Precipitous Delivery

 Early in the morning, May 20^th, we drove over to Blue Lake to pick up some vegetables.

The afternoon winds had already picked up, although it wasn’t nine o’clock yet and the air was ocean-current cool. Driving east, it warmed slightly when the foothills blocked some of the wind, but most of it made its way through the narrow valleys that wend their way alongside rivers and streams in the eastern portion on the county, bringing the meltwater out and the salt air in.

The vegetable pick-up was for ten and we arrived in town before nine with no clear destination. We stopped by the tennis courts and my daughter Esmé took her bike once around the nets before abandoning it for an errant tennis ball, which we threw back and forth for a while the sun warmed the courts and a team of a sort of ping pong-tennis hybrid moved in an occupied a quadrant of the court. We all stopped, mesmerized by the plink and plunk of their miniature rackets and balls.

The breezes slackened and the sun warmed us into more exploratory movements. We wandered out past the horse corral, over the pedestrian bridge that spans a dry creek bed and up to the foot of a lumber mill which no longer runs but is chromatic enough to appear functioning despite the closed fences and the weeds springing through the parking lot.

Parked in front of this derelict mill, was an abandoned Mercedes, missing a back door. I climbed in. Gina, my wife, didn’t like the look of the thing, and, once inside, I had to agree. There’s something interloping about even being in an abandoned car: a place that only one or two people have spent substantial amounts of time in, molding it to their shape and personality. The mill, on the other hand, was too general to have this kind of feeling. It would be hard to interlope in a place that had been created for a large-scale purpose but sitting in the back seat of someone’s car was like finding a photo in the trash and trying to put oneself behind the viewfinder, imaging why it was taken in the way it was and why it’d been thrown out. 

While I was taking my time thinking about all this, Esme’ had climbed into the car with me and we were sitting in the back pretending to passengers in some great cross-country road trip when Gina hurried us out of the broken-down and doorless car, it was time to get the vegetables and get to our appointment at the pool.

When we got back home from the pool and half an hour of playing crocodile, I wasn’t too surprised to find a pool of water in the hallway even though we’d showered, and changed back at the locker room. Somehow, going to the pool, one brought puddles of water home, even when you didn’t cross the threshold with wet flipflops and dripping bathing suits.

However, this puddle was more viscous looking than pool puddles and standing over it, Gina mentioned that it had come from her. This was no errant pool water. It was amniotic fluid perhaps coaxed forth by our time in the pool and the similarity of the surroundings. Either way, here it was. No contractions, no other signs of labor, but enough of a sign to call the hospital.

On the phone, the nurse asked the requisite questions and it came back that we’d have to come in. As usual, feeling nothing myself, I dithered, inquiring if maybe I should stay and let Esmé have her nap, after that I could take her in the bike trailer to her grandparents and, only then, would I ride over to the hospital to check in on things. I liked the idea of riding a bike to important life events: weddings, births, etc. Luckily, Gina isn’t nearly as nearsighted as I am and requested that I stop what I was doing and get everything together.

I still probably took too damn long, but eventually, we ended up in the car driving a few miles over the speed limit only because I felt I had a good excuse.

At Gina’s folks, I puttered around getting the car seat out, still in no real hurry. Esmé, two years before, had been induced and the entire process was about 48 hours in the hospital. I saw no reason to hurry for something that worked in long stages and, with such dubious reasons for even going. Water breaking? Wasn’t that a Hollywood reason to go to the hospital? Did anyone’s water even break in that crazy-making way? It certainly didn’t for us. Not last time, anyway. I drove to the hospital like a grandmother driving home from church, still half-convinced that what I’d seen on the hallway floor at home was from the pool.

We went into the same tirage room we’d been in years before, the one we’d slept in while we’d waited for the induction drugs to start working. Gina got the once-over and they were about to let us go when the nurse got the call from the doctor—check the cervix.

Four centimeters. Well, this was slightly unexpected, but…um…encouraging. I guess it was good that we’d packed these bags and dropped Esmé off; yes, maybe it would be a good idea to stay. But, still, let’s take a nice long walk. After all, we’ve got a sitter now and really no reason to stay here. Might as well go out and get a coffee or something.

We moved into the delivery room. The same room we’d been for 14 hours the last time we’d been here. The room where I’d read, talked, encouraged, lapsed into silence, hid in the corner, cheered and cried out “it’s a girl!”. It was a great room, but like the empty mill, it had been designed for an institutional purpose and didn’t maintain one’s memories—I guess that’s an argument for giving birth in a car; until you have to sell it, anyway.

I was prepared to toss my stuff down and stride out the door, but, the hospital has its requirements and we had to fill out the intake forms and give preferences, listen to options, etc.

We were still moving through the bureaucratic rigmarole when Gina started to feel sick and then started moving around the room looking for things to hang from. She started to moan and I stood by, uncertain when things would get serious enough to act. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, but I didn’t want to look uncaring either, so, I just followed her around like a Charlie Chaplin character miming someone, making quiet suggestions of encouragement, mostly to myself. Still wondering if we were going to be able to take that walk. 

Luckily, a nurse came in and, by the look on her face, gave me reason to abandon the idea of doing anything but staying in this room. It was good to understand where we stood. I started to give my encouragement a little louder now, with a little more confidence, but still mostly to myself. By now, Gina was moaning loud enough to drown me and pretty much everyone else out. The nurse saw me in the corner shouting encouragement to myself and suggested that I offer a sort of guided meditation, listing body parts to relax. I couldn’t tell if Gina thought it was a good idea or not because when I said things like “Relax your hair; good! Now, relax your ears” she just moaned louder, but when I got to ‘relax your shoulders’ and saw them flop down, I thought perhaps it was helpful, so, I kept going.

I got so wrapped up in finding new things to relax each time a contraction started, I didn’t notice the room gradually filling with nurses. I did notice that Gina’s moans and had turned to screams because I could barely hear my own guided meditation which by this point had digressed into more of an anatomy lecture as I thought of more and more esoteric parts of the body to relax like uvula and hyoid bone.

One contraction went on for so long I was hoping to get my guided meditation down to relaxing tarsals and metatarsals, but when I was still on ‘sternum’ the doctor walked in briskly with a whole coterie of nurses in tow. There must’ve been about 20 people in the room. I wondered how many had come over from idle curiosity, as Gina was now screaming loud enough to almost command an audience. We’d only been in here for about an hour and I wondered how long she’d be able to keep it up without losing her voice. Then the doctor, leading the assemblage of nurses in a chorus, squatted down like an umpire behind home plate and shouted “push!”

“Push?” I looked down to see how things were progressing and saw there was reason to push. The baby was already on his way out. This wasn’t Hollywood, it was faster. We’d gone from “I think my water just broke” to “Push!” in about two hours. Most movies are longer than that.

It took a while for my excitement to catch up. I’d been so ready to be standing on the sidelines for the next six hours or so, that I needed to remind myself that this was my wife and my child right here both happening now. I took up the refrain “Push!” I shouted, maybe a little too loud, checked myself and then switched to “breathe!” because it didn’t seem so demanding. But when I realized that breathing wasn’t going to get the baby out, I switched back to “push!”, but I stopped jumping up and down and clapping my hands when I said it.

In a few minutes and what I can only imagine to be indescribable pain, it was over. Gina looked up at me, dazed, but still fully in possession of her faculties.

Still dazed Gina looked up at me and asked “Is it a boy or a girl?” With Esmé, I’d been able to help in a way that wasn’t just cheerleading. I’d seen her come out and announced “it’s a girl!” to the room. This is the great thing about not knowing the sex, it gives the partner a purpose, but, even in this respect, I’d dropped the ball. Everything had happened so fast: I’d been so caught up in yelling “push” and so relieved when the baby came out, I hadn’t bothered to look at the genitals. “I don’t know,” I admitted. The doctor looked up from her work anticipating the placenta and turned the baby over in her hands so I could see the penis. “It’s a boy!” I yelled, although I was pretty sure that Gina could see for herself.  At that moment, it was like everything came back together again. The three of us—me, my wife and the baby— had all been put in these disparate roles in this somewhat socially circumscribed task of childbirth, but, the news that the baby who’d just shot out was a boy was so remarkable, the three of us, my wife, my son and me, cried. The doctor, seeing that we were in this vulnerable position, asked the boy’s name and it was like we all said it at once: Luca.

…

Later that evening, when we’d been moved to the postpartum room, I drove out to get dinner and, leaving the hospital, I felt like an astronaut drifting out into space further and further away from the earth and from warmth, love and life. I passed the exit for the 299, the highway that heads out to Blue Lake and thought about the ordinary morning we’d had walking past abandoned mills and climbing in empty cars and I saw that perhaps it had been the emptiness that had resulted in Gina’s labor. When the cold becomes too intense, we seek out warmth and when the world feels depopulated, perhaps we seek to fill in the absences. It felt that way, anyway, driving down the near-empty highway at night, the father of a baby boy who already felt too far away.

…

We got home the next evening after staying the requisite 24 hours in the hospital for all the tests that ferret out the various maladies that might not be immediately obvious. Luckily there were none. It was impossible not to continually compare the experience to the way it’d been when my daughter had been born. I kept finding myself saying inane things like “I don’t remember this.” As if having a single child is enough to turn anyone into birthing center expert. Luckily, they kept us fed and often enough someone would come in and see how we were doing. The whole experience really gave me sympathy for nurses who are constantly having to barge in on other people’s life-changing moments and ingratiate themselves to the mood. Here we were beaming with happiness and the nurses who were probably having all kinds of ordinary non-beaming-with-happiness kind of days, were having to acclimate themselves to our level of joy. I know I’d find this very hard to do every day.

