Summer evenings we gather in newly restored Craftsmans, extended ranch houses, post-and-lintels built in the sixties, these are our homes, we have money and mortgages now, children who swim in carefully fenced backyard pools, we grill chicken and fish, corn on the cob. We sip wine and eat cheese and grapes and speak of life and weather, sometimes we bring out the guitar, strum a few chords and laugh, waiting for the air to cool, the sun to set, the kids to bed down.
Then we look at each other, wondering if it’s time, if we’re ready. Always, we are.
We go with slick refilled glasses of wine into the living room, we sit on sofas and chairs, on the floor like children. The lights dim. A screen is pulled. Tape flaps, a fan whirs, a soundtrack clears its throat, and we watch film from an old projector. The projector reminds us of moments we’ve seen in movies, a nostalgia for a time we never knew.
None of the clips we watch have made the Internet. At work, when we vaguely mention their existence to colleagues, we draw blank stares. No one else knows of them. The clips pull us here—partially—because they are so rare, they are private, only ours. And it’s also that our lives are so ordinary, we’re not disappointed in this exactly, just cheerfully resigned.
The clips are something else entirely, new, unexpected. Nothing about them has been explained. They are mailed to us intermittently. No return address. We recognize people in them we don’t know personally. We feel they are moving us somewhere, propelling to a climax we cannot guess. And we sit forward in our seats, hungrily, waiting for the next clip to begin.
THE FOOTAGE IS especially grainy in #4, the sound cluttered, immediately we hear the whine of the diesel VW Westfalia. The public television show host is on the road again, we see, precisely what the voice-over says as the clip begins, The public television show host is on the road again, ho-hum, always on the road, hum of engine, hum of road, rectilinear agricultural fields, irrigation canals, mountains, deserts, etc., etc., look at him, the host, so solemn, so distracted.
The camera zooms in on his face. His chin and jaw are strong. His white flattop seems gray in the footage. There are wrinkles deep around his eyes, like an old surfer from quieter days.
He stares out a window, chin on fist. The voice says, The host ruminates over a recurrent nightmare: empty deserts, the vast Central Valley with nothing but oil derricks and bones and him standing alone in denim shorts and boots and a white muslin shirt, sunglasses missing and microphone in hand, but not a soul to speak to. It’s a nightmare a mind could get lost in.
On the screen, audibly, the host sighs.
What could it all mean? asks the voice. Does emptiness forespeak of great miseries?
The host laughs shortly, “Ha!” and turns from the window. He looks directly at the camera, at us, and it is this moment that always disarms us—that he knows he’s being filmed.
He smiles. What does he see? Who is behind the handheld camera?
Why is he smiling?
The camera pulls away as he looks down and taps his hiking-booted feet against the bus’s floorboards. The host smiles, the voice exclaims, Floorboards, he thinks! Such an antiquated word! Were cars truly once fitted with floorboards, actual pieces of wood that somehow did not cause fires? Combustion? Is there an auto museum in this state with an auto museum docent who can say if once cars had floorboards? Do auto museums have docents? Attendants? A pit crew? There is the Internet of course, but we don’t use the Internet, we use real people, That Is Who I Am, thinks the host happily, He Who Speaks to Folks, this is how we learn about the world thinks the host how we experience life here in the western Americas, here on the road, and yes! there is indeed one of course the auto museum on Museum Row in downtown Los Angeles, what a fool,
The film flaps, the clip is over.
EARLY ON WE choose favorites, usually the purer ones lacking voice-over. #10 for example is amusing, behind the scenes, the host and his cameraman in a bright studio, sitting at an older PC, editing segments from their television show. They speak in the monosyllables of men who know each other well. “Too long.” “Yep.” “Cut here?” “Cut here.” “Chatty Cathy, isn’t he?” “They all are.” #5, too, is enjoyable, the host standing outside an office building (in Studio City, we all agree, though we’re only guessing) paying for a delivery of gyros. “Are the fries in there?” he asks in his soft drawl. “I gotta have my fries, delivery man!” He laughs and clearly tips well—the delivery man thanks him twice. The office door shuts, the clip ends, warm, lighthearted.
