Tightrope

     It was a beautiful sunny day and the stands at the fairgrounds were full of families. Below us stood a cage, or two cages, filled with tigers. The ringleader introduced his special guest, Wonder Woman. It was the late seventies and the Wonder Woman TV show was on, though this wasn’t Lynda Carter but just some woman dressed as the character she played. Our seats were pretty high up but her sexy red, white, blue and gold outfit is seared into my mind as she cracked her whip at the big cats. 

    “You don’t remember that at all?” I asked my brother recently. He did not. A few days later I asked my mother and she didn’t recall any of it either. “I feel like I’m losing my mind,” I said.  

    The only other thing I remember about that day was an older man walking up a rope that stretched diagonally from the ground to the rafters of the grandstand. He passed right over our heads, carrying a pole for balance. I can very clearly see his white shoes; they were cleft, like a camel’s toes, to help him grip the rope. I remember thinking there was something dishonest about this. As he passed overhead, he looked down and winked at me, though I know for sure I’m making that part up. 

    Years later, our father took us kids to the Ringling Brothers Circus. Unlike that earlier experience, neither of my siblings contests that this one actually happened. All I remember are the elephants shitting behind the tents. It’s so lonely being the only one who remembers something, especially a spectacle as surreal as an Amazon princess taming a pack of wild jungle beasts. I know I didn’t dream it, though the memory has the feel of a dream. The old man on the rope winks at me again. I yell up to him that I hope he falls and breaks his fucking neck. 

Marmalade

        They discharged Lee from the hospital so he could die at home. Val drove Julie and I out to his condo. Not knowing what the accessibility would be like, I took my crutches instead of the scooter, and it’s good I did since his unit was on the second floor. There was no parking so Val went and parked across the street and came back and led us upstairs. A young man answered the door of a darkened apartment. Val apologized and he told us we probably wanted 205-B instead of A. So I hobbled down the hall and down the stairs and across the lot and up another set of stairs and down another hallway until at last we were greeted by the woman who I’d met in the hospital last week. She hugged us all and started to weep.

        The visit was a blur of women coming and going. They said there was a 24 hour nurse but he was in the back room taking a nap. I wasn’t really aware of much other than Lee’s body. He was propped up on a hospital bed in the living room, facing the door. The walls were covered with concert posters. He was conscious but not lucid, words dribbling from his lips in a stream of slurred glossolalia. I sat next to him for a while as the women flitted about the kitchen. He had lost a lot of weight over the past two weeks and his skin had a grayish pallor. He kept trying to rip his tubes and bandages off and I kept gently pulling his hands away. He didn’t fight me. The skin of his wrists was scaly, his arm hair stiff. I thought of my father, just a few years older than Lee, who at that very moment was in the hospital for another fall. Instead of being there I was here, staring into the face of a man who was unquestionably dying, little more than a shell breathing and muttering and doing very little else. 

        I’ve been losing more and more friends over the years but somehow I’d never actually seen anyone this close to the end. The deaths had all been sudden and remote and while the shock is awful, this was obviously very, very different. Actually seeing it, smelling the sweet lotion they put on his flesh to mask whatever smells his body was emanating, was a completely new experience for me. I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say much, just gave him some water when he stuck his tongue out like a lizard. He kept trying to scratch and pick at himself and once he managed to throw the blanket off. Suddenly, there was his penis, vulnerable and exposed to the brutal world. I quickly covered him up and held his hand. His wrinkled fingers were soft and dry. He mumbled a word that sounded like "marmalade" but probably wasn't. 

        At one point a German woman stopped by who made it a point to tell us she was the head of the HOA. It seemed obvious that she was there less from caring about Lee than concern about all the strangers coming and going. She did not linger, and we left as well, after what might have been days or weeks but was probably about an hour. There was nothing else to do or say. He wasn’t opening his eyes, was only grunting occasionally. We didn’t know it but he would be gone within hours. In the hallway outside the condo I found the blackened husk of a dragonfly splayed out on the concrete. I picked it up and pressed it between the pages of my book then slowly made my way back down the stairs. 

