Blind Sight (29 page)

“I feel sort of in love with her,” I said. “I know that’s lame.”

“Nah,” he said. “Love isn’t like this thing that people say it is. Like some big thing that only happens once in awhile when you really get
to know someone and share the same life goals and all that. That’s something else. Love happens all the time. Don’t worry about it.”

“So what’s the other thing? The something else that isn’t love?”

“Contract negotiations.”

“I just don’t want her to think it was just the sex part,” I said. “Like I was using her or something.”

“It is the sex,” my dad said. “It’s the sex and the why you wanted to have sex, and wanting to see her again is about the sex too.”

“It’s about her as a person, too,” I said. “I liked her a lot before I had sex with her.”

“You liked her a lot
because
you wanted to have sex with her.”

“No. Wait. Really?”

“Otherwise you would’ve just hung out at her pool and come home.

“Using somebody is when you have sex with somebody you don’t really want to have sex with,” he said. “Or you’re only doing it because you want to get something out of them. You had, like, this pure thing with her. Don’t worry about why.”

“So what should I do?” I asked.

“Just text her every now and then something sweet. I’m not saying play it cool. I’m saying just let it flow.”

“I did that,” I said. “A sweet text. The day after. She didn’t get back to me for four days.”

“There you go,” he said. “That’s her pace. I like this girl. She doesn’t sound all needy. Good for you, Luke.”

“I’m gonna let it flow,” I repeated. “Love happens all the time.”

“That kind does,” he said.

It makes sense, the way he said it. Scientists haven’t been able to isolate the physical properties of “being in love” in the brain. No distinct neuronal sequence or protein has jumped out and declared itself. All the tests people think up are pretty crude: like giving people photographs of someone they say they are in love with, and then giving them photographs of friends, and seeing what happens differently
in the brain. But presumably if you are in love with someone you also want to have sex with them, so you can’t isolate sex from love in that test. Maybe you can’t isolate it because it doesn’t exist. Maybe love in the brain is something like black holes, or dark matter, something we think is there because of the strange way things behave around it.

We went to another movie premiere. We had dinner with two really cool friends of my dad’s: a married couple, actors Mark knows from New York. They had been away doing a play in Florida for most of the summer, and it was nice to meet them and see my dad hanging out with people he really likes. Geoffrey and Amelia asked me lots of questions about myself, and I ended up sort of telling stories about my life in Delaware, and we all laughed a lot.

“They’re great,” I said to my dad, on the way home.

“Yeah, they’re family,” he said. “Sometimes you get born into a great family, and sometimes you have to make one up.

“I guess it’s never exactly the same, though,” he said after a moment. “Family is family. But now I don’t have to be all wistful about not having a real family. Because I have you.”

My dad and I shopped for gifts for me to take home to everybody, and things for Carmen and Kati, as a thank you. We got a second suitcase out of the garage for me. We worked on Humphrey’s obedience skills. I borrowed Mark’s car and drove to the modern art museum, and got the book on the Rothko retrospective to give to my dad. “Happy Father’s Day, past, present, and future,” I wrote, on the inside cover. Father’s Day was back in June, but I had only been in LA for about two weeks at that point, and we were still saying “Dad” and “son” in funny voices. Mark asked me if I wanted to do something special for my last night, but I said, “Just hang,” and so that’s what we did. We grilled vegetables and watched a documentary about the making of
Star Wars
, and played with Humphrey. I did a last load of laundry, and Mark helped me pack. I gave Mark the Rothko book. He asked me if he could get me a car for my birthday in October.

Kati came to the house this morning to say goodbye. It’s kind of funny that I had a crush on her at the beginning of the summer.

She asked Mark if he wanted her to drive us to the airport and Mark said, “No, because I am going to cry like a girl.”

I said goodbye to Humphrey.

We had agreed that my dad wouldn’t walk me into the airport, so we wouldn’t have to have a public goodbye and stuff, but when we got to LAX, Mark said, “No, fuck it,” and parked the car. I let him check me into the airline and wheel my suitcases over to security. He offered to buy a ticket just so he could walk me to my gate, even though he knew that was sort of ridiculous.

