Inland Empire

Elaine always thought it was strange, the name for the place. Inland Empire. It seemed to promise something bigger than it really was. Everywhere you went, you had to take a car. And she barely saw anyone walking the streets of Rancho Cucamonga, even carless children.

The strip malls looked the same. The houses in the subdivision looked identical. “Like Sims,” Justin had said quietly on one of their nightly walks, and that was accurate.

But there were variations if you looked. Their two-bedroom ranch, for instance, sat at the start of the desert, at their subdivision’s end. From a distance, the desert was pixelated. But close up was what mattered, on her walks at least, and close up, it was scraggly and strange, free of mathematical corners. Behind it, the San Gabriel Mountains spread out like melted butter. In the far distance, there was a field of gigantic wind turbines, standing there like tall old men from a race older than humanity, paused on a long walk. Sometimes Elaine thought she could hike out to them. She could take the day off work and make it there by lunch.

​

*

​

She liked being with Justin, but hadn’t she settled, really.

Justin felt like a good friend, a cool roommate. He had his activities: his old high school swimming friends, with whom he met up at the clean, modern, Encino pool. His local chess club.

They'd met as college sophomores. Elaine’s father was in the hospital with pancreatitis, and she barely attended her fall econ lecture. Justin sat three rows behind. She’d noticed him blurrily; his swim team tee and his shining floppy center part. He’d offered her his very neat notes if he could take her off campus for upscale barbecue. She'd agreed, and over dinner he'd listened intently as she spoke, setting down his knife. Together, they'd fallen into something. When Elaine had told her father about Justin, he'd snorted from his hospital bed.  

Justin's demands were small. A yearly EDM concert in the desert with his high school friends. A monthly craft beer and poker night with dollar stakes. It was easy to get him gifts. Elaine would write a few sentences on a supermarket card and order an eBay addition to his carefully dusted, reasonably-sized Gundam collection. Deeper entanglements followed—a long engagement, a house.

She liked that Justin had his activities. And Elaine had hers. Reading, and crosswords, and desert walks. Once a month, she'd drive into Highland Park and get dinner with her college friend, who managed a roller rink and dated a sound mixer and rescued a three-legged dog and bought her groceries from an unlicensed co-op. Sometimes, Elaine would drink a little too much at these sushi dinners with her old friend, and Justin would drive all the way from Rancho Cucamonga to pick her up.

She wasn't sure she loved him. She wasn't sure she loved anyone, except her father, who lived in a remote mountaintop cabin in Idaho with bad cell service and blackout blinds.

She liked Justin, in the way one might like a well-behaved baby, or a small friendly dog that could also file your taxes.

​

*

​

It was February. In two weeks Elaine would turn twenty-eight. She checked Instagram while on her solitary evening desert patrol, among the prickly pears and the cholla. She spent a lot of time on Instagram. She opened the app there in the desert and spotted a suggested Thread, from a girl she'd been sick with obsession over at sixteen and thought about at least five times a day for years after.

She clicked on it.

The girl—woman—was now a kindergarten teacher turned stay-at-home mom. She posted constantly about her nineteen-month-old toddler. She discoursed at length about the protein content of breast milk and residual placental nutrients. Her husband had a friendly lumberjack beard and woodworked his baby’s crib.

Scrolling down quickly, Elaine passed a photo of her ex-obsession's mother, who had apparently died six months ago. She was bald and frail and wasted in a V-neck sweater and holding the baby up in the air and smiling at it.

Elaine had not known her ex-obsession was a mother or that her mother was dead, like Elaine's. The last time she had had a real conversation with this girl was when they were sixteen and the girl told her she was a creep who needed to leave her alone in the library and at lunchtime.

Elaine's ten-year high school reunion was that spring, and she was thinking halfheartedly of going. The girls she had known were feeding infants from their heavy hanging breasts. She herself had thought of freezing her eggs. She'd had conversations with Justin's parents over bimonthly hot pot about his severe allergies to dogs and cats and some hypothetical future baby's potential allergies, and about hypoallergenic poodles. Elaine had never expressed the desire to own a dog, though she secretly did want one, much more than she wanted a baby.

Elaine closed the app. She put her hands on her hips and appraised the cactus thicket.

​

*

Elaine's father had flown an SR-71 Blackbird.

