Panorama City

by Antoine Wilson

  It was only the next morning, after we’d eaten something, or she’d had coffee, I had oatmeal, it was only with the break of dawn that she stumbled upon a new track, a new piece of speech that wouldn’t again lead her to the decision point, something she’d never tried with me, she set down her coffee and looked me straight on, and she said to me, or she asked me, for the first time, What do you want? I said, I want to go home.

  The words came out without me even thinking them. Then I told Aunt Liz that I wanted to respect my father’s wishes, her brother’s wishes, your grandfather’s wishes, I wanted to bury him where he belonged, which was next to Ajax and Atlas, which was not in some cemetery next to Kutchinskis and Browns. She took a sip of her coffee, she took a long sip, she looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup, she was assessing, she was considering what I’d said. She put down her coffee cup then, and nodded, and said, her words, That sounds reasonable. She would get me as far as the bus, she said, she would buy my bus ticket back to Madera, of course I could always call her if I needed anything, but for right now she couldn’t go with me, she had too much notarizing to do, she had people in need of verification and certification, she needed also to recuperate, she listed many reasons why she couldn’t come with me, I didn’t need any, I hadn’t expected her to come with me, I could take care of myself, I told her so. After which a change came over Aunt Liz, she seemed greatly relieved, she had been trying to force herself to kick me out, she had been battling internally between needing to be rid of me and wanting still to control my every move and thought, and together we had found a third way.

  She reminisced about my first day in Panorama City, she talked about the look on my face coming off the bus, and the suit I’d been wearing, and she talked about my first day on the job at the fast-food place, and so on, I had been so promising. Her reminiscing took on a darker tone, there was a dark magnet in Aunt Liz’s head, it took her speech and led her where she didn’t want to go, she reminisced and then she asked did I know, could I help her figure out where and how and why she’d failed. I told her of course that she had done no such thing. I told her she’d been very hospitable during my stay in Panorama City, I told her that my only regret was that she and Paul Renfro couldn’t see eye to eye, it would have made things more pleasant, but east is east, as your grandfather used to say. And besides, I had done what I came to do, or I had stopped doing what I came to do, I had seen the error of my premises. I thought I had come to Panorama City to become a man of the world, while in fact I had come to Panorama City to become a provincial type, thinking that was what it meant to be a man of the world. Had I succeeded, had I never been disabused, as they say, of that notion, I would have indeed become a provincial type, I would be telling you right now that I had become a man of the world, and I would hold up my golf clubs to prove it. Instead, I came to understand that a man of the world is not something you can just kick up your feet and be, a man of the world, a true man of the world, is something you are always becoming. It is a question, not an answer. So I did not mind leaving Panorama City, because although I hadn’t achieved my goal I had exposed it, or it had been exposed to me, as a false goal, which is far more valuable than achieving it could ever be, and I had come to understand that I could be a man of the world, or I could keep becoming a man of the world, anywhere, which included Madera, and besides I was eager to find Carmen again, my mind kept turning back to the flowers she brought me when your grandfather died.

  PART SIX

  TAPE 9, SIDE B;

  TAPE 10, SIDE A

  OPPEN

  I departed from the North Hollywood station, everything looked the same as it had forty days earlier. Aunt Liz wished me luck, she hugged me, she told me to call if I needed anything, I thanked her again for her hospitality, I promised updates, I hoped she would visit sometime. I would miss her cooking, I said, which wasn’t all I would miss, but I knew how proud she had been to feed me, to feed someone who she called a growing boy, even though I had stopped growing years before. I pulled my leather suitcase out of the Tempo’s trunk, the bus driver grabbed it and threw it into the cargo hold, he didn’t care how the bags were stacked, he didn’t examine my ticket at all, it seemed like he’d rather be elsewhere, though once we got on the road he was excellent, his driving style was fluid and precise. I sat alone in the front row and watched the city get thinner and thinner until we started up through the Grapevine, then some wires bobbed up and down and I fell asleep.

