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There are many different kinds of darkness. The darkness of a windowless room, from which you can hear a big city’s rush hour and there might be the glow of a digital clock or a shard of light slipping through an air vent; this darkness is different than that of a cave, a lava tube, in which it makes no difference if your eyes are open or closed, the dark presses into them just the same. You wait for your eyes to adjust, but there isn’t even the faintest glimmer for them to cling too. There’s nothing, and subsequently, the implication or at least the possibility of everything. Somewhere in between is the dark of the desert in winter. In fact this darkness can be quite bright; if there is snow and a good moon you could read a book standing on a cold mountaintop, if you are out on some alkali flat the reflection of the celestial bodies is greater still. But if it’s stormy, as it often is, the blackness penetrates even the bars with the best jukeboxes; the warmest stoves seem to render the night darker by proposing the possibility of light.
Not than I’m a connoisseur of darkness but after one particularly slow fishing season I found myself acquainted with the color of night in ways I’d never been before. The bright lights of New York City were as far away as the endless summer days in the Gulf of Alaska and for no particular reason, and with no particular plan, I wandered into the backwaters, so much as backwaters exist in this age of smart phones and face books.
The coast starlight express leaves LA everyday, and one day I dragged myself out of Ashby’s arms and onto the platform. Ashby was better to me than I deserved and took me on some of those endless journeys through that endless city. Her room always was filled with that light, as though the walls would melt, and her skin too, and all that would be left was an infinite whiteness, a nothing so big it would be impossible to even imagine there had ever been anything at all. But even when we were naked with our feet in the ocean and out heads in the clouds, there was this tickle in my soul. So I stuffed my pack. The train stopped in the rail yards I grew up beside, in Oakland. I’d be a stranger in those streets now. I looked out the window and recognized the textures, the East Bay shimmer, poor and yet always so cool, but I didn’t recognize myself having anything to do with it. As we sped north I considered how I’d shed everything. Not only my family, my friends, my careers and possessions, but my beliefs too, even my ideas, and now I was just this empty bucket with a hole in the bottom. In the parable of the hand trying to grasp the water I was the water, not the hand.
The platform was small and cold and black ice covered the streets, as you could see the fresher flakes ghosting smoothly across the asphalt. It was a one-horse town and I hit the highway for a ride north. The train line headed over the mountains and I didn’t want to go there, not yet. An old timer gave me a ride. It’s not so easy, to tell the difference between the old timer and her opposite, whatever that is, a new timer I guess. Snow was falling in big flakes and the pines hovered so steep and tall beside the highway that it felt like we were driving in a deep canyon. She had the BBC on the radio. Poor reception but enough to hear Obama had moved to freeze federal salaries; the Ducks were one game away from the national championship. She didn’t say much I could tell she was kindly, and happy with herself and her life, and optimistic about the fate of the world even in such an anxious age. The way she held the wheel, and squinted for deer crossing the headlights.
She let me off at the southern edge of town and I went into a Shari’s and ordered a cup of coffee. A few moments later a man in formal wear entered the halo of the parking lot’s light pulling a cross. It must have been twelve feet tall. He had wheels attached to one end and a pad where the load met his shoulder and after setting it down he wrapped a cable around the crux and locked it to lamppost. It was neigh on the witching hour and well below freezing, but he was in high spirits, smiling as he came in and sat down near me at the counter. I asked after his pilgrimage and he told me a little of his story. Our waitress, Lucky, listened in, sipping Dr. Pepper. He’d been a jazz musician of all things. Played regular gigs around the Bay Area. Bought into a little club in the upper Haight, a couple blocks from the park. Had a little apartment on the Panhandle. Worked at the library by day. He loved the late nights, the neon. They’d play until two and then pack up and walking home he’d stop into the corner store run by some Turks who knew his name and buy a forty and talk sports, and the bums knew his name too, and he finished off the forty watching those first rays of light creep up the urban canyons and he’d fall asleep to Brahms or Aphex Twin or maybe a little Gamelan. One day he was shelving books and out of that singular library silence came a revelation. He had to change everything. He bought a bible, quit the jobs, sold the apartment and his share of the club and gave all the money away. He didn’t know where he was bearing his cross, but he was confident he’d know when he got there.
