1.
The barking forsythia teeth – a real Teddy Roosevelt grin encircling the house. Chester and Gimbley are on the porch. “I wonder if Shakespeare or the supposed priest who wrote Beowulf ever sat around and imagined their folios rewinding themselves back into the insides of a sheep.”
Chester announced this as the tumbleweed fog rolled in from the Gashouse Cove, the Pacific, over the hills, and snaked itself, bounced itself, and pulled itself like a bed sheet over the house, seeking the tip of the chin in a land – one can safely assume – far, far away.
The house had nine occupants: (1) Jules Hadley, a rich man’s son from Newcastle who had left Harvard for San Francisco, started a soccer team from scratch, and then become a bear (Practices were redolent with sayings like, “Let’s see you juggle alternating between the inset of both your feet … Okay. Good. Now eat a fish”), and not a ‘San Francisco Bear,’ mind you, but the real fur and paws kind, (2) Grandma Shufflefoot, the landlady – she’d cut a vase’s worth of forsythia and now the plant was reaching towards the window, trying to drag itself and fellow compatriots inside, (3) a pregnant Detective – Maria Casaco – “You really shouldn’t be working,” said the Chief, prompting her reply: ‘If I can climb this physical marathon mountain, I can put a few half-wits Occam’s Razoring their remaining set of wits to the lowest bidder behind bars” – who had a bed filled with golden retrievers, and, boy, were they unhappy when Jules turned into a bear – though given their constant supine-ity, everyone in the house would ask Maria at least once a day for the chance to lay down in her bed, since all the retrievers looked so comfy and nice – (4) Adam Nicholas, from Ghana, who took to stand-up comedy as a way to develop deep patience, who lined one wall of his room with facsimile dollars from his country, beautiful pieces of art in their own right (especially up against these monochromatic green things, he thought – what gives?), who would have to start looking for a proper job soon – he had just arrived – but was caught up being happy in the city – who claimed to arrive in San Francisco using “Pac Man Logic” (“If you ever see a crowd come out of the Pacific shouting, ‘No-mah! No-mah!’ you’ll now know why,”) walking into the ocean from Cape Hateras and emerging – sopping wet – past Chinese fishermen taking a break on one of the dunes along the Great Highway picking their way through a bowl of noodles while sitting on crates that framed a mattress that bore the graffiti, “Art is The Only Thing That Mattress …” (5) Jim Gimbley, studying to be an engineer and stuck in a hamster wheel of wonder about counterparts a thousand yard’s stare away – thinking about a planet constructing some sort of ‘dam’ to redirect light from a nearby star to their light-deprived land or another chunk of civilization-covered rock establishing the foundation for inter-galactic transit, using the suns as the hubs, the great de-atomizer, reassembling moons built around other locations across the universe, the sun as wormhole, testing the overall structure of the star to ensure that it can maintain its form with large currents of energy running through it, so a ship could be fired at the sun, the thing would de-atomize, zip across the galaxy, and re-assemble at another system, though using anti-matter as rocket fuel (1 gram of antimatter = 20,000 tons of chemical fuel), the Alcubierre warp drive, and laser-beam-pushed ‘sails’ were all more likely candidates for interstellar travel than imagining the universe as a giant conglomeration of neural pathways (6) Dee Flanagan – an Irish girl who had studied Walt Whitman in college and had just come back the day this story began from an interview with the Spanish Consulate near Franklin Street she thought had gone well – (7) Ozzie “Chester” Pagliotti – a food truck driver trying to think of a decent set of post-Industrial skills to add to his resume whose cousin was staying in the house as a guest, and was bent on saying things to shock, like, “Guess what I’m going to name my first child? Africa.” (“What?” Adam replied across the dinner table. “Is he or she going to join a band with Moon Unit Zappa and New Zealand Jones?”) – (8) – a collection of QED particles writing their autobiography: “I was born. No, I wasn’t. Where was I? Oh, yes –“ (9) – and Eddie Vocaphone, entrepreneur, founder of the start-up Bookstore On A Boat, who insisted on using the house for meetings to save money on office space down by, say, the Embarcadero, who would instead get up early to get everyone coffee from Mama’s in Washington Square up in North Beach, braving conversations like —
“How are you doing today, sir?”
