Vacation (3 page)

I nod, but she isn’t looking at me, so I say, “Yeah.”

And I’m reminded of what my sister talked about the night before. After I passed out in my motel room, she said, “Easter Island is, like, the perfect name for this place. What with the whole resurrection thing and all. This whole island has been totally revamped over and over again. Once upon a time, the Rapanui tribes overpopulated the island and used up too many resources and, like, killed all their trees for agriculture and for moving those cool statues. So, of course, they started killing each other. Eating each other. That’s what people do in these situations. So that sucked, but they calmed down and bounced back. After that, well, like usual, civilization had to go and rape their culture. That’s what civilizations do. So the Rapanui were enslaved and diseased and their population dropped down to about a hundred or something. But they bounced back again. Oh, and they had a tsunami to deal with in 1960. But they survived. The statues were glued back together and set back in place. Like I said, resurrection.”

And that day, before the disco party, the Tour Group explores the island. We find fifteen maoi standing in a row, some wearing cake hats Jack calls topknots, and some letting their bald flat heads bake in the sun. All fifteen maoi stare at a single toppled maoi some yards in front of them. This fallen maoi, he’s lying on his back, staring wide-eyed right at the sun. The Fifteen might be mourning him.

Or maybe, just maybe, he’s not dead. Maybe he’s refusing to stand, and the Fifteen are pissed.

But what the fuck can they do about it?

They’re fucking statues.

And maybe the town of Hanga Roa where all the people live is lush and green, but the rest of the island, where the maoi live, it’s barren.

The trees are gone.

The land is dead.

And I’m thinking about last night, when my sister, who smelled like prunes, said, “The thing about resurrection is, the problem is, you can never, like, bring it all back. Try to bring back a human, and you get a zombie. Bring back Jesus, and he can’t perform miracles anymore. The point is, bro, you always lose something. And maybe that’s a good thing. And maybe it’s not. But, like, as a human being, you should always try to find out what you’re missing. Otherwise, you might find yourself empty, and you won’t know why.”

With an eyedropper, Krow drips the clear liquid on my bloody knuckles, where Pumpkin Head’s teeth encountered my fist. Beforehand, Krow doesn’t say, “This might sting a little,” because, when the liquid touches me, it doesn’t sting at all.

“Lavender,” Krow says.

I look up from my hands.

“That’s what this is,” she says. “Back in the 1930’s, I don’t know the exact year, a French chemist named Rene Maurice Gattefosse. I’m probably not saying his name right. Well, he burned his hand and stuck it into the fluid closest to him, which happened to be a bowl of lavender oil. It healed him fast, and there wasn’t any scarring.”

“Interesting.”

She screws the eyedropper, which also acts as a lid, back onto the tiny vial. She adds this vial to her velvety box of vials, and slides it under her bed, between her feet.

“Thanks for helping out back there, by the way.” She says this like I paid for her meal after she discovered she forgot her wallet. Purse.

The moments play in my head, over and over, like a broken record that’s stuttering your favorite part of your favorite song, so you leave it on for a while. Honestly, I’m not aiming for his mouth. But I’m drunk, and I’m no fighter. Pumpkin Head falls back, the way a tipped cow might, or a maoi statue in a tsunami. I imagine his pumpkin head cracking open on the road, spilling out all the gooey orange seediness. Luckily, that part doesn’t happen.

“I know it seems like that guy was after me,” Krow says. “But the truth is, he was after you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I smelled him. He may have grabbed my breasts, but he wasn’t horny. He was looking for a fight.”

“Really.”

“It happens in bars all the time. Some guy wants the crap beat out of him, so he acts like an asshole. Feeling guilty about something. Hence the macho penitence.”

Thanks to him, I feel a little courageous. Tomorrow when he apologizes, I even feel a little respected.

“And you can really tell all that by sniffing the guy?” I say.

“You could too, after a couple intramuscular shots of Vitamin A. After that, you’re a bloodhound. Or at least a woman. Women can smell circles around men. Humans, I’m talking about now.”

“I figured.”

She crosses her legs. Her knees hang off the side of the bed, and I’m afraid she’s going to fall forward, but she doesn’t. Instead, she says, “So, you want me to do a reading?”

“Reading?”

“Let me sniff your armpit and I’ll tell you your future.”