The nurses also seem to be on rotations shorter than their shifts. I know nurses work long shifts, but it seemed like every five or six hours, someone new was coming in and introducing themselves to us and we’d have to watch as they measured our happiness and gave a commensurate response. By the time the last one came in, I was too weary of watching them mirror my elation to really respond to their questions with anything more than monosyllables. It almost started to seem like they were more excited than me, which I didn’t think was possible.

When they finally let us out it was late in the afternoon and we had to deal with the added strangeness of daylight after being inside all day while strapping a floppy-necked infant into a car seat. The whole process of taking an infant home from the hospital is so awkward, I imagine there would be a lot of money in any idea that could make it feel cozier somehow, like, I don’t know, baby taxis or something.

Gina’s folks were waiting for us with Esmé at home and what we’d been waiting for all day—this new sibling meeting which seemed to cement the four of us as a family—was almost too ideal to feel real. We set Esmé up with a Boppy cushion to hold Luca and she gently smoothed his hair and repeated ‘hi Luca!’ with a toddler’s candor and interest. I’m sure at some point, she’ll get jealous of him, but watching her smooth his hair on the couch with a radiant smile on her face, that moment is hard to imagine.

…

It was initially difficult to settle down. I felt like I had 100 things I’d fallen behind on while in the hospital and the house was a mess. There were also these two babies that needed to be cleaned up and put to bed. Gina was almost too exhausted to stand and I had no idea how I was going to be of much help. I kept walking around in circles, picking things up and setting them down in the wrong place.

I managed to get my daughter to sleep and to pick up a little. Gina was in the bedroom with our new son, hoping he might sleep for more than two hours at a time. I sat in the living room having a beer, thinking with this new pace of life, an evening beer would probably be my only respite from family, work and social obligations. After the beer, I meant to go in and read, but I fell asleep almost immediately.

I couldn’t have been more than two hours later when I woke up to Gina shaking me awake. “Esmé’s awake!” She whispered at me. I was so tired, it took me a minute to remember that Esmé was my daughter. I stumbled into her room and discovered that she needed a diaper change. In my exhausted state, I accidentally emptied the contents of the diaper on the floor, then I did the same thing somehow in the bathroom. Then, in her crib, Esmé hit her head and started crying.

After half an hour, I finally got her quieted down long enough to crawl back into bed and then be awakened again by her cry coming over the baby monitor. This time, I grabbed a pillow and a blanket.

…

Our first night as a family, I slept on the floor of my daughter’s room and my wife slept—if you could even call it that—feeding my son, in various positions, crib-side. When Esmé woke me up on the floor in the morning, and when I heard baby cries coming from the next room over I cried out “welcome to your new life!” to Gina. I was smiling when I yelled it.  

 

 

 

Security Deposit

 

When I was a kid, we had an illustrated bible that featured a vertiginous scene of Korah being swallowed up by the earth. The spine of the book is probably broken over this page because I used to look at it so much. It represented the essence of fear to me, an inescapable danger that could thrust itself upon you from the most innocuous of places. I studied this picture to try to understand where this danger came from. I pored over the flailing limbs, the trailing robes and streaming, Samsonesque locks, the gnarled fingers clutching for purchase in the crumbling soil. I knew the story was, in some way, about punishment, but I didn’t know for what. So, it seemed to me like a fate that could befall anyone. One moment you’re walking along and the next, you’re falling into an endless darkness so vast and entire it’s textured and soundless. The worst part about this fate? No one knows what happened to you. On the surface, you’re just gone.

…

We often talk about the students who ‘slip through the cracks’. And, when we hear this phrase, I think we all envision someone being failed by the educational system. You see a student, struggling with material, with time management and then, for one reason or another, they throw in the towel. Maybe there’s a catalyst. Maybe a teacher is rude to them; maybe they fail an important test or maybe their ego has been dealt one too many blows and they decide they’d be better off out in the world where at least the blows pay off—if only in minimum wage.

We think of slipping through the cracks as being a result of frustration, but we overlook the fact that slipping through the cracks can be totally outside one’s control. I may have had every intention of succeeding. I may have been on the path to victory, but forces outside my control grew and grew and subsumed my efforts. This, too, is slipping through the cracks. According to literary terms it is also tragedy, which is defined as a situation in which “A noble character confronts an obstacle, but succumbs to it after a struggle.”  

A few days ago, the cracks were at my feet and now, one decision later, they have precipitously risen up around me; they are becoming walls. It is only from this precarious situation that I can understand how easy it is for others to slip through when the cracks position themselves under your feet and how difficult it is to conceive of the danger, when they are distant, benign and not the canyon I am struggling to stay out of.

…

I probably should’ve stayed home with my family, but it was a beautiful afternoon and I’d been inside all week working on the computer. I wanted to get some exercise and, besides, my wife and daughter had plans for a park outing with another mother/daughter duo. No one expected me to go. Why not cut out for a long afternoon bike ride?

The ride to Blue Lake from Arcata is like express forest bathing, something like a forest Slip’N’Slide. You climb over a ridge by the green waste center which is sweltering with woodsy dampness and gradually rise to a sunny crest before plunging back into a dim, redwood and Spanish moss grove that feels like a pond bottom. Climb out of this and you’re in pasture, a narrow but sunny valley. From here there’s another drop into a dim forest corner before climbing back out and into another bright pastoral vale. It does this about twice more before you ride over the Mad River into the village of Blue Lake.

There’s nothing to really do in Blue Lake, so I checked out the Little Free Library and compulsively organized the books when I didn’t find anything to take. Then I biked over to the convenience store to get some water since I’d forgotten to bring a drink.

My phone rang while on my way over. It took me a moment to realize it was ringing and I fumbled with it a little. By the time I’d gotten to it, the call had gone to voicemail. I checked it. My landlord sounding gloomy, but it was his phone voice, the voice of an older generation which, for some reason, does not like to emote over the phone. My dad is the same way. I called back. He told me he had something for me. When could I come? I told him I’d be back in about an hour, wondering what pack of batteries or replacement bulb or cleaning solution he’d picked up for me this time. I hung up, drank my water, stared at the mountains a moment, felt the sun shrink the skin on my forehead and warm the tips of my ears and then I turned the bike around and rode back, the same way, dipping in and out of the sun and forest pools.

I chastised myself a bit before I left. Making threats about what I would think of myself if I forgot to call the landlord when I got back. Lately, I’ve been forgetting little, unimportant, things like that. So, in order to remember, I kept dredging the memory up during the bike ride. “Call the landlord when you get home.”

I remembered and we met in the backyard. I was oiling my bike and he came striding across the lawn, head sort of down, like his pate, rather than his face wanted to talk to me. He held an envelope. And he seemed like he wasn’t altogether sure what he had come out for. He stretched out his envelope hand and I thought, what is he paying me for?

The landlord is an older guy. He occasionally has trouble getting around. We live side by side on a parcel of field just outside town. I’ve helped him with odd jobs around the house. He’s particular, though and each time I’ve helped him, he seems to hesitate before asking for help again. He explains that he wants to hire someone, but no one ever seems to be up to his standards. I’ve never seen a worker around for more than a single day. On nice days, I enjoy doing a little yard work, so I try to help. I always decline money but he’s always forced it on me, even for a short job. I guessed it made him feel better. I didn’t mind. But I couldn’t remember any recent work I’d done that he’d be paying me for now.

A gift probably. Since my daughter was born a few years ago, he’s bought her gifts for holidays, for her birthday. Little things we don’t need, but gestures. He’s shown that he cares about her and we appreciate it. He calls her ‘Sissy’.  

I was thinking about all this when he tells me he’s giving me 60 days to vacate.

He’s joking. Of course, he’s joking. I may have smiled.

No, no, 60 days, there have been breaches; he’s given it a lot of thought. 60 days.

A joke, right? We’ve been model tenants. Paid on time, usually early just so we wouldn’t forget. No noise, no late nights, no guests except our parents dropping by. He plays with our daughter. Calls her his friend. She’s two for God’s sake. We clean the fucking house, polish the goddamn doorknobs, do all we can to not upset him because he’s incredibly particular and he knows this.

I don’t mention any of this, but ask for clarification in a mild way. I’m still unable to think of this as real.

Again, let’s be clear, breaches were made. Peccadillos, yes, but breaches. We hung the coat rack without asking for instance.

This makes no sense. He must be drunk or something. The three things he’s brought up now all happened in previous years. Why now? Where was the tipping point?

He says the ‘renter safe’ faux wallpaper was an issue, but we put this stuff up before our daughter was born, so over two years ago. This makes no sense.

A verbal agreement, he stammers and, suddenly, I understand. When we moved in, he said he preferred one, but two would be fine, if we were quiet, gentle on the place. It had occurred to me that he might not be thrilled about us having kids, multiplying in there as it were. But the place was big enough and I figured his limitation had been about adults. I’d told him we were having another kid and, yeah, he hadn’t offered congratulations. In fact, he’d been almost uncharacteristically incredulous. It had been almost rude.

Verbal agreement, he mutters again and turns to go. Leaving me with 60 days.

