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Overpass: 2003

Summer: Coming home from downtown, I walk from the Balboa Park BART station, here in the south-central outskirts of San Francisco. This place is not on the maps of the city that you see in the Travel pages or in guidebooks; usually it gets cut off just below the Mission. This is the last stop before Daly City. It is a place eviscerated by freeways, BART tracks, MUNI lines—bypassed, razor-wired, forgotten. But people live here, and on the side streets you can see sherbet-colored stucco bungalows built before World War II. The place is like a jigsaw puzzle made up of mismatched pieces from different boxes. You can’t put it together.

I walk along the desolate eastern side of the station, a Brutalist cliff of pock-marked concrete. At the corner of Ocean and San Jose Avenues hunkers an abstract sculpture of rusting steel. I laugh at the optimism of public art in a place like this: its hopefulness just underlines the sadness of the scene. The piece, which I may be the first person to actually look at in some years, is signed and dated: 1977.

I walk through Balboa Park itself, a large, overgrown city green space slated, as are most spaces in this part of the city, for “revitalization” at some time in the not-too-near future. I pass the creosoted wood playground and head back toward an ivy-shrouded concrete ramp that will take me to the freeway pedestrian overpass. My anxiety increases with each step. A city worker wearing camouflage uses huge shears to hack away at the bushes obscuring a soccer field. He could follow me with those shears, I think. There’s no one else around and the roar of freeway traffic drowns out any distinct sounds as I start up the ramp. He could follow me, or there could be someone up at the top, waiting.

I’m only taking a walk.

Once I get onto the overpass above the rushing traffic I feel calmer, although I’m not sure why; I’m visible, but who in those cars barreling toward downtown at seventy, eighty miles an hour has any power to help me even if they chose? I am almost off the overpass when a large, burly man with dark shoulder-length hair steps into the chain-link tunnel ahead of me. We are walking toward each other and I think something along the lines of “This could be it.” He carries a jacket in his left hand, trailing beside him, and he takes up a lot of space in the center of the tunnel. The traffic is roaring. He doesn’t move into my path, but he doesn’t move to the right as walking etiquette demands, either.

If something happens, it will be my fault for walking here. That is clear.

They say to make eye contact with strangers in vulnerable situations: would-be assailants don’t like to know that you know what they look like. But that is too much, here. I stare at the ground ahead of me, where I’m going.

We pass each other.

The whole time I had my cell phone in my hand, but what was I going to do with it, dial 9-1-1 while the guy cooled his heels on the overpass, shout into it at the emergency operator over the roar of the traffic, tell her where I was—and where was I, on an overpass over 280 off of what street? If I couldn’t remember now, I surely would not have remembered under pressure. It was ridiculous! Ridiculous to think that anything but the odds could keep me safe.

Once I get off the overpass and round a corner I am in my own neighborhood. It’s foggy and cold today, in the fifties, but the walk has warmed me. I pass old houses in various stages of decay and restoration, half-million-dollar houses crouched above the highway. The concrete buildings of City College sit like bunkers on top of the hill. I speed up as I pass a van parked by the curb. A dented Ford pickup, rusted in its bed and at every margin of its body, looms out of the blowing fog—a ghost of the Seventies. In the fog, the place seems to have one essential quality: indistinctness. It is without light or dark.

One more time, I have survived to see this scene. “I won’t walk that way again,” I think. But which way will I walk?

Hillside: 2010

The hill behind Heather School is redolent of eucalyptus oil, mineral earth, and dog shit on this first morning after the first rain of November. All the summertime eliminations have dried in the heat, preserved for this moment of sudden wet. If the rains keep up, you'll hardly notice any shit at all till the end of May, maybe June. The springtime showers have extended the past couple of seasons until the summer solstice, creating a steaminess so strange for these dry, oak-and-Toyon hills. On the other hand, in the last weeks of October we experienced temps in the nineties on more than one day, and now a Valley Oak below the upper trail here is showing new-spring-green foliage. All of California's predictable tragedies—drought, fire, flood—seem to be giving way to quieter, more insidious failures: rot, premature growth, failure to thrive.

But the Toyon is fruiting right on schedule. At first, when I pass one thinking of other things, I don't recognize it as Toyon. I just see its ripe, deep orange-red berries and sharply toothed leaves, some of them already turned orange and ready to fall into duff, others curled in on themselves, curled around some already departed thrips or perhaps some fireblight that left a blackened spot, tinged with red. I see the plant, something beautiful, singular, and subject only to my seeing, not a part of anything else.

I walk on, throw the dog a stick down the hillside, call her back so that she can go down and fetch another. Then we head toward the lovely glass house below the lower trail, where the people have not fenced their yard, preferring to savor the illusion that their property extends beyond their back patio and past the centenarian oaks, on up the hill. This is one of the best spots for squirrel hunting, and I hear Meg crash down through the oak leaf mould and whimper out her squirrel alert. Then she races back across the space, patrolling the hillside. This is where, on separate occasions, both the man and the woman who live here have come out of their beautiful house to chastise me from the safe cover of the trees, telling me that my dog is supposed to be “under control” here in the off-leash dog area.

As I make my way up the path Meg follows me, runs past panting, doing this thing that is the only way to calm her body and mind for the rest of the day. The last time it happened, when I heard Meg barking down by the glass house, I called her off and she came immediately (which, to be honest, pleased and amazed me), and the man observed with an irony that his German accent turned nasty “Oh, he's really under control, I see!” Several replies went through my head, the best (as always) being the Buddhist rejoinder, “I'm sorry you're suffering.” But I said nothing.

And the main thing is he is right: my dog is not perfectly under control. She loves people (especially kids), other dogs, even the cat, but she will bark if you glare at her or if you shrink away in fear. It is true that dogs smell fear, and they don't like it, not one bit. And the training that she must sit and observe when she senses fear or hostility, rather than bark and escalate the scene, continues. It will always continue. Each time I walk her off leash here I bring treats and work on reinforcing the command to “Come,” and this time it did work: when I told her to, she came. She left the Teutonic grouch to his own unhappiness. But no, she is not “under control,” I think; she’s alive.

And then it comes to me: the plant I had been looking at. Toyon. Heteromeles arbutifolia. California Holly, where Hollywood got its name. The berries, like clusters of tiny apples, gave the plant its Latin generic name, which means “different apples.” Here is a plant that Carl Linnaeus never saw, but that owes its botanical name to his insight that all of life might be classified in a hierarchical system based on physical form, and more specifically on sexual characters. The number of pistils and stamens, the sexual parts of plants, provide the first point of departure for classification. This was risky business in the eighteenth century: Some theologians and even scientists of the day considered it an obscene and heretical system, but Linnaeus declared, “The flowers' leaves...serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity...” He more than once claimed, in Latin, that “God created, Linnaeus arranged” (Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit).

