Reflections
Zeke Gerwein
The ocean is invasive, the crash of waves dark and loud. It’s since stopped raining. Everything around me is muddy and wet, the trail down a frightening crash course on how to descend a mountain using only an iPhone flashlight.
“Khaled!” I yell into the darkness. “Are you there?”
This beach is almost always empty, accesible by a muddy singletrack that leads over a steep headland to a tiny spread of pebbles maybe five feet wide. It’s cold and dark, the air still heavy with the aftertaste of rain. I walk across the corrugated array of rocks to the water, let the waves crash against me, stand there bleary eyed, half asleep, and shivering while the ocean fills the hollowness.
“Khaled!” No answer. The waves drain my shouts anyway.
The clouds recede a little, dark empty sky cracked apart to dry, cold February. I swallow, clouds refracting across salt water. Three thirty. Three thirty a.m. in midwinter at a deserted strip of rocks on the coast of Northern California. At the crook of my arm is a blue green vine, unseen river of oxygen on the pale underside of my elbow. It turns a raw crimson from the blood rush if I hit it with a rock. Whine of an airplane. Crash of water on rock, rock on skin. Over and over. Over and over
My left arm is sore and I hang it limply at my side, hoisting myself back up to the muddy trail running toward the top of the headlands, light flashing erratically from my iPhone across the hillside. San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley glitter across dark water, an array of flashing white lights, the slow roar of ocean faded into benevolent white noise.
“Khaled!”
There’s no response.
On the wall of a cafe claiming to sell the best Punjabi burritos in California is an oil painting of two naked people split apart by lightning, the rest of the canvas dark and flecked with silver. The painter is sitting next to it in a small red chair, his blue beret on backwards, tufts of grey hair issuing from under it. I ask him what the painting is.
“I call it Stormclouds. A piece based off of Plato’s Symposium. The Symposium holds that humans used to be…”
“I know what the Symposium is,” I interrupt. I try to look indifferently attractive. Why do you care what he thinks?
“Yes, I’m trying to emulate the feeling of separation in the shading. If you see here…” He must sense that he’s losing me. We artists know when people stop caring. As I turn to leave, he calls after me, “It can be yours for three thousand six hundred seventy eight dollars, plus sales tax!”
I don’t respond, just walk faster, trying to cut the thought from my mind.
I take the six twenty five ferry across San Francisco Bay even though it’s both longer and more expensive than the BART. It feels like going full circle somehow, as if this ferry is linked to the first one I took in October, to Seattle. Grey water, grey sky, Angel Island a dull green to the north with brown headlands rising steeply from the water. San Francisco’s crowded smear of grey buildings stand along the western side of the bay, Oakland’s on the east. The dark shadow of the Bay Bridge as we skin the water into the Oakland Harbour.
The humid air of a pre-storm morning weighs me down as I step off of the ferry and onto the cobblestone of Jack London Square, scattering a gathered crowd of seagulls. My left arm still twinges when I hold it straight so I keep it bent to my side as I walk up Broadway into the waking chaos of Downtown Oakland, the familiarity of the surroundings discomforting. I get coffee and take it five blocks to the lake, sit on a splintering bench next to the water, space out. I can finally decompress.
“I’m so sorry to bother you.” I glance up from the coffee. There’s a small man standing in front of me, grey hair thinning and uncombed above weathered pale skin, full shopping cart parked against the grassy embankment. His voice is rough and low. “But I decided that it was imperative to inform you that… how should I put this? Your reflection, er, your centre is a little bit… hmmmm… Have you heard of Plato’s Symposium?”
I close my eyes. The empty gaze of Khaled’s eyes during High Holiay services, two hundred of us in the stifling fast of an unseasonably warm Yom Kippur, throats coated with sandpaper from the fast. The beach. With Khaled in the Sierras, on a trip, in Yosemite, parked outside a store. Kris in a smock, holding knives. Alone with a cup of coffee next to Lake Merritt. Symposium blasting through the stereo over and over again. Blood on tiles, Khaled’s body under the shower head.
“The story goes that humans used to be bunched up, like beach balls. Two sets of arms, two sets of legs, and two faces on either side of a head. They were all was one of three sexes, just as they are now except instead of male, female, and intersex they were male-male, female-female, and female-male. And here there are many different versions of the story, why exactly humans displeased the gods or if the gods were just doing it for fun. But in all versions they were split!” He raises his arm and swings it down at empty air. I notice the other sleeve of his plaid shirt hangs loosely by his side.
