I've Been...

investigating a killing. The investigation's been all-consuming for the past month—sorry to neglect you here. When the story is published, you'll be the first to know. And when I'm done researching and writing the piece—probably in about a week—I'll resume here.

Fight

I just applied for an internship at McSweeney's. I hope, after the interview, my snake is small.

Mud-Red Rum

The Guyana coast, dusk. Slate sky streaked with stratus clouds, red-grey and low over the horizon. Turquoise water shimmers in the pre-storm light; the mud-red clouds darken and expand, invade the slate-sky-cool. We walk barefoot, Justin and I, stepping from smooth rock to seaweed to shell-ruins on the damp shore-sand. Slow. Lime-green seaweed, slimy between my toes and foreign. Prehistoric.

The clouds dissipate outward like smoke—fade; the electric sky-light dims to night. Justin slips his hand under my arm, grabs my arm. Squeezes it, playful. I smile, pull away. Undress.

“What are you doing?”

“Nobody’s here,” I say.

“What?” Justin picks my t-shirt up, shakes out the sand. He throws it at me, expecting me to catch. I let it hit me. I’m cold.

“Let’s get married here,” I say.

“What?”

“Let’s get married in Guyana.”

Justin looks at me—at my eyes. “Will it count?”

“Think so,” I say. I shiver.

Justin smiles, picks my shirt up again.

“I love you,” I say. The whole plane ride—the whole week—I hadn’t told him. I normally tell him every day. “Why’d we come here?”

“I love you.”

I exhale, long and necessary, put my shirt on. My skin is cold. I feel like I’ve won the lottery but don’t want Justin to know. Justin is the jackpot, he doesn’t know.

We walk, hand in hand, to town.

Through town. Rum and gold. Molasses and diamonds. No, I don’t want to buy anything. I’m sorry I’m a tourist—Guyana would be cleaner without tourism.

I’m embarrassed I’m a tourist.

At the end of a residential street we find a club, loud and colorful. Regina Spektor sings “Fidelity.” El Dorado Rum here! The song ends. We enter—cologne and beads and alcohol—and Dispatch plays now, “Flying Horses.”

Justin buys rum.

I drink rum.

I dance, alone and without Justin and with a man with beads in his hair, dark and thirty-something. I have no idea what he is. He speaks Guyanese Creole. I wish I could see a thirty-minute film: His Life Condensed. The beads blur like colored gas.

He slips his hand up my skirt, into my underwear. He fingers me.

I pull away. “Justin!” I am cold and tight.

The beads are gas, then cold gems, gleaming in the slow-club light. “Marco!”

I listen.

No Polo.

North

Justin and I sit in the car—This American Life is on—and float through a neighborhood like Collin’s neighborhood. Too-big houses, gardens, landscaped yards with hedges and fountains. An ocean-view. My heart clenches. We haven’t said a word.

His right hand rests on his thigh, veins bulging. Fingers swollen. I move my hand through the car-air and place it on his.

“Where were you,” Justin says. My hand jumps and lands, now on his thigh.

“Can we get some fresh air.” I roll down my window.

“You farted.”

“No.” Maybe he was making a joke? I try to laugh—a raspy burst. Harsh.

He jerks his leg away.

“I’m sorry,” I say. We’re on the highway, flying north. Where are we going? “Do you like the roses?”

“No.” He is smiling now. He slips his hand between my thighs. My thigh-vein throbs. I feel like I’ve just cried, or orgasmed.

I grab the rose-bunch, prick my palm. Toss it out the window, onto 101.

Justin laughs. Trees retreat behind us, to the dim blue horizon. The highway rises and turns, hugs the ocean, the water sun-gold-huge. The moon floats like a ghost—hangs over the glowing ocean like a translucent insect on a bright stem, eating the stem away.

“Where we going?”

Want surges through my crotch like water out of a hose-tear. My legs tingle.

The sky to the east darkens, a clear, bright navy. The air cools. West, over the ocean, a hundred black seagulls swoop and dip in the gold-blue-huge. “Where are we going, Justin?”

For Justin

No one is looking at me, I don’t think, so I twist Attorney Mason R. Madison’s rosebush branch. It bends, doesn’t snap. I prick my hand in two places, bleed on a yellow rose, the green-brown stem. A dog barks. My hand cramps.

I step away from the bush, off the lawn. The blue air touches my thorn-pricks like a cool hand. My palm tingles. I feel brave.