“Fine. You?”
“My name’s Jamie. Do you have a minute for clipboard awareness?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. This is a clipboard.”
“And … ?”
Jamie made a face.
“And that’s it.”
— just to get coffee and to see the city – Al’s Attire, Firenze by Night — the graffiti: a biker sitting on a sea horse dragging a BART bus behind them while a bird balances on their finger and updates a phone, the park: a kid who takes a running start on his soccer ball, trips, falls forehead-first onto it and back up onto his feet, steadies himself, and then looks around warily, just to make sure no one else has noticed – as if the air hadn’t filled with horizontal gray scratches signifying a VHS on the speedy reverse – a woman on a blanket who had fallen asleep with a newspaper still open, whose dog casually perused the article propped up by sleeping hands being swept over by birds and like birds a whole flock of books flutter through the morning BART cars, peeping (“I’m not really sure what visceral realism is,” “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia,” “The church is blowing a sad windblown “Kathleen” on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone and goopy …”), the bell on the door rings, the morning customers, one eating ice cream – “I’m doing all my meals in reverse today,” he explained when queried – and with a shrug that says, “Well, all right,” it’s out the door, into the city, and back up the steps into the house Eddie goes – with the windows thrown open to spring, where the occupants and the air are calibrating themselves off each other for the first time in months – spring is the lazy dispensation of multiple hearts like boules into the air – Jules already up and on the phone with other members of the board, TV on, Craig Ferguson announcing that his dancing name used to be, “Dust It Gently,” click, the news, KPIX, “I’m Wendy Tokuda,” something about parking meter rates changing, cringing at the synapse-annulling haze of brassy electronic screens, brain ammonia being spilled into the room, turn the thing off, swat it away, swat it away – there’s work to be done.
“How are we this morning, Jules?”
Eddie sat the coffee down a small tray as Jules gave the bear’s equivalent of a thumbs up, caught up in the conversation with voices scattered across the globe.
“This roster – this roster of ours – how shall it be determined, boys?”
He had placed a phone call to Barcelona’s Antoni Ramallets – the great Barcelona goalkeeper from the 50’s, who would often grab the ball, shout, “No!” at it, then roll it back out onto the grass, yelling after it, “Look out! It bites! And might piss on your leg!” – and asked for advice.
The team managed to snag Karrea Gilbert from the Sounders, Fernandez Suso off the Liverpool Reserves (where he later told his teammates that good-looking girls in Liverpool are called ‘potent,’ like something that exists on the edge of magic, as Truffaut once so pointedly effused), Deane Smalley from Oxford United (who recalled the charity shop with the large sign that read, ‘1000’s of Evening Gowns,’ Frank Turner playing in the nook of a window, Foals the band writing their songs watched over by a watercolor of a German Sheppard, shrimp-like cigarette butts accumulating in ashtrays and makeshift ashtrays), Roly Bonevacic from Jong Ajax (who taught his teammates-turned-friends Dutch slang like, “Graftak” – as in, a “bore,” “liefdesgrot” – as in, “cave of love,” a female’s genitalia, and this – this in particular induced peals of laughter in the club house – “de aaradappels afgieten,” when one is finishing up a trip to the toilet and has to “shake the potatoes dry,”) a kid who played Futsal – that is, football in the salon (presumably amongst all the powdered wigs a Salonierre could find) and – when he was brought to the pitch – began to run about the grass with a feeling of relief, Bořek Dočkal, Tomáš Pekhart (these two were Rammallets’s idea – “I can’t get enough of the Czech U21’s this year,” he said), and Lorenzo Criesteg from Inter-Milan. A phone call narrowed into a plan and the plan moved forward while Jules’s mind moved elsewhere.
