I'm on the lunar side of the fence, that much I know for sure. I don't know where or how, but I definitely made that choice. And lonely and awful as that choice can sometimes be, I have no regrets.
And I do two things on my side of the fence, and both of these things are the occupations of characters in two very short stories I'll quickly tell.
The first story was actually a failure when I told it to Dag and Claire a few months ago: "The Young Man Who Desperately Wanted to Be Hit by Lightning."
As the title may indicate, it is the tale of a young man who worked at a desperatly boring job for an unthinking corporation who one day gave up everything—a young fiancee flushed and angry at the altar, his career advancement prospects, and everything else he had ever worked for—all to travel across the prairies in a beat-up old Pontiac in pursuit of storms, despondent that he might go through his entire life without being struck by lightning.
I say the story was a failure, because, well, nothing happened. At the end of the telling, Young Man was still out there somewhere in Nebraska or Kansas, running around holding a shower curtain rod up to the heavens, praying for a miracle.
Dag and Claire went nuts with curiosity, wanting to know where
Young Man ended up, but his fate remains a cliff-hanger; I sleep better at night knowing that Young Man roams the badlands.
The second story, well, it's a bit more complex, and I've never told anyone before. It's about a young man—oh, get real—it's about me.
It's about me and something else I want desperately to have happen to me, more than just about anything.
This is what I want: I want to lie on the razory brain -shaped rocks of Baja. I want to lie on these rocks with no plants around me, traces of brine on my fingers and a chemical sun burning up in the heaven. There will be no sound, perfect silence, just me and oxygen, not a thought in my mind, with pelicans diving into the ocean beside me for glimmering mercury bullets of fish.
Small cuts from the rocks will extract blood that will dry as quickly as it flows, and my brain will turn into a thin white cord stretched skyward up into the ozone layer and humming like a guitar string. And like Dag on the day of his death, I will hear wings, too, except the wings I hear will be from a pelican, flying in from the ocean—a great big dopey, happy-looking pelican that will land at my side and then, with smooth leathery feet, waddle over to my face, without fear and with an elegant flourish—showing the grace of a thousand wine stewards—offer before me the gift of a small silvery fish.
I would sacrifice anything to be given this offering.
EMALLGRATION: Migration toward lower-tech, lowerinformation environments
containing a lessened emphasis on consumerism.
I drove to Calexico this afternoon by way of the Salton Sea, a huge saline lake and the lowest elevation in the U.S.. I drove through the Box Can yon, through El Centre . . . Calipatria . . . Brawley. . . . There is a sense of great pride in the land here in Imperial County—"America's Winter Garden." After the harsh barrenness of the desert, this region's startling fecundity—its numberless fields of sheep and spinach and dalmationskinned cows—feels biologically surreal. here. Even the Laotian
colonnade the highway.
while driving to the bor
of overwhelming fertility,
pened to me—an inci
about. It went like this:
Salton basin from the
Everything secretes food looking date palms that Roughly an hour ago, der within this landscape an unusual incident hapdent I feel I must talk HI had just driven into the north, via the Box Canyon road. I entered the region in a good mood at the lemon groves of a small citrus town called Mecca. I'd just stolen a warm orange the size of a bowling ball from a roadside grove and a farmer rounding a corner on a tractor had caught me; all he did was smile, reach into a bag beside him and throw me another. A farmer's forgiveness felt very absolute. Back in my car I'd closed the windows and was peeling the orange to trap the smell inside, and I was driving and getting sticky juice all over the steering wheel, wiping my hands off on my pants. But driving over
a hill I was suddenly able to see the horizon for the first time that day —over the Salton Sea—and there I saw a sight that made my heart almost hop out of my mouth, a sight that made my feet reflexively hit the brakes.
It was a vision that could only have come from one of Dag's bedtime stories: it was a thermonuclear cloud—as high in the sky as the horizon is far away—angry and thick, with an anvil-shaped head the size of a medieval kingdom and as black as a bedroom at night.
My orange fell to the floor. T pulled the car to the roadside, sere naded as I did so by a rusted honking El Camino full of migrant workers that almost rear ended me. But there was no doubting it: yes, the cloud was on the horizon. It was not imaginary. It was that same cloud I'd been dreaming of steadily since I was five, shameless, exhausted, and gloating.
I panicked; blood rushed to my ears; I waited for the sirens; I turned on the radio. The biopsy had come back positive. Could a critical situation have occurred since the noon news? Surprisingly there was nothing on the airwaves—just more ice rink music and a few trickling Mexican radio stations. Had I gone mad? Why was nobody reacting? Cars casually passed me coming the other way, no hint of urgency in their demeanors. And so I was left with no choice; possessed with lurid curiousity, I drove on.
