76 → Ava Phoenix, a conversation
“We moved here from Vancouver when I was twelve. I didn’t want to. Moving across the continent from your friends, your whole life. I pitched a fit, but Mom was resolute.”
“Was it for a job?”
“Ha, right. Job. That would be the normal adult thing, wouldn’t it? No, get this—the two of us moved to New York City so my thirtysomething-year-old divorced single mother could chase her dream. Pathetic, right? I mean, she always painted. My earliest memories were of her hanging her own art on the wall, stepping back to admire it in a state of utter serenity like she’d really gotten that one right. That usually lasted a day, two tops, before she’d rip it down and toss it in the trash. I don’t know why she thought she could handle New York.”
“Maybe she just wanted to see if she had what it took.”
“I can tell you she had the drive. Hell, she may have had the talent. But she did not have the constitution. Mom basically crumbled once we got out here.”
“And she’d already been taking the pictures at this point? For the video?”
“Yeah, she’d been doing that since before I was born. So far as I know, there were only a handful of days she didn’t take a picture—a few vacations, a surgery to remove her gallbladder, I think, and then the few days it took to move out here. Oh, and I guess the day she had me? But mostly, you could set a clock by it.”
“But you’re not in any of them.”
“In Vancouver she always took the photos in our basement, alone. But yeah, once we got out here we lived in this tiny two-room apartment, so I usually watched her do it, but she didn’t want me in them. Said it had to be the same room, same items every day to highlight the object of the piece—so, her—as the variable. If everything around her changed over time, her own change wouldn’t feel as significant.”
“The piece, you called it.”
“Yeah.”
“So she thought of it as art.”
“Oh, definitely. I don’t know what her original concept was, as far as what to do with all the photos, but yeah. She thought One Face, Forty Years would be, like, this multimedia masterpiece. At the very least she liked that it was hers, you know? Just hers, no one else’s. You ever do that?”
“Do what?”
“Have an idea, something personal that belongs just to you—and then later on you find a bunch of other schmucks had the exact same idea? When Mom started, she never could have predicted YouTube, or the dozens of others who’d done the same thing. So now here she had this lifelong work, this thing that was hers, this extraordinary thing in her hands like some rare bird—and the advancing world made it utterly common. It broke her, I think. And that’s when things started to get weird.”
“Weird how?”
“She stopped taking care of herself? Like, stopped bathing? Stopped brushing her teeth? At some point—this is going to sound weird, I know, but—at some point I realized she was saying the same things over and over again.”
“Like what?”
“Like she had these little phrases she’d use, but she said them every day like she’d just thought of them. Like this one, I’ll always remember. ‘I just want to create,’ she’d say. ‘Just to create.’ Like that, you know? And then something else like, ‘It’s not enough to put yourself into your art, you have to—”
“‘Die to it.’”
“That’s right.”
“It’s Mila Henry.”
“Who?”
“The author.”
“Oh, right.”
“What else did she say?”
“Weird stuff. Some of it, I still don’t understand. Something about a new sweater.”
“What?”
“Like her life was an old sweater, and she’d outgrown it. Kept saying she needed a new sweater. I told you it was— Hey, are you okay? You’re not going to hurl, are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Hang on. I’ll get some water.”
77 → the advancing world
While Ava is getting water, I leave, just walk out the door, and I think about what she’d said, about holding some extraordinary thing in your hands like a rare bird only to see the advancing world crush it. Aimless walking now, the buzz of traffic, the shoes of strangers, and I half expect Ava to chase me down, but it doesn’t happen.
She’s probably busy inspecting the bottom of my fucking mason jar.
More walking, more buzz and shoes, and, If everything around her changed over time, Ava said, her own change wouldn’t feel as significant, and between that and the new sweater thing, it’s like one of those charts they give you in elementary school with two columns of seemingly random objects and you’re supposed to draw a line from the object in column A that somehow relates to the object in column B: the iron goes with the shirt, the bacon goes with the frying pan, the bird goes with the nest, and the Fading Girl goes with Noah Hypnotik.
I throw my hand in the air, a cab pulls over, and on the drive up to the Bronx, I look out the window and think about this peculiar habit of Ava’s. She said she needs to know where things come from, but I don’t think that’s it. I think when a person loses something, they take what they can get. Ava’s mom left, and because Ava can’t find the place where lost things go, she finds the place they came from. Ava takes what she can get.
We all do, really.
YES, IT IS TIME FOR → PART SEVEN
“You know how many times I’ve quit? Thousands, just for the good of my own soul. I’ll finish a sentence and declare it my last. For me, if it’s worth writing, I have to go empty, exit the robot. If it’s worth writing, it fucking hurts, is what I’m saying. But—inevitably I write more sentences. So I don’t know. Maybe there’s something beautiful about it too.”