His wife Sara gave birth to their first son, Carl the Younger, seven months after their marriage  (sin being the first principle of organization, the infraction often so much finer than the rule that governs it.)  Linnaeus's coat of arms featured at its center an egg, which he recognized as the seat of all life. His inclusion of homo sapiens among other “anthropomorphs”--or 'man-like creatures,' apes and monkeys-- and his classification of mammals as mammals, that is, based on the way their mothers feed them, were both revolutionary. Apparently he could tell a good story, was often full of his own exploits and accomplishments, at other times spoke of offing himself if only he had possessed “a rope and English courage.” He was a man so alive that the intellectual conception and classification of all life were not beyond him.

The Toyon. Linnaeus took away the Toyon, the singular shrub with red berries, and left in its place Heteromeles arbutifolia, each individual of which could reproduce sexually with any other individual and make another, many others, and not only on this hillside but anywhere in the world. He took away the local gods in favor of creation; took away singularity in favor of organization; and based his entire system on the chaotic imperfection of sex.

I'm still thinking of what I could say to the man with the glass house. I even see myself picking my way down past the oaks to his patio, shaking hands, introducing myself and trying to explain what we're doing here, Meg and I, maybe making some progress in this world. But the response that feels most natural, maybe most authentic, is this: “No, my dog's not under perfect control, Man, but then, neither are you.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus

(Carolus Linnaeus, from De Systema Naturae, quoted in http://curieuxunivers.umontreal.ca/en/classification/hmv/page4.php)

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/tribute_linnaeus.html

Music from ccMixter: "I Need Something," by copperhead, featuring Admiral Bob, WillemWillem, Norm Peterson, and Robert Siekawitch; and "In the Garden," by snowflake.

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atascadero      mire, bog; (fig) stumbling block.

atasco              obstruction, blockage; traffic jam.

—The Collins Concise Spanish Dictionary

My instinct, mid-stream in the molasses flow of late-afternoon San Francisco traffic, was to just keep moving. This was getting us nowhere. Mom sat beside me listlessly looking out the car window while I steered us around and around, trying to make out the logic of this neighborhood: a tangle of pockmarked city streets, overpasses, skyways, and gracelessly aging industrial buildings that housed sweatshops and auto mechanics. Here and there an artist had carved out a space in all the late-industrial jumble, but SoMa, that amalgam of material desire and millennial longing, hadn’t been invented yet. It was still just South of Market.

“Pull over,” Mom said. “Pull over in the bus stop there and let’s ask in that store for directions.”

“All right.” I pulled to the curb and switched on the hazards. I ran into the corner liquor store to get directions to the freeway.

“You’re almost there; take a right, a right, and another right, that’ll put you on Division,” the pale kid behind the counter told me. The painful brightness of the stud piercing his tongue darted in and out of view as he spoke. In my memory, he nervously tapped a pack of Marlboros on the counter, evidently ready for his next smoke break. I noticed his long, white fingers and the skin pulled tautly across the ligaments on the backs of his hands. “Then take your first left, at the light, and then right up the ramp.”

I thanked him, then ran back to the car and switched on the radio. Before we even took the first right, the disembodied voice from Metro Traffic Control informed us that scores of our fellow citizens were running onto both levels of the Bay Bridge from the East Bay side, shutting it down just before the evening commute was to start—putting their bodies on the line for peace. The drive back to Berkeley did not look good.

“I can see what they’re doing, but it just seems like it’s not the best way to convince people.” Mom said. “They’ll be trying to pick their kids up from daycare, or trying to get home to dinner. They’ll be worrying about their families and be getting angry at the protesters, not at the war.” She sat squinting out the window at the stream of pedestrians making their way across the intersection I was attempting to cross, the car’s right-hand turn signal clicking uselessly. She continued, “What if we were on there and I’d already taken my shot and we couldn’t get any food?”

I thought of this: the insulin flooding her blood stream, Mom getting more and more irritable, then dangerously agitated, maybe clutching at the door handle as if to get out and walk among the other cars idling on the bridge. That, and the sweat starting, the nervous heat of a body getting too much of one thing it needed and not enough of another. An insulin reaction was much scarier than the possibility of a diabetic coma, what most people had heard about. Mom always carried around candies or dried fruit in her purse just in case she “got low”; her fear of getting stuck on the bridge without food was just a useful hypothetical. But it made me nervous anyway.

“I know, it’s like attacking other people, holding us captive.” I flexed my fingers and then squeezed the wheel, hard. “Damn it, would somebody let me through?”

The light turned yellow and a couple of stragglers jogged to the curb. I stepped on it and just beat a late-model Mercedes that was turning left against the fresh red. Mom braced herself on the dash with her left hand, a gesture that might have been involuntary or might have been calculated to make me feel that I was taking an unnecessary risk. It was left over from the days when we didn’t wear seatbelts, when no one wore seatbelts, when stories circulated of people being “thrown clear” of an accident and mercifully saved, rather than incinerated with the wreck. In those days Mom drove a Pinto whose treacherous fuel tank had been mysteriously “converted” to make the car somehow not a death trap. When she had to brake the Pinto suddenly, Mom would throw her arm across my chest, as if this would save me from flying through the windshield in the event of impact. Even at the time, this gesture seemed ineffectual, yet I found it reassuring, a sign of my mother’s constant caretaking.

Mom looked much the same now as then, with shoulder-length ash blond hair, skeptical green eyes, and a kind, full mouth. Her skin, she would say, was a farmwife’s skin, large-pored and not fine at all, but the kind of skin that doesn’t easily wrinkle. “Your mother is so young!” people were always telling me. And she was young; and I was young also, but with fine skin that was sure to wrinkle as I got older, as my grandmother’s had (Mom always pointed this out as she talked about her own tougher skin).

What we were doing here, trying to leave San Francisco after a day of sightseeing, should have been simple. And I had an easier time with the second right; the third, onto Division, was free of pedestrian complications. I peered up at the concrete tendrils of the highway interchange. “Well, we could take 101 South from here, I think. We could take one of the other bridges. Or we could go down to Gilroy.”

“To the outlets?” Mom asked.

“Yeah. It’s a long way to go. But we could go shopping, then go back north.”

