INTERNAL STRUCTURE
-June:
-Recent Job interview made him remember
people that died:
-Eric Foot-mushrooms and went into
cardiac arrest at an outdoor concert
-My cousin Marlin flipped his car into oncoming
traffic
-Two weeks later the best of us, Timmy
Hughes (we called him Kiki), a man incapable of spite or sarcasm, was drinking
up by the estuary one Saturday night and he dove into the dark green water
only to float up three days later, leaving behind a dog and an
engagement ring for Ginnie Foot who was Eric Foot’s sister
-July:
-Meetings for people who want to stop drinking:
-Day one-He met a woman called Betsey
(kicked out of her stepmother’s house and forced to prostitution at 14
years old)
-One night-Betsey’s advice:
when you first stop drinking you should substitute
cigarettes or ice cream or sex
-August
(toxins):
-Every night-go
out with Betsey and other people of the meeting.
-Betsey’s conversation- every
seven years your cells regenerate and your body is
completely reborn. She told me toxins build up in your pores and
cuticles and that drinking a lot of water or sweating helps the detox process
-One night-He went to Betsey’s house:
-That afternoon there was a brutal storm.
-Droplets of rain from the wet tree leaves onto my
face-I hadn’t had or noticed I’d had a pleasant sensation in many
months, maybe even a year. Was that possible?
-Two smoked butts lay together in the grass:
-sign either that:
-we would stay together
-or that something else was going on which I would
understand in time.
-September
(1bed):
-Over the next few weeks
we made plans for finding a new house and moving in together:
-Announcing it sometimes
at the end of a meeting, which you were not supposed to do.
-I thought,
I’m making love to a prostitute.
-October
(St johns):
-He took St johns in
form of tablets or tea.
-We
made daily tenth steps and gave up white sugar and took field trips
to Monterey Bay and Carmel
-There was a retarded girl on the boat who
laughed if anyone vomited. Betsey vomited on two occasions but
in her story about it later she changed this to three.
-
I began to meditate every day and saw a
recurring image of a mouth opening and closing, not a human mouth.
-July
(1suggestions):
-
I was told I should leave parties early and arrive late.
-I had never broken the
law outside of driving.
-Another man whom I’ll never
forget told a story about fucking an Indian when he was a merchant marine
then killing him and throwing the body overboard. There was absolute
silence in the room after he told us this. He said, I
guess the statute of limitations ran out on that.
-Thursday night:
- There were two shows I liked to watch on television.
- I taped one and watched the other until the first one got
cancelled.
-She didn’t watch either show, she only
pretended to read.
-October
II (1chevron):
-
After a few weeks Betsey and I
found an apartment in the tenderloin near a residents’ hotel where another
friend of mine worked.
- The three of us began a
regular schedule of juice fasting, which we were mistakenly told would
calm our vibrational field.
- Everything seemed like it might work at
first.
- The fasts lasted for four or
five days
- Once when we made love she
fainted:
-She could have been dead. I didn’t
believe it but still I felt strangely close to her then since usually she
talked all the time.
-I was a boy who at twelve
wore black mascara and at fourteen
was shooting speed up my nose because I could not deal with after-school
chitchat.
- On the days the wind blew from
the east, which was not very often, we all got scratchy throats due
to toxic leaks from the Richmond Chevron refinery
- To offset this and other maladies we
began to take zinc.
-November
(1christians):
-They continue taking vitamins
(riboflavin, etc).
- We were having a lot of sex then and
Betsey liked to fuck and watch television and have a cigarette going at
the same time
- After we stopped smoking
everything seemed a little less meaningful.
- At the Vallejo county fair we met some
Californians for Christian Focus and attended a rock concert for Jesus.
- Two of the Christians gave us woven
friendship bracelets:
- I had often seen young
girls making these on Telegraph Avenue as they sat on relay mail boxes and
both the young girls and the young Christians seemed so
fresh and hopeful.
- Later that week Betsey and I
went to a meeting where a woman announced she was giving herself permission to
wet the bed. After that we cut back on our meetings and our sex
drive improved.
-November
II (1ring):
-When we went to the movies I held
her hand over the armrests and twisted the ring with my fingers.
-She gave me a cashmere scarf for Christmas,
black on one side and gray on the other, which made my skin itch and I gave it
to Goodwill but later lied about that.
-We set out our pills in small plastic
containers with the names of the day printed on them.
-We stopped eating out then we
stopped holding hands in the movies.
-She told me she had no time to
meditate. We tried yoga together.
-She spent more time in the
library.
-January
I (1bleaves):
- Betsey decided she was going to take up
her grandmother’s offer and go back to nursing school.
- Before she left Betsey gave me
jars (iron, etc)
-January
II (1questions):
-I began to question all her stories
-When I wrote to the address she gave me, her
grandmother’s house, the letter came back to me.
-Everything was moving away from me very fast; I no
longer saw my old friends.
