Wide Eyed (6 page)

Twilight is the most beautiful time because you have only darkness to compare it to. Twilight precedes death. Twilight, when things are visually reversed, is the ideal time to exhibit faith in something. Twilight is a time to stop being skeptical. I guess this Transcendentalist view allows for the worship of natural wonders. It beats praying with some blue-haired lady on TV. Once a day you have faith that the universe isn’t totally evil, that there are things beyond your control, and you might as well stop to appreciate them.

I hope I can appreciate my grandma before she dies.

After I get the fortune cookie, I call my mom on the phone and ask why Grandma is such an evil bitch.

“Don’t call her that,” Mom says.

“She called you a bitch,” I say.

“She’s had a hard life,” Mom begins. I’ve heard Grandma’s Louisiana swamp stories before, so I’m not in the mood to rehash how she couldn’t even afford toilet paper. I don’t want to hear about how her family used to take day trips to go see the whippin’ posts at the port where the slave ships used to dock. That’s what Grandma used to tell me—but then I remember that this ring I’m wearing belonged to one of those backwater people, and I feel ashamed.

“Are we white trash for stealing the rings?” I ask, hoping she’ll say,
Yes, we are going to rot underground for this one,
just so I can feel honest.

“No. That ring is yours. Grandma would want you to have it. I could call her right now, tell her you have it, and she’d be thrilled.” Mom may be right, but I think she’s wrong. Grandma would hate me.

“Maybe we should call her and confess.” Then I read Mom the fortune, and mention that Grandma’s in her twilight years. “She doesn’t have much faith in us.”

“Neither do you,” Mom says. I breathe hot air on my ruby ring and polish it on my jeans before changing the subject.

My dream after the fortune cookie, after the phone conversation about who’s evil and who’s white trash, involves a ghost murderer floating beside me as I row through mandrake roots and Spanish moss in a skinny, winding canal. The air smells dank like rotten Band-Aids, plasticine and poisonous. The killer leads me to his lair and chops me up. Fingers come off one by one. I lie face down in red, bloody water. My extremities waft off to shore where baby gators can fight over them.

I see creatures swimming beneath me. The water’s colors are stratified like a twilight sky: red, orange, pink, green, blue, black. Crabs crawl by. Long eels slither across my peripheral vision. Fish, crawdads, and mosquito larvae hook back and forth, back and forth. But I don’t care, because I’m only parts now.

A manatee swims up close and sniffs me with his big, whiskered snout. His skin is beautiful and gray. My eyes open wider to see him clearly, and he gives me a brush with his paw. He’s my first friend in the afterlife, a savior much more appealing than any god. No, he doesn’t represent my grandma, the murderer does. I think of sailors mistaking sea cows for mermaids after long, lonely voyages at sea. Sea cows are like underwater angels, especially with their feathery flippers. I wake up wondering,
Is he my mom, my dog, a cigarette, some beer, a fortune in a cookie, pretty mixed drinks, the darkening sky, Chinatown, or the ring?

It’s true. I have no faith in us. I stole a family heirloom. I drank beer and smoked while I wore it. My mom convinced me to do it. When I think of Grandma, I think of a woman possessed by the devil. I picture her head twirling 360° over and over on her shoulders. Then I picture myself possessed by a demon I don’t even theoretically believe in. I sinned. The manatee saved me. We’re all sinners, my idiotic swamp relatives too.

ANIMAL PARTY

I used to play a lot of Burgertime. I was living by myself in the Mojave Desert, and coyotes had just eaten my cat. Burgertime is a Nintendo game where the player is Chef Pepper, best burger-maker in the world. Chef Pepper positions buns so that lettuce, tomatoes, and yellow cheese will fall onto them from outer space. Since the game design is primitive, the ingredients are chunky and squared and the colors are flat. The lettuce doesn’t have the real thing’s multiple shades of green. The buns are solid brown, and their rounded edges look zigzaggy, as if they’re cross-stitched. Since Burgertime is my favorite video game, I sometimes think I should embroider a quilt covered with hamburgers and Chef Pepper’s arch villains: Mr. Hot Dog, Mr. Pickle, and Mr. Egg. Quilts are also useful weapons in the fight against loneliness.

At first it didn’t seem like I’d be lonely in the desert, what with so many critters around. The day I moved in, I walked barefoot on the patio and got stung by red ants. The ants were the color of my burgundy toenail polish. If I stood still, they circled my feet and prepared to ascend my ankles. The colony was so extensive that I felt like I should’ve petitioned their queen for the right to live there.

Then a fruit bat moved in. He flew in the window one night while I sat on my couch in the dark watching thunderstorms in the distance. The lightning cracked, making neon hairline-fractures in the sky, only to reassemble in clouds that glowed on and off like a lightbulb with an old filament. The bat flew up to my ceiling and perched upside down. When I turned on the light to see its reflective nocturnal eyes, it looked back in a gentle way that I interpreted as happiness to see me. The bat lived there for two weeks, munching on insects in the rafters.