“We could do it. We’ll see how the traffic is.”

A road sign announced I-80 East - BAY BRIDGE - 101 Fwy South. I pulled into the left turn lane, the car’s blinker again supplicating meekly against the oncoming traffic, then pulled through on the yellow. I steered right onto the sweeping arc of the I-80 onramp, stayed right to curve south onto the 101. This time Mom did not brace herself but let the car carry her up and onward. Once we were on the freeway we were in another country, one of unlimited possibility, or anyway of possibility limited only by the prevailing speed.

On the 101, going south out of San Francisco on this clear blushing February evening, sailing past Potrero and Bernal Heights and Visitacion Valley, the speed was somewhere between seventy and seventy-five, my hands resting lightly on the wheel and Mom’s folded, for now, in her lap.

We had planned to stop at the outlet mall in Gilroy on our way up to Berkeley from L.A. earlier that week. I'd been down for a vacation in Claremont; now Mom was coming back north with me for a birthday visit, planning to fly back home at the end of the week. It was the kind of plan that begged for something to go wrong. We took the scenic route up the 101, stopping for lunch at a Taco Bell in San Luis Obispo before heading inland on that asphalt incarnation of El Camino Real. Just outside Atascadero, my ’82 Mazda, at nine years old already in late middle age, broke down. I was cruising in the left lane when suddenly the relationship between the weight of my foot on the gas pedal and the forward motion of the car was lost. For a minute I couldn’t catch my breath. “What’s happening?” Mom asked.

“I don’t know, it’s just not getting any power. It’s like it’s just not getting any gas.” The panic clutched my throat.

“O.K., now, just try to get over to the right.” Mom’s voice stayed calm and soothing, a touch of brightness at its edges. “We’ll just get over to the right and see how far we can keep going.”

Empty grazing land spread off to the east, and we could see a few scattered trees ahead and the first run-down buildings of Atascadero. “We’re close enough here, we can walk it if we have to. There now,” Mom continued, her head craned to the right and her hands gripping the curved handle of the door beside her, “just after this blue car, then it’s clear. Go now.”

We edged over to the gravelly right shoulder in slow motion and went on, the car suddenly roaring now and then with an infusion of gas, then just as suddenly shuddering and slowing. Even though we could see the town from here, it would be a long walk along the highway to get there.

But we made it; we went on like that, lurching along, until we reached the exit ramp and turned east into town. We found a garage right away, a refuge for limping pilgrims on that old road.

“Sounds like the fuel filter.” The mechanic, a handsome, muscular but not burly man with long, trim sideburns, stood considering the nearly expired car in the driveway, stereotypically wiping his hands on a rag already far from clean. Randy was neatly embroidered over the pocket of his short-sleeved, steel-blue shirt. On the taut skin just below his right shirtsleeve was tattooed the simple, indelible motto: semper fi.

“It’s funny it made it this far,” Mom said.

“Probably the grade’s what did it. Got a little plugged up before that, you’re pumping all that fuel through to make it over, jog a little gunk loose, that’s it.”

My throat tightened up again, thinking of it. If the car had stalled on the Cuesta Grade, that long, curving climb up from the coast, we’d have had to get out. There was nowhere to walk there except the narrow shoulder, with semis chugging up the grade and cars and panel trucks gunning it around them. Two people had been killed there the year before, run over and over by cars that didn’t even stop to see what they’d hit.

“I had it tuned before I left,” I said. “Shouldn’t they have changed the filters then?”

“Should have, yeah,” Randy said, still thoughtfully rubbing the rag between his hands. “So you all are probably headed somewhere and want it back this afternoon.”

“Berkeley,” Mom agreed.

“Berkeley,” he nodded. “I’ve got to finish this job I’m right in the middle of, got the car up on the lift, then I’ll get to it. Should just be a couple hours. That O.K.?”

“Sure, we’d appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome to wait here. Got some magazines out in the office there.” Randy gestured toward a small glassed-in room next to the garage. “Coffee.”

We both thanked him and walked toward the little room.

Two brown vinyl-seated chairs with extruded metal frames and legs that had a peeling, rust-flecked chrome finish had been set up here beside a formica coffee table. The table held two limp and wrinkled copies of Car & Driver and a few back issues of Guideposts, less well used. On the counter, next to an assortment of work estimates, pens, a stapler, a phone, all coated with a thin patina of grease, a drip coffee maker sat burbling and spitting. The coffee must have been made some hours earlier, and although sitting on the burner hadn’t improved its flavor, it had at least concentrated it to a reasonable strength.

“I might need to eat something,” Mom said, looking up from her book after we’d been sitting in the little office for about half an hour. “The coffee’s not sitting well on my stomach.”

I looked over the top of my book. “Yeah, I could use a little snack. There was that grocery on the corner when we came in.”

“Let’s go see.”

We picked up our purses and shoved our books in, setting out for the corner store a block away. There were no sidewalks here. The shoulder of the road was steeply curved toward a gravel ditch to catch the runoff from the rains that were always expected in November and December. Now it was dry but clean, with none of the dust that would coat the road and the gravel and the few spindly weeds later in the spring and summer. The air was clear, dry, and cool, and the gravel made a sharp crunching sound as we walked toward the Kwik and Convenient we’d spotted as we coaxed—or maybe willed—the Mazda around the corner. The sky was a soft blue overhead. The sun’s low angle, even at two in the afternoon, made the horizon out over the highway, toward the coastal mountains, a pale rose color.

We bought two bags of peanuts and a Diet Pepsi at the market. There was a bench in front of the store. It looked out on a parking lot strewn with fluttering food wrappers and smeared with used motor oil. We sat to eat. Beyond the parking lot, a narrow road climbed a low hill, heading east. It was lined with upright eucalyptus and what looked like bay laurel, rangy and arched over the road. The trees’ slender leaves moved a little in the breeze and reflected the late winter light grayly. After a block the road dipped out of view, so I had the impression that the avenue of trees continued, perhaps up into the hills, perhaps right out of town and into the country. While we sat there no cars went up this road, which I began to think of as a lane, and none came down it.

“Oh, damn, I forgot to shoot up!” Mom said suddenly. “I don’t think what I took at lunch will cover this.” She opened her purse on her lap and began to rummage through its contents. Finally she pulled out a small syringe and a glass vial, brushed some lint from the rubber top of the vial, took off the orange cap that covered the needle, pulled in a bit of air, and plunged the needle into the vial. She upended it and drew out a small amount of fast-acting insulin, withdrew the syringe and tapped it with a fingernail to move any air bubbles to the tip, then pushed in the plunger until a little drop appeared on the end of the needle. Mom poked it into her thigh, right through her jeans, and depressed the plunger all the way. She pulled the needle out. “That should do it,” she said, recapping the syringe and putting it back into the tangle of her purse. “Maybe we should walk a little now.”

