Too Much of Nothing excerpt
i.
The graveyard where my bones are buried lies close enough to the beach to receive a shroud of fog on mornings when the chill breath of the ocean rolls onshore. I like to linger in the fog, hang around like a scrap of it, and listen to the slapping waves. Sometimes I’ll wander to the beach and watch the homeless men who live there like phantoms, browsing trash cans for clothing and food. I’ll sit on the concrete steps leading down from the strand and explain myself to a dirty, wire-bearded man with shining eyes, a lunatic more interested in some half-eaten sandwich than in my grievances, who, as a general rule, will turn away before I’m done and go grumbling into the fog. It’s frustrating. To the most observant or sensitive people I must be nothing more than a shimmer of air, an unexotic wave of heat, but I can feel the dimensions of my body the way amputees can feel their missing arms or legs. I still have the stubborn sense of being Eric Sperling, mopey shlemielish teenager, walking around in baggy shorts and a digital watch. In fifteen years, this feeling hasn’t dissipated. My nerve-illusion, or whatever it is — this wispy shape — has grown heavier, to the point where I’m not even convinced it’s unreal.
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Right now a tramp called Rodney is rooting through yesterday’s trash. I haven’t seen him in years, but now he’s back, wearing a canvas hobo pack and a fisherman’s vest. His hat with its dangling fishing lures sits crooked on his head, and the fabric of his vest as well as his bare skin are olive colored with grime. His handlebar mustache has turned peppery white. Rodney’s a Stanford graduate, also a former hippie. Fifteen years ago he was the most prominent bum in Calaveras Beach, but now he seems to have lost his mind. He keeps staring in my direction.
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On good days I can levitate over the beach and the concrete stairs to the level of seagulls perching on sodium lamps along the strand. Sometimes I rise higher than that, as high as a crow, and take in thisi whole suburb on the western edge of L.A. County — the swerve of seashore laced with surf, the railroad parallel to the beach, with its odor of dusty oleander and cinderbed; the parks, the schoolyards, the cars, the acres of asphalt draping the town.
But most of the time I feel like an ordinary kid, physically solid and hale. Which is strange, because I was killed in 1984 by a boy named Tom Linden. He went down on manslaughter, and my death was apparently the result of an accident — teenagers in a car, no seat belts — though of course the cops and the courts got it wrong.
His mom is embittered by popular culture: She still thinks Tom was corrupted by A Clockwork Orange.
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I go quiet sometimes. I seem to blink in and out, like a firefly. The periods of wakefulness can be long or short; I don’t have any control over that. The periods of quiet are like a deep meditation or watching. When I get bored watching people on the beach or in the graveyard, I visit my parents on Nelson Street, or wander the town, or spend time in the library. Like a young yeshiva student I can sit for hours at the long library tables and pore over newspapers, magazines, novels, plays; books on astronomy, history, philosophy, religion, architecture, boating, or dog breeding. (I try to read only what strangers leave behind, to avoid lifting books off the shelves and spooking the staff.) The Calaveras Beach Western Branch Library is one of those ugly but functional government buildings put up in the deep Cold War, with broad picture windows hedged by junipers, and an official name or designation in iron letters bolted to the brick. It’s not a major branch, and the books are outdated. But a modest life of the mind is better than nothing.
To me the most relevant document from the library is a yellowed page of the Strand Bulletin, which I managed to save from the recycling bin years ago by allowing it to fall behind a Xerox machine. The Bulletin is our local weekly, published every Thursday, and the item in question ran on May 24, 1984:
LOCAL BOY KILLED IN MYSTERY CRASH
Last Saturday, Eric Sperling, a sophomore from Calaveras High, was killed in an auto accident when the car in which he was riding rear-ended a truck on Vermont Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The car had been stolen from the high school last October, and its driver, Tom Linden, a Calaveras freshman, has been charged with vehicular manslaughter as well as grand theft auto. The formerly green Chrysler was disguised with blue house-paint. It is not yet certain whether the victime knew he was riding in a stolen car, which made headlines last autumn and has baffled local authorities for months.
That’s a good one. Of course I knew about the Chrysler! Teenagers are not complete idiots. Maybe the reporter wanted to spare my parents a rumor that I was involved in stealing the car. Very sensitive. The truth is, I had nothing to do with stealing it, but my parents in the end weren’t spared the rumor, wince it was all but printed right there on the front page of the Bulletin. Oh, well. I guess if the full truth got published my parents wouldn’t even recognize me. They had enough trouble figuring out how a well-behaved boy like me could have died in a stolen car. The Bulletin doesn’t even mention Rachel Cisneros, Rick Fischer, or a single gram of Colombian cocaine.
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