AFTER CLASS, I WENT to the halfway house and shut the curtains and got a couple hours of sleep. I woke up at two in the morning and made some coffee in the common area and went to work. I drove out to the warehouse by the airport where the newspapers got trucked in on pallets, stacked and wrapped up with a strip of plastic. I waited in line with my cart, and I got a couple bundles of papers, took them to my table, and started bagging them. The girl that had the table across from me was real slow, and we always talked while we were bagging. She seemed like a junkie to me. Late September, hot as hell, and she would wear long sleeves. She was pretty, and she always looked like she had the flu.
“I don’t know how you bag those so fast,” she said.
She was right; I was pretty quick. The bags hung on the side of the table, and I would set up all my bundles on the table so that the cart was empty, and I would grab a bundle, turn it over, rip the plastic tab, fold one of the papers in half, then roll it, and slide it into the bag. Then I’d toss the bag, open end facing me into the cart.
“After you fold the paper, you gotta roll it,” I said. “That way it slides into the bag easier.” She would just fold them in half and then try to wiggle them into the bag. “And it’s better if you turn the stack over, that way you can see the front of the paper through the bag.”
“I just woke up,” she said. “I always wake up right before I get here, and I’m so tired, it feels like I’m still dreaming. Like, before, I was dreaming about wrapping Christmas presents, putting them in boxes and writing cards for them. And there were cinnamon rolls in the oven, but I didn’t even recognize the house I was in. It was like another life. I was wearing someone else’s pajamas.”
“That sounds like an all right dream,” I said.
“And now here I am, wrapping newspapers, putting them in the bags, and it feels like I’m still in the dream.”
I was done with my papers, but I figured I should wait for her.
“There was something stressful about the presents. They were late or something, I was in a rush. And I suck at wrapping presents. They were sloppy, and it was actually kind of a nightmare.”
I jumped up and sat on my table, looking at her more intently. She was so high, gone off blues, rambling in the opiate stream, feeling that whisper-spine tingle and the gentle itch on her skin. I let my mind run for a second. I had some money now. I cashed all my checks at Amscot and kept the bills hidden in a lockbox under my bed at the halfway house. She took off her sweatshirt, and I could see her track marks, and my heart started beating fast the way it does.
She said, “Where does it end?”
“What?” I asked.
“The routine. Wake up, go to work, go to bed. Sometimes it just feels so stupid.”
I nodded. I thought about kissing her and shooting blues. If I stayed away from the uppers, I thought, I could probably keep my mind intact. I imagined us living in a motel room, coming in to run our routes every day, and it didn’t seem so bad.
She finished up and we wheeled our carts to our beat-up cars.
“Where’s your route again?” she asked.
“I go south, couple neighborhoods down there and some apartment complexes,” I said.
She nodded slowly.
“I got these awful nursing homes though. I gotta go in and deliver the papers door to door on the apartments. It’s a pain. And the places smell like old people,” I said.
We packed the papers into our cars, piled them up as much as we could in grabbing distance from the driver’s seats, and said bye. I sat at the wheel for a minute, in a daydream, and when I reached for the shifter, I realized I had forgotten to put my keys in the ignition. I lit a cigarette and tried to just focus on my route. I had started timing myself. I had a yellow stopwatch that I would start as soon as I got into the car. I was shaving minutes off my time each night. I liked this competitive element, trying to beat my personal best. It felt like I was mastering something. Like I was in charge of the night.
As I did the nursing home, I was still thinking about oxys, about watching my blood bloom in the chamber of the needle and slamming it back down into myself. About that heart-soaring feeling and the lightness of it all. So I started to force myself to think about school, and my hands, ink-stained black from the rolling and the folding, were working independently of my head, ripping holes in the plastic and hanging the papers on the doorknobs. At first, I had to carry a sheet of paper with me to tell me which apartments got papers and which didn’t, but I had been doing it for a few months now and I’d memorized the sheet a while ago. I needed three duffel bags full of papers to do the first complex, and I had one slung on each shoulder and the other in my right hand, I’d grab the papers with my left, pop a hole with my thumb, and hang it. I didn’t need to use my brain for it anymore, and so I had taken to studying while I ran my route.
I put a paper on 208, 211, 214. A little farther, 233, 238, 245.
Not studying from a book, but just thinking over all the material from the classes, quizzing myself, mostly about bio or chem, but Faulkner kept jumping in, interrupting me — when the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again. I had a test on respiration coming up, and I was going over the chains in my head. I was thinking about the diagrams — glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, the electron transport chain, imagining all the energy moving around according to the strict figures: the circle, the pathways, the enzymes, and the channels. They taught the cell like a factory, like the newspaper warehouse, the folding tables, the route. This was useful for memorization, but I couldn’t really believe everything actually looked like that up close. It was too neat. The citric acid cycle, it can’t just be a tiny circle of movement inside the cell, that doesn’t seem realistic. It was some afterward thing, mapped onto the absolute strangeness and wonder.