When Lucky got off she took me with her. I couldn’t believe her Civic could get around those icy roads. On the way to her house we pulled into a 7-11 and she bought cigarettes and we smoked there in front of the store. The snow had stopped and there was an icy blue glow rising from behind the long ridges to the east. Lucky lived in a little cottage in the oldest part of town, near where the old mill had been before the logging industry dried up and it was replaced with outlet malls. It was a century old place with a stone foundation and sagging ceilings and a kid, hers, asleep on the couch. She ushered the girl into their bedroom and I lay on the torn furniture with my hands behind my head and stocked the little wood stove, and outside you could hear the river slipping by, heading north. There were frayed Indian tapestries tacked to the green walls and an old wool blanket with a collie sleeping on her back on top of it. I took a swig of Nite Time (generic Nyquil to which I’d become addicted) and fell asleep.
That night I had a dream that I was a finalist in a painting competition. The other finalists were my friend Dasha, who has odd discolorations in the irises of her eyes, and a mighty bearded, cane wielding Leo Tolstoy. We were in that Silent Barn joint in Bushwick, and there was a big panel of judges, everyone looking at our canvases. I can't remember mine or Dasha’s, but Tolstoy’s was brilliant. It was of a giant parking lot at night, well lit, and it was snowing heavily, and at the edge of the lot was a huge Walmart, with hazy figures walking to and from their cars, a little blurred like the late Gerhard Richter. I don't know who won. Just before waking I had another dream. It was set in various eastern European cities and was quite melancholy. I was traveling alone by boat and train between them, spending a lot of time in stations and terminals, looking up and around at the architecture, sitting in public parks, on boardwalks and esplanades. It was a lot like a Sebald novel (Austerlitz might remain my favorite piece of the past 25 years), abstractly concerned with the force of history (as manifest in acute attention to the raw physical environment, the condition of a cobblestone road, the whitewashed side of a mosque), and that force’s relationship to my own personal cosmos, and vice-versa. Of all the cities I saw in the dream, I’ve only walked three in reality (Vienna, Prague, Berlin). So most of what my dream self saw was either imagined entirely or composed of my experiences with the culture of those places, photographs and films and novels and music and such. Sarajevo, Budapest, Bratislava, Sofia, Bucharest, and eventually even in Odessa, Kiev, Istanbul, and Baku. At some point in my wandering of each place, you showed up on some old bicycle with bad breaks and a wheel untrue and wobbly, and offered historical anecdotes, the Black Plague killed this many hear, the Nazis did this, the Communists did that, the American corporations the other. Always your comments were tinged with sadness, tragedy. And at the end of the day I was left alone and feeling some obscure connection to “old wisdom” of some sort, maybe all the old architecture put in mind a medieval and more mystical mode of religion, and I was reaching out for that god. Maybe I just didn't know where I was going. Anyway, thanks for stopping by.
At noon the sky was perfectly clear and Lucky and her daughter were out front making a snow woman. The yard was strewn with odd junk which jutted up out of the snow half exposed. There was a harrow, and a bed frame, and a Winston heavy bag torn down the middle and sewn up with dental floss. Lucky pointed me in the direction of a coffee shop and I thanked them, my new friends, for the unexpected kindness. The thing about Lucky that amazed me so was her feeling of roots. She didn’t want to even travel anywhere let alone move. She said the thought of bright lights big city made her ill. She had her place. I was far from convinced that it was even possible to have a place in the abstract, let alone concretely, in reality. She didn’t question what it was exactly that sustained her, but something in the mountain air did it so completely that though she was poor, and her daughter and she were alone, she woke smiling, she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
I walked across a footbridge and looked down at the water. Just upriver was a big spillway below where the mill had been. The tall smoke stacks were still there, as were many of the old exteriors, red barn like warehouses and brick administration buildings. The Banana Republics and REIs which occupied the structures now doubtless brought more money into the community than the timber industry had, but still it was hard not to feel that something was lost. I guess something always is. Sometimes, anyway.
By the time I was sitting with a cup of coffee and the newspaper classifieds in front of me it had started snowing again. The jobs were few. Cars slipped around on the street, cinder stained slush splattering up into the wheel wells. Behind the register two clerks were joking around, laughing, but I could barely hear them, their faces were out of focus. There was an old woman at a corner table reading Kripke, Naming and Necessity. Even the steam rising from my coffee seemed to do so in slow motion as I felt a wave of nostalgia wash over me, so strong it made my stomach drop, my eyes water. I know you know what I mean.
