Going through my files tonight, I came across this crude map I'd drawn of my immediate neighborhood, back in 2008. It was obviously meant to be somewhat humorous, but it was also meant to illustrate a particular problem at the time.
What happened was, I had found a set of knives (marked in red text, above) on the ground outside my bedroom window. This was disturbing, but it was not possible to tell if someone had been lurking outside the window for some nefarious purpose, or if they had been hidden there after a crime, or they had been flung there by someone needing to get rid of them fast (for instance, a parolee who'd just seen a cop).
We took the knives to the police station, and while the cops seemed unimpressed, it was still worrying. I drew this map illustrating how all three scenarios had potential, and posted it to an internet forum so my online friends could give it a look. (For the record, most people thought scenario 3 - someone running from the Forlorn Intersection had flung them there - was the correct one and since nothing ever came of it, I assume they were right.)
Looking back on it now, though, what I see is a psychogeographical map of a fringe area. Fringe areas are of particular interest to me, being transitional places where one thing becomes another. Fringe areas are often overlooked, even though they are around us all the time. Entrance ways and exits, alleys, the outskirts of towns. Fringe areas are also frequently places where crime is more likely to occur - though I hasten to add, my family never personally experienced any crime there.
There were a few transitions occurring in the scope of this map. First (and most noticeable in person) was the petering out of the gentrified neighborhood of restored houses into unrestored houses and then, across the tracks (off the map) into dusty slums. There was an overlapping of social backgrounds and economic status. Then there is the blending of traditionally racially identified areas. Many different types of people came together in this street.
Studying the map (and also from memory) the true fringe area must have been the Forlorn Intersection. I knew quite a few very nice people who lived on the other side, but that intersection - just a drab little road, really - was always the place where things went down.
It's interesting to note that right on the edge stood the convent house - A Poor Clare monastery, to be exact. Quiet, peaceful, shining like a beacon on prayer nights. No one ever, ever messed with the Poor Clares. Regardless of status, they were there for everyone.
All these years later, it occurs to me that there should be many more things marked on the map. Like the house with stained-glass windows, or the silent hedges. I feel lucky that some of these things are captured in the early part of this blog (which was kind of the point, really). But there are other things that aren't so easy to capture. Dust and silt. Humming streetlights.The church carillon that rang every day at 8, 12 and 5. These are little things that make up the secret nature of a place.
One white hot summer day, my friend Arturo was riding past on his bicycle and we stopped to talk. He waved a copy of the local newspaper. "Did you hear? About the creature?" he asked, pointing at the front page picture of the Cuero chupacabra. We both thought it was fascinating, but agreed that sometimes things were better if we never learned the whole truth.
If I could, I would put that on the map, too.
(apologies - I ended up posting this yesterday before it was finished. (long story))
A friend rang the other morning. He said, I'm calling from inside your old apartment. They are about to tear the building down.
And just like that, the place we used to live moves from tangible to intangible. It exists solely in memory now
Live long enough, and it's bound to happen. We don't only lose people, but we lose places, too. It's been happening at a steady clip as long as I can remember. It's progress, and commerce, urban development and all those other things. The grocery store of our daily errands is now a call center, the club where we used to dance becomes a gym.
If we believe in an afterlife, we can imagine that our lost loved ones are with us in spirit. Aside from the occasional time slip and trans-dimensional gas station, though, the existence of remembered spaces is far more nebulous than even a ghost. Unless, perhaps, the shades of long-ago shoppers still patrol the rows of telephonists, reaching for loaves of bread circa 1996.
The house of memory is a peculiar place; everything lives on top of each other. The boundaries of such a house are permeable and strange. The empty room is never really empty. Minus space time and plus soul time, as Nabakov once said.
You wouldn't know it but there is someone hiding in that picture above. Of course you wouldn't, because he has concealed himself behind the bench. You could raise a legitimate point and say it doesn't matter, since until now, only he knew it and I knew it. If either of us forgets, is the meaning of the photo lost? If a 10 year-old boy hides behind a bench, sometime in the summer of 2001, and no one remembers, does he disappear forever?
For all practical purposes one could say yes, but as long as there are tales of long-dead monks roaming ruined churchyards and Roman soldiers marching along no longer existent roads, then I am not so sure.
The place had stood for 30 years, housing any number of college students, young marrieds, the elderly and refugees alike. Hardly any time at all in the great scheme of things, but more than enough time for the drama of human life to play out. I would be delighted to learn, in 50 years time, of reports of disembodied laughter and running footsteps at twilight, or the sound of splashing from a nonexistent pool. I can even imagine the astonished murmurs as a mirage of the lighted corner store sign (now also gone) appears in the night sky.
And by then, only the old folks will remember why.
It was about 10 minutes 'til midnight, and I had settled into watch Late Night With Conan O'Brien when I realized the electric bill was due. I didn't have a car in those days, but judging the distance between my doorstep and the utility company, there was just enough time to drop a check into the night deposit before deadline if I walked fast enough. I grabbed my sweater and scampered off down the hill.