It takes an hour to drive from Berkeley to Marin; I have time. I wander the sky-lit sidewalks, find a pharmacy—Marin Drug and Candy. The roof is Spanish tile, a thousand terracotta arches, a hundred-thousand dollars. The door: yellow ivy grips a red clay archway, an arch I’d get married under. Mint leaves grow behind the stone seagull. I’m underdressed.

The floor is marble. I buy a box of Band-Aids and gardening shears. And an apron.

I tie the apron on and rip the cardboard off the shears and I am a gardener. My name is—Tammy. This is my job.

I walk back to the rose bush, clip off fifteen roses. Two women with loose skin pass—they both have pearl earrings—and I wave my shears. They don’t smile.

The sky dims, soft as honeydew rot, and the sun creeps behind a house, backlights the greenhouse. The greenhouse hosts a forest of foreign plants, black and twisted before the pale sky-dawn.

I untie my apron. “Justin! You smell like basil,” I say to my face in a flower shop’s dark window. I wish I had a ribbon for the roses. My phone rings. 

They were cheap at that store, not to offer a ribbon.

Escape to Dolce Vita

Marin, California. I walk down the winding street, past large houses with green lawns and an empty tennis court. The ocean rests below like an extension of the sky, pale blue and foggy. I’m wearing my high heels, last night’s dress and vest. I wish I had sunglasses. I take my heels off, carry them.

An hour of walking—southeast, I think—and I’m at the town center: a few quaint restaurants, a small grocery store. A sun-bleached Victorian—Mason R. Madison, Attorney at Law—with a yellow rose bush. An art gallery.

I start to cry.

I call Justin.

“Hi?” He’s somewhere loud. I want to ask where.

I step over bird poop—the bottom of my feet are now black—and onto a restaurant’s lawn. A man walking tiny poodle asks me where Dolce Vita is—how he can get to Dolce Vita Wine Bar. I ignore him. “I bought you roses,” I lie.

Justin doesn’t care about flowers; I do. He’d rather have a sandwich or a free movie ticket. “Yellow roses, they smell like summer,” I say.

I slip my feet into my high heels.

To Be Houdini

I lie alone in Collin’s glass-stone home, Lily’s house. Mommy’s house.

Collin’s bed.

I turn on the TV, the local morning news—Prince William is engaged—and then the national news: a little girl in Texas is missing, Prince William is engaged.

I want to see more me-news—more Basecamp Berkeley hate. I want the story. The ocean’s doily edge flows out then fades then widens, like a pupil in inconsistent light. Sunlight saturates the shore’s wet sand; the window-wall frames the day, white-hot and quiet. The sea-fog glows. I go online.

I search “buy-cott Basecamp Berkeley.” Nothing. “Basecamp Berkeley hate.” Nothing. “Kay Ryan escape.” This:

Houdini

Each escape

involved some art,

some hokum, and

at least a brief

incomprehensible

exchange between

the man and metal

during which the

chains were not

so much broken

as he and they

blended. At the

end of each such   

mix he had to

extract himself. It

Was the hardest

part to get right

routinely: breaking

back into the   

same Houdini.

I’m engaged. I imagine calling Justin now—ending it. Or calling Collin. Lily is confused. I want to extract myself from Justin like a needle from fabric, a hand from water. Or not from Justin, from Berkeley. I love Justin. Like play-doh loves hands. I am pl—

My phone rings. “Hello?” 

Breaking back.

Morning in Marin

I wake up in the ball-chair, in the light. Sunshine washes out the furniture, the frosted floor. The walls. The whole space is sun-white.

The TV is on, on silent, and I hear water spurt-spray somewhere—a shower? The ocean is close—I can smell salt-sand. I unball my body, stand. Walk in the light.

Walk upstairs. “Collin?”

The water-spurt fades. Lily is talking—a child-exclamation, thrilled and high. I open the door, lean into the room. Lily sits on the bed, naked and grinning. Bouncing. Collin holds her clothes.

“Hi,” I say, smile.

“Morning honey,” Collin says.

Lily stops bouncing, watches me.

“How’d you sleep?” Collin asks. It’s seven-thirty. The phone rings.

“It’s so pretty here. I—”

Collin holds a finger to his lips. “Hello…hi honey, how was…oh, yeah, been wonderful. Lily says ‘hi.’ ”

“Hi,” Lily says. “Hi hi hi hi hi hii hiiii!” Collin holds a finger to his lips.