301, 309, 310, 318, 322, farther, 341, 347, 348, 349, 350.
It was making it hard to study, the circle and the chain and the diagrams made it seem like a class for kids, like it was so oversimplified that it was worthless, just little colored pictures, purple and yellow and red, to test my memorization skills. When I left the building, I still had one newspaper left in my bag, which meant I had missed a door, but I didn’t go back in. Energy goes in, energy goes through a channel, energy gets altered, energy gets used — newspaper comes in, David folds it, David bags it, David throws it, some guy reads it, some guy trashes it. And by the time I got into my car, I gave it up completely, and I was just thinking about Faulkner. I was reciting the passage in my head and under my breath, but I was getting louder in the car. The radio was off.
1240 San Jose St., 1252, 1261, right turn, left turn, 1313 San Ferdinand, 1321.
I had both windows down in the warm night, I was rolling down the street twenty mph, holding newspapers with both hands, tossing out the right window, out the left. I bump the steering wheel with my knee if I need to. My throws had gotten perfect, every paper chopping sideways through the air, spinning like a flat planet, and skidding right to the doorstep. It was a practice, every day the paper weighed something different. Lightest on Monday, then Tuesday, Wednesday has inserts, Thursday has coupons, Friday is light again, and Sundays are the heaviest. Each day needs a different throw. This was my favorite part:
1550 San Obispo, 1552, 1553, 1554, 1556, 1558, 1559, 1561. Right, right, left, right, right, right, left, left.
There was something so satisfying about nailing that section. When the route manager first showed me my route, he did this neighborhood first because it was a little out of the way, but I always saved it for last so I could finish on the San Obispo pattern, a right-left symphony finale. Hitting it felt like hitting the very end of a good book, when the words disappear on the last page, and you stop pedaling and just coast off into the white, into the air, into beautiful catharsis, finally alone, finally released from the burden of gravity and all of those laws and boundaries. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.
I still had my one paper left, the one I had forgotten to deliver at the nursing home. And on my way home, I drove over to Bruce’s house. I parked my car and walked up to his porch with the paper, looked at the swing where I used to sit waiting for McKay, my shack in the back, black and alone, shifting slightly in the wind. I ripped a hole in the plastic, opened the screen door and hung the paper on his doorknob. Whenever I had an extra, I would do this, just to let him know I was still working, still showing up, still OK. I hadn’t seen him around in a while. At first, when we were both going to meetings, we would hang out afterward sometimes, shoot the shit and smoke cigarettes. I hoped his schedule had just changed, but I could see a light on in a back room, and I knew he would never be up this early. And I thought about him in there, smoking meth, sitting at his computer, howling at the ghosts closing in at the corners of his sight. And it felt, for a moment, like he and I were sharing some corner of our souls, like whatever he was doing to his body, he was also doing to mine. The meth was traveling through his lungs and into my consciousness, and I could feel my heart race, the blood overflow my ears. I wanted to kick the door in, to gather him up in my arms the way he had done to me and carry him to a bed and let him rest and get him food. To buy him an ice cream cone and just let him know that I was there. But another part of me, it wanted to go in and sit next to him. To take the stem in my own hand and disappear back into the chemical smoke. To disappear from work and class and the halfway house. To never go back and to run myself down to bone again, like I had done so many times before.
I looked at the doorknob, and the paper hanging there. I held my breath, and I asked the world for guidance, I asked into the dawn. And I let my breath go, and I found something, a hidden reserve of will that was foreign, like a gift I forgot to open, and I thought that leaving the paper would be enough. He would see it whenever he left, and he would remember. I decided that the next day, I would bring up that I’m sober around the girl at work. Just mention it, and even it if it made me feel uncomfortable, she would at least know. It could maybe plant the seed if she ever decided she wanted to try to stop.
Fifty-three minutes, and it was 5:05. I went to my car and I drove out to the sunrise, to the beach, into the warm dawn with the windows down, feeling the empty air against my face.
