Stuck

Walt’s phone rings when he says, “I do.” It’s Adi’s favorite song by the boy band, The AZs – Walt’s ringtone. It’s loud, the ringtone, because Walt is losing his hearing, and only four people are in the church, so there’s the echo, and no one says anything.

There’s Walt in his old too-tight pants, who might die of a heart attack because he wants to answer it but wants to marry Ella.

Ella in her mother’s wedding gown, who’s not letting go of Walt’s hand, who’s not saying, it’s okay, he needs you.

The priest staring at the bulky phone inside Walt’s pocket, the small tear at the side of Walt’s pants, the phone still ringing.

Walt pulls away. “It’s okay,” he says, fighting his pocket, “I’ll tell him.” His pants rip. His bare thigh.

On the phone, Adi asks, “Dad, can you come get me?” Adi is forty-nine years old.

And, finally, Ella’s ninety-year-old mother, who throws her small purse at him which hits the priest.

Ella braces herself against the wooden arch she built with a shaky hand. She takes off her heels, unclips her silky gray hair. White petals crumble. She tries to storm out, but her mother has a bad hip.

Walt has time to go after her to tell her he’s going to finally tell Adi he’s met someone and that Adi will have to figure things out because he’s almost fifty. Walt has time because Ella comes back for the purse on the ground, grabs it, walks away, and brushes the soles of her feet in the aisle. There’s time because Ella, slowly pushing the door, glances back.

But Walt is stuck.

So is the priest.

Walt almost calls out to her but wonders what if someone hurt Adi for getting off the bus too slowly? What if he held up the wrong line, the wrong person, at the grocery store? What if a stranger thought he was ignoring them? Walt takes off his tie.

“I’m okay, Dad. I’m just stuck.”

“Like stuck, stuck, or just stuck?”

“Just stuck, Dad.”

“Oh good,” Walt says, looking at the priest. “He’s just stuck.”

Still stuck, the priest smiles.

“Where are you?” Walt asks, staring at the closed double doors.

“The same place,” Adi says.

Walt doesn’t remember “the same place.” He won’t ask Adi or go back home to get the address either. A parent should know “the same place.” But it’s been a year since he’s been there, the longest Adi has been away. How can a parent forget where their child lives? The same place Walt helped him move into, a small basement with a small bed and a small fridge. It’s off the freeway, next to a Yum Yum Donuts and an EZ liquor store – that he knows.

“Adi, I’m coming,” Walt says, unsure of where that “same place” is but confident he’ll find it. He just needs to get on the 405 and look for the guide signs. Then he’ll remember. That sixth sense of his, the bond between father and son, the glue between Walt and Adi, will kick in.

Walt is stuck. He’s going the wrong way. It’s 405 North, not South. Stop, go, stop, go, stop, he tries to exit. Sticky back against the seat, he almost turns off the radio when a love segment on 98.3 comes on. Today’s guests, Dr. Lovinsky and YouTube star Guru Gale. Old Walt would’ve turned to his favorite podcast, Single Dads Raising Special Kids. But new Walt watches Hugh Grant movies, puts Cosmo in his grocery cart, and listens to nothing but this. But it’s not time for love. It’s time to find his son, so he turns it off and merges on the right freeway.

After a while, he reaches the right guide signs:

Pacific Ave 1

Atlantic Blvd 1½

Shore Ave 2

Taking a deep breath, he lets go of the steering wheel. Soon Adi will be in his car, and everything will be okay. Walt can relax. He can roll down the window and let the cool air dry his face. He can listen, just for a little bit. Five minutes, maybe seven.

Dr. Lovinsky: “You know you’re with the right person when pieces of your past finally glue together. A beautiful jigsaw, years in the making.”

Walt smiles. A truck honks.

Guru Gale: “Happy couples live longer, are healthier, and have better sex. That’s a fact.”

Walt turns up the volume.

DJ Love: “So Doc, I must not be using the right glue.”

Everyone laughs, so does Walt as he takes the wrong exit because there’s no donut shop, no liquor store. No Adi. This time, he really turns off the radio. He pulls into a gas station. Someone has to know EZ and Yum Yum.

After shuffling back and forth, car to car, stranger to stranger, a woman finally points him in the right direction. Before leaving the parking lot, he texts Adi, almost there! – even though the woman pumping gas told him, “Sir, that’s way over there.”

