“I could replace it with neon,” he says brightly.
“You’d have to run current out here. An investment.”
“The only neon for miles.”
Great country of appetite, where a lunger’s son can dream of inert gas captured in tubes. Out where the sky’s a little bit bluer. Out where delusion’s a little bit newer.
Walking beside my landlord, I’ve got the shivers. Maybe it’s all too big.
My last conversation with Ellen came after she’d been beaten outside a roadhouse frequented by butch girls from the reservation. She had cracked ribs.
“It only hurts when I breathe.”
Other things hurt worse.
“The rest of the world. Everything rubs me the wrong way. I feel sometimes like I could float right off the planet and it really wouldn’t matter.” Finally she rested her hands, met my eyes through the smoke from her little cigar. “For a while there I thought you might provide me some gravity. Too much to expect.”
“From a man,” I added piteously.
“From someone who keeps missing the point.” She raked fork furrows in the top of her unnibbled coconut pie. “Who couldn’t get the point if it ran him through.”
Men nearby discussed megabytes and upload key sequences with evident fervor.
“The rest of the world,” she resumed. Her thumb went to her face, moved from scab to scab as if defining a constellation. “Could I be allergic?”
The commissary wallpaper featured Hollywood caricatures: Clark Gable, W. C. Fields, like that — something you’d find in an art house of the Minneapolis suburbs. A little bit of showbiz heaven, the faces smiling ferociously, as if at a malignant practical joke.
Ellen coughed, winced. “I find myself looking at children eight, nine years old. Little girls in sunsuits.” Her eyes lurked in caves of swollen tissue. “I think, ‘Well, they haven’t gone wrong yet.’”
“So that’s where you’re looking for gravity these days.”
“I think of myself at nine, sullen already. Up in my room, sleeping all day. From there to here isn’t so very far, either. Room to room to room. Isolation wards. I could be all sealed away. I could clock the next fifty years without a moment of pleasure.”
Ellen went for more coffee and didn’t come back. The last I saw was her brown pullover consumed by a squad of white shirts at the beverage station.
So, in the end, I had nothing to offer. Too much to expect. With a thankless kind of wisdom she had sought refusal while I, pretending not to, had imagined everything. Pearls for the asking, love in a hammock, wind in the palms.
Moments of pleasure? The gift of cruelty? How easy it is to forget, how easy to feign surprise. The years telescope and I cannot resist. Bravo. Hegel observes that what we learn from history is that no one learns from history.
It was August at its thickest. We had been to a pool party at the home of some gay blade who wrote travel guides and Violet had irritated me all day with her easy chatter and eagerness for gin. Then, as I drove home through Sunset Boulevard stop-and-start, she nagged me to stop at a ladies’ room. Her voice was a circular saw. I swung into a towaway zone, reached under her and pulled blue panties over her kneecaps. She giggled like someone in an Italian movie.
“Let go of it,” I said.
“What?”
I put my palm over her bladder, pressed hard, and the gin came hosing out of her, splattering her thighs and pooling on the upholstery. I said for her to sit still and shut up. She cried without a sound and as I turned north on Fairfax, reached between my legs.
You cringe and recoil? Very well. But here was a compatibility, awesome in its precision, from which she and I could not turn away. An absence of imagined pearls. What cleaved us to each other and ultimately cleaved us in two were these types of closeness, progressive as a disease. More thankless wisdom, but in time, in desperation, wouldn’t we have intertwined mortally, choking in unison? Isn’t that true?
Distinctions again, goddammit. Habit of a lifetime, whereas rigor truly is not. Sure enough, there’s more to this than erasing the old tapes and inserting the new; those work habits — automatic exchange, alternatives on request — worse than useless now.
A reprise of the wind flattens grass outside and rattles the boards. I’m shivering again. The hotplate’s taped cord throws off a few sparks while I heat water for soup. I pull the zipper tab, empty the foil pouch of its yellow powder and dehydrated shreds of chicken. Black birds are skirling, angered by the turbulence. I drink hastily from the bowl and burn my tongue. Clouds are knotting and the wind shifts constantly, erratic as a drunken driver. Still not warm, I feel cloaked and cozy in this unlikely place with its rust-stained toilet and splintery pine walls. I am the fox in her den, the beaver in his lodge.
Before me on the floor I start to empty boxes newly brought from the car, arranging items in no system, improvising a collage of books, postcards, cufflinks, matches, a piece of rose quartz. My fingers are cool and smooth. Objects fall smartly into place, Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial abutting a broken watch, horseshoe magnet perfectly centered in an ashtray from the Beverly Wilshire hotel. The more I unload, the stronger my impulse to give it all away. That biker’s little girl could play with my rubber dinosaur, and Dag, the military man, might appreciate Bernal Diaz’s memoir of his years with Cortés. Potlatch at the Pronghorn. Too bad, but I can’t fool myself. This is a fatuous ruse, like someone cleaning out the closets after a divorce. Rare things, pretty things, favorite things — standing for themselves alone, all are things and no more. Their addition or subtraction does not transform. Okay, one more issue to give up on: shortcuts. Progress. Elimination process.
Extra socks and a sweatshirt with the hood up aren’t helping my shivers any. Muscles down my back contract, recalling New York winters, the snow and ice I haven’t missed once in all these western years. “No seasons,” transplants to L.A. were forever complaining. Sometimes I bought them one of those Citizen Kane paperweights in which you can shake up an artificial blizzard. Usually I just said, “See you at the beach.”
I heat more water, drink more soup. The black birds have gone. From here no trees are to be seen, no cliffs. Maybe they’ll find some roof eaves for shelter, or a dry culvert. The wind is repetitious now, singing an autistic little song. Salt from the soup feels to be crystallizing in my belly; the pains are sharp and quick. I get into bed and pull the blanket up to my ears. There, far below, it seems, my possessions are scattered on the floor. I feel weak in mind and body. No rigor. No vigor. Maybe I’ll never get out of here.
Padilla, what I’m asking is this: If it’s such a great country, why is everything so hard?
44
TIME ALL HASHED UP. Lying here how many cycles of light and dark? How many sweats and chills? Wondering must mean I’m coming around, emerging. Every ligament and muscle packed tight with exhaustion. Diaphragm a belt of pain from heaving, mouth a compost hole, hair crisp with evaporated sweat. But now at least stilled, floating like a lily pad, no more shakes and spasms. After much spinning, mind becalmed as well, regaining assessment capability.
Idiot’s delight. I’ve seen faces in the window, heard quiet, repetitious music. A menagerie of stains has galloped and bucked, sometimes browsed in the ceiling pasture.
In troughs between deliria, I’ve contemplated this bungalow as a place for dying, or rather as a place in which to be found all stiff and yellow like a wax icon. There’d be head-shaking and sucking of teeth. Another friendless derelict. Mercy, but they get younger all the time. Tag him and bag him, another one for the county. Then they’d interview Dag: