fire expresses itself with fire

Learned Behavior

I.

When I was in pre-school they called my mother in for a conference and told her I had an interesting approach to arranging the furniture in their two-story plastic dollhouse. It was a sort of test they administered, and I had passed. Mostly.

“At this age, children usually push all the pieces up against the wall, but you see how she’s got the table in the middle of the room and the couch is there, cutting the room diagonally? Highly creative, very intelligent, but it may also be that it’s difficult for her to understand the way other people live.”

While Miss Elliot spoke and my mother nodded and frowned, nodded and frowned, I sat with the construction paper, safety scissors, and discarded magazines in the back of the room and cut out the faces of blonde-haired, blue-eyed models in the JC Penny catalog.

My mother gathered their notes and her purse and slipped on her coat. I wrote my name in crude four-year-old block letters at the bottom of a collage of upside-down smiles.

II.

I kissed Matt Duvall in the closet on the second day of kindergarten, forever establishing myself as That Girl. Then I kicked everyone’s ass at the alphabet. And colors. And reading. And writing out words.

By third grade I had read every book at Island View Elementary. Some of them twice. Some of them three times. By fifth grade I had worn down the pavement between my house and the public library. Had won every reading contest in the city, had a drawer full of blue ribbons to show for it.

My mother asked, “Don’t you want to watch TV?”

III.

In eighth grade, my English teacher had to ask me to cut back on the oral book reports. The other students wanted to take their turns. The English teacher looked like Tom Selleck and drove a white convertible Porsche. I was maintaining a steady C- in math.

Senior year, a Germanic home ec teacher with high cheek bones and thick, strong eyebrows said that my quilt corners were a disaster but my colors were exquisite.

The corners were indeed very bad, but the greens and grays and deep, afternoon-yellows kept the cold away.

IIII.

They still do. You can try it; it’s there, folded on the couch that cuts the room diagonally.

I still feel the need to keep the bookshelves away from the exterior walls but I don’t like to talk much anymore, so you can have all the oral book reports. Really, take them all.

I watch TV now, sometimes—while I’m reading. And rearranging the furniture. And reciting the colors. And writing my name. And kissing the class heartthrob.

I have not learned to balance my checkbook.

Water Signs

At first you will know because there will be a sinking feeling where your heart should be. Like all things, it will happen slowly and then all of the sudden. All of the sudden one day you will be sinking.

In the beginning there will be empty arguments about inconsequential things like money and laundry and yard work and art history and the Who. After the arguments there will be silent dinners and quiet car rides and entire Sunday afternoons during which no words are spoken.

Despite the unpleasant nature of these arguments, it is the silence that will bother you most. It’s the silence that really stuns you. 

There will be days that end with indifferent silence, days that end in determined silence, and days that end in silent silence. There will be days that end with frozen pizza and The Sopranos.

On one particularly cold and rainy night you will have an extremely uncomfortable and drawn-out discussion on the nature of adulthood and suburbia that will end with you playing the song, “Big Sur” by the Beach Boys from the record called Holland, which, you will both agree, is the most ridiculous and over-wrought album of its era but, nevertheless, it does contain this one precise, perfect, and hopeful song. 

After the argument and “Big Sur” and sublimation and arms folded around each other out of a lack of anything else to do, and after pulling on sweaters and hats, you will drive to the 24-hour Dick’s Drive-In near your one-story  rambler-style house and at 2:16 a.m. you will each have a double cheeseburger, large French fries, and a chocolate shake.

You will not be drunk, stoned, hung-over, 16, or even hungry and yet you will sit in your European station wagon and eat this crap in the middle of the night and you will pretend that it makes you feel good. Afterward, you will drive back to your nearly suburban home and pass out on separate couches having felt too much, ate too much, and cried too much to be awake and alive any longer.

At this point, you will have begun sinking, but you will mistake it for the cheeseburger.

