anti:freeze

Monday, 10:30 AM. Sunlight hits the downtown tower of the Union Bank of California.

The brass letters that spell the bank's name reflect long, straight rays onto the limestone. Each line is sharp, precise, as if guided down the facade by a ruler. Can light be this precise, this calculated? I imagine the sunlight like an x-ray, revealing the inner structure of the building, the geometry of its name - Union Bank of California, in three-dimensional brass, sans serif. I am not watching sunlight on the surface, but seeing deep inside the stone, beyond the supports and foundations, back in time to the process, when the building was a sketch on a drafting table. For a moment, I can see the architecture in letters, too, the vanishing point of an A or K.

The painter's continual search is for a place to welcome the absent. If he finds a place, he arranges it and prays for the face of the absent to appear.

-John Berger, in Studio Talk (for Miguel Barcelo) in The Shape of a Pocket

Note for the dead boy: That is what I am doing today and everyday. When I write a sentence and cross it out, when I rerrange the fragments of a narrative, or leap from astronomy to forensics to archaeology, digging for evidence that links me to my past, to you and your past, to a story longer and larger than the both of us. I wander the Portland streets, but my heels and toes do not touch the same sidewalk as you. I am lost, searching for a way to make your absence look back at me, with a gaze so heartbreaking it's worth it.

Mission Theater, NW Portland.

I love juxtaposition, when words or objects or images collide like midwestern weather fronts, swirling into a storm, quieting the birds, shocking the earth with electricity. . . Yesterday, I ventured out with my Lomo, looking for little storms in my neighborhood, hoping a tornado would suck me up from the sidewalk, drop me some place new . . . That's when I walked past the Mission Theater.

I wonder if the employees got the joke even as they slid the plastic letters into place, if they decided to leave them there anyway. If "Holes" were adjusted to the far left margin, it wouldn't have the same effect - or if it were displayed on the top slot, or if there was one line of space between them. I can't believe no one saw this. On the other hand, no one could have planned it, either - to run these two features just for the sign.

Happy July 4th!

More pictures coming . . .

1. Buddhist monk at the crosswalk: The hem of his brown robe catches on a crack in the curb as he steps down. He lifts the fabric without looking, forefinger and thumb barely pinching an inch of slack, and keeps walking.
2. Starbuck's barista in a green apron: Red curls spiraling down a kelley green apron, like she's lying in wet November grass. I remember all the times I rolled down hills or stretched out on Iowa dirt, my forearms itching from the poking of dry grass blades, my face flushed in the sunlight, my toes tingling as the breeze blew between them. Sandals thrown to the side. Shirt cinched up. Skirt hem lifted so it barely covered my thighs. In Portland, the grass is brighter and thicker - especially in wet winter - but I've never had the urge to lie down in it. Is it because I'm getting older, or because the landscape is so different - wetter and moldier, no scent of sunshine in the soil? Or am I still resisting? Will I ever stop resisting?
3. Two Portland Police officers on break in the Starbuck's cafe: One of them leans over, balancing on a maple wood chair, his forearm holding his weight. His holster is exposed, the gun inside somehow more powerful for being contained, and it takes on an animated quality, as if by its own volition it might fly out of the belt and start firing. There's a gun in the coffee shop. It radiates energy outward, concentric circles of power. But this relationship works both ways. The policeman stands in the center of these concentric circles, which form an invisible target. This man and his gun are the bulls-eye, and all the nervous glances and stares are aimed like arrows at his back and hip. In this way, the gun neutralizes its own power. The policemen leave, and suddenly, people turn to their books and newspapers again, not bothering to look up as customers come and go.

I think back to the monk, in his simple friar-like robe. He surrounded himself with a different kind of energy, a vortex of peace and quiet. I mean vortex literally - it did not radiate outward, but seemed to sink into itself, so that anyone who came near him was drawn into it. That's stronger than a gun, and something similar to the red curls against the green.

My beautiful friend, Dewi, at the dinner party for Antioch's graduating class.

I love the blurriness here - so much like the drunken mood we were in. I love the quiet, too, how it seems there is no one else nearby. She and I sat at the far end of a long table, drinking and talking and taking pictures. Our own little pocket of Los Angeles . . .

Almost makes me wish we hadn't graduated yet. But I'm not that crazy.

