by Hob Broun
“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:
“You know how they is nowadays, can’t figure which sock to put on first. This boy here, he was leastwise handy. I mean he knowed which end of a screwdriver goes where. But for most of it, he was just as green as the grass we ain’t got.”
I collapse halfway to the sink, too dizzy even to crawl. Expansion of lungs painful. Eyeballs a half-dozen sizes too large. Safest course is to stay put, lie here like a thumbsucker.
Linkage between sickness and childhood: relinquishing power. A sublime gauze curtain descends and your face may go blank behind
it, your voice disappear. Incapacity, given in to, means entry to a private realm where you float around, or through, obstacles on a silent barge.
So here in this shabby drifter’s cabin I am a little doll. Time all hashed up, let me repeat. And on gusts of fever these streamers have flapped within reach….
I am a gasping little doll with clotted chest and my mother sponges me with alcohol. She is party ready, smoothly powdered, silhouette enlarged by a fur jacket, her glowing orange lips my night light.
I am eating pureed carrots and gray crumbling meat. Have to finish—while I watch Circus Boy, the maid Amanda watches me. “They can’t have gone far,” says the snake charmer. “Go on, it’ll put hair on your chest,” says Amanda.
I am nested in the back room of a summer rental that smells of creosote, waiting out the same cold as everyone else. The motorboats on the lake, even Gordo’s high-pitched sneezing, seem far off to my congested ears. I have baseball magazines, Green Lantern and Andy Panda comics. I watch ice melt in the ginger ale.
I am lurking in the doorway of my sister’s bedroom where she lies in state, in shadow, peppered with measles. She is typically kempt, bundled in white terry cloth, but spews eager germs with every breath. It is forbidden to go in. From my side of the border I whisper bad news, see her rapidly blink, then turn toward deeper shadow. Carla will not be well enough to attend the final performance of the Ice Capades.
Reaching the sink is no triumph, the basin scummed with bile like the foam that dries inside a milkshake cup. Should I risk a trip outdoors? A galvanized tin stall, a narrow stream of rusty water. Anything to slough this fetid skin I’m in. But getting into pants takes all my strength, leaves me marooned on the mattress again. I don’t want to sink back. Enough indoor mirages. But I haven’t the will of a doorknob. Except to bare my teeth at the dented, demented smile hanging in the windowframe.
Glad of the invitation, in walks Dag just as real as the tear in my pants.
“Shitfire, son. Look like a curse been put on you.”
“A virus,” I find myself saying, “is the simplest life form.”
From what I can hear, my voice is of an automated gun-slinger in a penny arcade.
“That’s right, simple but smart,” Dag says, picking through my canned goods.
“What day is it?”
“We need some lunch.” He slaps the air decisively. “So where’s the damn opener?”
Watching him empty creamed corn into a bowl is all the lunch I need. Cautiously, I sip from the cup of water he brings over, dribbling it down my bruised throat. Ice Capades. I see myself facedown, skimming the length of the rink.
“Fill ’er up, huh? You’re all dried out, I can see that.”
Dag gets another cooling cup into me before I pass out. Quite a bedside manner. His yammering seeps through the wall of my doze, drenches me as I wake.
He stops, frowns into the scraped-clean bowl, and I can see old stitches like a zipper alongside his head. The Beanball Incident he’s forever reciting—but Padilla says he got whanged by a horseshoe-pitcher at a church picnic.
“Get you some fresh air,” Dag says.
He hoists me, gets me out the door. Daylight overwhelms my eyes. I subside into crunchy dry grass and feel around with my hands.
“Where are my toys?” I say. Stimulus and response.
Not looking up, Dag points to hazy blue sky. “Worry about getting’ some a that, and that’s all.”
The big gas ball. I can have all I want.
“Who’s worried?”
Across the path, motorcycle parts soak in a pan of oil and a young cat claws at tar paper hanging from Padilla’s toolshed. A vista. Farther out, the land is careless and uncolored, has been for so long that its present is as invisible as its past.
As words come out of me and pass through Dag like water through a sieve, I come to see how it will be.
“I’ll go out where few things are possible. Where most things are inevitable. I’ll give it all up to that place and I’ll have a new shape.”
“You lookin’ for work?” Dag is puzzled as only he can be.
Steep hills to the north, a broken-glass profile. No more intimidating than an afterthought. To the east, where scrub thickens in a gray-green crescent, root webs extend no more than an inch below ground. The cat, coming toward us now, carries a limp brown snake in its mouth. Science can be such a comfort. I explain to Dag that we are just coded strands of nucleic acid.
“Brain fever,” he says. “You need dousing down.”
But one look tells me it’s been a long time since any water has passed through that cracked black hose. Grumbling and spitting, Dag kicks fruitlessly at the spigot.
