carbon dating
by Pares
When I was 16, I spent the summer in a Florida suburb with my mother's parents.
I was the only chick visiting the nest that year, with older siblings already out of school or at band camp, and younger ones stuck at the Y. My grandparents got me a job under the table working the counter at a local coffee shop, so that I would gain valuable job experience and intrude less on their daily routines. Grandpa Harold was devoted to model building and talk radio and Grandma Jean spent weeks at a time working jigsaw puzzles the size of carports. They played Bingo with the owner of the place, a bearded ex-helicopter pilot named Craig, who had once invested in tree farms and now hoped to finance his retirement on the backs of the Social Security set who hovered over herbal teas and hash every morning. It was a little soup and sandwich luncheonette as well, with a blocky, primary color cheerfulness reminiscent of an upscale kindergarten classroom. We closed every day at three, and even now, whenever I'm in a diner, I get nostalgic for the smell of empty soup pots scorching on the burners.
An unusually dry summer had lead to a rash of small forest fires in the area. Some mornings, you could smell the smoke from fires miles away, and with the scent came an accompanying restlessness, a sense of foreboding. Forest fires smell entirely different from friendly beach bonfires or a Labor Day barbecue pit; something in your lizard brain can tell the difference, can sense the inherent danger in a fire that is ungoverned and therefore unpredictable. It is the hot black breath of wildfire that sends the roe deer and the boars and black bears out of the forest before it, stepping over jogging rabbits and paced by black-handed raccoons. Mere suburban three-alarms don't spark an animal exodus.
One day during the lunch rush, a soot-streaked firefighter heaved himself into a seat at the counter and ordered a pitcher of ice water and a fruit cup. He was well over six feet, hump shouldered with muscle, his fine features crowded together into the middle of his wide red face, and somehow brought into focus by a neat light-brown moustache.
I brought him his order, and I saw that he held a scrawny, naked chick in his left hand. Its swollen head wobbled on a gawky stick neck. Translucent veins seemed to be throbbing all over its alien gray body, and although its eyes were nearly sealed shut, its beak was opening and closing in silent demand, as smooth and yellow as a bright plastic toy.
The fireman mashed up a pink square of watermelon with a fork and dangled a scrap of the resulting pulp above the chick's waiting maw. It snapped it down, the bulge of it visible in its gullet as it swallowed.
"The baby animals can't run away," he said, voice hoarse with yelling directions over the roar of conflagration. He went on to describe the charred nests of squirrels and birds, the den of foxes he found once, the kits mummified by fire, hairless and black, lips singed into snarls over needle-sharp milk teeth.
I was paralyzed with horrified fascination at the sights he was describing to me, because my brain, as was its wont, immediately began to superimpose nuclear devastation on the summer fires. From the natural disaster, I extrapolated the ultimate, inevitable result of mankind's tinkering with the atom, and I mentally upped the ante, exchanging fox kits for the plastic boxes of newborns factory sealed in every hospital nursery on the continent.
"Andy."
Dag thumps me on the shoulder.
"Andy!"
I blink and realize I've spaced out. I've lost the thread of Dag's conversational foray and I'm pissing him off.
Ordinarily, I'm a fairly attentive guy, but my brain has been hijacked by a scent. The poisonous and invisible smoke of a butterknife, its plastic handle melted from being left too near a lit gas ring, had lead me back to that lunch counter of junior antiquity, to a memory not of an actual time or place, but of luridly imagined horror.
"Sorry. Total flashback."
"Live in the now, Andy. Jesus."
Dag is not much for Angry Young Man, but he's been twitchy and unsettled since I got to San Felipe. I think he's worried that I'm going to pack up and make for The States any time now.
Dag squashes a grilled cheese sandwich with a spatula, glaring at me over his shoulder with a cigarette drooping from his lip like some Sixties hash slinger. As his short-sleeved shirt is unbuttoned, revealing a normally pristine white wife-beater underneath that has been spattered with frying butter, the illusion is complete. His Camel (cigarettes are cheap here in Mexico, but his traditional brand of blacklung is hard to find locally), mostly a column of shivering ash held together by the ghosts of cancer victims past, threatens to pepper my sandwich before he gives the frying pan a skip and tosses my sandwich squarely on to my plate.