I ate a sandwich on the hood of my car, and I changed into my bathing suit, enacting the same routine I did every morning. I waded out, and I floated on my back and watched the light fill the air, the sunrise from behind the condos, the tails of fish rippling the water, their little jumps. Birds whistling in the morning. And the sun, which I revolve around, which pulls me in and holds me and spins me, it rose up, and I floated with my ears under the water, the sounds of the Earth muffled or dead, just the low humming of underwater in my ears. I imagine that the land is gone, and the planet is just how it used to be, one hot sea, and I am, like everything else, pre-evolved, a single-celled organism in a fertile culture, waiting for my million-year march up the evolutionary ladder, bobbing and doing nothing, surviving, waiting to crawl out and grow legs and arms and a fat brain.
Watching the sunrise, I thought it might be the end of the world, like the sun was crashing into us and sending everything to hell. The papers I’d deliver tomorrow would say just as much on the headlines. All the water in the sea would evaporate and the plants and trees would wither and die, dehydrated, endless desert top to bottom, side to side. I’d die, and so would everything else, and our physical forms would dry out to dust and blow away in the wind, my dust and everyone else’s mixed up and dancing in the wind, until the sun would finally set our dust ablaze, and the fire would raze the whole planet down and down into a little ball of char, and then, poof, like old and spent firewood it would dust up, too, and blow away in some interstellar wind and go God knows where and mix with God knows what, and I’d not be a single thing and neither would anything else.
But it passed, the apocalyptic feeling, and the sun just went regular. And so did I. It stayed far enough away to keep the water like water, to keep the Earth like Earth, spinning two ways like a carnival ride filled with enchanted life, the pull not so hard as to grind me up and not so loose as to let me fly away, sharing time and space with other people being pulled with the same perfect tension. And as this becomes revealed to me, I see the rest of it revealed as well, time laid out like a map. I can point here or there and I can clump up little bits and separate them from the others, compartmentalize them, or I can spread it out in a trail, and I can watch it flow forward like water from a tap. The sun revealed to me the address and schedule of my heart — here now, later there.
On my back with the water in my ears, wearing the Gulf like giant earmuffs, I let the running record of my life slowly fill the newfound quietness in my head. The day, my most recent actions, the most visible ones, results of plot chains extending deep into my subconscious, into sense memories, which, deeper and more inexplicable, more potent than other memories, steep my mind like bones in broth, before being removed and forgotten, but their taste lingers in my consciousness, fills the depth of the day as if they’d never left, as if I were sucking on the bone directly. What are these bones? What strange animal did they come from?
The ice in the cooler is melted, the drinks mostly drunk, mostly empty cans of beer and soda. I could be five, I could be nine. I don’t remember. My mom is in a low beach chair, and I am next to her. My brothers and my dad are standing at the water’s edge where the waves sometimes are and sometimes aren’t. I stand up and walk into the water, so that if I start to cry, no one — not even myself — will notice. It will all just be salty water on my face.
We are there, staring out over the Gulf, watching the sunset. Everything is still, the air isn’t moving, and the waves, one inch tall, are gently gliding across the sand like a careful hand over wet clay. It is a cloudless sunset, one whose colors do not reverberate across the sky but instead stay contained to the low parts, the harsh line where the sea meets the sky, but as the light evens out, so does the line, and the sunset, not the typical orange pandemonium but a dim, pink light only a few inches off the sea, is so subtle that you could easily miss it. So subtle that it doesn’t even make me sad as I say goodbye under my breath. As it drops, it looks like the dark blue above is pushing the bright color down, rather than it being drawn down by the sinking sun like a shade.
I can hear my dad saying to my brother the same thing he always says on days like this, “These are the perfect conditions for a green flash. Without clouds, the light will bend but not break. It won’t be scattered.”
I go into the water, and I dunk my head. And as I watch the sun go from circle to semicircle to arc, I can tell it is going to go green. I look back at my parents, at my siblings, and I can see that they see it, too. It drips down, and part of the sun gets shaved off into a little green fleck at the top of the orb. After the sun is gone, only the green dust remains, popping for a moment before it’s gone.
What it is, the refraction of light. When the sun is low, its light passes through more of the Earth’s atmosphere, and the light gets bent and all of the colors contained within are separated. When there are no clouds and all of the other unseen conditions are in harmony, a person can see it, but supposedly it happens at every sunset. The cool colors — blue, green, and violet — are refracted more than the warm ones because they have shorter wavelengths. All of this, my dad excitedly tells us after we see it, as he has told us before, before and after times that we didn’t see it. But now that I am finally seeing it, the explanation doesn’t mean much to me. It is the flash itself that I think about. It could be tiny aliens captaining the sun’s descent, it could be the color of the sun getting swallowed by the ocean, it could be anything, and I wouldn’t care. What is important is that strange hue of green, that light, light emerald which I had never seen before, that shines and glimmers and defies my eyes and then disappears into the sea. Waiting for something I had never seen, trusting that it was real, waiting with discipline and diligence, and being rewarded, that was what I see refracted to me in the green, a drop of strange and beautiful confirmation. That my standing there matters, that it is important, that someone who waits and watches can be rewarded with colors and magic.
