“I’ll be shattered by then but now I’m not and can also picture white clouds ... faded sunlight falling across the picture ... I’ll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.” - Ted Barrigan, A Certain Slant of Sunlight



8:53 PM



 



I didn’t really want to come down here, and I can tell that you didn’t either, judging from the semi-combative way you’re resting your drink on your knee, tapping the glass with your thumb over and over again, perhaps to signal boredom, perhaps to subconsciously establish and continually re-establish ownership over said drink like some version of territorial urination. I mean, I don’t blame you for that. New York is an exhausting place, because 1. the entire population is on foot and 2. the neat right angles and interlocking grids—a marvel of modern planning, I am frequently reminded—means you are almost always looking at someone dead in the face. Or at the very least trying very hard not to. After a few days of unwanted voyeurism, it’s only natural that you crave some personal space you can rightfully call your own.



I could give a litany of minor reasons why I thought this trip wasn’t worth it—the weather, the four subway transfers, the overpriced food, the fact that our hour of return necessitates hailing an Uber back to the apartment, an Uber which will be at least $27 and will inevitably be driven by some guy who enjoys regaling us with stories about his nephews. Or maybe Theoretical Uber Driver will be a political type (not an entirely unlikely scenario, this being Day 10 or so in Trump’s America after all) which will mean the conversation will be rife with sentences that begin with “in my day” and “if you really get to the root of it.” 



But the real reason I didn’t want to come is because I kind of hate Koreatown. The name itself denotes a false sense of grandeur; at least with Chinatown they had the decency to section off a few blocks, enough square feet to somewhat qualify it as a locality. Koreatown is basically an attempt to attach geographic signicance to a loose cluster of barbecue restaurants and karaoke bars.



If the intention behind Koreatown was to transplant Seoul to New York City, it can be classified as somewhat of a success, successful in the sense that if you position yourself just right on West 32nd Street and proceed to mentally block out all the yellow cabs and food trucks and construction barricades it is possible to attain—for a eeting split second—the odd sensation of being back in the motherland. But there is a nagging theatricality to the place, the feeling of being an unwitting walk-on in a collective attempt to condense an entire culture into two blocks. The way, for instance, that all the waiters and waitresses here wear name-tags with their name in Korean lettering, something that never happens back home. Or the fact that every store is attempting to blare K-Pop at ear-piercing volumes, to the point that one begins to realize that the version of Korea that Koreatown is attempting to evoke is a place that doesn’t exist.



Of course, once you get to the edges of the block, the illusion starts to fray—a Citi-bank here, a souvenir shop there. New York inserting itself back into the situation. I’ll bet that you, like most people I know, nd something pathetic in how self-consciously eager to please the entire place is, i.e. maybe if we bombard people with enough nostalgic stimuli we can trigger some sort of Proust-madeleine moment. Or maybe it’s just me.



My friends joke about how it is that New York is so massive, the self-proclaimed the center of the world after all, and that all the Korean yuhaksaengs (Koreans who are living abroad for school) still hang out in something like a four-minute radius from one another, flocking down 32nd Street in groups of five as if we’ve all formed some kind of bizarre mutual suicide pact, locked in the cell that is Koreatown. I mean, I guess there is kind of an old-fashioned nationalism to Koreatown, as is the case with any cultural neighborhood, that peculiar brand of patriotism that is halfway between comforting and conning. I suddenly recall how one of my grade-school teachers once lamented that patriotism was becoming passé in my generation. Like it was becoming deeply, irrevers- ibly uncool to be proud of one’s national identity. As I sat in the cab earlier, cruising past Koreatown as the in-ride television blared some report about a Trump cabinet pick, I realized I wasn’t so sure about that anymore.



9:38 PM



I guess I will stay a little longer, after all the conversation at our table is still relatively lively and I’ve denitely missed any window I had to make a quick undetected exit from the group anyway. Amidst the usual obsessive comparing of social networks and mutual friends, someone is talking about how the Oxford English Dictionary concluded last week that we are now in a “post-truth society. ” I always imagined the Oxford English Dictionary offices to be in the dungeons of some secluded castle, where people still write with quill and ink under the flickering lights of a torch. Or I imagine some massive conspiracy of linguists huddled around that massive roundtable from Dr. Strangelove. Which is funny, of course, because I know that in reality the “Word of the Year” was probably selected by a group of English B.A.s in a small conference room in a nondescript office park somewhere—no torches or missile launch systems in sight, just linty carpet and the smell of stale coffee and the interminable flickering of cheap fluorescent bulbs.



It annoys me that there has always been a cultural push to portray the previous generation as being a bastion of honesty, a symbol of simpler times that exposes how corrupt current society has become. To say post-truth is a 2016 word is to imply that every year before was somehow more reverent of the truth, which is complete bullshit.



Case in point: in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower worked with a New York marketing team and produced a bunch of advertisements called Eisenhower Answers America, in which he pretended to address the concerns of “real everyday Americans.” Except what actually happened was that Eisenhower recorded a bunch of short talking points on his own, which were edited together with footage of actors asking questions to ultimately produce the illusion that Eisenhower was talking to regular Americans one-on-one.



They shot a bunch of these ads about eight minutes from here, actually, in a downtown film studio that is now a chiropractor’s ofce. The whole strategy was the work of none other than Rosser Reeves, then golden child of the New York City advertising world.



In my imaginatory rendering of the scene, Eisenhower is in the backseat of a 1950 Cadillac, sitting upright, his limbs effortlessly arranged in a series of right angles thanks to years of military training. To his left is Rosser, slightly slouched, showing the bare minimum of required respect as he fiddles with his notebook and puffs a cigar—Cuban—out the window. Every time Rosser refers to Eisenhower he calls him “General,” although Dwight has told him it is okay to call him “Dwight” or “Ike” or even just “Mr. Eisenhower.” But Rosser calls him “General,” over-enunciating the vowels as if to mock how self-serious it is to be referred to by a title and how small-minded The Rest of AmericaTM is to attach such mythic qualities to military accomplishment.



“You’re from Kansas,”—pause as he puffs on the cigar—“right, General?” Rosser asks. “You can just call me Ike, Rosser.”

“Oh, no, please. General, we are such great fans of yours! Isn’t that right, Tom.” (this is the name I give Reeves’ hypothetical lackey, who is sitting in the passenger’s seat, eager for any and all opportunities to interject into the conversation and be noticed.)



“Such huge fans, General, couldn’t have scripted a better story if we tried.” 



“See, General, even Tom agrees. Least we can do is call you that.”



“Okay, then, ne.” Eisenhower states, arms up, a defeated man. Victorious in many respects, but in the icy, soot and piss-strewn streets of New York City perhaps not so much.



(At this point, the car hits one of the run-down areas of New York, and I imagine Rosser pulling down the blinds and the driver self-consciously speeding down the block to prevent any disturbing vistas of urban decay from unsettling the general.)



“See, General, we really want to play the whole Kansas thing up. Like what was it like there? What was the name of the town you were from again?”



“Abilene.”

“Abilene! Fantastic! Perfect name. Quaint, rustic.”

“Tri-syllabic,” adds Tom, who is promptly ignored.

“We really want to make Abilene a focal point of your campaign. The fact that you were from the Midwest and all. I’m thinking we make it a whole branding—”



“Excuse me, branding?” the General asks.

“Oh sorry, I don’t mean branding you! I mean, uh, branding your message. To make it stick to the average voter,” Reeves says “average voter” with a kind of disgust, the way one refers to an unpleasant coworker or a neighbor’s dog that always barks over the nine o’clock news. “Average voters will really, shall we say, connect with the narrative about a man rising up from the depths of Middle America. About people like us.”



Eisenhower probably cringed at the “us.” I’m sure Eisenhower hated Rosser. Or at least was put off by him. The very name Eisenhower—it meant iron miner in German—screamed blue collar. Papa Eisenhower had worked in a creamery to put his kids in a decent house. Reeves had made his first load of money after refusing to study for a chemistry final (this is true, by the way) and instead producing an essay called “Better Living Through Chemistry” which captured the attention of the DuPont marketing team. In fact, Rosser eventually got kicked out of UVA for driving under the influence. And now this asshole was trying to manufacture some sense of camaraderie our of thin air? And the way he talked about Abilene, every syllable dripping with something more than condescension, something approaching unfiltered contempt for the town and everything it stood for.



Yes! I am from fuckin’ Abilene, Eisenhower thinks, staring with contempt at Tom, who is desperately preparing another cigar for Rosser. Eisenhower probably imagined his face being projected, warped and grainy on a dozen shitty Kansas televisions, all across Abilene. A candidate for the highest office in the free world appearing in the same broadcasting block as cereal and Tide and Dove bars. An election of celluloid! The great future of democracy, as Rosser would say. But what would the people of Abilene think? Would they call him—perhaps rightfully—a sellout? When he was saying things like “getting back to an honest dollar” on air, wasn’t he cynically using his small-town roots to pawn off a false vision of Midwestern wholesomeness, creating nostalgia for an America—an America where people rise with the sun to do Honest Work and believe in Big Things—that never really existed outside of some collective imagination? But this had to be done, this was the new reality, after all. That was the what the military taught him: you don’t make the rules but you make sure you kick everyone’s ass playing by them.



