If I remember all of the good things, isn’t it my responsibility to also remember the bad? If I remember the consumption of happiness at Thanksgiving, shouldn’t I also remember the downing of poison, the force-feeding of hydrogen peroxide? If I can feel her heartbeat through her chest as she sleeps nights snuggled next to me, shouldn’t I also hear her gasping for breath when that same peroxide went down wrong?
The bookends of these memories join to create a vise. My head is stuck between the moveable jaws, which also act as giant conch shells to create the white noise of the ocean, as someone cranking the vise handle makes everything tighter and louder and more unbearable until I struggle to remember why I’m even here. A sale, yes, but a sale on what? What am I shopping for? I search vainly for my bearings in a place that is not that big, not that overwhelming, and not at all unfamiliar. A trolley of tourists passes by with its deafening clang, a sound simultaneously muffled and piercing. I think of the trolley bench in the veterinarian’s waiting room; does the trolley make its last stop there? People exit shops like they’re coming right at me. A man walks two dachshunds on leashes; they cut through the crowds, laser-focused.
Just as they pass me, I start to dry heave.
Everything is a blur, and the only thing that registers in my brain is that I’ve got to get out. My car is on the sixth level of a parking garage that I suddenly feel incapable of navigating. Escaping it would require a tight series of right turns down a central vertigo-inducing ramp that would be the end of whatever shreds of equilibrium I have left—never mind driving home. I stagger past two restaurants, both so unappealing and bland that even on my best days I wonder who dines in them. I know these restaurants mark the exit from the mall, the way to the garage, but I can’t bring myself to walk the narrow path between them. My brain fills with thoughts of the man who jumped off the roof of the parking garage and landed with a splat at the base of the escalator some months ago. Not thoughts about the man, exactly; I know nothing about the man except what they reported on the news. But of death.
Of bones crunching.
Of finality.
Of strangulation.
Of the octopus.
I stumble forward, knowing this commits me to another lap around the eastern end of the mall. Out of the corner of my eye a sign registers, announcing a J. Crew Men’s store that is “coming soon.” I think to myself that I would like that, if I ever get out of here alive. If I ever have the nerve to come back.
Somehow a table presents itself near the grassy area where they erect the skyscraperlike Christmas tree each November, the one that would be here now if it were actually Black Friday. I slump into a chair and put my head down. The tabletop is sticky, but I don’t care. I don’t even know who this table belongs to. I’m probably supposed to purchase a Häagen-Dazs ice cream or a Wetzel’s soft pretzel to sit here. And maybe I will, but for now I just need the spinning to stop. I need thoughts that don’t squeeze me. I need good feelings that don’t bring bad ones; I need the deafening roar in the conch shells to subside.
I need to not be rankled by self-doubt.
My head continues pounding, and the air is thick, like trying to breathe custard. I’ve sweated through my shirt; it sticks to my back like Saran Wrap. I think of pills, little candies of pleasure and relief. I can’t remember if I have any at home. Goddamned Jenny, not prescribing me more. I try to imagine the calming whoosh of a Valium. The mounting clumsiness as the brain’s messages are transmitted more slowly. The calming happiness. The warming embrace. Maybe I can will myself into a more placid state just with the idea, the memory, of pills.
A piece of fuzz lands near my feet. Then another. I wonder if it’s snowing. Not actually snowing—it never snows in Los Angeles, except at The Grove at Christmastime when they launch fake snow from the roof of the movie theater with these cannonlike machines. Have two flakes coasted on a gentle breeze for six months, only now coming in for a landing? No. A mother chases a toddler blowing dandelion fluff. I should have known. Nothing floats effortlessly in limbo—not for six months.
From underneath my armpit I can see the dachshunds pass by again. I can just see their little feet, their short legs, eight of them in total, like the octopus’s, but they move at such speeds they look like more, like million-legged millipedes out for an afternoon stroll. Seeing how they deftly maneuver around huge obstacles and through loud noises, coupled with the idea of pills, slowly brings me some calm.
Lily would never tolerate The Grove. Not anymore. Not in old age. She would not have the wherewithal to navigate such a crowd. She would cower, with her head down, until I found a safe place for us to sit. She would be like me now: helpless, spinning, afraid.
As
