by Patti Smith
—That guy didn’t pay his check, the waitress scolded.
—Oh, I’ll take care of it, I said.
A button was on the floor by my foot. Just a small gray plastic button with a tiny thread attached, which I pocketed; a lucky penny heads-up from a dream within a dream.
That night I spread the wrappers on the table. No traces of chocolate. No candy smells. Aside from a bit of sand, clean as a whistle. It’s a cult thing, Ernest had said. The absurdity of this investigation suddenly struck me and I laughed out loud. A laugh that hung in the air, as if to turn on me. I tried mapping it out. Okay, I was in the Dream Motel sitting in a chair by the sliding glass doors that led to the beach. I had a dream that propelled me to hitch from Santa Cruz to San Diego where I met Ernest who told me about the bonfires that no one saw save myself. I remember poking through charred wrappers and then folding bits of ash in a piece of gauze.
I leapt up and went through the pockets of my jacket, but the roll of gauze had vanished, though I noticed the tips of my fingers were smudged and blackened. Ernest had said to sleep with the wrappers under my pillow, but didn’t indicate what state. In the bedside table drawer was a matchbook with a phone number written inside. Striking two heads at once I lit the wrapper. It burned slowly, letting off a faint scent of hayfields. I tore a page from my notebook, poured the ash in the center and folded it over and over, like an origami bird.
Slipping the packet under my pillow, I wondered if Ernest and I were friends. After all, he knew nothing of me and I less of him. But it’s like that sometimes, you can know an imperfect stranger like no one else. I noticed the gray button lying in the dust. I guess it fell out of my pocket when I threw off my jacket, still in a heap on the floor. I reached for the button, a small gesture identical to some other that I seemed destined to repeat.
There were hounds baying, and farther away, in Santa Cruz, the gutteral barking of the king of the sea lions reverberated over the wharf as the others slept. There was a low, whistling sound. The baying grew more and more faint. I could almost hear the prelude of Parsifal rising from an unworldly mist. A photograph fell from a wallet, a small boy with a woman in dark crepe. I was certain I had seen that image somewhere before, maybe a scene in a movie. A close-up of eyes the color of chocolate, an undulating carpet of tiny flowers that was no carpet at all, but the flounce of a dress illuminated by a passing car. I slipped my hand under the pillow and touched the packet, to be certain it was really there. Yes, I affirmed sleepily, then closed my eyes, enveloped by a hazy flutter of images: the swan and the spear and the Holy Fool.
* * *
—
BACK ON VOLTAIRE STREET I bumped into Cammy by the organic-food market and helped her deliver several cartons of onion jelly. I noticed her charger plugged into her dashboard. My phone was long dead as I had left my charger at the Dream Motel, dangling in the wall socket, sadly without purpose. Cammy let me use her cell phone so I could check about Sandy. She talked through the entire phone call but I managed to grasp the report. He had not regained consciousness.
She was telling me she had met a woman who knew the uncle of one of the missing kids she had mentioned at the end of our drive. I had almost forgotten. It turned out the boy was returned unharmed with a tag pinned to his shirt saying that he had a heart murmur. Never diagnosed but swiftly confirmed. He cried all night, wanting to go back, refusing to tell them anything. I said nothing but could not help thinking it was very close to the story of the crippled boy who was sent back home after a brief taste of paradise in the tale of the Pied Piper.
—I have to go to Los Angeles tomorrow, she told me. I have a big delivery in Burbank.
—I was thinking of going to Venice Beach, I said impulsively, mind if I come along? I’ll pay for the gas.
—Done deal, she said.
That night I used the hotel phone and called everyone I thought I should call. Not one person was in, or rather, not one person answered. I left messages. My phone is dead. I’m fine. You can call at the hotel. There was something funereal about the whole episode. Four people, four dead phones. I closed the window. It was getting chilly. I picked up the hotel pen and filled a few pages of my notebook waiting for the phone to ring, but it didn’t.
I checked out and had a stale bran muffin and black coffee in the lobby. Cammy pulled up in her Lexus. She was wearing a pink sweater and the back seat was loaded with taped-up cartons. As we drew closer to Los Angeles, she brought me up to speed about the various comings and goings in Cammy world, some of which I mercifully missed out on as my mind was elsewhere.