The mental recreation kind of fizzles out after this moment. There are, of course, obvious flaws in my story. Maybe the two actually liked each other. Maybe they laughed and joked about football on the car-ride and smoked cigars together after they were done filming the advertisement. Maybe they talked about how ingenious it was that they made every viewer—yes you!—feel selected in the fulllment of a divine American destiny: moving past the war, buying a suburban home, starting a family. Returning America to the halcyon days, to the time before the wars, before the Depression.



Or maybe Eisenhower faced the camera alone that day, nobody around him save the imaginary presence of an imaginary citizen, a voice in the back of his head crying it’s all fake! like a street preacher on a subway, the ash atop the lens bright and unforgiving like an imitation of the sun shining over an imitation of Kansas.



11:15 PM



The sun sets kind of differently depending on where you are. And I don’t mean dramatic differences in location; the way the sun sets on 86th Street feels nothing like the way it sets in Brooklyn, and the way it sets in Pittsburgh is nothing like the way it sets in Philadelphia. I’ve always wondered if that has to do more with the way light refracts on different building materials or with changes in the weather and atmospheric conditions. Or perhaps the entire phenomenon is psychosomatic. Either way, the sun setting seems like one of those universal experiences that should be the same everywhere but never actually is.



In New Hampshire—where I attended boarding school for four years—the winter sun sets in a particularly striking way, as in it doesn’t disappear into the horizon as much as it is abruptly interrupted, consumed alive by a swarm of barren tree branches. By 4:30 it is almost completely dark, but the last dregs of sunlight reect onto the ice, creating an otherworldly afterglow that never seems to disappear until the rst pair of lonely I-93 headlights switch on in the distance.



Actually, because the sun set so quickly in New Hampshire there would always be ten or twenty cases of really bad seasonal depression every year at my school. I later learned that the antidote was something called a Verilux HappyLightTM, a small plastic obelisk that projects imitation sunlight and is advertised online alongside stock images of well-groomed people in their mid-thirties taking walks on an exceptionally photogenic beachin Florida. The cure for seasonal depression—according to the infirmary at my high school at least—involved staring idly at said Verilux HappyLightTM until you were no longer seasonally depressed.



A good portion of life at my boarding school was structured around these HappyLight-esque moments, moments that were supposed to give a passing resemblance to human warmth. This was possibly because it was in the best interest of the school to keep kids relatively sane, a tall order when you pack 535 teenagers into unkempt New Hampshire woodlands with shoddy WiFi connectivity.



For instance, at the beginning of every morning we had an assembly at the chapel, where we would often be forced to hear some incredibly mediocre piece of music performed by a freshman who was half-asleep at the piano bench. Except everyone would then proceed to give a standing ovation, because it felt good to believe that we all agreed about something, if only for a few seconds. Or take the fact that every year began with something called “Dropping Your Waterline.” Dropping one’s waterline involved a facilitator sitting a group of bored juniors and seniors around a conference table and asking them to uncover their “genuine selves.” This really meant that the room was forced to uncover increasingly uncomfortable pieces of personal information until one person nally stepped up and mentioned a fact that was deemed “sufficiently vulnerable and genuine.” This moment was then milked for maximum dramatic value, and the facilitator walked away, basking in a warm sense of fulfillment, blithely unaware of the fact that some asshole would probably spend the rest of the semester publicly humiliating the poor kid who was brave enough to speak up.



When I first tried the HappyLightTM for myself—one particularly dreary evening in January of my sophomore year—I think I laughed at what I then believed to be a tting and extremely clever metaphor for my boarding school experience. Except then I found myself disgusted at my own disgust, because this was exactly the kind of first-world, Holden Caulfieldian, conspiracy-of-phonies whining that I had tried my best to expunge from my system by age 14. So ultimately I just stared at the otherworldly Verilux glow in silence, wondering when the positive effects that punkybrewer from Amazon.com mentioned would kick in.



12:38 AM



Your friends have been dropping increasingly unsubtle suggestions that you leave with them for the past hour or so, and I have to agree that from a purely cost-benefit standpoint there is no point for you to stay here. We have reached that awkward impasse where half the table is drunk and the other half doesn’t drink or lacks the funds to order more drinks, which means we will simply continue the act of staring at one another and slowly coming to terms with the staggering lack of things to talk about (potential start-up idea: an app for your phone that suggests conversation starters based on personal data harvested from Facebook?).



Over the past hour or so, the bar’s youthful twenty-something optimism has settled into the rhythmic sounds of people settling for another disappointing night on the town. Even the conversation has worked itself into a corner:



Person 1: So I remember there was this one time back in Seoul, I think it was like July or something. It was super humid. Anyway, [Person 2] called me up at one in the morning and convinced me to come down to some crap bar in Hongdae and we got really trashed—



Person 2: I wasn’t that drunk, it was mostly you.



Person 1: Nah man, you were out of your mind. And then we met [Person 3] at Octagon.



Person 4: I do remember that. Actually, funny you should say that because, there was this time that [Person 3] and I decided to get really wasted.



And so on and so forth, a self-sustaining feedback loop of people talking about nights that were supposedly much better than the one we currently nd ourselves in, but which likely also consisted of people talking about other nights much better than the one they found themselves in. The small talk equivalent to the Droste effect. I momentarily consider joining in on the fun, reaching into my own dwindling reservoir of semi-listenable drinking stories. But then I stop.



You see, even though we’ve supposedly only met today, you’ve probably seen me before. Maybe at the immigration line at Incheon International Airport, or at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, or walking down the streets of Gangnam, or at the small ramen restaurant above the Kennedy Departures Terminal, or at the U.S. Consulate’s I-20 visa line. Chances are our paths have crossed. Chances are that we’ve spoken to each other before. Probably a short conversation. After all, I was just one of a million interchangeable Korean-American college students that you met, and you were one of a million interchangeable Korean-American college students that I met. And we had our standard-issue seventeen minute conversation—entirely superfluous but peppered with enough interesting personal factoids and anecdotes that it seemed more thoughtful than small talk. We probably spent these seventeen minutes pretending that our relationship was special, that our connection was unique, when in the back of our minds we knew there was something deeply disposable and expendable about one other. Which is just what’s happening at this table, isn’t it? Because, let’s face it, although right now we’re laughing and collecting Snapchat handles and Facebook friend requests the truth is that tonight is an unbearably unremarkable night. Best case scenario, we will go our separate ways, and perhaps in a few months - when we are sitting around a different table with different people drinking different beers - we will make cameo appearances in each others’ accounts of That One Time I Went to New York City and Got Drunk. 



So no, I decide not to share an anecdote, because at the end of the day, what’s the point? Isn’t taking part in the conversation making me complicit in our table’s collective self-delusion that we are actually getting to know one another? Not to mention the fact that I am already contributing to the broader collective self-delusion that is Koreatown. The world—especially this 2016 post-truth-according-to-some-person-at-the-Oxford-English-Dictionary version of the world—does not need more dishonesty coming from my end.



Or perhaps this is an exceedingly cruel assessment of the situation.



The more I think about it, it’s funny how I’ve spent almost three hours now imagining this massive one-sided conversation I want to have with you even though I have yet to speak a single word your way. It’s not even a conversation, really, considering that I haven’t even added in any spaces for you to pause or react or respond with anything more complex than a nod. And it’s also funny that I created an entire character for you (you are a shy, quiet 19 year old kid who enjoys Scrabble and Bob Dylan and hot tea) based wholly on a small subset of verbal habits and behaviors and conversation snippets that I observed today, observations that I amassed in an extremely unscientic manner and are probably nowhere near representative of who you actually are as a person. And funnier still is the fact that I formed an attachment to this projection to the point that I—maybe around 11:47 and drink five—actually began to think of ourselves as kindred spirits or something.



And even while I am thinking about talking to you what I am really doing is talking to some diluted-down, Ron Howard biopic version of you, a sort of faceless composite character I have cobbled together. Which is to say I am really talking to myself.



And maybe, just maybe, even though the conversation that everyone else is engaged in is shallow and deluded and more than likely pointless, at least it can be categorized as an attempt at some form of connection. Some approximation of friendship (could we really hope for more?). Maybe the people at our table aren’t going through some pre-congured set of socially-obligated niceties. Maybe they are holding onto some belief that—through the right sequence of hangover stories and ill-conceived jokes about their genitalia—this table can form a lasting bond that will stand the test of time. Because, if you get to the bottom of it, aren’t drinking games and lame personal anecdotes and corny political advertisements and dollar-store Korean patriotism and Lowering Your Waterline—as flawed and messy and disingenuous as they may be—still rooted in some basic optimism that one can get to know and connect with a fellow human being? After all, if we have really managed to render the truth irrelevant, isn’t the obsessive search for the “genuine” ultimately a self-defeating endeavor, nothing more than another source of paralyzing self-consciousness? And maybe my entire career of sitting quietly in the back of the room in smug self-satisfaction as I laugh at HappyLightTMs and lament the ultimate disintegration of truth and engage in made-up dialogues with cardboard cutout versions of Dwight Eisenhower—perhaps that’s an even deeper form of dishonesty, one that borders on cowardice—



oh, wait, Jim from Uber’s about two minutes away. I guess this means that we’ll have to start making arrangements for the check. I am hoping that keeping silent will solve the problem on its own. “It was nice meeting you, by the way,” I find myself saying. I see that someone from the neighboring table’s asking you to join them for a toast. He seems nice. You should go over; I’m sure you two will hit it off fine. 