The cloud was so enormous that it defied perspective. I realized this as I was approaching Brawley, a small town fifteen miles from the border. Every time I thought I'd reached the cloud's ground zero, I would realize that the cloud's locus was still far away. Finally I got so close that its rubber-black stem occupied the whole front of my windshield. Mountains never seemed this big, but then mountains, in spite of their ambitions, can never annex the atmosphere. And to think that Dag told me these clouds were small.
At last, at the Highway 86 junction where I turned sharply right, I was able to see the roots of this mushroom. Its simple source both made instant sense and filled me with profound relief: farmers within a small area were burning off the stubble of their fields. The stratospheric black monster created by the frail orange rope of flame that ran across their fields was insanely out of proportion to the deed—this smoke cloud visible for five hundred miles—visible from outer space.
The event had also become something of a chance tourist attraction.
Traffic had slowed down to a trickle past the burning fields, and scores of vehicles had stopped, including mine. The piece de resistance, aside from the smoke and flames, was what those flames left in their wake— recently charred fields now in lee of the wind.
These fields were carbonized to an absolute matte black of a hue that seemed more stellar in origin than anything on this planet. It was a supergravitational blackness unwilling to begrudge to spectators a single photon; black snow that defied XYZ perspective and that rested in front of the viewer's eye like a cut-out paper trapezoid. This blackness was so large, intense and blemishless that fighting, cranky children stopped squabbling inside their parents' mobile homes to stare. So did traveling salesmen in their beige sedans, stretching their legs and eating hamburgers microwaved back at the 7-Eleven.
Around me were Nissans and F-250's and Daihatsus and school buses. Most occupants leaned against their cars with arms crossed over their chests, silently respectful of the accidental wonder before them— a hot, dry silk black sheet, this marvel of antipurity. It was a restful unifying experience—like watching tornadoes off in the distance. It made us smile at each other.
Then, directly beside me I heard an engine noise. It was a van pulling over—a flashy looking red candy-flake high-tech number with smoked windows—and out of it emerged, much to my surprise, a dozen or so mentally retarded young teenagers, male and female, gregarious and noisy, in high spirits and good moods with an assortment of flailing limbs and happy shouts of "hello!" to me.
Their driver was an exasperated looking man of maybe forty, with a red beard a
nd what appeared to be much experience as a chaperone. He herded his wards with a kind but rigid discipline, as might a mother goose tending her goslings, forcefully but with obvious kindness, grabbing them by the neck, offering them redirection.
The driver took his charges to a wooden fence that bordered the field and separated us and our cars from it. Then, amazingly after only a minute or so, the garrulous teens became silent.
It took me a second to realize what had silenced them. A cocaine white egret, a bird I had never seen in real life before, had flown in from the west, its reptilian instincts alert to the delicious offerings the burned fields would soon be bringing forth—now that so many new and wonderful tropisms had been activated by fire.
The bird was circling the field, and it seemed to me to belong more to the Ganges or the Nile rather than to America. And its jet -white contrast with the carbonized field was so astounding, so extreme, as to elicit gasps audible to me from most all of my neighbors, even those parked quite far down the road.
Then the reactions of my giggly, bouncy teenage neighbors became charmed and unified, as though they were watching a fireworks volley. They were oohing and aahing as the bird and its impossibly long hairy neck simply refused to land, circling and circling, affecting arcs and breathtaking swoops. Their enthusiasm was contagious, and I found myself, much to their great pleasure, oohing and aahing along, too. And then the bird circled in retreat, westward, just down the road from us. We thought its culinary meditations were over, and there were mild boos. Then suddenly, the egret altered its arc. We quickly and excitedly realized that it was going to swoop right over us. We felt chosen. One of the teens squealed alarmingly with delight. This caused me to look over in their direction. At that very moment, time must have accelerated slightly. Suddenly the children were turning to look at me, and I felt something sharp drag across my head, there was a swoop swoop swoop sound. The egret had grazed my head—it claw had ripped my scalp. 1 fell to my knees, but I didn't remove my eyes from the bird's progress.
All of us, in fact, turned our heads in unison and continued to watch our white visitor land in the field, occupying a position of absolute privilege. We watched, entranced, as it began to tug small creatures from the soil, and such was the moment's beauty that I essentially forgot I had been cut. Only when I idly reached up to brush fingers over my scalp to bring down a drop of blood on my finger did I realize the directness of the bird's contact.