“That won’t make you low?” Exercise was good for Mom’s diabetes but could sometimes send her blood sugar plummeting.

“Just a little ways.”

When we got back to the garage, Randy showed us the invoice and Mom paid the thirty dollars (he only charged us for recycled parts) and he handed us the key in his matter-of-fact way, as if he hadn't just saved us, like it was this way every day. We threw our bags into the back seat of the Mazda and backed out of the driveway, over the gravel ditch, onto the road and back to the highway, with Mom behind the wheel now, giving me a break.

We drove north. By the time we passed the outlet mall in Gilroy, it was too late to stop, and anyway, we weren’t really in the mood for shopping.

The war protests had started the next day, on my birthday, my twenty-second. As Mom and I sat celebrating this personal occasion in Caffe Venezia in Berkeley, young men and women marched down University Ave toward the highway. Serious and exalted faces streamed past the windows while mother and daughter sat sipping red wine and relishing our mixed green salads dressed lightly with oil and vinegar and topped with delicately shaved Parmigiano Reggiano. We were not unaware of the irony of this scene.

“We’re dining for peace,” Mom said, laughing and holding up her glass.

I clinked Mom’s glass with my own just as a young woman with shoulder-length brown hair walked past outside, yelling something unintelligible and holding up a sign that read “NO BLOOD FOR OIL.”

“Hey, now I’m half your age, I just thought of it. I’m as old as you were when you had me.”

“That’s right,” Mom said.

“It’ll only happen once.”

“Right, it won’t happen again.”

“I can’t imagine having a baby right now!”

“It was fun.” Mom laughed. “You slept all the time. Took two naps a day, two or three hours at a time. I remember every morning I would go to the store—there was a shopping center near our apartment in North Hollywood and I would walk over there with you in the stroller—and I would buy a mystery and an eclaire. And every day I would spend your nap time reading the mystery and I’d eat the eclaire.”

“You must be forgetting the hard parts.”

“Maybe—I don’t know—maybe I just didn’t know it was supposed to be hard.”

The last straggling protesters had moved past the windows, and now only normal evening traffic streamed by on University. A declaration learned in one of my U.S. history classes (I couldn’t remember which one) entered my mind: Events are in the saddle and ride mankind. Emerson. I found a strange solace in the idea.

I learned the next day that when the protesters reached the highway, they had suddenly run into a clearing in the traffic of I-80 East near the Berkeley Marina, somehow leaving enough time for the oncoming cars to see them and to stop. I could see the connection between the slogan “NO BLOOD FOR OIL” and the protesters’ risky action: cars stopped on the freeway: gas is taking you nowhere tonight; stop and think. But I doubted that they were changing many minds this way (most minds, headed east from Oakland or San Francisco or Berkeley, on an evening whose air and light felt like early spring, being anyway not too differently disposed than those of the protesters). I said as much to Tony, the guy sitting next to me in a bright and shabby Berkeley seminar room while we waited for our medieval history discussion to start.

“I was out there,” Tony told me. “I don’t want to go again, but I will if I have to.”

The force of this statement—the profession of reluctance and also of decision—struck me. Where something compelled Tony to act, something equally compelled me to stay on the sidelines and to feel that judging events was an adequate response to them. Tony did not go out there for fun (getting in his requisite Berkeley protest before graduation), but feared we were entering another of those conflicts that people could picturesquely call a ‘quagmire’ and that the Selective Service registration form he was required to fill out to receive Federal financial aid would put him right in the middle of it. When I signed that same Selective Service form, I checked the box that claimed my exemption—I am female. But it was not just the accident of sex that separated us. Tony felt that his actions mattered.

“I can’t just sit around and watch it on CNN,” he told me. His light brown eyes looked straight into mine and his dark brows knit together. He had a mess of curly brown hair that covered his ears and a short, serious face. The word “pugnacious” entered my mind as he stared me down. Was that the right word?

Then it occurred to me that perhaps he was a better person than I was. I felt that I could live with that.

The clock ticked over to 10:00 AM and an electronic buzz signaled class’s beginning. We had notebooks and pens and most of us had our paperback translations of The Book of Margery Kempe arranged in front of us on the seminar table. Here and there the brazenly false wood grain of the table’s formica top had been carved with someone’s initials or with the random, tired shocker: FUCK. I fiddled with an earring and waited for the day’s discussion prompt from our graduate student instructor, a friendly and serious woman writing her dissertation on the medieval iconography of time.

“Margery Kempe,” she said, standing at one end of the table. She raised one eyebrow to give her face a skeptical and interrogatory look. Well, that was about as noncommittal a beginning as you could come up with. It was now up to one of us to jump in with some kind of statement, back it up with evidence, and submit to further probing. The clock’s second hand beat loudly as we stared at our books on the table.

I riffled the pages of my book, looking for something. Margery was always getting into trouble for crying too much in public and making a spectacle of her empathy for Jesus’ Passion. I, too, had become a little weary of Margery’s carrying on by the end of the book. Margery was the pilgrim as publicist; she actively sought an audience, even a hostile audience, for her expressions of deep and gaudy faith. And she often held in contempt those around her who believed in a quieter orthodoxy. Still, I admired Margery’s boldness in the face of arrogant authority. I found the passage I wanted:

When her crying was passed, she came before the Archbishop and fell down on her knees, the Archbishop saying very roughly to her, ‘Why do you weep so, woman?’

She answering said, ‘Sir, you shall wish some day that you had wept as sorely as I.’

I took a breath and began to make my argument.

Tony chewed on his fingernails. He always did this, all through the discussion. No matter how hard I willed him to stop, he kept biting them, until the quicks were exposed and red and jagged. I wanted to grab his hands and stop him. Don’t, please don’t.

That afternoon, after class, I had taken Mom sightseeing in the City. And then the second evening of protest had begun.

We didn’t have to go all the way to Gilroy, of course, when the protesters closed down the bridge. We could have parked the car and taken BART home through the tunnel under the Bay. Or we could have driven north to the Richmond Bridge. We passed the San Mateo Bridge (which was packed) and the Dumbarton (which was more or less clear) on our way south. Finally, we could just have gone north from San Jose, up the eastern edge of the Bay. Instead we continued down through the outskirts of San Jose, where the 101 narrowed to two lanes in each direction; down through the green remnants of the Santa Clara orchard country, where the office parks and technology “campuses” had not yet reached; where the highway, eight or ten years later, even after widening, would often be almost impassable, packed with commuters willing to drive for an hour—or two hours—between jobs with stock options and houses with upwards of 2,000 square feet for less than $600k.

