She recognised that this secret alienation she saw in him could be a reflection of her own lack of real involvement in her work. She was rich. Her parents owned a flourishing winery.
After her B.A. in Fine Arts, a sense of aimlessness had overtaken her. This job was her Term of Involvement with Reality, an immersion in the hard and hurting strata of the world. Different Path was a criminal-justice diversionary program, counselling and community services for the drug-riddled, the sick and the desperate. She worked it, pulled her Beemer into the lot at eight sharp, waded into her case files, made her house calls, networked with the D.A.’s office – the whole 9 yards.
But ultimately, she didn’t believe it made any difference. Didn’t believe counselling and community service did a thing for the already-damaged, the already-damned. And her own underlying contempt for her work made her sure of Larken’s. It was a felt thing, a sympathetic vibration between them.
Being indifferent, though, was a far cry from being insane. What was there about him, when she studied him from a distance like this, that always ended by sending that cold thrill of suspicion up her spine? This conviction that the man was not really here, was deeply, utterly somewhere else?
She had to go meet with a counselling group. On impulse, she went over and leaned into Larken’s nook on her way out.
“Hi Carl.”
“Hey, Marjorie. The Press Republican says they’ll run a feature for us.”
“Super! Just put the copy on my desk.”
“It’s done. Take it with you. I’m going for a run soon. If you’re out on the road, don’t run me over.”
A little standing joke. Larken worked a loose schedule, often taking long mid-day runs in the nearby countryside. She’d passed him a number of times, smiling and waving, wondering at what drove the guy – far from young, but every inch of him honed down to sinew and vein and tireless muscle. Heading out, she glanced at the copy of his feature:
For those stricken by chemical addictions, shoplifting and other petty property misdemeanours are more the symptoms of an affliction than the acts of a real criminal. At Different Path, with the generous co-operation of the Superior Court of Sonoma County, we take these afflicted folks out of the criminal justice loop, and into a circle of care, counselling, and rehabilitation.
And so on. The usual. She paused at the exit to the parking lot and glanced back at Larken, balanced on his chair, murmuring into the phone. Those humanitarian homilies that he composed so glibly—they didn’t really fit the man at all. He had all the standard smiles, the affable, earnest expressions. But the whole shape and aura of him . . . he looked about as compassionate as a coyote.
Larken’s phone interview with “Dan G.” was going well. It was amazing what people would just tell you about themselves. Back when he had taught at the Junior College, he’d been delighted by how much personal revelation he could draw from his students with his writing assignments. He was always struck by how faintly these kids seemed to feel their own existence. They had to squint to see their own feelings. They had to strain to remember the things they had seen with their own eyes in the course of a single day. But when driven by an instructor, and the need of a grade, they could scrape some of it together, report what life was like for them.
“So Guy, if I have this straight . . .” Guy Blankenship was “Dan G.’s” real name, which Larken had gotten out of him easily enough, “. . . the meth cost you your wife and kids first, and then your house, and now, because you started spiking it, it’s given you AIDS. And you’re what? Only twenty six?”
“It did a major number on me.” This was spoken solemnly, almost with a kind of satisfaction.
“Well I have to tell you that your story is one of the most moving ones I’ve ever heard, Guy. I want to suggest something to you. I want you to bear with me for a minute here, because I want to suggest an idea to you, and I need to work up to it a little, okay?”
“Sure. I don’t mind.” And you could hear his comfort with the conversation; Guy was well along in the morphine phase of his AIDS-related cancer.
“Okay. When you look out your window, what do you see? I want to get a feel for your neighbourhood.”
“Well. Mim’s Market is right across the street, like a mom and pop. And boy, those kids with their skateboards and earrings, they like live on the sidewalk in front of it I swear.”
“You’re on Prince over towards the Fairgrounds, right?”
“Right”
“And if you head down Prince you hit Crestview. You probably turn on Crestview when you go down to the hospital, right?”
“That’s right.”
“So Guy, did you ever keep going up Crestview, into the hills behind the Fairgrounds?”
