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A short short about interpretive horticulture.
Over lunch, Luke tells me about the murder, how he looked up and saw a black cow standing all by itself in the field. And how that was what made him cry. After everything. The cow standing there all alone, completely black.
Luke says he’s not afraid anymore.
I look for a cigarette, then think I must be losing my mind since I’ve been quit for over a year. Luke has switched to vaping. So I can’t bum one off him. Instead, I ask why he came to San Diego, but he only adjusts his sunglasses and shrugs.
Life fell apart, he says, when he quit drinking. Marianne got promoted. He couldn’t go out anymore. His sponsor relapsed, disappeared. He spent a lot of nights alone.
“So that’s why—it happened?” I can’t bring myself to say it.
The waiter comes over and asks if we want anything else. I order another beer. Luke gets a club soda.
“That’s just it. I don’t know. It wasn’t me.”
The wind blows a plastic bag along the sidewalk by our table and we both look down at it instead of at each other.
“She was beautiful that day.”
Two blocks west, Pacific Beach rolls white static in the heat. We can look down Chalcedony Street and see the thin line of the break coming in. Everybody here is tan except Luke, who’s a waxy Missouri pale. He got thin since I left Hauberk. He grew his hair long, dyed it black.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
He looks at a waitress inside the cafe laughing at a table with three blond surfers. “I don’t understand, either.”
But Luke says he remembers everything. He’ll never forget how happy Marianne was when Bulldog moved her desk into his office. Bulldog has a real name. Everyone just calls him that out of affection, but everyone hates him.
“Marianne hated him. But she was so happy.”
“She always seemed happy.”
Luke takes out his vape pen. It’s chrome, has GOLIATH down the side in a space-age font.
“You met her twice,” he says.
She started going out after work with guys from the office. To Nene’s, the Burmese Lounge, the Five Dimes. He’d call around until he found her, ask her to come home. Luke was never invited. What was he going to do? Sit there and drink 7-Up? He tells me nobody liked him. Bulldog made fun of him, called him Sauron. Marianne thought it was funny.
“She didn’t really think it was funny. She just said she did.”
“Is that why—”
Luke exhales a thick cloud that smells like a chocolate liqueur dissolved in alcohol. “Stop. Can you please?”
I feel embarrassed even though I didn’t do anything. I don’t know where to put my hands now that I’m done with my salad. So I put them in my pockets, which still feels awkward. But Luke doesn’t notice. He’s watching the waitress talk to the surfers inside.
I’ve never met Bulldog, but I’ve met Marianne and I can imagine: up goes her desk to the third floor right next to the Dog, who’s taking her out to Nene’s later with the lucky few who can’t say no. And Sauron isn’t coming because, frankly, he’s embarrassing and uncomfortable and not too stable. And what’s she doing with him anyway?
I picture Luke next to Marianne in the dark, eyes open, maybe whispering her name, maybe putting his hand on her arm. That’s great, but their lives, like their stuff, are all mixed up together because they’ve been living with each other for three years. Situations like that don’t get solved by calling around at bar time or touching someone’s arm in the middle of the night. Maybe she says, “Luke, let’s get some sleep.” And maybe that’s what they pretend to do.
He tells me how numb he feels. “Like I’ve been away somewhere for a really long time. Like I’m someone I don’t know.”
“That’s how you seem to me, too. No offense.”
“None taken.”
He vapes. He watches the waitress inside the cafe. I look at the V of ocean down at the end of Chalcedony Street and think about how the water is pale jade but it looked gunmetal a week ago and how this is a lesson of some kind.
Luke could have learned to accept Bulldog in Marianne’s life. “He has this five-story house in north Hauberk. One of the old Victorians. It used to be the girls’ school. He has a refrigerator that plays music. His wife, Kathy, she wears a lot of gold. She’s a treasury. That’s what he says, my baby’s a treasury. But he means all the gold.” And it could have been okay like that. But the one time Luke and Marianne came over for dinner, Kathy’s old shih tzu pissed on Luke’s leg. So Bulldog threw Luke out.
“Funny that he’s named Bulldog and he has a dog.”
