TV, though, was booming. It was said that there now more channels than there were people. That when you died, when you passed on, it was into TV. “TV for president,” people muttered, sincerely, at their own flat-faced, blueblazing TVs.
LJ’s mom herself no longer watched TV. She bought stuff for LJ — literature, stuffed animals, a typewriter — though LJ was rarely ever home anymore, seemed always to be at school. LJ’s mom actually was not doing too good. She had lost it a bit. She had purchased a vacuum cleaner the size of a lawnmower, the idea of which depressed her enormously. She felt constantly impending. The daily experience of things thwarted her, like some theory of quantum mechanics she just could not understand. She took to eating candy and became sallow and uninspired in the face, like a curry dish. She bought yet more things. People from far away — from TV, she felt — came daily to her front door, sold her stuff. Nights, she lay awake, waiting for morning, for the sun to come and crash her brightly along, which it would do. She sometimes thought dizzily of packing up, taking a trip, entering into TV… or some other place, any yet unsquandered world, as there must be, she felt, somewhere one could go; that if this world was ruined, if one messed up, there would be another place, sympathetic and conciliatory, to leave towards.
The first day of October, a group of her relatives flew down from Canada — six or seven grown-ups — and lived with her. She and LJ moved into the house across the street, but more relatives came, friends of relatives, and soon both houses were filled; the day before Halloween, then, they all flew back to Canada, the relatives, the friends — everyone — including, by force of association or by lack of anything else to do, LJ and her mom.
On Halloween Jed sat on the sofa feeling sorry for himself. He had made plans with LJ. They had not seen each other for a long time, and were to trick-or-treat together, and then stay overnight at Jed’s house.
Jed began, very quietly, to cry.
Jed’s dad had made squid suits for Jed and LJ — they were going to be children giant squid — and Jed, finally, put his on and fell asleep on the sofa, laid across his dad’s lap.
In the morning Jed’s lung collapsed. It was spontaneous, the nurses said, just happened sometimes — maybe because of stress — and was called pneumothorax, all of which sounded, to Jed’s dad, a little absurd, a little made up.
A week later, out of the hospital, Jed’s lung collapsed again. After that, it happened again. On the third time, they did surgery. Each time, also, they made a slit in Jed’s side, between two ribs, held down his body, and forced in a plastic tube, which was connected to a suction machine. The second time, the tube had a point at the end of it — a newer model — and they pushed it in too far, so that it almost pierced through to the other lung. After each chest-tube procedure, Jed would feel lucid, and invulnerable, almost, but also inappreciable, like something momentary and undetectable, and though he wouldn’t remember crying, his face would feel hot and wet and open-pored.
Nights, nurses came in with painkillers. Mornings, X-ray machines the size of refrigerators were wheeled in. Jed’s dad sat against the wall, straight-backed, below a gray-green window. He watched Jed. The entire time, he had made up going through his head, honed and impervious as something to be launched into orbit.
The third time the plastic tube was taken out, the doctor was athletic and did not sit down. He came in the night, cut the sutures, removed the tape. “This’ll feel a bit strange,” he said. “I’ll count to three.” Jed feared, as he did each time, that the tube might latch onto something on its way out, that his entire insides — his round and oily heart, his brain somehow — might be yanked out. The doctor said, “One—” then flung his arm back and jerked the tube out from Jed.
After that, everything became a lot less compelling. Things were generally more dispersed, a little vanquished-seeming. Birds flew higher in the air, sometimes flapping straight through to outer space. It was mid-December. Jed began to feel a sort of low-level buzz to his perception of things — a buzz, he felt, that meant he was alive and that everything was real, but just barely — a soft and cellular hum that moved him noticeably along.
LJ’s mom phoned Jed’s dad one night. She and LJ were back, had bought another house in the same neighborhood.
She invited Jed and his dad over, for Christmas Eve, which was a week away.
On Christmas Eve, Jed and his dad went to LJ’s mom’s new house. They built a sofa-cushion fort in the living room. There was a giant squid swimming pool float the size of a grown man on top of the TV. LJ’s mom had bought it for Jed. A Christmas tree was flashing from another room, lighting up the walls, dark and middleless and fugue’d as some unpeopled dance of the future.
Outside, it was black and silent, as most everyone, it seemed, had by now moved away.
In the living room, blankets and pillows covered the floor. They were all going to sleep there tonight. The TV was on, showing previews. They were to watch the movie Yi Yi, by Edward Yang, a favorite of LJ’s mom. She was in the kitchen, which was open to the living room. “Cream of broccoli and Swiss cheese,” she was saying. “Everyone will love this. It has the most beautiful color. I always thought it was like what you’d see if you were falling through the sky and went on your back. The wind going across, the trees reflected onto the clouds, all creamy and moving around. The sun glowing somewhere …”
Jed’s dad was in LJ’s room, moving LJ’s mattress out into the living room. He was taking his time. He was thinking that maybe he would begin, now, to long for some outlying aspect of LJ’s mom, to yearn gradually for her, to work towards a real kind of wanting, and finally, then, some day — some breezy February morning, years from now — look at her face or eyes or neck, at whatever would be the most her part of her, and try, with all of slight and glancing life, to love her wholly, truly, and knowingly.
Jed was inside the sofa-cushion fort and so was LJ. They were both ten now. Jed had on his squid suit and LJ had on bunny slippers. “I’d like to disappear one day,” LJ’s mom was saying, in the kitchen. She talked in a soft, uninflected way, like it was just to herself. “I get the feeling sometimes that I can do that. It’s like there’s some place I really want to go to, and I’m not sure where, but I can still go. I think I’d really like that. I’d sit down one afternoon. I’d say, ‘Okay now, Susan, time to go.’ Clasp my hands or something. Then I’d do it. I’d just be gone then. No one would know. I wouldn’t even know.” Jed and LJ were crawling through the fort, which tunneled around and over the sofa. Jed was anticipating the part where he’d go up, onto the sofa, then over, in a drop, to the carpet. LJ was listening to her bunny slippers shuffling behind her — like real bunnies, she was thinking, baby ones.
That night Jed woke up. He was on the floor, on blankets. He saw in the reflection of the TV that LJ’s mom was lying on the sofa, behind him. Her eyes were open. She lay on her side and looked very awake. She looked worried, Jed thought.
She shut her eyes tight and kept them scrunched like that — hard. Then she slowly opened them until they became very wide. She blinked a few times, but kept her eyes large and round, her face a face of surprise. Then she stopped that and looked worried again.