Drenched in kittiwakes – seagulls that sound as if a nest of aunts were pummeled out of a paper-mâché party donkey and spread like streamers across the town – Newcastle flitted across Hadley’s mind as the fleshed-out morning filled up San Francisco – sounds of Little Comets, the ghost of Ulysses S. Grant waving up and down the Tyne, art-work being brought into The Biscuit Factory – (“I’m going to go ‘Tyne’ me guitar. It’s always in Tyne. I can drop it into the water, watch it sink to the bottom, and it will remain perfectly in – ” “Williams! Shut. Your. Gobby. Little. Gob.”) – for it was here that he was human, before he became a bear, his two legs taking him down past the church on Neville St., hands in pockets (pockets – oh, how he missed pockets!), stopping at ‘The Dog and Parrot’ to watch ‘Life’ pass by …
There was Walcott Williams , Billy Johnson, a plumber-turned-blogger, and Felix Compañero, the latter of whom had been hired by Newcastle University upon their mutual graduations, a goal all three of them – in varying degrees of private self-confession – had wanted.
“And you’re teaching what, again, Felix?”
Compañero was showing off an idea for an “invention,” which Hadley greeted with disbelief.
“Ziggy’s Ciggies?”
“David Bowie cigarettes for children,” Williams explained.
“Comes with a Ziggy Ciggy Stardust tray, too.”
“Thanks, Billy. But, again, Felix – what are you teaching?”
“Hindi, Hindustani, and Urdu.”
“Where did you find the time to learn that? “ Hadley asked. “We all thought you were going to be an economist.”
He shrugged.
“I went to India and picked it up. And you, Mr. Frost – Mr. Paxman, I presume – how was Harvard?”
“Well, the day before I left, I spent most of my day watching a jazz band in The Pit – a day that felt rich and ebullient – as if Walt Whitman was playing a game of ‘Duck Duck Goose,’ but instead of running around in a circle, just decided to hug whomever he subsequently Goosed. And there were two things noteworthy about the jazz band: one, they played a jazzy version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” for a group of congregatin’ kiddies – one trombonist even crouched down to play at their level; two, when a bus rolled by and honked its horn twice, they responded with two honks of their own without even missing a beat.
“As for the school and the year, it went well – me Da keeps asking me what I’m going to do when I graduate, and I keep saying I’m going to make a football team in the States, which seems mad, is mad, but that’s fine with me. I keep scrawling out all these different designs for kit – Paul Bunyan with a crayon presiding over a half-finished map of the United States, a Sgt. Peppers-like collection of Americans — Kerouac, Martin Luther King, Groucho Marx, Thurgood Marshall, Theodore Roosevelt – who would probably eat the ball, for all I know …”
Billy’s dad – a coal miner – entered the pub with a pit pony.
2.
Later that night, Shufflefoot, Flannagan, and Gimbley ate on the roof. Gimbley’s telescope stood watch – a thin sentry.
“Twin peaks on Twin Peaks,” Gimbley muttered, indicating the lego-like design of the top of the house – the dining area residing in the center – and where they were.
“It looks nice,” Dee said. “They did a nice job.”
“Doesn’t it, dear?” Shufflefoot replied, running a hand across the tiles that lined the roof as a dog – she didn’t know which one it was: maybe Abe, or Joe, or the one with that really long name, Ephraim Chambers in the 21st Century – licked her hand.
When it comes time to leave the earth, Gimbley thought, they’d first have to pass through the Heliosheath and the Heliopause. His pen drew itself in aimless, deepening circles on his napkin as he thought of planets filled with gondolier-piloted jetliners paddling their way through one pool of clouds after the other, minarets filled with – and maintained by – cherry blossoms, and maybe experiencing something like a biological second law of thermodynamics.
Looking up, it seemed that Flannagan had wiped her mouth, put the napkin down, had picked up her bag and stopped at the door that led to the roof. She was getting ready to go.
“Where are you off to?” Gimbley asked.
“What’s a funny song for a girl to sing at karaoke?”
“Tibetan throat singing,” Gimbley replied.
3.
Frontier F.C. – Hadley’s team – played at The Gathering, a stadium island built specifically for the team. When no one was using it, The Gathering sank itself into the Pacific – not in a sulk, mind you – technology hadn’t arrived at that – but for aesthetic and technological reasons – Alcatraz – for instance – was enough, the ships at sea were enough – and the thing generated hydroelectric power for the city, too – slats would open along the side, fans would kick in, and up the wattage would go.
The stadium’s location fit well with the home-run-catching culture that surrounded the Giants and McCovey Cove, too, the kayaks cluttering together like a logjam in the Pacific Northwest.