Then, in the morning, the sensation that you are underwater will awake you from a fitful slumber and you will begin first slowly and then steadily to name the desperate feeling. You will live with the sinking feeling for a number of weeks and during that time, you will secretly hope against what you know is logical and right that someone (someone) on the failing vessel inside your chest cavity has a bucket. You will hope that whomever has this bucket is adept at bailing, and that sooner or later before things get really dangerous the person with the bucket will somehow find a loophole within the confines of physics and bail the cold cold water out of the sinking ship even as the ship itself is sinking in the very same cold cold water.

You will hope against what is logical. 

You will be kidding yourself when you think that it is not already very dangerous. 

You will continue, for a short time—one last, luxurious short time—to hope against hope that the laws of physics, logic, and that which is inevitable and true can somehow be evaded. You have evaded so many things already, why not fate? Why not evade fate?

Why not hope for the salvation of the entire planet then? Why not hope to fly with the grace of swallows? Why not hope for the resurrection of ancient empires? Why not hope for solid gold rocket ships capable of cruising through time?

But it is not possible to evade fate, and all of the sudden one day you will finally admit that you’ve taken too many steps too quickly. You married the wrong man for the wrong reasons and you answered too many questions without considering enough of the options. When you look in the mirror one day and notice that the blue in your eyes has become watered logged and pale, you will finally say out loud that you are sinking.

And that’s when you will finally go.

II

Although in your youth you insisted that you would not retain a single idea from the years of forced science and chemistry lessons, somewhere inside your unconscious mind you are aware that like seeks like and so, after a period of solitary months, you begin to hunt out other sinking vessels.

Not the least of these is Alan Turner.

Alan Turner will not be particularly interesting, glamorous, or especially handsome. He will be an entertainment lawyer that you meet one night around a broken table in a side street bar after too much whiskey. He will be the post-college roommate of your post-college officemate. He will listen carefully to you when you speak and by asking you questions that you’ve never considered before he will tell you things about yourself that you never even attempted to know.

Alan Turner will play Tom Waits and Nick Cave, on compact disc, while stroking your palm and forearm with the tip of a calloused forefinger during lunch hours spent in his 17th floor corner suite. Each time you go, ascending in the elevator without checking your hair in the mirrored lobby, you will carry Vietnamese sandwiches on French rolls from a take-out place on the corner but neither of you will eat them. His office will seem not unlike an exclusive hotel at some foreign seashore as you pass two hours once every other week or so over the course of the winter.

Neither one of you will ever take a piece of clothing off, not in the 17th floor office nor anywhere else. 

You will tell Alan Turner things you’ve never told anyone else. You will tell him things you should probably pay a doctor to hear. You will tell him long, lonely things. And he will listen. Alan Turner will hear some of the longest stories you’ve ever told.

Sometimes, to go with the stories, Alan Turner will supply cocaine and red wine. Not in his office on the 17th floor, but in his apartment, which overlooks the lonely and nostalgic industrial quarter. Huge orange cranes, freight trains, swingshift workers, and whistles. You will talk, he will listen. Alan Turner will not want more than your stories and the occasional line of cocaine and glass of red wine. Remember, Alan Turner will be sinking too.

You will want to talk about the things you miscalculated, and the night you went numb, and the days you went unnoticed, but you know better than to introduce certain parts of the past to what doesn’t feel like a certain future, so instead you will tell Alan Turner about Shannon and Nicolete Foster, who lived on your street the year you were in the fifth grade. You will tell him about how Nic was younger than you but also brilliant and how, conversely, Shannon was older than you but stupid, boy-crazy, and dull.

You will tell Alan Turner about the summer the three of you slept in the Foster’s side yard in a two-man tent and ate Red Hots in half-zipped sleeping bags under flashlights with stolen romance novels. Red Hots purchased at the 7-11 that the three of you could walk to any time, any day of any week, because things were simpler then and because you were always back on 8th street long before anyone thought of missing you.

You will tell Alan Turner, the lawyer, that it was that summer, before junior high (such a cliche), that your Uncle David came back to town. Your mother’s much younger brother David, who had been away at some kind of private hospital. Back in town but not trusted. Not really. And not really like family, not like Aunt Dolly and Uncle Truman and your cousin Ellen and her grandmother on the other side who was called Elsanore. Not really. David was more like you grandmother’s “friend” Joseph, who you didn’t trust at all.

