Permafrost

       

       When I was very young, I lived in a place called Pufton Village. It was ugly and gray, full of grad students and poor people. Roaches roamed freely on the kitchen floor. My mother did what she could with the place. She built a loft for my brother that could be reached by a chunky ladder made of two by fours. There was a small nook underneath where I played with a set of wooden blocks. My brother would construct elaborate mazes and thoroughfares and then put a marble in my hand and tell me to drop it in a certain location. I was little so when it disappeared and then reappeared, I was delighted. My brother surrounded himself with bright colors. He had a bureau that he painted grass green on the outside and electric blue on the inside. He filled an entire drawer with hard candies with colorful plastic wrappers, the kind that made crunching noises when you balled it up to throw it away. I remember sinking my hand down to the bottom and rifling through them. The apartment was small enough that one time, my brother constructed a giant web of masking tape, sticky lines running back and forth across the space. There were other boys there, my brother’s friends, scampering around, gleefully unrolling rolls and rolls of tape, shrieking when it made that thwap sound as it unpeeled from itself. I was small and clumsy and I ran into a piece of tape in the corner, bringing an entire section down with me. “Crawl. Just crawl! Damn it!” yelled my brother. 

In photographs of that time, I am wide eyed and smiling. I am adorable. In one picture, my face is scrunched up with joy. In another, I am sitting in my mother’s studio amidst her calligraphy pens and various nibs, a row of ink bottles close by, playing with a pair of orange-handled scissors that look massive in my hands. In another, I am sitting like the Buddha, a book splayed out on my lap, just awoken from a nap, a blanket draped over me like a monk’s robe. I am utterly at peace. That photo has circulated amongst my mother’s friends because of the look of serenity on my face.

There was a store called Watroba’s that we went to for things like milk and bread. The owner always gave me an Andes chocolate for free when we went to pay for our items. I liked the mint green strip sandwiched between the milk chocolate. I liked the dark green foil wrapper with the mountain peak on it. I liked how stiff it was as you unwrapped it, how it kept it’s shape.

When we went one November, I wandered around the store until I came across a pile of frozen turkeys behind a glass door. I stood there quietly until my mother found me.

“Are those turkeys?” I asked. 

“Yes,” my mother said. 

“Can we save them?” 

“Well...”

“Can we bring them back to the woods?” I said, without taking my eyes off of the pile. I thought their feathers and heads would grow back, that all we had to do was return them to the woods and they would start hopping about. I didn’t understand that frozen meant dead. I grew very upset. So my mother told me that she and my father would come back to the store and bring them to the woods and they would be alive again, free. I retrieved my Andes chocolate and left, convinced my mother would follow through with her plan.

“You were always compassionate,” my mother said when I told her I thought I’d sewn a set of armor so tight around me that I couldn’t get out. I was thirty-three. 

“Sometimes, I’ll break free, when I’m with S.,” I said. “We were at a gas station and I turned the corner and did a flying kick. Out of nowhere. My foot got really high, too.”

It happened with M. sometimes. We were talking about farts. I got the giggles, my cheeks pushing up into my eyes. With others, when they were in front of me, they shimmered like mirages. But I couldn’t feel them. I thought maybe it was because I couldn’t gain a foothold where they had vaulted. I saw couples form. They started with a large dog and then added a small pug. Or it was a cat and then a Great Dane. I knew what came next. A child. Always a child. And I also knew, I would never have one. Children shouldn’t beget children. That’s what I say if people asked, “But I’m still I child.”

He was in the elevator when he told me. My boyfriend had sent a text that read: Disaster. I lost a shit ton. I’m an idiot. He left $300 in his account for food. I was the only thing standing between him and zero. I was a mouth to feed. And Thanksgiving was just around the corner.

“Hold on...hold on,” he said. “I might lose you.”

No, I thought to myself, you won’t. I heard an ad playing on the radio. 

“It’s not just time to talk turkey. It’s time to buy turkey.”

The World At Large

In Erfurt, Germany, while doing an internship at a state parliament in Thuringia, I started asking, “Was braucht die Welt?” - What does the world need? My desire to study political science had been fueled by a youthful idealism and a naive exuberance. But it left me feeling empty...spent. The internship was a farce. I wandered in and out of the parliament building and into various ministries where I interviewed the men and women who made up the government. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I didn’t know where I was going. So I asked, “Was braucht die Welt?” over and over again in an effort to lay claim to a direction. I was determined not to make a frivolous choice. I thought by asking those around me, the adults, the grown-ups, I was being efficient. I was considering law school. But did the world need more lawyers?

After pondering my query for a minute, one man responded, “Captain of container ships?” 

“Really?” I said, slightly incredulous. Sitting there, in my long black pants and spiffy corduroy jacket, did I look like a future captain? 

