I stand to see what life is going to feel like after the crash. I’m a little wobbly, but I don’t need to sit down. It’s as if the accident occurred from the inside out, not the outside in. Amazing the kind of punishment a body can take. That it was built to forgive you of forsaking it. I’d leave right now if it weren’t for the wisdom and kindness of another human being. The doctor putting out for the cause, retying her profession to its original purpose of healing.
I open a drawer and find alcohol swabs and ammonia capsules and soap packets. Needles sealed in see-through plastic and a dozen different kinds of Band-Aid. When I slide it shut, the lock clicks like a fingernail on formica. Above the counter the cabinet is also open and I investigate, not knowing what I’m looking for, but somehow knowing that I’ll leave it where I find it. The moment I have this thought I come upon a framed photograph, face down beneath a stack of carbons.
She’s young and she’s happy, surrounded by Indians at an outdoor market, the eyes, nose and mouth of the swaddled baby in her arms centering the photograph. Bringing it peace. My breath catches again. Second time in five minutes.
I put the photo back and drift, intent on tapping this emotion, all the content that matters. The gold in this office, the real fuel, the story of a life. I imagine the worst reason for the picture being hidden, that core fear of all parents who watch the infant sleep for the first time, and she’s back.
I slink onto the patient’s bench. “I’m sorry.”
“Not at all,” she says. “A doctor’s office is more boring than most think.”
I nod, smile, I wonder.
“Well, thank you for waiting.”
“Yes.”
She sits down on her doctor’s stool and rolls slowly toward me. She leans forward and squints, as if trying to better make out the lashes of my eyes. Then she pulls back, upright now, and says, “Do you mind if I ask you again?”
“No. It’s ... okay.”
“Do you feel,” she says, reaching out for my hand, “as if you’re going to hurt yourself?”
I swallow the dryness in my throat, look down. She’s holding a pink slip of some kind.
“No.”
“If it is not too much before I sign you out, could you repeat to me how you feel, Mr. Tusifale?”
There must be things to do, and reasons for doing them. People to find, and reasons for finding them.
“I want ... to live,” I hear myself say. “Of course.”
38
I Feel Some Kind of Liberty
I FEEL some kind of liberty in my bones and my blood today. If the job from NOW comes through, I’ll take it, heal during my first week of work. This morning I don’t know what I’m going to do except defy the doctor’s orders. Because rest can wait. Somehow keeping the rules would be disrespectful to life.
I take to the road on my own, the Bridgestone Trailblazer beneath me, heading south from Old Almaden Road, breathing the dry air deeply through my nose. My lungs are hot at first, but not burning, and when the mind takes over less than a half mile into the ride, I settle into the pain okay.
The tall brush of the yellow, distant, unadorned hills is pushed by the hot wind into rows of diagonal lines. On the road ahead are farmhouses with wide lots and double entrances separated by a homemade batting cage, an outhouse on the lawn, stacks of hay bales. Storage barns and water towers and horse apples in the driveways. American flags and political stickers on the old school mailboxes at the edge of the street, a hundred yards from the houses. The plots of land stretch out in no particular pattern because these homes were built one at a time.
The oaks and acacias thicken. The shadows from their careless branches widen over the low-shingled farmhouses. I see a white-backdropped banner in red letters over the road up ahead:
NEW ALMADEN
1854
It hasn’t changed much by virtue of space, perhaps—it’s small and not conducive to carpet-bombing construction—but I’m sure its day will come. This valley has gone through worse facelifts than wiping a quaint town off the map.
But still I hope for this time warp of a town, if only to provide a reminder of something, though I’m not sure what. You feel as if you’re in Yoknapatawpha County, 1929, crawling along the yellow lines of a giant storybook. The post office has one door, one room, one window, and when I bike up the little wooden walkway it creaks under the tires like an old Victorian. I pull back onto the main road and pass two little outlets with wooden bridges over a shiny stream. Get suspicious glances from ladies in scarves watering their vegetables on their knees.