   Believing himself still young, a ditchdigger in the town where I once lived abandoned his dog so that he could travel the world and see what was what. I was only six years old at the time, beloved, and oblivious to the old mongrel’s lonesomeness when we took her in.

   In the mornings she’d rush in, ailing and enthusiastic, pummeling my bare legs with her front paws to wake me out of bed, as if kneading a window for escape: *Up, up!* And in the evenings, when I’d run her down the pavement, she’d scatter gravel underneath her abdomen, clocking particles of airborne terrain across my sight: floured leaf, insect bone, grits of carbon, silt, sod, some clay. I’d fan for a warm breath, catch flashes of the moon eating dusk on the alternating pages.

   *Give me a break you idiot space cadet,* I’d say.

   And once, when we were off up the sloping sidewalk near the school, the sky overhead softened into an unusual spectrum, looking like something oily leaked on the blacktop. Ah, a planet, I attempted to tell the dog, seeing a distant ship flicker the shades of coined metal—aluminum, nickel, copper, brass. It was the one with the ammonia crystalline atmosphere and the baritone name, where it rains diamonds sideways across 240-mile-per-hour winds. Jupiter. But she’d already jogged ahead, her sable gray coat blending to the curbside snowbank. Unwittingly camouflaged, she yelped from the gloom, worried that I’d lose her. This way, I said, lifting my arms to a porch light, casting beckons like shadow puppets. *Psst! Dumbass! Over here!*



      And there she was: legs trawling, eyes loosed to ground, finding relief at my shins.

      Pat her twice on the head.

  

   We called the dog Laika after the Soviet space mutt: Laika, that pioneering canine who took to the air in a satellite. Only, our Laika never made it farther than the tot lot on her own. She was a coward in fact, damaged goods from the kennel, and when she died from bad nerves, we laid her in the same garden from which she once stole tomatoes. I was nine years old. It was October then: The old oaks and haws were already bending under frost and the fields, pro forma, had iced down utterly.

   Sooner rather than later, we hypothesized, the blizzards would follow suit.

   Had it been like any other early winter, I’d’ve spent the days off from school enjoying the particular incongruities of the overlapped seasons: throwing snowballs at cherry leaves, shoveling the walkway under the chickadee’s sigh, forgetting all about autumn until the puddles dried. Idled and without a dog, however, I was summoned to help my mother deal with the birdbath in our backyard. The problem was that the birdbath kept freezing over, and the frogs, bemused at the early winter, kept getting stuck on top, their legs locked under the ice. Most were dead when we found them. For the others, my mother would bring along a steel knife and near-boiling water and try to carve out their legs as best as she could. And a few times, when only two or three limbs were free, a frog would lunge from the ice early, abandoning its final appendages in a kind of premature jubilation. I wasn’t permitted to watch. My mother delivered the wounded creatures to the stream on her own, but left behind thin red stumps in the bath for me to discover later on.



   In Juan Rulfo’s novella *Pedro Páramo*, a mother’s corpse says to her son’s corpse, *Just think about pleasant things, because we’re going to be buried for a long time*. We ought to take any mother at her word, but I’m hard-pressed not to ask: Are things really that fixed? The bonds between atoms vibrate at 10x1014 hertz. The mane down the dog’s nape swaddles as she stalks. Melting snow smells differently on different people, I’ve found. The black hole at the center of our galaxy is imploding at a rate of 70 million miles a day, like a pebble falling in a gravity well.

   I bury myself in such facts each winter: Exposed blood freezes at temperatures just after ice forms; turtles under the ice get oxygen by suckling water into a large posterior opening where special tissues filter the oxygen right into the arteries, like so many gills. And did you know that on the Terra Nova voyage to Antarctica, a British officer, whose frostbitten feet were hopelessly slowing the others down, came up with an idea? Late one night he simply stepped out of his tent and froze himself to death.

   There’s a boldface sign in front of a burned up NASA replica at my hometown museum that says something like, *These brave men gave up their lives for that most sacred purpose of discovery.* Or was it, *behold, skeletons, we have reached the moon!* Next to the replica are scans of Russian space-propaganda posters which are stunning as well as terrifying: They’re these extravagant, stirring images of Yuri Gagarin reaching across the stars, or of people standing in the exhaust of missiles and being blissfully transformed and, sure, disintegrated. One can’t help but be enthralled by the national yearning that the Soviets had in the ’50s and ’60s. The century was pretty rough for them. They suffered revolution, genocide, war, poverty, and half the population was sent to the camps. But somehow, in spite of it all...



Soviet scientists had decided to use Moscow strays for space travel, figuring that such an animal had already learned to endure conditions of extreme cold and hunger. The original Laika had been picked up as a stray wandering the back alley of a Moscow pinball factory that had only recently stopped manufacturing missiles. Laika was a three-year old, 13-pound, husky mix who looked good on camera when she won the lottery. A Russian news magazine described her as *phlegmatic*, saying that she did not quarrel with other dogs and that this was the necessary temperament: *phlegmatic*.

   In the subsequent weeks, Laika was regularly confined in small, rackety containers and spun in the centrifuge. She wore wires in her brain and in her heart that showed how she was doing. And on November 3, 1957, she was strapped inside the Sputnik 2 satellite atop an R-7 rocket and sent 900 miles up through the stratosphere where she died within just a few hours.

   But still she made history: Hers was the first body to orbit Earth.



   Few had heard the true circumstances of Laika’s death until 1999, roughly 42 years after the launch, when some of the scientists involved in the mission went on TV and fessed up to the malfunction that actually caused her to die, for it had been reported until then, that the dog had survived a week, passing only when the oxygen ran dry. A pleasant end.

   In fact, she burned up during liftoff like cigarettes.

   People were outraged at the revelation. My mother couldn’t stand to look at our own Laika without getting upset. *You can’t imagine how the heat is,* she’d say, *how it affects you.* I tried to consider what it would be like to overheat in zero-G. Sweat, I imagined, would not run down the face, and if brushed off would just hang as globules in the air until evaporated. But dogs don’t sweat, so what’s it matter? I was more bothered when I found out that there weren’t countdowns at the Sputnik launches. Like there was no one at mission control, chanting (in Russian), *T-minus five, four, three, two, one, blastoff.* As it turns out, no one did countdowns before NASA—the Americans who a decade after World War II started watching German cinema again and in particular the 1929 Fritz Lang film *Frau im Mond. Frau im Mond* was the first instance of a countdown being associated with a rocket launch. Only in Lang’s film, after each number the phrase *seconds to go* was repeated.



   *The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes,* wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in a book having surprisingly little to do with dogs. Out on the frozen creek, Laika and I once went snooping. She was my Holmes, and I, her watchful Moriarty. *What’ll you discover today, my dear?* On a picnic table at the edge of the woods, a pitcher had been filled with glass, which, upon being emptied into the creek, made a metallic sound, like tin against tin. Where two rills intersect, a mother bullfrog whelped through the ice to her eggs trapped sleeping beneath. Carefully, I cracked the surface with my pocketknife and reunited the family. Laika cheered. It was only upon returning the following day that I learned the sacs were gone, that Laika ventured back for a taste, having been provided with renewed access.

   Another time I asked the dog to shake and instead she convulsed.

   Laika (version 1.0) said *hello* to the people of Earth on a radio broadcast a week before her flight. She barked into the microphone. Soon after launch, she transmitted a continual beep-beep-beep on a radio frequency, which served as a tracking signal. But within a week Sputnik 2’s signal died and all contact with the craft was lost. Laika’s 1,120-pound capsule remained in orbit for a total of 162 days, circling the Earth 2,570 times before burning up in the atmosphere on April 14, 1958. To anyone watching the sky at that time, she made her final statement as a tiny falling star in the night.

   In the waiting room my mother described it as planes of communication wearing thin.



   They did build Laika a window. Despite objections from higher-ups and the large costs of securing a window in a pressurized capsule, the engineers did it so the dying dog could look out—a window for Laika, whose monitored execution had been their one objective in all interactions that had bonded her to them with the keen devotion of every well-loved canine.

   What the scientists didn’t yet know was that once reaching peak-altitude, Laika would have seen nothing but blackness and the faint indigo squint of the troposphere on the horizon miles away. She wouldn’t have bothered to look at the sun, which, without cloud cover, burned unforgivingly against the vessel’s glare shield. And she wouldn’t find other stars. Had she survived the week as reported and lived to see the capsule turn, however, Laika would’ve caught one last view of the forested mainland. She would’ve been the first to disclose those undiscovered countries. And there, there below: a downy avalanche over Peru—an earthquake jolting at 200 miles per hour, disporting itself in amorphous bulks of snow, an extravagant gesture, uprooting the livid conifers and 4,000 lives, 4,000 tiny dots in white. From up above, the landslide would’ve looked like a photograph, moving just inches at a time across the dog’s windowsill—a peaceful wipe of snowflake and dust, almost perfectly still, in witless motion.



