool, head toward the diving board.

  “Dr. Kirby said to take it easy, right?” she says, but it’s a big pool, and she’s drifted near the opposite end, so I pretend not to hear. And maybe I can escape Val’s stare, but her first question climbs right out of the pool and follows me like a dripping shadow: You okay, No?

  Up on the diving board now, right out on the edge. The sun is almost down, and there’s that warm kind of dimness that only late summer can bring, when the air feels milky, and it’s beautiful but kind of sad watching the day die right in front of you like that, knowing there’s nothing you can do for it. I guess the sun and the Fading Girl are a lot alike.

  You okay, No?

  It’s like this: one summer, when I was eight (pre-Iverton days), I went to this camp where I made a bunch of new friends who taught me how to make slingshots, and that’s where I had my first (and only) cigarette, and this one kid even had a picture of a lady in her underwear, which prompted an eye-opener of a talk, and that was when I learned sex was more than just naked kissing. Then, after camp was over and I came home, I went back to playing with my old friends and realized they knew nothing of slingshots and cigarettes. They did not know sex was more than naked kissing.

  Much as I love Val and Alan—and it’s a lot—it sometimes feels like they know nothing of slingshots and cigarettes. Like they still think sex is just naked kissing.

  Across the pool, Val slides off the float, grabs one of those long foam noodles, and whales on Alan’s head; he splashes her back, and they laugh carelessly in that summer way people do.

  I close my eyes, dive, give myself over completely to the water, and there, submerged in its slumber, I imagine a diagram of my heart:

  Whatever portions were once filled by the people I cared about most have been transplanted with Old Man Goiter, the Abandoned Photograph, Mila Henry’s Year of Me, and the Fading Girl. I do not know how or why this happened.

  I call them my Strange Fascinations.

  3 → some thoughts on Iverton and home and walking while walking home through Iverton

  Iverton, Illinois, is the personification of its resident youth: someone gave it the keys, a credit card, and no curfew, and now it thinks its shit doesn’t stink. The suburb is populated by these gaudy, homogeneous brick houses, each a clone of the one next to it; driveways and garages are stocked with a variety of shiny SUVs, lawns are pushed to the greenest of greens, and trees grow in suspiciously symmetrical fashion.

  “How white is Iverton?” Alan would ask.

  “How white?” I would respond.

  “So white, the snow doesn’t show.”

  Val and Alan’s mom is from San Juan, Puerto Rico, their father of Dutch descent. (“Rosas come second to none,” was all Mrs. Rosa-Haas would say anytime someone asked about their last name. Apparently it was the only way she would agree to marry Mr. Rosa-Haas.) In a town like Iverton, being half Puerto Rican means half the people assume Val and Alan are white, and the other half ask questions like, “No, really, where are you from?”

  Last year this kid on the swim team asked Alan that question, to which Alan said, “Iverton,” to which the kid said, “No, I mean, from from,” to which Alan said, “Ohhhhh, I thought you meant from from from-from-from froooooooooooooom,” to which the kid turned every shade of red, pretended to hear his cell ring, and walked away.

  Val and Alan get this shit all the time, and they pretend it doesn’t bother them—and maybe it doesn’t, what do I know. But I’ll never forget something Alan said once. “It’s like this town wants me to be Rosa or Haas. Like it can’t deal with me being both at the same time.”

  So, yes, Iverton may have the keys, the credit card, and no curfew, but me-oh-my, does its shit stink.

  * * *

  Halfway home now, and I will give it this: after dark, on a clean summer night, Iverton is highly walkable.

  Some might argue that walking is the slowest method of getting from point A to point B, and fair enough, but for me, getting from points A to B is only an ancillary benefit. I find inherent value in the steps themselves. This is exponentially true of my walks to and from the Rosa-Haas house, as if I’m closest to my true self when I am somewhere between my friends and family.

