In Case of Emergency (16 page)

“I get vertigo.”

“Dizziness?”

“Well, yeah, but I get it in really bad episodes. If it happens while I’m…”

“I can barely hear you.”

She lifts her head. “The last time I tried to drive, I got a massive panic attack. It was too much. People crossing the street, people parking, people
looking
for parking, the lights, the signs—so many signs—everywhere you look. I got the sweats. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do.”

“How do you get around?”

“Bus.”

“Doesn’t that take forever?”

She makes an exasperated sound. “It takes ten minutes to get to work—or it used to. Thirty if I walked. People in Los Angeles are funny about their cars. Besides,” she pulls at the hair hanging down over her face, “you’d be surprised what you can get used to.”

I recognize how insensitive I’m being. “Sorry. Just took me by surprise, that’s all. I thought—”

“Everyone drives in Los Angeles?”

“I guess I deserve that.”

She bolts from the couch. Grabbing a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of cleaner from under the kitchen sink, she squats in front of the AC unit and starts cleaning up the strands of dust. As I watch her wipe down each slat on the vent, I feel as though I’m no longer in the room. My tongue is swollen, immobile.

When I finally speak, my voice sounds like a petulant teenager’s. I ask her if she still wants to go, and tell her I can do the driving.

She shakes her head, a guarded expression on her face. “Do you really want to do this?”

And suddenly I know she’s not just talking about the road trip, and she’s as terrified as I am. I go to her, remove the bottle and the towels from her hands, and make her follow me to bed. She doesn’t resist. When she lies down, I climb on top of her, straddling her waist. I can feel her heat through my legs.

“Where should we go?”

She squeezes my hips, hooking her thumbs on my belt loops. “How many days off do you have?”

I slide her gray T-shirt up and kiss the soft place just above her belly button, then slide it higher and kiss the birthmark on her sternum. “Do you really write down what we talk about?”

“It helps me remember. I don’t want to keep asking the same questions.”

“That’s so romantic.”

“You better not be making fun of me.” I can tell that she recognizes my sincerity but she’s embarrassed anyway.

I press my lips against her eyelids and tug lightly on her hair. “I’m not,” I keep saying. “I’m not kidding, Ayla.”

The moment passes and it’s like I never saw that vulnerability flash across her face. She finishes taking off her shirt and removes mine. I rest my bare stomach on hers and feel the quiver I always do when we’re skin to skin, the reminder of how much my body wants this body. “My next shift is Wednesday,” I tell her.

“How about somewhere on the coast?”

“I want to go to Monterey.”

“Monterey it is,” she says.

As she unhooks my bra and slides her hands across my back, I can
feel the strain in her dropping away, the lifted shoulders melting down into their sockets. This is where we reverse: she slows down, gets patient. I fumble with her belt, trying to get her undressed before my excitement makes me even clumsier. There are plenty of times when she’s distracted, her focus split in a hundred directions, but these are always the moments when I have her full attention.

When we’re naked she rolls on top of me. She does this thing that kills me, every blessed time: she puts her fingers into my mouth, follows the crooked path of my teeth and the shape of my tongue, before putting her hand between my legs.

21

The I-5 is jammed in a few places, and my right toes itch for the depth of the gas pedal—nothing deflates the start of a road trip like traffic—yet I find it impossible to be anything but cheerful about my current situation. We listen to pop music and sing along loudly, laughing at ourselves; Ayla tries to get truck drivers to pull on their horns and they stare blankly at her. When we finally begin the grapevine climb, there is nothing to see, because everything is a sloped and treeless brown. The radio will play only static.

“Want to play a game?” Ayla asks. “You’d like it, it’s a logic puzzle.”

She gives me a scenario and tells me I can ask her all the questions I want in order to solve it, but only yes-or-no questions. Scientists have been working in Antarctica and find the perfectly frozen and preserved bodies of Adam and Eve. The question is, how do scientists know these bodies belong to Adam and Eve?

“Perfectly preserved as in, flesh and hair and everything?”

“Yes.”

“Carbon dating?”

“No.”

The traffic starts to loosen; the cars recover speed. I sit up straighter and move over to the fast lane. “Are they wearing clothing made of extinct plants?”

“No.”

This continues all the way past Bakersfield, and Ayla tells me she knows a lot of these puzzles since they were popular with her unit while she was overseas. The puzzles helped distract on long convoys or after the card games got dull.

“I’m always afraid to ask you about Iraq,” I tell her, “but I don’t know if I should be.”

She swings her feet onto the dash; her toenails are painted silver except for where the polish has chipped off. She leans forward, scratching at the polish. “You ever get that feeling, almost like you want to walk out of your own skin? When I’m with you, it’s the opposite. You’re steady. I like how steady you are. It makes me not want to bring up certain things.”

“So I’m boring?” I tease. I place my fingers around her neck and rub my thumb down a tight cord of muscle. Then I ask her what she thought about the war when it started, what she thinks about it now. At first she doesn’t say anything, then she sighs and says, “Here we go.”

Her response is long and complicated, as I figured it might be. She starts out by telling me about the vegetable garden she and her mother used to take care of, how when she was stationed in Iraq—“in country,” as she says—the few times she got to call home, her mother would give updates on how the carrots and fava beans were doing, and Ayla would sit inside the phone tent in 110-degree heat, her Kevlar helmet in her lap, and try to think of what to say.

