It’s out there, he thinks.Somewhere.
His face, his cheekbones, the inside of his mouth tingle as he crosses the room and boots up the desktop.
Why has he never thought to do this before?
The machine hums to life unfathomably slowly, junked up with viruses.It’s LimeWire, he tells Lola, blaming his music piracy, failing to mention his forays into the X-rated underbelly of the web. Videos take ages to download, but there’s pleasure in anticipation. Knowing something magnificent and illicit is arriving. Awaiting the slow, tantalizing load of a tit.
Don’t get distracted now, you’re on a mission. A whir of a desperate fan, the monitor flickering blue, a chord announcing the dawn of information. Open a browser and type: SUSAN BLISS.
Nothing.
Crushing, horrible nothing.
SUSAN BLISS LIFE AND TIMES
Did you mean Susan Byrne?
An explosion. Sebastian’s mother is everywhere, immortal, her headshot (how!) pinned to a forum page dedicated to Margie Ludlow. He gorges: the time she tried to kill herself by overdosing. The time she got in a knife fight with a pimp, carried a scar on her chest. So many strangers contain splinters of her! These are his people: LATfan4ever, burger_mama, daytimemuse.
Fuck.He tips the chair back, almost far enough to be dangerous. Into the dead of the house, he emits a stunned little laugh. He needs to call his aunt, to tell her: it’s all here, it’s waiting for us! How many years has he spent without a trace of her when all of this was here to be known?
Click through the jungle, the vast soapy universe, until you come across a link—a full episode! Sounds of a struggle. Men in torn suit jackets against a darkened backdrop.Get up. Get up!Melodramatic percussion, choral synthesizers. A heart being monitored from a hospital bed. A title card falls—this is:LIFE AND TIMES.
It’s her, she’s coming!A gun is removed from a man’s back pocket, sirens blare to a conclusion and fade into the low tone of a cello. Enter his mother.His mother!Sparkling earrings, rosy cheeks, clothes clinging tightly. Look how she moves her mouth, how she leans to the side as she tells a joke.His mother!All of her, the fleshy pinkness of her arms, the lightness of her.Her hair!Long and dark, tumbling down past her shoulders. The bounty of it. The camera caresses her legs, her back. It grows dizzy on a prism of light refracting off of her earrings. A young Orson Grey turns to combine a series of translucent liquids into a glass. The camera looks longways down the bar. His mother is reflected into a mirror, doubled. She is smiling a strange, coaxing smile.
His mother.In the overwhelming present tense, existing, now, here, existing and existing and existing. Maybe she has not actually died but just changed herself again, transformed into another character, living another life inside the internet.
He wants all of it.
Hours disappear. Sebastian searches involuntarily, urgently, sinking into the sound of her voice, pouring another Madeira and eating packet after packet of Fritos. The way people talk about soap operas, Sebastian assumed they would be trite. True, the sets are stagy and the dialogue isn’t always polished, but the stories are brave, with real drama and controversy, and his mother is fearless and free in all of them.
He follows along with the scripts, trying to piece together her thoughts in the margins with the actions on the screen. If he looks hard enough, he’ll find it, the thing that brings everything together. By the time Lola comes home he is pacing like a nutjob, scripts strewn across every surface. She kicks off her shoes, pulls her hair out of her ponytail. “Jesus. You might want to pick this all up before Dad gets home.”
“Or what?”
She shrugs. “Or you’ll have to talk about it again.”
“I want to talk about it.”
“What could you possibly want to say?”
He spreads his arms across the mess of her. “Look!”
Lola looks. Her eyes are his eyes, the same pristine green, but somehow, she is looking without seeing. “The tapes made him sad, Seb,” she says plainly.
“If he really missed her, he would have kept them.”
“I don’t think that’s true, necessarily.”
“Lola, he’s hiding something.”
In the background, their mother is talking to a man with slicked-back hair. Her hands are on her hips and she is facing away from the camera. She turns, and implores him not to leave her. Her lips are cherry-red and her voice is fraught.
“I think you should ask yourself if that’s something you really want to know.”
He eyes her, his twin. Sees her seriousness. It’s a look he knows well, Lola afraid of some nameless thing.
“Seb. Come on. Can we just talk about this when I’m back?”