Walking through a small town late at night can be a special experience. The quiet streets, empty shops, traffic lights shining in the dark. Even the striped barber shop pole curling upwards into nothing, straight out of a Ray Bradbury story. It's these kind of things that a night walker treasures. Though at this point I was mainly concerned with getting downtown before the bell struck twelve.
The fastest route would take me past the Protestant church, with its own lighted clock tower, which could be seen from my bedroom window on Winter nights when there were no leaves on the trees. The glow from the gas lamps was soft and comforting and I wasn't at all afraid.
For some reason I don't know - maybe a windstorm or something like that - several of the frosted panes of glass on the west facing clock (the left side, above) were gone at that time, replaced temporarily with clear ones. So on the night of which I speak, the areas between the 7 and 12 could be seen through, though not much of interest was ever visible - except on that particular night.
It was only natural that I would look at the clock as I approached the church, worried about the time as I was, but I was not expecting to see what appeared to be looking back. A huge, grey, leathery-winged creature leaned on the edge of the window, peering down at me with an affable grin. I was startled, to put it mildly. Not only was it unlikely to see what looked unnervingly like a real, live gargoyle, but even more unlikely to see one in the tower of a Protestant church. It did occur to me, before I sped away, that at the very least it looked friendly.
I've never maintained that what I saw that night was real, and not just a trick of the light, or an instance of pareidolia, or even some piece of statuary that had been stored in the tower for reasons unknown. Maybe it was a hallucination, inspired by an unconscious whimsy that the local Protestants were sadly lacking in gargoyles. I've never maintained it was real, but on my way back from the utility company, I still took a different route home.
That was a long time ago now, and I suppose I'll never know what I saw in the tower that night. There didn't seem to be any way to find out. Pulling the minister aside and saying "...so, about that winged monster in your clock..." would probably be a real conversation killer.
Sometimes in life, there are questions just better left unasked.
It's been one of those frustrating weeks, when the behavior of other humans seems endlessly, irritatingly confusing. Do people really not know what they do or why they do it? Do they really lack so much insight into their own foibles or worse, hypocrisy? This eternal headscratching is one of the pitfalls of the bookish introvert (me) who must spend the requisite several hours a day in relentless examination of this thing they (horror of horrors!) don't understand.
When my overwrought brain gets stuck on this particular spin-cycle, a memory or two will come to the surface, much like lint from the towel you didn't know was buried in the bottom of the washer. A couple of years ago, such frothings produced the saga of Heinrich and Peggy; this time - due to a specific situation that's been developing - it's coughed up a story about my friend Catherine, or more properly, the effect Catherine had on men.
Catherine was (well, is) a fun girl, beautiful, very clever, and as such had a cadre of friends. Male friends especially, but female friends, too. I'd known her for a long time and very well, so...how can I put this?...it was normal for Catherine's male friends (the heterosexual ones, anyway) to be in love with her. She has a way of making a man feel like he's the most fascinating thing on the planet, so whenever her lovely green eyes lighted on him, he'd get this massive ego-boost and come over all soppy in love.
This was just par for the course, and not something it ever occurred to me to think about overmuch. It's just a Catherine thing. In other words - don't take it personally, she's like that with everyone.
On occasion it did come up, when one of the guys came to me hoping for an inside track of Catherine's affections, or just to talk about their anguished unrequited crush. Then I would shift to the motherly role, giving them a pat and talking in soothing tones. I did not give them false hope - in those days, Catherine herself was suffering a bout of crazy love for one particular man, and frankly, no one else had a chance in hell. Oh, I'm sure I was kinder than that, but that's the gist. For her part, Catherine was glad I was there as a comforter of desperate love angst - that way she didn't have to hear awkward confessions like "I feel like a giant blinking neon penis whenever she walks into the room." ;)
This was the situation, back in Catherine's single years, and as I say, par for the course. This is not what's been preying on my mind, the lint in my mental load of washing. No, it's something else. It's that there were other men, too - also "friends" of a sort, but not so close, more on the periphery of Catherine's circle, and they were not like the sweet yet passive buddies who came to me with their feelings, or even just garden-variety friends. These were the ones about whom Catherine would sometimes say, "don't leave me alone with him" or "if he calls, tell him I'm not here".
There was no more promise of a romantic relationship with these guys then the others, but something was different. I could feel a cold, hard-edged rage coming from them, and the rage was not directed at Catherine - it was directed at me. This was an uncomfortable situation, and I tried hard to understand it. I knew they didn't like me and worked extra hard to be nice - though of course mindful that my friend did not feel comfortable alone with them - but the overwhelming feeling I kept getting was that I had ruined everything, that the only thing keeping said guy and Catherine apart was me, champion cock-blocker of all time.
There were only a few of these guys, but that was plenty. It's never a pleasant situation to feel so much hate flowing your way. Had I been more sophisticated at the time, I likely would have identified this as the kind of red flag situation akin to the the man who fawns over his date at dinner but denigrates the waitstaff. But if I'd been more sophisticated, I probably wouldn't feel the need to write this. Strange as it sounds, it's possible to be naive and knowing at the same time. It's the nature and sensation of being hated - that particular sort of hatred (disgust? derision?) that's been puzzling me. Being the target of a sort of blame I didn't understand.