It felt more like being an astronaut than going to space, he said. He'd never gone to space. But she believed him. He told it to her sitting by her bed, when she was a child, as she lay tucked beneath a handmade patchwork quilt, clutching her stuffed elephant in the lamplight.

You tilt up and jam forward and the sound barrier drops behind you like a heavy coat, he explained in his low voice. You're going faster than a bullet. The cockpit glass could burn your hand.

You sip fuel mid-air from a heavier plane, like a hummingbird at a flower, and then keep flying, up to 80,000 feet, where the sky darkens and the sun is just a strip of light through a gigantic shut door.

Your world is reduced to a few ritual objects. The dials, which light up in front of you, stacked between your legs in a triangle like a Christmas tree. The throttles and stick. The air-giving placental pressure suit, your own powerful life-breath whooshing through the mask and tube. You're pressed up against all of it: the earth, bending below you. Above you, true outer space.

Her father had a whole career of weekly sliced up timeslots of infinity. By the time Elaine turned seven, he'd retired. He started flying a smoky, underpowered ad plane, trailing beer pennants over industrial San Diego.

​

*

​

When Elaine was in seventh grade, her father asked if she wanted to go see the Blackbird. Her mother had died in the summer, and that winter morning her father had sat in the kitchen, wearing a button-down and drumming his fingers, not looking up at her face as he spoke. She'd mutely nodded and dropped her backpack. They drove out into the desert in his black muscle car.

After two hours of Creedence Clearwater Revival and her father's silent smoking, they reached the gates of the base. Her father pulled out his old pilot ID with the 'retired' stamp. It had gotten scratched enough that it looked vulnerable. He cleared his throat as he offered it. The teenaged guard at the booth waved them past.

They parked and got out, her small, him large in his scuffed loafers and battered flight jacket, and walked together into the cramped steel hangar. It smelled like varnish. The sharp winter Mojave sun shot through the windows. The air was cold enough for Elaine to button up but not cold enough to hurt or bother. The temperature just felt like a cool reminder, announcing that somewhere far off in the country lay blankets of snow. In a Blackbird, her father told her, you could fly from L.A. to DC in just over an hour.

Elaine remembered thinking that there were the perfect amount of other visitors in the hangar—enough elderly men pointing their wives' hands at what they once flew, enough fathers with high-and-tight haircuts and young giggling families, enough people for Elaine to observe like minor attractions but not enough to crowd her view or make lines for the bathroom. Everyone traded giddy looks, as if to say we should all be working today, a Thursday, but we're not. We're looking at these splendid planes. Can you believe our luck? Elaine liked the old captions almost more than the planes, liked their earnest, school-project quality. She felt overwhelmed by how good the day was going. Her father hung behind her, offering occasional stories or facts. She didn't really care what he said. She loved the sound of his voice when it  relaxed.

Elaine's father bought her a personal cheese pizza and a ginger ale at the air base food court and they sat at a Formica table, him smiling at her and watching her eat. Then they went back to the base's museum and tried the 4D flight simulator. As she went green he laughed and squeezed her shoulder.

Then they stood silently beneath the Blackbird, small in its shadow.

Elaine called the plane beautiful. She admired its delicate curved black topology. Her father said its appearance was nothing more than the end result of physics. He called himself a sled driver, driving a sled.

Heading home, they stopped at a gift shop in Mojave and ate astronaut ice cream.  

​

*

​

Elaine was stuck in Disneyland, half inside and half outside of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. It was her twenty-eighth birthday weekend.

Elaine had sped in pleased stupefaction in her little car through the narrative, past the glow-in-the-dark candelabras and sheep and whistling police officers and wigged judge and leaping flames and winged lawyer devils. As the ride unfolded, she thought to herself––the ride is happening, I am experiencing what I waited for, and soon it will be over—and as the final doors opened, she thought, with bland regret—it's done.

She heard a screeching. Her car jerked and stopped, its nose just outside the door and its back half still in the glo-light realm of Toad. Elaine could see the line, feet away—the confused, sweaty children sucking their thumbs—but she couldn't get off.

She could, if she really wanted, probably force the bar. But that would get her in trouble. So she sat there, half in and half out of the ride.

Justin had gotten a call about a work emergency and gone back to the car. She thought about texting him and telling him about being stuck, but didn't. They'd slept in and arrived just after lunch and spent the day standing in one line after another. Elaine read her book and Justin played his mobile video game. At one point, they sat down beside floating pirate boats at a bayou-themed restaurant at which it was always night and shared a mediocre gumbo.

