A red-winged wasped grazed the head of the yellowing wheat grass, bore down, and skimmed the sand. It fluttered up and disappeared like a sprite.
We had driven right through Visalia, Madera, and Pigsley. We talked about the moon and the planets and Andean condors. I looked out the window at the vineyards and the neatly arranged almond trees. Row after row flashed by like a nickelodeon.
The hills were still, well defined by dead streams and dry silt. The oaks stood their ground gallantly, black and still-in the cold, in the rain, in the sun, by some clouds.
Ah.
There is nowhere I can go that is more sacred than the hallowed halls of shelves and tiles in the library. I can lose myself there–and yet, somehow, that is the only place where I actually feel present. No stupid distractions. No idiotic sounds escape from my mouth. No Myspace, no Facebook, no compulsions. Only me and a book. I discover new worlds.
I am in awe of the expansiveness and quality of the library. It occurred to me today to look up several of the books I’ve been wanting to read but cannot find in the bookstores I visit from time to time–and don’t have money to buy, anyway. And I found them. I checked out three today:
I feel alive with passion and drive. I just need to get my ass back to the library and devour it all.
“Do you love me?” I ask, leaning or sitting against stone steps facing Lake Michigan with street lamps hitting the water with yellow light and turning the naturally green water a more light green – a more pea-soup color green. “Tell me the truth.” I say now as she stares outward, maybe into the sky for a moment where one or two stars shine weakly, depressingly; outdone by the city lights from the west.
“I don’t know” she says and wind from off the lake moves her dyed-red hair across her eyes and she brushes it away.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” I ask, prodding her for an answer, any answer, just a simple “Yes” or “No.”
“I don’t think I should answer that.” She says, looking away and trying to hide her face from my eyes that are turned toward her and staring.
“When you told me earlier that when your boyfriend asked you whether you were more upset about cheating on him, or possibly losing a friendship, and you said cheating, but told me that you thought you had lied… Did you mean it?” I ask.
“Yes” she says sternly, or not even thinking about the answer, or as though it had been rehearsed and that she knew the question before I had ever asked it. She shifts her weight from her left side to her right, towards me and asks, “Do you regret what happened?” and she stares at her hands, rubbing them, warming them from the cold wind that I only half-block from hitting her.
“No, not really.” I respond after a brief pause and then I say, “Well, I do, but not everything.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, her features looking confused, numb and she sniffles.
“When I woke this morning and I turned my head and you were lying there, I didn’t feel so empty, I didn’t feel so alone.” And maybe if I did regret anything, I regretted falling in love with her so quickly. But, what do I know about love? I don’t even know what love is.
And just as quickly as the conversation began, we were walking down Chicago Avenue, towards Tempo Café where I would order a coffee and she would probably just drink ice water. Sitting down in a booth, I push our menus to the side and we’re facing each other and she doesn’t look happy. Her face is blush and her eyes are glossy, and her hair is a little unkempt from the wind, but I still think she’s beautiful.
“Where do we go from here?” I ask just after an Hispanic busboy pours my coffee and our waitress takes our menus away and doesn’t make eye contact with me.
“I don’t know.” She responds.
“I had this dream tonight, before we met at the Lake, maybe about seven, or eight… I’m not sure.” I say and take a drink of my coffee and want a cigarette badly. “I had this dream where we were eating at some restaurant, and I had forgotten to leave a tip, so I went back. But, before I could leave the tip, I woke up and you were calling me.” I finish, and she’s looking at me and doesn’t know what I mean.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“I’ll never be okay until I can figure this all out.”
“Figure what out?” she asks, putting her spoon into her ice water and picking up ice and dropping it back into the glass.
“Everything,” I say, “Whether or not I can live with these feelings.”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” She responds, putting her spoon back down on her napkin and pushing her hair back across her ear.
“What am I suppose to do?” I ask. “Keep going on like this, like nothing happened?” and I finish my coffee and the Hispanic busboy fills my coffee back-up and I read “Pedro” on his nametag in bold, misaligned letters that are fading and beginning to peel.
“I don’t know.” She says, of course she says.
“I think I love you.” I say “And I don’t know what to do about that.” She plays with her silverware now and an unopened cream. “Tell me what to do.” I ask, “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
She continues flipping the Homan Creamer and finally responds, “Just be my friend.”
