AQUARIUM

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“Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng”

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“He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you’ll rise up as smoke to the sky
you’ll then have a grave in the clouds where you won’t lie too cramped”

- Paul Celan, “Todesfugue” / “Deadfugue”

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At a statue of the Thinker we opened our clear, plastic bags of chocolate-covered pretzels and ate them in our various ways. She, with red hair and freckles covering a thin and hard face, carefully and methodically nibbled at the chocolate edges, revealing uneven and baked surfaces which she studied before consuming. Her brow contorted with thought as she went about the process. One of the few pictures I have of her alone is one I took at this moment, she, with one arm at her waist, the other hand holding up the pretzel (I was holding the bags, out of the frame), brilliantine emerald eyes aimed at a downward angle but looking at nothing in particular, she, standing under the statue of the Thinker, in unironic posture. For a while afterward, I had a print of the photograph tacked up on a bulletin board in my studio apartment. Then I purposely lost or misplaced it in a drawer. Then, on a bookshelf, under a copy of A Scanner Darkly. Finally I framed it and kept it on a nightstand and from that moment onward I slept on my side, facing her face, thinking, and it was then that the insomnia began.

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Being an artist in a city where artists do not belong is actually a great career move. Because everyone paints New York; everyone paints subways; urban decay is too beautiful to ignore. It is far easier to find a homeless person engraved in charcoal on smooth, environmental-friendly paper than it is to find a high school kid with cowboy boots and an oversized belt buckle standing on a bale of hay next to a tractor in the middle of a high school campus. While I pencil in the lines of his chin, a fight breaks out across the way, a cacophony of yells and cheers as one girl accuses another of stealing her boyfriend. A campus supervisor, an overweight man with a thick moustache, steps out of a golf cart and pushes his way through the crowd. He breaks up the fight and sends the girls to the office for disciplinary measures. The crowd is disappointed. The kids filter off, dissipating, diaspora-in-miniature.

I finish my drawing and put away my materials in a backpack. I sling it over my shoulder and walk to my car. It hasn’t been vandalized during my hour-long visit.

I drive to a Starbucks, which is open twenty-four hours, and inside I drink a cup of coffee.

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One morning, she woke me up early, too early, and asked me to drive north, to Monterey, to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The sun hadn’t risen yet, so we could make it by the time it opened. It was the middle of the week, so we could have the aquarium mostly to ourselves, she explained, while I scrubbed at my eyes. She sat on the edge of my bed, one leg tucked underneath her while the other dangled off the side, her foot covered by black tights and a sneaker. I looked up at her and she was completely dressed in a t-shirt bought at some rock show the previous Friday. We had gone to the show partly because of the band and partly because it was held at the Natural History Museum. Before the set began, we had walked through the darkened corridors and amused ourselves by telling stories about the bobcats, the bears, the saber-toothed tigers and coelacanths.

She placed half of a Pop Tart in my mouth and the other half in her mouth. She ate carefully and methodically. The Pop Tart in my mouth prevented me from complaining or protesting, so I didn’t. I ate it. It was S’mores-flavored, and unheated. I got up, brushed my teeth, showered quickly, shaved, and dressed. My hair was still not yet dry when we got into my car and began the five-hour drive up the coast. As she volunteered to fill the gas tank, she leaned forward and kissed me on the mouth. We were stopped at a Chevron. I asked her to purchase two cups of coffee. She always drank her coffee steaming-hot, too hot, like how I imagined the center of the earth must feel. I always preferred to wait until it was lukewarm, or even cool, before I took my first sip.

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I open my eyes. A girl in a black t-shirt, jeans, and a green apron says in a low voice that they’re about to close. But I thought you were open twenty-four hours, I say to her. She says there’s something going on, some corporate bullshit, and they have to close while a few suits discuss the future of this particular branch. A young man in a Lacoste polo and khakis paces back and forth. He is probably the manager. I pick up my backpack. She says they’re not even paying them for the time they aren’t working. She says there wasn’t any advance notice, and she says how the fuck will I pay rent, and by this time I am walking out the door, but I left my coffee behind, only half-finished. I pause. I walk back inside the Starbucks and she says I just want some solidarity in my life, some structure, some regular shifts, none of this tectonic fuckery, this other-force bullshit wrecking, wreaking havoc, there’s a live band playing tonight and how am I going to go when I’m not even being paid, three hours, fuck you, she says, to the manager, who paces back and forth. I pick up my coffee cup and it is the perfect temperature. I leave.

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We didn’t have to wait in line when we arrived. She paid for our tickets, explaining that it was all her idea and this was a present when I protested, then she dragged me, but drag isn’t the right word, because I came along voluntarily, she dragged me to a sign listing the day’s schedule of events. An otter feeding at 1 PM caught her emerald eye. She loved the water and she loved the seas and oceans. She grew up in Australia and she had a scar on the inside of her left thigh from coral-diving. When her parents had taken her to the Sydney Opera for a production of Tristan and Isolde, she had watched, enraptured, without falling asleep. She was seven years old at the time.

We walked through the Outer Bay exhibit, which features a tank full of one million gallons of water and a large variety of animal species from the open ocean. I held her left hand in my right hand. We looked up into that luminescent blue, the corridor itself dim and empty, and said nothing to each other. A sunfish swam past us and for a moment I felt like we were floating, like plastic bags in the ocean, and I told her this. She said plastic bags in the ocean end up suffocating some poor little fish and she said she would prefer if we weren’t plastic bags. I said what if we were feathers from eagles, slowly drifting through the differing levels of pressure and with feathered eyes seeing all the strangeness that the ocean held for us. She said she liked that and she said you should write something about that. She squeezed my hand. I squeezed her hand back. She squeezed harder, and I squeezed harder, and it became a game, whose tender grip could exceed the other’s, and when our hands were red from the differing levels of pressure I reached around with my other hand and pulled her close to me and I kissed her on the mouth. A sunfish swam past us and for a moment I felt like we were floating.

