There is reason to seek adventure

This is part of a story started by Keith, written in my absence, and which I am continuing.

Honestly, our life seems to make much more sense through the allegory of a post-apocalyptic zombiescape.

The last thing I gave you before I left was a tube of anti-Infection cream. I'd bought an extra store of it, knowing that it might be hard to come by if the rosy assertion that there were no Infected on Easter Island turned out not to be true.

But I'd forgotten about the stringent quarantine procedures at the airport -- nothing could go on board that might be used to spread Infection in-flight. I watched as the security guard, whose disgruntled demeanor seemed to ooze resentment against the daily tide of those who were getting out, pulled it out of my bag and put it in a bin of things left behind.

They must raid the hoard at night, I thought, looking at a pile of still-edible fruit, no doubt smuggled in from less toxic agricultural regions, a bottle of wine, a pair of toe-nail clippers that doubled as a Swiss army knife, hair brushes, mascara, combs, mouth wash -- anything that could transmit infection -- a still sealed container of industrialized milk, the kind you couldn't get in the city.

Anti-Infection cream had never really been proven to do anything but slow the spread of the disease -- if Infected you might have hours of gradual decline into madness, watching the muscles die one by one while your mind stayed relatively lucid -- but I bought a tube of it anyway,as a sort of a good luck charm, or morbid reminder of what awaited me if I stayed.

I packed in a hurry. I was never good at planning things, and in those final days all I could manage was to lie on my back, in the bathtub, on the couch, on the few sparse green patches in between the barbed-wire fence enclaves that stood in for parks.

I forgot the tubes until the last minute. I had left them on our dirty bathroom sink, so overrun with the cockroaches who had long ago succumbed to a virulent strain of (non-communicable to humans) Infection that made eradicating them impossible.

I fit everything I could into my duffel bag. Our living room was a wreck, as I made piles of things I would need, things I wouldn't need, things I would miss too much to leave behind. I knew I wouldn't need the knee-high survival boots, once a distinguished brown leather, now splashed with blood, muck, the acid remnants from rain storms, laced with dirty shoe laces and held together with safety pins. But, I tried to fit them anyway. They had to stay behind, I realized, along with most of my clothes, my books and all my cooking equipment.

Food had become easier to come by lately -- my government job paid better than any of the activist work I'd been doing, plus we got access to military commissaries because of my very low level security clearance. But even when we had to scavenge the shelves of our Brooklyn neighborhood's only grocery store for dried beans and cabbage, a rare green delicacy that was still available because of its long shelf life, cooking equipment had always been easy to find.

I had pilfered much of it from the sidewalk as apartments once inhabited became tombs to the Infected, and then reclaimed in turn by cut-throat landlords, who wouldn't let a few undead lower the market rates on their real estate investments.

But I didn't want any of it now. I wanted to leave it all behind, and let it rot in the mildewing kitchen that faced the garbage-strewn courtyard out back. I took a handful of pictures, almost exclusively of you and me, clothes, a painting of our cat, a couple books I couldn't bear to part with, and my journals, torn and falling apart, with my scrawling, manic handwriting inside.

That morning as I brushed my teeth for the last time under the dim glimmer of a yellow, bare bulb in the bathroom, I remembered the tube on the sink. I had already sealed my duffel bag with duct tape, so I shoved it in between the flame thrower and the emergency tourniquet in my carry on. I was unwilling to put either out of immediate reach into my checked baggage.

Those had to go too, the disinterested security guard said as he methodically unpacked what I had so carefully crammed into the limited space.

I shrugged. It didn't seem to matter now -- the airport was the only place I could think of where security was tight enough to make them seem unnecessary.

And by the time I got off the plane, I wouldn't need them anymore.

The security guard began chucking the forbidden items into the bin behind him. When he got to the anti-Infection cream, I hesitated.

It seemed silly to throw it away. It was brand new, and you might need it.

I could still see you, behind the chainlink maze of security checkpoints. You were standing there, impotent and sad, watching the scene as I made the final preparations to leave you.

I asked the security guard if I could pass it back to you.

There was no going back for me, he said.

But, I flashed him a pleading look and he picked up the tube, shuffling toward the gate. He whispered something to another uniformed guard, who walked it to the next checkpoint.

I watched as one by one they passed it back.

I waved at you -- trying to communicate in hand signals that they were bringing you something.