Happy Days

    A few days after my visit to Urgent Care my phone rang. It was a man from the Center of Disease Control telling me that the lab had called him with my test results, as they are required to do when they come across any fairly uncommon pathogens. He explained that the bacteria in my foot is the same which causes diphtheria, though he assured me I was in no danger of contracting that. Shortly afterwards my GP, whose name I can never remember, called me. I’ve never met him in person, we’ve only had a few video appointments, in which his face shimmered like a phantom against a wall of light. He told me he was talking to the infectious disease department to figure out a course of treatment. That night I picked up my new script and he said he’d try to find a foot doctor who had an opening. I asked if he knew anyone good and he said no.

    That weekend I got nervous and went to Urgent Care again. The same  jockey-sized physician’s assistant saw me and took more photos of my foot and said I should just keep taking the antibiotics. I asked if he knew any good foot doctors and he said no. 

    The following Tuesday we had first aid/CPR training at work. We spent the afternoon breathing into the parted rubbery lips and clicking the chests of the limbless torso. “Be prepared to do this for hours if you need to,” our instructor warned. “And remember, you’re going to break some ribs.”

    The following day my GP managed to get me a last-minute appointment at a foot clinic. As I rode the bus across town I braced myself for the worst, prepared myself for the news that the infection had entered the bone and my misshapen foot would, at long last, need to be completely amputated. 

    My new doctor was young and lovely and met my gaze with huge brown eyes as I gave her the basics of what I was going through. She carefully unwrapped everything and scraped and hacked at my foot, then took x-rays and sat and went over them with me. The infection was serious, but had not reached the bone. She said I should stay off it and come back in a week. My terror of amputation evaporated but was replaced by a wave of lesser but still powerful anxiety about what would happen next and how it would affect my job. There is always more fear waiting in the wings.

    She sent me to the hospital to get a bunch of blood work done. In the waiting room I emailed my bosses to let them know that I was happy to keep working but would not be able to be on my feet. On the way home the head of the department called me to tell me not to come in to work the next day, that HR would be contacting me. I was surprised –when I’ve had foot issues in the past, my old bosses always found sit-down work for me to do. These were not my old bosses though, and I felt myself overcome with dread and paranoia. This is how they are going to get rid of me, I thought. 

    HR sent me a terse email the next day with instructions on filling out forms for a new state medical leave program that just happened to be starting in a few days. I didn’t really understand it but in the meantime I would use up what sick and vacation time I had. After that I had no idea what would happen. 

    Saturday Mich once again picked me up so we could visit Lee, who was still in the hospital. He was supposed to leave last week but instead they’d had to operate again. It had not gone well, and they were sending him home as soon as they could get hospice care set up. I walked on my crutches past the office where I had seen one of my many useless foot doctors to the ICU. The visit was awkward. I didn’t know what to say, and then felt bad for not knowing what to say. My humor –the tool I reach for most in awkward situations- remained out of reach. Mich was also subdued. Lee was quiet as well; I couldn’t tell if he even knew or cared if we were there. What can one possibly say in the face of death? What good can words possibly accomplish? It seems like language is the least accessible when we need it the most. 

    Another of his friends arrived during our visit, and she immediately went up to the bed and warmly grasped Lee's hand and held it as she smiled sadly down at him. I felt humbled by the eloquence in this single gesture, and saw in this woman a compassion I did not feel capable of. 

    I had a ticket to see a play later that evening. I wasn’t about to let my limited mobility stop me from going, so I hopped on my scooter and got onto the train to head across the river. A tiny local theater company was putting on a production of Beckett’s Happy Days in the abandoned Victoria’s Secret store at the mall. Most of the mall stores have closed, but they’ve been trying to revitalize the place by lowering the rents to allow smaller local businesses move in. My favorite comic book store is there, and a nice little record store, and a bunch of other shops. And the ice rink is still operating, though it was closed for the night. A very widewoman was driving a Zamboni around, leaving the ice shiny and reflective in its wake.

    A few flyers pointed the way to the old lingerie store. A woman sat taking tickets just inside the entrance. Sheets of plastic hung everywhere, corralling you to the middle of the store, where thirty folding chairs set on the floor or on risers in front of a pair of red sheets that looked like shower curtains. I sat of to the side so my scooter wouldn’t be in the way. A young woman sat behind the old check out counter which had been converted into a makeshift sound and light booth. 

