by Edie Meidav
—naked!—
—just down Highway Five, a highway for which he felt obscure gratitude, given what it had so copiously given and taken. With its migrant workers and unreconstructed cowboys, red-jawed religious families and blue-collared car salesmen, broad-haunched Italian ranchers and thin-lipped diner waitresses, the highway served as an artery of his future and past. Add music and bodies, better than a nude beach! His sign had come; Dirk was ready to shed Hermes.
Plus a friend from the old co-op days owed him a favor and let him take a skanky truck down Five. He was happy to be wearing his old plaid shirt and same old chicken-grease legs, tanned and oiled, lead-footing it past every speed limit so he could make it down in about four hours of driving. And okay, so the truck broke down a few times along the road but his mood changed: he felt restored to a vision of human goodness.
A cop even forgave him for speeding, letting him off with Do better next time.
I will, man, said Dirk with great solemnity, I am trying.
Many times he almost didn’t arrive. Who needed the concert at Hope Springs?
Because along Five, one Mexican family took him into their camper-trailer, kids’ legs wiggling from sleeping ledges up near the ceiling, frying up for him the best chilaquiles he’d ever had, pimento-spotted, tasty, larded with goodwill and non-gringoness, loving Dirk’s good Spanish and laughing when he used his idioms in trade, his best the like-father-like-son el hijo de la gata ratones mata. Dirk could have stayed on with them, they offered something that huge: a whole fantasy of acceptance, crossbridging and quinceañeras, an educated amnesia, something he’d never found in Chiapas. Easy for him to have stayed with them and followed the garlic harvest in Gilroy, the oranges near Valencia and the wine grapes in Sonoma and Napa, just moving up and down the state picking crops in order to fall dead asleep in their camper-trailer.
But something ticked his skull. A person could call it destiny, not superstition at all, given that Mahler had once said that superstition was the name people used to describe religions they were afraid of.
He could have mislaid his destiny along Five but something about this place Hope Springs just itched. The name sounded right.
Plus, the subtitle—Hope Springs, The Temple of Coming Home—made him feel he’d finally find the place where everything could be embraced, the Truckee chocolate-milk past, the cumin lentil potash, Mahler’s fissures, the masa and the outhouse, the bad trip, the polar-bear outfit and his time in the Single Resident Occupancy in down-town Berkeley where everyone in his cagelike room along the corridor had stories not so different from his own. All those failed café philosophers were still having afternoons of flea-ridden herpetic sex in the embrace of amiable slumming patchouoli-scented college girls after having spent caffeinated mornings filling random notebooks with block-lettered sentences dependent on chiasmic axioms and islands of nouns like WORLD CONSPIRACY and U.S. TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENT. If they didn’t have a willing sex partner and moneyloaner, the SRO residents played chess in the afternoon. Or lined up for the gourmet, local-produce homeless dinner served in the church near the famous coffeehouse.
Dirk was pondering it as he drove toward Buttonwillow, the riddle of identity as the millennium approached: to each individual an orthodox routine as predictable as it was self-invented. You could jog your parcourse or sleep in an SRO, but everyone hungered for a buffet of choice, namely, the Emersonian invention of a religion that made sense to the individual, as Mahler had said.
In such spirit Dirk had come into Hope Springs, the buzzkill of the early nineties bearing hard on his neck. After his first hours there, Dirk had gone to the communal bathroom, and after shaving off his long beard and mustache, his dream of playing Paolo Freire preaching revolution to peasants had drawn its last breath.
The place—was it the negative ions released by the bubbling waters?—made him want to be part of something more egoless. Almost. Because everyone walked around naked, and, bucking the trend, he would be clothed. Everyone came to this place in order to free himself while he came for binding, ready to serve. He found a better place to camp out in the main field. As he set up his tent, building on knowledge he’d gleaned in Chiapas, he noted structural difficulties in the sleeping platform, the warped wood and varieties of lichen growing near the pools, the mulberry tree dripping fruit in liability-luring manner upon the walks.
Soon as he could, he shared his insights with the founders, DorAlba, never to forget the pleasure of their respectful listening.