This is where it gets muddled. It's hard to put into words. The best I can do is to say that, in the eyes of these men, Catherine was a sparkling treasure, and I was clearly some slimy thing that had crawled out of the bubbling muck at Innsmouth and was STOPPING THEM FROM CLAIMING THEIR PRIZE, DAMMIT!
But the thing was, I knew this wasn't true (about Catherine, not the Innsmouth thing). Catherine wasn't interested in them that way. I wouldn't have been there if she was. I was only there because she wasn't. For Pete's sake, who would bring along a friend if they were trying to make a sexual conquest? No one with any sense, and certainly not Catherine. So what did they think was going to happen?
And more to the point - was I really that awful, so wretched in comparison? Is my low self-esteem justified? These are the questions that keeps the bookish introvert up at night.
Long experience has taught that whenever something is muddled, there has usually been a failure of logic somewhere, or some clue that's been missed. In this case, the kind of clue that your average fourth-graderwould have picked up, but must have slid right past me at the time. These particular guys - no doubt the more aggressive, possessive type - had misread the light in Catherine's eyes as romantic (or at least sexual) interest. In their minds, she must have been a sure thing, if it hadn't been for "the friend". Because the human psyche is full of peculiarities and blind spots, they didn't get that she was like that with everyone, or that she wasn't a possession to be claimed, or that this very attitude made them even more unappealing to her. Hey, there's nothing wrong with me, so it must be Cthulhu over there at fault. Not questioning why Cthulhu was there in the first place.
Well, it makes sense, but it's really not that hard to grasp. Surely I must have known this at an intuitive level? I'm not that dumb. Yet the subject still seemed muddled. Logic was still failing me somewhere, and therefore I had to worry it like a dog with a bone. This sort of obsession always means something is wrong, a blind spot in my own psyche. What was it that I couldn't see?
It seemed irrational, on the face of it. If someone is a close friend of the object of desire, it stands to reason that it would be foolish to alienate them from the start. After all, they're in a position to have information that one might want to know, aren't they? A potential way to someone's heart? Even from that strictly Machiavellian perspective, it makes no sense. And then I understood. The reason I fielded so much angst from Catherine's lovelorn buddies was the same reason for the cold-blooded disdain from those other guys.
This quiet girl, sitting there, contained one particular piece of information - that they would never, ever sleep with Catherine.
Maybe it's just one of those nights - too still, too quiet. Heaviness hangs over everything, like a watchful fog. Outside, two owls (great horned ones, by the sound of them) call to each other from each end of the street. A bad omen, according to legend. Witch birds on the prowl.
Then again, roosters crowing at night are a bad omen, too, and if that were true, this whole neighborhood would be doomed. Regardless, I can't be too careful. Last night I dreamt about dark magic: a handmade doll, with burning candles choking the air with smoke. One of those dreams you can't shake, no matter how hard you try.
Time to circle the house with salt and say a few prayers, perhaps. Stuff my pockets with ash leaves and rosemary sprigs. Wave some sage around. Ring a brass bell. Write the name of my enemy and tear it into nine pieces on the edge of town. Why not?
It all seems perfectly reasonable, on witchy nights like these.
I was the last to notice that something was wrong about the woman in the corner apartment. She was only very aged, I thought, and maybe a bit out of touch with reality. Lawrence said she gave him the creeps, though, he didn't like walking past her door. Angela said she was crazy, but when I asked how she knew, she just said, "I know."
The first time I understood was when the topiary angel appeared, set up in the garden facing the woman's windows. I should say, it was once a topiary angel. Now it was something else, and we felt cold when we walked by. It still had the vague shape of wings at its back, covered in ragged greenery like the rest, but its face was greyish with mold.and its crown was a triad of spikes. It was no longer the thing it was meant to be, but had become something chilling and strange.
We could see the angel's dark shape beyond the ash trees, and learned to circumvent that part of the garden. Sometimes we'd forget though, and realize too late that we would have to cross its path.We'd hurry as quickly as we could, feeling the gaze from its eyeless, moldering face.
The woman watched from the window. At night, she would creep into the garden to talk to the shape in a low voice. Sometimes she would place objects inside its frame; marbles or bits of colored foil. Then she would take them away again.
Stephanie said, I want to get rid of it, just run by and snatch it and hurl it into the nearest dumpster. But I can't stand the thought of touching it.
The woman on the corner muttered and whispered. She talked about poison, how they all wanted to poison her. There was a strange smell in her apartment, in the vents. They had killed her dog, she said. But the angel was watching them.
She disappeared one night, the woman, along with the angel. Only the crown of spikes remained, wedged in the boughs of the ash tree. We all stood, staring, wanting to take it away but too afraid. Eventually, the crown disappeared too, and the fear at last began to fade from the garden.
In keeping with the previous post, Thanksgiving week brought a moment of unexpected department store oddness.