The plate itself is a sea-foam colored trapezoid with smooth plastic ridges that corral your food into regimented sections. The ritzy real estate goes to the entrée, and the disenfranchised have to duke it out for gravy rights in the segregated side-dish ghettos. It came as part of a set of four in Claire's picnic basket, the one we'd hauled out to the abandoned subdivisions of Palm Springs on many a desert day so hot that it seemed even the delicate fluids cradling your eyeballs must evaporate. It's also the only tableware we have.
The hotel (there is a hotel here) is actually a converted modestly mansionesque estate consisting of three small two-story A-Frame buildings connected by breezeways roofed with terracotta tiles. The buildings need paint and some minor repairs, but they already feel familiar. It's almost as if someone transplanted our Palm Springs bungalows and watered them with phosphates. Legend has it that a retired serial actor came out here in 1951 to drink himself to death in reclusive style. Claire has already dusted off her trusty Ouiji Board and has scheduled a midnight seance in order to contact his ghost, if it's still on the premises.
I've been in San Felipe all of an hour, but my friends have already been hard at work. As the first order of our building renovation, Claire polished the hardwood floors in the lobby, and Dag has painted a vivid red treasure-map X on the now-gleaming planks in front of the battered registration counter. On one side, it reads You Are Here, on the other, Usted Esta Aqui. I know instinctively that he's done this with me in mind, and I'm very touched.
Claire clomps in with the doggies in tow. She's wearing a pair of Dag's tennis shoes, many sizes too large for her, and there is a smudge of salmon colored paint on her temple.
"Silas is helping me paint the closets," she announces, stealing my grilled cheese and peeling off the crusts for the dogs.
Dag had hired Silas ('Sí as in yes, las as in Vegas'), a weatherbeaten local with an air of extreme dignity enhanced by a prim mustache, a week before to help us set up and run this place. He was once head groundskeeper for a Hollywood producer, and the L-shaped swimming pool he maintained out back was the bluest I'd ever seen.
Dag had fretted that Silas secretly held him in contempt, but he was determined not to worry about it, as Silas got along very well with Claire. "And he wouldn't set the whole place ablaze knowing that she sleeps here, too." Dag attributed this bonhomie to Claire's fine-featured prettiness and her excellent command of the Spanish language.
As a child, her long months spent immobilized in a cast after back surgery had been supervised by a shy, round-shouldered Mexican housemaid who took pity on her and agreed to teach Claire Spanish by watching telenovelas with her and drilling Claire on the dramatic events of plot: "Christobol dice a Maria que ella es una puta y cancela la boda." (Christobol calls Maria a whore and calls off the wedding!)
As a result, Claire's post-date-from-Hell non-Texlahoma bedtime stories are often about beautiful, earnest Chicana virgins who come to the city to have tragic affairs with white urban professionals. These stories usually end with grisly car crashes due to cut brakelines or gasoline-fueled fires that raze soaring vacation homes set on lonesome hilltops, as a nod to her soap opera roots, and her own sense of frontier justice.
*
Claire is determined to paint one final closet before retiring for the evening, and she stands up to kiss my cheek ("Milles tendresses, Andrew!") and take the bottle of water I've held out to her before traipsing back inside. As she is still holding half of my sandwich, the dogs shadow her, endlessly hopeful, and without any sign of having noticed me at all.
Dag drops into the chair Claire has just vacated and fidgets, staring at his hands. Our silence stretches on, and the rich scent of processed cheese food whiffs into my nose and reminds me that I still haven't eaten. Eventually, Dag looks up at me and leans forward to set a tiny origami crane on the table before me like an offering. He's folded it out of the slick white and gold paper fished out of a crumpled pack of cigarettes. I haven't told him about the egret I'd seen on Highway 86; it's too fresh an experience for me to sort and describe, but, unwittingly, he has just become a part of it.
