How Did You Get This Number (13 page)

That’s when it happens.

My seat belt tears tight across my chest. My stomach lurches, gravitating toward my lungs. My neck bends forward and returns upright. The car swerves and the tires screech and I hear Jeff scream, “Oh, shit! Oh, shit!” with unmitigated panic. Thoughts are corralled into half-seconds. My head is on fire, my synapses cast in the role of hero and trying to get every image out of the back of my mind and up front to safety. I wonder if we are careening off a cliff. I think,
No, it’s August—what’s there to glide on? Are we even on a cliff?
I see ice. People can careen off ice. Am I going to die like this? Will I drown? And is that so bad? There’s more glory in smacking proactively into an iceberg than being smacked into by a taxicab. I try to remember what happens when you drown. Is it as merciful a situation as dying in a fire, where you pass out from smoke inhalation before you’re burned alive?

The car stops. We are propelled forward again, and then flopped against our seatbacks, and then... nothing.

No glass shattering. No explosion. I feel my face, checking off features with my fingertips. As I drop my hand and stare forward, I realize that our car is not the problem. The problem is the pickup truck ahead of us, which has flung itself from a side road and is ahead of us. Its driver is clearly drunk and swerving wildly. If anyone needs to be having half-second death fantasies, it’s this guy.

A baby brown bear comes ambling out of the woods. As Jeff’s cursing echoes in my head, my newly acquired vocabulary kicks in, momentarily translating “shit” to “scat.” But after the word zips around, it lands on my primary definition of “scat.” I think:
Run, little bear, run
.

But there’s no time. The truck plows straight into the cub. The driver speeds off in the same direction he approached (i.e., a sampling of all of them). The noise of the bear being hit is actually not so bad. But the visual isn’t doing my denial any favors. The bear rolls next to our car and goes limp, a mound of fetal fur moving up and down, but barely. We gasp in unison, the sound of our warning bells banging against our necks. As we crane to see if the bear is still breathing, April and Jeff spring out of the car. Even for them, this scene is unusual. They flank the bear on either side, preparing to hail oncoming traffic to prevent it from getting hit twice. But no traffic comes. Jeff calls the park service, and we wait. There’s no telling how long it will take them to get out here. The animal attempts to distance itself from a widening puddle of blood, leaning on one arm for a moment before collapsing in exhaustion. He can’t seem to grasp why the bones and cartilage and muscle that were working so well a moment ago will no longer hold. The blood is growing darker, so that it looks like a flat extension of his fur. It is easily the most upsetting thing I have ever seen.

“I hit a moose in Montana once,” one of the bridesmaids says, trying to help.

Everyone turns to look at her. She starts to speak again but doesn’t. There’s nothing to say. A moose is worse for one’s car, but it’s ultimately much less cute.

I seek out the cuddly paw fanatic, and sure enough, her bottom lip is trembling. She can’t hold back. She starts crying.

“It’ll be okay,” says the moose killer.

The girl becomes hysterical. But in the wrong direction. She worries that the bear will cryogenically heal and become rabid. Having seen her apply a similar level of concern over an egg omelet with cheese on top, which was supposed to be an egg-white omelet with cheese on the side, I assume her panic will subside at any moment. Instead, her words become increasingly nonsensical, a mixed bag of ranting and dramatic gasps that hack away at my sympathy for the bear. “It’s not that big a deal,” I want to yell. Except that it is that big a deal. My resentment is rising. I am trying to absorb the situation and would like to do my absorption in peace. In general, I prefer to record all traumas and save them for later, playing them over and over so they can haunt me for a disproportionate number of weeks to come. It’s very healthy.

I turn away from her and try to concentrate on the bear, who has now put his baby snout flat to the pavement, his eyes and nose forming a trinity of black spots that look up, searching for a spot on which to fixate. This is more nature than we bargained for, to be sure. Exactly how much more? I find myself longing for yesterday, when I was intimidated by trail mix.