But now, for Mom and me, it was not only possible to go on, but exciting. We were happy to be going shopping. We were happy, truth be known, that the bridge was shut down, that people were home trying to get a glimpse of the bombing on TV (the tantalizing suggestion of the destruction brought to them by heat-sensitive camera equipment and satellite communications and Wolf Blitzer). We said as much to each other. “We’re shopping for peace,” I said and laughed, and Mom laughed with me. It was ludicrous to drive all that way, and we knew it; but it was war, and we were having fun.

I don’t want to go, but I will if I have to. As I drove, I thought of the protesters closing the bridge; of bodies in the way of cars. I could see Tony, one of the first out, running and shouting and hoping that the car coming toward him would stop. Or was there even time to hope that? Would he see the car coming at all?

It took a certain credulity—or faith—to participate in a war, I thought, and also to protest one. It was easy to tell myself, cruising south on the Royal Road, that I didn’t believe in it, not any of it.

When we got to Gilroy it was dark. The lights of the outlets shone over the highway. I pulled the Mazda up the exit ramp and then left, onto the overpass that led to the stores. I parked in front of Liz Claiborne and killed the engine. Mom didn’t make a move to open her door; when I looked, her face looked pale and shiny under the artificial light from the store’s windows.

“I think I’m low,” Mom said. “I think there’s a Snickers in my purse. Can you find it, in my purse, in the back?”

I unhooked my seatbelt and reached around to the back seat, feeling for the purse. “Where is it? It’s not back here.”

“Oh, here it is.” Mom reached to the floor under her legs and pulled it out. “Here, look. Oh, I can look.” She was disoriented and shaky. Finally she pulled out a small sandwich bag filled with hard candies and a couple of bite-size candy bars. She ripped the wrapper off a Snickers bar and took a bite. “I’ll be O.K. after this. Then we can go in. We’ll get something else to eat in a little bit. I’m O.K.”

“All right.” I sat in the driver’s seat and waited for her to finish the candy bar, for the sugar to metabolize, the glucose to find the insulin key to my mother’s fragile, resistant cells.

We didn’t end up buying anything that night; we looked around a little bit, but we really didn’t find any bargains. We ate a sandwich at a small, fluorescent-lit café in the outlet center, then we got in the car and drove back north. Traffic was clear through San Jose and past the cutoff toward Oakland and Berkeley. All the way, I felt like turning the car around, felt that if we’d just kept going, just stayed on the highway heading south toward Atascadero, we might have found what we were looking for.

Music from ccMixter: "I Need Something," by copperhead, featuring Admiral Bob, WillemWillem, Norm Peterson, and Robert Siekawitch; and "What It Takes To Be Me," by Alex Beroza, featuring FORENSIC and Nicolas Kern.

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Come so far when you think - you think back
You can’t buy what we made, you and I

—Peter Frampton

I measure the imported rice, squeeze the plum tomatoes and chop them, chop the flat-leaf parsley and rosemary from the garden, the garlic, the onion. I grate the cheese and dice the celery, drizzle olive oil into a heavy casserole, eyeballing the measure. In go the garlic and celery. Dinner will be tomato parmesan risotto and rabbit with white wine sauce. The rabbit pieces are soaking in cold water in a clear glass bowl in the deep stainless sink. I lift each piece out and let it drip, then put it on paper towels I have spread on the granite counter. When all of the bits of the small body are arranged on the towels, like words in a poem, it makes me feel faintly ill to look at them. But I pat them dry as the recipe directs, then add them to the olive oil, garlic, and celery waiting in the casserole dish. I put the lid on (it makes a muffled ringing sound as it slides into place) and turn on the gas. It lights in a blue-and-orange burst and settles into two concentric blue rings. I turn it as low as it will go.

Outside the kitchen windows the fog is blowing by on its way to the Great Central Valley. The shining green leaves of the myoporum trees in the neighbors’ yard hiss with the force of the air and the tiny sand particles carried on the air. In the morning the back patio will be covered with a fine grit and with fallen, yellow leaves. Summer, here in San Francisco. I take a gulp of white wine and note the time: 4:30. The rabbit will stew for two hours before I will be needed again. My husband and daughter are downstairs, watching a video. There is this time in front of me that demands to be used but refuses to suggest its proper use. I think of someone I have not thought of in some time, of summer in L.A. I try to conjure the light and the heat and the dusty dryness of that place but I’m not sure, in this half-light, that I can get it right.

* * *

I saw him last when I was seventeen, at a Thunderbird party, where we celebrated chunks and spurned worms. Drinking Mescal and eating the worm were for popular kids, kids we called soches; Thunderbird chunks were for poets.

Lauren and I were standing in the kitchen. She was arranging clear plastic cups on the breakfast bar counter, pulling each one from the stack and lining it up with the rest; a phalanx stood ready to serve the multitude. A fully stocked bar ran the length of the wall behind us on glass shelves backed by mirrors. The bottles were carefully arranged with the labels facing squarely forward, legible to anyone sitting at the small round formica table or lounging on the green velveteen couch in the attached family room. But no one was sitting there now. It was looking to be a grim party.

“When is Will getting here?” Lauren looked at the wall clock in the kitchen. “He said 6:30.” Lauren’s parents had been out of the house since 5:00, but no one had shown yet, and it was already 7:00. Then we heard the front door whine open on dry hinges, felt the movement of warm air as a cross-draft was briefly created and then cut off. It was Will. As if on cue, he came in with his hands tucked in the pockets of his black trench coat.

“You’re looking rather wan, Emily,” he told me in his studied California Ivy accent, every syllable pronounced like it was a gift to the listener. He produced three cylindrical bottles from his inside pockets. He untwisted the cap from one, then filled three cups halfway, concentrating. His thin white face glowed against the deep black of his trench coat, his polyester button-down, his stiff processed hair. Before there were goths, Will’s esthetic was one of decay and perversion, and his beauty lay in the effective deployment of that esthetic on his own person. His lips were pale and thin and his light eyes deep and close-set behind short brown lashes. A seductively sculptural nose—a nose with no straight lines, only long architectural curves, held my eyes as he handed me a cup. “This’ll put color in your cheeks.”

