Panorama City (21 page)

 

She put the photo back into the envelope and I asked her if there was anything else, if there were any general readings, if she might gather any more insight about the future. I did not care about the future, Juan-George, or I should say I don't care about the future, perhaps it is best to say that I don't concern myself with the future, if you spend all of your time living in the future, you tend to miss out on what's happening right now. Which is something I knew a long time ago, forgot for a while, learned again, forgot, and learned again while talking to you, while talking into these tapes. But I asked Maria for another reading so that she would again lay her hands on mine, I wanted to recapture that feeling, that spiritual feeling I had never felt at the Lighthouse and had always felt at Maria's. She lay her hands on mine, she closed her eyes, she asked me to close mine, too, but I did not, I could not, it was dawning on me that the feeling was gone, that the feeling would be gone forever, that there was no way to recapture an old feeling by going through old motions. I looked at her face, at her beautiful face, the light from the chandelier casting a pattern on it, and I sent her a message, from my mind, I aligned my thoughts like a magnet aligns metal filings, I sent her a message with every part of my mind. Open your eyes. She did.

***

I crossed the parking lot, the envelope in my hand, someone yelled hello from the Lighthouse Fellowship but I didn't even look to see who it was. I rode the bus back to the fast-food place, where my shift was ending, I bought a bag of burgers and fries from a puzzled Roger, and I waited outside for Aunt Liz to pick me up. When she arrived I pushed my seat all the way back and handed her the envelope. She pulled out the picture, smiled, and shook her head at the same time. Don't you look handsome, was what she said. All through dinner she kept remarking that I looked handsome and respectable in my Employee of the Month photograph, I didn't know what to say, as you know I thought the picture was terrifying, as you know I thought the photograph looked like my body without me in it, I wondered how Aunt Liz could not see this. After dinner I went straight to the crawl space with the bag of food, my evening talks with Paul were my lifeline, everything else was falling apart. He had been pacing, he said, or practicing a form of pacing, on the beams over the kitchen and trying to push forward the mountain rock of his thinking, and despite the limited headroom he'd been able to experience the freedom of movement he'd been looking for. I was pleased to hear this, I was pleased to hear that Paul would be moving his thinking forward, and I said so. He shook his head, he shook it slowly and said that unfortunately lack of movement was not what had been impeding him, or was not the bedrock source of what had been impeding him. He was thankful for the elegant solution we'd come up with, meaning the socks and the beam, but being able to pace, or practice a form of pacing, had only opened up to him another series of obstacles.

Aunt Liz sat me down for breakfast, she sat down with her coffee and her newspaper, she had finished the crossword puzzle already, she had put on her face and was ready to drive me to work. She sat me down in front of a pile of waffles and said that we had to have a serious talk about something she didn't want to address but needed to. She asked, her exact words, she started by asking, Am I correct in saying that we are the only two people living in this house? My heart stopped, my throat swelled, I couldn't speak or see. How had Aunt Liz detected Paul Renfro? He was silent, or he was near silent, he was quieter than the squirrels on the roof, they landed on the roof with a thump, it was a long jump from the trees. If I hadn't known he was there I never would have heard him walking back and forth on the beams. I couldn't answer, I was incapable of speaking, I stared at her, which was for the best, which Paul Renfro would later explain to me was the foundation for the legal concept of the Fifth Amendment, the founders had had more than one moment just like this, Paul said, between their wives and their slaves, chopping down cherry
trees was the least of their indiscretions. I didn't answer Aunt Liz's question, I thought she'd discovered that Paul was living over the ceiling in my so-called quarters, I was paralyzed and waiting for her to speak, which was good, in situations like these it is best to be quiet and wait. Don't try to eat anything to cover up the fact that you're not talking, which was my mistake, I took a big bite of waffle to cover up the fact that I wasn't answering Aunt Liz's question, but my mouth was dry, my body had responded to her question by drying out my mouth. This could have been, this would have been a bigger problem, but then Aunt Liz spoke again, and amazingly enough the subject was not Paul Renfro, the subject was not a third person living in the house, the subject was pushpins. There were only two of us living in the house, she said, and she knew she hadn't gotten rid of a bunch of pushpins, which meant that I must have taken, without asking, and in a dishonest way, I must have stolen, she hated to use that word but she had to call a spade a spade, I must have stolen a dozen pushpins from her corkboard, there was no other reasonable explanation for the fact that they were missing, that the remaining pushpins were doing double, and in one case triple, duty holding up her invitations, photos, and keepsakes. I chewed my waffle, I nodded, I drank some orange juice to wash it down, I do not like the flavor of orange juice and maple syrup combined, I don't know how both together became part of a traditional breakfast. I admitted that I'd taken the pushpins. I can't remember the last time I felt so relieved. My feelings were not synchronized with Aunt Liz's face. She hoped I could explain myself to her satisfaction, she knew that there must have been some kind of misunderstanding, she expected me to take this seriously. I apologized for taking the pushpins, I told her the truth, which was that they appeared to be employed redundantly, that I didn't think it made much of a difference that I'd taken some for my own purposes, I didn't mention Paul Renfro, of course. Aunt Liz then said I was treading on a slippery slope, and though I might try to minimize, her word, what I'd done, I'd in fact stolen something from her, I'd taken her property and not returned it. I argued, not forcefully, but enough to make my point, that as long as the pushpins were still in the house, which they were, I hadn't really stolen them, it was more along the lines of not returning a screwdriver to the tool drawer. She said that I'd made a good point there, which surprised me. But to her mind I had come very close to stealing, and any kind of theft, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, put me on a slippery slope, meaning who was to say I wouldn't begin stealing bigger things, and from other people, who was to say I wouldn't find myself in more serious trouble if she didn't nip this behavior in the bud?

