Best of 2010: Patrick White - In the Dark With Monsters

Sometimes when I was, and am, scared, I lock the door to the basement. It’s the scary place where the monsters dwell, and on particularly threatening nights, they come out of the basement, feeding off your fear, and do whatever it is that monsters do. Unless you lock the door. In that case, they are stuck down there, pacing up and down the stairs, helpless until the door is unlocked, in which case you are no longer scared, and they are no longer real.

When I was ten, I had recently been granted the privilege of going home after school instead of to a daycare (which I attended until an embarrassingly old seven years old, the shame) or to my Mom’s office. On this fateful day, there was a storm brewing. I was watching Wheel of Fortune on NBC before the news came on. The wind was howling and the rain was pelting the window behind me, so I had to turn up the volume to hear. On the bottom of the screen, the scrolling bar listed Sioux county (“That’s where I live” I thought) as under a tornado watch. Of course, I knew even then the difference between tornado watch and tornado warning. "Watch" meant nothing, an empty threat. Maybe I’ll come and be a menace, just you wait and see, and there’s a chance I’ll come and possibly get you. Warning meant everything, a threat come to fruition. You’d better run and hide because I’m not coming anymore. I’m already here.

Partway through a commercial break, it started to hail outside. I could hear the house being struck repeatedly by marbles of ice. Thunder crashed around, and the sky was dark purple, giving that color about as ominous a presence as possible. I, a child who delighted in scaring others, was now on the receiving end of fear. I was waiting for Mom, Dad, someone to get home so everything could be okay. Pat Sajak and Vanna White checked to see if there were any RSTLNE’s on the board. I saw the contestant pick, but could no longer really hear, their additional letters and vowels. MCDO. Not much help, this one would be difficult. And the timer started. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. No right answer yet. Five. Four.

Then the sirens went off around town. Knock, knock. Guess who? I knew the drill: go to the basement, it’s the safest place in town, get away from all windows and glass, and bunker down ‘till danger passes. I chased after and grabbed my cat, then sprinted to the basement entrance, where I stopped.

I stared down the stairs, which changed direction a quarter of the way down, leaving the rest of the basement in mystery until you were already there. It was a large place, and it felt old, almost a dungeon. There were several rooms, many of them with offshoots, and nothing was quite level. The walls were white stone of some kind, but you could see the individual bricks, and the wall bowed in and out. Some doors wouldn’t shut unless real force was applied, and then they were twice as difficult to open. And of course, this was where the monsters lived.

I used to go “monster hunting” with friends, snorkels refashioned as guns, and even at two o’clock in the afternoon, I would feel uncomfortable in the basement. After all, we were just playing. We didn’t want to find an actual monster. Monster hunting was much less intimidating looking around the shrubs around the neighborhood.

I looked downstairs, struggling to find the courage to do what I knew had to be done. Outside, the wind and hail were creating a background of apocalypse. I closed the basement door behind me, sealing myself in. I exhaled, reaffirmed the grip on the cat in my arms, and took the stairs one by one. The small, feeble basement windows rarely let enough light in on the brightest days of summer, and at present I could see virtually nothing. And step by step I descended below the ground until I felt the cold floor under my feet. I was in the main chamber, and I traveled by memory to the next room, shuffling along, holding out my cat-free hand feeling for the door, dreading finding something else or, even worse, something finding me.

The door knob was in my small hands, and I slipped into the laundry room, windowless and as tornado-proof as any room in town. I closed the door tight, and wandered forward, now in complete darkness, swinging my arm to find the light cord. I was petrified, because I knew that this was the room where the monsters sprang from, and even though I wanted the light, I was reasonably certain that when I turned it on, there would be something right in front of me. At least in the dark I wouldn’t know, and maybe it would be over before it began.

I gripped the cord, the moment of truth at hand, and I tugged. But something went wrong. The string snapped, leaving the light off, and I was suddenly trapped by the darkness, unable to see or perceive the orientation of the room. I frantically grabbed for the rest of the cord, hoping it had broken low, but to no avail. It was out of my reach. I grabbed my cat closer, and sat down, as terrified a child as possible. Outside, thunder crashed relentlessly and the sirens continued to blare. And I sat, alone in the dark where the monsters lived, clutching my cat, crying for someone to save me.

