Warnings from the Future Read online

  I heard Shasta moan, long and mournfully, and there they were again, my brother from nine years ago, my niece from six years ago, winding along the side of the mountains with white towels in her lap, a red penumbra spreading across them, the thighs of her jeans already saturated with blood, looking like something from a horror film. I saw her elbow thrown across her eyes like someone trying to nap on an airplane, less because of any physical wounds than to avoid interacting with her father. I saw the part of her face you see beneath a superhero’s mask, her jaw set with emotion, glazed with tears, white from the loss of blood.

  “How’s her color?”

  “Pale.”

  “Gray at all? Blue?”

  “Just pale.”

  “That’s good.”

  He was at least half an hour from the hospital. There was not much else I could tell him. The situation sounded as stable as it could be for an injured person riding through the dark in a dirty pickup. But he didn’t hang up, so neither did I.

  Rick had taken a swing at me at a family barbecue over a matter of probate. When our father died, the whole of his estate was his cabin in Tahoe, which had been our vacation home before the divorce and his only home in the years after. Rick had wanted to take over the house, but of the hundred and fifty thousand he needed to buy me out, he had about five.

  Our mother, who had lost the Sacramento house after a banker boyfriend talked her into a host of ill-considered investments, was working as a waitress in Truckee and getting older. She could move out of her apartment, and she and Rick could share the house. It would be good for the family. Good for the family mattered to me, but I still had my loans from physician’s assistant school, and Denise and I were still upside-down on our mortgage. We hadn’t even started our 529 plans for the girls. Gifting that kind of equity was untenable. I thought it a breach for him to even ask, so it was perhaps in an ungenerous tone that I suggested the two of them go in on an apartment together.

  That’s when he took his swing, and yes, it did connect.

  After that, I sent my lawyer to talk to him and his. He never apologized. My mother considered my failure to give them half a house miserly, so I lost her in the deal, too. She was a type you see often enough in movies, a lifetime of stints as a diner waitress and bartender, interrupted only by marriages to more successful men. She was pretty in a blunt way that hadn’t aged well, turning her into one of those square-jawed old ladies that made me think of extras in spaghetti westerns.

  Shasta’s graduation party had been at my mother’s apartment complex, hot dogs in the park-style grill boxes poking up around a pool whose unnatural turquoise color screamed of some kind of carcinogenic additive. A few families were in the pool, but no one from our group. We all stood dopily on the grass in the June heat. There was no mixing between the two populations of our party—Shasta’s friends and my mother’s. I’d come to see Shasta, knowing Rick was off in Goose Lake near the Oregon border seeing about a used boat. I didn’t want to see her tumble into a family rift she’d played no part in creating. My mother made a few crossings to offer the girls Ruffles from a melamine bowl, but she knew where her tribe was. I was stuck between the two. My mother didn’t come talk to me, and I didn’t go talk to her. Neither did I have any desire to hover around a group of six teenagers. Shasta finally resolved my dilemma by deserting her friends to talk with me awhile. She held her bottled Coke the way men held beer bottles at patio parties, with a thumb and three fingers, nonchalant, elbow bent to keep it at rib height, as if it were a microphone she might soon need to speak into. She was more practiced with the real thing, I suspected, from parties at which her grandmother wasn’t lurking. And the way she pulled up next to me, rather than facing me, so that we were looking out together at the kids half-submerged in the industrial-solventcolored pool, made me worry she might light up a cigarette.

  “How’s Denise?” she asked.

  The way she posed this simple question, as if asking were a dry joke, contained a fully formed critique of my wife: that she was too limited in her worldviews, that she was simple in her attempts to find balance and meaning through inspirational pictures and motivational quotes, that she did not know how to be a real person. Shasta, even in her elementary school years, had not bought into the pleasant and extremely mommish way Denise tried to lead her and the girls through activities. She perhaps thought there was something dishonest about that kind of acting, that it was concealing a void, that it was a sheet of wrapping paper over no gift. It was certainly not an act that Rick ever put on, and so must have seemed terribly insincere by comparison. I was of course familiar with the dirty or dark jokes Denise made after bedtime, and caught the jokes she lobbed over the girls’ heads, jokes neither they nor Shasta realized existed. Even disagreeing with Shasta’s critique, though, I caught the knowing wink of her question, the one hiding in every TV advertisement: you get it. Who doesn’t receive a thrill from a secret compliment?

  “You know,” I said. “Doing lots of fun activities.”

  My mother visited the girls again with a bowl of Chex Mix. She did not come to Shasta and me, but she did look at me passively, as if she might be trying to identify some realtor she’d seen on a shoppingcart ad. Shasta nodded at her and told me quietly, “Susan’s the type of lady who’s always thinking about poisoning people’s tea, muttering to herself she could do it if she wanted to, nobody would stop her.”

  “That’s awfully judgmental,” I said, “but not necessarily inaccurate.”

  I prepared myself for some unkind question about my daughters, but instead she started talking about herself. She was a beach girl, she said. Kids who stayed up here didn’t care about knowing anything. It was too easy to grow pot in the national forest lands, to teach summer people to jet ski and winter people to snowboard. Everyone said the drinking water up here was laced with something, and that was why even people who didn’t smoke seemed stoned all the time. To save your brain, she said, you have to escape.