“Well, there’s a shortage.”

“Oh. Huh.”

It didn’t seem like a viable career choice for me. Not then. Not now. I chose architecture school. I emerged an artist, ill-equipped to deal with the rigors of a traditional architecture career. Digital space was deadening. I floundered. Others, looking in, saw my stagnation and made suggestions. They keep coming. It started with a letter from my uncle, whose low opinion of me led him to believe I should consider the sanitation industry and shovel shit out of port-o-potties. I was pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked anymore. I was pretty sure the process involved a large pipe or hose that sucked the contents out rather than a shovel. A friend of my mother’s said I should work for the telephone company. He had made a career out of it. He had a pension. It had been a good gig. I suspected, however, that the ‘telephone’ company was only a fraction of its former self, that it was now a patchwork of cellular networks vying for market share. Did he think I would be laying down wires in the ground, as he had done? Or would I be repairing fiber-optic cable networks? Or hocking cell phones at a Verizon store in a strip mall? People tend to suggest their own line of work, which strikes me as small-minded and unimaginative, indicative of a lack of empathy and supremely narcissistic. 

My brother told me I should go into security. He is in security. The monotony, I thought. What qualified me for this line of work? I’ve broken the law and gotten caught. He said they don’t check those things if you go into management. “What a mismanaged industry,” I thought to myself. What made him think I would enjoy monitoring people’s movements? Or patrolling the inner sanctums of some building in the off hours? Would I carry a gun? Or a large flash light? Would I shine it down the hallway when I heard a strange noise? Would I have to hit someone over the head with it? 

      “Where the fuck does this guy get off telling you to go into security,” said a friend, when I told him of my brother’s suggestion. He followed up with a number, the number he thought might be my IQ. “What the fuck.” My father did not suggest I go into nursing, but he is a nurse. He stops life from leaving the body. I could never do it. I don’t have enough respect for life. I don’t have enough respect for myself. 

When I made a move to the West Coast, I started looking for jobs. At first, I cast a wide net. If people asked what I was looking for, I told them something adjacent to the creative world at the intersection of art and culture. 

“Are you interested in accounting?” 

“So...marketing?” 

Why did they keep missing the mark? I thought. How daft were these people? When I got an offer for a job at Pottery Barn Kids, I declined. The title of the position was Designer, but it really meant sales, with an impossible metric of $600 an hour. I wasn’t interested in schilling shit for a multi-million dollar business, or recommending the latest shade of beige as a wall color for some young mother’s nursery, or suggesting they spell out their child’s name with giant, ornamental letters, baby blue for a boy, pink for a girl. When I described the position to someone they said, “So, it’s a little bit like you’re a whore.”

“Exactly,” I responded. 

“You have the wrong attitude,” said a friend of a friend when I told them I’d rather do nothing than do that, I’d be doing more harm than good, populating the world with bad taste. It turned out I had the same attitude as a cousin of theirs, a perpetually unemployed, possibly schizophrenic, sometime meth addict. And, sitting there in the hot tub, the water swirling around me, I remembered something I will never forget. “Some people,” said a professor once, during a seminar, “Go up,” and his fingers flitted toward the ceiling. “And some...” his fingers made a downward, trickling motion, like he was stroking the air, “Don’t.” It turns out, the world doesn’t need me at all.

These Bandits Are No Outlaws

In Los Angeles, in a quiet suburban hell, there is a house on Larco Way, nestled into the horseshoe of a canyon. A steep wall of hard dirt rises from the ground in the back where there’s a cement patio, smooth as skin. The front door opens to a set of brick terraces spilling out to the edge of the street. When I arrive, the flora is alien. A grove of giant stalks with oversized leaves borders the lawn along with a set of massive succulents sporting thick, spiked leaves. A bush with yellow flowers conceals the bedroom window, hummingbirds needling their way into the blossoms every morning. A curtain of magenta flowers on the other side doesn’t attract them. Here and there, groups of thick branches grow in odd curves along the ground. A front section of the yard has five rose bushes sitting in round hollows. Every time the roses bloom in full, a bold, enterprising deer comes by and eats them. In the morning, it looks like a massacre, the red petals spread out like blood over the ground. When the roses bloom again, one bush is yellow, another pink, another red and two seem dormant, battered. I smell them all but only the yellow one has a scent and even on the single bush, only certain flowers. 

I am living with a man I am trying to love. When his sister comes by to drop off her dogs, a hyper teacup Yorkshire and a King Charles Cavalier with cataracts and a dumb look on his face, she maintains an intense, dour look. She wears black when she drops them off and she is wearing black again when she picks them up. She motions for me to follow her outside where she tells me, “That tree is out of control. This bush...they need to cut it.” She selects a few stalks from the grove. “And here, they need to take these out, they do not look good.” She walks to other side of the yard. “And here, these leaves, they need to be pulled out.” I can tell that some of them are dying, browning along the edges. She draws me around the corner and points to another plant. “Here...these leaves should not be touching the ground. They don’t want to do it because it’s more work. I pay them extra. But they don’t want to do it. More work for them. I will call them and tell them. But you see them, you can tell them too.” She is talking about the gardeners who come twice a month. 