I sink deeper into the grass. Fading again, that sensation of being hollowed out. But soon I can get to an uncolored place. Already on my way.
I don’t mind the heat or the dry grass spiking me or the insects traversing my bare back. My memory is as quiet as a dead snake. I must be getting well.
45
I AM HERE ON the desert floor, alone in a silver pod. I have no telephone, no mailbox. I have no heat, no plumbing, no qualms. The land under me was an inland sea until it dried up a few million years ago. Now it is government land leased to a Japanese corporation, From my window, roughly the size of a picture tube, I can see as far as I might want. Quiet, haggard space. The sky is huge. Nothing moves. But I believe in tidal rhythms here among fossil fish long ago powdered and dispersed on the wind. Nothing moves and I contemplate beginnings: the first men to see patterns in the stars, the discovery of coal, the creation of blue glass, the invention of the Nipkow disc.
For this silver Airstream trailer I gave cash and my car to a newly retired Spec/4 who’s leaving the base to live with his daughter in Beaufort, South Carolina. Citizen Sonny towed it out here, his face wrinkling like a sandwich bag with what I took to be envy. He showed me the well a mile or more to the west that I share with some shabby shorthorn cattle. He placed in my hand a copy of “Survival for Desert Commandos.”
The old man knew confined space at its best—in Beaufort they should let him get jolly on bourbon and sing the grand-kids to sleep. I have brackets for a kerosene lamp. I have a Primus stove, niches and shelves, a writing desk that folds out. From a director’s chair, with tequila bottle in hand, on a black-and-white powered by an army surplus generator, I am watching Perry Mason ruin a witness with unfounded and argumentative questions.
So at last I have taken steps, made the final subtractions. Citizen Sonny chastises me about planning, but I have confidence in the undesigned campaign. My belief in grace is firm. That is to say, I take things lightly.
There was my first true experience of sand: soft, warm, and easy. I moved on my stomach like a turtle between Long Island dunes and thought of burying myself. My mother appeared in tears and snatched me. That is to say, you are lost only so long as someone is looking for you.
So I don’t worry about being found. I don’t worry about dehydration or changing my mind. I remember the old man walking in a tight circle as I counted out his money. “What I’m going to miss is the big picture.” Would he find Beaufort tight and foolish, the grandkids a nuisance? Would he yearn for the crush of the mess hall and artillery fire echoing among the rocks and the soft flicker of his kerosene lamp? Let Sonny envy that.
“But you returned that night, didn’t you?” Mason says. “You went back determined to destroy the lipstick formula.”
I turn from the weeping admission and look out my window. The chemistry of industrial espionage is contained in these pale wastes, in layers of the ancient sea. Sonny claims the Japanese are expecting to take uranium out of here, and are being fleeced. Fuck integrity, eh? Elementary. But is this place as lifeless as it looks? There might be secrets here just waiting to be looked for, a primeval rectitude I can’t even guess at.
I built a fire my first night, roasting sweet potatoes in the embers, and wondered who the unfamiliar light would attract. I was expectant, not fear
ful, peering into watery shadows. But it was something I heard rather than saw that taught me right off to respect this place. Wet wind put out the flames of my fire as though aimed. The slow prefatory scraping was like two algae-covered slabs pulling apart, and then came a sound both mechanical and animal, an admonitory rumble and roar that had me crouching in the illusory safety of the pod, reduced. I stayed awake while the sky shifted from black to blue, without hearing so much as an elf owl, and this gravid silence was worst of all.
Try as I might, I could not keep myself from interpreting the experience, could not in the now ominous daylight hold down the conviction that my choices were to leave and be doomed or to stay and be absorbed. I felt as though I were being closely examined from above like something in a petri dish. When I said before that I took things lightly, I lied. But you must be used to that by now. In cities where I have lived, candor makes licit all sins: Go ahead and fuck me around, just be honest about it. So, in the current style, I could wrap things up by confessing to solipsism. But a swindle is a swindle. This is what I mean by the doom that awaits me everywhere but here.
Inside my pod there are seeds. I fold down the writing desk, align pencil and paper. What am I going to put down? A grocery list? A letter? Do I want to draw heads or play hangman with myself? Outside a thousand absorptive processes are taking place. Leaves suck sun and make sugar. Maggots take nutrition from pus. I am still wary, still uncomfortable. But at last I have something to write.
Q: Are we not men?
A: No, we are animals
All the consoling fabrications must be waived.
46
THE MARGIN FOR ERROR is thin. Beware of moods. Ignore quick decisions. Balance, proportion. I learn to walk all over again, canting forward on the lead foot for a gradual transfer of weight. I learn to conserve energy. Information shaped like an arc, my eyes sweeping back and forth across the steadiness of the landscape. Caution, deep cover. I learn to recognize danger signs.