When we finally turn off the 5 and take the 46 west toward the coast, stopping in Paso Robles to eat a late lunch, she’s still not finished. I can feel the four hours of driving in my lower back and knuckles. We stop to get gas in King City and stretch our legs again, getting lost inside the gas station.
It’s more like a mall inside, a sprawling mecca of gaudy key chains, mugs, magnets, hats, and T-shirts. The mechanics’ section has air fresheners, sun visors, and license-plate holders that say
RIDE IT LIKE YOU STOLE IT
, and the food area has an entire wall dedicated to beef jerky.

“It’s hard to explain,” she says when we’re back in the car. “I don’t support the war, not knowing what I know now. I ran off to join the army for the same reason as everyone else—9/11—but I also wanted to get the fuck out of Wisconsin. I thought I was ready for something bigger than me, something I could believe in. And all of that got fucked. We got fucked, while a few politicians made money on our corpses, and there never seemed to be a reason for it. I’d like to think we did some good over there, but I’m not sure we did.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to say.”

“Right. But the difference is, you don’t know shit about it. When I came home, half the people around me didn’t even realize there was still a war going on. Thousands of people dying and they thought the conflict was already over.” She cranes her neck to look at a billboard we’re passing. It says something about being a real Californian. “You know what I miss from home sometimes? Deep-fried cheese curds. That stuff is delicious.”

I follow signs for G16 and turn onto a two-lane road by the name of Carmel Valley, which has walls of bright green vegetation on either side and winds through a series of hills. She’s right, of course. My daily life changed very little in the last nine years, no matter what the headlines had to say.

“I got so reconfigured with the brain injury,” she continues. “My friends kept saying I wasn’t acting like myself. And certain things I remembered being good at, I wasn’t good at anymore.”

“Like what?”

“Like my perception is a little bit off, all the time. I used to know how to work with my hands; I could fix up my old car, work in the garden, build
things. Now what used to be intuitive is skewed. Or things like logic puzzles. I couldn’t solve one now if my life depended on it.”

We drive for a few minutes in silence. Then I ask, “Did the scientists figure it out by using equipment?”

“No.”

“Tools?”

Her face scrunches up. “Are you fucking with me right now? You asked that already.”

“So they could tell just by
looking
that they were Adam and Eve?”

“For the last time, yes.”

“What the hell kind of scientists were they?”

“Yes or no only. The funny thing is, deep down you think you’re going to be fine—even in the middle of a war zone you think this—and then all of a sudden y
ou’re
the story, you’re the one people are talking about. ‘My friend Ayla hit her head and now…’ At first I wanted to stay close to people from before. Because they knew me. And then at some point that stopped feeling true.”

“Is that why you came to California?”

“Go west, brain-damaged one.”

I fake-punch her arm, trying not to laugh. “Stop it.” But she’s laughing, too.

“Did you get anything out of it? I mean, maybe a new appreciation, or a different way to look at things? You must have been so—”

“Pull over.”

“What?”

“Now.”

Ayla’s eyes are squeezed shut, and she’s pushing herself back into the seat, arms locked, hands gripped on her thighs, as if she were trying to stop the car with the force of her neck against the headrest.

I find a turnout. Before I come to a complete stop, Ayla throws open
the car door, sticks out her head, and pukes. She does all this with her eyes closed, hands reaching for support as she leans out into unseen air. I hear the sound of liquid hitting dirt. Then she sits up and wipes her mouth.

On nausea/vomiting calls, we use the acronym OPQRST to guide our assessments. Onset, palliation, quality, radiation, severity, time. Her eyes are still closed; I touch her back gently, as if to let her know where I am, and ask, “Ayla? When did you start feeling sick?”

The shoulder blade moves slightly under my palm. She leans against the door frame, her head tilting at a wistful angle. You know you’re in trouble when the person who just vomited looks beautiful to you. “The road’s a little squirrelly,” she says. “Must’ve set it off.”

“Has the nausea been constant since it started? Or does it come and go?”

Ayla presses the pads of her fingertips into her temple, as if her head were a basketball that could be spun between her hands. “I’m trying not to let it get away from me. If I open my eyes right now the whole world is going to be completely flipped.”

The only thing worse than watching her experience something intensely uncomfortable is knowing there isn’t a thing I can do to help. I try to think of something funny to say. “Are you sure you’re not faking it?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Maybe you just don’t want to talk about Iraq anymore.”

“Big faker,” she says.

“If I was really going to be an EMT right now, I’d ask—
Oh
.” My hand jerks up from her shoulder as if touching something hot. “They didn’t have belly buttons.”

“No,” she says. “They didn’t.”

It’s dusk almost, the sun is low in the sky, and it’s hard to see, because the landscape has a pinkish tinge and softened edges. My car’s headlights come on automatically and I see a small shape crawling about ten feet in front of the car, its front four legs reaching tenuously for the asphalt from
the dirt of the turnout. It’s a tarantula. There’s another one, a few feet from the first.

“Ayla?”

“Yeah.”

I tell myself it’s fine, just a couple of tarantulas, out for a friendly stroll. But then my eyes drift farther up the road, and I lose count after ten, twenty, there might even be close to a hundred, tarantulas spreading across the next half mile or so of road, all heading in the same direction.

“What is it?” Ayla asks.

“Are you afraid of spiders?”

“Depends. Are they tarantulas?”

“Yes.” I’m scared to look out my side window, or down at my lap, for fear of seeing one up close, its many beady eyes fixed on me.

Ayla starts to nod then immediately winces. “They’re early.” She gives her eyelids one more squeeze before opening her eyes. When her softened gaze finally comes into focus, she looks out at the road and smiles. “They do it every year. All the males are looking for mates.”

She gets out of the car slowly, pulling herself onto two feet, and convinces me to join her. We stand at the edge of the road facing Monterey. Ayla keeps laughing at the way I check the ground around my feet.