Kicked out. Not me, not my wife, but my daughter. My little girl. The house she came home to from the hospital. Her home, she’s the one being kicked out. What kind of a start…

And it wasn’t the landlord, it was me! I failed. I failed. I FAILED. My little girl. When we sing “baa baa black sheep” we replace ‘the little boy’ with ‘the little girl who lives on Bay School Lane’. Her home has been fucking SUNG to her since she was an infant and now, because I failed to see how easily it could be taken away, she’s lost her home. Her room. Her living room playtime. Her bathtub splashings. Her kitchen highchair flung food. Her sleeping in bed with mom and dad. No, it’s not the landlord’s fault. It’s mine because I should’ve seen this threat. I should’ve mitigated it. I should’ve left before this happened. But, I was blindsided. The earth had opened beneath my feet. No one would know what had happened to me.

…

My wife drove up to find me standing in the backyard, holding the notice and she knew by my demeanor. She’d always had the inkling that something like this would happen. Now it feels like we’ve lived the last three years at the edge of a knife blade and I’m wondering if this has been true. Have we always had this Damaclean sword hanging over us?

We went into the kitchen and began the sort of talk that feels like pumping up a tire with a substantial hole. We berated the landlord for his heartlessness and then ourselves for the little signs of his unreliable nature we’d overlooked and then back to the landlord for not even giving any kind of warning and all the while my wife’s pregnant belly heaved in agitation and my daughter tried to play with us, but our frantic talking subsumed everything. Another aspect of falling through the cracks is that once you begin to fall, the flailing tends to precipitate you. In an hour, everyone was worn out and thoroughly miserable. My daughter was crying and irritable, dinner had been forgotten, the house seemed to have filled with an obscuring fog and we went through the bedtime routine like robots. I could find no purchase on the night and slid down into it, eventually to sleep.

I was ready to tell everyone, to sound the alarm. “Extra, Extra Crooked Landlord Throws Out Two-Year-Old and Six-Month-Pregnant Woman!” Also, did I mention I’m a teacher. It’s not like I’ve got some munificent roll of money I can throw at this problem. The more I considered telling people, I began to realize how ashamed I was. ‘Evicted’ they’d say. ‘Booted out’ they’d whisper. “They must’ve done something to deserve it.” I saw how people’s imaginations would run roughshod over the way we lived. They’d see tangled clotheslines, rusty bikes, loud fighting, my daughter running around with no clothes—I swear, it’s potty-training technique!—and just all kinds of general squalor. This for a family that hates to see dishes piled in the sink. This for a family that scrubs the kitchen floor by hand. Having a two-year-old is messy, but no one has done a better job cleaning up.

Let me get back to the narrative. There’s too much injustice and it keeps derailing my thoughts into these poorly punctuated chasms. This is the flailing part I warned you about.

So, I didn’t tell anyone, but my wife, in her pregnancy, couldn’t help herself. She called her mom. Her mom appalled, called everyone she knew. Who knew of an open place? Who had friends who could help move? Who know someone who rents? In a college town, she was a valuable resource, but, of course there’s a housing shortage here and a surplus of studio apartments and roommate situations. An influx of students who have to stay inside. You might not see them, but they’re there behind the blinds and the sagging low-income housing façades. Was there any room inside anywhere?

There is! Frank—a pseudonym—has a lead. “Leads,” my wife told me the next day. “We have leads!” and, already she’d begun to find hope in this hopeless situationand her enthusiasm was catching. So, Frank, a friend of the family, knows, G. a farmer who lives near us. He’s renting. What or where isn’t certain, but we can arrange a showing. He and Frank are friends. Furthermore, Frank stops to talk to R. one afternoon. R. knows G. very well and R. declares that we are good people and that he’ll talk to G. at once and put in a good word. These are reticent farmer types, so it’s difficult not to feel somewhat vindicated when even they are taking umbrage at your predicament. I imagine them leaning over fences and shaking their heads maybe even eyeing their pitchforks.  

Monday, two days in. The clock is ticking now. 58 Days left. We went to see G.’s place. The appointment was for 4:30. The weather had clouded and dampened. A light drizzle was falling like something squeezed from a rag. I don’t know whether I’d expected anything, but my wife wanted to. It was clear from her rushed demeanor, she meant to make this work. This place was our ‘in’. With R. and Frank’s recommendations, if we liked it, we could take it. A peaceful transition, almost unnoticed in the grand scheme. It was even in the same general area.

We drove up at 4:30. And G. came out in farmer’s coveralls, carrying a bunch of hay. Here we were, Joseph and Mary being shown the stables. The house wasn’t separate from the main house, but built into the back. G. opened the door and rather than hurrying out of the drizzle into the shelter it afforded, we gingerly moved into the cold and the heavy smell of mold and mildew. It was a basement smell, a smell of damp neglect. The carpets had cigarettes burns and were faded and shaggy, very little light reached into the rooms. The bathroom had a massive water stain that had spread across the floor. The bedrooms were odd, on the bottom and the living room and kitchen were upstairs. Everywhere, it was sad, like a place you’d find yourself in your early twenties after a long party, the last to leave, hungover on Sunday morning. It was the kind of place you’d never be able to clean. It would always feel soiled. My wife and I looked at each other, nodded tacitly and thanked G. No, we weren’t this desperate yet.

We drove home in silence, the mold still swirling in our sinuses. It’d been so long.

“I’d forgotten about this,” I said.

“You mean how dirty these places can be? I know,” my wife shook her head.

“It was different before having kids. We could’ve lived there. We probably would’ve lived there.”

“Imagine brining a newborn to that place,” my wife said, and she began to cry softly, as if in imagining it, she’d done it somehow. I stared ahead, unable to say anything.

The other potential option—the only potential option— was a bright, sunny apartment near downtown. It had a balcony that faced the mountains and a beautiful open floor plan. When we watched the video walk-through I found myself longing to carry boxes up its capacious front stairs, to wrestle with my daughter on its clean carpets. To sip coffee early in the morning on that east-facing balcony while the apartment woke up. A modern TV dad.

But the rental company was notorious for their negligence and their demand for co-signers, based as they were in a college town they assumed everyone had parents who were doing well enough to foot the bill. A closer look at the ad revealed that the occupant would have to make three times the rent. Three times! How could they ask this? Who makes this much other than people who don’t live h—ah, of course. If it wasn’t a co-signer, it was for people coming from out-of-town, incomes from Silicon Valley on sabbatical. It hadn’t been more than a few days and already all the weight of the renter’s situation was crashing down on me: very few options, dirty places, high rents, cosigners and price gouging.

As luck would have it, my last check showed a project I’d been delayed on being paid for. The sum had come all at once. It was enough. If they only asked for a single check stub, I could prove I made the astronomical sum required to live in an apartment in a small town, six hours from any major city.

We worked quickly to get all the required paperwork in and the $30 application fee and then began casually calling.

“Just wanted to make sure there was nothing else you needed…”

“I believe my wife’s application needs to be attached to mine somehow…”

“A convenient time to come and see…”

While we were working this angle the calls continued to come in from all the sources my wife’s mom had put on the housing hunt. Nothing. Nothing. No one renting. One place in McKinleyville, maybe one in Eureka. Sure we could do it, but, we’re looking into this place…

The next Thursday, twelve days in. 48 Days left. The rental agency called back and set up a showing with my wife for Friday. I called them back, after taking a glance at my schedule. Could we do it now? I’m not sure if this made me sound desperate or serious. These days, it’s a fine line. The rental company agreed and, in an hour I was making my way over to see the place through a mid-afternoon fog of rain. I’d put on new shoes, just in case I needed to appear more professional than I was.

From my car, I watched the agency representative open the door and go up the steps. I looked down at my new shoes for assurance, pulled on my hood and ran into the rain and into the apartment, up the carpeted stairs into an oasis, even in its empty state. A clean open floor plan, a living room that breakfast bared into a kitchen and stretched out a little beyond its bounds in a somewhat futurist balcony. Even in the rain, the place was streaming light. No yard, no sound of the ocean at night and neighbors who might not appreciate the newborn we’d be bringing home soon, but all of this seemed secondary to the idea that no one would suddenly take up the idea that we were unwanted tenants and kick us out. The rental company had an interest in keeping tenants who were clean and paid on time. Following the rules here would mean we could stay. Goodbye insecurity. Goodbye yawning gulf beneath my feet. I ran my hands over the mottled walls and felt solidity. I clapped my foot down on the wooden floor and found purchase. I asked the representative what the next step was.

“Well, if you want it, we can set up your payment today.”

I tried not to beam too brightly. I’d been under the impression that there were others in line. But, of course, that’s always the impression, right? I drove home through the rain muttering ‘thank God’ to myself. 

…

But in the days to follow, during the transition, I grew homesick. I woke up before dawn listening to the distant cyclic roar of the ocean and imagined it replaced with the roar passing trucks and loading dock shutters being pulled up. I woke up and looked out the frosted windows at the expanse of lawn and imagined it replaced with a view into someone else’s living room window or down into a cyclone-fenced courtyard. I went out to look at the mountains and imagined them replaced with a row of impassive homes. Meanwhile, my wife began to dismantle the house we’d brought our firstborn home to. She took down the nursery decorations she’d put up before the room had been inhabited. She packed away the extra pots and pans. We sold the washer and dryer to the bed of a Toyota pickup that carted them away for a few bills. We emptied the place of any signs we’d ever lived there. We took down the record of our existence while we still slept with the memories. My dreams turned threatening. I was stalked by nameless things that could find me no matter where I hid. I was irresponsible and very late for important engagements. I started waking up early and lying in bed, listening to the house that would soon stand empty again. Since I’d moved from my parents’ at 18, I’d never lived anywhere so long and now perhaps the cycle of moving would begin again. My wife kept telling me that our equanimity had been disturbed. What had we intended, to rent this place forever? There was a time when we’d hoped we could buy it, but we’d given up on that idea ages ago. And now, back to an apartment and a year lease and what beyond that? The rent for the new place wasn’t really tenable. It would be a small drain on our savings, but a drain nonetheless. The fund for our future would begin to slip away. I looked out the window and listened to the house and felt those days ticking past. Only the clock had been reset. One year to go. 363 Days. And the earth began to grumble, waiting to turn in its sleep and split open—hopefully somewhere far away from here.

