Lonely Girl Travels

December 9, 2003

“It’s a special kind of anesthetic. So we won’t be putting you completely under—you’ll still be lucid—but you won’t remember anything.”

Paper gown and stirrups, they injected the needle and you didn’t flinch.

You took it as a challenge: remembering.

You stared out of the window—out of the white walls made antiseptically cheerful, away from the faces and charts and the gleaming tray of tools—looked at a pond outside, gray water against gray sky, the geese sitting and splashing and silently honking—no noise, just their beaks moving in the shape of a scream.

The room went away, and the sides became black, tight, squeezing in, like the end of an old-timey cartoon—tunneling, until the whole world became that pond and those geese, trapped there in a December afternoon and a pinhole of consciousness.

And it’s like you weren’t there. You couldn’t see them working, couldn’t feel them working (working on you). You couldn’t hear them—or at least, you couldn’t remember hearing them, maybe a sound floated in here and there, but it didn’t stick to anything, memory like fly paper or that sticky tape the rats get stuck to and sometimes chew their own legs off trying to escape. So in that way, they were right.

You focused on the pond, out the window, struggled against the squeezing black. You fought for that pond, those geese (which now seemed like plastic geese) and you wondered if it was real or man-made—the pond, that is—whether the office park was built up around a marsh, filled in and cemented and paved clean, and the pond had been left there as a charming relic; or if it was added later, an empty lot dredged, a sliver of pastoral idyll amidst the row of generic 60s architecture.

It was man-made, you decided, because this was Alameda and everything was man-made, an entire island of fabrication: unearthly flat, because it wasn’t earth; flat like the Bay, because it was the Bay. Because the Bay moved under the flimsy layers of landfill, murmuring, like a waterbed.

And they’d always said that if a big enough earthquake hit, the whole goddamn island would sink—crack and crumble and get swallowed into the water, because there was nothing solid underneath, just landfill, which you’d always assumed meant trash, like a trash patty, a whole city built on garbage.

And you imagined a big enough earthquake making the water reach up, tear apart all the little everyday cracks—in sidewalks and in the walls of old buildings—reswallowing the place: the office, the pond, the whole island. And you imagined those plastic geese rising up, flying off in a V shaped like an arrowhead, their beaks moving (open, close) in silent honking, which might have been prayers, or might have been screaming.

Because they didn’t need anything solid to exist, or anything unsolid either, but you did, or at least you thought you did—though whether it was the solid earth or the murmuring black underneath, you weren’t sure.

It was pretty fun, you told your mom later—a pretty good drug, all in all. Not one you’d do recreationally, there wasn’t enough of a high, but not bad at blacking out what needed to be blacked out, and keeping in some strange sliver of what didn’t matter, what meant nothing to nothing: the geese and the gray light of the gray afternoon. Which was, after all, all it was meant for.