(O to Kill or to Thrill at the) Whirl of Memory (a Four Tet Remix)

"May you find water and shade Mangin," Rand told him sadly.
-Lord of Chaos, Robert Jordan

I was walking along a sparse March forest, snow up to my hairy shins, which were tucked, like all of me, thickly in a few too many layers of winter wrappings, a sublime sweat starting to build, due the gathering effort.  This was many years ago.  Walking further into the Fraser firs I forgot the nonpresent moments.  Stepping into deep snow and pulling my poor subsumed wet boots out, with both hands, her white nails holding tight on my memory, and hoping to work that out.  Dig down headlong harder.  

It was cold.

Hearing a woodpecker’s distinctive percussion overhead I look, but too quick and the effect is dizzying.  A wonderful drunken feeling, like reading surrealism whilst drinking gin.
Wood beetles make their own antifreeze in the winter with glycerols that effectively lower the freezing point of their bodily fluid: Just below the surface bark, each little grubby bug the woodpecker plucks is a sugary sweet dessert.

Tightly retying my boot laces and looping uphill past the tiny prints of a hopping deer mouse to a rocky ledge with an odd depression that held my destination apparent: an old chrome Airstream camper, with a brown light emanating from within.
 

I would have thought that I made enough noise walking up and walking in to alert whoever was within to my presence but this would have been wrongthinking.  Inside, two sets of terrified young eyes piercing me at the door.  One was tied down. The other, only half naked.

 I think you forgot something.  


Let’s go back, to get this right.  Let’s tell it back right for all of them, especially my friends, the kids from school, my forever and best audience.
 

There was a potluck banquet for our wolf scout pack, families included.  We all lined up with our partners for a race, I still have the faded photograph in a cigar box under my toilet bowl cleaning products— our baby faces. Each young badge designee looking proudly schlubby, each with their corresponding duck.  

Don’t ask.  Anyway

I remember that CJ was there that day.  I remember, even though he isn’t in the picture, or he's a blur in it. I can't remember, but I remember feeling bright and hungry, and overhearing him try to explain to the clever Panamanian exchange student how global warming was just Earth deciding to go on a diet.  He wouldn’t have used the words “global warming,” although our brains were brimming with Captain Planet.  The clever Panamanian Exchange student was staying with the Ortner’s, Mike + Kelly, whose son Ryan was in our pack.  They were a bit more of a granola crowd than we were, and by extension she, staying with them, was certainly way out of CJ’s league.  He didn’t care, or more likely didn't even know, nor did he know that I was watching any of this.  Some inner voice must have compelled him to keep talking I suppose, pure gut instinct, explaining his crackbrain idea.  Fate sometimes smiles upon us.  She, rather than flyswat him, showed those small tender signs of interest that, even more remarkably, CJ tuned in to.  He lit up like a glow worm and offered to go get her some Kool Aid.  I wondered if her English was so bad that maybe she had no idea what he was even saying.


 

Why do I even remember this?  I’m getting worried.

 

CJ wasn’t like the rest of us.  He had moved to town from New York and was already a year older but still in our grade and most of his "friends" didn’t really like him, and so when he was met with even the slightest bit of attention he was like a frequently ignored puppydog getting his ears scratched, and when we were a few years older and he started to gain active cognizance of the farer sex there were frequently explosive consequences.  He hurled his sexuality at them, kissing and petting and even getting away with it sometimes— or not.

Puberty hit him hard and early; he had thin hair, flecked skin, thin lips, a big nose and dirty hands.  He got no help at home and sometimes he got on the bus in the morning smelling like wet rodent, his squirrely eyes singling me out to come and tell me through his bad breath about his hot rod designs or some wrestling thing or other.  He was like a bad talk radio station, it didn't matter if you weren't listening, he spoke very intentionally and was not at all offended when you didn’t care, but the minute that you voiced an opinion opposed to him or told him it was stupid, which I never did, but I saw people do it just to goad him into a fight, he always lost it, coming back to find me, crying, maybe bleeding.  Why was he so passionate? I don’t really know.  But I remember the time with the exchange student. It was earlier.  It’s one of those sparkling oracular moments when you remember that the world, as if a dream, is only really a fraction of what we can see.  And what you can see manifests itself in a twinge of doubt directed at or by a girl.