This is why, years later, in 2008, having formed a new dance liberation praxis, Dirk wrote to DorAlba. Of course they remembered him because, being MENSAites, they remembered everything, their neocortex that refined, and they invited him back, this time as guru-in-residence.
He kept certain quotations up on the wall of their room in Hope Springs, upon which Lana’s eyes cross:
There is the need for the interdisciplinary reading of bodies with students, for breaking away from dichotomies, ruptures that are enviable and deforming.
Newness is not the gift of a tabula rasa, but a resurrection; or miraculous pregnancy. A virgin shall conceive, in old age, as in the case of Sarah, or the Roman Empire. Natural innocence is only an image of the real, the supernatural, the second innocence.
If you’re dancing physics, you’re dancing contact. If you’re dancing chemistry, you’re doing something else. When an apple fell on his head, Newton was inspired to describe the three laws of motion, that carry his name…. In his attempt to be objective, Newton overlooked the question of how it feels to be the apple. When we put our bodymass in motion, we raise above the law of gravity and go toward the swinging, circulating attraction of the centrifugal force. Dancers ride upon and play with these forces.
The phenomenology and aesthetics of human movement have reached theoretical and practical insights about human interaction and embodiment that are closely related to the ones that are found recently in the fields of artificial intelligence (embodied robotics), cognitive science (embodied cognition) and new biology (self-organization and emergence).
The earth is much bigger than you are so you’d better learn to coordinate with it.
FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 2:04 P.M.
Lana heads out with the boys and Hogan so he can show the grounds with what seems a scoutleader’s pride: she almost expects their guide to start demonstrating rope-knots.
“There’s the reptile cemetery,” says Hogan, bald head gleaming as if ready for planting, she thinks nonsensically, afternoon sun addling her. A few years earlier, one of her sons had asked why his thingie needed to live at the top of his legs when, if it grew out of the top of his head, it would be more convenient whenever he needed to pee, and she recalls this conversation as Hogan puts a railroad cap on over that off-putting face of his that resembles the famous cross-eyed actor. The gaze pinioned at some central meniscus, the skin so unmarked and eyebrows frozen at such strange peaks that what he resembles most is some albino creature peeking out from a rock. She tries not to laugh at the weird combo dancing before her, the vision of baldness, thingies, an albino glare and meniscus. Some sensuality lives in the guy. The skinny-rat, boyish narrowness of certain older men, toolbelt and heavy keys marking turf in their hang, as if all expression had been shunted to the periphery, to everything below that tight waist, or just to the shoulders and hands, these parts twisting and quick, and isn’t there great life in Hogan’s close-set eyes, the way they hold tight as if trying to slam her into recognition?
Admittedly, the encounter a few days earlier with her old schoolmate had rattled her cover, enough that she almost has the urge to natter on about Jane Polsby and her old friend Rose to skinny-rat Hogan, but she must haul herself up short. This guy shouldn’t become some newfound confidant, especially when Lana has the bad habit of turning the wrong people into confessors.
“That’s because you lack the boundary of trust,” a half-friend of hers up in Yalina had said—crossing the same boundary in her app
raisal—“it’s something that happens to victims of sexual abuse, which, by the way, I’m guessing is part of your background?” to which Lana had just grunted.
When Hogan had learned Dirk could not join their tour, given all the supplicant work lining up, Lana had not been surprised by how apparent Hogan’s relief had been. She had guessed Hogan might be the kind of man who, like Dirk, flourishes away from the cynical, rivalrous gaze of other men, no surprise there either, given that the majority of her life has been spent around men who yearn for the undivided flower of female attention, men who when young probably had been scolded more than once for not playing well with others.
“There you have your motel and diner,” Hogan is saying, down below. “That next tier above? That’s where you’re staying. Above you have the kibbutz,” he says. “Nothing zionist, just what we call the school for your boys. Experiential learning. Fully accredited,” Hogan continues in a brochure voice. “You didn’t know about that perk, did you?” She did, since to entice her out of Yalina, Dirk kept using mom porn of the organic-bib, glass-bottle variety, telling her many times of the experiential school that was accredited.
