The Things She Refused to Leave Behind

She lived in a house the size of a matchbox, at the very last address on the very last street in the very last town at the edge of the world. Out of the little kitchen window she stood at to wash the dishes, she could see only sunshine and smoke – white and hazy and filled with nothing, like a magic trick. In fact, from that angle, there was no indication that her house was built on anything at all. It seemed to hang like a constellation, suspended in the void.
The house was as wizened and crooked as she was – stooped and creaking, with crumbling walls inside and a bravely repatched exterior. Everything seemed held together with a few nails and some strategically placed duct tape. And the way it perched on top of its tiny hill – the only one for miles – made it appear in constant danger of capsizing, either back into the laps of her neighbors, or out into the sunshiney nothing.
Her friends, if she had had any, would have called her a packrat. Her neighbors, though they didn’t know her, called her ‘eccentric.’ Even from the bottom of the tiny hill, they could see the evidence of The Things She Refused to Leave Behind. Her front yard was a museum of ceramic pots, small fruit trees, milk crates filled with old car parts – these were hidden under the front porch – tennis balls, and small decorative boulders that served as tanning beds for an endless string of errant cats. And more yet: along the top of the garden fence, an assortment of empty wine bottles, arranged just so. Chipped and repainted lawn gnomes hidden among the trees and flowerbeds. Hubcaps of various sizes nailed around the garage door like enormous dull Christmas lights. A roadcone painted turquoise. Everywhere flowers. Exploding out of pots on the front porch, trailing out of windows and around door frames, smeared like thumbprints along the path to the garden gate. The yard was beautiful, there was no question – everything positioned very exactly, everything cared-for. There was just so much of it.
Inside – as though the yard was only there to catch what spilled out of the house – coffeeandend tables struggled to hold pounds of knick knacks. At least one bookshelf stood against every wall, bursting with musty hardbound and paperback books like rows of uneven teeth, some unread, some falling apart. In corners, piles of alphabetized magazines and newspapers supported the ceiling. Randomly saved beercans and more wine bottles were clustered like modern art displays, and chunky coffee mugs had been filled with soil and now contained the flowers that wouldn’t fit in the garden. An outoftune piano served as the music library. Above it, stretched across a corner of the ceiling, a stained and torn flag bore the symbol of the republic of California. A hobo had thrown it over her after a concert in LA. “Rock and roll, Kurt Cobain is dead,” he had sung to her, as he ran into the street. And pictures. Framed, unframed, pinned to the wall with thumbtacks – old movie posters, show fliers, watercolor paintings, collages made by small children – whose? – and in a tiny gold frame in the middle of the mantelpiece, a timefaded family portrait. Everybody looking slightly to the left.
Her bedroom was at the center of it all. Her bed lay in the middle, a sea of pillows and comforters and handmade quilts. Her closet was like the costume department of a professional theatre company. Pairs of sunglasses and bits of ribbon and scarves and necklaces with charms and bracelets and earrings dangled from every available hook and corner, and stretched across the mirror, and lay like silver puddles on the nightstand. Under her bed, stacks of shoeboxes held the most precious memories – photographs, ticket stubs, letters from old boyfriends, the nametag from her first job, the cast from her first broken wrist, newspaper clippings her mother had saved from the day she was born, her senior yearbook picture, her ragged journals – she had written in one every single day since she was fifteen – and an urn; empty.
She never threw anything away. When she did “a big cleanup,” which she did about twice a year, she simply rotated things. Things that had become less significant would be relegated to the living room. Things from the living room went into the garage. Things in the garage were moved aside or put into boxes with other things, or moved out into the yard. Things in the yard grew into the soil, or became trees, or sometimes escaped through the fence and went clattering down the hill into town, like children on the last day of school. Every so often, on her way home from work or shopping, she would stumble across a hubcap in a neighbor’s yard, and exclaim, “There you are!” and carry it back with her as though she couldn’t live without it. These recaptured treasures would usually find themselves back inside the house and it was sometimes years before they made it outside again.
Only once had something made it far enough away to be lost forever. This was years ago, before she lived in the crooked little house at the edge of the world, before her hair grew wiry and she stopped throwing things away. She was still in LA, living with a boy who had pink hair and wrote songs about love. It was a skateboard, peeling on top, painted orange underneath, that had been modified with a black Sharpie and his young, eager hands. It had rolled away very suddenly one day, on wobbly wheels that badly needed replacing. She had searched for it for months after it happened – spent nights weeping in the cold with a flashlight. Sometimes now, when an errand took her over to the edge of town, she still had a look for it, though LA was a worldandahalf away, and by now her search was more for show than anything – she thought that perhaps if whoever had taken it saw her still looking for it, they might be inclined to return it.

