The Perpetual Motion Machine Read online

  Our parents never found anything we took. It was a crime so harmless, it was like it never happened. And we got bored of it eventually. Maybe we wanted our own things in our own home. Maybe we were tired of all the other houses.

  Dad was commuting back and forth to New York during the week, Monday to Thursday evening. He did this for about two years even after we moved. Mom let me sit in the backseat when she drove to the airport at night to pick him up. I stayed up to see them kiss hello when he got into the car, but then I’d fall asleep on the ride back. This was when they still missed each other, whether it was because the chaos of watching after two children got out of hand, or because of actual, real love. It didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to see them together. I liked wearing my pajamas in the car and listening to the radio. I liked when he got in the car and I could smell his cologne on him, pungent and manly, entering the car and sitting up front next to Mom.

  Our daily activities became mundane. Florida was hot, a kind of hot we've never known. But it rained a lot that summer, so there weren’t many “nice” days to go out and play, not that we are even the type to go out and play. Our hotel had a pool, but we never used it. The pool was extremely small, a square, no slides, no hot tub, nothing. A few weeks before we finally bought our house in Boca Raton, there was finally a “nice” day and my mom insisted we go to the pool for a few hours.

  Mom sat on a lounge chair and read the paper while my brother and I splashed around the too-cold pool. In the hotel gift shop, Skyler had somehow swindled my mom to purchase us a pair of water guns. This was awesome, and horrible. Everyone liked shooting them, but no one liked being shot. It hurt, as these were cheap water guns with sharp pieces of plastic coming out from all ends, they didn’t work properly, only stayed filled for thirty seconds or so, but it was our entertainment.

  Any time I got shot, I would wail and throw my hands in the air, pretending to drown, and my brother would be forced to come scoop me up and see that I was okay. Then, with him just where I wanted him, I would gulp up a big sip of pool water in my mouth and then sit up and let him have it, spitting it right in his face. He would push me off of him and throw me back into the water in disgust, where I would once again pretend to drown and the cycle would repeat itself. “I’m really drowning now!” I’d say, head bobbing out of the water and my arms flailing, going from floating to drowning instantaneously.

  Mom, Skyler and I were the only people at the pool, and when we got too noisy, she looked up from her paper to scold us. Maybe she was still stressed out from being in the in-between of living situations. We had looked at so many houses in such a short period of time. Maybe she was feeling despair that Dad was away and couldn’t help out as much as she needed him to. Or maybe it was just a bad day. She felt we had gone too far and as I latched onto my brother in the deep end and spit water into his face, Mom told us to swim over to the edge. She grabbed the water guns from us, my bright pink gun and Skyler’s neon orange gun, and threw them down on the ground. Mine broke instantly, but Skyler’s only had a crack down the handle. I grasped the edge of the pool wall and began crying as Skyler screamed “Mom, stop! We’re just playing!”

  “No, look how upset you’re making each other!” She yelled back at us.

  “No! Mom!” He screamed back as she lifted up her foot and stomped on his orange gun, breaking it into pieces. The plastic tore into her foot, and she hobbled back to her chair trailing drops of blood on the cement. Neon orange shards were everywhere, scattered among pool water and blood, like a children’s crime scene.

  A maid passing by saw Mom bleeding and ran to get her help. She went inside to get cleaned off and bandaged. I knew how mad Skyler was, and while normally I would have gotten upset about Mom getting hurt, my fear turned into rage and I understood his anger. He got out of the pool, grabbed his towel, and headed upstairs. We never went to the pool again after that. Mom later apologized for breaking the guns, and offered to buy us new ones, but we didn’t want them. We soon moved out of the hotel and into a real house, with a big pool, one we never really swam in for the nine years we lived there.

  I remember holding onto the edge of the pool and seeing all that broken plastic. It was getting dark outside, probably going to rain soon, another predictable Florida day of weather. I got out of the pool and picked up one of the solid pieces of my brother’s orange gun and tried to piece it back together. It was too hard. I left all the pieces on the ground, broken and brightly colored.

  The Transportation Center

  We are on the monorail from EPCOT to the Transportation and Ticket Center. When I was little, we used to wait so I could ride in the front car with the conductor. I always wanted to do this, but if the line was too long, we took whatever we could get and rode in another car.

  I know all the stops. If you’re riding from Magic Kingdom, you’ll stop at the Grand Floridian, then the Polynesian. If you’re coming from the Transportation and Ticket Center (TTC), you’ll stop at the Contemporary and then off to Magic Kingdom. From EPCOT, you only make one stop, but today it’s taking longer than I thought it would. I’m looking out the window. Skyler is taking his medication and Mom is watching him. I count each pill as she hands it to him. No one else on board seems to notice this transaction. No one else can see that we are doped up on Disney magic.

  Below, there are two men walking on Disney grass. Two employees who make sure the place gets taken care of, that everything works and flows in proper Disney fashion. We pass over them and move into more parking lots. Hundreds of cars, trailers, buses, some adorned with Disney bumper stickers, some with kids filing out wearing matching T-shirts for a field trip, some families making their way into the park. I want to look out this window forever. There’s nothing better than warm sun coming through the glass.

