A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (12 page)

I sit down again.

Toph is on his back, his arms splayed. He sweats when he sleeps, regardless of the room
’
s temperature. When he sleeps, he moves and turns around and around, like the hand of a clock. His breathing is audible. His eyelashes are long. His hand hangs over the foldout bed. As I am looking at him, he wakes up. He gets up and comes to me as I am sitting in the chair and I take his hand and we go through the window and fly up and over the quickly sketched trees and then to California.

Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above us, in, say, a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car hurtles, low to the ground, straining on the slow upward trajectory but still at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless, sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1. Look at us, goddammit, the two of us slingshotted from the back side of the moon, greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed. Every day we are collecting on what
’
s coming to us, each day we
’
re being paid back for what is owed, what we deserve, with interest, with some extra motherfucking consideration—we are
owed,
goddammit—and so we are expecting everything, everything. We get to take what we want, one of each, anything in the store, a three-hour shopping spree, the color of our choice, any make, any color, as much as we want, when we want, whatever we want. Today we have nowhere to be so we
’
re on our way to Montara, a beach about thirty-five minutes south of San Francisco, and right now we are singing:

She was alone!

She never knew!

{Something something something!}

When we touched!

When we {rhymes with
“
same
”
}!

All (something something} !

All night!

All night!

All I every night!

So hold tight!

Hoo-ld tight

Baby hold tight!

Any way you want it!

That
’
s the way you need it!

Any way you want it!

Toph does not know the words, and I know few of the words, but you cannot fucking stop us from singing. I
’
m trying to get him to do the second All night part, with me doing the first part, like:

ME:
All night!
(higher)

HIM:
All-ll night!
(slightly lower)

I point to him when his part comes but he just looks at me blankly. I point to the radio, then to him, then to his mouth, but he
’
s still confused, and it
’
s hard doing any of this while trying not to careen off the road and into the Pacific and I guess in a way the gestures look like I want him to eat the radio. But Jesus, he should be able to figure this out. He isn
’
t cooperating. Or he could be dumb. Is he dumb?

Fuck it—I go solo. I hit the Steve Perry notes, I do the Steve Perry vibrato. I can do these things because I am an extraordinary singer.

“
Can I sing or what?
”
I yell.

“
What?
”
he yells.

The windows are open, too.

“
I said,
‘
Can I sing or what?
’”

He shakes his head.

“
What do you mean?
”
I yell.
“
I can sing, g^dammit.
”

He rolls up his window.

“
What did you say? I didn
’
t hear you,
”
he says.

“
I said, can I sing or what?
”

“
No.
”
He smiles hugely.
“
You can
’
t sing at all.
”

I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant—children so seldom know what is good for them—I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time—Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy—and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me. He is mine, and you cannot stop me, cannot stop us. Try to stop us, you pussy! You can
’
t stop us from singing, and you can
’
t stop us from making fart sounds, from putting our hands out the window to test the aerodynamics of different hand formations, from wiping the contents of our noses under the front of our seats. You cannot stop me from having Toph, who is eight, steer, on a straightaway, while I take off my sweatshirt because suddenly it
’
s gotten really fucking hot. You cannot stop us from throwing our beef jerky wrappers on the floor, or leaving our unfolded laundry in the trunk for, fuck, eight days now, because we have been busy. You cannot stop Toph from leaving a half-full cardboard orange juice container under the seat, where it will rot and ferment and make the smell in the car intolerable, with that smell
’
s provenance remaining elusive for weeks, during which the windows must be kept open at all times, until finally it is found and Toph is buried to his neck in the backyard and covered in honey—or
should have been—for his role in the debacle. We cannot be stopped from looking with pity upon all the world
’
s sorry inhabitants, they unblessed by our charms, unchallenged by our trials, unscarred and thus weak, gelatinous. You cannot stop me from telling Toph to make comments about and faces at the people in the next lane.

ME: Look at this loser.

HE: What a
spaz\

me: Look at this one.

he: Oh my
God.

ME: A dollar to wave at this guy.

HE: How much?

me: A buck.

HE: That
’
s not enough.

ME: Okay, five bucks to give this guy a thumbs up.

he: Why a thumbs up?

ME: Cause he
’
s got it goin
’
on!

HE: Okay. Okay.

ME: Why didn
’
t you do it?

HE: I just couldn
’
t.

It
’
s unfair. The matchups, Us v. Them (or you) are unfair. We are dangerous. We are daring and immortal. Fog whips up from under the cliffs and billows over the highway. Blue breaks from beyond the fog and sun suddenly screams from the blue.

