It’s like going to sleep not caring if you wake up. Here’s to one more endless night in a motel at the end of the world with nothing but a pile of ashes for a bed. The salt stings your eyes; the listless sun will handle the rest of you. A bloated bird, one-hundred thousand dead Tilapia, the endless stench. It’s in your sweat. There were dreams, once, at least for a little while. But you better be careful what you invest in. Keep your assets liquid so you can get out if—make that when—you have to. Don’t get too deep into anything or anyone out here.
I guess none of this matters now. You watch the day rise out of the scalding water and fall down the mountains, keeping company with the dead and the mad, pretending you’re different, not like them. Sure, you’re just a spectator, not a participant. Then why don’t you leave? Nope, this is it, the end of the line. You'd almost forgotten about Chinatown, Jake, but it caught up to you out here in the desert. It had to. So, welcome to where everything finally stops. Greetings from the Salton Sea.
Note 1: The highest number of dead birds recorded in one day at the real Salton Sea is 640. Botulism becomes common in the summer as the desert temperatures heat the water and the bacteria infect weakened Tilapia. Still, the Salton Sea remains an important waterfowl and shorebird refuge.
Note 2: The film Chinatown ends with Detective Walsh trying to comfort his devastated associate, Jake (J.J.) Gittes, with the line, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
This is the last night you’ll ever drive these dirt roads. The sun sets behind you and the mountains are cooling, darkening to a deeper blue. The blinding heat of the day fades to a whisper as clouds of dust rise up behind you, where you’ve been now lost in the distance. A shallow mountain river thick with boulders runs beside the road and you wonder how many times you have been in that water. Sometimes you swam alone, the river and the birds the only sound beyond your breath. Other times you slept on the warm rocks, your bodies touching, less alone than you ever imagined possible. But as with this last day of this last summer, you know there is nothing you can truly hold onto and the more you have tried the more quickly you have lost what you’ve had.
You loved this place, the mountains stacked one on another and rising to the east, clear streams and cold rains, sleeping under moonlit skies, the long pines blowing overhead. But you hated that through it all you still felt lost. So close to perfect and so utterly wrong.
You pull the car off the road and step onto the grass. Beside the river you see a cloud of midges hovering above a still pool. You can smell the sweat that has dried to your skin and you reach your arms into the cool river to cleanse yourself, ancient hemlocks darkening the valley. There are no words for what you feel, at least none you can recall, so you look at the sky and the water and the hills and wait for it all to pass. You know you’ll never be back, but that is not your thought. Instead you ask the forest to tell you what it is that you fear you have missed, that you are always missing, that will never come again. The trees are quiet as darkness falls.
The gravel crackles under the wheels as an owl crosses the road ahead, noiselessly, lit only by the headlights. Of so many nights, this one is the last.
ANSWERING MACHINE, Pt. II - I call your answering machine just to hear your voice. Sometimes I call nine or ten times a day. Most of the time I can’t force myself to hang up before the beep so I know you see the number of calls. 10, 11, 12. You’ll come home and push play and there won’t be anything. There are times when I leave you a message after I’ve hung up. I go on and on. Maybe I should feel embarrassed at myself or humiliated, but I’m so far beyond that now. Have you ever loved someone so much you…what? Cried? Stayed in bed all day? Told yourself you’d never be with anyone else again? Have you ever loved someone so much that all you longed for became nothing? Nothing might feel right, but you can’t make it happen, no matter how hard you will it.
I find that I hate myself just as much as I love you, so I call your answering machine. If you pick up I wait a moment and then hang up. You know it’s me, but you don’t ever call me and tell me to stop. You just erase the messages and it makes me love you more. I want you to do something to make me hate you. I want to hate you and I want you to do something to make me hate you. I want to hate you. I want you to hurt me the way I hurt myself each time I hear the beep and hang up. All day, every day, all of the time.
DEAD SEASONS In the autumn, it was as if I’d learned a new language. One spoken not with words Or gestures Or a look. But with nothing Except desire and delusion.
In the winter, at last I had perfected a new language. But I found that not a person I knew Or met Or me Could understand what I said.
In the spring, alas I tried to re-learn their language. But found that every single word Was wrong Or misunderstood Or just something that could not help anyone anymore.
What the hell? More first-person narrative drama and then a fucking prose poem? I feel like I'm getting close to some kind of saturation point here, so hopefully I'll have a nice short story or something to post soon. But I kinda wanted to do the "Answering Machine" thing to death and then I threw in a bit more about communication (or the lack thereof) to beat the horse more completely. Yeah, a theme. Anyway, thanks to everyone that has sent in nice comments lately. It means a lot, really. Really. I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas. I'll be back soon. And this is nice: My Heart is an Idiot.
ANSWERING MACHINE, Pt. II - I call your answering machine just to hear your voice. Sometimes I call nine or ten times a day. Most of the time I can’t force myself to hang up before the beep so I know you see the number of calls. 10, 11, 12. You’ll come home and push play and there won’t be anything. There are times when I leave you a message after I’ve hung up. I go on and on. Maybe I should feel embarrassed at myself or humiliated, but I’m so far beyond that now. Have you ever loved someone so much you…what? Cried? Stayed in bed all day? Told yourself you’d never be with anyone else again? Have you ever loved someone so much that all you longed for became nothing? Nothing might feel right, but you can’t make it happen, no matter how hard you will it.
DEAD SEASONS
