Truth Front

Lying in the dark I watch the sleeping shadow of my boyfriend and decide to leave him. Just a pair of clothes and a little bag of essentials would be all I’d need. The thought of it makes me cry, not because I’d miss him or this crazy life we’ve created together, not because of the failure, of having to start all over again. I cry because I realize how very little of this world I can actually claim to own.

Instead of leaving I roll onto my side and face the window, watching the snow fall in a roiling midnight hush. I let the tears carry me down into a deep dreamless sleep where there is no snow and there’s a reason for everything. In the morning my boyfriend’s already gone to work and I get up and make coffee. It’s stopped snowing. I start a shower and get ready for work.

*

I had just started my shift when she came to my checkout stand looking so thin and pathetic in her faded rags that I wanted to reach out and cradle her face in my hands. She handed me twelve assorted tubes of oil paints, a medium roll of uncut canvas, three cheap brushes and a spindle of black thread. Twenty-two twelve, I told her. She handed me a few crumpled bills and I asked her, What type of painting are you working on? Oh, nothing really, she said, I’m just messing around. She looked down to the ground or at her feet or maybe past them to a place deep and warm and I handed her the change with a receipt and put her things into a plastic bag. Thanks, she said, and smiled, and I watched her walk out into the bitter cold with just a sweatshirt, the bag of materials nestled tightly like a treasure in the crook of her arm.

*

She came into the store a few days later looking rested and calm and I noticed how large and clear brown her eyes were, almost comically large, very bright and disproportionate to the rest of her face. How’s the project going, I asked her. It’s okay, she said, and handed me a set of brushes and two bottles of black acrylic paint. I told her that I loved art, I loved Monet and Renoir and Impressionism but that the French lacked above all else a working class perspective. I mentioned that my favorite painter of all time was the American Thomas Cole and then I said to her, Since it was the Germans and the Americans that dominated Expressionism, wasn’t that just the most apt metaphor for the twentieth century as a whole?

I took her money and handed her the change and both of us smiled and looked to the line of bodies waiting behind her. You wanna get some coffee some time? she asked me.

*

Do you paint? she said, sipping her coffee. No, I said. I’m afraid not. She gave me a strange look and so I told her, I’ve always been fascinated with art and painting but I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I haven’t got a creative muscle in my body. I mean, I love studying the methods and the schools, I love reading about troubled artists and their gross sensitivities, their frailty and idiosyncratic behavior. But as far as actually putting brush to canvas . . .

“How long has it been since you tried?” she asked me. She held her cup of coffee in both hands, the fingers pointed straight out. “Creativity isn’t just an ideal, you know. It may begin that way, but it still has to be realized. Being an artist, a person that creates every day, it takes a lot of resolve and stubbornness.”

“Maybe that’s why I stopped,” I said. “I’m sort of averse to working hard at anything.”

“Oh, come on.” She set her hands in her lap and sat back in the chair, studying me. “Sure, the creative process can be terribly difficult at times, but you shouldn’t just give up. It’s such a tremendously rewarding experience. And we’re all of us capable of creating at least one great work.”

“You might be right,” I told her. “But I’m afraid I’ll never know. I’ve tried and tried. I wanted it very badly since I was a teeny little thing. It just never happened. I’m convinced that the artist inside me is buried alive in a dark grave somewhere.”

“Rubbish,” she said, looking at her watch. “Oh, dammit, I’m gonna be late for work.” She stood and pushed her chair in and began walking away.

“Where do you work?” I asked her. “Or wait, I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m Norma Jean,” she said, reaching her hand out to me.

“I’m Angela,” I said, and took it. She rushed out of the café and into the dark cold like the icy dramatization of a dream, leaving her cup steaming its curious illusions into the air.

*

The room is bright with bodies spread sparsely in the silence. I stare at the wall straight ahead, study its colorlessness, try to seep into it. I feel nothing. The yoga instructor is seated at the front of the class and she says, Are you with me, Angela?

I feel like jerking back into the real world, a landscape of emotion and thought. I want to say, Yes, I’m with you. I try to focus on my breathing, involve myself in the session. But instead I just sit there staring at the wall, unable to make a sound, unable to feel. Maybe I should try the truth, tell her, No, I’m not with you, I’m not all right, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My eyes begin to well up with tears.

I’m sorry, I say, and stand to leave.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

My Online magazine died a sudden and apathetic death so I left San Francisco for Los Angeles and was hired to write investigative pieces for a major weekly. My first assignment was to infiltrate the community of junkies and vagabonds in the gutters of downtown Los Angeles and root out the source of the plague. “Get in there and talk to the drifters, the diseased,” my editor told me. “I want this to be as oblique and sprawling as Los Angeles itself. Dig deep into the sewers, become a part of their world. I want to feel these people come alive, I want to know why their life seems to be a life so depreciated that even death rinses its hands of it.” He was very old and terse and hardened by a long career in news. “I see great things for you, young man,” he told me in his office. “No more wasting energy on this time travel nonsense. This piece you’re about to write, it’s the reason you became a journalist in the first place. Think about it. You’ll be doing a great service to the community, to the world.”  He looked out to the newsroom and the flashing digital tickers strung up on the walls, the television monitors feeding in images from all over the globe. “I’ve been in the game a long time, son,” he said. “I’ve been through a lot of changes and I certainly don’t have much time left.” He leaned against his desk and fixed me with a firm glare. “I’ve always wanted to win a Pultizer.”

