I move into the sacred unused diamond lane, remembering the last Hummer I’d seen, or had registered, the modern American family of the leash, remembering my newfound anonymous friend, his sprinting through the shadows of Campbell, accelerate past a (last year’s trend) Beemer and finger the passenger side window down. The Hummer is so high off the ground I have to lean all the way across the seat to find the driver.
“Hey!”
Salt-and-pepper-haired man looks over slowly and then down, speeds up. I stay with him at sixty-five miles an hour.
“Hey! We’re on the most beautiful freeway in the world! It’s all ours!”
He snickers at me or at my car or at both me and my car. The son of a bitch.
The engine on this relic’s about to blow up, but I don’t give a fuck. Not any longer. He pretentiously raises his eyebrows, and I shout, “Join the army if you wanna drive a fucking tank around town!”
The monstrous Hummer’s wheels sound like it’s in an invisible wind tunnel of its own.
“You Schwarzenegger wannabe! You ain’t no Terminator! You got nothing!”
He tilts his head with amusement and pulls his elbow flag in, as if his skin is being corroded by my words, the Rolex shining against the darkness of his tightly wrapped leather interior. Condescending eyeblink, effeminate purse of the lips, tinted window rising.
Before it’s sealed shut he veers over and cuts me off, his bumper tapping my front end. I swerve left to avoid an accident, shouting, “Hey!” as the door kisses the divider, then seems to be stuck to it, grinding into it, steel on concrete. His tank rapidly shrinking into a black dot as I slice back across the lane to regain equilibrium but go airborne instead. All this in an instant.
I know, suspended in the silence, that it’s all over.
Time has finally stopped and will finish itself off....
Then the world slams a palace door across my face and I’m spinning through the wash cycle of—“arrrrrrrrgggg!”—two-hundred-and-seventy-one dollar diamond-lane pavement of the most beautiful freeway in the world until—click—everything in the 1982 two-door Honda Civic goes black.
36
The Tup Tup Tup Tup Tup
THE tup tup tup tup tup of slowing vehicles. Their labyrinthine undersides like the roof of the mouth. The wiry tread of tires straight-lined in the spin. Then the exhaust. No one stops. Only the vehicular slowdown occurs, sand lining up for the middle of the hourglass before the freefall. Above my head, behind my body, a hundred feet past the 280 North exit, the race resumes: my spill means merely minutes lost to the masses, nothing more. It’s like a Godfather hit: it’s not personal, it’s just tup tup tup tup tup business. I too have lost minutes before, have lost a lifetime of minutes.
I am thinking of the middle-aged man in the Hummer. I do not think of the feeling in my legs, which I twitchingly amazingly still have—and would certainly be thankful to have—had I thought for even a moment of the alternative. I do not think of the alternative. That’s how I’ve been taught: everything is an alternative. Nor had I thought of the tup tup tup tup tup of my beating heart when I’d first awoken and known, in a widening pool of my own blood, that the tractor tires of the Jeep Wrangler treading 3-D into pavement would flatten any part of my body not flattened already.
Am I a stain in the road? A drop of bird shit on the roof? A dead branch shed by the manzanita bushes lining the side of the freeway? Am I, at most, worth someone stopping?
I cough tup tup tup the blood curdling in, up, and out my throat like an angry Nevadan geyser. The tractor tire and the swerving Jeep Wrangler gone. Two other Jeeps just like it, gone. Mine, the 1982 two-door Honda Civic, done. A smoking heap of uninsured junkyard scrap metal. Yet still, despite their horizon-riding, fading-vision gonedness, more cars come and come and keep coming, climb out the opposite horizon line of the Fremont Hills. Jeep Wranglers, Ford Rangers, Volkswagen Bugs. Lexus hatchbacks, Mustang convertibles, a juiced cherry-red ’62 Impala. Buses and utility trucks. Sixteen-wheelers. Motorcycles and, somehow, the beehive buzz of a moped. I cough tup tup tup again, so spasmodically that my cheek kisses the pavement, a quick chicken peck.
