Passion Contents

On the other three sides it’s the same, the same view of steel and glass. Sometimes when I feel gloomy, I walk around my floor — the thirty-sixth floor in a tower of ninety stories — and try to find a corner where I can see the sky, but I haven’t found one yet. No one else seems to share my desire. When my co-workers leave their cubicles, it’s only to walk to a conference room, to the bathroom, or to the lunchroom. And the conference rooms are rarely used because most of our meetings are now held online. So they spend most of their time, as I do, staring at a computer screen.

I’ve met most everyone on my floor at our occasional staff meetings, so I can greet someone when we pass in the halls, though I don’t remember their names. They give brief smiles but never stop to talk. Once in a while there are women in the lunchroom, but they’re always talking in pairs; and when I smile, they look right through me and continue their conversation.

In the bathroom, I occasionally hear the men discuss their adventures. They seem intent on recounting the strange places (some of them public) where they’ve had sex. They’re all young — my age, in fact — but so different. I couldn’t do what they brag about doing. Perhaps it’s my upbringing. I was raised on a ranch in Idaho, and though my parents left the Mormon church when I was a child, they held onto many of the values. They didn’t drink or smoke or curse, and I don’t either.

My co-workers grew up in expensive suburbs of large Eastern cities and went to prestigious Ivy League schools. They take for granted their place in this big city. I wound up here by a fluke, the reward of a God-given talent for mathematics. When I was a senior at my local college, I published an encoding algorithm which increased data compression on the Internet by a factor of two. On the strength of my discovery, I was hired by a multi-national communications company.

I enjoy my work, really, and the salary is great — more than I could ever spend. But when work is finished and I go out into the city streets, I feel like a dogie lost in the Red Rock Canyon. The people walk so fast! Someone always steps on my heels, barks out “Sorry” and veers past me without a sideways glance. I’ve stopped looking anyone in the eye, because I keep getting hostile stares in return.

Lately, the isolation has been getting to me, and I find myself staring out the window a lot. Not that there’s much to see. The offices opposite look just like mine: rows of cubicles lined up in perfect symmetry. Occasionally, someone will rise up out of a cubicle, walk away from the window towards one of the central facilities. But the other day — well! Someone walked to the window and stared out. I was so surprised I stepped back and kept moving until I reached my cubicle.

I sat still for a few minutes. I wondered if there could be someone like me working in one of these offices, someone who got tired of seeing life through a small glowing screen and longed for more. I had retreated so fast that I hadn’t even noticed if it was a man or woman.

The next day I walked to the window just before noon. I saw someone in the same spot, five floors up and several windows to the left. This time I noticed a skirt and long hair. Definitely a woman. Her hair might be red, though it was hard to tell colors in the February gloom. At this time of year the sun never makes it into the canyon that divides our two skyscrapers.

I pushed my glasses up on my nose and tried to see more details of her face, then thought how rude that was. She had probably come to the window for a moment of private contemplation. I let my eyes drift over the facade of the building, though I was acutely aware of her in the upper left corner of my view. Just as I was about to go back to my cubicle, she raised one arm and passed her hand across the glass in a single wave. Before I could respond, she turned away.

I thought about the woman during the afternoon, while I tried to debug my code. If she liked looking out the window, perhaps she was someone I might find compatible, someone working in the city but not enamored of its values. Late in the afternoon, I looked out again, but the windows opposite were empty.

A day later I returned to my window just before noon. The woman stood in the same spot. Today her skirt was a different color; her hair was definitely red. As I stared at her, she described a half-circle with her hand, the same casual wave. Shivering a little, I raised my hand and imitated her gesture. I waited, my heart thumping loudly. Then she raised her arm again and pointed downward, waggling her finger.

She wanted to meet me! For a moment I was too flustered to answer; then I nodded. I realized she might not see that small gesture, so I also pointed downward, but she had already turned away. I knew she was descending to the plaza, a pedestrian mall with a coffee shop and a few stone benches where the smokers gathered. I returned to my cubicle, put my computer to sleep and clipped my cell phone to my belt.

On the elevator I thought about what to say. “Hi!” No, perhaps “Hello” was better; less casual, more respectful. “You like to stare out the window?” Too dumb, too blunt. How about, “I couldn’t help noticing…” That was better, putting myself out there a little. But noticing what? Your red hair? That you’re a woman? That you’re lonely just like me?

