Blind Sight (26 page)

“Luke?” It’s Mark, knocking on Luke’s door.

“Yup,” Luke says, jumping up from his desk. “Good timing.”

“How’s it coming?” Mark asks, as they head out of the house together. They are going to the REI store to look at camping equipment for their upcoming trip to the Sequoias. Mark asks Luke to drive.

“I don’t even know why I’m still doing it.” Luke backs slowly down the driveway. “I think I’m going to use the one we wrote on the plane after all. So it’s not me: who cares? Why do we have to run around identifying ourselves all over the place?”

“You’re asking the wrong person.”

They laugh.

“So you’re going on this date tomorrow, huh?”

“It’s not really a date,” Luke explains. “It’s a group hang. I guess a bunch of her friends will be there.”

“Ah,” says Mark. “A group hang. That’s cool. Well, in the morning we will go rent you a car. I assume you don’t want me driving you there?”

“Thanks,” Luke nods. “I really appreciate it.”

“So, this is what kids do, right? I shouldn’t have any problems with this or do, like, any parenting thing?”

“You’re fine. She said ‘hanging by the pool.’ I assume that means swimming, right?”

“I hope so. I hope it means swimming in the pool and not standing around outside it, taking Ecstasy and doing tequila shots.”

Luke assures his father that he has been around people drinking before, and doing drugs. Luke has not done very much of either of these things. He tells himself that it is because he likes to remain “alert,” although it is not that. Luke is afraid of what might emerge if he loses control of himself, and has never been in a situation where he felt comfortable testing this. To be in such a situation is something Luke wants very much.

“You two were sitting there with half-empty cocktails at the party,” Mark says. “Don’t think I didn’t see that.”

“They were half full, actually,” Luke says. “Don’t be such a pessimist, Dad.”

“Ha. Well, if you drink, stay away from the pool because you could slip and concuss yourself, or drown or something. And if you do drugs just do a quarter of the amount that everyone else is doing so you don’t lose your shit. Just don’t drive, is all I ask. If you’ve had even one drink, call me and I’ll send a car to pick you up and I’ll be crouched down in the backseat so no one will see me. I’ll be very cool.”

Luke tells Mark that he has really gotten the hang of parenting.

They enjoy shopping for camping equipment. Mark has never camped before so he leaves the decision making to Luke, who picks
out basic items in the mid-price range. Mark attempts to supplement these with more elaborate gear. Members of the REI staff fall over themselves to be helpful. Luke observes that in public, Mark seems to retreat an inch or so inside his own face, leaving a Mark Franco mask.

“It will be good to have all this stuff for the future,” Mark says when they are back in the car. The mask melts. “Hey, Luke, we should get harmonicas.”

Back at the house, they ready themselves for another event, a charity dinner for the World Wildlife Federation.

“Is this one black tie?” Luke asks, hopefully. Luke really likes the way he looks in his new suit.

“Listen to you,” Mark says. “By the way, if this isn’t an incredibly gay question: what are you wearing tomorrow? To swim in, I mean.”

“My trunks,” Luke raises his left eyebrow. “That’s what people swim in, right?”

“Those blue-and-white things?” Mark shakes his head. “Yeah, no, you need to upgrade those. I’ve got dish towels in better shape than those trunks. Let me see what I have.”

Mark disappears into his bedroom.

“Um … Dad?” Luke calls out.

“Don’t worry, they’re not Speedos,” Mark shouts back, correctly interpreting Luke’s concern. “I’m not that gay.”

The trunks are plain blue. They’re loose on Luke’s hips, but he agrees that they are an improvement over his own.

“Kati is a magician,” Mark says later, as the limousine pulls up in front of the hotel where the charity dinner is being held. “I don’t know how she gets me into these things. I’ve never even donated to World Wildlife.”

“That’s okay,” Luke tells him. “I have.”

Mark blinks at Luke.

“On our birthdays,” Luke explains. “One of our presents is ten dollars to donate to the cause of our choice.”

“So that’s what a good parent does, I guess,” says Mark. Photographers,
clustered to one side of the driveway, spring into life as the car stops.

“Hey, you’ve done awesome parenting today,” Luke says. “Every day. You are giving me the best summer of my life, Dad.”

“Don’t thank me,” Mark says, sharply. “I haven’t done anything. Don’t thank me, Luke.”