The houses out here have names and copper plaques. You pass the Randol Family House and the Robert Scott Home and La Casita de Adobe, and if you go far enough down the Alamitos road there’s a ranch set deep in the woods with a wrought-iron fence at the entrance and the words A Day’s Lovely Glen welded across the bars of the gate. A restaurant called La Foret sits aside a lush creek of pine and jasmine. No set schedule for business. I watch a bobcat big as a groundhog scuttle up a precipice of ivy with raw meat in its mouth, the domesticated cats crouching on the porches in fear and jealousy. A family of turkeys crosses the street with confidence. Every now and then a car comes, often a Ford truck with tires high as the rooflines.
I ride on decidedly, my lungs still warm, feeling almost undamaged.
At the end of town I enter the Deep Gulch, a tunnel through the green that reaches up the hill like a giant brown arm. I start the mile-long climb to the Rotary Furnace atop Silvermine Plateau. Manzanita huddles in the crook of the branchless cedar trunks. Ivy covers the base of every tree, like the first line of defense, green soldiers, green battalions. In the shine of the morning sun, the leaves of the cedar branches look like snowflakes, like glitter, stars in a mild sky. Moss shrouds the skin of the trees, fluorescent as seaweed, easy on the eye, a dress shirt for the body and arms of the wild oaks. I can see the shoe prints of the steeds carrying their overfed rangers, the zigzagging prints of anxious dogs caught between instinct and yielding to the loud biped with the leash. Everywhere the organism of the surrounding wilderness seethes with animal scent. I am doing my damnedest, like the dog, not to think too much. To stay on the trail and let the greater force that I can’t and won’t understand drag me along.
Let me bike up this damned dirt trail in peace, safe from myself and my own corrupt heart, hopeless soul, let me be clean of the connection to anyone else, let the tang of each sour step quicken me all into verb, pure verb. I’m closing in on the silver mine, escorted by the low spreading silver clouds, the path barely visible. If this is as close to heaven as I’ll get, it’s just enough to make the next blind bend in the trail, and then the next. The cool mist of the nearing hilltop collects at the tip of the nose and—You can say it, man, say it!—how good the clean condensation feels on the insides this early morning.
But think on none of it, just follow the long winding road up to the sky, breathe in, breathe out, one more revolution on the crank.
Already at the crest of the hill in a bath of light: the promise of a new day, a better vision, of regeneration. The big sell, the big purchase. My lungs open up to the molecules of untainted oxygen left in this valley. Whatever has survived the onslaught of toxins and emissions and ejaculations must be here at the end of the trail, farthest from the exhaust of man, this sequestered, green, natural, orchestral hall where the birds have made their final flight.
I pedal beneath their position and they don’t scare but sing stronger for the sake of the last song, which may come now without warning (though we know there were warnings: this life is one big declarative warning), this irreversible slalom to the void, to the nethers, wherever we end up, however we end, whyever. Whether we began with an incoherent evolutionary grunt—ugh!—or a seventh-day kiss on the forehead from the deity—smack!—what we are now is too much, too vast in scope, too covetous of knowledge, too close to the mystery of this thing. Reckless spirits yearning in desire to follow knowledge like sinking stars beyon
d the utmost bounds. ...
We’re about to pull the green curtain on the magic of the wizard and discover that we’re all just sniveling dogs.
I’m nearing Hidalgo Cemetery, and I put one hand up to shield my eyes like a horse with blinders. Deny, deny, deny until you die. I ride past death and its weed-laden cement house of bones. The birds are now fully aware of me. I step off the bike in the beauty of a morning’s silence, breathing in, breathing out.
Here under the wooden beams of the silver mines that have rounded from the rain of a hundred and fifty years, discolored, frail, eaten, I remember two lines of a western poem from the last century—“... the great deep mine, emptied, seeping methane, employing no one ...”—and then I see the body hanging listlessly in the shadows, dividing the dark hole into the dank mouth of the San Cristobal mine, wet from the soft rain of yesterday, the head collapsed on the collarbone, the limp palms open against the hip, the hiking shoes dangling heavy from the knees like ripe fruit.
