6/29/91 Oleg calls from on the road, Indio California. I tell him he’s in the San Andreas Fault bed. The Salton Sea, the Sea of Cortez. He asks if the San Bernardino Mountains are the Rockies. He has no idea. No, I say the Sierras, simplifying geography a bit. I tell him how the peninsula of Point Reyes came from there along the fault, though it was probably from the Tehachapes, or at least that’s what geologist say. But most of those same granite outcroppings extend all the way to Cabo San Lucas. At Point Reyes I saw the same kind of rock as I did in Cabo. How I love the story of rocks.
Anyway, finally, I think I made a geologic impression on him after all this time. He’s never fully grasped the magnitude of the idea of how living along the fault line has shaped our culture and our coastline. He doesn’t think of the earth is moving because we can’t measure it with the naked eye.
When he called, he said he was in Forestville, he said he couldn’t leave me, then he amended it by saying he was in Indio. It was a joke maybe not in the best of taste, considering the circumstances. I had mixed reactions.
I was willing to go and pick him up, but I had a pang of dread, thinking of all I had to do before I left for Hawaii at 5 AM on Monday morning. Both of us were trying to pack at the same time. It wasn’t working. So I said squelched my needs in order to meet his needs. I still haven’t physically packed though I did all my bills and chores.
I couldn’t pack with him in the house. He was ending a way of life, while I was merely preparing for a short respite from the interruptions of the past nine months.
Having Oleg in my tiny house was definitely a pattern breaker. So, my life was turned upside down. Rather than face the emptiness of his not being here, I opted to get out of the house. A complete change of scene. Hawaii. The eclipse will take my mind off the past year’s events, and hopefully it will launch me into the next stage of my life, whatever that is.
And so, his call was welcome, though I fought down the guilty beasts rising within myself. Why don’t I like to answer the phone? Fear of responsibility, and of what is to come. I hated it when he called, asking me of my plans and is pathetic hangdog voice. I’d love to make over his telephone voice too, because I knew I always had to come and get him wherever he was. Beck and call. I was always responsible like a mother to a child, and I hated it. I loved it when he was self-reliant, which wasn’t often, but it seems we fight too hard to get there. My secondary emotions, resentment and anger included all the primary emotions.
I just re-learn the word sublime from the ground up. To pass from solid to gaseous state without going through ice to steam. Turner’s paintings are sublime landscapes, Wind, steam and fog. I too learned to pass from one state to another, bypassing logical progression, into the sublime state. Pavlovian emotions. How to stop the roller coaster heart now?
He forgot five rolled cigarettes In the Bugler can on top of the clock radio. Women are more sensitive to smell, than men—it’s biogenetic. We are born that way. It makes sense—food, danger, sex, all carrying odor with a message of one kind or another like the on/off binary code of computers. Pixels. Danger/no danger. I hated the smell of tobacco, rolled, unrolled, loose, burnt, etc. Nothing to do. My nose smells the minutest particles. I could smell him rolling cigarettes in the kitchen while I stood in the bedroom doorway 8 feet away. Sometimes it made me sneeze.
The past few months I’ve had to take allergy pills day and night to suppress my allergies as it was an unusually bad pollen season. His cigarettes, my down comforter, and pollen were too much for my immune system. I kept getting short term viruses with a duration of a few days to a week, the worst part is the low grade fevers and the night sweats. Of course it scares me, AIDS foremost on my mind. None of us can completely rest assured when it comes to our sexual past. I saw a gripping documentary Absolutely Positive, how HIV affects lives, both straight and gay. I guess the hardest part is to get to the no blame section as the I Ching says.
No, I never got to the no blame, or at least it was pretty rare. I did it times achieve that state, saying to him, no blame, but when you do A, B, or C, this is what happens within me…
How can we avoid this möbius loop? Issues of time being the most prevalent.
I took Oleg to meet my family after we went to Point Reyes. He said he wanted to. I didn’t suggest it, but I pointed out landmarks dear to me— my hill, Mount Barnabe, and the Olema Hill Road. We were on our way to Bolinas and Mount Tam for the solstice. As it turned out, we hiked to the other end of the point, Chimney Rock at 4:47 PM, or whenever the precise moment the solstice was, and missed it. I wasn’t aware that the solstice happened at a certain time, I was waiting for sunset to celebrate.
At the solstice I was alone, enclosed within the circle overlook, a wooden fence, very much like a wooden Stonehenge watching the sun set due west behind the lighthouse. I was alone on the edge of the continent, celebrating the sun, something far older than me within, and across the naked fields, a small black dot, man’s torso, Oleg always lagging far behind.