“Yeah. Marjorie took us up there to a picnic like just a few days ago.”
“Oh right, she told me that. That’s a great view up there, isn’t it, Guy? Those big crooked oak trees down on the slope below that turnout there? Four centuries old, minimum, those oaks. You remember them, don’t you? Huge big crooked old trees?”
“Big trees, yeah, sure.”
“Well, just imagine this, okay Guy? Imagine a bluejay landing on one of those trees’ branches. Just fluttering down, and landing, pecking up a couple little bugs, peck, peck, and then flying right off again. Say he’s there four seconds. Imagine how brief, how short, his time in that tree was, compared to the whole span of that tree’s life. That bird is just a quick blue blip that scarcely touches the tree at all. And the idea that I want to get across to you, is that’s how short your life on this earth will have been, Guy, when you check out a year or so from now. Your whole stay on this glorious green globe will be like that bird’s landing and flying off again. It’ll hardly have happened at all.”
“. . . What’re you . . . you’re sayin’, like . . .” The man’s morphine patches defintely had him on glide. You could hear him trying to hook in to this idea, startled by suddenly realising that his own existence, and his own death, were the focus of this conversation.
“I’m just telling you I feel for you, man. I wanted to share with you the poignance I feel in your situation. My good thoughts go out to you. I’m going to write up what you gave me. We’ll talk soon, okay?”
“. . . Okay . . .” Guy was more than morphine vague now. You could hear him struggling to bring these imponderables into focus. His own existence. His own death.
Larken gently hung up the phone. He very much craved a run. A couple hours chugging down the country blacktop would bring him back to a nearly empty building, and he could put the last few touches on the corporate newsletter. He slipped into his sleeveless running jersey, its once-black laundered to a light grey. Out the back, he broke into an easy trot across the parking lot.
For a mile or so it was all body shops and strip malls, gas stations and burger chains – lots of cars and mucho monoxide . . . But after that, the street became a county two-lane which ran past rural lots and sprawling fields, some orchards and dairy farms still surviving here and there, but increasingly, grapevines out to the horizons.
He had an easy lope that ate the miles and never tired. He cruised in the tough vehicle of his bone and muscle, lightly oiled with sweat, and thought of his words to Blankenship. Reckless words if the guy should wake up enough to resent them. Reckless if Larken wanted to keep this job.
His problem was this exaltation, this high and reckless humour in his heart. For days now it had filled him, sneaked into him at odd moments as he worked, and set his heart floating. A foretremor of hope. A limbic tingle of something approaching – something approaching at long, long last!
His meditation as he ran was what it always was out here: Behold the visible world! How simply impossibly beautiful it was! The fields, the far-flung quilt of tree-lines over the hills, giant hermit oaks, swollen and crooked with vegetal muscle! Those towering windbreaks of eucalyptus, cascading with silver applause for the wind! Those hillsides of cattle gorgeously mottled black and white like antiq
ue ceramics. Those turkey-vultures hanging on man-sized wing-spans above the roadkill feasts which were spread on the two-lane by the hustling Mercedes, Beemers, and SUVs, above all the pizza-ed possums and skunks decorating the webbed highways . . .
Life! All its parts mortal, but in their aggregate, immortal and unstoppable. Life the star-conqueror. It spread and spread everywhere, slipping itself like a green glove over the bare, steaming bones of the universe.
All living things were dangerous miracles. Each tree brimmed with majesty as it wore the light, and the wind moved through it, but anything that lived could blow up in your face. And if you did win your own immortality, then you must live it in the web of these mortal lives, and you must endure all of their deaths, death after death after death. And if the beauty of it all – fields farms trees skies suns stars – was almost unendurable now, must not immortality itself kill you if you did attain it? Kill you with all that excruciating beauty?
His run had passed the two-hour mark, and he decided to push to three. First, a piss. In recent years, with San Francisco fortunes being pumped into the wine country, new fencelines and country estates had stripped the roadsides of the margins of old-growth trees and weedy coverts wherein a man might duck to pee concealed. Bleeding your lizard now required thought, and retention skills. He chose a crossroad towards a spot he knew.