“What about this bush?” I ask, pointing to the one with the yellow flowers.

“Yes. It is out of control.”

Two Thursdays go by and they don’t come. Grass starts growing in uneven patches. Weeds sprout up around the roses. Dead leaves populate the terrace along with flyers for expensive houses and shitty pizza. A book of yellow pages gets dropped off. More flyers get stuffed into the wrought iron railing that runs up the length of the steps. When the gardeners finally do come, I go out to meet them. One of them is standing near the fence with a weed whacker thrumming in his hands. He turns it off when I approach him. I ask if someone called about the yard. The man nods. All I can see are his eyes. They are blue. He wears a bandana across his face, with the corner pointing down in a triangle. I point to the bush and say it needs to be cut. He nods. I motion to the tree in the very front and make a sweeping curve with my hand. He nods. I go to the bush with too many leaves. I grab at the air and pull. He nods. I forget to mention the giant stalks or the plant whose leaves are touching the ground. I am nervous. I am suddenly aware of being white. Of being American. Of being educated. Of being unemployed. When he pulls down his bandana, I am shocked to see how good-looking he is. I go back inside and notice that my shirt is see-through. I try on another shirt, one that is also transparent. I put the first one back on. When I look outside again, there are four or five men in the yard, dressed in pants and long-sleeved shirts despite the heat. They don’t look like the other Mexican gardeners. These men don’t have short legs and short torsos. These men don’t have dark skin and dark hair. They are light with blue eyes and good bodies. One is clipping the front bush with abandon when I suddenly remember the hummingbirds. Another is hacking brush with a hatchet. And another has a machete, poised to take stalks out. It is a violent scene, full of sharp edges and swift movements. With their red bandanas covering their faces, their baseball caps pulled down to shield their eyes, they look like bandits. It’s not that I don’t feel safe. But I choose to leave, telling myself it’s the noise. I imagine where they’re from, a dry village in the middle of nowhere, chickens kicking up dust as they pick their way through town. I imagine them making their way across the border in the dead of night, crawling along the ground like lizards. I go to Baskin-Robbins for a strawberry milkshake and, blasting the AC, start driving down a tree-lined street that seems to go on forever, winding its way through the hills. When I turn on the radio, a black man is talking. He is struggling to describe what it feels like to have a terminal degree and be pulled over for no reason, to be questioned. He starts to cry.

“Take your time,” says the DJ.

I turn it off. Driving around in a borrowed BMW, it is so easy to feel you are above and not below.

Losing/Losers

I live in a complex designed by Peter Osler. It features three man-made ponds with resident fowl including flocks of geese and a pair of swans, monogamous. Each year they bear between two and seven cygnets. It's heartbreaking to watch a group of them diminish from say five, to one. Walking past them, as they hiss, you wonder what fate befell the young. You imagine one was snatched up in the jaws of a dog, the other falling to its death in the cistern of the pond's filtration system. Whatever the case, it will be repeated the following year. This place is lush, verdant. The meat and bones of the structures are shit. The siding was replaced, the balconies enlarged. These were superficial measures to improve things. At dusk, though, bunny rabbits (and hares as well, apparently) appear and hop about. Deer amble past nibbling on the grass, raising their heads gracefully in alarm at the slightest movement. It's paradisal, really. I've lived here for seven years now. Unable to forge my way through graduate school, stopping and starting and finally withdrawing in disgrace...and disgust, I am prone to spotting fellow losers. They develop singular and, upon observation, similar habits. And I find it alarming. First, there's Glen. Fifteen years ago, he would pop up in my mother's unit and she would kindly listen to him as he contemplated suicide. His wife was leaving him. He was bereft. He was balding. He had long, wavy hair that he wore pulled back in a loose ponytail. It was disgusting. Having moved back here I am acutely aware of his habits. He drives a burgundy SUV. A headlight or tail light is always out. He drives in and out of the complex at all hours of the night, roaring over the giant speed bumps. I once asked him what he did for a living and he said something like, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you." And now I think maybe he deals in penny stocks, something shady online. Or he's a drug dealer. Heroin. Pot's ubiquitous and doesn't require dealers anymore. When I go running, I pass his porch in the back and he's always smoking. He jerks his chin out in greeting. Or waves, cigarette in hand, always on the phone. His fat dog running after me, sniffing for my crotch. What Glen and I have in common is the smoking. No one smokes here. But I like to slip out the sliding glass door of my bedroom, slide down on my haunches and smoke cigarettes on the cement patio. When I'm done I stamp on them with my foot and put them in a can. And he stays up late. I stay up late. This is a sign of being a loser. Or it is symptomatic of being a loser.
I ride the bus because I crashed the car. All kinds of losers ride the bus. Losers who talk to themselves. Losers who talk to other people who have no interest in listening to them. When I choose to leave the house for a routine errand, a woman from the complex seems to time her excursions with mine. Or mine with hers, is maybe what she thinks. In another time, she would have been branded a witch. She wears a black, wide-brimmed hat, bristly gray hair bursting forth and a long, black coat to match. If she sees you, she will approach you, talk to you and not stop until you walk away. Sometimes she will follow you, still talking. She covers any topic you can think of. She has a strategy. If you say something, if you utter one word, she will pick up on it, contextualize it and start spewing. It's terrifying. She walks with purpose. She wears practical shoes. She is alone.
People fail. People lose. People fall. And don't get up. Mental illness might play a role. And I wonder, is this my future.
When I go grocery shopping, when I randomly go to DSW to browse, when I go to Michael's to get superglue I always see Chris on the bus, a man who might be called 'touched', a man who is slightly off, wearing a bright orange beanie, the kind you see during hunting season, talking up a storm with a pronounced lisp. Talking to no one.

