In Case of Emergency (31 page)

He looks at his watch. “Because of, er, the intensity of the call you just had, I want you to know that we’re advising you to take some time off. You’re a good employee, and we’d hate to lose you, but… this is your chance to take a break. Really think about whether you want to be here, and if this is the job for you.

“We can give you a thirty-day leave before we have to let you go, so ideally you’ll be able to come to a conclusion in the next month. And then just let us know. All right?” He smiles. It looks a little like the pamphlet, this smile.

In the parking lot of Station 710, I pour out the coffee that was bought for me because I couldn’t pull my shit together. I watch the brown waterfall splatter against the dark asphalt, drenching the weeds poking through the cracks. Going inside, I stop at the office first to shove the pamphlet—damp from my clammy hand, crumpled from the way I’ve been clutching it—into the shredder, before making my way to the locker room to pack up my bag and leave.

49

She answers the door and I stare into her face, half-believing. It’s her but she looks different. As if she’s been flattened and reinflated. For the last twenty-four hours, since seeing her crumpled and lifeless shape on that bus, everything has been like that. The same but not the same.

Ayla raises her eyebrows. “You coming in, babe? Or you just going to stand there?”

The smell of the garlic-and-herb chicken dinner she’s cooking travels through an open window. Nausea bubbles in my throat. Using the view as an excuse, I convince her to sit with me on the concrete steps leading up to her bungalow. The sky in front of us is unimpressive, a thin brown layer squatting over the city.

I hear myself telling Ayla that I’ve picked up the night half of a shift in order to help out a friend. She inspects the side of my face as I lie to her. I hadn’t intended to do this before coming over here. As soon as she answered the door, looking like some kind of impostor, I knew I wouldn’t be able to step inside.

I can’t, I keep thinking. I can’t do this.

“Sorry to cancel last minute on you.”

She nods, raises a fingernail to her mouth to chew on it, thinks better of it, and drops her hand back down. “Is something wrong?”

I shake my head, eyes fixed on that miserable view. “No, not at all.”

She follows my gaze, dropping her chin onto crossed arms, and says carefully, “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it? Maybe something happened at work?”

Everywhere. I am going to vomit everywhere.

“Nothing happened at work.”

I force myself to look at the Ayla sitting next to me, trying to keep my eyes casual, my face neutral. Perhaps a smile would be appropriate in this moment? I can’t remember how I used to act. My eyes find her left ear, trace the shape of it, see it dangling like a bizarre earring from a hole on the side of her head, bloody ribbons coursing down her shirt. The vision disappears as quickly as it arrived, but I’m glued to the concrete, still staring. Look at her, she’s alive, she’s right here in front of you, it’s wonderful. It’s all a big lie. Ayla shifts her arms and tilts her head, returning my gaze. I realize that at
any moment she might try to hug me or put her hands on me, and with a sudden panic I yank myself to my feet. The last person I touched was dead.

“I’m kind of tired. Not myself. I have to go to work but I’ll see you soon? Enjoy your dinner?” I give her a quick kiss on the top of her head and throw myself down the stairs. She calls something out but I don’t look back.

In the car, driving, driving, driving—Ayla lives only a few miles from me but I take the longest route I can think of back to my apartment, the 2 to the 134 to the 101 to the 405 to the 10 to the 110, a big horseshoe loop around Los Angeles, gripping the steering wheel, occasionally punching my thighs or tugging at the hair above my ears as if to distract the headache that’s sprung up in both temples. Everything is fine, nothing is wrong, everything is.

When a Volvo neatly cuts me off on the 101 freeway, I follow it for miles. I bring my car as close as I can to the license plate that reads
FMLY MAN
, to the sticker that says
MY OTHER CAR IS A YACHT
. Honking continuously, shrieking a string of profanities, tears leaking down my face. I enjoy the man’s terrified expression in the rearview mirror.