A long time ago, she had been a musician. Now she worked as a secretary for a small real-estate office in town. Recently, the company had moved its location to a nicer, bigger office down the street. The building was light and airy and smelled yellow. She supposed she couldn’t ask for a nicer coffin.
Her coat had hung on the rack by the door for fifty years. It hung like it had done something wrong – the way a dog does when it has pissed on your favorite rug. Like a hapless sack of guilty potatoes. It quietly watched people come in and out. Sometimes someone coming in – a new client, or a skittery new intern – would glimpse it out of the corner of their eye and turn abruptly, hands raised, mistaking it for a silent third person in the room. Sometimes, when the air outside was silent and the office unbearably still, it would fall off the rack. Just for a lark.
Her desk held no knick knacks or books. She hadn’t collected any in the fifty years she had been living in the crooked house and working for the real-estate company. Everything she had at home came from a time before. Besides, company policy stated that there was to be no intrusion of personal life into the office. It was a pity – she could have used the storage space.
She walked to and from work every day the same way – down the hill, across the street, past the bus stop and around the corner. Then it was a mile down the town’s main street, stopping occasionally to look in shop windows or collect wayward hubcaps that had escaped from her yard. She walked very slowly, hunched in that way specific to very old people. She never needed a cane. She never once came up against a red light – she had learned to time her trip perfectly to coincide with green lights. In this way, her life shuffled slowly on.

On that particular evening, she decided to take a different road home so she could walk past the park. The air felt pinker than usual, and there was a strangely electric openness in it that made her want to be outside. The skateboard was sitting so obviously in the middle of the sidewalk that she didn’t see it at first. It wasn’t until she was right on top of it that she realized what it was. She froze. Her blood felt suddenly new and vital in her old limbs. She stared at it like a rabbit stares down a car. She wanted to pick it up but she couldn’t move. The skateboard grinned up at her and began to meander away on a gust of wind. The yelp in her throat propelled her after it.
It was an intense low-speed chase. The skateboard yawned along lazily, stopping every once in a while so she could catch up, waiting until her hand almost touched it, then rolling on. She creaked after it, cursing under her breath. The light in the sky turned pink to match the air.
She finally caught up to it at the edge of the park. It had come to rest, either by accident or by choice, in a bush by the lake. The swans were out like yachts, telling dirty jokes to each other and looking down their noses at the bits of bread children threw to them. She snatched up the board and held it in front of her face. It was unchanged. Not a day older, not a bit more worn. The same signature was still scrawled across the underside – similar to hers but bolder. There was still a small chunk missing from the front lip. A small bloodstain the same shape as the scar on her left palm. Wobbly wheels.
She held it against herself with her arms. The sky was pinker than it had ever been – a deep orangepink like an Indian Grapefruit. She smiled at the swans polka-dotted against the black lake. Then she turned around and walked home.

