At first I thought the footsteps might be echoes of my own, but then my subconscious realized the steps I heard were out of synch with mine. My walk’s pace skipped a tiny beat and a keen observer would have realized that something had changed in my demeanor, that my body language revealed I had sensed a danger of some sort.
The steps I heard were, I figured, about a stone’s throw away, faintly crunchy like the sound of Cocoa Pebbles being chewed across a table. And because the steps were faster than mine, I knew The Stepper was gaining on me.
I was weaponless. I did not even know who the possible enemy might be. I felt a rivulet of hot sweat dribble directly down my side undernearth my shirt. I tried to decide if I should stop, and turn around, or to jump off the road and … well … there was nowhere to take cover. No boulders. And maybe the Stepper had blinding halogen lights … handguns … rope. Oh, Jesus.
I stopped. The only sound became the stepping sound approaching. I tightened my shoulders. I turned around. I saw the black silhouette approach against the cobalt blue night sky. I saw a shooting star; a military plane heading toward Twentynine Palms; the ink of the canyon. Because there was really no other choice in the matter I said to the shadow: Hello.
There was no answer. The shadow—shortish, hunchbacked?—continued walking toward me at the same speed. I said, once more, emphatically, Hello!, and the shadow drew closer and the gravel crunching sound increased. I certainly had no energy to run and so, dispiritedly I stood, perhaps to die, perhaps to kill—too pissed-off and too scared and too weary to think things through. I have heard stories of how fear hones one’s senses, but I don’t think these stories are true. Fear on top of everything else adds only confusion, not sharpness.
And so the shadow grew larger, almost to full size. I saw a hunched man’s figure with a backpack of urethane foam battened down with bungie cords and flattened McDonald’s white paper bags. He had a white Spanish moss beard and a plaid shirt and green Dickies work pants that were so worn they were shiny. He was a drifter—a desert rat—like the ones who occasionally haunt the Desert Fashion Plaza, visibly, frighteningly suntanned even in the dark of three-quarter moonlight, with skin like beef jerky, pores like a salt and pepper shaker and milky hints of cataracts in both eyes. He walked toward me and I guardedly said, “Hello” once more. He then stopped short of me, as though we had met casually outside a Radio Shack or something. He said in a voice rich with phlegm and years of desert monologues: “I walk out here almost every night, but tonight there won’t be rain, and so we’re fine.” His breath was like fire; like pepper.
My relief was great; he was mad but not harmful—too poor even for weapons. Even in my dilapidated condition, I could take him in a scrap. It was my turn to talk. I said, “Rain? No-I guess not.”
In retrospect it was quite idiotic. I was trying to be casual about this decidedly odd encounter and he was simply too crazy to perceive it as even being odd. I was trying to pretend we were meeting each other under sunlight, not moonlight; I was trying to give our situation a comfortable guy-like dignity, like two models chatting in a J. Crew catalogue.
My drifter pal then made a shrug with a dirty left shoulder, spat a gob and indicated that we continue walking. My legs now wobbled, mainly from my lack of blood sugar. Walking together quickly erased much of what fear remained. The drifter didn’t even question the fact that a person might be walking lost in the desert at night—as though lost strolls were the most natural activity on earth.
And he wasn’t really talking to me, either—he was broadcasting—like a cheap AM radio station that had come through on the SEEK button. I wish I could say that we talked about simple things while we walked, too—that he offered me salt-of-the-earth insight into life—wisdom garnered from all his years of drifting. But he didn’t. He never even volunteered his name and I never volunteered mine. He talked some more about the evening’s rainfall that was never to arrive. He talked about a Republican conspiracy; about the Colorado River; about Princess Caroline of Monaco. I only half paid attention to his words, as though I was driving. He told me he was walking to Indio. He asked me, “Now where’d you be headin’ for a stroll?”
I replied without much energy that I was trying to find one of the roads back to Desert Hot Springs, Bermuda Dunes or Palm Springs.
“Well if that’s your case,” he replied, stopping us in our tracks, “you’re walkin’ the wrong way.”
It was jarring that he actually connected with me here, that he had actually heard my words. I tried to react casually to this. “Oh?”
He stopped and I stopped and he said to me, “Look, whatever you’re doin’ out here, that’s okay. Maybe you didn’t want to see me and,” he smacked his lips, “maybe I didn’t see you. But that there’s the road you want to be walkin’.” He indicated a small “Y” in the road a stone’s throw back. “And it’s maybe an hour to Dillon Road. Not that you’ll be closer to much. Hot Springs, maybe. It’s a two-hour walk from there. Capish?”
His tone of voice made it clear that it took a strong act of will for him to be able to connect with me as much as he already had. I nodded, and his face dissolved back into its previous craziness.
The fact of the matter was that he was simply a very far-gone desert rat. I felt naïve and middle-class for having hoped—even briefly—that I could bond with the unbondable, for thinking that all it takes to make crazy people uncrazy is a little bit of hearty attention and good sense.
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.