—Oh goodness, she blurted, did you hear about the disappearances in Macon?
—Macon, Georgia? Are you talking about children?
—Yep, seven kids.
I experienced that kind of feeling I get when looking down from an extremely high place. It was as if tiny ice cells were moving slowly, vibrating in my veins.
—Can you believe that? she said. One of the biggest Amber Alerts ever.
Cammy switched on the radio but there was nothing about it in the news. Both of us fell into a welcomed silence until she pulled into Venice. I gave her forty dollars and she gave me a small mason jar labeled rhubarb and strawberry jam.
—Seven children, I said numbly, undoing my seatbelt.
—Yeah, she said, can you believe that? It’s nuts. Nothing was posted, nothing was demanded. It was like they were just spirited away by the Pied Piper himself.
* * *
—
VENICE BEACH, city of detectives. Where there’s a palm tree, there’s Jack Lord, there’s Horatio Caine. I checked in at a small hotel near Ozone Avenue, not far from the boardwalk. From my window, I could see the young palms and the back entrance of the On the Waterfront Café, a good place for lunch. The coffee arrived in a white mug decorated with an engaging blue starfish floating above their motto—Where the Brew Is as Good as the View. The tables were covered with dark green oilcloth. I had to keep swatting flies away, but that didn’t bother me. Nothing bothered me, not even the things that bothered me.
I noticed across from me a good-looking fellow like a young Russell Crowe sitting across from a girl with a lot of pancake makeup. Probably covering bad skin, but she had an inner thing you could feel across the room, decorated with dark glasses, dark bob, fake leopard coat, a born replica of a movie star. They were immersed in their world and I in theirs, imagining them as detective Mike Hammer and the glamorously detached Velma. While I was writing this all down, the pair left unobserved, their table cleared and new napkins and clean utensils laid, as if they had never been there.
I always liked the beach in Venice as it seems vast, a wide expanse that increases at low tide. I removed my boots, rolled up my pants and walked along the shore. The water was extremely cold but therapeutic, my sleeves soaked from scooping up seawater to splash on my face and neck. I noticed a single wrapper caught up in the waves but didn’t retrieve it.
The trouble with dreaming, a familiar voice trailed, but I was lured away by the sound of peculiar birds, big squawky ones, standing at attention and right on the verge of speaking. Unfortunately, a small part of me was already debating whether birds could actually speak, which broke the connection. I circled back, questioning myself why I had regrettably hesitated when I am well aware that certain winged creatures possess the ability to form words, spin monologues and at times dominate an entire conversation.
I decided on the Waterfront for dinner but went the opposite way and passed a wall covered in murals, Chagall-like scenes from Fiddler on the Roof, floating violinists amidst tongues of flame that produced a disconcerting sense of nostalgia. When I finally circled back and entered the Waterfront, I thought I had made a mistake. The layout looked totally different than in the afternoon. There was a pool table and nothing but fellas of all ages with baseball caps and huge glasses of beer with slices of lemon
. Several looked at me as I entered, an unthreatening alien, then went about the business of drinking and talking. There was a hockey game on a big screen with no sound. The din, the drone, was all male, amiable male, laughing and talking, broken only by the tapping of a ball with a cue stick, the ball dropping into the pocket. I ordered coffee, a fish sandwich and salad, the most expensive plate on the menu. The fish was small and deep-fried, but the lettuce and onions were fresh. The same starfish mug, the same brew. I laid my money on the table and went out. It was raining. I put on my watch cap. Passing the mural, I nodded to the Yiddish fiddler, commiserating an unspoken fear of friends slipping away.
The heat wasn’t working in my room. I laid on the couch, bundled up, half watching the Extreme Homes channel, endless episodes featuring architects outlining how they built into rock and sloping shale or the mechanics of realizing a five-ton revolving copper roof. Dwelling places that resembled huge boulders replicating real surrounding boulders. Houses in Tokyo, Vail and the California desert. I would fall asleep and open my eyes to a repeat of the same Japanese house, or a house that represented the three parts of The Divine Comedy. I wondered what it would feel like to sleep in a room manifesting Dante’s Hell.