I swallowed hard and looked away from him. “That’s a pretty lofty expectation, sir,” I said.

“You can do it, son,” he said. “I’ve read your stuff, you’re a tremendous writer. You just need some guidance and support. Someone to get you away from this obsession with time travel.”

“And you just want me to get involved with the homeless of Los Angeles, the crack addicts, the lowlifes, the drunks. You want me to record what I see.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Let the story develop itself. This isn’t your first dance, you know what you’re doing. You’re a trained journalist. You’ve been out there writing for a few years now.”

I sighed. Yes sir, I said, and stood.

“It’s gonna be great,” he said, smiling, patting me on the back and leading me out of his office. “You call me at any time, let me know what you need. Just remember,” and he raised one arm and looked up to the fluorescent lights and said, “I see Pulitzer.” I wanted to ask him if he meant the prize for journalistic excellence or if he was actually seeing the ghost of Joseph Pulitzer floating there above us, shaking his head or smiling or pointing a finger, but instead I just said, Yes sir, and walked out into the sunshine.

*

“Hey honey,” I said. “You know where can I score a little rock around here?”

Get the hell out of here before I call the cops, the woman said, and I walked out of MacArthur Park feeling frustrated and distraught. I’d spent the past three days traveling about the city in my tattered and filthy clothes asking around, trying to get someone to embrace me, to point me in the right direction. I’d almost been arrested twice, once for urinating against the side of a building and once for drinking a brown-bagged bottle of Early Times at the bus stop. Nobody would cooperate, not the bus drivers or the gaunt ghost riders on the MTA, not the scalp and groin scratchers in the public libraries, not the Blacks in the ghettoes of Inglewood or the Mexicans crusted in dust and sweat out in Chavez Ravine. I thought I must be doing it all wrong, I was trying too hard, or maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough. I was beginning to feel desperate and perhaps that was why I got my first lead, because desperation is equally as contagious as it is egregious, and so by dusk on that third day I was sitting against a brick wall in the alley shadows of Sunset next to a homeless man named Dutch watching the tourists and the Hollywood wannabees strut the glittering concrete fantastic.

“We’re in the thick of a massive social reversal,” he said.

I took a hefty sip from my bottle of Schnapps and offered it to him. He shook his head. “What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean there are roughly eighty-two thousand people sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles on any given night. Eighty-two thousand. Think about that, man. Did you know that twenty percent of those eighty-two thousand are holding Bachelor’s degrees?”

I looked over at him. He was heavily bearded, late thirties. His eyes were a stark aquamarine but their depth appeared to be concealed behind something, a clarity emerging randomly, infrequently, at inopportune times, leaving whoever was looking at him feeling as though they had just missed him, he was just out of their reach.

“And so the greatest minds of my generation, as Ginsberg would have said, are often relegated to dark alleys and rat-infested tenement basements, sitting in the crusts of their own shit, watching the meat of the world parade inconsequentially about their obsessions, namely materialism and the Image, and this is what propels the machine of American life. Not science or reasoned discussion or careful deliberation, not the classics. Our core system of value judgments has been reversed, it’s been tossed on top of its head.”

Just then another homeless man came stumbling around the corner and sat next to us. He was old and very drunk. Hey Dutchie, he said, trying to focus his eyes on me. It was getting dark in the alley. I cain’t fuckin sleep, he said.

“So what are you, a nihilist?” I asked Dutch.

“I am everything and nothing,” he said. “Did you hear about the architect?”

I shook my head. What architect, I said.

“Some famous architect died here in the city last night. One of the most famous in the world. Rigged up one of his buildings full of explosives and blew it to the stars, him still inside.”

I remembered hearing something like an explosion the night before. “I might have heard it,” I said, looking up at the dark pocket of sky above. The old drunk started snoring.

“That was him, the architect. Leaving this world. Boom.”

“Why’d he do it.”

“Who knows why anyone does anything,” he said, and stood up, his silhouette like a black tongue in the night.

“Where are you going?”

“Let old Charlie sleep it off. I’m gonna take a walk.”

“Hold on, I’ll join you,” I said, and stood. “What do you think about time travel?”

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

I parked the Jeep in the driveway and killed the engine, listening to it tick and hiss. The digital clock on the dash read exactly midnight and every house on the block was hushed in shadow. What the hell am I doing back here, I thought. I’m not ready for this yet. I’m not prepared for the onslaught of emotion and the flood of words. I’d been driving for fifteen straight hours and my eyes were fried, my brain was drugged by the hypnotic meter of passing road signs and stitched highway lines and I looked up at the dark windows of my old house and thought about leaving again. I could just restart this Jeep and head back west, continue this boundless exploration, separate myself from feeling and consequence, from time and its perverse control. But I knew that I could rearrange time no more than I could continue to evade my wife and father and the rubble of my former life.