The crooked hill and the matchbox house were razoredged against the sinking sun. Everything was so ablaze in the sunset that at first she didn’t see the fire. When she got closer, though, she smelled the smoke. It smelled like books and handmade quilts.
By the time she got to the top of the hill, the house was so engulfed in flame that it was the sun. Tiny flowers popped and crackled around the porch. Inside, she could hear piano wires snapping violently. An upstairs window crashed open like a piñata, spraying shards of glass and dumping china dogs, earrings, paperweights and thumbtacks onto the lawn. A beam fell from the top of the porch, and suddenly the whole house seemed to be tipping toward her like a jar of marbles, spilling kick knacks. Things rolled past her feet and through the fence. Inside, pots and pans fell with bursts of applause. Scraps of posters and watercolor paintings launched themselves still flaming through open windows, burning up in-flight, leaving trails of smoke in the sky. The house wasn’t burning down. It was burning out. The grass around her feet began to take. Clutching the skateboard like a life raft, she turned and hurried down the hill toward town. She had suddenly remembered she needed to buy matches.

The house didn’t tip over after all. One wall remained – the back wall with the kitchen window facing into nothing. It stood up like a bad haircut. Everything else was gone. Still clutching the skateboard against herself, she shuffled her feet through mountains of ash, kicking for buried treasure. An hour ago she had been standing by a lake watching the swans. Her foot touched something hard. She bent down and retrieved the urn; empty. Slowly, she sat down in the ash and examined the skateboard in the changing light. She blazed the sight of it into her mind. She pressed her nose against it. She rubbed every rough edge with her fingertips. She spun the wobbly wheels. She licked it.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a box of matches. Lit the whole thing and placed it under the skateboard. It burned orange and pink, like an Indian Grapefruit, and was gone in minutes. She scooped the ash into the empty urn. Stood slowly and went to the kitchen window. The hazy white expanse of nothing behind it was streaked with gold, like a creamsicle. When she opened the window, the air opened too, warm and electric. She tucked the urn under her arm and climbed out into the void. Stars pricked holes in the sky.

Go Away Alice

I.
In the dream, there is a girl. The girl has no name, or at least, I don’t know what it is. She’s quite young – perhaps twelve or thirteen – and she lives in one of those little houses in New York that are surrounded by more houses on both sides, with a stoop out front that you can sit on. She’s a happy little girl.
At some point, close to the beginning of the dream, she meets another little girl, called Alice, a ragdoll of a girl with a dismal gray skirt and a threadbare wool sweatshirt. Alice is a bad girl. We know Alice is a bad girl because she has vacant eyes and sunken cheeks, and drowns kittens in her spare time (she says.) I never witness her doing these things in the dream, but it is one of those things that is blurrily assumed.

II.
Barack Obama has the hardest job in the world. Not only does he have to keep himself from being assassinated on a daily basis, he also has to sort out the disaster we like to call “America.” When we elected him, it was with an almost violent fervor, a palpable excitement for the change he was going to bring us. I remember watching his inauguration with my knees curled up to my chest, one eye closed, praying, “Oh please don’t let him be shot. Please don’t let him be shot.” Every step he took onstage was another small triumph – every moment that his brain was still inside his skull, and not splattered Kennedy-style all over the front page of tomorrow’s paper, was heart-pounding relief.

III.
The night sky. What number of carefully arranged adjectives and hopelessly imperfect sentences can describe it? It’s like a velvet blanket covered with spilled talcum powder. On a clear night, when you can see Orion and Cassiopeia and Signus; when you know you are in Santa Cruz because the North Star is there to your left and the Summer Triangle is directly overhead, it is one of the most heart wrenching sights a human’s eyes can absorb.

I.
What we don’t find out until later in the dream, is that Alice is not actually a real girl at all, but a figment of the other girl’s (for some reason I’m beginning to think her name is Sally) imagination. Alice is Sally’s dark side, her psychotic break – the part of her that will tear through the silk screen that separates a dream from a nightmare, and drag her screaming into inky blackness. Alice is, I suppose, the thing that we all fear the most inside ourselves. That part of us that bites our nails until they bleed, smokes cigarettes, refuses to be a good hostess, hates making small talk, wants to fuck just for the hell of it even though we know it will make us feel worse. Because we are bored with the rules and decorum, and, most of all, the effort it takes to be a functioning member of society.