Prologue

I’d thought the worst had been in the initial confrontation and relating the news of what had happened, but, as it turned out, the actual move was quite jarring. We spent two days, before and after work, throwing things into unlabeled and mismatched boxes: the toaster with a pair of socks, pictures with the bathroom stuff. Even when we’d emptied the house of all our smaller possessions, there was furniture. The bed and the crib had to be dismantled. The mattresses carted out. I couldn’t get the computer to fit back in the factory box and, in a fit of pique, broke the huge white box down and shoved it into the trash, spilling cardboard and Styrofoam everywhere. My wife and I were continually bumping into each other and muttering while crossing from room to room. She’d begin a sentence: “Could you take…” and it would disappear with her into the bathroom. I’d shout ‘what?’ but of course, the answer would but swallowed in the same manner, as she spoke into the shower she was scrubbing. I’d have to drop what I was doing and go into the bathroom. And, of course, by then, I’d be annoyed.

I was much worse at this because I talked constantly, saying things that didn’t need to be said aloud.

“How’d this drawer get crumbs in it?” I’d ask myself.

“What?” My wife would ask from the other room.

“Well, this drawer, it’s got—”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Nevermind!”

It was the antithesis of communication. Something that perhaps would be worthy of study given that we were unable to convey a single piece of valuable information to each other all weekend.

There was also the landlord, skulking through the clipped phrases of this unintelligible conversation. He kept rearing up whenever we’d begin to feel a kind of assurance that everything might work out.

“Look,” I’d yell. “There’s another stain on the linoleum. Think he’ll notice?”

“God. He’s going to make us replace the whole floor. You know how anal he is!”

“But I looked it up, linoleum yellows when it’s not exposed to the sun. He’s the one who had that rug there, remember?”

“What you do with the—”

“WhAT?”

Friday, we got it all out, ever last stick of furniture. It was piled like an avalanche in the new place, ruining any sense of refuge the place had ever offered. Our home was now empty—only the smell remained to connect us to it and our new apartment was a mess of bags and boxes that looked like it would take weeks to untangle.

I set up the crib in my daughter’s new room and my wife put up the decorations and books so at least my daughter’s corner of the world would look like it had been successfully transported.

She’d spent the afternoon with her grandparents while we’d been dragging bookshelves and couches around. She hadn’t eaten well; she hadn’t napped and now, coming into this utterly disorganized apartment for the first time—her new home—she was overwhelmed and cranky. I think she may have also picked up on our nervous energy. Even the new carpet cleaning solution smell in the air couldn’t cover the sweat of nervous exhaustion that has an awful sweetness to it, like old beer in the sun.

My wife’s parents stuck around trying to help, but there was no dent to be made in the mess and beginning any kind of task unraveled into hundreds of other tasks. I tried to throw something away, but I didn’t know where the trash was. I went looking for it and found it was overflowing. I didn’t know where to take it out and crammed the piece of trash into the already overflowing basket—which was in the wrong place—feeling like an utter failure.

It seemed like giving my daughter a quick bath might be a way to welcome her to the new place. My mother-in-law offered but within minutes some of the worst screams I’ve ever heard my daughter make were issuing from the bathroom. I tried to put things in the kitchen away, but all the cabinets were in the wrong places and I knew I was making a mess. I tried putting the peanut butter in three different places while my daughter howled down the hall. I wanted so badly to comfort her, but I knew I’d go in there probably still holding the peanut butter jar, smelling of exhaustion sweat and when you’re upset, this is the last person you’d want trying to offer solace. I stayed in the kitchen, making a mess.

After my in-laws left, we calmed our daughter down and she and I played a game on the floor of her room, feeding her stuffed animals different pretend foods, until she seemed to be getting tired. I put her in her crib and lay on the floor singing looking up at the ceiling, using the song to calm myself. I could hear my wife out in the kitchen, rearranging all the stuff I’d made a mess with. I took assurance in the idea that she’d know what to do with the peanut butter I’d left, in utter defeat, on the counter.

When my daughter fell asleep, I decided to take a shower. We didn’t have any shower curtains, but I noticed I could angle the spray to the inside corner and sort of hunch down there without making too much mess. I balled myself in a standing fetal-position and tried to relax, but I could see the water was still splashing off on the floor and I was making another mess so I gave up on the idea. In front of the mirror I noticed my face wasn’t so exhausted as agitated. The expression on it bothered me, so I strode out into the hallway.

For a moment, there was a sense of peace to be savored. My daughter was sleeping. Her white noise machine was cascading with the sound of rain. It was also raining outside and I could hear the real sound eclipsing the recorded one. It was nice to be dry and inside during the rain, even if everything was a mess. I turned and went back into the bathroom to finish drying when a walloping, caterwauling sound came braying out of a hidden amplifier. An alarm, am alarm buried somewhere within the confines of the apartment was squalling, louder than a car alarm, it was like a burglar alarm on a bank.

“!WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!# XAH!< XAH!< XAH!<XAH!”

Those unearthly characters are the only way to do justice to this sound and its violence and it was issuing from just outside my daughter’s room!

But what was it? What had set it off? Was there some kind of burglar alarm that we’d tripped? Had the apartment only now because aware of our interloping presence and decided to take some kind of action? I stood there like a moron, frantic, yet having no idea where to begin looking or what action to take. My wife, who’d been in bed, was, once again, a little more decisive.

“It’s the fire alarm!” She hissed and started waving a towel at the flashing alarm directly over my head. I grabbed a towel and joined in. We waved and slapped at the alarm until it quieted, belted out a last XAH<! and then fell back to its former disanimation.

We waited breathlessly outside my daughter’s room. No cry? No calls for mom? Worried, we both peeked in. She was still asleep. Earthquakes would’ve been noisier than that thing and she’d slept through it. A testament either to how exhausted she was or, perhaps proof that everything would work out because in unexpected ways, we are all rewarded for our attempts to save ourselves, no matter how fruitless they may seem.

Saturday, I woke up exhausted after the rushed move. Not so physically drained, but just mentally tired of dodging emotional bullets. Today marked the end. The day we would cut ties with the old place and I didn’t know what to anticipate.

When we walked into the old place for the last time, I found that it already held very little meaning for me. I think this is the value of stuff. Condemn possessions all you want, but after moving around for years and constantly selling what few items we’d acquired at moving sales, I think both my wife and I were grateful to realize that our stuff—the stuff we’d had in storage for years, the carpet we brought back from Georgia, the books I mailed from my folks’, pictures for the wall, hell, refrigerator magnets,  had absorbed some of the blow of separation. The fact that we were able to reconstruct my daughter’s room with her crib, carpet, dressed and stuffed animals was amazing. In the old days, we wouldn’t have been left with anything.

Now, looking around the empty house that had once been filled with this stuff and associated memories, I saw nothing more than a job to do. Drawers needed to be cleaned, floors needed to be scrubbed. We had to try to get those stains out of the linoleum. I knew the landlord (who by this point, through repetition of his name, we’d taken to calling ‘him’ or ‘he’, depending on the syntax) would be merciless and any, I mean any little discoloration or scuff would only prove to him that we had indeed been horrible tenants and that he was justified in giving us the boot. My hope was that with a little elbow grease we could leave on reasonably good terms. That he’d see the place and think—"hmm, they cared about it after all.” Maybe that would give him something to think about before evicting the next well-meaning tenets. Not likely, but at least it’d make me feel a little better.

My wife is nearly a compulsive cleaner and there are certainly well-intentioned and clean people who would’ve found themselves with a much bigger job than we did that day. Still, when you’re cleaning for a single audience and one who you expect to give everything the white glove test, you can’t be too thorough. Cleaning didn’t really feel better, it was anxiety inducing. We’d find little, almost microscopic things and wonder, “will he take this into account?”. We tried to talk to ourselves about normal wear after three years, but it wasn’t convincing. It felt like each thing we couldn’t make sparkle like new indicated some kind of shortcoming in our characters—or at least I felt this way, I hope my wife didn’t.

There was also this dulled feeling of indignation. I’d been trying to forgive the bastard because I hate carrying a grudge, but when I saw my pregnant wife bent over the toilet bowl, scrubbing like her life depended on it, I couldn’t help but to want to just call ‘him’ up and say “You know what? You’re so damn particular, do it yourself. We shouldn’t even be doing this. We should be waking up on this Saturday morning, drinking coffee in the living room and going outside to enjoy this beautiful day, not stuck in here breathing bleach fumes.” But then I reminded myself that we’d soon be ending our relationship and this was the last obligation we had. Better see it through.