“I talk! I will talk to Mommy!”

“She’s only half-up, honey,” Collin tells his wife.

“I am up!” Lily says. She leans into the phone. “I am up!” Collin gives her the phone, looks at me.

“I—why that Mommy here, Mommy?...She’s here.”

The Mommy speaks, at least a minute.

“Where are you?”

The Mommy speaks—I can hear ‘T’s and ‘P’s. Collin takes the phone. “Honey, talk to you tonight, okay?”

A ‘T.’

“Love you, honey.”

A ‘T.’ Love you too?

Collin hangs up. “What did Mommy say, Lily?”

Lily is watching me. “Who’s that Mommy, Daddy?”

“Aspen’s not a Mommy, honey.” He turns to the wall. “Aspen is a babysitter.”

I look at him; his hip faces me. He turns, slips on Lily’s underpants—pastel yellow and tiny.

Lily watches me. She doesn’t blink.

I walk out the room, down the stairs—consider leaving. There’s flour on the glass-sheet shelf, sugar. Butter in the fridge.

The sun out the window-wall is high now, no longer blinding. The ocean smells like summer dirt—dry flowers.

I make pancakes.

Wine and Fame

They babysitter greets us, hands off the kid. Leaves.

“Lily, this is Aspen.” Lily, a blonde toddler with wide eyes and a tiny nose, lifts her arms up—she wants Collin to pick her up. He does. “She’s being shy.”

“Hi, Lily,” I say. I make a smile. She looks at her daddy.

“You like a drink?” Collin says, walking upstairs with Lily. “White wine in the fridge, help yourself.”

I wander the floor—this is a large house. A colonial, but the furniture is modern. The dining room holds a blue-glass table—all glass, even the legs. Glass sheets extend from the kitchen walls, also translucent blue, in lieu of countertops. The walls are white stone, no pictures or outlets; the whole interior is white and frosted blue, stone and glass.

I find the living room—instead of a couch, three ball-chairs—and turn on the TV, a bathtub-sized flatscreen. Local news: posters on the Cal campus, down Telegraph Avenue. Pinned and piled over Berkeley.

“Find the wine, honey?” Collin stands behind my ball-chair. My crotch throbs.

“Where’s your wife?”

He sits down. “She’s in Russia.”

“I couldn’t find the wine.”

“It’s there.” I expect him to get up, go get it. He’s looking at me. I get up.

“It’s in the fridge door,” he says to my back.

I hear the words Basecamp Berkeley—he knows?—and, wine in hand, run back. “What?”

“Didn’t say anything, honey.”

My legs feel weak—overtired and excited. “Sorry.”

“You forgot glasses.”

I sit back down. “Your babysitter saw me. She didn’t look surprised.” I hear it again—a man’s voice: Basecamp Berkeley. The news! Collin is up, gone, getting glasses.

Posters all over Berkeley: Boycott the blasphemous Basecamp Berkeley Blogspot. No, Buy-cott. Crazy. Somebody hates me. The posters are incoherent.

Collin’s returned, has poured the wine. “Honey?”

Going Home

We drive through the damp night, pale-eyed suit-man and I, now and then stealing a glance at the other. My knee is bouncing; his shoulders look tense, his arms over-extended.

“My name’s Aspen,” I say.

“Nice to meet you.” His thumbs press into the steering wheel—hard. His thumbnails, in the wet light, are white. “Call me Collin.”

Rodeo Beach, Marin

I want to ask if Collin’s his name, or if it’s just what I should call him—try to be funny. He might take it wrong.

“What’s in Vancouver?”

“What?”

“What’s in Vancouver for you?”

I remember. “I’ve just never been there.” I turn my cheeks toward him, look right at his eyes. “No ties here so why not.”

He signals right and pulls over. The car still, rain bangs on the roof like gumballs on a hollow drum. I don’t move. Collin says something.

“What?”

He leans toward me. “It’s pouring, you’ll freeze.” Over the rain, he’s yelling. “My place—I have a guestroom. Sleep tonight and hitchhike in the light.”

“Okay,” I say. My knee is bouncing. “Thank you.”

The Marin roads are dark, quiet. The town—it’s eight-thirty now—sleeps. We turn onto a windy road, left up a long driveway. His house, a light-colored colonial, stands above us.

