iv. night lights

It was around the start of December, Christmas trees were being sold
off neighbors' private lots, the cattle bundled up inside barns and
stalls, that celebration began in earnest in Small Wood. My mother had a tradition; she'd round the family up in the car and take us on a long winding ride to check out Christmas lights on display. It was exasperating in its tedium, but also good quality family time, stuck together as we were. The tone was often far more mocking than
revelatory, as Christmas was a time when even the more cultured and
well-meaning were somehow struck with a curious holiday affliction
known as complete and wanton tastelessness.

This year, Mom heard about a botanical garden and adjoining bed and
breakfast that was said to house a splendid and classy assortment of
holiday lights and decorations. So it was to be our mini-vacation to drive
there and spend a cozy night, relaxing away from it all.

Maybe for a week or so I could not get a particular girl out of my head. She was
not an expected choice for carefree idle obsessing over, as she was
as different from me as could be. So many attractions in life tend to
be of that variety, but for me it was a rare thing and I kept it to myself. It was not that I had anyone to really share the notion of her with. My family, I preferred their ignorance on all matters romantic, and the friends I could claim would have just tried to knock some
sense into me. So I found it the most casual and comfortable to just let the feeling linger beneath the surface, and pop up for breath only on occasion.

But as school winded down with the impending holiday time, and we, as a
family, took long drives up and down the coast to do our shopping and
preparations, I had an excess of time to fantasize and live in my head
with her. Some women I find very good for that, and it is ever only
in the imagination that they take on real and exacting depth. A
horrible thought, but I'd learned that so much of life was trial and
error, with the end result so often siding with the negative. I actually tried asking this girl to Winter Formal, only to be shot down in flames. The notion and my attempt really did come out of nowhere and must have appeared to the poor girl as a blustery,
confused sort of query. She knew of me, but nothing concrete solid. We
had no real interaction with each other except eye contact in halls.
We did not share a pool of friends, nor did we participate in
activities together. It was admittedly a pretty horrible idea on my
part, but I regarded her as older, cooler, and my hormones ruled all.
Thankfully, after my subsequent dismissal, no mention of my attempt to
ask her out was ever relayed back to me by a third party, so I always
assumed she had the common decency not to make a show among her
friends regarding the error of my ways.

It's very strange because even now, almost ten years after last
seeing her, I really don't want to say her name or conjure up her
image. When I write, I want to feign ignorance. This is that part of
me I have trouble reconciling. So intensely personal I feel I can shed
light upon
some incidents from my past, but small little things like this, it's
almost like a stopper is in place and I can not drain this pool of
thought. It's personal shame, perhaps. I stash away the memory for my
own, and realize that there was once so much wasted opportunity for
connection, and my own personality and development as a person comes into
doubt when I think back to all my blunders and blind fool ignorance. I withheld
so much of my true feeling and emotion, and that baggage still runs within
me, deep and prescient. In the end it all comes down to that
unshakeable feeling, and
I harbor so much doubt about what might have been, could have been.

So there was that, and here now my extended analysis of rejection, and I suppose ties somehow to how I feel most alone during holidays, a time of all that
togetherness and cheer, that strips me naked, leaves me to shiver in the cold. I love my family, I love my friends, I love the women who were that half of me in their
time. The holy days, the change in temperature and climate, the
lengths we go to show how much we love and cherish. It all seemed a
bit much. Ennui is the best way to define it, as it has always been
there, that cold bit of distance like I'm a goddamn exile in my own
skin. Every last sentiment and doubt is quite firmly my own mental
folly, an excuse to despair when all is seemingly well in the world.

The holiday food I ate the year before I came to Small Wood was the
hallaca, a variant on the tamale, very popular in Venezuela. It was a
true mutt of cuisine. Inside the ground lard and maize enclosure was
basically whatever leftover the chef felt obliged to insert. I've
always very much enjoyed that tamale texture and flavor, or anything
dumpling-like in nature, all carefully portioned, wrapped, and
steamed. Half the fun was the surprise in seeing how very different
each meal turned out. A little bit of this and a little bit of that,
all wrapped up like a present, very time consuming to prepare, a labor
of love and special to the season. I bring this up, because that was
the last time I felt like a child, when the holiday was sacred, and
the world so beautiful it hurt. The cusp, is what I know it as.
Somewhere between the Small Wood holiday, and the Venezuelan one
prior, I'd lost it. I'd breached the cusp and was well on my way. The
luster, the luminous veil I now regard childhood with, that was gone
from sight.