50

About two weeks go by. I fall into a kind of routine. I pretend to work; I pretend to work shift after shift after shift; I avoid people; I use Marla as an excuse not to see Ayla and Ayla as an excuse not to see Marla and work as an excuse not to see anyone. Ryan calls and calls; I never answer, but when I finally call him back, it goes to voice mail. My brother has changed his message to the crooning of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which means he and Malcolm must be fighting. I hang up.

I can’t be around anyone anymore, but when I’m alone, I long not to
be. I crave Ayla especially. I picture scouring her face and hands and neck, making undeniable her living presence, fortifying reality somehow. But when I see her everything in me retreats. I shrink and hollow. She’s no longer the Ayla I knew.

Every day it happens all over again, the pause before the scream, the recognition before the inventory. If I manage to sleep, my dreams are nightmares—a vibrant bloodstained wash; I wake up shaking—but my dreams are gentle compared to my sour-sick blossoming consciousness. My dreams are a lulling whisper compared to that terrible moment, right after I realize I am no longer dreaming, right before I open my eyes and consider what is true and what isn’t, because the moment of my awakening always consists of me standing on a bus, looking down the aisle, and Ayla is dead.

I start to avoid public places. My room is dark and quiet, with very little sound from the street, and this feels best. While Marla is at work or at Tom’s, I’ll venture out to the living room and watch my old swim meet videos, or footage from the Olympics. I watch Michael Phelps beat his own world record and become the most decorated medal winner in history. I rewind a ten-second close-up of his butterfly stroke and play it over and over again; his long torso arcing through the water like the spine of a porpoise, his legs and feet undulating below the surface; now you see him, now you don’t. I watch it on mute so I don’t have to listen to the yelling of the announcers.

I can no longer watch regular television. Violent crime shows fill me with a numbing terror; commercials enrage and horrify me.

Most of the time I drive around, pretending to be at work. Sometimes I park, lean the seat back, and try to sleep.

Around me, always, a blur. Deafened sounds. Motion suspended. Motion sped up. A timeless quality, a buffer, a craving. The desire for nothing to touch me, for no one to speak, while I pretend to be out saving lives.

I think about the frequent flyers most. The woman who invents a new name every time we pick her up and asks that we please not take her to
the graveyard, the drunk who apologizes profusely when we find him in a pile of his own vomit, the sallow-faced man who always talks in hundreds. There are a hundred lessons to be learned in a lifetime, he’ll say, addressing someone we can’t see. A hundred ways to say “I love you,” a hundred ways to die. When we were kids Ryan tried to explain that despite Mom leaving us, she still loved us; finally I explained to him that for me to move on with my life I had to stop believing that. I want to find the sallow-faced man and tell him: there’s just one way to die and that’s dying.

One day I’m in the bathroom line at a Starbucks with three women ahead of me, and I can feel it begin. The fear, the loneliness, the unfairness of it all, the anger at having to
wait
, the total shame of knowing I don’t deserve even my rage. But it begins anyway; it builds and builds, and when I go inside, I kick the ceramic toilet bowl so hard my shoe flies off, and then I limp out with a vague sense of accomplishment.

I avoid public places. The surges of anger that break across me with a terrifying velocity don’t frighten me at the moment they happen, but they frighten me later when I think back on them.

When I saw Ayla two days ago, she asked if there was anything I wanted to talk about. I haven’t been myself lately, she told me. I’ve been distant and withdrawn and it’s clear I’m not sleeping well. Am I stressed because Marla is moving out? Do I need to take a few days off work? I wanted to tell Ayla that I can’t
feel
anything anymore, not the way I used to. Nothing can touch me. Not Ayla trying to cook for me, or her hand rubbing my back as she says, “Why don’t you swim anymore? Maybe swimming would help.” I want to be left alone; her hand is a million miles away; swimming won’t help.

The visions are always so much worse around Ayla. Whenever I see her, I wait for her hair and face and body to mutate in front of me. There it comes. Here it is.

I am frightened all the time now and I can’t tell anyone and I don’t know why.

