Blazed (5 page)

After I put my camera away, I throw my headphones back in and play the M83 album
Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
. If I could play one album on a twenty-four-hour loop from some invisible speakers in the sky, it would be this one.

There was this one afternoon where me and that girl, that bitch, sat next to each other on a swing set and ate ice cream cones.

She told me that she wished her parents had named her Emma, and I asked her why.

“It's so beautiful,” she told me. “When you hear that name, all you can think of is how lovely and pretty that girl must be, and I don't feel very pretty even though everyone says I am. I never have, Jaime. So I've always wanted the prettiest name in the world. That way, when boys and girls heard it, they'd get an image of this girl with a pretty face and an amazing smile.”

“Maybe you should ask your parents to change it.”

She smiled and licked her ice cream. “I don't want to ask.”

“Why not?”

“Cos I'll never be Emma,” she said. “And that's fine. Just daydreaming about it is wonderful. And I'd never want to ruin those daydreams by having them become real. When you lose your daydreams, you lose the only place you have where life can actually be perfect.”

What she said that day, it still makes more sense to me than almost anything else I've ever heard anyone say.

I told her she was pretty right after we were done with our ice cream.

She blushed and told me I was cute, then she put one earphone in my ear and one in hers and she played that National song “Slow Show” and grabbed my hand.

That was the first time we held hands, and my palm was sweating so badly.

THE HOUSE IS STILL AND
silent. It's unnerving. Everything is the same as when I left it this morning, except in the kitchen. On one of the counters are four bottles of pills—Oxy, Vicodin, Xanax, and Valium—and at least forty of them are scattered together in a big pile.

I call for my mother over and over and over, but she never answers.

The way the natural light is pouring in through the windows would be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen if not for the unsettling feeling looming over the house.

I set my backpack down.

I look over the pills and I pick out an Oxy. Then I turn on the sink faucet, fill my cupped hand with water, and wash the pill down.

I walk upstairs.

It's much darker up here.

The steps creak and moan.

I call her name again.

Wish the Oxy would just hit right now.

I want it so fucking bad. It makes you feel so happy.

I could be on a chain gang picking up trash in 120-degree weather, and if I was riding a wave of baby blue, I'd be so fucking happy stabbing pieces of garbage with a poker.

I could be hanging out with some dumb girl who's drunk on Fuzzy Navel wine coolers and playing me the worst songs ever. Songs from bands like Kings of Leon or that awful Gotye shit or Macklemore tunes. But if I've entered the glass castle, if I've dropped a blue dream down my throat, I'd have a big, fat, fucking smile on my face. I wouldn't cut her down the way she deserves to be cut down. The way anyone who gets into that bullshit deserves to be shredded and bled.

A cool draft blows through the silent hallway.

I call for my mother one more time.

Still nothing.

I turn the handle on her bedroom door and push it open.

I fall back a couple of steps. My body shakes.

Sprawled in the middle of the bed is my mother. My beautiful fucking mother.

And she's covered in vomit and blood.

Her eyes are closed.

There's a frown on her face.

Her face is white like the snow, and her hair is spread out underneath her. It looks so perfect too, the way she's lying, she looks like a wrecked angel.

She looks better than a wrecked angel.

She's wearing her ballet dress. The one she wore during her final run in New York when she was considered to be one of the finest talents.

I run to her.

I'm not even sure I feel anything.

I'm just moving.

I wrap my arms around her waist and pull her to me.

I'm cradling my mother like a baby. She's still warm. The blood and vomit are wet and gooey and stick to my skin. They smell like iron and whiskey and hate.

I shake her. “Just wake up!” I scream again and again and again.

Look around the room, there's pills everywhere. Three empty bottles of red wine and a half-empty bottle of vodka lie on the floor and the nightstand beside the bed.

“Mom!” I yell. “Please, wake up! Please.”

But there's nothing.

Tears slide down my face. I lay her back down and put my fingers against her neck.

Finally, I find a pulse.

It's light and weak but it's real.

I whip out my cell phone and call 911 and beg them to hurry.

“I can't lose her,” I tell the operator. “She's all I have. She's my best friend. We listen to records all the time together.”

The phone drops from my hand.

I'm so fucking confused and angry.

And then I see it. It's a note. It's lying on top of a pillow.

Reaching over my mother, I grab it and read.

I hate what I've become, Jaime. I'm so sorry for what I did to you last night. I hurt you so bad and then stood there as you lied to protect me. And I let you do it. I can't face you again after that. You were right. I think it's time you met your father. I love you so much. Don't ever forget that. I'm in a better place now. A place where I can't hurt you anymore. My baby boy, my life. I tried my best. I really did. But I'm not good for you. Please keep being amazing. I love you so much, and I know you'll take the world by storm. It's better that this ends now. I can't live with myself knowing I hurt the only reason I have to live. God, you are so much better than I'll ever be. Take care, my beautiful boy. I'll see you in the good place a long time from now. I'll be watching you always. . . .

Part of me thinks that this is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. The other part of me thinks it's the most pathetic thing I've ever read.

Either way, no one can ever see this letter. This was an accident. That's all. She just partied too much. I'll never let anyone find out she tried to kill herself, because if they do, they'll take me away from her, and I won't let that happen.

I rip the note into pieces, then run into the bathroom and flush them down the toilet.

After that, I sit down next to my mother. The first wave of baby blue crashes over me as I take out my iPhone and play New Order, which is my mother's favorite band of all time, while we wait for the ambulance to show up.

