Help! I'm Alive, page 17
“We’re trying to stick with Jacob, but my mother-in-law is already calling him Jake, so that’s tough.”
“I bet.”
“Do you have children?”
“Two. Both boys. They’re older now, practically men.” She sighs. “Time goes by fast.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Oh I know, people told me that too and I didn’t believe them, and now — poof, they’re grown,” she says, exploding her hands in the air. Pavan reaches over and strokes Jacob’s cheek. “Adorable.”
“Do you want to hold him?”
“Yes, if it’s alright.” Pavan makes her arms into a cradle. “It’s been so long since I’ve held a baby.”
The woman smiles and straightens her blouse. “I’m sure it’s like riding a bike.”
Pavan rocks and bounces the baby. She’s talking to the woman but still looking at Jacob, her voice flitting in and out of baby talk. “You know, I read this article in one of those parenting magazines the other day that said that raising boys was like a terrible breakup. They need you. You give them everything. You’re their world and then one day, without warning, they don’t need you anymore and they’re gone.”
“I can’t imagine that. Boys always need their mother, don’t they?”
“Of course they do. It was a silly article.” Pavan’s still smiling at the baby, her own memories of motherhood coming through, a life of perfect little moments, gone. She thinks it’s how Lisa must feel too and is filled with guilt for how she left things with her. She tried to make it right. She called, left messages and even went to the apartment but by then they had moved. She managed to get Lisa’s new address from the building manager but hasn’t reached out again. What was there to say but sorry. She tickles baby Jake’s feet and belly. “Oh this little one is going to break your heart, aren’t you? You’re going to break Mom’s heart. Yes, yes, you are. You’re going to break her heart in two. Yes, yes, you are.”
“Pardon me?” The woman’s voice is filled with concern. “Come here, Jacob. Come to Mommy,” she says and scoops the baby up.
“I’m sorry. That didn’t come out right, I meant that he’ll be a heartbreaker.”
The woman doesn’t say anything more and moves to another seat where she whispers to another woman, who then stares at Pavan. For the next thirty minutes Pavan tries not to notice them; she tries to look interested in the gift-opening and then the baby name games; she tries to fill her voice with airy enthusiasm but can’t keep it up and eventually she slips away.
* * *
She’s glad that Peter’s not home when she gets back. She doesn’t feel like talking and fabricating stories about how great the shower was, how good it was to see his mother, his sister, and all of the other little lies that she tells to get through the day. Ever since she held that baby, she can’t stop thinking of her own, how soft and tender they were, how loved they were and how they loved her. And now, though they’re grown, they’ll always be layers of who they were, incarnations of their former perfect selves, their spoken names, an incantation of her deepest desires. She thinks of Lisa and how terrible it is to be denied this, to never know your child this way. Pavan takes the journal from her purse, tears out her failed attempts and finishes writing what she started. She tells Lisa only what she needs to hear, writing only what Jay should have said.
Before mailing it, she reads it one more time to be sure that it’s enough.
April 2
Dear Mom,
I’m sorry and I love you.
Always.
Jay
Day 82
It’s the sound of clattering metal that prompts Anik to turn around.
Rose’s van, with tendrils of soup cans trailing like tin jellyfish, skids into the campsite. The sides of the van are draped in colorful flag banners with a vinyl cling beneath them: Anik’s Way, A Soul’s Voyage! Rose parks and jumps out of the van, arms outstretched.
“Ta-da! Amazing, right?”
Anik circles the vehicle, taking in the banners and the tail. “I don’t even know what to say. What is all of this?”
“It’s your marathon of hope, your hero’s journey to raise awareness.”
“Raise awareness for what?”
“That we’re losing ourselves, our souls, our humanity, our spirituality, our morality, our sense of decency. It’s everything we talked about this week! The rampant post this, like that, follow me culture, the isolation, right-wing politics, apathy, hyperconsumerism as identity, the loss of community — and let’s not even start on climate change and our unwillingness to save ourselves. We’re all snowflakes, too scared, too easily offended and unable to get past the pedantic and semantic to make real change.”
“I said that?”
“Well, yeah. More or less.”
“AniksWay.com . . . I have a website?”
“It was Carol’s idea.”
“Carol from Starbucks.”
“You know it,” she says with double finger guns.
“For real?”
Rose pulls out her phone and opens a web page. “You know what they say: every movement needs a social media strategy.”
“A social media strategy?”
“Yeah, just like we talked about the other night.”
“This is insane,” he says.
“It gets better.” Rose slides the van door open and grabs her laptop. Anik sits next to her as she opens up tabs. “Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat.” She pushes the laptop toward him, scrolling through the photos, the video clips, the likes.
“Check it, almost five thousand followers on Instagram.”
Anik lingers on the word followers but says nothing. He hates the idea of it, the individual en masse, some new construct replacing actual community where members contribute to a meaningful society. That’s where everything has gone wrong. No longer citizens, people are just followers, cult-like in their pursuit of consumption and now here he is contributing fodder — the irony.
