The Golden State: A Novel Page 13

  I pause in the anteroom with the little piano and put my back against the wall by the door, out of sight of the main dining room, and slump, a slump that translates itself to Honey, who puts her head on my shoulder and her injured paw on my other shoulder and inspects her new appendage. I smell her hair which has its puppy smell and then put her down to pack away my wallet her diaper shit and prepare us for maximum efficient travel on foot.

  I carry her out the door down the concrete steps and into a vast lavender sky and hot dry air that saps the remaining vitality I had counted on to carry us home. We walk through the parking lot and stop at the road while a truck barrels past. My heart suddenly starts pounding. I picture myself and Honey under the wheels of the truck, all her bright red blood outside of her body, her limbs mangled, and start crying. She puts her hand on my face with her toilet paper mitten and I walk fast, nearing a run as we pass the railroad tracks. My arms are beginning to falter as we round the circle toward the house and I’m gasping for the last twenty-five yards and then finally we are inside and I’ve illuminated every lamp before I realize neither of us has eaten anything. After debating with myself for three minutes about how best to approach the wound I find Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet and steel my entire body and wet the toilet paper and ease it off, during which Honey screams, and more blood oozes. I wipe the flap with a Betadine wipe and she screams more and starts wiping the finger on my chest again, and the blood streams. “I can’t fucking do this again,” I say to the empty room, to no one. We go to the sink and wash the finger again, and she cries. But then, miracle, as though she’s already grasped the basics of what needs to happen, she actually holds out her finger for me to look at and wipe with some gauze and dab on some cream and more or less wrap a Band-Aid around it. What a smart baby. I put Saran Wrap around the mitt and affix it with a tiny strip of Scotch tape. I fix scrambled eggs. I cut an apple. Honey, smart baby, knows to eat with her other hand.

  I give her a warm washcloth bath and take the Saran Wrap off. I hold her tight and we read The Little Blue Truck, which is about a truck that stops to help a mean dump truck when a bunch of farm animals leave the truck stranded in some mud. “This is not a good message,” I tell Honey. “Really we should help people even if they don’t deserve it.” That’s what Little Blue Truck was doing; whether the farm animals absorbed this lesson or not is unclear. But maybe Little Blue was just helping a fellow truck. I put her in the Pack ’n Play. I go on the porch to smoke a cigarette and remember for probably the third time today that I am married.

  Honey looks so much like Engin, came out looking so much like him in the way that children are said to resemble their fathers for troubling evolutionary reasons. And even though I carried Honey and gave birth to her and nursed her and pour my life into her sometimes I look at her beautiful small face and wonder if I’m her mother. Then I try and feel for one moment what it would feel to be almost seven thousand miles away from her and I wonder that Engin has not boarded a plane and fought his way through a battalion of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers to be with her and a fury settles like a cloud of horseflies on the image of his face before I think this is a horribly unfair thought to have.

  Here are the ways I have imagined Honey dying: she stands up on a chair and the chair tips back and crashes through the window and the glass shatters and pierces her throat. She stands up on a chair and the chair tips back and crashes through the window and she falls two stories and shatters on the pavement. She darts out into the street like a panicked cat and gets crushed by a bus. She strangles in the blind cords. We fly to Turkey and someone blows a hole in the fuselage or the pilot reaches the nadir of a years-long spiritual torment and drives the plane into a mountainside or the pitot tubes freeze up and the inexperienced pilot who knows something is wrong is overruled by his imperious boss who was in the bathroom and has no idea what the fuck is going on but always has to have the last word and the plane speeds into the ocean. I give her a tortilla and she folds it up and crams it into her mouth all at once and stops breathing. The ceiling fan comes loose from its 1920s moorings and crushes her skull while she eats breakfast. We visit my father-in-law and he doesn’t pay attention and she is swept away by the sea. We go anywhere and I don’t pay attention and someone spirits her away. I go to work and forget to bring her to daycare and she roams the house screaming until she falls down the stairs and breaks her neck. I go to work and the Big One hits and I can’t get home to her and she dies in the wreckage of her daycare with all the other babies. We go to Istanbul and some demented widow from Dagestan blows herself up and Honey is scattered across the pavement. We stay here and she goes to school and some demented teen takes his dipshit mother’s unsecured assault rifle and fires rounds and rounds of bullets into her body and her classmates’ bodies. She rides a bus across Bulgaria and the bus veers off the road and flies into a concrete barrier. Her cells suddenly decide to murder her with mad replication. She gets in a taxi outside of Diyarbakır and a van crosses the median. Why did I have a child? To have a child is to court loss.

