Polaroids from the Dead: And Other Short Stories Read online

  Anyway, Columbia is also preoccupied as she undresses her children, preparing them for the rumbling sleep-inducing drive back over the mountains later that night. While she has enjoyed her evening hanging out amid the parking lot scene and chatting with the Deadheads who rambled past the van, she’s angry with her husband, Ezekiel. She’s not mad at him for leaving her out in the parking lot with the children while he attended the concert—three weeks old is simply too young for a baby to attend a concert. Instead Columbia is angry with Ezekiel because of his neglectful behavior back at their house, at their small redwood-shingled geodesic dome in the Sierras of Lassen County.

  “Bundle up, sweetie,” she tells Luke. “We’re heading home soon.”

  “Back to our house?” asks Luke.

  “Yes,” Columbia says, placing the baby, Logan, on the passenger seat. “Back to the dome.” She helps button on the older children’s bedclothes: men’s flannel shirts bought for twenty-nine cents apiece at St. Vincent’s Thrift Shop in Reno. She rights a tipped-over canister of rice, then sweeps the spillage through a rust hole in the floor.

  Yes, she is angry with Ezekiel—Ezekiel had rented a children’s plastic swimming pool in Susanville for Logan’s wet-birthing. Not that Logan’s birth hadn’t gone well, mind you—almost deliciously painless, with Logan weighing almost twice as much as Luke and Shasta had combined. Rather, the problem is that Ezekiel never bothered to empty out the swimming pool of the afterbirth and water. The mixture has been sitting in the swimming pool outside the dome, day in, day out, for weeks, evolving into a bizarre dead playboy’s layered cocktail—a rusty tomato aspic topped with a pissy yellow vinegar solution. Columbia is disgusted thinking of drought-parched bears and wolves and eagles up in the mountains sipping her fluids; Ezekiel, on the other hand, is aroused by the thought. Columbia is unable to make Ezekiel’s mental leap from abomination to mythic sensuality.

  When Ezekiel emerges from the concert, which ought to be soon, at least he’d be too out of it to continue the terse mood that had marked their drive from northwest California through the Highway 24 tunnel into Oakland earlier today. Columbia is, she supposes, being uptight. But really. And those poor people in Susanville must want their rented swimming pool back soon. And where will the money come from to pay them? And when is it ever going to be cleaned?

  The twins jiggle sweetly under their quilts, and Kashmir and Vanilla snuffle up against them providing warmth. Circling the children’s necks are purple neon glow-strip necklaces made of plastic given to them by Ezekiel’s tree-planting partner, Pete, before the show.

  The children are tired and a touch edgy. The drumming of rain on the van’s steel roof is enervating them. They want a story. Columbia, atop her stool propped next to the doors, and peering out the tiny windows that face the Coliseum far in the distance, tries to improvise, thinking of the stories her mother told her, growing up in the commune in Mendocino. She thinks of her world. She sweeps a streak of dirty hair away from her young brow.

  “Once upon a time,” she begins, “there was an enchanted city.”

  “A real city?” asks Shasta.

  “Yes, honey, a real city.”

  “A city with deer?” asks Luke.

  “Yes, honey, with deer.” Columbia starts again. “Once upon a time there was an enchanted city next to the ocean whose citizens, favored by God, lived with great abundance, and were blessed with lights and bridges and spires and horses that never grew tired.”

  “Don’t forget the deer,” adds Luke.

  “Yes, honey, and deer. And the citizens of the enchanted city were grateful for their blessings. But the enchanted city had only one problem, and the problem was that the sky above them would not bring forth rain.

  Ed Dubrowsi/Archive Photos

  “And so the enchanted city was bone dry—dry for so long its citizens could barely remember the feel of water falling on their skins. Year after year the citizens of the city prayed for the rains, but year after year, the rains passed the city by. The prayers of the citizens continued—louder and louder—and still the rains would not arrive. The beauty and wonder of their city began to feel tainted, as though a curse had been placed upon them all.

  “And then one day, a skeleton walked into the drought-stricken enchanted city, and the people of the city were afraid, thinking the skeleton must surely be connected to the drought.

  “And the frightened king, standing before the skeleton, asked, ‘Skeleton, who are you, and why have you visited our enchanted city?’

  “And the skeleton said to the king, ‘Who am I? I am you—I am the skeleton that lies inside you all. I have come to tell you to fear not—your city is not cursed as you think. But I have come instead to tell you a fact you all must know.’

  “‘What must we know, then?’ asked the king, his legs clattering, as were those of his subjects.

  “‘You must know,’ answered the skeleton, ‘that while you pray for rain, you are also praying a different prayer—a prayer so deep and strong and insistent you are hardly able to know you are praying it.’

  “‘Oh, and what may this prayer be?’ asked the king, now more curious than afraid.

  “‘It is simple,’ replied the skeleton. ‘While you live in mortal splendor—with glass elevators and silk shirts and grapes in December—the price you pay for your comfort is a collapsed vision of heaven—the loss of the ability to see pictures in your heads of an afterlife. You pray for rain, but you are also praying for pictures in your heads that will renew your faith in an afterlife.’”

