Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  Close to the end of the film: that mountain again, the camera fixed now, a man approaching from the distance, a bulky shape. Then the explosion, premature, the fraction of a second it takes for the shockwave to knock down man and camera. The screen whirls, the camera like a dead man’s open eye staring at the sky. Raindrops fall on the lens. Someone picks up the camera and its glides over a man’s legs, registers for a moment his face seen from below – a short, grizzly beard spotted with gray. The flashing whites of the eyes, like those of a dog suddenly appearing beside you in the dark. Mediohombre. My father. Immeasurable loneliness was his task and his fulfillment. He created nothing but emptiness around him. It was a nuclear longing, the things shall never rise up again, he will rule over his grave for a million years. Schultz walked towards the place of the explosion, a climb. The camera swerved, a view of treetops as far as the eye could see. Higher. You could hear him panting. Sometimes he paused and pointed the camera at the destruction. Around it nothing but jungle, green and feverish at the edge of an open wound. That he had been there all those years . . . I tried to imagine the volume of stone, the mind-boggling effort needed to move it all. The hollow gaze of the Indians as well, that comment on the futility of yet another hallucinating gringo come to bend the earth and the people to his will. They were used to this, their history was a litany of defeats and subjugation, their fate was hereditary.

  ‘Only the proud know what falling means, the chasm. The abyss at your feet. That one little step. That longing.’

  The hissing of the wind, sometimes an animal noise like a dentist’s drill. His snorting breath. Far below, people were moving, forming chains; obedient ants.

  I didn’t watch the entire film, at least not to the point where I had come in. Going out the door, I felt nauseous. The searing light – sunglasses, I needed a pair of sunglasses. From the glare of an over-exposed photo, the girl I’d just met suddenly appeared. I was not surprised.

  ‘So, are you convinced?’ she asked.

  ‘Wait a minute.’

  I squatted down, with my hands covering my watering eyes.

  ‘Hey, can I do something?’

  ‘Could I borrow your sunglasses for a minute? I think that would help.’

  I let some light in through my fingers to get accustomed, then accepted her glasses. Colored lenses, a comfort to my eyes. I stood up. The girl in rosy light.

  ‘I needed to sit down for a minute,’ I said, ‘I was completely blind.’

  ‘Are you allergic to light?’

  ‘Not that I know of, no.’

  ‘Your eyes are watering really bad.’

  ‘Did you come back to demonstrate a little?’

  ‘No. I just came back.’

  A confident smile. Little teeth, the moist pink gums. To take my tongue and feel how smooth that would be.

  Her shopping cart was parked in front of the diner window. She was drinking tea. She pointed at the stitches on my eyebrow and asked what had happened. Concerning the milkshakes going to other tables, she knew the quantity of sugar, colorants and fat they contained; the hamburger I’d ordered she commented on in terms of the origin of the meat, labor conditions in the meat-processing industry and the issue of waste. It was like clutching a landmine. She said, ‘That’s true, in the long run. That’s why it’s so hard to convince people, because it doesn’t pose an immediate threat. We’re not made to see long-term threats. We jump to our feet at a rustling in the bushes, that’s what we’re made for; a disaster fifty years from now doesn’t matter much to us. In evolutionary terms, we’re not prepared for the solutions to the problems we’ve created ourselves. We act as though nothing’s wrong. Our day in the sun is more important.’

  ‘You’re certainly well-informed,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right, joke about it. While you still can. So what did you think of the work of our Mr. Schultz?’

  ‘Mister Schultz?’

  ‘Um-hum . . .’

  ‘Lonely. It’s lonely. I’ve never seen anything that lonely.’

  ‘A strange choice of words. For something so criminal, I mean.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I don’t have to.’

  ‘You go out demonstrating against something you haven’t even seen? That’s ridiculous.’

  She shook her head stubbornly.

  ‘You don’t have to crawl into the sewer to know that it stinks.’

  ‘Nicely put, but it doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘I look . . . well, you can look with your principles too, if you get what I mean.’

  ‘Pretty blue principles.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Just kidding.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed that.’

  ‘You didn’t finish what you were saying, about Schultz.’

  ‘There’s no way we can have a conversation if you haven’t even seen it.’

  ‘Now you’re angry.’

  I grinned at this strange creature across from me. The tip of her tongue between her teeth. We knew. I got a hard-on.

  ‘Let’s go buy you some sunglasses,’ she said.

  She had been born in Augusta, Montana, left home at eighteen. Boulder or Seattle, that’s where she wanted to go. Boulder was further away, she figured I’ll go there first, I can always go to Seattle later. I couldn’t quite follow her line of reasoning, but it made me laugh. Boulder hadn’t felt like home, so she went west, to Los Angeles. Her apartment was in Venice. She had never made it to Seattle.

  She pushed the shopping cart along, talking the whole time with an exuberance that did me good. Her soul may have been drenched in activism, but there was little that was grave about her. She wore striking clothes, wide linen trousers, a black blouse that reached to her knees, on top of that a knitted something, maybe what they call a stole, purple, sometimes she stopped for a moment to fling it over her shoulder again. Flip-flops on her feet. Glistening rings on toes that were long and slender, no helpless appendages. Thin, sensitive wrists.