After a few hours of scrubbing, I was surprised to realize we were finished. We still had a mountain of stuff to unpack and my daughter had spent another afternoon with her grandparents. I wanted to get back to her and to our new house and leave this unpleasant memory behind. By this time, we were standing in an empty house, the same one I’d come to when we’d first came to look at it more than three years in the past. All the life that had taken place within its walls had gone somewhere for me. Maybe it had gone to the new place, maybe it had gone into something intangible, something in my memory, but it wasn’t here anymore. Not so for my wife. The last thing to do was to call the landlord and do the ‘walkthrough’ that he’d requested. I hadn’t seen him since the day, two weeks ago, he’d given us the boot. I didn’t want my wife to be there for this ‘walkthrough’—which, by the way, isn’t anything you’re legally required to do—because I didn’t know what he was going to try to drag our noses through before losing us as whipping boys.

I took out a last load of trash and came out to find my wife crying next to the car. To her, it was still the house she’d brought her baby home to. I got that. To her, it had been a nest. Even if the tree hadn’t been hers, the twigs, branches, moss and whatever else goes into those things had been hers, or had at least been meticulously arranged by her. Probably up until that moment, it hadn’t seemed like anything anyone even had the power to take away and here it was, already gone.

I tired to comfort her, but I felt awkward because I felt like ‘he’ was watching from the house next door. I tried not to look up at the cold, impassive windows of his place that seemed to record everything that happened. I tried to offer assurance, but I just wanted her to go. I wanted to get this over with.

She drove off and I called him to say I was ready. I went back into the house and inadvertently walked into my daughter’s room. The physical aspects of the place may have not meant much to me anymore, but the smell of her room. It was her smell, or maybe the smell of the room and imparted something to her. So many nights I’d stumbled in here out of a soundsleep to find my little girl standing at the railing of her crib, holding astuffed animal in each hand, reaching up. How many nights had I bounced on the yoga ball in here singing the same songs over and over in a breathy, whispery voice waiting to see her eyes close? How many mornings had I come in here and heard “dada?” as she peeked over the top of the railing? And how many times had I, after getting up to go pee, come in here just to look down at her because, in my sleep, I had missed this tiny little girl, or had worried that the blankets might have gone over her head? I smelled all of that and stepped out into the living room as the door opened.

“Hey Jonny,” the landlord began, cordial enough. He seemed relieved. I think seeing the empty place gave him hope. Perhaps he thought we were going to try to hunker down and challenge him on the eviction.

I returned his greeting in a perfunctory way. I wanted to make sure I didn’t start thanking him or something.

Before he’d come over, my wife and I had been so worried that we’d gone from room to room taking pictures, just to document how nice the place was, how clean, worried that he’d try to make us buy a new house because the linoleum was faded or the carpet hairs didn’t stand up straight. I was ready for him to pick apart everything we’d done, but he strode from room to room oozing appreciation.

“Ok, you cleaned this. Looks good. And this, well no big deal. And there’s this, oh good that’s been cleaned, too.”

I followed him around, unsure what the hell my role was supposed to be. Curator of the museum of my life? A sort of museum in reverse that shows the absence of artifacts? I dully explained how I’d removed our impression everywhere.

“Yeah, we scrubbed here pretty hard. Took each drawer out. Oven cleaner, lots of it.” Mostly, I just stood in the corners of rooms and watched him poke around, feeling like a kid whose work was being inspected.

A brief note about that:

When I was a kid, we had carpeted stairs. My job had been to vacuum them with a little handvac. My dad, if he was home, would always demonstrate how the grit that had been tracked in would get kicked to the cervices of the stairs and how it had to be picked out with your fingers. The vacuum cleaner couldn’t get it. Even after I’d begun to do this picking, somehow it always looked like I hadn’t. No matter what I did. It seemed there was always a little grit in the crevices. The job always looked unfinished. What bothered me more than anything was the expectation that my efforts would be incomplete. My dad always seemed to expect that I wouldn’t pick crevices at all. Any remaining grit was an indication of this oversight. It was Sisyphean. The job frequently had to be redone. I didn’t mind doing it again, so much as the implication that I’d done it half-assed the first time. When you’ve genuinely tried and had your effort dismissed, this has got to be the most aggravating feeling in the world.

I was prepared to feel it in this moment and then, suddenly, as if transported back to the moment when we’d moved in, I found myself standing outside, talking in a casual way. It was done. Here were the keys.

I guess he wanted to get rid of us as much as we’d wanted to get rid of him. I knew in the morning he’d come in and probably redo the entire job, but I didn’t much care. Let him do what we wanted. It was his house now. I walked down the street, away from the open rural area where we’d lived when our daughter was born, where she’d learned to crawl and walk, where she’d said her first words. Where we’d become a family.

The wind was coming off the ocean and, with no trees to stop it, it brought the brisk temperature of the ocean floor with it. The sun was powerless to stop it, but gradually, as I walked away and reentered the bounds of the town with the houses and trees and other wind-blocking impediments, the wind died down and the sun warmed my back, the trees, the sidewalks. In a yard, there were daffodils, in another wild sweet pea. The world beyond the windy confines of the old house was growing and I was happy to be rejoining it.

I stopped to delete the landlord’s number from my phone so, when he called a few days later to inform me he’d be keeping our security deposit because the place hadn’t been cleaned to his satisfaction after all, I didn’t even know who was talking. Much less did I care what he was saying.

 

 

Skittles

 

It’s my first day back to work and I arrive at the café just after they open at 7:30. The sun is still glowing behind the hills and the air is brittle with the cold. I get my coffee and go back to work at my seat, pausing occasionally to stop and watch the glow over the hills increasingly slightly. We’re back in the purple tier so I have to work outside, which is fine.

By 10am, it’s warm enough to have taken off my jacket and gloves and even my sweater is beginning to seem extraneous. But stationary work outside isn’t a warming activity and I am still nursing a ball of cold somewhere at the bottom of my lungs that the coffee and the sun still haven’t completely dislodged.

The mid-morning rush comes and makes its customary noise. The guy with the dogs arrives and turns on his radio. Democracy Now. A few people cluster around him to listen and to chat about whatever lunacy’s going on far from here. I check the inauguration date on my computer between responses to new students, gearing up for whatever, I guess. The radio is turned off, but the group remains, mostly sitting rather than talking. The day has warmed nicely. Even the other solitary workers look pleased, hammering away at their computers.

After 11, the place really quiets down. Most who’ve planned on coffee have gotten it for the day and usually lunch traffic is pretty light. By this point, I’m either quite focused on a task or just trying to be, hoping to finish, or at least begin, an important task before I go home for lunch—knowing as I do that I seldom get much accomplished in the afternoon when I work at home. Even through the closed door, I can hear everything happening in the house: cries, admonishments, encouragements, blandishments, little running feet and narrated meal preparation. Sometimes, I put my headphones on, but then the music distracts me. I get my real work done in the morning, at the café.

But since it’s the first day back, I don’t really have to worry about afternoon work. There isn’t any to do, maybe another handful of assignments to comment on for the students already getting to work, but even that could wait until tomorrow.

I’m considering packing up when a dog comes up and pushes his nose against my leg and then against my backpack on the ground. Behind the dog are a couple with a very large stroller with a baby lost in it somewhere and a young boy, probably about six with the kind of hair cut that looks like it was buzzed about a month ago and has grown out into a formless, dirty blond puff, the kind of haircut that I can’t help but to associate with hyperactivity and Kool-Aid stained lips for some reason. The mom is a typical young mom who has completed accepted the role and vanquished all of her own desire except maybe on New Year’s and the rare night out with friends. The dad is unreadable. He’s got a bandana on instead of a mask, but even this mask statement seems to say nothing. He doesn’t look exceptionally happy, but neither does he look nagged or cajoled into being in front of this café on the holiday. Both parents are carrying grocery bags. The baby is a baby with close set eyes, looking a little like a siamese cat, taking everything in quietly.  

The boy has a handful of Skittles that he must’ve got out of one of those 25-cent machines—or perhaps the bag ripped all the way open and now he’s carrying them. When his mom stops to get their purchases (there’s a grocery store in the shopping center) in order, the boy sets the Skittles down on one of the café tables. The table wobbles and five Skittles or so bounce merrily around on the sidewalk for a minute, like ballbearings or something in Home Alone to exaggerate the chaos of a scene. To this the mom gives an agonized sigh.

“You weren’t supposed to put ‘em on the table! uuuhhhh!” This sigh comes out in an ‘I-can’t-believe-the-shit-I-have-to-put-up-with’ kind of way. The puffball hair deflates a little. From where I’m sitting it was obvious that the kid’s Skittles were getting sticky and that he’d set them down to regroup and now he’s got his mom practically lamenting that she’s brought him into the world to commit such egregious mistakes. She goes inside to see if there’s a cup she can put them in—why the kid can’t just pick the Skittle back up is unclear. While the mom goes in, the dad mumbles through his mask.

“Fuck. Why’d you have to set those down?”

This doesn’t come out in anger so much as in abject hopelessness, as if in setting the candy on the table, the kid has just reaffirmed that he is once again the most clueless dope in the world and that he is no more an asset to his parents than leprosy would be.

It’s such a small thing. Nothing that I could call out, but I want to cry for this kid. I can feel his shame blazing off his hot little ears, sticking out from that bushwaked hair. The dad is not belligerent; in fact he retreats back to obscurity, but the kid moves off and sits on the curb, not crying, probably accustomed to this kind of treatment. When his mom comes back outside carrying a cup from the café; she has to cajole him back. It takes a while, but he gets up and accepts the cup of Skittles. I notice the dad says nothing. It’s like he’s not even part of the picture. He’s just barely there.

The family, like so many others plods down the sidewalk to god knows where, the Skittles rattling around in the cup, Skittles that now won’t be tasted, all their flavor having been blanched by the dad’s irritation.

