What Makes You Think You’re the One?
Later, when I lay in bed with my eyes wide open, I imagined I felt it happen—felt the small bones crunching under the car tire. But fresh snow crunches too and it also makes a faint squeaking sound when you’re going slowly and listening very carefully.
My grandmother’s ’76 Valiant just wanted to float. I wasn’t that drunk, but I had been drinking and there was compacted snow all over the road. The cassette machine was flipping the Tusk tape over and over, never getting through its one good song. Alex had been drinking as much as me. But why always think about cause and effect? Do things have to turn out one way because of something that happened before? For the last month it had been all wine and whiskey and a pile of photographs of Alex’s beautiful life. The old kind of photos that you can hold in your hand. He kept them in a big swollen cardboard box. But they still had sharp corners, so I guess they weren’t that old. Not as old as the ones of my mother when she still wore her hair in dark waves and her eyes were still clever and intense. It wasn’t as though Alex was all that much older than me, but he’d been to Italy and Germany and he had enough nostalgia for the life he was still living to make you think it had all happened long before his time. Definitely before mine. He called himself a cliché because he had gone to an art institute in Florence. Art school was a joke to him. He said he was over it. He looked liked Florence to me: light brown and round in the cheekbones with squinted blue eyes. There were pictures in that box of women in threadbare t-shirts with sun in their skin, laughing like they knew what was really funny. They were at that hologram age when you flip the picture from side to side and you can’t tell which one she is, the woman or the girl. I sat on Alex’s floor flipping his pictures like that while he pointed and told me which people had taught him how to listen with his eyes and how to look when his eyes were closed. In his box there were astonishing portraits of men. Boys. Many on skateboards, doing something revolutionary one summer when they took over five blocks of Olympia, a city I’d never heard of until then. There was one of a man with a huge gorgeous overbite smile, sitting on a pebbly beach looking like he belonged to another century, when in fact he just lived over on Parson St. and I’d met him one night before I’d met Alex. Everyone had been drinking and I was freshly free of high school and the guy from the photo accused me of being a heartbreaker and a Manson girl who would mess with your mind. He was drunk in a cruel way that I wasn’t familiar with, and he pointed at me, singled me out in a room where everyone laughed and I went red, confusingly charmed by his antagonism and embarrassed by my own glued mouth. Alex wasn’t at that party. It was just a small town coincidence that I was there and then later I saw the photograph and I said, Hey! I know that guy! Alex said, Who is he? I don’t know him. I wonder when I took that. There was also a photo of a guy holding someone else’s child and laughing about that fear. I said, Alex, you take beautiful photos. I didn’t understand how people like that could be in someone’s photographs and not in their life. And I said something about that and he smiled like he was being patient. He said, I’m just an old man. He was twenty-six, but he liked to wear a white t-shirt and a wool toque and to be unshaven, drinking whiskey in bed. He had a round, slightly soft, light-gold-coloured chest and a face like a man from Vladivostok. That’s what I told him. Called him Vlad, which pleased both of us, spending hours horizontal with the agreement that people didn’t do enough talking and eating in bed. I carried Russian novels with me everywhere, not actually reading them, just keeping them on my person and taking them out as though I intended to read. And I did intend to. Up until that summer I’d been an honest reader, but for some reason my attention span was shot when I was near Alex. I did pen-and-ink details of intelligent baboons and cosmic rats while leaning against his bed or a wall of his studio apartment, with a kitchen down at the window end. The apartment was long like a church. I was in awe there, silenced by it, and by him and the stories he told about hitchhiking south through Spain with no money, sleeping in a field and waking up with a rash all over him. I was in awe of that rash. I drank whiskey like an old man. Alex laughed at me. What? I asked. What? What? And I went red. Nothing, He said. Just tell me. When are you going to leave me, Lenni? Why? Where would I go? How long are you going to drag it out? This life? Being alive? Until I die, I guess. He laughed and shook his head and said, You have more agency than that. You’re smarter than you show, Lenni. You’re a withholder. I didn’t know what any of that meant. C’mon! What do you want here? Are you just going to stay in this town working at KP Wong’s Buffet? He smirked, filing through some new photographs, occasionally slowing to study some detail. He had called me a withholder, but it seemed to be the word that best suited him. I had a mother who needed my income. That was one thing I knew about my future. Alex had come in to KP’s every day for two weeks; then one night he closed it down, hanging around asking me questions