Adi grew up without a mother. She left when he was tiny, his entire body in the palm of Walt’s hand. No stepmother either. No random girlfriends in his studio apartment, sitting on the futon as Adi came home from school. Walt didn’t know how to split his time and love. Adi needed a village – he got Walt. As far as friends, Walt had to give that up, especially after ten-year-old Adi caught Lionel and Jay putting tequila in their orange juice right before Scrabble night.

“How could you guys!” Walt said.

“It’s more fun this way!” they said, accidentally knocking letters off the little table and leaving.

“O-N-L-Y,” Adi said, “twenty-one points.”

It took a while for Walt to get used to their absence. To play with only his son, the quiet tap of tiles between them. The echo. To play without friends buzzed on Tequila Sunrise. But Walt eventually forgot what they felt like, so he stopped missing them.

But as Adi got older, Walt daydreamed about being with someone. Someone to go watch a movie with when Adi didn’t want to go because Adi didn’t like scary movies or comedies, said they gave him bad dreams. But mostly, Walt daydreamed about someone lint rolling his back or telling him he had buggers because Adi stopped looking in the upper corners where it really mattered.    

The first time Adi moved out, Walt joined 2ndChance.com. Ella and Walt, instant match. Within fifty miles, check. Under a hundred years old, check. Undisclosed baggage, check, for premium members only. But it didn’t last long. Adi lost his job and moved back in. This happened over the years, Adi, coming and going. But Ella understood. As a missionary worker, she often went back to her mother’s. She understood that when a child needed a parent, the world stopped. But Walt said it was finally time. Time for Adi to create a world for himself. Time for infinite booger checks and lint rolls.     

When Walt arrives at the same place, he quickly switches to an AZ station. Adi’s under a lamppost in his pajamas. His hair is turning gray like Walt’s. Adi doesn’t look mad. He doesn’t look like anything. In his armpit, a huge toaster. Suitcases around him. They’re all heavy, even the small one with wheels. After they load the trunk, Adi tries to say something, but Walt just hugs him, father and son in each other’s arms on an empty street where a nearby stop light turns green, yellow, then back to red.

“Dad–”

“Adi, it’s okay.”

“Your pants are ripped.”

Walt drives to Taco Bell. They both get the same thing: a burrito and a drink with all the drinks. Alongside a window, Adi tells Walt he got kicked out for taking long showers. Mouth full, Walt shakes his head even though he understands, feeling sorry for the owners’ electric bill. Adi tells Walt he got fired from his custodian job. He needed to clean three restrooms. Adi could only do one. Walt imagines Adi cleaning a dirty toilet as if painting a masterpiece. Walt puts his burrito down. They sit in silence for a while, Adi picking onions and lettuce off the wrapper like gold, Walt staring out into the parking lot, empty, wondering if Ella got what little she had at his studio. Move in after the honeymoon, that was the plan.

Adi has been fired from every job for being slow. Walt calls it mindfulness. When Adi was young, it’d take him an hour to color the planets, thirty minutes to cut them, ten minutes to glue, five minutes to paste, and two minutes to stare at it. Walt set a timer once. Adi would lose his recess and lunch just to finish one spelling worksheet. Math wasn’t too bad. But, in high school, slow meant late, and Adi-late meant Ds and Fs. But he’d still get them done.

“You would’ve gotten an A+, Adi,” his teachers would say.

He barely graduated, thanks to those teachers and a counselor who said, “If only the world were as slow.”

But the world doesn’t have time for slow.

In Adi’s world, cars wouldn’t go past thirty, there’d still be dial-up, and Amazon would just be a rainforest.

Back at the studio, Adi takes a shower, which gives Walt time to replace the bed sheets, even maybe take a long nap. Before sticking them in the hamper, he sniffs Ella’s pillowcase. It smells like pillow, but he still cries a little. He stares at the shoe rack missing her pink Sketchers. The coat hanger missing her scarf and jacket. The nightstand missing the little black fan that hums her to sleep. He keeps searching, opening drawers and cabinets, for forgotten things in hidden places, things Adi could find. Walt sneaks into the foggy bathroom while Adi is still in the shower.

The next day, Adi and Walt play Scrabble. They read. They watch the sunset over the ocean. Walt peeks at his phone when Adi is not looking.