In the middle of a day of practice and in the middle of a juggle, Lorenzo noticed something odd – on the first kick, the ball was a ball; on the second, it was the man in the moon, mouth open, singing, “Moooooon River!”; third, a decapitated Mayan head, sacrificed to please the year’s harvest; then the moon again, with ponds from recent rain across the grass bending up like a foot stuck in mud or a pencil stuck in glue – and when it became an eight ball and started shouting, “No holes! No holes!” – then Lorenzo started to describe this to the team physio, and that earned him a swift helicopter flight over to San Francisco General.
The team followed half an hour later. Deane and Suso walked alongside Jules.
“What do you think he has?” Suso asked.
“Maybe something invaded the zone of his corazon.”
Suso turned.
“Are you mining my language for slang and wordplay?”
“Maybe.”
“That reminds me: why don’t you come over with the girlfriend later tonight? I’ll make everyone dinner.”
“That’s nice. What’s on?”
“Pasta dental.”
“Haven’t heard of it.”
“It’s very fresh.”
Jules trundled silently on.
Lorenzo‘s condition got everyone talking about what they’d do when they were too old to play – when the ball didn’t fit their feet like a glove and they couldn’t time the rhythm of their bodies down to such a point they could be a life-sized substitute for the well-worn bouncing ball of Walt Disney and friends.
“No myoclonic jerks …,” the attending Doctor mumbled to his clipboard when everyone had crowded into Criesteg’s room. “Just in case this isn’t psychological, though – just in case it’s a swelling and we have to do a decompressive craniectomy – we’re going to give you a MRI.”
Suso only said, “Typewriters and horses.” Deane wanted to head back to Oxford and get a flat overlooking the bustle of High Street – the bikes, the sunlight moving about like someone had knocked over a glass full of fractals, tutorials taken outdoors in great weather, the Deli where – when he visited as a child – he was greeted by a collection of walnut-skinned pensioners as “Prime Minister.” Roly said he wanted to make canoes by hand and try and dissuade more athletes from marketing cologne.
Even though the doctor had said MRI, Lorenzo kept sing-songing in his head, The CAT scan revealed that there was a cat in the CAT scan, so they removed the cat and tried again. The MRI found neuron towers that looked like sailing ships, which surprised everybody – even the CAT scan (technology was there for that) – as everyone was used to seeing pyramydial neurons, ganglia and dendrites, betz cells and basket cells, but there was the mast and there were the sails, a moveable set of axons, somas, and dendrites, pinging about the brain like they owned its seven seas.
Olive trees, thought Lorenzo. Porto Levante in Rovigo. Oranges snapped up and spun upon the back of one’s hand. Ahoy! Who goes there?
4.
With Jules at The Gathering, Dee would have lunch with the landlady. She made fried Hama-Hama oysters, which – when layed out upon the table – prompted Shufflefoot to ask:
“So which one is Hama One and which one is Hama Two?”
Dee grinned, slurped, and plowed on.
“I’ve always wanted to ask: how do you make your money, Mrs. Shufflefoot?”
Clarinets followed Bessie Smith around on the record player like the neighborhood cat. The forsythia were trying to take over a couch. Dog nails clicked across the floor.
“I used to take the cars out of a rich man’s garage to make sure the parts stayed active and didn’t rot, but nowadays I make screen prints for tickets for all sorts of shows, mostly at the Komotion.”
“The Komotion?”
“Like New York’s CBGB’s, dear, but with the threat of constant flooding.”
“Fl – “
“They built it near some water. By the way – when are the workers coming?”
“I don’t,” Dee said as she got up to see if the Consulate had left her a message on her cell phone and passed Chester talking to the QED particles, who was taking the time to ruminate.
“I wonder if people call writer’s block for coming up with a pen name, ‘Plume de nom nom nom nom,’ as if there were little teeth grinding away the struggling phoenomes.”
“Shouldn’t you get back to your autobiography?”
“I am the wind and the sea!”
The sound of a dial-up modem filled the room.
5.