about Mr. Wong and getting me laughing. Then he asked me if I wanted to come to his apartment—it was just upstairs—to see his artwork. He used to do big paintings, he said. Now he was doing minimalist sketches. Just a few black lines on large white pages. We drank wine and I babbled about a book called Envy by Yuri Olesha, a Russian. I was not flirting in any intentional way because it would never have occurred to me that this smart artist who was the colour of gold would have any interest in a just-out-of-high-school girl who worked in a Western and Chinese family buffet, so I was shocked when he reached out and called me a mystery and touched my face in a way that made my heart stutter, made me place the bottle on the floor beside me. By the end of that month I was trying hard to remember all the things I’d been babbling about that first night. I’d become mute. It seemed that nothing I could say would ever be as interesting as everything Alex had done and seen. My life was all theory. His had happened. I knew I was free to leave town, but my first year out of high school had only just begun. I didn’t have much money saved and my mother was on the street again. I visited her every day that I could find her at the HSBC entrance to bring her food. She refused to come over to my grandmother’s when she was off the wagon. She only wanted alcohol, but I was too young to buy it. She took the food, but I knew that it wasn’t much help. Maybe I’d get a scholarship to a fancy college in Italy, enough money to bring my mother over there, give her some new perspective. But I didn’t want to study art. I wanted to read books. Alex handed me a photo of myself. I looked like a silver ghost. The light cut through my body and I was superimposed over rooftops and sky turning orange at night.When I got the keys to my grandmother’s Valiant, I thought it would be just the right thing. It was. Alex loved it in the passenger seat. He put his boots on the dashboard and said we should drive over to Palo’s and see if he’d get in. Palo was a delicate one whose pretty face breached the boundary of the photograph. He sat in the back and his laughter was more than happy; it was the kind of laughter that, if you listened too closely, you’d hear it for the thing it also is. Palo said, Your eyes are in the mirror, Lenni. I can see the way your eyes are looking ahead. I can also see the back of your head. Your hair’s long and in the dark it blends into the back of your chair. Your hair is the chair. And his laughter wrapped around us and we laughed too. The chair was a big bouncy spring-loaded bench-seat and if my hair was that chair, it was wrapping around Alex like the arm of an old friend. Casual. He was sucking whiskey and I wondered how he saw us then. He said, I’m going to drive east across the country. When? He said, Maybe next week. Maybe I won’t pay Mr. Wong my rent this week. Maybe I’ll just buy a car like this one and go. It snowed that night. July thirteenth and it snowed. Nobody was out driving and that’s why I wanted to drive more, up the spiral road of Q.E. Park—a park like a pointed white cake. A place for children. We got out at the top and watched the small city I’d been suspicious of my whole life, but that night it was gold and silver and black and endearing. Large glowing pieces of snow were falling, landing in my dark hair, and Alex plucked one out as though he were some crystal botanist, fascinated by flakes and flakes alone. Palo started shivering, uncomfortable with something, maybe something about the three of us or maybe just the cold. His eyes looked like they were crying and he shook and sucked worry through his exposed teeth. Alright, Palo, I said. Let’s go. Alex smashed a bottle off the edge of the lookout, like a kid playing an old man, playing a kid again, and the glass danced out of the dark and was gone. The road was steep and icy and the car wouldn’t stop going. I sat up straight as we slid sideways against the wheel, and back the other way. Each one of us was quiet, together. The tape flipped over again, reminding us of its effort to play and the big car twisted again and I gripped its wheel tight and listened with my eyes, hard, until the road levelled out. The snowy park opened around us like an invitation. No one spoke and I pressed the gas and we proceeded and Lindsey Buckingham proceeded to sing, What makes you think you’re the one, who can laugh without crying? What you makes you think you’re the one, who can live without dying? A grey cat came out of the darkness and across the snowy road. Palo was leaning between us like he was our skinny black-haired foster child. Stop, he said while I pushed the brake pedal in and out, in and out. Alex called, Stop! I pushed deep and we turned and glided sideways drawing the headlights away from the cat, sliding past, slowing. Then we stopped. So did Lindsey Buckingham. The tape cut-off in the middle of its good song. Alex said, Fuck! Some of us don’t know a difficult thing when it’s happening. We just get out of the car and walk back along the packed snow, slipping around because our shoes aren’t meant for this. We hear the fast high mewing of a broken cat and feel little else but a need for it to stop. Its blood showed up bright in the snow. I crouched and saw a small thing, crushed but alive. More blood in the snow than in the body. Alex was coming