Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  Instead I leaned against the headboard and scribbled in my journal: “Chemistry as artificial transcendence. Mistook this for living, for feeling, for progress.”

  Sweat slid through my sideburns as I watched Kari and her mom carry boxes to their cars. Clothes, appliances, photo albums and dishes—carted silently to our apartment building parking lot, mother moving daughter back into her home, past the wallflower fixture, the crumb in the carpet fiber.

  Love blooms, love dies. What else was there to say? Should I have asked if she remembered the time during our Sacramento trip where I drove her to the Cosumnes Preserve to show her Muir’s tropical luxuriance, what all my excitement was about, and how she never got out of the car? How she just sat in the passenger seat—“No,” she said, “you go”—because we’d gotten swarmed by yellow-jackets, and so I left her and cut through the dense undergrowth along the slough? How I rushed, not for fear of getting caught by preserve staff in an off-limits area, but out of consideration of her boredom? Did she remember that? I did. She was doing the right thing leaving me and moving on. She could do better. She, the persistent worrier, self-described homebody, lover of sitcoms, and someone so terrified of hurting people’s feelings she routinely avoided conflict until the backed-up vitriol burst forth volcanically, the person who had raced back to Phoenix weeks into her freshman semester at University of Oregon because she felt isolated. We didn’t align. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder: how was I not moving out?

  At least I’d never passed out in the John. Bookstores, yes. In philosophy class, yes. But never in a bathroom. At least I’d never shot up, never stole anything. Nodding’s never the plan, just where it all sort of leads regardless of intent.

  Intent. I said it aloud. Such a philosophical concept, part animal psychology (ie: if preference implies intent, is it proof of decision-making in animals?), part conceptual hair-splitting moral theory. A quick sniff drew the drug back into my nose. I never intended this. You’d rather have a millionaire’s bed, something plush and downy, full of feathers and flannel that puffs around in a tender hug as you sink in to its soothing folds. Something akin to loving arms. I only wanted something to own, something my own. A house, a pickup, 401-K—big property like my own book by now, birthed of hard work.

  Motel beds are so hard.

  A drop leaked from my nostril and landed on my knee. I should be out in the field, I thought, making notes in natural areas, finishing reading, taking as many photos as my camera will allow. Instead, a talking head announced the weather in New York City. Two hosts covered the newest child protective seats and spoke to some aging Southern cook over a crackling skillet. My body slowly tilted to the side.

  A surprise email arrived in my work email inbox one day. “I learned so much from you,” Kari said, “not only about myself but the world around me. To this day, when I go on road trips, I always make sure to check out the view and note the riparian (sp?) areas as I pass by them.”

  She lives in Phoenix still, with her husband now and two kids.

  I wrote back but labored over the wording. How do you say “I work at a retail bookstore” and “I’m still working on the Valley thing at age thirty,” without sounding like a loser? I mentioned the bookstore and my writing and maybe that was the difference: I no longer cared what people thought. I was no longer scared of making impressions. “I’m on a mission,” I told her. Too bad part of my mission wasn’t apologizing for my mistakes.

  “Studying?” the waitress asked. “Writing an essay?”

  “Studying,” I said, “so I can write an essay,” and described Latta’s 1938 boat trip from Bakersfield to San Francisco Bay. “I’m going to retrace the exact course, campsite-to-campsite, by car and foot—since most of those waterways aren’t there to boat on anymore—and then tell the story of the land itself as well as the people.”

  Her hand on her hip, she leaned over my packet of Xeroxed newspaper clippings and the map I’d drawn of his journey and smiled. “Hmm. So you can ride a boat from there to there?”

  “No, not anymore,” I said. “Those rivers and wetlands are all gone now. It’s like that old Valley is dead, never to return. And that’s what I want to show.”

  The CD-R arrived at my New York apartment in a thin white envelope, the stranger’s careful handwriting along the disk’s edge. Hearing those songs for the first time flooded me with enough memories to fill the Kern River. You can hear my joyous “woo-hoos” during the applause, my voice calling out song requests: “Spokes.” Desperate. Envious. Hungry. Enchanted.