 

Now Juan-George, I must pause this scene to highlight two pieces of language Aunt Liz used, two pieces of language that seemed transparent to me, I mean I hadn't noticed them, I hadn't thought about them until Paul Renfro illuminated them for me later. The two pieces of language are
slippery slope
and
nip in the bud.
Paul, who had been listening to the whole conversation from above, who had been pacing on the beam when he heard the conversation, Paul explained that nonthinkers, those who weren't going to move history forward in any way, those who preferred to let others do their thinking for them, loved the term
slippery slope,
he explained that
slippery slope
was a favorite term among those who wanted to erase distinctions between discrete things in order to better control those around them, which I did not understand and so remember. It is an insult, Paul's words, to compare a person's behavior to a slope, it is degrading to one's sense of agency. And talk of nipping something in the bud turns people into trees and bushes to be pruned, anyone who talks about nipping something in the bud is playing the role of gardener, anyone who talks about nipping your behavior in the bud wants you to become a plant. These are dangerous phrases, Paul's words, and people use them every day.

 

Aunt Liz said that if in fact what had occurred was a failure to return the pushpins after borrowing them, then I could return them to her right away and we could consider the whole issue resolved. If, however, I could not return the pushpins, she would have to consider this an act of theft, and we would have to figure out what to do from there. I told her I'd be happy to return her pushpins, I'd be happy to bring them back, I apologized for inconveniencing her, I apologized
for borrowing them without asking. I rose from the table and walked to my door, which I'd been keeping shut, I walked to my room and Aunt Liz followed me, I wasn't sure how I was going to get the pushpins out of the crawl space above the ceiling without causing Aunt Liz to ask more questions about what was going on, but sometimes all you can do is move forward and stay nimble, sometimes you don't know what's around the bend, but you can't afford to slow down and think about it, you just have to find out when you get there, you have to trust that you'll know what to do. Aunt Liz was right behind me when I opened the door to my quarters, I told her I'd be right out, but she followed me inside. There really was no way to climb into the crawl space without ruining everything, and Aunt Liz did not look like she was about to leave my room, and so I prepared myself, in my head, I prepared myself to deal with the consequences of admitting, untruthfully, admitting that I'd stolen them and didn't know where they had gone, or could not return them, or something like that. I realized that I would have to make up a story, that I would have to come up with something credible to explain how I'd not only stolen the pushpins but also lost them, and as I have mentioned earlier I'm not a liar, I don't lie, and so I didn't have any practice at that sort of thing, I didn't know where to begin. I looked around the room, I thought maybe something in the room could help me get started, something could prompt a story I could then embellish, Paul's word, but I wasn't getting anywhere, the ivy wallpaper was not helping. Then I saw, sitting on the little writing desk that I had never used, because the desk chair was too high and the desk was too low, you'd have to be a skeleton to fit in there, a skeleton with a very short torso if you wanted to actually write something there, I saw, just in front of the chair, on the middle of the desk surface, lined up like toy soldiers, points sticking up, Aunt Liz's missing pushpins. I did my best to pretend I knew they would be there, I picked them up with my right hand, one by one, and squeezed them between the first two fingers of my left hand, in a line, and then between the next two fingers, which is the safest way to carry pushpins if you don't have a box handy. I went back into the kitchen, Aunt Liz still following, and replaced the pins where they'd been. I told her I wouldn't touch them again, and that I needed a quick shower before work, I would be a few minutes. I could have gone to work without showering, I had showered after work the day before, I didn't actually need a shower, I needed to go back to my room to figure out how the pushpins had ended up on my desk.