No one stops. My eyes are on the undersides again. Eyes wide, head leaking, supine. Between the flash of automative arrival and departure, the pink stuck diaphanous sky. Now the cry of nearing sirens, their cry a distant song of death, whose death I do not know. It cannot be the death of the prim and proper middle-aged man, gone forever into the squeeze of the undulating traffic.
I, Silicon Valley native ingrate, Donkey Kong king at age four, bastard child of the Data Generation, am conditioned to the flashing thoughts of my own head, the flashing photos from a satellite, the flashing lights of an intersection, the flashing international news briefs, flashing billboard commercials, flashing Hollywood films, flashing clocks, flashing perverts, flashing finally boring heroes, flashing, flashing, flashing your regrets of the past.
That’s what it is: The middle-aged man has something you don’t. A verifiable past, a measurable yesterday, and thus a verifiable future,a measurable tomorrow. He had known, too. He had salt-and-pepper hair in the way that salt-and-pepper hair says, I have a past. And this is the result. Hey, asshole. I have a story.
But I have one, too. It’s just that it’s cut right down the middle of everything. I am a half-breed American man who can claim the brown pride of Polynesia or the white wisdom of western culture, land on opposite ends of the valley. I have been the best and I have been the worst. I am smart and yet I am tough, or reverse it. Walking through the hallways of decorum and posing in shiny ambition or sludging across the swamps of gutters and tiptoeing about in rocky prison yards. I know the mermaids on the bed of seaweed and I know the barnacles on the bottom of the boat. I have loved God and lost him and I have tried to regain him and failed. I have tried to love in an era of lovelessness. I have ridden both the GOP elephant and the Jeffersonian donkey both and have been tossed from their saddles through no poor handling of my own. I have written poetry in a hallway of charcoal portraits and have walked across the street to spend ten bucks at a liquor store on porn. I am beautiful and I am ugly, noble and depraved, I see too much and am therefore confused as hell; I am trying desperately for the rights to a story, something that lines up, goddammit, that lines up.
But there is only the tup tup tup of the tires on the speed bumps of the divider like the tup tup tup of the blood in the throat and the piercing song of the ambulance sirens rising. What is it that makes no one stop? That pushes forward onward outward upward? What plants this carnal chaos, the swallower of reflection?
I must stop now and think. For good, goddammit, for good, or my head’s gonna explode. Feel an urgency I’ve never quite felt before. Linked—and what’s this?—to the tup tup tup of the final moment.
Cars again!
Cars always again!
Not one square inch of pavement gets a rest, pavement serving over 99 billion miles of tire tread!
Dread the day the piston-pumping came and kept coming out from the horizon and over the hills and down through the fertile plain of my head to ride it, electrodes, tendrils, cortexes, smoke like clouds out the ears and nostrils and even the tup tup tup gurgling mouth. Dread the day I walked into Wendy’s and ordered nothing, burning for a five-star meal. Dread the day this life destroyed my laughter, my fear of loneliness. Dread the day, the first one, where I had no discernible thought of bedding down a woman, all the yearning gone. Dread women, dread men. Dread the tup tup tup of my throat, my fucking throat. Dread what I am and what I see, dread what I hear, what I think I know.
“Can you hear me?”
I tup tup tup say, “Middle-aged—”
“Don’t speak. Don’t say a word.”
“—bastard.”
“Don’t speak!”
They are latching on to me in all ways now: strapping devices to my arm, a wind-cold mask over the mouth still tup tup tup spurting like a fountain. Everyone is touching me in every place except
the pockets, and then even that.
“Here’s his wallet. Do you have any relatives? Don’t speak!”
“How about this?” someone says. “You don’t speak, rook.”
“Hey! I’ve been on this job for eighteen months!”
“Act like it then.”
“Hell with you!”
“Yeah, that’s right. Let’s get pissed off and feel proud and good while the poor fuck dies.”
I swallow the tup tup tup ensuing argument and realize that I am the poor fuck of fatal reference. It hits me like a car crash. I have not been prepared accordingly. I am like a medieval bride on the baptismal eve she sees her very first cock: I am shocked. I have seen it at a distance so far off that the word, a breathless, ubiquitous, dark-eyed foreigner, has become less personal than business itself. I haven’t pondered the word in ages, not since Cowboys and Indians with BB guns on the rooftops of Scott Lane Elementary School. In the last half month, the insouciant web of the Silicon Valley mocking its very existence: “We killed ’em, boys, knocked ’em tup tup tup.” Or, “That deal was tup tup tup in the water before it ever begun.” And, “Better alive than tup tup tup.”
