Then last month she’d ordered this Relaxation Machine on a lark from the back of a magazine. Manufactured by a company called NeuroPeace Labs, it was advertised to quiet the mind and “restore cat-like balance to the consciousness.” She hadn’t expected miracles and chuckled at the ridiculous goggles when she first put them on, with their little lights inside like a toy robot. When she clamped the headphones over her ears and began the Session, however, instantly she unstuck from herself and swam out into the bliss of mental oblivion, her mind light and empty as a balloon tied to a child’s wrist.
She’d used it every day since and had found the ambient whine of fright in her life greatly reduced. But lately, however, long-sunk memories and unwanted recollections had been intruding upon her Sessions, like water seeping into a hole she was digging with her hands. Even with the volume up to a white roar and the lights set at a dizzying strobe, she couldn’t entirely flush the intruders from her mind. What had eased things slightly was using her old reel-to-reel to record herself describing the thoughts that came, in the hopes of turning them loose. Best of all, in the surf-racket of the headphones, she couldn’t even hear what she was saying, which was preferable. Much of the contents of her head she wanted little to do with. And maybe one day, when she could stand it, when she was stronger, less panic stricken, better, she would listen to these tapes, to this voice of hers that she’d couldn’t hear, to this stranger telling her own story to an empty room.
Now in the blue strobe of her Relaxation Goggles, she saw again her son bursting into the house only a few weeks ago, winded, terrified, his forehead deeply gouged and already scabbed over, without that security blanket helmet he’d always insisted on wearing, though it did comfort her too.
But he hadn’t left the house since. Perhaps he’d learned his lesson? It was Will’s gorgeous, overdriven imagination that worried her most. He barely lived in reality, so how could he register its dangers? Who better than she knew how Thunder Bay could reach out and harm a child: the bears and wolves in the woods; the trains, the harbor, and the elevators; the cheap grain alcohol, the highway, the frigid lake, the biblical weather, the hurtling brutality of hockey, all those hard-eyed boys that used to lift Charlie’s shirt over his head before pummeling him, the acres of identical birch trees—serene as grandfather clocks—for Will to vanish into.
No wonder she’d allowed him to stay home for so long. But had it been her doing? In all those years, he’d never shown the slightest interest in leaving. Maybe a better mother would’ve flushed him out earlier. Take your lumps. Play hockey. Crash your bicycle. But what hurts a boy other than lumps? Lumps are brain damage. One lump can drown a boy in a creek, can stop his heart dead as a stone, can rip him from your arms forever.
No, despite his little excursion, she and Will were relatively safe. How many of the world’s mothers could claim that? It’s not a prison if you’ve built it yourself, she mused as the Relaxation Tape ground down and the Play button popped, and she unstuck the clammy headphones from her ears and lifted the clunky goggles from her eyes. It’s a fortress.
With some baseline of calm restored, she put away the apparatus, went downstairs, and put on the electric kettle for tea. Lately, usually after she did her Sessions, she’d been detecting hints of a worrisome burning odor in the house—plasticky, like wires frying in the walls. She lowered her nose to the kettle to see if it was the culprit, but found nothing.
5
That morning the mailman brought a package. “You look like you need a nap, Will,” he said. “Rush delivery. You know where to sign.”
After he’d lied about slipping in the creek and striking his forehead, his mother had been waking him nightly to flashlight his pupils and ask if his mouth was dry or if he had strange dreams. “My dreams are always strange,” Will said, referring to the hours he’d just spent doubling with Marcus through the woods Helmetless upon a cackling dirt bike.
She’d Black Lagooned ferociously for days after his first official trip Outside. Like an improperly loaded washer on spin, their bed jiggled at night with her panic. Each morning, she lingered under her quilt, sitting up to fingerpick morose ballads on her guitar or spoon the canned soup he’d heated in the slow cooker and presented with a flourish in the clay masterpiece mug he’d once glazed for her birthday. She upped the Relaxation Tapes to twice daily, and, eventually, after a week, her weeping subsided and she started to venture out from San Francisco.
Now Will breached the package with his safety scissors and unearthed the Helmet he’d ordered to calm her, this one traffic-cone orange. It fit perfectly and didn’t smell vinegary like his last. He couldn’t exactly recall when he started wearing Helmets—always the hockey kind, no face mask. She said she ordered his first when he was learning backwards somersaults as a toddler. When not in use, the Helmet hung from the hook on their bed in San Francisco. In the morning he put it on before his feet touched the floor and even when he shuffled to Venice at night to pee.
Here was the thing about the Helmet: like not going Outside, she’d never exactly made him do it either. But, he found, the ethereal machinery of the house ran smoother with it on. Her shoulders unbunched, her breath passed more easefully through her windpipe. She left him for longer periods of time without checking up on him and even permitted more dangerous actions like running up the stairs or pedaling the exercise bike at full tilt.
Along with the Helmet had arrived other mail, and Will sorted the bills and invoices from the letters addressed to his mother in the usual crazy-person script. He set the others aside and whisked the letters down to Toronto, where he dumped them in a banker’s box. Over the years Will had read samplings when boredom had overwhelmed him. They were penned by people in mental institutions and prisons mostly, but sometimes universities and film associations, who all seemed to have memorized her films shot-for-shot. Though Will had never watched any of her films—she said she didn’t have prints, which his routine searches of the house confirmed—the portrait he’d assembled was that they lacked actors, or even a story, and were only footage of objects and people she’d shot haphazardly on the thrumming streets of real Toronto—imagine!—with her voice talking overtop. As far as many people were concerned, they were about something called “modern urban malaise,” which made Will think of city people barfing into open manhole covers, because malaise sounded like mayonnaise, a forbidden substance because it went deadly poisonous after only a few minutes out of the fridge.
A filmmaker was a person who made movies, but not the ones you’d want to watch like Predator or Die Hard, which his mother called “bullet ballets” and limited to special occasions. His mother once said she’d made films that people wrote dissertations about. “Is that like getting dissed?” he’d said, to which she replied, “Essentially.”
She made all six of her films in Toronto, where they once lived, which he hadn’t remembered at all until he’d gone Outside, because all their years Inside had overwritten it. Mostly his memories consisted of near-death experiences, colors they’d painted the rooms, epic stains in the carpets, whole epochs of furniture configuration. But real Toronto was where his mother had met Arthur, his father, who was a genius architect, except he wasn’t really a genius when it came to phone usage. He had a new family and lived in the Netherlands. Will had talked to him a few times, but the calls tapered off because they consisted mostly of long, searching silences. But Arthur’s buildings were all over the world, like real Paris and London. The plural of genius is genii. And that’s what Will’s family was, really, genii, including his mother, except Will couldn’t tell anyone that because of the tooting horn. As a boy, Will vowed to use his genius to build them a teleporter so they could go back to Toronto or go surfing in Hawaii, where he would crack coconuts for her with a machete, but she said she’d be too afraid to get into it.