II.
Barack Obama’s campaign was based on Hope. The hope that we could drag ourselves out of this quagmire and emerge, dripping and cursing, a powerful Empire. There is no doubt that America is the next Great Empire. And there is no doubt that, like Rome and England and China and Spain, the Empire is crumbling. It is crumbling the way all Great Empires and mediocre cookies crumble – from the inside out. The reason it is crumbling is because it is an Empire built on nothing. It is an Empire built so far ahead of itself that it has nothing to stand on. America exists in a cloud seventy feet or so above the earth. Everything that can be done in America nowadays can be done online. That is why there are no decent railroads, factories or solid institutions. America is the youngest nation in the world, and consequently, it is being built on the youngest technologies in the world, before it has had a chance to establish the old technologies. Countries like England, France, China, have all had a chance to root themselves to the Earth with sheer manpower and brute strength – wooden ships filled with iron men. America, poor young bastard sibling that it is, is attempting to build an Empire out of air – paper ships filled with wires and plastic and a computer for a brain. It is a premise that has the potential to work, but only if the youngest people in the world are willing to take the wheel of these new technologies, learn how they work, and use them to steer the ship – or at least remotely control it from the harbor.

III.
There is absolutely nothing in the world that is older than the night sky. Nothing. Hundreds of bajillions of years ago, cavemen with badly plucked eyebrows and broken noses looked up at more or less the same sky that we look up at today. They saw more, because there were no horrible, cancerous cities like Los Angeles to pollute the sky with their artificial light, but the basic premise was the same. Stars have come and gone, burned out and been born, but the same constellations have pretty much been there. The same three little dots in a diagonal line with three even littler dots falling away from them have been Orion’s belt and sword. And it is somewhat relieving to know that no matter how much invisible matter we vomit into the universe in the form of emails and youtube videos, the blackness that surrounds those splattered stars will never become cloudy or spaghetti-gray. We Hope.

I.
Eventually, Alice becomes such an overpowering force in Sally’s life that Sally goes completely insane. From her pole position in the back of Sally’s head, Alice tells her to do terrible things, and Sally, being the blonde little innocent that she is, cannot handle it. She is sad all the time. She hates herself and she hates Alice, but as we all know, something so evil and so strong cannot be easily banished.

II.
This is why I feel (I know) that the future of America depends on us. We cannot be a nation of apathetics anymore. We are the iGeneration, the generation that elected a “just add water president.” We are so used to instant gratification that we expect our president to be an immediate solution to our problems. Need I remind anyone that Kool-Aid powder does not become Kool-Aid simply by adding water? You have to stir it. We seem to think that our job is done: we elected him, and that’s all we had to do, right? Wrong. Obama is a great leader. But a great leader’s job is not to fix a country’s problems. It is to inspire the country’s people to want to fix the problems themselves. That is what Obama does. That is how he won his campaign – through inspiration and Hope. How many of us remember watching the inauguration? How many of us remember going outside onto our balconies afterwards, smoking a cigarette, looking at the world and thinking, “Yes. I can do this.”? And perhaps you don’t have a balcony, and perhaps you don’t smoke (you shouldn’t, according to everyone) but you know what I mean. Changing this country is not Obama’s responsibility. It is our responsibility.

III.
When the sky is foggy in Santa Cruz, you can’t see a goddamn thing at night. The clouds settle over the Earth like a lid. During the day it’s like being in a pot full of water about to be boiled. It’s a welcome change from Los Angeles, where you can’t see the sky period. Where the night sky isn’t black and white, it’s vaguely orange. Where the entire sky looks like one big Northern Light (except you’re in the South.) In Santa Cruz, the fog hangs like cobwebs until about noon, when suddenly the sun shafts through and everything is burned away within a matter of minutes. It’s like watching the curtain rise on a magic show. In Los Angeles, the smoke and grime seem to intensify the sun, pulling it closer to the Earth, trapping and heating it until even shadows sweat. In Santa Cruz the sky is covered by fog. In Los Angeles, the sky is covered by smog.