Picked Up in Chinatown

I walk through the Chinatown rain—I’m wearing high heels and have no coat. I don’t know where I’ll go.

Justin is gone. I have my phone—I could call him—but no. I’ll show him a night without me. I stick out my thumb. The first car to pass stops. A Lexus.

“You want a ride, honey?” The driver: a clean-cut guy with high cheek bones, light eyes. He’s probably forty? He’s wearing a suit.

I run around to the passenger side and get in.

“Where you headed?” he says. We’re moving now, east, I think.

“Where are you going?”

“Marin—home.”

I unclench, exhale. He’s alright.

“I’m married,” he says. We’re on the Golden Gate Bride. The city is a blur of lights and navy and wine-red.

“Yeah? I’m engaged.” I scrape the dirt from under my fingernails—my fingernails always hold gunk—with my thumbnail. Does he think I stuck my thumb out just for him? “I’m trying to get to Vancouver,” I lie.

He turns on the radio—instrumental jazz—and stares ahead at the car-lit rain. “I hope you don’t plan on hitching there.”

“I do. Made it this far from LA, and I’m not dead.”

“Don’t have to lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“You’re not engaged.”

I look at him—his nose is elegant, his eyes gentle and grey-blue like a lake in day-fog. “Maybe I’m not.”

My Party Will Have Teacups

I sit in a lantern-lit tearoom in Chinatown, planning my book release party. I haven’t got a book—not yet—but the party will be held at the Cliff House as the sun dips into the bay and colors the evening seashore gold. Through the window, below the patio, wet sand will glow like snow in moonlight, and the lanterns—just like the ones heating this tearoom—will project red puddles, iridescent and out-of-focus festive, on the mat-stone floor. The floor must be mat-stone.

The Cliff House

The color scheme, pastel blue and white, must fade into the dusk-light—enhance the dusk. Unobtrusive. Celestial. Invisible behind the smiling and the buzz-hugs and the red-pool lantern-glow.

“Let’s go,” Justin says. I’d forgotten he was there. I am looking out the window at rain.

“It’s raining.”

“Yeah let’s go.” Justin eyebrow twitches, I can see the tension in his shoulders.

I’ll want rain. Rain upsetting the bay: waves, clouds—panoramic seascape drama. Rust on the low sun, the water. A million water-drops jumping on the uneasy sea, the texture of unrest. Building up.

Champaign. Pop! The party starts and the band gets loud and lantern-light projections morph into shifting prisms and starlight and the moon is close out the window-wall.

“I’m going,” Justin says. He stands up.

I don’t move. “You pushed me up there.”

“What?”

“Last night. You made me get up there.”

“You did fine.”

“I sucked.” The Chinatown lights, neon and too-loud, stain the rain. This tearoom is seedy. I want to smash my teacup on the dim-stone—no, linoleum—floor. I drop it and it breaks in half, like the teacups in Alice in Wonderland. I smile.

Justin walks out, into the neon rain, away. Everyone is staring at me.

I try to think of my book release party. I cry.

In Limelight

I push through the crowd at the Starry Plough—it’s open mic tonight—and sign my name, drop it in the hat. Lights still glare day-bright in the pub; people grin and shout and multiply in the pre-show-bright. I am blushing. Justin pulled me here.

Beer. One for Justin, but not me, I’m nineteen. I lean toward his ear. “Please?”

The lights dim. Justin sits. I sit. The MC, an Irish woman about forty, hops onto the stage. “Anyone under twenty-one?”

I stand. Me. She tells me I’ll go first. The stage lights cool to blue. A cold blue.

She steps down.

I climb up.

The mic’s too high, I don’t move it. I shift my weight to my other foot, it’s not better that way. I shift back. “This is poetry,” I say—apologize. In the dim pub, I notice too many guitar cases. People came for music. I pull my poem out of my pocket and unfold it. Paper-opening: phone-static. I breathe.

I read:

“The Planets Align”

Spring infants in a cold desert. We both

lie on our sides—the fetal position—facing

each other. Heads touching. Frost-scraped

sand but I am

violently hot,

shivering.

My whole body clothed.

Sand, an ever-multiplying number of

grains, pouring toward an edge. Hourglass

sand, neglecting the time.

Sand; say it a hundred times and it means infinity and

paralysis, or an orgasm. Blue night.

Dim stars and Mars and shadows wavering over combed

sand. The moon.