Not that when you were in the fifth grade you referred to your grandmother’s friend Joseph as your grandmother’s “friend” Joseph but around the time when you are speaking clandestinely and truthfully to Alan Turner as he runs a calloused forefinger up and down your arm, you will employ quotes wherever and whenever you need them.

You will tell Alan Turner the story about your Uncle David because he has already seen the parts of you that are like the parts of everyone else, and he has expressed to you that they are still, somehow, singular and worth seeing.

It is around that time, then—the time of the story about the Red Hots and the romance novels and the ultimate betrayal of trust—that you begin to resent Alan Turner for allowing you to believe that you are special. You begin to view Alan Turner as a simple and naive man. You spend a weekend tallying up the moments when Alan Turner was too easily impressed, too quickly interested, too quietly in tune. You spend another weekend wondering if you will always find a reason to turn a person’s love for you into a weakness that flaws their character.

You continue on in this way until you or Alan Turner, you will not be sure which because the wine is too red and the lines are too white, admits that it feels as if something more should happen, but that it isn’t ever going to happen and if it did it would be awful or at least bad and embarrassing because both of you know too much and think too much and feel too much and need too much and maybe it would be better if you didn’t hang out together on the 17th floor or in the apartment overlooking the orange cranes. At least for awhile.

And then you pour more wine.

One Thursday, instead of having lunch—or not having lunch—on the 17th floor, you will sit on the steps outside the city’s museum and wonder just how and why it is that an entertainment lawyer has callouses on his fingers. You will wonder if a person’s fingers can become calloused simply by signing papers and convincing other people to sign papers because if not, there might be something about Alan Turner you do not know. It is difficult to comprehend what that might be but then, there on the steps, you decide that you don’t really know all the things you think you know. You cannot always divine the truth simply by believing that that’s what you were born to do, and if you could, it would probably mean that plenty of others were born that way as well, and that would mean that more people than you care to admit are capable of seeing that you are clinging to Alan Turner the way a child clings to a plaything he has long since outgrown. 

The thing, the real thing, is this: Alan Turner is a gateway drug. Alan Turner, the moderately handsome, kind, and exceptionally ordinary lawyer with the cocaine and the nostalgic apartment and the high rise professional suite is just something you have to do in order to begin.

Eventually, you will say to Alan Turner—or, eventually, Alan Turner will say to you—something about the both of you saying exactly what you mean. And so you do; each of you, in turn, to each other and otherwise, begin to say what you mean, starting with Goodbye and it feels like diving headfirst into a lake. A lake that abuts a generations-old family home. The dock and the diving board both sturdy and strong.

Where once you were sinking you are now slicing through clear water with purpose instead of merely losing yourself in the open sea.

And as you smack your head on the bottom of this tap water-warm familiar lake you feel almost graceful; almost gorgeous, almost lithe. Or rather, you don’t feel that way at all, but the sudden force of pressure on your cranium unlocks the long hidden notion that you could be any of those things or all of the above.

You reach for them, all of those potential yous, there at rock bottom. And your outstretched arm is either the symbol of deconstruction or reconstruction, it depends on who you’re talking to, and the time of day, and how much you’ve had to drink.

III
At this time you will be living in the basement of late-century Victorian on the south side of town. The dark cool will feel tenuous and fleeting in late June, when you first begin reaching, but by August, you will find that the subterranean cement floors and thick, temperate cellar walls are things of true mercy. Experiencing this mercy—perhaps at the expense of knowing the kindness of those who love you, or could love you, if given the chance—allows you to push further into a pocket directly above your heart where your true nature resides.

Because you are too close too soon to the place that defines you, you begin to deepen your familiarity with addiction. Without Alan Turner, cocaine is a hassle so at first there are diet pills, right before they are taken off the market, and then, for a brief time, there is methamphetamine, which is easier and quicker and cheaper than the stuff used by entertainment lawyers and people who are not divorced or otherwise compromised. Snorted, not smoked. Most often alone, in the basement, inside the delusion that torture is art and pain is lovely and no one understands and even if they did it wouldn’t matter because things change rapidly in the basement—too rapidly for the average set of eyes to perceive.