  The bus rattled and I awoke in the middle of the Central Valley, golden grasses and farmland on both sides, cars and trucks and buses lined up in two orderly rows to the horizon. I pulled my compact binoculars from your grandfather’s old shaving kit, but even through those powerful lenses I couldn’t make out why our side of the freeway was clogged. I had expected, Juan-George, or hoped, or somehow felt without thinking that after falling asleep near the Grapevine I would awaken in Madera, but it wasn’t meant to be. We lurched forward and stopped, lurched and stopped. The wires on the side of the road kept no rhythm to doze off to. I scanned the shoulder for items of interest but the landscape seemed more suited to being sped past rather than examined in detail. This of course had nothing to do with what was actually on the side of the road but what was in my head, Juan-George, which was Paul Renfro. His papers everywhere, the Christmas lights, his suit inside out. Pouring ketchup packets into his mouth and wolfing down the french fries I’d brought him. The cardboard briefcase, the pushpins, the stuffed socks. I tried to focus on the freeway shoulder, I tried to turn my thoughts to what lay directly in front of my eyes, but sometimes when something is in front of you, even if it’s coming right at you, your head, what’s in your head, would rather be somewhere else entirely, and my head, for whatever reason, wanted to be hundreds of miles away, surrounded by beams and insulation, in the cranium of Aunt Liz’s house. Then the traffic thinned in a strange way, the gaps between cars grew without there seeming to be fewer cars. My attention turned to the road ahead, I wanted to see what had kept us lurching and stopping for almost an hour, but there was nothing. We just lurched one last time, then stopped, then accelerated smoothly to freeway speed. I asked the driver what had happened, maybe I had missed something. He shrugged and said, Random. At which point my mind returned to Paul Renfro, I wished Paul was sitting next to me, making a mess of his papers, Paul would have given the driver a piece of his mind, as they say. The word random is a white flag of surrender, Paul’s philosophy, for use only by the cowardly and the defeated. To call any phenomenon random is to declare your own ignorance, is to declare pride in your own ignorance, Paul’s words, by predicting, falsely, the fruitlessness of further inquiry. But on the other hand, my philosophy, the driver was good at his job, he drove the bus smoothly and precisely, exactly because he was not interested in the fruits of further inquiry. His ignorance, as Paul would have called it, was in fact a tool. We can’t all swallow the whole world, Juan-George, some of us need white flags. Even Paul knew this. I remember the police leading him away, Paul going past me in handcuffs, wincing every time his ankle hit the floor. I was still arguing that he was an invited guest in Aunt Liz’s ceiling, that he’d been welcome, that they couldn’t arrest him. Paul said that I needn’t advocate on his behalf anymore, that I was wasting my breath on those people, the police, that small minds could not be changed. He said there was a high probability we wouldn’t see each other again, and he wanted to take the moment, before these barbarians dragged him away, to thank me for acting heroically and nobly in aid of a fellow thinker, in service of the struggle to save mankind from its own stupidity. It wasn’t fair, I said, it wasn’t right what they were doing to him. Paul looked at me with that newly hatched alligator smile of his and said, Oppen, my friend, listen, it’s the way of the world, he who laughs last must first endure the laughter of others. Then they took him away.

  I was the only passenger getting off in Madera. The driver yanked my bag from the cargo area and dumped it at my feet, then hopped aboard ag
ain without a word. I stood on the tree-lined sidewalk, looking down at my leather suitcase on the bricks. The air stank of almonds roasting and grapes fermenting. Through the Dial-a-Ride office’s window I could see the same woman I’d seen there when I’d left for Panorama City, sitting in the same position, eating soup while talking on the phone, as if no time had passed at all, as if time had never passed and never would. Then someone called my name. Oppen, not Mayor. Oppen. Above the row of cars parked nose to curb I saw a person, or I should say I saw a person’s hair and sunglasses, the hair sticking up all over the place, it was Officer Mary. She came out from between the cars, waving, and gave me a warm hug, her badge hanging from her shirt like she had magnets in her shoes. She told me that Aunt Liz had called her, and that as long as I was back in town, her words, the least she could do was give me a ride home from the bus depot. Madera hadn’t been the same without me, she said. What a coincidence, I said, I hadn’t been the same without Madera. We got into Mary’s police car, I put my bag in the backseat, Madera-style. Leaving for Panorama City had felt like getting on a rocketship to fly to another planet. Coming back to Madera felt more like realizing I’d never left the planet in the first place.