“Hello? Are you even listening?” she says, snapping her fingers.
Anik tunes back in as if his attention were a radio, dialing back to her frequency. “Yeah, sorry. It’s a lot to take in.” He plays one of the boomerang loops of him cheersing his Tim Hortons coffee cup as they set off a few days earlier.
“Even Tim Hortons liked it! If you start trending, maybe they’ll sponsor you or give us free coffee.”
“When did you do all of this?” He’s speed-reading through content, abbreviated versions of their evening conversations, all the bottom-drawer existential matter of life and meaning.
“When you’re out walking, I just chill at Starbucks or Timmy’s, occasionally A&W — by the way, the Beyond Meat burger is amazing, it made me want to go vegan hardcore.”
“Rose.”
“Oh sorry, right. Initially I was just sharing stuff on my personal pages but then I figured it would be cool to make a blog and so I kind of started it without telling you and then I thought why not a web page . . . yay free Wi-Fi at Starbucks, and then when we talked the other night it seemed you were cool with it . . . I went ham. Are you mad?”
“No, not mad. Just surprised.”
“I know, right? I was surprised too. I didn’t expect it to take off the way it did but all it took was one comment, and a few celebrity retweets, and things kind of went viral.”
“Celebrity retweet? Who?”
“Tom Hanks.”
Rose scans back to the tipping-point tweet that had a split-screen photo of Forrest Gump running and Anik walking. “Here it is.” She reads it aloud. “@TomHanks Not Forrest Gump this is the real deal, a soul’s voyage #AniksWay #WalkToTheOcean #SaveYour Soul.” Rose leans back, smiling big. “Cool right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Then he replies and retweets. See here.” She points to the screen. “Sometimes you have to go to know where you’re going #Anik’sWay.” She slaps him on the back, shoving him. “That’s Tom fucking Hanks tweeting about you.”
Anik shakes his head. “I can’t believe it and you . . . you did all of this for me?”
“For us,” she says, correcting him. “We’re in this together now.”
Anik goes quiet and looks down, his face deepening with emotion. He’s touched by her efforts and overwhelmed by the attention he’s not sure he wants.
“Don’t get all mushy on me. It’s just a few tweets and pictures. It’s nothing. Besides the GoFundMe page will pay for gas.”
“Wait — how much have you raised?”
“Just a couple hundred bucks.”
“People are giving us money?” He shakes his head, his mouth twisting. “I don’t know, this is way more than some pictures online.”
“I guess people want to help, be part of something.”
“Yeah, I get that, but I just don’t get this. I’m just walking. That’s not much of a cause.”
“It’s not just walking. It’s metaphoric, it reminds people that they have a choice to walk out on the shit in their life that doesn’t work.”
“And you know this how?”
“DMs,” she says, squinting.
“Serious?”
“Yep. You have some fans. Like I said, people are inspired.”
Anik sighs, thinking of the way crowds react to Peter, hanging on his every word like it’s gospel. “I’m not trying to inspire people. I’m just out here trying to figure things out.”
“I know it’s not what you had in mind, and maybe I went too far but . . .” She pauses for a moment. “It’s kind of been fun for me, you know. It’s given me something to do and I’m actually good at it.”
“No, you’re great at it,” he says and walks around the van, thinking of what he wants compared to what she needs. “Can we at least get rid of the soup cans? I’m pretty sure that’s some kind of road hazard.”
“Can I keep the banners?”
“Really? They make us look like local politicians at a ribbon cutting.”
“Anik for mayor!” She yells it with her hands cupped around her mouth.
“I don’t know, Rose.”
“Come on, the banners are fun! Please,” she says, making prayer hands.
“Fine, banners can stay but the streamers go and you shut down the GoFundMe page. We aren’t a charity.”
“Deal,” she says and tells him to stand by the van so they can take a selfie. “Three, two, one, Anik’s Way!” After she posts the photo she says, “There is one other thing.”
“What?”
She scrunches up her face. “Don’t be mad.”
“Mad about what?”
“The local news wants to do a piece on you.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s just a human interest, five minutes of fame type thing,” she says.
He thinks about his momentary internet GOD is DOG fame and wonders if the onslaught of negative comments was the start of him feeling crowded out of his life; he doesn’t want to invite that in again. “What could I possibly have to say that would be of any interest?”
“Just tell them why you’re walking.”
“I don’t exactly know, remember?”
“Just quote some of that Ram Dass shit we were talking about the other night.”
Anik looks at her confused, trying to catch up to her train of thought.
“You know — he said something like, We’re all just walking each other home.”
“Yeah, but that was about the meaning of life.”
“Exactly,” she says as if it was so obvious, as if there was never a question.
Day 86
Winona’s been grounded ever since the brownie incident.
