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[W r i t e r' s N o t e b o o
k]
Sketches of Those We Have Known: BERKELEY PEOPLE
Watson walked on listening for the creep of the bus behind him. It
reminded him of an animal, old and slow but indomitable and fated to rule
the earth. He turned and watched the old eyes glower through the mist that
were like beams of radiation. In the distance were the buildings; only two
counted. One was brick with large rectangular windows. The other was
a steel obelisk directly across the street, it's windows retracted into
the black steel. The fog hung along the tops of each on of them,
concealing the watchtowers. There were two watchtowers, he remembered. One
on the old building faced east, toward the surrounding hills. The other
faced west across the green expansive bay between the spires of the Golden
Gate and out to where the ocean and sky danced together in a vaporous
line.
He briefly thought of the women in those buildings. He thought they
were damsels from another age looking for heroes. One used to stand all
day combing her blond hair that fell down her back and rumpled along the
floor like some hairy snake. Occasionally she would pick up binoculors and
search along Grizzly Peak.
The other paced with a cigarette in her mouth and held a trembling
mirror to her face blurring the room in the background. She had told him
that work was boring. "But it is work and honorable useful work
is hard to come by."
He had forgotten their names but remembered vividly the day he met
them. They said they would search Shattuck Avenue for the "loners".
They found him sitting in a cafe on the corner of Shattuck and Allston.
"Am I a loner?" he had asked defensively.
The blonde one had laughed like a little girl who sees her father naked
for the first time.
"I'm not a loner!" he demanded.
The one with the cigarette nodded her head, "That's right, you have
your pestering dreams. I can always tell a dreamer by the fog in his
eyes....and, mister, you have fog!" Then she laughed a husky, friendly
laugh that made Watson smile.
They said they worked for the city and when he told them he worked for
the post office the two of them took him down to the park. It was not late
at night but it was dark and Watson held onto the two hands that escorted
him down to the tiny creek running through a cool bankside.
There was something supernatural about these women even if they said
they were simple city workers.
Watson asked the blonde how old she was and she turned her head and
looked into the creek.
"I'm a silver leaf!" Watson opened his eyes and, yes it was true taht
a leaf snagged up on a rock and the woman bent to put her hand in the
cold stream and swirled it gently until the leaf was bumped from the snag.
The current pulled it gently into the middle of the stream. The other
woman flicked her cigarette into the water, then stood behind Watson and
brushed her hand through his hair.
"I'm from Neptune," and her hand slid before it moved down his shirt.
Watson quit asking them questions, in the park, down by the creek, empty
of sound but the hurried feet of the squirrels somewhere behind them.
Watson perceived a groan in the creek. It wasn't a bellow but an eerie
sigh that became a groan in that delicate gurgle of the water rounding
over the pebbles and rock.
A green stake, like the one used for surveying, suddenly became visible
to him. It stuck in the middle of the creek directly in front of him and
he wondered at the illusions of night that could make noise and things,
alternating like drunken eyes, looking like blinking neon signs.
The two women were then opposite him asking personal questions. They
wanted to know about everything. His age, his income, address, phone
number, place of birth, exact time of birth, his favorite color, favorite
books, favorite music. Did he sleep on the left side or right.
Right-handed or right-handed? Smoke? What was his philosophy of life and
if he was too boring to have one, where had he been? What did he do? What
did he know...exactly?
He answered as best he could and when he stumbled over something they
went to another question, to return to the previous one later. He didn't
question what they were doing. Perhaps it was out of the ordinary he
didn't know because often, he wasn't sure what he was saying. Even in the
cool air he felt hot and sticky with sweat.
The last thing he remembered saying was "letters" then they attacked
him.
On the bank they stripped him of his clothes and threw them in the
water. "What...what are you doing?" he yelled, kicking and scratching as
he tried to pull from the women who had suddenly turned on him. They
didn't say anything.
When his clothes had been disposed of in the creek, the blonde one (and
he remembered the monstrous green eyes palpitating in their sockets)
pointed up to the moon that was half a yellow grin, toothless but filled
with a pale cheek.
The two stood and started running through the park and when they had
disappeared Watson could hear a chilling, whining shriek that was joined
by a rebel call, "yeyeyeyeyeyeyeye" as if the tongues were vibrating like
the blades of a reaper against the roof of the mouth..
Watson was cold for a long time. He sat stunned, unable to fetch his
clothes from the water. They hadn't drifted downstream. His shorts and
pants were twisted around the rocks and fallen twigs that lay haphazardly
in the water.