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I drive to an orchard while the sun sets behind me on a light-polluted horizon. The kids in this city often get drunk in these orchards. I have painted this scene in watercolor several times. One sold to an LA gallery because the owner particularly liked the hazy feel of small-city delirium captured in the hues. I had no idea what he was talking about but I accepted the money anyway.

I get out of my car and walk through the trees. They are bare. I cannot identify what grows on the trees. The hard dirt crunches underneath my shoes, black leather shoes by Kenneth Cole. I look down at my shoes and I almost laugh at the contrast. I continue to walk.

Long after the dark has settled into the air, I arrive at an abandoned barn. Others have been here before me. There are layers of graffiti over its exterior. One entire wall is missing. I walk around the corner and inside, using the moonlight to navigate. It is a full moon. Inside, there is more graffiti, and the dirt is littered with bottles, some broken, and some unbroken. I clear away some space against a wall and sit down and open my backpack and retrieve my sketchbook and a thick pencil and I begin to draw.

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Of course she loved the otters-at-play, swimming sinuous lines through the water while aquarium employees fed them crab meat, clam meat, sea urchin meat. The sea otters batted at bright, neon-colored beach balls. They inspected other floating objects cut into different colors and different shapes. I wondered out loud what a sea otter felt when it fell in love. She explained that sea otters are not monogamous; that their sex is rough, with the male aggressively biting or clawing the female, and each male usually has several female partners. But she continued, saying that the female sea otter has powerful maternal instincts, demonstrating a caring and protective behavior rarely seen. She said that a female sea otter will often craft a kind of floating blanket out of kelp to protect its pup while it hunts for food. She said that if a pup dies, its mother will often cradle it in her arms for days while she goes through the process of mourning.

I said, wow. She grinned up at me and she said I’d like a kelp blanket. I said I’ll make one for you right now and we left the aquarium. We went to a grocery store and purchased firewood and newspapers and lighter fluid and a torch-style lighter. We went to the beach. We carried our fire-materials to a firepit and we built a pyramid of firewood. We pushed crumpled-up newspapers into our pyramid and we doused our pyramid in lighter fluid. I lit a strip of newspaper with the lighter and I pushed it into the bottom of the pyramid. I lit the edges of the newspaper-kindling inside the pyramid. It blossomed into red and orange. We crowded around our fire, shoulder-next-to-shoulder, and we held up our hands to its warmth. I said would you like your blanket now and she said I prefer being next to you actually, and I smiled at her, and she smiled at me.

She asked me, if I die will you cradle me in your arms for days? And I said yes, yes I will, but you will never die, not for a billion years, like a star, and I cradled her in my arms then, and buried my face in her bright red hair.

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I finish my sketch. Thousands of dark, thick penciled lines cross the page. Each line touches another in a sort of haphazard grid. It is a drawing-of-drawings. The focus is the graffiti on the wall across from where I sit, probably two dozen names scrawled in different scripts, signatures proving identities, proof-of-existence.

Can I see your ID, a bouncer says, and I present a pocket sketchbook to see his reaction. The drawing on that particular page is an experiment with ballpoint pen. The bouncer looks down at it and then looks at me. He is not smiling. I turn to the page upon which I glued my driver’s license. He scans it with his eyes, shining a tiny flashlight onto it. He gestures toward the door with a nod. I walk inside the bar.

It is a busy night. I walk up to the bar and lean sideways to fit between two strangers and I hold up my hand to a passing bartender, who nods at me. I put my hand down on the bar and look around. A popular rock song about a girl, one of a million popular rock songs about a girl, plays over the speakers. It is almost blindingly loud, so a person has to yell-converse at another and hope the words reach the other’s ears.

I walk out the back door after several drinks and it is a cold night. I light a cigarette with a match. I smoke the cigarette, then another. Someone asks for a light. I provide my matchbox, which says The Other Room on it and has a rectangular shape. Thanks, someone says, and I say you’re welcome. She says are you from around here and I say no, not really. She says cold night, isn’t it, and I say yeah, yeah it is. She says I saw your stunt with the bouncer, she says I guess he’s a critic, she says aren’t they all, she laughs, she says maybe he’s more into pointillism, she says or maybe he’s a metaphysicalist, she says maybe he’s de Chirico-in-disguise, she laughs. I finish my second cigarette and turn around. She puts a hand on my shoulder and she says hey what’s the matter. I say you can’t even begin to understand. She says I want to try. I say I don’t. She says can I see your sketchbook. I say I don’t want to be rude but she says trust me. I hand her the pocket sketchbook. She flips through the pages, studying them carefully and methodically.

On every single page, including the one upon which is glued my driver’s license, there is a drawing of she whom I love.

She turns to the back cover, after pausing on the second-to-last-page, and she asks for a pen. I hand one to her. She writes her number onto the back cover and gives my pen back to me. She smiles at me and she says you know, you’re kind of a mess, but that’s all right.

I say no, no, no it isn’t, and I leave.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) The autopsy on ———— —- inconclusive ———————————————- ———————————————–, the medical examiner’s office said Tuesday.

———————— ———————————————————————– appeared to be accidental————————————–.

———————— —————————————————————————– —————————————————– ————————————————————————————————- ——————————————she ————————————————————————- —————————————————————— ———-young,” he said—————————————————- —————————– ———————– ———————— ——-.

————– ———————————————– ————————- could not be reached for comment. A close friend who wished to remain anonymous——- ————completely shattered—————————— ——————— —————- ———————————————————– ————————————————- tragic————————————————- ————————————.

——————– ————————————————————————————————- ——————————— —————-.

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