In Pondicherry, back in the Bush years, before the Iphone, before Glee and the Gulf Oil disaster, I met an Israeli girl named Hev. I was limping. A reef cut from the Andaman Islands got infected as soon as I stopped swimming everyday, and I was sitting on the promenade drinking tea with a couple Tamil vendors (one was peddling fans though there was a stiff wind blowing in off the Indian Ocean) and she walked up and asked the time, in English. We got to talking and when I showed her my foot she insisted we go directly to a hospital. We crossed the canal, out of the wealthier French side of town, and into the Tamil part. The hospital was overflowing in that particularly ecstatic Indian way, the violent wind blowing everyone’s colorful fabrics horizontal and Hev’s hair in her face. They sliced my foot open and cleaned and bandaged it and gave me antibiotics. Lizards crossed the floor. Hev and I walked around the old town. She was staying near the French consulate. There was a pink church, and endless Triumph cabs. We didn’t talk much. She didn’t ever want to go back to Tel Aviv. It wasn’t her place. Of course, neither was Pondi. The streets were surprisingly quiet at night. I had a tiny room, a twin bed with Fashion TV the only channel on the little wall mounted screen. We ate dinner with a couple from Toronto. It was simple; it shouldn’t have meant anything, pointed to anything beyond itself. Maybe that’s just the magic of time; to render things so different you can scarcely recognize them. Last time I saw her was at an Internet café. I was gchatting with an old friend in Wellington, or was it Picton? She was buying a ticket from Chennai to Jakarta. When she was gone I felt like I was the only person left in the world. I didn’t even know her last name.
She told stories about raids in the West Bank. She gave me her toenail. She was headed to Australia to pick fruit. Then Korea to teach English, though she wasn’t a native speaker. She said she could never go back to Tel Aviv. Her earliest memory is of sitting on an air mattress at a lake. Two buckets of sand stood beside her on the shore, plastic buckets made for the express purpose of children playing with sand. Her sister is in the water, gracefully butterflying. Splash sounds speed across the glassy surface of the lake only to bounce slightly against the pines of dry land and dissolve into the hills which rise up steeply all around. There are so many types of clouds it is almost painful for her to think of them, so much complexity is bad for her spirit, the ego cannot maintain its grace beneath the specter of such infinite might. But they play games with the light, the clouds, momentarily bathing her sister in a shimmering whiteness as her shoulder blades come together, mid-butterfly, then shrouding the entire basin in a purple cloak which, expansive as they are, lends the mountains an aspect of interiority, which she finds comforting, this is all it takes for the child to regard the wilderness as her own bedroom, which is painted the same shade of purple.
It’s snowing, lightly, and the town is asleep. She takes off her glasses, cleans them, and places them back on her face. Her boyfriend offered to buy her laser eye surgery for her birthday, but she wants a bicycle, a steel single speed with a fixed cog on one hub and a free cog on the other and blue grip tape. Blue is her favorite color, though she prefers to wear green. She looks out at the snow as she bends to pick up the dustpan. She used to work mornings but recently she’s been closing the café. She likes it. At night, late, after the customers are gone, they turn up the music, Company Flow or Fucked Up or Body Talk, and the boys in the kitchen tell boisterous stories about their exploits on snowboards or younger women. She has no desire to go back to Echo Park. When she walks home, past the Sports Bar and the 7-11, she loves how contained it all is, small circles of light standing out in an infinite blackness. Of course the blackness is not infinite. You could travel through it and eventually, no matter which way you go, you will approach the glow of other civilizations. But those in betweens are deep and, in their own way, dangerous.
She was ten pounds at birth, two weeks late, three days before going into labor her mother hiked a mountain. Her parents were expecting a boy and had only the name Alexander prepared for the new arrival. In elementary school she did a report on Alexander the Great, and it led her to lay awake pretending she was Alexander after all, not the Macedonian on his famed trip to Persia but a new Alexander on new missions of new greatness. Into space or into the deep. And not with a copy of Homer annotated by Aristotle but with a laptop, a smart phone, and a credit card with no limit.
In fourth grade she bought a book on astrology from the school book fair and discovered a new identity for herself as a Libra. Other people gave her more modern, more advanced texts as time went on but her young adult paperback remained her new age bible. Born in the year of the snake, she felt somehow existentially confirmed or supported in her character by the Chinese zodiac as well. The eve of Perestroika, the Smashing Pumpkins debut record, the dawn of the last decade of the twentieth century. She always fought with her sister, a Capricorn from the year of the rat whose pragmatism and constant sense of immediacy, ability to focus on the physical, alienated her inherent abstraction, her preoccupation with theory which betrayed in fact a commitment to another world entirely, one consistent, in a sense, with the spatial temporal properties of the other but yet operating in other dimensions and constructed of anti-matter, or dark matter, or perhaps no matter at all. The numinous, if she thought of it at all, wasn’t a light shinning from between the cracks in heaven’s pavement, it was water and air, dirt and wood, human flesh and the human voice and the human touch, too.
