Polaroids from the Dead: And Other Short Stories Page 7

  D.

  Neal Peters Collection

  15

  HAROLDING IN WEST VANCOUVER

  IN BRITAIN THERE IS A SUBGROUP OF CITIZENS CALLED TRAIN-SPOTTERS WHO SPEND their afternoons sitting on railway embankments clocking the passage of local trains. In North America there is a certain subgroup of teens—“Harolds”—obsessed with hanging about cemeteries, continually witnessing the passage of life into death. (Etymology: the seventies cult-film classic Harold and Maude, in which a young man obsessed with death frequents funerals and graveyards as a hobby.)

  I was once very much a Harold.

  The cemetery I frequented was the Capilano View Cemetery, the municipal burial ground of West Vancouver, located in the British Properties—a hillside Pacific Palisades/Glendale-ish suburb of Vancouver that was spawned, ex nihilo, from the West Coast rain forests mid-century. (Its growth continued well into the seventies.)

  From about the ages of eighteen to twenty-one, I Harolded away almost weekly at the Capilano View Cemetery, sitting on its benches, strolling among its neatly mown stones, seeing who had died when, and at what age. Implicit in the act of being a Harold is hubris, a self-conscious notion of one’s own immortality. Harold laughs in the face of death (har har!), and, most important, he derives a specific hit of pleasure from knowing death exists, yet not fearing it.

  Capilano View Cemetery is the only part of the British Properties to have any history of credible duration. Its first burial was in February 1926. The cemetery’s topiaried ilexes, yews, cedars, spruces and cherries, are all aged roughly fiftysomething, and thus supply the suburb’s young Harolds (I was not alone) with visible, capital-H history simply not available locally at the Park Royal Shopping Centre (1950) or amid the post-and-beam Homes of Tomorrow flanked by split-leaf Japanese maples lining the British Properties’ steep, twisting streets.

  Capilano View’s ten spartan acres speak of Mies Van der Rohe’s uncompromising minimalism; no protrusive tombstones are allowed (all stones are flush with the soil and ideal for Friday-night Frisbee throws); all “floral offerings” must fit into cups recessed into the soil so that the container does not peek above the earth’s surface. Plastic flowers are allowed only between November 1 and April 1. The cemetery is flanked, to the north and east, by a great West Coast rain forest. There are rhododendrons; there are monkey-puzzle trees.

  Harold Lit: I used to read stories about tea planters and rubber-plantation owners who died in hot climates and were buried on the same day, for fear of rot, in lands far away from home. Part of growing up in West Vancouver was to feel as if you were growing up in the middle of nowhere: a zero-history, zero-ideology bond-issuing construct teetering on the edge of the continent. Oh, how I identified with those tea planters! To be buried on the edge of nowhere is to question one’s sense of existence. Who are we, if we have no landscape to call our own?

  I often visit cemeteries whenever I am in a new city: They are often a city’s locale of greatest respite. Toronto’s Mount Pleasant is as silent as the womb; Tokyo’s Akasaka cemetery is usually nearly empty save for a few specialized visiting days and has the sloppy, stacks-of-dishes feel of a bachelor’s apartment.

  Cemetery architecture tells us much about the way a culture relates to its ancestry. Mexico’s dazzling, almost optically painful marzipan crypt confections convey a they-are-still-alive rapport with the departed; Ireland’s mournful, lichen-encrusted Celtic crosses, snaggletoothed over tufts of unscythed bracken, speak of loneliness—and of the acceptance that we all live with one foot in the grave. And West Vancouver’s highly municipally ordinated, gridded and near-invisible gravestones treat dying as a low-fuss return to the nature that is contained in the rain forest enclosing the graveyard. One’s soul is simply ATM’ed into the forest next door.

  I stopped being a Harold because of one particular incident: In the summer of 1983 I was playing a toy xylophone on a cement bench at the extreme east edge of the cemetery. I was trying to duplicate the opening sequence of notes from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s 1981 hit, “Joan of Arc” (a brief flirtation with Catholicism).