  I walk up our driveway, past the assortment of Oakman automobiles: my Hyundai hatchback (which Alan refers to as my fun guy ballsack), Dad’s Pontiac station wagon (complete with wood paneling and a backward-facing trunk seat), and Mom’s ancient Land Rover. If you listen closely, you can actually hear the neighborhood’s collective sigh of disapproval.

  We bought this house shortly after the passing of Papa Oak, who lived his final years as a semi-reclusive widower, and who, upon his death, confirmed suspicions regarding his net worth. Everyone in the family got a sizeable chunk, at which point I learned something: if nothing reveals the deepest desire of one’s heart like a windfall, my father’s deepest desire had less to do with torque and German engines, and more to do with suburban bliss. Dad is a vegan chef, and he does okay for himself: weddings, bar mitzvahs, and bat mitzvahs, mostly. And while Mom is an attorney, she works for the state government, which means we basically owe our house to Papa Oak (RIP).

  I’m hardly through the front door when I hear Mom from the living room, all, “Hey, honey.” It’s her knee-jerk response to the two-beep alarm anytime a door in the house opens.

  Beep-beep-hey-honey.

  I could swear I hear them whispering, but when I round the corner into the living room, they’re all smiles, snuggled up on the couch, watching an episode of Friends.

  “How was the pool?” asks Dad, pushing pause.

  “Fine,” I say, imagining myself pausing them.

  My parents are basically super in love, which, kudos to them, but it’s a bit much sometimes. Take this ritual with Friends, for example. They watch at least one episode a night from their prized DVD collection. Dad with his bourbon, Mom with her wine, they sing, “I’ll Be There for You” in unison and recite all of Joey’s lines right along with Matt LeBlanc.

  “How’s your back?” asks Mom. “Any developments?”

  Developments. Like my back is a riveting television miniseries.

  “It’s okay,” I say, careful to keep the descriptive language as vague as possible lest Mom put on her cross-examination hat. “A little tight, but okay.”

  Our half-dead Shar-Pei hijacks the conversation by walking into a wall. Dad scoops him up, all, “Poor Fluff,” gently settling the dog onto his lap. Fluffenburger the Freaking Useless limps around the house, generally owning the crap out of his name, and while he is most definitely not a lapdog, try telling that to my dad. Ever since last year’s incident, in which Fluff yapped himself permanently hoarse, my parents seem to think of our ancient dog as more of a human toddler.

  “Dinner?” I ask.

  Mom sips her wine. “It was my turn to cook,” she says, which means chicken cordon bleu. Dad calls it his “vegan cheat night,” and he pretends to love it, but I know the truth: he loves her, and it’s all she can make. “Penny got hungry, so we ate already, but I put a plate in the microwave. Just push start, should be good to go.”

  I head toward the kitchen, and again, just out of earshot—I hear some whispering. Probably sweet nothings. Probably I don’t
want to know.

  I connect my phone to the Bluetooth speaker in the kitchen, play Bowie’s Hunky Dory, press start on the microwave, and stare at the spinning plate. My hunger has decreased significantly since I stopped swimming competitively, and during that time the idea of food has become kind of weird to me, animalistic even. The tearing, the chewing, the crunching, even the word—masticate—suggests some wildly carnal activity.

  I mean, we’re basically a bunch of wolves.

  The microwave beeps, the plate stops spinning, my prey awaits. I carry it over to the bar counter where Mom has a napkin and a drink and silverware all set out for me. And right there beside it is a Post-it with my name on it (in Mom’s handwriting) followed by five exclamation points and an arrow pointing to the voicemail light on the home telephone. Dad insists we keep a landline as “home base” for his business calls, and while we mostly end up with one sales pitch after another, there is one other thing this phone is designated for, my only personal experience using it: recruiting calls.

  In the background Bowie sings of lawmen and cavemen, sailors fighting in dance halls, and I wish he were here now, in this kitchen with me, and I would hold his hand and together we would talk of life—on Mars, or otherwise.