Hysterical Girl continues to be so. I roll down the window, and April leans over me and holds her hand, trying to calm her down, but it’s no use. She frenzies herself into a dull mumble, leans over my lap, and implores April and Jeff to get back in the car. She screams as though gathering the troops to retreat on the beaches of Normandy. I rub my ear. I am on the verge of slapping her, convinced it’s the humane thing to do, when she pauses and, with the support of a giant heaving breath, belts out:
“What about the mama?!”

They say if you give a monkey enough time, he’ll type Shakespeare. Presumably, you’d have to give him a typewriter as well. But that’s neither here nor there. Either way, the same is true for the neurotic. I whip around and blink at her, my bear bell following me.

“She makes a solid point,” I say to April.

When a squirrel makes a poorly timed highway excursion, I am not particularly concerned about its mother emerging from a tree to gouge my eyes out. A bear is another matter. This road cuts straight through a thick forest. Mama can’t be far off. And if the punishment for picking a wildflower is scalping, there’s no way crippling a cub has a lenient ending. April gets back into the car, her face red and scrunched. She wipes her eyes on her sleeve. Jeff is still on the phone with the park service, looking out for nonexistent traffic.

“Did anyone get the license plate?” he shouts.

“958XPO,” I recite. Everyone turns and glares at me, possibly even the bear.

“What?” I look around. “I grew up in the burbs. We were all afraid of getting kidnapped. I used to memorize the license plates of shady vans.”

I may not know how to gut a salmon or BeDazzle a gun case, but I am not without my skills.

Just then a car pulls up behind ours, and a man in a Navy Seals T-shirt and green fishing hat emerges. He adjusts the hat as he walks forward. He adopts a “What seems to be the problem here?” swagger that feels out of place. The problem is apparent, the picture painted: baby bear, injured, blood on pavement. The man and Jeff stand over the bear. The introduction of a stranger somehow reactivates the hysterics of the passenger to my right.

“Oh my God,” she snorts. “What’s he doing here?”

I don’t know, driving home? Making waffles? It’s his state, not ours. What are we doing here? I can feel the tingling in my hand as if I’ve already slapped her, so right does it feel. Before I left for Alaska, my sister told me to (a) fly safe and (b) watch out because “I hear everyone has a gun.” I glare at our sniffler. Now, I think, would be such a good time for that to be true. Although after her last revelation I wonder if she sees something I don’t. Perhaps danger has a color. Perhaps this man’s aura is flashing neon red and is visible only to unnerved women. Meanwhile, the conversation on the road is growing heated. I make a move to get up, only to realize I’ve had my seat belt fastened this whole time. By the time I unbuckle it, the man has taken a wide step toward the bear.

“Hey,” I say, surprised at the sound of my own voice.

The bear tries to get up once again, this time with less success and the bonus indignity of defecation. We are helpless as goldfish behind the SUV’s glass. The man lifts the back of his T-shirt to reveal a small holster. He removes a handgun and shoots the bear point-blank in the head four times.

The blood goes black.

Our bells are silenced.

The sound of gunshots reverberates off the tree trunks and rocks around us. I wonder about avalanche triggers. There’s a collective whimper in the car. I have always wondered what I would do if I was in one of those movies where someone gets stabbed or eaten alive while I’m in the closet or under the bed. The last thing one wants is to be unprepared when one walks into the bathroom to find their spouse has been making toast on the ledge of the bathtub
again.
Now I know. I would do nothing. I would just stare. Make a note of it and replay it later.

Which I will, and recklessly. I know each time I tell this story, I damage my memory of it. Each time it moves a little further away from what happened. The visuals are fading, merging what dead animal fur looks like and what I
think
dead animal fur looks like. I remember the polar bears in the zoo and think perhaps it’s just a bear-specific issue. All stories involving bears and blood are subject to literal and mental disfiguration. And yet I can’t resist the retelling. Look how
real
Alaska got. Look at the beauty and the beasts. More than one person will react by saying, “Nice how everyone in Alaska has a gun in their car.” Prior to my arctic excursion I would have dismissed this as a gross generalization. Now I nod.
Yes. Nice
.

