by Patti Smith
Jesús and Ernest had picked up the pace again, talking simultaneously, sometimes lapsing into Spanish, and I missed out on the moment when the discussion shifted to the opening segment of 2666, The Part About the Critics. Specifically, they were focused on the critics’ dreams. One of an infinite and sinister swimming pool and the other of a body of living water.
—The writer must know his characters so well that he can access the content of their dreams, Ernest was saying.
—Who creates the dreams? asked Jesús.
—Well, who if not the writer?
—But does the writer create their dreams or does he channel the actual dreams of his characters?
—It’s all about transparency, said Ernest. He sees through their skulls when they’re sleeping. As if they were crystal.
The blonde stopped picking at her coleslaw and extracted a pack of cigarettes from her purse. They had a foreign look, a white pack with the words Philip Morris stamped in red. She placed the pack on the table next to a flip-top phone.
—Even more impressive is his unorthodox placement of space breaks, she said, inhaling deeply. The water was alive, he wrote, and then he places a space break. The reader is abandoned in the middle of a long, dark and infinite pool without so much as an inner tube.
We all stared at her mystified. Suddenly she seemed far more advanced than the rest of us. I was no longer hungry. Who would bring up a space break and thus end a conversation?
It was a good time to step out for air. I walked to the end of the pier, picturing Sandy in his baseball cap pulling into a parking spot in his white van, the one with the air of an intellectual hoarder, piled with books, dossiers, amplifier parts and obsolete computers. When he was young he had a sports car and we’d drive through Central Park, stopping at the Papaya King, or keep going all the way to the tip of Manhattan. Somewhere along the line he switched to his white van, and in the nineties, after a concert in Portland, we drove to Ashland to see a modern take of Coriolanus at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Sandy loved Shakespeare, especially Midsummer Night’s Dream. The concept of transforming men into donkeys fascinated him. I told him that Carlo Collodi turned mischievous boys into double-crossed donkeys in Pinocchio. But the Bard did it first, he retorted triumphantly.
For some time, we plotted an opera based on Medea. Not the traditional opera that would require singers with a lifetime of training, but an opera nonetheless. He wanted me to play Medea. I told him I was too old to play her, but Sandy said Medea need only be formidable, and I was more than capable of negotiating the glare of her splintered mirror.
—Shards of love, Patti, he would say. Shards of love.
We talked endlessly of such things late at night searching for a place where he might get a slice of cheesecake. Our Medea. I wondered if we would ever write it. Though I guess in a way we had, in that van, under the stars shifting overhead.
Nothing had changed back at the table, though the subject had somehow switched to dog racing. The blonde had an ex-fiancé who owned no less than three champions in St. Petersburg.
—They have dog races in Russia?
—No, in Florida for Chrissakes.
—We should go. You can take a Greyhound from Burbank to Tampa.
—Yeah, with at least three transfers. But they’re closing it all down, that’s what I hear. It’s bad news for the dogs, packs of highly skilled greyhounds out of work.
—There’s no unemployment for racing dogs.
—They’ll kill them off.
She pressed a hot paper towel against her eyelids to loosen the glue of her exceedingly long lashes.
—You could kill somebody with them lashes.
The blonde suddenly stood up. She was really something after all, a smart cookie with the curves of Jayne Mansfield.
Jesús and the blonde departed. Ernest pocketed the ball of tissue encasing the lashes. It seemed like he had something on his mind. He sat there for a few minutes spinning a dime on its edge, then he just picked up and left. I had the oddest feeling that Ernest wasn’t really a stranger but I couldn’t place him. I remained engrossed in penniless thoughts straight into sundown. Closing time, for the WOW had never been a nocturnal café.
* * *
—
MORNING LIGHT STREAMED across the thin coverlet. For a moment, I thought I was back at the Dream Motel. I was hungry and hurried down the stairs, passed some kids playing ball on the beach and trekked the length of the pier back to the WOW. I had fried eggs and beans, and was on my second cup of coffee deep in a Martin Beck mystery, Murder at the Savoy. Ernest had entered moccasin silent and parked himself across from me.
—The Laughing Policeman is better, he said.
—Yeah, I said, surprised to see him, but I already read it twice.
We sat and talked for a while. I couldn’t help but marvel at our mutual ease winding from one obscure topic to another, from Swedish crime writers to extreme weather.
—What do you make of this? he asked.
A yellowed newspaper clipping from 2006. Hurricane Ernesto Raises the Dead. A photo of a small plot with overturned headstones.
—Was that in Virginia?
—It happened on an island off the Virginia coast. Same name as me.
—The island?
—No. The hurricane.
He carefully refolded the clipping and slipped it into a worn snakeskin wallet when a small black-and-white photograph dropped. I caught a glimpse of a woman in a dark flowered dress with a small boy. I wanted to ask him about it but he suddenly seemed uncomfortable. Instead I told him about the dream I had in Santa Cruz, the wrappers in the wrong colors, the bonfires at twilight and the enveloping sense of a strange chemical calm.
—Some dreams aren’t dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality.
—How should I interpret that? I asked.