   Wintry air makes a wolf’s tongue numb. With sharpened blades, Inuit hunters used to set traps for wolves. They’d dip the knife in seal blood and bury the haft in the snow. The blood would freeze into a deadly popsicle. A hungry wolf would smell the blood, seek out the knife, and lick it until it shredded its tongue to threads.

   I mean, the wolf would bleed to death.

   Laika once came home with petals of blood on her nose. There were muskrats in the garden that liked to fight back. My mother wiped her face and then told us about black holes. She showed a picture of our own galaxy, laid her finger on the chartreuse center and said, *You could never see someone fall into a black hole. *If a traveler were to fall into a black hole, his image would just get slower and slower till he reached the horizon—at which point his image would stick. It’s kind of like Zeno’s paradox, where Achilles never wins his race against the tortoise because the distance of their subsequent movements reduces infinitely, by half the distance of the finish line. Only with black holes the light bouncing off of the traveler would also be shifting to lower frequencies, making him not only infinitely slower but infinitely dimmer and redder too.

   My mother unpressed the bloodstained napkin from Laika’s face.

   Because of black holes there are hundreds if not thousands of dim red tortoises frozen across the universe, she explained.



I watch a snowfall from my bedroom in Clifton, Virginia. The clouds settle and depart as if pulled on a leash. In the evening I take a walk down to the creek where I once scouted tadpoles, checking the rills for frogs stuck in ice. When at one point I think I hear a spadefoot hurrying a croak, I shut my eyes and pray it was instead a sound that only sounded like a frog, because I’ve forgotten my knife.

   Commence countdown.

   *Five*—at two miles above the Earth’s surface, pilots without air tanks begin to suffer hypoxia; blood-oxygen saturation reduces to ninety percent and with prolonged exposure the brain loses its ability to make judgments or retain thoughts. *Four*—at four miles, temperatures drop to negative 55 degrees Celsius and homeostasis becomes impossible; the pilot begins to freeze. *Three*—at six miles, bodily fluids expand nine times their size at sea level, decompressing the lungs and rupturing any abdominal organs containing trapped gases. *Two*—at eight miles, blood begins to boil and all internal liquids vaporize. *One*—at ten miles—the human body inflates, inflates, and inflates and then bursts open from within. *Zero*—in fact there’s one other way to kill a wolf: let it bite down your arm, then wrestle it under you and lace your fingers—one in each eye—and squeeze through both eyes into the brain.

   The panting stops; the blood freezes thick; the sound, it turns out, was a skidding rock. I pick it up and throw it across the icy creek. I recall that in the hours before Sputnik 2 launched, one scientist brought Laika home to play with his son and his daughter.

  

   Sometimes I think of my old mongrel pup: of how hard it was for her to keep her head steady, of the cigarette burns the ditchdigger left on her belly. Other times I think about what it would be like to live on a moon 15 light years away. You could point a giant telescope from there to Earth, and the image would arrive 15 years delayed. Today you’d see Laika and a boy playing together as they did when they first met, racing past the turnaround roadsides and rows of softwoods, winding.

   In the first few years after Laika’s death, I would always dig the snow off the dirt where she was buried. It would make a dark hole, a round of soil exposed under ice, that I’d leave behind, carrying my plastic shovel in tow, counting, *seconds to go, seconds to go.*

Were he to open his eyes now, Paul Castor wouldn’t be able to tell whether he’s drifted, or how far. Head dangling off the nose of his board, he can hear the sighs of the water flowing past his ears, sloshing in the space between the rounded fiberglass and the curve of his back; can feel the hair on his scalp swirling out into a shape that, were it viewed from above, would resemble a wreath. A near-digested breakfast of cheerios and orange juice rolls in partial harmony with the tide beneath, and his chin juts upward as he belches vigorously. Castor attends neither the thin pool of water evaporating on his abdomen, nor the faint, almost subconscious pain of unabated exposure to early-morning sunshine. The air is motionless, and he imagines a sensation like perfect stillness. He thinks of a burial at sea, of pre-Columbian tribes interring their dead in huge ocean-faring canoes; half-dreams of himself as interred in one, moving serenely and purposefully among tall ships and glaciers, underground rivers and violent inland seas; dissolved in the bosom of a thundercloud, scattered in snow.



Between sleep and wakefulness out here from moment to moment, Castor forces his eyes open and draws breath deeply, turns on his belly and begins paddling back toward the breakwater and the shores of Giacondo Beach—the largest in the town of Comanche, CA—where by now five or six other surfers are queued up for the last scraps of the morning’s meager high tide. Resigned, he slides almost furtively off the board and into the low trench just before the shallows. Eyes open as he dives downward, the water is mud-colored and profoundly cold: darkness free of direction. From his left ankle, Castor feels the tug of his bungee leash pull him back towards the surface. He lifts gradually and emerges, slick and inhaling powerfully, then taking up the board and making his way across the beach toward the lifeguard tower where he’s left a duffel of dry clothes.



There’s a spigot near the steps at the edge of the sand, and he washes off the grit caked on the soles of his feet and around his ankles, then walks up the steps onto the boardwalk. From there he recognizes Bill’s pickup and walks gingerly, barefoot, across the pavement to where his friend is parked. Bill is smoking a cigarette with the music turned up, looking impatient and tapping his left wrist when Castor approaches, as if he should have been expected. He turns the music down and leans his head out the driver’s side, and they exchange loose greetings. Castor’s hair is still wet, and he puts his surfboard and his soggy bag into the bed of the truck. Bill wears sunglasses and Castor can’t tell where his friend is looking when he climbs into the cab. He has sun-bleached blonde hair that he wears short, and his face and forearms are covered in freckles.



You must be going for the record, Bill says as they pull away, and Castor notices beads of perspiration forming on his forehead. Bill’s shirt, a cream-colored button-down, is already beginning to soak through with sweat. What record might that be, asks Castor, but Bill has already turned the music back up, making a quick left to take them downtown. The morning sun has risen well in the sky and the storefronts there roll past in high relief. Loudly, Castor asks where they are going, but there’s no reply, and Bill just squints and leans forward over the steering wheel where the sunlight makes a tonsure on his head. You smell like a dead fish, Bill says. Are you going to wash that off, or are you going to walk around all day like that? Castor ignores him and slumps on the truck’s bench, blowing air gently out from between his lips and watching the sidewalk and the sway of palm trees waving their muted and eternal farewell. Gradually, the volume of the engine erases whatever lingered in his ears of the sound of the ocean. For two weeks now he has been seventeen years old, and the world in that time has seemed changed—magnetized and alive with whispers like promise and he has waited for their words.



 



They come to the other side of town and stop the car on a quiet street that runs along a park and a municipal playground, and walk together down a pathway through the trees towards some buildings on the other side. On the playground they can see two young boys—not yet of school age and oddly unsupervised—pushing one another on the swing set. Castor watches one swinging higher and higher, wheeling upward above the latticework shadows of the tree line. The child laughs at first and then, growing frightened, softly begins to cry. The two men pass without comment, the small amazement at the coolness of such places in the summertime coursing through each of them.



On the opposite side of the park is the Sphinx, a refurbished multiplex and the only movie theater in town, whose chalky, sandstone facade and geometric patterning exude something more like a crudely-interpreted Moorish homage. Inside, there is a new coolness, something closer to that of a museum or a storage facility. The large, windowless atrium has a dingy, vaulted ceiling with violet felt curtains hanging down the walls. Between vending machines and antiquated, box-shaped arcade games are blown-up, high-contrast photographs of studio-era Hollywood stars. The images are all of the same dimensions, and some of them have been distorted or awkwardly cropped in the enlargement process. Their expressions are various and enigmatic: some of rage or surprise, others of anguish, hypnosis, possession, and in a handful—perhaps no more than one—the unmistakable image of supernatural calm. Castor recognizes none of them.



The doors are unlocked but there aren’t any screenings at the moment, so no one stops them from walking through the corridor of theaters towards the area at the back of the multiplex, where a girl stands vacantly tending to a long glass case advertising popcorn and concessions. She wears a maroon long-sleeved polo shirt that fits too loose and seems to tangle her up like a blanket might a restless sleeper. Near her heart is a pin with the name *Nora* printed on it. We’re not technically open for another half-hour, she says, surprised but friendly. This popcorn is free if you want some though. It’s from last night. She has straight, sandy blond hair, and her features have the sharp smallness of a bird. There’s a shy deference in her voice, as if she’s reciting from a script.



Uh, we’re not here for that, Bill says, stepping closer to the glow of the counter and removing his sunglasses. I work for your boss, remember? Nora laughs and shakes her head, half-rolling her eyes. I didn’t recognize you with your friend, sorry. Yeah he opened up for me about an hour ago. He should be upstairs. Bill starts up again at a hurried clip, offering no thanks, not waiting to dwell on the small embarrassment. Castor follows along a step and a half behind, glancing over at the girl as she sprays blue cleaning solution on the glass countertop and swings a rag across its surface in quick, circular motions. She is pale and looks a little older than him. The image of a beautiful woman on a section of the wall behind her—whose hair is trimmed short and who wears a long fur coat—hangs, ghostlike, in the half-light of the gallery.



