Claire's Head (28 page)

T
hey were on a plane to Las Vegas. Claire kept glancing at the aisle seat, not expecting to see beside her this somewhat shaggy-haired blond man in another garish shirt, this one loud with purple stripes. They were midway across the continent when Brad leaned over her, peered out the window, and said he'd been born down below, in Rochester, Minnesota. She told him she knew where that was, southeast of Minneapolis, just west of the Mississippi, which curved beneath them. That she knew where Rochester, Minnesota, was surprised Brad, until Claire reminded him what she did for a living. There are twelve Rochesters in America, she said, and I know where all of them are.

His father had grown up in Canada, Brad told her. In 1958, Arni Arnarson had come south from Gimli, Manitoba, and was such a mean hand of a mechanic that everyone of Icelandic extraction in Rochester (there were a lot of them) had banded together to find him a wife and wouldn't let him leave.

Did he have brothers, Claire asked. No, only sisters, five of
them, all older than he was. What did his father think about having a massage therapist for a son? Well, in his father's presence he called himself a physical therapist and talked about all the ball players he'd worked on, going on about their bum shoulders and elbows and leaving out their manicured hands. Manicured hands? Yes, really.

It was now Friday, a little after midday. On Wednesday night, Brad had tried calling people he knew in Las Vegas. He'd lived there once for some months, he said, back when he was just starting out, and had returned a couple of times since, flown in by someone he wouldn't name, who'd brought him to town for a series of private sessions. Rachel knew all this, of course. At one point, he and Rachel had even talked of going out there together for a weekend. His acquaintances were mostly other massage therapists and people who practised body work of one sort or another, some in spas on the Strip, others in private clinics. It was a good place for people like him to find work, all those burlesque dancers and circus performers who needed his kind of servicing. Maybe something he'd said had spurred Rachel to go to Vegas. Someone he'd mentioned to her. There was also the desert and the fact that Las Vegas was close to the Grand Canyon, which Rachel had referred to in her diary as some kind of migraine sufferer's haven. There was more to the city than the Strip, although as Claire pointed out, Rachel had sent a postcard with a picture on it of a hotel on the Strip; it seemed likely, although it wasn't a given, that she had stayed there.

Claire couldn't figure out why, if Rachel's migraines were worse than ever, she would go to Las Vegas, of all places. She
had never been that sort of gambler, but on this point, the postcard was mute. Once, in severe pain, Rachel had given up her child. In her diary, she seemed fixated again on giving something up. If nothing was helping her, how far would she go this time?

As a child, Claire's friend Maura had lived next door to a man who suffered from arthritis so crippling that he was confined to a wheelchair, who spoke matter-of-factly of his pain to Maura's mother but did not complain about it. One morning, he wheeled himself out to his car, drove to the closest mall, doused the car and himself in gasoline, and set himself alight.

Rachel had spoken of thresholds, of how, having exposed yourself to various things that might cause pain, you suddenly reached a point of vulnerability that pushed you over the edge. The more susceptible you were, the less trigger it took.

In March, towards the end of their last phone conversation, Rachel had said, I can't go on like this. She had used such words before, repeatedly in her diary. How did you know when to take them literally?

On Wednesday Claire had cancelled her return ticket to Toronto – she could fly back the next day, or the next. What, by now, did another day or so matter? Brad's cellphone rang. He answered it. It rang again. Someone he knew in Las Vegas had given a massage some weeks back to a woman who said she'd once been treated by Brad at Pure. It didn't sound like she was a regular client, or anything more than a client, and also the woman his friend Rita had seen was blonde. But why didn't they go to Las Vegas for the weekend, cheap package deals were easy to come by, and even if Claire couldn't come, he wanted to go, to see what he could find. “I don't mind doing this. I feel a kind of
responsibility to make sure she's all right.” It was as if the voice of Rachel's need and suffering was working on him, pulling him back towards her. It was his profession to look after people. “I care about her. She doesn't make it easy and I've tried to pull away but I don't see, especially now, how I could turn my back.”

Claire took Rachel's phone into the bathroom and called Stefan.

“Where are you? I thought you were at a yoga class.”