And so I stood by him rather dumbly and he twitched. I stared at his backpack like a Labrador dog staring at a dinner table and then I felt badly; I realized I was menacing him with this stare. For the first time, I think he was a bit frightened at meeting me—a stranger—in the middle of nowhere. He reached into the pouch on his back and pulled out two lumps and handed them to me: a microwaveable plastic container of Beefaroni and a cold Baked Apple Pie from McDonald’s.
“The macaroni’s swiped from a 7-Eleven,” he said.
I said, “No no!” I wanted to let him know that I wasn’t planning to rob him, so I handed him a fifty dollar bill from my shirt pocket which he stuffed, unfolded, into a grubby front pocket. Having done this, he darted away without even saying good-bye, off down the road, vanishing all too soon into the night, leaving me there near the Y in the road, scraping the Beefaroni out of a plastic cup with dusty fingers, eating the Baked Apple Pie without even chewing, knowing that, bad as my situation was, at least it would not be forever.
Now:
There is so much you don’t know about me—things I haven’t told you—for instance, that I do have a family, that I believe there is a God, that I was once a child—and that I have fallen in love twice and that neither time lasted. But how much of this matters in the end if you are alone. What is our memory? What is our history? How much a part of us is the landscape, and how much are we a part of it?
My body grows old, it turns strange colors, refuses orders, becomes less and less a part of the me I remember I once was. I read what I have written here and realize that I am not a happy person and maybe I never will be.
My night in the desert was a few years ago now. Since then I have seen more of this world—I have lived in Los Angeles and seen the fires burn there; I have seen the glaciers in Alaska fall apart and float away into the sea; I have seen an eclipse of the sun from a yacht floating on an ocean thick with crude oil. And with each of these sights I have thought of the damaged face of the drifter in the desert, gone, untraceable, vanished into the wastes outside of Indio, Scottsdale, Las Vegas—his own private planets in his own private universe.
But I talk too much here. Yet how often is it we are rescued by a str
anger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness—so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?
It is with these thoughts in mind that I now see the drifter’s windburned face when I now consider my world—his face that reminds me that there is still something left to believe in after there is nothing left to believe in. A face for people like me—who were pushed to the edge of loneliness and who maybe fell off and who when we climbed back on, our world never looked the same.
PATTY HEARST
This past week has gotten me to wondering about life. Well, not life exactly—but the sequence of life’s events. Does, for instance, it matter in life that we travel through our days from A to B to C to D … birth to love to marriage to children to death, and so forth? Or is this storyboard aspect of life just some sort of bookkeeping device we’re stuck with as humans to try to make sense of our iffy situation here on Earth? As I have said, this past week has gotten me wondering about this.
First of all, there was Walter. Walter was a black Labrador retriever who lived three doors down from my parents’ house up on the mountain West Vancouver. A quiet, good-hearted soul, Walter had been visiting our house for many years. He would appear outside the kitchen patio door, woof once, and we would let him inside. He would then amble around the house a bit, his toenails clicking on the linoleum, mooch a scrap or two, and then he would lie on the kitchen floor and be one of the family for a few hours. When it was time for Walter to leave, he would woof again once more, and we would let him out. Walter was all the fun and benefits of a pet without any of the fuss and muss.
Anyway, about a month ago Walter stopped visiting my parents’ place. Mom mentioned it to me during a phone call, saying she and Dad were a bit concerned but they didn’t know what exactly they should do. Then a few days later their phone rang—it was Mrs. Miller, Walter’s owner, saying that her husband had died some weeks previously. My mother expressed condolences to Mrs. Miller, who said the worst of it was over and that her children were being good to her. But one problem she was having, though, was that Walter had become miserable and wasn’t his old self anymore. She wondered if we might come over to visit him and try to cheer him up.
Mom rallied the troops. She asked me if I would come over from across town and I said that of course I would. In the end me, Mom, Dad and my younger brother, Brent, the aging film student who never left home, all walked to the Millers’ house—Mom with a blueberry-peach pie, me with a box of liver-flavored doggie treats and Brent with a HandyCam with which he recorded our visit.
Mrs. Miller answered the door, we made our greetings and then she showed us into the living room where Walter sat on a Hudson’s Bay blanket on the chesterfield with Wheel of Fortune playing in the background, looking, for all the world, like a senior citizen. Brent was excited that there was a TV on in the room. I think he thought it made his videoing more arty.
Anyway, when Walter saw us he raised his snout, pricked his ears slightly and gave us a dispirited little wag of his tail, but all of his vim was gone. We turned down the volume on the TV and took seats beside him and patted his head. I gave him a doggie treat, which he nibbled at so as not to make me unhappy—such gracious manners—but otherwise he remained miserable-looking.
We talked to Walter. Brent told him that the Klassens’ evil Siamese cat, Ping, had a litter of five kittens but Dad said, no, Ping had had six, and that Mrs. Klassen didn’t know who the father was. And then Dad and Brent got in a squabble over, of all subjects, Ping. Normally the very mention of the cat would have had Walter’s neck hairs bristling, but then he merely raised his eyebrows slightly, his chin resting on his forepaws.