“Before you came,” he said. “I was nervous. I was like, what if we don’t like each other. It’s going to be a long summer. Now. Shit. I almost can’t stand this.” He teared up a little, which made me tear up a little too.

“Wait, it’s cool, I’ll see you soon,” he said.

“Definitely.”

“Text me random things,” he said. “Call me late at night and wake me up. Email pictures.”

“I will,” I said. “You too.”

“I love you, son.”

“I love you too, Dad.”

Then he practically ran out of the airport.

Just before I turned off my phone, in preparation for takeoff, I got a picture text from him. He was holding Humphrey and a sign that said, “We Miss Luke!”

I feel like I was in Los Angeles for about five minutes, not ten weeks. And now I’m going back to Delaware, going “home,” and everybody will want to know how it was, and what my dad is like, and how I feel. And I will have to say something about that.

Maybe in another language, one of those really old ones like Hindu or Farsi or something, there is a word for how I feel. Or a mathematical equation.

Maybe it’s like that thought experiment, “The Mary Problem.” Mary is a scientist and lives all her life in a black-and-white room. She learns everything there is to know about the physics of light and color from the black-and-white room via a black-and-white television. When she is finally let out, and she sees an apple for the first time, she discovers that she did NOT know everything there is to know about color. She did not know the qualia of color. She did not know redness. This is supposed to show how the physics of something only tells us about the physics of something, and is not the whole story. There is how something feels to us, how we experience it: a kind of knowledge we can only have through experience. Qualia.

So now I know the qualia of being a son, and the qualia of having a father. So I should, like Mary, realize that there were things I didn’t know before. But it doesn’t feel like that. I don’t feel like I’ve acquired some new special knowledge. I am going to make a guess here and say that hypothetical Mary didn’t either. She didn’t see an apple for the first time and stare in wonder and say, “Ah, so THAT is red! I never knew! You bastards!” I think hypothetical Mary saw the red of the apple and just thought, “Yes.” It didn’t shock her, or alarm her, or enlighten her. Because all that time in the black-and-white world, without being conscious of it, she had a space in her mind all prepared for red. Red was there, it was always there. Mary just didn’t know that space inside her was called red. Now she knows.

Now I know.

S
ara is waiting for Luke in the arrivals section of the Philadelphia airport. Luke sees her first because she is standing apart from a cluster of people and staring very hard into space. Luke thinks that he should have spent the plane ride thinking about home instead of writing about the last couple of days with his father, because he doesn’t feel ready for Sara, for her attention, for her scrutiny, for her knowledge of pre-summer Luke and her expectation that post-summer Luke will be identical.

When Sara sees Luke, her face lights up.

“Here you are,” Sara says. “Here you are!”

Sara hugs Luke hard, then leans back and examines his face.

“Yup, it’s me,” Luke says.

“Well!” she says. “Well!” She presses her thumb briefly against Luke’s forehead, which is something she always does to Luke, who always says, “Sheeeyaaangh,” when she does it, like a gong, as if Sara were ringing his third-eye chakra.

“Sheeeyaaangh,” Luke says.

They walk to the baggage claim area. Sara puts one arm around Luke tight, and hip to hip, they match strides.

“Was it hard saying goodbye?” Sara asks, at the carousel. “It sounded like you two really found each other. I was thinking, Soul mates. That’s what it sounded like to me.”

“Mhmm,” Luke says, who is thinking that when someone says something close to what you’re feeling, but not exactly right, and not in words you would use, it becomes TOTALLY wrong.

“You tired, honey? You must be tired.”

“No, I’m good.”

“You have pictures, right? I want to see everything. I want to hear about everything.”

“Like, right now?”

A fault line appears in Sara’s smile.

“Okay, but first fill me in on what’s happening here,” Luke says, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Aunt Nancy’s here?” Aunt Nancy always visits for a week before her semester starts in Maine.

“Yes, since Monday.”

“How you holding up? She driving you crazy yet?”

“Not at all. We’ve been having a great time. The girls are coming tomorrow. In your honor. They’ve both been working their pants off this summer. Although apparently Pearl’s been stoned half the time.”

“Oh,” Luke says, startled into actual interest. “Um. You think?”

