Lost in arcadia a novel, p.11
Lost in Arcadia: A Novel, page 11
Well, the guys didn’t care about what she was going through, what they cared about was that even at fourteen or fifteen, this girl had an amazing rack and the face of a Greek goddess and all they can think about is how to get with that. Every group in the school had their alpha guy claiming dibs on T, talking about how fast they’re gonna pop her cherry and how she’ll be licking up their cream like a good little pet before the week’s done. ’Course it’s all talk, just bullshit talk because most dudes especially in like high school are too shy to do anything about an intimidatingly beautiful girl, so while you’d think she’d be fucking popular as hell instead she’s sitting alone at lunch for her whole first week.
One guy, though, he gets up the nerve to come and talk to her. He’s saying that he’s heard she’s bored with the Southwest, but hey at least the state fair’s in town now and maybe she’d be interested in heading over there, because while he wasn’t claiming it was the best or anything at least it had cotton candy and churros and a few rides, weak as they may be. T says okay ’cause why not, anything’s better than going home to her mother crying, and they meet up after school. He’s goddamn giddy with excitement about the date, thinking that her luminous presence will change his life forever and that he’d be happy just to be near her for a few hours. And fuck it, maybe she’s a secret slut and he’ll get lucky.
So here they are after school and he’s walking her to his car, which is probably something like a ’16 Centrino sans air conditioning, but she seems perfectly content with things and happy that at least someone’s reached out to her. They circle around the fair’s large, fenced-in square and can smell the horseshit before they even get in and the attendant is this huge fat guy exuding even more grease and stink and the whole area is dank and nasty and all that. But at the same time they start getting whiffs of fried food, and after parking in a dirt lot and paying a couple bucks to get past the gate they’re in the fair proper, surrounded by booths and toys and candy. This guy’s trying to make a whole evening out of things, taking it slow and exploring the grounds, but T gets bored quick and wants them to head straight to the midway, so they skip out on the rodeos and the ethnically themed villages and the rest of the filler crap.
Let’s cut to the chase. They play a few of the standard games, whacking moles and shooting birds with BBs and maybe he wins her a stuffed bear or some shit. They look around the area and of course she wants to go on the biggest roller coaster they’ve got, and while this dude’s kinda afraid—he figures that if he mentioned his fear of rides she’d think he’s the biggest pussy ever—he says okay because he wants to be with her. So they wait in line and step in the little cart together and the coaster starts heading uphill, and the guy’s so freaked out that if she weren’t with him he’d be in tears. But she is there, so instead he squeezes her hand and she squeezes back which makes it all okay. They drop down the first big hill and it’s amazing. He’s so happy he makes a move and this girl, vulnerable under the circumstances of having such a fucked-up family and being so goddamn alone in the city, reciprocates and they kiss a little while going up the next hill, and it’s actually a first for the both of them. And while maybe she’s doing it out of pity or whatever, that doesn’t matter to him.
Now the problem with rides at fairs and carnivals and places like that is that they aren’t always up to code. Three days before, when the carnies were settings things up, one of the screws on the left side of the track wasn’t tightened as much as it should’ve been. I mean, it was tightened and all, but as the ride had been continuously used that little margin of error gradually grew until it slipped out entirely. With that one out, the one next to it started to loosen, so did one on the other side of the track, and soon so did the ones next to it. And it wasn’t a particularly well-made ride to begin with, so the metal on the tracks had been slowly bending for years. Worse yet was that the cart this pair was riding in, which I guess I hadn’t mentioned was the one at the very back, had a connection to the rest of them that had been slowly rusting away. So as the pair careened down the second big hill, when they should’ve turned to the side with the rest of the carts, sparks flew up as theirs broke the bent track and immediately snapped clean off from the rest of the ride.
T grabs onto the guy in a panic as they’re careening through the air and he’s got his tongue in her mouth, sucking on her face so hard she can’t catch her breath. Time slipped for a moment and he was in the air forever, raising a family with her and watching as they’re coming home tired from work and watching TV. Then they’re arguing about their children’s colleges and visiting an old friend in the hospital together, worrying about finding burial plots side by side. For those few moments of eternity they were raised up like angels floating on a cloud, and he held on to her as tightly as he could and she was holding him back and it didn’t matter that it was so short because those seconds before they hit the ground together were the happiest in his life.
How I heard it was when they crashed into the dirt below they were still kissing. The dude who told me was like, Steve, her head went all the way through his, and that somehow cushioned the impact, and that’s the only reason she survived.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
For Holly, the worst part of any trip into Albuquerque—regardless of how much other bullshit might crop up while visiting her mother or seeing old friends who clearly would have preferred it if she’d disappeared entirely when she moved away—was visiting her grandmother. Growing up, Grandma Inez and Holly had been just shy of inseparable. While Gram had certainly been more thrilled by Gideon’s birth than anything else in the twenty years preceding it, it wasn’t until Holly’s arrival that it became obvious to the family that what she’d really been waiting for was a granddaughter. Gram remained scrupulous in treating the Reyes children as equally as she could manage, giving them equivalent birthday and Christmas presents and keeping the same hardline approach to manners at the dinner table, but all it took was one gaze at Holly to see that this connection was stronger, this love was something special.