Caress the moon’s craters. Cold, cold

dents in eternity. Silver then

pink then white then

tender. Shoot an arrow into space and it will never hit

anything, the chances are devastating.

Light a match.

Push.

Lush

lips

pursed

like rind, pain, sugar.

Breathe.

Grain-vein-

pulse-pulse:

pant.

Hic-

cup

and

howl

in

the

night-bed-morning-moon joy.

The

chan-

ces

are

devastating.

I jump down.

I run to the table. People are cheering, clapping. My arms are hot-red, heart having a beat-seizure. Justin grabs me and kisses me like sunlight washing out limelight and my throat tightens like I’m about to cry and I don’t cry but exhale. Pink.

The stage-lights are pink now. A young man is singing, strumming on an acoustic. He’s good. No one’s looking at me. That’s good.

“You did good,” a man at our table says to me, looking at the pink-acoustic stage. He’s friendly. The whole pub is pink-acoustic-kind.

I smile. “Please?” I say to Justin, looking at his drink. “A shot?”

“You don’t do shots.”

“I want to.”

The man strums the last chord of his soft-world song. The lights smudge to orange, then gold. “To celebrate,” I say.

A girl, not older than I, steps onto the stage, into the yellow-warm light. Rachel Angel. I say again: “please.”

Wedding Date

Snow falls—goodbye good trails—and Bridgeport glitters in the grey light. The sky, white and pouring snowflakes, swallows the sun. The sun backlights the white, warms the clouds like a candle heats winter dinner.

Justin and I sit, holding hands, in Travertine Hot Spring. I tingle, and Justin, nose to the sky, faces the sun-glow. His face catches snowflakes. Steam rises from the hot spring, melts each snowflake before it hits the pool. Snow drapes our towels, the ground, the Sierras—not a misplaced stitch.

Snow fits Bridgeport like a custom gown.

“Let’s set a date,” I say.

Justin’s eyes are closed. The snowlight defines his right cheekbone. I kiss it. “Soon,” I say.

“December.” He opens his eyes and turns his cheeks to me. “In the mountains.”

Mom Did Laundry

When, in ninth grade, I came home baked and naked, my mom jogged to the laundry room. I followed her—she was crying—and, when she reached both arms into the dryer to unload the fresh clothes, I hugged her. 

She kept her arms in the dryer.

"Mom Did Laundry"

A clothespin the size of a thumbnail; it couldn’t hold up a sock.

Its tiny metal coil could be a tack-holder. Blonde wood,

and when I squeeze the legs together—hug the

legs with my child-body—its mouth

opens wide.

I release.

It snaps shut with a dull click. My

mother.

My Brother's Loss, Mine

The following story is fiction.

"My Brother's Loss, Mine"

I tell him he'll get arrested, that what he's done is reprehensible. We sit in the damp sand, cold in the moon's weak light, and the moonlight jumps from crimp to ripple on the black lake. The sky, dark and clear, sinks down around us. His face is too white.

"He's only twelve," I tell him.

"Yeah and he acts six."

"He's twelve, Ryan. You don't punch a twelve-year-old. And you don't—" I exhale, lie back, let the cold sand cradle my naked spine. The coolness feels good against my shoulder-blades. At the edge of my eye, I can see Ryan, a twenty-three-year-old man, my brother, cradling his raw knuckles against his chest like a baby. I close my eyes and imagine I am back in Chile, lying on the sun-scorched beach in Valparaíso. The darkness outside my eyelids is only the sun's unbearable brightness, inverted. 

In Chile, life was not mundane—not petty. I don't remember once brushing my teeth or getting dressed, though I'm sure these things were done. I took busses and trains and taxis to University every day, but I spent no time in transit. I scribbled notes on the color of the sunlight streaming through the barred train station windows, the color of my cab driver's earring. 

I filled a book a week with these notes.

And then I was in class—from street-notes and stories to class, transported. Antonio Skármeta stood before me. Antonio Skármeta. I've now read everything he's written, but, back then, he captivated me live. He is an actor, I believe—an actor who lives the intonations of his speech. Every lesson was a story, and he shared that story with me and all of Chile. A camera crew circled our class, and I knew this intimate conversation on the effect of an immoral government on the morality of its people and the power of art to undermine such a government, was being broadcast.