Best of 2010: Aurora Nibley - Spine vs. Spine - Espionage in the Stacks

I don't know her name. No one knows her name; none of us can even remember whether she ever told us. All we know is that she comes in to the public library twice a week, with her ill-fitting jeans and her overbite, and she's nothing but trouble.

She's not the only incompetent volunteer the library's ever seen, she's just the most consistent. Usually the ones who don't know what they're doing are kids who need school credit. They come in once or twice and don't have the opportunity to do a lot of damage. Alternatively, our “regulars” tend to be older, and have a firm grasp of alphabetical organization.

This woman appears to be in her early fifties, although it's difficult to tell. She obviously immigrated to the US from a Central Asian country, India or Pakistan, but exactly which one is also mysterious. She wears her hair in one long braid down her back, as most women from that part of the world seem to do (her hair is black but her roots are gray—I see that a lot in Asian women, do they dye their hair or does it grow out that way when they get older?), but her clothes are western, obviously cheap and badly sized; she has neither the Hindu forehead dot nor the Muslim head covering, so there are no clues about her life there, either. We literally know nothing about her except that she's a walking apologetic smile of incompetence.

When she first came in over a year ago, we started her off with audio/visual materials. We keep these only loosely alphabetized and most people find them to be the simplest items to shelve. But we soon noticed that she couldn't tell the difference between regular audio books and teen audio books (the teen audio books are marked with a large blue dot on the spine—even if you're colorblind, you can see the giant dots) and would consistently put the teen materials in with the adult materials. When we tried to gently correct her, she switched to putting the adult stuff in with the teen stuff, which was worse. She does not take well to instruction, either; if you repeat an instruction (and she realizes it's something she's been told before), she gets huffy, declares that she has a college education, and sulks. But she never leaves.

What we can't figure out about her, aside from everything, is why she wants to volunteer at the library at all. One of our clerks told me that her family just brings her and leaves her here twice a week, to force her to get out of the house (For her sake? Or theirs? Again, unclear). But if that was all it is, she could sit with a magazine for a couple of hours, or use the public internet. Instead, for reasons known maybe only to herself, she wants to be helpful. My theory is that she somehow got the idea that shelving books at the library would help her to improve her English language skills. This might be the case, if she were reading the English books or conversing with English-speaking people. Instead, she is bringing me books marked with the letter F, because they were written by, say, Jonathan Franzen, or Ford Madox Ford, and asking me where she should put them because she doesn't know where the books go that are written in French—which, admittedly, also begins with F.

My personal relationship with her has evolved since we've known each other. At first, I was happy to show her around and explain where everything was supposed to go. I didn't mind answering her questions. Asking questions is how you learn, after all. But after the third or fourth time she would ask me the same question and then get offended at the phrase, “Remember when I told you...”, she gave up asking me. And shortly afterward, when I realized she would just ignore me if I came to help her unsolicited, we basically reached a silent agreement to ignore each other. Except that she hasn't figured out how to walk around a bookshelf if someone is in her way, so if we're working in the same area at the same time, I end up getting squeezed past far more often than is comfortable for me. Which is to say, at all.

Now she and I are at a stalemate. The librarians refuse to ask her not to come back (their philosophy being that any volunteers are better than none, which would make sense of we didn't have a couple of dozen others to choose from), so they keep just trying to think of different new tasks that she might not fuck up. But she always finds a way. She's wily. She kept putting books in the wrong place, so they asked her to put the books on the shelf with the spines facing up instead of out so that we can check them when she's done. But after about one day, she learned to only face the spines upward when she knows the book is in the right place—if she's not sure, she puts it in normally. She thinks that by doing this we won't be able to figure out that she's the one making all the mistakes. But we did. We thought that maybe she was getting things wrong because English is not her first language (although no one knows what is), and so maybe she's just having trouble with the alphabet. I wouldn't trust myself to alphabetize correctly in Greek, or Chinese. So we asked her to put the non-fiction books in order, because they are arranged numerically. For some reason she's not into that, though, so she does about a third to half of the numerical arranging (usually poorly), and then goes back to fucking up the alphabet again.

I myself have been reduced to following her from a distance while she's in the library, like some kind of crazy detective. If I try to do my own work, she'll take the books I'm working with and put them out of order, or she'll trip over me trying to walk through a narrow passage instead of going around. If I get too close to what she's doing, she gets super defensive and offended. All I can do is trail far enough behind her to hope she doesn't notice, and repair the damage.

