by A J Grayson
My eyes began to be opened when I got onto my feet and found one of the first great wonders of the park. Hidden just out of sight in a bend in that very road, past which thousands of cars drive every day on their commutes, is the largest standing stone cross in North America. The Prayer Book Cross, erected in honour of the first English-language Christian services on the West Coast, back on St John the Baptist’s Day in 1579. Now, I’m not one for the Prayer Book (no Episcopalian roots in me), but I can’t imagine a person who wouldn’t stand in awe of this cross. It’s the size of a small office building, absolutely massive, atop a hill that wants to tower over the landscape around it, and maybe once it did, before the park was planted. But the trees that surround it now have become thick and monumental in their own right, so this extraordinary sight – literally a hundred yards from the swerving traffic of 19th Avenue – is almost completely unknown even to locals.
I relished in the sight the first time I saw it. I thought I was dreaming when I found the enormous waterfall (fake, of course) that flows from its base down to the main ground level at the bottom of the hill.
This is a place that cares about beauty, in the middle of busy life.
I’d been back just about every day since, checking out all the varied wonders that Golden Gate Park contains. Two Dutch-style windmills. A polo field. A paddleboat-laden lake with Chinese pagodas and a peaking island at its centre known as Strawberry Hill. A rose garden. A statuary park. A lawn bowling club. Countless fountains. A Japanese tea garden.
Isn’t it strange, that a man with a gun in his face should remember a Japanese tea garden? That with the blood still wet on my skin, I recollect in such vivid clarity the sloping red roofs of the pagodas?
Finally, after all that wandering, I’d found my spot. The Botanical Gardens occupy a plot of land running along the park’s southern edge from 9th to 18th Avenues, a triangle set aside for the most beautiful sights in a venue full of beautiful sights. From the first moment I stepped into it I knew I had found my refuge.
It was another three months of wandering before I settled on the pearl of it all. Three months, just to explore the Gardens! Even with all that, I’m sure there are paths I’ve not covered. Little alcoves and expertly curated scenelets that I’ve yet to see. But once I found the pond I lost the drive to explore. I know there’s more beauty out there, but it took just one look to know this was something different. This was my beauty. And once you’ve found the beauty that touches your heart, you don’t keep looking. You let it take hold of you, and you give yourself to it without qualification.
I’m looking into Joseph’s gun again, now. The blood caked on its shaft isn’t beautiful. Joseph isn’t beautiful. I’m fairly certain I’ll be dead within a few seconds – that’s usually the outcome once situations have gone so far that a rifle is aimed at your eyes. But I know there’s beauty out there. I’ve seen it and tasted it and revelled in it. And it’s strange, but that memory actually brings me an overwhelming peace.
48
Thursday
Joseph doesn’t kill me, in the end. He keeps the rifle levelled on me for what might have been a few minutes or only a few seconds. Memories have the power to shift vast expanses of time into mere instants. But by the time my memory is fading and the vision of the park receding, Joseph is lowering the rifle.
His head is shaking. He’s scolding himself, and I don’t think he can bear to look at me.
‘I’m … I’m sorry,’ he mutters, his face turned away from mine. ‘I didn’t mean that. I shouldn’t have pointed the gun at you.’
I contemplate answering, but there’s little to say.
‘It’s just, well, you know. Nerves,’ he continues. His face darts about the dark trees again. He’s all nervousness. ‘You know, people could be looking for us. You were shouting.’
Now I do want to say something, to assure him of a fact that to my surprise is actually true: I’m not angry. I’m not upset with him for holding me at riflepoint. I should be, by any and all accounts. But it stirred up the most beautiful memory, and I can’t quite force myself to be mad at him, despite the threat his actions so obviously implied.
‘We’re under a lot of stress,’ is all I manage. I don’t know how to say those other things. I’ve never been good at sharing emotion in anything other than a poem.
‘You know I wouldn’t hurt you, Dylan,’ he answers. I’m not too emotional to acknowledge the irony of the comment, coming from a man who’d had both a fist at my face and a gun between my eyes within the past fifteen minutes. But he’d stopped himself both times. I think he’s being honest.
But he still hasn’t answered my question, the one that initiated this moment. I want to know one thing above all else, and it’s the one thing that it’s now abundantly clear we won’t be discussing, at least not here.
There was no woman. There is no ‘her’.
Finally Joseph looks squarely at me.
‘Are you hungry?’ The question is absurd. Of all the situationally inappropriate comments he could make, he goes and … but then I realize that yes, actually. I’m not just hungry.
‘Starving,’ I answer. Perhaps violence requires more than a usual intake of nutrients. It’s not something I’ve ever thought of before, but the fact is I’m completely famished.
‘I don’t suppose you have any food in that pack of yours?’ I ask.
Joseph shakes his head. ‘Left it back on the hill before we went in. Didn’t want to be toting extra weight.’
That ruled it out. Neither of us was willing to even suggest returning to the landscape around the farmhouse.
‘Well we can’t just sit here,’ I say. ‘But we’re in no condition to walk into town.’ He looks at me, puzzled, and I motion towards my clothes and then to his. We’re both caked in blood.