And then there is a morning that feels like midnight and you cannot differentiate between the setting sun and the harvest moon and there is no one there of whom you can ask to make the call so you close your eyes and cover your face with both of your hands in an attempt to block out the light, whatever the source. In that darkness, in the cool basement, you remember the diver and you recall the hope of school children who pitch their tents in side yards and your nose begins to bleed but slowly, just the lightest trickle. In the bathroom, where a radio sings Nat King Cole, there is a box of soft tissue. You feel all of the sudden lucky and beautiful to have tasted this tiny trickle of blood because the alternative would be swallowing yourself whole.

But the addictions—though less toxic—persist, because the ache you feel is unnameable and often, when animals ache, their solutions are superficial. Animals are not smart enough to know that the ache comes from inside so they build drugstores;  brightly lit all-night drugstores, with aisles and aisles of falsely fulfilling products and solutions. Potions, pills, cleansers, scrubs, separators, rejoiners. Kohl, plant pigments, powder. Face paint.

When, one day you wake up hungry and the only meal you can remember is a chocolate milkshake and “Big Sur” by the Beach Boys, there begins an addiction to dark whole grain rye, black beans cooked with Mexican digestive herbs, and licorice tea, brewed stronger than coffee.

It is around this time of cool dark basements and bitter black foods and trying to feed the places that are hungry that you hear “Everyone is beautiful/in their own way” on a receptionist’s piped-in playlist while waiting for a dentist who reminds you of your Sunday school teacher. The next morning you throw an expensive jar of eye cream into the dumpster in the alley and the day after that you clear off an entire shelf.

You begin to limit the use of your voice to only the strictest business. You get to where you don’t quite recognize the sound of it when you hear it. At times it seems too hollow and then too high, at times it sounds as though it’s coming from the other side of the room even as you feel your jaw crack over the hard vowels.

And then, while looking for a new apartment—something, you hope, above ground—you find yourself in a cornflower blue bathroom in a brick building on the west, sea-cliff buttressing side of the city and the soft pale, 1952 shade reminds you of your mother and her mother before her and all of it pushes to the surface and the little cry you make when the landlord steps outside to answer his cellphone rings true. It rings true like a pistol or a shot gun.

Because you recognize your voice in it, the cry becomes a wail and soon you are unable to control the sadness you feel for them: for the others you’ve not been fully able to love, and for all of the you’s you have lately found inside yourself.

Soon you’re crying about the emerald ring your mother wears on her ring finger and then for the cheap department store blender your grandmother gave you for your bridal shower and after that, for the wallpaper in the room you grew up in and then for the fact that you could have burnt a hole through your nasal passages or blown through your one and only heart. You cry because you once actually believed that you experienced pain on a level that few other humans could understand and you cry because now, without that self-pity and deception, you must wander the same grocery store aisles as everyone else, knowing that all of them are as empty and ignorant as you are. You cry for all the long and useless time you spent underwater, and for the headache that you can only hope is due to your slow but eventual rise back to the surface as you make your way back toward the shore.

When you hear the landlord twist the doorknob open you grab ahold of yourself and practice taking deep, quiet breaths. The landlord can tell that something monumental has happened and he is hoping it bodes well for his rental contract. You do like rounded archways and the maple tree outside the window and the way the sidewalk lifts and cracks on top of the cedar roots near the front stoop, and the cornflower blue room will stop being sad, you hope, as soon as you call your mother and grandmother and tell them that you’ll be home for Christmas.

And as easy as that the place is yours.

You do not have anyone to sit with at the window facing the maple, but neither do you have a drug habit or a mortgage payment or a child who needs to be delivered to an estranged lover every other weekend. You do have Forever Changes on vinyl so you unpack your stereo first and put it on.

