“Eating it with what?”
“Cucumbers, tomatoes, some pickled turnip.”
“At least I didn’t call when you were having sex.”
“This is worse.”
“You’re way serious about your kibby.”
“So entirely serious.”
“I’ve just been radically clamshelled,” I said, which is surfer lingo for being enfolded by a large collapsing wave and wiped off your board.
Bobby said, “You at the beach?”
“I’m speaking figuratively.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Sometimes it’s best,” I said, meaning that someone might be tapping his phone.
“I hate this crap.”
“Get used to it, bro.”
“Kibby spoiler.”
“I’m looking for a missing weed.”
A
“Weed?” Bobby asked.
“A totally small weed.”
“You playing at being Nancy Drew again?”
“In Nancy work up to my neck,” I confirmed.
“Kak,” he said, which along this stretch of coast is not a nice thing for one surfer to call another, though I believed I detected a note of affection in his voice that was almost equal to the disgust.
A sudden flapping caused me to leap to my feet before I realized that the source of the sound was just a night bird settling into the branches overhead. A nighthawk or an oilbird, a lone nightingale or chimney swift out of its element, nothing as large as an owl.
“This is stone-dead serious, Bobby. I need your help.”
“You see what you get for ever going inland?”
Bobby lives far out on the southern horn of the bay, and surfing is his vocation and avocation, his life’s purpose, the foundation of his philosophy, not merely his favorite sport but a true spiritual enterprise. The ocean is his cathedral, and he hears the voice of God only in the rumble of the waves. As far as Bobby is concerned, little of real consequence ever occurs farther than half a mile from the beach.
Peering into the branches overhead, I was unable to spot the now quiet bird, even though the moonlight was bright and though the struggling laurel was not richly clothed in leaves. To Bobby, I said again, “I need your help.”
“You can do it yourself. Just stand on a chair, tie a noose around your neck, and jump.”
“Don’t have a chair.”
“Pull the shotgun trigger with your toe.”
In any circumstance, he can make me laugh, and laughter keeps me sane.
An awareness that life is a cosmic joke is close to the core of the philosophy by which Bobby, Sasha, and I live. Our guiding principles are simple: Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; and grab all the fun you can. Don’t give much thought to yesterday, don’t worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie. Sometimes black humor is the only kind we can summon, but even dark laughter can sustain.
I said, “Bobby, if you knew the name of the weed, you’d already be here.”
He sighed. “Bro, how am I ever going to be a fully realized, super-maximum, jerk-off slacker if you keep insisting I have a conscience?”
“You’re doomed to be responsible.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“The furry dude is missing, too,” I said, meaning Orson.
“Citizen Kane?”
Orson was named after Orson Welles, the director of
I made an admission that I found difficult to voice: “I’m scared for him.”
“I’ll be there,” Bobby said at once.
“Cool.”
“Where’s
Wings thrummed, and another bird or possibly two joined the one already roosting in the laurel.
“Dead Town,” I told him.
“Oh, man. You never listen.”
“I’m a bad boy. Come in by the river.”
“The river?”
“There’s a Suburban parked there. Belongs to a mondo psycho, so be careful. The fence is cut.”
“Do I have to creep or can I strut?”
“Sneaky doesn’t matter anymore. Just watch your ass.”
“Dead Town,” he said disgustedly. “What am I going to do with you, young man?”
“No TV for a month?”
“Kak,” he called me again. “Where in D Town?”
“Meet me at the movies.”
He didn’t know Wyvern a fraction as well as I did, but he would be able to find the movie theater in the commercial area adjacent to the abandoned houses. As a teenager, not yet so religiously devoted to the seashore that it had become his monastery, he had for a while dated a military brat who lived on-base with her parents.
Bobby said, “We’ll find them, bro.”
I was on a perilous emotional ledge. The threat of my own death troubles me far less than you might expect, because from the earliest days of childhood, I’ve lived with an awareness of my mortality that is both more acute and more chronic than what most people experience; but I’m crushed flat by the loss of someone I love. Grief is sharper than the tools of any torturer, and even the prospect of such a loss now seemed to have severed my vocal cords.
“Hang loose,” Bobby said.
“I’m just about untied,” I said thinly.
“That’s too loose.”
He hung up and so did I.
More wings beat a tattoo through the dark air, and feathers rattled leaves as another bird settled with the growing flock in the upper branches of the laurel.
None of them had yet raised a voice. The cry of the nighthawk, as it jinks through the air, snapping insects in its sharp beak, is a distinctive
The quiet of these birds was eerie and disturbing, not because I believed they were gathering to peck me to pieces in an homage to the Hitchcock film, but because this sounded too much like the brief but deep stillness that often settles upon the natural world in the wake of sudden violence. When a coyote catches a rabbit and snaps its spine or when a fox bites into a mouse and shakes it to death, the dying cry of the prey, even if nearly inaudible, brings a hush to the immediate area. Though Mother Nature is beautiful, generous, and comforting, she is also bloodthirsty. The never-ending holocaust over which she presides is one aspect of her that isn’t photographed for
