So I slept in yesterday, which is not normally something I do all that often, especially in winter, but I'd had to take the car up to Joel's garage the night before -- it had been making some weird threnodic singing noise when I tried to start it in the mornings -- and the parking scheme there is like one of those honeycomb triangle puzzles you get at places like the Museum Store. I don't know why Joel doesn't just tar over the whole lot and get it on the Western grid system, because you basically have to juggle geometry problems and maybe an exponent or two if you want to back into a space, and this is assuming you have two hands free to manipulate the steering wheel. I actually found a space in not too much time, but maneuvering into it and not bashing the hulking ATVs on three sides just left me with all this residual adrenaline hanging around in my system. I tried working it out on the way home, punching mailboxes and stuff, but going a mile in freezing January conditions is more likely to wake you up than lull you to sleep, so once I got home I stayed lit for hours. I ended up crashed out in front of some crap on Comedy Central with a stack of white cheddar rice cakes about as tall as me. I don't even like those things -- it's like the cheese destroyed itself in some long-ago war and you're just coming upon the dust of its civilization.
Anyway, I stayed in bed way longer than usual, and what woke me up was Lillian, our cleaning lady, bashing around in the bathtub downstairs. Lillian's a sweet old woman, but you really don't want to be in her way when she's on the job. I wasn't even sure she knew I was there -- my mother is the one who pays her and arranges schedules and stuff, and she's barely been up from Union City at all this week, the post-Christmas hangover being her busy season. Lillian and her brother basically shot their way out of the favelas in the eighties after her second kid was born, so I definitely didn't want to surprise her, especially after having been so quiet all morning. Real quick, I rolled out of bed and ducked into my brother's room.
It was kind of creepy in there, not least because I felt like I was fourteen years old again. It's incredible, but I think it really has been that long since I was last in there -- Luis got all closed off and weird while I was in high school, and the last year he was around, he pretty much never moved from the family room. It was a rare day when I needed to borrow something from him; the pencil sharpener was basically the only thing of his that I ever needed, and he gave that to me for Kwanzaa one year (the year he decided to start observing Kwanzaa, obviously). I hopped up on the bed, which was still the same slate-black comforter he picked out to match the navy blue walls, which in turn were only painted that color so he could slap tiny glow-in-the-dark moons and constellations all over them. (Luis spent most of middle and some of high school thinking he would go into space.) The desk was untouched, the same abandoned Rubik's cube and dinosaur erasers, with like eight books on the shelf -- Carl Sagan, the second or third Hitchhiker's book, something about human biology. The thousand-dollar telescope, which he spent two weeks glued to and then only used occasionally to tell if the neighbors were out so he could have band practice, was still set up near the window. The posters were still Kurt Cobain slumped over a guitar and Jimi Hendrix aiming his at the moon, even though Luis never owned or, as far as I know, learned how to play a guitar. I wish I could report that there was a photograph of him and me somewhere on a night table, or even a shot that I took, of Cally maybe, but Luis didn't much like things that reminded him of starting circumstances. I don't know that there's a single thing in that room, actually, besides maybe a wallet-sized map of Cuba, to indicate the places or people that Luis was from -- just where he hoped to go.
I don't know why I'm talking about my brother like he's dead. He's probably not. We haven't heard from him in two years, but he's an idiot, and I've noticed that idiots tend to find great favor in life.
Lillian left about an hour later, by which point I had already drawn up a list of all the places in town I could remember where the railroad tracks are accessible on foot, so to speak. Once I get the car back I'm going to make some rounds and see if I can't get some good shots of train-blown debris. I have this idea for a series that would basically be pictures of wind, in different circumstances. Now's the time to really start working on my portfolio, and anyway there doesn't seem to be anybody else in town to hang with. I thought I saw Marty Krasinski up by the high school a couple days ago, but he looked like he was shouting at something so I just drove past. Marty's a good guy but you definitely have to be in a certain mood.
