Last Things (18 page)

I wanted very much to see a zombie. Everywhere we went, I looked for the glazed eyes and listless walk which were the telltale signs. The only thing that would bring back a zombie’s memory of his former life was the taste of salt, my mother said. Because of this, we always carried packets of it in our pockets and in the glove compartment of the Purple Pig.

We saved salt to put in the time capsule we were making too. My mother had gotten the idea for it from my father’s show, the one about the space shuttle that broke up into different parts. One of the parts was a silver time capsule that shot like a bullet into space. Inside it were books and photographs and a letter from the President. Also, packets of seeds in case the people on other planets were starving to
death. One day we might land on Mars, my father said, and be surprised to find it covered with wheat.

I wanted to launch our capsule into space, but my mother said it would just fall back to the ground, so we were going to bury it, instead. Already, we’d dug a hole in the backyard and covered it with leaves. We’ll have to write a note, my mother said, explaining everything.

We put a box on a table in the middle of the living room. Every day, I thought of something new to put inside it. So far, I’d put in my “I am the future!” button and a cockroach I’d shellacked with rubber cement. A dinosaur would recognize a cockroach, my mother told me, and one day aliens will too.

Mostly, she put pictures in the box. There was one of my parents getting married, and another of all of us at the beach floating around in inner tubes. My mother said that one day these pictures won’t make any sense because no one will get married or swim in the ocean anymore. Everything will be inside, she told me, and we’ll all live in huge buildings connected to one another by tunnels. When you want to see a wild animal, you’ll go to a special museum and put quarters in a machine for a light to come on and shine on a wolf or a bear or a bird. As long as you put in money, the light will stay on, but if you stop, even for a minute, the room will go dark. By then, our skin will be thin as paper from staying inside and we won’t even remember that we once told time by the sun. All the tunnels in the buildings will lead to subways
which will be the same, only faster. You’ll just touch a button when you want to get on or off.

One night, my mother put all the photographs from the album in a plastic bag and wrapped it all the way around with tape; then she put everything in another plastic bag and wrapped it up again. By the end, there was so much tape you couldn’t see the pictures anymore. Just a little piece of my father’s mouth that she had missed before. After she went to bed, I went back and scraped the tape off his eyes, so he could see in the dark.

On my mother’s thirty-fifth birthday, we buried the time capsule in the backyard. The box was made out of a special kind of metal that could survive any kind of disaster known to man. It could survive a terrible fire or an earthquake or another age of ice, she said. Someday, a thousand years from now, someone would dig it up and know that we were here.

We went to the bar to give Wink some cake, but for once he wasn’t there. “Where could he be?” my mother asked. “Do you think he’s left us all alone?” We drove to the railroad tracks near his house and watched the trains roar past. He could be on that one or that one or that one, she said.

When we got back to the apartment, my mother couldn’t sleep. Something was wrong with her heart, she said. At night, she could feel it racing and had to lie very still until it stopped. Also, she had a cut on her
knee that wouldn’t heal, and this was proof that something was wrong. She pulled off her Band-Aid and showed me her knee. It was purplish blue where she had banged it on the coffee table playing horse. “Blue is the real color of blood,” I told her, “but it turns red as soon as air touches it.” My mother pinched at the skin on her knee. “You’re just like your father, aren’t you?” she said.

The next night, when we went to the Bitter End, there was a new bartender there. “Where’s Wink?” my mother asked. The man behind the counter shrugged. He had a handlebar mustache and small dainty hands. “Eloped to Las Vegas with some girl, I think.” My mother excused herself and went into the back room. She snapped a pool cue and broke the clock. The clock had white horses on it that ran toward a waterfall. They stopped running when the glass cracked. My mother came back and threw twenty dollars on the bar. “What the hell?” the new bartender said. My mother checked her lipstick in the mirror behind him. Then she drove us home in the stinking car.

When we got back to the apartment, she fell asleep right away for once. I knelt beside her and watched her eyes fluttering beneath her lids. Once, at church, she had knelt before the minister for a blessing and he had placed his hand on her head and said,
For all the world we are wreathed in splendor, high and low
. When my mother passed out on the couch, I touched her hands and face and blessed her like this.

But the next morning it seemed that she had forgotten everything. She told me she was in love with a man she had never met who’d written the inscription in a book she’d found. “Where did you find the book? What was it called?” I asked her. “It was called
Thrum
,” my mother said. “It had a green cover with a Ferris wheel on the front. How do you think I can find this man?”

Later, when I consulted the book of dreams, it said:

L
OVE

To dream of loving one person above any other denotes a secretive and greedy nature. The love of animals indicates contentment and the love of children joy. For a time, fortune will crown you
.

My mother said, “Why don’t you look at me when you talk to me? You never look at me.” We were in the bar with the pickled eggs. The bartender stopped smiling when he saw her, and walked away. My mother got up and went outside. I followed her. It was raining. Tree branches blew across the street. We held newspapers over our heads and ran. When we got home, there was a note on the door that said:
Final Notice
. My mother went out on the balcony and watched the rain tear through the trees. Balloon animals bobbed across the dark pool. In the back room, the wind slammed a window shut. My mother came and stood in the doorway. With wet hands, she
held the hair back from my face. In the corner, the miraculous corn shone like a light. Someone was getting in a car somewhere, I thought, and driving toward us in the dark. “I want to see you,” my mother said. “Look at me.”