  DAY 6     For some reason I wake up on my own at 5:00 a.m. exhausted but alert. I go in the closet and look at Honey who is sleeping peacefully with her hand over her head, the Band-Aid brown with dried blood, and I go onto the porch with a cigarette. It is a breathtaking Paiute morning, the air is so cool, so thin that the call of a bird or a human voice would carry the hundred miles to the place where the mountains rise out of the plains. The sky is streaked with pink and the smell of juniper is tempered with some other freshness, some hint of a cooler season to come. There are three deer in Cindy’s yard, picking their legs through the damp grass with grace that belies their witless expressions. I sit for a minute and feel the whole-body feeling of place-love, and the smoke from my cigarette lingers discreetly in the morning air.

  But then I come back to earth and it is Monday and obvious that I am going to have to do something regarding my place of work and explaining why I am not at it, in addition to my potentially lost income of $69,500 which is my family’s primary income. What is interesting is that under normal circumstances examining our finances and being hyperaware of every sum available to us is one of my primary interests and hobbies in life but in the past six days I have assiduously avoided thinking about it at all, namely the fact that $1,700 is due for our apartment and $1,100 for daycare, both of which are far below the market rate and contingent on the health and/or goodwill of the price-setters, which could change at any moment, and if we go to Turkey after all or Engin makes his way back here that will be $900 for the plane ticket if we are lucky which will have to go on the credit card. I lug out the laptop and log on to the banking portal and take stock which is $268 in checking with $176 available after two nights at the Golden Spike.

  It is nearing the end of the month and I can assume that the University has not gotten wise to my job abandonment and thus that my full monthly salary is forthcoming on the first which after my mandatory retirement contribution taxes healthcare will be $3,316 which after daycare and rent leaves $516 which is never quite enough for phones and utilities and the food we are all three eating on two different continents and hopefully Engin will get one of his periodic but not totally reliable payments from Tolga et al. And there is the mobile home obviously with its current list price of $80,000 down from $99,900 but it’s not something to bank on although Christ that would be a windfall. I read in the news that some huge percentage of Americans can’t find $400 in an emergency so in the grand scheme of things we are really doing astonishingly well, a thought that both bolsters me at the intimate nuclear family level but demoralizes me at the citizenship human family level. I’d wager some huger percentage of Altavista residents can’t cobble together $400 but then again Cindy Cooper owns her own mobile home and goes to the Golden Spike every Sunday for $4 Picon punch with her lover so maybe she’s sitting pretty, who knows.

  It occurs to me now in full force that if I do in fact abandon my j
ob I will lose my gold-plated university health insurance and I conservatively estimate that whatever alternate mechanism I take advantage of if I do not resume the job will be $700 per month if we stay here, and what if one of my dire nighttime imaginings comes true, what if we are sickened or maimed, what then?