At the top of the stairs, they find a waiting area and a window into another room where a squat and ancient looking man sits at reception. He wears a look of mild reproach as they walk in that Castor can only guess means he recognizes Bill. Castor begins to remember what Bill has told him about his job working for Mr. Salvatore in the year since his friend quit school, and understands without much thought that his job with this man has been—like the man himself—something of a mystery. Whatever business Bill is involved in—as an errand boy and chauffeur, occasionally a messenger—was never a concern to Castor, but there is a sudden trepidation about the present task. As they reach the office door—finished wood centered by yellowed pebble-glass—Bill makes a gesture to his friend as if to say, *Let me do the talking* and *I’m sorry about this*, both at the same time.



The first rush of natural light since they had come to the Sphinx disorients Castor and he wonders if they haven’t made a mistake and wandered into a forgotten corner of the place where some shrine might be kept. Salvatore is there though, bearded and immutable like a judge, flanked by banners bearing images of grave samurai and monsters from science fiction. He looks first to Castor and his expression transforms, from one void of insight, to that of someone satiated after small discomfort. Ah Bill, I see you’ve brought your friend, fantastic, he says and turns slightly and definitively to the other boy. Bill’s told me only the best things about you, Salvatore speaks as he shuffles through a suddenly conspicuous stack of manila envelopes of varying girth and hands one from the center of the pile to Bill. He pauses, and turns to no one so that when he begins to speak it’s as if to a camera: People have asked me for most of my adult life what the key is to being a successful individual in my line of work. And I tell them that there’s nothing more to it than knowing how to work with people. The truth is that people aren’t complicated; there’s a few things that everyone wants in life—sex, money, entertainment, health. Put yourself in a position where you can give somebody one of those things, or where you can take one of those things away from them, and you’ve figured them out. After that you can make them do anything. I make it a point to say that to every young person such as yourself that comes to my office, and I like to think I’ve taught your friend here something by saying it to him more than once. The mirth trickling out from his voice, he looks up again: It was so nice meeting you Paul. I’m really glad that you’ll be helping us out on this one. Remember that if I like what I hear, there might be more work in it for you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to have a word with Bill privately.



Castor waits in a sagging fabric chair across the room from the silent, totemic receptionist and hears nothing of the conversation in Mr. Salvatore’s office. Bill opens the door shortly, sunglasses restored, carrying a thick manila envelope of the kind on his boss’s desk. On the way down the stairs, Bill, visibly relaxed now, peels back the metal seal on the envelope and peers inside while he explains what they are meant to do. It’s a hospitality job. We’re supposed to pick a guy up tomorrow night at the Veracruz Airport and take him around the town. Basically, he says, we take the guy out to dinner, then to a couple of bars. We do whatever he wants. If he likes pool, we shoot pool. If he likes cards, we find a game. He’s a client, and he’s in town to negotiate a contract. Mr. Salvatore says if we show him a good time it’ll soften his outlook on things the morning after. He asked me if I knew anyone who could come along and I said you would. And we have plenty of petty cash—there’s a bonus in for us too.



What made him ask for me? I don’t even know the guy, either of the guys.



It beats me. I mentioned you once or twice, how you like to surf. Maybe the guy we’re meeting likes surfing. Or maybe he’s a queer. Anyway, there’s no way we’ll be able to spend all this, Bill says and plucks an indeed impressive wad of $20 bills.



Now hold on, what’s him being queer got to do with me?



It’s possible that you’re missing the big picture here, pal, Bill says this time airing himself with a money-fan. Speaking of which, I noticed the exchange between you and the counter girl. Give it a shot, it doesn’t look like a waste of your time. Not exactly my type but you might get something out of it. Bill has successfully changed the subject: Castor is grateful that the glowing of his ears is undetectable in this light, sensitive as he is to his friend’s remark that, without any particular difficulty, has found him out. Bill detects the tightening of his friend’s countenance, and places a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. Take your time. I’ll wait in the car.



 



They make their date for later tonight—a few hours after her shift ends, at the same theater where she works. He is relieved when she suggests a crime thriller and not a romance. He tries to look in her eyes the whole time, and when he does he can see no trouble in them. Whether he has caught her by surprise, or whether she is simply being polite, he does not know and feels free of worry. He can hear the blood jumping through his head as he walks back through the park where the children were playing before; can feel a modest sweat trickling at his back where the sun beats down from its position at noon. Bill leans against the hood of the truck, smoking, when Castor returns, and doesn’t ask how it went.



They drive around for a while not saying much of anything. In the afternoon they have enchiladas at a cafe a few blocks away from the beach. Someone has left a newspaper at the table before them, and Bill turns to the section with the comics and reads quietly to himself, chuckling from time to time. He points to the page once, shaking his head, but never shows his friend what he is reading. Castor asks him about the man they’ve been hired to look after.



He’s a client, like I said. I don’t know anything else. I think he used to be an actor.



An actor like in he movies?



Yeah, I think he acted in a few of the movies that Mr. Salvatore produced back when he was still doing that. They may have been partners. I don’t know, you can probably ask the guy when you meet him.



Bill produces a red pen and amuses himself drawing details on the characters in the comic strips. In one strip, he draws mustaches on all the female characters, and then X’s over the eyes of all the male characters. In another, where the characters are all children, he draws an enormous red penis on each character, regardless of gender. At a certain point the smile drifts from his face and a look of intense concentration overcomes him; he focuses on producing the same curvature of his stroke for each shaft, the same flecks of pubic hair on each inflamed scrotum. In a third strip, he begins drawing new characters in the strips of his own invention; crude, gleeful, and moon-eyed, a part of an alternate universe in the world of the cartoon, invisible to the rest of them, like vampires caught in a mirror.



Their friendship is an odd one; since they were children, the closeness between Bill and Paul has always been more that of siblings near to one another in age than of people with much in common. From when they first knew one another, and now more than ever, Bill has always exuded an inflamed sense of ambition, a preexisting need to determine the circumstances of the world around him. Castor has watched his friend for years now, fascinated by the expedience and the animal optimism that for all their time together is still alien and opaque to him. Physically, Castor is the more imposing of the two, but Bill has never been shy about announcing the ease with which he assumed a sexual life. Bill doesn’t object to Castor’s quiet company, and would seem to have become somewhat reliant on it now, were it not for something Castor was certain he wasn’t being told about their assignment.



What kind of movies did Mr. Salvatore make when he was in the business?



Everything from what I could tell. Comedies, horror movies, westerns. Art house stuff too. It all went direct to video though, never even screens it in his own theater. The only thing he mentions a lot about is video distribution—he says that a million suckers every year try to get a movie made, and it’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears getting it done. But the money end is in distribution; if you can put up a little bit of cash up front as a producer, you can make a real killing on video sales.



Sounds like a real shit way to make a living.



Not if you play the angles right. Don’t get pushed around, what he says. The directors are the ones you can’t take shit from, he says. Even the schlock jocks think they’re Scorcese. Gotta let ‘em know where the money is, who’s the boss. If they short you, leave you in the lurch, you have to come back on them. Hard.



Castor can see a look of confused excitement in his friend’s eyes as Bill’s sunglasses slide down his nose, like a young boy watching a transaction between adults whose meaning surpasses his understanding. Bill pays for their meal. Castor takes his things from the back of the truck and they part ways as he heads toward the beach. Later on, he paddles out alone and the afternoon high tide is more consistent. The waves are fickle with him at first; he forgets their delicacy, paddles in too quickly or too tentatively, and they crumble beneath him before his head can climb above the foam. Soon though, he begins to move more freely, more sensitively, as if he could remember the water’s language and suddenly speak. The ride becomes his pattern of thought, and his thoughts take on the colors that he can see now in the water reflecting the variegating light that nevertheless fails to cast the sand any other shade than that of bone. The water is murky and refuses to yield his image as he paddles out again. After a long time his body registers signs of fatigue; the muscles in his shoulders begin to tighten, and his knees feel bruised from where he straddles the board. The day is over. He sits, half-sinking in the water thinking of nothing, and then the image of Nora’s face as it moves across the ghost of the woman in the theater—each one translucent and irradiated as if from behind, by some lantern.



 



His grandparents have gone to dinner early, and the house is deserted when he gets home. He leans his surfboard against the perforated cardboard wall over his grandfather’s workbench in the garage, and leaves his trunks and his undershirt in the basket next to the washing machine. While the shower warms up, Castor walks around the house naked, sipping a glass of milk and stopping to watch the television. His limbs are wiry; narrow, unfinished masses that seem to hang from the fibrous mantle of his upper chest, suspended. This is but one form. The specter of the television fills the room with a pale blue light and unnatural warmth. Mounted above the set and elsewhere in the living room are photographs of his family—his grandparents with him as a baby, their vacation to Disney Land, bodysurfing with his grandpa and later boogie boarding. From an early age, he spent too much time on the beach, in the water. A bright boy, he nevertheless neglected his schoolwork. His grandma never pressed him on the matter, believing that as long as his hair was wet when he came home that he couldn’t have been getting to much mischief. Most of the photos of his grandma are from when she was much younger and, from time to time, she’ll be holding a small baby girl with raven hair. Letting his eyes wander, he meets the gaze of his own mother through the reflective glare of the glass that protects another of her images—young there, not much older than he is now. From the distance between them he cannot feel much for her, not even a curiosity about the question as to her decision; how one chooses to die when it’s their own choice to make, how one dies for the sake of another that they cannot love because they will never know. She was well behaved, her mother tells Castor, the way he was and still is. Never a burden, no-how. The last light of day drains from the room and his eyes don’t resist the loss of the image. Her face is flat; it is not a space. He would plant himself there if he could, stretch out and let it continue through him, but something like a tide is lifting him ever upward and away and there again is the same distance between his face and the other, empty one. There go the thoughts he will not have.