Then a month goes by. Walt’s jaw and teeth no longer hurt. Adi chews slowly, so he chews slowly, piercing no more than two peas, two beans, one raspberry at a time. Walt is happy he doesn’t do this with rice. Adi takes his time walking, mindful of each step, so Walt takes his time, pointing his feet forward as they land. As they read, Walt matches his breathing to Adi’s chest and shoulders rising and falling. Walt drives in the slow lane, but not thirty miles per hour.

At the beach, Walt brainstorms while Adi feeds the seagulls.

Walt suggests the monastery downtown, but Adi says, “People only live once.”

Walt suggests a yoga teacher, but Adi says, “I don’t know what namaste means.”

“What about a hospice?” Walt asks.

“Strangers say I love you,” Adi says.

Walt almost throws his hands up and says, “What then?”

Adi reminds Walt that he’s suggested all those things before. Walt’s memory is getting bad, but he forgets how bad, so it’s not that bad.

They sit in silence, watching waves fold. Adi starts cleaning seashells with his sweater. He lines them up, shiny to broken. It makes Walt think of something: how Adi’s school teachers would use YouTube to teach ABCs, numbers, months, days of the week, anything a kid needed to learn. Walt thinks about these kinds of videos, how Seashell Sarah Counts Seashells on the Seashore has millions of views. How Guru Gale has billions.

“Adi, I got it,” Walt says, grabbing his elbow. “YouTuber.”

“I don’t watch YouTube,” Adi says.

“You don’t have to.”

The sudden thought of the world seeing what his son can do makes him feel light again like he could run and splash into the waves – but only if Adi wanted to. Walt imagines people watching Adi videos wanting to be just like Adi – wanting to float. But not like how regular people do it but how Adi can float up into the air and stay suspended five feet above the ground. Air glue, Adi called it when he was seven years old. The first several times he did it, Walt thought he was possessed. So, he took him to a possession specialist. They ran tests. 

“You’re not possessed,” the doctor said, handing him a lollipop. She turned to Walt. “Kids.”

Adi couldn’t explain it, except that he could feel it everywhere, not like super glue, more like Elmer’s Glue or hot glue, but strong enough to make everything slow. Make everything stop.

“Daddy, look, I’m stuck,” he’d say, in the air. Perfectly still. Perfectly stuck.

The poses were different. He never chose he said. He’d close his eyes and let his body float into whatever it needed to be. Sometimes he’d fold into a ball, knees to his face. Sometimes he’d open like a star. Walt’s favorite was the skydiver – not because of how beautifully slow it took for Adi’s body to face the ground as his legs and back slightly curled, his arms resting in the air. It was because Adi would smile as if surrounded by clouds. As if, at that moment, Walt was doing everything right.

People thought it was an illusion, like those street performers until they’d crawl under him. They’d pull and pull as Adi stayed stuck, eyes closed, smiling. Several kids at his school could do it, but none got as high as Adi. Teachers hated it. But after a while, it got boring, so Adi stopped showing people. He just did it at home.  

But now there’s new research: the transformative and healing benefits of floating. Some people think it’s a hoax. Some say it’s the new hot yoga or CrossFit. Guru Gale calls it your seventeenth chakra. In any case, it’s been proven to scrub and wash away stubborn grime in the brain. It clears the skin, eliminates migraines, and even reduces heart attacks by sixty percent, among other benefits.

“You could make money,” Walt says, “do what you love.”

“But it’s not love, Dad. I just do it,” he says, wiping a seashell.

“Exactly.”

Walt takes out his phone – still no text. He searches for a Guru Gale video.

“Hello world,” Guru Gale says in his John Lennon shirt, his beard covering Lennon’s eyes.

Walt turns the volume up.

“Today, I’m going to show you how to access your seventeenth chakra in five easy steps. Just make sure you follow each step before you move on, okay? Otherwise, you’ll never float, like me. Let’s begin. First, you need to be able to do one thousand consecutive jumping jacks. Nice and slow, smooth, like this.”

Squinting, Walt leans in closer, so does Adi.

“Okay, world, once you master these with the correct form, you may move to reverse floaties. Just get a crate, or this one which you can buy online by clicking on the link below. You want to land with the correct form, bending the knees. Safety first, world. You don’t want to hurt yourself. Because it’s all about learning to fall before you can float.”