We were at a Target store in Houston, hunting for cans of Sterno. Everything was as you'd expect - one Target store being much like another Target store. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I was struck by a weird feeling, a sort of dizziness and many-layered deja vu. I said aloud, "jeez, that's weird" and the spouse said "yeah, I feel dizzy." We agreed there was something weird about just this one little spot, but could come to no conclusion about what it was.
While we were waiting for a worker (lovely man, very helpful) to find the Sterno, I snapped a photo of the deja vu inducing area, because, erm, that's what I do. Just in case there might be some clue there that would only be evident with study. As you can see, it's a photo of....coat hooks.
Nothing much exciting going on there. No obvious cause of odd sensations striking us in the housewares department. Maybe the stark black and white color scheme had something to do with it, or perhaps all the little holes in the pegboard caused some sort of visual overload.Who can tell? It was just one of those brief down-the-rabbit-hole moment that crop up seemingly just to keep you on your toes.
We paid for our cans of Sterno and left, and nothing else strange happened at all. Well, except the person in the next stall in the restroom unexpectedly shouted "whoo-hooo!" but probably that was nothing supernatural. ;)
It's one of those things that most people don't notice, or if they do, they don't mention it. Assuming, of course, that it exists, which some would say it doesn't.
Walking down the big shopping center on the edge of town, I told my companion to stop.
"Do you feel that?" I asked, hopefully.
He looked around, considering.
"yes" he said.
"well, what does it feel like?"
"like something important happened here."
There was nothing special about the place where we were standing. It was a nondescript spot toward the far end, somewhere between Petsmart and Ross dress-for-less. The shop-space nearest us was empty, and being that this was a fairly new shopping center, may never have been occupied at all. It was an unlikely place for happenings of importance, past or present.
I've long been fascinated by shopping centers, and it's nothing to do with shopping. There is something about them that haunts me. Maybe it's all the sharp edges and corridors and odd empty corners. One feels (well, I feel) some immeasurably distant past is there. Some sort of lost hope, maybe. An eternal lonely longing that settles in the eaves, regardless of all the people milling about below.
Perhaps it's the geometry of the place that evokes this feeling. Architecture that suggests hidden needs that might be fulfilled. There is a reason that psychologists are used to help design shopping malls. It's all meant to direct and disorient, whatever will lead the customers to buying and spending more. Personally, though, I've had my doubts about this being the reason for my own reaction, as these mysterious feelings never lead me to think about shopping. They only make me question the nature of reality instead.
I know from working at one of the big retail centers that they are prime places for unusual happenings. We'd get vertigo walking down the hallways or get lost coming back from lunch. There would be portentous conversations with complete strangers, flickering lights, ghosts in the storerooms. Mannequins would stare at us blankly. Outside, on those slow, hot days when the only sound was the echo of pigeons' wings, one of the payphones might ring as you walked by. If you answered, god only knew what you might hear; someone singing, or a staticky robot voice reeling off numbers.
One evening not long ago, I stopped to peer though a moon-shaped structure, not too far from where we'd had the conversation at the beginning of this post. There was a small breeze blowing dust and leaves around the sidewalk. I looked down and noticed half a dozen small leaf-devils whirling at the base of the wall - the angle must have been just right for it. I remembered that dust devils and whirlwinds create their own electrical and magnetic fields, and I wondered how many other odd little winds were bouncing around all these spaces, invisible to the eye, but affecting our minds and bodies in unexpected ways.
Then again, I also remembered the old tales that whirlwinds are wandering spirits, passing through on their travels.
Either way, all I know for sure is that the world (and the occasional shopping center) can be mysterious and infinitely strange.
It's been a year now since I posted "the girl who was witched away". It wasn't easy to write, nor was it very informative or even very good, but it seems to have been enough. Which is what I'd hoped for, after all.
When an icy wind cuts across the fields and the sky is a certain color, the familiar twinge of anguish bites. Then I remember, I already wrote it. It's over, it's done. The twinge is only the remnant a 30 year-old habit. It can be dismissed, sent off to the past where it belongs. It no longer lives and breathes.
The story doesn't have to belong to me any more. I no longer have to be haunted by it. It's just another damn thing on the internet now.
My previously mentioned experiment to lower my anxiety levels was having excellent results - I'd only had one serious anxiety attack in a week, which is a great improvement - but having my psyche in (apparently) better shape brought out an old nemesis. Quite suddenly, I'd fallen ill with what seems like a total body breakdown, some systemic illness erupting in assorted peculiar ways. Conversion disorder, anyone?
On one hand, it hardly matters if this is my unconscious way of expressing self-hatred through illness. The fact is I'm ill, in pain and life has become extra difficult at the moment. Naturally it's very worrying (and oh so convenient, smirks my punitive super-ego). When one is beset by illness and worry, it's damn nigh impossible to take the necessary steps toward self-improvement. Which, obviously, is what's on the other hand. Of course there is a chance that I'm simply ill and the timing was purely happenstance - there is a chance, but I know my neurosis, and I'm not buying it.
Still, I'm dedicated to finding a solution. I am determined to work my way toward some type of inner peace. If joyfulness is too much to ask, then contentment is perfectly acceptable. I'll keep working at it, even if I feel I'm falling apart.
