MACHINES IN THE GARDEN

fiction – 

I’m searching for a ghost that I’m afraid to see.

I used to look for it by driving familiar streets and boulevards late at night, each one imbued with its own collection of myths. I was fond of the one where we drove to the ocean and listened to oldies on the radio. I miss that one.

I was attempting, forcing maybe, the reconstruction of a trace of an image as simple as the one where we’re in the park in the afternoon and the lady in the wheelchair near the tree gets upset with us for smoking on the swings.

The effort of forcing a memory though is not good practice, and attempting to use willpower to draw silhouettes on the present scene misses out on the subtleties experienced through undivided attention.

I’m talking about ghosts, but not in the way that we usually talk about ghosts.

They exist beneath the polished surface of the material world and are often locked within the layered problems of memory. Their projection can be triggered by even the most casual movements in time.

Moments at which the present narrative and a memory become entangled and together form a new and original experiment. Ghosts then play over our surroundings, like holograms or movies.

The blue fabric chair in the corner, you on it, reading your Japan travel guide in the afternoon light. The lamp with the paper shade, casting a shadow over the small orange skull with a half burned wick on top. The French doors open and the air moving through the room and the sound of the leaves rustling outside.

The night we slept on the couch, when your husband was out of town.

I go back to old places late at night, in the city, on its edges. Sometimes as far as the suburbs if I’m looking to stretch the feeling. On highways and freeways, connecting the electric metropolis of organized chaos when I stitch together a narrative in the dark.

I change the radio dial and get off the 10 somewhere and go to 7-11 for a pack of cigarettes and the drive to the place on Broadway where we would meet each other late at night for a drink, but I don’t find any trace of you.

I draw on a napkin and then fold it and put it in my pocket.

One day, I sat in the patio of the empty café, listening for the sound of your black ballerina flats moving in my direction. I remember those same flats moving across a checkerboard floor, your shoulders back, chin tilted slightly up with just a hint of arrogance. Like a perfect picture dancer caught in time. How beautiful you looked.

All you needed was a rose to match your red lipstick and this image channels Wim Wenders and his classic Polaroids of Perris, Texas.

How do you search through a labyrinth? What are the strategies and why should I trust them?

What can I do to forget you?

fiction –

I believe that there are physical places in this world that are able to mine the ghosts that exist deep inside ourselves. That are able to pull back the layers and reveal an undiscovered country. A place which exists in our bones. In our marrow. In our soul.

There is a lonely bar on the edge of this country, with a spherical red light casting its shadow on the green felt of a pool table, and an old jukebox in the corner plays all of our favorite songs, a couple, in love, eternally slow dancing next to it, and that’s when it gets real bad. Or maybe real good.

Like a mirror, these places reflect the raw ingredients of emotion and draw out an artifact of a memory. Play it like a movie projected onto the three-dimensional space in front of us. A mythology built, like a fire, from the combustible mix of history (the remembered) and forgetting (the forgotten).

The characters in these myths, the specters in these memories, emerge from physical relationships between objects which together weave something like a dream. And on the edge of this dream exists a perfectly good nightmare, ready to be picked like a ripe fruit.

Observing and cataloging examples of these places, a time-tested method, allows a natural understanding to develop. This process lets us build the scaffolding, a precision tool, for the work, an artistic product.

Through the heavy lifting of memory, a thoroughly difficult task, we come to see that they, these places, don’t necessarily have to be objectively horrible to have ghosts. They don’t have to be war zones or crises rooms in hospitals or encampments of the forgotten and the dejected on the fringes of cities. The far away and the unknown and the unknowable.

Neighborhoods which fight to resist the avalanche of time and change are the first examples which come to mind, but even they can be tinted with anxieties which alter an organic emergence. Anxieties which doom a natural curiosity.

More examples follow: late afternoon walks down tree lined streets, fingers crossed behind backs; early morning commutes, full of small battles for quick moving ground; reading the Obituaries in the California section of the Sunday Times, a cup of coffee at the kitchen table.

But these images fail under careful scrutiny. Why? They are static and sidestep a more granular reflection and analysis.

They lack a narrative development, a sort of patient nothingness, required in order to create real ghosts, and that takes time. So, like in a bad film, craft is used in our memories as a substitute for feeling.

This keeps the horror at a distance, and we are protected once again. Standing at the line demarcating bullshit and the truth. An infinite firewall that we can never see through.

