Sunflower

MY DAD WAS A BIG BELIEVER IN THE THEORY THAT YOU COULDN’T TURN YOUR LIFE AROUND until you’d truly hit rock bottom, preferably wrenching your elbow and herniating discs four through six as you landed. His entire life, he was a pretty successful drunk, but not really elite enough he could make it to the top of the profession, which, in the upside-down kingdom of the alcoholic, means making it to the bottom so low that you finally give it up. Lord knows he tried. He lost a job once when he went on a bender for a week, ending up calling collect from over a hundred miles away outside of Pittsburgh. I was the one who answered the phone.

“Will you accept a call from ‘Hey honey I’m at the Holiday Inn off Exit 13 in Pennsylvania please get me!’” I knew the drill. Mom took her time, but she got to him. She couldn’t let the man just die out there. She believed in the whole sickness and health thing, and by 1987, we’d all been taught to think being a drunk was a sickness.

But that ended up being about as low as he got. A friend was starting a new business, selling machines that made computers talk to each other over long distances. Mom thought it was a scam, because it didn’t sound real. But Dad was a hell of a coder, it turns out. He didn’t know what to say to me when I had trouble in math or couldn’t figure out what to do after high school, but he knew how to talk to computers. We never wanted for money again, which meant there were limits to how low he was going to be able to go from then on. He was there for my graduation and my wedding, and the worst his drinking led to was that he died before my divorce from wife number one.

I saw the trailer to the new Star Wars movie last year. I didn’t go, because even bargain matinee movies are now eight dollars, which is also the cost of a value meal, and I don’t know which fact is worse. But there was a line in the trailer where a young man looked at the helmet once worn by Darth Vader and promised I will finish what you started. I hadn’t known it until then, but that’s what I’ve been trying to do most of my adult life. Only I’ve got much grander plans than just to bottom out in the here and now. Sunflower, my girlfriend, turned me on to a much bigger idea.

Sunflower wasn’t the name her parents gave her. Don’t put that rap on them. They were the God-fearing types and named her Naamah, which maybe isn’t the best Bible name, but it’s in there, and by the time they had her they were down to their eighth name. When she rebelled, she couldn’t decide which religion to turn to that would hurt her parents the worst, so she turned to all of them.

She’s the one who taught me all about karma, how things you do in this life affect you in the next one. Like if you kill a lot of frogs for no reason, you come back as a frog. Sunflower wasn’t sure when I asked her about what happens if you’re like a professional frog hunter who does it for a living. She was still new to all this and figuring it out, but I think I got the basic premise.

My dad probably just came back as someone like himself again. Whatever powers decide these things most likely looked at him and decided that he’d done a lot wrong, but he couldn’t help it, because he’d been sick with alcoholism, and overall, he’d done alright for someone with his affliction to just kind of keep it together. They’d give him another chance, put him in the same kind of life with the same kind of choices to make. He’d have the same parents, marry the same wife, drive the same Subaru, and have the same kids. Which meant there’d be another me.

Well, I can’t have that.

The idea, then, is for me to hit the rock bottom my father never did, but in a karmic sense. Make it so in the next life, I come back as a worm or a fungus living on one. Anything but what I am.

I’m off to a good start. I didn’t inherit my father’s knack with talking to computers, but ironically enough, I’m a natural with the languages people speak. Not the easy Romance languages, either. We’re talking Mandarin, among others even more exotic. Some company that specializes in moving jobs away from the States and their unions uses me to help with the negotiations. It’s a hell of a good living. For me, anyway. Not for the union members. I don’t avoid eight-dollar movies because I can’t afford them. It’s just the principle.

It’s not a bad living for Sunflower, either, who picked me, I think, the way she picked her religions, looking for the thing that would most irritate her parents. She doesn’t know how lucky she is. Most ex-evangelicals who want the opposite of what they’ve been taught to want end up with someone who would have relied on her income as a waitress at Red Crustacean to pay the rent. Imagine. She’s got more nail colors lined up in the bathroom than the number of dollars the average worker in Indonesia makes in a month. They overflow her sink and spill over to mine over the gray granite countertop. I read the other day that workers in factories making synthetic granite countertops are getting sick, even dying. Sunflower must have done something good in her past life that she doesn’t know any of this and lives the way she does without realizing how special that is.