Grandma Inez’s husband died when Holly was two, and following a quick funeral she left Vegas to be closer to her grandchildren. As early as Holly could remember, Gram had been the Reyes’ default babysitter, helping Holly finish chores as fast as she could so they could draw with crayons or bake cookies or play with her stuffed animals. Holly’s fondest memories as a child were with Gram, making dinner for their exhausted parents, Wheel of Fortune in the background, trying to guess words and phrases before the idiotic contestants. Gram always said she wondered how they found contestants so dense that her eight-year-old granddaughter could give them a whoopin’.
By the time Holly was ten, Gram had taken her granddaughter to get her ears pierced, much to Autumn’s annoyance. She’d taught Holly how to count cards and spot a bottom dealer and how much baking powder to put into a cake without measuring. Autumn had long since returned to working fourteen-hour days in anticipation of tenure review while Juan Diego’s schedule was as busy as ever, the intricacies of Arcadia’s branching network structure leaving him in perpetual crunch time. So Gram practically lived at their house, and the “guest room” became “Gram’s room,” even though she still had her own small townhouse on the West Side. It was around that age that Holly began periodically feigning sick just to stay home with her grandmother, and while Autumn was almost certainly aware of this deception, she never said anything about it, knowing both of them enjoyed their days together so much.
Gram became not just a part of her daughter’s family, but her son-in-law’s as well. She began attending the same church as the extended Reyes family and meeting regularly with Nick and Charlotte, who reached out to her after her husband’s death. Gram began telling Holly that she thought Nick was a wonderful man (perhaps better than the one her daughter had chosen, but who was she to judge…) and he helped her set up a workout routine in an attempt to get her interested in life outside her daughter’s household again. She met up with them in the morning to go running, and while they were at work, she’d stop by to lift weights. When it was too cold out, she’d use their bike and Nick recommended some light rock climbing, maybe, if she thought she was up to it. Holly thought her grandmother was a bit nuts, but she seemed happier and no less doting and attentive. Eventually Holly couldn’t even remember how her grandmother had spent her time before she’s known her fitness-obsessed in-laws, mixing protein shakes and taking weeklong backpacking trips in the Sandias.
Holly was twelve when it happened. Nick and Charlotte were vacationing in Vegas on Gram’s recommendation. They’d never thought of themselves as Vegas people, always saying that the city was too seedy for them. Its women were all strippers at best, whores at worst and the only entertainment was getting drunk and gawking at them. But Gram said there was a lot more to it than that, there were the shows, there were the rides, there was the adrenaline shot of almost winning big.
Holly arrived home from school and was surprised Gram wasn’t already there waiting for her. She was worried, but Autumn soothed her and said that Gram was a grown woman and could look after herself. If she needed help, she would call, said Autumn. “I’m sure she just forgot.” After school the next day, Gram still wasn’t there, so Holly tried looking for her. She called Gram’s house three times and still no one picked up. Because Gram lived far away, Holly decided to bike to Nick’s first on the off chance that she was over there. The front door was unlocked and lights were on, so Holly walked inside relieved. She yelled for her grandmother, and after hearing no response she headed into their small gym, where Gram was collapsed on the elliptical.
Paramedics arrived shortly afterward, though Holly couldn’t say how long it took. The only thing she could be sure of, the only thing that kept her sane during the eternity she spent crying alone, surrounded by fitness equipment, was that Gram was still breathing.
When Holly was finally allowed to visit her, Gram still breathed easily from her hospital bed but everything else about her had changed. She mostly kept silent except for a few instances when garbled words came out of her mouth. According to what doctors told Holly’s parents, Gram seemed to react to physical stimuli such as being pinched or pricked by a needle. She seemed to feel pain, but was otherwise unconscious and completely immobile—a body completely disconnected from its mind. The first time Holly saw her now-incapacitated grandmother, she ran out of the room, screaming that it wasn’t Gram there in the bed and why weren’t the doctors doing something about this isn’t that what they were paid for why did they tell her it was just a coma just a coma this was everything thiswastheworstthing oh my fucking God.
Gideon was sad about Gram, but largely unaffected. He seemed resigned to Gram’s coma, as if that was just what happened to old people. Juan Diego seemed to react similarly, but after a few months he went off on an anti-exercise-equipment crusade that laid waste not only to the family’s elliptical but also to their treadmill and even the yoga ball. His rants about the dangers of solo exercise further traumatized Holly, though they mostly confused Devon—after seeing how Holly reacted to Gram, their parents decided that it was something Devon shouldn’t know much about. Holly had no idea whether Devon visited her later, on his own, or if he just pretended that she was no longer alive, but Holly always felt an obligation to see her grandmother, even though the experience sometimes gave her nightmares for weeks afterward. Her mother felt no such obligation, apparently, a fact that further damned her in Holly’s estimation and caused no end of fights until Holly finally resigned herself to her mother’s seeming callousness and decided to never mention Gram in Autumn’s presence again.