That isn't the point of this post though. What I came here to say is quite different, really.
Before I became ill, there was this one night - the tenth of November, I think it was - the weather was warm, the sky was lowering and grey. I'd felt well and strong enough to take the dog for a walk. It was sunset and we went the long way, since it was that sort of evening. Silhouette birds swooped low over trees and there was a sprinkling of rain every now and then. There was a feeling of walking upon the crust of the earth - which of course we always are, but really feeling it, you know, walking atop this ancient and marvelous place. The beauty of even the ragged rocks is apparent at times like these. The hills and creeks seem to contain some ineffable secret.
At home, the boys had got hold of a projector and were playing with it on the lawn, shining pinpricks of light at the house and trees. They laughed so much, chasing around in the surreal landscape they'd created.
I consider myself fortunate that happiness, when it does come, seems to come for no particular reason. There is no set criteria of events that must be met; I know from experience that such criteria would never be met. Instead it comes at random, perhaps triggered by some confluence of factors impossible to define or maybe nothing at all. Again, it hardly matters. There was nothing special about November tenth, except that I was happy for half an hour. Because it was random, it could happen again at any point. Therefore there is a reason to keep going. I don't dare give up, because happiness could suddenly appear with no warning. It's worth it to keep going. When those fleeting moments of happiness do appear, I wouldn't miss them for the world.
One night, I dreamt that the woods were alive. That is, that the woods were sentient beings, twig-like creatures who only assumed their true form under cover of darkness. At night, when everyone else was asleep, I could hear their rustling whispers as they moved. In the dream, I came to understand that the underbrush did not so much grow as creep.
This little twig configuration I saw the other day made me wonder if one of them hadn't been caught in the daylight after all. :)
Possibly the worst thing about my anxiety/depression is what I call "the horrors". It might be more accurate to call them "the terrors", but the horrors, with its shades of Heart Of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, has always felt more appropriate.
The feeling may be best summed up in an image. The Scream might be the most famous example, but what really comes to mind is a drawing, ubiquitous in old horror comics - the face of the hapless victim, pouring with sweat, eyes wide upon finally seeing the monster that's been hunting them for the last couple of pages. I know that feeling, intimately and horribly. For me, though, is what seems like the ultimate unfunny joke - the monster is invisible.
This has been the most frustrating thing for my loved ones, I think - seeing a person frozen in blind terror at something that can't be seen, heard or otherwise perceived. It's frustrating for me, too. This is not something I'd signed up for, this nameless, faceless, free-ranging annihilation anxiety that's beaten my quality of life to a pulp. It's not something easily understood by people who haven't been there. Trying to explain this miserable internal state is fairly pointless, and not something I do well. Indeed, I hate writing about it at all. It makes me nervous.
The only reason I mention it today is because I have found what seems to be a little relief, and I want to write it down, make some catalogue of minor success. I've tried many things over the years, but aside from taking a particular SSRI (which worked all right until it gave me OCD and chronic sleep-paralysis) and a combination of COQ10, barley grass powder and yoga (which worked like a charm throughout the summer of 2002, before running out of steam), most things haven't made enough headway to make them worth noting.
I'd tried binaural beats with some small success, but when I came across isochronic tones, I felt my response was much stronger. About 6 weeks ago, I started listening to theta wave isochronic tones while sleeping, or even just sitting quietly, and noticed my anxiety was much less prominent afterward.
It's this one in particular I've been using while meditating or sitting quietly:
And this for sleep:
I've tried the Alpha, Gamma and Delta wave tones also and find Gamma and Theta to have the most positive effects. For me, anyway. While Alpha is touted as a most beneficial type of brainwave, and I do find visualizing comes more easily while listening to the tones, I've found that my depressed feelings and despairing thoughts increase afterward. Delta has its own set of weird effects, which may be down to my peculiar brain chemistry. Whatever the case, my anxiety - though not gone - is reduced and I haven't had a real attack of The Horrors since beginning. Because of this I've been able to leave the house 4 times under my own power, organized my closet, made a Halloween costume and have turned in several blog posts in the last 6 weeks, after promising myself that I would do so - which is sort of like climbing a mountain would be for a normal person. At this point, even if it's far from ideal or even average, I consider this a great improvement.
I'm going to stick with this pattern for another two weeks, then take a break and see if the reduction in anxiety continues. I've read that an overabundance of theta brain waves can lead to depression, but given that my depression and anxiety seem to be hideously intertwined, I'm grateful for a relief in at least one of those things. The fact is, I can't do much to help my depression when I'm frozen in terror. Or horror. Whatever.
Meditation is supposed to be an excellent tool to deal with anxiety, but lets's face it, I'm far from being an enlightened monk who can find inner peace amidst the constant, grinding fear. This might be meditation the easy way, tinned and ready for consumption, but between that and never getting better, I'm going to take it. The effects seem to be quite similar anyway. It's not so much fighting the invisible monster as dissolving it - like the koans say.
I will write an update at some time in the future. Meanwhile, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this could be a drug-free remedy for The Horrors at last.
