Blind Sight (28 page)

Luke tastes Leila’s hair and is filled with a profound gratitude: to Leila, to the Japanese who invented futons, to Google maps for successfully navigating him to Brentwood, to BMW, the makers of fine and reliable automobiles, to Mark for bringing him to Los Angeles, to Mark and Sara for having conceived him, to his twelve generations of ancestral women, to women in general, to the quarter of a million years of human evolution and the gradual selection and adaptation of human beings, to meteorites, gases, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and the accordion big banging and crunching of the universe. To all things known and unknown that have led to the perfection of this particular moment.

P
eople who don’t believe in God but who think that there “must be something bigger than us” should go to the Sequoia National Park. There is something bigger than us. There are these trees. And you can see them and go right up to them and touch them and some of them are over two thousand years old and they are alive. They are real.

It was cool leading my dad through the mechanics of camp making: the setting up of the tent, hanging a line for drying clothes, building a fire, the rules for proper food storage, the mysteries of the butane cookstove. At the beginning of our trip, I was worried that Mark might be bored, with no activities other than hiking, and looking at trees, and swimming in streams, but on our very first night, as we settled into our sleeping bags in our new two-person tent, Mark said,

“This is just … perfect.”

We spent the second day hiking up to a fire lookout station.
We wanted to do all the hikes labeled “strenuous” in the trail guide. When we got back to our camp, I got the vegetarian chili started and gave my dad my latest essay attempt, and he read it out loud, which was pretty hilarious.

“I’m telling you, Luke,” Mark said, once he finished, “this is good stuff here. I think you have the makings of a great screenplay. I can totally see this whole Sacred Journey thing.”

“Can you go and read it to the college admissions board?” I asked, spooning out two bowls of chili. “It’s a lot funnier with you doing all the voices.”

“I feel like I really nailed the Jeff character,” Mark said. “And your mom.”

“You’ve got her down,” I told him. “She sounds exactly like that. It was spooky.”

“Hey, Jeff said the number two would be significant in 2007, and here we are. The two of us.”

“Well, that proves it, then,” I said. “Numerology is accurate. We should call MIT.”

“What should I do?” Mark looked at me over his shoulder. “Should I be doing something?”

“We’re all set. You’re doing the dishes later.”

“So what was the question that you were supposed to be answering with this one?” Mark asked, about the essay.

“ ‘Talk about a special trip.’ I decided to do that one instead of ‘Describe your strongest character trait.’ Although I sort of got to that one too.” I brought the chili over to the campfire and handed a bowl to Mark.

“You think your strongest character trait is your blood type?” he asked. “What do you think my strongest character trait is?”

I ate some chili while considering this.

“Wait, don’t answer,” he said. “I don’t want to know. What are some other questions?”

“ ‘What do you plan to do with your college degree?’ ” I tried to remember what on my list I hadn’t gotten to yet. “ ‘Where do you see
yourself career-wise ten years from now? Reveal your life philosophy. Do you maintain strong beliefs and adhere to a philosophy? How do you solve moral dilemmas?’ ”

“Jesus. I’m glad I don’t have to answer any of that. How
do
you solve moral dilemmas?”

“I guess I pretty much go with the basic system,” I said. “If you say to yourself, I don’t want to do that, but it’s okay if other people do, then it’s not a moral thing, it’s a matter of personal taste. But if you say to yourself, I don’t want to do that and I don’t want anybody else to do it either, and I think people who do that should be punished, and I would be wrong not to punish them for doing that, then that is something that’s a moral absolute.”

I’m not actually sure whether I do this or if it’s just how I
think
I should do it.

“What if there is something that you feel is right but everyone else thinks is wrong?” he asked.

“Then you’re a psychopath,” I laughed. “Or a genius. But people like Galileo, they had evidence for believing that something was right even though almost everyone else thought it was wrong. That’s why I think you should have evidence for all of your beliefs. Otherwise it’s more just a hope.”

“So, okay,” he said. “Your being a vegetarian, is that a moral thing? This chili is kick-ass, by the way.”

“Thanks. Actually no, I’m not even sure that I can say absolutely that cruelty to animals is morally wrong.”