  The show played on a loop that freezing winter. My then-girlfriend Abby liked the music and was excited for me. “I waited nine years for this,” I explained.

  “Turn it down a bit,” she said the night it arrived. “They’re sleeping below us.”

  “Who cares what the neighbors can hear.” I moved the boom box into our office and studied the German postmark. World tours, big tour buses, bands who opened for them—Calexico had come a long way since those days. A long way from Arizona.

  I lean against the frame and stare at the semis a couple more minutes before closing the motel door. Back at the desk, I replay “Windjammer” and finish the proposal: “On Saturday June 18, 1938, San Joaquin Valley historian Frank Latta and three high school kids embarked on an unprecedented, and now largely forgotten, expedition. Starting on the Kern River in Bakersfield, California, the crew maneuvered their fifteen-foot skiff 455 water miles through a maze of flooded sloughs, primitive ditches, and rivers swollen with snowmelt, finally reaching Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay on July 1. It was the first and only recorded float trip from Kern County to the sea.”

  I type another draft but know I can do better. How should I phrase this? “The wild San Joaquin Valley’s agricultural conversion is a human story of lands mapped, lives lost, fortunes squandered, and the cumulative facade of what history calls ‘progress.’ I hope my piece can sit alongside Gerald Haslam’s essays, David Mas Masumoto’s Letters to the Valley, and Gary Soto’s stories, that in capturing this oft-ignored landscape’s character, I can paint a worthy portrait of Mr. Latta, a man whose passions and professional contributions centered fully on this Valley. As a land of superlatives, paradoxes, and surprises, where tarantulas coincided with cranes, marshes met barrens, summer drought followed spring floods, I believe Haslam’s “other California” shines best in a layered, multifaceted narrative.”

  “Multifaceted” is good. But I haven’t yet worked in “honey-bloom.”

  TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

  Why would neighbors want to know each other? Look at us.

  In my second apartment building in Portland, Oregon, there was Dave, the balding, grey-eyed introvert who, when not in his apartment, could be found browsing the sci-fi/fantasy section at the bookstore where I worked. Elliot was the shy forty-something musician in Converse All-Stars who practiced the same chord progression on his acoustic guitar over and over for the first ten months of my residence. There was Tom or Tim or Todd—I never got it straight—who, when you made a joke, simply bulged his eyes instead of smiling, as if forty years of repressed laughter threatened to launch them from their sockets. Louise’s cooking mishaps required frequent visits from the fire department. Then there was Chad.

  Chad wanted you to know that it was he who’d crafted that art in the hall—yes, the cut section of green garden hose set on his welcome mat, previously the Tab soda can, before that the single yellow brick—and that he’d done so with items fished entirely from the trash. “Pretty cool what you can find in there,” he’d say if, like me, you encountered him nearly every night while reading a book after work on the building’s communal front bench. It didn’t matter what you were doing. When he encountered you, he interrupted.

  “A friend of mine just sent me these,” he said one night. I was walking toward my unit, lugging two huge laundry bags. He was standing in the hall, closer to my apartment than his own three doors down, just waiting for me or Tom/Tim/Todd or any one o
f our neighbors to walk up so he could share photos of himself. “I was a dirty fifteen-year-old punk,” he said, lifting a photo from the stack in his hand. “Man, it’s crazy.”

  I didn’t look. I spent my eight-hour workdays in retail satisfying the demands of demanding strangers; at home, I told myself, I needed invisibility. So I said “Huh,” then slipped inside my apartment to separate my shirts and socks.