“That house is as filled with ghosts as milk fills a bottle,” the man on the corner mumble-prologued to Casaco as she stood behind a phalanx of squad cars, blinking like a LED system undergoing a sleep study, “and every day it bloops, gurgles, curdles and pours.”
Maria Casaco crinkled her face. Two frenetic performance artists tried to match their buckets of red and blue paint to the spinning lights atop the squad car. They were failing – and often falling – and no one from SFPD had gone over to ask them to start cleaning up.
“It’s a church.”
“Church. House. House of God. House That Ruth Built. House of Cards. The Condo of Moderate Guilt. I don’t know how to define me an infrastructure – sometimes a city feels more like the woods than the woods do, though don’t tell the developers that.”
“And you’d never expect the priest to put murder victims in his own graveyard, now, would you?”
The man grew quiet.
“No,” he said. “You wouldn’t.”
They’d received a tip-off earlier in the day. Now Casaco had to work backwards.
6.
Roofers: at first, it sounded like a stethoscope; now it sounded like arrhythmia. The house had arrhythmia! Shufflefoot took out an old stethoscope from a box filled with things she’d picked up at yard sales and placed it on the walls as the roofers put applied those new tiles and thought she heard Pagliotti gently knocking his head at his desk saying, “Is this going to be it? A food truck? No Switzerland? No degree in medicine? No cop? A truck?”; she thought she heard Gimbley flipping the pages of his text book, humming a sped-up version of Elvis Costello’s “Allison”; she thought she heard Adam reading For Whom The Bell Tolls, astonished at how the events in Egypt had flushed and infused the book with the rapid pulse of necessity; she thought she heard Dee plunge inward like a spelunker to a cave – a ship-in-a-bottle dropped into the bottle – a lampshade removing its own hat – a secret grin, a secret elevation – a kid stomping on unexploded noisemakers that line the street – she thought she heard Dee shuffling through the postcards that lined her raggedy journal/planner the cards lined anyone else’s wallet, postcards for a friend who had dropped out of school and left California to raise tomatoes in Maine, postcards to be sent to a hotel and await the arrival of her touring musician friend (“Does the concierge smell?” “Someone rode me around on the handlebars of their bicycle today. I whooped and yelped. A wall of strawberries at the Farmer’s Market broke my fall. I had to buy all of them. Which, also: can you lend me five bucks?”), and postcards kept because she liked the design; she thought she heard Eddie hold court over a meeting –
“Our initial targets should be the Seattle Waterfront, major rivers (the Seine, the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Nile), the Hong Kong Boat People, and maybe any fantastically tiny island with a name only a handful of people know.”
“Well, hold on, Eddie, let’s take a step back – is this the best idea? An industrial scale shipping fleet of book stores?”
“I don’t know. There’s a ‘Book Barge’ in England, but I want to go big. I also don’t want to see The Economist judge globalization by ‘The Big Mac Index.’ I’d rather see a ‘What Are You Reading?’ Index.”
“So you’re doing this to outwit a marker of globalization?”
“No. I’m doing this for the languor of it all – ‘cause when E.B. White said, ‘Half a man’s life is devoted to what he calls improvements, yet the original had some quality which is lost in the process,’ he was right – or I think so, at least. I mean – a tree passing, a bird looking at you like a Brooklynite draped over the fire escape on a knuckle-scraper of a day, the water carrying you like a carefree clarinet – that’s all I need.”
7.
Ate.
9.
A strip of light fell across the trees like a neighbor peeking out through the blinds – a cardinal sounded like someone chipping a small rock on a larger rock as told in the warp of a chirp – pinecones were puffed up like tiny birds throwing off water after rain –
Dee had left dinner early to meet Adam in a car and drive through the night and have a morning dance on the shores of Lake Cuyamaca, and after they had danced, they lay down on a blanket, where Dee held her hair up between both her hands – stretched like a lazy ballerina over her head – the almost-dive, the almost-pyramid, the hair slowly dripping back down.
Adam was glad to leave the city. He had performed his last stand-up gig – he had had too many baffled or negative reactions for too long – and ended with this joke, “And now I’d like to have a moment of silence for the fifth minute of my set, which I did not write,” and though no one liked it, he did, and he was happy where he was now.
“What a chaotic day,” Dee said, and made her way to Adam.