From time to time you will feel as if an axe is splitting the space between your temples but you recognize this feeling as temporary and you know that you must simply continue swimming through it. You must, literally—in a figurative way—rise above.

When the splitting becomes particularly painful you go down to the city park on the waterfront and walk the two mile loop around the beach and through the evergreens until the pressure subsides. Before you know it, you are walking on the beach and through the evergreens not because your head aches but because you love it there. Because it feels like home. Because you are watching the water, not flailing around underneath it.

And you take all of this as a sign. You know that you are safe now. You are riding the waves.

Some Years Ago, Some Years to Come

I was driving. A 1987 Mercury Lynx. The kind of car you shouldn’t drive past your thirtieth birthday. I was in violation of that, but I had my excuses.

You said tomorrow, and maybe we could listen to records. And drink some wine. I said, sure, yeah. I said that sounded good. I pulled over into the parking lot of a sandwich shop and wrote your address on the back of an envelope. When you said there would be a black truck parked outside I stopped writing and just stared into the storefront window. I could see a rack of Cheetos, Doritos, and Lays, an empty cash register station, and my reflection, obscured by shadows and a direct beam of early spring sunlight.

Twenty-four and some hours later I lied to my roommates and pulled on to your street—which felt like it was in some other country, one known for noise rock bands, abstract artists, and natural history. It was so far from what I had known of the city between the mountains and the sound, but so typical of it also. 

I parked the Lynx behind the black truck. I reflected on my excuses: A decade in New York City. A pending divorce. Stimulants and need.

When you opened the door: an orange cat. And two tortoise shells ones. An antique armoire. A Turkish rug. A fireplace. I thought, this isn’t a date. He doesn’t want to date me. He has better things to do. Better things to be. 

You showed me the markings that differentiated one tortoise-shell sister from the other. I said their names out loud, thinking, I will need to know this later. The first sister left us alone, politely, the second looked at me with interest, like how advantageous; she had been looking for a friend. The orange cat stayed, too. He had eyes as big as my own. When you meet your match, you are both humbled and challenged. You think, why not?

Two glasses in: why wouldn’t you want to date me?

And then later, we were on Adirondack chairs on the outside of sliding glass doors listening to minimal German post-punk and talking about friendship, small towns, pizza, and jean jackets. We were talking about thrift store couches. Betrayal. Cover bands. Cross-dressers. Cocaine. The 60s. The 90s. The 80s. The time that had passed since 1999 and the time that had stood still.

We watched the sky. We watched each other. We drank what was in our glasses and revealed ourselves without realizing that we were doing it.

I thought I might stay. I thought I might really stay.

I think now, often, that I would like a recording of the whole thing. Front to back. Start to finish. Awkward hello to intimate goodbye. But what would you do with something like that anyway? What would happen if you could spy on yourself in that way? If you could listen to the moment when you became who you are on a blue vinyl-covered stool. In black Converse. With a no-wave soundtrack. At the bottom of a bottle of wine. 

At 3:33 in the morning I said something and you said nothing and kissed me because the numbers on the dial corresponded with a certain understanding that we both had about guitar chords and bass lines and I stopped worrying about what it meant and you stopped caring about what they might say and we both fell into a quiet, black-lined hole. 

I am still falling through it today. Are you? Are you still, in the middle of the day on a Tuesday, floating backwards falling softly lying comfortably wondering how on earth you got so lucky?

Inside this black hole I am set free. Inside this black hole I am able to see me, as me. And you, as you. Time and space and space and time. They pass. Everything must pass. This too shall pass. But love my love, I would be nothing without it. I would be so lost without it. Without these years with you, without these years that remain, I would be nothing. And nothing would remain. 

Thank you for all that remains. Let me rise up to all that remains. Let us live all that remains.

Let us devour all that remains. 

Hymn and Me

Maps and Legends

Today I made a map for you, just in case you should ever lose your way.

The main roads are colored red. Red like the red in the snap-front cowboy shirt I wore on the afternoon when we first stole time. Remember how you took your right hand and smoothed the wrinkles out over and over across my back? Your hand felt so capable and strong and my back never seemed so small. I remember sitting there very still, like if I didn’t move maybe you would never stop. The main roads, they never stop.

