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If the Mulholland Backflip is executed correctly, what it does is light up the pleasure centers of your brain so that you are a veritable slot machine of flashing lightbulbs and energetic noises, which is almost enough to drown out the signs of your burgeoning irrelevance
His mother and grandmother, for as long as he remembered, had been a duo of huddled, conniving manipulator worrywarts whose primary job was to manage the ongoing crisis of his catatonic father,
and then raise Beamer and his siblings with whatever energy they had left over, which was none.
What she did have was a hierarchical system of caretaking, which meant she was out for Carl first, herself second (to preserve her ability to take care of Carl), then her kids, then her grandkids, then her domestic help, then a stranger in Liberia, then the woman Linda Messinger told her she read about who needed gallbladder surgery in Iowa but was stuck in a snowstorm, then her Jewish daughter-in-law, then her Gentile one.
“First they came for my yoga symbology,” Jenny said. “But I was fairly inflexible and so I said nothing.”
Nathan Fletcher had grown from that little boy making twenty-four-hour four-point contact with his mother during his father’s kidnapping into not so much a whole man but a collection of tics: a composite panic attack whose brain lived in both the unspeakable past and the terrifying future and rarely in a particular current moment unless that moment contained more fear than the past and future put together and therefore deserved his complete attention.
See? A terrible ending. There would be no growth, no revelation, no coming of age, no plastic hour brought to fruition. There would be no reckoning with all that happened or resolution. Their problems were solved, and there was no need for any of that now.