I got out of the Jeep into the mild night and stretched the road from my muscles, I listened to the symphonic creak and snap of joints, and suddenly I felt very tired and very old, like all the miles and all the towns and the stories had finally caught up with me, all the dark hours and the years and the promises, memories now just as lost as I was in front of that house I would never again call home.

I unlocked the front door and Harvey was right there pouncing on me, licking my face and hands, and it was only then that I realized I’d forgotten all about the dog, my one true friend on the planet and the only soul I could trust. I should have brought him out there on the road with me, through the peaks and valleys, the quiet wastelands and steady grumble of metropolitan America. Seeing him again and hearing him whimper with joy, feeling his body shudder with excitement reminded me that there is nothing more consistent in a man’s life nor more loyal to him than his dog. I scratched his ears and rubbed his belly and my eyes began to well with tears but I wasn’t certain it was from the sudden rush of love and sentiment for my dog or from all the smoke in the room and when I heard the leaping gust of flames coming from the rear of the house I jumped up and ran back there.

Fire was crawling up the walls and across the ceiling, fire in red and blue tongues with yellow eyes and orange legs, hissing and growling, fire like the light and heat of the world fresh out of god’s pocket, and I stood there watching rapt with the flames like dancing miracles in my eyes. Harvey was at my leg barking at the fire and I finally slipped from my trance, thinking about my wife. I’ve got to save my wife. I ran upstairs to my old bedroom and my father naked save for his boxer shorts was beating at the flames with a blanket, his body thin and pale and hairless like a white worm. My wife sat on the bed watching, screaming insults at my father as the draperies and the carpet and the room burned bright and loud with Harvey next to me barking still. My father continued to wave the blanket, fanning the flames, swelling them in a storm of sparks and then suddenly he fell down. I ran over to him and picked him up and slung him over my shoulder. Holy shit, my wife said, seeing me for the first time. Baby, where’d you come from? I told her to get out of bed before the house burned down and she just sat there staring at me dazed with the flames snapping about her in a whirl of hunger and lust.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

The hiker who found her tangled in the brush at the foot of Gorgola Hill told police that at first he thought the body was an exposed tree root. Her skin was just as pale as bone, he said, and she was all twisted up like.

And so resulting from the hiker’s quote in the local news media the dead woman came to be known as the Tree Girl, and her case, through the various channels of law enforcement and the bureaucratic fog of the D.A.’s office, invariably and unofficially became the case of the Tree Girl. All around Neophalia in the business offices and on the construction sites, at the fitness centers and in the kitchens people were talking about the Tree Girl, did you hear about the Tree Girl, who was she and where was she from.

But no one seemed to know. In a pocket of her shredded and bloodied jeans police found an identification card and a folded piece of paper upon which a short message was handwritten: I’m doing this because art is dead. Detectives quickly confirmed the woman’s identity as Norma Jean Brown, 25, the resident of a small studio apartment in Neophalia’s Garden district, and they cautiously treated the Tree Girl’s plunge to the base of the steep and rugged cliff as a suicide.

The police found the Tree Girl’s apartment dark and nearly empty save for a bare mattress lying on the floor in the center of the room and paints everywhere, paints of all types and colors, in cans and tubes and crusted dry and cracked upon plastic palettes. There were brushes and chemicals and handcrafted art materials and there were canvases and woods in varied states of completion. After a thorough search detectives could find no trace of friends or relatives of the Tree Girl, no working associates and no leads as to why this young woman would either jump from the summit of Gorgola Hill or become the focus of someone else’s violent designs.

After a week without anyone claiming the body, police appealed to the news media to help locate anyone who may have known the Tree Girl. They used the photo from her identification card and splashed it all over television and the Internet, in the newspapers and on billboards, the image of a frail girl with pale skin and large eyes, her smile forced and diffident perhaps in a vain attempt to help conceal her bad teeth. Plastered to the sides of local transportation vehicles and on the tiled walls of the subway tunnels the people of Neophalia were continuously reminded of the Tree Girl and her tragically anonymous life and death.

Then a young man came forward to police and told them he didn’t know the Tree Girl but he had seen her in a night club about a week before her body was found. She was inside the club, he said, painting some sort of picture on the wall. How can you be sure it was her, the police asked. I’m sure, the young man said, and described how he’d stood against the wall watching the Tree Girl paint that picture for hours while the room at her back strobed with light and sound and heat and movement, he stood frozen amid the fury of flesh until after the music stopped and the last of the dancers had gone, until the bouncer or the door man or the owner of the dance club came up to him and said, Dude, seriously, you gotta go. He told police that he walked out of the dance club with the sun just cracking the surface of the sky, feeling oddly connected to the young woman back in the dance club with her paints and brushes and harried concentration.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.