An ocean breeze cuts through an open window and sniffs about the apartment before reaching a book resting on a desk. Off in the distance, those seagulls sound restless. All of which intrudes on the moment without knocking but let\u2019s focus on what we know so far. Let\u2019s jot down the facts ripening like fruit. I never remember details if I don\u2019t jot them down. This is a book full of letters, sure. Contessa Glockenspiel complied the letters, double sure. For certain it stresses what\u2019s missing because there are curious gaps on every page. And we know gaps are used in filmmaking all the time.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s examine this. Someone\u2019s shown walking on a street. We only see and hear loud shoes striking and then like a lightning bolt the movie jump cuts to a hand grabbing a doorknob. Now insert the absent details and become therefore involved. Sucked into a world of truth waiting around the corner, out of sight but always present. A thriller\u2019s activated. The walker reaches the building and checks the address on a crumpled note. There are wrongs to be made right. Flashback to a few of them. An abandoned car on Pacific Coast Highway. A chained dog barking. A broken chair in a kitchen. A pot of boiling water. This revenger shivers before heading up some stairs. A gun is made ready. The coast is clear. Now the killer\u2019s hand touches the door. See how much drama happens in the mind between shoes hitting asphalt and a trembling door handle. Nothing but the actuality of cinema.<\/p>\n
That same ocean breeze bumping through my second-story apartment window moves the lime-green flyer from Yellow Jacket Books thumbtacked to my wall. Light also comes through. Daylight spliced with lamplight vitalizes the pages of Letters<\/em>. As far as this book\u2019s concerned, Glockenspiel\u2019s technique is to let the words be themselves, gaps and all. No explanations and no plot-making details to Mickey Mouse things up.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Letters<\/em> begins:<\/p>\n You\u2019re right. Your question\u2019s good. Our plan\u2019s simple, darling. Stay away long enough to erase doubt. I keep at preliminaries. Tulips and roses, red and yellow. Patience is our agreed word. Remember not to worry. Remember our walk when you said the slice of moon\u2019s a smirk on the face of night?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n That \u201csmirk\u201d is no lazy word. It hints at the glaring theater between the lines. Maybe the \u201cdarling\u201d receiving the letter is alone in an apartment just like I am. The same midday sun enlightens us both. Might we also be listening to the same waves and the same squawking seagulls?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s call her G. He writes letters to her. He\u2019s A. A is her dear friend, someone who matters quite a bit, though they are not the kind of lovers we think of when we think of romance. But you never know about these things. Eyewitnesses have seen them strolling barefooted on the beach. Sometimes they walk at night when the sound of the waves hitting the wet sand is all there is.<\/p>\n They both work at Gobo\u2019s Garden Supply Center, which is just three blocks from the sandy beach. They met at Gobo\u2019s. According to their coworkers, what sticks out is their ways of dealing with customers. G trusts her eyesight. She sees someone browsing the shelves and reading labels and knows immediately what that person is thinking. It\u2019s really a whole floriculture of native plants arranged in knot patterns that the customer wants, and \u201cwhen you\u2019re ready for a real garden, we can make it happen,\u201d which is what she says. Then she discusses plants, color patterns, soil pH and amendments, because \u201cdirt needs calcium just like people,\u201d water preferences, direct versus indirect sunlight, animal control, and \u201cwhat about humus?\u201d Like a perfect plan, she ends her talk with a smile punctuated with crooked teeth showing.<\/p>\n A\u2019s strategy is far different. He agrees with customers, the effect being that everyone is simultaneous boss and the smartest person on the planet. \u201cYes,\u201d he says, \u201cof course a hoe will do the job. You\u2019re right on that mark.\u201d His goal is to make their desires happen no matter how bizarre. With them he nods, pointing out their trophy-like brilliance. Even so, he processes none of it. While he\u2019s echoing back their words his mind is lost on fog and the science of fog and how it creeps along the shore when the air and water temperatures are perfect. When fog surrounds the end of the pier it\u2019s the ocean\u2019s artistic masterpiece. Everything\u2019s sticky whenever fog trundles in.