  When we pulled up to the house I noticed two things right away. One, there were no longer any tracks cutting across the yard where the mini-excavator and flatbed truck had come through. Nature had reclaimed them. And two, the mailbox, which I had expected to find stuffed, was empty, which was a relief. A momentary relief, I should say. In fact I had gotten massive amounts, all held at the post office, thanks to Wilfredo, and all later sorted through with the invaluable help of Officer Mary. There is a world of paperwork, Juan-George, an alternate universe, Paul Renfro might have called it, where nothing can be done without the right documents, where every human moment is assigned a piece of paper, paper that exists only so that what is evident to everyone involved can become clear to someone who is not. Without Officer Mary’s help I would have been lost there forever.

  Is it that dust has a way of getting into a house and no way of getting out, or is it that having no people around for a while allows the dust already in the air to settle? A question I cannot answer, Juan-George. Other than the accumulation of dust on everything, the house hadn’t changed since I’d walked out the door some forty days earlier. Oh, and the bread, I’d forgotten some bread, it was a fuzzy black ball. I brought my things upstairs, I’m not sure why, but the first thing I did was bring my bag upstairs to my room and put it on the floor. My sheets were messy, I hadn’t made my bed before leaving. I sat on the bed a moment, I thought about breathing my own air, but I didn’t want to leave Mary alone downstairs wondering. I gathered my strength and stood and walked out of my room again, I had done it so many times, getting out of bed and heading downstairs, it was like every muscle in my body remembered those motions and those views, they’d made a deep trench in my thinking, and my head was slipping into the trench, so that I had this strange feeling, this notion, or suspicion, I don’t know what to call it, I mean, I knew it wasn’t true, I knew it wasn’t fact, but another part of me felt sure I was waking from the dream that had been Panorama City.

  Downstairs, I told Mary what I’d always told everyone, which was that I could take care of myself. She wrote down her phone number, said that I should call if I needed anything. Groceries, post office, whatever. I told her I was fine, that I would be fine. She walked over to the phone in the kitchen and picked it up, listening for a moment. You’ll need help, she said, getting this reconnected. She flipped a light switch up and down. Nothing happened. And this, she said. I got a flashlight from your grandfather’s old toolbox and fetched some matches and candles. Officer Mary left, reluctantly, after offering to stay the night. I took a shower, a cold shower, there was no hot water, and put on the nicest clothes I had in my closet, a white button-up shirt and some plain tan pants. From my window I could see the horizon splitting the sun, clouds turning orange and red, shadows everywhere. I went out to the garage and found my favorite bicycle, the blue-flake three-speed with leather bags. I wiped it down with wet rags, put air in the tires, sprayed WD-40 on the chain. There was something I had to do.

