“Where were you?” Dad says when I finally stumble inside. No time has passed. All the time has passed. Enough time has passed that species have become extinct and been reborn.
I want to cry. I want so fucking much to cry.
Why can’t I cry?
“Nowhere,” I say.
My brain keeps ticking over a slide show of disconnected images:
I am carrying a tray of glasses made of thin crystal and the wind going over the tray makes a sound of whistling.
In black and white, I am disappearing.
There is a bowl of fruit.
My dad is a dog. The dog is dead. The dog is dying.
I am alone.
I am the dog.
I am dying.
I think maybe I faint, I don’t know.
I open my eyes and I’m on the floor in the front hall and Dad is looking down on me, confused.
“I’m okay,” I lie.
My dad is asking me something.
“Where were you?” he says again. He doesn’t sound mad, but then again, I can tell by his flat affect and the way he’s holding his hands extra carefully, like a drunk trying to walk a straight line, that he’s taken an extra something from his vast array of somethings.
“Uh,” I say, “I got dizzy.”
I glance at the clock. Again.
“Are you high?” he says. Then, “Christ, answer me. Your eyes are red as hell.”
He rolls over to the kitchen table. He is behind the house he is building. The house stands between me and him. There are people in the window of his house. A boy and a girl.
There are people in between us. Those people are us. We are in between us.
My brain is screaming. There is a Tilt-A-Whirl and I want to get off.
I shift from foot to foot to foot and I’m rocking like a little kid, and he pulls his magnifying lens back down over his eyes. I haven’t seen this house before. It’s new. Did he do all this today? It is nearly complete, with gingerbread trim and detailed siding. His big saw is out in the living room. Did Gary bring it up or has it always been in the living room?
I am still dizzy, or dizzy again.
Plate-sized eyes. A hand on my knee.
Come on. Make it goddamn stop.
I grab the doorframe to stop myself from tumbling headfirst onto the table. I feel funny, bad, strange. Like I’ve got amnesia but not enough to make me forget, just enough to make everything look slightly strange and unfamiliar. Wrong. Out of place. A film that’s offset from its soundtrack, the mouths moving faster than the words can be heard. The feeling you sometimes get when you fall asleep too fast, too deep and are startled awake and it seems like the walls of the house shifted while you were dreaming.
Dad coughs. “Like it?” he says. He points at his construction. The dollhouse is tiny, too tiny to even be a dollhouse. It’s just a tiny house. Tiny stairs and tiny windows. Tiny doors and tiny people. His dollhouses always come with a family, did I mention that? Father, mother, brother, sister, dog.
Like we used to be.
He looks at me, expectantly.
I shrug. I’m still feeling like I can’t get a breath all the way in. I’m so tilted inside, the room feels like it’s shifting away from me. I’m sick, that’s all.
My memories are tiny. I am tiny.
I want to tell him what just happened.
But what did just happen?
I don’t want to tell him.
Can’t tell him.
What would he do? “Dad, I think that I was just abducted by aliens in the cornfield.” I don’t think he could take it.
I can’t take it.
But this is my goddamn problem.
This is my crazy.
It’s a cry for help, I tell myself. I’m just asking for attention.
I don’t tell him.
He looks so old, squinting through his half-glasses at the tiny toilet he’s cradling in his hand like it’s a precious gem, pretending to care about where I’ve been.
“I actually was just running,” I say firmly, forcing my voice to be strong.
“Running,” he repeats. “What are you playing at?” He turns around and stares right at me. “You can hardly walk,” he says finally. “I’d think even you could come up with a better lie than that. Just how baked are you?”
I can’t answer that because I am baked. Can you measure bakedness? I want to answer him, give him a number like Tanis would. “Seven.” Or “Eight thousand.” What measurement would I use? Miles? Pounds?
I am always baked.
I cannot remember not being baked.
The entire time I have been back home, I have been one-hundred-percent high, one hundred percent of the time. Two hundred and fifty percent. “Any percent higher than one hundred is just stupid,” says Tanis. But Tanis isn’t here, so I guess she says it in my head or has said it enough that it echoes there.
“Baked,” I say. Maybe it sounds like agreement or an admission of guilt, but I don’t care. The eyes were like quicksand and pulled me inside. Can you ever explain that to a person?
“How baked?” he says again.
“Yeah,” I say. “Well, I don’t know, Dad. I think…my knee. It’s better.”
He takes off his glasses and gives me a look. A look that says, “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious, Dad,” I say. “Look at it.”
I stand next to him, so close I can smell his unwashed stink. Urine and cigarette smoke and whiskey and that dusty tang of medicine, the salt of sweat.
I pull my pant leg up, half expecting to see it like it has been—swollen, purple streaks down the sides—half knowing it is going to look fine. We both peer at it, like it’s a specimen of something under glass. The knee looks totally normal. Knobbly, hairy.