The smaller service roads are the color of the gray-blue eyes I inherited from my father’s father, and his father before him. I see you following my eyes, sometimes it seems like you’ve fallen inside them. Like the rest of the world is a humid summer day and they are the gray-blue cool of a mountain lake.

That’s where I travel—on the side roads, parallel to the highway. Close enough to hear the noise and the rush of traffic, but separate, and alone. This way I never lose sight of the fact that I’m different from them. Isn’t it funny, to think that somehow I could? Lose sight, that is? Me with my cracked mirror, broken odometer, and secondhand tires. There is always some part of me in some state of disrepair and the mechanics are never quite sure that the things I break can be ordered and replaced.

But somehow I just keep going.

A soft pink draws the tiny trails and walking paths. These are really the only roads you ever need; they are carved out and swept clean just for you. The pink I used is the color of the blooms on the oldest rose bush in our backyard. Pink, washed in time. I think you understand the symbolism here just fine.

Where the map is deep brown and tanned by the sun, that’s where the hills are. The gray-greens, those are the valleys. That terrain makes up a lot of my territory. I am almost all ups and downs. I know I’ve pulled you across that rugged landscape often, so I tried as best I could to match the color of your eyes to the highest elevations. That the foothills would peak with the same shade of solid, patient earth that paints the way you look at me, that is one of the most accurate truths I have ever told. And although I’m not proud of those dull green valleys—those little deaths where I’ve stumbled obstinately and become covered in envy, jealousy, and doubt—I wanted to be sure you could always find me, even in the most unflattering places.

The cities are black, the towns are a washed-out gray. There isn’t much there for us anyway. We take what we need from those places and we go.

The surrounding water is a light, shadowy blue. So light and shadowy that it’s almost not blue at all. That foggy pale clarity—shallow and see-through but only if you’ve been born and then lived so that you can recognize what’s underneath, only if you’ve been ice fishing in February or sailed against a trade wind on the long way home—not everyone can make out what’s underneath it’s changing waves but you can. And so can I.

A bright, fragrant yellow marks our home. You are here, it says and god help me but I could repeat that phrase over and over, possibly until the very end of time. You are here. You are here. You are here here here. This is where I’ve wanted to be all this long and awkward time. This is where I’ve wanted to be every since the notion of wanting became available to me.

So there you have it. It’s really quite simple. This is my map, and this is my legend. You are here. You are always always here.

My Memory Isn’t Very Good But My Memories Are Perfect

The songs you played were either for drunken opposition soldiers or distinguished illegal aliens. The chords were big or the chords were soft. You looked at me when the chorus broke. You broke me in half when the last verse began. You swept over me like I wasn’t even there. 

Afterward, outside, you were damp underneath your jacket, probably because the show was hot and crowded and you played hard. Or because the early morning afterward air was empty and cool. 

I wanted to say that I like the way your body feels when sweat makes tee shirts and jeans cling to muscles but I couldn’t because it is a secret. I do remember that.

I know we were with your intelligent but boyishly lazy friend the painter and his bookish and oddly pretty pregnant wife but I’m not sure who else was there. It was either all of Brooklyn — like, every painter and every plumber, and every stolen car and every city bus, and every old Polish lady and every banal fucking Ohio-born wanna-be cool kid — or there was nobody else around.

They led the way, the painter and his lady. We were just visiting. Passing through.

You were nineteen, I was sixteen. My parents didn’t know where I was.

You were seventy, I was just shy of it. I had wild, wiry gray hair.

It doesn’t matter which one is true. 

We either stood in line with a throng of thwarted dance club loser Italian guys in bad fashion jeans or the place was empty. We either sat on the stoop and watched the neighborhood stumble home on parade like on some pagan saint’s day, or we ate alone in a quiet calm as if we were facing the saltwater bay that sits at the bottom of our hill.  