But if they are not these places, then what are? Where do they exist? Where do we find them?

I don’t know, and I’m not sure, but I can tell you that searching for evidence and presenting it as truth is bad logic, because truth can be a slippery thing.

What I find interesting, and what is unexpected – what we’re less prepared to deal with if prepared at all – is when horror isn’t actually seen as horror at all, but at first as something beautiful.

When the birth of chaos comes from order. When the ghosts are found sitting right in front of us in the garden, bathed in the warm happy glow of daylight.

We rarely expect to see horror and ghosts in beautiful things, in beautiful places, so we are ill prepared for their presence when they rear their ugly head.

fiction –

I’m walking down 8^th and Olive in the hot afternoon and I stop at the corner of the street, waiting for the light to change, and when it does I look both ways and step off the curb. A girl in a red skirt and a flower in her hair passes swiftly by, and when I step onto the curb again I feel the phone in my back pocket begin to vibrate.    

I answer.

“Hey little bro,” he says to me, and then, “hang on. Hang on just a sec.”

I walk into the old hotel and toward the elevator doors and step inside before they close.

I wait in silence for what seems like a small eternity, surrounded by three mirrored walls trimmed with red velvet, and then the doors open and I walk out toward the doorway, still on hold, the blue sky and the tops of buildings cut out in a rectangle. I step through the door and the sound of traffic comes back within earshot and a car honks and the breeze on the roof is punctuated by the accent of a slow beat from the speakers near the pool.

He comes back on the line.

“Hey, sorry about that. So, what did you want to talk about?”

I think carefully for a moment before answering. “I don’t know,” I say, “Everything. Nothing.”

There’s a silence on the other end.

“Well, I don’t know what you really had in mind by calling earlier, but thanks,” he says.

“Not a problem”, I say.

“Have you talked to the parents?” he asks me.

“Yeah, I call Dad or he’ll call me when he gets the chance. It’s not scheduled or anything. Just when he can or when I can.”

“Good, he says,” sternly. There is a skepticism in his tone.

“What about you?” I ask him.

“What about me what?” He replies.

“Have you talked to the parents?”

“Everyday,” he says, without hesitation, and then continues, “I call the house at 8:30 every night. Just to check in, you know.”

“Mm-hmm,” I sound out.

I hear someone talking to him in the background.

“So, what did you want to talk to me about really?” he asks, present again.

“What’s the rush?” I ask him. “I thought we had we had some time. You never answer when I call.”

“There’s no rush,” he says, ”I just have to get through the next chunk of work so that I can move on from it, you know. There’s this project that my group is working on, so gotta’ talk to the team and triple check work and write reports and rinse and repeat to make it all happen again tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that I guess,” I say.

“Funny,” he says, dryly, but still aware of the joke.

“So what about you funny guy?” He asks this seriously, and I imagine him with his forearms on the edge of his desk, hands crossed in front of him. He takes a moment in the space between the next question. “What have you been doing?”

“To be honest with you,” I say, “what I’ve been doing feels like a whole bunch of bullshit.”

He doesn’t say anything after I say this, as if waiting for me to say more, so I continue.

“I guess I thought that by doing this, I would be doing exactly what I wanted to do, which is to make art and be out in the world and meet people. To live that dream I guess, but it’s a big task, and right now I feel like I’m drowning.”

I can hear him breathe on the other side.

“The more I get into it,” I add, “the more that I do it, the more that it feels like I left a career for something fickle and vain.”

“It’s all transitory,” he says. “I wouldn’t worry too much about the fickleness of it little brother. We’re all just passengers, passing through.”

“About vanity though” he adds, “I don’t really know what to tell you. It can get you a lot, for sure, if you put in the work, but it can be a drain on someone like you.”

“I don’t think I understand where I want to be right now, so I have to ask myself if I was wrong.

“Mm-hmm,” he says.

“What’s the point, you know?” I tell him.

“You have you to stop digging your own grave,” he says.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“You have to stop with all of this what’s the point bullshit,” he says, “that’s the real bullshit that you should be worried about Julian.”

“Well then, what the fuck am I supposed to talk to you about then?”

“Calm down,” he says, “Look. I don’t want to press you on this, just keep that in mind, but I’m not selling it to you as advice either. Just something to consider.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I know.”

“See,” he says, “you say that, but I don’t think that you actually know Julian. And even how you said it gave me the impression that you don’t actually believe that you know either.”