  4 → a concise history of me, part nineteen

  On January 8, 1947, David Robert Jones was born in London. It was a Wednesday. It was snowy. Somewhere across the Atlantic, a little boy named Elvis celebrated his twelfth birthday. Neither was considered a musical prodigy, though both would go on to shake music to its core, shaping and reshaping it until the word itself—music—was hardly recognizable.

  When baby David was born, legend has it the midwife claimed, “This child has been on Earth before.” Years later, David Robert Jones became David Bowie, and people speculated that perhaps he’d spent time on other planets too.

  When Elvis was born—January 8, twelve years prior—his twin brother was stillborn. Gladys Presley would go on to tell friends that her son Elvis “had the energy of two.” For much of his life, Elvis was haunted by his twin brother’s death and by his own seemingly random survival.

  Some people have been on Earth before and some people never get the chance.

  On January 8, 1973, an unmanned spacecraft called Luna 21 successfully launched into orbit. After landing on the moon, Luna 21 deployed a Soviet robotic lunar rover called the Lunokhod 2, which took over 80,000 TV pictures and 86 panoramic images.

  Little David grew up, wrote songs about astronauts and space, and released a record the same month Apollo 11 landed on the moon. (Apollo being, among other things, the god of music.)

  Years later, David Bowie’s son would make a movie called Moon.

  Little Elvis grew up and joined a band called the Blue Moon Boys. He had a daughter who would go on to marry an iconic musician known for a dance move called the moonwalk.

  Later, Elvis would strike out on his own, eventually hiring a man named Thomas Parker as his manager. About Parker, Elvis would say, “I don’t think I’d have ever been very big if it wasn’t for him.”

  Thomas Parker’s nickname was Colonel Tom. Colonel Tom made Elvis a star.

  David Bowie wrote a song about Major Tom, who was left to float among the stars.

  Luna 21 and the Lunokhod 2 are no longer on the moon. Little David and Little Elvis and the moonwalk dancer are also out of commission. Their music is alive, though. I’ve heard it, I know.

  And so are those pictures from the Lunokhod 2. I’ve seen them, I know.

  I often wonder about the subtle connectors of the universe stretching through time and space, some skipping from one star to the next like smooth stones across a pond, some left to float through the wide, aimless infinite. I wonder about words like reincarnation and relativity and parallel. And I wonder if any of those stones ever land in the same place twice.

  I was born on January 8.

  5 → I am thinking about wolves again

  It started freshman year. Alan said, “We should join the swim team,” and so we did. For as many hours as we spent in the Rosa-Haas pool, and for as many races as I’d won, I figured why not. Turned out I was pretty good—fast, not the fastest. Then, sophomore year, I grew into my limbs or something, because suddenly my times were ridiculous. Not Olympic ridiculous, but good enough to get early interest from a few lower-level D1 schools like Saint Louis, Manhattan State University, Eastern Michigan, and University of Milwaukee. (My parents were especially excited about the prospect of UM, as Milwaukee was just a couple hours from Iverton.) Junior year my times continued to improve, interest escalated, and by July 1 of this year—the first day a college coach can call a recruit—I got two phone calls: one from Coach Tao at Manhattan State and one from Coach Stevens at Milwaukee, both indicating a potential full ride. These weren’t elite schools with deep pockets, so full scholarships were few and far between, a fact made abundantly clear to me on the regular.

  The great secret: I don’t love it. Swimming was just this thing I enjoyed, this thing I was pretty good at, and before I knew it, a thing I was really good at, and then everyone was all, Welp, I guess this is the path for you, young man, talking about swimming with a gleam in their eyes so bright, they never noticed I didn’t have one for myself.

  And then this summer happened. Long-course training (Olympic fifty-meter), I’m in the middle of the pool, when I start cramping and my whole body clams up. Someone pulls me out, and Coach Kel is all, “You okay, Oak? What’s wrong? What hurts?” And without even thinking, I say, “My back.”