The pizza was very good. I am sure of that, but given the circumstances, there’s no way it could have been anything other than. We had had nothing but city blocks, used record stores, and pale, watery beer since the morning. 

I don’t remember where we slept that night. It could have been there, on the street facing the Pacific Ocean and the yellow taxi cabs, or it could have been in the bed of whatever parade sergeant stranger was kind enough to take us in. We were warm. We must have been warm. I know that we were warm.

I remember that the pizza was good. I know that we were warm. I remember that you loved me.

Stay

We have a plan and the plan is simple: Get home, and stay. We have water in bottles, beans in cans, rice in sacks, and candles and matches double-wrapped in plastic bags. We have a generator, we have firewood, we have a gun.

When I am driving home at night I run it like a drill through the part of me that is not steering left or steering right or speeding up or slowing down. I decide that if it happens during the work day, on a day that I have taken the car to work, I will leave the car in the lot across the street from my office and I will walk. The shoulder is small but it’s big enough for me. Their cars will line up like bricks on the viaduct as they attempt to flee and I will walk calmly past them. I keep meaning to mention this to you—that I’ll leave the car in the parking lot—so that you will do the same thing. So that you will leave your car in the parking lot across the street from your office. If you’re reading this now please keep it in mind. We shouldn’t even try to drive. Remember the failed exodus from New Orleans? From Cape Town? From Novosibirsk?

With any luck it will happen when we’re already home. Say, late on a Saturday afternoon maybe. Lunch dishes drying, the week’s laundry half-done. Sun Ra on the record player and then the record player slows as the grids grind to a halt. The laptop screen snaps to black; the furnace goes silent. You look up from whatever you’re working on. I walk toward the window. The birds go numb. We’ll know. With any luck it will happen when we’re already home.

When I am out on a Friday night, having dinner with a friend or attending some libertine social event that’s been inelegantly dressed-up to look like a fundraiser or altruistic networking opportunity, I may appear to be listening to a story about a book deal or a lawsuit or a pant suit, I may seem to be declining a second cocktail, I may look like I am impolitely sending a text message, but I am identifying the exits, I am making a note about carrying small, efficient food stuffs in my handbag, I am thinking about how far I can walk in these heels, I am considering the force of a half-dozen floors on a Toyota Camry in the garage below the hotel ballroom or the bay-facing restaurant bar or the museum curator’s condominium. I am getting ready to use the plan.

Get home, and stay. There have been others who have refused to leave. When we were kids we made an icon out of Harry Truman on Spirit Lake. He wouldn’t go. He made friends with St. Helen the mountain. He wanted to see her blast. He wanted to feel her weight shifting under his feet. He wanted her dove gray ash to fill the cut lines in his wrinkled skin.

It won’t be quite like that for us. We are not called to witness flames in the saltwater or watch suns go white and cold. We have no interest in documenting the vainglorious downfall. We will draw the blinds. We will shutter the doors. We only want more time because time is what you use to buy one more morning cupped under blankets, one more evening of bright heat from a stone hearth. We will defend ourselves if necessary but we will stay here and we will be alone. Together. We will protect only our right to fade quietly, to go blithely, to drift of our own accord toward the salient end point of our choosing.

Because what would be the motivation for continuing this species? For what after-world would we be surviving? Under what pretense would we labor to escape? Toward what false idea of green-belted safe zones would we be heading?

We have water in bottles, beans in cans, rice in sacks, and candles and matches double-wrapped in plastic bags. We have enough for a few final meals. We will drag chairs into the backyard. We will not be concerned with contamination. We won’t be around long enough to see the worst of the decay. We have a generator, we have firewood, we have a gun.

IMG_439

This is the first picture you took of my father. He is sitting in a canvas captain’s chair on his back deck which has recently been painted blue, red, and two shades of green. The adjoining house is a third type of green and has brown trim. He is holding a tobacco pipe in one hand, in the other there is a large plastic coffee mug commemorating one of the oldest vessels in the Washington State Ferries fleet. He has just finished taking a long draw, exhaling, shaking his head with either content or resignation, and quoting the songwriter he casually refers to as Rhymin’ Simon.