“Marianne thought so.”
“Sorry.”
Luke looks at me. I can’t see his eyes behind his black aviators.
“Nobody’s ever sorry,” he says.
He’s not the kid I knew in high school. Piers Anthony novels at lunch and Judge Dredd comics and too much Black Sabbath and his dad on duty in Gavin Long Men’s Facility five nights a week. His mom died before he got to know her. Maybe that’s what we’ll say in the end—that’s what fucked Luke up. But in the end no one will probably say anything. Marianne’s dead. I don’t know what it means.
“So I ran over the dog. It’s name was Scruffy. I ran over Scruffy.”
“Did you kill anything else?”
“No. Just the dog.”
I nod, like, that’s good. It’s good you only murdered one human and one dog.
“It didn’t suffer.”
Two years ago, I went back to Hauberk for my uncle’s farewell. Luke came and it was good to see him. He was quiet, stood in the back of the church, and tried not to stare when my aunt collapsed on the coffin. Who will go to Marianne’s funeral? Will Luke stand in the back and try not to stare? Will I?
“Where are you going now?”
“Mexico, I think. Maybe nowhere. I stabbed her. With a bread knife.”
“Jesus Christ, man. I mean—”
“I stabbed her and she was wearing this Hawaiian sun dress. It was white but it had huge red flowers on it. You couldn’t see anything. She didn’t suffer. I promise.”
“Alright,” I whisper. “I guess that’s good.”
Tears run down under his aviators, but his mouth stays flat, his voice level. “You believe me, don’t you? That she didn’t suffer?”
“I believe you.”
“We were having a picnic by this little stream. It was a good place. It was peaceful. You could hear the water on the rocks. Then I looked up at that black cow. And it didn’t seem nice anymore.”
My throat’s too tight to speak. I drink some beer. Then I look at Luke and say, “Yes. I understand.”
The first time I realized I didn’t have the temperament to be a concert pianist, I was sitting in an enormous practice hall at San Diego State University with my teacher, Dr. Conrad. I was 16 years old. Eight years before that, through a serendipitous confluence of family connections, happenstance, and generosity on the part of my mother, I’d started taking piano lessons from him at $10 a week.
Even in 1989, that amount seemed considerable, given that living in San Diego ate up most of my father’s middle-class teaching salary and my mom wasn’t working. So I felt rightly privileged to learn from a professor of piano and composition, who I discovered many years later, actually had a reputation as being one of the most difficult, ferocious members of the music department.
To me, he was a kind gentle person, always willing to cancel a session to talk about the lives of the composers or take me down to the recital hall to look at the harpsichords or just tell jokes. One day, we took an upright piano apart, piece by piece, to look at how it worked and produced its range of sounds. The experience had me fantasizing about becoming a professional piano tuner for years.
But really I was just in awe of Dr. Conrad, who seemed surrounded at all times by an aura of brilliance and gentility and yet had a goofy sense of humor and a love of children. I learned more from him about music, teaching, and life than anyone I can think of. He was an important person to me.
But the day he told me I just didn’t have it, I took it very hard. I knew a number of kids at my school who were into theater and music, many of whom had formal training like me, but who always seemed better, sharper, one step ahead. It kept me up at night. I wanted to be like them, as good as they were.
Having been surrounded by poets, painters, and professors throughout my short life, I thought creative artists, especially classical musicians, were a breed apart. My idol at the time was John Field, an Irish pianist who studied under Muzio Clementi. He was considered a weak student early on, but he rose to greatness later in life, praised by Beethoven, and even mentioned in War and Peace. The reasons I took him as a model should be obvious.
That improbable dream seemed to melt away the day I asked Dr. Conrad the ultimate stupid question, one that I have since been asked many times by young (and more than a few older) writing students: Do I have the talent to make this a career? It’s a horrible question, one that should never be asked by or of anyone, not even of oneself.
Unfortunately, it’s asked by everyone at least once, and it’s something every art teacher hears over and over. Do I have it? Am I good enough? Am I worthy? Will Béla Bartok let me into heaven? Will Gustav Holst discourse with me on the nature of the spheres while Mozart packs my bong? I know das Leben ist kurz, aber die Kunst ist lang, but I’m ready to go the distance.
