“And now you’re not exhausted?”
“Now I don’t know what I am.”
“Do you miss it?”
“I’m not supposed to, but yeah. I do sometimes. I miss knowing what I’m supposed to do with myself. I miss feeling like I was good at something.”
We drive a little longer, past a line of old, boarded-up buildings and rusting cars without tires, shacks built around them from discarded parts, homes made out of hollowed-out buses with a few people sitting around like piles of rags and ashes, more broken than even the buildings. Most don’t raise their heads to watch us go by. They are not like the people sitting by the road just outside the housing development, probably with full-time jobs they still need to supplement in their off-hours.
“Don’t worry,” Ivy says. “This car is pretty, but it’s also built like a tank.”
We drive so fast, the people are nothing but a blur.
“The thing about being a performer,” Ivy says, “is that you’re always performing, even when you’re by yourself. After a bunch of years of that, you forget who you are. Fame becomes its own addiction, maybe even more than the pills and booze. I don’t know if I’m okay unless other people think I’m okay. Ever since I was little, I’ve defined myself by the jobs I get, the interviews, the fans, how much people want me. If they don’t want me, I don’t know who I am.”
She has asked me nothing about myself. Daddy would say that’s bad manners. Papa would say it’s the sign of a narcissist. But I’m almost relieved. This way she doesn’t have to find out how little I have to say.
“I thought I knew who I was once,” she says. “For a little while, a couple of weeks, I thought I knew exactly who I was. But I’ll tell you about that later.” She smiles now, lost in some veiled memory. A billboard for a new housing development flashes by—a suburb of a suburb of a suburb.
“Maybe you just need some rest,” I say. “Then you can figure all this stuff out.”
“Yeah. That’s what my therapist says. All I want to do is sleep, but I can’t. I have this anxiety and insomnia, and I’m getting acupuncture and doing all these herbal tinctures that taste like shit, because my doctor won’t let me have anything resembling a sleeping pill. And I’m supposed to be taking a break from work for a while, or A-Corp is never going to hire me again. They can even sue me. So I’m always awake, without anything to do but think, because I’m not working. I’m not doing anything. I don’t know how you all do that.”
“Do what?”
“Not you. You’re different. You have a job. But the rest of them. They just . . . do nothing while their parents are off who knows where working their asses off. How amazing that must be. To be so sure of your own worth that you don’t think you have to earn it. It’s like they’re incapable of feeling shame.”
“Have you heard of this drug called Freedom?” I say. “My friend Tami does it. It’s supposed to take away shame.”
“I don’t want to talk about drugs,” she snaps. “Or Tami.”
“Have you met Tami?” I say. “She came to your last party.”
Ivy says nothing. There’s a new tension in the car, like the electricity went sideways. Neither of us says anything for a while. All I see are trees and more trees.
“There’s a fine line between shame and having a conscience,” Ivy finally says.
“She’s kind of awful,” I say. “Tami.”
“I know.”
The car is quiet for a long time.
“Oh, I’ve heard about this place,” I say as we approach a huge gated compound with a sign that says “Ray of Light Ministries.”
“What’s this one about?” Ivy says.
“I think it’s the one about no procreation. The men and women live on separate sides of the compound and have no contact.”
“Sounds nice.” Ivy laughs. “I totally get it. All these people giving up everything they have to go live somewhere where they don’t have to think for themselves anymore. Where all their choices are made for them. They’re just giving up one kind of freedom for another. I dated this girl for a while—Lorelei Simmons? She was in that movie Cold Heat?”
It takes me a moment to realize Ivy’s asking me a question. I’ve gotten used to her talking without needing much participation from me. “It sort of rings a bell,” I say.
“One day she just disappeared. I called her agent and he told me she decided to join that big cult outside of Santa Cruz, the one with that guru with the gold teeth and neck tattoos who used to be a drug addict and claims to be a reincarnation of the original Buddha. Lorelei just emptied her bank account and handed it over. No one’s heard from her since.”
“Is that the one where they all have sex with him?”
“Probably. All cults end up like that. As soon as someone calls themselves a guru, it’s over. It’s so weird when you think about it. All the rich people with their protected, sparkling sci-fi lives trying to leave the cities and live off the grid and go back in time. And all the poor people trying to do exactly the opposite, all those people in places without electricity or internet or clean water or food. That’s what going back in time is really like. It’s not camping. But the rich people think it’s some vacation, and they can just go back home when they’ve had enough.” She grips the steering wheel. “Because they can.”
For someone who’s supposed to be cultivating silence, Ivy sure does talk a lot.
“I think part of me wanted to die,” Ivy says. I don’t know how she got to this statement, how the map of her mind led her here, but it’s a ride I think I’m starting to get the feel of.
A sign on the side of the road says 45, and I see the number 73 on the dashboard. But whoever designed this car made it drive so smooth, you can’t even feel danger.
“The exhaustion,” Ivy says, and she takes both hands off the wheel to do air quotes around “exhaustion” and we swerve, but the car corrects itself on its own. The car says, “Autopilot engaged.”
“I’d do a bunch of one thing to keep me awake and a bunch of another thing to calm me down,” she says. “And then it’d be time for a party and I’d do a bunch of whatever was there. I’d just keep doing it until I couldn’t anymore, until some manager would intervene or I’d pass out, or whoever I was dating at the time thought they could save me and tried a few times but gave up after they realized they couldn’t and figured out I was way more trouble than I was worth.”
After a pause, she says, “But I have a strong constitution. Just like my mom. That’s what she says. I’m a survivor. Whether I want to be or not.”