 

The first thing I did when I got into my room, after shutting the door behind me, was to pull the desk chair into the closet and stick my head through the hatch to ask Paul what had happened. He was not there. I pulled myself up and looked around. He wasn't anywhere. I came down and scanned the room. Nothing. I went into the bathroom and found Paul sitting in the bathtub, concealed behind the shower curtain, hands wrapped around his right ankle. He explained that he'd heard our conversation, he'd known where it was going, it had been obvious, and so he'd torn down all of his papers, he'd pulled out all the pushpins, and he'd jumped down from the crawl space to deliver the pushpins to my desk. Unfortunately, in doing so, he'd twisted his ankle, he didn't know how badly, it had made a snapping sound, he was pretty sure he could walk on it, really he was just waiting for me to help him get back upstairs, he didn't like being down here at all, despite the shower curtain being closed he felt exposed, he was anxious to get above the ceiling and start thinking again.

Two days later Aunt Liz reinstated, on a probationary basis, her words, my bus privileges, in part because she had an early notary appointment in Woodland Hills, which was not on the way to the fast-food place. I was delighted to find Clarence behind the wheel, Clarence who stayed to the right, who preferred living in Panorama City to being a black man in Minneapolis, I felt immediately at home in the front seat with Clarence driving, of all the drivers Clarence was my closest friend, Shaniece was second, she was friendly enough but limited in her ability to pay attention to a long story. We drove the old route toward the fast-food place, as usual, past the mini-mall with the butcher shop, past the big rig parked in someone's driveway, but when we got to the fast-food place, or the stop for the fast-food place, I should say, I didn't stand. I could only picture in my so-called mind's eye the way Aunt Liz beamed when she saw my Employee of the Month picture, the way she seemed so proud of it, it was the last thing she should have been proud of, I had become Employee of the Month because I had, without intention, tortured some poor woman with
irregular french fries, I had, without intention, entertained, in a manner sordid and abject, both Paul Renfro words, I had entertained Roger Macarona, and he had decided to reward me for it, and anyone could look at that picture and see that it wasn't me in there, that I'd gone absent. I couldn't continue the charade, I needed something else, I needed to do something different, something that I could be proud of if I saw a picture of me doing it. Which I don't recommend as a technique, I don't recommend ever imagining how what you're doing would look as a picture, you tend to lose awareness of your immediate surroundings. Clarence turned in his seat, he turned to look at me, and he said, Your stop, Oppen. My stop. I had created a groove in Panorama City, so that someone like Clarence would remember where I got on and where I got off, it reminded me of the way everyone in Madera knew me by my bicycle, the way they all knew I'd be coming into town to look for something to do, or riding out of town, maybe with groceries, to head home. I told Clarence that I wasn't going into work, I couldn't do it. I told him I was looking for my own path, I told him I'd rather ride the bus a little while. Clarence nodded, he said, his words, I been there. Nothing, he said, nothing better for sorting out your head than a nice relaxing bus ride, leave the driving to me, you let your mind do its work. Which was how I came upon something that had always been there but I had just not noticed, which was that riding the bus was a way of thinking, which was that all modes of transport had been for me ways of thinking. I have mentioned already how riding a bicycle stimulates both thought and ideas, the rotation of the pedals and the forward motion of the bike, and everyone knows that walking, walking with a proper gait, can stimulate all kinds of regular thought, which was Paul Renfro's preferred technique, and I'd discovered already how motor coaches, I mean big buses, can stimulate sleep if you're synchronized with the rising and falling of power lines, but this was new, I'd stumbled upon a new way of thinking. Which was advanced in its own way, the key was to make the mind like the bus, the key was to let thinking proceed, let the thinking happen with its regular rumble and turns, speeding and slowing, let the thinking do its thing, but then at regular intervals stop the thinking motion completely, sort of crystallize everything, it's difficult to describe, I've never tried to actually describe it, the stopping and the starting. Stopping to let ideas on and off, then rolling along with some thinking to the next stop. Not unlike what's going on with this tape recorder.