Historical

UNDERDOSING: To live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

HISTORICAL OVERDOSING: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

as we speak. He's slumped over the wheel of his tractor and he's crying. His wheat is dying of history poisoning."

"Good, Claire. Very weird. And Andy? How about you?" "Let me think a second."

"Okay, I'll go instead. When I think of the sun, I think of an Australian surf bunny, eighteen years old, maybe, somewhere on Bondi Beach, and discovering her first keratosis lesion on her shin. She's screaming inside her brain and already plotting how she's going to steal Valiums from her mother. Now you tell me, Andy, what do you think of when you see the sun?"

I refuse to participate in this awfulness. I refuse to put people in my vision. "I think of this place in Antarctica called Lake Vanda, where the rain hasn't fallen in more than two million years." "Fair enough. That's all?" "Yes, that's all."

There is a pause. And what I don't say is this: that this is also the same sun that makes me think of regal tangerines and dimwitted but­terflies and lazy carp. And the ecstatic drops of pomegranate blood seeping from skin fissures of fruits rotting on the tree branch next door—drops that hang like rubies from their old brown leather source, alluding to the intense ovarian fertility inside.

The carapace of coolness is too much for Claire, also. She breaks the silence by saying that it's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments. "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them."

I agree. Dag agrees. We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert—to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process.

"Strip." T'Talk to yourself." 1I"Look at the view." t'Mas-
turbate." Ill's a day later (well, actually not even twelve hours later)
and the five of us are rattling down Indian Avenue, headed for our
afternoon picnic up in the mountains. We're in Dag's syphilitic old Saab,
an endearingly tinny ancient red model of the sort driven up the sides
of buildings in Disney cartoons and held together by Popsicle sticks,
chewing gum and Scotch tape. And in the car we're playing a
quick game—answering Claire's open command

to "name all of the ac- tivities people do when

they're by themselves out in the desert." T'Take

nude Polaroids." T'Hoard little pieces of junk and

debris." T'Shoot those little pieces of junk to

bits with a shotgun." H"Hey," roars Dag, "it's

kind of like life, isn't it?" HThe car rolls along.

IT'Sometimes," says Claire, as we drive past the I. Magnin where she works, "I develop this weird feeling when I watch these endless waves of gray hair gobbling up the jewels and perfumes at work. I feel like I'm watching this enormous dinner table surrounded by hundreds of greedy little children who are so spoiled, and so impatient, that they can't even wait for food to be prepared. They have to reach for live animals placed on the table and suck the food right out of them."

Okay, okay. This is a cruel, lopsided judgment of what Palm Springs

really is—a small town where old people are trying to buy back their youth and a few rungs on the social ladder. As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth. It's really not a bad place here, and it's undeniably lovely—hey, I do live here, after all.

But the place makes me worry.

*****

There is no weather in Palm Springs—just like TV. There is also no middle class, and in that sense the place is medieval. Dag says that every time someone on the planet uses a paper clip, fabric softens their laundry, or watches a rerun of "Hee Haw" on TV, a resident somewhere here in the Coachella Valley collects a penny. He's probably right.

Claire notices that the rich people here pay the poor people to cut the thorns from their cactuses. "I've also noticed that they tend to throw out their houseplants rather than maintain them. God. Imagine what their kids are like."

Nonetheless, the three of us chose to live here, for the town is undoubtedly a quiet sanctuary from the bulk of middle-class life. And we certainly don't live in one of the dishier neighborhoods the town has to offer. No way. There are neighborhoods here, where, if you see a glint in a patch of crew-cut Bermuda grass, you can assume there's a silver dollar lying there. Where we live, in our little bungalows that share a courtyard and a kidney-shaped swimming pool, a twinkle in the grass means a broken scotch bottle or a colostomy bag that has avoided the trashman's gloved clutch.

*****

The car heads out on a long stretch that heads toward the highway and Claire hugs one of the dogs that has edged its face in between the two front seats. It is a face that now grovels politely but insistently for attention. She lectures into the dog's two obsidian eyes: "You, you cute

little creature. You don't have to worry about having snowmobiles or cocaine or a third house in Orlando, Florida. That's right. No you don't. You just want a nice little pat on the head."

The dog meanwhile wears the cheerful, helpful look of a bellboy in a foreign country who doesn't understand a word you're saying but who still wants a tip.

"That's right. You wouldn't want to worry yourself with so many things. And do you know why?" (The dog raises its ears at the inflection, giving the illusion of understanding. Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church, but Claire objected to this because she said she knew for a fact, that when she was in France, the dogs spoke French.) "Because all of those objects would only mutiny and slap you in the face. They'd only remind you that all you're doing with your life is collecting objects. And nothing else."

HISTORICAL SLUMMING:

The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villages— locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back—so as to experience relief when one returns back to "the present."

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23