The majority of us prefer #6. It is long and simply shows the host making coffee. He seems aware of the camera but not distracted. He glances up, nods at us, doesn’t speak. He is deliberate: he opens his refrigerator, removes a bottle of water, pours it into an electric kettle, flips a switch. He opens his freezer, removes four bags. He smells each, shutting his eyes tenderly with each sniff. He lingers over one bag, nods. Measures three scoops into a black grinder. Seals and returns the bags to the freezer. He presses a button and grinds the coffee. The kettle begins to steam. He flips a switch. The steam recedes. Onto the counter he sets a coffee mug fitted in what looks like a wet suit; on this, he sets a perfectly fitted filter. Spoons grounds into the filter. Last he pours the steaming water slowly, incrementally, everything precise, just so.
He removes the filter, blows steam from the lip, sips, smiles. And so the clip ends.
WE LAUGH OVER the phone, over email, over text—simultaneously we’ve realized that we’ve each been reconsidering our coffee habits, how much we tip, our interactions with coworkers.
After the laughter dies down, we start to wonder if this is no accident.
#23 BEGINS WITH the host sitting forward on a brown leather sofa. On the wall behind him hangs a mirror. There is reflection of neither camera nor crew, a crack in logic that disturbs us.
“But how was it done? An F/X program? How much money was spent on this, really?”
This is what Don always wants to know. The strangeness worries him greatly.
Hush, we tell Don. He sighs, sits back, sighs again, frustrated.
In the clip, the host leans over a clear glass coffee table set upon iron claw feet.
On one side of the table is an enormous mound of walnuts, still in shell.
The host pilfers the pile. Eventually he thumbs a single nut into his palm, shuts his eyes, and squeezes. The cracking of the shell is audible. He opens his eyes, his palm, and reaches in for the meat, which he sets on the opposite side of the table. The shell bits he wipes to the floor.
The voice-over says, The host cracks walnuts just like the Godfather or more to the point, Brando. He never tells anyone of this ability though it is a source of great pride. He cherishes the strength of his hands. It makes him feel of the land. Self-reliant. He could have been an arm-wrestler, he thinks sometimes, and is surprised at his regret in not having been an arm-wrestler.
The host is wincing, eyes squeezed, two hands around a nut.
He looks at his palm, frowning, and suddenly throws the shelled nut across the room.
He is six feet, four inches, strong as most any man, even at sixty, and when his cameraman of eighteen years (whom he still calls “cameraman”) cuts off his feet or hair in close shots, the host cries, “Least you got my guns, cameraman!” flexing his biceps.
The host, reaching over, begins cracking walnuts again, one nut at a time.
From the start we recognized the host, of course. We have all lived in this state longer than expected—some of us born here—and so we all know the public television show, the ebullient host interviewing this person and that, exploring the magnificent wonders of California. The first clip, marked #2, we thought mailed mistakenly: it shows the host washing his hands in an anonymous white bathroom. The clip is shot through a stall in the bathroom. It is barely twenty seconds long. We watched it and wondered what it meant, ignored it, laughed.
Two days and the second clip, #3, arrived: the host in a Ralphs grocery store, considering maple syrups, seemingly unaware of the camera, again the clip short, a minute at most.
Then the third, the fourth, and so on. Sometimes two, even three, four in a week.
We don’t yet know what they mean.
After each ends, we go outside and it is cool, even in summer, the ocean breeze only half warmed by the breath of millions between us and the seas; we sip the harder drinks we’ve moved on to, the gins and scotches, or those of us still driving home our simple glasses of tap water. The kids sigh in sleep through screen windows. We stand barefoot in grass. Something like stars resound above the city skies. Wonderings about the host. Does he know? Is he part of it all? The more modern of us imagine that the clips have been found by an enterprising PBS intern, a film student with a taste for the avant-garde, amused by the potential in these odd and casual outtakes.
This is our early innocent theory, when all the clips seem that way, innocent.
“What if he doesn’t know?” Don says. He always worries. “What if it’s a threat?”
We laugh Don off—certainly the clips are a prank by someone’s distant cousin at the public television station. A joke with us. It’s all simple fun, and one of these early nights, when we’re drunk, enjoying ourselves, someone brightens and suggests, “Let’s call him! See what he knows!” We applaud the concept. Quick research is done and we find an extension at the television station attributed to the host. Maybe he’s in! It is decided we’ll use a pay phone—Don insists, no cell phones, no home numbers. We think this very hip, very noir. Cynthia, our only smoker, recalls once using a pay phone at a nearby convenience mart. Being a water drinker, I’m sent as driver.