To our right is the Pacific, and because we are hundreds of feet above the ocean, often with nothing in the way of a guardrail between us and it, there is sky not only above us but below us, too. Toph does not like the cliff, is not looking down, but we are driving in the sky, with clouds whipping over the road, the sun flickering through, the sky and ocean below. Only up here does the earth look round, only up here does the horizon dip at its ends, only up here can you see the bend of the planet at the edges of your peripheries. Only here are you almost sure that you are careening
on top of a big shiny globe, blurrily spinning—you are never aware of these things in Chicago, it being so flat, so straight—and and and we have been
chosen,
you see, chosen, and have been given this, it being owed to us, earned by us, all of this—the sky is blue for us, the sun makes passing cars twinkle like toys for us, the ocean undulates and churns for us, murmurs and coos to us. We are owed, see, this is ours, see. We are in California, living in Berkeley, and the sky out here is bigger than anything we
’
ve ever seen—it goes on forever, is visible from every other hilltop—hilltops!— every turn on the roads of Berkeley, of San Francisco— We have a house, a sublet for the summer, that overlooks the world, up in the Berkeley hills; it
’
s owned by people, Scandinavians, Beth says, who must have some money, because it
’
s all the way up there, and it
’
s all windows and light and decks, and up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman
’
s North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco... and at night the whole fucking area is a thousand airstrips, Alcatraz blinking, the flood of halogen down the Bay Bridge, oozing to and fro, a string of Christmas lights being pulled slowly, steadily, and of course the blimps—so many blimps this summer—and stars, not too many visible, with the cities and all, but still some, a hundred maybe, enough, how many do you need, after all? From our windows, from our deck it
’
s a lobotomizing view, which negates the need for movement or thought—it is all there, it can all be kept track of without a turn of the head. The mornings are filmstrip white and we eat breakfast on the deck, and later we eat lunch there, we eat dinner there, we read there, play cards, always with the whole
thing, the postcard tableau, just there, all those little people, too much view to seem real, but then again, then again, nothing really is all that real anymore, we must remember, of course, of course. (Or is it just the opposite? Is everything
more
real? Aha.) Behind our house, not too far, is Tilden Park, an endless expanse of lakes and trees and hills, mohair hills touched by patches of shrubs—as in, mohair hill, mohair hill, mohair hill, then an armpit of dark green, then the mohair hills that go on and on, like sleeping lions, as far as— Especially when you
’
re on your bike, starting from Inspiration Point, pedaling into the wind on your way in and with the wind on the way back, the hills going on until Richmond, miles away, where the factories and power plants and big tanks full of deadly or life-giving things are, and the bike path goes the whole way there, all the while with the Bay visible in the distance to the left, the hills on and on to the right, until Mount Diablo, the biggest of all of them, king of the mohair hills, twenty miles east, northeast, whatever. The paths are paralleled with and per-pendiculared by wood and wire fences that hold cows, and sometimes sheep, and all this is minutes away, all there, from our house, our house behind which there
’
s even a hiking trail that reaches, just about reaches, the huge rock, Grotto Rock, that juts out twenty feet beyond our back deck, and on some days, when Toph and I are eating our breakfast out on the porch, with the sun crazy and happy for us, smiling and teary-eyed with pride, there will suddenly appear hikers, male and female, always coupled, in their khaki shorts and brown shoes and hats on backward, who will step up from below the rock, and then be atop it, and then be there, holding their backpack straps with their thumbs, at eye level with us, as we eat our breakfast on our redwood deck, twenty feet away.

“
Hello!
”
we say, Toph and I, with compact waves.

“
Hello,
”
they say, surprised to see us there, eating our breakfast, at eye level.

It is nice, this moment. Then it
’
s awkward, because they are at
the top, the end, of their hike, and want only to sit down for a while and admire the view, but can
’
t help be conscious of these two people, impossibly handsome people, Toph and I, who are sitting not twenty feet behind them, eating Apple Jacks from the box.

We drive past Half Moon Bay and Pacifica and Seaside, the condos on the left and the surfers on the right, the ocean exploding pink. We pass through cheering eucalyptus and waving pines, cars reflect wildly as they come at us, they seem to come right for us, and I look through their windshields for the faces of those coming at us, for a sign, for their understanding, for their trust, and I find their trust and they go by. Our car thrums loudly and I turn up the radio because I can. I drum the steering wheel with open palms, then fists, because I can. Toph looks at me. I nod gravely. In this world, in our new world, there will be rocking. We will pay tribute to musicmakers like Journey, particularly if this is Two-for-Tuesday, which means inevitably that one of the songs will be:
Just a small-town girl...

There are times when I am concerned about Toph
’
s expression when I
’
m really singing, with vibrato and all, singing the guitar parts—his expression one that to the untrained eye might look like abject terror, or revulsion—but I know well enough that it is awe. I understand his awe. I deserve his awe. I am an extraordinary singer.