<\/p>\n No one seems to know what they do outside of Gobo\u2019s. For sure they\u2019ve been seen on the pier, eating hotdogs and chatting it up with the old man who limps because of a prosthetic leg. The guy selling donuts at High-Hat\u2019s reports that he\u2019s seen a couple who fits their description getting \u201ctwo coffees with maple bars to go.\u201d He wears that same greasy white apron every day I question him. His take is they walk down to see the sunrise slowly flood the beach. They\u2019re two nice people, he says, and that\u2019s that.<\/p>\n How out of sorts it seems now that the sun outside is a klieg light bleeding through yet another pasty sky. Squawking seagulls tumble in synchronized movements and plunge at the seawater, at something in the seawater and too far away for positive identification. Off to the left of this a merry-go-round house sits at the end of the pier. Holding my hands like a picture frame and looking through this frame makes it become a cottage at the tip of a peninsula. Maybe the old salt living there lights a pipe and tugs at some gray whiskers and talks nonstop about adventures with sea monsters. One leg is missing and, well, there you go.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s be candid. Glockenspiel is beautiful. I know this because her picture\u2019s on that lime-green flyer that I borrowed from the bulletin board at Yellow Jacket Books last week when I picked up her unbelievable book. The flyer sits perfectly at eye level and shows her pixilated face partly enveloped with light dusty hair with that same crooked grin that sticks in my mind long after I\u2019m done looking at it. It\u2019s that flash of white taking its sweet time to ripple and disappear whenever you close your eyes the second after you flick on a light in a dark room. Is it possible to fall for a lime-green flyer thumb-tacked to a wall? Head over heels, the saying goes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another letter:<\/p>\n I\u2019ve one idea to add. Talk to no one. Discuss zero. Once gossip erupts like a volcano, there\u2019s no stopping. Avoid it. It\u2019s a plague. Keep to yourself. Stay inside. All\u2019s not ready. Give it time. Let our plan develop.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n A train\u2019s crawling on tracks and it\u2019s rhythmic, looping over and over in the background. The tracks are two blocks away, behind Gobo\u2019s and near the abandoned brick building where there used to be lumber kept and it took time to rearrange the wood into symmetrical stacks and the supervisor at the time got grumpy when asked to cut a two-by-four the length of a baseball bat. Window panes are broken now from all the rocks. I can almost hear the sounds of glass breaking and train rolling mixed in the letters, combined with the over-and-under pleading about Glockenspiel dubbed into every sharp word.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For instance:<\/p>\n Remember the trampoline park when we talked \u2018til dawn and our fingers got cold? You smiled just because. We sat for hours with no one to bother. Keep your thoughts there. Dwell there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n For some reason C visits almost every day and when he walks in I\u2019m thinking beach tent because his shirt\u2019s too big. As usual he has a cinnamon stick in his mouth, its edges frayed and chewed because he\u2019s been working it for hours. He scans the room\u2019s corners like a documentary creator aiming his camera at the cobwebs there, searching for proof there, even though there\u2019s nothing there, not even dust. Only C isn\u2019t a documentary creator. He\u2019s my one literal friend wearing a big Hawaiian shirt that\u2019s scattered with green palm trees stuck in dirt mounds. He grabs my little notebook on Letters<\/em> from my oversized chair and tosses it on my purple ottoman and plops down, stretching his legs over my pages. By the way this is very nervous making. He asks what I\u2019ve been up to and why in the world I won\u2019t pick up my phone anymore.<\/p>\n First, I say, \u201cI\u2019m being methodical.\u201d But saying it makes the apartment feel peculiar, as if everything\u2014book with the spine aligned with the desk\u2019s edge, desk with the chair perpendicular, beige mug inches to the right\u2014all of it has some stranger\u2019s fingerprints. Second, and I\u2019m counting on my fingers as I go along, \u201cthe rent\u2019s due and I\u2019m dead broke.\u201d Third, which I save for last, \u201cG is missing. Can you imagine? Fourth\u2026\u201d I pause to let the odd feeling hang like smoke.<\/p>\n \u201cMan, Lance Beck, you\u2019re a predicament. Unbelievable.\u201d He crosses his legs. My notes, written by hand in the open spiral notebook, rustle on the ottoman like autumn leaves. Mud\u2019s pancaked in the crevices of his sandals.