  A few days later, reading a copy of the local biweekly North Shore News at a local Midas Muffler shop, I learned that there had been a grave robbery at the cemetery not a day after I had been playing the xylophone—and not far from my prized Harold’s bench. A decayed head, or other body parts had been exhumed and stolen, thieves unknown.

  Well, that was that—I immediately ceased Harolding the Capilano View. Mortality (in the form of the most depressing ilk of trailer-park evil) had crept in from the forest and invaded my pristine Harolding site. I remember being depressed and terrified at somehow being implicated in this random and seamy debauch. And to clinch my avoidance of the cemetery, the newspapers also soon gave the news that West Vancouver was about to chainsaw and expand a further five acres of rain forest adjoining the cemetery’s lovely north side.

  Expansion in the New World is invariably at the expense of nature—never at the expense of previously existing structures. And to someone completely of the New World, the ravaging can be too painful to watch.

  Ciao, Harold.

  I returned to Capilano View recently, though—ten years later. By one’s early thirties, loss in all of its forms invariably makes its presence known. I felt an urgent need to visit Harold’s old stomping grounds.

  It was not a sunny day as I revisited Capilano View, and I was surprised by what I saw. Yes, its Miesian green fields, flat as billiard tables, were unchanged. But the five-acre chainsawed clear-cut to the north had been left to go to seed. I had been expecting a brand-new golf green peppered with grave markers; instead the ex-forest sprouted a dense, furry hippie’s beard of several thousand leafless alder trees—millions of ganglions of leafless branches, poking upward, all of them receding into the fog upon the hill, like brain dendrites cultured on a sterile agar, no longer connected to a sentient being and hence incapable of thought.

  Mixed feelings: the fact that the forest had not been destroyed—merely “repurposed” as an alder glade—might, at first, seem like a reprieve, but it was not. An alder is a weed tree, which, by B.C. standards, is a mere precursor of destruction that has not yet been fully completed—destruction on hiatus. Alders mean that the bulldozers have yet to arrive; alders mean that the Circle K minimart is still being designed; alders mean that the complete erasure of Nature is still yet to come. A field of Kentucky bluegrass would have at least betokened some form of completion; alders instead betokened Nature having her back broken on the rack.

  But this is tree-hugger talk.

  “It’s a B.C. thing.”

  Whatever.

  The fact is that I felt oh-so-much older standing next to this brain-dead glade, this copse of erased memory. Its millions of thick, chewy wet branches, three times my own height, all bunched ridiculously close together, comprised a challenge to me—a challenge impossible to refuse.

  And so, forgetting propriety, and soaking my sweater and pants and shoes, I stepped into this monoculture of wet cellulose fronds—into its mud and into its leather-strap branches that slapped my face, trudging deeper and deeper, as though into a field of tall, tall corn—and I went out looking for Harold.

  Archive Photos

  16

  TWO POSTCARDS FROM THE BAHAMAS

  POSTCARD ONE:

  THE WHOLE WORLD

  AND AN ENTIRE LIFE

  IN A DAY

  I WALK AROUND THE ISLAND AND I SEE MOMENTS OF BEAUTY THAT DAZZLE ME WITH their transience: sunset inside a wall built of green bottles up above the graveyard; a hibiscus flower inside a bottle atop the wall; a yellow moth atop a yellow flower. These small moments become memories.

  I think I am losing my memory, and while I know it’s natural, I think I’m too young for this to be starting, and it frightens me a bit. I was thinking about this early this morning while I was walking down an Island road.

  There was a hurricane here a few years ago and many trees fe
ll down and many houses lost their roofs. Roads that once had shade now sit in blinding sun, and once-familiar landscapes now confuse.

  As well as being worried about losing my memory, another thing is happening, which doesn’t frighten me, but does concern me: I am starting to confuse my dream life with my waking life.

  “Didn’t I already take that medicine?”