—Mila Henry,
excerpt from the Portland Press Herald interview, 1959
78 → but first, a drink
Hiding a hard-on in front of your dad feels a little like hiding a golden ticket from Willy Wonka: he had one first, he knows where it came from, and he knows its shape in your pocket.
Thing is, our flight attendant looks exactly like Jyn Erso from Rogue One and smells like an amaretto Oreo, so this is basically a dream I’ve had. She hands Dad and me our ginger ales and moves on down the aisle. Dad’s looking at me, I can feel it; I wonder how long I can sit hunched over like this without him asking questions.
“You okay?”
Not long, I guess. “I’m good.”
He gestures to my back. “Not the most comfortable seat, I know. How’s your back feeling?”
“It’s, you know . . . fine. It feels fine.”
Dad opens his mouth, and I think I know what’s coming—some shit about Manhattan State, how lucky I am to still have opportunities, how proud he is—and then: “You can tell me anything, you know.”
Okay, not what I was expecting.
And then he starts in about how when I was born, he was a stay-at-home dad, and we were “dirt poor, but, Noah, I’m telling you, that was the best time of my life,” and he goes on about what a unique situation it was, how Mom was studying for the bar, and he was just taking care of me during the day, coming up with creative dinners every night, and he doesn’t even know how it happened, but things started to click, and now, “Like that, we’re off looking at colleges.”
I never know what to say when he talks like this. It’s like I was part of this momentous occasion, only I have no memory of it.
“Anyway,” he says. “You can always tell me anything.”
And I open my mouth to do just that, to tell him I faked this back injury because I was done with the pressure, and I’m not even sure I want to go to college much less swim at one, but instead what comes out is, “Dad, what happened to Mom’s face?”
“What?”
The airplane’s engine suddenly sound
s louder.
“Her scar.” I motion down the side of my cheek. “She won’t talk about it.”
Dad is all, “Oh,” in a breath, and in that one word I hear the complexities of family. “You don’t . . . remember?”
I want to say, I never knew to begin with, but so much has changed these last months, so many familiar things turned foreign, I’m not sure how to separate what I’m supposed to know from actual knowledge. “No, I don’t.”
Dad clears his throat. “We were always so open and honest with you about this, even when you were a kid. Thought it was for the best, but . . . now I don’t know.”
“Dad.”
“When we get back, I think we need to have a serious discussion about getting you into therapy.”
“Dad. What happened?”
“You really don’t remember?”
“I really don’t. Should I?”
Jyn Erso passes: Dad orders a scotch and tells a story.
* * *
Once home, it takes all of three minutes to unpack my bag. I flop down on my bare mattress and try not to think about the conversation happening in the kitchen right now. The ride from O’Hare had been painfully silent, and when we got here, I gave Mom a quick hug and came straight upstairs. Get in, get out, leave them to talk.
I pull a pillow over my head and scream.
79 → and the ice
It had been an especially snowy November that year, you were ten, says Dad, meaning pre-Iverton, back when we lived in Ohio, and your mother’s job has always been demanding, and Dad pauses, drinks, and the ice shakes in the little plastic cup, and in the early days she hadn’t learned how to cope with that, with the stress of it, and the plane bumps around a second, causing that sudden communal telepathy where every passenger wonders, as one, What on God’s green earth are we doing up here anyway? but it calms, and Dad says, she started drinking, like a lot, and he didn’t know what to do with that, tried to talk her down, talk her out, talk her into AA, but she wouldn’t listen, and then one day at lunch with a client, Mom came back to the office drunk, and she was put on leave, given severe warnings, but then it happened again, and they fired her on the spot, right in the middle of the day, and God, I just wish—I wish she would have called me, and Dad says that again, that he wishes she would have called him, but instead, with the afternoon off, she decides she’d like to pick up her kids from school for once, another bump in the sky, communal panic, everything is fine, Dad continues, so she picks you up at the middle school first, and then on the way to get Penny, she hits a patch of ice, and again Dad says, such a snowy November, and she overcorrected, hit a telephone pole, her blood alcohol level off the charts apparently, and you were fine, thank God, but she sustained pretty severe cuts and bruises to the hands, arms, face, and here it was, the wake-up call she needed, and she got cleaned up, AA and everything, but she never forgave herself for putting you in danger like that, and Dad finishes his scotch, looks at the ice in the glass, and it’s why she’s so concerned about your back, and he holds off tears, it haunts her that you may have bruised some vertebrae in that car accident, and he shakes the glass, nothing but ice now, then looks up with wet eyes, you really don’t remember any of this?
Another patch of turbulence rattles the plane—and the ice.
80 → facing the world as Penelope Oakman
Downstairs, in the kitchen, the muffled voices of Mom and Dad: they’re talking about me. Still.
I don’t know.
Maybe I need help. Probably, I do, but right now I have this intense desire to lean in to the familiar, to do something for someone that matters.