I laughed too hard at his words. He looked at me five beats too long.

“Did you get any luscious chunks in yours?” Lauren held her cup up to the low-angle sunlight coming in through the open sliding glass door and admired the dregs floating in the liquid red.

I looked down into my plastic cup. “Can’t tell.”

“Well, if you get any make sure to chew them, there’s genuine nutritional value in there, although they haven’t yet established a US RDA for chunks.”

“Yeah, OK.” My hair was still wet from the pool out back, and the smell of chlorine mixed with the candyapple stench of the booze as I took a sip.

“I’ll just step into the living room to attend to our musical needs.” Will pulled a tape, still encased in cello-wrap, from his pocket: Your Funeral, My Trial. He looked at me again, his face blank, and left the bottles of fortified wine on the bar.

Now, left for dead by the look he had given me before he exited the room, I said, “Will despises me.”

“No, he doesn’t.” That was as much contradiction as Lauren could manage. “He’s just in a mood because Shana wouldn’t let him use The Sheik on her last night. She was all ready to go and they went into Steve’s room and were going to do it, then he pulls out the thing and she’s like, ‘You’re not using that thing on me!’ and that was it.” Lauren paused and pulled her close-knit eyebrows closer together. “I’m going to call Dave. He’s got to bring some more people or we won’t have any fun at all.” Dave was Lauren’s fallen Mormon boyfriend, who would soon be legally kidnapped by goons hired by his judge father and spirited to Provo for some expensive reprogramming. She went to the phone, an avocado model mounted on the wall by the sungold refrigerator, and dialed. “I wonder if he’ll come over. He’s got to come over.”

Music started up on the living room speakers.

I walked out to where Will was listening to Nick Cave. He sat looking through Lauren’s older brother Steve’s record collection. The room was like a shrine to Seventies kitsch, already a marvel even by the mid-Eighties: smoked-glass tile mirrors with gilt veining covering the wall behind a brown ultrasuede couch whose cushions were worn shiny; carved shag carpeting in variegated brown and beige undulated over the floor. Steve’s basketball trophies, lined up on a wood-veneer cantilevered shelf, were reflected in the obscure mirrors over the couch.

Will and I were the only people in the room, but he didn’t look up as I walked in. I crossed the room and sat down on the floor under an open window, a light warm breeze touching my skin. I hugged my legs to my chest and rested my chin on my knees, still holding the cup of Thunderbird in front of me in my left hand, a token of membership in this strange brotherhood.

I could see the amber-red starting to show in the ends of my hair as the pool water evaporated from it. I was in the habit of wearing stark white powder on my face and neck, something my mother loathed, but I hadn’t reapplied it after my swim. I studied the freckles on my arms just below the rolled sleeves of my ink-black button-down shirt. I leaned back against the wall and concentrated on feeling the breeze move the soft blonde hairs on my legs.

Will let out a manic high-pitched laugh.

“What is it?” I said from my haven by the window.

Will came and knelt beside me, holding up the album cover for me to see. “I’m in You—Peter Frampton!” he exulted, and let out another crazy laugh.

“Excellent!”

“I’m going to put it on.”

“Yes, definitely!”

The antique groove of Frampton came on, and Will came back and sat beside me. He lit a cigarette, exhaled, and looked at me. I smiled and he looked away. After he had smoked it pretty well down, which didn’t take long, he held it out to me. “Here—it’s never too early or too late to start.”

“Oh,” I laughed a little—“Oh, no thanks.” I felt like a dweeb.

He sat next to me and looked at me. I looked at him and I waited.

Will said, “God you’re beautiful Emily.”

“Thank you,” I said.

And with that little speech he made me know that he was not going to kiss me. Will you believe me if I tell you it was one of the more disappointing moments in my life up to that point and for some time to come? He made me feel that there was some defect, something in me so inadequate, that beauty alone could not compensate. On the other hand, it seemed to me at the time that he also saw something there that he wanted to leave unsullied. With that speech he made it known there was something he valued about me, and so there was no way he was going to come any closer.

The record required turning over and so Will stood up and walked to the turntable.

No one else came to the party.

* * *

The rabbit has stewed in its own juices. I take the lid off the casserole and turn up the burner to cook off the liquid. I measure a half cup of wine from the bottle I’ve been pouring for myself, add it to the casserole. I start broth simmering in a saucepan on a back burner. I melt butter in an enameled pot and throw in onion and garlic. I add the rice to the butter mixture. I splash in wine from my glass, estimating the amount this time, and begin slowly ladling in broth and stirring. I’ll be stirring from now until dinner is done.

I’m doing something I know how to do.

Music from ccMixter: "More Water," by airtone, featuring Adisa McKenzie; and "I Need Something," by copperhead, featuring Admiral Bob, WillemWillem, Norm Peterson, and Robert Siekawitch.

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Up at Pulgas Ridge, Megadog and I walk the Cordilleras Trail past the multiple-addiction rehab center tucked at the edge of San Francisco Water Department land. This open space, reserved for hikers and their dogs, is flanked by the rehab on one side and the county mental health services on the other. Sometimes we see guys playing basketball out in back of the rehab building, its tile roof and pale stucco walls aging with Katherine Hepburn style under California live oaks. Sometimes we see them tending their garden, where tomatoes still ripen on the vine on into the fall. Occasionally, they are out playing cards in the morning heat, or washing cars to raise funds for the center. Today, no one.

Decomposed granite crunches under our feet as we pass outbuildings maintained by the water department, surrounded by dry bunch grasses and cracked clay in a wheat-colored meadow. Water is the only reason this land is not covered with houses, condos, a mall: water and its exigencies have kept much of the peninsula south of San Francisco an open woodland. Looking at its green hills now, it’s hard to imagine that over a century ago, this area was clearcut to build the city not once, but twice.

Mega wears her red saddle bags and halter. Her short hair is the same color as the grass, and her 50-pound body appears to be all muscle and sinew as she powers down the path. She has a black nose with a white blaze under her chin, and as she pants, her mouth curls up into a muscular smile. She carries her own water. Past the wooden bridge over a blackberry choked creekbed, the granite path ends and the trail becomes dusty clay the color of rust. We walk in the shade of oaks. The buckeyes have lost their leaves by now. The trail angles up over a canyon lined with leather leaf ferns. Massive California bays reach up to us from the dry creekbed below, their roots exposed by the winter rains that have been so stingy the last few years. No water is running, but the creekbed looks dark, and I imagine putting a hand down there to feel the coolness of the secret water below. 