Joseph grins, broad and ironic. ‘No, guess we can’t.’
His amusement troubles me, but he doesn’t give me time to ponder it. He’s already reaching out a hand to lift me onto my feet.
‘Come on. I know a place we can go.’
49
Taped Recording Cassette #057A
Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
The conversation on the cassette is moving faster now than usual, but not too fast for the words to be clear and distinguishable in the recording.
There is an expectation in Dr Pauline Lavrentis’s voice. It is evident that she regards the last few moments of their conversation to have been critical and doesn’t want to lose the momentum.
‘You say you hated this man,’ she says. ‘The one you went there to attack. And I believe you truly did hate him. Is that why you did what you did that night?’
There are sounds of Joseph squirming in his seat. ‘I did what I did because it needed to be done, that’s all. I’ve told you that before.’
‘Those are vague words, Joseph. Be more precise. What was it that needed to be done?’ A bit chiding. He’d needed to be goaded on.
‘You have the trial transcripts, for fuck’s sake! Everybody knows what happened.’
‘That’s right, I have the papers,’ Pauline answers, ‘and I’ve read them several times through. But you’ve never accepted those records, Joseph. Not since you’ve been here. You’ve always insisted they aren’t the real story.’
‘Lies, that’s what they are.’ Joseph’s voice has become angry again. ‘Never known half the story, and they’re always cocksure of everything. That’s the way everyone is. So sure of themselves when they don’t understand a fraction of what’s really going on.’
‘Tell me, then, in your own way, what it was you felt “had to be done” that evening at the farmhouse.’ Pauline’s voice is soothing, but urging. ‘I’m giving you that chance. No buffers, no other people involved. No one claiming to know the story. For right now, I’ll know only what you tell me, nothing else.’
Joseph lingers in reflection for a long while before answering. Thirty-seven seconds.
‘I’d heard more than I could bear. Th
at’s all.’ A hesitation. When he speaks again, there is a pleading agony in his voice. ‘Nobody could bear what I’d listened to. I mean, have you ever heard a man talk to his wife like that?’
‘Like what, Joseph?’
‘Like a damned animal. No, worse than an animal. Worse than a beast. Have you sat outside a house like I sat outside that one, listening to him beat her? Watched her emerge the next morning, blue and red and broken? Have you?’ Joseph is shouting his questions. Spittle can be heard flying off his lips.
‘No, Joseph,’ Pauline answers soothingly. There is authentic sorrow in her voice. ‘I wasn’t there. I haven’t had those experiences.’ She can’t help feeling, as she listens to the recording now, the same gulp of oxygenless emotion that had choked her throat as he spoke.
‘Then you can’t fucking know what I was feeling, not even the littlest bit. None of you can.’ He draws in a deep breath. ‘I’d been listening, watching for a while. When he didn’t think anyone was there, or that anyone knew what he was up to – I knew. I’d made sure I could be a witness to all of it.’
‘You’d found a way to keep an eye on him?’
‘I’d found a place where he never knew I was watching. I could see and I could hear. I was never far away. And I kept waiting for it to stop. Waiting for things to change. But when they didn’t, then I knew that I had to stop him.’ He hesitates. ‘Yes, definitely a him. You were right before.’ Then, matter-of-factly, as if the statement fixed a great many things, ‘I didn’t kill my wife. I’m sorry I said I did.’
‘It’s okay. What you’re acknowledging right now, it makes a lot of things clearer.’
Joseph takes in another deep breath. His next words flow like data being read off a prompter. ‘I did what had to be done. What had to be done. No one else was going to, that much had become clear. I’d let enough time pass that if anyone else was going to step up to the plate and act appropriately, they would have. But there’s a limit to everything. So I got some guns and took the responsibility that others wouldn’t.’
‘Where did you get the guns?’ Pauline asks.
‘It’s not hard to get weapons, not out there. Everyone’s got ’em. I snatched a few from neighbouring houses, I think.’
‘So you definitely had a plan for this. You’d worked it out in advance?’
‘Yes, I guess I must have. If I went round looking for the guns and things. Probably had it worked out in my mind what I was going to do.’
The sound of Pauline’s pencil taking down a note scratches across the recording. She has the note before her now, as she listens. Worked it out in my mind. A plan.
‘And then?’ she finally asks. ‘What came of your plan?’
‘Well,’ Joseph answers, ‘it must have come off just fine.’
‘Meaning?’
There is no pause at all.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
50
Thursday
It takes us nearly forty minutes to arrive at the place Joseph has in mind. He seems familiar with the forest, but we’d run away from the farmhouse in a frantic beeline, and it takes him a little while to reorientate himself and figure out just where we are and which direction we need to go. But once we’re in motion, Joseph guides us expertly through the dark terrain.
It’s hard to describe the blackness of a forest at night to someone who’s never experienced it. It isn’t just dark, the way towns get dark, or the way a hillside is dark in the starlight. Forests at night are like the world beneath a blanket. Only on rare occasion does a moonbeam make it through the trees as far as the ground, which otherwise is too black even for shadows.