After fifteen minutes or so we left the house, telling Walter that he could come and visit us any time and we waved goodbye. Again he gave us a dispirited little thumpthump of his tail and that was the last we saw of him.
Walter died days later—of a broken heart, we all supposed. Brent phoned me up to tell me the news which depressed us both, but Brent said not to be. He tried to make a joke. He said, “Well at least Walter got to go through life with a hip all-black wardrobe.”
I said that he and all his trendy art friends were sick. And then he told me to lighten up. He said that duration doesn’t mean anything to a dog. Whether you go to the corner store for ten minutes or whether you go to Hawaii for two weeks, all your dog experiences during your absence is a “sadness event” of no fixed duration. “One hour … two weeks—it’s all the same to your dog. Walter suffered and was miserable, but not the way a person would have suffered.”
Brent then said that humans are the only animal able to feel the pain of sorrow that has been stretched out through linear time. He said our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time—our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events—a story—and that when we can’t figure out what our particular story is we feel lost somehow. “Dogs only have a present tense in their lives,” he continued. “Their memories are like those carved ice swans you see at weddings, that look good but melt in an hour. Humans have to endure everything in life in agonizingly endless clock time—every single second of it. Not only this, but we have to remember having endured our entire lives, as well. What a drag, no? It’s amazing we all haven’t gone mad.”
I said that sorrow was sorrow. I said I had to think over what Brent was saying. And I said that I missed Walter in whatever kind of time Brent wanted to talk about, thank you.
Our call ended on a rather testy note, but Brent really did get me to thinking.
Anyway, there was another event that happened this week that has gotten me wondering about life’s strange sequence. An event more important than Walter’s dying (though I don’t mean to diminish his loss to me). It’s just that … well—you’ll see.
The event was this: I received a phone call from Jeremy, an old high-school friend. Jeremy told me that my sister, Laurie, had been spotted up at Whistler, working at one of that ski resort’s convenience stores—not the Husky station, or the Rainbow but one further up the highway. I asked him if he was absolutely positive it was Laurie and he replied that he hadn’t actually seen Laurie himself. Rather, a friend of his had made the sighting. So Jeremy wasn’t 100 percent positive.
Nonetheless, this small tidbit was all I needed. I turned off my computer, grabbed my coat and left my office early to begin driving the eighty miles up north to Whistler and check out the sighting, to see if it was true.
The sky was liquid with rain—the rainiest day in the world—the thick healthy drizzle that feeds the trees and the ocean and which colors so many of my memories. By 4:00 the sky was already darkening as I passed Horseshoe Bay and began the drive up Highway 99’s seaside granite hairpins, up the fjord of Howe Sound, the “Sea to Sky” highway. I was driving slowly; even the headlights had difficulty penetrating the fall of water. Potential chocolate pudding mudslides brooded up the sheer mountain slopes above Montizambert Creek and Lions Bay. In the last light of day at Britannia Beach I was able to see the Pacific Ocean to my left pummeled flat as a sheet of lead.
The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing—a blanket—the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.
It was just up past Squamish where I saw the fire—a slag fire from where new land was being cleared—off to the right of the road, past a cluster of brightly lit yellow tractors—a mighty salad of ten thousand stumps and branches—a million tree-rings of time, all burning, all sizzling—a shocking amount of fire, like a lake of fire; so much flame that the rain turned to steam before it hit the embers. I had never seen so much fire in one place at once; I had never believed that there could be so much. A field of burning urine and liquid
sunsets—I stood in the mud on the sidelines and watched, feeling my skin redden, feeling small cinders singe my skin as the fire calmly raged, like a dream of fire—a fire under the ocean—in the blackness, in the rain, like a secret you just can’t keep hidden any longer.
Laurie. This part isn’t as straightforward as Walter. Laurie vanished from our family’s life five years ago. She was my older sister and for at least a few of the years before she vanished she was closer to me than anybody else, back when we were younger.
My nickname for Laurie was “Louie” and she called me “Louie,” too. She was the coolest of all the five kids, the tomboy beauty, the animal lover, the one who had it all together. She was the second born (I am fourth), and it was Laurie who sat on a Donald Duck raft in the pool on a hot summer day, saying she felt like she was floating across Lake Chanel in a giant leather handbag as she made me fetch her Cokes and calcium tablets. She was the one for whom I would skip high school—to go drive around with her in her rusted Ford Courier pickup to smoke bad pot and deliver papers to newspaper boxes, one of her many jobs after high school.
Snapshot: Laurie has borrowed Adam’s (my oldest brother’s) cordless phone, has dialed it from the kitchen phone, and then stuck the cordless phone in a beehive inside a rotting cedar stump in the backyard forest. The two of us are sitting in the kitchen with our ears to the receiver, listening to the bees buzz.
Another snapshot: in the back yard watching bats dive-bomb a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee we are throwing while waiting for the occasional owl to swoop down from the hemlocks next to the telephone poles, plump and juicy, like a man’s head with wings.
Life After God Page 6
