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.

I'd Rather Live in Richard Gere's Butthole

I sift through craigslist grit, hoping a jewel-apartment will surface on my screen. Charming Garden Studio Apartment: $2,300. Light-Filled Flat Near Beach: $3,700. Beautiful Glassy Condo: $3,000. I don’t want to spend more than twelve-hundred.

For twelve-hundred, I can get: Cozy, Mossy Hut in Muir Woods: 

 Twelve-hundred, and spacious enough for two gerbils. Gerbil-feed not included. 

Inside The Room: The Toilet

Tommy Wiseau, you won me over. I—like hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people—am hooked. I can’t get enough.

Saturday night Justin and I went to Piedmont Theater for a midnight showing of The Room, a terrible movie Wiseau wrote, directed, produced, and starred in. A terrible movie that’s rib-crackingly hilarious.

Take a look:

Justin and I are making a film. It’s called The Toilet. It’s a drama, and it takes place entirely on the toilet. We’re going to hire our friends—together, we have three—to play the roles. On the toilet. We’re going to invest $6,000,000 of our money—we’ll take out loans—to finance the film.

Or maybe we’ll flush the money down the toilet.

Wawona Needed a Caretaker

“Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

John Muir, protesting the damming of a river in Yosemite

Porterville, California. Orange trees sculpted into cubes, packed onto land like military gravestones. Spotless sky. Hot. I wonder how many people in this town aren’t illegals picking fruit, melting under the monotonous sun.

Justin and I speed on the highway through town—southern California has become tiresome—and accelerate uphill, out of the valley. Pearly mountains rest above us, sit like temples neglected by a damned humanity. Purple and hazy, the mountains catch the sunlight in a celestial fog. Shaded by this hot fog, the Sequoia National Forest, at the rate of lichen, grows.

*     *     *     *     *

We wind up the mountain-road toward that relentless sun, and the thick heat dissipates, the sun retreats behind the hills. We gain six-thousand feet of elevation. We park.

The forest, at last.

A river I can’t see pours and crashes—Justin and I must yell, even two feet apart, to be heard. But no need to talk.

I wander to the river’s edge and then upstream. White and lavender wildflowers spot the forest floor. The trees and brush open to a clearing, moss-coated and sheltered. Lichen colors rocks and roots and tree trunks lime green and maroon, two unlikely hues to encounter in the woods.

*     *     *     *     *

Justin and I sleep in the forest, and, the next morning, we walk a trail to an ancient sequoia grove.

Three-hundred foot giants sweep the sky with their crowns, stand like silent dinosaurs over a vivacious forest, chirping and burbling and young. Stand like gods.

Paul Bunyon was stumped by the sequoias.

The trail switchbacks up, gaining another thousand feet of elevation, and forks. POSTED: NO TRESPASSING. PRIVATE PROPERTY. Doyle Springs, it seems, is privately owned and subtracts a section of the Tule River and surrounding area from the public wealth. We must detour around Doyle Springs.

“Jerks,” Justin says of the people who must live there. “Selfish jerks.”

We walk up the narrow detour path, pressed up against a pretty cliff that meanders with the river. Down next to the river, we see a tin roof.

“Doyle!” Justin yells down to the house. “Helloooo Doyle.” A weak attempt to harass the jerk.

The detour weaves through clearings and groves, everything blossoming, and crosses the river back and fourth. The soil smells like wet pine. “This is beautiful,” I say. Justin doesn’t deny it.

*     *     *     *     *

On the downhill back to the road, Justin stops short, cherishes the opportunity to once again yell to Doyle Springs. He’s not upset; the berating is more out of principle. There are only so many gems nestled in America’s wildernesses, he believes, and they should be enjoyed by everyone who wants to enjoy them. No one owns the air.

*     *     *     *     *

The sun’s low now—right over Porterville—but the sky still burns blue. My face and arms shine with sweat. The people in Porterville, do they ever come here? They’re so clo—

“The Wawona Redwood,” Justin says. He again stops walking.