She told him she was in New York and wanted to go to Las Vegas with Brad Arnarson. Brad thought Rachel might still be there – someone he knew had possibly seen her. “She left a diary, Stef. She doesn't sound good in it at all. It's pretty disturbing.”

“Claire, no, that's going too far. There's no reason for you to follow her around, whatever state she's in. Why are you doing this? She's selfish and manipulative and doesn't care what anyone else thinks. Let him go on his own. She didn't even write to you, she wrote to him.”

They were beyond Minnesota now, Stefan falling farther and farther away, and yet distress still clung to Claire, Stefan's distress and her own. It left a chemical residue; commingling with grief, it made invisible furrows through her. When the muscles across her forehead and behind her eyes began to tighten, she took an Anaprox and a Gravol. She could not take a Zomig until they landed. She would only take one if she had some reasonable expectation of its working, which medicating herself in the hostile sensory environment of an airplane didn't offer. The pills were too expensive. You had to calculate carefully, or gamble – was
this one bad enough, was it worth it? – and even though you were instructed to take them as early as possible in the migraine cycle to ensure their efficacy, this warning was counterbalanced by the fear that overuse might render them less effective, and the fear of unnecessarily using a fifteen-dollar pill (did scientists factor in the psychological effect of the cost of a pill when performing drug trials?).

Besides, she only had four Zomig on her, one blister pack of three and one extra, no more than the stash of pills that she carried on her at any time. She'd left home expecting to be gone just a day. Before leaving New York, she had taken the packet of Imitrex and the expired bottle of Elavil from Rachel's kitchen cupboard. On Thursday, after she and Brad had made their travel plans, she had called and left a message for Allison, telling her what she was doing and what she feared Rachel might be capable of. And another for Charlie, asking if he could put her on some kind of leave, medical leave, whatever, but she had to find her sister.

Hours later, it seemed, Brad shook her arm. “Don't miss this.” He pressed her towards the window, where, down below, the ancient crevasses, the great red wounds, of the Colorado river valley opened.

A black pyramid flanked by a sphinx swam out of a heat haze just beyond the runway. Yellow smog ringed the brown mountains and spread over the flat terrain in front of them, the Strip – already so close – thrusting up from the flatness in one long, outsized, crenellated line.

Brad asked Claire if she minded waiting for the shuttle to the car rental depot or if she wanted to take a cab straight to the hotel and he'd come back for the car later. Burrowed behind sun hat and sunglasses, she said why not pick up the car. They were exhaled into the heat.

She was sitting in a chair in the car rental office while Brad filled in forms. Next thing, he was honking at her from behind the wheel of a white Dodge Neon. How had he done that? He'd also yanked a black baseball cap down over his head. Once she'd settled herself beside him, he passed her a tube of
SPF
35 sunscreen while slathering the white cream over himself. The vents blasted air conditioning. His fluidity behind the wheel surprised her, although no doubt it shouldn't have. The sunscreen smelled raw. As they approached the Strip, every building grew huge. Out of scale. Or they, in their little white car, were shrinking.

They'd managed to find a room in the Flamingo Hotel as part of a package deal. Brad had said he'd be able to stay with his friend Altha, another massage therapist, although now, when he tried her, wanting to drop off his bag, she wasn't around. The room, on the seventh floor, was one of thousands in a great three-sided block. Even though it was a nonsmoking room on a nonsmoking floor, there was a palpable hint of smoke, which must have come drifting through the ventilation system. The window didn't open. As she and Brad stared down into the gardens below, Claire spied, under a cluster of palms, by the shore of an artificial pool, foreshortened by distance, some pink, long-legged croquet mallets – no, flamingos.

It was seven minutes past one, although it felt like late afternoon. Stefan would be nearly through work for the day. Should she call him, but if she did, what would she say? After eating a room-service tuna-salad sandwich, Claire took a Zomig and told Brad she was going to lie down for a while. She stripped off the blue floral bedcover and slid onto the bed in her clothes. The white grill of the air conditioning vent billowed gusts of cold air into the room and made her shiver.

“Want me to turn it off?” Brad asked.

