Someone who looked like my neighbor Charlie came riding from the pier on a bicycle. A fishing pole balanced from under his arm and rested on the basket attached to his handlebars.
I waved and his middle finger rose, right on schedule.
Amad went back in the store.
Wooster’s, beside the main beach lot and across from the clock tower, was teeming with hollering swimsuited kids. Sodas in hand, they ran off in a dispersive sprawl into burning sand. In the parking lot, surfboards stuck out from back windows of cars and trucks, like knife handles, and the voices of young women flittered, sliding my way on the hot breeze. I walked toward the water, toward the floral-printed bikini tops and torn jean shorts. Their young feet and candy-colored nails, pale between sunburned toes scampered over the hot white powder. The girls jumped, laughing, into the white, hand-blocked light of the blue sky, flip-flops dangling from fingers. I scrunched my eyes, and they all half dissolved in a sun-soaked vision of volleyball, flickering in the screaming radiant light. I had to catch my breath. And a throng of runners, immaculate, numbers pinned to their chests, came padding up the concrete path, and I wondered where on earth they were going. This was southern California, land of perpetual health. The religiously healthy nearly naked everywhere you looked. The roads like clogged arteries, but nobody seemed to give a shit, bouncing along beside each other, breathing smog and briny smoke blowing inland from the ocean. I was feeling hungry and thirsty. And tired, because I’d always been a light sleeper, suffered from scary colorful nightmares as far back as I could remember, and while I no longer prayed before sleep like I did as a child, to keep the nightmares at bay I did sometimes close my eyes and ask that I might dream of Sarah running.
I saw the taco line was way too long. I was sure Amad was steaming.
The grilled fish taco at Wooster’s was not a thing for which I’d moved to California, but had I known the simple joy of it, I would have. Red cabbage slaw and a fresh corn tortilla. Hot peppers, radish, and a lime slice, squeeze your lime slices. Even for breakfast. This is among the most perfect things I’ve encountered on earth. On occasion, back east for business, I’ve even made pilgrimages to Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens in response to reverent whispers, rumors of a Latin authenticity, of, say, a short Dominican couple serving chimichurri in the back of an El Camino. I was always disappointed. I originally went west, I guess, because of the simple fact that it was about as far away from New York as I could get without leaving the States. I was a young man running. I chose Otter because of Main Street, which was really just so charming, but also for its rough beach and the eroding rocks along the shore. This was a humbling place, beaten down by water and wind. I was supposed to be here. A spot of such natural and open mystery that it let me fill up with wonder, and not have to give that wonder a name. New York had become a land of secret corners and dark side streets, all man-made. Everything we make seems to fall down anyway. And of course I went to California for the women. Who was I kidding? For the quivery dream of young women, the lusty blur that fills you just before waking. Pink mouth and breast, the unhinged leg hovering just above dream, still inside the still-asleep bubble. Until morning sun fills a gauzy window; then gone. Girls of my teenage American wet dreams. Barbie-doll drivers of classic cars laughing in the saltwater wind. Of course, I found no such thing. Sarah was nothing like that. She had freckles on her forehead. Really not so unlike some romantic runaway from a midwestern farm filled with dreams of a brand-new birth, placenta snail-trailing as you first cross Sunset Boulevard, fresh off the bus, I left under the oldest American spell of all: I ventured west to begin …
Another buzzing at my waist.
Amad 9:37.
I walked down Main Street, suddenly excited for work. I smelled the sun, and the salty Pacific stink. I would prove, today, this day, that Amad and Teri were wrong; this would be the start of the long-awaited resurrection of Otter Computer Incorporated. Of me. No more idle hands.
Then a buzzing, and a text from Amad.
“I’ve been watching you dawdling for the last five minutes. I can see you from here.”