Mega presses on. 

The only thing slowing her down is the saddlebags. Without them, she would chomp at the restraint of her halter and try to take off after every lizard on the trail. Wearing the saddlebags in pack mode, she would stay on the trail and close to me even without the leash, but it's required here, where woodrats make their homes under piles of lichen-coated brush. They don't need a one-year-old Mutt crashing through their shelter in search of fun. 

The trail opens up and becomes sandy, lined with sunbaked chaparral. Flaky lichen clings to the bases of the chamise and manzanita here, a reminder of the rains that have let us down lately. I've read laundry lists of the native understory plants that bloom here in the spring, but can't remember their names now. Only the desiccated stalks of sticky monkeyflower here and there suggest that something more lush and colorful has happened recently. 

At the top of the Ridge we stop for water just inside the split rail fence that surrounds the off-leash area. From her saddlebags I pull Mega’s bowl and water bottle. She laps at the stream of water as I fill the bowl on the ground. I drink too, then unbuckle the saddle bags and leash to let her run. 

She sniffs, pees, and is off. 

We clamber down eroded paths past monumental blue gum eucalyptus planted while this place was still a tuberculosis sanitarium, a refuge from the city fogs and a place apart. The hospital buildings have been pulled down, but here and there concrete stairs with galvanized hand rails lead down through the crackling chaparral and live oaks. 

Stone retaining walls from early in the last century remain to dam up fallen leaves and support cascades of poison oak. Dedicated people, people with fixed ideas, have here and there planted pre-Columbian species to ward off the oleander and eucs and pepper trees, the remnants of a California that was a cultural colony. Plants as facts on the ground. 

Under one of the oaks I see a couple of old concrete footings that look like a good place to stop and rest in the shade. 

I leave the water out for the dog and sit and look around. About 10 feet away, someone has constructed a small shelter close to the ground, out of a fallen oak branch and smaller brush. It looks just big enough to crawl into, maybe huddle with my dog for warmth on a cold night in fall. The thought fills me with comfort. Near my feet, a small concrete pipe pokes out of the ground. Its cover reads: Domestic Water. 

As Mega scrounges around, I decide to explore near some stairs and take a side path that dead-ends near an old pepper getting crowded out by one of the intentional live oaks. Pepper trees are a particular favorite of mine. Despite being known as California pepper trees, they came originally from Brazil. The Franciscans planted them in dry packed mission courtyards and they became a signature of the Old Spanish California scene romanticized—or fantasized—by the yankees. When I was growing up near LA, in a landscape swiftly turning from agricultural-utopian to suburban-bland, every vacant lot was home to an old pepper, whose branches invariably swept the ground and made a perfect playground for my girlfriends and me. The old fruit trees would go to ground if untended, but the pepper trees survived on their own until the bulldozers pulled in. So maybe it is no accident that I stop and walk around the tree and look at the ground around it, climb in under. 

And in this out of the way place I see it—a stone. A flat, oval stone, clearly a marker. I call Mega over and, as I get closer, I imagine it must be a memorial to someone’s longtime companion here. A strong, happy dog like mine who would stay close and come when called, mostly. 

I crouch down and see the words I love you written in script at the bottom of the stone. At the top is a picture obscured by dust. I start to wipe it with my hand and stop, suddenly still and cold. The first thing I see in the picture is what must be human front teeth, the large, protruding, recently emerged front teeth of a child. 

And suddenly I do not want to be here, but I can't leave. 

In front of me is a gold painted concrete oval with red, white, and blue striped edges inscribed in pink, blue and white script. Some of the words have faded and are not legible, but I think I can fill them in, in my mind. 

Megan Marie Kuhn 
7/4/1989 to 10/24/07 
Courage is ___ what you’re ___ to do 
…
There can be no courage unless ___ scared 
Always in my heart I love you 

Courage is not what you're supposed to do. 
There can be no courage unless you're scared. 

Courage is doing what you're not supposed to do. 
There can be no courage unless you're scared. 

Always in my heart I love you. 

I think of the different variations. How disrespectful, I think, to read this as a sign; how childish to read it as a warning. How self-important to feel it's somehow my special duty to witness its message. 

Which weakness do I choose? 

I go with the third, thinking on my way down the hill about this particular dead girl—and I was meant to think of her as a girl, her picture there being obviously one of someone much younger than 18. And then generalizing to the many girls, dead and disappeared, to whom I have been called over the years to bear witness. All the lives of all the dead girls. 

Like cool water running under dry land. 

As we leave, guys are out in back of the rehab, playing chess, reading. From here it looks easy to be in recovery, but hard, immeasurably hard, to be recovered, and to leave. 

I think of this essay as a kind of epilogue to my memoir Nobody’s Property, about my aunt's disappearance in Germany in the 1970s. Her story, for me, is a presence, an obsession, and yes, an addiction.

Music from ccMixter by copperhead: "I Need Something;" and by Alex Beroza: "Too Young," featuring snowflake.

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It doesn’t help that I have PMS on the day my chicken dies. I find her in the backyard coop, one wing drooping out of the nest, her head lolling. I have always told myself that if illness struck my tiny flock of two I would face it with the pragmatic detachment of a farmer, letting nature take its course or, in the interest of humane treatment, helping nature along by whatever means I had at my disposal. (But not owning an axe, I’m not sure what I expected I would do: twist the necks of birds I had named “Visions of Johanna” and “Absolutely Sweet Marie”?)

I come from farmers, after all: my grandpa, an Oklahoma migrant, had a great affinity for animals, a gentleness and an empathy that made him, according to one farm boss he worked for, the best horse team driver around. But when an animal’s time came, it was unsentimentally dispatched, by shotgun or, in the case of my mother’s childhood pet terrier, Corky, by the dog pound’s gas chamber. That was what was sensible. This attitude was such a matter of faith with my grandpa—a token of personal integrity, of fitness to exist in this world—that once when my mother spent $500, almost her month’s salary, to save our cat Bugsy from an entrenched case of feline urinary syndrome she swore me to secrecy. “If Grandpa found out about this he would think it was the most foolish thing he’d ever heard,” she told me. And he went to his grave not knowing.

But here is Marie, Absolutely Sweet Marie, unable to move, her legs useless underneath her. “Oh, baby, it’s going to be okay, we’re going to get you help,” I croon to her. The waterer in the coop is low and a little grungy; could her condition be my fault? Have I been a bad farmer? I have to do something. I call the SPCA; they refer me to a vet called All Pets. I call; they can see her in half an hour. I don’t ask for directions; I’m sure I’ve seen their storefront in the Inner Sunset many times before.