  I rode through warm and humid evening air into town, into your mother’s old neighborhood, she doesn’t want me talking about this, but I don’t trust her to tell you, it is important, it is where you come from, Juan-George. It was dark but there were people on the streets, people making the most of the warm night, they were barbecuing and drinking, they were playing loud music. I pulled my bicycle up onto the lawn and leaned it against the house. Carmen’s roommate’s son Fabio was sitting on the porch in the same place he’d been sitting forty days before, but this time he was asleep with an empty bottle of beer next to him. I knocked, the door opened from me knocking on it. I entered the house, there was garbage everywhere, nobody had cleaned in a long while. Which was odd, from what I had seen before, your mother was a tidy person, this was what they call a disaster zone and it was dark, too, none of the lights were on. I went into your mother’s room and saw two bodies on the bed, a man and a woman, doing what men and women do. The man didn’t see me, he was facing the other way, but the woman looked up immediately. She was not your mother. I asked her where Carmen was, the man turned around and asked what was going on. The woman said that Carmen had moved out, and the man said to me, Can’t you see I’m fucking here? Which was how I learned that your mother had left her house, had left the house she had been renting, I later discovered, because her roommate’s habits had become, her words, too risky, which meant drugs, your mother always avoided drugs. I woke Fabio, I asked him if he knew where Carmen had gone, he had no idea. Which was when I found out he hadn’t told her I was coming back, which was when I found out Fabio had told Carmen only that I’d come by to say adiós, and that I’d been with another woman, instead of telling her that I’d gone away to become a man of the world, instead of telling her that the woman I was with was Officer Mary, instead of telling her that I hoped she would wait for me, that I would keep her in my heart, that I would return for her, the only thing he’d passed on was adiós.

  Late the next morning I was moving furniture around, I was trying to figure out how I was going to change the house, now that it was mine, I mean, but I was lost, Juan-George, I had no routine. You should know by now, if you’ve been listening carefully, or even not so carefully, that most problems can be solved by waiting. If I’d been in town, looking for your mother, if I’d been driving around with Officer Mary, asking people questions, trying to find your mother, if I’d taken a day to track down and visit her family somewhere else in the Central Valley I would not have been home when she appeared on my front porch just before noon, peering through the dusty windows, calling my name. She called me, she still calls me, instead of Oppen, she’s the only one who calls me Open, like what you do to a door, I decided that day not to correct her. Hello, she said, Open, are you home? I was. Fabio had told her I was back, she said, and looking for her. She came in, I let her in, and together we sat on the sofa in the living room. I asked if she wanted anything to drink, I offered her tap water or warm soda, I apologized and explained that the electricity hadn’t been turned on yet, I hadn’t gone into town yet to sort that out. She asked how long I’d been back. I told her I’d just arrived the night before. She asked me if I had come looking for her even before going to PG&E. I told her I hadn’t come back to Madera to pay an electric bill. And what about the police woman? she asked. She’s not your lover? I explained to Carmen that Officer Mary was my friend, only my friend, and that she had helped me a great deal, and that she was still helping me. Carmen squinted at me and then asked if she could have a soda. I opened one for her, even opening it I could tell it had gone flat, she took a sip and put it down on the coffee table. I asked her how it was and she said it was disgusting, which is something I love about your mother, she tells the truth. I asked her where she was living now, she said she’d rather not say, it wasn’t a good place. I
t was safer than with her old roommate, but it wasn’t good. She shifted her body side to side on the sofa, I couldn’t tell if she was making herself comfortable or getting ready to stand up. My mouth went dry, and my throat felt like I had half-swallowed a pill, and I knew I had reached one of those points in life where any event no matter how small could happen a different way and change everything that follows. I looked at your mother, I tilted my head down to look her directly in the eyes, and she looked up at me, she met my gaze, as they say, and that look, the two of us exchanging that look, neither of us looking away, gave me the courage to mention that there was extra room in the house and that she was welcome to stay if she wished. I told her I’d have the electricity connected again soon, and the telephone, and that I was still in the process of rearranging the furniture to my liking, and that I’d accept any ideas from her, but she was welcome, she would be welcome here. She smiled, her white teeth and gold teeth all showing, and then laughed. I wasn’t sure why she was laughing and waited for her to finish. Enough, she said, you don’t have to be a salesman about it. Which meant yes, which was her way of saying yes. Later she would say that it was the beginning of her new life. She’s staring blades at me now, Juan-George, I wouldn’t be surprised if she erased this part of the tape, your mother has always been a very private person, I hope she won’t erase this, what could be better than the beginning of a new life?