They get to the end, where he sticks himself to the air, a foot above the ground, casually, like how illusionists would shock people into saying, did you see that? He levitated, he levitated!  But this was real, and Gure Gale could float higher than anyone else on YouTube.  

“Don’t forget to subscribe.”

Adi looks at Walt and says, “He got high.”

“Not like you,” Walt says, smiling.

“Floaty progressions, expensive crate?” he asks.

“None of that kiddo. You talk and stick, I record.”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“Adi, you could change everything.”

Adi puts a seashell down and stares at the ocean. Walt’s heart starts skipping. He tells Adi he’s going to wash the sand off his feet. He goes to the restroom instead. On the cold ground, sand stuck between his toes, Walt calls Ella. He leaves a message:

“Ell, I have a plan,” he whispers in a doorless stall. “YouTube Adi. It’s going to work. He’s better than Gurus. Not better, better, but sticks better, you know, the glue. Everything will work. I promise. Plus, doctors say we have better sex because we’re jigsaw pieces.”

Walt almost says I love you when Adi walks in.

“Who are you talking to?” Adi asks.

“Huh?”

A year goes by. They post their first video. It’s of Adi stuck above the bed, in a meditative pose, higher than anyone else on YouTube. Higher than Guru Gale. People subscribe, so they make more. After a while, it gets easier. Adi stops saying things like I don’t know who “You” is in YouTube. He also stops stuttering. He looks at the camera and smiles. 

Walt tells Adi people don’t have time, so Adi talks about what’s useful, like the air glue he feels. He says things like just because you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it’s not working. It’s always there, sticky dots like dust particles, pulling us from where we are to where we need to be.

In one video, he talks about the bond between strangers, how he can feel glue residue from a man running and pulling a rickshaw, from a little girl barefoot, hugging plastic scraps, from the wings of a thousand bees. Air glue never gets old. Some bonds only get stronger with time, with distance.

Walt records him doing a breathing exercise where he sucks in his stomach, turning it into a small cave. But it’s just for fun. Most kids can do this naturally.

The video with the most views is about feeling bristles against your gums and teeth, your foot slipping into your shoe, your eyes and words before they touch anything. That’s air glue.

In the video with the most likes and dislikes, Adi says you can inhale and exhale air glue because it’s only toxic if you make it toxic. Last week, a woman was rushed to the hospital, complaining of severe abdominal pain. She blamed Adi. She told police officers he told her in the video to breathe through the nose and out the mouth.

Walt records Adi stuck in nature, above boulders and a river, alongside redwoods, the morning sun lifting his shadow. Everything becomes viral, fast. YouTubers post “The Truth About Adi” videos, and Guru Gale posts “Adi is Dangerous, Part One, Part Two.” Part Three coming soon. What’s important is that people feel Adi. They get it. Air yoga, that’s what they’re calling it. Scientists call it floating. Guru Gale calls it your seventeenth chakra.   

Adi teaches at yoga studios in town first and then around the country. Walt goes too. Then they travel across the world. They visit countries such as Iceland, Cambodia, and Egypt. They visit Calcutta where Adi runs and pulls the man on his rickshaw. Adi floats with women in Gambia after helping them plant mango and coconut trees. The perfect moment for Walt to sneak off and call Ella to tell her where they are and how they’re doing. She tells him she wants to meet Adi someday; he’s changed her life. Her blood pressure has gone down, her hand no longer shakes, and she jumps rope every morning.

Today, at a cafe in France, while Adi is speaking French with French people outside on the patio, she tells Walt she misses him. The way she whispers it suddenly makes him feel out of place, stuck to his chair in a noisy restaurant as he sips on wine, her sweet voice trickling into his chest, down his body. The sound of laughter around him, of a language he doesn’t understand.

“Voulez-vous autre chose?” Pierre asks, setting down a bowl of crème brûlée.

Five years go by. One minute they’re living in a studio, and the next, they’re in the same studio, but with money. It doesn’t stop, the money. They give most away. Walt buys a telescope. Adi gets a karaoke machine. One night, after their voices crack from all the singing, Adi asks, “When should I move out?”

Holding his microphone, Walt searches for another AZ song, but they’ve sung them all. “When you’re ready,” Walt says.

They receive messages daily:

“OMG! You changed my life. I only use my phone to call.”

