works by w.pham

works by william pham, 2005-present

Untitled ("Monterey")

"Wake up. We're going to Monterey."

I turned away from her voice. There was no reason to go to Monterey. I looked at my alarm clock: three in the morning. There was definitely no reason to go to Monterey. Some other time, maybe.

But the drive wasn't so bad; I'd been to Monterey before. A couple of hours on the 5, a brief ride along the 46, and then the 101 up to the 68. A little over three hundred miles later and you're there, beautiful Monterey, jewel of the Northern California coast, a place with just as much to offer as nearby Carmel but with half the population of pretentious tourists, who were mostly crotchety old ladies with expensive handbags and even more expensive handbag-sized dogs and either of the two could be used as bludgeons if you pissed them off.

I burrowed my face into the pillow and wondered if I had been in the middle of a dream before she had woken me up. The pillow only vaguely smelled like her, which meant she had barely slept at all. The imprint of the contours of her face and head were already fading. I pushed my face deeper into the pillow and somewhere in my head a television news special or health blog article was telling me that the only thing I would accomplish in doing so was the proliferation of pore-clogging oils. Somewhere in my head I listened to recommendations of facial scrubs and exfoliating washes.

"Get dressed. I packed for you."

I sat up and looked at her. "There's no way I'm going to goddamn Monterey at three in the morning," I said.

---

I was sitting on a bench at an outdoor shopping plaza one day, watching a middle-aged woman who was in turn watching two small children, probably no more than six or seven years old. I had difficulty distinguishing between the two; they both had tiny masses of blonde hair on their head that resembled plant growth more than human hair. Blonde shrubberies with human voices. They didn't seem to realize that I or anyone else existed, except for each other.

But then one of the children walked up to the middle-aged woman and pointed at something I couldn't see. She retrieved it for the child: it was a large styrofoam Jamba Juice cup. The child took it and walked back to the other, and they launched into an animated discussion, presumably about the Jamba Juice cup, full of gestures and giggling and other strange noises. Then they took hold of the cup, removed the lid, and started pouring its contents into a bush. The middle-aged woman became frantic; she waved her hands, and shouted at the children: "Stop!" and "Why?"

"If it's good for us, then it should be good for the plant."

If you stop to think about it for a moment, the argument makes a great deal of sense.

---

And then you're in Monterey and you wonder: what the hell am I doing here, with this person?

But before I could try to reason it out, before I could shake off the quiet haze of sleep, she pulled the car into the parking lot of a diner and we walked in and got a table and we were looking at worn paper menus with cheerful typographical errors.

Two cups of coffee appeared. I didn't notice a waiter or waitress. I wasn't noticing a lot of things. I was tired, and mildly confused. I drank my coffee while she methodically tore open a packet of sugar, poured the sugar into her coffee, stirred the coffee with her spoon, placed her spoon in her mouth and licked it, then again, the whole process again, two times, three times, four then a fifth time, then she poured a spoonful of milk into her coffee, stirred, and lifted the coffee cup to her lips and looked at me with her dark, dark eyes.

"You're wondering, why Monterey? Why now? Why this diner, why this coffee, why am I even awake?" she said in monotone. It was the first time she'd spoken since we left Los Angeles.

"Your faculty of observation astounds me. I am doubled over, stricken in the sublime terror of witnessing a power beyond my comprehension."

"Your faculty of being an asshole astounds me. Can you listen, for once?"

No, I wanted to answer. "Yes," I said.

"You don't really mean that."

"Right."

"But you're going to listen anyway, because you owe me at least that much." She held her cup of coffee in her small hands in front of her mouth as she spoke. A sign of weakness. Blood in the water. Let the sharks come.

"Do I? I don't think I do. I'm not schooled in fin-ance but you are neither a credit card nor a small business loan nor a mutual fund, so I don't think I owe you a thing. I don't believe in minimum payments and I don't believe in debt. I don't really believe in you, either. For all I know this could be an extended lucid dream, or a hallucination. And if you faded away right now I wouldn't be surprised." I knew I wasn't dreaming or hallucinating, but in the reduction of her I found a spiteful kind of solace. I was still tired and I still didn't know why I was in Monterey.

"I'm not going to disappear. I am not a hallucination and I am not a ghost. My name is--"

She kept on talking but I stopped listening, or I can't remember the rest. In any case it's not really important. We ordered eggs and waffles, ate, then left the diner.

---