I watched Amad through the plate glass window. He was speaking with a large bald man in clam diggers, and he was wearing one of his ill-matched sweat suits. Clean white sweatpants rolled up high near his knees, and a bright poppy-red sweatshirt. He checked his watch and smiled, holding up an ergonomic keyboard. When Amad had first walked in the store, this was how many years before, after answering an ad I placed in the L.A. Pennysaver, I said, So, tell me about your work history. He crouched, started rummaging through motherboard stacks, and silently assembled a desktop system. Hardware and software, it ran Solitaire in twenty-five minutes. I knew my way around a computer, well enough, but really my reason for being in the business was happenstance. I was lucky. Then again, I was always good at selling. It was in my blood. My father was a born salesman, always selling me on the idea that I was special. I bought it, for a while anyway. I’d been giving sermons since I was seven because I had a knack for commanding attention, and I liked it. Even still, I can turn it on but rarely do. If I’d been born into a more practical family, I likely would have run for class president, or started a small business at twelve. The entrepreneur’s toolbox is not so different from the preacher’s. I say that with respect. And so I sold computers—processors, hard drives, and memory—and this turned out, at first, to be a lucrative and very special service. Inside the computer waits every future mapping of the world. Amad had tried to explain the inner workings to me many times. It’s easy, he’d say, all very easy. I would stop him cold.
He looked up when he was finished, and said, “My name is Amad. This is how I work.”
Then he said, “Forgive me, I wanted to kill the ugly man that was driving right behind me, but now I feel much better. Praise to all that is.” I remember him nodding and making a sweeping-away gesture.
I once said to him, “I want to be more like you. You’ve got it all figured out.”
He said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The big stuff, I mean.”
“Big stuff doesn’t interest me. What big stuff?”
That first week we opened, a customer referred to him as Gandhi. He said, “You mistake me for someone else. Please, my name is Amad,” and he put out his hand.
I said, “You are an unacknowledged master, a crackerjack Sufi. You help me recognize the world.”
He called me a “foking tommy.”
He said, “I’ll kick you right in your balls if you don’t stop that bullshit. I’m hungry and I’m going to lunch.” Three hours later, I found him across the freeway, getting drunk on Budweiser. He raised a glass as tall as a nightstick and said, “Back home I was a rocket scientist.” Then he belched. “It’s not a joke.” A few years later, he named his dog Little Josie so that I would have a role model. This also wasn’t a joke, and when I look back I see the good sense it made. Little Josie loved every day, no depressions! If I’d paid more attention to the pup it probably wouldn’t have taken me so long to snap out of my stupor.
I knocked on the plate glass window.
I watched the bald man leave as I entered the store. I waved, and Amad nodded back: So, you’re actually here. He walked over to a display table sparsely stacked with boxes for external tape drives, cabling, wireless mice. The boxes were empty, and a pale ray of light painted a band across the table.
“Here I am,” I said. “I told you.”
He turned and walked to the back counter, obviously displeased. “And you’re late. I thought you were going to watch the bikini girls all day.”
A short, squat woman in wraparound sunglasses walked in and quietly waited. Her wide waist was cinched in a pleated denim grip. One size fits all.
“Guess what, I talked to Sarah today.”
He raised a finger to his lips and walked toward the woman.
I saw my reflection in the mirror behind the counter, and the digital numbers, the red reversed c
lock numbers on the shelf behind me.…
“Please make yourself useful.” He was suddenly beside me holding a clipboard. “Josie.”
I shook away and took the checklist.
He said, “Inventory. Please.”
Behind me, the woman said, “My husband says our old computer is fine. I’m not even sure what I’m doing here.” I turned. She wore a baby-blue sun visor, crowned with explosible rust-colored curls, and they fought the visor’s hold like blood boiling over.
“You are here,” Amad said, “because you know that your husband, he is dead wrong.”
I watched her for any signs of customer discomfort. She took off her sunglasses.
“Mr. Amad,” she said, “why do you say that?”