“Been on the road in my decked out van for two weeks now, visiting different states, meeting new people. Thanks my dude for freeing me.”

“Please stop teaching this nonsense. It’s hurting the gaming industry. Casinos are shutting down. Since you haven’t replied to our messages, our lawyers will be in touch.”

“This morning, geese and goslings crossed the street, bright and yellow in the sun. Everyone stopped. No one honked!”

“Everybody needs to calm down. This isn’t new and it’s not cool. My boss at Chuck E. Cheese can do this.”

“I used to play Scrabble with them!”

“Hello. I am not suppose to use the computer but I just want to tell you my mom walked me to school and we talked the whole way. Thank you Adi, from Adeline.”

“Can u make a tutorial? For the coming down part. Where r we supposed to look?”

“Bro bro! I stopped looking at porn!! My wife is a goddess! If your ever in Phoenix hit me up!”

“Adi, marry me!!!! We can walk on the beach every day.” Hearts, kisses, ring.  

“You’re not fooling anyone with your glue. No one is getting high. Not like my stuff that gets people higher than the moon. Y'all want that real transcendental experience, go visit my site. Guarantee you’ll never come down.”

“Can we collaborate and stick together? Peace, love, and happiness from Guru Gale.” 

Walt reads them at night in the dark when Adi is asleep, snoring, not for the comments but for Ella’s. Different videos, different conversations. 

EllaM46: “This video of Adi is lovely. I love bonsais.” 

Wadam00: “Lol, yes! A crowd of floating pencils.” 

EllaM46: “Can we go, all of us, my mom too? She wants to see it one last time. She’s still mad at you :)”

Wadam00: “Do you see the baby owls behind Adi?”

EllaM46: “You look happy.”

Drenched in sweat, Adi turns to his side, groaning. He grips his pillow.  

Walt shuts the computer.

Today, they’re in Times Square with many people on the street and millions online. It’s Air Yoga Day. Some call it, Adi Day. Along the one-thousand-foot yoga mat, people interview people in yoga clothes, barefoot celebrities and politicians and people who just want to walk on the mat. There’s a big stage. No cars. Soon, people across the world will float and stick under the sun, under the moon, bodies in different poses, different shapes. Whatever they need. That’s air glue. To see everything and everyone stop. To feel the world stop, like the day Walt was stuck, kneeling against the hospital wall, praying. The beeping sound of a heartbeat. The day Adi almost didn’t come.

But first, a performance by The AZs. Adi sings with them. He knows all their songs but not the moves, so he just stands. In the back corner of the stage, Walt hears and feels everything: the thumping music in his chest, the crowd singing along with the band and Adi, everything but his phone ringing in his pocket. 

After a while, people hardly watch his videos. YouTube fades. People stop posting. They stop commenting. They stop idolizing Adi. They do things they love, things they had forgotten or never knew to love – like Tai Chi or Dorodango.   

One day, Adi says, “Dad, I think I’m ready to go.” It’s Sunday morning. Walt’s not sure. His keys and shoes are not where they’re supposed to be, so Walt’s not sure about those either. He almost asks Adi for help.

 “Like go, go, or…?” Walt asks.

Adi smiles. Walt tries to.

They walk to a nearby bus stop. It’s not sunny or cloudy. It’s not anything. On a bench, they wait in silence, alone. A minivan slowly passes. People inside sing and dance, their smiling eyes, and open mouths. He can’t hear the music, but he wonders how long it’ll last, how long they’ll keep singing until it’s quiet again. If there’s even a song.

From a distance, a bus approaches.

Adi gets up and tries to say something, but Walt hugs him, trying to slow everything down one last time, one last minute, but he can’t. His heartbeat, his breath, nothing feels slow.

That’s okay – the world is.

The bus door opens.

Walt lets him go.

Most days, they’re at the beach, pants rolled up. They brush sticky sand off each other’s skin. They shuffle around, the sand heavy on Walt’s legs, his entire body. Sometimes, he stops and sits because everything feels so heavy – the weight of seashells in his pocket, the bag of towels on his shoulder, his mismatched sandals. The sudden piggybacks because sometimes Ella forgets. Other times, it’s knowing what little time they have left, the weight of tiny pieces, of loops and slots they may never glue.

But every time they float along the shore, every pose they float into, their arms slowly reach. Their fingers lock.

A ringtone over the waves.