  Columbia gives a sideways glance; the children are drifting off.

  “Well—the king and his citizens scoffed and, thinking the skeleton mad, lost their fears and sent him away from their city, and then once again they resumed their communal prayer for rain.

  “But shortly after the skeleton’s departure, the earth trembled, and the bridges shook and broke and the roads of the city tumbled down and the glass elevators cracked and the inexhaustible horses of the city were unable to ride and there was much destruction.

  “The skeleton once again returned to the enchanted city and said to the king and the citizens who once again stood before him, ‘I am the skeleton that lies within each and every one of you. I am the skeleton just underneath your lips, your eyeballs, your flesh—the skeleton that silently carries both your heart and your mind. And once more, I tell you that while you live in mortal splendor, the price you pay for this material comfort is a collapsed vision of heaven—an inability to see any longer pictures in your heads of an afterlife. You pray for rain, but you also, at a deeper level, pray for pictures in your heads that will renew your faith in an afterlife.’”

  Luke asks if the citizens were grumpy people, but Columbia says no. They had tried hard to do their best, but they could only believe what they saw with their eyes. She says, “Well, once again the king and his citizens scoffed and they drove the skeleton from their city and resumed their prayers for rain, quickly forgetting the skeleton’s words. And shortly thereafter a fire swept through the parched city and burned the houses of the rich and the houses of the good and the houses of the righteous. There was a great loss of beauty and the hearts of the city’s people again were greatly hurt.

  “And yet again, the skeleton came forth into the enchanted city and said to the citizens, ‘Must I tell you again? You live in mortal splendor, yet the price you pay for this comfort is a collapsed vision of heaven—an inability to see any longer pictures in your head of an afterlife. You pray for rain, but you also pray for pictures in your heads that will renew your faith in an afterlife.’

  “And yes, yet again the king and the citizens of the enchanted city cast the skeleton from its burned gates, continuing their prayers for rain and denying the skeleton’s words. And shortly thereafter, another trial visited the city—the artists who would create and rebuild the burned-down houses and collapsed roads and bridges of the city began to sicken and die. The source of the city’s beauty and wonder was be
ing forever lost. And at this the king and the citizens wept furiously and said, ‘Enough! Enough! We are losing our soul—something too valuable and irreplaceable is dying and we are powerless.’

  “And so when the skeleton returned to the city one final time, the king said to him, ‘O skeleton, we were wrong to have ignored your wise words. O skeleton, please—our suffering has become too great for us to bear. We are losing our soul. We realize now that our city’s splendor tricked us into forgetting about death and the afterlife, and that we have secretly prayed for those images to appear to us to remind us of what lies beyond. But please, tell us what we need to know now to stop any further needless death and destruction from being visited upon ourselves.’

  “And at this, the skeleton smiled his skeleton smile of teeth and calcium and bones and said, ‘King, you have prayed for rain, but at a deeper level, you have also prayed for evidence to remind you, amid your splendor, of the death which does await us all. Accept the fact that as we live, we are also dead and all of your other prayers will be answered.’

  “‘Thank you,’ said the King. ‘As I am alive, I am also dead.’

  “And with this, the skeleton raised his bones to heaven and brought forth a bolt of lighting and a flood of rain onto the enchanted city—on its spires and bridges and roads and horses and glass elevators, and the citizens of the enchanted city fell to their knees in the rain amid their glittering abundance and thanked the skeleton for his generosity and then danced in honor of all that is good in this world and all that is good in the next.”

  Columbia looks at the sleeping children in the cool darkness of the van. These are her children; the grandchildren of her own hippie mother.

  Suddenly Columbia feels old, or rather, she feels she has reached the point where she can never think of herself as being young again. She feels she has been a conduit through which has flowed an entity older and larger than herself—her mother, perhaps, or the ideas of her mother’s times.

  Years ago, Columbia once asked her mother, Melissa, what the sixties were like. Columbia greatly wanted to know how it felt to be alive then. Melissa, wistful, planting cilantro seeds in the soil-filled indentations of an egg carton, smiled, looked out the stained-glass window and said, “Honey, I’d love to tell you, but it was like a friend you loved very much who died of a horrible disease. While you might make new friends in your life, the new friends can never truly appreciate your old, dead friend because no matter how much you try to describe that dead friend, your new friends never knew the old friends when the old friends were alive. You just had to be there.”

  Despite the obliqueness of her reply, Melissa couldn’t help but regale Columbia with endless tales of that long-gone era: tales of gardens and horses and moonlight and tear gas and beards and electricity. And from these tales, Columbia knows that at the heart of the sixties dream lies a core truth, a germ that refuses to die, an essence of purity and love that is open to abuse—and continually abused—but without which Columbia could not live her own life peacefully.

  Columbia looks at the Coliseum. Any minute now Ezekiel will emerge, ready for the ride home. They will sleep in the parking lot tonight, she decides. In the morning they will drive home.