The line, never long, dispersed. It was ten thirty at night. With a screech, the car started moving.

An attendant spoke to her as she left. He wore a little Scottish beret. His nametag read Neil. He had thin, slightly unwashed white-blonde hair in a widow's peak, and his pale blue eyes were competent. “Sorry about that, friend.”

“That's okay,” said Elaine.

“You'll get a free premium pass to an attraction of your choice.”

“The park's almost closed,” said Elaine.

“Today it's open till midnight.”

“I don't think I'll stay after this.”

“You're not returning to the park? The pass transfers.”

“I don't know,” said Elaine. “If I'm returning. This was sort of an experiment.”

He gestured at her shirt. “Where'd you get that?”

Elaine looked down at the shirt. “eBay.”

“Oh. That was my year,” Neil said. “I still fit that shirt. I keep it ironed in my closet.”

“Oh,” said Elaine. “What was it like?”

“It was the best night of my life,” said Neil.

Elaine said nothing. She had found the old 2001 Disney Grad Nite shirt on eBay and liked the design. It felt alt and ironic, like something her Highland Park friend might thrift, or her ex-obsession might have worn sincerely when they were sixteen. She'd bought it for forty dollars plus shipping. Justin had blinked when he'd seen her wearing it, had rubbed at his eyes, but said nothing.

Elaine had never gone to Disneyland as a child. Her father hated crowds. Justin had gotten a work bonus the past weekend and suggested it.

Neil paused. “I'm about to wrap up my shift. My favorite ride is Jungle Cruise. It just closed.” He stared again at her shirt. “I can take us.”

​

*

​

The riverboat was surrounded by jungle and spun along a dark current. Animatronic hippos and monkeys screeched and chattered in dark tableaus on the landings beside the boat. Neil was driving, using the big ship's wheel, and humming under his breath.

Elaine sat there, swaying, staring up at the trees along the river, unsure if they were artificial. The palm fronds expanded and resettled in the lamplit blackness like lungs.

“So, where's he? Why isn't he with you?”

“Working in the car,” Elaine said. “An emergency.” Justin engineered software for parking lots.  In her free hand she held a small box of popcorn. She rummaged through it absently.

Neil's eyebrow rose, and he again offered her the weed vape. She shook her head. This was a powerful strain. She usually smoked once a month or so, after dinner. Justin would usually sit on the couch with her for five minutes and then head to bed.

She'd texted Justin to head home without her. She'd spend money on a rideshare. She felt strangely cheerful at the extravagance. Maybe she'd pretend to the driver that she was a tourist and didn't speak English.

“I'm good,” she managed. “This is strong.”

Neil laughed. “Yeah, it's like forty percent.”

“Do you smoke—a lot?”

“I don't think I'm ever sober. Except maybe when I'm sleeping.”

Elaine stared out at animatronic lions working hard at the carcass of an artificial zebra. Her own words sounded gummy, like she was waking up at the dentist's office. “You don't dream?”

“No,” said Neil. “Never.”

“All my dreams are about high school.” Elaine touched her chest, then blinked.

“I think if I dreamed, it would be about high school,” said Neil. “And I'm 39.” He took another puff from his vape, staring contemplatively outwards, his hand on the railing of the boat. “Or younger. Like, childhood.”

Elaine paused. “By the way, I'm not interested in—anything happening. If you thought that.”

Neil laughed. He had a thin, high laugh. It relieved Elaine.

She gestured at the vape. “Isn't this against the rules?”

Neil shook his head. “I don't care. I've already been fired. My last day's next week.”

Elaine blinked. She worked remotely as part of a four-woman team that reviewed hospital technical reports. The health care sector was doing badly, and her boss's boss had explained in a video call that future layoffs were likely, but they hadn't happened yet. “For what?”

He looked out over the black water. A brass line played from hidden speakers. “Who cares what?” He gestured out. “I've done hundreds of things wrong.”

Elaine saw ten thousand versions of Neil turn the boat's wheel.

“The wheel's for show,” she heard Neil say. He was smiling, watching a robot elephant spray itself with water. “The boat's on a track.”