And I loved knowing that. This conversation—my conversation with the great writer Antonio Skármeta—was one of the most important conversations in Chile:

When a government—when Pinochet—disregards morality and dwarfs the value of a human life, the citizens of that dehumanizing doctrine will internalize it—will begin to treat one another as valueless. The crimes of a government are thus reflected in the crimes of its people, Skármeta taught. When a government murders thousands, murder no longer seems wrong. People will kill each other over petty things. And the government won't punish the murderers—won't care. It is the responsibility of the artists—the writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, storytellers—to expose the brutality of immoral governments and, thus, to color dark scenes of oppression with hope. I loved this. I devoured it and craved more. I, an aspiring writer, could be essential.

I will tell Ryan that leaving a twelve-year-old bleeding on the street solves nothing, no matter what the child has done. No, I'll show him—make some illuminating analogy so potent he'll feel his wrongness. 

"You don't—" I say, sitting up beneath the navy sky, glowing beige in the east and lighting the side of our faces. "It's like—imagine," I try. "The government, like Guantanamo." My voice chokes over a dry spot in my throat. Ryan stares into my eyes. I need some water. "Let's just go home."

The Crest over Pinecrest

I drive through Central Valley—long hours of strip malls and dust—and decide not to go to Yosemite. I don’t have a camping permit or a bear canister or a Subaru minivan packed with toddlers and a carabiner-pocketknife-combo ($99.99 at REI), for when you’re rock climbing and need to slit your throat.

I’ll go to Pinecrest.

I’ll climb Big Sam Mountain.

I won’t see anyone.

The sun blurs behind the valley’s fog-haze like a porch-light in smoke; the sky, blue-white and soft, blushes above the dust-fields. The cloud-streaks rust.

Fifty yards in front of me, a truck streams dust, orange and illuminated in the low-light. Powdered gold. Sunlight and dust and tule-fog, I can’t see shit.

*     *     *     *     *

Outside Pinecrest at the end of Crabtree Road, I park. It’s dark, and there isn’t a car, a light. Somewhere close a river pours—I love the sound—and under a million stars, in the light of my headlamp, I pitch my tent. The air smells like pine. My breath-puffs swell and fade.

I awake to sunwarmth, sunlight through the pine trees. Frost glitters on my shoelaces, my car, the frozen ground. The river gushes.

I walk down to the river—it’s not thirty feet from me—and breathe its cold. White light jumps from wet rock to standing wave, rests in an eddy. In the November woods I drink, pack my tent. Hike west. 

*     *     *     *     *

The trail cuts the trees and switchbacks up, out of the forest, into the blue-cold sky. No snow on the trail—I’m surprised—and I walk on a network of roots under roots, over granite. A breeze, and aspen leaves flutter through the sun-sky like yellow rain. I stand in it.

Around nine-thousand feet the trail falters, breaks. Disappears under snow. A mile west, Big Sam Mountain rises into the sun. The trail steepens and I kick, toe above toe, up the slope. The snow: ice-crust over powder. Ice-crust: slippery. Powder: light, solid as air.

I slip—slide down fifteen feet, stop on an ice-crust-ledge.

I breathe. The air, frozen and too blue, burns my chest.

I tremble. Toe-kick over toe, I climb.

The Mountains are Calling and I Must Go

Yosemite. I'll be away a few days.

Halloween Walk

Justin and I wander the San Fran streets—Golden Gate Park to the Sutro Bath ruins to China Beach to Haight Street. I am Brigitte Bardot, hair and all. Justin is a hipster.

At the Sutro Bath ruins—tan-rock cells crumbling under flowered hills, glistening in the breaking waves—a bride poses for pictures. She looks, in the clear dawn, like a blue ballerina, a dancing child. She looks in-costume.

Waves crash against the ruins—spray the bride and the cameraman and the bouquets, baby blue and lavender. The bride does not flinch. The bouquets match the sky.

“Hi,” I say to Justin. I wave him over—he’d been looking at the ocean. He jogs. I point.

“She looks twelve.”

“She’s wet,” I say.

We wander along the cliff-path over the water, and down to China Beach. In the sky and water and fog, the Golden Gate Bridge floats, red. Close. I imagine we are in Japan. Justin says something.

“What?”

“A nude beach. It’s around here.”

“Here?”

“It’s hidden along here. Maybe we’ll see it.”

“It’s too cold,” I say. But I’m carrying my jacket and ocean air feels humid. “It—”

“Maybe we’ll find it some other day.”