I find the cardboard pet carrier that I use to take my cat to the vet, put a towel in the bottom, and gingerly move Marie out of the nest. I see she has egg stuck to her underside—either her egg has broken or malformed inside her. The whole time I’m talking to her, telling her it will be okay, but she doesn’t look good. I strap the box into the car behind the passenger seatbelt.

God forgive me, in the car on the way I’m remembering Marie’s habit of running inside the house any time the back door is open, and I’m thinking it would be nice not to have to worry about that anymore. And she’s the one who flew over my neighbor’s fence and ate the flowers. While I’m thinking of this, though, I’m racing to the place I’ve seen on Ninth Avenue near the park.

I find a spot on Kirkham and pull Marie’s box out of the car. I practically run down the hill only to find the place locked; this is All Animals Hospital, not All Pets. Shit. But I have my cell phone; I call, and they give me directions to their South-of-Market hospital. Now I’m really frantic. I strap Marie back in the car and take off.

I call my husband at work and I start crying. “It’s going to be okay,” he tells me, in much the same voice that I’ve been using on Marie. I fly down Oak Street to Gough to Division, find the place on South Van Ness, park out front. I rush through the front doors and the staff there bursts into motion. “You got here fast,” one of the women behind the front desk says as the other speaks urgently into the P.A. system: “All available personnel to the back. Emergency. All available personnel to the back for emergency treatment.”

They whisk Marie, still in her box, behind swinging doors. I have dried my face but I know I still look harried and tearful. “Everything’s going to be okay,” a squat woman with closely clipped hair and an eyebrow ring says to me as she hands me a clipboard and asks me to sign. “We need your signature before we can proceed. We’re performing emergency resuscitation on Marie right now.”

That is what the form says:

Our staff is performing emergency resuscitation on your pet. These life-saving measures are necessary before any evaluation can be made of your pet’s condition. These procedures will cost between $200 and $400 dollars, exclusive of any further treatment necessary for the wellbeing of your pet. Your signature indicates your consent for us to proceed and your agreement to pay for these services.

I look at the woman. “Can you just tell me if she’s a goner?”

“We can’t determine anything about Marie’s condition until she’s stable. We’ve got five people back there right now working on her.”

An image of five gloved and gowned figures, laboring over the almost lifeless body of my Rhode Island Red, flashes in my brain. “I just thought it might be Newcastle’s…,” I say feebly. If it were this extremely contagious, deadly, and costly poultry disease, I thought they would want to know about it. I thought I was doing my civic duty bringing her in. But the squat woman just looks at me, and the woman next to her, with caramel skin and wavy black hair, just looks at me too. I sign.

“The doctor will be out to speak with you as soon as they stabilize her. They’re going to do X-rays as well.” The squat woman takes the clipboard back from me and the dark-haired woman turns to her keyboard and begins to ask me for my personal information. I give it, but I am beginning to weep again. I sit down, try to read some pet information pamphlets from the side table, but I can’t stop weeping. And I know they think I am the crazy chicken lady, weeping over my failing poultry, but what I am thinking is “My husband is going to kill me. He’s going to kill me!” And does my grandpa see from the other side how ill-equipped I am to live in this world, where people are available to resuscitate your chicken and give her X-rays? No, I don’t really believe it; but I have his voice inside me, growling “Emily—don’t be a silly girl!” Silly was about the worst thing you could be in his book.

The doctor calls me in to one of the examination rooms. She is a young woman with two dark braids, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, precise red lipstick, and the white sleeves of her clinician’s coat rolled to reveal tattoos scrolling up her forearms. She has a warm smile. She projects concern. She tells me they are now X-raying Marie; she has been given oxygen and an I.V. drip. But it doesn’t look good at first glance.

“Chickens are a funny combination of tough and delicate. We may be able to give her drip antibiotics and force feed her overnight. Sometimes it works. But I wouldn’t hold out too much hope—we’ll see when the X-rays come back.”

I wait again. Now I have the privacy of the examination room to weep in. “Get it together!” I think. “Two hundred to four hundred dollars,” I think. And antibiotics and overnight force-feeding—how much could that cost? I think of the almost-empty waterer in the coop. I think of times I yelled at Marie for running inside the house. Chickens, I’ve found, don’t seem to mind when you yell at them, but they’re hard to read. Unlike dogs, they don’t mime human expressions, and they don’t cower and they don’t beg. They do scurry away from you when you move fast, and they’ll peck food out of a child’s hand and eat it without compunction. They’ll close their eyes when you pet them. They’ll eat their own eggs, or they’ll sit on the eggs but eat the chicks when they hatch, but not out of anything other than confusion about what’s appropriate, what they’re supposed to do.

The doctor comes back in, mounts the X-rays, flips on the light. What comes up looks exactly like a chicken carcass after Sunday dinner, spread-eagled, or I guess you could say spread-chickened, the soft tissues on the bones an albuminous apparition: so temporary.

“It’s not good,” the doctor says, and I feel sudden relief. “You can see this cloudiness in her reproductive tract; that’s an infection. It’s so extensive it looks like she’s been working on it for quite a while, and it finally got the better of her. This happens a lot; an egg bursts inside or is imperfectly formed, and then the yolk is the perfect medium for bacterial growth. It’s not your fault.” I read after it was all over that it’s called an egg embolism.

“I would recommend putting her down, at this point, so she’s not suffering anymore. She’s almost gone as it is.” No all-night force-feeding. No more unaccountable costs.

“Okay,” I say. I sniff.

“Would you like to see her before I do it?”

“Yes, thank you.”

A tech comes in minutes later, wheeling Marie on a tiny gurney, a burgundy towel covering her, a small oxygen mask over her beak. A chicken with an oxygen mask! It is ridiculous, and yet its effect on me is almost religious in its intensity. Her eyes are closed, and her mahogany head, still perfectly formed, rests halfway inside the clear mask. The image makes me wish I were a painter: it is surreal and beautiful. And I love Marie for being so perfectly what she is, and I love the world for giving me the chance to see her this way.

The tech goes out again, and I cry again, and I tell Marie she was a good chicken, the best, and she laid great eggs, and I am sorry. The doctor comes in and gives Marie a purple syringe of barbiturates, and the vein in the soft mahogany-red neck stops pulsing.

They wrap her in the burgundy towel and say they are sorry, and I bury her in the backyard and after a suitable period of mourning get myself another chicken. I name her “Carolina in my Mind.”