  I’m home from college for winter break and we’re all in sweaters. We come for a day trip this time, hitting up a few of the parks during the day and then driving back home at night. Every time my brother goes to the bathroom I think he’s using. Every time he closes his eyes I think he’s nodding out. Every time he laughs at something I say, I wonder if it’s funny because he’s as high as a Georgia pine and he thinks neither Mom nor I can tell.

  Yet it’s one of the best days of my life. Sitting here on the monorail, we are situated so nicely in the warm car. We are escaping reality again. We are not telling each other the things that need to be said, like, “Sky still has a problem. I’m not okay. Nothing is okay.” I stay quiet and look out at the Disney trees, so tall, so green.

  We’re only three hours from home, but this place feels so timeless to us. It has a centripetal force that pulls us in. We always come back. It’s always the same. My brother starts to fall asleep. We’re heading toward the center. We seek something on this monorail, the one-way track to where we always knew we’d go. I never see him anymore, I never get to spend any time with him. I’m so caught up in just being with him, the wonderful unrelenting love I have for my brother, that I forget about the wreckage ahead, what will happen when we leave Orlando.

  Mom and I can’t look at each other. The faces of other families blur into the afternoon. His dose of Seroquel kicks in and he will struggle the rest of the day. We’re at full speed though, riding it out. I can feel his eyes snapped shut like a Lego brick when it gets stuck to another, an unmovable clump that gets lost in the bottom of the bin. Not even the fireworks exploding can wake us up from our stupor.

  A Brief History of Partying

  “You should bring a pair of socks for later,” Dad says before I leave to attend my first bar mitzvah party. I’m twelve and some of the kids in my grade are already thirteen, most of them Jewish, and so there will be a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs this year. This is the first, though, and I am in a black dress and heels and I’m in a phase where I try to straighten my hair but the back always ends up bumpy. In pictures, it looks like I’m wearing a hat of my own hair that’s too big for my head.

  “No one does that!” I yell
back, even though I’ve never been and don’t know that for sure. The only bar mitzvah I’ve ever been to was my brother’s, and his was special because we went to Israel for it. He never had a big party like this. We celebrated it as a family on top of Masada, far away from everyone we knew.

  “Everyone does! And you’ll be glad you brought them. What do you think happens after the service when it’s time to dance? You think everyone dances in their shoes? Everyone takes them off for Coke and Pepsi and the Electric Slide. Do they still do that?”

  “I don’t know! Probably not.” But they do. At every single one I attend all these games are played, and all in socks and not dress shoes or high heels.

  It’s Adam something-or-other’s bar mitzvah and my best friend and I have arranged so that we don’t go to the service, like jerks, and only go to the reception. “You only go to the service if it’s your good friend or family member,” I say with authority as the only Jew in the car. My friend’s mom scribbles into her checkbook and hands it over. Twenty-five dollars. “It’s supposed to be in increments of eighteen. Chai or double chai,” I say. She waves us out of the car, tells us to have fun and call her cell phone when we’re ready to leave. She pulls away and we stand on the sidewalk for a minute, eyeing our similar black dresses and heels, but her hair is crimped, which is also a thing now, and she’s got my baby blue eyeliner on. I put black eyeliner on the inside of my bottom eyelids.

  Inside there is a cocktail hour going on and adults are getting drunk and kids are saying "hi" to each other and pulling at their tights and shirt collars. The theme is Under the Sea, so half-naked mermaid women and funny-looking pirate men meander about and collect our envelopes and tell us to have a good time. When it’s time for the big reception, Adam comes out in a suit with dancers to a choreographed routine and we take our seats at the assigned tables. Two boys pull us under the table and pass around a highball glass filled with clear bluish liquid. We take turns sipping and I realize this is alcohol. One of the boys says he collected half-finished drinks from glasses during the cocktail hour and dumped them all into one. Magic Potion.

  I imagined a party being something different. I forgot about the chance that someone might become drunk, that kids would care about getting messed up and hooking up rather than getting dessert from the fondue fountain or customized temporary tattoos. If you danced with a boy, there was the promise of something sexual. If you got too drunk and threw up in the hotel pool, you caused a scene and your parents had to come get you. I didn’t want any of this to happen.

  Later, everyone takes off their shoes and plays Coke and Pepsi. I think of the stack of invitations on my desk that I had RSVP’d “Yes” to already. I think of all the dresses and all the socks in my future.

  The black game console is always waiting for your return. It sits on the floor obedient and ready to entertain. Red wire to red socket. Yellow to yellow. White to white. Unravel the cords from around each controller. Plug them in. Push start.

  Little colored karts buzzing, engines roaring, red hat, green hat, gold crown, dinosaur head, and mushroom face in the back. Lakitu holds the traffic light on a fishing pole from his station, his fluffy, digitized Mario cloud.

  On the third siren, push the “A” button, hold it down, blast off into the rivalry, race past all the others. Nip Luigi in his side, swipe an item block, resist the urge to slide your pointer finger around the controller and press “Z,” let it be a surprise, let the lottery of item choices spin, magic mushroom, green shell, red shell, then you get a star, cruise by the rest of the pack attacking each player in your way, they fly out left and right when you tap them, just a mere graze and they’re gone, poof, out onto the edges of the screen.