“This is not a joke.” He put one hand flat on the counter. “For your husband to privilege the old computer simply because it has worked in the past, simply because it is dependable, it is to take it lying down. It is to die.”
A bit persistent.
He said, “It is we who change, not the world.”
“My daughter,” she said. “Her cell phone’s more like a pacemaker. I don’t think she’s ever seen a typewriter. I say, learn all we can. Let me run next door and tell her where I am.” She patted his hand like, you just wait right here.
I watched her leave, and said, “That was really something. The hard sell.”
He picked up a fallen cable from beside my foot. “You’re late. You dawdled. And somebody has to make the money here. What can I say?”
“But I’m here. You owe me a breakfast burrito. And a coffee.”
“You mean Teri does.”
“Teri isn’t here.”
“She will be. And if you want to ask her yourself, feel free. Myself, I’d be very afraid.”
I laughed, and said, “Today’s supposed to be our anniversary, and guess who calls.”
“How is she?”
“We’re having dinner tomorrow. Maybe.” I gave him a look like, is this a dumb idea? Please tell me it’s not a dumb idea.
“You are what they call a necrophile. You love what is dead. And my very pregnant wife is fine, thank you for returning the favor and asking about her.”
“Oh, stop. How is she?”
“Too late.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. You are way too late. And she’s fine, giving me acid in my stomach. Do you know how expensive a preschool is?”
“I told you it would be crazy.”
“What did you tell me? You told me nothing. You have nothing to tell me. Do me a favor and put on a chicken suit, and stand out front. We need customers. Unless of course you would like to make an effort here.” He motioned toward the door.
The woman had returned and now she was dragging her daughter along. The girl was fifteen, maybe sixteen, gangling, and popping gum, a perfect picture of bulletproof teenage oblivion.
“This is my daughter, Alison, Mr. Amad. I’d like her to meet a person like yourself. And I’d like to buy her a portable computer for school. Like we talked about.”
“Hello, Alison.” Amad extended his hand.
But the girl just looked at it.
“Take his hand, young lady.”
The girl reluctantly extended one hand, cell phone snug in the free palm.
Amad said, “This is Josie. My boss who is very late.”
I set the clipboard on the counter. “I’ll be right outside.”
All three of them gave me similar looks of disapproval.
Sitting on the bus stop bench out front, I lit another cigarette and watched the tourists walk by lapping ice cream. I thought I saw Sarah drive by in a red Honda. Lately I was seeing her face in lots of places. Because there are several ends to every love, and good God, we mourn its death in many stages. I saw her in supermarket lines, in afternoon game show commercials, and in the face of pretty much every short female runner. Hairs glued in strands across her forehead, glasses forever fogged while she jogged, actually impairing her vision. A pink ribbon emblazoned on her T-shirt: “Race for a Breast Cancer Cure.” She had a vast collection of souvenir shirts. “Let’s Win the Race Against AIDS.” Run for muscular dystrophy awareness, or heart disease, or some children’s hospital. Actually, anything at all having to do with children. Personally, I’d never wanted to have kids. I had made this clear from the very beginning. I also said that if she wanted kids, well then, we should have kids. She sometimes accused me of contradicting myself.
I told her once how I heard a man tell his son—well, I assume he was the boy’s father, because they were walking along with baseball equipment bulging from a duffel bag—this was a sunny day and I watched this man proudly announce to his son, his chest was all puffed up, he said, “Do you know it takes only four minutes for sunlight to reach the earth?” I figured no way this was possible. I had to go home and look it up. It takes eight minutes, it turns out. He was wrong. And I knew this was not the kind of misinformation that would necessarily divert a child’s healthy trajectory, but all I could think of at that moment was when my own imaginary son first asked me why the sky was blue, or where babies came from. These are basic father-son exchanges, and was I really going to tell my child, if we ever had one, that I had no idea? I mean, I did of course, I do, but we all know where those kinds of questions lead at some point—how did we get here, why are we here, and what happens after we die?