​

*

​

The Uber driver was in his twenties. He'd smiled at her and asked her about her day, if she'd had fun in the parks. Elaine felt almost normal. She thought of the bedroom to which she'd soon return, thought of Justin sleeping, peacefully curled on his side, facing the Gundam and their sunflower in its sunflower pot.

The sedan cruised through Anaheim's dark wide empty avenues. The driver turned up the overwrought Donna Summer song about baking a cake.

“Is it okay if I roll the windows down?”

“Of course,” said Elaine. She felt a little carsick.

“I'm asking 'cause some guests don't like it.”

“It's fine.”

Eventually the driver started talking about his mother and brother in long reams. Elaine offered occasional one-word affirmations that seemed to keep him going. She nudged at a used Jack-in-the-Box jumbo cup rolling in the footwell. Red slush edged out of it.

“You know orbs?” He asked, at one point.

“What?”

He turned and smiled, ignoring the barren highway. He wiggled his fingers. “You know, orbs. They're shaped like a circle, and they float.”

“Oh, orbs,” said Elaine. “I guess I do.”

The Uber driver explained that his brother had died, and he and his mother both believed that his brother came back to visit them in the form of a floating orb.

Elaine asked what color the orb was.

“Red,” he said. “Always red. My brother likes to pop up while I'm doing yard work, as the orb, he, like, knocks against my head and fucks with me when I'm mowing the lawn. He was always a joker. I know he's up there laughing his ass off.”

“My friend says red is the longest wavelength in the spectrum,” offered Elaine, looking up from her phone. “That's probably why your brother manifested in that color. It requires the lowest amount of energy.”

He looked at her, his voice and face suddenly shifting. “You texted your friend about my brother?”

“No,” said Elaine, though she had in fact just been texting her Highland Park friend about the Uber driver and his brother. She put away her phone.

“You two were making fun?” The car sped up, and he drifted across a lane. “You were having fun, making fun of me?”

“No,” said Elaine. She wished he would look back at the road. “Not at all.” She began to feel sure that he would ask to read her texts and that she would have to show her phone to him, and he would decide not to drop her off, and instead take her somewhere unimaginable.

She'd forgotten fear. She hadn't felt it since months ago, when she and Justin had tried to use their plastic snorkels for the first time at Laguna Beach where the waves were choppy, and she'd been held down. After a few failed attempts to stand, she'd dragged herself, heaving, onto the beach, to face eleven disapproving onlookers and a teenaged lifeguard staring down at her, disappointed at having no one to save. He'd sternly told her she needed to be more careful, that the ocean was real. He said she shouldn't have left her boyfriend out there alone. Elaine tried to explain that Justin was a strong swimmer, but no one was listening. The fear as the waves pressed down on her had felt sharp, a cut. In the Uber, it felt acrid and tangy, like a bad stomachache.

“My mom actually died,” said some part of Elaine. “And she visits me like that all the time. I totally believe in angels and ghosts.”

This desecration of Elaine's mother's memory seemed to placate the Uber driver, and by the time he dropped her off in her empty subdivision he was offering her relationship advice.

​

*

​

Elaine stood in the den, silently sipping a small yogurt drink. The bedroom door was half-open. She could see Justin's healthy, medium-sized feet.

The feet rubbed together, and his soft voice called out. “Baby?”

“I had a scary ride,” Elaine said loudly. For a moment she thought of walking into the room and taking her shoes off and clinging to him, burying herself against his bare chest.

She heard Justin make a half-awake noise. He said something in Korean. Then: “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” said Elaine. “Rest.”

She heard him sit up. “It's late.”

Elaine pulled out a chair and sat, keeping her eyes trained down. “I smoked weed with this guy in the park. Who worked there. Then when I drove home the Uber driver was—weird.” She could see her hands shaking. “He kept talking about orbs. I provoked him, I don't know why. Something Sheila said. He got upset.”

She heard Justin's voice change. “Did he do anything?”

“No,” said Elaine. She paused. “I don't know why I provoked him.”

Justin cleared his throat. “You—smoked weed? With a guy who worked at Disneyland?”

“I think he was gay.”

“My parents called. When I told them you were still at the park they were worried about you.”

“It's a theme park, Justin. It's not dangerous.”

Justin said nothing for a while. Finally, he spoke. “If you didn't want to go with me, you could just say that.”

Elaine said nothing. She looked at Justin's birthday gift for her, wrapped on the kitchen table. It had been sitting there for two days. She hadn't wanted to open it.