    The play consists of a woman buried up to her waist in the ground, or in this case a cloth-covered mound. Beside her is a bag filled with belongings that she occasionally rifles through. Her husband or partner sits just out of sight behind her; you can sometimes see his arm or back of his head when he moves around. It is unclear how their situation came to be but it is apparent that it has been going on for some time, and their provisions seem to be dwindling. The woman prattles on cheerily to the audience, to the man, to herself, insisting on how wonderful everything is. It would be unbearable –and it almost is- if it wasn’t so comical and strange, and while the woman’s acting was a little broad, I really loved the show in all its hysterical bleakness. I thought of Lee in the hospital, I thought of my parents, I thought of all the people I know who seem to be inexplicably sinking into the earth.

    When it was over, they led us toward one of the staff exits, since the mall was closed for the evening. As we filed past a security officer he smiled and said hello and I recognized him. He used to work downtown and would come to the museum’s coffee shop. I hadn’t seen him since the beginning of the pandemic. We chatted as he walked alongside us across the mall, then left us as as we filed through a set of double doors into a long, narrow corridor. I was last in line and as I heard the doors slam shut behind me I saw up ahead a steep set of concrete stairs leading up. There was no way I could drag my scooter up that many steps. I called out to the people ahead of me but no one turned around or stopped, they were all focused on escaping the buidling. I wheeled back to the double doors and tugged at the handle but they were locked. I banged on them and called the name of the guard, the sound echoing along the dimly-lit corridor. 

    I pounded and pounded. 

Squirreluccino

     Mich picks me up and we drive way out to the edge of civilization to visit our friend Lee in the hospital. It’s the same complex where I had my foot treated for a while; the last time I was here, it was Colon Cancer Awareness Month, and in front of the main entrance stood an enormous inflatable colon you could walk through. I describe it to Mich and she says, huh. 

The woman at the front desk directs us to the ICU. I’m surprised to see that we’re nearly the only ones in the entire building wearing masks, despite the recent uptick in COVID cases. 

We hear Lee talking before we reach his room. When we enter he hangs up and we sit down. He actually doesn’t look too bad, despite what he’s been through; emergency surgery in which they removed his spleen, part of his stomach, and a “ton of gook” that had collected in there, obstructing his bowels. They aren’t sure what the underlying issue is yet; the biggest concern is cancer, of course. Tubes sprout everywhere and machines whir and beep quietly in the background. 

I tell him about the inflatable colon and he says, huh. I make a note to work on my delivery. He warns us that if we hear a sound like rain it’s just him urinating into a tube attached to his penis with a  condom-like thing. I’m looking forward to hearing it, I say. 

We all chat a little while. They are both native New Yorkers and still sound it despite being in Oregon for decades. Lee especially sounds like he just got back from a Brooklyn Dodgers game and is going to stop at Katz’s for a quick nosh. Today he is somber but in decent spirits. I’ve spent so much time in his position, in a bed just like this one, with well-meaning visitors nattering on, that I feel like I’m inside his body, feeling my back get sore from lying down too long, shivering beneath the paper thin sheets. 

At some point his nurse comes in and takes his vitals and says it’s almost time for the shift change, and less than a minute later the new nurse comes in and takes his vitals again. She is tall and voluptuous and very pregnant; as she squeezes past me I find myself sweating at her exquisite ripeness. 

When she leaves, the conversation starts slowing down. I hear a sound like rain hitting the window. “There it is,” Lee says. Mich drives me home, chattering pleasantly about her own health issues. As someone who has struggled with a chronic illness most of his life, it’s interesting seeing everyone else around me starting to catch up. Not gratifying, exactly. Not really.

