OREN AND I SIT IN THE CAR, IN THE HOSPITAL PARKING LOT.
“Well, that went well,” says Oren, sucking on his pipe.
The engine is running; the turn signal is on for some reason, clicking away, but we haven’t moved from our spot.
“I’m sorry,” says Oren, turning to me. “I’ve never seen her like that before.”
“I guess . . . I’ve always been a trigger. . . .”
I may have waited too long. But, weirdly, I feel almost relieved that I went, that I saw her. There’s only a small, well-lit corner of her mind that was yearning to see me. For a second she shared that part of herself with me, and we sort of forgave one another for falling out of each other’s lives. I never realized how much I needed to do that until it happened. I’ll never get my mom back. I always knew that, I think.
“There’s always hope,” says Oren. “They’re making breakthroughs . . . new medications, technological discoveries . . . optogenetics. It’s just faulty wiring in the brain.”
I run my hand along the seat belt. “Yeah, just.”
Oren chews his lip. He seems like he wants to say something else.
“What?” I say.
“Mom was the one who asked to be hospitalized. No one ever took her away.”
I look at Oren, all blurry, through tears pooling in my eyes.
“She didn’t trust herself anymore,” he says. “She was worried she would hurt you. She never wanted to return to Moldavia.”
I frown. “Even after I left?”
Oren nods.
Jesus. All this time, my mom was protecting me—from herself. She sacrificed what was left of her freedom to do that, even when it didn’t matter anymore.
“She was more comfortable here,” says Oren. “She feels safer here.”
I lick my lips. “You didn’t want to tell me this?”
“Because,” says Oren, adjusting his cap, “I figured you’d think she was running away from Dad . . . that she wanted protection from him. You’d go dark with it.”
I’d go dark with it. “Would I be wrong?”
“I think she felt safer here because she was afraid of hurting someone she loved.”
I look at the main hospital building—all the quaint windows, with their blinds drawn, everything picturesque and dry after the rainstorm. You’d never guess the tumult and anguish raging behind those walls.
“Just thought you should know,” says Oren.
I tap the dash. “Let’s get out of here.”
Oren pulls out of the parking lot with a lurch and a loud screech.
I watch the trees flying against the gray sky. After a while, I frown out the window. “Where are we going? This isn’t the way back.”
“Well, I wanted to take you to lunch,” says Oren.
“Isn’t it a little late for lunch?”
“A bit. But haven’t you worked up an appetite after watching Mom have a psychotic break?”
“I could eat.”
“Good. I planned this ahead as a little surprise.”
“Planned what?”
He turns off the highway and down a few rough unpaved roads, and then I realize where he’s taking me.
Twicking Ham Station was the only place we’d ever leave the castle to go to, usually for a special occasion like my birthday. Beside a reedy marsh, in these protected wetlands, in the middle of nowhere, sits an old-fashioned train car. The honeyed light emanating from its windows is the only speck of warm color for miles.
I remember minty milkshakes with cumulus clouds of whipped cream and nuclear-red cherries on top; spears of fried pickle with red-pepper aioli; creamy shrimp salad sandwiches on toasted raisin bread; waiters in green-striped seersucker jackets twirling around trays with tall burgers, discs of onion and tomato toothpicked on top, fries piled in paper cones. White Formica tables with red chairs, each with a window of its own, facing the marsh outside. When I was a kid I always begged to go.
“And this is for you, Birthday Boy,” says Aida, handing me something wrapped in light-blue paper designed with spring flowers and shooting stars. She gives me a big, wet kiss on the cheek. People are hooting. Empty fountain glasses are everywhere, the milkshakes they contained having long been sucked away, leaving a chalky residue.
There are so many purple balloons, they filter out the light and form a sort of giant berry over my head. Streamers and party hats and party whistles. It all sparkles and squeaks. I’m choking inside the revelry, hot and tired, at the point in my own party when what’s been looked forward to for so long is more than halfway over, and there’s only the end of it now, the slow quieting down, leaving an uncertain emptiness ahead.
I tear off the wrapping paper. The gift isn’t what I expected, but I don’t even know what I expected. It’s a leather journal and a ballpoint pen clipped onto it with my initials engraved, royally, in gold. “So you can write down all your thoughts,” says Aida. “And maybe one day you’ll have your own stories to tell. The world will want to hear them. When you feel sad, just write. It will help, Dario.”