MY MOTHER DOESN'T DIE. HER
stomach gets pumped. She wakes up. She gets questioned. She gets sedated. Now she's resting peacefully in a room that I'm not allowed to enter.

So I sit in the waiting room and read Rimbaud's
A Season in Hell
(I grabbed it from my room while the paramedics were putting my mother on the stretcher) and listen to
The Year of Hibernation
on my headphones.

This album continues to help me and give me comfort.

And I've always felt this almost, like, spiritual connection to Rimbaud since the first time I read him.

I've read
A Season in Hell
at least eight times. The first time was when my mother was sleeping with this twenty-one-year-old girl named Simone.

Simone was majoring in English at the University of Saint Francis. The two of them, they'd do cocaine a lot. They smoked lots of pot, too. And drank tons of wine while they listened to records in the living room. My mother has always slept with women here as far back as I can remember, but I've never seen her as happy as she was with Simone.

I walked in on them once.

That was the last time I'd seen my mother in that same ballet dress.

Simone had my mother bent over the grand piano in our music study at our house. My mother's dress was hiked up to her waist while Simone fucked her.

They never saw me that day. My dick got hard. I hid behind the couch in the living room and slid my hand down my jeans.

Less than five seconds later, I came.

Guilt and embarrassment and shame immediately followed.

I ran out of the house and washed my hands off with a hose in our neighbor's yard. After that, I climbed a tree in a nearby park and sat there till it got dark. I don't remember what I thought about while I was up there, I just remember how calm and quiet it was there.

When I finally did go home, my mother was smoking a joint in her bathrobe and listening to the Magnetic Fields on vinyl. She didn't say much to me, but I knew she was happy.

I made a sandwich and ate it in my room.

Later that night, while my mother was asleep, I went downstairs and played two Sonic Youth records,
Daydream Nation
and
Washing Machine
, to practice guitar.

This is when I saw the book. It was sitting on the piano. The cover sucked me in. A black-and-white figure had its arms raised in the air, as if it was asking to be saved.

I opened it and began reading. I fell in love on the spot. And for the next two days, Rimbaud saved me from everything normal and boring I had to live through.

SO HERE'S THE DEAL, AND
it's a terrible one, it's absolute bullshit. The doctor who takes care of my mother in the ER tells me I won't be able to talk to my mother or see her at all tonight.

There's also a child welfare service representative and a cop standing on each side of him.

He says she's under way too much duress. And that she's confused and scared. And that she's too emotionally unstable right now, and that seeing me might push her back over the edge.

“You really think you pulled her back from it?” I ask.

“She's more stable now,” the doctor answers.

“What does that really mean?” I snap.

“She's still alive,” he says.

“But that's all,” I say. “Ya know.
That's
all.”

He stares awkwardly at me for a few seconds. And then moves on with the plan that all these other people, these adults who have never met me before today, came up with.

It turns out my mother won't be coming home anytime soon. After tomorrow, they're going to put her in the psychiatric ward for an eight-day evaluation.

Me and my mother, we don't have any living blood relatives in Joliet or the entire state of Illinois. My mother was an only child. Her parents died in a car accident when I was three, and me and her lived in Chicago at the time. She got everything in the will (they were really well off), so we moved into the house she grew up in about a month after their funerals.

She always wanted to be back in Joliet, but she couldn't handle the embarrassment and the stress of the ridicule she would've gotten from her mother if we'd moved back.

“She hated me for having you.” My mother told me this one morning when I was, like, four and woke up to find her watching a recording of her first lead performance in a ballet right after she moved to New York.

Right before she met my father and fell madly, insanely in love with him.

“The night I told her I was pregnant with you, she walked out of the restaurant where we were dining. Then she called me an idiot. She told me I'd never dance again.”

My mother paused. She looked over at me. Her eyes were filled with tears. And then she shook her head and looked at the floor. “She was right,” she whispered. “She was right about everything.”

Back to the waiting room now.

The doctor says, “Your father is coming here, Jaime. He'll be here in the morning to take you back to San Francisco while your mother is being evaluated.”

I'm pretty sure I'm fucking speechless for the first time ever in my life. My head gets all fuzzy. It feels like Mike Tyson just slammed a fist into my head.

I'm dizzy.

My chest tightens and my hands shake.

The child services rep steps in now.

And she says, “We know about that night in New York, Jaime. We know your father struck your mother across the face and pushed her down. And we know about the restraining order against him. But she never pressed any charges. Instead, your father agreed to fast-track the divorce and pay the amount of child support she wanted. It's been thirteen years, and without any other guardian, your father has legal rights to step in, given your mother's current state.”

“Jaime,” the doctor says. “Do you understand this?”

My mouth is dry. It feels like chalk.

“Jaime,” the doctor presses.

“No,” I say.

“No what?” he asks.

“No,” I say again. “I don't understand any of
this
. You're sending me to stay with the man who betrayed my mother. He ruined her fucking life and made her crazy for all these years, and I have to go live with him now.”

“Just until the evaluation is over,” the doctor says.

“What happens if she doesn't get better?”

The doctor looks back at the child services rep.

“Don't look at her,” I snap. “I asked you a question. Look at me, dude.”

He sighs. “We'll cross the bridge if we come to it.”

“Great,” I snort. “That's real, fucking great. And what about school? Final exams are next week.”

“You'll be allowed to take them after this gets resolved,” the woman says. “You don't have anyone else to care for you here. You don't have any other family besides your father.”

A scowl cuts across my face. “He's not my family,” I rip. “That bastard is the reason why my mother is here right now. So let's just be clear about that. He's
not
my family.”