  Anyhow, the concert is over. Columbia’s face, feebly lit by Coliseum-parking lot sodium-vapor lights, is barely visible from outside the van’s rain-beaded windows, and her face recedes into the depths of the vehicle, as though sinking into a deep dark pond. All that is visible now from outside the van is water dribbling down the roof onto its darkened glass. Water, water, ceaseless and nourishing, flowing everywhere—flowing down the Highway 24 tunnel up on the mountain, cascading from the Christmas lights garlanding nuclear aircraft carriers in the harbor, through the branches of eucalyptus trees that survived the fire—cold and clear, no hint of stopping—down all surfaces—over the oxidizing melted consumer durables in the Oakland Hills, into the dens of animals sleeping through the storm, through forgotten windows left open in the city—water, water, beating a drum on the roof of a van in a parking lot, the van in which Columbia’s children are dreaming of a dancing skeleton. The skeleton that dances inside of me. The skeleton that dances inside of you.

  Ed Taylor/FPG

  Gary Randall/FPG

  Part Two

  Portraits of People and Places

  Al Harvey

  11

  LIONS GATE BRIDGE, VANCOUVER, B.C., CANADA

  PERHAPS IN YOUR CITY THERE IS A STRUCTURE SO POTENT AND GLORIOUS THAT ITS existence in your mind becomes the actual architecture of your mind—a structure through which all of your dreams and ideas and hopes are funneled.

  In my city, Vancouver, there is one such structure, a fairy-tale bridge called Lions Gate Bridge. Its three delicate spans link the city of Vancouver with the suburbs of the North Shore, where I grew up, and with the mountains and wilderness of British Columbia beyond those suburbs.

  The only other road access to the North Shore is five miles down the harbor to the utilitarian and unfortunately rather charmless Second Narrows Bridge: a six-lane people-mover about which little more can be said without taxing the limits of charity.

  Lions Gate Bridge is by no means a practical bridge—it looks to be spun from liquid sugar, and, unfortunately, it now seems to be dissolving like sugar. By urban planning and engineering standards it borders on being a disaster, but then isn’t it true of life in general that nothing is more seductive than the dying starlet? The lost cowboy? The self-destructive jazz musician?

  The bridge has three harrowingly narrow lanes. Depending on the time of day, commuters on the Lions Gate may have either one or two of these lanes apportioned to them. The rule of thumb is, tormentingly, the more traffic moving in your direction, the higher the probability of having only one lane.

  But enough about the bridge’s technicalities. We tolerate goodness knows how much from the people we love; the same goes for objects we love, too. I figure I have driven across the bridge maybe five or six thousand times in my life—that’s all the way from Vancouver to Halifax and back—and never in all these miles have I once tired of the view, endlessly renewing, endlessly glorious.

  Some of my happiest memories of Vancouver, or my life, for that matter, have been simple memories of driving across Lions Gate Bridge. In my mind, the AM radio is playing Heart’s “Dreamboat Annie,” the sulfur piles of North Vancouver shine their dim yellow hues, and the ocean and the boats and the mountains of West Vancouver shimmer like Tina Louise’s gown.

  Maybe I am headed to my parents’ house or maybe I am off to the airport—the bridge’s very existence is a metaphor for journey.

  Like most regular Lions Gate Bridge drivers, I have my own little set of bridge quirks and observations. For example I get angry if I see a driver who discourteously breaks the one-two/one-two pattern of merging onto the north end: four lanes of traffic grudgingly, yet with decorum, braid into one.

  Also, I have noticed that within moments of driving onto the bridge from the north end, most people instantly turn on their radios or stereos. I have no theory why they do this, but they just lunge for the dials.

  As well, I have always noticed that traffic headed cityward mysteriously slows to a crawl once it hits the bridge’s first draping span. It then shortly resumes its normal speed. I ascribe this predictable slowdown to people who are not from Vancouver. When they suddenly encounter the beauty that surrounds them from mid-bridge—the quartz of the city to the south; the freighters below, plump with wheat and ore; the cruise liners tramping away off in the distance; as well as the swoop of the bridge above them—the out-of-towners are overwhelmed. They respond by jamming on their brakes.

  In an odd way this makes me proud of my city—proud to live here. I never begrudge this inevitable slowdown.

  For people who don’t normally drive Lions Gate Bridge, discussion of bridge traffic by regular drivers can seem endlessly bothersome and incomprehensible:

  “How was bridge traffic?”

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sp; “One lane.”

  “Standstill?”

  “Yup.”

  “Both lanes the other way empty?”

  “Yup.”

  “Ferry must have come in at Horseshoe Bay.”

  “I was going to take the Second Narrows but I thought Lions Gate would be clear after seven P.M.”

  “Do ferries arrive on the odd hour or the even hour?”

  “Oh, and there was a stall…”

  (Insert scream from non-bridge driver here.)

  A bridge memory.

  One night in 1982, shortly after midnight when art school had closed, I was driving in my old rusted yellow VW Rabbit through the Stanley Park causeway that funnels into the bridge toward the North Shore. Suddenly, the traffic in my lane ground to a stop and traffic in the lanes from the other direction vanished altogether.

  Something was up.

  I turned off my ignition and walked a short way nearer the bridge’s south approach, where I quickly learned, as did the other drivers who emerged from their cars (with little question marks inside the thought balloons above their heads) that there was “a jumper” up in the bridge’s riggings.