Up to that day, I’d had no idea Dr. Conrad smoked. Besides, it was forbidden in the practice halls. But before he answered my question, he motioned me outside. The hall with about 50 grand pianos was on the second floor and, from the balcony walkway outside, we could see the women’s gymnasium, the campus tennis courts, and the great parking lot beyond, packed with cars glittering in the late afternoon.
It was windy that day. I remember Dr. Conrad setting a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, crossing his arms, looking into the distance, and thinking for a moment. He had the habit of stopping to think, as if he were listening to a voice only he could hear, and I knew not to interrupt him. But it only made the moment heavier, more dreadful, as if my entire future depended on what he was about to say.
After what seemed like a very long moment, he flicked ash over the metal railing, looked at me, and said, “Michael, you’re very creative and I have no doubt that you will find the right way, but you lack the temperament for serious musical study.”
I nodded. What could I do but nod?
Then he said, “I think we’re through for today.” Because he knew that if you’re going to tell someone what you consider to be a hard truth, you have to allow them time to mourn their lies, their comforting illusions.
Of course, I was crushed. But there was nothing but honesty and kindness in him when he said it. And even then, I knew that when someone speaks the truth at that level, with that much transparency and, actually, compassion, you should accept it at face value. You might not agree with it, but you cannot disagree with the sincerity behind it.
A very deep part of me knew that he was right. It would take years for me to fully accept it, years spent both struggling with music and becoming fascinated with English literature and essay writing. It was me finding my true will, that path Dr. Conrad said he had no doubt I would eventually discover. But it wasn’t pleasant; it took a long time; and it demanded a lot in return—the general template for most things in my life.
I was a weak music student, but not because I didn’t practice hard. I practiced so hard that at times it affected my health. I had the obsessive nature of a musician without the bifurcated mind necessary to be both mathematician and sculptor at the same time. In retrospect, even then, I thought more like a writer, but I wouldn’t realize this about myself for almost a decade.
At the time, my dedication to piano, though misplaced, brought me a certain amount of instructive grief. I took a long time to analyze pieces; I was often deeply, inconsolably frustrated at my technical inability; and my adolescent self-doubt was only amplified by these things, rendering me morose and miserable much of the time. Add to that, my lack of social development and the fact that my heroes weren’t celebrities or pop stars but 17th and 18th century composers. And I had the perfect recipe for spontaneous teenage bridge jumping.
Though I came close a few times, I would not trade those grueling hours in the practice rooms or my loneliness—as much due to the other facets of my life as my musical studies—for anything. I learned discipline. I learned what it is to do everything right and still fail. I learned compassion. I learned to revere the creative life as one of invisible risks, enormous sacrifices, and sometimes rewards that make those things worthwhile. And I learned the value of telling the hard truth as I understood it to my own future students.
Dr. Conrad never told me I didn’t have talent. He always said that’s something no one can know, not even about oneself. He told me I didn’t have the temperament. And that’s why he was correct. I have the temperament of a writer, something he recognized but didn’t know well enough to name. His world was music. And because of him, I was able to exist in that world long enough to acquire some of its virtues and vices.
When I do play piano these days, it’s for my own amusement. And I can only be amused at my ability (and lack thereof). In the fullness of time, when I get my Roland out of storage, I think I’d like to start practicing again, maybe learn some Professor Longhair. If I manage it, one day I can be that grinning old man with long white hair, playing boogie woogie on his balcony.
Who’s that up there?
Just some old creep, honey. Don’t look at him. Get in the car.
A short short about an epilogue.
You want a book and a blanket, warm shoes, a strong cup of coffee. You want interesting birds at a comfortable distance, flowers nodding in the sun, forgetfulness at least for a time. You even want redemption, relief, the past to stay past—even as it reaches out somehow to the present—symbolically, perhaps in dreams or in the figure of shadows beneath the trees—to reassure you that it’s going to stay put. You want the world to stop ending for a minute and the mountains to stay purple under their white peaks. And, yes, you very much want to be in love.
