Three Snippets
The grayness of the sky flooded in through the small aperture in the top corner of the room; the sprawling piles of books were painted every which color, and yet it seemed, at least for the moment, that all color and form had been drowned out by the grayness, waterlogged and heavy. On either side of me, poorly arranged stacks of books rested haphazardly and precariously. This was hardly a bookstore, by the looks of it—at least in the traditional sense—there wasn’t a single shelf to be found, and none of the stacks, which loomed up towards the ceiling with reckless abound, were labeled or organized in any apparent manner (imagine a bookstore with no categories! Imagine a highway diner with no eggs, a memory without a girl…!). Categories that one wants—unknowingly, that is, until you are without them—from the shelves in a bookstore: genre, price, author. Even the more personal, less practical categories that one could expect from their own private collection were absent: color, age, language. Perhaps the books did find some order for themselves, if only it were in a secret inter-textual (connecting novels silently between their closed covers) language that I was too human to observe. Or perhaps it were the fact that the books were piled on top of each other horizontally, so that in order to read their titles, one had to crane their neck and read sideways, as one looks at a famous painting or sculpture one hasn’t the faintest clue of how to digest (intelli)gently.
After some intermediate amount of time I find an eclectic handful of books to take home with me: a picture book of English chapels and countrysides, an French novel in translation, and a collection of what seemed to be totally unrelated essays regarding contemporary matters (contemporary at the time of its writing, or assemblage, that is) and hand them to the wrinkled shopkeeper, a bald Israeli with comforting old skin, full of dots and marks, battle-worn by his life collecting, and not cataloging, among of course a lifetime of other ventures to which I am sadly not privy.
He tests my Hebrew, and I fail—we switch to English, and he asks me if I am married. I respond in the negative and he asks why not. I answer something about love, to which he chuckles: “and if she has a nice family? And if she’s wealthy?” No, no, something once more to do with love—I hold the line. “Let’s ask him”—he beckons over a pious-looking twenty-something year old with curly, orange sidelocks and a top hat, and they talk in Hebrew. There’s some laughing, and a moment later, a hand with four fingers gets held up by the pious man—I assume one for each of his children. His fingers are covered in red hair, are thin and dehydrated-looking, and the number four takes an odd, nefarious, quality when expressed by this man and his hairy fingers.
After too long their conversation wraps up, and the shopkeeper again turns to me, like I hadn’t been waiting there patiently and expectantly for my books, which are sitting in a neat little pile in his lap. Yes, I’m still interested in love. I manage to get my books and exit quietly, proudly, and not having conceded anything to the number four. It is still gray outside.
~
The tide pulls back against our feet. From where we are standing, about halfway between where the waves foamy crests begin to furl onto themselves and where the thinnest slice of the tide, the meekest remnant of Poseidon’s rage, crawls up onto the sand before beginning its return journey, the water rises just above the balls of my ankles, and the pull of the tide is subtle but persistent; this being a particularly dangerous combination of traits, advertised on large white signs with red lettering, “Beware of Rip Tide,” along with an illustration.
The losing of ground here quite literally mirrored the state of my feelings towards the woman on shore standing opposite me. There was something about the erosion of sand under my feet—the dematerialization of the floor and my sinking into it with only the slightest perception of my doing so—that captured physically the silent intrusion of love into my heart for this curious, wavy-haired girl. She spoke little of anything in public, and alone almost seemed to be concerned with matters far off and spiritual, and never quite relevant; yet through her cryptic speech—comprised of a majority of non-sequiturs and jumbled, half-swallowed sentences—the sand I had built my life upon, everything that I had known and felt with such severity, had quickly melted out from underneath my toes. She watched me from her spot on the dry sand—as she was afraid of the waves; the large red-and-white billboards did nothing to help my case in trying to convince her to join me—with an intensity that only one who reserved their speech for holy matters, as she did, could: not a single word nor gaze of hers was taken for granted. I wondered if it was a technique that she had somehow cultivated for herself, some type of conscious titration of the mundaneness of the world in order to protect her fragile soul, or whether it was how she was born, and knew of no other way to go about life. Either way, this ability of hers was new to me, and from my spot amongst the waves, I realized the full force of how she and it had captured me over the last few weeks since meeting her acquaintance. Still, with her unnaturally large black eyes, she appeared to be staring straight through me; it was a game we’d invented, since she wouldn’t enter the waves with me—she’d watch me from the shore, and with my back to the rest of the ocean, I was supposed to watch her face for subtle hints of approaching waves. Truthfully, I had not a care for the waves, and instead believed that all we both wanted to do was stare at the other, and the game was a wonderfully designed excuse to do so...
~
and yet the grandness of the scenery had much less of an impact on me then than it does now, reaching me only through the convex lens of memory. Much more striking to me then was the nervousness at my very being, the dryness of the desert air and how it made my upper lip crack and scab over. Still, to me now, everything that had filtered in through my unsuspecting periphery, around the nervousness and the cracked, numbed lips, comes back at once when the year approaches a particularly crumbly autumn and the brightness of the sun becomes simply undeniable: namely, the whiteness of the mountainside, how I would wake up in my sleeping bag and make my way barefoot across the cold, wooden walkway at dawn to the makeshift cafeteria of the research station, and pour myself a steaming mug of tea, along with a slice or two of crust bread with peanut butter. From my seat over the mountain hills, just beginning to glow in the morning, I can just barely make out now the daybreak, and rarefied air hovering like heat does over asphalt in the dead of the summer. But rather this was a cold phenomenon, and I would like to keep the details here as such: stark, crystalline, vibrating.
We scoured the mountain for three days for a particular kind of stone, (what kind, my memory hasn’t been kind enough to grant me just yet, maybe one day; perhaps on my deathbed, I shall utter some Latin name to my grandchildren and they will be perplexed, and I will have succeeded, in a certain sense) and having not found it among the piles of shard-like earth, returned each day back to the compound defeated but nonetheless satisfied with the effort of our day’s search.
Someone would concoct some inconsequential dinner (I concerned myself more with my solemn breakfasts) and I would wash the dishes. There was a shelf above the sink, a wooden one, one which were stacked horizontally a pile of CD’s, all in Spanish, and a small CD player—from these I would choose one and scrub leisurely to bright, plucky guitars and songs I couldn’t understand. Then, all retiring to their barracks and their sleeping bags, I would be once again left alone (recall my nervousness at life) to enjoy the darkened, wooden cafeteria, which at night much resembled the inside of a sauna, and help myself to more tea and peanut butter.