You laugh at the exquisite absurdity of the scene. Your screenplay, a dystopian satire, depicts a world in which humans have become so obese and car-dependent that they have grown into their vehicles. Their blobby, boneless bodies, filling every inch of their cars’ interiors, have fused with their automobiles’ exoskeletons. Nothing but cyborg arthropods cruise the hot, barren planet, tanking up at automated gas stations and feeding through tubes at robot-run drive-thrus. The creatures mate like insects. The females lay eggs that resemble tiny Volkswagen Beetles. You still get chills when you imagine the opening credits rolling to the provocative tune of Gary Numan’s “Cars,” its optimistic melody undercut by a sinister undertow that slowly becomes apparent when the viewer realizes that there are no human beings in the scene.
“Caroline,” says your mother, “you ought to plan your baby for the summer.”
Your mother counts on her fingers: “September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May.”
And then she winks suggestively at you, as though she has somehow been reading your mind, following the grotesque sex scene you’ve been tinkering with. You wonder how you can engage your audience emotionally with scene after scene of soulless, car-human hybrids, cruising and eating and fucking and crashing. You wonder if you should have an archetypal rebel character who, unlike the other automatons, sees what grim conditions humanity has been reduced to and longs to break out into a more vital form of “reality.” You chuckle to yourself as you imagine two cyborg arthropods falling so deeply in love that they want to burst their carapaces and embrace each other flesh to flesh.
“You and Tim would have the most beautiful baby in the world,” your mother says, forcing you to think about the husband situation again, perhaps reading your mind again, for it was the very subject of reproduction that prompted your three-day argument.
And you do want a baby. But not right this minute. You want to wait until you are ready (financially, emotionally, physically). Your schedule is too crazy. You are too nervous. You drink too much wine. You have not published an article in a peer-reviewed academic journal. The ramshackle cabin you bought five years ago is only half-renovated. And, perhaps most importantly, the planet you happen to live on is a polluted ball of shit overrun with an insane and rapacious species of absurdly successful ape that will probably destroy itself within a decade.
“But you’re not getting any younger.”
Four days ago, your husband actually uttered this vile cliché. And that’s when you lost it, reminding him that sperm quality also suffers as men age, that men over forty are more likely to spawn autistic children and schizophrenics and mentally sluggish offspring with emotional issues, and that everything is not always the mother’s fault.
Your own mother, for instance, had three children whom she smothered with obsessive love, not because she was a bad person, but because her entire identity revolved around being a mother, which was partially your father’s fault and partially society’s.
“Of course, it’s difficult to disentangle the roles of individual men and those of the patriarchy,” you actually said, wincing as your husband smirked at your choice of terminology.
Two years ago, when you were finishing your dissertation on female monsters in 1970s cinema, your mother would call twice a week and say, “Caroline, have you finished your dissertation?” And now that you have finished your dissertation (which ended up taking several years), your mother prods you to take the next step in your long, arduous journey to adulthood.
“I can’t wait until you have a baby, Caroline,” she says now, firing up a Camel Light, looking like a hoodlum child because she is only five feet tall. And this image makes you fondly remember your own first cigarette. You and your best friend, Squank, had kept a stash of cigs in the shed, a dim moldy space where you also experimented with French kissing. You still recall the clammy warmth of Squank’s perpetually sweating hands. His hysterical laughter. His neurotic habit of pinching his arms black and blue every time he committed a “sin.”
“Mom,” you say, “do you remember Squank?”
“Squank,” she says. “That rings a bell. James, who’s Squank?”
“You remember Squank,” says your father. “Odd fellow. Weird laugh. Caroline’s boyfriend.”
“I wouldn’t call him a boyfriend,” you say. “Just a friend.”
“I’m having some memory problems,” your mother says.
You feel sick to your stomach, because your mother has always kept track of your childhood friends, obsessively, in fact, just as she tracked your progress with your dissertation.
“Mom,” you say, “who’s George Bush?”
“George Bush,” she says. “That rings a bell. James, who’s George Bush?”
“Our idiotic president,” you say. And your father winces, as he usually does at your political leanings. But this time he holds back from saying anything and, instead, sinks, as though from exhaustion, deeper into his chair.
Raiding the junk rooms of your brain, you call out names: Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson, Michael Jackson. And your mother has no idea who they are.
“What’s a shovel?” you cry.
“Scooper,” she says.
“What are these?” Making a peace sign, you point two fingers at your nostrils.
“Nose holes.”
“How about a tampon?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s a dragon?”
“A long short crawler.” She smirks sagely, as though answering some ancient riddle.
Your father, his face obliterated by shadows, sips silently. You spend the next hour subjecting your mother to demented quizzes, a panic rising within you like a locust swarm, a thousand tiny beating wings.
“Who’s Jesus?” you ask.
“He was on the cross.”
Why do people eat? What’s electricity? What’s the difference between plants and animals?
Cancer, tulips, radon, Slim Jims. Moonbeam, Bee Gees, Kleenex, rain. Tadpoles, Teletubbies, Rasputin, Atari. Tupperware. Lizards. Dinosaurs. Ice.
What is love? Where do babies come from? What happens when you die?
Sometimes your mother answers correctly. Sometimes her face goes blank. Sometimes she says something nonsensical yet poetic, cryptic even, her face serene and wizened like Yoda’s. As darkness closes in on the balcony, you feel the world shrinking to nothing but you and your aging parents. You hear the clink of your father’s ice. You hear a roar that might be the ocean or it might be traffic or it might be something inside your own head.
“Mom, what’s the ocean?” you ask.
“It’s big,” she says. “It’s made of something. What do you call it, James?”
“Water,” your father says.
That night, you have nightmares. You are on a vast, dilapidated spaceship that reeks of leaking gas. You move down endless corridors, trip over clusters of ripped-out wiring. You discover a medical area, dim yet stark with flickering fluorescent light. Among the rows of sick and dying, you find your mother, tucked into a corner, hooked up to a mess of dirty tubes. Before your eyes, she shrinks into the bedding until there is nothing left but a small spot of grease. And when that vanishes, you are aware that the earth no longer exists.
You wake in the throes of a panic attack. Something is rustling beneath your bed. A small head pops up. You recognize the impish grin, the electric hair rollers.
“Good morning.” Your mother stands up, spreads a crumpled garment: a vintage sundress, purple butterflies and ivy.