“Split right down the middle,” he continues. “Into two. And now we can never be truly happy until we find our other half. But, and this is the reason I had to stop right now, you are empty. Your other half was taken from you, quite recently.
“I don’t want to talk to you right now,” I say, grabbing my coffee in one swift movement. It spills onto the pavement, the top askew.
He kicks the brake lock off of his cart and begins wheeling it forward, jostling for space between commuters. “Alright then. Have a nice day!”
Some time aftrerwards I find myself in a stuffy, overheated bookstore in Mill Valley paging through a recently published book by Margaret Atwood.
“Have you heard of Plato’s Symposium?”
I turn in the chair but there’s no one, it’s mid morning on a Tuesday. Which reminds me that I should start looking for a job in Seattle, maybe a barista job or something, I can’t live off of the few magazines that publish my short stories sporadically.
“Split right down the middle, into two. And now we can never be truly happy until we find our other half."
I shake my head wildly. There has to be someone here, someone talking to me but there isn’t anybody here. I smack the crook of my left arm again, almost out of habit, feel the weight of the empty bookstore fill my intestine.
I never went to his funeral. The memory makes my center feel ajar as if the emptiness is spreading into my esophagus. No, that dude had no idea what he was talking about. I’m not empty. I can’t be. I fully intended to go to Khaled’s funeral. The Mourner’s Kaddish was still ringing in my ears over and over as the BART train crept underneath the bay. Yitgadal v’Yitkadash sh’mei raba… I had memorized it earlier that week, holed up in the warehouse, reciting it to the blank white wall of my writing and living space, the short stories and poems that had hung there having been packed into a backpack or sold or recycled or put into storage. The goal was to limit the things I was bringing to Seattle to fit into one backpack.
“Are you sitting shai-vay?” Cam asked, having once read a Chaim Potok novel.
“Shiva.” I corrected them in a monotone. “No. No one really sits Shiva until after the funeral and even then it’s only immediate family or spouses.”
“Hay may-come yeen-ay-chaym ayt chaym,” Cam said and I didn’t correct them, went back to memorizing the Mourner’s Kaddish. But as the BART train screeched through the Trans-Bay Tube it escaped the confines of my hippocampus and I panicked.
It had rained the day before and the stairway out of the station was slippery, footprints of commuters imprinted across the platform. The bus to the cemetery would leave in a few minutes. Yitgadal, yitgadal, yitgadal… What comes next? What’s after that?
Within twenty minutes I was half a mile away from the cemetery, shivering, wishing for a sweater. The bike path from the bus to the cemetery ran along an expansive marsh, grey water bisected by low scrubby islands, the wealthy suburb of Mill Valley on the other side, masked by manicured pine trees. The way it ends. How does it end? But I couldn’t remember it and I didn’t go the funeral and instead hiked four miles over the headlands to the ocean.
I felt guilty at the ocean but not as guilty as I would’ve felt at the cemetery, seated in an uncomfortable chair in an uncomfortable room while his relatives delivered their eulogies and a rabbi, sweating in their thick coat, chanting the Mourner’s Kaddish. That afternoon I was gone anyway, riding a mile to the Greyhound Bus station while the clouds burst open and the first storms descended on Oakland. And now I’m back, I remind myself. And I’m empty.
The Kaddish ringing in my ears, I call my friend Daoud.
“Hey Daoud.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure? By the way, I’d love to hang out sometime while you’re still in the Bay. What day…”
“Daoud, I need to get out.”
“Back to Seattle?”
“Just out.” I exhale. I need to find someplace private, someplace of my own, where I can just immerse myself in pure self pity. Around me, tourist families on their way back from the giant redwoods and the ocean are surrounding me amongst the overpriced paintings hanging from the store windows. Cafes, the kitsch of a suburban, touristy, downtown district. The weather has soured, grown colder, a formidable wind blown in from the north.
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Just tired.”
I wonder if he’ll bring up Khaled. I wonder if he was at Khaled’s funeral. The world outside is blurry but I can see Kris in his smock, holding a knife. I never heard Khaled’s scream but the bathroom is a sticky mess.
“Hey, you want to come with me to Yosemite? Go backpacking? Spend a few days in the mountains?”
I tap my foot against the sidewalk. “No backpacking gear. Or warm shit. I’m cold here.”
“I can lend you stuff. I’m renting this space on a much larger ranch and the owners always let me borrow gear if I need it. Where are you?”
“Downtown Mill Valley.” Exhale again, as if all of the carbon dioxide in existence has made its way into my body and I need to expunge it.
“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” Daoud says and hangs up, leaving me to wander, dazed, amongst the paintings.