“Huh,” he says. “That’s…”
“Yeah,” I say. “It is. A miracle, I guess. You want dinner?”
“What the hell,” he says, scratching his head. “What the hell?”
I shrug. “You want dinner or not?” I swallow. The spinning of the room is slowing. My mouth tastes like I’ve been sucking a sockful of rusty nails but I am okay.
“I am okay,” I say out loud, and it seems to bounce around the room like something silver and shiny that we both watch for a few minutes, mesmerized.
There’s a long pause. He’s looking at me like I’m a mosquito who has suddenly learned how to perform a guitar solo. Finally: “You cooking?” he asks.
“Sure,” I tell him.
Tonight I’m going to make meatballs. We can have meatball subs and a big green salad with our corn tonight. I’m ravenous. I need to eat. I need to eat everything. I roll up my sleeves. My arms are still shaking a bit. Not so much that Dad notices, but enough that I leave the room fast before he does.
“Nice dollhouse,” I say over my shoulder from the doorway.
“It is, isn’t it?” he says. “She’s a beauty. This may be my best one yet. I’m thinking yellow. Or taupe. But…she seems to want to be yellow. Do you think?”
“Yellow’s nice,” I say. “I like yellow.”
Our old house was yellow. Mom used to say that yellow houses held on to only happy memories. She also said that no monsters ever lived in yellow houses.
Of course, my mom turned out to be full of shit.
Right before she left, she went down to the basement and she took all those glass jars of tomatoes that she ’d worked so hard to preserve. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them. She took them and she stood on the stairs and, one by one, she smashed them on the cement floor.
When I came home, it looked like a sea of blood. I was only fourteen and I’d just seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I thought someone had been killed.
Who does that to their kid?
Happy memories, my ass.
I wonder if he ’ll add that detail. A basement flooded with red, like the house itself was hemorrhaging from the inside out.
My dad does okay selling his houses, but I don’t know why he bothers. In his best month, he made six hundred dollars selling them online. We make that in a week selling pot, sometimes ten times that. But he likes to think that other people think that the houses are carrying us.
I slowly take vegetables from the fridge and line them up on the counter. I reach for the knife and I wonder who will defend Dad in court when we get caught. In the divorce, Dad represented himself and lost badly. Mack Wong represented Mom, and now Mack is my dad’s archenemy. But he’s also the only other lawyer in town.
I guess I have to just hope we don’t get caught.
But I know we will. It’s just a matter of time.
The blade on this knife has been sharpened so many times that it’s lost its shape. The edge is so sharp, it’s paper thin and cuts into the cutting board like a razor.
Dad goes back to his work, and I chop up an onion and I think about how I read somewhere that Tibetan monks can control their heartbeats. I am not a Tibetan monk. My heart is going so fast, with no sign of slowing down, and yet it’s not scaring me. It feels normal, a thousand birds in my chest flapping their wings. I slowly mush the onion into the meat with an egg and some bread crumbs. I look out the window. Aliens. I think about how the smell permeated everything, how it permeated me. I can still smell it.
It happened. Or it didn’t.
Did it?
“No,” I say. I pound my fist hard onto the countertop.
“You okay?” calls Dad.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You cut yourself or something?”
“No, Dad. Sorry,” I say.
The sky is alive with stars, but nothing up there is moving. No flashing lights. No indication that what happened was real. My thoughts slow to a jog, like pigs wading through mud. I feel like I’m dreaming. Still. Again.
The window starts to steam up.
Through the condensation, all I can see are shadows and the distant lights of houses, the neon sign of the Motel 6 at the exit from the freeway. The headlights are so far away that they are just dots, shrinking and vanishing over the foothills.
Dots of light everywhere.
Those dots of light in the sky that I thought were stars: Are they? Is one of those dots moving away? Or moving toward? What else is there that we can’t see?
I put the meatballs into the fry pan and they sizzle and spit, droplets of hot grease bouncing out and hailing onto my forearms, a tiny hailstorm of pain.
“Smells good,” Dad calls.
“Thanks,” I say. “Yeah, it does.”
I’m starving. I could reach into the hot oil and eat one half raw. That’s how empty I am. I am completely empty. There is nothing in me, except my heart, racing in a hollow space.
The pot of water for the corn bubbles and I go about making the salad. Chopping lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, cucumber. That’s one thing about living on Our Joe’s farm, we get food. Apart from corn, corn and more corn, he has a vegetable garden that’s just for us and him. Well, just for him, I think, but I take what Dad and I need.
I have to. Someone has to look after us, and it sure isn’t going to be the man with the miniature kitchen sink clamped between his lips. He puts the sink into the hole in the counter. Then he is painting a dish to look dirty. Two dishes. Three. He breaks a dish in half and puts it on the floor.
“Dad,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me.
Carefully, he cuts some of Glob’s hair into tiny strands and spreads them on the couch. It looks like he’s smiling, but it could just be a squint.