The end of the record is when everything goes haywire. Instruments dropping off into nothing, a circuit dialog gradually muted in the expanse of 90 seconds, then returning to claim the colorblind.
Earlier, the turning of a faucet on the side of the house. On again, off again.
I didn’t care as I inched my way forward to the edge of the stage, my vision reduced to a telescopic slowness, the diffused light and silver streamers parting before me, my arm shaking from the strain of single lens reflex. I remember it well enough to know I was mostly there, like that unseasonably warm February night after two drinks at the Lakeside Bar, when Aileen Quinn hooked her slender arm into mine as we walked past Thompson Park and I knew that her patent leather go-go boots would not stay on her feet much longer. It was that kind of night. The kind that would make her grandmother frown.
She slips her arms into the sleeves of her coat and leaves the theater just seconds before the film’s closing scene: the reunited family lowering its once despised patriarch (now exalted) into the earth on a misty day. Black suits, black veils, black umbrellas. He sits through the credits and, getting up to leave, sees that she has left something behind on her seat—a sealed envelope addressed with one word handwritten in a tidy script. In the lobby of the theater he surveys the people standing about to see if he can find her. Was she wearing a sundress? He sees her nowhere, slides the envelope into the back pocket of his jeans, walks out onto California Street and turns west towards the ocean.
What do you do with the answer, sealed in an envelope? This question travels with our hero on one bus, and then another as he makes his way home. And I can already see where this is going, and I’m already someplace else. Let’s forget the envelope and the woman in the sundress, and instead let’s say that he went to see a movie, and afterwards he went home, and nothing unusual happened that day, and at dusk he went out for a sixer and a half gallon of milk, and nothing happened on the way to the corner store, or in the store, or on the way home. And at home, after his third beer and half a Miyazaki movie and 20 minutes of baseball highlights, he rang someone who did not answer the phone. The message he left was regrettable. Cool, he said, call me later. But it was not cool at all.