  “But I did return that library book.”

  “I once walked down this road before, but wasn’t it different then?”

  This morning I figured that if you lose your memory more or less completely, then each individual day becomes your entire life—because the next day you’ve already forgotten what came before. For a person with no memory, existence becomes a chain of discrete, day-to-day lives.

  So anyway, today I figured that since this is where I’m headed anyway, I might as well attempt to see today itself as representative of my whole life, or rather, as a whole life unto itself.

  I didn’t do a great deal today, but simply by being open to the day’s shortness and viewing it through a new lens made it feel as though much actually had happened, or that I did do a great deal.

  I saw kids playing basketball; I saw honeybees bumbling about a tuft of cilantro flowers; I saw a mockingbird and a dove, each atop separate telephone wires, speaking to each other.

  I wondered how I would be judged if just today were to be my entire life. Was I being good? Was I being evil? What sort of judgment would be passed on me?

  To merely observe the world seemed insufficient. I began to wonder if I could hurl myself into the world…do more than simply exist.

  And so I continued walking about the Island. I saw many people with sunburns and I said hello to them. I felt that one way of feeling at least more relevant was to express more humanity—to be more humane—for as I age I indeed notice that one’s sense of humanity can vanish and you wake up one morning feeling not quite as…human as you once did. So saying hello was a small start in this direction.

  Toward sunset I walked toward the harbor, past some large houses, and I got to thinking about how some people are rich in worldly things, and how some people are not, but how silly it seems if life is only a day long. And I thought of all the rich people I know, and how so many of them sit alone in their living rooms saying to themselves, “So…what’s next?” And I thought of all the not-so-rich people I know, and how desperately they want to be alone inside a cool, clean living room saying, “So…what’s next?”

  I arrived at the harbor just as a tangerine sun was sinking into turquoise waters charged with angel fish and minnows. I watched this from a bench, and an old man who is known locally for telling rambling stories to audiences who would probably rather not listen came up to me and rambled, as he tends to do. Other people walking by gave me knowing looks of sympathy as well as relief at their not being in my situation.

  And so this old man and I watched the sun go down and he said that when the Day of Judgment comes, each of us will melt down into the earth, gently and slowly, just as the sun melts down into the ocean. I was startled, as judgment was very much on my mind today. After this, the man left in pursuit of fresher audiences, and I walked home, thinking.

  Normally when the sun goes down, the world loses its attractions and I reach for a cocktail the way my hand reaches for the car radio’s ON button when the car hits a red light. But tonight I didn’t, and I decided to pass by the outside patio bar where many people were enjoying rum drinks. I went home and observed the night.

  There was heat lightning on the horizon, over in the direction of Nassau, as well as an unusual number of shooting stars. The stars themselves were dense in the sky tonight, like an enormous batik fabric.

  Outside my house there was a woman standing beside her bicycle scrutinizing the stars. She pointed out a constellation to me. I thanked her but told her I didn’t want to know any constellations. She asked me why, and I told her it was because many years ago I had learned the names of all the plants, and I wanted to at least keep the skies a mystery.

  But then she told me she had no choice but to learn the constellations. I asked her why, and she said she had two sons who attended school halfway around the world, and so the only common ground they had was the sky.

  We said our good-byes and I sat down on my stoop, a lizard scurrying to my right, wasps sleeping in their nest in the rafters outside the bathroom window, and I felt my day coming to an end.

  I guess the thing about today is that I spent it alone—not with you. Are you the person I’m thinking of right now? Maybe you are. Where are you? Where did you go? The day is fading and I’m wondering about my next life, tomorrow. I wish it was with you.

  We all have a “you” in our life…someone out there who was to have spent the day with us, but who then went away for some reason. That special “you” is not here now. Nor is the sun inside the green bottles of the graveyard wall, nor is the sun reflecting on the angelfish, now fluttering inside black waters.

  The sun has fallen into the world as I have fallen into the world, but the sun will not be judged for falling whereas I will judge myself.