“So now you care?” I tell him, and then neither of us says a word.

“The grass is always greener on the other side,” he says, “And unfortunately, the only people that can convince us of anything are ourselves.”

I clear my throat a little.

“True conviction,” he adds.

“I just don’t want flail and wander about my life and do everything halfway and then leave it for later,” I say.

“Then don’t leave it for later,” he says.

“I’m trying,” I tell him.

“There’s a huge problem with that though,” he says, “trying.”

“There is no try in this game Julian,” he says, “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this. There is no time for the good old College try.”

I listen.

“Life itself is simply too important,” he continues, “but you know that and I don’t need to remind you of that.”

“That can be another conversation,” I say.

“Sure,” he says, and then, “just think about it first please. Don’t just wing it.”

“I just want to ride into the sunset,” I say.

He eases up and I can see him shaping a smile on the other side.

“Be serious,” he says.

“I just don’t know what I’m doing,” I say. “And I don’t know why I’m doing it and I feel like I’m wasting my time.”

He lets out a big sigh on the other end of the line.

“Look,” he says, “I have to go, but it was good talking to you brother. All I’m going to tell you is that you’re smart, you’re good looking, and you got the drive, but I don’t think you’re using your brain in the way that it should be used. You’re wasting it everyday.”

“You have an OK head on your shoulders,” he tells me, “but it needs to be better. You need to be better Julian.”

“Yeah,” I say, “thanks.”

“You got a lot of potential kid, but you’re wasting your time in that city.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say.

“Next time you call me,” he says, “please have whatever you’re going to tell me ready, if not, no offense little brother, but don’t waste my time.”

I don’t say anything.

“Just keep that in mind, please,” he says.

“Alright duder,” I say, “I’ll talk you later. Love you man.”

“Love you too little bro,” he says, and then he hangs up.

fiction –

Song, Artist, Album, Year

Song: Any Color You Like

Artist: Pink Floyd

Album: Dark Side of The Moon

Year: 1973

Grandma

Grandma is buried in Rose Hills, far East of Downtown, a beautiful and rolling piece of land from which you can see the entire LA basin stretched between Palos Verdes and the San Gabriel Mountains. There is a peacefulness in this place, a gentle calm, overlooking everything. We would park near the top of the hill on afternoons during High School and then climb the old water tower and watch the sun set and the city in the distance illuminate the dark.

Grandma was born in a small Texas town in the early 20’s and came West not long after that, in her adolescence, to treat her tuberculosis. Doctors told my great-grandparents that she had only a forty percent chance of survival, so she spent three years in isolation at Olive View Sanitarium in the 30’s in order to recuperate. She was quarantined that entire time, so the crucial moment between fourteen and seventeen was spent without a physical connection to her family.

I remember I used to ask her about how the city was like during the 40’s and the 50’s, and she would tell me stories about how her and her friends would go to Downtown, to Broadway, to the old Dance Halls and Theaters, and stay up later than they were supposed to.

She told me about how she met Grandpa while they were both tenants of an apartment complex on Vermont. Her, working during the day as a secretary, and him, behind the switchboard on the night shifts at a radio station.

They could only see each other in passing, so they left letters under one another’s doors in order to talk. To communicate.

They grew together in this way, and she wrote once I will always be thinking of you, even in dreams. ”That’s all that it took for your Grandpa,” she told me, “to know I was his.”

“He was a good man,” she would say, “he built this house,” and then she would point down to the floor in the kitchen where we sat. She would tell me that he was loving and affectionate and cared deeply for his three boys. I remember her looking at me and saying,” You would have loved him, he was such a good man,” and then taking an almond cookie from the plate, the same cookies that my friend Maggie Chien had introduced me to in middle school.

I remember sitting in my Grandmothers kitchen and talking to her about these things. And then sometimes we would just sit and listen to the sounds of the birds and the windchimes outside and then she would call her little dog, “Tiny! Tiny!,” she would say, and the little Pomeranian would jingle on over with his small head tilted to the side and his tongue sticking out from between his crooked teeth. The protector of her heart in the quiet moments.

I think about these things as I ride East on the 60 and down the 605 and then exit and make my way toward the cemetery. I come here less frequently now, but somehow it’s always on my mind.

I miss her, I think. I really do.

When I arrive, I turn the engine off and untie my bag from the rack and then make my way through the maze of headstones from different times and move in the direction of my Grandparents.