The glass door swung open automatically, and I stepped out into thin cold light. Across the cement expanse I saw a woman with auburn hair, regal in a long leather coat, walking purposefully in my direction. I started forward, slowly, still pondering what to say. Twenty feet in front of me, she threw her arms around a tall man and buried her face in his shoulder. I stopped short, and my mouth fell open. The man had thick, beautifully waved hair. He wore leather trousers and a bulky white roll-neck sweater.

My castles tumbled down. What had seemed possible high in the air, in a cubicle separated from earth and sky, now felt ridiculous. How could I hope to fit in?

I turned back to my building but couldn’t move my legs. I dreaded returning to my computer. A voice behind me said, “Hello.”

I turned again, to see a woman planted firmly in front of me. She wore cowboy boots and a duffel coat, her curly, carrot-red hair pulled back in a ponytail. A grin spread across her wide freckled face. “I couldn’t help noticing,” she began…

Passion Contents

Passion Contents

The papers said it was an accident. But none of them, not even the people standing on the street, noticed the man on the roof. They did not see him peering over the edge; they did not see the slouch of his shoulders or the lines around his eyes. They did not see him close his eyes and step forward; they did not notice that his eyes were closed the entire time. They saw something fall from the sky. They did not know it was a man.

An elderly woman from New Orleans fell down two flights of stairs and broke her arm. She was lucky it was nothing more. She had been trying to answer the door for her son, who had forgotten his keys. He stood on the doorstep shuffling his feet from side to side impatiently, while his mother lay half-conscious on the other side of the door.    

On Mount Everest, an American climber slipped and fell into a yawning chasm while trying to cross the infamous Khumbu Icefall. His brother was waiting for him on the other side of the crevasse. They would have been the first American brothers to summit Mount Everest together.  

There are more.  

A woman jumps out of a flying plane, a parachute trailing limply behind her. 

A man dives headfirst into the ocean, and his body arches as if posing for a photograph.  

Rollercoaster riders fall, again and again — plummeting down winding tracks, and there is the feeling of weightlessness and something else like panic, but it is an orchestrated fall and so not a real one after all…
 
Every two weeks, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. For them, there is perhaps a moment of indecision. There is a moment, like the calm before a storm, where the image of a white shuttered house with a smoking chimney appears, or the memory of something long forgotten, and they wonder if they could stop and begin again. There is that moment. And perhaps the water is like a siren’s call, singing of some nameless freedom and the recognition and understanding that will come, because who will notice that they didn’t jump?  

The moment passes. They fall, and from a distance their drop seems small and insignificant, and eerily beautiful. The drop is 220 feet.

For others, the fall is shorter.  

A young boy wakes from a dream he doesn’t remember, because he is falling off his bed and narrowly misses the tiny plastic soldiers lined up along his dresser. A girl slips and falls on the ice in the lake where the children skate, and her cheeks become blooming roses, but it is only from the cold.  

All falls have an accidental nature — like the girl on ice skates, like Mount Everest. When they begin, they do not unravel frame by frame. You can’t press pause in the middle.  

You cannot rewind. You cannot stop a fall. Even in dreams, falls have an interminable Alice-in-Wonderland quality. The only way to stop falling is to wake up, which is exactly what most of us will do. The ground rises like a phantom beneath you, but it is nothing. You cause a small earthquake on your bed when you wake, but it is nothing.  

In the dream, you are still falling.

Not all falls are bad. Falling in love comes to mind. Falling out of it. Emotional gravity does not follow the laws of physics.

A fall does not have to end. It does not always kill people; at least not immediately. Sometimes it leaves the body alone.  

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Passion Contents

By the end of their first week of classes, they shared breakfast at the Union every morning and dinner in the evening.  A few weeks later, he mentioned that his roommate had dropped out, and no one had been assigned to his dorm room.  She moved in, and they remained inseparable.  Without ever really dating, they discussed marriage after graduation.

Although their relationship seemed ideal, one thought tugged at the back of Arlan’s mind soon after Diana’s parents visited.   Her mother was — there was no polite way of saying this — fat.  Grotesquely so.  He recalled hearing that if you want to know what a young woman would be like when she got older, look at her mother. 

Arlan tried ignoring such an obviously shallow concept.  He loved Diana for who she was, not what she might look like in twenty-five years.  Still, he noticed that her rear end was flabbier than he thought when not packed into tight-fitting jeans.

Diana had loved how he absentmindedly caressed her legs as they lay in bed reading, but lately his touch seemed different when he reached the meatier parts of her thighs.  At his urging, they began running mornings and avoiding late-night pizzas.  She understood.   She had seen the look on his face when she introduced him to her mother.  Although they talked about nearly everything, neither dared approach this one topic.