On the bank naked and shivering, Watson could hear the squirrels or
ground birds rustling behind him. He knew if he turned there would be line
of curious and staring eyes, twinkling and fixed and bright.
He had to admire their effeciency in undressing him. He chided himself for not responding fast enough. "What my father always said about me! How humiliating!" It was as though they had done this often, knew precisely how to get the poor sucker off guard, and strip him before any of his manhood kicked in. "They schemed up in the office, I can see that now. They drew up diagrams and went over timing and processes. And, most important to Watson, they carefully planned who the victim was to be. That was what got to him. He had been singled out because, from a distance, he appeared an easy target. "But what is it? What tips them off?"
Watson spent days in bed staring up at the ceiling after he had gathered his wet clothes and waited a reasonable time before he put them back on. His mother had always insisted he take off his clothes that had been exposed to the lightest rain. "You'll catch your death of pneumonia," she would say. So he slunk back to his place, head filled with humiliation and dark feelings, sneezing, feeling he might have caught that pneumonia now. Three days laying in bed. What had he lost since that moment he felt on top of the world? The post office sent a guy around to check up on Watson and make sure he was really sick. The guy viewed him suspiciously and Watson got the feeling that the guy knew exactly what had happened. Maybe he, as well, had been a victim. Little was said between them. Now the bus was coming up behind him and he ran, then walked quietly to the stop that was in front of the railroad tracks. The tracks ran parallel for a mile before bending around a small hill that was part of someone's backyard. The tracks were filled with broken green glass that nestled with the crushed rock between the ties. Watson himself had thrown a few of the bottles there, late at night. That is, when everything was shut up in the neighborhood and he could experience the extravagance of sound that exploded from the glass breaking on steel. Watson had lost his job at the post office and had become somewhat derelict since the incident with the two women. He had sought them out but they no longer worked in the buildings or so the people said. Perhaps they were lying for them he didn't know. The more he thought about it the more he realized that the women had wanted to seduce him, to soften him up before moving in and extracting his seed. The more he thought about it the more he believed it was a good thing or, at least, an exciting thing. "What they were saying was, we are special and to have us you must go through fire." So now his mind was filled with thoughts of them, clothed and naked, wild and pensive. It was a game! Of course. It was his humiliation that had prevented him from seeing it for what it was. A serious game that had to be played at a high level to extract all its value. Before he reached the bus stop he suddenly halted. He had seen a crack fissured slightly in the concrete. It had split just a fraction and he had seen it, seen it like one could see the hands of a clock move when the mind was concentrating adequately on it; on anything. Just so the eyes blinked occasionally and not miss the movement of the hand. He was glad to be outside. He had lived with earthquakes all his life and recognized, now, how subtle they began. He bent closer to the crack still reminding himself that he'd seen it. After all, there it was. But, then, he had seen a sign in the distance that enlarged his imagination and turned out to be a swab of paint some vandal had put on. He dropped his eye into the sliver that was nearly a foot long. It had split through a handprint someone had made in the cement years before. The hand that made this, he thought, is now red and beat like the porches and roofs on the cottages that fell inward throughout the neighborhood. The print was larger than a child's but smaller than a man's hand. They had pressed hard because the print was framed by a rim of cement. Watson pressed his ear to the crack, remembering an old prophecy that earthquakes could be heard coming before they struck. He heard a faint roar as if it were caught deep in the interior of the Earth and yelling for help. He didn't hear any cries of help. Perhaps it was the ubiquity of the ocean. He looked to see where he was in relation to the telephone pole but when he raised his head the bus rambled past him and he stood to run after it, fingering his pocket for the quarter. But at that moment the red signal light changed, black and white arms crossed the road, and in an instant the area was shook by the stampede of cars, one after another, in an endless row, led by a Gothic engine, all the wheels clacking like playing cards hitched to a bike wheel. Out of breath, hunched over with hands on his knees, feeling disaster was going to strike at any moment with what he'd heard from the crack, from the depths of the Earth, sweating, his belly punching in and out in short pants, wondering in a flash what had happened to him, why he was on his hands and knees in the dark without a job or prospect, riding busses with the poor and crazed, in this state he looked up to see the two women, standing on the back of the train, with no expressions, arms crossed, flicking a cigarette off the train to the ground below. Back to
Top David Eide eide491@earthlink.net � 2002 David Eide. All rights reserved. |