Christmas lights were dull and obnoxious to me, an eye sore. The
Christmas tree, a decaying thing, gaudy all dolled up like that. I
never really believed in Santa as child, but in his place I always had
a sense of spirit, a concept of the beauty of the thing, and whatever
that unknown now failed me, or perhaps I failed myself. That sense of
history, the richness of the collective suspension of disbelief, the majesty and dream of a white sunrise, all that gone. I played pretend along with everyone who believed, I willed myself into fooling them all and going along with their foolishness because it mattered so very much to the world at large.

I spoke to my father my newfound sense of holiday dread and
he shrugged and told me, "When you have young children, I hope you'll
feel it again."

Before departing to the bed and breakfast and the Feast of Lights, I was
talked into playing a part of the town's annual radio drama rendition
of some sappy holiday pap our school librarian had written and poured every last bit
of herself into. I was to play Santa.

St. Nick and I had a confused and troubled history, as I'd also been assigned to play
him in a second grade wee tyke production about cultural confusion. It
would almost have been construed as racist if it weren't so gosh
darned cute.

For the radio play, I hoped to draw upon my rich and checkered past
with the character, so I wouldn't actually have to do any damn work. So
all that week, I lied and said I'd practiced my part, and when it came time to do a live reading on the air, I stumbled through my lines and botched the whole mess. Regardless of that performance, the librarian was so pleased with my enthusiasm and
doltish nature, she cast me as Lil Abner in the school musical without
even asking me. I refused to hurt her feelings, and keeping with the
holiday cheer I agreed to that as well.

Between mucking up an attempt to ask mystery girl out to winter
formal, making an ass of myself on the radio, and feeling general
loathing anytime anyone muttered "Merry Christmas", things were going
as well as they could.

The family unit put miles on the minivan that Friday evening, driving
in darkness an hour and a half away from Small Wood. I remember
sitting in the passenger seat, watching it all with a casual
detachment, feeling emotionally empty in a strange and novel way. I
did like I do now, I thought through my situation, gave much mind to
my troubles, if they even existed in a definable sense, and plotted a
course of action. With the winter holiday occurring after the end of
the next week, there was closure to the football season, to my first
school term in Small Wood, and an end to a year that started half a
world away.

We stopped at a small book store between Small Wood and the bed and
breakfast. The name of the place was "The Cat's Pause", and it was
lorded over by two elderly lesbians who knew their shit when it came
to good books. Tammy had saved a whole bag of paperbacks for my sister and
I, to our surprise. Grandma and Tammy organized a library book sale and
had ferreted out some pretty choice titles. Also included, for me
specifically, was a journal. It was a curious thing because it had a
name written on the outside, but nothing else to go on within. Right
there on the cover, it had once belonged to "Dean", whose hand-writing
was far superior to my own.

Later on, I took to writing to Dean from the perspective of some
stupid kid who had stolen his super awesome journal. It was
an entertaining way to write, but also a silly way to jot down
thoughts. I was pleased when something far more natural came out of
the process over time.

"Dean. I think you did the right thing, finding some way to rid
yourself of this diary before a kid like me got the chance to find it
and read it. See, now I'm the fool, putting my words in here, to be
discovered and divulged. If I had any secrets, I'd share them with
you, Dean, but as it goes, I'm pretty boring. I don't have a
girlfriend, I'm not all that popular, and I'm not sure what I'll be
doing when I graduate. I might do something with computers, or I might
see what's up with this journalism thing. I've had some strange dreams
Dean, like you wouldn't believe. I keep dreaming about this second
house on the property that doesn't exist in real life. I guess if you
were to go there awake, you'd find nothing but trees and maybe a bit
of a crick running through it. But in my dreams, it's this old
abandoned place, maybe three stories tall, but the third story has
sort of fallen in on the second, so it's very hard to get around in, lots of mattresses lying about everywhere. In my dream, my room is somewhere in there, and I'm always getting in trouble for how messy I keep the second house, as if I had anything to do with how gross it is. Tell you what Dean, if you ever come back and want your journal, I'll set you up a room real nice in the second house. You can live there, like a boarder, only rent free, because it's basically my place, and since you've given me the diary, I feel I can give you a room in return. Fair trade, huh? Now I don't feel so bad, because my words are going in here where yours never will."

So on and so forth, until I began to get more serious about
my words and the exact effect they were having. Say you create a
character in your mind, for instance this Dean fellow. Say he actually
exists, but the details about him are so very thin, like the skin of
milk left out to sit. Dean becomes something else with every passing
suggestion or idea that comes to mind. You begin to say stuff like, "I
wonder what Dean would think of this?" And Dean takes some precedence
in your thoughts, and over time he takes on features and the barest
emergence of personality begins to emerge. What has Dean become now,
but a presence nestled against the small of your thoughts? To me, Dean
always existed, he was around before my thoughts could ever give birth
to him. I hesitate to reveal just how I saw Dean, and where to lead
the narrative thread from here, but like any ghost that ever was, know
that Dean is dead now, and continues to live on in an appropriate form long after his demise. Because like I said, Dean once existed and will forever continue to haunt places such as these.

