All This Life (4 page)

Things happen, she tells herself, heartbeat cranking, the hum in her hands getting more volts running into them.

She puts on her uniform. She can't be late, otherwise why not call in sick? Moses will be equally pissed, late or a no-show.

She gets in her car and motors down the cul-de-sac; it's not a dirt road, but its pavement has seen better days, charred by the sun and badly creviced. There are about twenty houses, all cinderblock palaces, topped with metal roofs. Front yards are mixtures of scrub brush and cacti, sand and dirt and rocks. The occasional yucca stands up above the rest like a celebrity.

She speeds down the block, notices a couple hillbillies sitting in their yard, tying lures on their fishing poles. She has her music pinned and is driving a little fast and her heart should really slow down, yes, it doesn't need to beat so many times a minute, please calm down.

She pulls into the diner's parking lot. She sits there. She notices that she's breathing, which is something everybody does all the time but you don't necessarily realize you're doing it, you breathe—that's what you do—that's how people stay alive, and what the hell is she going to tell her brother, Hank, about the sex tape and why the hell did Nat do this in the first place and she should have listened to Kristine's public service announcement, sexting with monsters is dangerous. Sexting with monsters can kill you.

Her palms pour sweat and she wipes them on her black pants and hears something coming from outside the car. It's knocking. Someone is knocking on her window, and someone is knocking
on her hands from the inside, a tiny little pirate trapped in there looking for treasure.

Sara looks up and sees Moses standing by the driver's side, pantomiming for her to roll down the window.

In her purse, her phone vibrates and vibrates and vibrates, and actually that's what her hands and feet feel like, cells set to vibrate.

Every new message about Nat, the sex tape.

Every new message about the end of her life.

She obliges Moses, cranks the window down.

“I don't need you today,” he says.

“I'm on the schedule.”

“I have to suspend you.”

She shields her eyes and looks up at him for the first time: “You can't.”

“I can do whatever I want.”

“Isn't that discrimination?”

“Call the ACLU.”

“When can I come back?”

“This is a small town, Sara. Let's let this blow over a bit.”

Her phone vibrates again. So do her hands and feet.

“I need tips,” says Sara.

“I'll call when we're clear.”

“That doesn't help me with money.”

“I'm not firing you,” Moses says, walking away, ending the conversation whether Sara has more to add or not.

She speeds off toward home. Cranks the stereo. Driving way too fast. For the first time since she found out about the sex tape, she cries. She's stupid, so predictably stupid, and what's she supposed to do with this anguish barreling through her?

Twitching, malicious thoughts race around Sara, and an unequaled loneliness swells and crests and crashes, crushing her down. She's hyperventilating. She needs to get home. She needs to
be alone. She might be dying. This might be a heart attack, an aneurysm, a stroke. She needs to be in her room with its cinderblocks.

She turns onto her street. So close. So almost there. Still speeding. Still crying. Still listening to rock and roll at the top of the stereo's lungs.

She'd seen a couple of her neighbors tying lures on before, but now one's in the road, practicing fly-fishing casts, whipping arm sends his line bouncing on the damaged asphalt. Sara slams on the brakes, barely misses hitting him. Here he comes up to her window and kicks her car, the side mirror flying off.

Of course this is happening
, she thinks.

Things keep happening.

It's not even noon and now she must indulge in one more meanness.

The sun is almost to its apex, baking the street, the town.

Sara gets out of the car.

3.

E
verybody calls him Balloon Boy. Started calling him that once he fell from the skies. Once he went thump-splat ouch. From that moment on, his real name Rodney was retired, and Balloon Boy was born. Or that's how he thinks of it, there being two of him: In his head, all the words compose themselves like a hip-hop MC delighting audiences with a nimble tongue, wild rhyming schemes. Maybe a TV minister auctioning off salvation at mach speed. But when Rodney's perfectly composed thoughts try to cross that threshold and make it out of his mouth, things malfunction. Reduced to speaking in monosyllables.

Reduced to being Balloon Boy.

Today is his eighteenth birthday, and he wakes up feeling ripe for adventure and for a few minutes it feels possible. Somebody like him can be summoned to greatness. Someone like Balloon Boy can do something extraordinary! Just because of his accident, just because he's lost that connection between the life transpiring in his head—one crackling with consonants, one unctuous with chewy vowels—it doesn't have to be a death sentence. It doesn't have to be poor Balloon Boy
being
his condition. That's not all he is. Because
if in fact he's poised, ready to be summoned to greatness, that won't happen if he's feeling sorry for himself, if he's mired in a poor-me soup, swimming in it. No, this is a time to feel optimistic, to charge into his adulthood. There will always be a harsh disconnect between what people see—Balloon Boy, the name he detests—and the inner life of Rodney, the diatribes and monologues lobbed eloquently around his skull. It's like a crowded theater in his head and he stands alone on stage, reciting Shakespeare, getting all the accents and rhythms right. He might not be able to articulate this, might falter trying to share with someone how he's giving a topnotch soliloquy in the amphitheatre of his consciousness, so don't go thinking that because his actual out-loud talking is garbled there's only mud thrumming in his mind.

He's eighteen now and can join the military, can go anywhere without needing any consent except his own. He is his destiny and nothing as silly as a broken mouth will stop him.

He stokes these calls to arms, these fantasies with his eyes closed, lounging in bed, imagining distant lands filled with beautiful women who actually like listening to him speak, who think it's sexy how he takes his time delivering every sound. They don't get frustrated with him. They don't badger him.

All these possibilities disappear when a booming knock smacks through his plywood door, these declarations and illusions that had thrived in his solitude now scatter like bugs, once Uncle Felix shakes the meager door with his anger and enthusiasm, saying, “Hey, it's fish o'clock.”