I knew this would be his end. Just as I knew as a boy that my folks were stuck at the starting line, just as I knew that I was lost from the first little squeak out my throat, just as I know that this country is finished. I have no inclination to cut him down or look him in the dead-yellow jaundiced eyes and cry out, Why? Why? How could you do this, Uncle? For once, this place makes perfect sense. I turn from the sight, mount my bicycle, and head blazing down the path, the gravity of the real fake world in which I live too strong to brake against.
39
Nowhere to Go
NOWHERE to go in the dead middle of the day and so I bike slowly out to my former place of employment, a house of unread books, the last spot of bloody infamy with good Cyrus. I think I’m fine. On the ride out to Santa Clara, I battle the inner part of me that doesn’t care if I am or not.
My uncle would have liked Cyrus. He would have understood the loneliness, he would have seen sadness where others hadn’t seen a thing, he would have related to the lifetime restraints of backstory, the pride of leadership, of assuming the mantle of protecting your brothers and sisters from thinking about the grave. Maybe I should have brought them together to keep my uncle alive another day.
The library is huge now, twice as big as the old building. It looks like a cluster of colorful Legos on steroids, all blown up out of proportion. You wouldn’t think that the yellowing leather-bound books inside are collecting dust. It’s like they spent money on a new stadium for the same team. You still lose the game.
Plenty of people here, mostly kids. The rack is packed with all kinds of bikes, so I park next to a tree, leaning it upright, not locking it. I can’t lock it because I don’t have a lock, never thought to buy one.
I walk over to the pay phone, dial Tali’s number.
“Hey, sis.”
She tells me two things—“NOW passed you over” and “Uncle left something for you at the U.S. Air terminal at the airport”—and hangs up.
I drop two more quarters into the pay phone, thinking that efficient people are sometimes not prudent, and dial 911. “Yeah. Silvermine Plateau in New Almaden? There’s a good man who needs burying up there.”
Yes, my uncle had heard my spiel before from superior sources. Heard it from his own head and heart, dual forces far greater than old Me Generation me. This flunky of a project, his last ars poetica. What a setup. The nonbeliever as would-be heir to his misfortunate fortune, his daughter’s flustered replacement.
How could I have convinced him that cowardice at Hamburger Hill was exonerated by a second tour, by his two Bronze Stars for Valor, by a Purple Heart? He’d have said that the deal, nephew, is a life for a life—Old Testament rigeur—and anything shy of that is merely rhetoric. Well, I could’ve said, if you’d had died in battle I would have never gotten the chance to know you as anything but an abstract face that looked halfway like my own, someone connected to my mother’s childhood but hardly connected to me. We would have never had the chance, Uncle, to be friends.
Maybe it required the end of our friendship to keep him alive. That I’d gotten cruel with the truth: “Don’t get down on yourself and your thirty-five-year-old fatal flaw because nobody cares any longer. Kids don’t play Cowboys and Indians anymore. And as far as Cousin Nina goes, this beautiful inclination of yours to examine memory is probably the same stuff that killed her.”
Maybe I should have given flippancy a shot. Ordered him to come inside the Blue Pheasant, drink a beer, drink ten, all night, black out, crawl into the corner of the gutter. If your wife is here, don’t get angry, don’t get sad, say hello instead, buy her a drink and watch her dance off out of your life, don’t let the weight of failure kill you. Why not get as numb and as pulseless as the masses, dear uncle?
No cause, no utility, that’s me. The conundrum of being alive today: In an era where an intelligent being won’t give up his life for anything, how might that same being maintain intelligently that his life has value? Does he have passion? A reason to use pure reason? I don’t want to go anywhere near using 8 percent of my brain. The 7 percent has provided enough confusion as it is.
I enter the library and immediately spot the Cookie Monster in front of the circus of an info desk. It’s not even reason enough to smile, but at least I know what day it is: Dress Down Friday. Been two and a half years since I last saw Robin in her favorite outfit. I drop my head so she can’t see my face, and then I decide against it. I’ve got to ask her a question.