I sit there for a few more minutes thinking this is what childhood was like. This complete unpredictability, the slightest shift in temperature and you’ve pissed someone off or trigged their gall. It’s something I’m glad to have escaped as an adult, constantly feeling like you were at the mercy of other people’s mood. When you’re grown up, you can choose to avoid perpetually bad-mooded bastards or choose to ignore their claim on your emotions but, as a kid, you don’t have the same choice.

…

A few days later, I’m back at the café, trying to focus on my work, but distracted by two little boys who show up from time to time with their mother who buys them apple juice in glass bottles. The boys linger near the table, but they’re too active to stay with their drinks and their mom. They look around on the sidewalk and at the edge of the parking lot. They slide. They shove each other. One of them reaches down. The other one grabs for what he’s holding. The mom has to intervene.

“What is this?” she asks looking at what the boy has reluctantly dropped into her hand.

“A Skittle!”

She throws it “You can’t eat Skittle you find in the parking lot.”

I hear it bouncing back over the asphalt; lost again.

  

Pica

 

I had to go down to work to pick up a stack of flyers to distribute for one of my spring classes. It’s a non-credit community ed. course, so instructors play a certain role in self-promotion, I guess.

It was a beautiful day and I didn’t mind the idea of a bike ride after a long week of sitting in front of the computer.

Down by the sawmill, they were slicing through some kind of coniferous wood that had a clear, limey smell. In the rising, late autumn fog there was something compelling about this smell and, since I hadn’t eaten much, I found myself with a pica-like impulse to want to eat it. Perhaps pica, or the impulse to eat strange, inedible substances while pregnant can be transmitted. My wife is pregnant, but seems to crave only bread, but I frequently find myself struggling with some strange impulse to taste pinecones or the ornaments made of cinnamon and applesauce (you’re not supposed to eat ém!””—my wife tells me) on the Christmas tree.

When I make it through this appetizing fog of shredded green wood, I remember the appointment and check my phone. There’s no message and this leaves my stomach feeling cold and tight, so I send a reminder.

“How’d it go?”

Or maybe it was:

“Hope everything went well”

Something innocuous anyway, because I’m hoping that it won’t be some fresh insult to receive the message. I worry about it almost as much as she does. The Doppler, then the ultrasound, the undetectable heartbeat, the unfeeling ultrasound tech callously saying “there’s nothing there”. COVID keeps me from attending any of the appointments so I’m off riding my bike and thinking of eating pine instead of being supportive. Support these days is just a text message and an innocuous one because when you need someone, a text message is total bullshit.

I’m out by the mouth of the Elk River when I get the reply.

“Everything good! Bebe moving a lot.”

She doesn’t write ‘bebe’’ because it’s cute but because that’s how she pronounces it and somehow that detail makes the relief so much more palpable. I grin and pump my fists like a 10-year-old.

I get on the highway and ride the rest of the way to work with the speeding logging trucks and I listen to this podcast about how people who don’t lie to themselves are miserable. It’s true. They did a test. Respondents who lied about stupid questions were more likely to be able to hide the pain of the world from themselves. Respondents who confessed stupid truths were less successful and frequently miserable. But it made me think of Mikey and how everyone loves him—at least I do—because he feels it all so keenly and doesn’t want a filter. Yeah, life is difficult for those who only tell the truth to themselves, but they’re a hell of a lot more admirable. I guess I’m in the middle somewhere. I can distract myself with really stupid things like new cereal or Halloween and I guess there’s a bit of deception in the reliance on these things for happiness.

Campus—as you’d expect—was empty. All the calendars in the associate faculty room were still on March 2019. It reminded me of the time my friends and I went into a haunted house when we were teenagers and found a calendar on the wall from the 60s. The realization the no one had been in there since then was the scariest thing about the place.

I got the fliers and responded to emails before packing up. A student needed clarification. A student needed an extension. I typed answers, probably way too long.

As a teacher—I’m tired of calling myself an instructor, I’m not that important or bland—you develop relationships with your students even online. They tell you things and, if they choose to, they write about these things in reflections and for assignments. One of these things this semester was cancer. One of the brightest students had had it, had been radiated and had had everything cleared up (I’m using the past perfect very intentionally here; a duration of time in the past). And then, gained strength. All semester, I had read the road to recovery, no, fuck that, the road to life, the road to everything the rest of us totally take for granted: running, building confidence, making plans for the future. And now. Now. No more past perfect. Three organs. Immediate chemo. Assignments might not be in. And the kicker, at the beginning “hope you’re having a good day”.

I start the ride home through the subsuming citrus fog with glassy eyes. “I hope you’re having a good day”. The logger trucks are wetly lapping past and I put the podcast back on because if they hit me, they hit me. They have your number or they don’t. The podcast continues to remind me of Mikey and how feeling it all sucks. And how there’s really no benefit to not deceiving yourself. Those of us who don’t, we’re not successful. We’re not happy. If we’re admired, we don’t want it anyway (we see how this admiration, too, is self-deception).

“I hope you’re having a good day.” They won’t even let anyone in the recovery room. How could anyone not think about these things?

 I go by the sawmill and the pica-impulse returns and mixes with these sad thoughts and I’d just like to sit in the cool darkness and eat splinters and bark and leaves until I’m full of self-deception. Instead, I go to the grocery story—a Hopper painting in the wet dark—and buy a frozen pie which just adds more weight to my pack and doesn’t deceive me.

After eight miles, I get off the highway and coast through the marsh on the other side of the bay. It’s not so foggy, but the darkness is sodden with cold and the bike path is unlit and only visible section by section as a repeating patch of flat, wet leaves. At one point there’s a backpack and someone back in the treeline rustling into their burrow. I check my phone: “ride safe!”

In the bottoms, the flat farmland out by the ocean, the house is a smear of light against the darkness. The back door is even propped open and the light is spilling out onto the plum tree in the back. In the window, the living room, my wife and daughter sitting together on the couch, wrapped in the same blanket. Steven Kellogg’s The Mysterious Tadpole propped up between them. When she hears me come in, my daughter comes running up and, without thinking, I drop all the stuff I’m struggling out of to scoop her up into my arms and I can’t hide from myself how great this makes me feel even if, to feel it, I have to struggle out of my preoccupations for a while.

We go back to the couch and read the book together and then, my daughter and I put our ears to my wife’s stomach and listen.  

Two Gates

 

The Manila Dunes are divided into two distinct sections. One, the southern section, passes briefly through a dune forest before emerging onto piles of humpbacked dunelands strewn with succulents, ropy flowering vines and clusters of other plants that grow over the sand like a net rather than through it. Walking in this section, eventually you’ll climb a slight rise and then the surf will be crashing into the densely packed sand no more then 50 feet in front of you, redwood logs lolling in tide, bladderwrack dripping with fog. The dunes are such an excellent sound-barrier, even the roaring of the winter Pacific can barely be heard through one of them.

The other, northern, section, is only open on the weekends. The access road to reach it is seven tenths of a mile long and it’s pitted with holes which, even in dry weather, collect morning fog and are lined with mud. In wet whether (which is the norm) each of these potholes is like a tarnished mirror reflecting the pine and cedar boughs that crowd the path on either side. From the parking area at the end of this road, the Mad River slough can be accessed. Before I moved to northern California, I’d never heard of a slough. Sometimes, I still read the word as ‘slow’ rather than ‘slew’, as it’s pronounced here. At high tide, the slough is a river; in low tide, it’s a trough of mud with a few drainage ditches snaking through it, egrets and herons poking around, godwits running in the mud. The trail here is beautiful following this river of mud along a narrow line that skirts a coniferous forest and a towering dune that’s pouring into the forest like something loosed from an enormous broken hourglass: a clean, solid background for the flaky, needled chaos of the swampgrowth at its base. Further down the trail, the shrubs and swampy undergrowth cluster and rise over the path creating a tunnel through which to walk, even in the bright afternoon, surrounded by a sort of littoral gloom.

This, perhaps because it is such an outrageous landscape, is the only place my two year-old daughter will walk at a persistent clip. Anywhere else, the forest, the beach, the marsh, she will take a tenth of a step and bend over to examine the minutiae at her feet or within arm’s reach, overhead and anywhere else she can find minutiae. I can’t bring myself to interrupt her explorations—it makes me feel like I’m pushing some kind of adult agenda on her—so I just stand there, unable to appreciate the pebble she’s rolling between her fingers for the five minutes she’s spent savoring the thing, and likewise unable to find the value in returning to the same broken tree to declare—in increasingly shrill tones—Broke! Broke! To which I invariably reply “Yes. It’s broken,” like I’m already starting to correct her grammar—God forgive me.

So, on Sunday, we went out to the northern section of the dunes to take an actual walk. I had some work to finish up as my students were writing their final essay which was due that night and the inevitable what-are-we-supposed-to-be-doings were swelling my inbox. After daylight savings, it’s been getting dark well before 6, but, as it was only a little after four when I finished up, I figured we had plenty of time for a little walk.

We arrived at dunes and bounced down the long, pitted drive to the northern parking area to access the path along the slough. There were a few other cars in the parking lot, but it’s not a crowded area. We only saw two other people on the path that only has a few spurs out to the ocean and is mostly a loop along the slough.