“No,” Balloon Boy says, and six seconds later adds, “thanks.”

With open eyes and a gruff uncle making too much noise, the reality of Traurig hits him like the heat outside.

Rodney sighs deeply, wipes his eyes. Each day always starts with the same action: looking at the picture on his bedside table, the shot of him and his mom on horseback, taken when he was ten years old, before the thump-splat ouch, before she ran away. The shot is taken
head-on: Rodney sitting in front of his mother, all of their faces lined up in a row—horse, boy, mother.

The day she left for good, she tucked this picture under his pillow, and he's come to think of it as a love letter, a last letter, an explanation, her way of saying she's sorry and she still cares for him, even in her absence. Yes, sometimes letters don't have words; sometimes the image tells you everything.

Yet some do have words: There is one other picture that Rodney has from his mom, a postcard. He keeps it tucked between his box spring and mattress. He had received it a few weeks after she left. It's of the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny day. On it, his mom has written, “Some day, I will tell you everything.” He likes reading the message, but what he adores examining is the return address, chiseled into his memory. He has no idea if she's still there but at least it's a way to start.

More knocking from Felix, the plywood barely standing up to his knuckles.

“You can't skip, not even on your birthday. I let you sleep in,” says his uncle, “but fish wait for no man.”

“Five,” says Rodney, “more, min, utes.”

“No more minutes. Fish beckon us. They challenge us. There's a fight to be had, and we will not lose.”

“Oh,” Rodney says, “kay.”

Balloon Boy knows it's not worth pointing out that there aren't any fish waiting outside, not even a body of water by their house, doesn't feel compelled to point out that they're going to cast their lines in the street. But the facts won't help him win. Nothing can. Uncle Felix will not accept any excuses, any logic, and so Rodney sighs and rises, bemoaning this beginning to his birthday. It's not as though he was expecting anyone to deliver an ice cream cake to his room, leave him with a spoon to gulp down the whole thing in peace. It's not as though his dad and uncle are the kinds of people to barge in his room with a pitch pipe, get that perfect starting note and regale
him with a harmonized version of “Happy Birthday” while wearing those little coned hats, blowing into kazoos as the song concluded, but did his first day as an adult have to start with
fish o'clock
?

“Today we may catch Moby-Dick,” says Felix, pounding a couple last times before walking away, calling to his nephew while marching down the hall. “Let's snare the white whale!”

Rodney gets out of bed, stumbles over to his dresser. Damn does he wish for central air conditioning. They do have a swamp cooler, but it only pumps its chilly air into the living room. The bedrooms, mere cinderblock squares, are like jail cells. That's another reminder of his mom in his room—the way they painted the cinderblock walls like a chessboard, alternating black and white. “Let's make your room look like Alice in Wonderland,” his mom had said, and they spent a weekend taping each cinderblock off, making sure they did an impeccable job.

Now, though, some of the black paint has peeled off; he'll find chips of it on his concrete floor, withered by the sun, the flecks looking like dead flies.

Rodney dresses, shorts and a tank top, no shoes, and starts walking toward the front yard, to watch the catch and release of the street fish.

He stops in the front yard, which is only sand and dirt and scrub brush, a little dune in the middle where his dad, Larry, stands, king of his sad hill. Rodney climbs the two-step dune and says, “Hi.”

Larry, clutching a whiskey bottle, says, “How are you?”

How am I?,
thinks Balloon Boy.
I'm a year older. I'm ready to celebrate. Ready to break out.

But what he says is “Fine.”

“You wanna cast after Felix?” asks Larry, pointing at his brother. Uncle Felix is in the middle of the street, like he's knee deep in a stream, expecting a trout to nibble any second.

“Asphalt practice is better than nothing,” says Uncle Felix, but it's unclear who he's talking to.

“Want a plug, son?” says Rodney's dad, shaking the whiskey bottle.

“No,” he says.

“Not even on your birthday?”

Oh, so he does remember.

“No,” Rodney says again.

“More for me,” his dad says, getting a good buzz on top of his tiny dune.

“And me,” Uncle Felix says, tossing another cast. “Fishermen have an unquenchable thirst.”

Larry admires the cast with a whistle, then says, “Gotta pay our respects to the brass band,” taking an honoring sip.

“Don't distract me talking about them crazies,” Uncle Felix says. “A fisherman needs to keep his focus. He has to keep his mind submerged under the water trailing all those schools of fish.”

Sara comes speeding up the road, all vengeance and vinegar. From where Larry and Rodney stand, she misses Uncle Felix by a few feet, her car skidding to a stop.

Balloon Boy wants to say something to Sara, ask if she's okay because she looks distressed. But he thinks better of it. Seeing Sara is hard. Reminds him of all he lost after the thump-splat ouch. They used to be best friends, Sara and Rodney, kissing sweethearts from back in eighth grade. Back before the balloon went up with him as a stowaway. After his accident, Sara stopped coming around much, which makes Rodney wonder if he's wrong—maybe there's not two of him, his true self surrounded by a shell of Balloon Boy. No, he might simply be the one the world interacts with, might simply endure a life trapped away from all he loves. It's like living behind a window that's been painted shut. No one can hear his true self from the outside. The Shakespeare actor, the MC, the minister, the boy on the horse. Nobody knows that there's more in him, that there's honor and the ability to love and thrive. But how can he help strangers see these things when he can't even talk?

Uncle Felix storms toward Sara's car, lifting his boot and kicking her side mirror, which goes flying, and he says, “Are you crazy, driving like that?”