Shelter in Place Read Free Page B

in the hair of my father’s forearms. Clear safety goggles perched on his head.
    â€œThere is nothing you can’t do, Joe. Nothing in the world,” he says, pouring oil onto a rag.
    â€œFly? Be invisible? Become a lion?”
    â€œEven those, kiddo. Even those.”
    Then I’m wearing the goggles, too big for my face, his eyes through the scratched plastic lenses, he’s lifting me up and I’m flying, arms outspread, and we’re no longer in the workshop, but on the back lawn gliding to the roar of jets, the smell of his coffee breath.
    I’m trying here to find some kind of order.
    I want to do now what my father did in his later life. I want to see the world, our history, with peaceful clarity, find in it some pristine logic. Or no, maybe what he really did was give up on all that entirely. Maybe what he did best of all was surrender.

11.
    T he drive to Big Sur must have been exquisite, but what I see from here are only stock photographs. That famous bridge. The ocean crashing into craggy rocks. The highway winding along at terrifying heights, the tall pines, dramatic headlands. These are not memories of experience, but of magazines.
    Still, I’m certain I drove that road, and found my friends at a campground down by a good beach. I can no longer see their faces, but I was happy to find them there, happy to be drawn out of my mind.
    We waded into the cold water, tore mussels from a looming black rock and collected them in our T-shirts. Arranged them on a damp plank of driftwood, and laid it on the fire. They are sputtering and snapping open as the wood smokes and blackens at the edges. We used their shells as knives to cut the flesh free, and as spoons to eat them. The most delicious food I’d ever tasted. Full of smoke and ocean. Someone had a guitar. We sang around a bonfire. We pulled cans of beer from an enormous white cooler full of ice. We sat with cold night air at our backs and firelight on our faces. I am standing at the ocean with a blond girl, our feet in the water and she is kissing me. I remember her warm mouth and the wind coming up and she’s holding me to her with such force. She’s touching my neck with her cool hand and then the two of us on the mattress in the back of my truck covered in a grey and white striped blanket. We’re on our sides looking out at the ocean, and she’s saying, “I love you, I love you,” and I remember thinking,
yes, why not
, said, “I love you, too,” and the way my saying “I love you, too” closed whatever space was left between us and she pushed back and I could feel her tight and so warm and the ocean was out there and everything would be fine and I was swimming not sinking, swimming not sinking. I was slow, kept my lips to her neck, whispered who knows what, pressed my hand between her legs. She was so wet then and embarrassed.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
    And I said, “For what? Why are you sorry?”
    She didn’t answer, but pushed me deeper and I kept whispering into her neck and watching the waves.
    There were days and days of this. I remember her, but not her name, and her face is only a wash of color. But I know just how she felt in my arms at the fire, and the way she put my head in her lap and stroked my hair. How I wanted to tell her about the bird and the tar, but didn’t have the language, or the courage. The way the mussels tasted and the beer and someone singing who could really sing and not a single day of rain. Someone with a laugh so high it seemed invented though it wasn’t.
    One of us running naked into the cold ocean.
    A girl gone missing and that thrill and spike of fear, and her being found just before the police were called. Then a lightning storm and loud thunder and rain for days and whatever had been was over and we left our camp and dissolved into our lives in various vehicles going on to various places.
    Is it