People never pay attention to how their body works, until suddenly it doesn’t. That’s when they really feel conscious of how bizarre and miraculous and utterly strange this thing is that imprisons their soul. This thing that throbs and pulses and sweats, that breathes and itches and gurgles and snots and shits. Then they know-when something’s wrong. Then maybe they pay attention and, if they’re not too consumed with fear, they try to do something about it.
Of course, sick people are in touch with this reality every minute of every day of their illness; they’re connected with the skewed rhythms of their malfunctioning bodies in ways that health nuts and appearance fetishists will never ever know. The reality of fragile impermanence. The absolute truth that this blip of existence they know is absolutely transient.
You know this as well. You’re acutely in tune with this very concept at this exact moment. It’s not a particularly original thought process, but you’re not lucid enough to think up anything new, so you guess your brain decided to run the first relevant old file that it could access. You’ve only been awake for a few minutes, but all you’ve eaten for breakfast is scrambled migraine. It is an almighty force of unstoppable power, the only thing in the universe right now, reverberating through your skull like an infinite echo chamber.
The car’s stereo clock is blinking like it’s been reset; the flickering digital lights are hard to ignore in the feeble light of the hotel parking garage. The clock says 12:00, but you think it’s later than that. The intricate, easily destructible components inside the tape deck are a little too easy to identify with right now, but at least you’re grasping the essentials of their, and therefore your, corporeal reality. The headache hasn’t seemed to have waned at all with sleep, and you have no idea how long you’ve been out. For all you know, the birthday party is still raging upstairs and dangerous, violent predators are still in charge.
Driving will be tough, but you think you can do it. You could leave right now. You should leave right now, or at the very least, try to get up and find a phone to call the detective, or maybe an ambulance; every time you close your eyes for longer than three seconds, you can see blood vessels slamming against your eyelids, syncopated opposite the steady beating of your skull. So find a phone, kid, and call-fuck, that was a bad jolt, more stars where they didn’t used to be-call who? Phone. Cops. 911 some…thing?
Clarity is an expensive luxury, in terms of expendable energy, when you find yourself in a horrible predicament like this. You plan out every move so as to endure the lease discomfort from rat-bastard treacherous locomotion. Spilling out of the car and standing upright becomes a ninety-nine step process, with some repeated due to complete failure of execution. Somehow it happens, though, and the thing gets locked, so you slooooowly turn around and focus on a target across the garage: the elevator. Then you’re there! Awesome! Push that little up arrow, you monkey.
WHOOSH-ding! Ah, now that’s the melodramatically ditzy welcome you’ve been waiting for, so you enter the box and the whoosh seals you in. Turn around again. Okay, so the elevator panel has, like, fifteen lights pretending to be buttons, and you know you need to press one of them to get in and go up to the lobby, but there’s no “L” and you don’t know if that means-wait, does that mean the lobby is the same as the first floor? Sometimes other hotels did that and…no, no dumbass, what was it when you came through here, an hour ago? The buttons are getting blurrier by the second, so you better decide. Which one? Wait, that one’s a “2.” No perpendicular intersection resembling an “L.” You speak for the first time since awakening: “Turn my head around the right way, Chewbacca, I can’t see.”
So he does, and you suddenly press the first button your eyes land on. This is mildly suspenseful-if it’s the wrong one you’ll be instantly zapped up into a nightmare of late-Roman proportions-but all of that is forgotten when the entire box begins to hum, exactly as it’s supposed to, and transubstantiate your internal organs away from their usual coordinates. This is pretty awesome too, it at least it would be if not for the constant cranial sub-woofer soundtrack. Hmmmm…this is probably taking longer than it should. Is the lobby/first floor/place which might have a phone and conscious desk attendant really that far away? I don’t think so. No, no it’s not, dude. Can’t be.
But it is that far away. You realize the distance is much greater than you’d anticipated, especially since it’s now measured inversely to what it had been (i.e., if this place has a lobby it’s probably now far below you), but before you can even think to swear it’s WHOOSH-ding! and LOUD and “Oh, thank God,” and “Mmmmfpffgh” and “Fucking hell, Derek, give me a hand and close the door!” and suddenly three other wet sacks of carbon join you in a box much smaller than it was. Yes, these things are definitely LOUD and sweating and breathing and smelly-this one perfume-y, that one pukey, the third a little musty. So we have two boys and a girl, do we not?
“R.J., hold his head up-he’ll get even dizzier,” you hear the girl say, but then the one who must be R.J. replies “No no, you have to make sure he’s pointing at the ground in case he barfs again.” You’re not doing much about any of this-you’re pretty sure that these three aren’t going to the lobby. You recognize them all now-good job, by the way-and take a not-so-wild-guess that Contestant Number Three is hovering between mental levels in a similar manner to yourself. Someone pushes a button and you all move through space.
“Hey,” you say, “is Roy gonna be okay? He doesn’t look too good.” Or at least you try to say that, but maybe there’s not enough oomph in your vocal cords because both Liv and R.J. both look up at you and go “What?” That’s a pretty good answer, though, so you just say “Never mind,” and help them both keep Roy from fainting. “This is too funny,” you continue, and who gives a fuck if they pay attention or not? “I was actually trying to find a phone to call 911 or something.”