In the morning, I watched the gulls swooping by my window. It was closed, so I could not hear them. Silent, silent gulls. There was a light rain and the hair of the high palms swayed in the wind. I put on my cap and jacket and went looking for breakfast. With the Waterfront closed, I settled for a place on Rose Avenue that had its own bakery and a vegetarian menu. I got a bowl of kale and yams, but what I really wanted was steak and eggs. The guy next to me was chattering away to his partner about some country that was importing giant carnivorous snapping turtles to get rid of the corpses floating in a sacred river.
There was a used-book store off Rose. I looked for a copy of The Third Reich but there were no books by Bolaño. I found a secondhand DVD of The Pied Piper, starring Van Johnson. I couldn’t believe my luck. I could hear Kay Starr, the mother of the crippled boy, singing her poignant lament. Where’s my son, my son John? Which got me thinking of the missing children. Kids and candy wrappers. They had to be related, though maybe not in the same proximity. Incredibly, there wasn’t a word about the missing kids in any of the papers. I was having my doubts about the whole thing, though it was hard to believe Cammy would make up such a story.
I walked through an arcade on Pacific, stopping at a door that said Mao’s Kitchen. I stood there wondering if I should enter when the door opened and a woman motioned for me to come in. It was a communal kind of place, with an open kitchen fitted with industrial stoves and pots of steaming dumplings beneath a sign that said The People’s Grub along with faded posters of rice fields on the back wall. I was reminded of a past journey when my friend Ray and I went looking for the cave near the Chinese border where Ho Chi Minh wrote the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence. We walked through endless rice paddies, pale gold, and the sky a clear blue, staggered by what was an ordinary spectacle for most. The woman brought a pot of fresh ginger, lemon and honey.
—You were coughing, she said.
—I’m always coughing, I laughed.
There was a fortune cookie on my saucer. I slipped it in my pocket to save for later. I felt connected to the modest peace offered with the fare, thinking about nothing. Just wisps of things, meaningless things, like remembering my mother once told me that Van Johnson always wore red socks, even in black and white movies. I wondered if he wore them when he played the Piper.
Back in my room I opened the cookie and unwound the fortune. You will step on the soul of many countries. I’ll be careful, I said under my breath, but upon second glance I realized it actually said soil. In the morning, I decided to retrace my steps, go back to the beginning, return to the same city to the same hotel in Japantown steps away from the same Peace Tower. It was time to sit vigilance with Sandy, clawing his way through cellular extremes—not, as was his custom, to explore an imagined system, but to plumb the depths of himself. On the way to the airport it occurred to me that the Pied Piper story was not essentially one of revenge but of love. I got a one-way ticket to San Francisco. For a moment, I thought I saw Ernest passing through security.
ICU
Peace Tower, Japantown
The traffic was light reentering San Francisco. My room at the Miyako Hotel wasn’t ready so I passed through two internal malls and ate at On the Bridge. Everything was just as it had been only weeks before, though I missed Lenny’s reassuring presence. The cook made me flying-fish-roe spaghetti. Anime clips from Dragon Ball were looping on the TV screens. I found myself plowing through the trajectory of manga, flipping backwards through Death Note 7, trying to make sense of the graphics: a black menace hovering over the boy Light sifting through pages of intermittent numerical sequences. My spaghetti was gone. I hardly recalled eating it. The check was dated February 1. Where had January flown? I made a list of things I should have been doing. I’ll do them soon, I told myself, but first thing in the morning, I would go to the hospital where Sandy remained unconscious in the Intensive Care Unit. In spite of that fact, I stopped at a small shop and bought him some sweets made with red bean paste. Sandy loved such things, fan-shaped bits of heaven.