We don’t speak on the drive, not at first, those balmy winds blowing through my window.
I have the air-conditioning on but she doesn’t seem to care.
Finally I ask if she’s lived in California long, if she’s from Los Angeles.
“No one’s from here, everyone knows that.” She seems bored. Smokes without asking.
I ask if she’s excited about making the call.
She shrugs.
I stay in the car while she puts in quarters, dials the number. She speaks into the phone. I lean forward to eavesdrop. She cups the mouthpiece and turns away. Her face, first smiling, shifts to alarm—and I, so late in the night, so excited, imagine that she’s paled in fear. I step from the car, worried, but she’s hanging up, saying into the phone, “Good-bye,” almost breathlessly.
She looks at me steadily. “Wrong number,” she says. She tells everyone else the same.
I’m too nervous to contradict her story, to describe the faces she made.
We all go home disheartened. All week I worry, what has happened, what it means.
Late Thursday the call comes. Another clip. We must gather.
We sit with unusual anxiety, sundown, curtained windows, breath held. We lean forward as the lights dim.
This clip doesn’t show the host. It’s me. I’m in my car, staring anxiously from a window.
A female voice-over says, He doesn’t know what to do with all his learning, is paralyzed by education, by the choices before him. Does he go to her? Does he sit quietly? Does he—?
I gape, confused, worried. What will happen next? What will happen to me?
Then I realize everyone in the living room is watching me, holding in laughs, exploding.
It’s a pretty good prank, I agree, but it upsets me all the same.
That’s the night, you’ll remember, we go home early and I refuse to speak to you.
SOME OF US think clip #27 has been unjustly overlooked. It is the briefest of all, a photograph of the host pinned to corkboard. The camera trembles as it zooms in. In the photograph he wears a tuxedo and holds a microphone, addressing an audience we cannot see. One arm swings wide in storytelling grandeur. The voice-over tells us, At gatherings he says, “How about ol’ Marlon Brando? Cracking those walnuts? Ever seen anything so amazing?”
No one has seen anything so amazing.
He feels overjoyed by this.
AND THEN SOMETIMES you call, which must cost you effort, pride. I appreciate that, I do.
“We haven’t seen you,” you say. “They miss you.”
Sometimes the patience in your voice irritates me.
“I haven’t been by,” I agree. “You’re very perceptive. You should be a private detective.”
“You’ve been drinking.” You always sound more tired than angry.
“I don’t have to be drunk to be angry,” I say.
“Are you ever going to explain it all to me?” Now your voice is sad.
“I saw her in Whole Foods today,” you say. Sadder.
Maybe I should explain it all, the her, the they, the you, the me. But does any of it matter anymore? All that remains from these stupid pronouns is your voice and its many shades, sad, angry, distant, forlorn, calm, pensive, brusque, bitter, small, and hurt. And hurt.
#9 CONFIRMS OUR unspoken suspicions. No more can we pretend it’s all simply a prank.
The clip begins with the host inside a ranch-style home—certainly in the foothills, we agree, above Pasadena, we can tell by the plant life, the yard, the architecture, the curve of earth, sun. The host sits at a kitchen island. Newspaper spread before him. The wet-suited coffee mug.
This time the camera is outside the house, looking in.
Inside, a phone rings very lightly, muted. The host picks it up, we hear and read his lips as he gives a (muted) booming “Hello.” Hello! cries the voice-over.
We see the host’s lips repeat, “Hello!” We see his mouth form the words, “Who’s this?”
The host! says the voice.
In his kitchen, the host frowns, pushes a button, sets the phone down. He looks annoyed.
The phone rings again. He checks the number, sets it back down. Now he is worried.
After a moment, though, he answers it.
Hello? whispers the voice-over. Hello? Hello? Hello?
And we can see, quite clearly, the speaker’s breath against the kitchen window.
THEN WE STAND out on the porch, itchy, it is summer, allergies, invisible pollens swell the air.
“We having fun yet?” Cynthia says to no one, to everyone, lit cigarette wanding the air.