As the term ended, and they planned to move back home for the summer, they shared how difficult it would be to separate.  But down deep, Arlan felt ready for the break.  When his parents arrived to drive him home, Diana noticed how much he resembled his father, except that Arlan’s dad was as bald as a doorknob. 

She, too, felt ready for summer break.

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Their mothers look on with weary despair. This isn’t the game they remember playing. What happened to the rules?

And later, when they become teenagers? Oh, God.

Heat Wave Contents

Once awake, I’d roll back old stones and peer at the grubs and worms of memory and conscience. The hours spent hunting sadness passed quickly. Now the earplugs take up what is in my head and show it to the morning, adhesive and greedy for dust. They grow dingy gray and yellow from use. I cannot bring myself to wash them.

The earplugs keep the neighbors out. But they do not bring silence. Rather they subtract all other sounds and leave cicadas buzzing. It is a burning, bright sound: the sound of poplars and asphalt, clouded with ochre dust frosting, a sepia rash on the skin of the world. It is the sound of past life.

You’d never see the cicadas living, not then. You’d hear their endless cyclone song — you couldn’t not hear it. Past the pond, clotted with poplar leaves rinsed clean of dust. Past the anarchic copse, along hot walls, into the only road that went anywhere. The cicadas bored a tunnel through summer. 

It was only in death and dying that they appeared and dropped in the dust. Their bodies of thick and shiny meringue were insubstantial, easy to crush. But the cicadas’ stiff prism wings were strong and brittle. You could hold them and watch the last, silent stretches. Now the cicadas wake me to solitary pre-dawn contemplation. They are closer than the neighbors, and earplugs cannot mute them. 

Heat Wave Contents

One afternoon, not far from the Sea Bus terminal in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, per chance my eye doctor mentioned he was visiting London for a short holiday. Since I had attended the English equivalent of high school in Chiswick, I mentioned some not-so-well-known visiting destinations, one being Hampton Court, where I was born.

The doctor became interested and made notes on a yellow notepad, adding that he often visited London, as his daughter lived there. Since he was clearly not writing a prescription, I relaxed and mused as to what would entice a Canadian girl to live in London. An actress, a gothic cathedral researcher or a druid fan? The doctor quickly solved my puzzle. His daughter was an actress appearing at the Old Vic in a play called Six Degrees of Separation.

I knew of the theatre and had once or twice visited it with an older cousin. I must have been about twelve and recall it was here I was first addressed as “Sir” by the usher, a memorial event for any twelve-year-old, signifying the then-welcome march of time. In recent years, there have been other age milestones not welcomed, including these eye appointments. The doctor wrote something more on a small piece of green paper and handed it to me, saying he wanted me back in four months. I exited through the large waiting room; I saw no one I knew. There used to be paintings of mountains and war canoes hanging on the light green walls, plus one Tony Onley work. In recent months, these have been replaced by enlarged psychedelic photographs of the eye, somewhat Kandinsky-like.

Later that day I Googled the production. In the cast were Anthony Head and the doctor’s daughter, Sarah Goldberg. Anthony Head was the name on which I froze, since I had gone to school in Chiswick with his elder brother, Murray Head. Murray was a year older than me. In those days everyone was at least one year older. Now, of course, everyone tends to be younger than me. On leaving school, Murray went on to short-term fame as a singer and actor. I went on to university to study electrical engineering. I see that he is singing in France these days; and we both are not famous but linked by a green piece of paper.

Heat Wave Contents

John said he was born with warm palms, covered my icy fingers for hours some evenings. I sketched his big rough hands: Sometimes they were pine cones, other times baby rabbits. My skin found them in the middle of the night. The cold surrounded our breathing, kept us locked together deep into mornings.

Our seeds were scattered among the barren dunes — one speck of a baby, then another — the blood would always wait five months. Swim out to sea. My hat blew off my head, two thousand times those years, tiny grains of sand filling the spaces between hair follicles, catching in the corners of my eyes.

John, he watched the ocean with his face a bible, lined. He took to working seven days, hired a hand, this routine attached to that routine. I became the cool shadow; in my mind he called me “evening.”

The wind tricked me into trying too long, Ma once said; but now she’s part of the wind, and I forgive her. I hate it when wind spits drops on my face, or my feet — when sand is so fine, it invades the seams of my boots.

He started to carry pots for me, then heavy dishes, then the cat. I couldn’t bend to pick her up one day, so he said he’d take her outside. He took the cat in his arms and learned to hold him curled up and comfortable (and now he sleeps on the good rug because he’s spoiled).

John remained strong enough to hold me in place when I screamed to the storms.

Wild Transitions Contents