Every day it happens all over again, and this is what I know: there is an ear, and it is almost severed; there is slick dark hair plastered against a familiar face; there are two fleshy palms upturned in a dead woman’s lap. These are the things I think about at the supermarket, where Ayla no longer works, walking up and down the aisles of Sustainable Living as if I am looking for something, and also when I drive around in the middle of the night, pretending to be on shift, because I don’t want anyone to know I don’t have a job to go to anymore, and the other night when Marla said, “Tomorrow? But I thought you worked yesterday,” behind her I saw a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, and I blinked and it went away, and Marla said, “Are you all right?” and I caught myself right before answering, “Yes, it’s gone.” This is what I know, that sometimes in these visions I am holding a corpse in my arms, rocking it back and forth, feeling its heavy head swing against my shoulder, while other times it is Ayla, it is a half-dead Ayla, and I can’t remember how I’m supposed to save her, I can’t do anything but weep for her, and she keeps asking for my help.

51

I come home and find Ryan waiting for me, sitting in his Volkswagen bug with a clear view of the walkway to my apartment. As soon as I catch sight of him I freeze. We stare at each other through the windshield. He gets out and approaches me as if I am something from the nature channel. I think about inviting him in and decide not to. Perhaps this conversation will be shorter if we have it in public.

“Pipes.”

“Ry.”

“I’ve been calling you.”

“I’ve been busy.”

He nods warily. His wavy brown hair falls around his ears; he needs a haircut and a shave. In his expression I see the face of my brother when we were teenagers, angry because I borrowed his CDs without asking, annoyed because I took too long a shower when he needed to get ready. I realize I’ve missed him.

“I talked to Marla again. She’s worried about you. We both are.” He tells me I can’t keep doing this.

“I’ve just been working,” I say. “Marla’s moving out so I thought the extra money might help.” I’m proud of the lie until I start to panic. Did I tell anyone I was working today? I can’t remember. I think I pretended to work yesterday, which means I should have been getting off shift at 0700 this morning. Which is probably what Marla told Ryan, and why he was waiting for me.

Ryan watches me, makes sure he has my full attention before saying, “That’s not what I’m talking about.” His voice gets louder. Listen, he says. He tells me about all the times I’ve disappeared, starting with when Mom left. He cites the friendships I’ve walked out on, and says he can tell I’m avoiding Ayla.

“Just stay out of it, Ryan!” For some reason I start to laugh, maybe at his ignorance, but the sound collects in my throat. “You’re being stupid. And it’s got nothing to do with her.”

“Oh, don’t even get me
started
. I mean, Mom was a piece of work. I know that. When you didn’t want to talk to her anymore, I couldn’t—”

“When
I
didn’t want to talk to her anymore? When
I
didn’t—”

“But then you had to go and make Dad out to be some kind of Antichrist… It’s like you lost all respect for him because he never got over her—how is that his fault? He loves you, Pipes. He’s not going to live forever. You act like he’s such a pain in your ass, but you’re his favorite.”

I wave my hand as if to shoo him away. “And you’ve got it all figured out, is that it? Maybe I should take notes from you on how to be a perfect communicator?”

He catches my right wrist. “What happened to your hand?”

“It’s nothing.”

This morning I bought a new phone. I’d been trying to send a text to Ayla yesterday explaining that no, I couldn’t think of a good day for us to have a date night, and when the damn thing kept trying to autocorrect my words, I beat it against a brick wall until it shattered. The knuckles of my right hand are raw, covered in newly formed scabs. Ryan drops my wrist and looks at me with concern. I liked the anger better. “Pipes, what’s going on with you?”

It’s all I can do not to flinch. Don’t panic. Just act like he’s overreacting. Everything is fine. But at some point someone will guess I’m not actually working anymore. Marla will talk to Ayla just like she talked to Ryan. Someone will call the station looking for me.

Ryan searches my face. “Pipes, I mean it. You can’t let go of people every time you get too close.”

“Oh, for—
enough
, Ryan. Goddamn it. Who are you to lecture me?”