The Teepee

As a child, I laid great stock in the quality of a backyard, the ratio of lawn to woods, the types of trees, the navigability of the forest floor. My best friend was named Brianna, a flaxen-haired girl whose squeals of delight became a permanent scowl as she grew older, an angelic face turned hard and bitter by chlorine and domestic discord. In her efforts to become an Olympic-grade swimmer, her body grew lean and hard, her hair turned green, and our friendship deteriorated. But oh, the glory of those early days. A lawn with brittle grass, peppered with acorns stretched from the back of her cape-cod style house. The siding was a warm, streaked gray, the inside crisp, clean white. A woodpile formed a wall on one side of the yard, perpetually occupied by wasps buzzing in and out of its dark recesses on their way to treachery. In Laura Ashley dresses with peter pan collars and paisley prints, we darted into the forest to disappear for hours. As houses cropped up around hers we collected felled trees to build a teepee. It was important that they were fir trees. We preferred white pine, the needles still green for having been so close to life. Is it a fir? Make sure it’s a fir, we would ask each other. We considered each limb, carefully inspecting it for the criteria we’d established; 3 to 4 inches in diameter, 15 to 25 feet long, supple but not too flexible. We would then drag it down the dirt road to prop it up against a giant pine tree, slowly amassing the conical shape of a teepee. We were wild. It was our primitive hut. One day, creeping along the forest floor, we discovered a crippled foundation. Huddled behind the wall, our small hands resting on the round stones protruding from the mortar, Brianna pointed to an animal, its hair bristly and tan. It had pointy ears and a short, stubby tail. Briana may have whispered, “It’s a bobcat!” but it’s unlikely she knew what we were observing. We became very still, very hushed, and suddenly very afraid. First, there was the matter of the creature’s size. It seemed large because we were small. It was on the prowl, we could see that, it’s nose lowered to the ground, following some invisible, scented path. This muscled animal had speed and power, we could tell. We sunk into the foundation and turned our backs to the creature. We waited. When we thought it was safe we peered over the edge. All we could see were patches of sky filtering through the branches, birds flitting about. We tiptoed back to the house and told her parents what we had seen. They smiled at our fear and were slightly astonished that we’d witnessed such a rare sight.Brianna and I worked all summer on that teepee. It’s apex lay far above our heads. Her mother Maureen would call for us at lunch time and feed us lentil soup in pink bowls that looked like roses. She always added cubes of tofu that bobbed up to the surface. She served us small salads with Italian dressing and a dollop of cottage cheese. She must have thought we needed all the extra protein we could get considering our unique choice of activity which was in fact, hard labor. Brianna and I were both vegetarians who grew to be big girls with strong bones. It was always our plan to spend one night in the teepee upon its completion. We left a small, triangular opening which served as an entrance and we began collecting the soft branches of fir trees and laying them down, creating what we imagined would be a soft bed. The long needles of the white pine mingled with the short needles of a different conifer. When we felt we had laid down a sufficient bed of boughs, we went inside for dinner. Dusk fell, we went back outside and surveyed our work, the dark mass of the teepee appearing as if it had always been there, a structure native to that very spot. We liked how you couldn’t see in. But once inside, the light entered in shafts and you could spy on the surroundings through the cracks. We entered the teepee, one after the other. The scent of pine was thick and rich. Droplets of sap trickled down the sides. We circled our spots like animals nestling in for the night. And when we lay down, we got right back up again, our bones already aching from the hard ground.