“Hold up,” Mark said. “What?”

I like testing out ideas on Mark.

“Well, animal testing was used to come up with a vaccine for polio and smallpox, and all kinds of other medical breakthroughs. I guess lab work on animals isn’t quite as gruesome as it used to be, but people are still giving animals diseases and removing parts of their brains or other organs. And if you are a vegetarian because you don’t believe in cruelty to animals, then you shouldn’t accept vaccines made through animal-testing technology. And if someone said,
‘Hey, we might have a cure for spinal meningitis but we need to test on a couple of hundred rats first,’ you would have to say, ‘No, I don’t think you should, and I hope you lose all your funding and your lab is shut down.’ You would have to say that even if you had a kid with spinal meningitis who was in agony. I don’t think I could do that.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty intense.”

“And you know, there isn’t anything on this planet that actually wants to be eaten,” I continued, getting into it. “A head of broccoli doesn’t want to be eaten any more than a cow does. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t produce toxins. But even organically grown vegetables have toxins because that’s how plants try to protect themselves.”

“So this chili I am enjoying contains beans that you murdered,” Mark said thoughtfully. “You boiled them alive, in cold blood, you bastard.”

“I’m a mass murderer of vegetables,” I agreed.

“So why are you a vegetarian, then?”

“I guess I’ve only really thought it through recently,” I admitted. “So I’m not sure. I don’t know where I stand now actually. At Leila’s house I ate an eel.”

“You ate an eel?”

“She had sushi,” I explained. “I always thought that sushi looked really interesting. Like, a big plate of ham, that looks weird to me, and I don’t like the smell, but I like the smell of seaweed and wasabi.”

“How was it?” Mark asked. “The eel?”

“It was really good,” I sighed. “Actually.”

“You don’t think vegetables have a soul or anything like that, though?” he asked.

“I don’t think I have a soul, remember,” I reminded him.

“Okay, this conversation is getting really deep. Let’s talk about sports. Or sex.”

I tried to make my face blank.

“You going to tell me about how you had sex or not?” Mark stood up to get another beer from the cooler.

“Okay,” I said, after a minute. “How did you know?”

“I’m psychic. No, kidding. It was in my numerology reading. I have the numbers of a Universal Sage and I was told that in 2007 my son was going to get laid.”

“For real, how did you know?”

“My swim shorts have hetero vibe on them now.”

I laughed, a little bit hysterically maybe. Mark settled himself back down in his camp chair.

“I guessed,” he said. “And you had that look in your eye the day after.”

“What look?”

“I’m just giving you a hard time. You don’t have to tell me.”

“Well,” I said, hesitating. “Well, yeah, I did.”

“You wear a condom?”

“Yeah.”

“You had a good time?”

“Yeah.”

“I actually wasn’t sure if you did it or not. Because you still wanted to go camping. I thought maybe you’d be all about this girl now.”

“She left for London. But I would have wanted to go camping anyway. This is almost our last week together.”

“For the summer,” he said. “But we’ve got the rest of our lives, right?”

“Yep,” I said. “You’re stuck with me for good now.”

“You’re stuck with me too,” my dad said.

“Good,” I said. “Good.”

When we got back from camping, my dad decided to get a dog. We were running together in the morning, and he said, “Hey, let’s go to the pound and get a dog today.

“My life has been so up and down,” he said. “But now I feel sort of … steady, you know? I feel grounded. Actually, for the first time I
really feel like an adult. Even when I bought a house I still felt like I was getting away with something, like someone was going to come along and say, ‘Who you trying to fool?’ But now I really feel like I’ve got it together.”

“You’ve got it together, Dad,” I agreed.

“I wanted to get a dog before you left,” he said. “So it will be ours.”

We ended up going to three different animal shelters before we found the right one. There were a lot of pit bulls available, but my dad said he didn’t want an aggressive dog.

“I want something I can take around with me,” he said in between the second and third shelter. “Maybe have in my trailer at work and stuff. What do you think?”

“I’ve got a great-aunt who breeds Dandie Dinmonts,” I told him. “If we don’t find anything today.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Mark said. “But it sounds really gay. Do you think I’m manly enough to have a purse dog? If I don’t put it into an actual purse?”