I usually told Sarah the timing wasn’t right.
She actually hit me once with a pasta spoon. This was not a wooden pasta spoon. And this just because I told her that kids would never keep us from dying. Can you imagine? I actually said to my wife, No matter what you may have heard, you cannot live through your children. Which was especially unfair, even mean, because our life at home had become so constricting, the place felt smaller every day. I knew that having somebody besides me—a child, say—would have been a completely natural and welcome and well-deserved change in our life. What can I say? The only real family life I knew seemed distorted. What model would I use? I told her once, toward the end, that a baby is no way to save a marriage. I accused her of “polishing brass on the Titanic.” I believe she called me a motherfucker. Who was that guy? And who was I now? I was a man who wanted to raise children with his ex-wife. Ridiculous. I hardly recognize the old miserable me anymore. I mean, there was a time when Sarah and I actually clutched at the soil on a daily basis, and we would not let go. We went mountain climbing. We drove cross-country and made love on desert floors. We bungee jumped over the Colorado River, and muled our backpacks down Grand Canyon paths. We took a hot-air-balloon ride in northern France and ate up the cold air in mouthfuls. We watched the ground fall away looking like a patchwork blanket, sweet earth sleeping beneath us.
I still loved her.
I considered calling Dad again, thought better of it, and watched the woman in the visor and her daughter leave the store.
They brushed right past me, as if we hadn’t just met, a large plastic bag in the daughter’s hands. The mother tapping the bag as they walked toward a gray-haired man sitting in an idling station wagon.
Amad was beside me, showing a receipt. He said, “Not a bad way to start the morning.”
I said, “Today is the day, my friend. I can feel the tide is turning. I feel alive, Amad, I wish I could tell you.” I followed him inside. He slipped the receipt into a black tin behind the counter. He snapped the tin shut.
I looked at him in the mirror, caught his eyes. “I may have to go to New York. See my dad.”
“The walls are still standing, for now anyway.” He patted my back. “But why are you having dinner with Sarah?”
I shook my head. “It’s supposed to be our anniversary today, so it’s funny, you have to admit. To have dinner tomorrow. But it should be fine, no big deal. Am I right?”
“Nothing is supposed to be anything and that is why you are always in a pickle. Nothing is supposed to be anything.”
“One of your famous pep talks.”<
br />
“Happy anniversary.” He blew me a kiss, then opened the door to the storeroom and disappeared inside.
I laughed out, “Is that all you got? We need to vacuum this floor.”
A muffled shout from the storeroom: “Teri is coming soon. And if she sees you standing there and doing nothing she will ruin our day.”
“When do I get to be the boss again?” There was a lot of light filling up the windows. “Tell me something,” I said. “What are we doing wrong here, exactly? And for how long already?”
“What are you talking about?”
“This, like a ghost town in here.”
He came out from behind the counter. He took my hand in his and he put it to his cheek. “My friend. If my wife left me, I would shrivel up and die. So I’m sorry. I really am. And you are right, this place will come back to life if we work together. Remember? When I first met you I said to myself, this man knows how to make money. Used to, anyway.” He walked away. “On the other hand, all of this did not happen overnight.”
I rubbed my hands together.
He knew the story all too well; he was there for most of it. How in the late nineties I’d backed a software developer after reading a magazine article. It had claimed all the clocks would stop come the New Millennium, 2000. My kind of language.
“Three million and change,” I said.
“You see?” He was fully awake and alert now and kept looking over my shoulder. “You were a millionaire. Maybe you still are, I don’t know.”
“Not so much.”
“You should come by for dinner this weekend and we can sit, and we can talk about what we should do. Is that Teri? I think I see her car.”
“Tell her to make that chili.”
“Come with me,” he said.
We went outside. The sun was low and reddening through clouds.
He said, “Look at them, all the tourists by the water. You see that? They always look for otters, and the otters have been gone for too many years already.”
High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel Page 11