  Her car was parked at a supermarket. She put the folders, press kits and bottles of water in the trunk, then walked off to return the cart. I shouted after her, ‘What’s your name, anyway?’

  ‘Sarah!’ she shouted back over her shoulder.

  When she walked everything about her moved in a private current of air that tousled everything, her curly dark hair, her clothes.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked when she got back.

  I told her my name.

  ‘German?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are you headed, Ludwig?’

  She pronounced my name as though tasting a new dish. I shrugged. She said, ‘I live close to the beach.’

  ‘I didn’t bring my swimming trunks.’

  ‘Trunks aplenty,’ she said.

  There was nothing wrong with the way she drove, it was just that she never stopped doing all kinds of things while sitting at the wheel. A dust mote that she tried to remove from her eye while looking in the rearview mirror, something in her bag, a piece of chewing gum, lip gloss that suddenly demanded her complete attention.

  ‘You don’t have to look at me when we talk,’ I said. ‘Just look at the road.’

  ‘You’re scared, ha ha! I’ve never had an accident, so don’t sweat it.’

  ‘That only hastens the day when you will have one.’

  ‘You’re drumming up bad karma, Ludwig.’

  At a gas station I bought a pair of sunglasses with dark green lenses. Broad, bleached freeway interchanges slid past below us, the road a track of bone. When you’re driving towards the ocean you can feel it, a kind of reassurance. Occasionally the sparkle of water between roads and buildings. And further away, on the horizon, the vision of Schultz’s lacerated mountain, in sharp silhouette like Mount Fuji.

  The hubcaps scraped the curb as she parked. We walked along the side of a house, climbed a set of metal steps in the backyar
d to her apartment. It was small, she mumbled something about not paying any attention to the mess, but it was impossible not to; the innards of a closet lay scattered across the floor, the couch, the bed. While she was digging around in a wooden crate, I looked at her backside.

  ‘Swimming trunks,’ I heard, ‘must be here somewhere . . .’

  A triumphant yelp, she held up a little black slip de bain. The bathroom was so small that your body acted as the lock on the door when you sat down on the pot. The hips of the man whose trunks these had been were even narrower than mine. I preferred somewhat roomier beach fashion, trunks in which you didn’t stand out so much. She was sitting on the bed, a sarong around her hips. The cups of her bikini top closed around her breasts like a pair of hands. There would be no resistance. We were living in a state of delectable deferment.

  We walk to the beach, it’s not far. Sarah. Her flip-flops make a clapping sound. The sun has permeated the pavement with heat, it seeps up through your soles. To touch her, to give her a little shove – it’s allowed, she is free in her conduct, without a word she has let you know that you may be as well. To give a little shove to someone you have known for only a couple of hours, call it playfulness but the seriousness of desire burns in your throat. The start of something. An encounter like this, those sparkling little teeth, the lovely dark hair; all it demands of you is participation, the willingness to leave your murky life story behind.

  She asks about you, who you are, where you come from, but your biography suddenly seems so leaden.

  ‘I’m going in for a dip,’ she says. ‘I have to pee.’

  Shameless creature, I thought, with your delicious tits. I watched her go, her ample butt and thighs. I kicked off my own clothes and followed. I thought about her urine when I dove, in the state I was in everything was charged with sex. She was already out to where the waves were breaking. Surfers lay in wait for the big rollers. I couldn’t catch up with her, she was the better swimmer. Bobbing around a bit, I waited for her to come back. The water was cold and stinging, I imagined the journey a drop of it might make, touching land again only at Sydney or Osaka. I also thought about a song by David Bowie, ‘Space Oddity’, about the wayward astronaut Major Tom who leaves his tin can.

  The rise of an approaching wave toppled me from my floating position, I resurfaced and rubbed the water out of my eyes. I found myself looking straight into her smile, behind her a wave rising up like a wall of steel. The surfers were lying on their boards, paddling full speed before the curl. Then it crashed.

  We found each other close to the beach, stinging water in my nose, Sarah rising up from the bubbling foam, laughing, coughing. She stuck her fingers under the hem of her bikini top and pulled it into place. Water glistened on her skin.

  ‘Come on, up onto your feet, you.’

  She slapped her palms on the water’s surface, the way boys do in a swimming pool. We walked back to our clothes. I saw the dimples in the small of her back. She spread out her sarong for us on the sand and said, ‘The water along the coast is actually too polluted to swim in. Around here it’s a little better, but people often get sick. Surfers develop sores. Seals and sea lions develop problems with their immune system. We do everything we can, but it’s tough.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Clean the Bay, an organization I’m involved in. We’ve had some success, but it takes such a long time!’

  She rolled her eyes.

  ‘And you, you, could stand a little sun.’

  She poked her finger at my upper arm and chest. I said, ‘So you demonstrate against an artist and in favor of clean water, and what else?’

  She glanced over, as though to check whether I was poking fun at her.