 



They meet beneath the streetlight outside the ice cream parlor, and though they greet one another naturally, a long time passes before he can recognize her. Nora wears a red sundress patterned with small white flowers that appears faded as though it’s been washed too many times. She wears earrings of white gold, long and elliptical. He knows it’s foolish to be surprised that she’s changed clothes, that she isn’t wearing the same smothering maroon shirt. There is a peculiarity, a surprise about her beauty that awakens—someplace outside of him—a melancholy, as if he were embarrassed for her. They walk slowly, side by side, her hair taking on different hues as they pass beneath the lights here and there. She talks about her family; a brother in the army, a father whose recent health problems meant her withdrawal after a year and a half from college. Castor focuses on each of her words but cannot prevent them from slipping away from him. When the conversation passes to him, he knows that what there is to understand about him can be said in a few words: he lives with his grandparents, his mother died in childbirth, he has never known his father, his best friend Bill—more of a stranger to him every day—is his only friend, he loves to surf. He worries that what he has to say may sound unsubstantial, vacant. She asks him questions—platitudes, really, but they sound to him as if what he had said needed clarifying, as if some explanation were required. What he’ll only realize later is that she may be nervous too. He answers her—politely, enthusiastically even—but the things he speaks about seem to come from someone else. He feels simultaneously uneasy and bored. Relief comes when the Sphinx appears around the corner, and the two of them can be silent again.



The movie is called *Ouvert pour cause d’inventaire* (though it is in English), wherein a detective arrives at a small coastal town in what appears to be Portugal to solve a string of murders. The bodies are found by fishermen in the shoals, and the victims are dressed immaculately in flowing white robes; the actors and actresses enlisted to play the victims are some of the most beautiful people that Castor has ever seen—young, fair-haired, with the faces of angels. The cause of death is, at first, a mystery, as none of the bodies turn up with water in their lungs, nor do the victims show any sign of struggle. The detective takes up residence in the home of a young widow—the wife of the first victim to be discovered—and begins the meticulous catalog of evidence that, thoroughness notwithstanding, leads him nowhere. He is bewildered at first, then outraged as more bodies begin to wash up along the docks. Paranoia sets in. A chronic stomach ailment sidelines his investigation for a time, and the therapeutic walks he takes along the cliffs overlooking the beach illustrate some of the more moving qualities of the setting; a purgatorial place harried by storms that, despite its desolation, retains the vertiginous beauty of the natural world reaching towards oblivion. The singular image of this series is a solitary tree growing on the rainy beach, its roots extended deeply into the breaking waves. Somewhere in the midst of it all, Nora puts her hand in his.



There are scattered details that have the semblance of significant clues: a persistent fog on the shore that only fleetingly discloses a white fortress; the devout, paternalistic and quasi-fascist local police force whose surveillance of the widow verges on obsession; a Nepalese fisherman, gone mad from his time at sea, explaining a belief in the transmigration of souls as if it were a kind of cruel joke. Soon, however, the trail goes cold; the townspeople forget about the killings—even the detective’s commanders in the capital seem anxious to tie up loose ends and file away the murders away, unsolved. The lull in the case marks what the detective can only guess is the beginning of his early retirement, and he takes measures to settle down with the young widow whom, over the course of the investigation, has expanded her role in the detective’s life from hostess to confidante to lover. His stomach condition is slowly deteriorating, and through the detective’s interior monologue it becomes clear that he doesn’t have long to live. The young widow brings him a medicine that she promises him will take away his pain. The viewer is left to understand that the young widow, whose husband was a police officer himself, has been administering the same drug to the detective for much of his time in the village, dulling his forensic skill. In such heavy doses, the drug has the power to induce a euphoric, dream-like state. The local police, prepared to kill both the detective and the widow should the former stray too close to the truth about the murders—which itself remains a mystery—relax their surveillance and diminish into a star-punctured night. The widow has saved the detective’s life by, in so many words, destroying his mind.



Throughout the movie Nora moves closer, and at times she directs his hand behind her head, which she then places in the nape of his neck. Her breathing is steady and soft, and he does not remember when they begin to kiss. He would like to feel tenderness for her in this moment, something adult and concrete, a desire for something to change. Instead he feels slightly squeamish, clammy and inert as if grasping something tightly from within the depths of sleep. He mistrusts his body. He cannot fathom the science that could explain how pitiful this all feels to him now. He thinks of Bill, who describes his conquests with such verve, and considers that what was so impressive all along was that his friend had the stomach to go through this willingly, endlessly.



Shortly, it becomes something rehearsed and mechanical, though not unpleasant. She responds to his hesitancy, careful not to announce with her body language that she senses his inexperience. Nora is curious about this lonely boy, who looks like something fragile and built for life on some other, kinder planet. She is startled by his comportment: simple, unreflective. Still in touch with her boyfriend at school, she’s talked with him from time to time about moving in together, but he doesn’t visit with any regularity. She imagines herself anticipating the visits of this boy—almost a child—at the dreary theater, someone to dress nicely for; someone to displace the persistent, soiled feeling that the Sphinx’s puerile owner leaves after each advance. She hasn’t paid close attention to the movie, but what impression she’s left with of the detective is that of an artist; an artist describing life in its purity, brushing closer and closer to some central fact of that life until the two become indistinguishable.



They leave through an emergency exit at the back of the theater that Nora knows will not set off any alarms. The parking lot that curves around the building has no fence to obstruct a course through a cemetery that, for the darkness, seems to stretch unspeakably. In the distance they can see the reservoir, ovoid and still, giving back the luminous, trembling forms cast down by an elevated highway still further out. They think together, woozy with a menacing lustfulness and move stiltedly, like zombies, towards the obscurity’s center. A periodic heat moves through the open in waves, pushing them closer to one another and roaring in a way that seems only to compound the dome-shaped silence all around.



There are some briars growing alongside a slender, unadorned mausoleum and they sit down nearby to get out of the wind. They begin to kiss awhile, and his hands move mechanically again to where she doesn’t stop them. A warm gust twists through the briars that bow low and scratch lightly at the flesh on her shoulders and neck. Nora’s hair circulates wildly, dancing in a kind of nimbus around her head. Around the edge of her thigh, she follows his hand with her own. He smiles and relents: We probably shouldn’t. She smiles back, feeling neither frustration nor relief.



A shared dizziness passes and, grinning, they begin to talk—conversation turns to the job Castor’s been enlisted for tomorrow night. Nora knows nothing of her boss’s business; the other employees at the Sphinx are mostly geriatrics and substance abusers. With the exception of the weekend crowd, there’s hardly any business; from the outside, the theater looks like a money pit. The proprietor’s associates, however, generally appear dangerous—jackal-eyed men with absent expressions, hungry and hypnotized. She thinks of wild mercenaries packing their cheeks with hallucinogenic grasses that make them dream of different names for themselves and worship death. She thinks of this other man the actor, whom she imagines looks something like the lonely detective in the film, sick and unknowing. She worries at first only hypothetically: Don’t go, she says, to no one in particular at first. He is listening. She thinks to herself that he hardly does anything but listen, really. You don’t work for him, not yet you don’t. You shouldn’t go. Don’t go.



They sit quietly for a while, Nora’s head on his chest while Castor runs his hands gently through her hair. Each stroke is made to coordinate with a careful rhythm that he listens for in the faint but discernable sound of the ocean not more than a mile away. He doesn’t know what to make of this sudden concern, this unprecedented closeness. The sound unfolds over the low echo of Nora’s words, recurring to the point of senselessness, or to the point of a movement through one sense towards another sense, a hidden sense. It is a sense like prayer: *Don’t go. Don’t go.* He imagines that the confluence of these sounds as identical to that of the passage of air through the branches of a tree like the one on the beach in the film he has just seen. It stands, defiant and deeply rooted in poisonous sand, bending beneath a phantasmagoric sky, closer and closer through the passing centuries towards its shimmering, mercurial twin.



