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dollars in the parking
lot of Serra Bowl in Encino. “Value’s generated by the world, not by
consciousness,” Mom said that night as we drove south to La Jolla. “The trick
is to take the world and its values and generate better worlds inside. You’ve
got a choice, baby, and it’s the only choice you’ve got. Either remake the
world, or allow the world to remake you. Did that sign say 101? Look for my glasses–there,
on the dash. And keep an eye out for Highway 101.”

 
    WE
WERE DRIVING, always driving, and always it was night. Outside our hurtling car
the darkness simmered with radio waves and the swirling, hot Santa Anas. Everything
converged out there, even the heartbeats of other stars and galaxies. Pulsars,
quasars, fissioning novas and supernovas, the radar of airplanes and control
towers, the diminishing cries of crepuscular birds. I couldn’t look into that
eternal night–and the oceans of static engulfing our AM radio every few
miles or so–without thinking the question. The question surfaced like
some underwater creature. It was learning to oxygenate. It was crawling from
the sea’s burning muck.
    “Whatever
happened to Dad?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself. The question was like force,
blood pressure, chemistry, light. “Where is Dad now? Is he alive? At night like
this, when the night is just like this, does Dad ever think about us? Is Dad a
person in the world, Mom? Or does he just lie in his bed and dream? And if so,
Mom, are we his dream, or is he ours?”
    But
Mom had already grown quiet, as if the question were not mine at all, but
rather part of some thin formless lapse within the continuity of Mom’s
diminishing world. She never said anything for hours at a time. She was going
very far away.
    I
merely traveled. But Mom journeyed.

 
 
 
    7

 
    THEN
ONE DAY I awoke puffy and unbathed in the backseat of our car and Mom told me.
The hot sunlight was filling the cracked vinyl upholstery, the warped,
discolored dashboard and dirty windows. Mom was leaning inside and pushing my
shoulder. “I’ve done it,” Mom said. “I’ve rented us a house.” So finally, after
years without memory, Mom initiated time again. We had our own house now, and
nobody lived in it but us.
    “I’ve
learned some important things in the last few months or so,” Mom told me that
night. “About myself, you, our world, the future. And about the sort of
unrealistic expectations people can develop about one another. Everything’s
going to be different this time,” she promised. “I’ve learned to be realistic
about things. I’ve learned there are things we simply can’t expect from one
another.”
    Every
few minutes she took her glass into the kitchen and hacked at a bag of ice we
had purchased from the local liquor store. The bag rested in the rusty and
chipped Formica sink, thawing and reshaping itself. Then Mom returned to the
living room with her icy glass and poured more Seagram’s and 7UP.
    “I
don’t care, Mom,” I said, compelled by my own confessions too. “I just want you
to know that I’m not mad at Pedro anymore. I have been very selfish and
confused lately, and I don’t mind if Pedro comes to live with us again. I can’t
keep you to myself. It isn’t fair. My love for you can’t be a selfish love if
it’s to be honest and true. I have to let you live your own life because that’s
what I love about you. That life you live apart from me. I’m learning a lot
about myself as an individual, Mom. And if Pedro comes to live with us again, I
promise to be nice to him.   I won’t
do anything I shouldn’t do.”
    Mom
sipped her drink in the cold room, the candles flickering around us, impaling
the mouths of Mountain Dew and Coke bottles streaked with ruddy wax. Mom just
looked away. It was as if she didn’t hear me. It was as if she were listening
to Pedro dream, the man whose name she taught me to say and then taught herself
to never say again. I wondered if in Pedro’s dreams