“Maybe everything isn’t a clue.” – Hua Hsu, Stay True
“I’m going to try to make meaning by connecting some unrelated things,” I say as we stand by the car.
A friend’s mother goes to the ER. On my couch, my niece crumples with anxiety and panic raging from nowhere. I order coffee and then realizer my debit card is lost, drive frantically all over looking for it. I open a letter demanding tax money I didn’t know I owed. Another friend steps on a tin can lid and slices her foot open. My sister’s tire suddenly sighs emptier and emptier, and all passing cars are honking aggressively as she searches for a gas station. Los Angeles turns out for their neighbors, a city contained in cars now person to person and chanting, able to touch each other, and build energy against outside attackers.
These things have nothing to do with each other.
But what can we do, especially us narrators, but hold a string to put each crisis on, stick our string through the vaccum of each person’s trouble, as we are blasted by what we realize is space. Not wide-open town space, not room to breathe, but the infinity vaccum. The universe is made out of what has stayed far enough away from black holes.
I admire my friend’s slashed foot. I tell her we can go get stitches at the tiny rural hospital closest to us. We have driven south and east for fun. She gives me one of her plasticky bandages, so I can enjoy having a peel-off not-sunburn, and I do. She cries in frustration and grief.
I pat my niece’s small shoulder. I tell her I know it can be very, very bad, and that I have lived with overwhelming panic. “How old were you?”
“I think like 28,” I admit.
“Lucky,” she says.
I think of the student who sometimes does the Wordle wiht me, and wonder if his family has been harrassed or grabbed by ICE. I think they are all citizens, but of course this doesn’t matter. He jokes about how the cafeteria lady always calls him a random Hispanic last name that isn’t his.
The day of the big No Kings protest, I am following the route of a stream from a cold spring. First we see the adult fish being tempted by the disguised hooks of today’s fishers. Further up the water, we see teenage fish, and they swarm our thrown fish kibble bits like the screaming eels in “The Princess Bride.” Though there seems to be plenty of food, after all these fish are being raised to be eaten, they are still frantic.
Finally we get to the babies, who swarm a kibble bit, equally hyper, but unable to open their baby mouths wide enough to chomp it. They have to wait for soginess to set in. Or give up, and let the morsel bump up against a filter at one of end of their section. A woman on the other side of the filter swoops up bigger fish. They have invaded the nursery and will be taken back to teen town.
Someone tells me a state senator has been assassinated, along with her husband. Another assassination was attempted, but may have failed. We are used to this dystopia now, the dystopia Trump lugs behind him like a stink.
We had hoped to canoe, but the water is too high. The flow from the cold spring is violently forceful, pounding rocks when it falls a level, leaving only one green island of moss perched like a Zen monk.
As we get closer to the cold spring, a wave of hushed, generous cold comes over us, a sober, sweet blessing.
Per tradition, we take turns putting our face in the water. Though the signs say no hands or trash in the water, they say nothing about faces. We lie on our bellies, set our hands as for a push-up, and lean down to dip. It’s cold but not horrifying, just clarifying. We stop several times, and closer and closer to the spring it feels better and better.
Not the huge, shocking upset, reset of dunking your body in a cold spring, but pretty good.
At our lodge that night, people sit in a circle and some play music and some listen. This is what people have always done, I think. I imagine pulling focus back, back, back, until we are characters in a snow globe or on a cuckoo clock, people in the summer at leisure. Musicians. A gathering. Someone will look at it in a stall at a grimy antique mall and say, “That looks nice.” They will say, “I wish I was there, with those people, hearing music, and not here, in this antique mall, in this town, this country, this time.
My friend who is a photographer is doing the same thing, I notice. He’s gone for the camera. The musicians are in the time they’re in, but the generative artists are always banking stuff, always filling out these deposit slips for the beads of the moments for the string, though they aren’t clues, and they don’t connect.
My sister slowly turns an egg-shaped shaker to add a rustle. Someone’s daughter sings a hollow, Irish song. My plastic cup of wine gets kicked over twice. Some of the kids steal the adults’ hats, artful dodgers. We eat barbeque chips, cashews, twizzlers, even though my belly is full to bursting from a big dinner.
I had been to protests, and I’ll go again. My mom went to No Kings. “I’ve seen the city burn before,” she says, and I love her for this.
The city doesn’t burn. The assassin is captured. Two of his victims recover. We drive home, west and north. Our tummies are sore from laughing over the dirty drawings form the game we played after the music: “shit burger,” “clown boy sex slave,” “scream box.”
Our next stop is home.
Going On 