Some people say (well, Malcolm Gladwell says, in Blink) that you can learn as much about a person by staring at their bedroom for 10 minutes as you could by knowing them for months.
I don't doubt this, actually, based on the idea that a person's bedroom is a private place, shared with only a chosen few.
It occurred to me to wonder if something similar could be judged by the contents of one's computer picture files. At the very least it would tell you about a person's interests and tastes, their hopes and dreams, much faster and perhaps more accurately than they themselves could.
The Autumn equinox has come and gone, another Summer is over. It's been four years since I've been posting here. I hold out hope that things will get better.
I had bought the vintage orange turtleneck over at St. John's Bargain Box some time before. Maybe a month, or a few months, there's no way to remember now. The sweater was one of those thin, ribby ones from the mid-60's, in pristine condition, and I was glad to have it. Things were pretty gloomy then and I needed some color in my life.
This is the prologue. Well, the prologue before the prologue.
...
The first time I came to Victoria, it was unexpected. It hadn't been part of the day's plan. What had happened was, my mother had gone to visit my aunt and uncle near Houston, and I'd ridden along. Mostly because I liked my aunt and uncle, but also because I needed a distraction. A friend of mine had killed himself that week, and everything looked grim. Since three hours in a car with mother is not something to be undertaken lightly, I had the Sunday edition of the Austin American-Statesman on my lap. The front page told the story of my late friend's shattered hopes and broken dreams. That was the ostensible reason I had the paper. The real reason was because I was searching the job and apartment listings.
I can't remember exactly when I'd come to the conclusion that my life had veered off the right path, but it was a distinct, uneasy feeling I couldn't shake. Things kept going wrong, badly wrong, and I felt there was a turn in life I should have taken but hadn't. It would have been simpler if I'd known where I should've been instead, but it wasn't clear at all. Hours spent trundling between work and my therapist's office only seemed to kill time. Holing up in my apartment brought no relief. The best solution I could think of was to find my way back to Austin. I wasn't sure if that was the right place to be, but it was better than where I was. I'd received my acceptance letter from the university there, so the day I ended up in Victoria, I'd been in the midst of planning my escape to somewhere altogether different.
The house of my aunt and uncle was a place of happy memories. Once upon a time, I'd romped with my cousins, playing Star Wars and having flashlight battles in the fog. But time moves on, and my cousins had grown up and moved away. We did get to hear a lot about them that visit - auntie not being one to hold back about her kids. Nancy, she said, was going to college in Victoria, and worked at the radio station on weekends. In fact, she called from the station every Sunday evening around 6, if we wanted to wait around to talk to her. 6 o'clock was a little late, considering we had such a long drive back, but auntie said that Nancy would be so disappointed if she'd missed us. Whether that was true or not, mom said we'd wait a short while longer.
Here is a point I don't like to ponder too frequently: had we left before the call came that evening, would the rest of my life have been completely different? Had Nancy not said "There's too much to tell you over the phone, is there any way you can come here?" what would have happened? There are so many ways it could have gone wrong. If my aunt's insistence that it was "just a simple drive" to Victoria had not won out over mom's protests, or if I had not had enough money for bus fare home, if it came to that...what would my future have been instead?
But we did end up driving to Victoria that evening, through the seemingly endless rice fields, with mom bitching all the way. We drove in from the east side of town, by Rio Grande street. We searched for the address Nancy had given over the phone, which I had written down as North Star instead of N. Star. We took a wrong turn and drove through streets milling with hobos, while mom shouted that she was going to turn around and go straight home. We did find the radio station eventually though, right as dusk was beginning to fall.
This is the part where I say, I told you all that to tell you this:
The moment I stepped out onto the cracked pavement, I knew - by some strange miracle - I'd made it back to the path. The disquieting sense of wrongness was gone. In some deep, ineffable way, I knew this. For reasons that were beyond me then, this confusing, creepy, backwater town was the place I was supposed to have been all along. Things had been so hard for such a long time. I breathed a literal sigh of relief.
Nancy popped out of a side door, waving cheerily. She ran to the car and pulled me across the parking lot, yelling over her shoulder for mom not to worry, I'd get home somehow. We rushed into the building, moving fast because she has to get back to the DJ booth before the end of the song. At that point, I already know - in that same ineffable way - that life is different now. The story that came before is over. Everything has changed.
I didn't move to Victoria right away, of course. That first visit I only stayed a few days. We had a lovely time, my cousin and me. A constant stream of friends flowed through her apartment, her phone rang off the hook. We bought cherry vanilla cokes at Sonic and drove for miles. We had ridiculous adventures, like breaking into an abandoned farmhouse and being chased by bees. At night, in the cool dimness of her bedroom, we'd lay out her Russian Gypsy cards and tell each others fortunes. It was just like old times. But I did have some vestiges of a life in my hometown, and I had to get back to it.