  I’d left Arizona for Portland, Oregon, four years earlier after landing a job at Powell’s Books. Phoenix bored me. It felt stiflingly familiar, too spread out, and dug up a lot of dark memories from my past. I needed out. It seemed to me at the time that the best place for a bibliophile to work was the world’s largest new and used bookstore, so I staffed the registers at Powell’s Books, maintained the inventory on its towering shelves and hosted weekly author events. And just months earlier I’d moved into this second-floor walkup in Northwest Portland from my previous dump in the city’s Northeast quadrant—partly to be free of the stink of ferret urine that had, thanks to a sweet but undisciplined pet who didn’t always find the litter box, suffused the unit with a farmhouse odor, partly to enjoy a historic, more heavily wooded neighborhood closer to work. Memories of my old life reeked. My new life, I vowed, would radiate fresh air and flowers.

  The air was fresh when I opened the windows, but my new digs suffered the usual drawbacks of dense urban living. Portland State University students ruled the adjacent building. It loomed on the other side of a narrow wooded green strip, and its windows faced mine. Theirs was the kind of building where off-key twenty-something karaoke singers yelled “More vomiting!” when you tried to end their session with fake gagging and coyote howls. Mine was the kind where raccoons climbed tall trees then plunged ten feet to fight over the trail mix you threw them. The kind of complex where the pixelated witch’s laugh of a neighbor’s alarm regularly jarred you awake at 6am, going “eh, eh, eh, eh, eh” for an hour a few times a month, then, after you yell, “Kill your fucking alarm!” for thirty minutes only to realize no one was home, forced you to slide a gently worded note under their door requesting he or she (you never once saw the person) shut it off when not home, thanks. Still, on the inside, this was hands-down the greenest, oldest, most beautiful and comfortable apartment I’d ever had. That you could call this residential collective an apartment “complex” was just a comic bonus. I certainly had one.

  So there, in my new studio with the large picture window and antique wooden floors, I settled into a stimulating routine: work all day, read on the porch at night. I consumed countless books on the bench this way, everything from Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert to Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

  Finding me out front, my face inches from the print, Chad stopped, leaned over and read the title on my book’s spine aloud. “Normal. What’s that about?” I told him it was a short story collection featuring people with problems, though that pretty much described all literary fiction. “Ah,” he said. “I should be in there.”

  The next time he arrived holding a wine bottle filled with urine, which he planned to lean against his door in the hope that someone would steal it. “We used to do this at punk shows in the desert,” he explained, holding the bottle out for inspection. “Some jerk thinks, ‘Oh, cool,’ takes it, then is like, ‘Aah man, that’s piss!’”

  “Huh,” I said. “Clever trap.”

  Since we lived on the same floor, I passed daily through his ever-changing hallway gallery on the way to the exit. He taped a rotating collection of fliers to his door: art exhibits, movie screenings, upcoming poetry slams, coffee shop ads which served, as I interpreted it, as both a to-do list for folks not reading the local weeklies and a public sampling of his personal tastes. The bulletin board approached identity the same way band t-shirts did for high school kids. It said, in no uncertain terms, “This is me, this is what I’m into.” I’d stop at his door heading to and from work and read the new items, not seeking haiku competitions, just glimpses into his character that didn’t involve conversation. He did pick some cool events. But judging from the consistently low-quality Xeroxes and eclectic business cards, he also seemed to display anything he found or was handed on the street.

  The objects he set on his welcome mat seemed equally haphazard: a bird cage, a tattered straw hat, the colored bricks. Items changed weekly. One day you’d walk by and see a yellow brick. The next day you’d find it replaced by a plastic Halloween pumpkin, or a pile of fallen acorns, maple or elm branches thick enough to call logs, a copper gecko tied to a rope threaded under the door so that, like a fishing line, he knew when someone touched it. The thing is, the items didn’t seem to carry any significance. They didn’t possess inherent aesthetic qualities or ring with symbolism. They didn’t relate to current events or to each other in a way that, in gallery speak, could be called “of a piece.” They just sat there on his door mat, inert, each receiving their own loosely measured week in the resident public’s eye. It sounds mean, likely bitter and close-minded, but viewing those items, I saw bricks broadcasting to the world, “I am weird.” A Tab can that screamed, “The person in this unit is unbearably interesting. Talk to him.” Like nametags at a corporate team-building seminar, the logs and hose and hat weren’t meant to be anything other than ice-breakers for their owner; they waited to bridge the silent divide between Chad and his neighbors, at least the neighbors who didn’t put their ears to their doors to first listen for his footsteps before entering the hall. This was social media before social media: an expression of loneliness, neediness, vanity, hunger. At least that’s how I took it. These qualities were easy to recognize since I carried them myself, me, who kept albums that I didn’t like in my collection because visiting friends would think they were cool, me, who displayed books on my shelf that I’d never read because they were part of the canon, advertising, “The person in this apartment is unbearably literary and rock and roll.” But for myself I had more patience. Something about Chad triggered me that I couldn’t initially figure out.