In my lap I held Dean's diary, gripped tight by fingers itching to
begin a dialogue with the white space inside. The oncoming headlights
looked like slowly exploding fireflies and I blinked in deep thought, working details
around in my head. Distortions in the glass were visual riffs, music
that I could play off in thought, a game of connection and
association.

We arrived and I pulled myself out of the daze. Opening the door, I heard the faint mewling of some animal or small child. It was off in the distance and it took a moment of the family standing around discussing it to realize the sound was coming from the woods on the other side of the road. We chose to ignore it and walked over to the bed and breakfast. The sign outside named it the “The Cozier Cottage”. A large Christmas tree was seen inside through the large front windows. The edges of everything were streamed in white lights, most of which simulated tall candles, dripping fake plastic wax.

It was dark, and we could not see the actual structure itself, but a lighthouse beacon burnt out across the night, its glass eye catching mine until I stopped staring.

The garden was a thing of beauty, tended by the young husband, Trav, who had quit his successful real estate career in southern California and moved up north on whimsy. The wife was Jo, and her face so full of joy, it seemed carefully molded on just so. The expanse of several manicured acres stretched out in most every direction. There were carefully placed rows to walk along and everywhere I looked, something was in bloom for the season, even in the dull cold chill of winter.

Inside the restored home was bracing warmth, clean and fertile smells of spice, and the comfortable feeling of being instantly familiar in the home of friends. It was a feeling I had to fight against, almost like nostalgic holiday intoxication; I wanted to keep myself cut off from, to preserve some individual sense of integrity.

Jo took our family photograph with a Polaroid camera, and pasted it into an album she kept by a register. She had us sign in and then ushered us into a sitting room, where hot cocoa and cookies were waiting. She told us a brief history of who they were, what they hoped to do with their new lives, and a little bit about the place. I wasn’t paying much attention, but caught fragments of pieces while I filled up on their foodstuff.

Trav came in and shook hands enthusiastically, told us he’d take us out for a night walk along the trail leading up to the lighthouse. He called it the ghost whistle. Trav explained that strong coastal winds would find their way into and out of the cracks of the column and the resulting sounds would carry far into the night. Sometimes, he said, it would seem as if voices called out.

We all carried large flashlights of the two-handed variety. We laughed as we trudged, clouds of vapor lit by our beams. Varieties of flora were singled out and lectured upon, my father gave lessons in coastal geological strata, and my sister and I discussed movies we’d like to see in the coming new year.

The lighthouse was surrounded by barbed gate, padlocked and rising high. Trav produced keys and let us into the bricked foundation walkway. He pointed out imaginary people and incidents long since past, snorting out disdain for the teenagers and tourists who’d come up to drink and fool around, oblivious to the high winds and slippery underfoot. He went on to explain that he and Jo were part of a troupe of community actors who’d re-enact historical pageants at the lighthouse during the summer and holidays. Although the lighthouse was not needed any more due to technological seafaring innovation, it was still kept operating by local tradition with diesel burning generating machines and their electricity.

This lighthouse was once hand-wound; the intricate lenses a dance of refraction and convection, the distance seen in all directions until disappearing under the natural curvature of the Pacific Ocean.

Trav told us about Russian lighthouses run on nuclear power and how they had disappeared into the ether, lost off the map. Their nuclear contents stolen for black-market materials, their physical locations erased from maps and memories. He dreamed of the intrigue of physically reaching those remote and precarious locations, the lighthouse silo like something out of a James Bond novel.

We were all getting very cold out there, but the sound inside was so very unusual. It was a haunted sound, painful and beautiful, shrill and serene. The pounding of the surf was like the sound of blood through the ears, thick and occluded and so close to overwhelming, echoed all around. Rooted to that spot we were, looking up in darkness, the stone masonry surrounding, the light twinkling up above shot out of floorboard and crevasse.

It was like nothing Christmas should ever be. Unnatural beauty erected at odds with the surrounding scar of water and rock. It was a beacon, this fortress of solitude. Slim and narrow, damp and noisy, a full time job and a home of sorts, this lighthouse was nothing if not an exaggeration of duty and human commitment.

If I had a girl to hug close, it would have been romantic. But even my family felt distant so close to me. I wrapped my arms around my chest to brace against the shivers that came easy, my teeth knocking against each other, my nose and ears so very red and flush cold.