by Tod Goldberg
Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Salt
Mitzvah
Walls
Palm Springs
Living Room
The Models
Granite City
Will
Other Resort Cities
Rainmaker
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
Critical Acclaim for Simplify:
“Goldberg complicates things, in brilliant and moving ways, in stories that live along the border between the mundane and the surreal...Goldberg’s prose is deceptively smooth, like a vanilla milkshake spiked with grain alcohol, and his ideas are always made more complex and engaging by the offbeat angles his stories take.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A keen voice, profound insight...Each story excites on its own. Fortunate the writer who discovers his obsessions early, for he’ ll have that much more time to transform them in fiction, to provoke the sources of their fearsome power...Simplify is devilishly entertaining.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Goldberg ’s best stories are told in retrospect, as if the narrators need psychic distance to fashion their memories in the most potent form.”
—Washington Post
“Goldberg has thought a lot about the human condition and the way our hearts and minds define us. He is effortlessly brilliant with his pared-down prose and attention to detail. In a society that is disinclined to contemplate our own deaths, Goldberg hits it head-on with no qualms or fluff. His stories will provoke and startle you.”
—Bookslut
For Wendy : Someday girl, I don’t know when,
we’re gonna get to that place...
Hold no man responsible for what he says in his grief.
—The Talmud
The Salt
Beneath the water, beneath time, beneath yesterday, is the salt.
The paper says that another body has washed up on the north shore of the Salton Sea, its age the provenance of anthropologists. “Washed up” is a misnomer, of course, because nothing is flowing out of the Salton Sea during this winter of interminable heat: it’s January 10, and the temperature hovers near one hundred degrees. The Salton Sea is receding back into memory, revealing with each inch another year, another foundation, another hand that pulls from the sand and grasps at the dead air. Maybe the bodies are from the old Indian cemetery first swallowed by the sea in 1971. Perhaps they are from Tom Sanderson’s family plot. Or maybe it is my sweet Katherine, delivered back to me in rusted bone.
I fold the newspaper and set it down on my lap. Through the living room window I see Kim, my wife of seven months, pruning her roses. They are supposed to be dormant by now, she told me yesterday, and that they are alive and flowering is nothing short of a miracle. Much is miraculous to Kim: we met at the cancer treatment center in Palm Springs a little over a year ago, both of us bald and withered, our lives clinging to a chemical cocktail.
“How long did they give you?” she asked.
“Nothing specific,” I said. The truth was that my doctor told me that I had a year, possibly less, but that at my age—I was seventy-two then—the script was likely to be without too many twists: I’d either live or I wouldn’t. And after spending every afternoon for three months hooked to an IV, I wasn’t sure if that was completely accurate. What kind of life was this that predicated itself on waiting?
“I’m already supposed to be dead,” she said. “How do you like that?”
“You should buy a lottery ticket,” I said.
She rummaged in her purse, pulled out a handful of stubs, and handed them to me. “Pick out one you like and if you win, we’ll split it.”
We live together now behind a gate in Indian Wells, and our backyard abuts a golf course that my knees won’t allow me to play on and that my checkbook can’t afford. My yearly pension from the Sheriff’s Department more suited for the guard gate than the country club. But Kim comes from money, or at least her ex-husband did, and so here we are living out the bonus years together. At least Kim’s hair has grown back.
I pick the newspaper back up and try not to read the stories on the front page, the colored bar-graph that details the Salton Sea’s water levels from 1906 until present day, the old photos of speed boat races, the black bag that holds a human form, the telephone poles jutting out of the placid water, the quotes from environmentalists decrying the ecological disaster of California’s fetid inland sea. I try to read page A-3, where the other big local news stories of the day are housed safely out of sight from passing tourists: Broken Water Pipe Closes Ralphs in Palm Springs. Dead Body Found in Joshua Tree Identified as Missing Hiker from Kansas. Free flu shots for Seniors at Eisenhower Medical Center.
“Morris,” Kim says. “Are you feeling all right?”
I see that Kim is standing only a few inches from me, worry etched on her face like sediment. “I’m fine,” I say. “When did you come in?”
“I’ve been standing here talking to you, and you haven’t even looked up from the paper,” she says.
“I didn’t hear you,” I say.
“I know that,” she says. “You were talking to yourself. It would be impossible for you to hear me over the din of your own conversation.” Kim smiles, but I can see that she’s worried. “I’m an old man,” I say.
She leans down then, takes my face in her hands, and runs her thumbs along my eyes. “You’re just a boy,” Kim says, and I realize she’s wiping tears from my face. “Why don’t you ever talk to me about your first wife? It wouldn’t bother me, Morris. It would make me feel closer to you.”
“That was another life,” I say.
“Apparently not,” she says.
“She’s been gone a long time,” I say, “but sometimes it just creeps back on me, and it’s like she’s still alive and in the other room, but I can’t seem to figure out where that room is. And then I look up and my new wife is wiping tears from my face.”
“I’m not your new wife,” Kim says, standing back up. “I’m your last wife.”
“You know what I mean,” I say.