I take his hand.

“Literally older than Jesus. People cut a car-tunnel through it.”

“Cool,” I say.

“It fell over.”

A tree that was older than Jesus.

*     *     *     *     *

Back on the main road Justin and I walk side by side, holding hands. A shiny snake lies in the middle of the road, and we don’t break hands to step around it. “Know what kind it is?” I ask.

“Not sure, maybe a Gopher.”

I hear something—thunder?—no, an engine, and we step to the side of the road to let a truck pass. “Did you kill it?” I call to the driver. He stops.

He sticks his nose out the window. “What?”

“Did you kill the snake?”

“You know what snake that was?” the man asks.

“A gopher snake,” I say.

 “Water. He’s a watersnake.”

“You live here?” I say, pointing to Doyle Springs.

“Sure do.” He’s the Doyle Springs caretaker—has been for twenty years. The Doyle Springs property predates the Sequoia National Forest, and he gets paid to live in the old Doyle house and fish.

Sweet job.

Justin and I have subscribed to the Caretaker’s Gazette. 

Kissing the Blue

I sit on the airplane, cold and sweating. Home. We’re going home. I feel empty.

We drift up into clear sky, and the Aspen lights falter and dim to dots, then dust. Blank dusk swallows the town, the day, our plane.

I never got away from the blue.

Justin rests his hand on my thigh, and I unclench my jaw. He relaxes his hand. I love him.

“I’ll be a lip model,” I say.

“What?”

“I have good lips.” I’m shivering—my lips are purple—and I couldn’t feel weaker.

Justin turns his chest to me and kisses my face.

A Test

This is not an expedition; it’s a test. We’re not going out to summit some technical fourteen-thousand-foot peak or traverse some ridge, icy and exposed. We just want to see how our gear holds up in winter—an easy hike to test our gear.

Conundrum Hot Springs is our destination, just nine miles from the parking lot in Aspen. A mild hike with a warm reward and stunning views of the Maroon Bells, we hope. Perhaps it will be too easy—we’ll get there with daylight to spare and want to summit a nearby peak. Probably we will summit a peak, keep on past the hot springs and end up on an icy pinnacle, piercing the sky.

The sky dims—it’s only four o’clock—and stars coalesce into focus. Justin and I drive up a winding road, scraped with packed snow, and park at a Snowmass/Maroon Bells Wilderness trailhead. I pitch the tent and Justin fiddles with the GPS, a device with which I am totally inept.

Our gear is eclectic, representing nearly every decade since outdoor gear became a formal product-category. Our 1969 Holubar down sleeping bags weigh nearly nine pounds apiece. The geese they are made from have been dead longer than your great-grandfather. But my spandex—wow are they snazzy. And my 2010-model North Face snowpants, breathable and water-resistant, shine in the sun a brighter white than the snow.

We leave the car—it’s nearly ten—and trek up the trail, feet heavy under the unnatural weight of boots. Well, I’ve got boots; Justin is wearing running shoes. We walk slow—with each step, our feet sink a few inches in the powder—and break every ninety minutes or so for a solid half-hour. I need the breaks; my lungs burn. I’m wheezing. I’ve never had asthma. It must. Be the. Cold.

The sky burns a clear, cold blue and stings the trees, the ground, my cheeks. Branches, bare and grey, glitter in the unfiltered sunlight, dusted in a fine layer of frost. It reached a low of two degrees last night, and, now, I don’t think it’s much warmer. Nine degrees, I’d guess, or thirteen.

My lungs throb now, and I’m coughing a deep, sick cough. My throat feels raw, scraped red by the icy air. I’ve backpacked from Mexico to Canada, damn it, this should be a stroll. This is a stroll. Old people walk to Conundrum Hot Springs.

But it’s winter. Everything is dead—frozen to death—sparkling in the sunlight with deceptive vivacity. I can’t feel my fingers. But they’re a lovely pink-white. 