A month after Gram’s stroke, Holly’s parents told her the doctors were uncertain whether she’d ever come out of it. Something about her frontal and parietal lobes sustaining massive oxygenation loss and, in a way, death, plus a smattering of damage to her temporal and occipital lobes. Still, it wasn’t enough to kill her, not quite. They always said to remember how unpredictable comas were, that people could suddenly snap out of them for no reason. But it was a decade later, and Gram still lay in her bed as far from waking up as the first time Holly saw her there.
Holly didn’t even know if what she saw when visiting was technically Gram at all. Sure, it looked like her, but so did photographs and digital images of her on a screen. If she’d wanted to, she could have moved Gram down to Robert’s studio and, after taking a 360-degree image, print out a life-size sculpture of her made from plaster and resins that would look, even to her family, as close to Gram as to make no difference. The difficulty Holly really struggled with was whether this newly created version, rendered and edited on a computer, would be any more real than Gram’s current existence. In either case there would be a fully three-dimensional body that could be touched or held but contained no personality, no thoughts or feelings or dreams that could be communicated. Only one version of her was made out of slowly decaying flesh that smelled of urine and looked unnervingly straight ahead, while the other would be no more than painted dust. And Holly knew, in that part of her so deep down and essential to her being that she could never share it with anyone, that she would rather visit the sculpture that had always been lifeless than the ex-woman and her vacant eyes.
But here she was again, pulling up to the nursing home, which frightened her far more than any funeral home, more than any horror movie or the threat of crashing her car on the way over. Heaven’s Gate kept Gram in an eerie ward at the back of the building, inhabited only by coma patients and their caretakers. Holly couldn’t tell if it was just her mind playing tricks on her, but the moment she opened the home’s door she smelled dead skin and urine covered by ammonia, a noxious fume that stank worse than two-year-old rotting vegetables. After signing in to see Gram, Holly walked past Alzheimer’s victims wandering down the hallways in confusion and an open door to a room with two women plugged into respirators. She passed a room of people staring out a window that only showed the wall of the building next door and another filled with overweight amputees. No one stood without assistance and almost everyone had a plastic bag or two attached to them, tubes going in and out linking them to the chemicals that sustained them and flushing out the waste of their own bodies in convenient pouches.
She’d always hated visiting Gram at the hospital, but there it seemed like everyone was getting better, improving. The doctors weren’t perfect but they still granted new years of life to people; here everyone was just in storage, larger boxes to prepare them for smaller ones. At Heaven’s Gate there was no research or development. No useful thoughts. No brilliant economic theories wrestled with Haight’s shaky theocratic uber-capitalism, no physicists pondered the meaning of existence, no artists created work that would ever be seen outside these halls. No one entered Heaven’s Gate and walked out again an improved person. But then, no one entered Heaven’s Gate and walked out at all.
Even the staff was gloomy. Giving a formerly respected city council member a wash because he tore off his diaper in a fit of confusion and took a shit all over his legs and the hallway. Trying to help a teacher remember the days of the week, the months of the year. Composing letters for those whose mouths couldn’t speak a word and hands couldn’t hold a pen.
Reaching the end of the Heaven’s Gate’s single hallway, Holly finally arrived at the coma ward, where two bored-looking orderlies watched over twenty-four beds. One miniscule window offered the room a faint gleam from the outside but it was lost in the flood of stale yellow streaming down from rows of old fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling. They were remnants of when the building had been an office during the 1970s and had never been changed.
Holly sat next to her grandmother, as usual uncertain whether she should say something or not. Occasionally there’d been other visitors when she came and they usually talked with the patients. Sometimes they spoke about times they used to have together, which resulted in tears, and sometimes about what was happening right now in the outside world, whether they’d gotten the promotion or not and what their kids were up to and how those idiot politicians were screwing up this, that, and the other, a stream-of-consciousness dialogue with a person who medical science said was definitely not listening. When Gram first arrived, Holly had been in the first category, crying about their past, plans they used to make for the future, Gram’s promise to go with her on a trip to Europe if she got into a good college, Gram’s botched attempt at making sopapillas like Grandma Reyes. But by the time she’d left town, Holly’d become a rambler, just talking so as to fill the void. She told her grandmother about plans for leaving high school and a boy she’d met and how she was pretty goddamn certain that AHS’s econ teacher was a full-blown fascist and probably a racist. But eventually she noticed the way orderlies listened to these stories and she started imagining that when she left they made fun of her, that they looked forward to her visits so they could hear more stupidity from the girl who dropped out of high school for what Autumn liked to call “no good reason I can see whatsoever.”
Sometimes, when Holly spoke, Gram opened her eyes.
Holly never detected any pattern about when or why it happened. Midway through a sentence she’d notice Gram staring at her intently, as if some of what Holly said made it through to her. But she never moved, and her occasional burbling didn’t come in response to words. While Gram’s eyes seemed knowing, possessing the same wisdom that they’d had since Holly met her, they didn’t follow motion or change positions. They kept staring at Holly or the ward’s wall in front of her. At some point after Holly left, one of the orderlies must’ve closed Gram’s eyes because they were never open when she arrived, and they were so unnerving that Holly never waited around to see how or if they closed on their own.