Smiling, pleased this fellow Hogan works so hard to please, she lets him continue to throb, climbing behind him on the rutted, lupine-fringed fire trail. Directives fill Hogan: she hadn’t seen it before but he comes off as hypomanic, dedicated to guarding against peril, his portable oasis a bota, the leather Spanish-style canteen slung against his dungarees now offered her. “Got to drink. Dehydration isn’t pretty, people go crazy. Plus we don’t have a lot of yucca here, ma’am.”
Ma’am: she is at the age where a man older than her calls her ma’am. Finding herself less pleased, but still wanting to oblige, she lifts the bota to drink water with the tang of leather, metal, someone else’s mouth.
“Heat so dry in these hills you don’t notice you’re losing water. It’s like some people lose their thirst. Boys, you too. And stay out of the brush near the arroyo. That’s poison oak. See the oil on the triple leaves? Not red this time of year. But that smell? Sumac. We’re going to burn most of this down. Too much fire hazard. Here,” says Hogan, commands shooting all directions, giving Lana a sprig of wild fennel. “Boys can chew this.”
“Yum,” says Sedge, agreeable. “Like Wrigley’s.”
Hogan shoots his puzzled cantilevered glance at Lana. “Must be your poet, right?”
Later she remembers: not long after the poet comment came the lion. At first Lana had thought: how cute, a cat’s face, beautiful eyes dark-rimmed, weirdly not unlike her dead Kip. Tail twitching, gaze fastened. Just before it pounced down through the dried brush straight toward Sedge.
A mountain lion.
Time froze in her veins at the realization and at Hogan’s voice lowered: go backward NOW. While Hogan stood his ground, managing to spirit Sedge above his head, holding him on his shoulders, already throwing stones at the cat and now shouting to Tee and Lana: keep facing him but get away!
Tee’s hand in hers, she staggered backward down the trail only a few paces, stopped by a ravine, watching the cat watching the man throwing rocks, her boy on his shoulders. Hogan heaved miracles, never bending down, but the fear bound her close, her legs so dense she could only grip her boy’s wet hand, the two of them stockstill until the cat quivered its nose in distaste, flicking its tail and slinking off into the canyon.
Afterward, Lana glows with gratitude. The moment so swift but Hogan had saved them, risking himself with an exact measure of unpreening gravity you rarely find in California men. “That cat could have mauled us,” she says, wanting to grab the boys to her chest yet trying to let them keep their big-kid dignity, Sedge and Tee quaking with the fun of having almost been destroyed. This close to death: their hands mark the distance like gospel singers calibrating nodes of ecstasy against heights of menace until the inevitable squabble rises over the question of who had been closer to danger, Sedge (on Hogan’s shoulders) or Tee (because only his mother’s hand and the ground had supported him). “We could have been eaten alive,” she says to halt their dispute.
“True,” says Hogan. “Mountain lions are no joke, ma’am.”
“He would have eaten me first,” says Tee, happily.
“Cat gave you boys your tongues back?” says Hogan. “Ma’am, you okay?” On her arm, his touch is tender, overstepping nothing, though she sees in the black depth of his pupils two shiny little imprisoned Lanas. “What’s that scar?”
Inside her wrist from old self-cutting days: she flicks her hand to flick off the question. “Thorns,” she says, unable to stop her post-lion tremble. One doctor in the asylum had told Lana that either she was Californian and her origins left him incapable of fully understanding her terms, some of which sounded mystical, or else that she was an unthinking force of nature and contained too much energy. At least the latter proposition seems to be the case. Lana still shakes, long after the others have stopped. “It’s like I could use some leeches to suck off some of this adrenaline,” she announces. “I got to sit.”
Beside the path, her boys, celebrants of life, fence with dried madrone branches. Her throat gone dry, she’d still rather not ask this Hogan fellow for more of his bad water. He has gained too much advantage too quickly, though she likes his way of saying ma’am: it reminds her of Kip’s family and their country speech. “Give me a minute,” she begs.