At one point a praying mantis lived inside my curtain folds. It started out tan, an inch long, then grew three inches while turning bright green. It would crawl out of the curtain to perch in front of me when I stood at the sink washing dishes. It seemed like my mantis loved me, or at least was curious. In desolate regions, animals and humans have to band together for company and social interaction, I guess.

The bat didn’t eat the mantis.

I moved to the desert to escape the noise and crap in Los Angeles. L.A.’s air felt gunky on my skin. Just walking outside I’d acquire greasy layers. I washed my face three or four times a day. Four hounds next door started barking at dawn every morning. The city felt claustrophobic and dingy, even at night when I was most alive. I couldn’t see stars. I’d sit at my desk spying through binoculars into other people’s houses. Even then, I only saw TVs flickering— no naked woman dancing, no stoner getting high. Everyone was so boring. Worst of all, I hated driving the grids; it made me feel stupid, like a termite. All the daily plugging away in the car, on the phone, on the computer, in the kitchen, shopping, getting dressed, talking, thinking, behaving, and controlling amounted to nothing more than survival, something that a termite does so easily with no financial security or brains.

It wasn’t fair: all the responsibilities, all the years of moral preparation and schooling, for no more accomplishment (a rented house, decent meals) than that of an insect. You think humans are superior, but they’re really not—think of all the amazing feats termites can pull off that we can’t: chewing and digesting wood, carrying things hundreds of times their weight, building massive muddy towers and secure tunnel systems, communicating telepathically without language. Being human is a gyp.

So when my first cat was fatally hit by a car, I decided to move where animals lived more naturally, where the species intermingled, where I could feel more like an animal. But then my second cat died.

The only official party I hosted in the desert was a Burgertime Party. About eight friends drove out from the city to spend the night. They were old friends whom I hadn’t seen in months. They’d been offended when I moved away, as if I were snubbing them for being dull. At the time, I was. But after a year of solitudinous living, I was tired of hosting animal parties, during which I’d down a couple bottles of red wine while searching every room and porch for other living things—kangaroo rats, moths, lizards, scorpions. Here’s a typical animal party:

1. Snoop through the vegetable bin in the refrigerator for leafy greens. Tear half a leaf off something.

2. Hunt the pantry for seeds, sunflower or sesame, for instance, and put some in a cup.

3. Look for something to feed the snacks to. If nothing reveals itself, go visit the black widow in her web on the back porch, leaving a small food pile beneath her. Do not hand feed.

Nights became so nonverbal.

So at the video game event we sat in a tendril-like arc around the TV screen with cords connecting us to the electronics. The Middle Eastern–inflected Burgertime theme song made us feel like we were surrounded by belly dancers in some exotic, smoky nightclub. I tried to remember how to make conversation.

“Put the cheese down before you sprinkle pepper on the egg. That’s the only way you’ll have time to finish the level,” I told my friend Belinda.

“I’m so bad at these games!” she yelled, and threw down the controller.

Jordan, a more serious video game player, told me, “You must’ve mastered this thing by now. You have so much time to play.”

“No,” I said. “I’m pathetic. Even if I played twentyfour hours a day, I couldn’t win. The pickle kicks my ass every time.” This confession made me somber again, since I thought about the irony of hosting a party featuring a game I sucked at. It was like hosting a pie party with burnt-up pie. Or a hat party while wearing a stained and faded baseball cap.

“What do you do all day, then?” another girl asked.

“Not much. I look around a lot, listen to sounds. Watch the sun rise and set.” It sounded histrionic, but I was just summarizing.

That was the end of talking. No one had much to say on those topics. Before, I thought they were boring, and now I was boring. I wished I were at an animal party.

Toward the end of the night, my neighbor Mildred called. She was ninety-three and survived on a respirator. She’d lived her whole life in the desert working as a waitress at the local diner. Sometimes she’d call me if her oxygen cords were tangled around the leg of a table, or if she needed a hand moving the boxy air machine. But this time she called to warn me.

“Is your cat in?” she asked.

“I don’t have a cat anymore, remember?” I answered sadly.

“Well, the bobcat’s making its way up the street, and it’s headed for your yard,” she said. “That same one came around here about five years ago and got Hal’s cat. Lock the door and you’ll be all right.”

I thanked her for calling and hung up. I’d always wanted to see a wildcat close up. We stopped playing Burgertime and killed the lights. This was enough action to impress my city friends, and we rolled another joint. Once we were settled and stoned, the cat wandered up casually onto the patio, and stared in my window. It had pointy fuzz on its ear tips and was three times as big as a house cat. Orangish-brown coat with slight stripes. Everyone had a peek, then went back to talking. Their chattering annoyed me.

I kept peering out until the bobcat and I finally made eye contact. I tried not to blink. The intensity of relating to a wildcat gave me mystical dreams for weeks. I dreamed about being half-human, halfanimal— mixed genera. When I spoke, meows came out. Not even my parents understood me.

In one dream I lived with woodrats under a boulder. I sat there naked and shivering while I watched them nestle into their rough bed, huddling together in a furry, warm mass. They winked at me with their long black eyelashes looking glamorous in the breeze that was freezing me.