There was this one girl—  this was probably in ‘aught three or four, on a dewlit cobblestone street with a French name with a lithe and lovely girl—  who was dumping me but trying to be pleasant about it. I wasn’t oblivious to this but I was having too good a time to be let down by it. I wore a baby blue silk shirt with white polka dots.  Nothing was going to get me down.   Maybe she wanted it to hurt a little, come to think of it. A white station wagon drove by and a placid ray of sun refracted off the windshield, momentarily illuminating our shadowy position alone in the park across from the Whole Foods where I bought some gluten-free pretzels and some milk.

She was in a red, white, and blue blouse with beige capris pants so I couldn’t stop staring at her calves and ankles— although it was the flowing dyed blonde hair across her shoulders that really broke your heart. She was a smart girl, smart and going to Mount Holyoke but from a poor family who lived in the back upstairs apartment of an old house in the north end. Her stepfather worked in security at the hospital and her mother was like that Fountains of Wayne song only bigger, sable haired, and ruthlessly bipolar.  I was “our valued guest young man” when I was taking care of my Pre-Reqs down at the U extension, but then it became known that I had taken a semester off to work on my novel, and things got cold for me very fast. Very fast.  

We started hiking along the nature trail even though it was wet and followed behind her, dragging my feet and I seeing flowers that I couldn’t name.  I felt a twinge of pain in my back. “I have a job interview” she informed me “on Thursday.”

“I thought you were going away. With Amy and them. To the mountain” I said, grimacing a bit, as the fire in my spine engulfed me and then was gone in a single deep breath.  

“That’s not until Friday,” she said. I didn’t ask her where she was interviewing, or for what. An immense cloud abruptly blinded out the sun and I felt wholly miserable and didn’t ask myself what I was miserable about.  I needed to cheer up.  Be the change you want to, etc.

“Enjoy the mountain” I said.

“But what will you do?” she asked me. I had no idea. I knew she didn’t just mean that specific weekend. What would I do?  I eyed the bumps above her ankle where she’d shaved the hairs off earlier that morning. She thought we needed to have a talk, this talk, this polite breakup, because she liked me.  Liked, in mostly the past tense. I wanted to do something to be liked again.  I wanted to not have this conversation right now or ever. I wanted to do something interesting so I could be interested in something and I had no interest in doing anything except, yes, buying a coat like the one I saw in that late night black and white French film (I didn’t know the term New Wave yet) and getting drunk, I wanted to do that, get drunk on jugs of wine like wretched Kerouac in the Dharma Bums.  I wanted to kiss her nose.  

“Write, I guess,” I said, trying to sound careless but I could hear myself and it didn’t sound hip or ironic or careless it just sounded vindictive, like I was mocking her, which wasn’t what I had intended or expected.  We walked along the marshy path under the highway and it started to sprinkle, even though the sun was still shining, like a parody of itself.  I don’t know why I didn’t answer her question legitimately— I mean, I do know, but I’ve beat myself up over it for years, years in which I wished that I could just erase memory rather than be burdened by it— but what I said is what I have tried to do all these years: put down words and sounds into stories and repeat them. It's more than mere communication because when it happens, and someone hears something that I’ve written honestly and earnestly I think of it as a miracle because I cease to be and they cease to be and all that remains is the idea exchanged in that INSTANT. This almost sounds like I am describing an orgasm. But sometimes you write things and years later they come back to you as old friends, full of jokes and insights into the secret music of your mind. Fancy words like those in Banville that I used to make into litanies, like an inaccessibly obscure prayer to the College Board deity, but I wasn’t doing it for salvation from them I was doing it because it felt good to weldwork those words into a sentence, to come close to doing on paper what was being done to me when I read Timothy Donnelly or Joseph O’Neill or the word desultory.  I wanted to write because when I read, truly read— not read while horny or tired or high— I could FEEL.  Back then I wanted to hide myself with big words because I wanted to be famous as much as I wanted to not be seen and now that most of my vanity and ego have gone I simply feel grateful that I was able to feel anything and I want to give that back to the world for the sake of that one reader out there who I will never even meet years from now when they are down on their luck and revising old comments to old girlfriends.  They might be dismayed to discover that there’s nothing much better to say now than what was said in the first place. This is what I would tell her now: I want to say good stuff.
 