#15 IS ONE of the longest and most unsettling clips. It begins with a black screen and that ever-present voice-over: The host has always felt restless, he is a jittery man, he understands that all his life he’s been waiting for a grand moment. That most people bore him is the great irony of his work. All he wants is what all of us want, a shift, an opportunity to prove himself.
The screen lights up, is blurry, comes slowly into focus. The host and his cameraman sit in a booth in a diner. Plates of half-eaten eggs and toast. A jar of dark syrup that looks black. Glasses of either milk or orange juice. The two men eat without speaking.
The voice-over explains, Today they film an Indian and his old oak tree.
“They don’t smile!” the host says suddenly. “They totally creep me out, cameraman!”
The host quietly distrusts Indians, explains the voice-over.
The cameraman looks worried. “You can’t say that!” he whispers. “People will hear!”
The host waves at the empty diner. “Hello, everyone! I’m racist!”
The camera pulls away from the men and zooms in on the front door. After a moment a shadow appears. The door opens. (Did the camera know this would happen? It seems so.) A man in brown uniform walks to the table. “Sir?” he says to the host. He holds out a sealed envelope. The host takes the envelope, and tosses it aside. The man walks away.
The cameraman watches this all but says nothing.
The host pokes at the liquid yolk with a crust but does not eat.
The clip goes dark—but after a moment it is light again, we’ve moved outdoors, time has passed. The host and another man stand beneath what the camera reveals to be a remarkable oak tree, a canopy almost fifty yards in diameter and so thick with branches that it is nearly pitch-black beneath. “Remarkable!” exclaims the host. “What significance has this for your people?”
The Native American is wearing jeans, an ironed polo shirt. His hair is combed neatly.
The voice-over says, The host can see that this man before him has crazy eyes.
The Native American talks a little about how his people were persecuted and some even hanged here beneath this sacred ancestral tree, and the host mumbles sadly. The Native American says, “There will be a turning point, of this we are certain. A day of reckoning in this land. There is too much history of violence. Old angers are bone-deep. All the blood has not yet bled.”
The voice-over says, The host is worried. Does this madman think this will make an actual episode? Does he care? This is a wasted trip, the host thinks. But let the man keep talking.
The Native American calms down and speaks more about the tree, the host asking questions, smiling. Their voices are muted as the voice-over says, Think about his words, host. A day of reckoning. Interesting, isn’t it? After all your hands are strong, you’d be fine, if the world tilted crazy couldn’t you lead us into alpine valleys where we will thrive in the climates as once we were meant to in peace and harmony? Couldn’t you be the one to save us all?
In the clip the two men walk away from the tree. The camera-man follows.
The image lingers on the tree. Slowly it zooms to the base of the oak.
We see a torn envelope—one we all agree is the same delivered in the diner.
Beside it, a sheet of paper. The camera zooms in and we read in block letters,
I NEED YOUR HELP. I WILL CALL WITH INSTRUCTIONS.
WE SIT ON the porch in the cool air. Was the man in the delivery uniform part of the plot?
Every time we watch the clip his face is lowered, obscured by the bill of a cap.
How could the host, the cameraman, not know they were being watched?
How could they not see a second camera filming their every step?
Why the talk of destruction? Of blood?
It’s a treasure hunt. We’re Hansels and Gretels picking crumbs off the forest floor.
That’s what Cynthia says, softly, before she leaves.
She means it lightly but her words don’t reassure.
YOU SEEM DISTRACTED. Somewhere else.
Where am I? I’m on a cell phone. You don’t know where I am.
You say that as if you’re angry, like you need to win a fight. You hurt me, remember?
No, that’s not it at all. You think I did the damage but it’s always the other way around. Don’t you know that when a person is angry it’s only because they were hurt first? Who in this world gets angry without being hurt first? No one. No one. Certainly not me. I’m not crazy.
You don’t make sense anymore.
Nothing does and it never did. Who thinks it should? Who came up with such a theory?
Certainly not a person with open eyes. Living in this world. Not him. Not her.
#24 BEGINS IN a darkened house, a camera stepping through fluttering curtains and an open sliding door. The footsteps of the invisible cameraman are barely audible, a faint shuffling on wood floors. The camera enters a room and there’s a lump shape in a bed.