That means somewhere in her past, there must have been a moment when she lay looking up from solid bedrock and the slime that inhabits the world below bedrock, so far beneath the crust that the sun was just a few photons dancing on the ballroom floor of her retinas. She must have served kings and been hanged for her loyalty; been a lobster boiled alive for a political fundraiser, then deemed too small after-the-fact and thrown in the trash; spent a thousand generations as various types of arthropod trapped in a web, slowly losing her insides through the chelicerae of a spider. She must have hit bottom somewhere to rebound this high.

I’m working on it. Lately, I’ve taken to buying as much Taco Bell as twenty dollars will get me, then inhaling it all at once. To wash it down, I drink something called Captain Stax, which is a cinnamon schnapps that costs less than half what the food did. Its motto is, “Nothing stacks up to the Captain!” and it has a picture of a vaguely piratical figure, holding a bottle of the stuff in one hand to salute a saucy wench who is looking at him with a mix of terror and fatal sexual wonder. I think it is brewed by melting down atomic fireball candies in a vat with rubbing alcohol.

The effect on my stomach isn’t anything good, but that’s the whole point. I’ve already thrown up three times, which means all those chickens in all those cages that were pumped full of drugs so they could grow fast and die young didn’t even transfer their proteins to another living organism by their deaths. Those chickens are on their way up in the next life, I can tell you that.

Sunflower has knocked on the bathroom door twice now to see if I’m okay. I don’t deserve someone like her, skin soft even on her elbows, worrying for me. But that’s okay; sooner or later, we all get what we deserve, which means in the next life, I won’t have someone like her. I’ll be married to someone like me, and I’ll work making toxic countertops until the factory moves to Chengdu just weeks before the doctors realize what’s in my lungs.

I feel like I’m going to die now, but I sure hope I don’t. I’m not there yet. There’s a wisdom that comes from excess, and I’m just starting to grasp it. Dying now will rob me of decades of using up every last resource on the planet. When there are no living organisms left here for my soul to fly to in the next life, maybe I’ll be the first to transmigrate to another galaxy. I’ll be a catamite for the Blugbarrs of Ixknaught-7. A prisoner of war in the long struggle of Duxloor to free itself from the yoke of the Tentamites, forced to abandon the old Duxloor ways and clean the Tentamite toilets with my bare sensen. My soul will demand it.

I have read that sunflowers are actually many small flowers in one. I have read that they follow the sun. I have read that they are native to America. The girl outside the bathroom, tapping softly as a heron dipping its head into the water, does not follow the sun. She follows me.

One day, she’ll find me dead in here, overdosed on liquor, food, excess, and karma. But before then, I have work to do. I’m going to record my next indulgence and put it online. I’ll dare others to follow suit. “The Stax Challenge,” I’ll call it. We’ll get thousands, millions to try. We’ll march chickens and cows and monkeys when Taco Bell runs out of other things to kill to their death so we can all bottom out together.

Does karma work for whole societies? What would we come back as? Is there a hungry maw somewhere, planet-sized, that digests its humoungous prey over thousands of years, like the pit of the almighty Sarlaac from Star Wars, the one I did see? Will this be the moment when things are so bad, we start to get better? In the cliché of my father, a dead end street is nothing but a good place to turn around. He never made it all the way to his dead end, but I can make it to mine. And if I take some with me, how much greater will be my fall! For it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!

Sunflower’s knocking is a little louder now, but with a hint of apology for needing it to be louder.

“Honey? Are you alright? I don’t mean to bother you. I just need my fingernail polish before I go to work.”

I let out a groan, and though I originally mean to make it overly dramatic so she will feel sympathy for me, it comes out so pinched and falsetto it scares me. It makes me think I’m in more pain than I really thought I was. I open the door from my knees, then sink back to a fetal pose as Sunflower pads into the room. I am looking up to her from the ground, thankful and mortified she is here with me.

“Honey? Are you alright?”