The Southeast Asian patron before her speaks such poor English that his mispronounced gutturals and fricatives sound like he’s chewing ice. She has the look on her face of an enlightened despot, such that his question is obviously stupid, yet she’s blocking his path to the vast antechamber of the library because, the eyes say, her duty first predicates nonjudgmental service to the serfs.
Same story here.
“Upstairs,” she says. “Second door on the right. You cannot take unchecked books into the lavatory.”
He nods appreciatively and walks off. She takes her place behind the desk, surrounded by stacks of rainbow pamphlets in rubber bands, city-sponsored flyers, matchstick pencils sharp as needles. Every answer about the library is, if not in Robin, behind Robin and her sweet-tooth brute from Sesame Street.
“Where’s Cyrus?” I ask.
I can tell she knows it’s me, but she’s gonna make me wait.
“Cyrus,” I say.
“He doesn’t work here anymore.”
Oh, no, I think, panicky.
“He’s the nonfiction shelver at the Franklin Mall branch. Can I help you with any—”
I walk off immediately and climb the wide, carpeted, stately steps to the second floor of the stacks, recovering from the fear I’d just had, wicked split second of speculation: A man like Cyrus only stops working for one reason.
My eyes are watering a bit from the relief that he’s still alive, that he has another day, hour, minute. I pass the workstation overflowing with on-line patrons, their eyes mesmerized by the shine of the screen, faces blue from holding their breaths, and calmly enter my old haunt, the Poetry section. Maybe I’ll find a self-addressed one-line note I’d tucked away in some ancient text to keep the game going: Hello. You’re still here. Good-bye. Then I can incinerate the note in the flame of a 7-Eleven lighter or crumple it into a ball and swallow it and write myself a new note for the next cyclical yet futile rediscovery of self: Hello. You still here? Good-bye already!
This spacious house of learning has plenty of dead, unused books to liberate. I seize the only copy of a flimsy paperback—Beatrice, by Anonymous—and head over to the men’s bathroom, take the book into the handicapped stall, rip out the silver sticker that alerts the lasers at the library door and toss it into the basin of the toilet, kick the handle with my foot, look over my shoulder, and find the janitor with a plunger in one brown hand, a spray bottle of Windex in the other, LA Dodgers cap pulled down low to the nose.
He says, head down, “Necesito limpiar el baño.”
His Pancho Villa mustache is gone now, but the dark brow and serious eyes are the same. It seems like a lifetime ago, someone else’s life, when I busted him good in the nose. Now there isn’t a word to share between us. I broke him off, he broke me off right back, the law broke him off again, and now he’s gonna clean up after me, though this time there’s no mess except a soon-to-be-stolen book on his watch. I walk right by him, don’t say a word, don’t wash my hands, right out the door.
I get a few steps out past the cinderblock books on Congressional voting records and change my mind. I freeze, turn. He exits the bathroom, pushing the utility cart with cleaners and solvents on it, plus brooms, dusters. He puts up the little yellow tent of a warning sign, rolls the mop bucket out of the cart, and starts to mop without looking up or over, though he knows I’m here.
A woman nears, stands less than a yard to my left. Jesus. She’s watching me as I watch him, another honorable citizen in this safe, lifeless Silicon Valley city. Is she gonna get out her camera? I hope she’ll leave. Pray she does. She doesn’t.
“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” she whispers, nodding at my old compadre with the broom.
What does she want me to say? We can’t Pine-Sol our own shit-encrusted toilets, we can’t pick our own crops, we can’t bury our own bodies. In less than two seconds, I’m nearly driven mad by the vagary of her question.
I turn and say, “Everything in this place is a shame, lady.”
I walk over and approach the paisa. He nods and I stop right in front of him. He’s got a wee bit of leftover shine from the rally, permanent shading under his eye, that I’d missed in the dull glow of the stall. I look back at the lady, but she’s already gone.
I say, “¿Me recuerdes?”
What We Are Page 35