Liv asks “Why?” and so you tell her and R.J. (because he listens to everything) about the headaches ever since the soccer game “thanks to this little punk right here” (cut to your foot gently kicking Roy’s ribs, and he groans), and you try to ignore your moving organs again so you keep talking and eventually you make your way around to that whole thing about the detective with a girl’s name and how “he’s actually trying to bust your cousins about…oh, fuck it, I can’t remember…something with like extortion or drugs or something and-” but then you stop and double over when a massive wave of pain KO’s your thought process “-and Jesus, this fucking headache, Roy!”
“What cop? Where? When?” asks Liv, so you tell her, because who gives a shit at this point, right? You tell her “the guy that hired your brother, the guy from the OC Sheriff’s office, you know?” She says “I know” with calm certainty, and both R.J. and I stare at her for different discombobulated reasons. “You do? Awesome. That’s awesome, Liv. You’re a goddamn genius. I’m telling all my friends.”
“Don’t you dare,” she says, smiling sweetly, with the eyes of a reptile. “Listen, Derek, I can’t let you do that-not yet, okay-because my cousins are still upstairs keeping my birthday guests drunk, and they’re, well, they’re waiting for you, okay? And you don’t want to see them, do you?” You shrug. “Meh. They’re complete assholes-no offense, Liv, but they are, and-”
“I know,” she says again, and jerks her head at Roy’s dead weight. “They did a number on him. Didn’t mean to. They don’t really even know him.” She moves to prop his head up but WHOOSH-ding! and…oh, it’s the parking garage again. R.J. tries and fails to hoist his older brother up, so I help, with little success. Liv is digging in her jeans pocket for something. “You seem pretty out of it, Derek. Can you drive?” You say you were hoping to-maybe to a hospital or something, but…
“Are you sober?” She opens her palm, in which reside two tiny blue pills. “Here,” she says, “take these, and you’ll be together enough to drive. You’ll stay awake enough to get yourselves home.” Home? Which one? “Home is, like, three hours away, Liv.” We are now alongside my car.
“What? No no, I meant ‘to your parents’ place,’ I guess. You weren’t gonna drive back to school tonight, were you?” You start to say that no, you weren’t really gonna drive anywhere, but up PCH and then Golden Lantern a few blocks to Mom’s seems infinitely easier than blundering around for the hospital, let alone the eternity you know it will be to Santa Barbara. You start to say it, but she puts the pills in your palm and closes it on them.
“They’ll keep you awake, Derek. Just long enough, okay? I’d take you myself, but I can’t-I’m not sober.” She could have fooled me. I look at R.J. inquiringly. “Dude, aren’t you, um, sixteen?” He smirks. “My friend Alan drove me. He took Roy’s girlfriend home just now, and I’m waiting for him to come back.”
“So…so…you’d dump your brother in a car with me?” This thought is so terrifying that you swallow both pills in a swift but graceless motion. Liv isn’t looking but she seems to know that this happened. R.J. is looking, though, and he’s getting angry. “That wasn’t really my plan, Derek,” he says, snatching my keys off my belt loop. He unlocks the Civic and all three of us haul Roy’s semi-conscious form into the back seat. WHOOSH-ding! goes the elevator off in the distance, but by the time I look over there, way across the parking garage, the doors have closed again.
“Don’t go anywhere without me,” says R.J. with authority. “I’m gonna drive you two home. I haven’t had a drop since Roy went berserk two hours ago.” He closes the door on his brother and starts walking back toward the elevator. “But where are you going now?” you ask him, as Liv turns to follow. R.J. looks back at you sternly. “Roy’s bag is still up there. Plus two bottles of unopened wine that we liberated from my stepdad’s pantry. Once we realized he’d miss them, it was too late to go home, but I can’t just leave them up there, can I?”
“They’re probably gone already,” says Liv from the elevator. “If you want to rescue them, you’d better hurry.” R.J. runs to meet her and by the time the doors close on them both that WHOOSH is echoed by another one coursing though my nervous system, and I’m suddenly, maniacally alert. Oh God. She gave me speed. Had to have been. Oh God Oh God OhMyGod OhMyGod. I’m leaning against the car with a fucking riot in my skull and stock cars in my veins. Or somewhere. Wherever speed goes. There. Snap out of it, motherfucker. Get your goddamn shit together.
So I get it together, just enough to hear their footsteps running from across the gloomy garage. They don’t say anything-maybe they’ve evolved to the point where vocalized rage is inessential, so I’m still pretty fucking surprised when two bleach-blond male heads weave expertly through the parked cars toward me. The two younger Addison brothers are moving with absolute lightning speed, and instinct is all I’m running on when I jam myself into the Civic without thinking and snatch up the keys that R.J. left on the passenger seat.
Now they’re yelling, the bastards, but it’s blocked by the closed window, muffled and devolved. Christian is closing fast, though, so I try not to panic as I start the car and reverse quickly, almost right into his path. Chris swerves slightly but the Civic still clips him, and he’s flailing wildly but there’s nothing for him to hang on to as I gun it and snake through the garage at a speed that would scare me shitless if I were…normal?
Fuck that-I don’t have any time to think about what’s wrong with me as I lurch onto PCH with the sound of Roy’s muffled snores floating up from the back seat. I just drive, trying to calm down and cruise effortlessly up the road to the Golden Lantern light. Signal. Wait. Turn right. Change lanes. Up another hill. It’s easier than I expected. La Cresta stoplight. Selva stoplight. Stonehill’s green, and so is Acapulco…
…Maybe I can handle the big drive tonight after all. Slash and burn all the way up 5 and 101 to school. Just keep going. Ignore the headache. Stay cool and keep going. Pass another point of no return? I can do this. Leave the rest in ruins. I can do this.