Anti-Infection cream. I didn't know what you must be thinking that that was all I could muster as a farewell.

It would be okay, I told myself. You'll come. You'll have to.

We'll be happier far away -- having adventures together.

Either that or I'll end up the unwitting victim of some medical experiments on Easter Island. The panic rose in me for a second -- it had been known to happen. To think that there was really a job there for me, in a place where the Infected had been kept at bay, where there was water and clear skies, all seemed too good to be true.

I could be doing something really stupid, I thought.

I didn't care.

I looked at your face again, drawn and far away, and then thought of the apartment, the sky-high buildings rimmed with electronic fence, of the crowded trains full of the possibly Infected, but mostly just unpleasant commuters, wearing face masks and trying not to touch one another even on cars pushed to the brim with bodies.

I thought of tomorrow and the day after and the day after that walking a seemingly endless line, doing the same, repetitive tasks, keeping the horror at bay with a few brilliant moments, when I would see the sun leaking through the branches of the trees as I lay on my back, when the sunset wasn't obliterated by the black, acrid smoke of Infected fires, when I would visit my statue and look at the miracle of the improbable.

I thought of holding my breath through hours of monotonous PR work -- writing copy for the government I had spent years organizing against. I thought of what my life would be, a series of conversations held in virtual space -- surfing the Internet for more and more disturbing stories of social injustice, hoping that one would wake me up enough to care.

I thought of you -- slouching and sad, embittered by years of disappointment, waiting for the moment when it would all pay off.

And I turned and walked toward the gate.

The leveling out

If there is one law of the universe that I would like to believe holds sway over all else, it is that things come back to us. Good things, bad things, things we have forgotten or buried, people and places, the inevitable disguised as the unexpected, will all eventually seep their way back into our lives as coherent flashes of justice meted out with just enough irony to knock us on our ass.

I tell myself this as much from experience as instinct -- or perhaps a truly idealistic belief that things will work out, because they must.

And by work out, I mean, bring into focus the contradictions that left unchecked would render the search for satisfying narrative resolution utterly meaningless.

I say all this knowing how ridiculous it sounds -- knowing that if there were any kind of karmic justice in the world things would have turned out better for so many people, and worse for so many more, knowing that what cynicism didn't come to me naturally through halfhearted adolescent detachment, has been instilled in me over years spent pushing rocks up hills at the behest of crusty old men who had long since replaced repetitious compulsion with genuine struggle.

And still, things -- personal, seismic and otherwise -- seem to be coming to cosmic fruition this week.

If I were the kind of person that paid attention to the movement of the heavens as bellwether for why certain things work out when they do, I would guess that the planets are facing off in a cosmic dance of opposites, in which things are being pulled apart and forced to reconvene at eye level.

I am too lazy, however, to really make a concerted effort to try to predict via the heavens the moments when cosmic disruption will occur, so instead I often try to see my way to end of things, to guess -- or more often, will -- how it will all turn out.

I am always wrong.

This week, in particular, the ways in which I have been wrong stick in my throat and weigh me down with realizations long held at bay by sheer will power and/or self delusion.

But resolutions, unpleasant or otherwise, are hard to come by.

And there is a certain satisfaction at recognizing that the hand of fate -- or blind narrative irony, whichever -- that push our lives in the unexpected directions they take, may, indeed, be more powerful than the childlike fantasies we build for ourselves.

Warren and Clyde

I had a dream about spiders a little while ago.

I dream about spiders a lot.

Most of my dreams about spiders involve sinister-looking gray and black spiders, which pervade the safe spaces of my psyche and veer precariously close to touching me -- a kind of psychic taboo I have yet to shed.

This dream was different. It was one of those dreams where you dream you're awake and in the room where you're sleeping, but you're obviously not.

In my dream I was in my bed, which is basically just a mattress on the floor of my apartment. And above my head there were two spider webs, with two black and red and gold spiders in them.

Even in my dream, I recognized the spiders. They are the residents of the jungle porch belonging to a friend of mine.

My friend, for whom I have to come up with a suitable pseudonym, is building a house on a half-acre patch of overgrown wild land down the road from me. The house, located on steep embankment of jungle underbrush, is really not much more than a room right now.

It is a nice room, however, with large bay windows, a sunny awning and hardwood floors that conceal magically anal retentive storage space on the floor.

