They removed their gold-leafed masks at the beloved soirée, and their faces disappeared like the cheerless phantoms dancing in all the tarantellas of the year. There’s no point. The sun set months ago. The maudlin despairs and false desires disappeared like smoke in velveteen dreams. Even the memory of those times has disappeared. All that’s left is the memory that you once had a memory of it, and it’s drawn up that way, a crude illustration of a fevered dream, a recollection of a spurious finale that you tell people, but you only tell them the reenactment of how you told it to others before. Would death be so soon? Would it be like this, a melancholy of varying aches and theater, until the memories of people you loved have been rehearsed down to dust?
Tom Wheeler finished writing in his journal, and then sat watching a summer tanager bathing in intervals of panic and selfpossessed care in the birdbath he set just outside his window. The bird would baptize himself under the water, shake it through all his thousand feathers in an instant, and then look up and around as if all the impending doom of the world were watching him, waiting for him to slip up. A house finch hops around the leafy groundcover nearby tossing leaves out of his way, looking for grubs, surveying the pastures of earth in a sporadic yet orderly manner, in which if he had the time and the stomach he would cover the vast hillside in all its contours and miniaturized undulations. What do I do now, Tom Wheeler thought, staring out across the San Fernando Valley from the house he rented from up in the hills overlooking everything. The sun went down and the sky darkened with the authority of a chiffon conceit, a desperation for dreams to emerge from its great blanket, the horizon of suburban lights stayed on as stars, and he thought about how there was no more frontier to go to, no more west to explore, no more virginal soil to corrupt, what must have this place felt like more than looked like in the swollen desolation of its antiquity. But he thought about it as he always had, temperamentally and casually and only in order to pass the time.
So he did what he sometimes did when the meanings of things gave up on him. He went to the karaoke bar down the hill that stays open til 4am, and watched the same old lady with bleached hair and the Marilyn Monroe shirt sing “Nothing Compares 2 U” to an almost empty room. And he watched her afterwards and she held the plastic cocktail glass with her long red fingernails and sips from the little red straw. He doesn’t talk to her. But she sits and stares at her drink and sometimes looks up and watches as one of the others sings, and she smiles with a distant melancholy age. The outmoded acrylic chandelier slowly turns on the ceiling motor, spinning like a weeping imprint from a huge firework over the grand piano, and is lit with a multicolored neon light, and the cubes of blue and red and pink light drift across her as she sits there, and for this moment he thinks he loves her in that remorseful sort of way. Or maybe it was just being fascinated by her, and those two feelings sometimes change direction. He doesn’t know. But then she leaves, back to wherever she lives, wherever she sleeps, doing the things you do at home when no one is watching.
In the withering castles of his mind there are dreams like tendriled ivies that block out the sun…and the horses roam again, and the perfumes of fond lovers fill entire ballrooms again. He thinks about the places he’ll never see, the jungles still purveying barbarity out of some cruel or uncruel need, the winds blowing snow off the crest of some mountain peak, the rivergrasses swaying slowly underwater to the current and then a crane walking through the shallows almost without a sound. But he’s decided to live much of his life here in this alien suburban desert, a summer’s rapture of deceit, a place where porno studios built next to churches built next to track houses where the backyards are turned into depots of catalytic converters. He wonders if he will ever leave, or if he will stay forever like one of those people who never leave their smalltown village, like a pig who never leaves his pen.
After a while, Tom Wheeler leaves the bar. Out on the sidewalk he sees Lou, this sixty-year-old alcoholic he lives with, stumbling down the sidewalk holding a bottle of KY and a bottle of vodka. He’s with a woman about his age who mumbles so much from all the pills she consumes, the same lady who tried to get him to go to bed with her daughter a couple months earlier—in the middle of the night she sent him myriad photos of her daughter in a bikini, and he thought about it, but he also thought about how unhinged and quickly it would get. Lou got a hernia that night carrying the woman up the steep spaghetti street just to sleep with her, and then broke the futon too that Tom Wheeler slept on for years. So he went on home and tried to sleep, and tried not to fall into the same old customs. Because for some time now, he would go away if things got more complicated than he was comfortable with. He would get scared from things, and so he’d disappear for days into casinos with no windows, in other countries where he didn’t speak the language, and indulge aimlessly in duplicitous torment, and watch the sunrise in a glass of whiskey, and wake up on the beach, in the rain, crying, having to start all over again. But lately he’s repressed all that, and nourishes those same dramaturges by rewatching the same Nouvelle Vague or Japanese noir films he’s seen a thousand times, reenacting their strange disillusionment, smoking cigarettes, watering his outdoor ferns and succulents in his Christmas underwear, eating half a croissant and leaving the rest for the birds, spitting on the cobblestones in the rain and watching it wash away. What’s the use, he thinks, we got lost, and the horses now roam without us. He used to think it was a phase that would run its course, but what’s the time limit for phases, he thought, I think we’re nearly passed that now.
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