She wants to be a kindergarten teacher, a novelist, a curator, a doctor. But she doesn’t want to be anything. She wants to be everything at once. At times it all adds up. She studies ecology in Chicago. She wants to be an environmentalist. She goes to Tanzania to study elephant dung. When something shits, in Swahili you say it is digging for medicine. She likes to watch elephants pee. Their penises sometimes grow so large they drag on the ground. Ostrich penises emerge from their anuses. She doesn’t check the Internet while she’s in Africa, doesn’t listen to the stores of Swedish electronica and west coast hip-hop sleeping in her MP3 player. Three is her favorite number. The way it looks, the way it sounds, the trinity, the troika, the tricycle.
Prayer was common in the evenings of her childhood. Lying in her bed, or sitting on the curb between the bumpers of her parents’ Hondas, she asked God for happiness and clarity, for problems to be solved, obstacles overcome. Nighttime lent itself to such activity; it was imbued with an aura of surrender and vulnerability. She went to bible study, and felt the Catholic Church gave her a social network and a moral framework of a quality not to be had elsewhere. How she lost her faith isn’t clear, but she learned to rebuild a personal ethics out of her own experience, her dialectical materialism led her into atheism and out to agnosticism where she rests, open to anything able to tell the story she wants to hear, about who she is, about the world she lives in.
After work she drops acid with her friends. They go bowling. They drive a hundred miles per hour across the playa. She finds herself describing her dreams. One, recurring since childhood, she is able to catalyze by thinking of it as she falls asleep. It’s Peter Pan inspired, a flying dream. She flies around all the houses and apartments she ever lived in. She flies around Tanglewood, her old neighborhood. She flies around Silver Lake and Echo Park and even Hollywood. Sometimes her flight is stymied and she has to climb a tree or get on a roof to launch again. She has a magic duffle bag which serves as a magic carpet, helping her soar when alone she cannot.
Death does not concern her. Like Mozart haunted by Salieri dressed as his father’s ghost, her charge is to find and execute her work. She is afraid of burglars, however. Of being chased, lost in Disneyland, even in the relative security of the mountains she still imagines intruders in the dusk. The problem of evil is to her just that. Li’l Zé in that Meirelles flick, that’s evil, but where did it come from? Where does it go? She knows the government is guilty of terrorism, but what about the Columbine killers? And doesn’t terrorism express some fundamental longing, some fundamental right which ought not be ignored? She’s no pacifist, even before she saw Obama speak in Chicago in the pouring rain she was on board with his just war. The division between nature and culture she finds more distasteful than terrorism. The notion of climate change is a little oxymoronic. Even the extinction crisis does not appear to her as a valid focus of public attention. The earth’s going to be engulfed by the sun eventually anyway. Earth’s geohistory is full of such incidences. The real problem is humanity’s reluctance to go extinct. It’s analogous to the individual desire to live as long as possible, regardless of the conditions of such a life. We should march joyfully toward our demise. She loves Deleuze and Guattari. She floats in the bath thinking about amor fati.
Team Edward has commanded her loyalty ever since Bella first moved to Washington. How beautiful, the vampire’s ability to survive on culture alone, listening to Suite bergamasque in his modernist, minimalist country mansion. She prefers Rothko to Pollack, Twombly to Titian. Logic has always held an aesthetic appeal. Her favorite novel is Pride and Prejudice. She is attracted to arid climates.
I first met you when you knocked on the door of my apartment well after midnight one autumn. You were in a bathrobe, your hair in curlers, your feet in slippers the shape of school buses. You were livid, shaking; barely able to speak you were either so angry or so nervous. Could you please keep it down you managed to whisper. Of course I said, but when I sat back down in the living and my friends and I recommenced our conversation I thought it was odd, because we were talking very quietly. No music was playing. Nobody was cooking in the kitchen. Jinhua had made some oolong but that was all, and she was quiet as a mouse. What did you think you’d heard? I didn’t see you again for nearly a month.
The next instance was again late one night. I was alone this time, watching my beloved Hulot toddle around on the tele, and there was a knock at the door. I figured it was my friend Jasper from up the hill, who came around late to share my obsession with art films of old, and smoke cigarettes with me on my classic brownstone stoop. But there you were, this time in a ravishing black cocktail dress, barefoot, and holding a loaf of bread. You’d come to apologize for your short temper the last time we’d spoken, and brought a sourdough from the bakery you worked at in recompense. Alas, the cocktail dress was not for me, you’d just come home from a night at the opera, The Magic Flute. Your date was some financial wonk about whom you had nothing good to say; evidently he’d asked you out when he came into the Anthropologie store where you also worked. You said he could take you to an expensive dinner and the opera but that was all. Amazingly he complied. You were very beautiful and something was very obviously different about you, that is to say you were definitely crazy, and for some people that’s impossible to resist. You came in and we watched Hulot together and I made some Puer.