I don’t know if it was the gloaming or just that we’d been the week before, but my daughter wasn’t as interested as she’d been in the past. She was still walking, but she’d mixed in a bit of her dawdling and asking to be carried, only to ask to be put down. We were making progress, but it was a steadily halting progress. The gloaming gathered around us and streamed from the swampy thickets, becoming a syrupy darkness, like something squeezed from the humid mushrooms that lined the path in places where trees had fallen and rotted. The lighter color of the sandy soil in contrast to the dark underbrush made the path just luminous enough to see and made the darkness feel like something grasping. There was no moon, but it was becoming a clear night and there was a touch of sunset smoldering under the western horizon.

We were a little more than halfway along our loop when Gina said something about maybe hurrying, maybe being locked in. It wasn’t something that had even occurred to me, but even with the mention and the swelling darkness, it seemed too early to worry about. We hadn’t been gone very long and when we’d left there’d been three other cars in the parking lot. Surely those people were all out here coaxing their two year-olds to a normal walking pace as well, but, when we arrived in the parking lot, we found it not crepuscular, but dark. All the other cars were gone. I’m the type of person that waits until the last minute to hurry and, as this was clearly the last minute, I dove into the car and started it up, hurrying Gina through getting my daughter into her car sear like it’d been my idea all along to hurry.

Let me be clear. As we splashed down that rutted road, the headlights scudding along the dirt and gravel, barely rising through the fog to eye-level, I didn’t really think there would be a problem. I jokingly said something to Gina about the suspense of the moment, but I felt sure we’d be fine. Maybe we’d cut it close, but I knew that no one was going to be that vigilant about locking a gate in the middle of nowhere but as I was thinking this, it hove into view, at first just cuts in the fog, like someone had been slashing a cutlass at it, but then slashes took on a strange geometric design, something like a long isosceles triangle barring the road: the gate was closed.

Even understanding that the gate was closed, and being faced with it, I didn’t feel worried. It could probably be opened, I thought and my mind wasn’t even scrambling, it was just ambling along a neat row of possibilities. I got out and checked the gate; it had three heavy padlocks dangling from a manacle of interlocked iron pieces. It was heavy and formidable to even lift the locking apparatus. Even if one of the locks could be forced, there were two others. I wondered vaguely who would go to the trouble of so severely locking a place that one could easily walk to if one wished. There was about three feet open on either side of the gate. Was it really that big of a deal to keep cars out or, in our case, in? I looked at those locks and then back and my wife and daughter looking up expectantly from the glow of the car’s interior lights. It was completely dark now and we’d have to call for help.

I took out my phone and, noticing I only had 8% battery, called 911. I knew it wasn’t an emergency, but I had no idea who else to call. After I explained my non-emergency to the operator, I was quick to mention the two-year-old with us, hoping to give the non-emergency a little more priority. I was given the Humboldt County Sheriff’s number. The battery was down to 6%. I called the Sheriff and explained to the voice on the other end and to the dark around me: the locked gate, the two-year-old who didn’t have a spare diaper the long walk from here to anywhere, that was dinner time about an hour ago.

“I’m sorry,” the sympathetic voice said. “We don’t have that key and I have absolutely no idea who would.”

By the way she’d stressed absolutely, I decided to cut my losses and call Gina’s folks. I hadn’t even hung up when the screen went dark. The phone had died. Damn things always die when they still read 4% battery.

I think we all have doubts about our parenting ability, but standing there suddenly holding a dead phone, looking at my daughter through the darkness, knowing I’d driven us way out into this remote swamp and when it started to get dark, I’d ignored the warnings from my wife that maybe we should try to hurry, I knew it was my fault. We were absolutely stuck and I’d been the one to ensure it. I stood there, uncertain how to even begin to address the situation. Luckily, my wife is resilient and has a lousy understanding of spatial relationships.

“Wait a minute,” she said getting out of the car after I’d told her my phone had died—naturally she hadn’t brought hers. “This bank is all sand,”she said pointing to the right of the gate. “Maybe we could dig our way out. The car’s small enough.”

“Maybe.” I said. Looking at our shoebox of a car. Luckily, I’ve got an even worse sense of distance and measurement than she does and it seemed herculean but possible to actually dig a road out of the sand to the right of the gate. We got a tire iron and a wrench out of the trunk and began to madly claw at the sand and plants. It was a ridiculous hope, but one that, if pulled off, would be immensely gratifying. I could see it, we’d clear out the sand and leave the gate-locking bastard scratching his head when he came back in the morning and found a lane open at the side of the gate. Maybe I’d even leave a note about the futility of putting gates in sandy places. That would show ‘em.

Our daughter was occupied with a bag of Kix while we hacked and tore at the bank, breaking through roots and pushing heaps of sandy loam between our straddling legs, like dogs at the beach. It seemed to be working, gradually we were breaking the bank down, first by inches than by feet. I was going nuts with that tire iron just hacking at the sand and the roots underneath, trying to make up for my other, myriad inadequacies. There were only two issues. We’d need an excavator to get rid of all the sand; it would be tough to drive over it and the gate had this terrible guideline projecting into the bank which was also iron and thick enough to gash a hole in the roof or break the windshield. Even if we dug a two-lane road out of the sand, this guideline, I was beginning to see, would still be too low to get around. I thought we could maybe dig it out, but the longer we spent digging, I began to realize that it wasn’t looking good. Even if we cleared it all away, that guideline couldn’t be moved and the car would be on a serious angle.

Still, we decided to take a look. Gina got in and drove right up to the opening we’d made. No good. No good at all. But, seeing no alternative, I couldn’t give up. I dug frantically for another 10 minutes, tearing and pushing heaps of dirt, but when Gina moved the car back, the situation was the same.

Luckily we had the stroller in the trunk. I took it out. We got our daughter out—she was surprisingly calm as little kids tend to be in those situations—and I got in and drove the car back to the parking lot so it wouldn’t be blocking the road, then, I ran back carrying more Kix and another toy that had been in the car. Gina had explained to our daughter what was happening and she repeated “gate” and “stuck” like a mantra occasionally asking “key?” like a refrain in a song about our situation. It was great. Two-year-olds are great for adding levity.   

The three of us, made our way down the rest of the road in darkness. We’d gone quite a way before Gina asked me what my plan was. Funny, I hadn’t really even been thinking of one. I’d gone into some kind of autopilot, perhaps planning on walking all the way home—as I would’ve done had I been alone, but it wasn’t an option.

“I guess we’ll try to flag down a car and ask to use their phone. There’s no way I’m going up to one of these houses around here.” The houses around the Manila dunes are notoriously ramshackle, swarming with barking dogs and cars rusting back into the sand that’s grown up over their flattened tires. The kind of yards that belong to people who shoot when they see someone picking their way up to their door in the dark. I wasn’t even so sure we could avoid being shot by these people even if we didn’t go anywhere near their homes.

We were nearly back to the first parking area, the one they don’t lock, when we encountered it, and even in the wisps of fog and strands of murky residual light, it was funny. Even if we’d managed to dig ourselves out of the gate, we wouldn’t have gone more than half a mile, before we would’ve hit this one, a second gate, which was even more formidable than the one before it with trees on either side. I started to imagine how awful it would’ve been to dig ourselves out from around that first gate, only to bang up against this one. It made me feel better that I hadn’t done anything too stupid to get out from behind the first one—that is anything other than spending half an hour frantically digging into an embankment. I imagined someone seeing it in the morning and having a pretty good laugh.

At this point my daughter’s mantra changed to “two gates, stuck, key?” When she said ‘key’ she shook her head.  

When we’d made our way around this second gate, a car pulled down the narrow road going in the other direction. We called after it and raised our arms. It continued around a corner, but I knew the parking lot to the beach was just around the corner, so we walked quickly, hoping to stop who ever was going to the beach in the dark to ask to use their phone.

We didn’t even have to go all the way to the beach. The car had stopped in front of one of moldering houses sinking into the sand, surrounded by rusted cars and collapsing fences obscuring barking dogs. Someone was standing by the car. Just standing there in the dark. I explained the situation to what could’ve been a cardboard cutout or even just a shadow. Gina took up the explanation and I thought it better to let her finish,  in fact to let her and our daughter take as much of the spotlight as possible so as to downplay that reality that one man had stepped from an empty darkness to address another who’d been standing, also alone, in this darkness.

The dark form, without saying much, offered a phone. Gina called her folks. We thanked the guy for the phone and went to wait by the entrance to the area just off the highway. Within a few minutes, the guy who’d let us use his phone came driving back out from the house we’d met him in front of. He slowed, leaned out the window and asked if we’d needed to use the phone again before driving away. When I’d called the Sheriff’s Department and told them I was in the middle of nowhere with a dying phone, no food or water—well, except the Kix—and with a toddler, I’d thought maybe they’d send someone just to make sure we were alright, but in the end, it was the kindness of someone who was either buying or selling drugs that provided the help we needed. The entire time we were out there, we didn’t see another car until Gina’s dad drove up to get us.

Luckily, Gina’s folks aren’t the judgmental type. Her dad was genuinely glad to help. As we got into the car, we realized we’d forgotten the car seat and I set off, all the way down the dark, gated and fog-saturated gravel road to get it. The car’s headlights swum out ahead of me at first, but then faded and dropped back until, turning around, they were distant enough to resemble stars in the sky. By the time I’d reached the car and gotten the car seat out, I couldn’t even see them and I was convinced something was going to eat me while I humped the increasingly ungainly car seat back down the road to the car that, was waiting on the other side of that second gate.

…

In the morning, I woke up early as I usually do when something is unresolved, got on my bike and rode out to the dunes.

It was foggier than it had been at night and I couldn’t make out much in front of me once I got to the dunes, but the gates, still locked, were just as plain as they’d been the night before.