“Yeah, ‘Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance, everybody thinks it’s true.’” You can read in his eyes the pride of a man who has just said the perfect thing. The only thing worth saying.

The angle and short depth of the shot don’t allow for a full view of the deck but I will remind you now that the floor is jade green, like a Buddha pendant from Chinatown, and the short railing and half-dozen stairs that lead down to the driveway are a deep pine color. The built-in benches around the perimeter are true red; the bases that support them are a bright, saturated blue that is never found in nature, only on 1970s cop cars and grade-school depictions of perfect skies. The overall effect is unsettling. It’s good that most of it escaped your frame.

My father has long regarded Paul Simon as a poet. He calls on several of his lines frequently, but none as often as the one contained in this image. The words mean different things at different times, depending on the story he’s telling or the mood he needs to underscore. Ever since my Uncle Don died, they have been used to end-note dialogs about how he and his brother and sisters grew up with nothing, currently have more or less that same exact sum, and yet still manage, with regularity, to detect the possibility of something more, better, richer, happier, easier, healthier around some mythical bend. 

After you pressed the shutter release the phone rang in the kitchen on the other side of the sliding glass doors and when we were alone outside I leaned over and grabbed your arm and whispered something about garish color palettes and cliche-ridden pop songs and promised that my nephew would be there soon to distract us all.

Instead of replying, you raised the camera, turned it toward me, and took another picture.

The Man with the Bandaged Head

The man with the bandaged head turned to the man at his left and said, So what did they take out of you? The man to the left seemed unable to move his head, or anything else, but his eyelids lowered and closed with quiet resignation. The man with the bandaged head realized that the man at his left was not going to answer, and the emptiness in his refusal suggested that the doctors had taken a deeply buried part of him that had long before gone sick and rotten. So long-ago and sick and rotten that the phantom pain had the rootless ache of omission. The stillness of the man said, what I want right now is to be relieved of obligations.

The man with the bandaged head stared straight ahead for one soft, shapeless moment and then turned to the man at his right and asked the same question.

The man at the right also took his time before giving an answer. The man with the bandaged head thought the man at the right was going to say just what the man at the left had, which was nothing at all. The man with the bandaged head was used to asking questions that went unanswered. He was used to silence. He had once wondered if silence was the thing that had been wrong inside his head to begin with, and now that whatever it was had been extracted, he hoped that the hours and moments and days when no one said anything at all might finally be gone. What if it was the silence all along? For a soft, slippery moment he felt everything go slack, and then

and then the man at his right said plainly, My guts.

The man with the bandaged head paused and thought about a man’s insides, and he thought about his bandaged head. With one finger he felt for the bottom of the bandage that wrapped around the back of his ears toward the stubbled nape of his neck. When the man with the bandaged head closed his eyes he could picture the red sea of thoughts and ideas that the layers of fiber were holding inside him. The man with the bandaged head looked at the man at his right and wondered how they stopped his kind of bleeding. He wondered where the bandages were and how many it took to hold in an emptied center. He said nothing. He tried to wait. For the first time in his life the man with the bandaged head just waited

and then the man at his right said, They were worth nothing. They were blistered and burnt by time and jealousy and greed, so now they’re gone. He said this without emotion, without anything at all, but the man with the bandaged head understood something about the way the man at his right said the word Gone, and in the way he became just a little less pale as he said it. The man with the bandaged head understood so he didn’t need to say anything more.

In the corner, some time later, three small red lights on a monitor flashed their warning. One two three. The man with the bandaged head noticed the alert lights even under the loud bright hum of florescent bulbs that rubbed at the muscles in his forehead. Something was soiled, something was empty, something was full, something should be checked on, held, straightened, or strengthened. A woman in white entered the room, pressed buttons marked with letters and numbers, and left. The man with the bandaged head stared straight ahead. The man with the bandaged head had no questions and no compulsions.

To his right, the man said nothing. From the left he heard the same thing. The man with the bandaged head took it as a sign and for the first time in his life, he closed his eyes easily and fell asleep with the lights on.