I stood up and was considering this drop of blood when a pair of small fat arms grabbed around my waist, fat arms bearing fat dirty hands tipped with cracked fingernails. It was one of the mentally retarded teenagers, a girl in a sky blue calico dress, trying to pull my head down to her level. I could see her long, streaky, fine blond hair from my height, and she was drooling somewhat as she said, urrd, meaning bird, several times.
I bowed down on my knees again before her while she inspected my talon cut, hitting it gently with an optimistic and healing staccato
caress—it was the faith-healing gesture of a child consoling a doll that has been dropped.
Then, from behind me I felt another pair of hands as one of her friends joined in. Then another pair. Suddenly 1 was dog-piled by an instant family, in their adoring, healing, uncritical embrace, each member wanting to show their affection more than the other. They began to hug me—too hard—as though I were a doll, unaware of the strength they exerted. I was being winded—crushed—pinched and trampled.
The man with the beard came over to yank them away. But how could I explain to him, this well-intentioned gentleman, that this discomfort, no this pain, I was experiencing was no problem at all, that in fact, this crush of love was unlike anything I had ever known.
Well, maybe he did understand. He removed his hands from his wards as though they were giving him small static shocks, allowing them to continue crushing me with their warm assault of embraces. The man then pretended to watch the white bird feeding in the black field.
I can't remember whether I said thank you.
Percent of U.S. budget spent on the elderly: 30
on education: 2
ROLLING STONE, APRIL 19, 1990, P. 43.
Number of dead lakes in Canada: 14,000
SOUTHAM NEWS SERVICES, OCTOBER 7, 1989.
Number of people in the workforce per Social Security beneficiary . . . in 1949: 13 in 1990: 3.4 in 2030: 1.9
FORBES, NOVEMBER 14, 1988, P. 229.
Percentage of men aged 25-29 never married . . . in 1970: 19
in 1987: 42 Percentage of women aged 25—29
never married . . .
in 1970: 11
in 1987: 29
AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHICS, NOVEMBER 1988.
Percentage of women aged 20—24 married . . . in 1960: 72 in 1984: 43
Percentage of households under age 25 living in poverty . . . in 1979: 20 in 1984: 33
U.S. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS.
Number of human deaths possible from one pound of plutoniurn if finely ground up and inhaled: 42,000,000,000
1984 U.S. plutoniurn inventory, in pounds: 380,000
These numbers multiplied together: 16,000,000,000,000,000
SCIENCE DIGEST, JULY 1984.
Percentage of income required for a down payment on a first home . . . in 1967: 22
in 1987: 32 Percentage of 25—29 year olds
owning homes . . .
in 1973: 43.6
in 1987: 35.9
FORBES, NOVEMBER 14, 1988.
Real change in cost of a one-carat diamond ring set in 18-karat gold between 1957 and 1987:
(in percent): + 322
of an eight-piece dining-room suite: + 259
of a movie admission: + 180
of an air flight to London, England: — 80
REPORT ON BUSINESS, MAY, 1988.
Chances that an American has been on TV: 1 in 4
Percentage of Americans who say they do not watch TV: 8 Number of hours per week spent watching TV by those who say they do not watch TV: 10
Number of murders the average child has seen on television by the age of sixteen: 18,000
Number of commercials American children see by age eighteen: 350,000 The foregoing amount expressed in days (based on an average of 40 seconds per commercial): 160.4
Number of TV sets . . .
in 1947: 170,000
in 1991: 750 million
CONNOISSEUR, SEPTEM BER, 1989
Percentage increase in income for over-65 households (senior citizens) between 1967 and 1987: 52.6 For all other households: 7
Percentage of males aged 30—34 married with spouse present . . . in 1960: 85.7
in 1987: 64.7 Percentage of females aged 30-34 married with
spouse present . . .
in 1960: 88.7
in 1987: 68.2
U.S. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS, CURRENT POPULATION REPORTS, NO. 423, P. 20.
Percentage of U.S. 18-29 year olds who agree that "there is no point in staying at a job unless you are completely satisfied.": 58 Who disagree: 40
Percentage of U.S. 18—29 year olds who agree that "given the way things are, it will be much harder for people in my generation to live as comfortably as previous generations.": 65 Who disagree: 33
Percentage of U.S. 18—29 year olds who answered "yes" to the question "Would you like to have a marriage like the one your parents had?": 44 Who said "no": 55
FROM A TELEPHONE POLL OF 602 18—29 YEAR OLD AMERICANS TAKEN FOR TIME/CNN ON JUNE 13—17, 1990, BY YANKELOVICH CLANCY SHULMAN. SAMPLING ERROR ± a"/0. AS REPORTED IN TIME, JULY 16,
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