ft ground

He sat against a brown vinyl booth for four (4). He sat like stone, the way the city willed him, under the fluorescence. He pressed his feet unobstructed against the slick terrazzo inches from the opposite bench. He surveyed all the spaces between walls and appliances in the restaurant. Grey spaces that someone could possibly slip into. Spaces covered with soft dust and powdery warmth. The space at large was surprisingly cold. The whites and yellows low on the wall in his line of sight slowed the pulse of the air and he stared into his coffee. The drops of cream he had allotted to the drink were slowly coagulating. He chose not to stir them. His eyes scanned as though he were attempting to break through in a Brownian motion against his own stony stature. He chose not to. He watched as the sequence of stages unfolded before him. Each change in value of both cream and coffee, from brown to pale and back, solidified his distance from the unraveling unity before him. As part of an inexorable natural process, the cream warmed to the temperature of the coffee and began to lose its coherence. To stir would be to abort this process that physics and aesthetics had given him to savor. The cream would not reach a perfect uniformity in this manner, but the act of drinking a happenstance cup of coffee, however mediocre, would allow a slight satisfaction through its situational alignment. It was not as though anyone were watching.
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The night was white cold and clear in its desert hoary winter moonlight. Somehow the calendar permitted a third winter to permeate the year. He knew that moon. He made his way up the road from his car walking on the outer edge of the pavement, skirting the Russian discos overflowing into the street. He passed open doors, where the crowds were heaviest, and came to a full stop in every moonlit stretch of empty pavement. By the time he was able to cross the road, he was fighting the desire to run. He stopped for several minutes outside his destination to get his bearings. As he stood there, poised to enter and confront the interior world, his fear made him seem almost graceful. Yet his body was frozen in such an awkward posture that clearly had not been meant to last more than a few seconds. An intermediate movement, that now seemed in danger of lasting forever, if he could not find a pretext for ending it. He had remained there for an appreciable length of time, when a car lurched to the curb and startled him towards the entrance.
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Real and false were fused here so perfectly that they became a new substance, just as copper and zinc become brass that looks like gold. It meant nothing to him that LA was filled with great musicians, poets and philosophers. It was also filled with spiritualists, religious nuts and swindlers. It devoured everyone, and whoever was unable to save himself in time, would lose his identity, whether he thought so himself or not.
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The air through the open window got cooler across his face. The night was white cold and clear in its desert hoary winter moonlight. The highway narrowed. The cars were so few now that the darkness was almost pure and the intermittent headlights hurt his eyes. The grade rose against chalk walls and at the top a breeze, unbroken from the ocean, danced casually across the night.
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It was late December. The night was wrapping down across the desert and the sky was so clear that the street lights on Sunset burned across the sky like a solid vapor. He drove east but didn’t return to Culver City. At La Brea he turned north and bled over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down to Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino, like a moonbeam, a flash. There was nothing lonely about driving in the dark. It was afternoon that sunk the spirit. He often said that driving at night was purifying. This road was a vigorous linear filter of his misgivings.
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When the days passed and he couldn’t forget her, he began to grow frightened. When he went to the deep desert weeks after he had last seen her, he desired warmth and coffee in the pitch blue globe of the night. He somehow knew that his only defense was chastity, that it served him, like the shell of a tortoise, as both spine and armour. Not chastity of the cloth, but a positioning of the thoughts in such a chaste sphere that the focus on the directional energy of life is inherent. He could not change its direction telekinetically, but he would come to terms with it. He could not shed this vow even in thought. If he did, he would be destroyed. He would ignite like a spark in a barn full of hay. He would take it all with him. He was right, so he remained motionless in his car or rigid and upright on the futon in his apartment. Same body in both locations.
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Somewhere farther up the hill a bird began to sing. He was in the desert seventy miles south south west of Las Vegas. The strike of light from the apex of the Luxor pyramid on the southern end of ‘the strip’ burned across the desert sky. He listened to the bird. At first the low, rich music sounded like water dripping on something hollow, the bottom of a silver pot perhaps, then like a stick being dragged slowly over the string of a harp. He lay quietly, listening.
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On the tenth day of October at quarter past six in the evening with a perfect cool sunset on the desertsky and an autumn wind blowing through the valley she found herself in Burbank. Not the Burbank of Disney or Bob Barker, but of megalithic anchors of retail, of stucco and of red plastic letters with tower lights behind them. The firmament was matting over with a back lit green. She had never meant to go as far as Burbank. She had started out that afternoon as many others, her only destination the freeway. But she had driven the Golden State and up to Silver Lake and instead of turning back when she found herself lost on the surface streets of Glendale she kept driving.
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When she drove into the night she took the girl in the car with her. Some nights she and the girl would not say a word until the car stopped at the hedge in Culver City. These were called weekdays, because on weekends the car never stopped, and it was night into day and back and again that they shuttled that route, like a pendulum.
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It was essential that she be on the freeway by ten o’clock. Not somewhere on Venice Boulevard, not listless at a metered onramp, but actually on the freeway. If she was not amidst her peers, her lessors, and their disastrous shared environment, she would lose the day’s rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum that was structured across something other than time: group dynamics of the anonymous. Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to the fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions. She grew cold to her peers.