We walk along the rocky beach. The tide climbs, pressing us against the cliffs. We find a cove crossed with rotting wooden planks—an ugly couple is posing before a professional photographer—and, beyond the cove, an old cement bathroom on the rocks, leaning against a cliff. It’s covered with graffiti, faded and peeling. It’s beautiful.

The mist sinks.

I take my heels off, leave them in the rocks. Thirty minutes and they’ll be floating—sinking to the floor of?—the Pacific. We pull ourselves onto the cliff over the graffiti-bath. We climb.

Loose rock breaks in my grip. I release it and watch it fall fifteen feet, hit a smooth rock, bounce into the restless water.

The sky dims—the sun has slipped somewhere, is rising in Australia and Taiwan for tomorrow. I climb onto a ledge—Justin reaches a hand down and pulls me up—and I look down at the shadowed sand for my shoes. I think they’re gone. The shoreline’s gone.

Waves break against the cliff and, in the blue-grey light, Justin points me the trail.

Snowbunny on Halloween

When I was sixteen, on Halloween, I egged Curtis Johnson’s house. Here’s why:

"AOL Snowbunny002"

My parents, both lawyers, hadn’t the conviction to convict

Mr. Curtis Johnson, my Nordic ski coach who didn’t

know how to ski.

I—and no one—knew why he took the coaching job.

Many days, he commented on my form: arms

higher, ankles closer together! Ski faster. He could not ski,

at all, but this advice was solid and true.

I once asked Mr. Johnson why—not why he coached,

but why ‘ankles closer together,’ and he glared. I would not be

forgiven.

I was a good skier, second best on the team, top

twenty in the state. I should have played

clueless.

I would not ride in Mr. Johnson’s car; I had my own

way back to school.

I had my hands, and they weren’t easily persuaded, and they already knew

how to ski. My hips, perhaps too far back—not quite under my chest—show I’m not

Olympic material. He had no idea.

He knew I wouldn’t ride and wouldn’t accept a good luck kiss.

Not forgiven.

I was fifteen.

Maybe by eighteen I’d have been a better

listener.

When the team voted me

captain for the following season

Mr. Johnson lied about the outcome. We’d known—he’d said we’d voted for

Courtney, unanimously.

A senior who’d counted the votes with Mr. Johnson

told me I’d won.

Mr. Johnson misused the word ‘unanimously.’ I was sure

it would be his demise.

My parents thought it was unfair—the captain thing—

but life’s not fair.

They hadn’t the time or ‘political nature’ to help.

Help.

Flying Like Indigo Flecks

Justin and I hike the Bay Area Ridge Trail over round hills, through fields spotted with cow patties and the bones of deer and cats. Just days ago, downpour tore up roots and washed mud into the streets; today with every step we kick up dust. The sun burns high and hot.

We pass a cow carcass, torn and rotten and reeking of death. Flies hover over the rib cage; turkey vultures circle and dive and rip off strips of meat. I walk faster.

Justin stops to watch—“Shit. Look!”

The trail steepens, climbs up into the hills over Richmond. High clouds descend—we stride just under them—and a white-grey haze erases the sun.

Above the dust, tiny birds flap and glide. Indigo and low over the drab landscape, they’re the only vivid color—specks of bright on a tan canvas.

We descend into the town of Hercules.

We hitchhike to San Francisco.

*     *     *     *     *

The San Francisco RocketBoat accelerates over the Bay, jumps off a wave like off a ramp. Air, drop, splash. Turn. We thrash through water, curve, accelerate more. Tear into the wind.

My wind-tears fly backward—hit the man behind me, probably. Justin and I sit, hands gripping our seatbelts, in the boat’s front-row. Clouds, pink and glowing, line the horizon; under the red-gold sun, the water ignites.

“Justin!” We bump-fly over to the Giants’ stadium—World Series fireworks are erupting orange and white over the dusk—and a Giants Party-Tugboat floats toward the ballpark, everyone dancing. I lean toward him, fighting the wind. “Justin, kiss me,” I scream. The wind flaps so loud no one can hear me, maybe him. I can’t stop grinning.

He kisses my grin.

Four jets fly over us—then the stadium—in tight unison. Camera flashes illuminate the bleachers, a light-seizure capturing screaming fans at bliss-now.

In joy-heat.