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Zeke Gerwein
The ocean is invasive, the crash of waves dark and loud. It’s since stopped raining. Everything around me is muddy and wet, the trail down a frightening crash course on how to descend a mountain using only an iPhone flashlight.
“Khaled!” I yell into the darkness. “Are you there?”
This beach is almost always empty, accesible by a muddy singletrack that leads over a steep headland to a tiny spread of pebbles maybe five feet wide. It’s cold and dark, the air still heavy with the aftertaste of rain. I walk across the corrugated array of rocks to the water, let the waves crash against me, stand there bleary eyed, half asleep, and shivering while the ocean fills the hollowness.
“Khaled!” No answer. The waves drain my shouts anyway.
The clouds recede a little, dark empty sky cracked apart to dry, cold February. I swallow, clouds refracting across salt water. Three thirty. Three thirty a.m. in midwinter at a deserted strip of rocks on the coast of Northern California. At the crook of my arm is a blue green vine, unseen river of oxygen on the pale underside of my elbow. It turns a raw crimson from the blood rush if I hit it with a rock. Whine of an airplane. Crash of water on rock, rock on skin. Over and over. Over and over
My left arm is sore and I hang it limply at my side, hoisting myself back up to the muddy trail running toward the top of the headlands, light flashing erratically from my iPhone across the hillside. San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley glitter across dark water, an array of flashing white lights, the slow roar of ocean faded into benevolent white noise.
“Khaled!”
There’s no response.
On the wall of a cafe claiming to sell the best Punjabi burritos in California is an oil painting of two naked people split apart by lightning, the rest of the canvas dark and flecked with silver. The painter is sitting next to it in a small red chair, his blue beret on backwards, tufts of grey hair issuing from under it. I ask him what the painting is.
“I call it Stormclouds. A piece based off of Plato’s Symposium. The Symposium holds that humans used to be…”
“I know what the Symposium is,” I interrupt. I try to look indifferently attractive. Why do you care what he thinks?
“Yes, I’m trying to emulate the feeling of separation in the shading. If you see here…” He must sense that he’s losing me. We artists know when people stop caring. As I turn to leave, he calls after me, “It can be yours for three thousand six hundred seventy eight dollars, plus sales tax!”
I don’t respond, just walk faster, trying to cut the thought from my mind.
I take the six twenty five ferry across San Francisco Bay even though it’s both longer and more expensive than the BART. It feels like going full circle somehow, as if this ferry is linked to the first one I took in October, to Seattle. Grey water, grey sky, Angel Island a dull green to the north with brown headlands rising steeply from the water. San Francisco’s crowded smear of grey buildings stand along the western side of the bay, Oakland’s on the east. The dark shadow of the Bay Bridge as we skin the water into the Oakland Harbour.
The humid air of a pre-storm morning weighs me down as I step off of the ferry and onto the cobblestone of Jack London Square, scattering a gathered crowd of seagulls. My left arm still twinges when I hold it straight so I keep it bent to my side as I walk up Broadway into the waking chaos of Downtown Oakland, the familiarity of the surroundings discomforting. I get coffee and take it five blocks to the lake, sit on a splintering bench next to the water, space out. I can finally decompress.
“I’m so sorry to bother you.” I glance up from the coffee. There’s a small man standing in front of me, grey hair thinning and uncombed above weathered pale skin, full shopping cart parked against the grassy embankment. His voice is rough and low. “But I decided that it was imperative to inform you that… how should I put this? Your reflection, er, your centre is a little bit… hmmmm… Have you heard of Plato’s Symposium?”
I close my eyes. The empty gaze of Khaled’s eyes during High Holiay services, two hundred of us in the stifling fast of an unseasonably warm Yom Kippur, throats coated with sandpaper from the fast. The beach. With Khaled in the Sierras, on a trip, in Yosemite, parked outside a store. Kris in a smock, holding knives. Alone with a cup of coffee next to Lake Merritt. Symposium blasting through the stereo over and over again. Blood on tiles, Khaled’s body under the shower head.
“The story goes that humans used to be bunched up, like beach balls. Two sets of arms, two sets of legs, and two faces on either side of a head. They were all was one of three sexes, just as they are now except instead of male, female, and intersex they were male-male, female-female, and female-male. And here there are many different versions of the story, why exactly humans displeased the gods or if the gods were just doing it for fun. But in all versions they were split!” He raises his arm and swings it down at empty air. I notice the other sleeve of his plaid shirt hangs loosely by his side.