There was another time.  It was in the mouth of a dark blue night and I was in an airplane flying over a moonlit ocean’s mysteries, thinking the world hushed and suspended with my eyes pinballing between the new New Yorker on my lap and the curtain.  A girl behind there with perfect white fingernails through which she was distributing free champagne to certain of the more privileged passengers. A tired crimson burning behind my eyes from too much reading under a too-self-serving glarelight. Get some sleep, get some sleep, get some sleep…

 

Or that job. That summer job oh lord with Laura there and my cousin Christy who got me in and Paolo, Stephen, Landon and Nancy, and big Tyler, and Oleysia, oh my god. That dry chalky warehouse with the big roller bins that would thunder across cement floors getting louder and louder like a jet crashing or a tornado bearing down or an earthquake outside, and just as quickly STOP and all would be well, still sitting there behind the freight dumpsters, still getting high with the Turner brothers.

That was the last time I heard anything from anyone about CJ, though, I confess that I invariably misremember how that went down and think that I saw him one last time and I have to catch myself.  I would have been nineteen, and Christina said her neighbor’s boss said that CJ had taken off with the circus. That was all I heard but I still see carnies when I think of it, and even at twenty he looked seedy, like an emaciated STD of a man with a fat waist like he was deep into middle age and hollow whiskered cheeks under hollow ferret eyes.

 

Are you sure that’s what happened?  Are you sure that’s what you saw?

Last month I went back to the camper.  It was a gorgeous late winter day of endless and incredible sun. and I felt good and bright to have made the choice to come up into the woods alone.  Nothing changes the endless sunlight, not even winter.  It was bright and cold and one could smell the mud in the air even if you couldn’t see it under the snow.  Good sugar weather.  I returned through the empty forest ducking through bare branches and twigs not yet studded with the emerald jewelry of buds and found my way up to the knoll where the camper sat, just a bit warmer inside than out. A dusty tin bed with a thin mattress on brown springs. I wanted to light a cigarette suddenly and very powerfully but I waited awhile and found a drawer with a picture of two skinny little girls on their elbows on the floor playing cards, and a smugly smiling woman seated behind, her chin up.  Hair of some wild animal was clumped up in the rear of the airstream, which panicked me for a moment but it didn’t look new.  Some feral dog long gone. As the grips of the bright day started to slip into gray, I lit the cigarette, and the smoke felt exquisitely good in my chest. It felt a little sexual. I felt like a king sitting there, and then the sun went behind the last cloud for good and the wind went up, and it was almost dark and suddenly chilly in the breeze but I knew that someday soon it would all warm up.  Not today, but someday. Nobody knew where I was today. Nobody. This camper wanted a friend.  I could stay.  Life would be sad, but fine, quiet, meditative, more lonely for me than for the camper.  I felt a song come into my head, some jingle, like the blood in my brain righting itself.  Old and crazy me, it's not like I planned this, smoking and scribbling words into his little book.  The sun down and the mud under the snow starting to firm up again for the night.  I could have stayed there for the night that night, started a little fire and gotten a little closer to god, just me out under the stars in that big rusting silver space capsule, but I didn’t.  Let’s not lie to each other or our ex-girlfriends. I didn’t stay but I left a little note in the drawer, next to the picture of the two little girls.  I’m not going to tell you what it says.  But if you find yourself out there this summer, and need a leaky seething place to lie down for the night, you could hole up there, if maybe you stumble around the forest long enough to find it and know that I wasn’t dicking around about everything, and pity me a bit because you’ll see that there’s no cell signal and then you’ll think of that note that crazy guy left and find it and scratch your head a bit reading maybe, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll think, wait, that’s pretty good.