And here is Kelley, another beautiful friend from Antioch.

Doesn't she look positively album-cover-esque? With those lovely Lomo blues? The blurry light. Her black hair, even better in person with its salt-and-pepper gray.

And the way she holds her hand to her face - that kind of thing just sends me. So delicate and naughty at the same time.

Enter Through Kaboom. I'm uncomfortable with the command, the way it directs rather than suggests. It's not at all like the "Accessible Entrance" signs you see on schools or government buildings, with arrows pointing toward the appropriate door. It's a flat-out order. Sure, I see these kinds of signs all the time - Use Other Door, All Bags Must Be Checked, etc. But those are directed at everyone, not a specific group, and so they don't have the same effect.

Or maybe it's the word kaboom that gets me. It's a shop name, of course, but it seems to have other implications, as if kaboom were some kind of religious experience or even catastrophic event, rather than a designer household store. An experience we are all supposed to enter through. (And in this reading of the sign, it does seem directed at everyone, despite the wheelchair icon)

Or then again, it might just be the red.

This building is only a few blocks from my apartment, but I hardly ever pass by. I usually walk along sixth or fifth, so I can take the pedestrian bridge over the train tracks. On this evening, my husband and I walked through Chinatown instead, past the Republic Cafe and the Chinese Gardens. When we saw the light on the side of this building, we stopped. We must have stood on the sidewalk for ten minutes, staring. Even after three years in Portland, I am still amazed by the quality of light here, the way it can sometimes feel so personal.

This is why taking different paths is worth it.

*click the thumbnail above to see a larger image

I called my sister yesterday, and I was reminded of how much her children have changed her, how, in the three years since I left Iowa, she has gone from a major in visual art to deaf interpretation, helping her husband and three kids get fluent in a language I barely know.

Her voice was raspy, a little muted as if she were lying down and balancing the receiver on her ear, the mouthpiece not quite in front of her lips. In highschool she sometimes talked that way when she was watching television and her boyfriend called. She was usually less interested in him than the sit-com.

"Sounds like you've got a cold," I said.

"Can you hold on?" She said. "I have to get my glasses."

Her glasses? To talk on the phone? I thought about this while I listened to my nephews play in the background. Elijah was screaming; Gabriel laughing. I imagined them ramming toy tractors into the furniture. You don't need to see in order to talk on the phone, I thought. No gestures, no tiny menu typeface, no pictures pulled from a wallet.

Then I heard my sister correcting Elijah's sign language. "Your fingers go like this," she said. "See?" She annunciated each syllable slowly, so he could easily read her lips.

Both my nephews are deaf or hard of hearing, and one communicates mostly through sign language. As a result, my sister has dedicated her life to deaf culture - with a passion I haven't seen since she studied ballet. She's resisting intense pressure from doctors, teachers, and other parents to put her kids under the knife for what she sees as the ultimate cosmetic surgery: having devices surgically implanted in their heads so they can hear. She wants her kids to be who they are, to make their own decisions about body and life-altering surgeries. That, and she doesn't think there's anything to fix.

I love this about her, how her children's challenges have become her own, as she advocates for them at school and gets certified in deaf interpretation. I love, too, how all the articulations she learned in ballet are coming back to her - an entire language in joints and muscle. So much meaning in a bent pinkie, a pointed finger.

Thinking back, the glasses make sense to me. For her, talking has transformed into a visual art, even when she's on the telephone and can't see the person on the other end of the wire. In this way, she is still studying dance, still practicing drawing and painting - just in the air instead of on canvas. Maybe not everything has changed.

Life is too short to spend it washing dishes. The sign is taped to a restaurant's front window on NW Glisan, and every time I pass, I think of the dishwasher. I wonder what he (or she) thinks when he reads it, on his way to punch the timeclock for the dinner shift.

Only some people can afford to keep their plates clean in the cupboards, while they slap down twenty dollars on a dinner, never listening to the clink of dirty china against the sink's stainless steel, or dipping their hands in bubbly water, never arranging mugs and bowls on a rack to dry.

My father-in-law meditates while standing over the sink, winding down from a day of teaching mathematics at the university. Another woman I know says grace while polishing her plates, filled with gratitude for her meal. I have often had my best ideas while scrubbing grime from the tiles on my floor.