“So you’re some kind of smell psychic, is that it?”

She grins. “Okay, I can’t tell you your future, but I can tell you what you’re feeling. What you’re thinking about. What you need.”

“Right,” I say, or maybe I just make a face that says it.

“It’s not so strange, you know. You realize, there isn’t a single thing in the world that gives off a smell. Things give off molecules that our minds interpret as smells. So why not analyze these interpretations?”

I raise my arm in defeat.

She leans in close, where her nose tickles my oasis of hairs. She smells like flowers, and she smells me, with a deep, slow breath. Afterward, she doesn’t vomit or even cough, the way I would.

“Well?”

Her eyes closed, she keep breathing careful, as if meditating. Maybe she is. Without opening her eyes, she says, “You smell…normal. Mostly.”

“What does that mean?”

She shrugs and her eyelids split. “Most guys I’ve smelled smell the way you do. But there is something else. It’s faint.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It’s something I’ve never smelled before. I don’t want to alarm you, but, the smell, it’s unnatural. If you’re sick, it’s no sickness I’ve ever smelled.”

“Are you messing with me?”

“I’m not, but.” She shakes her head, black hairs sweeping her face, though it’s already clean. “Forget about it. It’s just a smell.”

I know she doesn’t mean that. Scent is her occupation. Her expertise. Her life. But I say, “Yeah.”

On the way back to my room, I picture a dictionary in Mrs. Royal’s library, and on page 728, between Johnsonian and Johnson noise, there it is in bold black letters: Johnsonitis. And maybe by the time that dictionary goes public, I’m already dead. I’m buried in my oversized tailor-made coffin, because my head’s mutated and looks like a maoi. I don’t decompose the way dead bodies should, because no maggots or bacteria or any living thing will touch me. They know to stay away, because of my smell. It turns out, the archaeologists, in their child-in-a-sandbox glee, dug up an airborne virus that only holds disco parties in certain people, like the rare Bernard Johnson.

But there’s no way the abnormal stench emanating from my pits means that I’m unique. Once my body slithers under the covers of my tight motel bed, my automated hand pecks at the pill bottle on the nightstand. I’m not special. I’m a diseased human animal like any other. Diagnosed with depression. Lost in routine.

Empty.

And maybe, just maybe, we don’t want to know why.

Part 4

We’re sitting across from each other at the little kid table, me in a carved-out-apple of chair, her, an orange.

“You looked it all up, right?” Aubrey says. “Everything I told you about Easter Island and the Rapanui and everything, you looked it up?”

“I asked Jack,” I say.

“And?”

“It checks out.”

She smiles, and unlike most people, the act doesn’t make her look any prettier. “I’m totally curious. How exactly are you rationalizing this whole you-me experience?”

I shrug. “At some point I must’ve read everything that you told me.”

“Interesting theory.” She pops a zit on her cheek and the missile lands on mine. “But it’s a stupid one and you know it. You feel it.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

With gnawed fingernails, she wrestles a little white worm out of the already-popped blemish. “Have you considered the idea that you might be going nuts?”

I’m not crazy and I tell her that.

She laughs in annoying honks, like cousin Sara. “That’s way typical. It doesn’t matter what happens here, ‘cause as long as it’s a dream, you’re not crazy.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“Of course not. We, like, get to decide what’s crazy and what isn’t, don’t we? A guy who hears voices in his head, he’s crazy, but a guy who reads books and hears the voices in his head, he’s not crazy. Think you know what God’s thinking, you’re crazy. Think you know what God’s thinking and get enough people to believe you, you’re not. It’s all so clear and so convenient.”

So yeah, I don’t believe my own excuse about reading all her tidbits of information beforehand. But I’m not fucking crazy. After a long pause, which may last hours in real time, hell if I know, I say, “Are you a ghost?”

“Ghost?” She looks at me sideways with those bulging eyes. “I thought Americans don’t, like, believe in ghosts.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“You want an answer? Okay, we don’t believe in ghosts because that would mean our deep dark secrets aren’t really deep dark secrets at all. And we don’t believe in ghosts because that would mean all the terrible things we do to each other, there’s no point to it. And we don’t believe in ghosts because if we did, we wouldn’t be so afraid of life. And if we’re not fearful creatures, then no one could use that fear against us.”