An incident, that’s what Jon’s calling it, rather than what it actually was — the worst birthday ever. Since she’s not allowed to use her car, Jon has been driving her to school, and since she’s not speaking to him, she just endures his all-news-and-traffic radio for the duration of the twenty-minute car ride, wondering why adults like listening to the same thing over and over. Traffic every five minutes. Newsflash: not much changes. What neither Jon nor Trish seems to realize is that being grounded isn’t much of a punishment for Winona, or really any other teenager. If they really wanted to punish her they would make her do something, like actually do something. She renegotiated the retention of her phone and laptop under the guise of educational necessity, so she was perfectly content and her life went on in the same boring way it had before. She came home, watched YouTube, did her homework while watching YouTube, doom-scrolled her way down rabbit holes that started with a variety of innocuous self-help, makeup or gaming tutorials. What her father doesn’t realize is that she doesn’t really have friends. Yes, she knows people, but other than Jay, no one really thinks of her as a friend. She’s awkward; she says what she thinks and realizes that people other than Jay, and maybe now Ash, find that unsettling. So in that way being grounded is less of a punishment and more of a relief.
She spends her time working in her mother’s art studio out back. It’s a glorified shed, rustic but equipped with everything she needs — a small table, an armchair and good lighting. She hadn’t created anything since the installation, but last week after spending hours watching stupid videos, she went from zoned out to zenned out and found herself inside the kind of boredom where her thoughts weren’t her own and new ideas seemed to pass through her until they took hold in the back of her throat, in the pit of the stomach, an urgent calling to do something.
She found a vintage TV in the free section of Craigslist and when no one was home, she convinced Ash to go with her to pick it up because safety. They drove to East Vancouver and, to Ash’s surprise, dismembered the TV in the alley behind where they picked it up. All she needed was the wooden shell and screen, and so with his help she gutted the electrical components, sorting them into use and throwaway piles. “It’ll be an expression of how we consume ourselves, you know like the individuals feeding on themselves, echo chambers and ignorance.” Ash nodded but she knew he didn’t quite get it, so she pulled out her phone and showed him her rough sketch. “Inside will be a head that I’ll mold out of these electrical components, and when you look at it, you’ll see your own reflection superimposed on the junk head. Get it?”
“Yeah. Garbage in, garbage out.”
“Exactly,” she said, shoving stripped wire into her bag. “We are what we watch, what we consume. I suppose it’s similar to the other installation. I’m thinking of it as a series.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
She looked up at him with a pensive expression. “Not sure, really. Isn’t making it enough?” As she said it she realized she was asking and stating the thing at the same time. Was it enough for it to exist without a purpose, and if it was, could that be true for people too? It was then that she decided she would model the head after her own, and now that she’d been working on it for a week it was finally starting to look like something.
She’d started with a mannequin’s head whose face she melted off. She rebuilt it with metal and plastic and is now sewing in long thin black wires with stripped copper ends into the skull. By the time she looks up, hours have passed the way they always do when she’s being creative. When she was working on her installation, life around her seemed to stop and now as she sits, stretching her back, she wonders if it was that creative flow that made her miss all the signs. Jay was with her the whole time, and she was with him, but maybe neither of them were there. She was buried in creation; Jay, in undoing. She didn’t see his texts that day until it was too late. By the time she replied he was already gone. Though she’s memorized them, she reads them every morning as if her attention now could make up for it. They were just regular what are you doing, want to chill later, need to talk texts. There was nothing to suggest that he would do it. They’d talked about killing themselves but maybe he always knew she wasn’t serious because sometimes he talked about the future — hers, not his.
Like little girls imagining their weddings, she’d spent hours fantasizing about her perfect funeral and had told him about it. It was something she started to do after her mother died, and though most would think it morbid it gave her a sense of peace, reminding her that eventually her life, like all stories, would be made clear at the end. When Jay died she added new layers to her imagining and now sits down cross-legged, eyes closed, disappearing into a Gothic cathedral with limestone arches and a ribbed interior that makes her feel like she’s been swallowed by a gigantic whale. She wears her black A-line mini dress with the Peter Pan collar and combat boots. Her face is powder-shimmered in pink and silver sparkles; she’s wearing false eyelashes, bright red lipstick and black extensions brushed straight over her chest. She’s Snow White meets Wednesday Addams meets a Tim Burton Claymation character. People cry. Jon’s grief is obscene. They play all of her favorite songs, and when they play “Try Not to Breathe” by R.E.M., everyone rises up from their pews and dances in two rows as if they’re at a ball in one of Jane Austen’s books. They twirl down the aisles, spinning partners and holding hands, and as the last pair approaches her casket, Jay floats down the aisle wearing a navy blue Regency coat with gold buttons and a silk ascot. He takes off his top hat and bows. Her soul slips out of her body, takes his hand, and she too dances through the aisles singing along with them. Her mother, no longer cancer-ridden, sits, yellow-haired and angelic in an Empire-cut gown, in the back pew and together with Jay they drift above the chapel and into the sky.
When she opens her eyes, she stares at her reflection in the screen, her image floating above the circuitry of herself. She hasn’t quite achieved what she’d hoped and takes a modeling hammer, tapping the center of the screen until veined cracks spread out over the surface and she is rendered an abstraction, a cubist reflection, a ghost in the machine.
