The Mars Room(59)
Knit was the past tense of knit. And no one wanted what Candy Pe?a knit, not even Gordon, who put the vest in a paper bag deep in the trunk of his car and tried to forget about it.
* * *
He let whiskey pad his brain at Baressi’s one night and was overcome by nostalgia for Simone, the woman he’d dated in Berkeley. Recently she had called and left a message, wondering if he’d plugged in his refrigerator. That had been her joke when they’d dated, meant to imply he was a work in progress, not ready yet, but eventually headed for, life with a plugged-in refrigerator. It was a way of equating his lack of domestic instincts with his rejection of her, which made him guiltier than she knew, because it wasn’t quite right. It was Simone he’d had reservations about, not parting ways with bachelorhood. He had not called back, and why not? Now that he was drunkish and lonely he could not think of the reason. The young bartender, with her big smile, her fake breasts pressing against the buttons of her shirt, kept asking the assembled but separate drinkers, all male, if they needed anything. “Y’all have everything y’all need?” She asked it like this was Appalachia and not the Central Valley.
On the TV above her was handheld footage of a city taken over by a Shiite militia, men and boys in white face masks ripping past the camera on motor scooters, piles of debris burning casually in the background. Someone asked the bartender to put on minor league baseball. Gordon would read about the militia when he got home. The war was private. It was between each man and his computer. Gordon might have opted for a more ascetic life and skipped getting DSL, but the previous tenant already had it installed. The landlord said he was one of the lucky ones. Many addresses on the mountain could not get service.
I’ll send Simone a postcard, he thought. Be oblique. Not disclose that he hoped to make her cry out like that puma on his mountain, in the scene he imagined. Simone, having come down to his cabin in the woods, his books in little stacks along the dirty floor, his bottle of whiskey on the kitchen counter. A woman there to witness his solitary life, his acquired taste for valley beauty—to the untrained eye, not beautiful. The valley was a brutal, flat, machined landscape, with a strange lemonade light, thick with drifting topsoil and other pollutants from farm equipment and oil refineries. It was a man-made hell on earth but then again a real valley, with mountain ranges on either side. It was the size of industrial agriculture, scaled for that. It was difficult to imagine what it had looked like before it was farmed. It was hard even to imagine what it had looked like farmed in the old-fashioned way, by people. Machines shook the almond trees in synchronous violence. Their fruit fell to the ground with every mechanical jolt. Other machines swept the unhulled almonds into furrows, and yet other automated contraptions sucked the almonds up chutes and into hoppers. That all happened very quickly once a year, the September harvest. Most of the time the huge parcels of almond orchard were empty and quiet.
He paid his tab and walked to the gas station next door. The gas station was the main booze outlet in town and there was a line, men and boys squinting under the harsh lights as they waited to buy their malt liquor and Mad Dog. Gordon retrieved a small Perrier from the refrigerator cases, for the trip up the mountain. The carbonation helped him stay alert while driving. The kid in line behind him gazed at Gordon’s drink as he set it on the counter. “What is that?” he asked. The green, pear-shaped glass bottle looked suddenly comely and exotic. Gordon understood the kid had mistaken it for something alcoholic. “It’s uh, this French water.”
“French water.” The kid tsked. “I thought it was some new kind of drank.”
They had no postcards at the gas station. Try the Dollar Tree, the cashier suggested. He found no postcards of Stanville. Apparently it wasn’t a place you commemorated and if he wanted to be in touch with Simone he could just send her an e-mail like a normal person.
* * *
That Christmas, his week off, he drove up to Berkeley to sleep on Alex’s couch.
“How’s your one-room life?” Alex asked.
Gordon did not contact Simone. He and Alex made the nostalgia circuit: the used bookstores, the Irish cafeteria in the flats, the coffeehouses on Telegraph that were filled with good-looking women who worked hard at appearing effortless and natural. The barbecue place on Shattuck and the blues club next door, which could have had a sign, when they were in college, Smokiest Tavern on Earth, but no one smoked in bars now; it was illegal. Alex and Gordon talked about the war. They both checked the same websites obsessively, Informed Comment for analysis and iCasualties for metrics. Found the same things funny and the same things heinous. It was all heinous, but some of it was funny. The way Bush talked about “Mr. Maliki,” whom the CIA had installed as president. “I’m trying to help the man!” Bush said with real but clueless desperation, at a failed press conference.
Trying to help the man! Alex kept repeating.
Just after Christmas, the new Iraqi government hung Saddam Hussein. Gordon and Alex watched it on the internet.
“He was pretty dignified,” Alex said. “He was being heckled as he died and yet I feel he got the last word.”
Gordon went over the bridge to San Francisco alone, ate at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown that his student Romy Hall had told him about. Not that she was recommending it to him. She listed it among places she missed. The cook, she’d said, has this funny habit. After he uses them, he bangs his cooking tongs twice, and tugs on his shirt. His smock has a big grease splotch where he does that. And his father sits chain-smoking and chopping meat, upstairs, where the bathrooms are. The cook was there, on Gordon’s visit. He banged the tongs twice and pulled on his shirt. The father was upstairs, chain-smoking and chopping a huge pile of meat.