“Thank you. I love it,” I tell her, even though I’m unsure at first; I wanted a video game for a console I don’t even have, and probably never will. But I know Aida is giving me all she can, and I love her for that.
“Here,” says Hayley, grabbing the pen. She’s wearing a pointy gold party hat and a cute polka-dot dress. She writes on the cover of the journal, on the blank space where the owner’s name is supposed to be handsomely inscribed, claiming all the brilliance to follow: Dario’s Lame Emo Boy Journal.
“Oh, Hayley,” says Aida, waving her off with both hands, but laughing a little as she goes, rejoining a cluster of drunken adults near the bar. I’m laughing too.
“Maybe you should write me something inside,” I say. “Just for me.”
She laughs. “Maybe I will.”
“Something important . . . too important to say to my face.”
There are way too many adults and way too few kids here for this to be a normal kid’s birthday party. But I’m not a normal kid having a normal childhood. A magician they hired got a flat tire and never arrived, and someone ordered a birthday cake, but something went wrong and that never came either. But everyone tried, although I haven’t seen my dad in hours and have no idea if he left. And he forgot to get me a present. But everyone else is here at Twicking Ham Station, fighting to bring a semblance of celebration to my tenth.
Hayley leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. “Happy birthday,” she whispers in my ear. I touch a finger to my lips, and then to my heart. I saw a guy do this in a movie and thought it was cool. Hayley puts her hands to her mouth, stifling a giggle.
We sit there while I get a few more small gifts from kind and generous crew members as the party rages on around us, pretty much forgetting about me, and I wait till it fizzles to nothing and it’s over so I can go home.
Oren swerves into the mostly deserted parking lot. When we go inside, we’re shown to a booth in the back. The place is pretty much like I remembered, but it’s quiet inside—the time of day when old people wearing baseball caps chow down on what could be their last Thai chicken noodle soup. Any place is different when it’s quiet and too bright. Oren takes off his coat, folding it neatly beside him. Then he takes off his cap, setting it on top of his coat, and starts flipping through the forty-five-page menu, humming. He orders us some burgers and fries and milkshakes and then orders himself a slippery nipple.
“There’s alcohol in that,” I tell him.
“Yes, I know.”
“Don’t you have to drive us home?”
Ignoring the question, Oren produces a package wrapped in plain brown paper, tied with string, like a parcel from the Great Depression. He pushes it toward me. “Happy birthday. It’s your birthday, isn’t it?”
I gasp. Oh my God. It’s June second. I turned eighteen today. Today.
“Jude!” I say, grabbing the sides of my head.
“Jude?”
“His birthday is two days before mine. I forgot. We all forgot!”
“Okay, relax, I’ll get him something when we return.”
“I can’t believe I lost track of time like that. We were so busy moving in and—”
“Open your gift,” says Oren, impatiently.
I tear off the brown paper and stare at a book, totally confused. Oren leans back against the booth looking pleased and smug. “It’s the autobiography of the popular actor Colin Hanks,” he says.
I blink a bunch of times. “This exists?”
“Obviously! I ordered it from Amazon dot com.” He holds up two fingers. “There were only two copies left.”
Colin Hanks is on the cover, wearing this black Henley, his head propped against his fist, a wry smile on his face. The book is titled Wake Up, It’s Me.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to spend a day in Oren’s world. Everything would seem possible. You could lift a finger and expect a butterfly to land on it. “What made you get this for me?”
“I just knew you’d like it,” he replies. “He’s an actor, you’re an actor.” Oren shrugs like the choice was so obvious it was painful. “You know he’s the son of Tom Hanks? The award-winning comedic actor?”
“Yes. I know.”
“Did I do well?”
I look up at him. “I can’t wait to dive in. Thank you.”
“Oh, good.” Oren smiles broadly and then flings the car keys at me, which hit me in the face, right below my eye.
“Ow!”
“Also, you can have my car,” he says nonchalantly.
“Your car?”
At that moment, the waiter places Oren’s drink in front of him.
“My slippery nipple!” he says way, way too loudly.
The cocktail looks vile, layered with different shades of brown cream. I feel sick just looking at it. He lifts the glass. “There’s sambuca in this!” he says excitedly. “Cheers! Do you have a driver’s license, Dar?”
“Yeah.” I made sure I got mine while I was still at Keenan.