  How are your grades? That’s how I got out. There’s a question I didn’t ask. I remember thinking that kids have no idea how simple their trajectories really are, how easy they are to trace. A token resistance to the lifestyle up there was just part of the lifestyle up there. The ones who never talked about getting out were the only ones who got out. And this girl who was worrying about her brain had been a truant since fourth grade. I’m sure she used wadded-up worksheets beneath the kindling of her campfires. A little scholastic prodding from an uncle—how much could it do when her father didn’t even read her report cards?

  I could have guessed that she’d stay, that she’d drink beer in the woods and fail classes at the community college. Going to bars at nineteen, getting stabbed in the crotch—well, that’s more than I anticipated.

  “Who did this?” I asked Rick through the phone. “Was it a stranger, some crazy person?”

  “Some white fuck who calls himself Indian Steve. The bartender called him her ex-boyfriend. Guy is almost my age.” I thought I could hear in his voice that he still had his beard, that his voice had to travel through it. “Crazy? I don’t know. Crazy if he doesn’t leave town or blow his fucking brains out.”

  “Big guy?”

  “Little guy, jumpy. Got a black mole right in the middle of his forehead I’m going to use as a target.”

  “Wait, Steve Hillenbrand? He was my year.”

  “Hope you’ve got a funeral suit, then.”

  “No one liked him then, either. He had trouble getting people to take him seriously.”

  Something like a snort came from the wet beard. “He tried to get everyone calling him Indian Steve,” Rick said. “Most just call him Asshole Steve.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Time I’m done they’ll call him Colostomy Steve.”

  A long moan with a sort of honking quality came through the receiver, like a goose mourning. If she hadn’t lost too much blood, her heart would be supercharging to maintain blood pressure; the arteries of
her neck would be rearing up like garden hoses, struggling against the choker she was almost certainly not wearing but that I couldn’t picture her without. I saw the usual sunny gleam of her tan wiped off the pale base beneath it.

  “Hey, Rick? Put your hand on her forehead. What’s her skin feel like? Hot? Clammy?”

  “Like a fish fillet.”

  “Obvious question,” I said, “but you’re driving as fast as you can?”

  Every once in a while that old Elton John song “Daniel” comes on the radio. Of all things that could have made me think about Rick, this is what I got. I have my own adapted version, like the silly songs you sing to little kids: [Rick], my brother, you are older than me / do you [know I] still feel the pain / of the scars that won’t heal? I thought it once, now I’m stuck with it.

  You are older than me.

  There’s a pause after you are, then older than me is sung as a unit, almost a single word. How charged that phrase is when it comes to brothers, how freighted with implied responsibilities. Before Sacramento, we’d lived in the Berkeley hills. When my brother was nine and I was five, our parents considered themselves at liberty to leave us to our own devices and spent half their weeknights out on the town. My mother would cut up hot dogs in some macand-cheese and take off at 4:30 in the Chrysler to meet my dad in Jack London Square. In the mornings we’d all pile in Dad’s Mustang, the air in the cab smelling like stale cocktails. He’d drop me and Rick off at school and my mother at her car on his way to work.

  My brother, charged with looking after me, had installed a hookand-eye latch on the inside of his bedroom door and spent most of his time behind it.

  One of those nights, fish sticks going cold on the stovetop while I ate a bowl of cereal by myself, the floor started heaving below me. The whole house felt as if it had been buoyed up on a wave, a moment of nauseating weightlessness. The tremor tipped my chair back against the wall and the oak table into my guts, pinning me between the two. My bowl of Cap’n Crunch slid against me without overturning, draping a cold splash of milk and crunch berries on my shirt. The rumbling was still shaking plates on the wall when Rick streaked by toward the back door. It was only as he turned the handle that he glanced over his shoulder. He paused when he saw me pinned there, his panicked eyes met mine, and then he was gone.

  A few minutes after the world had calmed down, he came in and shoved the table off of me, and we sat in front of the TV, watching quietly together. Few memories of our aborted brotherhood are so dramatic, of course. And the memories are not so much memories as an agglomeration of neglectful years. Though I’m old enough now to be past measuring people—brothers, mothers—against their ideal versions, I still feel it’s fair to judge mine against the average.

  My parents had been waiting in line for the Bay Bridge tollbooths when the quake happened. The bridge collapse terrified my mother so viscerally she made us move to Sacramento, which was the beginning of the end for their marriage. I told myself that, as far as I was concerned, I was moving without a brother, and I wanted to believe this lie more than anything. How many more years until I stopped wanting it? Have I stopped wanting it now?

  A real brotherhood needs the fire of a shared childhood to form. Is it even possible to build one, now that the forge has cooled?