I wonder how I could suggest that she'd rather volunteer at the UCLA library?

Best of 2010: Barbi Beckett - POP

In the summer of 1969 a prematurely balding man found love at an Arthur Murray dance studio in Texas. The woman was an attractive, plump, single mother of five and she snagged the man right up because he had a good job and he would have her.

The woman and her kids moved in with the man and she spent his money on trips with her friends and a sports car and things like that. The children were discontented. The oldest boy counted the days to his sixteenth birthday when he would ask the woman to sign a form allowing him to join the Navy. The oldest girl started running away at thirteen. The other kids have sporadic memories of her in that house. The middle boy sported a scar in the shape of a rose by his left eye. The woman wore a rose ring on her right hand. The youngest boy was scared. The youngest girl was a baby.

It wasn’t long before the woman decided to love a new fellow. She and the man fought loudly and the youngest girl, now four years old, got scared too. They all stayed with the man for several more months while the new fellow came around the house for holidays and such.

With the two oldest gone and the middle boy too angry at the woman to live with her anymore, that left only the two youngest to move in with the woman and the new fellow. They lived in a few different apartment complexes over a summer and fall. The new fellow worked in Greenland, which would be a long commute so he really just paid the rent and would come around occasionally to yell with the woman. One of those arguments ended in tears at Grandma’s house where the youngest boy would stay to live. The girl would go back to the house with the man and the middle boy. The woman was free to move to Greenland with the new fellow.

The man was now the single parent of a six year old girl and a teenage boy – though the girl has very little memory of the middle boy in the house with them. He went off to college and it was just the girl and the man. Often, just the girl. The man’s good job was an hour away so he left in the dark and, starting in first grade, the girl got herself up, fed, and dressed everyday. She’d slam the front door with the force it took to engage the lock and let herself back in after school. Two hours later the tired man would come home and make them dinner.

The girl thought and dreamed of the woman always. She wrote letters and waited for phone calls and visits. She resented any caring grown-up relation who wasn’t the woman. The man loved the girl as his own and, as far as she knew, she was. No one had bothered to tell her otherwise.

A few years later, when the girl was twelve, she went to visit the woman in another part of Texas where she was working as a house-parent in a facility for troubled youth. During the visit the girl found a strategically placed photograph of herself at her parents’ wedding. She was only a toddler but she easily recognized herself amongst her siblings. The woman told the girl that her real father was a race car driver who had been killed in a work-related incident. She made the girl promise never to tell anyone that she knew this truth. The girl agreed. It was a hard secret to keep.

The first few years were difficult for the man and the girl. He didn’t know how to have a girl and she didn’t know how to not have a mother. The girl spent a lot of time with the youngest boy at Grandma’s house. She strived to make him laugh because he was so sad. She was always happy to learn that the oldest girl was still alive, even if she was alive in a correctional facility and not allowed in Texas anymore. She exchanged letters with the oldest boy who had settled in California and never looked back.

By the time she was in high school the girl and the man had found their way together. He worked hard to protect her from the youngest boy’s darkness but there was little he could do. The girl was unable to hold all of the boy’s pain and would sometimes hurt herself. She hid the wounds from the man.

The girl appreciated the man’s support of her relationship with the boy, whose troubles now included the law. It wasn’t easy for the man to drive her to the jailhouse on those early Sunday mornings so the boy would have visitors or to be the boy’s guardian years later when he needed twenty-four hour supervision by court order. The man had come to love the boy but he did these things for the girl.

When it came time for the girl to graduate from high school, the woman came around and told her that her real father was not a dead car DRIVER but a living car SALESMAN. In fact, he was the most famous living car salesman in town. He had a series of gimmicky commercials that everyone knew. The woman reminded the girl that she’d met the salesman during an event at one of his dealerships a few years before. The woman introduced them and the salesman showed the girl a talking car. Again, she was sworn to secrecy.

The following weeks were surreal for the girl as she would have to sit through the salesman’s commercials while having dinner in the living room with the man.

Since the woman said she’d be informing the salesman that he had a daughter, the girl sent him a graduation announcement with a photo and a letter. She told him not to feel any obligation to her and that she had a loving father. It was unclear whether the letter ever reached him but she did not hear back.

Two years later the girl moved out of the state. She and the man were terribly sad and spoke on the phone often. As she learned to live on her own over the next few years, he always let her know how proud he was and how much he admired the woman she’d become. They’d visit each other and made efforts through letters and cards to express their gratitude and love, but the words they knew always fell short.