around the side of the car. I said, We need something heavy. Red lights and exhaust mixed. I opened the trunk and found folded paper lanterns. I groped beneath them, into the deepest parts. Alex asked if I was serious. I didn’t know the answer and went in search of a rock in the snow. He said, You think you’re going to kill it? You actually think that you can do that? The car gurgled, keeping Palo warm with his face in his hands. My hands and feet were wet and all I could find were small sharp stones that scraped my numb flesh under the blanket of snow. When I went back to the broad road, the cat was crying alone and Alex was walking into the field. Just walking. It’s difficult, in a long car like that, on a wide road like that, to aim the tires over something so little. First, I did it from behind, reversing back along the road, red glowing exhaust in the side-view mirror, Palo searching the cab of the car like a worried child waiting for something to come down on him. I got out again and walked toward the small hemorrhaging body. I needed somebody’s help but Alex had gone to the trees and houses on the south side of the city and so I told Palo what he had to do. He said, Are you crazy, Lenni? Palo stood in front of the car with his hands dangling limp beside him. He shook his head back and forth. Straight? I called. He could hear nothing. The headlights bathed his black sweaty hair, his rough red and brown flannel workman’s shirt, too small. He bounced a little and I could see him crying. I drove straight toward him and he pointed right but then let his arms drop and shook his head. He bounced more. I reversed again, looking for the tiny spot of red in the red taillights in the side-view mirror. The longer it takes to get something done, the harder it is to do. I drove forward and reversed again. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on the steering wheel, then sat up again and clunked the old car into gear. Palo did not like his job, guiding me slowly, snow crunching and squealing in a way that made me grip at the wheel and clench my teeth until Palo’s face finally changed and I knew it had happened. Later, when I was driving him home, looking for lonely walkers on the empty streets, he said, You scare me, Lenni. I didn’t say anything to him. I didn’t ask him why I scared him. He answered anyway. He said, I can’t tell if you’re warm or cold.
Later, when I was lying in bed, I imagined that I had felt it happen—imagined that I felt the small bones crunching under the tire. I felt it in detail: a small death passing through the steel of the car and into my body, through my hands on the wheel, a feeling that was getting stronger the longer I lay there thinking about it. I sat up and pulled the curtain away from the window. The streetlight was glowing pink above the wires of the town. Everyone seemed to be asleep. I opened the window and let some cool air in. The car was back in the garage and I was in the quilted single bed in my grandmother’s quiet house with its macramé plant holders and baked raisin-bun smell and linoleum on the kitchen floor that allows you to move through the room silently in socks at any hour. The bedroom used to belong to my mother when she was a teenager, before she got pregnant with her one-time poet/lover who ploughed through the barrier of the Port Mann Bridge after finishing a bottle of Seagrams. She gave me to my grandmother and later, my grandmother told me that my mother had always wanted to take me back but every time she tried, she got scared that she’d do it wrong. The longer she spent not being my mother, the more convinced she became that she couldn’t do it. The longer she was sorry, the sorrier she got.
Palo came into KP Wong’s and sat in a booth by the trickling fountain. On my fifteen-minute break, I took a coffee and a plastic wrapped fortune cookie and went and sat with him in the cushioned maroon booth with high backs. He asked me if I knew that some scientists had detected faster-than-light particles. I didn’t. I broke the cookie and dipped half it into the coffee. Yes, he said. Maybe Einstein was wrong. What does that change? I think it’s the theory of relativity. But probably everything. Then he asked me if I knew that Alex had flown to England. I shook my head and filled my mouth with half the cookie. I felt it slowly begin to dissolve. Palo said, He found a cheap one-way flight. I swallowed. I said, I thought he was going to drive across the country. I think he has some friends in England who own a gallery. The beaded curtain to the buffet room clattered like cockroaches as someone passed through. On the radio, a man was singing slowly about waking up in the morning with nothing to say. Maybe I’ll drive across the country, I said. Not that it was something I had ever thought about doing before. It just came out of my mouth. As I ate the other half of my cookie I stared at Palo, or kind of stared through him, considering this new idea. It was odd, but Alex not driving east suddenly kind of gave me the option. I didn’t care if getting into a big old car and heading onto an open road wasn’t an original idea. It was an interesting idea to me, because I realized that I could do it if I wanted to. Palo reached across and picked up the white strip of paper lying by my coffee cup. Your family, he said, is young, beautiful and highly respected.
