I guess I’ll have to do it myself.
I pull a cucumber off the vine, pluck some late-season tomatoes, and rip a head of lettuce from the ground.
In the kitchen, I find some knives. Japanese. Very sharp. I cut open the cucumber to discover that it’s disgusting. Pulpy and warm. The lettuce is okay, though I find dead winged insects lining the crotch of the leaves. I wash it five times. I slice into the tomatoes but miscalculate and catch the end of my finger. It spurts. Shit. I wrap it in a paper towel and then wipe the little droplets of blood from the cutting board.
It’s not until I’m eating the salad that I taste the metallic tang of the blood I missed. The cutting board I used is made of a porous wood and, by the time I rinse it after dinner, it’s stained.
It seems atmospheric to read Patrick Bloom’s books at his house during my first night there, and he has copies on the bookshelf with uncracked spines. I take a couple to the living room and flip to my favorite sections. A preface about foraging for mushrooms in the wilds of Humboldt County. A chapter about our genetic similarities to flies. A passage that compares Gatorade with the sugar water left out for hummingbirds.
Normally, I read his books and feel excited about the possibility of language and how bizarre the world is. Tonight, it just exhausts me.
It’s stuffy in here. It feels like my insides are stewing. I fight to keep my eyes open. The words swim on the page. I need to sleep.
I go upstairs and lie down on Patrick Bloom’s bed, but I can’t drift off. This room gives me the creeps. It’s the kind of room where someone would go to die, dark and primitive.
Every time I roll over, I catch my reflection in the shadeless windows and my heart jumps, certain that I’m seeing a ghost. I almost pass out, but the howl of a distant Amtrak jolts me awake.
It is shockingly, terribly hot. I jump out of bed and rattle the windows, but there’s no way to open them. There are no fans, either. I swing the door open, praying for circulation.
I pluck my iPhone off the bedside table. No response from Jack. Not that I’ve gotten one from him in months, but still. Nighttime is Jack’s time. My mom always hounded him about staying up until three, four, five in the morning and then sleeping all day long.
If he’ll ever respond, it’s now.
My mom met Jack’s dad, Dez, when I was four and she was a freshman at Cal. She had recently returned to school after my birth derailed her life; Dez managed a Top Dog. When Dez replaced my spot in my mother’s bed, I moved to a cot in the living room. Jack slept on the couch. We weren’t supposed to have more than two people in the apartment, but nobody ratted on us. Our neighbors had all kinds of things they weren’t supposed to. Pets, drugs, massage businesses, subletters.
Jack was twice my age and a mystery to me even then. He had a sullen, boyish beauty. At night, if I turned over toward the couch and opened my eyes, I’d usually find him awake and staring back. I began to think of Jack as nocturnal; something other than human.
Just before finals week of her junior year, a crushed-lilac bruise appeared around my mother’s eye. She made Dez pack his bags while she was off in some lecture hall filling in the bubbles on a Scantron. She ended up getting an A.
After that, I moved back into the bedroom with her. Jack stayed on our couch and Dez sent money every month. What kind of guy dumps his kid with an ex like that? A guy like Dez. He wasn’t a junkie or a criminal, just the world’s biggest asshole. Still, in turn, my mom cared for Jack. In turn, Jack cared for me.
When a girl pushed me down on the playground, he followed her after school, shoved her against the wall, and said that if she ever touched his little sister again he’d break her arm. He walked between me and the homeless folks we passed on the street; when they hassled us, he covered my ears and cussed them out. He always shared his candy, panicked if I ate it too quickly, watched me chew as if he were afraid I might choke. He stole pretty things for me — origami paper, hot-pink erasers, stickers.
My mother ignored the ways Jack grew stranger and darker. As a teenager, he came home with a lip pierced in the school bathroom with a safety pin and tiny, squiggly shapes pricked into his skin by a friend’s shaky hand using a sewing needle dipped in pen ink. But that was the Bush era, a time for Bay Area teens to go to punk shows and rage against The Man. Besides, I may have called Jack my brother, but my mom never called him her son. Her responsibility to him, as she saw it, was to make sure he survived to adulthood, no more and no less.
I hadn’t heard anything from Jack for more than a decade when I got a call from my mom in March.
Jack had gotten in touch to tell her he was back in Berkeley. He gave her a phone number, which she read to me.
“I have nothing to say to him,” I snapped. But I still remembered the number long after I hung up. Memory works in funny ways.
When the acceptance letter came for journalism school, I said yes, even though I’d never wanted to move back to Berkeley and even though it felt too much like following in my mother’s footsteps. This was different. It was grad school. Patrick Bloom was an instructor there. And I had applied before I knew Jack was back.
I hadn’t made my decision for him.
But I had called him the first week of classes.
“Jack?” I said after he picked up. When the line went dead, I was certain that it was him.
I’ve been texting him since, but I haven’t heard a thing.
I roll over to face the ceiling. I angle my phone toward my face and it lights up. Spots flood my vision. No wonder I can’t sleep when this shit is so bright.
The house I’m watching is cool, you should swing by, I type. And then I add the address. Not that he’d ever come. Not that I’m certain I’d want him to, anyway.
I leave my iPhone faceup, but it does not illuminate with a message that night. I don’t fall asleep until sunrise.
I wake in the afternoon. In the master bath, I examine the deodorant-crusted stains ringing the pits of my shirt. I peel it off, put it in a pile for the laundry. After my shower, I can’t find the bath towels, so I wipe Patrick Bloom’s skinny hand towel and tiny square of a face towel all over my body. I feel like a cat rubbing itself on things to leave its mark.
I bring my laptop to the patio. I’m supposed to take notes on an episode of a podcast for my radio class. My whole body hurts from the lack of sleep and, though the podcast is supposed to be some great feat of audio editing, it can’t hold my attention. My head keeps drooping.
When my laptop dies, I realize I forgot to bring a charger. Of course.
Biking all the way home for a stupid charger sounds awful. I could go upstairs to Patrick Bloom’s study. He might have a charger there. But I already bled all over his cutting board; I don’t need to make things worse by breaking into his study. I’d inevitably fuck something up. Accidentally set off an alarm or knock over some priceless heirloom — I don’t know what kind of delicate, precious things someone like Patrick Bloom would have in there.
Forget the computer, I’m only here for two more days. I’ll consider it a digital detox.
I want to be having more fun in Patrick Bloom’s home than I am. I get the joint I brought and take it outside to smoke on the deck. I hope his neighbors don’t complain about the smell. No one cares about pot in Berkeley, but I don’t know if the rules are different in the hills. These are the hippies who sold out, not the hippies who became crackheads and now line the streets just a few miles away.
I take a long rip.
I was thirteen when I first smoked. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment by then — my mother and I still shared a room, which we split down the middle with a folding wooden divider. Jack had his own room, barely bigger than a closet. It was so small that when he and I sat on the carpet beside his bed, leaning against the comforter that smelled like Old Spice and boy body, the toes of my checkered Vans touched the door.