We’re two miles from the hot springs and it’s three o’clock—one hour to dusk. We strap on our snowshoes. I cough with my whole body.

I cough again.

“Let’s camp,” I say, turning back to Justin. “Next water we see, let’s camp.”

We hear water in five minutes and, together, pitch the tent. I’m feverish and shivering and my throat—my damn throat—I haven’t the muscle-control to speak.

I crawl into my negative-forty-degree bag and sweat cold sweat.

Snow drifts down all night and I can’t sleep. I position and reposition myself, cough up mucous, shiver. This is miserable, this gentle hike to Conundrum Hot Springs. Horrible. I want—what do I want? Comfort. Tea? I know I have a fever.

In the morning we turn back; it’s not even a question. A fresh foot of powder has fallen—glittering and seductive, of course—but we know better. This kind of beauty is cold—dead.

The gear survives, unhurt. Untouched, it seems, just cold. And Justin, in his running shoes and thin gloves—he’s fine. He strides with an eager hop in his step, ready for a cup of coffee and a hot shower. I, bundled in my expedition-weight down jacket and 2010-model North Face snowpants, shiver and cough.

In this frosty wilderness, I am 104 degrees.

The grade, you ask? The gear passes—earns high marks. Before you write a test, though, make sure you know the answers.

Clear Blank Day

I sleep under a eucalyptus tree on the Cal campus and wake to a sunrise seminar on the failure of the communal mission of John Winthrop’s New England. Birds squawk and flap—seagulls and grey jays—and the sky warms in the east a hazy gold. It’s already hot. A blue day, I’m sure.

Eighty and blue—and I’m sick of it. I need a storm. A change.

Colorado.

I will fly to Colorado. 

An Advanced Degree

I ran away from home when I was fifteen—haven’t returned. The most advanced degree I have is Oak Hill Middle School, with honors. But I want to go to college. I should go to college.

I walk down the long hill—the Bay rises beneath me like a hot fog—and through downtown to the Berkeley campus. The sky burns blue, totally clear, like the day before and before that.

I walk up and down Cal—all over it—looking for direction. Most everyone’s with friends. I smile at a Muslim girl. She’s wrapped in a burqa, but she’s wearing eyeliner and jeans tight as stockings. And her nose is pierced.

“Hi?”

“Hey do you know where the English department is?” I hadn’t known I’d been looking for it.

“No.” She turns her shoulders away.

A band is playing—it’s not good—and I wander toward it, push to the front. Students jump and twist, happy to be unobligated and present here, on Sunday, at Cal, now. I’m jealous.

I want to go to Cal.

I find the English building—it’s Wheeler—and enter every room with an open door. Shakespeare. Milton. Contemporary African literature. Creative writing senior seminar.

Creative writing seminar.

A man in white robes is doing Tai Chi in the tall lobby, and classical music plays down the hall in a graduate student lounge. I follow it. The door is open.

Three men, bearded and wearing vests, sit at a long table around a bottle of wine. They are talking.

“Excuse me,” I say, my head in the doorway. “I—I’m going to go here. Is it good?” 

A Wedding Hike

Today, according to the New York Times, more than 39,000 couples—78,000 people—will get married. 10/10/10, many brides feel, is the perfect date—a perfect ten three times. 39,000 weddings.

39,000 weddings and I will crash one.

*     *     *     *     *

I try looking on the internet for big weddings in Berkeley—I want to be one of at least two hundred—but can’t find details. Tons of venues. Plenty of parking. I could just go to a garden or a park—any garden or park today. Just show up. Just show up and find out there are sixteen guests.

Fuck it.

I drive to Marin.

I take a hike: the Dipsea Trail.

Sunlight darts on the low ocean, pours through moss and leaves, illuminates trail-dust and twigs and the little hairs on my arms. Shade pounces then retreats.

The ocean shimmers like hot air, then evaporates like hot air into the too-blue sky.