A digital clock says it’s 3:00 a.m.
The phone rings, the camera pulls back.
A hand reaches from the bed, hits a button. The host speaks softly to the phone. “Hello?”
The voice-over says, Go to Silver Lake, swim to the fountain, find the next clue.
And then, as always, darkness.
Our theory is that clip #8 follows #24, at least chronologically. #8 is a long and quiet night sequence, filmed from a car we cannot see. We are following taillights—presumably the host’s—and that is the only visual. The voice-over speaks softly. Los Angeles at night, the 110 freeway, always puts the host in a pensive mood. This is the hidden freeway, curving through hills, past homes where men once raised cows, planted corn and squash, didn’t care about the gleam of Dodger Stadium, Chavez Ravine, a canyon named for a hacendado from the nineteenth century, an old husband of a daughter of a son-in-law of a conquistador who killed Indians with muskets and put plow to land and lived by that one word all men in this land once lived by: build. The host knows this, reflects on this now, during his late-night drive. He knows that the landowners died, that the land was parceled, the ranch house fell into disrepair, was razed, the land scooped up by speculators, Broad and Bren, Kaufmann and Argyros, Emmerson, Roski, great place for a ballpark! The history as it always is in this state—vanished. Gone. Amazing.
Amazing. Amazing. The word is his now. Several years ago he interviewed an etymologist who explained the word’s origin. It was unsurprising, after all—maze, labyrinth, to be confused, confounded, caught in a world of unseen connections . . . but still there is a logic to mazes, isn’t there? The spool of thread in the first labyrinth, Ariadne, spider’s web. Amazed.
Night brings back memory, how he was taunted once as a child back home in Tennessee squalid Tennessee where to dream to delight to awe was not correct. Smoky Mountains sunset, sad, evocative. He had an old Pentax Q10 rigged to a fencepost as tripod and took time-elapsed photos of dying light. He showed the pictures at school. Isn’t it amazing? he whispered.
The teacher and the older kids beat him after class. He has admitted this to no one.
The voice quiets but the taillights keep moving, pulling farther away, until the clip’s end.
“WHAT IT IS IS a meditation on the nature of television, of film,” Don suggests one night. We’ve all had too much to drink. Now we’re frustrated—this week’s clip, #62, is blank. Nothing. Angrily we blame the creators of this absurd virtual chase that never leaves our living rooms. We assign petty motives. “Bored rich kids,” we agree. “Avant-garde assholes,” we say.
But Don has a larger and more complex point; he’s an academic. “Isn’t television after all the great medium of our time? Our country? This state? We live fifteen minutes from Hollywood. We are the image, not the thing itself. We are the gaze and the object. Why trust these clips as real? They are film! Two-dimensional!” Don spills his drink and swears loudly. He’s under pressure. Up for tenure in the fall, struggling to complete his book, to find a publisher. Normally we cut him off but tonight we let him ramble. “What do we know about the host? He is like us—like us, he loves television. He remembers moments—moon landing, Watergate, Ali-Frazier, Munich, those transcendent moments offered only by television. Television is one-way immersion without obligation. You sit, you flip a button, you look away, you read the paper, you look up, you mute, you change channel, take piss, heat pizza, wander house, push-up, sit-up, phone call, text. The Internet? You can’t wander from it, it’s too needy. Only television is so accommodating!”
He’s almost shouting. “It wouldn’t work on the Internet! This is film, this is community! Here we are in other worlds—real ones, real people! The world used to be parks! Then it was benches! Then it was sofas at home!” He stares at us, desperate. “I’ve seen gaming chairs in Target, speakers built in and wires for kids to sit in for hours!” He looks madly. “Quick! I need to write!” Someone passes him a pen and napkin, he grasps them, begins jotting furiously.
We pity and loathe Don. I hold Cynthia’s elbow as we walk to our cars. She smiles sadly.
“Now calm down, that was an ocean of gin you drank, cowboy.”
She blows me an air kiss, is gone.
IN AUGUST I take to night-driving, Mulholland, very quick, very romantic, clichéd, stupid.
YOU KNOW HOW it goes, of course—the strange things that matter don’t go on forever.
First we get a call: there is a new clip, yes, but we will not be watching it.