<\/p>\n \u201cA has something to do with her vanishing. There are clues.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOkay.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe letters. A writes to G only she never responds because she can\u2019t, obviously, at least there\u2019s no proof she can. The letters create this terrific illusion she\u2019s reading them. That\u2019s their purpose, to create an illusion. It\u2019s too perfect, don\u2019t you think, that we have such an obvious red herring?\u201d<\/p>\n C raises an eyebrow. \u201cSo, guess what. I met this little kid at the fish market the other day who told me right to my face that he had no stomach. Came right out and said so. Yeah, food just travels straight through him.\u201d He\u2019s scratching his abdomen. \u201cMe. A total stranger.\u201d<\/p>\n I know what he\u2019s thinking. I let him go on believing I\u2019m on a wild goose chase, which is what A wants me to be on, which is why I can\u2019t be on one because that\u2019s way too air-tight.<\/p>\n \u201cSo out of respect for one poor stomach-missing kid let\u2019s do something honoring the food he can\u2019t.\u201d C stands. \u201cThink gastric charity.\u201d The notes lay now with bent corners. \u201cI say let\u2019s forget about your missing woman stuff. Head that Italian place. Remember the baskets of garlic bread? Come on. Don\u2019t make me beg.\u201d<\/p>\n I want to act antagonistic, to stand square-shouldered, to inflate my lungs and grind my jaw. Instead, I shake my head and exhale in a drawn out way and rub the back of my neck. Through the window\u2014looking like a Van Gogh painting\u2014the klieg-like sun has dipped a little further into the sticky horizon. A melancholic train horn peals over undertones of rhythmic track rumbling as it passes the brick building it no longer stops at.<\/p>\n \u201cAh, come on.\u201d C picks up my notebook from the purple ottoman. His movements agitate the room.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a big mountain of reasons why I can\u2019t just traipse off with him. One, I say, \u201cI don\u2019t have any money,\u201d and two, again counting with the fingers, \u201cI\u2019m thinking A needs to be tracked down and questioned,\u201d and three, snapping my fingers, \u201cdon\u2019t look at that.\u201d<\/p>\n But C flips through my notes and points with the cinnamon stick and I worry about potential drool so I make a move to grab them, which he countermoves by lifting his arm. \u201cSo, suppose that for purposes of pure entertainment we entertain the idea this dude really did something with her. Suppose he tucked her away in a dumpster.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIs that possible?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOr buried her in the sand.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSand\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI saw a movie once. Don\u2019t remember which one. This dude buried his wife in the sand. Then he got all frantic acting and started running around town trying to find her. Organized a search party even.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAh\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s always the husband. Detectives know right off. They arrest him. They interrogate him. His story changes the more he tells it. He\u2019s trying to throw them off the scent.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBrilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhich is as good as a confession in their book.\u201d He tosses my bent notes down on the ottoman. \u201cYou think you can let it go for one night?\u201d The cinnamon stick is back in his mouth cigarette-style. \u201cCome on, man. Pasta for the kid.\u201d<\/p>\n Does resistance weaken from overuse like old wood or does it become thicker like scar tissue? For my part, I tell C no in as many unspoken ways I can think of. I yawn. I stretch. I shut the window. I adjust the book on my desk. I take a nice long drink from my beige mug. Coffee drips down the side like lava oozing from a volcano. I mosey to the front door. The fingertips of my left hand touch those of my right, forming a cage. I cover my nose and mouth.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s way too much to sort through,\u201d I finally say, opening the door. The hallway to my apartment is as salty and as damp as beached kelp. It\u2019s lighted with a single light bulb hanging on an electric cord. Standing at the door I\u2019m a guard at Buckingham Palace, steel jawed, unmovable, cemented. My mind, though, races with possibilities.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of these days, old buddy. I\u2019m getting you out of here. Nice babe.\u201d He\u2019s glaring at Glockenspiel\u2019s picture on the thumb-tacked flyer.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the truth.