“Split right down the middle,” he continues. “Into two. And now we can never be truly happy until we find our other half. But, and this is the reason I had to stop right now, you are empty. Your other half was taken from you, quite recently.
“I don’t want to talk to you right now,” I say, grabbing my coffee in one swift movement. It spills onto the pavement, the top askew.
He kicks the brake lock off of his cart and begins wheeling it forward, jostling for space between commuters. “Alright then. Have a nice day!”
Some time aftrerwards I find myself in a stuffy, overheated bookstore in Mill Valley paging through a recently published book by Margaret Atwood.
“Have you heard of Plato’s Symposium?”
I turn in the chair but there’s no one, it’s mid morning on a Tuesday. Which reminds me that I should start looking for a job in Seattle, maybe a barista job or something, I can’t live off of the few magazines that publish my short stories sporadically.
“Split right down the middle, into two. And now we can never be truly happy until we find our other half."
I shake my head wildly. There has to be someone here, someone talking to me but there isn’t anybody here. I smack the crook of my left arm again, almost out of habit, feel the weight of the empty bookstore fill my intestine.
I never went to his funeral. The memory makes my center feel ajar as if the emptiness is spreading into my esophagus. No, that dude had no idea what he was talking about. I’m not empty. I can’t be. I fully intended to go to Khaled’s funeral. The Mourner’s Kaddish was still ringing in my ears over and over as the BART train crept underneath the bay. Yitgadal v’Yitkadash sh’mei raba… I had memorized it earlier that week, holed up in the warehouse, reciting it to the blank white wall of my writing and living space, the short stories and poems that had hung there having been packed into a backpack or sold or recycled or put into storage. The goal was to limit the things I was bringing to Seattle to fit into one backpack.
“Are you sitting shai-vay?” Cam asked, having once read a Chaim Potok novel.
“Shiva.” I corrected them in a monotone. “No. No one really sits Shiva until after the funeral and even then it’s only immediate family or spouses.”
“Hay may-come yeen-ay-chaym ayt chaym,” Cam said and I didn’t correct them, went back to memorizing the Mourner’s Kaddish. But as the BART train screeched through the Trans-Bay Tube it escaped the confines of my hippocampus and I panicked.
It had rained the day before and the stairway out of the station was slippery, footprints of commuters imprinted across the platform. The bus to the cemetery would leave in a few minutes. Yitgadal, yitgadal, yitgadal… What comes next? What’s after that?
Within twenty minutes I was half a mile away from the cemetery, shivering, wishing for a sweater. The bike path from the bus to the cemetery ran along an expansive marsh, grey water bisected by low scrubby islands, the wealthy suburb of Mill Valley on the other side, masked by manicured pine trees. The way it ends. How does it end? But I couldn’t remember it and I didn’t go the funeral and instead hiked four miles over the headlands to the ocean.
I felt guilty at the ocean but not as guilty as I would’ve felt at the cemetery, seated in an uncomfortable chair in an uncomfortable room while his relatives delivered their eulogies and a rabbi, sweating in their thick coat, chanting the Mourner’s Kaddish. That afternoon I was gone anyway, riding a mile to the Greyhound Bus station while the clouds burst open and the first storms descended on Oakland. And now I’m back, I remind myself. And I’m empty.
The Kaddish ringing in my ears, I call my friend Daoud.
“Hey Daoud.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure? By the way, I’d love to hang out sometime while you’re still in the Bay. What day…”
“Daoud, I need to get out.”
“Back to Seattle?”
“Just out.” I exhale. I need to find someplace private, someplace of my own, where I can just immerse myself in pure self pity. Around me, tourist families on their way back from the giant redwoods and the ocean are surrounding me amongst the overpriced paintings hanging from the store windows. Cafes, the kitsch of a suburban, touristy, downtown district. The weather has soured, grown colder, a formidable wind blown in from the north.
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Just tired.”
I wonder if he’ll bring up Khaled. I wonder if he was at Khaled’s funeral. The world outside is blurry but I can see Kris in his smock, holding a knife. I never heard Khaled’s scream but the bathroom is a sticky mess.
“Hey, you want to come with me to Yosemite? Go backpacking? Spend a few days in the mountains?”
I tap my foot against the sidewalk. “No backpacking gear. Or warm shit. I’m cold here.”
“I can lend you stuff. I’m renting this space on a much larger ranch and the owners always let me borrow gear if I need it. Where are you?”
“Downtown Mill Valley.” Exhale again, as if all of the carbon dioxide in existence has made its way into my body and I need to expunge it.
“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” Daoud says and hangs up, leaving me to wander, dazed, amongst the paintings.
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