There it was. A rank of big old eucalypti stood between the margin of the road and the fence of a vineyard. In a little strip of brush behind the trees stood the roofless ruin of a little cinderblock hut.
Several well-trod footpaths crossed the poison oak and foxtail and blackberry vines, threading through the litter of trash in the weeds outside the hut: cast-off shirts and shoes, a torn, stained mattress. He stepped through the concrete doorframe. In the centre of the heavily littered concrete floor was a little grass-choked drain-grate. He stood there, downloading hours of coffee into it, while high over his unroofed head the cascade-shaped eucalypti splashed and glittered in the breeze.
He liked the square solidity of this cinderblock hull, which he guessed had been a tool shed. Its simple shape, tucked in this green nook, made him think of a little country temple in ancient Greece.
It was surprising how much of the litter in here was discarded clothing. Many a fieldworker who had tended the adjacent vineyard had surely found free sleep-space here in the warm months, and free drinking space, to judge by the beer cans and flattened cardboards of six-packs. Clothes, thrift-store stuff, were something the poor seemed to have in abundance. He noticed, as he was zipping up, that there was one little snarl of clothing, isolated slightly from the rest, that possessed the most amazing suggestion of personality.
Here lay a pair of khaki workpants whose legs seemed to leap, and just above the pants’ waist a red-and-black checked flannel shirt, its sleeves wide-flung, which seemed to be the top half of the same leap. To provide the clinching touch, one black tennis shoe lay just below one of the pants leg’s cuffs. The shoe presented its sole to the cuff, but in every other respect it was oriented perfectly to become the leading foot of this clothes-fossil’s leap. Just rotate the tennie one-eighty around its long axis and the effect would be perfect . . .
With a sense of ceremony, of an augmented silence surrounding him, he bent, and inverted the shoe.
The result was remarkably expressive. This was a grand, balletic leap, an outburst of eloquence and power, a leap of jubilation . . . or an explosive escape? A surge of will to be shut of it all, to shed the body with one fierce shake, burst free and clear of the shabby garment of bone and skin.
The strangest surge of inspiration welled up in Larken. He’d noted a roadkilled possum a little way back down he road. Suppose he . . .
Don’t weigh it, spontaneity was everything. With a leap of his own, he bolted from the hut, and ran back down the two-lane, retracing his approach.
Here was the possum, flat as a puddle, and baked crispy by several days of summer sun. It was a Cubist possum, where inner and outer possumparts – front, back, left, right – all shared the same plane. Hair, intestine, a ten-key piano-fragment of flattened vertebrae, a spill of teeth surrounding one raisin eye, a parenthesis of sinewy tail as naked as a rat’s – all sides of the animal could be possessed at a glance without the trouble of walking around it.
Careful not to pause but to move fluidly at the prompting of his imagination, he took out his Buck knife and sawed through one leathery drumstick, obtaining a hind paw, and then he sawed and peeled free the tail’s sharp comma. With his trophies he trotted back to the cinder block hut, feeling surer with each stride, more convinced he had found something real.
Stepping back inside the hut, Larken felt he was stepping into a pool of waiting silence, a tension of expectation. He knelt, and tucked the bone of the leg into the cuff of the hinder pants leg, so the possum’s little clawed foot was providing the thrust for the leap. Then he tucked the root of the tail through the rearmost belt loop of the slacks.
This was a decisive, perfecting touch. The little up-curving tail-spike clarified the clothes-fossil’s leap. Its emotion was both gleeful and savagely furious. This was a demon’s frolicsome, vengeful leap.
And then, as if his enhancements themselves opened his eyes to a further one, he saw something he had not noticed. A little, flattened hat lying not far above the shirt’s collar. He darted his hands out, half unfolded the hat, tilted it by half an inch – perfect!
It was one of those small-brimmed fedoras that bookies in old movies wore, and it was now cocked at just the exact angle to be perched upon the clothes-fossil’s invisible head.