“I don’t use the Bug much. I thought maybe . . .”
“That’s very generous of you, Oren.” And it is. I’m a little in shock.
“Well, today wasn’t the best eighteenth birthday a man can have, was it?”
Nope. No it wasn’t. I got shot and watched my mom go psycho.
“Aaaaaand here we are!” says the waiter, setting down our frothy strawberry shakes. Oren remembered I prefer strawberry; that’s something I don’t tell everyone. “Your burgers will be out momentarily!” The waiter skitters off in a blur of striped green.
“Mmmmmm!” says Oren, switching from his gross girly drink to the milkshake and then back again in one of the most nauseating maneuvers I’ve ever seen. He dangles the maraschino cherry over his mouth, puckering his lips, making more mmm noises.
“Oren.”
He bites the cherry off the stem and flings the stem over his shoulder, coolly, like he’s in some milkshake–themed Western.
I fold my hands together on the table. “Oren, Mom said some disturbing things about—”
“Not again!” He throws his head back, exasperated. “There are no dead babies buried inside the walls!” he bellows. At least three old people turn around; a few spoons clatter against bowls.
“Keep your voice down. Jesus. I know that. I know that!”
“Mom is mentally ill. And she likes Poe.”
“What?”
“You know, Edgar Allan?” he says. “I used to go there and read to her. I think she was absorbing ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ into her delusions. Next time I’ll read Harry Potter and we’ll have more fun with her. Maybe she’ll think she’s the sorting hat.”
“God, Oren—”
He throws out his hands. “It’s okay to jest sometimes! Things are so horrifying, what else is there to do but jest? So we jest, we can only jest—”
“Stop saying that word!”
He sips his brown drink. “Mom suffers from command hallucinations. That’s what they call it, the voices she hears. They’re not in her head. It sounds like someone’s literally right behind her . . . telling her things.”
I think of the hornets buzzing when things get bad. My palms get sweaty.
Oren holds the napkin in front of his mouth and talks in a deep gravelly voice: “The aliens are everywhere, Dario.”
“Stop that.”
“You’re an alien child. The government knows . . .”
“Seriously, stop.”
Oren folds the napkin on his lap. “Stop what?”
“Oren.”
“They know so little about the mind, it’s almost absurd!” he says. “And the newer antipsychotics aren’t much more effective than the old ones. And the side effects . . .” He throws up his hands, shaking his head.
“Aaaaaand here are your burgers and fries!” says the waiter.
“You look so upset!” says Oren.
“Of course I’m upset!”
“Would you like me to give you a scalp massage?” he says as our food is served in what feels like an hours-long process of plopping down plates and side plates and arranging it all so everything fits on the table. When the waiter finally leaves, Oren sticks a fry in his mouth, leans over the table, and starts vigorously rubbing the top of my head. “There we go. . . .”
“Oren . . . get the fuck off me.”
“Your hair is so soft! It feels like olive oil! Is that pomade? So delicate and fine.”
“Sit back down.”
“Sorry!” says Oren, flopping back down. He glares at his side salad and then pointedly removes all the cauliflowers, setting them on a cocktail napkin, which he brusquely pushes away.
We eat in silence for a few minutes. The food isn’t as good as it looks. The burger is dry. The milkshake is too syrupy. The fries are soggy. Something’s lost its luster here, or it’s just my mood, or I’m just remembering this place wrong. What we thought was so amazing when we were kids doesn’t always hold the same appeal later, I guess.
“You must worry too, right? Or you did at some point?” I ask.
“Worry about what?” says Oren, chomping down on his burger.
“Becoming . . . like her.”
“I’ve thought about it before,” he says, nodding. “Mental illness is genetic, clustered in families. Our grandmother was crackers, but”—he shoots out his hands—“we can only live our lives. I’m still here . . . you’re here. I was always too busy with the studio to really stop and wait for it to hit me. I was lucky that way.”
I dunk a fry in some ketchup, in one of those paper cups that are never big enough. “It was disturbing how much of what Mom said sounded like it was straight from Invasion of the Immortal Wasps.”
“Not my favorite film,” says Oren. He holds up his empty glass and bangs his spoon against it, signaling to the waiter for another slippery nipple. “Mom saw every Moldavia movie multiple times. I’m sure she retained a lot of those wild stories, stored them away somewhere in her unraveling subconscious. Just like she did with Poe.”