  And tomorrow when I rise with a new sun and a new life, I will redeem myself and I will find you, and you will be here in my life, and we will walk the Island’s roads together.

  Superstock

  POSTCARD NUMBER TWO:

  POWER FAILURE

  I really wonder whether all memories are the same or if some are “more important” than others. Like many people my age, I was exposed to extreme amounts of well-produced, high-quality information and entertainment from birth onward. The other day I saw a Shake ’n Bake TV commercial, one I had not seen in twenty years, and in a flash, the whole commercial came back to me, as though I had just seen it five minutes ago. So I guess my head is stuffed with an almost-endless series of corporation-sponsored consumer tableaux of various lengths. These “other” commercialized memories are all in my head, somewhere, and this is indeed something worth considering.

  What would it be like to have never had these commercialized images in my head? What if I had grown up in the past or in a nonmedia culture? Would I still be “me”? Would my “personality” be different?

  I think the unspoken agreement between us as a culture is that we’re not supposed to consider the commercialized memories in our head as real, that real life consists of time spent away from TVs, magazines and theaters. But soon the planet will be entirely populated by people who have only known a world with TVs and computers. When this point arrives, will we still continue with pre-TV notions of identity? Probably not. Time continues on: Instead of buying blue Chairman Mao outfits, we shop at the Gap. Same thing. Everybody travels everywhere. “Place” is a joke.

  And here’s something we’ve all noticed: During power failures we sing songs, but the moment the electricity returns, we atomize.

  I am choosing to live my life in a permanent power failure. I look at the screens and glossy pages and I don’t let them become memories.

  When I meet people, I imagine them in a world of darkness. The only lights that count are the sun, candles, the fireplace and the light inside of you, and if I seem strange to you at times, it’s only because I’m switching off the power, trying to help us both, trying to see you and me as the people we really are.

  Superstock

  17

  POSTCARD FROM PALO ALTO

  PALO ALTO TURNED ONE HUNDRED TODAY. PALO ALTO IS WHERE TV’S BRADY BUNCH would have lived (and still might): amid the Arcadian suburban foliage of the mid-San Francisco Peninsula—in shingled Arts and Crafts neighborhoods flocked by eucalyptus, junipers, pears, tree ferns, sequoias and flowering grapefruits—or in quiet rancher-lined streets bursting with Nile lilies and Watsonia, purple Mexican sage and hibiscus; bright yellow flowering patio daisy trees and clematis vines.

  Palo Alto is also home to Hewlett-Packard and hundreds of other Silicon Valley tech firms—each of them also elegantly and discreetly nestled behind precisel
y bermed and groomed grounds—fully considered landscapes politely serenaded into a sunny lull by the intermittent tsk-tsk of sprinklers and the occasional hum of a passing Lexus or giggles of passing youths on bicycles.

  Palo Alto (population 55,900) is perhaps the last fully functioning, fiscally secure middle-class California dreamscape in existence. Its twenty-six square miles are a gracious and charming place in which to live, and there are no caveats on enjoyment of the place. It is a lovely city and it works; it has given the world far more than it has ever taken, and to find any fault would be gratuitous and petty. It is the embodiment of middle-class tranquility and freedom. It is Palo Alto, or a platonic vision of a city like this, that lurks in the backs of many minds as the ideal that is worth fighting for when fighting is called for.

  Stanford University, Palo Alto’s initial engine and raison d’être, was founded in 1891 by railroad tycoon Leyland Stanford in memory of his son, Leyland Jr., who died of cholera during that family’s Italian voyage. The mightily endowed campus, like most coastal California campuses, is an abundant collection of terra-cotta-roofed buldings surrounded by well-established, properly tended foliage. As one drives up University Avenue from downtown Palo Alto—the quarter-mile westward to the main quad buildings, sentineled on both sides by beefy, obviously old Canary Island date palms of Mediterranean aspect—one realizes that this is a place blessed with never having had to scrimp.