I knock lightly on Penny’s door. No answer. Very slowly, I twist her handle and open the door a crack. It’s dim, the only light coming from the lamp on her bedside table; Penny is fast asleep, a book on her chest rising and falling with each breath. At the foot of her bed, Mark Wahlberg raises his head and looks at me, and I put a finger over my mouth, which—of course—he seems to understand. He puts his head down on his paws and doesn’t make a peep.
Back in my room, I dig out that old letter with her Breakfast at Tiffany’s pros and cons list. At the bottom of the page where it asks, Will you watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s with your darling sister? Please check one, I put a checkmark in the box next to, Yes, of course I will.
Down the hall again, in her bedroom, I place the list with my answer on her nightstand, ease into her favorite leopard-print beanbag chair in the corner, and watch the book on her chest rise and fall, rhythmically up, rhythmically down, up, down, like that.
So who’s in your canoe, Penn?
“It’s useful being top banana in the shock department.”
I don’t know what that means.
Means grab a paddle, darling.
I sit like that through much of the night, unable to turn my brain off long enough to fall asleep, unable to work up the energy to get up and leave. I just sit in my sister’s beanbag and wonder how long she’ll offer that paddle before letting it slip into the water.
Best not to find out.
81 → the herculean curtain call
“Is this for real?” Slowly, Penny’s face comes into focus. “This,” says the blurred face, “right here,” pointing to the bottom of her pros and cons list. I sit up gingerly, rub a massive crick out of my neck. “This checkmark. Do you mean it?”
“God. Penny. Gimme a sec.”
It takes a full five count to remember where I am. I can’t say for sure when I fell asleep, but my best guess would put it somewhere around three a.m.
“Okay, I just gave you, like, ten seconds,” says Penny. “Is this real? You wanna watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s with me?”
Even in my daze I can’t help admiring the life within my sister: the smile in her eyes is like a bubbling volcano, ready to erupt at the first sign of confirmation that yes, in fact, I am agreeing to watch this movie with her.
I clear my throat and rock back to get some momentum to stand. “Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?” she says, the two words ending in a sort of hybrid laugh-squeal that only my sister could make cute.
“I checked yes, Penn. Don’t push it.”
I don’t know what the right word is for Penny’s dance moves. Probably, there isn’t one, but it’s like if a puppy got drunk at a fifties sock hop and wouldn’t stop saying, Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Uh-huhhhhhhhh.
I tell her I’m not feeling well at the moment, that we’ll watch the movie in the basement after school, and you’d think I’d handed her a blank check and told her to go crazy at the mall.
But I mean, yeah, I feel pretty much golden.
* * *
As it turns out, faking sick to get out of school is a lot easier when your parents are currently walking on eggshells every time you enter a room.
“I don’t feel well,” I tell them in the kitchen. “I think I’m coming down with something.”
“Okay,” they say, and within an hour everyone’s gone. I switch my phone to silent, toss it on my bare mattress, and open my laptop. Sometimes a thought takes forever to form, moving along at a snail’s pace; other times it explodes like a supernova, those precious final moments in a star’s life when its true greatness is most terrifying, a herculean curtain call for the ages. And even though I can barely keep my eyes open, I need to get this supernova out of my brain.
82 → a concise history of me, part forty
2003. Nick Bostrom, a professor at Oxford University, publishes an article presenting the “Simulation Argument,” in which he outlines three potential options for the future of the human race, or a “posthuman” stage: a) we go extinct before reaching the posthuman stage; b) having reached the posthuman stage, we are unlikely to run any simulated realities; or c) we are currently living in a simulated reality.
The idea is this: given the trajectory of technological advancement, and under the assumption t
hat this advancement will continue, one might assume a simulated reality will be possible at some point, and given the assumption that those in the simulation will be unaware of their simulated state, it then follows that if our current civilization were simulated, we would a) have no way of knowing, and b) swear it was real. Like dancing shadows on the back of the cave wall, or like Neo in the beginning of The Matrix, we would accept what’s offered, live inside the robot, and do so thankfully. But what if
83 → the cursor blinks
But what if . . .
But what if . . .
But what if . . .
I close my document and open Google, type in “Elam” and “Ambrosia” and “Phoenix,” “Ava” and “Wren,” and I consider the significance of names, Philip Parish to Pontius Pilot, Nathan in Jonathan, and of my own name in relation to Abraham and Elam, and my own name in relation to Neo, and my own name in relation to NOAA, and my own name. I stare at the screen for a minute or an hour, and even though it was a single night’s bad sleep, I suddenly feel I haven’t slept in months. Close the computer, stumble to bed, close my eyes, I let this chilling idea grow, my cheek and hands against the rough fabric of the bare mattress.
But what if . . .
84 → Piedmont
It’s a thick slush of a fog, a ghost town; I walk through it, wondering if someone relocated Iverton to the top of a mountain, but that’s silly—you can’t move a whole town, and now I’m on a street I don’t want to be on, and now I’m in his yard. The moon is large and bright and looks like a black-and-white photo of a watermelon.