I took one hundred thirty-two photographs in Alaska, one hundred of which are of icebergs. Sometimes you can see otters or fishing poles in the background. Sometimes you can see the Ghost Forests, betraying their vampire-like nature by showing up in pictures. Mostly it’s a lot of ice. I blind people with iceberg photos. Here’s an iceberg from far away. Here it is again, up close. Here’s a chunk of it floating in the water. Here it is from the boat, from the shore, from the side, give me cold, give me big, you’re chiseled like an ice sculpture, you’re a cube and the ocean is your glass. Brrr, baby, brrrr. The pictures are frustrating.

What I want to say is: Here is a country that is ours but not ours. A crazed landscape of death and marriage with designated bells to acknowledge both. Here is the longest breath of fresh air you will ever take, the bluest stream you will ever dip your hand in, the humane thing to do. Here is my friend, who I miss so much. I may have found new people with new novelties, perhaps even better suited to my own. But none to go kayaking on the Hudson with me. None to look up more than they look down. None to remind me that this is, and has always been, the real world as long as people are here to witness it. Why does none of it show up on film? Maybe I just need a better camera.

So shines a good deed in a weary world.

-SHAKESPEARE, VIA
Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory

 

 

 

 

I
had little red circles stuck to my chin, cheeks, and forehead when Zooey Ellis warned us that Rachel Hermann was going to be joining our slumber party. We sat in a circle as Zooey instructed us to be extra-sensitive because Rachel was new to school. And because she had two mommies. No one, under any circumstances, was to bring this up. Nor were we to acknowledge this abomination of a situation by encouraging Rachel to bring it up. Giving credence to this unnatural and—let’s face it—unfashionable union would risk making Rachel “feel the shame a child of her age should never have to feel.” Zooey’s parents were Republicans.

I nodded in unison with the rest of the girls, memorizing Mrs. Ellis’s words as they funneled forth from a miniature version of her pouty mouth. One of the red stickers came loose from my chin and fell on the carpet. I plucked it up, pinching it in my nail bed, but when I went to put it back on, I saw that its minuscule circumference was already covered with carpet fibers. So I sat on it instead. The sticker, meant to double as a “zit,” was part of a board game called Girl Talk, an early-’90s version of truth-or-dare, designed to sanction prepubescent cruelty via laminated cardboard. Accompanying the board itself were zits peeled from an adhesive sheet and doled out to those who refused to participate in dares. Imagine the karmic opposite of candy dots. Girl Talk was the main reason I wound up enrolling in a college without a Greek system.

The game began by spinning a plastic arrow so cheap and lopsided that you didn’t “spin” it so much as flick it very fast. The arrow touched down in one of four pie-shaped categories of clairvoyance:

The whole concept of forecasting and fortune telling was very en vogue at the time, often taking the form of origami finger puppets that told you when you’d lose your virginity and where you’d live when you grew up. Soda-can tabs predicted the first letter of your future husband’s name, candles melted to reveal secret scrolls, moods were exposed depending on the temperature of your ring finger. The future was everywhere, and it was all very illuminating. Girl Talk simply did the grunt work for you, its forecasting preprinted on triangular cards that fit into the board like the courses in TV dinner entrées.

To its credit, Girl Talk was downright empowering compared to Mall Madness, a game of fiscal responsibility that encouraged girls to buy everything in sight until they found a boy to do it for them. Girl Talk was also strangely complicated, a layered enterprise with rules complex enough to make the ancient Chinese game of Go look like Candy Land. Before you put your fate in the hands of a plastic wheel, you had a choice. You could either tell the truth or pick from a series of dares. These ranged from the coy (“Call a boy and ask him who he likes”) to the suspect (“Act like Pee-wee Herman for one minute”) to the dehumanizing (“Lap up a bowl of water like a dog”).

Imagine, if you will, the legal repercussions of a game manufactured today in which underage girls are encouraged to call strangers’ homes in the middle of the night. Or to leave the house sporting a “silly outfit.” It’s all fun and games until someone winds up in the back of a cop car, clutching a Cabbage Patch Kid. In hindsight, I am proud that I declined to imitate a convicted child molester or assume a doggie position in order to win a board game. As if all this wasn’t enough, you needed “household” items to play, including shoelaces, a short-wave radio, and a blindfold. Were we preparing for our future fiancés or the apocalypse? Or both?