***



When their first and only son was born in a village outside Asunción, the parents of former actor Agustín Barrios named their boy after his great uncle, the famous Paraguayan classical guitarist Agustín Barrios-Mangoré. Aside from his virtuosity, which was met with the acclaim of all of Europe during the first and only tour he made through the continent near the end of his life, Barrios-Mangoré is remembered as the first solo guitarist to record any of his compositions professionally, which he did first in 1909 and then sporadically as cost would permit up to his death in 1944. In 1912, the guitarist found himself the subject of no small scandal when, on a tour through Brazil that included stops in rural parts of the country (where ostensibly Christian residents instead worshipped a plethora of minor ancestral gods and spirits, the most potent and wicked of which were believed to command spells meant to control or destroy the ability to speak) he began to perform with accompaniment by a recording of himself playing and occasionally singing. The skill and the speed of his hands, combined with the incorporeal nature of his assistance—an idea originally proposed by his manager as a way to save money and, ironically, to attract publicity—compelled a particularly stunned audience to presume that he was an emissary of one of their more powerfully malevolent gods. The duration of Barrios-Mangoré’s tour through Brazil was beleaguered by the infamy of his ‘heathen music’ as it spread through the countryside, and the combination of poor concert sales and a number of death threats was sufficient for the guitarist to cancel the remainder of the tour and return to Asunción, opting out of his contract with his promoter under the terms of a provision regarding ill health.



What is regularly overlooked of Agustín Barrios-Mangoré in contemporary scholarship (to the extent that it exists to any respectable degree) is that he was an avid mountaineer and topographer, and would often bring his guitar into the more remote villages and outposts of the Andes on expeditions. There, he learned traditional folk compositions from the locals that had survived the earliest colonial conquests by the Spanish. Accepting from time to time the hospitality of his Andean counterparts, Barrios-Mangoré—who rarely managed to get to sleep because of the scarcity of oxygen at such altitudes—would look for prolonged periods of time from his window or (if he could manage it without disturbing the people who had taken him in for the night, many of whom were poor scrub farmers or goat herders and rose before the sun was up) from the grassy edge of a precipice at the milky contours of snow-covered mountains as they were framed by the yawning firmament. It is known that he enjoyed a brief acquaintance with the English occultist Aleister Crowley, himself a mountaineering enthusiast; apparently the latter was on a climbing trip in Peru during the guitarist’s tour through Brazil and decided to travel to meet the man after his last summit. In his private journal (confiscated by government police during the dictatorship of Paraguayan military dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who maintained power between 1954 and 1989) Barrios-Mangoré describes his admiration for Crowley, and details an encounter in which the renowned magician offered an introduction to the teachings of the Golden Dawn, which the guitarist—deferring to his Christian faith—politely declined.



Elsewhere in this same notebook are his topographical sketches—remarkable for their meticulousness, displaying an almost primordial understanding of the Andes on a local level that is unaccounted for by what historians know about his educational background (he studied as a physician in Ascunción for two years before withdrawing into music full-time)—which predate aerial photography in the region, and were of considerable use to Stroessner’s air force, several decades later, for the purposes of scanning small valleys in search of resistance strongholds, in strikes led by the dictator’s son Gustavo, an alleged homosexual. Early in his air campaigns, Gustavo was baffled by these drawings, stemming from the fact that—the pilot’s gross incompetence notwithstanding—each sketch had been, in effect, made twice. The guitarist, perhaps anticipating that nearly twenty years after his death, his labor of love would be put to the most evil of purposes, had made identically-labeled sketches on facing pages with radically different features. Gustavo eventually discovered (not without taking losses in his squadron, initially) that one sketch from each set was the ‘correct’ one, though from among the hundreds of pairings he could never detect a coherent pattern or any clue as to which one was to be trusted. Later on, after the fall of the dictatorship and the brief resurgence in popularity that Barrios-Mangoré’s music enjoyed in Paraguay, it was postulated by historians and speculative fiction writers that the ‘incorrect’ sketches were not incorrect at all, but instead actually constituted *acoustical* topographies of the ranges in question, as if during the course of his adventures—perfectionist that he was—Agustín Barrios-Mangoré were planning every last detail of a tremendous concert event, searching the mountains for a place where his music would echo off the surfaces of the cliffs in perfect resonance with the natural world, for eternity or as long as anyone could be expected to listen.



 



His was the great misfortune of being a better *impersonator* than *actor*, or such was the diagnosis of his director on the set of his first film. Consequently, the actor Agustín Barrios has always lead a life somehow not quite his own. His aspirations as a screen actor in Hollywood are best forgotten: at the time, and more or less to this day, it was virtually impossible for a non-Caucasian to find consistent work in American film. Barrios’ complexion is the color of caramelized sugar, the faint but irrefutable sign of a Mestizo in North America. At first, he contented himself with a modest salary as a recurring character in a soap opera syndicated by most of the Spanish-language networks in the Southwest, and enjoyed a minor celebrity in the immigrant communities of California, Arizona and New Mexico for three or four years before the show was finally cancelled. Strapped for cash and unwilling to return home, he began working on the set of non-union productions as a sound engineer and cameraman (he had little or no idea how to do either, but the video equipment functioned mostly intuitively and no one seemed to notice even the most major indications of ineptitude). He knew that some of the people struggling like him made a quick buck starring in pornographic films; still others turned to hustling on the street. Most of the latter were supporting drug habits, and he was cautious not to fall into a pattern of behavior that he worried would affect his future. On a whim and nearing the end of his rope, he spent $15.50—no small sum for him at the time—on a bus ticket to Grapevine to attend a free actors’ workshop. It was there that Barrios was discovered by the filmmaker Anton Kotz—the man who offered that first bit of advice—and his producer at the time, Ronald Salvatore.



Over the next two years, Barrios became one of a string of consistent collaborators in the films made by Kotz and the handful of other directors associated with Salvatore’s studio, best known under the name Passive Radar. Among the seven films he starred in, Barrios had leading roles in *Engine Falls* and *Patterns of Speech* playing roughly the same stoic and vaguely mystical character. When Passive Radar fell apart, Barrios went into the production business with Salvatore. Their estrangement as business partners a few years later was the reason for his visit today, his first to the West Coast in nearly five years. Specifically, Barrios, who fell out with Salvatore shortly after accepting a loan of several thousand dollars from the man, returned now to make amends, and to ask for more money.



 



On the curb outside the airport, Barrios sits on his suitcase with a paperback, looking up occasionally for a sign of his retrievers, and watching for the wobbling glow of a departing aircraft’s fuselage as it catches the light of buildings from below. Even if his plane landed in Veracruz ahead of schedule, they’re still late, and when they arrive it’s as if they’ve appeared from a cloud of smoke. If he hadn’t seen it run, Barrios would have guessed the pickup truck they drove up in had been dragged from the bottom of a lake. Two men are inside—they’re boys, really; wispy things with dark visages and a look of slouched cruelty like child soldiers—and when they stop, one helps him inside while the other puts the bag in the truck’s bed. Ron hadn’t mentioned there’d be two of them. As they set out, the one that introduced himself as Bill asks if he’d like to get a drink before they go to the hotel. How about some dinner? he asks. Bill mentions a diner a few towns over, and without waiting for his guest’s response, hangs a U-turn at the light outside the parking lot and thunders northward.



At the diner, Barrios orders a stack of pancakes, a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee. It’ll be morning in New York soon, he jokes limply, and unfolds the paperback from his pocket again. Bill and the other one, named Paul, begin to talk: mostly the former, who is apparently the more accommodating of the two—jovial, loquacious, and immature. In a wrinkled green blazer and the only moth hole-free button-down he owns, Barrios feels (and looks) as if he were the father of these two boys, divorced and with partial custody, taking them out for a weekly dinner. Bill is goading Paul, asking him about some girl. As the latter clams up, a small affection for the boy wells in Barrios not unlike the mixture of emotions he would concoct for himself as an actor in order to manipulate his performance. There is something about him that he recognizes; not just a likeness, but a sort latent nobility that Barrios has encountered only a few times before in his life. Vague shapes and the faces of loved ones, both real and fictional, drift through the field of his consciousness and align over the image of Paul Castor, and the former actor is overwhelmed in a moment out of which he must wake himself.



Refreshed from the coffee, Barrios acquiesces to Bill’s insistence that they get a drink of something stronger. They take the highway through a desolate patch of inland desert where all along the western edge of the road, the placid skeletons of oil derricks rise up in rows highlighted by red and orange lights, looking like the ruins of some robot world. No more than an hour in this place and Barrios is already feeling the gravity of his return, as if he were passing through sacred ground or the realm of some past life; the sense of a constantly-renewed destiny, of ceaseless forward motion and palpable trajectory. He realizes that it is something close to sadness, and here now with these young men he wonders why it has taken him so long to understand that he is not like them anymore.



The place where they are headed is an old biker bar, a roadhouse with a sawdust floor and an anachronistic showcase stage at the back. A five-piece country ensemble collects there, milling through one song after another, each dirge-like and indistinguishable from the one before. The regulars are indifferent, drinking and playing pool not just casually but emphatically. The band’s fondness for blues affect edges, Barrios notes, towards a terminal depression. He thinks of his great uncle, and of listening to his records at family gatherings but, drinking now and more exhausted from his flight than he realized, the emotions are adrift and beyond his recall. Bill plays darts with a few young women on the other side of the bar. Paul sits nearby but says nothing. Alone, Barrios grows uneasy. He thinks of tomorrow’s meeting with Ron; he wonders if he can manage a dignified apology, leaving aside the new loan he must insist upon if he’s to keep his own small company afloat. They parted ways under no uncertain terms, but Barrios knows he could’ve been flatly refused or been offered a buyout over the phone. That he agreed to the meeting has to mean something. Still, he’s heard the rumors; of a rapid degradation of empathy or mercy in the business dealings of Ronald Salvatore; of that degradation’s inverse relation to coercion, intimidation, violence. Reaching for the cigarettes in his inside blazer pocket, his hand brushes across the leather holster of the .38 he keeps strapped along his ribs—a mixture of occupational hazard and old habit that he has carried since bandits robbed the set of *The Parts of Speech* at gunpoint and even shot a lighting engineer (though he lived). The thing is decades old, and he has grown accustomed to its feel such that sometimes he forgets he’s wearing it. The time spent with his handlers and the erosion of his suspicions through imbibing leaves him in the mind that at least these idlers are not his assassins.