I feel drained by the visit, and anxious to wipe it from my memory completely. Although it’s a beautiful night I don’t feel able to do much other than flip through the Facebook dating app I’ve been using for the past week. I’ve done online dating before, of course (my misadventures on OKCupid have been distilled in my book Pomeranian, copies available upon request), but since I’ve only recently acquired a touch screen phone I’m still new to the world of dating apps. It’s a much more streamlined experience than I’m used to; there isn’t room for much information, you’re just encouraged to look at the picture and swipe left with your finger to dismiss it, right if you think they look interesting. Some people do write descriptions, but after a week of going through these, and not getting a single person liking me or responding to my liking them, I’m ready to give up, and find myself flipping through the dregs of the site rapidly, barely looking at the faces, which are by now nearly all either unattractive or so fake looking you can tell they were either created by or heavily modified by some computer program. 

        One of these latter causes me to stop though. Her –its?- face is so robotic, so caked in make up, her body so perfectly plastic, that it almost takes my breath away. I feel a weird nausea, like I sometimes do when I get a peek into the seedier corners of the uncanny valley. Digital filters and effects and emojis all make me sick, but this seems somehow even worse. Beneath her picture he description reads:

        For lease by ower: 1986ish model-original features. Dual front airbags. Suitable rear cargo. 

        And so on, getting a lot of -yes, mileage out of the used car analogy. Beneath that, she makes a statement about not having any tolerance for bullshit, followed by, “Yes I have a pet squirrel.” 

        Sure enough, scrolling down I find a photo of her sitting with a gray squirrel on her head. The squirrel is much too large though, the size of a cat, and has obviously been added digitally. Her face is the same as it is in all her photos –not just similar, but exactly the same, as if the same image has just been altered slightly and placed in different locations. At the bottom of her page is a collection of her photos from Instagram, and sprinkled among the weird, robotic images of her- buxom but always fully clothed, and almost always sitting in cars- are more images of the squirrel, though in all of these the squirrel looks normal-sized. Here is the squirrel poking out of a pocket. Here the squirrel is sitting on a steering wheel with its nose in a glass of foam which she explains the people at Starbucks prepared –she says they’ve dubbed it a “squirreluccino.” All her Instagram photos are accompanied by long, extremely filthy captions. She says she wants to make people laugh, so there are plenty of examples of raunchy humor –she describes “the gluck gluck sound a gal makes when her mouth is full of (here she has, er, inserted an emoji of a zucchini)” but the captions beneath the squirrel photos are oddly chaste and self-deprecating. 

        “Just a slightly overweight squirrel who is too lazy to walk, chilling in my pocket,” reads one. “Your dose of squirrel content that none of you asked for,” she says, before describing how distraught she was when the animal went missing for two weeks, then showed up at her door as if nothing had happened. “It is her house…I’m just the peasant that feeds her and pays the bills!” 

        She complains that the squirrel tore up her $119 Miss Me jeans in order to make a nest, and the photo of her wearing the torn pants is not at all provocative. None of them are; her perfectly-proportioned body has all the erotic charge of an inflatable doll. Meanwhile, she makes an elaborate home for the squirrel from pieces of cat trees. The squirrel is never named, though she calls it a her, and the photos are a few years old –a Trump 2020 sign is clearly visible in one. 

        The entire thing is so utterly strange to me, someone who only chooses to scrape the surface of the web. Is this a real woman, probably a prostitute or stripper, who really just wants to make people laugh and share her life with a small, furry creature? Or is this all some strange AI project, possibly a scam or prank of some kind? I’m baffled but fascinated, despite (because of?) my repulsion. I suddenly remember Lee, a real life non-robotic human who is stuck in the hospital with tubes coming out of him, and think I should shoot him an email, but instead go back to looking at the pictures, reading every one of the captions, most of them awful –“What can I say, I’m just a girl who likes sunsets, tacos, and getting my back blown out.” Finally I realize this whole thing doesn’t really lead anywhere healthy, and after one last look into those empty, blackened eyes, I finally swipe left. 

Budgie

         The heat wave came as predicted and since it was too uncomfortable to leave the house at night I decided to wade back into the tepid water of the online dating pool. My experiences over the years had grown increasingly depressing as I’d gotten older –it had been two and a half years since my last miserable coffee date- but I was feeling desperate and besides, I had a smart phone now and so had access to a whole exciting world of dating apps I’d never tried. By the time the heat wave lifted I had not had a single person show interest or respond to me. I expected it to be sad but was still taken aback by the deafening silence but I just unhooked my little droid-like air conditioner and, with uncharacteristic optimism, rolled it back into the closet.

