“What was that?” I say.
Ivy says, “Keep driving.”
We cannot hear the people on the street, so many anonymous, masked faces, some bare, braving the smoke, their mouths open wide like fish, fingers pointing, other hands pulling out phones.
“Did I hit someone?” Ash says.
“Keep driving,” Ivy says. Calm, so calm.
I say, “Stop!” but no one hears me.
Ivy and Ash are somewhere manufactured, in a present moment unburdened by shame. Is this what Daddy is always talking about? Is this equanimity? Is this what it means to be at peace no matter what happens? Are they islands made out of rock, unmoving in the storm? Is Freedom the shortcut to awakening?
No. They are running. They are made out of fear and want. They are always leaning forward.
There is a fine line between feeling shame and having a conscience.
I am the only one who looks back.
I am the only one who sees the body on the ground, the pool of blood, the muscled arm bent at an unnatural angle. I see the familiar tattoos, those corporate brands he paid to be advertised on his skin, images and words and patterns made meaningless from being repeated on so many bodies. Now this body, this life, has been made meaningless.
Of course he was on his way to Tami’s condo. He missed us at his house by only seconds. If only he had arrived seconds earlier, or later. If only he had stayed with Raine. If only he had never started wanting what he couldn’t have.
There is a theory that souls travel in packs, across lifetimes, repeating the same stories together over and over again, everyone playing the same roles, everyone on their own karmic journeys, waiting for someone to wake up and break the cycle.
Of all the thousands of people who could have been walking in front of the parking garage at that exact moment, of all the anonymous people who could have gotten caught under Ivy’s tires, of course it was Vaughn.
None of us will ever wake up.
I scream, but of course no one hears me. I scream so hard, my throat, already raw from the smoke, tears itself to shreds. That is where it starts, the splitting, at my throat, the place where my voice lives, the pressure valve that opens and closes to let me out or keep me in, the place where my voice dies.
The tear slices through me. I am unzipped, cracked, split down the middle. I am two halves, no longer connected.
30
Can I be two places at once? Is it that easy to split me? Half of me here, in the car with Ash and Ivy, half of me back in Tami’s condo.
I have gotten used to not feeling my body. I’ve gotten used to being unseen. Maybe I am a ghost again, haunting Tami now, following her as she paces around in her tower, clutching her phone, texting everyone she can think of, every single person who could get here fast. There is no app for ordering friends. There is no app that cures loneliness.
I keep glancing in the mirror every time I pass it, but I’m still not there.
This feels like my memories, something I have pulled out of the recesses of my mind, something saved in black and white but that I have colored in, am coloring in now, blindfolded, making it new.
This is not real. My memories are not real. I have imagined all of this.
All I know how to do is make stories. There is a fine line between fact and fiction.
I don’t know where my body is.
Tami texts Vaughn a million times. Maybe his phone is crushed, broken bits in his pocket below. Maybe Tami’s messages will be stuck in limbo in some channel forever, her desperation reduced to ones and zeroes that never land.
What happens when your destination is erased?
She downs her drink and puts the phone to her ear. “Vaughn, I’m here waiting. You know it must really be serious if I’m calling. You know I hate talking on the phone.” She laughs, but I can hear the sandpaper in her throat. Her face goes blank and the laugh stops abruptly as soon as she hangs up. She is still for a moment as she looks at the windows that used to show a panoramic view of the whole world beneath her but now just push up against a flat wall of smoke. Now everyone gets the same view, no matter how much they’re paying.
Tami’s shoulders slump. Her face contorts and turns red like she is straining, and it is the first time I have ever seen her look ugly, even if this whole scene is just my imagination. I think maybe she is trying to cry, but she doesn’t know how. Maybe her face cracks, just a little, but it’s too late. Girls like her get everything they want, they don’t deserve my sympathy too. She throws her glass at the window in frustration but it doesn’t even break, and now there’s a mess of ice cubes on the floor that will soon melt and make a puddle.
She takes a deep breath. She forces herself to smile.
She leaves the spilled glass for someone else to clean up.
I follow her out the door, down the hall, into the elevator, down through the sky to the ground level she despises. What if Seattle had two levels like New York? What if people like Tami could stay in the sky all the time? Would she have ever even met Vaughn? Would their lives never have intersected at all?
Is that the destination? Is that what would make all of this complete? For some people to never have to land?
Tami pauses in the lobby, taking in the scene outside the glass doors. The crowd on the street has grown. Police lights pulse in the smoky night, like the whole world is throbbing. People crowd around a barrier made of yellow tape. Tami checks her phone but no one has texted her back.
We step into the night without masks. Red and blue flash across the scene like some morbid dance club, the tense chatter of onlookers our music. One cop is putting Vaughn’s wallet in a plastic bag. Another cop is talking about informing next of kin. I think of Vaughn’s wife, Raine, wheezing in their oven of a home, making plans for their new beginning in a place that is also dying. I think of Ivy and Ash, who stole Raine and Vaughn’s new beginning on the way to theirs.
Medics lift the stretcher into the ambulance. They are in no hurry.
The white sheet snags on something and reveals the gnarled and bloodied meat of the body. The whole street groans, like some spectator sport, and I think of Vaughn’s failed career as a fighter, and I can’t help but think that he finally got the audience he was waiting for.
And there’s his arm, there are his generic tattoos, and here is Tami, standing eerily quiet beside me. She starts walking, calmly, her chin in the air, parting the crowd with all her entitlement. “You can’t go in there,” someone says, but of course she can. Girls like her can do anything they want.
“It was like a spaceship, man,” someone says to a cop. “The car that hit him.”
“Did you get a look at who was driving?” says the cop.
“Nah, man. Those windows were all mirrors.”