It wasn’t hard to get my bike around the gate and I rode until I came to the mess we’d made trying to get out of the second gate. Sand was strewn all over the gravel and ferns and a few other plants were tossed here and there. There was a wild crisscrossing of tire tracks where we’d made a few attempts to drive through before giving up and doing a ten-point turn to go back to the parking lot. I kicked a few of the ferns aside in an attempt to tidy up, afraid that when whoever arrived to unlock the gate, I’d be charged with some kind of destruction of property.

It was fitting that whoever had been so zealous about locking the gate the night before should be late to unlock it in the morning. We’d checked and all the signs said that the gate was locked “an hour after sun set”. The sun set around five and I’d called the Sheriff’s department at 5:52. We’d cut it a little close, but we would’ve been ok if the hours had been a little more strictly attended to. And now the gate that was supposed to open at sunrise was still locked with the sun floating an entire hand’s breadth above the horizon. I took another walk around the forest and, when I came out, it was like some magic spell had blown through the air. After focusing on these locked gates for over twelve hours, they’d come to seem immobile and, driving through them, even at that early hour, I couldn’t help but to give a little toot on the horn for all those living in various kinds of captivity; would that your gates, your bars, your cages, like mine, should one morning, be found standing inexplicably open no longer impeding the progress of the clear and rising sun.

In my imagination, I could hear my daughter’s reaction “two gates, open?” and I drove home just as the fog, that had settled in so heavily the night before, started to burn away.

Neighbors:հարեւաներ:qonşular

 

i.                     Azerbaijan

In 2010, I was in Baku for a few days. My friend Elliot and I were going to take a boat across the Caspian to the port of Turkmenbashi in Turkmenistan. The boat, a freighter, was continually delayed for departure and, as such, we had to put up in Baku longer than we’d expected.

As dull as the experience became after a while—both Elliot and I were anxious to get to Turkmenistan—it was an important one.

For the last two years, I’d been living in Armenia and traveling around the country. I’d seen some of the results of the Karabakh (or Artsakh, in Armenian) conflict. In some places, Armenians who’d fled Azerbaijan in the late 80’s still lived with only basic amenities. Along side these homes, were others that were empty. But when I asked Armenians about their erstwhile neighbors, I couldn’t get them to condemn anyone. Most of the people I talked to still referred to the Azeris as neighbors or ‘harevaner’.

Perhaps because the Armenians were so forgiving and gracious, I could only assume that the people on the other side of the border were the bellicose saber-rattlers. And with a passport full of Armenian stamps, I think I crossed into Azerbaijan almost looking for a fight. I hoped to tell anyone who would listen that the Armenians wished them no harm. The problem was, there was no one to listen.

It hadn’t been possible to travel overland into Azerbaijan, so we’d flown in Baku, a city that felt much more cosmopolitan that Yerevan or Tbilisi. Karabakh, and the resulting devastation, felt very far away from the central shopping district where we wandered between McDonalds, different Irish pubs and oil workers out for the weekend..

The only time Baku felt like anything I’d imagined Azerbaijan to be was during the last call to prayer of the day when the setting sun was rippling from the smooth paving stones, the cats hunted through dumpsters and more bearded men in shalwar kameezs seemed to be out. Even then, it wasn’t threatening, just a little vague. True, there were a lot of flags, many of them very large, but the people didn’t see to be weighed down with nationalist fervor. They walked along with the levity of a people with no grudges, people with McDonald’s to go to. It was hard to believe Sumgait was only 20km away.

…  

One afternoon after we’d brought our bags down to the pier only again to be told that the freighter wouldn’t leave that day, we took the long way back to where we were staying with a houseful of lovely EVS volunteers. On the way we stopped at the memorial for those who’d died in the Karabakh war. I don’t think we knew it was there. We just happened to pass it. There was the same statue I’d seen all over the Caucasus, but instead of commemorating the Great War, it marked a much more recent occasion. The marble was whiter, less weather-beaten, but I couldn’t tell if this made it more or less dignified as a monument.

Later that afternoon, we stopped to get peroshki, as we did many times on that trip, and when we told the proprietor we’d been in Armenia, he seemed curious and even hazarded a ‘barev’. I think he tried to say something else in Armenian as well, but we weren’t able to understand it until he’d repeated it a few times. The word was rusty from disuse. ‘Sosed’—neighbor. and left the experience feeling slightly confused. Rather than get a fight, I was only meeting indifference and here even appreciation. Who were these people who’d ordered the war? Who were these people who’d build the monuments? Had they all died? Despite the flags had they been forgotten or had everyone just stopped paying attention?

A few days later, we got our answer when our freighter finally came in. We’d gotten a call the night before and celebrated with probably too many Efes beers and so when we got to the pier, we forgot to be nervous about all the Armenian stamps in our passports. In fact, we forgot all about them until an official summoned us up from our sweltering room below decks where we’d been trying to figure out the bathroom with only a fifty gallon drum of water, a toilet with no flush and a hose.

When we got above decks and met the loose jowled military figure with our passports, we knew it best to feign ignorance when he pointed to the stamps.

“Armenia?” We asked. “Shto?” But even in broken Russian (on our side) the official ferreted an explanation out of us. It was clear he didn’t like what he heard, but that there wasn’t much he could do. We didn’t have Armenian names and we didn’t have a Karabakh stamp in our passports, and I was glad we didn’t. After seeing the bathroom in the freighter, I could only imagine what the bathroom would look like in jail. He grunted at each answer. “Volunteers.” “America.” “Ochin karasho.” It seemed we’d finally met the adversary I’d been hoping to meet all along, but it was in the last person I wanted to challenge—the one with the visa exit stamp in his hand. Let him be bitter. I knew I couldn’t change his mind, especially not in Russian.

Eventually, he mumbled something and slammed the stamp down. We scooted back below decks to the improbable bathroom and ended up drinking chacha with some Georgians who came barging into our room as always seems to happen on long passages through the former Soviet Union. After the interaction with the official, it was nice to have a predictable experience. I guess if we’d have been employing all our faculties, the official would’ve been a predictable experience, too. But, with all the casual indifference we’d met with, I’d forgotten there was even a conflict that we had to be mindful of.  

ii.                   Karabakh

Six years later, I had my chance to visit Karabakh and I got my visa still thinking of the Azeri official at the port of Baku and his scowl. He seemed to be peering at me through the years from under his visored official hat. Thinking of him, I flaunted my Karabakhi visa that night walking around Stepanakert. It was a strange feeling to possess something that would’ve, at one point, been so problematic, but now, would mean very little. They hadn’t even put the visa in our passports. They just handed the unpeeled stickers to my wife and me. But, because of this, I was continually taking the sticker out and looking at in the fading autumn light. Karabakh.

It was October and we walked the long sidewalk out of town to the Papik u Tatik statues. A row of streetlights stretched out to the monument, but otherwise it was ringed with dark fields and further off, the smoke from burning dung fires on the chilly night.

At the statues, such a famed symbol of both Karabakh and Armenian-ness, there were a group of young people listening to Ruski Pop and sitting around their white Lada Nivas eating sunflower seeds. We nodded to them and climbed up to the monument. I stretched out over pyramidal head of the Tatik. I couldn’t help it. The shape was too inviting.

…

We spent the next few days in Shushi, roaming around the crumbling, but respected Govhar Agha Mosque and walking the janapar, the famed hiking trail that has a Swiss or Alpen quality to its views and sheep and twisted vinegary apple trees. The sole difference, I found between a village in the Dolomites and the trail from Shushi was to be found in a neglected Muslim cemetery. Just a few tombstones with indecipherable calligraphy and names, the same tombstones I’d seen a few years before in Repulika Srbska in Bosnia and even in Albania. There’s something particularly pious and haunting about overgrown Muslim cemeteries. But, like the mosque, the tombstones weren’t broken or defaced. They’d just been left alone a long time.

On our way back to the hotel, we stopped and talked with the streetful of twilit children while gusts of wind blew the smoke from bonfires into our clothes. It felt as if we were on a ledge looking down over the sea of lights that was little Stepanavan. Above us the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral loomed in new white stone, like that I’d seen in the memorial in Baku years before.

And the next day, back in Stepanakert, we stopped at a peroshki stall we’d found at the bus station and had a long talk with the proprietor about the war and its ravages and relics. “Look” she’d told me, “that’s all in the past. We have no problem with our Azeri neighbors”—haravener—there was that word again. The same word I’d heard from her Azeri counterpart in Baku and the same word I’d heard from the displaced in Armenia. Was the border official the only one with any animosity? Had it been required of him?

…

Today, as civilians on both sides of the line are dying, I’m reminded of those sagacious remarks from two shopkeepers in peroshki stalls in Baku and Stepanakert who worked right under the white stone that symbolized the deaths of their countrymen and forgave.

To me, Karabakh, Artsakh is Armenian, because that’s the way I experienced it. The people who welcomed me into their homes were Armenian and the people who’d told me to visit again were Armenian. But I’d be remiss if I forgot the crumbling mosques and the tilting headstones, just as I’d be remiss if I’d overlooked the ruins of Armenian churches surrounding Erzurum.

Today, the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral is rejoining the Govhar Agha Mosque, as the stone repair work is blasted open again, and both beautiful buildings succumb to the rapid decay of mortar fire. I can’t help but to see the kids that ran down the street from one landmark to the next, mindful only of the approaching autumn night and the building, church or mosque, that was closest to their home and marked the way in walls of white stone.