Generation X (25 page)
What I found when I got up the next morning around eleven was
a note taped to my front door. Claire's handwriting:
h u n n y b u n n y ,
we're off to san felipe! mexico beckons, dag
and I talked over the holidays and he convinced me
that now's the time, so we're going to buy a little
hotel . . . why not join us? I mean, what els e were
we going to do? and imagine,
us
hoteliers? the brain
boggles.
we've kidnapped the doggies but we'll let you
come of your own free will, it gets cold at night so
bring blankies. and books, and pencils, the town is
supertiny, so to find us just look for dag's wagoon.
we're waiting for you tres impatiently, expect to see
you tonight
luv,
claire
At the bottom Dag had written:
CLEAN OUT YOUR SAVINGS ACCOUNT, PALMER.
GET DOWN HERE. WE NEED YOU. P.S.:
CHECK YOUR ANSWERING MACHINE
On the answer machine I found the following message:
"Greetings Palmer. See you got the note. Excuse my speech,
but I'm totally fried. Got in last night at four and I haven't
bothered to sleep
—/
can do that in the car on the way to Mexico.
/
told you we had a surprise for you. Claire said, and she's
right, that if we let you think about the hotel idea too much,
you'd never come. You analyze things too much. So don't think
about this
—
just
come,
okay? We'll talk about it when you get
here.
"As for the law, guess what? The Skipper got brained by
a GTO driven by global teens from Orange County yesterday,
just outside the Liquor Barn.
Quelle good fortune!
In his pockets
they found all of these demented letters written to me telling
about how he was going to make me burn just like that car,
and so forth. Moil I mean, talk about terror. So I told the police
(not untruly, I might add) that I'd seen the Skipper at the scene
of the crime and I figured the Skipper was worried that I might
r e p o r t h i m . T a l k a b o u t n e a t . S o i t ' s c a s e c l o s e d , b u t I t hink
this
little funster's had enough vandalism for nine lives.
"Anyhow, we'll see you in San Felipe. Drive safely (God,
what a geriatric comment to make) and we'll see you toni . . .
"Hey, dickface, move your butt!" hectors the short -fused Romeo to the rear, tailgating me in his chartreuse rust-b u c k e t f l a t b e d .
Back to real life. Time to get snappy. Time to get a life. But it's hard.
Disengaging the clutch, I lurch forward, one car's length closer to the border—one unit closer to a newer, less-monied world, where a
different food chain carves its host landscape in alien ways I can scarcely comprehend. Once I cross that border, for example, automobile models will mysteriously end around the decidedly Texlahoman year of 1974, the year after which engine technologies became overcomplex and
nontinkerable—
uncannibalizable.
I will find a landscape punctuated by
TERMINAL
oxidized, spray painted and shot-at "half-cars"—demi-wagons cut
WANDERLUST:
A condition
lengthwise, widthwise, and heightwise, stripped of parts and culturally common to people of transient
middle-class upbringings. Unable
invisible, like the black-h o o d e d B u n r a k u p u p p e t m a s t e r s o f J a p a n .
to feel rooted in any one
Further along, in San Felipe where my —
our
—hotel may some day environment, they move
exist, I will find fences built of whalebones, chromed Toyota bumpers, continually in the hopes of finding
an idealized sense of community
and cactus spines woven into barbed wire. And down the town's delir-in the next location.
iously white beaches there will be spare figures of street urchins, their
CRYPTOTECHNO-PHOBIA:
faces obscured and overexposed by the brightness of the sun, hopelessly The secret belief that technology
is more of a menace than a boon.
vending cakey ropes of false pearls and lobular chains of fool's gold.
This
will be my new landscape.
VIRGIN RUNWAY: A
From my driver's seat in Calexico I see sweating mobs ahead of
travel destination chosen in the
me, crossing the border on foot, toting straw bags chockablock with hopes that no one else has
anticancer drugs, tequila, two-dollar violins, and Corn Flakes.
chosen it.
And I see the fence on the border, the chain link border fence that
NATIVE APING:
reminds me of certain photos of Australia—photos in which anti-rabbit Pretending to be a native when
fencing has cleaved the landscape in two: one side of the fence nutritious, visiting a foreign destination.
food secreting, and bursting with green; the other side lunar, granular, parched, and desperate. I think of Dag and Claire when I think of this
EXPATRIATE
SOLIPSISM:
When arriving in
split—and the way they chose by free will to inhabit that lunar side of a foreign travel destination one
the fence—enacting their difficult destinies: Dag doomed forever to gaze had hoped was undiscovered, only
longingly at his sun; Claire forever traversing her sands with her dowsing to find many people just like
oneself; the peeved refusal to talk
rod, praying to find water below. And me . . . Yes, well, what
about
to said people because they have
me?
ruined one's elitist travel fantasy.
I'm on the lunar side of the fence, that much I know for sure. I
don't know where or how, but I definitely made that choice. And lonely and awful as that choice can sometimes be, I have no regrets.
And I do
two
things on my side of the fence, and both of these things are the occupations of characters in two
very
short stories I'll quickly tell.