        A month ago, I doctor had told me my foot was healed up and I could take the boot off at last, after six long months of hobbling along. Two days later my wound had opened right back up again and I was in worse pain than I’d been before I started seeing him. He had told me to come back in a month, but when the time I came I couldn’t do it. I knew if I went into that office I wouldn’t be able to hold in the rage I had at what an inept, uncaring piece of shit he was. I knew I needed a new doctor –I was in intense pain, and afraid of getting another infection- but I found myself paralyzed. The idea of rolling the dice and picking another doctor at random from the internet –like online dating, come to think of it- was too daunting.

        When I woke up this morning, the sun was blanketed by smoke from the inevitable fires from the North. An eerie golden light fell across the sidewalks and the sun turned the color of stagnant urine. I got out of bed and pain shot up my leg. I looked at my foot and while it didn’t look swollen or red, it seemed somehow more misshapen than usual. My heart started to race; what if I had the infection I’d been dreading? I had been feeling a little off physically the past few days, though at the time I’d chalked it up to the changing weather. Tense with dread, I got online and made an appointment at the urgent care center I’d last visited two summers ago for this same exact problem. It’s a miserable little office but it’s very close to both my apartment and the Safeway where I get my prescriptions filled; I can get there on the streetcar.

        The waiting room there is tiny and so was the doctor. He was very young, I felt like I was talking to a small child. He was nice enough and said he didn’t think it looked too bad but he took a sample and gave me a prescription for antibiotics and the number of the wound care specialists. My foot doctor had never had me go to any wound care, had said he didn’t think it was necessary. As he spoke, I found myself fixated on his shoes. They were very smart brown shoes, and I told him I liked them and asked if they were comfortable. He didn't respond so I just thanked him and went and had breakfast while I waited for my script to be filled. As I was taking the streetcar back to Safeway the doctor called; I was terrified. I was certain he’d got the lab results and was going to tell me to check into the hospital immediately, even though it was Sunday and there was no way he could have gotten them so quickly. 

        Instead he said he’d shared my pictures with the wound care specialists and they had recommended some different dressings I could try; he apologized and asked if I could swing by the office so he could give them to me. I told him I was nearby and twenty minutes later I went back in and undid my dressing (which I had done myself) then watched as he struggled to wrap my misshapen foot with the new dressing, which he kept dropping on the floor. I sighed and told him that if he got a new one, I’d do it myself. He seemed relieved and told me I probably didn’t need to take the antibiotics after all, that they were really just a precaution.

        I left the clinic and resisted the urge to run back into Safeway for a bottle of wine and instead got onto the streetcar to go back home. I felt so drained I could barely stand up, and the afternoon had grown humid and oppressive. After a few stops a guy in a wheelchair hauled himself on to the streetcar. He had no legs below his knees. When I got to my stop, he looked like he wanted to get off seemed confused and disoriented. I asked if he needed the ramp and he said yes so I hit the button and waited as he rolled himself off. “Thanks bro,” he said, his mouth twisted in a snarl of anguish.

        When I got back to my building, I saw a new-looking birdcage filled with supplies sitting in the trash room. A piece of paper on top of it read

GOOD STUFF

BUDGIE DIED FROM HEAT

Please Take Food is Fresh

One of my neighbors walked by and said, “Well that’s fucking depressing.” I agreed and went upstairs and wished I knew what to do about anything. 

Feathers

      In the street in front of my apartment this morning is a pile of feathers about the size of a reclining body. They are small, white feathers, some of them tipped with brown. Aside from the pile, feathers also line the curbs up and down the street, thousands of them, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, caught in the cracks of the asphalt and the corners of the buildings and under the parked cars.

     When I come home from work, the pile has mostly disintegrated but feathers remained in clumps up and down the block and even around the corner. There are too many for it to have been just a few burst pillows, it seems like a truck must have dumped its load. How do they transport large quantities of feathers, I wonder. I picture barrels; maybe a barrel somehow rolled off the back of a truck and dumped its contents.