Why? The police have been contacted. The host has been notified. Much grave concern.
We move harried through the week. Worried at each police car, flinching at each phone ring. Don dutifully sends panicked emails at the top of each hour. The police call some of us in, those who’ve hosted screenings. One, at the police station, being led to an interrogation room, sees the host. “Of course I’m concerned!” the host is yelling at a detective. “Who wouldn’t be?”
Enraged, he looks at our passing friend. The host’s face is red, wild, incensed.
A few of us meet in a bar Friday night, sitters for the kids, those with kids. Cynthia can’t make it. I tell you as much later. You don’t believe me. Another goddamn fight. Over drinks we murmur, booth-cramped. What we know—thanks, police—the clips aren’t old. They’re made each week. The host has recognized several—he knew where he was, what he was doing. The detectives want answers but the consensus is they don’t suspect us. As if that reassures us.
“Why should they suspect us?” we protest. “We’re not suspect!”
We drink our drinks and agree that police are fools. Someone else is the guilty party.
Or maybe we just can’t bear suspecting each other—your cruel theory all along.
YOU TELL ME they like monkeys so Saturday, monkeys. Of course a gorilla escapes its cage.
Really. I need to piss so I leave them in the cotton candy line. Too much water in me, it’s too hot in this city, this state. Thirty-five million people roasting three months a year. Madness.
I wash my hands and outside lean over the water fountain. I hear a snorting, a snuffling.
I turn. A gorilla is staring at me. He’s much larger than me. Wider. Firmer base. His eyes are dilated, he looks stressed. His muscles are enormous and shagged with coarse hair. Such fingers. He could destroy me. We turn at a siren coming through trees. He grunts, scoots along.
They are at a picnic table, lips coated in pink puffed sugar, and what do I say to them to explain the police swarming the zoo? That those peaceful gorillas can get loose and maybe if you’re lucky you won’t get hurt? Is that the lesson here? Instead I tell them a story about a father who invents magical glass boxes for his children, all they have to do is push a button and whoosh, glass walls all around, safe and sound. They say what about air? Food? Xbox? I reassure them. These are advanced glass boxes! Totally decked out! They exchange skeptical looks.
I drop them off and you say to me, “Hear the one about the escaped gorilla?”
I tell you the gorilla was me and you don’t understand how such a thing could be true.
ON MONDAY NIGHT, in my mailbox, a large yellow envelope. No return address.
I open it inside, lights out, feeling nauseous.
A film canister.
CLIP #49 BEGINS as many do—nothing but darkness. Then a voice from the void.
“Like Genesis,” murmurs Cynthia, fanning herself with the business section.
I ask for quiet and listen to the words.
He has seen and touched every part of this state literally traveled every paved road, been to every county seat, every damn landmark and boy there are a few thousand, aren’t there, has spoken to professors and town folk to historical society ladies and blue-collar workers to illegals and Border Patrol to vigilantes and human rights crusaders has sat with mayors and senators and oh so many civil engineers, dam builders bridge builders highway designers public transportation consultants architects and other assorted madmen, the oldest living woman in the state, and when she died the next one, and the next, and the next, plucked fruit with original fruit pickers packed crates with original crate packers flipped patties with original burger makers made fries with the sad McDonald brothers and once talked with Ray Kroc himself before that rich and sleazy salesman kicked the bucket has surfed with surfers dived with anemone divers flown with kite fliers sand volleyball players racecar drivers rock climbers artists of every color ate donuts with Sonny Barger Sonny Bono a very young Arnold and so many cultural representatives schnitzel tabbouleh pupusas cricket tacos Oaxacans Basques Guatemalans Romanians Filipinos even Tasmanians all here in this Popeye-arm-shaped state
At this point the darkness recedes. Light enters the frame. It reveals a swastika.
“Holy shit,” says Cynthia.
The camera pulls back farther. The swastika resides on the face of a deranged man.
“Whitman?” wonders Cynthia.
The voice continues, and still the most famous, the one above them all, the firmament over this state is and always has been him, the single most unsettling person the host has ever spoken to, and the host believes that there is something of this man in us all, in the water, in the air, we are all this man, a derangement not as the rest of the country thinks, not Californians as hippies and crystals and free love but anger to the bone that anchor on Popeye’s arm swinging round and round the chain digging into the skin of the palm that pressure that needs burst.