The first
story was actually a failure when I told it to Dag and Claire a few months ago: "The Young Man Who Desperately Wanted to Be Hit by Lightning."
As the title may indicate, it is the tale of a young man who worked at a desperatly boring job for an unthinking corporation who one day gave up everything—a young fiancee flushed and angry at the altar, his career advancement prospects, and everything else he had ever worked for—all to travel across the prairies in a beat-up old Pontiac in pursuit of storms, despondent that he might go through his entire life without being struck by lightning.
I say the story was a failure, because, well,
nothing happened.
At the end of the telling, Young Man was still out there somewhere in
Nebraska or Kansas, running around holding a shower curtain rod up
to the heavens, praying for a miracle.
Dag and Claire went nuts with curiosity, wanting to know where
Young Man ended up, but his fate remains a cliff-hanger; I sleep better at night knowing that Young Man roams the badlands.
The second story, well, it's a bit more complex, and I've never told a n y o n e b e f o r e . I t ' s a b o u t a y o u n g m a n —
o h , g e t r e a l
—it's about
me.
It's about
me
and something else I want desperately to have happen t o
me,
m o r e t h a n j u s t a b o u t a n y t h i n g .
This is what I want: I want to lie on the razory brain-shaped rocks of Baja. I want to lie on these rocks with no plants around me, traces
EMALLGRATION:
Migration
of brine on my fingers and a chemical sun burning up in the heaven.
toward lower-tech, lower-information environments
There will be no sound, perfect silence, just me and oxygen, not a
containing a lessened emphasis
thought in my mind, with pelicans diving into the ocean beside me for on consumerism.
glimmering mercury bullets of fish.
Small cuts from the rocks will extract blood that will dry as quickly as it flows, and my brain will turn into a thin white cord stretched skyward up into the ozone layer and humming like a guitar string. And like Dag on the day of his death, I will hear wings, too, except the wings I hear will be from a pelican, flying in from the ocean—a g r e a t b i g dopey, happy-looking pelican that will land at my side and then, with smooth leathery feet, waddle over to my face, without fear and with an elegant flourish—showing the grace of a thousand wine stewards—offer before me the gift of a small silvery fish.
I would sacrifice anything to be given this offering.
I drove to Calexico this afternoon by way of the Salton Sea, a huge saline lake and the lowest elevation in the U.S.. I drove through the Box Can yon, through El Centre . . . Calipatria . . . Brawley. . . . There is a sense of great pride in the land here in Imperial County—
"America's Winter
Garden."
After the harsh barrenness of the desert, this region's startling fecundity—its numberless fields of sheep and spinach and dalmation-skinned cows—feels biologically surreal.
Everything
secretes food here. Even the Laotian-looking date palms that
colonnade the highway.
Roughly an hour ago,
while driving to the bor-der within this landscape
of overwhelming fertility,
an unusual incident hap-pened to me—an inci-dent I feel I must talk about. It went like this:
HI had just driven into the
Salton basin from the
north, via the Box Can-yon road. I entered the region in a good mood at the lemon groves of a small citrus town called Mecca. I'd just stolen a warm orange the size of a bowling ball from a roadside grove and a farmer rounding a corner on a tractor had caught me; all he did was smile, reach into a bag beside him and throw me another. A farmer's forgiveness felt very absolute.
Back in my car I'd closed the windows and was peeling the orange to trap the smell inside, and I was driving and getting sticky juice all over the steering wheel, wiping my hands off on my pants. But driving over a hill I was suddenly able to see the horizon for the first time that day
—o v e r t h e S a l t o n S e a —a n d t h e r e I s a w a s i g h t t h a t m a d e m y h e a r t almost hop out of my mouth, a sight that made my feet reflexively hit the brakes.
It was a vision that could only have come from one of Dag's bedtime stories: it was a thermonuclear cloud—as high in the sky as the horizon is far away—angry and thick, with an anvil-shaped head the size of a medieval kingdom and as black as a bedroom at night.
My orange fell to the floor. T pulled the car to the roadside, sere-naded as I did so by a rusted honking El Camino full of migrant workers that almost rear ended me. But there was no doubting it:
yes,
the cloud was on the horizon. It was not imaginary. It was that same cloud I'd been dreaming of steadily since I was five, shameless, exhausted, and gloating.
I panicked; blood rushed to my ears ; I waited for the sirens; I turned on the radio. The biopsy had come back positive. Could a
critical sit-
u a t i o n
h a v e o c c u r r e d s i n c e t h e n o o n n e w s ? S u r p r i s i n g l y t h e r e w a s nothing on the airwaves —just more ice rink music and a few trickling Mexican radio stations. Had I gone mad? Why was nobody reacting?
Cars casually passed me coming the other way, no hint of urgency in their demeanors. And so I was left with no choice; possessed with lurid curiousity, I drove on.
T h e c l o u d w a s s o e n o r m o u s t h a t i t d e f i e d p e rspective. I realized this as I was approaching Brawley, a small town fifteen miles from the border. Every time I thought I'd reached the cloud's ground zero, I would realize that the cloud's locus was still far away. Finally I got so close that its rubber-black stem occupied the whole front of my windshield.