They get out of the car and there’s the now-familiar-to-Luke stir of energy, name calling, event-coordinator elbow pulling, flashbulbs. While this is going on, Luke reminds himself to ask Mark what his blood type is. Luke thinks it would be very cool if they had the same. Even better if they had matching bone marrow, so one could donate it to the other if that was necessary. Luke makes his camera face and wishes for a moment that his father could have that opportunity, to give Luke some of his bone marrow, so that he could stop wishing he hadn’t given Luke enough.

I
’m going to drive to Leila’s house in about fifteen minutes. I had to explain to Mark that I’m too young to actually rent a car, even though he seemed to think the place would let us anyway. He ended up getting one for himself for the day, and I’ve got his BMW. This will be my first time driving it by myself. I don’t even want to think about how expensive his car is. It has a GPS system, but I’m not going to use it. I’ve already mapped and memorized the route to Leila’s. I was even able to zoom in on Leila’s house with Google’s satellite system, but mostly all you can see is a gate. I don’t know why I’m writing right now. I should just go. Okay, I’m going.

Luke has difficulty finding the house numbers of the houses in Brentwood. He knows he is driving too slowly for the people behind him. “This,” he says to himself, “is kind of a nightmare. Wait. Is this it? This is it.”

Luke stops at a gate, unrolls his side window, sees that he’s too far away from the little white box to reach it, gets out of the car. He notices two video cameras above the gate. He hopes that nobody is watching him, pushes a button on the box, and gets quickly back into the car. After a moment, a woman’s voice, not Leila’s, comes fuzzily out.

“I’m here to see Leila,” Luke says, loudly, toward the box. “She invited me?”

“Okay, Leila, okay,” says the box, and the gate opens.

Leila’s house is enormous, white with a Spanish roof, columns, and a circular driveway in which several cars are parked. Luke counts two Mini Coopers, an Audi, an Alfa Romeo convertible, and a BMW just like Mark’s. He parks and heads for the front door, glad now that Mark counseled him against bringing his own beach towel.

Luke is texting Mark, as instructed, on his safe arrival, when the front door opens and a tiny woman appears wearing pink shorts and a T-shirt. She looks, for a moment, so exactly like Bubbles that Luke almost says, “Bubbles!”

“Hello,” Luke says.

“Leila in back,” the woman says. “I show you.”

Luke says thank you and introduces himself in Spanish. The woman, Elsi, leads him around the side of the house, down a path banked by a tall bougainvillea-covered wall. Luke can hear music playing, a splash, male laughter, a girl’s voice, not Leila’s, shouting, “No way!” The path leads to steps, into another path, and then down more steps.

“Okay, there.” Elsi points through a row of cypress trees that Luke can see lead to some sort of terrace.

“Gracias, Elsi.”

“Okay,” says Elsi, patting Luke on the arm.

Luke walks past the trees onto the terrace, turns, and is immediately smacked hard in the forehead with a wet Nerf ball.

“Oh shit!”

“Who’s that?”

“Hey dude, you okay?”

“Josh, you dumbass.”

“Luke!”

Luke can see now, from his doubled over position, two sets of purple-painted toes. He stands up, removes his hand from his forehead.

“Hey Leila,” Luke says. “Ow.”

Over the next five hours, Luke is instructed in many matters. He is told why the beaches in Bali are preferable to the beaches in Bora Bora, how the Australian Open is much more fun than Wimbledon, and that in the view of Josh, Patrón Silver is superior to several other brands of tequila. Luke is shown things on YouTube: the story of how one girl’s hair weave stopped a bullet, a demonstration from a Ukrainian porn star of her ability to projectile orgasm, and a tutorial by a masked man who is able to suck his own penis. Luke has several new sensory experiences: he rinses off in Leila’s poolside shower which is nozzled in such a way as to produce three different aromatherapy settings, including one called “Amazonian Rain Forest.” Luke eats unagi, and has the toenail of his left big toe painted green by a girl whose Chihuahua has appeared in three feature films. He plays
Guitar Hero
with Caleb, who has an actual band of his own, composed entirely of the children of actual rock stars, one of whom is featured on the cover of the
Guitar Hero
case. He is asked if Delaware is a city or a state.