\u201d There\u2019s nothing more dramatic than wanting to find her. Nothing better than wanting to hold her and say we\u2019ve so much in common we must be kindred souls.<\/p>\n \u201cMan, Lance Beck. A living predicament.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Anxiety is more than a word:<\/p>\n You have no idea what this is doing. Remember the times. I suffer for what has no reverse. I\u2019d put it all in a bag. Bury it. What then? Let\u2019s go back to precursors. What led to this. I said so and so and you nothing. I did this and that and you like a schoolgirl covered your eyes. What now? Is there a tomorrow? Let me visit. Think of the beach and the echoing waves. I\u2019ll visit. Let me. What then is up to you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Tony\u2019s Italian Restaurant sits on the pier just beyond High-Hat\u2019s. Next, there are two other restaurants with cooks offering free tastes of their unique clam chowder in small paper bowls. Beyond them sits a gift shop with seashells the color of bones in the window, then an ATM boxed in dried redwood, and then that merry-go-round house that draws the eye. I\u2019m on a cement bench. The fishy air minces with the smell of pastrami cheeseburgers. The setting sun still feels warm. Here\u2019s what we know, what\u2019s in the palm-sized spiral notebook. G\u2019s a genuine missing person. When questioned the clerk at Yellow Jacket Books shakes her head and acts overwhelmed. The donut maker won\u2019t talk anymore. The staff at Gobo\u2019s are clueless. Seagulls again squawk and dive in the background, off the edge of the pier. In the day\u2019s brightness Letters<\/em> glows.<\/p>\n And A is getting more substantial. Using himself in letters as clever diversion. He walks in a cemetery although no one he knows is buried there. A few clouds hang. He touches headstones, running his fingers along the curves of Beloved Daughter. Statuesque angels watch. Precious Wife and Mother. His neck is sunburned. His mouth tastes dry and the heat\u2019s a heavy blanket. He must be an orphan because he writes that the stones and the names make him remember he\u2019s a man with no history.<\/p>\n Around me G\u2019s mysterious disappearance hasn\u2019t had any effect. Life on the pier thrives on the very edges of a mysterious riptide that has pulled someone sweet and wonderful away from me and from the world. People move past now like so many minnows, feeding, congregating, now bouncing off each other. All this while the most significant action happens offstage.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A final one before the end:<\/p>\n I could watch the waiting only so long. Such futility. Hope does not lighten weight. It does not lessen. Does not diminish. It\u2019s incompatible. It is not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Those who are taken always leave behind information for the curious observer to detect. A broken twig, a folded piece of paper, initials etched in a wall. From the apartment window I watch the gummy horizon go from pale to charcoal while lounging in my oversized chair with my feet propped on my purple ottoman. Letters<\/em> is open on my lap with the spiral notebook of notes on top. Now the wind picks up and I start to fall asleep to the brushing sounds of tree branches.<\/p>\n It would be wrong here to say I might dream. I never dream. I only think of things as I drift off and those things never make dreams. Dreams can\u2019t go the distance, not the way yearnings can. I prefer to think how one day Contessa Glockenspiel and I will touch our fingers together and both of us at that same spark of time will feel our hearts tremor.<\/p>\n Later that night a storm approaches. The wind grows harsh. Waves stir against the pier. The lights leading to the merry-go-round house are like a trail of breadcrumbs. An empty soup can tumbles across the street, hitting, clanging. Tree branches scrape the apartment. The apartment walls groan like old wooden buildings do under stress. An aggressive wind pushes against the window.<\/p>\n C\u2019s no longer suffering from a generous hunger since he\u2019s now walking in the street. He watches the same soup can tumble across his path. Drips of rain hit the pavement Jackson Pollock-style due to the disturbing wind. The can strikes the curb and its momentum is ruined. The sky\u2019s a mesh of moving colors. Dark clouds gather like crows. Within these clouds there\u2019s muted rumbling like a train. C\u2019s hard shoes strike the moist asphalt as he walks. A tree branch cracks. He hurries, tightening his coat around his neck.