*     *     *     *     *

The Dipsea Trail leads me along a ridge—sky surrounds me—and down to Stinson Beach. It’s six o’clock and the sun is low, almost touching the water, and the water swallows silver pools to black and silver pools, unswallowed, grow. Waves swell and crash and splash the sand with light.

I hear clapping—people cheering, now—and look up. Down the beach, not fifty feet away, a couple just got married. Behind them, decorated in red lanterns and shaded by giant red umbrellas, a dance floor reflects the ocean.

Two hundred people, at least, I’d say.

The Crazy City

My first day in Berkeley. I join the San Francisco Writers’ Community on www.meetup.com. There’s a meeting tonight—a finish-your-novel support group at Café Royale —and I’m going.

I take the BART from East Bay to SF and get off at Powell. I’ve google-mapped the directions—down Eddy Street and up Leavenworth—and I’ll be there early.

I walk down Eddy against the traffic. A man, thin and toothless and greasy, shakes a palm at a passerby: “I needs the love, friend. Needs—” The passerby passes. Toothless follows.

“Fuck you motherfuck-fuck-bitch, man. The love. Just love.” Gone.

Toothless turns his song-plea to—me. I speed my stride, don’t make eye-contact. Down Eddy, down Eddy. Café Royale.

“Don’t treat me right. No love here. You ain’t never trea—scared?” He’s following me. “Ya scared mama?”

I don’t look at him, but he follows me three blocks, singing to and yelling at me. I’m his mother. Now I’m his classmate. Now I’m the police and the government, and I want to fuck him up.

I feel the back of my arm—something wet. He spit on me. He spit on me.

Now he’s gone.

*     *      *     *      *

Café Royale. I’m there—here—but it’s not a café at all; it’s a bar. And I’m not twenty-one. “I’m not twenty-one,” I say to the bartender.

He doesn’t look up. “I’m not twenty-one but I’m meeting some writers here and I’m early and is it—”

“Then don’t order alcohol,” he says, cutting a woman at the bar a wedge of brie. “Five dollars.” She pays him.

“Thank you,” I say.

The brie-woman, angular and about fifty, talks to me. She asks me lots of questions, trivial things, and I find her odd—in violation of the social code by which most everyone lives.

“How old are you?” she asks, her third question in rapid succession.

“I’m nineteen.”

“Nineteen and new here.”

I’m not sure why she would find those two facts unusual together, but she seemed to. “Yeah, my fiancé and I just moved here like two days ago.”

“Nineteen and engaged.”

“Yes.”

She tells me great, congratulations. Wonderful. She’s engaged.

“Cool.”

“To an actor.”

“Really, who?”

“He’s from the original Ovaltine family.”

“What’s he in?”

“He plays opposite Sandra Bullock. They’re shooting the movie now. He’s from the original Ovaltine family.”

“What’s his name?”

“Benjamin Curtain.”

I have my laptop so I google him right there, and nothing really comes up. I show her. “How’d you meet him?”

“In the Cloud World. Clap your hand three times, kiss your palm, raise your hand to great great skies, and pray for the clouds. Most people there are dead.”

Two crazy people.

“But if you do it right and you’re alive you can get in.” She raises her hand, and for a second I think she’s trying to show me. “Hello. Excuse me.”

The bartender turns to her.

“Excuse me, I’d like another piece of cheese.”

He cuts a piece—another wedge of brie—and hands it to her.

“How much?”

“Five dollars.”

“Is it the same size?”

“What?”

“Is it the same size as the last one?” She picks it up and examines it. “Should you take some back, or should I pay you a little less?”

“What?”

Her neck tenses. “Is it the same size as the five-dollar cheese I bought before?”

The bartender looks at me—I’m smiling—and coughs. “Sure. Zact same size.”

The woman says thank you and hands him five dollars. Her neck relaxes. She's wearing a pant-suit, I notice now, and it looks like she makes money. She takes a bite of brie and kisses her palm and rocks in her stool, singing to herself. No, mumbling. No, not to herself.

She's talking to Benjamin.