Larken was captivated. For a long moment he could only stand and gaze at what he had made. The original fossil was a ghost, and full of a ghost’s haunting questions. And these marsupial parts Larken had given it were an answer, a new touch of evolution.
And then he felt a stirring somewhere near . . . and realized there was someone else in the little roofless room with him.
Though the knowledge crackled through him like lightning, he did not move by the slightest fraction. This Someone Else felt far nearer than anything visible could feel. This Someone’s presence was like a chord struck ever so lightly, a fugitive coherence that reached his nerves without identifiable route through any of his senses.
Once long before, bellying cautiously up towards some possibly occupied bump in the jungle, Larken had heard (except he could not possibly have really heard) the faint thrumm of a claymore’s tripwire, as the guy off to that side of him tripped it – Harry Pogue, that had been – and Larken had slammed his face in mud with only that precious nano-second of micro-noise for warning, and in consequence, Larken had lived, while Pogue’s head had been brightly sprayed across an acre of green.
Not a sound he had heard, no. He’d known it even then. A Someone who had warned, had thrown him a fine filament of intimation, a slender bridge across the abyss of Annihilation Everlasting.
A Someone who was with him now.
What must Larken do? What was wanted? And because he had framed these panicky questions, instead of acting with instant instinct, and drawing understanding after, because in his heart, in his awe, he had hesitated . . . he could not grasp what must be done, could not capture the deep, veiled prompting. The moment passed, and then Larken knew that what this Someone wanted was solitude in this shrine. It wanted his withdrawal.
He backed out of the hut, slowly, ceremoniously, eyes downcast. He should speak something, some acknowledgement, some valediction. Again, his instincts failed him, no inspiration came, and he completed his withdrawal feeling the silence hanging there sullenly behind him, feeling his tongue-tied failure of grace in this first encounter.
Marjorie gave her cell phone number to some of her clients at Different Path. She was wryly aware of a certain insincerity in this “personal touch”, because she always left the phone in her Beemer, so she surrendered none of her real privacy with the gesture. It rang as she pulled into the parking structure of
the downtown mall. She thought it would be Pat Bonds, her currently significant other, and so Guy Blankenship’s vague, whiny voice disoriented her for a moment. She carried Guy and her conversation with him out of the parking structure and into the mall.
“It was like . . . it was unreal. It suddenly hit me, he was like saying my life, my whole life. It was like this blue bird landing on a branch and pecking twice. My whole life was that short! He just . . . told me that. He just said that to me . . .”
Marjorie, making tracks towards the mall’s central fountain, where she and Pat were to decide on their dinner destination, was saying things like, “Well that’s ridiculous, Guy! You’ve got your whole life still ahead of you!” but meanwhile the image of those massive old oak trees, of the bluejay’s quick flutter and flash among their leaves, struck her imagination indelibly as she strode past windows where Technicolor jellybeans gleamed in barrels, and Technicolor lingerie flaunted on headless white mannequins. And just as vividly, she visualized Guy Blankenship then: his plump red underlip, so slack and unprepared; his narrow, tufted eyebrows–minimal, as if the man was drawn in haste, and economy in materials was a priority.
That this poor, simple guy, his past and his memory of it so abbreviated by childhood abuse and hard drugs’ erasure, and his future so short . . . that this Guy should also be seeing that same bird dance on that green bough, that he should be looking at his existence for the first time in his life like a wise man – it struck Marjorie as a minor miracle that Carl Larken had planted this vision in Guy Blankenship’s mind.
And this made her see Larken again as she had once seen him, loping along in the dusk past orchards where the gloom had begun to gather under the tangled branches. He was a wolf-lean, muscled shape in her headlights who turned at her honk and waved as she passed. His face was a shadow-holed mask, the brambly hair thick on his brow like undercover he lurked in. She had feared him then, and she feared him now because she realized that something in her applauded the little mental cruelty he had done to Guy Blankenship, that soft little twit from whose fingers the gift of life was leaking so swiftly away.
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