Lost in La La Land
Tara Brown
Prologue
Manhattan, New York, 2020
My reflection in the mirror isn’t what it ought to be. There’s a flash of something I vaguely recognize, a person I used to be or someone I will eventually become.
She’s tired and haggard, she’s probably dying.
She’s there one moment, sitting in her chair, blankly staring out the window. And then she’s gone. And I am me, normal me.
If I lean in and stare closely, directly into the flecks of my eyes, I still see her. It’s the reflection. The window she stares from casts her back at me in the mirror. The gray day outside the window where she sits, the gray hospital gown she wears, the gray pallor of her skin. I blink and it plays live, clouds floating by, trying to animate the day and the woman I have become.
If I look close enough, I see the exact instant I will become her, become lost in la la land.
I can pinpoint the precise second that was the beginning of the end.
It’s funny when you look back and see the end. To you, it disguised itself as a beginning, but it was a path to destruction. I craved that destruction, that end, that finality.
The end started the night I decided to change my work, to create a new machine from the one I’d been working on.
I was at a friend’s, sitting in the dining room, waiting for her to bring dinner to her massive wooden table. Being the only one seated, I was alone there amongst the eight chairs.
From the kitchen she giggled, obviously reacting to something her husband had said. I felt like a voyeur, listening in on the intimate moment occurring in the other room.
Being alone was hard enough without couples giggling and kissing, as was their prerogative. But it reminded me that I too used to kiss and giggle. I used to lean into someone, placing my whole heart on a shoulder.
Instead of hating them, I distracted myself by pretending to peruse the new apartment. I made a list of things I could mention when they came to the table. Normal people did that, discussed art and tables and area rugs.
My eyes scanned the walls and furnishings, and I happened upon a new painting. It was one of those art pieces that spread across the wall, continuing on several canvases as if the painting had been sawed into three or five or eight. This particular one was broken into five long thin panels.
The eye-catching work was of a beach at sunset with a boardwalk and long wispy sea grass. The clouds were thin, suggesting the air was warm with a slight breeze coming off the water. It was the sort of scene that made you want to step inside and walk off into the fading light of dusk.
If I let my eyes drift out of focus, I could hear the waves crash as I forgot for five seconds that my entire world was gone.
The smell of him and the burning house was stuck in my nose, despite all the time that had passed, but it couldn't fight against the overpowering scent of the sea and the windswept salt.
The taste of him and my tears was still on my lips, but it couldn't compete with the flavor of the sunscreen I would have spread over my arms as I roamed the sandy dunes below the boardwalk.
The sight of him, his smile and his back entering that smoky house, was lost in the blinding brightness of the beautiful beach and the way the water sparkled under the sunlight.
There had never been a competition inside me for what I felt more, my grief or anything else. He was always the winner, until that moment.
For a few minutes I sat there, free of every burden his death had laid upon me. For the first time I breathed deeply, imagining the air was crisp and clean and I was someone new. I was clean with the breeze.
I don't know how long I sat staring at the painting that stretched across the wall, broken into five scenes. Mentally, I hopped from each canvas, heading further and further into the work of art, fleeing my broken heart.
And like all scientists, I wondered what if.
What if I could make that picture come to life?
Even better, what if I could go into a painting made from my own heart’s desire?
What if I could go there and he would be real again?
Would I care that he was just a dream?
I was the worst dinner guest from that moment on.
We ate salad with battered fish and crusty bread, and I tried to engage in conversation but everything was halved. Half an attempt at a smile. Half a conversation. Half a distracted stare as the painting caught my eye more than once.
Normally, I would have lingered over my plate, closing my eyes and tasting everything, dragging the crusty bread through the balsamic and Parmesan dressing, savoring the olive oil on my tongue as it mixed with the fish. I would have spent a few seconds paying homage to the fact I could taste and smell and devour all of it, and he could not.
It was my way of making sure he saw me living on—saw me appreciating things he no longer could. It was an act I wished to do well enough that he might believe I was living without him.
But that night I didn't live without him. I plotted. I was preoccupied as my eyes roamed the canvas, strategizing and arguing the scientific possibility of what I was contemplating.
Marguerite and Stanley were the perfect hosts, ignoring my absentmindedness. A fault they no doubt blamed on the loss of the only man I could ever love. It afforded me many transgressions. Every time I did something people disagreed with, they blamed him. I could have gotten away with a great many evil things with him as my justification.
I left that night, arguing equations in my mind.