I turned in early. There was nothing on TV. I imagined I was in Kyoto, which wasn’t hard as the hotel bed was close to the floor next to a rice-paper lamp and a tableau of grayscale pebbles studiously arranged in a bamboo sandbox. There was a candy-striped pencil on the nightstand. I’m not so sleepy, I told myself, I should get up and write, but I didn’t. In the end, I wrote the words that are here, even as a whole other set of words slipped away, alphabeting the ether, taunting me in my sleep. You don’t follow plots you negotiate them. Manga guidance, a repetitive mantra melding with my own thoughts.
The pencil seemed far away, well beyond my grasp, and I actually watched myself fall asleep. The clouds were pink and dropped from the sky. I was wearing sandals, kicking through mounds of red leaves surrounding a shrine on a small hill. There was a small cemetery with rows of monkey deities, some adorned with red capes and knitted caps. Massive crows were picking through the drying leaves. It doesn’t mean anything, someone was shouting, and that was all I could remember.
In the morning, I arranged transportation to the hospital in Marin County helped by mutual friends who had taken it upon themselves to tend to Sandy. With no living family, the task was left to this small devoted circle who knew and loved him. I reentered the ICU. Nothing had changed since my last visit with Lenny; the doctor seemed to have little hope of Sandy regaining consciousness. I circled his bed. A hospital chart was tacked to the foot, his middle name was Clarke, my son was born on his birthday, a fact I had somehow forgotten. I stood there scrambling for the right thoughts, ones that could permeate the coma’s thick veil. I had flashes of Arthur Lee in prison, little red books spread out like a pack of cards. I could see Sandy falling in slow motion in a parking lot near an ATM. I could almost hear him thinking. Convalescence. Latin. Fifteenth century. I stayed for as long as I could, doing my best to suppress my intense phobia of tubes, syringes and the artificial silence of hospital settings.
I shuttled back and forth from hotel to hospital. The medicinal smells and rubber-soled entrances of the nurses with clipboards and plastic bags of fluids unnerved me as I sat bedside desperately searching for a way in, some connective channel. On my last day, though visiting hours had ended, no one instructed me to leave so I stayed until nightfall. I found myself projecting constellations of words onto his white sheets, an endless jumble of phrases streaming from the mouths of miraculous totems lining an inaccessible horizon. Medea and monkey gods and kids and candy wrappers. What do you make of it, Sandy? I prodded silently. Machines pulsing. Saline solution dripping. Sandy squeezed my hand but the nurse said it didn’t mean anything.
YOM 2016
Hie Shrine
There was a shipping place directly across from the hotel. I packed up the last of my belongings and sent them to New York, then walked to the other end of town toward Jack Kerouac territory. Passing through Chinatown, I collided unexpectedly with preparations for the lunar new year, the Year of the Monkey. Bits of colored paper fell from the sky, small squares with a monkey face stamped in red. Parade 27. It was certain to be spectacular but I’d be long gone by then. Funny how I left San Francisco on one new year and was leaving again on another. I could feel the gravitational pull of home, which when I’m home too long becomes the gravitational pull of somewhere else.
The bench of the three wise monkeys was empty. I sat for a few minutes composing myself as the festivities took me by surprise. I remembered as a child standing before a similar effigy of the three monkeys in a park with my uncle. Which monkey would you rather be? he asked. The one that sees, speaks or hears no evil? I felt vaguely sick, afraid of making the wrong choice.
I found a side street just off the perimeter. Dumplings to go, two tables covered with yellow oilcloth. No menu. I sat and waited. A round-faced boy in pajamas appeared with a glass of tea and a small basket of steamed dumplings, then disappeared behind a pink-and-green floral curtain. I sat for some time wondering what to do next, finally deciding to follow whatever impulse dominated other impulses. In other words, whatever impulse won. The tea was cold and I was suddenly conscious of being isolated in a strange eatery. This exaggerated sensation escalated until I felt as if I was held within a force field, like an inhabitant in the bottled city of Kandor in an old Superman comic.
I could hear strings of firecrackers going off a few streets away. The Year of the Monkey had begun and I wasn’t at all sure how it would play out. My mother was born in 1920, the Year of the Metal Monkey, so I reasoned her blood might protect me. The boy failed to return so I left some money on the table, slipped through the invisible barrier and walked from Chinatown to Japantown, back to the hotel.