The man struggled helplessly to comfort the girl when the youngest boy took his life. The girl’s heart seized and she only felt relief when she thought of joining the boy. She received the boy’s ashes and took them to the same place she’d taken Grandma’s a few years before. She often went to this place by a river with a wooden bridge to be with them. It was better than a graveyard and she could sort of feel them there. The boy and Grandma had never seen a setting like that in their lifetimes and the girl knew they would like it.

Around that time the girl told the oldest boy about the race car driver and the car salesman. He felt certain that her real father was a military man who’d let the oldest boy play with his gun. It mattered very little to the girl. The man was the only version of dad she cared to concern herself with anymore.

Ten years after she left the man’s house the girl found a beau. The man had never before heard her say that she was in love and he was delighted for her. Two months later the man died. The girl’s Love held her up while she moaned and cried for weeks and months. They lived in a space thick with grief and new love, with guilt and confusion around joy in the face of such sorrow. She couldn’t believe her Love would never know the man.

Prior commitments eased or forced the girl back into life where she would have to learn to be in the world without the man. He had always been there, as long as she could remember. Who would care when she boasted an accomplishment? Who would she call when she was afraid her Love would stop loving her? Who would call her because it had been more than a week? Who would send flowers on opening night? Who would tell her the same stories over and over as if for the first time?

Who would send a barbershop quartet to serenade her on Valentine’s Day while she waited tables?

Well, at least that one was a relief.

Now, the girl has a girl and a boy of her own. She will tell them about the man. The same stories over and over, as if for the first time. She hopes they'll want to know.

Best of 2010: Nathaniel Hoyt - Summer Vacation

I shuddered and died and stuttered and fell. I lay on the bricks and spilled out on the gravel highway. Names came and went, but whatever it was, it was we, and us. We climbed the trunk of a city of roots, while the advertisement beacons bid us to buy another beer, buy another beer. So we did and we did and we did. I kicked open a dumpster like a treasure chest and stood on my tiptoes to peer in. We ate dough and sand, and we ate raw bleeding hearts and minds. We were met with applause. I was outside, inside this city of blisters and infants, and I met up with the wind on two wheels, and I shrugged at twenty-two tons of rolling death. I laughed at tasteless jokes. I moved too fast, and fell, and hurt myself. I was what I wanted to be: I was a child and a nuisance.

I will hone the edge of summer to its sharpest point, to stab into the heart of November and out through March's back. I hate March. I hate November. I need December and I need January. I always forget about February. None of that matters anyway. I'm remembering, in a place where every day is pretty much the same, the trash heap on the docks -- massive, easily the size of a hill, made of scrap metal skeletons and the unidentifiable remains of physical infrastructure. Tools, pylons, rebar, gaskets, drums, bolts, bearings, casings, bits, mounts, chassis, cables, and rust, exhumed from the foundations of the little port city and displayed, for a time, auburn and cold, on the dock to wait for the Stygian ferry, the godhand to clutch and drag away. Waiting to be out of sight, and out of mind. I used to approach the scrap heap as if it were a sleeping beast, shapeless and terrible. You couldn't even touch it, every point was blood. But I so wanted to dive in, to burrow my way beneath the dome and live like some trashlord fox. One day the whole damn thing was gone, lifted away like my hat in a headwind.

We always keep in mind the silly game we are taught to play with authority, and obediently tuck our cheap beer cans into our sleeves while the cruisers slide past. They make me uncomfortable; they are reminders. They don't let me forget this isn't a lawless wasteland (although I'm not really too sure). I know I am being watched; my bravado is a frog's croak on the highway. My rebellion is met with ambivalence, tolerance, condescension too. But when they're gone, I'm back in the wasteland; back in the grit and desert of my fantasy. I just want to build a fort and forget.

I allow the question to linger. Sometimes I think I need the tension that comes from unanswered questions. Sometimes I even like it. I can be satisfied enough just waiting for satisfaction. We rarely make eye contact; our conversations are always in motion, always moving, never going anywhere. Strange, but it doesn't drive me crazy anymore. I let it be. Stet.