Staring at us steadily is Charles Manson.
That’s it. That’s the last of the clips.
*
YOU LEAVE VOICE messages via can-and-string, say they’re worried about me, you are, too.
Stop working. Take a break. Come inside. Dinner’s ready.
But mustn’t we believe that if we can unravel just one thing the maze will come undone?
I dream of walking at night in the dark.
I see a large man ahead of me, saying, Who are you? Why are you following me?
Carter Sullivan and Jack Benny, oh Jack, Your money or your wallet . . . golden silence.
California gold? Television! That clever image, those flashing lights! We are all moths!
I lie awake tonight, thinking of mankind fleeing darkness, flapping at bright screens.
It’s not a lightly thought thought.
The state of California. Been there. Not sure I made it back.
Cynthia blocks my number. Don gets tenure. Everyone sort of tolerates me but they don’t hide it well. I move out of the city, to an apartment in Eagle Rock. We don’t see each other anymore, them, me, you, us. We were part of the group of smart people, so smart, our group of smart clever smart people, and then you and me baby we split and sure we tried to make up, but we split again and they all chose you. No, no, that’s not exactly what happened but it’s close. I call Don late the way I used to, drunkenly smoking on our porches, but he’s married now, has to sleep, notes for tomorrow’s lecture. “Those were some strange days,” I tell him, my voice thick, I can’t help it. He’s polite. “Yes, indeed. Strange days. Like in that the Doors song,” he says. That the. Always smart, Don. “Gotta tuck up, bud,” he tells me. “We’ll get together soon.”
Some days I sit watching reruns of the host’s television show. How cheery he is! How sated! I know that TV-him isn’t real-him, that he’s a different man with his own fears, his own struggles, I know I need to stop need to let go of Cynthia/her the kids/them you/you so I/me can move on but the words trip me up every time, move on, isn’t moving on just moving back? Yielding? A surrender? I’ve never liked this state, it’s always felt uneasy to me, trembly, on the verge of explode, it’s the air, the winds, the fires, tides under ocean, deserts, I don’t know, such foreboding, just a sense is all. You can come to the West what you can do is you can come to this land of grand scale and learn to think in shadows, in shadows men will pan for gold backroom deals buy all the land steal the water forces align, it’s obvious, look around, such tremendous forces after all. Look, that dome, that volcano, that geyser. That beach. That bear. Eagle. Whale. Ronald Reagan. Woolly mammoth. Joshua tree. Death Valley. Donner Party. Neverland Ranch. John Muir. Manson. To think no forces are conspiring would be to be a fool! Sometimes I think I could learn a bit by reading up on Manson but what good would that do? It’d only make me obsessive and it’s bad to obsess over crazies. Obsess over normal things. It’s healthier.
UNPACKING BOXES THIS week, I find these words in an old notepad:
Go to Silver Lake, swim to the fountain, find the next clue.
I laugh about it. So silly, all that, the days of magical mysterious clips, when everything was so cosmic and fraught. Nostalgic, I take a drive to the area. I walk the path that loops the reservoir. There’s live music from a bar. Young people laughing. Couples walking past, smiling.
I consider swimming to the fountain. Instead I sit on a bench in sight of the fountain.
A man walks past me. He pauses. Of course I know who it is—of course it’s the host.
We stare at each other.
“You’re the one,” he says. “I dream about you. You’re always following me.”
I shake my head in denial.
“Why are you here?” he asks. “Who are you?”
“I’m no one,” I say.
His voice is soft. He sounds tired. I feel bad for him. He’s old. “You did all this,” he says.
“All what?”
He sighs. He’s confused. Exhausted. Something falls from his hand. I pick it up. A photo. On the back is written #1. It’s a Polaroid of a chalked word on a blackboard:
CALIFORNIA
I rise and hand it to him. He nods thanks. For a minute we stand there together. Looking at the photo, then around us, at everything. “What is this?” the host asks softly.
“All this time I thought you’d know,” I admit.
We stare out. It’s dark but we know what’s out in the darkness. The valleys below us. The seas. Hills and roads. People. Silence. Trees. I’m pretty sure we can hear waves crashing in the bay.