Eventually, she heard him sleeping.

*

​

Elaine needed a black coffee. She brewed one, then walked outside and called her father.

She was surprised when he picked up on the second ring, though she knew he kept night hours. He called her rarely and left short voicemails. Elaine. It's your father. It's four thirty-seven in the afternoon, it's overcast, and I'm chopping wood. Call me.

“Hi, sweetie.”

She could hear the cigarettes in his voice and knew he hadn't quit. She took a small breath. Suddenly, she felt tears in her throat.

She could see him, then, in Idaho, her father, at his small dark basement desk, bathing in his own privacy, the window shades taped, glasses low on his nose, offset by his untrimmed beard. Bent over painting at his tiny war figurines. She envisioned a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, beside his old AFB ashtray and a sweating water stain on the wood from his beer.

“Hi, daddy.”

“Isn't it a bit late for you?” She could hear the loud sound of wood scraping against itself, like he was throwing logs onto the fire. She wished he'd get a dog.

“I went to Disneyland today,” she said.

He snorted. “They're playacting.”

“Yes, but it can be fun. It stimulates your imagination.”

“I'd rather live in the real world.” He paused. “Do they even have real trees?”

Elaine paused. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, are the trees fake too?”

“I actually don't know,” said Elaine. “I think some of them are. But most aren't.”

She heard his long ragged breaths over the phone and wondered if he was afraid of her. “Justin and I are thinking of getting a dog.”

“Good. Get a German Shepherd,” he said. “Or a Doberman.”

“Those aren't hypoallergenic.”

Her father coughed over the line.

Elaine was glad he had forgotten her birthday. It gave her access to a clean, virtuous disappointment. She sipped the black clumpy coffee dregs. “What did you do today?”

He laughed, which meant he had done nothing up to his own standards. She could hear the mute click of a lighter.

​

*

​

After hanging up, Elaine put on her padded coat and walked out into the desert. The desert was so big and open and dark, the pathetically bright lights of the cul-de-sac shrinking tiny behind her. Somewhere far back Justin was curled up in their bedroom, feeling disappointed in who she was. The full moon threw the world into a forgotten third alternative to night or day, the desert shaded in bright granular grays. The moon reminded Elaine of her mother.

Elaine walked towards the turbines. She felt like a stick girl in a flipbook, each page showing her barely moving towards her destination. She walked through a patch of blooming chaparral yucca, huge shocks of celestial asparagus. Elaine had tucked a sandwich in her pocket in cling wrap, and as she walked she rubbed the plastic with her thumb.

Hours later, Elaine stood at the turbines, at the center of an old valley. They were huge, tall, impossible, and very silent. They looked like priests, performing an old rite.

The stars were fastened tightly to the sky, like the pinpricks of light on Space Mountain. As Elaine had ridden that coaster with Neil, still very high, she'd thought to herself—maybe this is what death is like. You shoot through a glowing tunnel with these twinkling lights and turn left eleven times through the darkness and scream and get off and start over.

Elaine sank down at the foot of the central turbine and rested her back against it. The metal felt real and cold. Suddenly the thought of eating her sandwich made her feel sick. She closed her eyes and let her thoughts break down.

In her mind's eye she saw the photo of her father on her dresser. He was in an air base cafeteria. Men and women dressed in identical uniforms sat at long tables, eating food nested in Styrofoam. At a side stage, a grainy blank-faced jazz quartet strummed instruments in dress whites. Her father perched at the end of one anonymous bench, young, mustached, biting alertly at a rubbery patty. He was impossibly young. His bright eyes danced at the camera, like he could see who he'd be. Like he knew that one day he'd be screaming a hundred thousand feet above the earth, encased in a skin of black metal.

Half-asleep, Elaine remembered feeling sun-baked and hot, sitting in the middle of a gentle late afternoon concert pit, sixteen, her dewy body heady with huge teenage feelings. She was spending the day with the first girl who liked her, before she stopped liking her, escorted only by the girl's friendly, patient, wonderfully boring mother. The mother had discreetly stepped away, leaving the girl and Elaine unnoticed in this circle of adult people. The girl had invited Elaine to this, not her usual friends, and Elaine was completely overwhelmed by the idea that she could be chosen. They were sitting cross-legged and sharing the same plastic water bottle and telling each other's futures by tracing each other's hands, and their futures were good.