And ringed with the circular metal frame of what will be a second story, and possibly a third, the house-that's-really-a-room holds enough promise of being a real house someday that it seems pleasantly habitable.

The first time I came over we constructed a fence together on his porch -- to keep in check a very large and very friendly Rottweiler he co-habitates with.

Having already taken me on a hike, during which my spider phobia was laid bare, my friend warned me ahead of the excursion about the spiders. And, of course, he had to walk me, shaking and pulling at the collar of his shirt, down an intentionally brambly path (to keep the neighbors out, of course), also populated with large, hovering spiders.

After the descent, having the deck spiders at a visible but safe distance was a bit of a relief. Still, the whole time I cut wooden fence posts with a metal power saw -- which I suspected was some kind of sly test of my constitution -- I kept one eye on the webs.

As I have been spending more time on my friend's deck, of late, the spiders have become slightly less terrifying. I still traverse the rocky hillside with my head down, staring at the ground and counting my breath until we cross the threshold of fallen trees on the main road.

But, I have given up -- almost, but not entirely -- keeping my eyes on the deck spiders, maybe more out of a psychic memory that reminds me not to tread too far in one direction or the other than actual acceptance.

Also, in my dream, I tried to keep an eye on the spiders and failed.

I would wake up -- or think that I would wake up -- and see them there, hovering. I would try to watch them, only to fall asleep again, knowing that I was at the mercy of arachnid restraint.

There was no resolution to the stalemate -- it just went on.

When I woke up, I told my friend about the dream. I told him I thought the spiders were the psychic price for spending time with a free-spirited jungle dweller, that with him came spiders.

I think this satisfied him -- if not deeply, then at least bemusedly.

Sometime after my dream, I decided to name the spiders. I was thinking something heavy handed and mythological. My friend, however, immediately shot that down.

"Something simple -- like Warren and Clyde," he said.

And so, Warren and Clyde they are.

I think the names help. I can't be certain though, as I am still on the fence about the spiders.

lovely views

The best part about living on an island is that you can never go too far without seeing the ocean.

also....

today.

introductions...

My first week here on Guam, I had an assignment to cover a Halloween-themed storytelling festival in Talofofo.

It was held on the private beach property of an aging hippie and his sunglasses-wearing wife, who I suspected at the time were the Guam equivalent of crusty activists. My suspicions were confirmed some little while ago, when I heard one or both of them railing against nuclear armaments at a recent EIS hearing.

At any rate, the stories were an odd mixture of mundane and macabre, with some detailing merely odd incidents, like the sighting of a passed-away relative in the back of a car, and others more elaborately structured, like miniature stage plays on a sandy moonlit beach.

The most compelling of the evening, I thought, was a story about a red-eyed giant ghost spirit the teller met on a pig trail one afternoon.

He referred to the creature familiarly as Taotaomo'na. Literally translated as 'those who have come before', Taotaomo'na is, according to the very helpful guampedia.org, the embodiment of Chamorro ancestors and spirits who once walked on the island with the living.

It was my first week on the island, and it was probably my second or third assignment. So I was stuck asking all sorts of uncomfortably obvious questions, like, "where did this story come from?" and how do you spell "ta-to-mono?" -- to which the teller balked, "Uh, I made it up..." and "I don't know."

I think I spelled it wrong in my article -- after unsuccessfully googling several creatively misspelled iterations of the word -- but I'm pretty sure an industrious copy editor fixed it before publication.

Since then I have figured out how to spell Taotaomo'na, and have run into references thrown out here and there, by locals who still say little charms before entering into the jungle governed by Taotaomo'na or refer fondly to hijinks carried out by the forest spirits.

Over Christmas I interviewed a Chamorro couple, who annually descend into jungle brambles to collect fresh moss for their alter to baby Jesus. Christ-worship notwithstanding, they spoke in semi-seriousness about Taotaomo'na, who often played tricks on them, stealing machetes and getting them lost.

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to a motley group of free-spirited former mainlanders, who had been living in the wild refuge of Guam for some years as professors and cruise-boat owners. We ran into them on a road while walking the incredibly friendly rottweiler with which I have recently become acquainted, and they invited us up to their "sunset" at a house on a hill in a still wildish area of Chalan Pago called Fa'ma. The group was made up of several extended families, neighbors who had known each for what I guessed was decades.