"You're not mad, are you?" The gawky teenager he had once been was very much evident in his jittery posture and wide eyes. "I mean, we did take hostages," he says, referring to the dogs.
"No. But I have a story to tell you. Maybe tomorrow."
He takes a huge, relieved drag on his cigarette, sucking the cherry right to the filter.
"Thank God, Andy. You have no idea." He lights a fresh cigarette and sinks back in his chair.
"Remember that night we all crashed out in your bed?" He says suddenly. "The day Elvissa left, right before Christmas?"
I nod slowly.
"I woke up, at like, seriously pre-dawn, and I was lying there with my tongue freeze-dried to the roof of my mouth, and I realized: I was happy. A little bummed about Elvissa, of course, and I'd have paid upwards of ten dollars American for a glass of ice water to materialize on your bedside table, but happy. It was like my brain had poked me in the back of the head just so it could wake me up and tell me that.
"And I was just laying there, you know, soaking in it, and I heard you sit up. And I peeked a little, from under my lashes, and you rubbed your face and looked around a little, and you tugged the blanket up to Claire's shoulder and then you turned to me and just rested your hand on my pillow a second before lying back down."
I realize now that it was the silence that must have woken me. (Claire and I have sworn an oath never to admit the truth, but Dag snores. Like a motor boat.)
Dag abruptly stubs his cigarette out on the paper napkin next to my plate, and keeps his eyes there.
"That second? Was the most perfect moment of my life."
Apparently, it takes me a very long time to fall in love. I'm like that pitcher that Aesop's crow fills up with pebbles until the water gets to the top and wobbles, a little contact lens bubble of surface tension. I always seem to be on the edge there, in need of just one more pebble to spill over. I think of Dag's tales of exploding supermarkets, of that night at Bunny's party, of a paper crane, and I feel the egret's claw graze my scalp again, ripping the top of my head off and cramming the whole white sky inside, as I lean over and kiss my best friend on the mouth.
*
The next morning the dogs nose me awake. It seems that they've remembered that I'm the one who usually lets them out in the morning. Dag is still snoring, and will quite possibly remain asleep until dusk, and so I smooth the sheet over his hip and let the dogs lead me out.
It's still dark out, the sun only a gray thumbprint on the black negative of the night, but Claire is already awake, sitting at the bar with her knees drawn up, a white cardigan pulled over her shoulders. She's reading a fat paperback, a cigarette burning forgotten between her first two fingers.
The doggies vie for her attention, and she pats each one on the head and smiles at me.
I realize that I'm not yet sure where the nearest exit is, and Claire points at one of the many doors along this tiled hallway. I see that Dag has tacked a Polaroid to this particular door with a shiny brass nail that pokes out of the wood. The nail spikes Dag right through the tie he's wearing in the photo: it's one that Elvissa must have taken of the three of us one night, poolside. Dag is reflecting light in his standard retro-hipster white short-sleeved button-down, like the summoned spirit of Mormon Christmases Past, and Claire is warm and golden, posing on the lounge chair beside Dag in an orange spaghetti strap top and white Capri pants. I'm there, too, in my light blue windbreaker, looking surprised. We look both strange and beautiful. Unearthly. The three of us are outlined in the inky black of PM Palm Springs, the eerie blue glow of the swimming pool behind us like a silent alien ship. Dag has cut slits into the corners of the photo and turned up four shark-fin tabs, so that when the door is open, the resultant crossbreezes make the photo spin on its brass nail like a Buddhist prayer wheel.
The dogs are crowding my legs, anxious to chase jackrabbits and pee on creosote bushes. Claire's head is bent again to her book, and I can still hear Dag snoring. An errant puff of air makes the photo turn, and it clicks against the door like a playing card tucked into the spokes of a kid's bicycle wheel.
This will be my last memory of Earth.
*
Generation X. Dag/Andy. Object: a butterknife, its plastic handle melted from being left too near a lit gas ring. Mood: angry.END
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