     Later that night I run into the Cherokee woman from down the hall smoking in front of the building. I want to ask her about the feathers, but she's bursting with excitement, having just gotten back from a Willie Nelson concert. He played with his son, and she says at one point between songs his son had looked over at his ninety-year old father and said, "I love you, Dad," and the entire place had burst into tears.

     My neighbor has kids and even grandkids herself, though you would never know it to look at her; she looks younger than I am, and is incredibly sexy. She's very gregarious but only releases personal information a morsel at a time. She lives in a two bedroom unit on my floor with her brother and her 22 year old son. Her brother usually comes down to smoke with her and for a long time I assumed they were a couple.  Once last week, I had stepped out of the elevator and almost walked into her as she stood there on the phone. "Oh hold on a sec, it's my beautiful neighbor," she said, and gave me a huge hug and kiss on the cheek. I knew it didn't mean anything but it was still nice.

     After listening to her chatter about Willie for a while, I head in and take a shower and go to bed. I fall asleep fairly quickly but an hour later I'm awakened by a woman crying out. The sound comes from outside, probably through an open window of one of the other apartments. The woman cries out again, and again, and continues to do so for a few minutes until one final shriek. I haven't heard anyone having sex in our building for years, and while I usually find it annoying or disturbing, I'm strangely touched by how joyful this woman sounded, as if she was about to burst into peals of laughter.

     I can't fall back asleep and start to feel crushed by my isolation. I read for a while but every time I turn out the light I'm assaulted by waves of loneliness and self-pity. Eventually I sank into a morass of miserable dreams.

     I get up early the next morning and sit on the balcony with my coffee and listen to the pigeons fussing on the ledge above me. When I leave for work the feathers ae still lining the street, tenaciously clinging to the weeds, to the curbs, to the bases of the signposts and electrical poles, quivering in the breeze but stubbornly refusing to let themselves be carried away.  

Minnehaha 5 (end)

    When it gets dark, we head back towards the camping area. We had wanted to pitch our own tents but they said they didn’t have any more capacity; they only allow a limited number of campers in the area. They do however have little cabins or pre-set up tents of their own to rent for the night, so we reserve two tents. All the tents have the names of birds; theirs is the Hawk, mine is called the Raven. The tents are old and in sad shape, but very roomy with foam pads inside to sleep on. The zipper to my tent flap breaks as soon as I unzip it so I just let it hang half open.

    Noodle and Bradley come in to hang out with me before we all go to bed. Babe produces a Ziploc baggie filled with beaded necklaces and bracelets. 

    “What’s that?” I ask him.

    “Oh, a bunch of jewels. I found them in the tent. Someone must have left them behind.”

    “You should turn them in at the lodge, I bet someone’s missing them,” I say.

    He doesn’t answer but turns the bracelets over and over in his fingers, focusing on one made of some shiny black stones. 

    Noodle and I get to talking about the old days a little bit, when she and I used to go out.

    “You know, it’s been exactly ten years since I met you, Nood,” I say, sprawling out across a mattress pad.

    “No, it can’t be!” she exclaims. “Ten years?”

    “So why did you guys not stay together, anyways?” asks Bradley.

    “I don’t think we were a good couple,” I say. “We weren’t all that good for each other.”

    “Yeah. Noodle told me once that he would have to break up with me when I had my operation,” she says.

    “What?” I say, shocked. “I never said that.”

    “You did!” she insists. “You said you didn’t think you could handle me being in the hospital for so long. You said you couldn’t take it.”

    I look at Noodle, with the scars above her lip from all the operations she’s had on her cleft palate. I wonder if I’d really said it, and if so, if I’d really said it as callously as she makes it sound. I wonder. 

    I hadn’t broken up with her though, and after the operation, she’d had her mouth wired shut. We hadn’t been dating long. I remember her eating nothing but cheesecake her mother baked then pureed in a blender so she could suck it up through a straw.

    After a while they retire to their own tent. I close the flap as best I can before popping a few sleeping pills and crawling into my sleeping bag. I have more strange dreams that I don’t remember.

    The next morning they wake me up at six and we all walk down the gravel path past the lodge to the springs.