“Down,” Claire said, because there was no other way to get any circulating air, smoke or no.

He took a copy of the photograph of Rachel that she'd been carrying around with her for the last month and said he'd see if he could find out if Rachel had actually stayed at the Flamingo, although Claire wasn't holding out much hope of his confirming this.

The medications blunted her headache but it did not vanish. At 4:35, Brad phoned from the lobby, by which point, anxious and restless and hungry, Claire was more than ready to go downstairs to meet him. He was waiting for her in a pink armchair and said that while he'd got no information out of the hotel, he'd spoken to a couple more contacts. He was asking people to check spa records and leaving descriptions of Rachel.

The heat had begun to diminish. They set off south along the Strip, among flocks of people ambling north and south, moving faster than the congested cars. They crossed Flamingo Avenue by means of a raised walkway, reached either by stairs or
an escalator, set to the east of the intersection, its upper section flanked by Plexiglas suicide barriers which cut off access to the roadway below. Perhaps it was anonymity that Rachel had sought here, or, perversely, somewhere that might heighten her despair. How large everything seemed, even larger, if possible, than before, as if things had grown while Claire slept.

Outside Paris, café tables and wicker chairs were assembled beneath a red awning, high on a raised dais, so that they, at street level, peered up towards people's feet. One huge gridded leg of the Eiffel Tower descended in front of them while the others vanished out of sight through the roof of the ornamented building the tower straddled. Claire had never spent much time imagining herself in Las Vegas. Until now, she'd had no plans to come here. What struck her, even more than the giant facades of the casinos, were the monstrous hulks of the hotels behind them, those thousands of rooms: she had not anticipated the amount of visual space they occupied, nor the small dark figures (mostly male, probably Mexican), each of whom held a handful of cards and thwacked one against his opposite palm before thrusting it at any man who passed, alone or no, while chanting girls girls girls girls girls. The sidewalk was littered with abandoned pictures of girls.

At 3:06 a.m., Claire turned on her bedside light. Brad, who was sleeping on the sofa since his friend Altha had mysteriously not returned his calls, started up wildly before rolling over and pulling a pillow over his head. Claire tiptoed to the bathroom to pour herself a glass of water and take another Zomig. This was
the second of the four she had left, and so she was fervent in the hope that she was simply suffering through an arrival spasm and once out of that transitional zone, she would feel better. After returning to bed, she lay thinking of Stefan, arguing with him and with herself.
Was
Rachel simply being manipulative? Was she wrong to have come here?

At five, both awake, since they were still on East Coast time, she and Brad headed out into the pre-dawn twilight to take advantage of the all-night breakfast, which ended at 6 a.m., at the Barbary Coast next door. Even at this hour there was the visual dazzle of the casinos to contend with and their auditory assault. They could not reach the street without traversing the babble of craps tables, the jangle of slot machines, without passing clusters of short-skirted women, and men clutching bottles of water, either to quench an early-morning thirst or because they were trying desperately to rehydrate themselves after drinking all night.

Brad had showered and raked his wet hair back. The fabric of his turquoise shirt was so thin his pale torso was visible through it. In a restaurant as gloomy as the darkened casino they had passed through to enter it, as shaded from the passage of night into day, they ate eggs and bacon, Brad on the banquette opposite Claire, fork gripped in his fist. He chugged from one of the single-portion cartons of soy milk that he'd brought with him in his carry-on luggage. He didn't consume dairy products, he said, not because he got headaches but because of some digestive sensitivity.

He told Claire he was still playing phone tag with Rita, the therapist who'd seen the blonde woman from New York.

“I'll catch up with you later,” Claire said, “but first I want to go for a walk.”

She would open herself to a place in which she took her bearings as much by the mountains, the sun casting its light from the east upon the flanks of the western mountains above the desert, as by the flimsy buildings in front of her. She was experiencing a great desire to be alone, to explore, yes, but also to shut out the rest of the world, or at least the people in it, as she used to do as a child when her head ached and her surroundings grew too much for her, or, as she lay in her bedroom, before Rachel appeared with her own headaches, when the room used to grow and shrink around her.