Something is off, I say. Small discrepancies have started to emerge in my existence that do not square with the reality I thought I knew, kind of like in the new Haruki Murakami novel that I've been reading lately where the characters slip unbeknowst into a parallel dimension and start to detect subtle anomalies in their world (the police officers carry a different brand of firearm, there's an extra moon hanging in the sky... ) Such a shift must have occurred in my own life as well, for I can think of no other way to explain the incongruities that have arisen of late.
The other day, for instance, a stranger smacked into me on the street and then he... apologized. Whoa. Breach of etiquette there, good sir. It's well-established that if you jostle somebody in public, you must avoid eye contact and keep walking; the recipient of your jostling likewise does not acknowledge you and keeps walking, now harboring hatred in his/ her heart that he/ she will pass on to the next hapless pedestrian to cross his/ her path. But this man looked all concerned said he was sorry and I floundered for words to absolve him of guilt, all the while feeling cheated of a chance to curse him under my breath, to pay forward the ill will, to forge another link in the human chain of passive-aggression. So that was Oddity #1, the first indicator that something was amiss. Other signs began to pile up, too. The air itself had taken on a different quality-- my nose searched the atmosphere for exhaust fumes and falafel and roasted nuts and miscellaneous human vileness, but instead came up with adjectives like "maritime" or "pine-resiny." And one night I looked up and saw a salt-sprinkling of tiny white lights across the sky. Stars? Excuse me? We don't do stars in Schmanhattan; the lights of mass civilization have long superseded the lights of the cosmos. When I crawled into bed later, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, unable to settle down for some reason. And then it hit me. My usual nighttime lullaby of gurgling bathroom pipes and clanking radiators and pulsing Dominican dance music from above was absent, supplanted by a near-silence: eerie, unnerving, blockading sleep.
The next day I decided to clear my head in the best way that I know: seeking out a body of water and staring at it for awhile until the world rights itself and I become freshly cognizant of my smallness while re-apprehending the grandeur of Nature, etcetera etcetera. I made for the Hudson River overlook near my apartment, aiming to capture that limitless sensation of being on the edge of the land even if this particular vista was blighted by the neighboring Shores of Jersey. But this time Jersey was nowhere to be seen! In its place was a silver-blue pane of ocean that stretched off uninterrupted to some misty vanishing point. In shock I pitched forward onto my knees, expecting to meet the impact of concrete, but pillows of plush soft sand broke my fall-- awestruck I buried my arms in the substance, pure white and fine as baking soda, temperate on the surface but cooler and damper as I plumbed its depths.
At that point I became certain that I was not in Schmanhattan anymore, that I had pulled a Narnia or a Down-the-Rabbit-Hole and had toppled into an alternate plane of existence. Clearly I was on a coast, but an alien coast, an inverse coast. I paused to take in my surroundings. The topography was savage, almost alive; mountains rose like massive stone vertebrae out of the sea, like the backbone of some dormant monster that might occasionally twitch in its sleep and cause mayhem on a geological scale. Pine trees had still managed to eke out a living here, roots navigating rocks, branches forming an asymmetrical dusky green canopy... oh! THAT was why the air had that smell... well, there was one aberration explained, but still the larger mystery loomed.
Stymied, I searched the recesses of my handbag for my iPhone, which would surely answer everything: it would Google-map me, predict the weather, throw in a recommendation for a great local tapas bar, and perhaps I could even download a teleportation app to beam myself back home (certainly the Good People of Apple had come up with that by now...?) But as my thumbs got to work on that well-worn screen, a dreaded missive appeared: "Signal unavailable. Safari cannot connect to the internet." Disaster! Where the fuck was I in the known universe to be outside the scope of AT&T reception? (Actually, wait a minute, I could be a lot of places). I felt naked; my trusty device was incapacitated, cut off from its mother planet of Omniscience, and here I was, bereft, reliant on the meager reserves of information in my own mind. With Safari-the-Browser now defunct, it seemed I would have to embark on my own real-life safari, me versus the elements, [Wo]man vs. Wild.
The place was absurd, I thought, turning again to face the ocean-- the hues, the pinkish-tinged streaks in the sunset, so tacky, lifted straight from the palette of a Thomas Kinkade painting... and then I thought, How sad, I cannot experience any real thing without making immediate recourse to representation, to a stand-in, an ersatz rendition; isn't it more likely that Mr. Kinkade once witnessed some ravishing natural phenomenon like this one and strove to emulate it in a visual medium? But now I, when actually confronted with the Thing-in-Itself, could only understand it in terms of some schlocky reproduction. This was what it had come to-- soon enough I would start meeting new people, flesh-and-blood individuals, and instead of inhabiting the sphere of their presence for a while and then drawing my conclusions about them as human beings, I would quickly pigeonhole them into fictive archetypes ("he's very David Copperfield, or maybe kind of like that guy from Arrested Development")... oh wait, but I already did that constantly, and so did everyone else. It was our only mode of discourse, the rough analogy. Were we all then so incapable of freshness, unable to see anything as though for the first time, paralyzed by our infinite points of reference?
Mournfully I contemplated the tremendous gulf between immediate experience and comprehension/ analysis, all the while contemplating the literal gulf in front of me that tossed and roiled in the Kinkadian evening light. I sat down. And then something strange started to happen. The waves maintained their rhythm, in, out, crash, silence, suspense, crash again, reporting to the moon or whatever, and they got into my head and started to bear down on the chattering stupidities that resided there. This lingering petty resentment, that circular philosophical quandary, my twitchy cell-phone-less paranoia-- all were loosened like boulders from a larger rock-mass and then methodically pulverized by the weight of the waves... only a fine, fair sand was left: it streamed smoothly from my mind, exiting, leaving a clean bright chamber... my breathing aligned with the tides, gentle cycles of brackish air moving through me... and I realized I was doing the impossible, sensing the power of the Real Thing, the Original, but of course I can't describe it here without reverting to facile hackneyed putrid metaphor, so I won't even try.
... and then what happened? I can't possibly leave you hanging here, you think, at this narrative impasse, but oh yes, I can and I will, I must be cruel and sever the story at its apex because I don't know how it ends yet either; I, too, am left hanging (on a beach, in maybe [?] an alternate dimension). I seek, always, a way to return to my homeland, to the cultivated, human-scale terrain and that great metropolis of convenience, but it seems that for the time being I am marooned on this strange coast, this other world... I have since christened it California-- I wonder (wonderingly) what it will teach me next, while I wait--
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