I want to rip the sign from the glass, change the words to read, simply: Life is too short.

Outside, construction equipment beats against concrete, cracking like lightning, regular as a pulse. It's been doing it all day. The rhythm creeps into everything, so that it's almost impossible to move without falling into it. I slice a tomato, and I wait for the pound of the machine to slice again. My feet tap along to the beat, as I sit in the old restaurant booth in our living room. My typing is slower. If it weren't for my headache, I might actually enjoy the noise.

This afternoon, I stepped into my apartment courtyard, and I realized I was hearing the sound's echo - not the actual source. The machine itself wasn't that loud, off in the distance, only visible if I stepped onto the pedestrian bridge behind Union Station. If I stood at precisely the right angle, though, the noise was suddenly ten times louder, amplified as it bounced off my building, then bounced again off the building across the courtyard.

This is perfect. The sounds of construction radiating outward, growing louder and louder, until the surrounding neighborhoods are forced to listen, forced to get into the rhythms . . . This is how gentrification moves. This is how it sounds. You get a warning. An alarm. I ran back inside and shut my window, surprised to find I couldn't hear it anymore. My building is sending the noise back.

Last week, my old neurologist was killed in a car accident. He and his wife were driving to a chronic pain conference when their car hit a patch of water on the highway, hydroplaned off the shoulder, and rolled over. He was thrown onto the roadside.

This is the doctor who gave me my first EEG, who closed his eyes as I walked across the shiny tiles in his examining room, listening for a Parkinsonian shuffle, and who tried every diagnostic test in his playbook - EEG, MRI, Evoked Potential Studies, etc. All to find out what was causing my seizures. And failing that, to find their focus, or the area inside my brain where they begin.

As a teenager, I hated him. He had these huge, bulging eyes that always seemed fixed on my nose, and when I answered his questions, he drifted off, sometimes staring into the tacky painting that hung behind my head. I don't remember his voice, but I remember the cold tips of his fingers, as he tested my nerve responses by touching different parts of my arms and legs.

Last night, I dreamt about his body by the side of the road. A team of neurologists jumped out of an ambulance and stuck electrodes to his scalp. This man needs an EEG one of them screamed. They used the police sirens as makeshift flashing lights, and they made sure to give him CPR too fast, to mimic hyperventilation. When they were finished, they gathered around the printout and read his brainwaves. See, they told him, there's nothing wrong. You're not dead. Your brainwaves spiked when the police lights flashed.

Anti:freeze will be quiet just one more day, as I catch up on revisions, send a few essays out to magazines, finish writing a grant, and hunt for a job. I will try to post when I get home tonight, but there's a good chance I'll get sucked into the last chapter of a forensic taphonomy book I bought at Powell's a while back. Sigh.

note toward a psychogeographic map: beneath the Burnside Bridge ramp, near Skidmore Fountain. 8:30 PM.

The lighting is the same texture and temperature as the light in LAX the first time I walked through it. The same hue of yellow, even. The yellow of crime scenes. The yellow light that shines on security fences - the ones with "Beware of Dog" signs. A place you might find a body. Or, in the case of LAX, a place you might brush past a terrorist on your way to pick up your suitcases.

Strange to stand here and remember that first landing in Los Angeles. The long, yellow tunnel that led to baggage claim was the exact shade of headaches, influenza, drug addiction - if these conditions have color. My palms were blistered by the canvas strap on my carry-on, which was too narrow and weak for all the books I had packed. My finger joints ached. I couldn't find the claim area for Alaska Airlines. I was prepared to leave my clothes behind if it meant getting to the hotel faster. Los Angeles was terrifying, and I wanted to curl up on my bed and hide.

That was before I stepped outside and felt the air. Before the cab ride through streets lined with palm trees. Before I walked along Venice Beach. I fell in love with Los Angeles almost immediately, and I still fantasize about moving there. Now I have a little fragment of the airport, right here in Old Town. Cars roar overhead on the bridge, and I close my eyes, imagining the SUVs and stationwagons as airplanes, speeding off the exit ramp as if it were a runway, soaring over downtown Portland.

note for map: area beneath Burnside Bridge induces to dislocation, terror, the sense that one could stumble over a body or fall down and become one . . .