And we’re riding on the L, the Red-Line, where I will transfer at Washington to the Blue-Line, but where she will take all the way to Cermack-Chinatown. At Clark and Lake, the stop before Washington, she smiles at me, and then as we get to Washington, I say, “Goodbye Marianne.”
Rising from my seat, her eyes follow me out the door and as I walk past where she is sitting on the outside of the train, on the platform, I put my hand on the glass, and maybe she was crying, but I couldn’t really tell.
“Doors Closing.” An automated voice echoes through scratchy speakers, and the doors close and the train moves. I lose sight of her a few seconds later and the train passes and I walk down the stairs and through a corridor to the Blue-Line.
A blind man sits in the center of the long corridor, decorated with moldy yellow tiles that probably haven’t been cleaned in years, and he smells thickly of urine and shit. It bleeds into my nostrils.
“Got any change?” he asks as I am walking by. I ignore him, even though I am the only footsteps in the corridor and he continues to stare forward, and I feel badly as the a Blue-Line train pulls into the station and I board and as soon as we go above ground, I get a text message from Marianne and it says, “Will I ever see you again?”
“Probably not.” I text back, and I close my eyes and lean my head against the glass, watching the cars and lights and buildings passing by in montage, and I feel like I could sleep forever.
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Introduction: Each week in my seminar on neuropsychology we discuss a new disorder or family of disorders. It often jars me into a newfound appreciation of my relative normalcy. However, it often also invites me to contemplate what it would be like to have an important part of my brain not function. I suspect that sort of contemplation prompted the odd dream that I had last night, in which I experienced something similar to what patient H.M., who had his hippocampus removed to curb seizures, experienced—which was an inability to encode new memories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient)
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I am living on a farm with my mom and my sister. It is lush and green, and I am happy. I spend most of my time atop a hill. We are harvesting tomatoes and transporting them by vehicle across a field to one of the only three buildings in sight. When we get to the building, I place a tube attached to the vehicle inside a storage bin, and my mom does something inside the vehicle, and tomatoes start shooting through the tube into the storage bin. I feel utter surprise that they do not break and bruise.
My mom notices my surprise, as if I have never seen this chore done before. She takes me aside and pulls out a battered photograph. It takes me a second to recognize it. It is our field, my home, the only thing I know. But it is different. Where there is now a smart red barn in the middle of the field, the field in the photograph is empty. More than empty, it is barren; there is no grass, no life. The field in the photograph is dead. It jars me to see it. I feel confused. I don’t understand how the field could have been that way. My mom says, “You don’t remember the field this way, do you?” I say vehemently, “No!” But she keeps talking, gently, and I understand what she explains to me: that because of something wrong with my brain, I can form no new memories. I’m living constantly in a fleeting present that will immediately drop from existence. I feel swindled, and I don’t know how many times my mom has explained this to me before, futilely, for I forget everything. I don’t know what I don’t know. I feel despair, but also a strange resignation. What can trying to fight this reality accomplish? Even this moment soon will pass from me to reside in the same place as those moments that never happened at all.
April 8th 2006
Anaheim, California
Pacing in the backyard, it runs its hands over its face like those men in the movies trying to compose themselves. It glances about for a moment. Yes, it glances at an axe driven into a stump. It stands supported by a tight channel it has hewn into the wood and if you were to flick it with a hand, the axe would ring like a tuning fork. This is exactly what it thinks early in the morning after a period of sleep, when it has become accustomed to sleep, and rises surpsised at what it is, surprised that it should be at all or that it once was, pacing to get its juices going. Yawning and twitching in morning air. For the first time in a year it has really looked at something. Maybe it has even examined itself. Now it sits on the toilet with drawers drawn, scribbling this down. In crabbed writing, with a stick pen, on a dogeared piece of paper. Now it makes a list of goals for the day. It has been raining all week. The brush is wet outside, but if it waits a few hours the brush will dry and it will only have to pick up dry brush. You see, it has also been windy recently, and the wind felled a cypress tree. It had to chop it up with its axe. And then the authorities came and said, You had better clean up them logs or we are gonna slap you with a fine. So, it worried about the fine and it paced in the garden and it tried to remember who or what it was on a Saturday morning.
