New Spirits

The following travel sketch is of a complex event of sorts, one both outlandish and coherent, worthy of mockery and of consideration. Perhaps, if we wish to understand such an event, a weird event, we must temporarily defer our trust to the likewise weird. Yes, to understand the ambiguous, let us trust characters of equal ambiguity – the comedic heroes who are alternately confused either as tragic clowns or foolish heroes. Rely on them, the characters of great disproportions. Let us see the perceptions of such a figure.

. . .

They park the car, which has felt seats, in the lot next to the large tree whose branches are still wet. Everything is wet, because it is only nine in the morning and the sun is not yet hot. The wet is on the hills with brown grass that looks like hay, on the gold Buddha placed on the grass and on the deer that do not move when Max walks by them. It is the wet on the eyeballs of someone who has stayed up until dawn.

A wooden staircase, besides two silver hybrid cars, leads to an open door, above which the sign says “gifts.” The book sold include: “Zen Buddhism: In Search of Self,” “The Path: A Spiritual Journey,” and “The Laws of Spirit: A Tale of Transformation." A carved stick surrounded by purple velvet with a crystal attached is on sale. Everything is expensive, but to make a purchase one need only to drop money into the basket.

They walk up the road and see a man with a flannel shirt and a red beard from his ears to his chin. He is singing solemnly on a stump and his face is rather like a bush with a smile.

“We’re here for the teen sweatlodge?”

“Yes, wonderful,” he says. “Scott on the stage is here for the lodge too.” They are setting up for the day, he tells them, and he points to the woods, to a dome cage not tall enough to stand within but at least twenty feet long. It is made of thin saplings like bones.

Jan leaves in the car. She leaves beyond the wet. Now Max is left with only ambiguous allies: the bush faced man, Scott, who wears tight jeans with small spots of bleach that are cut beneath his kness, Eloise his friend, and – above all – the image of thin saplings bent into a skeletal frame which he saw distant in the woods. It is this picture, like a ribcage from the ground, like a glance at his own innards, which remains fixed in his mind while he waits.

Max explains that he is taking a year off before college and that he is from New York. Soon he will be in Latin America. “I do not know what I am going to do there, but maybe I will learn to trust what happens when I do not know what will happen.” Perhaps this trust that his experiences will precede his understanding is why he is here today, sitting with affluent teenagers, preparing to pray to voodoo gods.

The group is fourteen and these kids seem so tender. They are almost naked as they walk to the woods. By the fire, they sit. Eloise sits cross-legged, her short hair combed back behind her ears. Max, searching for her gaze, makes conversation. “People like the South Californian shores,” she says as she turns. “They are quietly beautiful, but I don’t like them. Point Reyes beaches are wild, wind and fog – their beauty is intense.” Much the same could be said about her eyes, which are wild and foggy blue.

After they walk the perimeter of the wood frame, deferential to the mystical energy that connects the fire to the altar to the entrance, they crouch inside. Hot stones are shoveled from the outside light into the darkness. The dark is hot and malicious; steam rises from the stones that are still vaguely red. The chanting begins: “Higha, lowhowa, higha, heelow.” Strange echoes fill the lungs, lingers on the skin, skin huddled in that small cavern, burns. People shout confession: “You know, creator, if you want Lou to die, let her die with beauty,” Ho! they shout when truth is said or they cry. “You know, creator, if she should live, creator let her live with beauty.” The steam hisses like whispers and at some moment, imperceptibly, the red from the stones disappears and the darkness is total. Everything is hot with breath, hot with skin, hot with wet.

It is at this moment of total blindness that Max feels the great wet cover his body. This awkward lodge is the womb.

Outside, they sit on rocks and drink lemonade and Eloise asks him how he feels. The breeze stings against his body, which is still wet. He says he is cold, but feels very alive. She looks at him. He thinks for a moment that the milky white has receded from her eyes, and that these wild eyes are no longer foggy, but blue like the sky...

But surely that is impossible! Max after all is still an impostor – though perhaps a little less than before.

Graveyard

At the top of the hill, Max sits against a gray obelisk. The sign below the hill says Home of Eternity, “Oakland Jewish Cemetary.” The roots of these trees, twisted and drooping – strangled, but strong; they feed in dirt packed to the brim with the grief of dead Jews. “Home of Eternity” he repeats to himself. Moving on the ground is an infestation: thousands of ants pour from seams and crevasses along the concentric walls, each grubbing at the earth, steeling its fruits. Together these stupid ants move with a common mad soul. It is eerie to find such wild life the dirt of a graveyard.