  I didn’t study visual art in college. I didn’t read about art movements, periods or styles as an adult. Having ignored Portland’s local gallery scene, the only art I came in contact with were the paintings in windows that I walked past while shuffling around town, yet I wondered if contemporary art could be this arbitrary. If I were a critic, my review of Chad’s exhibit would’ve read: “Accidental, capricious, deliberately indiscriminate.” The one art I knew intimately was literature. Honest essays and fiction were only accidental in that first drafts and opening paragraphs rarely foretold the shape of the finished piece. The creative process led the artist along a surprise course in unforeseen directions, a process akin to an early morning drive down an unfamiliar road that starts out dark and gradually grows lighter. But this welcome mat mélange was as accidental as tripping on a curb. It was a parent saying “Oops” as baby filled its diaper in the Walmart checkout line, then Chad adding, “Not oops: art.”

  In truth, his art wasn’t my problem. My problem was that he irritated me for some reason, so I resented everything that sprung from him. Logs became lectures about pee at punk shows. Bricks continued conversations I’d tried ending on the porch. That’s why I never asked his name. I figured, how friendly could a person get with someone who refused introductions? I knew the feral cat rule: if you don’t want to hear constant meowing, don’t feed feral cats. And isn’t it Dracula who never leaves your home once invited in?

  When I moved to Portland, the idea of living in a dense, walkable urban area sounded invigorating and socially progressive compared to the sprawling commuter conditions I grew up in, but the practical demands of density took some adjustment.

  I was an only child. My childhood home consisted of my mom, dad, me and some hamsters. At one point we had a rabbit, but he lived in the backyard. My mom’s New York family was talkative and loud, but our house was one that offered privacy and space when you needed it. I have four half-brothers, all of whom I love, but we didn’t gro
w up in the same house. They were older than me. Without siblings to share with, I got my own room. If I wanted company, I invited friends over. When I wanted to be alone, I simply closed my door. Growing up this way, I got used to dictating the terms of my personal space and social interactions, and in the process, I grew overly accustomed to enjoying my hobbies with an intense, singular focus.

  I used to draw. When I wanted to draw, I drew. When I wanted to read, I read. When I read as an adult, I remained the same way. I liked finishing an article in one sitting. I know that’s a privilege, but it’s what I was used to, because constant back and forth and interruptions frustrated me. There was something pathological about what was partly neurological. Maybe Chad wouldn’t have bothered me if I had grown up with siblings in a big, noisy household. Granted, I could have set firmer boundaries with him, but that felt rude, and I was so used to being able to simply read a book or listen to music by closing a door, that I wanted him to read my closed-off body language without exchanging a word. I wanted him to go away by doing nothing at all. And after work, I often wanted to be alone.

  While staffing one of my bookstore’s customer information desks, a middle-age woman set two huge architecture books on the counter in front of me and asked, “Which one of these would my sister like more?”

  “Well,” I said, “what does your sister like?”

  Clearly amazed by my failure to grasp the obvious, the woman puckered her lips, arched one brow and said, “She likes books.”

  I said, “You definitely came to the right place,” and pointed to the book on the left. “That one. She’ll like that much better.” She agreed. It didn’t matter that I’d only glanced at the covers.

  As thrilling as it was for a bibliophile like myself to work with books and see daily proof that not all Americans had abandoned reading, customer demands wore me out.