-In addition, a man I once worked for disappeared from his
house:
-I had worked in their yard
-They were nice to me but they owed me some money.
-She said, Anthony (main character’s name finally
revealed) I’m not at my best.
-There was once a little kid but I didn’t ask
where it was.
-I wished that I was the little kid and I wished that I
could cry in her kitchen
-I also knew her husband would come back which he did but not on that
night
-She was really very nice, and as I ate her eggs I thought about the time
when the two cigarette butts lay absolutely perfectly parallel on
Betsey’s front lawn and I decided that what it meant was we would
have a journey together of fixed duration and that was cool.
-March
(1tenlbs):
-I met a man who told me he would work with my electrolytes if I
could give up meat. Later I gave up wheat, coffee, yellow
vegetables, and grain. The coffee I cheated on occasionally.
-I met a woman through this man, before we broke up she
taught me qidong, the art of deep breathing.
-I began to ride the BART into the city to take tai chi
classes in the mornings outside facing west.
-I became interested in my physical self.
-I acquired a dry weight measure that hung in my kitchen.
-My shrink told me about directed dreaming.
-I took a trip with a few people to a cabin in the eastern Sierras
and learned how to not watch T.V. For my part I introduced them
to nut salads and organic tomatoes, which cost a lot more but are definitely
worth it.
-June
(1flowers):
-In the summer I went to a conference on flower essences
-Breaking the rules sometimes reveals the unexpected.
-Tuesday mornings three fiddlers gathered near the School of
Public Policy to practice or perform.
-They made me think of taking up a musical instrument again,
a woodwind perhaps, but I never did do that.
-April
(1gumby):
-When I came back from the cabin I felt ten years older.
-It had been a long time since I was that boy who
tripped with Eric Foot then watched him die.
-My family was feeling better about me.
-I was still living in Oakland…There were only a
few strange reminders…Another was a man from the residents’ hotel who
Betsey called Gumby. None of these people seemed to remember me,
though.
-September
II (1ends):
-I never once asked myself where it would end.
Each thing seemed like the last thing at first.
-I was paying the rent and the gas bill on time. I
was washing my whites, boiling water for tea, meditating, etc.
-You wait for a beginning, middle and end, but usually
you can’t see the end until the beginning comes around again.
-October
II (1ginnie):
-I re-introduced grain into my diet so I could go to a cafe
and drink wheat grass tea and maybe meet some women:
-I bumped into Ginnie Foot who was Eric
Foot’s sister and Kiki’s former fiancee.
-Kiki… I’d never heard
him be mean or sarcastic, not once in my life and I’d
known him since we were two.
-Slowly I added items to my
diet and convinced Ginnie to move in with me.
-Ginnie told me stories of life in a boarding school back
east, stories that were more than ten years old,
-She had a tattoo on her neck in the shape of a cross.
-I thought: this is a girl I could marry.
-November
II (1ginnie2):
-Could it be that these were my happiest days?
-Finally at last I felt here is someone who can connect me
back to all my previous selves.
-There were days when she couldn’t leave the apartment or
she had to return because someone gave her ad strange look.
-We touched all the time, even at dinner, and sometimes I
pretended that she was the woman whose husband had disappeared and I was the
husband who returned.
-Maybe we even had a child or maybe she was the child.
-In the mornings I chose Ginnie’s clothes for her when she
needed me to and I began reading a book to her about the Alexander Technique.
-I didn’t ask her about Kiki, we never talked about Kiki.
I’ve learned now that the present cannot answer the past.
-April
II (17chakra):
-I looked up enlightenment in the dictionary. I heard about the
seventh chakra which can suddenly open and let light flood in.
-Sometimes she still dreamed of Kiki. She said, I’m
not like that anymore.
-Betsey had a spark like a motor but Ginnie was part of my life
before
-We had gone on alone and then met up again like something
parallel that has been shifted
-February
(1jobs):
-When at last Ginnie
left too I rented a small apartment near People’s Park and found a job as a
copyeditor.
-After a few weeks the routine began to feel
soothing
-I started gaining weight again and I ran every day
and felt my bone density increase just as my physical therapist predicted.
-Soon I felt well enough to work full time and I
opened an IRA.
-I was promoted, then I changed jobs.
-I went back to things I remembered liking in childhood
-I was making money now and began trading stock
options and I had a really good run.
-April
III (1eat):
-Last April I bought a house in Redwood City
-These days as I stand outside looking through the eyepiece
I can see how far I have come.
-I would like to watch the moons of Venus eclipse, which I’m told
happens every thirty-one days.
-A few weeks ago some of my old friends looked me up and
when we went out for sushi:
-Ginnie Foot was working in a gift shop in Kauai now and
that made sense to me.
-These are the people I’ll never see again but it
doesn’t make me feel bad.
-As dinner was winding down one of my friends asked me what I’d
been doing with myself all this time but I couldn’t go into all
that.
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Carolina Cody Aldaz
cacodyal@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press