  I am coming home high for the first time. I am driving and have to pull over at a gas station and ask for directions to Woodfield Country Club where I live. I know the way, but my brain can’t process roads. This is before the iPhone and GPS. I call Mom and she recommends asking for directions. I tell her I am lost. I say people were smoking at a party and I inhaled the air in the room, so I must have gotten affected. She says this makes no sense. She just wants me to come home.

  The man at the gas station tells me to head east. I ask him to point and he does. I go that way for a while until I recognize the roads. I drive my brother’s old BMW with the radio off the whole way home. When I get to the gate, I feel like I’ve accomplished something in my life, something big, something great.

  Mom takes me into my bathroom and looks at my eyes. She knows. She sends me into Skyler’s room. She tells me she will talk to me in the morning, when it wears off, and she leaves. We play video games. Skyler starts up Mario Party and I am losing horribly. I have no idea what is going on and I’m laughing at the spinning blocks instead of headbutting them and finding out how many spaces I need to move.

  “How the fuck did you drive?” He asks.

  “I had to pull over and ask a gas station attendant where Woodfield was.”

  “What happened?”

  “He didn’t know. But he said to go east. I knew I had to go east.”

  This elicits a large cackle from Skyler, one of the deep ones that is produced in his belly and comes out hazardously up through his throat. I’m pleased with myself. I’ve never smoked weed before. There was a bong at a house in Coral Springs and I hit it, many times, not knowing that once is enough. I stood outside for a few minutes and coughed. I almost threw up and then my breathing went back to normal. Someone on the couch was talking about how you are never by yourself because you’re “with yourself” when you’re alone. It made perfect sense to me until I got in the car and had to navigate the South Floridas alone. Not even Mom could help through the phone. Not even the gas station attendant. I was alone.

  “I don’t think you’ll get punished,” he says, picking up a star from the Wizard.

  “How did you already get a star?”

  “Because I’m playing and you’re not!”

  “You don’t think she’ll kill me tomorrow?”

  “No, because I’m here. But don’t drive if you’re high. I could have gotten you.”

  “I was all the way in Coral Springs!” I inch back against his blue bed, the same one from childhood, the same one I’ve watched many a Mario match from. He’s above me in his swivel chair. He’s not even supposed to be home. He’s right though. Mom can’t kill me if he’s here. He’s my protector. He’s my guardian.

  “That would have taken me fifteen minutes, tops.” He nods at the controller and I pick it up to play again. I’m starting to come down. I’m starting to see straight again.

  We play until I feel fine enough to go to sleep. I ask if everything will go back to normal tomorrow because it seems foggy now, like I’m on Benadryl, like a sickness. He says it will be fine, that I’ll be okay. He says he’s going to stay up and that he’s here if I need him. I shut the door behind me. His TV emits light from under the door. It shines a path from his room to mine, showing me the way.

  Finish your laps quickly, faster than everyone else even though you’re smaller, little Toad in his denim vest and happy smile, push Yoshi into the wall, shoot Bowser down with a red shell, always gaining speed, always pursuing the Mushroom Cup, always in the lead. Pick up a magic mushroom and tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap until it runs out, until you can glide the joystick with ease, until you are flying. Press “R” and do a hop over the finish line, your time illuminated in big, bubble letters on the screen, Toad waving from his kart, the others coming in slow, one by one, and you gloat, you throw down your controller and watch the colors swirl.

  I’m invited to a lingerie party at Jean Pierre’s house in Boca Raton because I sell weed to the popular kids. J.P. and his high-class friends want my weed because it’s from California and my brother gets it sent to him biweekly. My brother’s in the depths of his addiction, and so am I. I am partying every weekend at someone else’s house and my first real boyfriend just broke up with me because he wanted t
o date someone else for a while, then break up with her.

  I’m supposed to meet a guy here who plays on the football team and is a big pothead. He heard about my special blend. I come to the party with a girl I don’t know very well and don’t like very much, but she wants to be popular and she wants to go to the party. She refuses to wear lingerie though, and I tell her she will look ridiculous. I don’t like her because she’s too quiet, and when I’m stoned, quiet people make me uneasy, like I’m falling down a dark hole void of sound.

  We park and I stash the little baggies in my purse waiting to hand them out like Valentines. Get the cash, give it back to Skyler, keep a cut of it, everyone’s happy. I’ve recently stumbled upon a bunch of Dad’s old CDs and it’s all I’ve been listening to. The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Spirit, which is my favorite right now. I play “Fresh Garbage” everywhere I go. I borrowed a white lace-up bustier from a girlfriend who can’t attend the party and wear a white hoodie over it. I have to look the part if I’m going to show up and sell these kids some drugs.

  Skyler’s in Miami. He was doing just fine in grad school until his roommates became cocaine dealers. When they’re not home and there’s a knock on the door, Skyler answers and completes the transaction. That’s how he falls into it. But something must have always been there inside, waiting to be awakened. “Hey, you wanna do a line?” Sniff sniff.