“Aurora told me,” Sara smiles. “And I talked to Pearl about it. I smoked a little at her age. I get it. We all have this desire to transcend out of ourselves, and sometimes we take short cuts. Ultimately, I know Pearl is way too creative to be satisfied with artificial highs.”

“Yeah.”

“Of course Rory told me because she knew I’d be cool about it to Pearl, and that Pearl would hate that!” Sara laughs. “I’m on to their ways.”

“Ha.” Just hearing this much makes Luke feel claustrophobic.
Home. Signals being sent from one woman to another. Electrical signals. Chemical signals.

“What about you, though? You have a good summer?”

“A good summer,” Sara nods. “A thinking summer. I’ll tell you all about it, after you’ve told me all about yours.”

“Dad said he was going to call you. To let you know I got on the plane okay and all that.”

“He did. He did call me.”

“What did he say? I mean, did you guys talk, or …”

“Of course we talked. Of course.”

There is a loud honk and a subterranean growl as the carousel begins to move. Sara and Luke spring forward. Luke’s suitcase (the new one) is the first to fall down the slide.

“This is actually mine.” Luke hauls it off the carousel. “I had gifts and things to bring back, and some other stuff. My bag going there was pretty full, remember?”

Sara raises her eyebrows, but says nothing.

Luke had promised Mark he would text him when he landed, but he waits until he retrieves his other bag, then goes to the men’s room, where he sends his father a quick message from a bathroom stall.

“So tell me,” Sara says, once they have left the airport and are on the way back to Acton.

Luke has to shout because Vlad’s air conditioning doesn’t work and the windows are down, but he begins describing bits and pieces of his summer to Sara. He finds it difficult to keep to a chronological order and it all gets jumbled together: descriptions of Bubbles are scrambled into the mechanics of surfing, the paintings of Rothko collide with watching
The Last
be shot in the Mojave Desert, the wrap party on the beach trips into the Sequoia National Park. Luke is not aware of how much he is saying “my dad” and “my dad and I,” until suddenly he is very aware. Luke shouts into the wind thundering through the car, feels his words boomeranging back into his face, but does not stop shouting.

When they get off the freeway, Sara tells Luke that she’s been thinking about where she’ll go after Luke leaves for college.

“Go?” Luke shouts, with unnecessary volume, as they are at a traffic light.

“I’m thinking about Colorado,” Sara says. “I might open a Wellness Center there, in Boulder. I’ve always loved Colorado.”

“You’d move there?”

“Well, I never planned on living my whole life with my mother! I think it’s time for a new journey. I think I’ve spent enough time trying to open minds in Delaware. I wouldn’t mind living in a community of like minds.”

“Wow. That sounds … great.”

Luke scrambles to process this new information: a Sara not satisfied with her life, waiting for Luke to leave in order to move to a like-minded community in a city named after a large rock.

“It’s just something I’m thinking about,” Sara says. “I want to hear everybody’s ideas about it, since it would affect all of you.”

“You should do what you want,” Luke says, somewhat blankly. Sara had always talked about the “beautiful opportunity” of living with Nana, and although Luke was used to the myriad meanings of “beautiful” in Sara’s lexicon, he had accepted that one as literal. Luke is trying to remember if he has ever heard Sara express dissatisfaction about living in Delaware before, but now it is Luke’s street, and then Luke’s house, and then what looks to Luke like the back end of his Aunt Nancy.

“Luke.” Aunt Nancy straightens up from the flower bed as they pull into the driveway.

Luke gets out of the car.

“Aunt Nancy!”

“My God, look at this child.” Nancy advances on Luke, kissing him on both cheeks, European-style. “You have changed once again.”

“So what am I now?” Luke stands up straight and submits himself to Nancy’s annual classification.

“Hmmm … a Murillo. You should not be wearing jeans. You should be wearing a cape, and holding the leash of a greyhound, and looking self-contained.”

“I’ll try to come up with something.”

“Do,” Nancy says, drawing the word out to two syllables, turning back to the asters.

Luke knows that for all intents and purposes, Aunt Nancy is now “done” with him, so he turns back to the car, where Sara is unloading his luggage. Nana comes out the front door wearing gardening gloves.