It has been there all along, hovering behind the cars on the horizon, as pink and living as the sky, the tender abscess of the sun.
Maybe, I think,it is the sun. An old wound. The moon’s eye. It is all that filth up there gathering for the big boom.
Apocalyptic energy blurs my eyes and someone yells out, “We’re losing him!”
But I will not go. I need to figure the sky and the middle-aged man and my evaporating life out for good.
I will not go.
I levitate onto the cloudy plastic bed and then I am rolling. I can find resilience somewhere within beneath the tup tup tup gurgling blood where I’ve heard words like soul spirit faith hope love take tup tup tup residence. I am lifted high off the ground by the thought of the words into the inside quarter of an ambulance. I am floating on plastic and then dropped into hygienic sanctity, everything inside these walls orderly and clean. Heavenly middle-of-the-cream-puff white. The faces youthful, angelic, the prodding massaging fingers, the coaxing words—”Come on, baby! Don’t give up, baby! I got you now, I got you!“—selling me into believing, even after all the mess, that I’m worth something.
I see the tup tup tup of the intravenous machine sucking into itself, plastic-hearted prune, looking down on me like a streetlight.
I will end with this beeeeep—
“Give it a go!”
“Go!”
—thought: I am unbothered that Chuckie Chinaski and La Dulce and Tali and General Cyrus Rohan and Sharon and my eternally split-up parents and six daddies and torn Uncle Rich and the middle-aged bastard in the Hummer or whomever the fuck beeeeep—
“Again!”
“Ready!”
“Go!”
—won’t visit. I’ve been frilled and prepped like a wedding cake for this day.
Death?
Well.
37
Of Course
OF COURSE, I live.
Three days down in this sticky hospital bed. Yesterday I got my mouth back, can painfully move it around to speak a few words at a time. My tongue feels like a fat slab of raw tri-tip in my mouth. I’ve got oxygen tubes stuck up my nose, but the doctor said the X-ray showed that I’m recovering. My own quiet room may be a long hike up the stairs. Nobody came to visit me in the darkness, no one comes now in the light. Not even my uncle, the crossed-up old soldier who went back to the war for more. Tali called, but her maternal, disappointed tone made me say, “No ... I don’t ... want .. . to see . .. you.” It’s just like the freeway: everyone busy during these happy days of our lives.
I didn’t expect anything different. You have to give to receive with this deal, an aphorism that seems to work fairly well for others. For me, I’ve just never really known what to give or to whom, so I’ve given everything to anyone in my vicinity and haven’t asked for a damned thing back. That way everyone’s covered or at least can shut up. There’s more to it, of course, always more, but I’m fair: got no complaints. No celebratory dances either. I mean, I’m always expecting at the end of these messes to be dead, and the only real problem I foresee whenever it happens is that there will be no means to express my wholehearted gratitude.
The nurse says, “Here’s your discharge papers, hon.”
Between watching her flitter in and out of my room, I reread an old tale, the only book on the floor worth reading. The protag’s un-mentioned problem, a missing body part that he wouldn’t talk about, should make me appreciate the scale of my own problems. I have a few lacerations on my face, across my neck, my chest and abdomen are swollen, a lung is partially collapsed, but I didn’t go into shock, my heart didn’t stop, I have no concussion, no internal bleeding, and I am not, after all, Jake Barnes, with the worst war wound you could walk away with as a man.
The nurse is above me. She detaches tubes and yanks out needles with the speed of a pit crew changing tires at Nascar. Probably helps that she doesn’t give me any eye contact. She’s thoroughly unimpressed by my story, the hairy chest, the little boo-boos.