At home, things seemed wronger than ever. My job was becoming a problem. My friends were unsupportive. My apartment was haunted. My granola-and-Dan Fogelberg-loving boyfriend turned out to be a dud, though really that shouldn't have been a surprise. There was a constant drumbeat behind everything that said "this can't work, this doesn't work, this can't work..." Even my therapist thought I should get the hell out of town. I fled back to Victoria often that summer, when I was tired of swimming against the tide. Things were so much easier there. When mom scuttled my Pell Grant for UT because she didn't approve of higher education and my former stalker appeared down the street, it seemed I had many more reasons to go than to stay.
This is the prologue.
...
After the fall semester had started in September, Nancy and her friends had begun a new routine. Once a week after class, they'd all go to her place to study, except it was actually a party. This is what Nancy had told me over the phone. I had missed the first of these events and had gone home again before the second. Consequently, I was in my own bed asleep that Wednesday night - it must have been Wednesday, even though memory insists it was Thursday.- if the weather data for that year is at all correct, it was in the wee hours of September 14th, when I awoke to find Nancy standing over my bed.
It had been a warm summer night when I'd gone to sleep, but an early cold front had blown in, and gusts of wind were howling as Nancy stood over me calling my name. As Nancy lived three hours away and as far as I knew, I'd locked my doors, this was startling. Also, she was dressed like a cheerleader. I screamed. Since (as she explained later) Nancy thought I must be screaming at the apartment ghost which she figured was standing behind her, she also screamed. We screamed until we were brought up short by the sight of her friend Jason, who wandered into my bedroom wondering what the hell was wrong with us. That's when I realized they had just got bored after the party and had driven up in the middle of the night to bring me back with them.
I changed into some warmer clothes and threw some things into a bag. The orange turtleneck must have been one of them, though I can't recall choosing it now. I zipped the bag, locked the door and ran out into the windy night. That wouldn't be the last time I saw that apartment, but almost. We got into the car - fast, because of the cold - and drove back to Victoria before sunrise.
If that was the 14th, there are three days in this story left to fill. I only remember some things with certainty; how the next day was grey and chilly, and we cut our shopping trip short because of it. That we hung out at the Froth 'n Java drinking cappuccinos. I sat in on a class or two and we borrowed someone's copy of Pulp Fiction. We made repeated trips to Sonic. We must have hung out with friends - they were always around - Jeff, Jason, Ben, Lisa and more than a few Richards. The only one I hadn't met was Nick
Everyone talked about Nick. He was the funniest guy they knew. He was a genius. He was sophisticated. He was older and almost finished with his master's degree. He knew a lot about politics and once tried to replace a newspaper graphic of Ronald Reagan's brain with a picture of a walnut. I'd almost met him the first night I'd come to Victoria, since he and Nancy usually went for coffee after work on Sundays. He hadn't called that night, though, and since then I always seemed to miss him by moments. He'd begun to seem like a mythical creature to me, often rumored but never seen, so the night of September 17th was a little exciting. I'd woken up from a late nap to find a note from Nancy saying that we were going to meet Nick at Denny's after she got off work.
It was exciting, but a little worrying, too. I had the impression that Nick didn't suffer fools gladly, and I wasn't convinced that I wasn't a fool. I had a bowl of Campbell's vegetable soup and watched Star Wars while I nervously contemplated my ignorance. I also contemplated my wardrobe. I was again grateful for the orange turtleneck. It was the only item of clothing I owned that might not draw the disdain of some educated genius smart ass.
...
At Denny's, Nancy and I ordered coffee and french fries while we waited for Nick. He got off work later than Nancy, and it was already after 1 AM when Nancy's eyes brightened and she said, "there he is!" The door hissed behind me and I turned to look, but I only made out a vague shape before I turned back. A terrible heat had suffused my body and I realized I was blushing all over. Oh, the humiliation! Nick had made his way to the table with his cup of coffee by the time I had the nerve to look at him. To my surprise, I saw he was blushing, too.
He sat down at the table and surveyed his lack of silverware My future husband spoke to me for the first time, these immortal words:
"can I use your spoon? I don't have syphilis."
....
That was 20 years ago tonight, and since then, no one can tell me there is no such thing as love at first sight, or that Fate doesn't step in to conspire in your favor. We tell our kids not to mock the holy sanctuary of Denny's, for if it weren't for Denny's and Fate, they would not exist.
But I can't help but think the orange turtleneck had something to do with it. Ever since then, orange has been my lucky color.
High Summer. The cicadas scream in the trees. It was July, many years ago now.
All that month, information seemed to crackle through the air, blowing like the wind through the house. The house itself was like a sailboat on a sea of grass atop the hill.
It was all very secretive.Word had come from down the coast that our cousins, Anna and Edward, would be coming to stay. We weren't supposed to know why, but of course we did - anyone who thinks they can hide things from children is a fool - so of course we knew their parents, along with our other aunts and uncles, would be attending to Serious Family Business. We just had to pretend not to know.
This sounds much darker than we felt at the time. For once, there was no trace of anything ominous in the air. School was out, the weather was fine, our parents were otherwise occupied. What wasn't to love? Our family drama had become part of the background by then, just another thing we weren't allowed to talk about. There was nothing to do but carry on.
