A knock at the door in the middle of the night woke my father up. He went to see who it was. It was her family. They had come to hang out with my family. We all sat down in the living room and watched a crazy fucking game show on television, one in which people killed each other in violent ways for fun and profit. The contestants climbed a giant DNA molecule. Whoever reached the twenty-first cytosine residue first would be the winner.
The show’s host was a demon who dressed all in yellow. His face was red and pointed. He was too enthusiastic about everything and he gave me the creeps. Every few minutes he said, “and now a word from our sponsors” and there was a commercial break. All the commercials were the same commercial: a brash, obnoxious ad for a new Gillette razor with seventy blades.
Her mother was a catlike woman with sharp features, and she never smiled. Her father was a burly asshole. He was a producer. He had greenlighted the game show we were watching. It was making him millions of dollars. He was very proud of this.
The couple had two daughters. The older one was boring and she sat in the corner reading Nabokov and sighing loudly every time she turned a page. The younger one was electrically gorgeous. I looked at her and suddenly realized that I could see in her eyes that she hated this game show we were watching. She didn’t want to be there. I can’t remember her name, but it was something pretty and lilting, much like her face.
When no one was paying attention, I confronted The Lilting One and told her, you don’t want to be here, do you? You hate this show. She said, you’re rude, fuck off.
I said, you can talk to me, you know. It’s okay. And she didn’t do it at first but then she did. She told me that the game show scared her and her family scared her and so many things scared her (but mostly the game show). I said, look, it’s like that for me, too. She said, let’s go somewhere to talk, can’t we go somewhere to talk? I said, yes, why don’t we? That was exactly what I was thinking, actually. How about the corner Starbucks? The one they built last night? Let me just grab my car keys.
I peeked out the window. Outside, it looked like the LCD screen of a malfunctioning digital camera. We lived in an ugly city where everything was a shade of brown, but where the streetlights buzzed with an unreal yellow intensity. I told her we’d get into my car and drive to Starbucks. I told her it would be a beautiful thing. Then she grabbed my hand and said in this amazingly playful, flirty kind of way that she did not in fact want to go to Starbucks after all; she wanted us to drive down the freeway under the stars for thirty minutes until we found an out-of-the way dive bar in the middle of nowhere. She wanted us to go in there, talk in there, because that would be “so” “much” “more meaningful.”
I said, you know what? That sounds great. Realizing I had found true love, I grabbed the car keys from my bedroom. It took several minutes of searching, but I found them. Then I decided I’d better tell my mother that I was going to disappear for a minute, or forever, but I ended up horribly caught in a web of family bullshit.
On the game show, contestants were crawling from one side of an arena to the other. The girl’s producer father, an immensely muscular man who ironically happened to be in a wheelchair (he had contracted polio just two hours before), had one leg stretched way, way out, encased in a cast-like apparatus (he had broken his leg ten years ago). He said, “hey, I can do that too. I can do it too. I’ve done it before.” My parents made me stay and watch him. It was immensely boring and I kept thinking about the beautiful lilting girl. Her mother was nowhere to be seen; she and the father had been fighting and they had gotten a divorce just thirty minutes before.
When I finally escaped the living room and went to the entrance hall with the keys, The Lilting One was there and there were tears in her eyes and she said, “we’re leaving, you know – my mother is taking us and leaving. We’re going to live on Mars. We’re going to live there forever.” The mother already had her older sibling by the hand and was dragging her and her Nabokov novel out the door.
I said, “no, you can’t leave,” and she said, “I’m sorry, but we’re leaving,” and I said, “no, no” but she was in fact leaving. Right before she left we kissed, and needless to say it was the greatest feeling ever but then she tore away and then I saw her walking across the grass, following her mother, and then I heard the gunshot and heard her scream and watched her fall and looked behind me down the hallway and saw her father, the polio-stricken monster, sitting in his wheelchair, clutching a smoking rifle. I could hear the roar of the studio audience from the TV back in the living room.
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