I.
The most vivid part of the dream, the part that everything else seems to be hazily surrounding, is when Sally comes home from school one day and Alice is lounging on the steps outside her front door. Taking up the entire stoop like she owns it. It is the first time I have seen Alice in the flesh. She has stringy black hair and a stitched-up cut on one cheek. Her head is sewn onto her neck. She looks like a twelve-year-old junkie. Sally is so scared of Alice that she cannot get into her own house. She panics and doesn’t know what to do, so she decides to run away and hide until Alice is gone. It is then that she notices what is written on the wall next to Alice:
GO AWAY ALICE
Exactly like that, but with an ‘x’ dotting the I. And Sally realizes that she must have written it herself, at some point within the last two weeks, or two months, or two years, or however long it has been since Alice started haunting her. She wrote it herself, in a moment of madness, trying to get Alice out of her own head. It is not a strong statement. It is not a stern warning to Alice that she’d ‘better get out of town or there’s gonna be trouble’: it is a plea. A weak and desperate attempt to gain control of herself and rid herself of this nightmare.

II.
We have two choices before us: we can give up and give in to the downfall of America – allow it to collapse and crumble and become a crazy hobo on the sidewalk of the world; or we can fight. The trouble with fighting is that it takes effort: it takes character and strategy and cunning and all the things that we, as a generation, seem to lack. Sure, we have education. Sure, we have a smarmy attitude and great sales skills. But do we have the character it’s going to take to tie the American Empire to the Earth and make it something lasting? Or if we can’t make it lasting, can we at least leave something valuable behind? What is our Mayan Calendar? Where are our aqueducts? Do we even care?

III.
On my ceiling, I have a representation of the night sky. It took me about three days, when I was fifteen, to paint it. I cut out stencils from cardboard, saved money to buy spray paint, spent days on a ladder with a tiny paintbrush dotting stars onto my ceiling. Sometimes, when I go to bed, it is my lullaby. A sky full of stars sings the most beautiful lullaby when you are lying on your back with your hands behind your head. Other times, though, it is a map. Like a pirate, I can memorize the patterns and constellations, I can look through the pinpoints to the greater picture behind them. Usually, the way I see them depends entirely on how exhausted I am at the end of the day – if I’m tired, I’ll let them sing me to sleep; if I’m wired, I’ll sail off into an adventure (second start to the right and strait on til morning.) Sometimes, though, I like to force myself through exhaustion and into the next big adventure. It’s a test of my character, strategy and cunning. It’s a much more rewarding way to spend an evening than lying on my back with me hands behind my head, ignoring everything and seeing nothing, pretending to be asleep.

I.
So the little girl runs away down the street and huddles next to a brick garden wall or something like that, because she’s too afraid to go into her own house. Suddenly, the dream becomes a montage – all I see is the girl huddled next to the wall like a hobo, growing older and older. So time is passing – the seasons all lend their different hues to the picture (spring is green, fall is red, winter is stark and white.) She sits by the same wall until, at the end of the dream, she’s a very old, very fat, very bald man, whose head is on backwards and who walks on all fours like a crab with a head that looks up at the sky. The man wears glasses and is pitiful. The very end of the dream is almost an interview – a perky but severe-looking woman with a microphone is about to ask him questions about his life, but he just looks up at her with eyes full of regret and limps away.

II.
We are a generation huddled next to a brick wall, scared to go into our own house. At the end of this dream, when Barbara Walters sticks her phallus in our faces, will we tell her about the aqueducts we built, or will we simply look up at her, through glasses full of regret, and limp away?

III.
Four hundred million bajillion squadrillion years ago, that star to your right died. How long will it take for people to forget about you?