I had gotten tired of waiting for him and forged on ahead, alone, but this is the way I experience the openness of nature best. Alone, elemental. Surrounded by sea and sky, light, wind, earth. But he came into my circle. And we watched the waves crash below us, I pointed out Point Reyes, to the west, Drake’s Bay, and the scalloped cliffs to our right. I’m on an island in time, we were on another island, it seems like Scotland or Ireland. Nova Albion. I get it.
I wore a nylon jacket from the 20th century and there were boats in the harbor, but it was as if time itself didn’t exist. My determined pilgrimage, my mindlessly running to this place, only to have the uncanny sensation of having had a similar experience before, unnerved me. But my relationship with Oleg has been filled with déjà vu from the very beginning. He was supposed to stay this long, I guess.
I remembered another useless dream about schedules, etc., fragments of conversation, meaningless in the dream, but they still came true nearly two years after the fact. Because I write down what I remember of my dreams, I have a running fact sheet of images. The earthquake dream came true too. The rubber band dream with the red carnations defied logic. Oleg had rubber bands around his neck with me helping him to adjust them.
In another dream, we were on Highway 101 by Cotati, heading north to Santa Rosa. Instead, in real life, I took him to the San Francisco depot late at night, I had placed a red carnation in his food bag. And there were plenty of rubber bands around his luggage items, as it seems. In fact, he took all of my fat rubber bands, only Leaving two behind, just like in the dream. I have the elements of the dream right here. The order may be out of sync or it hasn’t happened yet.
And so we went to my grandmothers house, had dinner with Jane and my mom. So many cornflowers or bachelor buttons in bloom in the field below. Oleg said they grew among the rye in the Ukraine considered a weed, but to describe a beautiful girl was like cornflowers among the rye, all blonde hair and blue eyes. I realized my darkness, my hair and my eyes were the opposite of assumed beauty in the Ukraine, with its predominance of blue-eyed blondes.
Home, this land I love, and roses filled the path to the upper garden. We struggled in the tangle. I showed him plants. Huge bushes, rosemary and flowering peach that I had planted in the rocky, barren soil as a child. I season our food with sprigs of rosemary from the parent bush of my grandmother’s garden. I’ve made many progeny. Several here in Forestville as well as elsewhere. Rosemary the blue sea rose of my name and of remembrance. Roman cliffs, Italy, the sea.
We said goodbye to the sun setting in the northerly gap on Mt. Barnabe. Fitting that I should come home, appropriate accident. Later, my mother tells me that my uncle Bill has lung cancer. I am so angry knowing he was missing a half a lung from TB and yet he continued to smoke. I’m surprised it took this long to catch up. Jane, Oleg, and my mother continue to smoke as she tells me the details.
The open window and the air purifier is for my benefit, the asthma that comes from inhaling cigarette smoke, will not help their lungs. I flash angerly at Oleg. See why I want you to stop? I say it just brings more death. He continues to smoke. I pointed to my mother, saying how our family is riddled with cancer. She had breast cancer, an,uncle died of melanoma, and my aunt Toddy has skin cancer and breast cancer. My grandfather’s throat cancer from the cigars. In defiance, he draws another halo of smoke around his shoulders, the pleasure on his face is unmatched even by sex. Even with the knowledge of death, they enjoy their guilty addiction, subtle, thorough and lasting.
I want to mail those last five cigarettes to Oleg just to get them out of my house but I am aiding and and abetting by mailing them back to him, or am I? Grim reminders of death. I leave for Hawaii soon. When my uncle be alive when I return on 21 July? I talk of returning to my childhood home, living in a trailer in the garden. Oleg says it would be coming down in life to live this way, it would be regressing, that I’m better off staying in Forestville. Wow. I didn’t see that one coming. A middle class Soviet.
I never liked my uncle Bill, especially when he tried to sell our land right out from under us. My grandmother crying one summer evening as he laid down the news. Who was he, living in a tract home, to tell us what to do with our land? In a rage I attacked him verbally. I wasn’t even 12 years old and he never for gave me for my adult anger in a child’s body.
And I never forgave him for manipulating us, trying to break up our family. Put her in a nursing home, what happened to me and Guy? The enemy was a man all right, within the family. Eldest born son with the arrogance to match. Shades of the dream. The white cylindrical tubes, the glistening silver lines—what significance can I attach to the number four?
Sarcasm is the first form of humor. I think of the word sarcophagus. Phagos. The body devouring itself. Cancer. Give me another fag. I can hear my uncle asking, as he lies, so white and pale on the bed. I want to tell him, the Little League coach, that the bases are loaded this time, and who is left to steal home?