“Of course I do,” Kim says.
The fact of the matter, I think after Kim has walked back outside, is that with each passing day I find my mind has begun to recede like the sea, and each morning I wake up feeling like I’m younger, like time is flowing backward, that eventually I’ll open my eyes and it will be 1962 again and life will feel filled with possibility. What is obvious to me, and what my neurologist confirmed a few weeks ago, but which I haven’t bothered to share with Kim, is that my brain is shedding space; that soon all that will be left is the past, my consciousness doing its best imitation of liquefaction.
I go into the bedroom and change into a pair of khaki pants, a button-down shirt, and a ball cap emblazoned with the logo of our country club. In the closet, I take down the shoe box where I keep my gun and ankle holster, and for a long time I just look at both of them, wondering what the hell I’m thinking about, what the hell I hope to prove after almost forty-five years, what exactly I think I’ ll find out there by the shore of that rotting sea but ghosts and sand.
Dead is still dead.
I find Kim in the front yard. She’s chatting with our next-door neighbors, Sue and Leon. Last week, Leon wandered out of his house in the night and stood on the fifteenth fairway shouting obscenities. By the time I was able to coax him into my golf cart he’d stripped off all his clothes and was masturbating furiously, sadly to no avail. That’s the tragedy of getting old and losing your mind—that switch flips, and everything that’s been sitting limply beside you starts perking up again, but you can’t figure out
exactly how to work it. Today, he’s smiling and happy and has a general idea about his whereabouts, but he seems blissfully unaware of who he is, or who any of us are.
“I can’t thank you enough for the other night,” Sue says when I walk up.
“It’s nothing,” I say.
“He was happy to do it, ” Kim says. “Any time you need help, really, we’re just right here.”
“His medication . . . Well, you know how it is. You have to get it regulated. I wish you’d known him before all of this,” Sue says, waving her hands dismissively, and then, just like that, she’s sobbing. “Oh, it’s silly. We get old, don’t we, Kim? We just get old, and next thing you know, you’re gone.”
Leon used to run some Fortune 500 company that made light fixtures for casinos. They called him The King of Lights, or at least that’s what he told me once in one of his more lucid moments. But today he’s just a dim bulb, and I can’t help but think of how soon I’ll be sitting right there next to him at the loony bin, drooling on myself and letting some orderly wipe my ass.
“I have to run out,” I say to Kim, once Leon and Sue have made their way back to their condo.
“I could clean up and come with you,” she says. “It would just take a moment.”
“Don’t bother,” I say. “I’m just gonna drive on out to the Salton Sea. See what’s going on down there. Talk a little cop shop.”
“Morris,” she says. “If I go inside and look in the closet, will I find your gun there?”
“I’m afraid not,” I say.
“You’re a fool to be running around with that thing. Do you hear me?”
We stand there staring at each other for a solid minute until Kim shakes her head once, turns heel, and walks inside. She doesn’t bother to slam the front door, which makes it worse.
In the spring of 1962, I took a job working for Claxson Oil and moved, along with my young wife Katherine, to the Salton Sea. Claxson had hired me to be the de facto police for the five hundred people they’d shipped into the area in their attempt to find oil beneath the sea, a venture that would prove fruitless and tragic. At the time, though, Claxson was simply concerned about keeping order: they’d already built an army-style barracks and were busy constructing seafront hacienda homes for the executives who’d oversee the dig and, presumably, the boomtown that would come once the oil came spouting out of the ground. My job was to provide a little bit of law, both with the working men (and families) and the Mexicans and Indians who populated the area. There’d already been three stabbing deaths in the past year—two roughnecks and one Mexican—and it didn’t seem to be getting better.
I was only twenty-eight years old then and had spent the previous three years trying to figure out how to get Korea out of my head. I served two years in Korea during the war and another five trying to conjure a better future for myself by reenlisting until it seemed pointless, before finally returning to Granite City, Washington, where I’d grown up. My father was the sheriff there—as I would later be—so he hired me on to be his deputy. It was reasonable work until a young woman named Gretchen Claxson went missing from the small fishing resort on Granite Lake. I found her body, and the man who’d done unspeakable things to it, a few sleepless weeks later. I’d like to say that I was honest and fair with the killer, a man named Milton Stairs who I’d gone to elementary school with, but the truth is that I nearly killed him: I broke both of his arms and beat him so badly that he ended up losing the ability to speak. I was rewarded with a job offer from Gretchen’s grieving oil baron father and a salary well beyond my comprehension.
A year and a half later, Katherine would be dead from ovarian cancer and I’d be back in Granite City.
But today I’m standing on the other side of a stretch of yellow caution tape, though this isn’t a crime scene, watching as a rental security officer stands guard over a patch of dirt while two young women and a man wearing one of those safari vests brush rocks and debris away from a depression in the earth. The Salton Sea laps at the edge of the sand, the stench rising from it as thick as mustard gas. The two women and the man are all wearing masks, but the security guard just keeps a handkerchief to his face while in the other hand he clutches a clipboard. It’s not the body that smells—it’s the sea, rotting with dead fish, sewage runoff, and the aroma of red tide algae.