  That’s it. All it took. I wasn’t off the team, I didn’t have to quit—I just didn’t have to swim anymore.

  As it turns out, back injuries aren’t always straightforward, so it’s not terribly difficult to perpetuate the lie as long as I keep it vague. I have regular appointments with a chiropractor, Dr. Kirby; most mornings I have physical fitness drills with Coach Kel, who assures me this will go a long way not only toward keeping me in shape, but also toward showing college coaches I’m serious about rehab. Mom and Dad and Coach tag-team calls with the schools, and right off the bat, Saint Louis and Eastern Michigan drop out. I don’t know if it’s Mom’s courtroom prowess or what, but both Coach Stevens at Milwaukee and Coach Tao at Manhattan State agree to stick it out for a while.

  The last few weeks have been full of played-out hypothetical situations. Mom or Dad go on about the importance of acting with urgency at the first sign of an offer, to which I remind them that most swimmers don’t commit until spring. “Yes,” Mom says, “but most swimmers haven’t missed weeks of practice with a back injury.” Then Dad says something along the lines of striking while the iron is hot, to which Mom says, “If you’re lucky enough to get an offer this fall, you really want to wait and see if it’s still there in the spring?”

  I never said much at this point. There was no real offer on the table, so I didn’t see that it mattered much.

  But now: a voicemail on the landline, and a Post-it with exclamation points.

  I look at the plate of chicken in front of me and envy the wolf its simplicity. I imagine it spending hours tracking its prey, chasing it, the violent takedown—and in the end, dropping it from its jowls, leaving it uneaten, and calmly walking away.

  I pick up the phone, press the voicemail button: “Hi, guys, Coach Stevens here. I’ve got some good news. . . .”

  6 → the further away, the stronger the urge

  “You have to come, No. Everyone is going to be there.”

  Val should know better than to think that last part was sweetening the deal, especially given the portrait of my life at this moment: sprawled in bed, laptop on stomach, Coke in hand, halfway through my third Gilmore Girls episode of the afternoon.

  “Which one is this?” she asks, plopping down next to me. Before I can answer, she’s all, “Ohhh, right.” Val is a Gilmore junkie. She’s seen every episode, including the reboot season, l
ike, a half dozen times.

  “Wait, don’t tell me,” says Alan, perusing my bookshelves like he hasn’t done it a hundred times before. “Luke and Lorelai flirt, sexual tension meets butter knife, nothing happens, the end.”

  “Alan,” says Val. “You have zero romantic wherewithal.”

  “Valeria. I have no idea what that means.”

  On-screen, Lorelai walks into Luke’s for something like her fourth coffee of the afternoon.

  “Do they ever drink water in Stars Hollow?” I ask.

  “Only when filtered through a bean.” Alan likes to dump on Gilmore Girls, but on more than one occasion, Val and I have overheard him belting the opening theme song from his room with all the off-key gusto of the Lollipop Guild. “However,” he says, “I have to admit, Stars Hollow in the winter is dope as fuck.”

  I nod from my little pillow nest. “Wish they’d capitalize the g in girls during the opening credits, though.”

  “Right?” he says. “What is that?”

  “It’s completely asymmetrical, is what it is.”

  “Okay.” Val pushes the space bar to pause, sits up, crosses her legs and arms. “Noah. I want you to come to this party tonight. For me. Please.”

  I don’t move a muscle. Stasis, inertia, the complete physical atrophy of a morning and early afternoon spent on nothing but Netflix: these are the things I will miss most about summer. “You know how I feel about people making me do things,” I say.

  “I’m not making you. God. I’m asking.”

  “And I’m saying I can feel summer slipping through the hourglass like the sands of time, and a night at the Longmires’ isn’t how I’d like to spend, you know . . . my sand.”

  “It’s cool, we get it,” says Alan, standing over my desk, tapping the stack of facedown papers. “Award-winning writer such as yourself—might be uncouth to show your face at a lowly high school party.”