Of course, as your body expels a month of agricultural pollution, you mostly want to breathe straight. You decide you love clean air more than anything else.
Coming out of the San Joaquin Valley in the high-pollution days of summer is like being reborn. You don’t remember how it was the first time, but can’t you imagine? Screaming, covered in slime, a slap on the ass, and then the first ragged breath: this is what it’s like driving north on the 5 and looking back at Gustine, Newman, Patterson, Westley. You stop for gas in Lathrop. You consider taking a detour out to Manteca because someone in your PhD program said he once ate a good enchilada there and you’ve been chewing old jerky since Buttonwillow. You didn’t want to get out in Los Baños because breathing there makes you want to brush your teeth.
But you don’t do the detour. You push north, feverishly. Maybe your fever isn’t only because of the gallons of chlorpyrifos being dropped on orange groves by the freeway. It tastes like talcum powder. It’s on the windshield, turning the sap of dead butterflies light gray. As with the butterflies, so with your lungs. Enchiladas de Manteca are one thing. Getting out of the Valley—really getting out without an engine fire or a family emergency or a carjacking or the strange magnetic pull of Fresno simply yanking you back to the Tower District—that’s an enchilada of a much higher order.
So you get out, and it’s quietly amazing. You spend the night in Sherwood and dream about a forest. You go up to Portland and you look at a tugboat. People walk past you with hands in their pockets. Someone laughs at a joke. The Willamette is clean beneath grey steel bridges and pillars of rust. You decide this is where people go when they figure out what matters in life. You buy a silver Ganesh pendant on Burnside Street and spend hours in Powell’s Books reading about Mikao Usui.
Finally in Washington, you make your first journal entry in weeks: I think I feel healthy—what happened? When you blow your nose, the tissue isn’t stuck with black. You no longer have a smoker’s cough after walking outside. You think this might be something. It might be momentous. Your lungs don’t feel like ten pounds of water.
You are inspired to meditate for the first time since you left Michigan. You are inspired to sit for hours at the edge of Puget Sound and not think about the doctoral program you left behind like a messy divorce. And you don’t think about the virus much.
You’re still running—both to and from some other life you could have, should have, would have been leading. But you might take a little time to watch an orange spider in its web. You might read a novel. You might close your eyes in the sun and breathe clean air for a while and, just for today, let everything slip, moment by moment, into evening.
A short short for Wynonie Harris.
It was then that he had a horrible moment of clarity, standing in the kitchen, listening to the clock. Normally, he didn’t hear it or didn’t pay attention to what he heard. But tonight, with only the soft whisper of rain against the roof, the second hand sounded terrible, like it was chipping away at something—inexorable, unconditional, tiny-but-relentless chipping. And the horror of it, of everything it implied, rooted him to the spot.
Perhaps that was the only place he could have one of his moments of clarity, the only confluence of space and circumstance—breaking a glass in the sink three hours before; gulping the last bottle of red wine to get the hateful, spiteful, self-critical voice out of his head and promptly vomiting; lying awake beside his sleeping-pilled wife, administering the old self-accusatory review of all his failures back to age eight—which could open his mind now to the hard truth.
One day he’d be too old. One day he’d run out of ways to hustle up the meagre scratch that kept them going. And then, when the juice ran out, it would be the street. The small mercies of the little house owned by his in-laws, to which he and his wife had repaired when they both lost their jobs, would be long gone. And then the street. And all the street would entail.
He could already see the signs: gray streaks in his hair, his wife’s chronic pain, the litany of sacrifices they’d had to make increasing steadily, incrementally, over time. His moment of clarity was a moment of dread so deep and profound and undeniable that he felt tears almost come. But crying was something he never did.
Still, one might cry, all alone in a kitchen, thinking about the future to a ticking clock. Daddy’s ghost wouldn’t bar his way to heaven for a transgression as small as that. Would it? Then again, if Daddy’s ghost were anything like Daddy, it would be a puffed-up, arrogant, critical, contemptuous sonofabitch. So maybe yes, Daddy’s ghost would bar the way for shedding a tear.