“No, Oren. Dad co-opted her illness.”
Oren frowns. “What do you mean?”
“Dad was a master collage artist! He took other people’s pain, tragedies, and illnesses, and used them for his films. You read those letters!”
“I thought Dad was just trying to communicate with Mom in her own language.”
I shake my head. “When are you going to stop defending him?”
“How do you know that’s not what he was doing?” says Oren.
“You collected that stuff, with the Immortal Wasps treatment, and put it all in the folder together!”
Or maybe some of that was Hayley. Maybe she was the one creating that sinister little narrative through the letters, and my dad’s film treatments, so I’d know the truth one day. Oren will do anything to preserve this romantic image he has of our family and how things were.
“Why do you think Mom said I was Moldavia’s greatest horror creation?”
“Mom is delusional,” says Oren.
“Didn’t it ever occur to you that she rejected me, saw me as something alien to her, because I was? Because she didn’t remember making me in the first place?”
“We don’t know that,” says Oren. “We’ll never know what happened.”
I lean across the table. “You said it yourself. You said I was a dirty little crime.”
Oren looks aghast. “I didn’t mean that literally! That’s such a horrible idea. I was so angry, and I just . . .”
“You put Dad on this pedestal—”
“He’s dead,” Oren mutters, choking back emotion, needlessly rearranging everything on the table. “Let me have that, let me keep him there. . . .”
“But Mom is right,” I tell him. “I am Moldavia’s greatest horror creation.”
“Please,” he says quietly, into his plate.
“Dad knew what he was doing; he was fascinated by people he thought were broken in some way. Eventually, he knew Mom would be too incapacitated to look after me. And he knew mental illness was genetic. So he’d have me as a fresh well of inspiration. I’d either go crazy like her or be traumatized by losing her. Either way he’d win.”
It would explain why he pushed me so hard as Alastair. Right to the brink . . .
“You’re saying you were bred to go mad?” Oren exclaims. “That’s nuts!”
See what he did there?
I don’t totally know what I’m saying anymore. Part of it is shit I’ve always feared the most, and part of it is frustration at Oren’s ignorance and denial about Moldavia, and the truth about our dad.
“Did you know about Aida?” I say. “That she lost a baby?”
“No,” says Oren, startled, dropping a fry on his plate. “When?”
“Aaaaaand here we are!” says the waiter, serving Oren his second slippery nipple.
Oren takes a long, pensive sip; a deep ruddiness spreads across his face, blotching his cheeks. “Aida lost a baby?” he asks, quietly.
“Yeah.”
A vein on his forehead becomes visible, a strand of cooked spaghetti rising to the top of a boiling pot. “That’s horrible. I didn’t know. Hayley told you that?”
“That’s why Aida played that part in Zombie Children, and that’s why Dad cast me as Alastair. Aida lost a baby. I had recently lost my mom. The movie is about a kid who’s losing a grip on his own humanity, lost in a depraved wasteland. Think about it.”
He does. I watch the realization spreading across his face. He’ll never believe all of it—I can’t even bring myself to fully believe all of it; these are just dark little theories, but I think some level of truth is finally breaking through to him. I feel like I can’t ever truly be close to Oren until it does.
“Maybe I got overlooked because I wasn’t broken enough for Dad.” He laughs. “I wanted to please him too badly. I fell into line too easily. I know you think I just blindly worshipped him. It wasn’t that simple.”
Oren lost out too. But he did blindly worship our dad.
“I was waiting for my chance,” he says. “But now I know he never took me seriously. I should have taken charge of my life. He taught me nothing on purpose. And I let it happen. He didn’t want anyone else to dilute his vision. He was too arrogant to consider a successor, which is why he made a joke out of his will. He’d rather have Moldavia dissolved. It was all about his legacy, Dario. I was always going to be his assistant, not his apprentice.” He downs the rest of his drink.
He’s right. If Oren remained ignorant, my dad could keep making movies until the bitter end. If no one could replicate his process, that meant cinema history would regard him as a true auteur, because you can’t replicate genius.
I think about babies buried in walls and spiders hiding in flowers and the castle digesting us from within like a carnivorous plant.
Outside, as yet another storm descends on the marsh, it’s like I’m looking at some blank lunar plane, bereft of life, filled with moon rocks and curling space mist. Then it becomes a clean sheet of ice, a rink glowing in the murk, and I see Hayley and me skating by, holding hands, keeping our bodies close against the cold. But there’s something else, something bigger. It’s not just about us. . . .
