Every night, I sit back on the tattered couch under the balcony, and listen to the wind rustling in the bamboo, and watch the moon rise over the palms. The coyotes trade echoes back and forth across the hills. The smell of fried garlic and meat seeps through the chain link fence, as the neighbors argue in Cantonese.
Tess perches on the arm of a chair across from, dark eyes bright under the dark waves of her, and listens to me talk. I open my arms and wave my hands wildly. We are discussing the possibility of imposing form on content in a way that creates a symbiotic relationship. I drop my arms, and she speaks quietly, lets her words fall softly, like leaves on the asphalt. Tonight we agree, although we approach the problem from different perspectives.
We discuss the fact that the world is ending--and every evening, I watch the sun soak the hills in crimson and violet, and thank God that I have been born in such violent times. A year from now, she has packed up her electric blue civic and broken for the northern coast. She calls me in the fall, and tells me that she has lost her way, that everything that seemed to simple then is far more complex than she could've realized. We talk in the dark of the winter--her perched on her windshield with earshot of the ocean, me in snow-packed boots--tramping through a silent neighborhood in northern Virginia. In the spring, she disappears.
That summer, I go to Boston, and spend a week wandering through Back Bay--walking back and forth across the Charles River, to visit Harvard Yard and the MIT Campus. I sneak into one of the classrooms at MIT, hoping to find some tangible evidence of genius, but all I see are machines I don't understand, and harrassed looking nineteen year-olds in glasses. In the afternoon, the Berklee School of music lets out, and then the streets are filled with high-schoolers toting banjos and cellos, and music coming from the alleys and from under covered doorways. I go to Jamaica Plain, to see the renovated victorian houses, which cover the hills in a flurry of neon siding and extraneous turrets--looking for a story. I find one, but I can't write it. The hills remind of the hills by the I-5, and the urge takes me, by-passes my brain and goes straight into my blood. Like the geese that cover the lawns on campus in October, I will migrate before winter closes it's grip.
In the end, I barely slip through it's fingers, and it chases me all across the southern half of the country. That fall, that desire walks with me under the bare branches and across the icy walkways. When I sit, plugged into an outdoor outlet, huddling back in an alcove away from the worst of the bitter wind--and begin to weep as I watch, from the outside, as the Green Revolution slowly collapses (article after article leading slow and inexorably to February 15th, 2010)--it curls in the corner by my feet. I send a garbled warning across the Atlantic, and it watches me quietly--rubs my legs, as I stare blankly into the silent brush.
In October, I see Orion rise above the dark banks of leaves--walking up across the sky--as I saw him climbing over the tiled roofs, and the thick-trunked eucalyptus in the city, and it fills me with a fierce kind of joy.
The first storm hits somewhere south of Asheville, and it wipes away everything. The clouds fill the valleys, as I wind my way up the side of the mountain. Halfway to the pass, the visibility drops to thirty feet, and the powder begins to pile up around the tires. I turn around, and as I am skidding down the road, I loose control of the car. It slews back and forth, between the face of the peak and the cliff on the other side. Eventually, I give up on braking and ride the spin--pull the wheel all the way to the left. The car skew wildly, and finally comes to a halt, facing up the mountain in a snow bank, ten feet from the drop. I drive slowly down the salted road between the peaks, shaking uncontrollably.
Freezing wind blows through the long empty avenues of Atlanta. I meet the girl at the hostel, whose name is Georgia, and has been able to buy tiny shorts emblazoned with her name at the University of Georgia.
In Jackson, an ice storm blows across the lush green hillocks, and the long drooping lines of trees. I stop for a coffee before getting on the road. Within thirty minutes, my car has been encased in a shell of ice. I use my lighter to melt it off the door, so that I can open the door.
Every bridge in Shreveport is iced over, we take turns riding point--being the first car to test the surface of the asphalt. I learn to differentiate between twenty shades of grey.
The roads in East Texas are covered in a light layer ice--I ride the wide ranging overpasses through Dallas with my fingers digging into the wheel. It is 13 degrees and windy when I wake up in Plano. The drive to Odessa takes ten hours--night falls, and I skid carefully down the slow lane as the trucks pass, headlights blazing, kicking up trails of debris.
I come into Tucson exactly three days after a U.S. Representative had been shot outside of a grocery store by a gun nut. My first morning there, I walk over to the grocery store to buy fruit--and realize I've been seeing it on the news. The hostel hosts a mix of would-be yogi/nis and forestry service workers tasked with servicing the Saguaro National Forest, and one rather bewildered Nepalese man. The second night, a brash woman with large breasts, uses them to bully him into cooking Nepalese food for us. She and her husband have been riding motorcycles through the Americas for the past ten years. That night we sprawl on the couches by the television and watch a bad movie. They ask me to stay.
The next morning, I settle my bill and leave before they wake up. I can feel the sea in my bones. It drives me north towards Phoenix. I stay in a hostel located next to an arts district in the middle of a barren plain. I stop in a shop to buy a gift for my sister, and the shopkeeper tells me that they were trying to revitalize this slice of downtown, before the city bulldozed the surrounding neighborhoods to build a stadium. This little street of shops is all that is left. The artists refuse to sell. The iced coffee is bitter. I see the first Mexican grocery store I have seen in two years and purchase a chile relleno from the hot bar. That night, the air is dry and static-y. I shudder in my bunk.
The 10 drives through the Mojave desert. I see a small garden of tanks, dull metal peeking through the scrub and the flowers. They are the proto-types that Eisenhower tested in the California desert before the U.S. entered World War Two. There is a trailer park attached to the monument, with a combination chapel/hamburger joint. I decline a hamburger and buy juice. The desert spreads out endlessly--the cars on the freeway are the tallest thing for miles. I lock my door. I can feel the desolation pushing under the windows.
The hills along the 210 are green, from the rain. They glow in the late-afternoon light. It's dark before I come down the ramp onto Eagle Rock Boulevard. I pull into the parking lot behind the coffee-shop on the corner and open a container of soup--in the umbrella of light streaming down from the streetlight. Darkness pools across the parked cars. For two years, I have had no reflection.
I go to my sister's apartment in Glendale, put my duffel bag next to the couch, and sleep for a season.
I dream dreams that I do not remember.
Tess lends me a book, and disappears. I see her again, briefly in the hallway, by the door.
She tells me the borders of Faerie have shifted.