We see from strange angles. We have no secrets, but we know all the city's. I think I climbed every tree in this park, and I've probably pissed on every tree in that one. At some point at least one of us will be naked. How old are we, twelve? Don't think we ever grew up. Our time lines are made from movable pieces. We are dogs, or rodents. We are a pack without the politics. When it's over I'll remember how foolish it all was, how futile. But I'll remember it with a grin -- a big, gormless, shit-eating grin.

Best of 2010: Lisa Taylor - Fire Season

October is fire season. While the rest of the country swoons over crisp fall air and Mardi Gras foliage, Southern California braces for color of a different sort. We residents scan painfully blue skies for scribbles of smoke. We examine hillsides furred with browned grass, punctuated with the gray-green eucalyptus trees -- ten-story candles, arboreal dynamite. We wince at forecasts predicting “Santa Ana winds” -- super-heated exhalations from the Mojave Desert which often mark fire season’s opening.

I’ve lived in Southern California my entire life. When I was young, the town I lived in, built in a bowl at the center of bone-dry, high-desert foothills, periodically found itself hostage to wildfire. I remember orange skies and ash falling like snow, a layer of black grit on windowsills and the hoods of cars. The omnipresent smell of burnt vegetation and swimming pools sporting an oily slick of spent fuel.

When I was about ten years old, the street I lived on found itself directly in the path of a wildfire. The houses across the street had backyards bordered by natural hillside, separated from relative wilderness by flimsy chain-link fencing. The fire’s point of origin was somewhere to the west of us, started -- intentionally, we found out later -- in the center of a small state park, and blooming outward. We watched the news for word of the fire’s trajectory, paid close attention to the direction and power of the wind. As this was before e-mail, before home computers, before reverse-911 alerts, the information we gleaned was attenuated; it was still possible, despite the orange skies, to feel somewhat removed from the action.

Then we noticed the fire trucks. Five, then six, then seven of them. Converging on our little neighborhood, their shiny red bulk diminishing our homes to mere backdrop. At first, none of the firefighters would talk to us, though we neighborhood kids were dying to talk to them, bouncing up and down on our heels and sprinting back and forth on the sidewalks behind our parents -- our poor parents, whose fear was mostly lost on us, fixated as we were on the firefighters’ uniforms, on their helmets, on their walkie-talkies, the tangible evidence of their importance. Then, receiving word of a shift in the prevailing winds, the firefighters’ focus shifted. A moment of awful, visceral thrill: the firefighters were talking to our parents, telling our parents to pack up and be prepared to leave on their order. We were no longer spectators -- we were the main attraction. We might be on T.V.!

With faces of stone, my parents hustled me and my sister back to our house. We were told we could fill a paper bag each with things from our rooms. At eight and ten, my sister and I did not acquit ourselves particularly well, here: I remember we both stuffed our Barbies and their wardrobes into our bags, but forgot our scrapbooks, our souvenirs. I did have the presence of mind to grab my stuffed rabbit -- named, imaginatively, Bunny -- from its accustomed place on my bed before rocketing out the door, where my parents were waiting in the driveway.
We stood beside our loaded station wagon and watched the firefighters race to the top of our dead-end street, where Little Sugarloaf and Big Sugarloaf (our local names for the neighborhood hills we’d all hiked countless times) could most easily be reached. Our dogs, loaded into the wagon first by my parents (before the photo albums, before my dad’s paintings, before my grandmother’s wedding dress, before my Barbies, for that matter), threw themselves at the windows, barking furiously in an excess of confusion and excitement and doggy-rage. We watched the hill directly across the street.

And then we saw it.

With the speed of water tumbling out of a cup, the fire poured itself over the lip of the hill. Untethered, the fire chewed its way through the brush, through brittle sage and grass and manzanita, a thick spill of red and orange flaring down and out, urged onward by gravity and wind, erasing the usual brown of the hillside. The fire made no sound; it was quiet. Except for the shouts of the firefighters already on the hillside, already in its path, there was nothing to hear. This seemed odd. To my ten-year-old mind, the absence of sound was the scariest bit. Anything moving that fast should have been noisy, should have sounded like a waterfall, like hail, like an engine. This fire was quietly, simply, efficient.

My parents had had enough. We joined our now-hysterical dogs in the station wagon and left.
When we returned to our house several hours later, the only evidence of the fire was a blackened hillside, relieved here and there by the pale gray of scattered boulders, and the smell of ash. The fire was contained quickly, and our neighbors’ homes were spared. Half the kids in the neighborhood vowed to become firefighters when they grew up. And fire season passed.