Finally they descend the mountain, adults reticent, Lana’s knees wobbly, kids abuzz with glory.
Aiming for solitude, she tells Hogan she wishes she could find a way to thank him.
“Well,” he says and already she regrets the words, because the face he turns on her is so dead and thick, mouth barely moving, he could be a raptor ready to snap thorax from abdomen: “Anyone would’ve stepped forward.”
“No,” she says, “not anyone,” which for who knows what reason must be exactly the right answer to rip some light through that face.
FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:32 P.M.
Rose finds herself explaining some recent signs along with her idea about people being either symbiotes or mavericks to the odd resort manager she has just met in the highway coffee shop with its every inch of wall space fitted out with western kitsch, all the fringed, signed, worn-saddle, cowboy-with-a-whip, days-of-glory paraphernalia any nostalgist would consider decent findings for an afternoon.
Hogan, he’d said his name was, don’t call me anyone’s hero.
In her booth, she had finished her ice tea and was asking a waitress about the spa up the road when Hogan had entered, setting down a leather canteen and taking off a railroad cap before sliding behind the counter not to attend to customers but to make himself a green-algae power drink labeled on the side of the can with a rainbow-hued globe and the title Elixir. Every flick of his had been economical and when he noted Rose studying him he said: “Each minute of life counts, right?”
He then told the waitress he called Zabelle some anecdote about hikers facing down a mountain lion and had stood lean and straight while measuring powder, eyeballs crossed as he raised the tumbler, a mock toast toward Rose. “To staying young always, right?” His noticing her didn’t lift Rose’s mood. Nor did his touch on her arm, a cold reptile’s before asking mind if I? while not awaiting an answer and slipping across from her in the booth, its seats hued the shade of old tongue. “Try some?”
He ignores her demurral. Must be the manager to be so confident, pouring the skeevy slop into an empty coffee cup and waiting for her to sip, clearly not satisfied until she swallows some of the green whey or whatever it is and lies. “Delicious.”
“You’re here for the protest,” he says, not really a question, leading quickly enough into conversational voodoo that gets her to disclose more than she means to, telling him she is not a therapist, as he first guesses, not a teacher or nurse but a freelance columnist. And only when she thinks it might help her cause does she also admit she is a lawyer. “Part-time though.”
Perhaps the lawyer thing do
es the trick or at least it doesn’t backfire. Whatever he thinks of Rose, he hints that despite her lack of a reservation, he can get her a room: he says get like git, his lips almost immobile until he flashes a smile, dark and fissured, his teeth displaying what she cannot decipher, whether lower-class upbringing, the poverty of a large family, in utero chemicals, schoolyard bullies, prison time or maybe just rebellion against a high-class upbringing. His skull is shaved clean, a tiny tattoo at its base a near-indecipherable infinity loop within a Celtic ring, and in a move of old-style flirtation she asks to study it.
Once she has explained her whole symbiote-versus-maverick philosophy, the smile again flashes her way. He relaxes. “What am I then?”
“I’d call you maverick-one,” she says.
“I like that. Maverick-one. What does it mean?”
“You take charge, sometimes at others’ expense. You like protecting people. But you have enough of a birthright of charisma to let it be okay. Usually. But you find your loneliness hard to take. It forces you to extremes.”
“Way to help out!” he says.
“Sorry. I don’t mean to—”
“Hey, you’re good. Like a cable psychic. Should have a late-night show.” Their time must be up. He glances toward the door.
“People probably tell you you’re a good listener,” she says, a mild flush of abandonment rolling down her fingertips. “I told you a lot about myself. Usually I’m the one asking questions.”
He waits. Spits into a handkerchief from his back pocket, sizes her up. Then hands off a flyer showing slicked heads floating atop a pool. “How about stay at the spa,” he is saying. “Go on up that dirt road. Past the griffin gate you’ll see the office. Just say Hogan says you get a good place in Venusberg. The women’s dorm. Say you’re my friend. They’ll orient you about the baths and all.” He’s suggesting she stay at the very spa where her old friend may be, entailing a direct approach when Rose had wanted to arrive crabwise, unseen by Lana until the last moment.