Max has spent the past days alone, and he is content. But here he senses that he is not alone. Yes, the presence of the dead floats in the September air. The tombstones, old teeth, sweep crooked across the green fields. One is never alone in a graveyard. Cold shudders shoot through his frame. Max is never alone. The presence of the dead, odorless and colorless, floats in is air: friends not there, mistakes committed, dreams lost – the sad memories of what is dead are strewn amongst the living like tombstones. Do not give too much too their ghosts, he knows. Dwell too long with the past, and the duties of living become too difficult. Every late-night trip to Facebook is like stumbling over tombstones of his past.

These thoughts fill his veins with sap. His mass is hot and paralyzed on the ground, as clouds begin to cover the sky and the first black drops hit the stone. Threads of rain shine obliquely against the trees and the sun. His cellphone rings beside him. It is a girl from back home. The rain falls everywhere now. From the flowers in the fields, to the spikes of the iron gate, to the crooked crosses and tombstones, it falls upon the living and the dead.

Memories at a Potluck

The guests sit against the walls. The room is not square when thirty people sit. It is a circle of faces cast in dim lights and one cannot help but watch: a dark-skinned man from Uganda talks about empire; a boyish Asian man with a beard sharpened to a point beneath his chin; faces beyond the walls fill plates from bowls; a white girl with a dreadlocked braid extending like a snake to the small of her back clasps tea; two brown-skinned children play in the candlelight. The faces are warm like freshly baked cake.

It is his second night at the co-opt house and the fourth night of his life that he does not have to account to anyone at all. Though it all blends together: hours bleed into days, faces into their surroundings and nothing is countable or separate. It is all one experience. It is supposed to be like this, he thought. When one leaves home for a while, one’s systems of order and chaos are left behind too; the brain yawns open like a wale and it sucks in all the floating specks of life. Everything is equal; dig everything. Memories drift and mix in his mind like plankton at sea.

Valencia Street. He has Mexican food in a small place with yellow ceilings. A young couple sits on stools in front of him. The boy wears a t-shirt striped with velvet purples. He has a terrible slouch but is nice-looking. The girl is blond. “I want to go and see a band or a night, but it’s tough, you know.” The boy nods. “I think sometimes that I’ve outgrown this city,” she says.

Max walks from the locker with his suitcase on his back. The boy from London with whom he had shared a room is leaving the hostel too.

“I didn’t recognize you with your sunglasses” he says in a British voice appropriate somehow.

“It’s my disguise.”

“Did you speak to the other two boys in the beds above ours?”

“Yes, they were assholes.”

“I tried to talk with them, but they didn’t want a chat. I came in late night late. I couldn’t sleep at all. At three in the morning I hear a zipping sound from the bunk above yours, and then the bed starts to shake like this,” he says moving his arms. Both boys have no doubts in their smiles. “Then at seven in the morning he does it again. I hear the zipping and I cleared my throat and it stopped right instantly.”

“Wanking – that’s the word for it in London, right?”

At the end of the city block there is a statue of a man pointing to the sky. Beneath the statue a poor man in grey clothes sleeps in the sunlight.

The girl he is staying with invites him to the City. She is beautiful and the conversation is easy. She has brought her friend. They three meet on Velencia at a bar where they are asked at the door for identification. The Boy might not pass for seventeen.

“I forgot my I.D.”

“That’s too bad. You look pretty young.”

“Yeah, bad genes or something”

Max smiles and the three of them leave. At the next bar, the girls are carded again but Max slips in. “Look at this!” he grins and pulls his shirtsleeve up. His arm is thin like a used role of paper towels, “You would be a fool or a suicidal to mess with someone with these!”

Next to the garden is the concrete patio. The sun is high and the concrete is yellow; the garden is filled with weeds. Max is worried about the party – they are too hip, too young (though they are ten years older than he), they wear tight black jeans, tight and vivid t-shirts, large black sunglasses; wholly they are good-looking, assured, their movements are fierce. Heat rises from the yellow concrete courtyard and kabobs hiss on the barbecue. “My sister is much cooler than I can ever hope to be,” she says.

The kids have airy gazes in their eyes. You know that Middle Class America frowns on them and anything that does not quickly turn a profit. But if our civilization falls, what remains? The group sits in plastic chairs in the shade or against the concrete wall. Is it our bank accounts or does it all come down to personal style? They have style. Which is not to say they are artist (who here could write a poem worth reading?), but that their values are stronger than most. Values born from that place in which these hipsters hide, from that crease between past and future, not knowing where you’ll be tomorrow and not caring: to live outside the law, you must be honest.