    We part ways at the sauna shed; I can’t go in there again but they seem hooked on it. Instead I continue down past the “healing waters” sign to the first pool we’d shared with Halley. I am the only one there. I undress slowly, standing naked as I look out over the meadow. The grass is tall and yellow in the morning light. The sky is bright but I cannot yet see the sun over the trees. To my right, a sharp toothy outcropping called Devil’s Point juts up over the valley. A layer of steam constantly rises from the pool. Sighing, I step into the water and sit back against the smooth rocks. 

    It’s peaceful, but I can’t relax. Blue dragonflies hover over the water, cutting through the steam with their cellophane wings. A hawk glides overhead. A spider drops down from an overhead branch and hurries back up its thread. Runoff water sloshes over the edge when I shift my weight. I feel painfully alone.

    To distract myself from this awful emptiness, I try to picture Halley coming up the path, slipping off her clothes and joining me naked in the tepid water, though, I know that she left last night; I saw her and her friend heading out to the parking lot. She’s gone back to her fire tower, back to look out over the crowns of the forest, hoping to see some smoke, some sign of purging flame. Eventually I haul myself up out of the water, slowly dress, and head back down the path towards the lodge.

    As I’m rounding the bend, I almost run right into a doe standing on the path, feeding on some scattered grain. Standing beside her, nearly invisible against the tan grass, is a fawn. Two fawns. Almost close enough for me to touch. The fawns lift their heads and stare at me with their big black eyes. Their mother pays no attention to me and, following her lead, the fawns go back to grazing. 

    The lodge is just a little ways ahead of me; a number of people have come out onto the long porch to watch the deer. I see Noodle and Bradley up there watching along with the others. I want to join them but I don’t want to startle the animals. Eventually they amble along, crossing right in front of the lodge. I follow slowly and quietly behind until I reach the front steps. 

     The three of us follow behind the deer until they veer off into the woods, then we turn off into the campground one last time to pack up our gear.

    It isn’t until we’re about fifteen minutes away from Breitenbush that we get reception on the cell phone. I call work just before eight and tell them I’m not coming in.

    We take a different route home, driving along the river towards Salem and then up I-5. As soon as we reach the interstate it’s as if we’ve entered the blandest, most anonymous landscape imaginable. Everything looks the same; we could be anywhere in the country. We pass massive housing developments, large chunks cut out of the forest to accommodate them. Tractor trailers roar past us on their way to and from distribution centers. Billboards flash by, faces sneering down at us. Bradley drives and I sit in the passenger seat. We don’t talk much. From the back seat, Noodle places a hand on Bradley’s shoulder and leaves it there for a few minutes before slowly pulling it away. 

    Once back in Portland, we drop my gear off at home. They only have a few hours before their planes leave -within a half hour of one another- so we stop by the co-op to get some snacks for their ride home before heading down to Powell’s books. Bradley wants to get a book for his niece, whom he’ll be seeing in LA. He has a specific book in mind:  “It’s something about these bats that go to the beach. It’s brand new.”

    “Babe, why that book and not some other one?” Noodle asks him.

    “I dunno, I just think my neice’ll like it is all.”

    “Have you read it? Do you like it?”

    “No, I’ve never seen it before. It just came out.”

    “Well where’d you hear about it?”

    “Oh, I dunno, I just heard about it somewhere.”

    So I take them to the bookstore. Powell’s is always an overwhelming experience, especially for the uninitiated. People are flowing in and out in a mad rush. We cut against the current and head down to the children’s department. I suggest looking the book up on the computer, but Bradley doesn’t know the name or the author.

    “It’s brand new, though,” he repeats. “They probably have a display of it somewhere.”

    I think he’s pretty crazy to have such faith, but there by the counter is a whole stack of the book about a family of bats who go to the beach. We each flip through a copy. As with so many other children’s’ books nowadays, the art is nice but the story is really stupid, with terrible rhymes. Bradley says that his favorite kid’s book was Outside Over There. Noodle pipes up and orders me to show him my favorite book when I was young. I looks around and find a copy of Rain Makes Applesauce but he doesn’t seem impressed. He looks around for a while, almost buys her a copy of The Giving Tree, but in the end gives up. 