  There are so many versions of this ride tonight. There’s the ride Rick’s on and the ride I’m on, his side of the phone and mine. There is the truck I see, Rick’s old truck, Rick’s self as I last saw him, Shasta as I last saw her. There is the truck of reality, which might not even be a truck. There is a ride in which Shasta doesn’t make it to the hospital. There is a ride in which she does. There is a ride that ends with him and me saying we’ll talk again soon, and meaning it. But these are not the only ways tonight’s ride might end. If my estimation is right, he’s on one of the stretches of road that runs like a shoestring over the top of a ridge, so steep that even in daylight you have to stick your head out the window and look down to see anything but sky. And if my estimation is wrong, he either hit that stretch five minutes ago, or he’ll hit it five minutes from now.

  As much as my concocting these different versions may sound like just a bit of mental masturbation, I think of them more like variances in time zones. I’m in Sedate Pacific Time. They’re in Retrograde Mountain Time. What would Rick think if I told him about Schrödinger’s cat, if I explained the thought experiment? How would he react to the words thought experiment?

  And since we’re playing with time, let’s rewind a bit further. Let’s see Shasta on a barstool as she turns toward the sound of the opening door and sees Asshole Steve has arrived. This picture is odd, because in my story it’s seventeen-year-old Steve Hillenbrand, his oily hair long and slicked back. The black mole above his eyebrow is the size of a gumdrop. Does she smile at him? Or does she grip the bar, make worried eye contact with the bartender? Is Steve able to approach in peace, or does he charge, knife in hand, the moment the door closes behind him? The answers to these questions must matter, my gut tells me, but there’s no truth to that. They’re all retroactive extrapolations from the same result, which generated the questions in the first place.

  Shasta, how right were my predictions for you? And if I saw where you were headed and your father didn’t, am I the one to blame for not steering you off that course? The idea of God is nice, but I’d find it easier to believe in an entity omniscient but the opposite of omnipotent. Let’s be honest. Adult trajectories are no more difficult to trace. My teachers knew where I was going and were just happier with the answer—or at least the teachers who didn’t think I was a prick. And my current trajectory is well and consciously triangulated by the house payments, the college funds, the retirement accounts. The Song of My Mortgage.

  That’s probably why our dad took so little interest in us after the divorce. We were too easy to predict. There was no thrill of the unknown. And if most lives are like movies whose endings can be anticipated before the close of the first scene, a certain percentage of parents are like the theatergoers ready to walk out on such predictable fare.

  Dad liked to take us to movies, actually, and mostly movies we were too young for. That was the one thing he could think of to do: an entertainment for us that would entertain him, too. We sat parallel to each other, staring forward at Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Silence of the Lambs, Unforgiven. Everyone had a popcorn, and no one could take from anyone else’s after he’d finished his own—a rule directed at Rick, who looked like he was holding a softball when he pulled his hand out of a tub. Dad was a partner at a major accounting firm in Sacramento before the divorce. He commuted from Tahoe for a year before starting a ramshackle CPA firm up there catering to small businesses and households. He became obsessed with skiing, and tried to initiate us into the sport, but the trips stopped after two winters of us disappointing him and holding him back. He went on days we weren’t there; he never mentioned this, but you could see the wear on his skis. After that, he became as predictable to me as I was to him.

  But on this strange night, in my darkened kitchen, here Dad is for his close-up. Jesus, now everything was pouring out of this wound. I won’t lie, a part of me wanted to hang up the phone, close it all off like putting a stopper in an oil well. Something of the situation reminded me of when Denise and I were young and newly together, talking late into the night, convinced we could heal our wounds better by picking at them than by leaving them be. How complicated it is, how impossible, to sort out one’s feelings toward those early life embarrassments. I long for them at the same time that I long to be further away from them.

  Rick said he was coming into South Lake.

  “How’s Shasta? Can you still feel a pulse?”

  “She’s still mumbling.”

  “Making sense?”

  “Motherfucker, motherfucker … something something … motherfucker.”

  “Makes sense, considering.”

  “Not too far from my own sentiments.”

  The kitchen light came
on, and I slammed my eyes shut. A little scream muffled itself. Opening them a crack, I saw a blurry shape too small to be Denise. When she spoke I knew it was Chelsea. She was holding the red Spiderman cup she still uses to rinse after she brushes her teeth. She came into focus as I adjusted to the light. She watched my hand as it clapped the phone to my shoulder.

  “What is it, kiddo?”

  “Daddy?”

  “What is it?”

  “Is that another woman?”

  “Jesus Christ, Chelsea.”

  “I won’t tell Mom.”

  Her manner bore this out. She seemed entirely unbothered by the prospect. Perhaps interested by it.

  “I would hope you would tell your mother. It’s your uncle.”

  Her eyes were unfocused. She was searching her mind for an uncle. His persona non grata status was not something she’d been privy to. Like her grandmother, he just didn’t come up. I could see her mind turning, thinking I kept a secret line of communication with her uncle in the hours when she was asleep, kept him to myself. She processed a betrayal differently when she thought she was the one being betrayed.

  “Get your water and go back to bed.”

  If she’d wanted water, she would have gotten it in the bathroom. She was out here for a midnight soda or something else off limits. Giving her an out for her indiscretion sped her along. These girls, like me, like the wife I chose, all calculate, plot, and plan, however benignly. When Rick was born he took the good looks and left all the forethought for me.