I watch her pick at a mole on her neck. I say, “If you won’t tell me what you are, at least tell me why you’re doing this.”

“Hmm. There are, like, a lot of answers to that question. If you play your cards right…or wrong, depending on how you choose to look at it, one day you’ll get some of those answers. But right now, I really just want to give you one. So the answer to your question is, I’m talking to you because I like talking to you. Where I am, it’s easy to get lonely. And homesick.”

The mole starts to bleed.

“Are you really my sister?”

“For now.”

Spend a month in New Zealand, kayaking, surfing, sand dune riding, mounting biking, white water rafting, bungee jumping, skydiving, horse riding, jet boating, hot air ballooning, paragliding, sandboarding, snorkeling with seals, hiking through ancient rainforest and glaciers, vineyard touring (engendered adventurous with the inevitable sampling of the merchandise), and then try to sit still on a plastic tarp splattered with cherry blossom at a festival in Ueno Park, Tokyo that Jack calls Sakura Matsuri. Your body feels like a soda can in a paint shaker without a diabetic finger nearby to pull your tab. But you don’t want to be pulled. You like how you feel.

And how you don’t.

Krow collects fallen petals onto her palm, gentle, the way you’d pick up broken glass. Once she’s happy with the mound, she brings them close to her orange nose and inhales. Yeah, she’s orange now, imitating a not-so-popular fashion style in Tokyo called Ganguro. White streaks circle her mouth and eyes, and she wears a blond wig. None of this surprises me. In New Zealand she wore a flax dress with shark-tooth earrings, and Maori tattoos decorated the right side of her face. The right side, she told me, would traditionally represent her mother’s history. The left, the father.

I take another bite of raw tuna or octopus or lobster penis, doesn’t really matter anymore. I’m a fucking adventurer.

“Jack said there are more than a thousand trees here,” Krow says. “But their scent’s overpowered by the venders and their fish. I have a funny feeling the blossoms are yet another excuse for people to get together and party.”

Maybe too quiet for her to hear, I say, “A beautiful excuse.” And at this point, I don’t think I’m talking about the flowers.

“If you want to hold onto these experiences, you should smell everything you can.” She holds out the pile of petals and I indulge. “Out of all the sensory memories, odor lasts the longest. Smells can help you recall memories that you might not otherwise remember. It’s called the Proust Effect. Oh, and years ago, scientists conducted an experiment on human subjects where they injected the volunteers with insulin while they smelled a specific odor. Like you’d expect, their blood glucose level dropped. But then, days later, they just smelled the odor without the injection, and their blood glucose level still dropped.”

“Krow.” I smile. “You already told me all this. In New Zealand.”

“I thought I only thought about telling you.”

“No, you told me on the plane, when we were waiting our turn. Remember? I asked why you were plugging your nose, and you said you didn’t want any odor associations with what you expected to be the most horrible experience of your life.”

“Humans aren’t meant to fall through the sky like that.”

“We’re not meant to ride waves either, but you seemed to enjoy that part of the trip.”

“Fine. Be mean and point out my hypocrisies. I hope it makes you feel good about yourself.”

“It does.”

She laughs at me, but not the way Marvin Blackrow would. “Did I ever tell you that people who lose their sense of smell tend to suffer from depression?”

I nod. “On the plane ride here.”

“What about the fact that most astronauts lose their sense of smell? There’s more capillary pressure when a heart doesn’t have to fight against gravity, so their sinuses are flooded with fluid.”

I nod. “In the rainforest.”

She sighs. “Alright, I’ve got something new.” The pinkish white canopy above filters the sunset onto her face. And the red-tailed paper lanterns, strung from tree to tree, light up in multicolored stripes. Suffice it to say, she’s no longer orange.

She’s so much more.

“My mom died a few years ago,” she says, propped back against her elbows. I’m afraid they’re going to slip on the petal-coated plastic, but they don’t. “She left her house to her church, but I was allowed to take whatever I wanted first. And, looking through her things, I found an old perfume bottle. The moment I sprayed it, all these memories gushed up inside me. Happy memories, of me, dressing up in my mom’s shoes and blouses and church clothes. But, to me, it didn’t feel like dressing up. It felt real. And I felt more content in those childhood memories than I’d ever felt as an adult. That’s when I decided to stop lying to myself. So I got the surgeries.”