Luke watches Leila float between her friends, the pool, the white-canopied cabanas; the table filled with sushi and pita chips, the giant stone Buddha heads that bank the hot tub. Occasionally their paths cross, and they speak. The number of people at Leila’s house—originally five at the time of Luke’s arrival—swells in midafternoon to encompass friends of friends and soon totals almost twenty. Luke does not find himself distinguished by Leila in any particular way over her other male guests, even though on the previous night they
had a two-hour phone conversation which ended with Leila saying, “I’m really glad you’re coming tomorrow,” in the same mysteriously coded significant way with which she had said, “I don’t like carpeting.”

Toward the end of the afternoon, as numbers have dwindled to half a dozen people, a girl called Michaela offers Luke a blue-and-green glass pipe filled with medical-grade marijuana. Michaela, Luke learns, is a backup dancer for a pop star, and has obtained a card for medical marijuana by a licensed physician, one of many in California, she informs Luke, who will write you a prescription for weed if you have symptoms of stress, PMS, migraines, or depression. Michaela personally suffers from none of these things, but she does experience quite bad jet lag, which “getting totally baked right before I get on a plane” greatly alleviates. Luke watches as Michaela peels off her (apparently false) left eyelash and places it on her knee. At this point, Leila appears and sits down on the deck chair in between Luke’s straddled legs, pulling her hair over one shoulder and contemplating him with her profile.

“Are you going to smoke?” she asks.

Luke, who once smoked pot with Pearl to no demonstrable effect, who has today refused alcohol and drugs for five hours, and who now believes his modest claims to Leila’s interest to have totally evaporated amidst potential rivals who have gotten tattooed in Morocco, snowboarded in Fiji, or posed for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, shakes his head.

“I don’t have any medical conditions,” Luke tells Michaela. “Unless you count head trauma by Nerf ball.”

“Oh my God, you’re hilarious,” Michaela says. “Leila, I love this guy.”

Leila places a hand on Luke’s knee.

Luke imagines pulling Leila back against his chest in the kind of easy, affectionate, flirtatious way he has observed all afternoon amongst Leila’s friends, but Luke is not sure that Leila’s hand on his
knee is enough of a green light for this kind of action. Michaela offers the pipe to Leila.

“I’m going to have one little smoke,” Leila says to Luke. “And I will cough and not really be stoned but it will serve as, like, a transition moment.”

Leila puts the pipe delicately to her lips and Michaela leans forward and holds her lighter over it. Leila inhales, seems fine for a moment, coughs, and then exhales, frowning. Michaela, summoned from across the pool by Josh to see the hair-weave-stopping-the-bullet video, moves off, leaving Luke and Leila alone.

“Do you smoke?” Leila asks Luke.

“Only once,” Luke says. “With my sister. Nothing really happened.”

“Do you like Michaela or something?” Leila reaches for a bottle of water by the deck chair and takes a sip.

“They started playing ‘No I Never’ in the cabana,” Luke explains. “So I came over here. There’s a lot I’ve never done.”

“You’re innocent,” Leila says.

Luke sighs.

“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“I’m not embarrassed. I’m just tired of not doing things.” Luke is surprised to hear himself say this. He asks himself if this is indeed true.

Luke takes the pipe from Leila’s hand.

“You don’t usually get stoned the first time,” Leila tells him, reaching for the lighter Michaela left behind. “So you might now.”

Luke inhales as he has observed other people inhaling, and holds his breath for a moment. He can feel a slight burn in his throat, and in his eyes. Luke exhales, coughs slightly, and laughs. Leila hands him the water bottle.

“Okay,” says Luke. “Yeah. Don’t let me drive until I can do some algebra or something.”

Luke and Leila sit in silence for a few minutes, passing the water
bottle between them. Luke looks at Leila’s hair, because her face is turned away from his. Luke runs a diagnostic check on his senses, noting a slightly elevated heart rate, an increased awareness of his tongue, and muscular relaxation in between his scapula.

“Is there anything,” Leila asks suddenly, turning around and putting her hand on Luke’s thigh again, “that you are embarrassed about?”

“Um … no,” Luke says. “Wait. Yes. Probably yes.”

“Like what?” Leila prompts.

“Well, give me a hypothetical situation,” Luke suggests. “And I’ll tell you if I would be embarrassed about it.”

Leila slides her hand a little farther up Luke’s thigh.

“Would you be embarrassed,” she asks, “to walk naked around the pool?”

Luke shifts slightly in the deck chair. Leila’s hand on, now, his inner thigh, is causing the hair on his arms to stand up. Luke concentrates. It is hard to concentrate.