<\/p>\n His footsteps are on the stairs and the wood creaks. A naked bulb lights the hallway. The corners are dark, the ceiling dark. The hallway resembles a tube. Outside, the wind shoves against the building. Inside, he looks at the tarnished brass numbers on the doors, 22, 24, 26 and then stops at number 28, runs his fingers along the door, horizontal and vertical, over and around the three projecting ridges of molding. Here is a small nail sticking up from the wood that\u2019s sharp, here\u2019s a splinter, here peeling paint. Behind him in both time and distance lie the footprints in the wet sand covered over by the sounds that waves make. He knocks. He tries the doorknob.<\/p>\n Inside number 28 the doorknob and the door shake together. The two details choreographed. I ease to my feet. Letters<\/em> hits the floor. My notes slide along with the book. I count my blessings that I had remembered to double lock the door earlier. I turn off the desk lamp without breathing.<\/p>\n Downstairs the front door blows open. The wind wheezes up the stairs. The light bulb swings on a squeaking cord, making the poor light move across the hardwood floor, up the wall with its peeling gray paper, down to the floor again and up the other side, illuminating number 27. Then the floor. Then the papered wall. Downstairs the front door slams shut. C hears it shudder as the wheezy wind dies and the light bulb on the cord swings, slows, stops. The wooden stairs creak. C gives the doorknob a much harder shake.<\/p>\n It\u2019s automatic. A thing that happens without thinking. I lean against the door, grip the moving doorknob, dig my feet into the carpet. I\u2019m making a wedge with my body.<\/p>\n A figure in a dark coat and dark hood stands now at the top of the stairs, frozen, for lack of a more convincing word. Maybe it\u2019s that I feel frozen and the effect\u2019s spreading. This scene, unmoving, holds long enough for C to shiver. Then the figure starts moving starts toward him, making plop-drag-creak sounds that are musical.<\/p>\n I push my face against my side of the door, against the door\u2019s ridges. My ear bends against the wood and I feel cold air squeezing in.<\/p>\n C doesn\u2019t run. He didn\u2019t come to number 28 out of fear and he\u2019s not about to leave because of it. The present situation then has nothing to expand upon or make worse. It merely is a lone fact drifting like a piece of wood from a downed ship lost in a storm. C\u2019s visit is part of detective-like thinking and a stretching of probabilities, of clues reworked. But there\u2019s still time. The figure approaches. When A washed up on the shore with the waves lashing him against the sand and pulling him back to sea simultaneously, C became a believer in cruelty. He became its eyewitness. What no doubt ran through his mind at that moment on the beach was the lime-green flyer thumb-tacked on the wall. The crooked grin must have spoken to him.<\/p>\n C watches the coat and hood get closer, plopping, dragging, creaking in the poor light. There\u2019s a missing person and now there\u2019s a cover up. He pulls a red-brown cinnamon stick from his pocket and puts it in his mouth. Darkness hugs the corners of the hallway.<\/p>\n Stepping, creaking, the approaching coat and hood drags a limp leg. C rams against the double-locked door, against the force of me pushing on its other side.<\/p>\n In one sense, I\u2019m the only friend C has ever had. In another, I\u2019m the one friend he never wanted, and it\u2019s these polar opposites that are now intersecting at the door of number 28. One moment is enough to lay siege to his thoughts and rifle-butt him to action. That and the still damp and salty memory of the beach and the sea that gives up its dead at the perfect moment to even the most skeptical eyewitness.<\/p>\n C focuses now on his own life.<\/p>\n He slams into me holding the other side of the door.<\/p>\n He repeats this with deadening force.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an exhale and the last plop-drag-creak of the hardwood floor.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a few feet away and raises a face to the poor, weak light.<\/p>\n The smell of cinnamon fills the dark hall.<\/p>\n She seems to notice this smell as she lunges at him.<\/p>\n A storm attacks the coast now and gale force sounds fill the air. Curious notions arise because of the noises in my hallway and the dull thumping against my apartment wall. Because of the pounding on the door that gets louder. Because the door bursts open and a hollow wind rushes in. Because my whole body is pushed aside and I hear myself not breathing. Because the room starts dissolving and Letters<\/em>‘ pages flutter like dead leaves. And my notes lay like a cadaver at the morgue.<\/p>\n How okay this all seems because Contessa Glockenspiel is there grinning like her picture.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is it possible to fall for a lime-green flyer thumb-tacked to a wall? 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