  ‘Oh, a couple of other things. The Venice Beach Tree Savers . . . the city’s plans for the neighborhood are completely ridiculous. And an organization called Save the Holy Peaks, the protests against Schultz are actually related to that. We work with Native American organizations to counter the commercial exploitation, the disfigurement of holy mountains in Arizona, Hopi territory. Ski resorts have already been built there, but because there’s been so little snow the last few years they’re talking about pumping polluted water up from the valley and using machines to turn it into snow.’

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘Perverse,’ I said.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the things people come up with.’

  ‘I guess it keeps you pretty busy,’ I said goofily.

  ‘In a couple of weeks there’s going to be a march on the Court of Appeals in Pasadena. If you come along you can see what we do, and why.’

  With a simple gesture she opened a perspective that went beyond today; in a few weeks’ time we would be together again, or still together. I was relieved to find that there were things that happened that had nothing to do with my mother. Her name admitted light into the picture. Sarah. She lay on her back, her arms folded behind her head. Short black hair in her armpits. I lost my way in the details, the little golden hairs on her tummy, darker on her forearms. I knew how the dried salt felt on her skin, that it tugged slightly, sometimes chafed a little.

  It was cool in the shade along the streets. Young families behind windows with wrought-iron bars, the clattering of pans and voices calling out to each other. She looked at me. Heat expanded in my throat. We stopped, she came one step closer. The warmth of her body, exhaling sunlight. I smelled her hair, she raised her head, her breath against my armpit, my neck, her face brushing lightly against mine. Our bodies dovetailed. I was embarrassed by my erection pressing against her thigh.

  ‘Are you coming with me, Mr. Ludwig?’

  She pulled me along, I drew her back and wrapped my arms around her. We kissed greedily, quickly, she pulled away again. Could they see it, the people in their houses, were we passing by in the fiery glow of a comet . . . ?

  She closed the door quietly behind her, latched it. Our coming together bristled with electricity.

  ‘Do you want to take a shower?’

  Clumsy mouths searching each other’s shape, imprinting them. Our hands went their way. The slow waltz towards the bed, I felt her hand on my member. Her giggle, light as a feather.

  ‘I noticed already, back on the beach.’

  She stepped back, the sarong slid off her. She reached around behind her, unhooked the bikini top, slid the straps down over her arms, it fell to the ground the way everything fell to the ground here. She stepped out of her bottoms. The stripes from elastic bands on her skin. The shadows. I pulled off my T-shirt. She unbuckled my belt. I struggled out of my trunks and my cock, the uneasy third party in this company, sprang to attention. Her cool hand closed around it, led me to the bed. She fell back, I knelt between her legs, spread my fingers to seize her breasts, lifted my head and kissed her hard, cold nipples, the bikini top had still been wet. Her hand felt its way down, took me into her, her eyes wide open.

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  I had never known purer rapture. She took the lead, the most experienced one.

  ‘Now, now!’

  *

  Her bed, the two of us lying on it with eyes open, looking at the different shades of blue coloring the room, and wondering aloud why most of them had no distinct name of their own but referred to something else of that color – sky blue, cobalt blue. The blues with Antwerp and Prussia in their names.

  ‘They have codes,’ I said. ‘Color codes. BI58CC. C378NB.’

  ‘Cold,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said.

  I slipped off, into sleep, my face nestled against her throat.

  ‘Ludwig?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Forget it. Go to sleep.’

  The room was dark when I awoke. From the sounds around me I figured it was still evening, not night. A television, cars. She was lying with her back to me, her hand on my pelvis. I slid out of bed; when I came back from the toilet she was lying on her back, looking at me.

  ‘Are you as hungry as I am?’
/>   Outside – the amazement that everything had gone on the way it always did, as though we were standing on a still point, a stone in the stream – there we stood and there went everything. I thought: heaven, that can’t be anything except this day, and then forever.

  We ate at a Tibetan restaurant close to her house, photographs of monasteries on the walls. Cold, hard mountain landscapes. Boulders hung with colorful pennants. I ordered something with black-eyed peas and rice, she had something with pumpkin. The food arrived with surprising speed, in ceramic bowls.

  ‘It’s easy to be a vegetarian here,’ she said. ‘This city is keyed to vegetarians. But the rest of the country . . .’

  There were things running through my mind. Questions.

  ‘Would you rather be alone, later on?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I have another place I can sleep.’

  She leaned across the table.

  ‘What do you think, Ludwig? I’m not finished with you that easily.’

  I’d expected a different answer, poignant phrases. I caught a glimpse of love as a conspiracy, the attractiveness of it. How quickly you became attached to someone whom you hadn’t even known existed that same morning. I thought about my mother’s omen, In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore, the contrast with this assenting little predator.

  In her bed that night as well, in the soft, flickering glow of the metropolis, her body was a loud affirmation of life – chasms and heavens opened up to me at the same time, we climbed and fell, before my eyes floated visions of Schultz at the edge of his abyss, he and his woman, embracing each other in their fall.

  ‘Goddamn it, Ludwig!’

  It had been a long time since I’d seen her so angry.

  ‘Where were you? What have you been up to?’