On the BART, Beauty

The hills after the storm smell like bay leaves and roots. Justin and I walk in the cool dawn along the Bay Area Ridge Trail (BART), through a eucalyptus grove and up onto a ridgeline. The sky rises, infinite and too-high and pale as ice in sunlight; blank as snow. A dim moon refuses to set.

If I ever live in a house, I want it up on this sunny ridge, built of metal and concrete. Huge windows, a view of beehives and ivy and city lights. And moss. No curtains. No rugs. I want it, in a hundred years, to look exactly the same.

No maintenance.

I think of Bridget Bardot. 

Her face. I’ve thought of her since I learned of her—since I started modeling. It’s thrilling: the moon, sunlight, Bridget. Me. Beauty, forever. Artists can’t paint a picture as beautiful as Bridget is.

The moon fades into snow-sky, and, in the sunlight, the burnt grass looks like golden roses. And now she looks like this:

I want the house to keep like a photograph in darkness.

But in sunlight.

I want the ivy to grow, wild and intricate, and honey to drip from the hive and glitter in the gold light.

If nothing gold can stay, I want the walls to be bronze.

A Beautiful Flash, For Now, Forever

The Berkeley hills, last night: rain poured out of the fog like from a river—tore up roots and washed leaves and worms into the street. The worms, wet and willful, squirmed and inched over the pavement like living filaments, iridescent and scared. Lightning.

A car drove closer—I heard nothing through the downpour—and its headlights illuminated the texture of fog. Crawling, it bounced through a rain-full pothole—the pool spread, contracted—and passed. Raindrops jumped in the hole-pool—in the air over the street—everything red in the back-car-light.

Darkness.

I walked to a glow—a streetlight—and stood in the gold-white rain, soaked and breathing:

"Green is Gold"

Night.

Lightning illuminates the rain like a camera flash captures 

a picture all of San Francisco admires

at once,

a still-frame shot of

love of violent wind, unframed,

named by parents ‘unsafe’ and teenagers ‘the night I totaled my

body.” Exposed limbs of eucalyptus trees crack and burn despite

the wet

leg I slip into your car, soaked,

thrilled,

Sex & Death & Now

My mom almost died today. A car drove out a parking lot perpendicular to traffic, and she almost died.

Justin and I were making love, and the phone rang, and we were nude and in the heat of sex and didn’t care. The phone rang again. Comcast has been harassing us for dropping them—the crazy customer service lady called us this morning nine times—so I made a joke—“I’m scared”—and the phone rang again. I orgasmed.

Justin came.

The phone rang.

We fell asleep.

*     *     *     *     *

We slept through the hospital visit—Mom had had a concussion—and the police—did she remember the criminal’s license plate number?—and her return home. I awoke to no one, and then to Justin’s voice down the hall, low and tight. Then Dad’s deep drone. Justin. Dad. Mom’s hiccup-talk—Irish and jittery. I dressed.

“Hey?” I said. Everyone looked happy. Relieved? Excited, I decided. Justin and Dad were lying on their backs on the bed, staring across the room at Mom. Mom sat, her neck tense, in her stuffed-chair. Her lip quivered.

“What you guys doing?”

Dad told me: they were talking. Mom’s neck-vein twitched.

A car had, I didn’t know then, just sped out of a parking lot and crashed into oncoming traffic—crashed into Mom. Both cars were crushed. Two men—the crazy driver and his passenger—jumped out of their smashed car and into another and sped off.

Mom sits in her stuffed-chair, smiling now. We’re all here, in her room, watching her.

*Mom = Justin's Mom, Dad = Justin's Dad. 

First Autumn Morning

The sun breaks over the hills. Orange light pours through a saddle, illuminates pampas grass and the spines of fallen leaves. Leaves surf on a gust of wind, fall, swoop up, turn. Flap like frantic birds. The dry grass quivers.

Photo by Mike Emmett

The leaves, the grass, my hands: everything seems brittle, stiff. Cold. It is cold—for the first time since I moved here—and the morning haze looks solid, almost. As if it were composed of that orange sunlight, compressed.

Composed of light.

The sun floats higher—untouches the horizon so fast I can see it move. They red-gold horizon fades to white, then blue.

Justin and I walk along a paved road, and where it turns to dirt we step down onto the Bay Area Ridge Trail (BART). 550 miles long, the BART circumvents the Bay over the crest of the hills. Today, we begin our 550-mile walk.