Not honey-blond: platinum.
Not platinum: ash.
Usually you cannot choose your children.
As a rule of thumb, in other words.
She is cradled in your arms, spine straight as anticipation itself, pointing at this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing.
She wants to know what every object in the universe is called, and she wants to know it in the next sixty seconds.
When she yawns, it is with a comfortable carelessness that adults forgot so long ago they now believe they never possessed it in the first place.
When she smiles, it is always a jolt to her, to you, to everyone, how outrageously beautiful she is.
You see her in a series of snapshots.
Muybridge moments.
At four, giddy on the downward slope of a playground slide.
At seven, tottering lipsticked before a bedroom mirror in Andi’s one pair of very high pumps.
At thirteen, halting in her tennis-shoe tracks in the kitchen when you tell her to be home by ten and she gives you The Look, a half-lidded once-over that takes children more than a decade to master.
Zeno and his arrow.
Changing and not changing.
The snapshot splutters into filmic motion.
Aw, dad, her flickering figure says, crackling a cheekful of gum, eyes rolled up in mock supplication to the ceiling. Nobody’s home by ten anymore.
You are, little lady, says dad.
She bops her forehead with her pipsqueak palm, exasperated, disgusted, repelled by your entire race of doddering begetters, then pirouettes on the balls of her feet and aims for the back door.
She bops her forehead, and you realize all children die by the time they are twelve.
Everything close becomes far.
Midnight, dad calls out behind her with what authority she has left him. Midnight! Midnight! Midnight!
Freeze frame.
Freeze heart.
Freeze everything.
The world for children is either very fun or very frightening, Andi reports beside you.
The fountain trickling.
The kids falling.
Falling and wailing, falling and bouncing, falling and rising and running along like nothing happened in their ceaseless Brownian waltz.
The best of the best or the worst of the worst, you say.
Childhood is nothing if not a province of extremes. There’s no middle ground. No emotional DMZ. It’s all about leaping without looking, figuring out what every button does.
It’s hot or it’s cold.
It’s… hey, isn’t that Jared over there?
Where?
Over there. By the inflatable dinosaurs. Nadie on his shoulders.
You wave a marzipan over your head. Jared is wearing large earphones like shelled sea creatures and holding a boom mike. A cumbersome reel-to-reel tape recorder hangs at his side. He catches sight of you and veers from the toy emporium, grin breaking across his features.
He reaches up, takes one of Nadie’s perplexed hands, and flaps it in greeting.
Nadie unsuccessfully surveys her surroundings for significance.
Ten feet away, Jared begins speaking:
Look at you. He slips the earphones down around his neck. You’re naturals. The congenital mall dwellers. You should open up your diner here.
Candy? Andi offers.
Jared holds up his palm like a traffic cop.
No way. My doctor, who will probably someday be implicated in the unspeakable acts under the Khmer Rouge, is convinced my bad cholesterol has become worse.
I’m sorry, says Andi, closing her journal and standing.
Dr. Kompong. Dr. Doomdoom. Call him what you like. It’s just a matter of time. Survivors will begin coming forward. Anyway, so. When you’re young, you think the only thing you think about is your body. Testosterone and estrus. Zits and pubic dandruff. When you’re older, you get to discover what thinking about your body is really all about. Do I have heartburn or is that the first sear of stomach cancer? Is that a sore neck from working out or is it my carotid artery about to blow?
Andi offers Nadie a chocolate-covered marzipan. She accepts it as she might a slimy wad of pond scum. The second it touches her palm, she drops it and it splats on the floor and her eyes spread apart and she is already focusing somewhere beyond the three of you.
Jared squats bulkily and, bracing her on his shoulders with one hand, puts down his boom mike, a fuzzy gray egg at the end of a six-foot aluminum pole, scoops up the sugary clot with the other, then grabs the boom mike and bulkily rises.
With a conjurer’s flourish, he slips the mess into his jeans pocket and continues talking, absentmindedly wiping his hand on one pant leg.
With his audio paraphernalia, he looks like a crank researching paranormal phenomena.
Pedestrians execute wide arcs around him, fearing he might without warning turn and begin to interview them.
A new piece? you say, also rising.
You tap his tape recorder.
Dream Skin, I’m calling it, he explains. Have you ever thought about what it means to own an album?
An album?
Nadie matter-of-factly reaches down and yanks Jared’s right ear.
Yeowch, he says, flinching. Nadie laughs. You, um… right. You mind if we stroll a little? We’re like sharks here. We’ve got to keep moving or we die.
You pull away from the fountain and fall in with the other consumers revolving through the mall.
Everyone unconsciously stays to the right except teenagers with numerous rings through their eyebrows and parents tearing after runaway toddlers.
You pass a store with life-size cardboard cutouts of Batman, Luke Skywalker, and Monica Lewinsky on her knees out front, then a Christian gift shop featuring all sorts of Bibles in its repertoire: real leather, fake leather, white with gold letters and rhinestones, gold with red letters and plastic rubies, pocketsize, tablesize, Spanish, Korean, one with a built-in music chip, one that is not really a Bible at all but a hollowed-out box that looks like a Bible inside of which is a video of the highlights from the Bible acted by Sally Struthers.
Sally Struthers and someone from Sex and the City whose name you cannot remember.
To own an album really means to have the right to monopolize the music on it, Jared explains as you move.
You get to pick when to listen to it, you say, where, how many times.
The illusion is that you, the customer, controls the commodity, right? Only… and here’s the really cool part… with each playing comes a kind of lack, a shortage, see?
Because the thing that sounds like it’s there isn’t really there? says Andi.
No band, you say. No star.
A young well-groomed woman in a celery-green dress stands behind a folding table on which fizzes a frying pan atop a Bunsen burner.
What is cooking in the frying pan is unidentifiable: whitish-yellow cubes that smell like curry and cat food. On either side of the frying pan are small cardboard signs with names of various sexually transmitted diseases neatly magic-markered on them.
Look at you, Jared says. You guys should be professors. I know it. Exactly: where’s the live band? Where’s the thing in-itself?
Gonorrhea.
Herpes.
Pudendal ulcers.
Which, not to put too fine a point on it, means that every time you play an album the commodity holds something back from you, right, which reinforces the notion that you’ll never be in touch with the original… which, of course, makes you want to buy another album, because maybe that one will get you closer to the thing you can’t ever be close to… which, of course, makes you buy the video, then the action-figure dolls, then the coffee mugs and key chains you’re embarrassed about buying the next day but be that as it may.