Forty years ago, this was roughly where Bonnie Livingston had her little bar and café. At night during the week, the working men would sit at the bar drinking the stink out of their skin, but on the weekends the LA people would drive in with their boats and water skis and, eventually, speedboats, and would come into Bonnie’s looking for authenticity. More often than not, they’d leave without a few teeth and, on occasion, without their girlfriends, wives, or daughters. They thought the Salt would be like an inland Riviera. They thought we’d find oil and prosperity, and that a city would rise from the fetid desert floor.
Thirty-eight years ago, Bonnie’s bar slipped into the sea. Thirty-five years ago, Bonnie’s home followed suit. Shortly thereafter Bonnie followed her bar and house, simply walking into the water with a bottle of wine in her hand, drinking big gulps all along the way. They never did find her body, but that was okay: her entire family watched her walk into the sea, bricks tied around her ankles. It wasn’t a suicide, her son wrote to tell me, because she’d been dead for at least three years, but more a celebration of the Salt. All things return to it.
At some point, however, memory becomes insufficient in the face of commerce and space. These bodies that keep pulling themselves from the sea are a hindrance to something larger and more important than an old man’s past: real estate. The Chuyalla Indians intend to put a twenty-six-floor hotel and casino here, and then, in five years, one hundred condos. They intend to fund a project that will eradicate the dead—both the people and the lingering fumes of a sea that was never meant to be—and once again tempt the folly of beachside living in the middle of the desert.
I’ll be dead by then myself. Or at least without the ability to know the difference.
The security guard finally notices me and ambles over, his gait slow and deliberate, as if traversing the twenty feet from the body to the tape were the most difficult task of his life. “Can I help you?” he asks, not bothering to remove the handkerchief from his face. I’d guess that he’s just a shade under sixty himself, too old for real police work, which probably makes this the perfect job for him.
“Just came down to see the excitement,” I say. I open my wallet and show him my retired sheriff’s card. He looks at it once, nods, and then from out of his back pocket he fishes out his own wallet and shows me his retirement card from the Yuma , Arizona PD. His name is Ted Farmer he tells me, and then he explains, as former cops are apt to do, the exact path he took from being a real cop to a rental cop. When he runs out of story, he turns his attention back to the body in the sand.
“Yep,” he says, motioning his head in the direction of the grave. “Lotta fireworks. My opinion? They should just leave the bodies where they are. No point digging them up just to move them somewhere else.” One of the female anthropologists carries a hand and wrist over to a white plastic sheet and sets them down across from another hand and wrist. “That first hand? Still had rings on it. That sorta thing messes with your head. It’s dumb, I know. Lady’s probably been dead fifty, a hundred years, more fertilizer than person. But still.”
About two hundred yards from the shore a small aluminum boat with a screaming outboard motor trolls back and forth. I can just make out the outline of a shirtless man sitting at one end, a little boy at the other, a long fishing pole bent between them. When she was at her sickest, when it was apparent that the only salve for her illness was the belief that tomorrow could only be better, when we’d begun to live in increments, separating the positives into single grains of sand, Katherine was certain that when she was well (never if ) we’d have a houseboat on this inland sea, that our lives would be lived rarely touching land, that each morning we’
d pick up anchor and find another destination, another view of the sun-charred Chocolate Mountains.
When she passed, I gave her that.
I look now at the bones being sluiced from the ground and know, of course, that it’s not Katherine. Oh, but she is here, holding my hand as we walk from Bonnie’s and dip our toes into the water, the air alive with laughter behind us, music wafting through the thick summer air, Chuck Berry singing “Johnny B. Goode” into eternity. Her hair is pulled back from her face and she’s wearing a V-neck white T-shirt, her tanned skin darkening the fabric just slightly, a scent of vanilla lifting from her skin. It’s 1962. It’s 1963. It’s today or it’s yesterday or it’s tomorrow.
“You okay, pal?” Farmer says. I look down and see that he’s got a hand on my chest, steadying me. “Drifting a bit to stern there.”
“Not used to the heat anymore,” I say, though the truth is that I feel fine. Though my perception is dipping sideways, it does not bother me. Seeing the past like a ghost is a welcome part of my new condition, and if it brings with it a few disorienting side effects, I suppose I’m willing to make the trade. Farmer fetches me an unused bucket from aside the dig, turns it over, and directs me to sit. After the horizon has straightened out, I say, “I used to be the law out here, if you can believe that.”
“When was that?”
“About a million years ago,” I say. “Or it could have been fifteen minutes ago.”
Farmer winces noticeably, like he knows what I mean. We watch the anthropologists going about their work in silence. It becomes clear after a while that the two young women are actually students—graduate students, most likely—and that the man in the funny vest is the professor. Every few minutes he gathers their attention and explains something pertaining to what they’ve found. At one point, he goes back to the white plastic sheet and lifts up a leg they’ve pried from the earth and makes sure his students have made note of an abnormality in the femur, a dent of some kind.