It wasn’t quite light out when we left. Under the slow falling moon everything looked blue. The blue hour, my father used to call it, but he had meant another time, the time just after the sun went out. I closed the door behind us. “So this is it,” my mother said. “The day has dawned.” Before I woke up, she had packed everything in the car. She carried the last bag to the door and let herself out. The cool air smelled of the river. The sidewalk was wet. It must have rained in the night, I thought, while we slept. But I hadn’t slept at all, only watched the hands of the clock tick their way around.

I got in the car. The night before, my mother had tied the corn on top of the car again. “For luck,” she said. I had thought someone might take it while we slept, but it was still there, shining in the dark. The white dog my mother called Ghost was picking through garbage in the abandoned lot. My mother called to him as she passed, but the dog didn’t look
up. He had a bag of bread in his mouth and was shaking it from side to side like a rat. Ghost, she called again. Ghost. A paper boy appeared and got on a bike made for a girl. I watched him as we waited for the light; he had a thin wisp of a mustache and handlebars that curved like swans. He saw us and smiled shyly. The basket of his bike was covered with flowers, red and green. The light changed. The boy sped past us, pedaling furiously. My mother roared ahead. In the rear-view mirror, I could see the boy waving to us. It was like a dream, the way he got smaller and smaller, then disappeared.

That night, my mother drove through a tunnel and I was terrified that I would lose the voice of the man on the radio who had been speaking to me quietly and secretively through two states. The voice was like my father’s, coming from every direction at once, the vents, the windows, the crack in the door.
He had always believed himself to be an honorable man
, the voice said,
but on the day of the piano player’s trial, his honor let itself out like a cat
. When we entered the tunnel, the man’s voice dimmed, but did not go out. Instead, it seemed he was speaking through snow.

We drove and drove. The Purple Pig smelled like a dead thing. The mildew grew secretly at night while we slept, I knew. Hold your nose, my mother said each morning when we got in.

My mother never tired of driving. She liked to listen to the radio and watch the towns go by. Sometimes cars honked at us as they passed. Whenever this happened, my mother sped up to see who was inside, but it was never anyone she knew.

In a motel gift shop, my mother bought a map of America and spread it out for me to see. Where were we going, I asked her. To Disneyland, she said. She told me that we would visit the last dusky seaside sparrow and stay in the castle where Snow White lived. But wasn’t that bird at Disney World, not Disneyland, I asked. It flies back and forth between the two, my mother explained. She took my hand and smiled at me. Soon we’ll be there. Very, very soon, she said. She mapped out our route with a yellow marker. Anaheim, she circled at the end.

But that night before bed, my mother pushed the Disneyland brochures away. Come with me to Thailand, she said. We’ll ride elephants through the shining streets. We’ll earn our keep plumping pillows in an opium den. We’ll dance on stage in costumes made of hundred-dollar bills. We’ll call ourselves the Beautiful Twins.

In the morning, we stopped at a restaurant and one of our credit cards was refused for the first time. My mother said that this was a sign we should eat less and drive more. In supermarkets, we listened for the voices of the dead animals calling to us. We drank only rainwater that she collected in a can by the side of the road. The hungrier we got, the more superstitious. We ate only bread that came in the package
with the star. “We’re evolving,” my mother said. “Soon we’ll need nothing but air to live.”

We were halfway to California when my mother explained about her luck. “It used to come so easily,” she said. “Then I lost my lucky shoes.” She’d found the shoes in a junk shop in New Orleans. Her initials were carved into the sole of one of them. “AW,” it said, just like that. She bought the shoes and that night she fell in love. His name was Michael and she knew he was the one the minute he walked in the room.

“How could you tell?” I asked. I looked out the window. Outside, the desert was completely dark. We could be on the moon, I thought.

“I just knew,” my mother said. “Before I even talked to him, I knew.”

That night in the desert, we stayed in a motel called the Cactus Chateau where my mother said she and Michael had stayed. In the morning, when we came out to the car, my mother said that everything had changed. Someone had taken our sleeping bags and replaced them with identical ones which were older and more soiled, she told me. Also, one of her favorite dresses had a tiny tear in it that had never been there before. She showed me her lacquered jewelry box and the small chip on the side that had happened while we slept. Only the corn on top of the car still looked new. It’s because it’s one of a kind, she said. They must have had trouble with that.

I stood next to the car and looked at all the things my mother said had been changed, but I couldn’t remember how they’d been before. I threw my bag into the car. Inside was a toothbrush, my detective kit, and the book of dreams.

All the next day, my mother talked about Michael. She had an idea that we should go to Joshua Tree and look for clues where he’d disappeared. She said if his car was still there it might have melted into the sand by now. Something that was hidden before could be glinting in the sun. You’re my private eye, Grace, she told me, but I didn’t want to go. I got out the map and showed her how far it was from Disneyland. Don’t worry, I know a shortcut, my mother said.

We were a hundred miles outside of Joshua Tree when she suddenly stopped talking about him. It was as if the marker we’d passed had been a sign. Before, she had said Michael always liked the desert at night, or Michael found a coyote skull over there, or Michael kept two lizards, but after the sign she was silent. In the distance, I could see lights. There were no other cars on the road. My mother drove so fast the car began to shake.

“Charles Manson’s ranch was around here somewhere,” she said. “Remember him, he was the one who killed the pregnant movie star.” She waved her hand in the air.

“He thought he was the devil.”

My mother frowned. “No, that’s not true. Who told you that?” She fiddled with the radio, but there was only static.

“No one,” I said. “I read it in a book.” I had seen a photograph of one of the Manson girls, grown up and a housewife now. The girl had a faint scar on her forehead where she had once carved a cross like Charlie’s. When the interviewer asked what she told her children about the scar, she said, I tell them Mommy fell on a cookie cutter.