—The thing about dreams, Ernest was saying, is that equations are solved in an entirely unique way, laundry stiffens in the wind, and our dead mothers appear with their backs turned.
I just stared at him, wondering who he reminded me of.
—Look, he continued in a low voice, the bonfires haven’t happened yet. You’ll see them later on the beach exactly at twilight.
The sky was overcast, permeated by a strange illogical brightness. I tried to calculate the exact time of twilight. Most likely I would have looked it up on my phone if it wasn’t dead. I removed my boots on the way back and walked barefoot in the frigid water. As a nonswimmer that’s as far as I go. I thought about Sandy. I thought about Sam. I thought about Roberto Bolaño, only fifty years old, dying in a hospital instead of a cave off a rugged coast, or an apartment in Berlin, or his own bed.
Anticipating Ernest’s appointed hour, I stayed close by. Through the arc of the afternoon I sat writing at the small white card table by the hotel window. There was a picture of my daughter between the pages of my notebook. She was smiling yet seemed on the verge of tears. I wrote of signs, strangers, yet nothing of my children though they were ever present. The sun was at its height. I felt myself surrendering, drawn by their abstract quiescence.
I awoke with a start. I couldn’t believe I had fallen asleep again, sitting at a card table, no less. I quickly set up the ironing board, a portable one with a yellow oilcloth cover, unrolled the bottoms of my damp trousers, shook out the sand and ironed them dry, then hurried down the steps and crossed over to the beach. Dusk already, but I figured Ernest would still be there. Although maybe I had slept longer than I thought, for it appeared I had missed the action, no one was around, just a long row of small smoldering fires. I felt momentarily nauseous, as if I’d inhaled the smoke of the dead.
Two security guards suddenly appeared, accusing me of starting illegal bonfires. I found myself babbling, unable to answer their questions. For some reason, I couldn’t remember
what I was doing here, not just the scene of the fires, but here in the first place. I clawed through the fog. Sandy was in the hospital. We were going to the Dream Motel to write a segment for our Medea, the part where she falls into a trance and moves into the future, dressed in a black caftan with strings of massive amber beads carved with the heads of sacred birds.
—It’s an opera, I was telling them, Medea removes her sandals and walks through the smoldering remains of the fires, one after another without a trace of emotion.
I could just live there for a while
They appeared as perplexed as I was. I was making a poor impression but couldn’t assemble anything better. They gave a warning, lecturing on beach protocol, rules and fines. I hurried back to my room, cautioning myself not to look back. It was Ernest who had told me about the bonfires, a gathering at twilight. I knew that. Why didn’t I speak up? I started thinking he had devised some kind of verbal trigger that temporarily closed a portal. The portal to him, that is. A pretty good device, I was thinking, but also quite tricky if used the wrong way. I tried to make out what the wrong way would be, but it was all too far-fetched. You’re dreaming, I told myself, looking out at the long pier silhouetted by moonlight. At the same moment, I had a flash of the sign atop the hill shrouded in black mosquito netting.
Morning. First light, fading moon still visible. The rest of my clothes had dried so I folded them up, then sat by the window and finished Murder at the Savoy. Toward the end the widow of the cop killed in The Laughing Policeman sleeps with Detective Martin Beck in a hotel in Stockholm, something I never saw coming. Across the road gulls were competing over the remains of a sandwich; there were no signs of any bonfires on the beach.
Back at the WOW, I decided to put the whole bonfire thing out of mind and ordered coffee and cinnamon toast. The place was fairly empty and felt comfortably mine. I wished I could just live there for a while, in the WOW itself, in the back room with nothing but a simple cot, a table to write on, an old refrigerator and an overhead fan. Every morning I’d make my coffee in a tin pot, rustle up some beans and eggs and read of the local occurrences in the newsletter. Just negotiating zones. No rules. No change. But then everything eventually changes. It’s the way of the world. Cycles of death and resurrection, but not always in the way we imagine. For instance, we might all resurrect looking way different, wearing outfits we’d never be caught dead in.
Greyhound terminal, Burbank
Looking up from the hole I was perceptually burning, I spotted Ernest talking to Jesús, who seemed extremely agitated. Ernest rested his hand on his friend’s shoulder and Jesús calmed, crossed himself and abruptly left. Ernest sat down and filled me in. Jesús and the blonde were heading to the Greyhound station in downtown Los Angeles, two days and nineteen hours on a bus to Miami, then a rent-a-car to St. Petersburg.
—Jesús seemed out of sorts.
—Muriel has a lot of luggage.
The blonde had a name.
—Did you return her lashes? I asked.
—A gull swooped down and took them, most likely they’re part of a nest.
I avoided his gaze, so as not to catch him in a lie. In my mind’s eye, I could see them quite plainly, without the slightest effort, wrapped in the same blob of tissue atop an old bureau beneath a painting of a lighthouse engulfed in badly executed mist. I noticed the book he’d set on the table, Pascal’s Arithmetical Triangle.
—Are you reading that? I asked.
—You don’t read books like this, you absorb them.