After it comes, our little family unit becomes like the cult of the Green Flash. We chatter about it, and as the night gets darker, the trance gets heavier, and we silently play in the black surf and each individually thinks about it, the sunset. Even my mother, who almost never goes into the water, who usually sat on her folding chair and read, and when I or my brother would run up to show her a crab or a shell would put her book down and look at the treasure with genuine interest, even she is in the dark shallow water playing in the moonlight. And as the air and the sea get darker, our splashes start to illuminate more green, bluish green. Running your hand under the water reveals a trail of green dust under the surface. The waves, as they break, send sparkling lines of glitter across the water. It is bioluminescence, my dad says, tiny plankton that store light from the day and shoot it out when they get stimulated by motion as a way of scaring off predators. But once again, the reason doesn’t matter. Throwing water into the air looks like lobbing a handful of diamonds into the night. My brother has glitter in his long and curly hair, and when he splashes me, for a second, my body glitters too, little sparks like all of the potential electricity in my body is becoming kinetic. And farther out, the Gulf, like the map of one electric brain, the waves of the second break pulsing and bright in the sleepy water, synaptic activity flashing with all the subtle movements of water and animal.
I see the silhouette of a pelican floating in the moonlight, and I wade toward it. When I get as close as I can, I push my palm along the surface and throw shining water on it. As it shoves off and flaps away, for a split second, as it takes to the sky, its body is full of sparks and it shoots electricity off the tips of its wings before it disappears into the hot night. He flies out over the soft and radiant white sand where the coquinas tumble in with the waves and burrow lazily with the ebb, into the shore where the sand fleas tunnel blindly and thoughtlessly, over the sea oats quivering in the night wind, the thick tangle of sea grape trees and banyans farther inland, out over the parking lots where families pack into their cars, collapsing umbrellas and herding children, loading coolers and chairs and rinsing off their feet, slamming trunks and doors, adjusting mirrors, waiting in traffic to leave, sitting on vinyl seats in sandy, wet spandex. He flies over the bridges where the families speed home, amber headlights extending over purple roads, bodies burnt and happy, heavy from the sun’s tender beating, out over the boats humming gasoline and cutting green triangular wakes in the black water; boats still, with engines drawn up, drifting in the current, and their passengers casting lines or weighted nets; more boats gently docked, slapping the tide with each light swell of a wave, straining and tugging their mooring lines, causing them to creak like bullfrogs in a swamp. Out over condos and complexes, their facades populated by a mosaic of windows colored with different shades of light — soft yellow, bright white, television blue, and, some, the old snowbirds’, with black glass, dark and asleep — lone lights in the deep night of beach land and coastal forest, and the raccoons and the trash cans, the king snakes asleep in the trees, the pelican flies over all of this and looks up into the night sky, higher into it, into the ends of the hot subtropical air where the atmosphere gets thin and cold, into the stars, the Milky Way, that electric scar jagging across the night sky, the stars falling one by one from nowhere into a deeper nowhere, and above all that frigid space — bird heaven, where the God of Pelicans presides over him and makes sure he eats his fish and floats as he is supposed to, and he looks down into the Intracoastal channel and swoops low away from all that cold black absence and the higher heaven above, and he lands on a pylon, a remnant of a dock whose boards collapsed into the shallow water years ago and is now just a collection of stumps stuck deep into the sand, poking a few feet out of the water. He roosts on an unoccupied post and, with the others, shakes his feathers, drying off, tucking his beak behind his wing, and he closes his blue eyes, and I shoot my imagination back to the water, to the salty warmth on my body, and the plankton and their glitter, and my family. I splash my brother with some water, and we laugh, and I put some in my mouth and spit it out straight up into the air in a line like a twinkling fountain.
I think about what my father said, all the reasons behind the magic, all the molecular little happenstances of the green flash and the glitter, only they don’t seem so cold and sterile. They are, themselves, beautiful too, and it is as if all the tiny unseen creatures of the ocean saw the green flash that night along with us, and they stored the memory and the light deep inside their bodies, and this was their fleeting way of re-creating it, that temporary light, of trying to express it and offer it back to the sun. Of course, the color isn’t exactly right, but it is color, and it is more than you would expect from those little dancing creatures that are as old as the Earth and the sea. It is more than enough, just to see them try to reiterate the strange, transient beauty of that particular sunset through their ancient and instinctual planktonic art, to see the water alive with rhythms beyond the scope of my understanding.