  I look at the Institute e-mail and see 165 unread e-mails which is actually better than I expected, it is 5:32 a.m. and I could conceivably read through all of these before Honey wakes up. I have the brief and insane idea that I could just work “from home” here in Altavista and not have to pay rent in the City but there are several reasons why that won’t work one being that Hugo would never allow it, he likes to have as many attractive and competent women bustling around his person as possible, and I’m still highly competent at least and Hugo assures me in his ludicrously inappropriate way that I will return to myself as long as I don’t have any other children. Two being Internet which is needed in order to access the VPN that will get me on the network drives. The final and most important thing is Honey because I obviously can’t sit in front of the computer while she just rolls around on the floor all day, although I often stare at my phone while she rolls around the floor. If I am going to work anyway and Honey is not going to have my attention she may as well go back to daycare and I may as well go back to the office and we may as well wash all the bedding and fold it up and sweep the floor and mop it and vacuum the carpet and make Grandma and Grandpa’s bed and tape some cardboard over the soft place on the bathroom windowsill and turn down the thermostat and set the timer on the lights and lock and close the doors behind us.

  Or we could go somewhere else. There is something almost sexually pleasing about this thought. I could take thirty-five dollars from the checking and go to Joie de Vivre which is the town’s sole beauty establishment and have my hair washed and blown out and I could moisturize my face with the ancient cold cream in the bathroom cabinet and iron my white blouse and put on Grandma’s jet-black fur coat from Gray Reid’s in Reno circa 1972 and put Honey in her overalls and we could polish up the Buick and hit the road and go somewhere where we will step out and really be somebody.

  I am feeling deeply criminal about my absence from work but the truth according to my lizard brain is that it is nearly impossible to be fired from the University, I mean various Vice Provosts are always groping their colleagues and it takes years before any action is taken. Moreover Hugo and Meredith are so divorced from the Deep Administrative State, HR and Purchasing and so forth—a sort of parallel army of administrators with less education who all the specialized administrators like ourselves loathe and condescend to—and since both Hugo and Meredith often contravene every employment rule by having me fill out their HR paperwork for raises promotions etc., not to mention my own performance evaluations, it’s highly unlikely they could get it together to file the piece of paper that would for example inform Payroll that I was gone.

  When I think about all this some muscle in the exact center of my body constricts. I do not want to fill out any more paperwork of any kind. I do not want to be referred to as Assistant in anyone’s e-mail. I do not want to look at the CV of a stranger and google them and write a letter of recommendation based on this information and sign someone else’s name to it, someone who has known this person and read their papers and met with them privately and in classroom settings for seven years. I do not want to deal with THE CONFERENCE for weeks culminating in having to stand in front of a room full of people sweating trying to make someone’s PowerPoint work because they didn’t let anyone know in advance that they needed audio. I cannot manage both my own sense of being over- and underutilized and that of Karen who shares my every grievance but makes 40 percent less money. I cannot hear Brad our central campus fundraising guy exclaim “Salam Alaikum” with his arms flung open in wide embrace whenever a rich Muslim visits the Institute. I cannot escort the Al-Ihsan guy around the campus with his hand on my elbow. Crucially, I cannot go in and meet with the Office of Risk Management to give my testimony regarding the Simpson and Khoury families’ pending litigation regarding the taxi to the Fidanlik Park refugee camp outside of Diyarbakır. Another brain, not the lizard, tells me that this last one is the one thing that I actually have to do.

  It is already 7:15 when I have done a rough inventory of e-mails and Honey will coo any minute so I go inside and wash my hands and slice a banana into very exact half-inch slices and get out two eggs, so many eggs we are eating, too many eggs, and fly around the house picking things up. We didn’t bring very much stuff up here but what we did bring has multiplied in the way of children’s things and there are single socks and stuffed animals I don’t even remember packing and books and the ubiquitous halves of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and the many bibs and wipes I use to wipe her nose which is always runny but which the pediatrician assures me is no cause for concern.

  She wakes. Breakfast. Change the dressing of her finger, a circumstance to which she has already adjusted, the lamb.