To get by today, I should abdicate Hemingway’s belief that a man can be destroyed but not defeated. Head and heart wounds aside, he’d pass me up as a potential protagonist for a story. He’d review my bio and general disposition and discover that I lacked the fierce clarity of his fishermen. He’d walk past the tiny Filipina nurses and into the clean well-lit room with a greased and thick-stocked double-barrel shotgun tucked tightly under his arm and pump a .762 German-manufactured shell into my chest. That’s how he’d read me: a shivering foal with a broken leg sprawled on the hay-scattered floor of the barn.
He’d say,You got no follow-through, son.
I’d say,Well. Nothing out there worth following through on, Papa. Nada y pues nada really truly means nothing now.
I remember when my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Silveira, pulled me aside one autumn afternoon, the light tinted in gold like some antiquated Byzantine mosaic, and said, “In my twenty-eight years of teaching, you have the best chance of all my children to be president someday.”
I’d thought, What a nice lady, and told no one what she’d said.
Later that same day I threw in ignorant and desperate as I watched her ignore the foreign-born Vietnamese, Mexican, and Filipino non-hopefuls for the White House.
Congressman Norman Mineta believed in me too, signed my papers for appointment to West Point. He was very sad when I failed the physical and even sent me off to a doctor specializing in spondy-lolisthesis, a degenerative back condition whose symptoms I’d fished up out of a medical dictionary while awaiting the army physician. He never knew, the poor sap. Hours before the examination at the Presidio, I’d read about Mishima faking insanity to avoid flying a kamikaze jet, a paradox I still don’t get to this day (You have to be sane to fly your plane into a ship, Mishima-san) and I thought, He loved his country but loved his life more and I at minimum question both.
“Any conditions?” the army doctor’d asked.
“Spondylolisthesis,” I’d said, without blinking.
This was an hour after I’d whipped out fifteen pull-ups, topping the list of my group of candidates. Two hours after the facilitator had noted my foot speed on the shuttle run.
“I see,” said the doctor, nodding.
He may as well have said, You don’t believe in anything, do you?
Back then I would have said with pride, No, I don’t, but now I’d say, I’d like to. Or borrow a line from Brando: “What’ve ya got?”
My current physician returns for the check out examination. She’s a lovely Hindu named Dr. Patel, whose kindness reassures me that under all the body of knowledge there’s a caring mother, a sister, or at least a daughter in there. Early forties, weary-eyed and wise, traits that seem to co-exist too often. I can tell that she’s seen a lot of life’s shit even before entering this ward of death.
/> She smiles, adjusting her gadgetry. The steel of the stethoscope jolts my heart, and she says, “Sorry there. Just for a little bit, okay?” I can smell curry on her breath, her doctor’s jacket, her hair. “Deep breath, Mr. Tusifale.”
I take all the spices in, wanting to say something nice. I manage through the wincing, “Are you ... doing ... all right ... today?”
“Yes,” she whispers, still investigating my body. Her hands are magical, so soothing that I want to sleep. In the interest of what she’ll say next, though, I stay awake. “Now, you have been in quite a hassle, Mr. Tusifale. I am a bit concerned, you know.”
I nod, look up at her with what I hope is tenderness, a reciprocity in spirit and goodwill. I don’t know why, but I care that she cares.
“Am I ... okay?”
“You are asking me?”
I blink yes.
“Well, let me say that I am encouraged. You are strong. And you have made a good recovery in so short a time.”
“Okay.”
“Now I want you to get some rest at home.”
“Okay.”
She nods, smiles. Something big is coming. “But first I must ask you a question.”
I blink in the affirmative again.
“The paramedics reported that when you went under, you said you wanted to die.”
Hearing this makes me lose my breath.
“Do you want to maybe talk to a volunteer about it?”
“About ... what?”
“Well.” The gentleness behind the wiry gold-framed glasses makes me feel almost shameful. Taking up her time, needing her expertise, involving her in my confusion. “What you were talking about in the ambulance.”
“No.”
“You are sure?”
“Yes.”
She pats my knee. “I will be back, okay?”
I close my eyes to rest. Open them a few seconds later and find again the lifeless machinery and laminated posters of knees and joints found in any office of Western medicine. The stuff that works without thought on the body, the gadgetry and knowledge that helps load the dice in our favor for a while.
What We Are Page 34