“You can borrow Aimee’s,” I said. “Since she’s not using it.”

“Oh fuck, I’m gonna miss you,” he said.

We found the perfect dog at the last place: a small terrier mix of various somethings, about eight months old, that had been found in downtown Los Angeles. He was recently rescued, underweight but healthy, a little brown-and-gray guy with a tail that curled over and a natural mohawk thing going on top of his head. We were pretty wrecked at that point, because all the people at the shelters were really wanting my dad to adopt from them, and it’s hard to look at needy dogs and walk away from them because they aren’t the right kind of needy dog.

“His name is Humphrey,” the shelter worker told Mark. “We found him on Humphreys Avenue.”

Humphrey, released from his cage, ran right over to me and started licking my hands.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey Humphrey. Who’s a good boy? Hey. Hey there. Go say hi to Dad.”

When Mark picked Humphrey up, Humphrey put his paws on either side of my dad’s neck and licked his chin.

I thought the adoption process might take some time, but we were able to walk away with Humphrey right then, after Mark posed for pictures with the entire staff of the shelter. He gave them a nice donation check, I think.

“Okay, let’s go get the stuff,” my dad said.

I held on to Humphrey in the car on the way to Petco, where we got a name tag, food, bowls, bones, a new collar and leash, a traveling crate, gates for the kitchen, a dog pillow, toys, and training manuals. We got the nicest of everything. There was another customer there with a big fluffy chow, and my dad talked to the owner while the two dogs did their sniff thing. The guy was about my dad’s age, I guess, and good-looking. He seemed like a really nice guy, too. He recognized my dad but he was cool. I didn’t get that the guy was gay, but he gave my dad his card in case my dad needed “the name of that dog-walking service” and after we had left the store and loaded up the car, my dad tossed the card onto the dashboard and said, “Tempting, but no.”

“What?” I asked. “The service? Or you mean …?”

“At this point that guy is going ‘maybe,’ ” my dad said. “Maybe I’m gay. Maybe I’m just gay friendly. Maybe I was flirting, maybe I was just being celebrity nice.”

“You don’t come across gay,” I said. “You seem totally—”

“Normal?” my dad laughed. “Yeah, I know. To you I do. But queers can smell you out, so you gotta be really careful.”

“He seemed cool,” I said. “He had a sense of humor, too. And a dog. You don’t want to go out with him?”

“Like I can go out with a guy,” Mark said. “No. When he tells all his friends at the gay bar tonight, they’ll speculate, but he’ll say, ‘Well, I don’t know, he had his son with him,’ blah, blah, blah. I can’t hook up with guys like that.”

“You can’t invite him over?” I asked. “Or, you know, meet him in a hotel in Chicago?”

My dad gave me kind of a look then, like I had gone too far.

“Um. Sorry.”

“You punk,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said again. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Actually it was funny,” he said. “Normally I would say, ‘Good one,’ but I just feel like being an authority figure right now. You’re going to be gone in five days. I need to parent.”

I held out Humphrey, who was squirming like crazy to explore the car.

“You can discipline our dog,” I said. “It’s like a substitute.”

“No kidding.”

My last few days went by really fast. I finally got another text from Leila, who was in New York at that point. She was coming back to LA on the day I was leaving. I was happy to hear from her, though, because her other text, in reply to this kind of romantic thing I wrote her after our night together, was either equally romantic or one of those random gnomic things she says. I still have no idea what she’s thinking, but my dad had some good advice for me about that.

“So what’s the deal with the chick?” he asked. “How’d you leave it?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. After, we had made out for a really long time, which was almost as amazing as everything else. She had pulled this blanket over us too, which meant I was able to open my eyes and look at her. Then we had sort of fallen asleep for a little bit, and then she said her mom would be back soon, and I got dressed, and she wrapped a towel around herself and walked me to the side gate. It was dark by then, and all these little solar lanterns were glowing and she looked, like, so pretty, and I didn’t want to go, or let go of her, and then I did, and was back in my car and we really hadn’t said anything.