At Grandmother's house in the next county, all the family had arrived. If our own house was like a sailboat, grandmother's house was like a tall ship in a storm. The adults sat around the kitchen table and whispered while the rest of us cousins (how many by then, 20? 24?) ran about like wild things, playing with Anna's little dog or swapping cassette tapes and comic books. At nightfall, Anna and Edward would be coming home with us, dog included. The dog! Over mother's hysterical protestations, the dog had to come too, there was no way around it. She tried to insist it be kept in cardboard box for the duration, a plan that fell apart within the hour. Score one for us.
That night, at the Sac-n-Pac on the edge of town, we raided the candy aisle for packets of Razzles and those cheap wax bottles with kool-aid inside.When mother didn't give us the death glare but simply paid up, it occurred to me that the rules were different for cousins. We sat in the back of the station wagon with the dog and our candy, the night wind whipping our faces. For the moment, adult tribulations had given us free pass.
...
I'd never thought our house was mysterious, or not very, or at least not for a long time. With Anna in it, it became mysterious. I suppose it was seeing it through someone else's eyes, but then again I'm inclined to say it was because Anna herself was mysterious. A curious sense of anticipation bubbled up in the corners when she was there. As we sat on the floor of my bedroom, Anna unpacked her belongings, full of arcane things like Blondie records and old issues of Punk magazine. Our ages weren't even in the double digits yet, so how the girl had laid hands on Punk magazine I can't imagine, but there they were. We put the magazines in the stack along with my collection of Nancy Drews. We did not find this even slightly ironic at the time.
Anna had brought her piano music, too, so we could play duets and she could keep up with her lessons while she was away. What this really meant was that we played duets while making up rude lyrics to every song in the Leila Fletcher piano course, books two and three.
All around the neighborhood we ranged that month. This was a new thing for me - I'd never previously been allowed to wander, but again, rules were different with cousins. Besides, we had to walk the dog. While our brothers exploded leftover fireworks in the yard, Anna and I clattered down the hills in our Dr Scholls, plotting and scheming while her little dog nosed around in the sweet-smelling grass. Once, we walked to the river with mother, who gossiped with the neighbors on the way. Mr. Jonas next door said how much I looked like Lady Diana. Anna snorted at this, but I recognized it as the compliment it was meant to be, maybe the first compliment I'd ever had. Anna twirled her Jordache purse with studied casualness, and said she'd rather look like Debbie Harry anyway.
Inside the house, we were up to no good. When we weren't watching The Facts of Life and eating Chef Boyardee pizza, we were inventing secret codes and signals. Surveillance was gleefully carried out with tape recorders, messages passed through windows. All sightlines in the house and yard were carefully noted, as well as the silhouette of mother in her studio, where she spent hours on the phone.
One afternoon, the house seemed unusually empty. The brothers must have been out somewhere, and Anna was nowhere in evidence. She wasn't spying through the fence out back or in the ash tree out front. Nor was she at the piano, the utility room or the shed. She wasn't even in the bathroom, where the curtain flapped (in a certain lonely way) in the breeze. Clouds were billowing up in the west and the wind chimes were just beginning to ring when I finally found her around the corner of the house. She had a secretive smile on her face.
"Look at this" she whispered, pulling out a book from behind her back. "It was in the bathroom." She tried to stifle a laugh. I didn't get the joke - it was just one of my brother's sci-fi /fantasy books that propagated like mushrooms around the house. I'd seen this one a thousand times. It was called "A Feast Unknown" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Well, did you ever look at it?"
"Of course not. Why would I read my brother's books? Especially if it's been in the bathroom. Ugh."
Anna looked around surreptitiously then thrust the book in my hands. "you mean to tell me there's dirty books lying around the house and you don't even notice!"
Indeed. I looked at the text and saw with alarm that it seemed to describe some kind of naked wrestling match. One of the naked wrestlers may have been Tarzan. And my brother had left it in plain sight, so sure that no one in the house would pick it up. Well, he was right, but he hadn't bargained for Anna.
Of course, after that, we went into our brothers' room and scoured through the rest of their books. That's how we found out that sci-fi was surprisingly filthy. We were the picture of innocence when they came home, scoffing and mocking the way they usually did. We were untroubled, content in our superiority. We knew their secret. They read dirty books.
It was August by then, and the corn was being harvested in the fields below town. A lone corn husk, blown by some updraft, sailed into the neighborhood and into the yard. I knew then that summer was almost over.
The night before my cousins had to leave, I dreamt that we were searching for Anna's dog, lost in the dark. I stumbled into a secret passage behind the fence, a tunnel of wild brush and flowers all limned with the most beautiful light. I crawled along in this mysterious place, where I found the dog playing with luminous moths that fluttered in the grass. I woke to the sound of Anna calling her dog and the sharp slam of the car door. I knew from the cold look in my mother's eye that my reprieve was over, the fun was all over. A rumble of thunder in the distance added the finishing touch.
The memories would remain, though, in places the adults couldn't reach.
Cicadas in the trees, moths in the grass, a bend in the road, the rustle of corn fields at the end of summer.