  Every time I get used to something with Honey it changes, which I am told by BabyCenter is normal, so I do not have a real sense of when her naptime is anymore—it used to be very regular back when she had two, but now I don’t really know if she has two still or wants to have them. Sometimes I put her in and she talks to herself for an hour and sleeps for thirty minutes and sometimes she sleeps for three hours. I don’t know. On our morning walk to Sal’s I put her in the Ergo frontways, she’s almost too big for this configuration and dangles off me like an overgrown appendage but I love carrying her like this, I feel so secure with her right on my front, and she rubs her eyes and rubs her eyes and yawns and looks grumpily drunkenly up at me and by the time we arrive at the hotel she has actually gone to sleep. I don’t want to deny her or myself this bonus nap so I wonder if I sit gingerly I might open the computer and see if I can’t answer one of the 165 e-mails. The crone is not yet here, only a tidy-looking man who looks exactly like my uncle Rodney with a beard and a tucked-in T-shirt and cell phone holster and definitely a gun somewhere, reading the paper and eating a muffin. I order coffee and a glass of water.

  My phone buzzes to life in the Wi-Fi enabled sanctuary. Daycare writes to me on WeChat. “We were worried about Honey,” she says, and I feel a pulse of shame so strong I worry it will wake the sleeping baby in her pouch. “I’m so sorry,” I type. “She is fine. We went on a trip to my grandparents. We will be back hopefully next week,” I say, which I hope is true. “Please do not worry, she is fine.” She sends me an emoji of a cat holding a rose and a checkmark that says “OK.”

  I decide to address Meredith and Hugo. I find the last of each of their e-mails and see something from Hugo about can I deal with getting his honorarium expedited from someplace where he went to give a lecture about Casualties of Capital which is not my job but Karen is on vacation. “Dear Meredith and Hugo,” I write. “I want to apologize for my absence of the last few days—Honey and I have been ill and now to compound this my grandmother is also very ill, so we are in her hometown trying to sort out her medical situation. There isn’t reliable Internet so I have been a little out of reach. I will of course be taking these days as sick time but will check over my e-mail and take care of anything that is urgent. Please let me know if either of you need anything at all.” I hope Karen is having a nice vacation from constantly upgrading Hugo’s flights against all state and institutional regulations and fighting to get justification signatures from the relevant authorities after the fact.

  I think the lie will fly—I have never to my knowledge mentioned the deadness of my grandparents and in fact Hugo has already written back. “Take as much time as you need” and I feel an embarrassing surge of gratitude and shame. They are actually always very nice and accommodating to me. Then I just feel relieved about my reprieve, as though I have already absorbed my right to this caretaking time for a grandmother who has in fact been dead for years. When my grandmother actually died it was a relief because she had been married to my grandfather fo
r almost sixty years and when he died it was obvious she had no reason to go on. The thought of Engin and me being married for sixty years and dying of grief at the other’s passing seems vanishingly small but I close my eyes for a moment and try to picture it, we are in our stone shack by the Aegean, Honey is there, she has a family, is her family Turkish? Is she? Do we have any other kids? I open my eyes, momentarily overwhelmed. Better to just picture an ancient version of Engin and me on a bench under an olive tree not saying anything at all. I briefly picture us on the couch in the mobile home and then I’m done daydreaming for the time being. I put my chin gently on the top of Honey’s head for a moment and give her hair a sniff.

  The crone has come! She scoots the door open with one whole side of her body and is in by the time I make a half-hearted move to stand up and get it for her. She takes one very slow step at a time, holding a cane before her. Her back is ramrod straight, and she is very petite and wearing a white turtleneck and a navy skirt and white Reeboks with an ample sole. I am transfixed by her but when she reaches the table next to us I snap from the reverie and half-stand and pull a seat out for her. “The little one is sleeping,” she observes. “Normally she’s squirming around.” This seems like a promising acknowledgment of our past interactions. She goes up to the counter and orders something and shuffles back and sits down. “How old is she?” “Sixteen months last week,” I say very brightly. “Sweet little Turkish baby,” she says. “Well,” I say. “Half Turkish, half Californian!” She sits down at the table next to the one where I’m standing and I seat myself taking care not to jostle Honey who is still doing her little-big baby snores in my chest.