We see the worst of ourselves in our children. . . .
“They have a child,” I say.
Oren looks around. “Who? Who does?”
“Alastair and Abigail. In the sequel.”
He looks astonished. “You want to make the sequel?”
“I think a sequel was a really good idea. What if Alastair and Abigail have a child? Let’s say . . . he turned her into what he is.”
But there’s something familiar about this idea. I’ve heard it somewhere before.
“How would they reproduce?” Oren asks.
“There’s no logic in Moldavia films. Why start now?”
“Huh.” He thinks it over, wiping a milky mustache off his upper lip. I wonder how much of Oren’s whole deal is an act, a shtick to mask all his insecurities. “You and Hayley . . . reprising your roles . . . ,” he says, his eyes wide and smoky as he looks at the roiling, greenish-gray sky outside the window. “You two. It was always obvious.”
“What was?”
“She’s your One. That’s why that scene worked so well in the movie.”
“My One?”
“One True Love. I think we only get one. Dad had one.”
And he lost her. My mom knows Hayley and I love each other. That’s why she told me to leave Moldavia. That’s what she meant when she said Moldavia would keep hurting me. That’s what she thinks is so dangerous. True love caused our mom and dad so much pain in the end. And also, she probably wants the bloodline to stop.
I reach into my pocket and take out the tiny photo of me at two years old that my mom used to keep in her locket. The glue on the back is all hard and yellowed.
“Ah, look,” says Oren, gesturing out the window. The rainstorm has made the wetlands seethe in this shimmering, electric way. “How cinematic.” He peers out the window, framing it with his fingers.
“What about your One Love?” I ask him.
He smiles in a way that makes me think he’s more deeply alone than I ever knew. I never saw that in him before. Or didn’t want to. He’s an incredibly weird man. But I don’t need to be friends with him. I just need to accept him as my brother. And it matters to me that he’s happy, and feels like he belongs.
Oren orders another slippery nipple, then another, and then another after that, slamming them down. Clearly, I’ll be driving us back to Moldavia. That was probably the plan all along. “Look, we can do this,” I tell him, fighting against accepting him as a tragic figure; today was just too much tragedy.
His eyelids look all droopy. “Do what?”
“Save the studio. Make this film. Do it together.”
Oren gives me a sloppy thumbs-up, quickly finishing his last slippery nipple. I’ve lost track of how many he’s had, but enough where he sort of muscularly collapses against the booth, eyes rolled back in his head, like a jellyfish that’s lost its way. “You look so much like Mom.” It seems almost like he’s talking in his sleep, his mouth barely moving. “I bet no one ever told you that before. . . .”
No. But they probably thought it.
I help Oren dig out his wallet and pay, and then I lead us out into torrential rain (Oren left his umbrella in the car), supporting all his weight, his arm wrapped around my shoulder, as we stumble through the mud.
“Don’t worry about the passshtt anymore,” he slurs. “Just consshentrate on yerrr future. Leading the ssshtudio to sssholvenssshy . . . going to collegesh . . . if that’sssh what chew desshhide ta do. . . .”
Oren lies sprawled across the back seat while I get the Bug started. I peel out of the lot, down a bunch of slick, empty roads, and onto the highway, trying to remember the way we came. Then I’m driving on a highway for only the second time in my life.
Cars, wet stains of angry light, whoosh by like white blood cells off to attack an infection. After a few minutes, my headlights reflect off a green road sign that says: Moldavia Studios, 14 miles.
We both laugh. Before he passes out, Oren says that sign is meant for delivery trucks because we’re so secluded; but squeezers also use it to guide them so they can stand outside the gates and leave calla lilies and cards and memorabilia while wondering endlessly what goes on inside, craning their necks for a peek they’ll never get.
Once, many years ago, there was an interloper, an obsessed squeezer who scaled the walls and walked the grounds in abject disbelief he got that far before being tackled by a carpenter. My dad actually stopped what he was doing, ran out there, and shook the guy’s hand. He told the guy, “Thank you for watching our films,” and autographed a poster or some bullshit the guy had on him. Then my dad had him arrested, built the wall even higher, and strung barbed wire across the top like a North Korean prison.
It’s true what they say: never meet your heroes.