The bartender corrects him as he moves to light one up: it seems this place has changed along with the rest of the world. Alone in the parking lot he holds the smoke in his lungs and glances at the amorphous light reflected from car to car. He walks aimlessly away and down the road for a minute or two. In the distance, from the side of the road, is a moment in space where the desert changes to low bluffs that bristle with row upon row of mountainous trees. He wonders how far out of their way they have gone, if—should he need to—he could find his way back to the city. The glassy twilight has no revelation for him. Describing his experience after the incident, the lightning engineer noted that the noise of the shot was what startled him first—that the pain came later. For Agustín Barrios, instead, the sound and the pain occur together and within one another as apart of the same incandescent phenomenon, spinning outward from a center somewhere near his right shoulder blade. He buckles, reeling from its gravity, and does not cry out. He hears another shot, and another, but they are apart of a different world than the one he remembers—a world in which it seems he has always lived, of asymptotic pain rushing closer and closer towards abstraction. A third finds the flesh of his upper groin and what to him is the certainty of waking from a dream is actually the mind abandoning itself, of the seizure of his body by another, more profound twilight.



 



When Bill moves to follow Mr. Barrios out of the bar, Castor trails his friend from a distance. When he rounds a curve in the darkness, Paul loses sight of him, after which time he hears the shots. Castor is careful not to run, understanding nothing of who has shot whom or why. Presuming an accident, he begins to shout his own name; uncertainly, at first, and then with more force. When he arrives in the clearing where the two figures have stopped, he finds Bill squatting on his haunches and tracing his finger along the chrome of a handgun Castor at first thinks can’t possibly be his. Somehow, he is totally calm, and can think only of taking the situation’s inventory:



Is that his gun? Are you hurt?



Do I look hurt? Bill sneers.



Who shot him?



I did, I guess. Unless he just had a heart attack from all the noise. I couldn’t really see where I was aiming.



Castor walks over to the second form, more discretely prostrate: Barrios is half-sprawled over himself, unconscious but breathing. He cannot see the blood collecting in the bound fibers of his shirt or his slacks, but Castor can imagine it and winces as he leans to check the man’s vitals.



He’s still breathing. I think we should call an ambulance.



He’ll be dead by the time they come for him.



You sure about that? Castor doesn’t know yet that he’s fighting a sort of indignation, and will soon have forgotten it.



Sure am. I hit him in the gut, didn’t I? I’ve seen the movies. You die from that.



You said you didn’t know if you had hit him at all.



Well didn’t I?



I’m not sure. It’s too dark for me to tell.



Shit, well I’d shoot him again but I think I’m out of bullets.



I’m going for an ambulance.



But Bill isn’t paying attention anymore, moving his eyes back to the article dazzling in his hand and throwing open the cylinder and spinning it before his eyes.



You’d better get rid of that thing, Castor says as he begins to jog back to the roadhouse, noticing only then that he is coated in sweat.



 



In such pain—severe, life ending—the body reorganizes itself. Lying in the clearing, unconscious, in clothes growing heavy and matted with the weight of his own coagulated blood, Agustín Barrios no longer has a mind. That mind has been replaced by the unconcealed fact of death. Illuminated, the fact’s light inscribes its code upon the fibers of his body—each inscription in its totality—so that what was once an organism is now a golem, a thanatotropic machine of a different order from what the two boys might call life if you were to ask them. It is this inscription that moves Barrios’ right arm around his side towards the undisturbed, fully loaded .38 caliber pistol, that manipulates the fingers that remove the safety, that extends the arm and instructs the thumb to cock the gun’s hammer, and finally to let the dead man’s eyes fly wide open. By now Bill has wiped his own gun down and pitched it into the woods, and stands not close to the body but near enough and in the cone of light that delineates what can only be called the dead man’s field of vision, so that when the golem raises up its weapon there isn’t even the time he would have had to defend himself. The single bullet describes a long parabola through the leftmost corner of Bill’s forehead, and had a sole witness been there they’d have taken an oath that they saw the life jump from the boy in the blossom of smoke that lingered there for an instant and was gone.



***



The sky over Comanche, CA gleams in its emptiness near dusk. All along the pier, the sunlight makes a canyon of the shops and stands and the shadows they cast, and the painted polyurethane moldings over the steel chassis of amusement rides all take on an aura of red gold. From the spaces between the planks on the boardwalk, the noise of the tide drifts upward sustaining a sound in the air above like flight.



Splayed out among the sand, leaning on elbows or squatting on the balls of their feet, damp and panting, the surfers of Giacondo Beach dwell for the last hour of sufficient sunlight along the shore in vigil. It is the same on every beach in this part of the world, and every other part where time passes easily for the worshipper that is most willing. This is what they share; many would never know one another but for this devotional cord that seems to penetrate and bind them all, as sure as there has always been an expression of childhood which is primordial and outside of time. So they sit and they wait for sunset, for the light of this life to shine elsewhere, for the lantern to pass them by and the spell to break, to return to their families or their jobs or their obsessions or their solitude or their sadness. For them the beach will always be here: here in Comanche, here in Libertad, here in Byblos, here in Kilwa Kisiwani.



Amidst a wing of constantly turning blue, they watch the last of their number collude, repel and fall slowly away from one another. Some crouch low on their boards like shipwrecked sailors. Others, further out, toss themselves high over the foam fringes of prematurely cresting waves. Expressionless faces flash with an elemental joy, a laying-bare of sentiments in reverence of the grandeur and the shape of this: a renewed encounter with the transfixing strange. The darkness grows, and to the last few in the water their fellows on the beach watch as if from within the threshold of an expansive natural amphitheater or beyond the membrane of a cloud. As a new crest emerges, the rider at the top of the order begins to paddle—a crawling motion evoking the earliest land-reptiles—and finally feels the water disappear from beneath the nose of his board. Mounting clumsily, he is nevertheless in the hands of the laws of physics, and drops into the curl with drunken abandon, letting the board’s seaward edge tear at the quivering, translucent skin that sprays brine up into his eyes. A thought—that the world could breathe and change beneath him—vanished as it appeared. Riding it to the shore, it is his only wave of the day.



The next wave fails to break—merely a low hill that rushes across the sandbar and moves across Paul Castor’s line of sight. From the shore, his bare back is visible, a thing glossy with the seawater that tumbles over him and the others like him with a relentlessness and atavistic fury that passes unnoticed among their kind. Hunched, his ribcage and the long bands of muscle across his back take on the definition of an anatomical illustration. Hair that the sun has turned nearly white hangs, uncut, in limp tendrils the consistency of seaweed. He positions himself six inches from the board’s stern, causing the nose to bob gently upward; now grabbing the water’s surface, now releasing it. His hands are placed preemptively in the water on either side of him, as he senses a new swell almost before he could see it appear about twenty meters out, growing in speed and slope. His motion does not break the rhythm of what is beneath him when he paddles in, snapping his body sideways and fishtailing to a 45° angle and rising up all as apart of the same physical event. When he takes the wave he is hardly visible to anyone on the shore.



In that series of endlessly recurring moments Castor might live whole other lives. Nothing leaves him, but even these have decayed: their forms share images and parts, augmenting and fusing into terrifying composites flush with inscrutable meaning and power. The wave is already closing, cradling him, and he feels the rush of air escaping the narrowing chamber where he hopes to remain. The men and women on shore forget what they have seen and dissipate.



Tumbling downward towards the trench, his eyes are accustomed to the darkness and they search out its bottom. A procession of features, faces, names—all disappeared—turn towards him, void of content like Attic masks, or perhaps like the elaborate and grotesque features of the same mask, as it is viewed from afar and then draws nearer. He dives deeper, where its gaze cannot reach, and where the music of its voice—a sound not unlike the music of Agustín Barrios-Mangoré—at length grew silent. The weight of Castor’s body and the velocity of his plunge has capsized his board and brought it down with him by the leash: a bungee threaded through surgical tubing, that hesitates to break the fidelity of the Velcro cuff around his ankle. Undaunted, Castor senses a moment at hand still hidden, that waits in the bosom of the earth. Surrounding him are the things in their bareness for which he has become the conduit, and he sees them clearly. The cuff that will open or not open, the bungee that will tear or not tear, are apart of that face and its emptiness—forgotten. Hands extended, he lingers streamlined, wanting to reach down and dig his fingers into the icy, clay-like floor, to take root and await transformation into a strange submarine tree, to listen intently and in peace to the vast silence, until some spirit awakes him.