Turned out you lived directly below me with a girl who was dating none other than the great grandson of Robert E. Lee. You said they were always smoking heroin. I mentioned it was a nonsmoking building and maybe they should take their recreation to the stoop like I did and you didn’t get the joke. You probably didn’t even know heroin was illegal. You asked if I’d ever been up to the roof and I admitted I hadn’t, I’d been deterred by the large Emergency Exit Only Alarm Will Sound sign. You assured me the sign was a bluff, and with your very pale and thin hand on my denim-clad forearm you led me up. You were right, no alarm sounded. The Saint Ignatius Cathedral was just a few blocks north and it towered over us, lit up in ambers and off whites. You were ecstatic, maybe just because oxygen itself seemed to get you immensely high, but I like to think your step lightened even more when you saw how happy you’d made me, how impressed I was with the top of our building, with Mount Sutro rising up to the south and Golden Gate Park stretching all the way to the Pacific, the Panhandle flowing down to Divisadero, and the two of us in the center of it all, the very middle of the world. You were running back and fourth, tapping me on the shoulder as you passed by, and then suddenly, in an instant like a flashback to an acid trip I never had, you jumped off the roof, and hung there, suspended, your hair floating upward as though gravity had been reversed, the souls of your bare feet even whiter than the palms of your hands.
And then you landed. Though I couldn’t see it from where I’d been standing you only just cleared the gap between our building and the next. Their roof was steep, however, and as you regained your balance you slid a little and my heart fell for the second time to my stomach. You caught the horror in my eye and wordlessly expressed simultaneous sympathy for my anxiety and ridicule, apologetic but also imploring me to wake up and live a little. You traversed the slope to the structure’s backside where a fire escape all but joined the roofs together. I helped to hoist you back up to my level. You gave me a kiss on the cheek and skipped back inside. As the door closed behind you I realized you’d propped it with your purse and it had locked. I knocked to no avail, and as I didn’t have my phone on me I was forced to wait until someone entered the building at the main door on the street, at which point I yelled down my request for rescue.
The leaves of the trees lining Fell Street cannot be accurately described. They define themselves in so many ways, clouded with ocean fog, streaked with the horizontal rays of commuter headlights, glowing with the vertical rays of traffic lights, red, yellow, and green. These colors too are changed as they meet the many faces of stone, the sidewalks, the sides of buildings, wood shingled Victorians, black asphalt, the shopping carts of the financially challenged, the BMWs of the financially gifted. Add to these factors the smoke which rises from your cigarette, a Marlboro 27, as you pace the select serene square meters which compose your office where Shrader Street meets the Panhandle. Your slippers may well be worn out, and in that there is something distinctly American, as there is in your floral dress, red lipstick, tangled hair.
I might see you at the ballpark, at the multiplex, honing a scholarly posture over an Americano. You have a knife specifically for cutting salami in Golden Gate Park. A chair you refer to as explicitly for sitting, “my sitting chair,” which bespeaks a joyful relationship with objects, a celebration of the fulfillment of their destiny. Remember Kant, “the thing in itself,” imagine a dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity imbued with grace. But now I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I learned from your roommates, skinny-jean Converse All-star American Apparel wearing semi-pro girls who wore their moneyed upbringings and expectations like make-up, that you had come from Montana and that you were indeed completely bat shit. They’d come home to find you in their closest, in their clothes, in their underwear even, or else wearing an old wedding dress you found on the street. You led every stray cat you could inside though the building was strictly no pets. Eventually, they had to have you kicked out because you wouldn’t obey the rules.
“The absolute is present, but not yet known.” You relished this thin veil of ignorance, this ever so slight separation from the full truth of the world. I could watch you, dancing along that line, almost divine but yet human, all too human. You moved in with friends from work in Excelsior. They had a dog which you walked regularly and one day, in a moment of distraction, you let it dart out into the road and it was hit and killed. You never forgave yourself. It’s you I’ve been looking for, all these years.
Joshua Willey grew up in Oakland and studied literature in Portland, then moved to China and commenced working a perennial series of day jobs including firefighting and commercial fishing. He currently lives in Mexico and is writing a novel about hitch hiking.
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