    Noodle is overwhelmed by all the books and the crowds; I suggest we get out into the sunshine. I remind her that she wanted a smoothie before she left, and the vegan place we had supper at the other night is right around the corner. 

    The vegan place is even more crowded than Powell’s was. Noodle’s face gets all scrunched up and her brow furrows. She looks at the people in the long undulating line before the counter as if she doesn’t know what they are, or if she should be afraid of them. 

    “Do you still want a smoothie?” I ask. Bradley has wandered off somewhere. She nods. “What kind do you want? Cacao coconut?”

    She corrects my pronunciation. “Cacao. Yes. I’ll get it, though.”

    “No, I’m buying. I want one too.” I step into the queue, which is actually moving pretty quickly. She joins me, her eyes bugging out as she stares at the people eating all around us. I see Bradley getting a juice out of a cooler; by the time he gets into line behind us there are seven people between him and us. I motion to him to bring his juice up so I can pay for it but he doesn’t see me. We get our drinks and wait outside for him.

    “Hey, let’s go down to that park we passed before,” he suggests. “You know, the one with the elephant. Is that close to here?”

    “Yeah, it’s only a few blocks. That sound good?”

    Nood nods and we head down to the park. It’s filled with kids out playing, as well as the usual tourists and the shady gutter punks engaging in all the usual shady interactions. We find a bench in the sun and sip our smoothies. The bronze elephant statue stands with its tail to us. It’s very stylized, covered in abstract patterns and swirls, and has a smaller elephant standing on its back. I’ve always liked it; I took pictures of it on my first visit here to Portland with Lucy. As we watch, a group of photographers descends like buzzards upon the statue and start snapping close ups of the swirls and spirals. We sit in silence in the blazing sunlight. Noodle takes Bradley’s hand and holds it tight.

    After a little while I check my watch and tell them that they’d better get going if they want to catch their planes. I think about accompanying them to the airport but they seem to want to be alone. I walk them to the car. Bradley decides to take one last photo. After digging around in his backpack, he declares that he’s lost his camera. 

    “You sure it’s not there, Babe? You didn’t look that long.”

“I’m positive. I would have put it right here in the pocket. I think I remember leaving it on a rock down by the river.”

    As he’s putting his things back in the pack, I notice the Ziploc baggie full of beaded jewelry he found in the tent at Breitenbush. He packs it away with his other things and slams the trunk shut.

    I tell them I’ll call Breitenbush to see if anyone’s turned in the camera. He looks crestfallen. 

    “I really wanted to show those pictures to my family,” he says sadly.

    I shake Bradley’s hand, give Noodle a tight, tight squeeze, and walk away. I’m not a big fan of goodbyes, and I know Noodle’s not either. I turn around and watch as they drive away, turn the corner, disappear.

    When I get home I see that Noodle’s sand dollars are still spread out on the coffee table. Nine out of twenty-five. I think that maybe I’ll mail them to her but they break so easily.

*

    A few weeks later, I call our old friend Teddy to catch up. I tell him about Noodle and Bradley’s surprise visit.

“I guess that was supposed to be their honeymoon,” he says. “I know they wanted to hike the trails out there.”

“Their what?” I ask.

“Didn’t she tell you?” He sounds puzzled.

“Tell me what?”

He pauses. “They got married six months ago. I figured you knew.”

“You have got to be kidding,” I say.

“Nope. I think it’s something to do with him going into the army and her getting benefits. She needs more work done on her teeth.”

I think about all that time we spent hiking through the woods, sitting by the fire, soaking in the hot tubs, riding in the car. I think about all the years we’ve known each other, all the things we’ve been through together. I feel hurt and rage bubble up inside me for a moment, and then I laugh.

“God damn it, Noodle,” I say.

    “I still can’t believe she didn’t tell you,” he says.

    “I can,” I say, and think about my old apartment in Allentown. I can still hear her little footsteps as she scampers up the fire escape, can still hear her voice, trickling like laughing water outside my bedroom window. “Noodle! Nooooodlllle....Wake up, Noodle! Wake up, Noodle! Wake up!” 

for Jasmine Lea, 1978-2019