It made perfect sense to me, and I was certain he had a whole line of regressions planned, if only to divert me from the subject of bonfires, but I impulsively threw out my own line, just to shift the angles.
—You know, I was in Blanes some years back.
He looked at me quizzically: obviously he couldn’t sense where I was going with this.
—Blanes?
— Yeah. It’s a sixties-style beach town in Catalonia where Bolaño lived till his death. It’s where he wrote 2666.
Ernest was suddenly very serious. His love of Roberto Bolaño was something one could almost touch.
—It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for him, racing toward the finish line. He mastered the capacity that few can attain, like Faulkner or Proust or Stephen King, the ability to write and think simultaneously. The daily practice, he called it.
—The daily practice, I repeated.
—He laid it out in the opening pages of The Third Reich. Have you read it?
—I stopped reading midway, it made me uneasy.
—Why? he said, leaning in. What did you think was going to happen?
—I don’t know, something bad, something bred of a misunderstanding about to go out of control, like in The Prince and the Pauper.
—You’re talking dread.
—Yes, I suppose.
He glanced at my open notebook.
—Does your writing evoke that thing? That uneasiness?
—No. Except for maybe a comic uneasiness.
—The Third Reich. It’s just the name of a board game. He was obsessed with them. A game is just a game.
—Yeah, I guess. You know, I have seen his games.
Ernest lit up like a pinball machine when everything goes the player’s way.
—You have seen them? Bolaño’s games!
—Yes, when I was in Blanes, I visited his family. The games were on a shelf in a closet. I took a photograph of them, though maybe I shouldn’t have.
—Can I see the picture? he asked.
— Sure, I said. You can have it, but it may take me a while to find it.
He picked up his book, the one with a red and yellow cover heralding the triangle. He said he had somewhere to go, somewhere important. He wrote an address on the back of a napkin. We agreed to meet the following afternoon.
—And don’t forget the picture.
Te Mana Café Voltaire Street. two o’clock. I folded the napkin and motioned for another coffee. Unfortunately, I had impulsively promised to give the picture to him in spite of the fact it was somewhere in Manhattan and I hadn’t the slightest notion where I had put it, what book I may have slipped it into, or what archival box I may have tossed it in, among hundreds of inconsequential shots. Black-and-white Polaroids of streets and architecture and the façades of hotels I thought I would always remember yet now were impossible to identify.
I didn’t tell Ernest, but in truth, I’d had a sick feeling having accidently encountered Bolaño’s games. Not bad sick but time-fracture sick. The closet shelf had contained a world of energy, the concentration once invested in those stacks of games still potent, manifesting as a hyper-objectified sense, observing every move I made.
The afternoon melted into evening. The moon rose, nearly full, affecting my bearings. I sat on the low cement wall watching the distant lights of the WOW go out. As though in answer the stars came out one by one, distant and ever present. It suddenly occurred to me that it wasn’t really necessary that I be at the hospital with Sandy. For the past twenty years we have lived on opposite coasts, keeping channels open, trusting in the power of the mind to transcend three thousand miles. Why should anything be different? I could keep vigil wherever I may be, composing another kind of lullaby, one that would permeate sleep, one that would wake him up.
* * *
—
AS PROMISED, I met up with Ernest on Voltaire Street at a friendly Hawaiian-style joint that served pulled pork and smoothies with little umbrellas. He arrived late, already midsentence in a one-sided conversation and slightly disheveled, a button loosened on his shirt. Ernest ordered two Cuban-style coffees and excitedly laid out what was on his mind, the gist of it being that he was packing up and leaving, high on the trail of a saint who was delivering nutritionally deprived and afflicted children from l
ifestyle diseases.
—Do you have kids? I asked.
—No, he said, but the way I see it all children are our children. My sister has three kids. Two are so enormous they can hardly get around. She spoils them, and stuffs them with fried bread and sugar. The saint is going to save the children.
Questions were criss-crossing with everything I had read of the rise of pediatric cancers, diabetes and high blood pressure, the fast-food world closing in on our young.
—How will he do that? I asked.
—I can’t tell you now.
—How do you know about him?
He stared at me intently, as if hoping I could hear his thoughts and save precious time.
—It came to me in a dream, like all sacred information. He’s in the desert and I think I know where to find him. It’s a cult thing, a good one, and I’m joining. Maybe I can farm or help build shelters or arrange baseball teams for the boys.
—Girls play ball too.
—Yes of course, he said distractedly. Baseball for them all.
—Blessings on the children and thank you for trusting me.
—Maybe I’ll see you there.
—But how would I find you? I asked.
—Keep the wrappers with you, put them under your pillow at night. It will come to you in your sleep. When you find the picture save it for me.
And then he was gone, on a mission anything but expected. There were starfish caught in multicolored nets adorning the walls. The coffee he ordered was sweet with a strong taste of cinnamon. I sat projecting myself back to New York sifting through layers of visual archaeology. To say nothing of the fact that the photograph was quite dark. The games had been neatly stacked, but nothing else was revealed of the closet’s interior: his leather jacket, worn leather shoes, and his notebook for 2666, slim, black with cryptic notations on graph paper. Things I saw and touched.