Yet Joseph moves swiftly, as if he knows every log, every rise and fall of the forest floor. I struggle to keep up. I chide myself for not having thought to bring a flashlight, and then the scolding makes me laugh. When this day began, I had never thought I’d be in a forest. I’d never thought I’d have had a gun in my hand and …
We arrive at the spot at what I assume must be shortly before midnight. At first I can’t make out just what it is we’ve come to. It seems at first to be only a black blob in the darker blackness around it. Then it looks like a mound. Maybe a hill. But as my eyes adjust and I draw closer, I can see it’s not a hill but a pile – a pile of odds and ends that have clearly been assembled here intentionally. It looks like there’s a bed frame in the mix. Definitely some corrugated metal roofing sheets, laid at angles. Some old, broken chairs. A tyre or two. The rubbish of the forest, always a favoured spot to get rid of household extras without paying removal fees to the state, had been gathered and assembled into this place. For what purpose I had no idea.
‘Come on in,’ Joseph says as we draw closer. The words confuse for just an instant, and then his meaning becomes clear. He lifts back a sheet of plywood – once painted but now mouldy and warped – and reveals a hollow space inside the pile.
This is a shanty. A kind of dwelling. What a child would call a fort, but what it suddenly seems, in this instant, might actually be Joseph’s home.
He’s holding up the plywood sheet, looking impatient. ‘You coming in or not?’
There’s no reason for me not to comply, so I walk up to what passes as the entrance, duck low and shimmy into the interior space. Joseph follows, releasing the plywood with a thud.
It takes him a few seconds to get it going, but in short order Joseph has lit a propane lamp that hangs from a jagged nail, its sharp end pointing ominously outward, protruding from what I think is the remains of a wooden pallet. The kind forklifts use to shift heavy loads. As the lamp comes up to its hissing brightness, I’m able to take in the surroundings. We’re seated (there isn’t really room to stand comfortably, so I’d sat automatically once I’d made my way in) on two layers of blankets that are heavily stained and mouldy, but which provide a decent amount of insulation from the earth below. The shape of the space that surrounds us is close to a dome, perhaps four feet in height by a circumference of six, and the ‘walls’ are a mixture of rubbish-heap oddities. A wire bed frame is the largest single element, and Joseph – I’m assuming it’s Joseph who’s crafted this place – has woven a tattered blue tarpaulin through the wires to give it a semblance of solidity. Another segment of wall is made up of a stack of furniture pieces, which include chair backs and drawers from a bureau. I don’t recognize every feature around me, but the ‘roof’ overhead is clearly a star-shaped criss-crossing of two-by-fours and one-by-fours over which Joseph has flung a large sheet of heavy clear plastic, tying it down with some of the same yellow cords I remember seeing on his pack. It looks like it might almost be waterproof, though I’d hate to be the one to put it to the test.
‘It isn’t much,’ Joseph says, noticing my wandering eyes, ‘but it isn’t bad. Pillow there in the corner if you need to lay down and catch some sleep.’
The pillow looks as old and worn out as everything else in the shanty.
‘Joseph,’ I finally ask, ‘do you … live here?’
It had never occurred to me that this muscular teenager, who spoke with a degree of country simplicity but was clearly capable, and even occasionally bordered at the precipice of profound thoughts, might be homeless.
‘Haven’t for long,’ he answers, ‘but for the moment it’s as good as home.’ He smiles, and there’s a kind of pride on his face. He doesn’t view this creation as anything to be ashamed of. ‘Got a cooler over there and there’s some food in it. A couple of beers too. Pass us some, would you?’
I look around until I find the cooler. Inside there are a handful of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, the kind sold at service stations and generally considered the last resort of the food-starved traveller. I find myself wondering whether these have been stolen, swiped by Joseph on trips into town in order to stock the larder of his strange little dwelling.
But if he’s a shoplifter, he’s clearly a good one. There are also six or seven cans of Coors Light in the cooler, along with a brick of cheese and a two-pound package of
raw hamburger meat. Perhaps in addition to a propane lamp Joseph also has some means to cook, out here in the middle of the forest.
I grab a sandwich for myself and one for Joseph, together with two beers, and close the cooler. A moment later and we’re both wolfing through our makeshift meal in this makeshift hut.
‘We’ll be safe now,’ Joseph says after he’s polished off the last of his sandwich. ‘Nobody knows about this place.’
He doesn’t seem inclined to offer me much more than that. No explanation for these surroundings, no expansion on what ‘being safe’ really means. But it’s clear there is more to Joseph than I know, which really shouldn’t surprise me. I’ve known him only a few hours, and not a single minute has been anything other than exceptional.
Suddenly I am overwhelmingly tired. I must look it, too, because Joseph’s next words are, ‘Yeah, it’s time for rest. You take the pillow. There’s a blanket just there.’
‘What about you?’ I just manage to ask as my eyelids go down with remarkable speed and weight.
‘I’ll lie down over here. I’ll be fine.’
And he seems to smile, and look almost compassionate, as I retreat beneath my eyelids and escape to an almost instantaneous sleep.
51