As Daddy’s cruel voice had reminded him not long ago in bed, as he’d learned the hard way growing up, all failures are accounted for, all sins recorded, all capitulations and weaknesses tracked with Newtonian precision. The world does not forgive. The world does not forget. And the only law the world has is that of Motion, of cause an effect, action and reaction, crime and punishment. And then the street. Where even this whispering rain, so quaint while one is safe indoors, becomes the executioner’s song.
This is why he drank, to stop that cruel voice and it’s precise accounting, to stop the dread. This is why he drank a whole bottle of his father-in-law’s discount red, since the beer ran out days before, and the lockdown meant getting to the store entailed days of advance planning and a depressing conversation about expenses.
But the voice didn’t care, that part of him that sounded like Daddy and hated him, that wanted him to suffer. He had to drink it into submission. And all he had now was the unopened fifth of Jim Beam he’d gotten for Christmas two years ago and was afraid to open. If he drank that, then the voice would tell him about his stupid, crazy things, things that he’d regret for years, that his wife would be sure he never forgot. Because he was weak. Because he’d lost his job. Because the Law of Motion. Because consequences.
And the voice, the cruel presentiment that kept him awake on nights he gave in to thinking. Its horrifying clarity about what would come. His failure to find more work. Their struggle to pay her strict disappointed parents the modest rent on this house and the sheer certainty that he and his wife would then be turned out of doors. The juice running out. Better, said the voice, not to think at all. Better not to wake up and have to face the payments and punishments of another day.
He walked to the sink. The razor-sharp Japanese paring knife was there, drying on a cloth towel. Don’t think about the electric bill you can’t pay, about the choices you’ve made, about a virus in the streets, dead bodies piled in the morgue, the juice all gone. Don’t think any of it is right or wrong—because you’re still going to pay, one way or another. Don’t think about Daddy’s ghost or the seven steps to heaven the song says are just too steep. Don’t think about what will become of your wife. Don’t think about the street.
Dead plants on the window sill over the sink. Dark blacktop glistening from the amber streetlight at the corner. The old willow just beyond, waving in the wind like it knows, dense with amber shadows. Don’t think about the street, the relentless ticking of the clock. And don’t cry. The doorway to eternity resides in every moment. Tell yourself that. Pick up the knife.
A spontaneous short short, written at midnight.
One dreams of an enormous bird of night, shaped out of a cloud, its edges illuminated, because one saw it at midnight and remembered.
A bloodstain above the horizon or a fume of ink, with surrounding moon and constellations, and the 12:40 freight to Gary, Indiana, pushing through the black landscape, its headlamp an angry earthbound star.
One dreams of the bird while sleeping on the dock of Vu-Tech Logistics—the only place it’s possible to sleep on such a hot night in Missouri—big spiders and moths up around the floods doing their dance and five more nightshift hours to dawn.
One guards nothing at Vu-Tech Logistics and gets paid for it, gets away with it, a job only a human could possibly have and only a robot could possibly do. Someday, they’ll invent a machine that can process nothing, contemplate nothing, scan through vacant warehouse space on an algorithm of emptiness, accomplishing nothing. And they’ll love it. And then the world will truly end. But until that time, nightshifts will pass hour-by-hour and fools will dream on loading docks in summer.
So why not dream? Dream anything but a horrible bird of night.
Dream the cloud of blood expanding, edges bright from a sodium-vapor sign above a dirt lot in Triton, Arizona—a landlocked town named for a sea monster, a town whose first mistake came long before its name and whose last would come long after it called its only bar, MOM’S.
The dirt lot behind the bar.
The bar, a filthy violent place.
A place you might someday forget, along with the blood.
And the blinking sign above: EAT . . . AT . . . MOM’S.
You roll on your side and watch the train pass by, as you have many times before, as you will again, listening to the crickets beneath the dock’s crumbled lip.
One day, there will be no bird of night, no bird-shaped cloud, no cloud-shaped blood. No memories of a dead drunk in the sodium light. Only passing freight to wake you up. And no more MOM’S burning in your dreams, making the wings above glow red.