After the sun went down, we headed from the hilltop house, where we had eaten cheese and crackers and done a number of what I suspected were home-brewed shots, to a property called affectionately "the Ranch."

It had been built by hand, over the course of decades, by a tall, white-haired, gregarious guy named Bruce and his family, who, according to one of the daughters, had slept in half-finished rooms for most of their lives.

The place, sitting on a sloping hillside, was impressively built, with open-air concrete kitchens and showers, and large loft-like platforms built underneath a carved wooden A-frame that I'm told had to be transported from the nearby jungle after the last typhoon. Out front of the cluttered garage a large electric peace sign beckoned welcoming.

Bruce gave us the tour and invited me back for Scrabble night sometime, apparently a Friday night ritual. Before I left, I was told that I had to partake in a short ceremony, which apparently all new visitors to the ranch have to undergo.

They had had some problems back in the day with Taotaomo'na. One of the younger sons, now in early adulthood, had fallen in a hole once and "gone all Lord of the Flies on us," Bruce casually tossed out.

There had been middle-of-the-night scratching, visitors at the door who weren't there. It got bad enough that at some point they brought a priest, who, upon entering the property turned around. He needed more stuff -- his holy water and crosses not being sufficient.

"There are some things the Catholic church cannot explain," he told them.

Since those early days, they have found a way of appeasing the forest spirits, by offering them introductions.

Bruce walked me, along with several other new additions to the Ranch, a young guy visiting from Japan with one of the daughters, and a somewhat bewildered Japanese teenager, who spoke little to no English, out onto a deck ringed by large disinterested spiders that looked out onto the wild regions below.

He, once again, brought out the home-brewed shots, served up in tiny ceramic shot glasses. And shouted out to the woods, "Taotaomo'na.... Taotaomo'na..." following with a few sentences in Chamorro, before turning to us all and asking us to shout our names.

I shouted my name out to the jungle, and half-expected a response back.

There wasn't one, but that's not how these things work, I think.

gray days...

Living in New York the past few years I spent many days in parks, lying on my back looking up at the branches of trees against the sky. With so little green space, it was a way to block out all the cars, and the noise, and the impending need to get back on the subway and go home or back to work.

Being here, parks are almost beside the point, as the green space that is hedged in around buildings pales in comparison to the greens and blues of ocean and jungle that hedge in everything else.

The other day I got off work a little early, and decided to walk over to the park in downtown Hagatna.

Downtown Hagatna is kind of a funny place. I work down there, but rarely spend much time outside of my car.

Just on the other side of the Cathedral Basilica is the Plaza d'Espana -- I think that's what it's called -- a large, open field, spotted with a few wide-branching trees, and remnants of colonial and military buildings from various eras of administration by Spanish, Japanese and American governments.

Because everyone drives everywhere here, and there's no real "downtown" to speak of -- just a series of office buildings surrounded by parking lots -- the park is mostly empty most of the time, except for a predictably timed busload of Japanese tourists unloading during lunch break on their whirlwind island tour, and several homeless people who live in the half-shelter of the open structures.

The park has several old(ish) stone and wooden buildings. Most everything from the Spanish era has been completely destroyed, but there are remnants of remnants. There's an old gazebo, called the "chocolate room" or something like that, because it was used to serve Spanish aristocrats hot chocolate. That building is gone, but the Americans built something similar in the same place, and used it for official functions (again, I think -- I read the plaques all rather quickly).

What's there now may not have survived any of the massive World War II bombing either, but instead may have been built after the fact as a replica.There are few rotting structures and stone archways that might date earlier, but it's hard to tell exactly. They reminded me of Pirates of the Caribbean, despite the fact that it's the wrong colonial government.

Most of the decomposing buildings mark only places, where something older once stood, but which were summarily destroyed by war or typhoon or both.



There are some very lovely spots though -- and in a place where so much has been lost by wind and tide and the march of progress handed out from (often) military overlords -- the little bit of history still left seemed important.

I wandered around for a little while, took pictures, and waited, as I often do in parks.

I sat under the large branches of a tree, looking up a the sky, which was pleasantly gray that day. Lately the weather here has been cooler and drier, and the humidity has been perceptibly less.

And for a second, feeling with the cool wind and looking only at brown branches, bereft of their green leaves for only a few days before they will sprout again, it felt almost like fall.