On the first floor of the bar, brown is salient – the walls, the tables, leather jackets. The people are packed in as if they are in a subway car. This is Max’s subway car through time: he is twenty-one. He wants a drink, but is too embarrassed because he does not know how to order. On the second floor they play a game of bad pool. Men watch around the table. There are games too important to be treated as games. So they dance. The music – Soul Music – is from a place too far away for anyone to know the songs well. The floor is almost empty, but the songs are good and at times they are very good. One notices that there are single moments when one’s heart begins to beat in time with the pound of the speakers. Everyone’s ears curl to the high notes from the jazzy voice out of the dj box: " I said my baby's coming home tomorrow." For a single moment the whole earth becomes the room, this dark, malicious room that moves to the voice that wails: "Ain't that good news. Yeah, ain't that news."

At the potluck a woman from Chile speak in a steady accent. She is a practitioner of holistic medicine. In time, her husband, Peruvian, picks up his guitar. He is a professional musician, a child of four hundred years of blood and fire, the story he plays with his fingers. The room is still warm and the candle continues to flicker off the wall.

Max mingles, but he is exhausted and looks to leave this world to which he does not belong and doesn't fit in. He enters the girl's room; he falls to the ground and looks at the ceiling. It is tiring being around people you do not know. She is in the room and so are the two neighborhood children. He looks into the eyes of the doll besides him and wonders to whom it belongs, though he knows the answer already: it belongs to him; he is so young. Outside of the door, the sounds and faces steam the windows, spin like wheals, sound like the street, like laughter, like silverware falling to the ground. Inside the door little children toss around the doll with black beady eyes.

Vehr are you travel?

“Vehr are you travel?”

“What – a hostel. Can you take me?”

“Vehr are you goh-ing?” Not now. It is four in the morning Eastern Standard Time at the baggage claim in the San Francisco airport. Has Self-Consciousness really chosen now, in an Eastern European accent no less, on a cellphone! to reveal to Heart that on behalf of Max’s Many Selves – the Intellect, esteemed, the Groin, darkly comedic, the Creature, soulful and weak, the Beast, the Crusader – that we (Max) are lost and need direction. I wished to respond: I do not know really...

In fact Max was not drunk. But wafting around him was a cruel mixture: the conditioned air inside the airport, calculated and sterile like medicated Vaseline, mixed with the intimations growing in his arteries that everything in his life would somehow be different. This mixture worked as a hallucinogen on his nervous system.

“Vehr are you goh-ing?”

“A hostel downtown…on 312 Mason Street. Can you take me there?”

The Boy made his way to the parking lot. In his bag: a new sleeping bag, a tremendous weight of books, including the Selected Works of W.H. Auden, On the Road, Latin America: Modern Times Vol. XI , a pocket knife, three pairs of khaki pants, and an electronic toothbrush. The contents of his bag reveal to some extent the content of his expectations.

On the way out of the airport, he began to hear a muffled buzzing from inside his bag, rather like a honeybee trapped in the mouth of an alley cat. What might it be? At best a cellphone, in which case Max was rather rude not to stop – but at worst? The object continued its fast oscillations. Was Max, unwittingly, trasporting across America woman’s good vibrations? A pimp with a Learner’s Permit. Or weapons? Yes, a bag filled with weapons, all vibrating to some ungodly aim. “Get to the floor" the Officer would say. Ah, Max got the joke. “Death to America” he might even shout back, if only to confirm for the Officer his worst fear: yes, Evil is now in the business of recruiting for Their dark plots the duffle bags of Jews. Seventeen-year-olds from Westchester, NY. An islomofascists with a Learner’s Permit! The Officer might then remove from the bag, rather triumphantly, the weapon of innumerable tears: a Braun C32 Electronic Toothbrush turned on by an accidental bump of the dufflebag. “Death to Plaque you goons” Max smiled in his preposterous head. “Get the fuck off me.”

Yes these were his thoughts. There is no reason to continue to explore them, the bright rainbow colors of his delusions, other than to make once again the point that Max was tripping wildly on his sense of contradiction – so drab was this building but so vivid was his own freedom to destroy or elevate himself, for which this airport served as the most immediate symbol.

Outside gasoline lingered on pavement; the air was dangerous but full of amusement: unsettled. The van to the youth hostel was blue and fat, and it sat on the curb like a caravan set to travel somewhere beyond a Tunisian horizon, where the sun sinks to innumerable moments of mystery. An old woman from Nova Scotia said “take me home,” in part to the driver, but mostly to herself. “I am very tired.” A Minnesotan woman with hair like peels of ripe bananas was in San Francisco to celebrate her son’s wedding. “I’ve been praying for him and his wife,” she said in Midwestern tones. Through the windshield, Max watched the highway push into the night; it was cast in grays too white for this hour, as if trapped in the concrete was a last blush of sunlight long past.

The van dipped into a tunnel filled with racing orange. “He listened to my prayers. God can guide you if you pray” she finished. As the van emerged from underground, the city lights of midnight towers sent vague, bright shapes reflecting off the windshield, like a hundred cats’ eyes piercing the dark. Max wondered about his own guidance.