When I returned home, I walked over the threshold into the dark apartment. With all the lights off, there was a faint glow from the train tracks high above, as the cars rumbled past. In the dark I passed the balcony and saw my neighbor for the first time. I hadn’t known she lived across from me. Had we missed each other for an entire month? There she was, across the courtyard, on the same story as me, laying on a mat on her balcony. The courtyard was empty most nights. I thought about calling out to her, but then a sudden motion of her wrist conveyed that she was, in her own mind, entirely alone and private. She stretched her hand up toward the passing trains and grasped at the thundering air, like she wanted to be swept away into some far-off country in the dead of night, or wanted to pull some passenger down to her, like the whole world was passing by above her, just out of reach, and she let the it run through her fingers like a comfortable breeze.
Strangely stirred, I turned myself to my keyboard, and sank into my work. Sleeping in late, I wrote again, immersed in my own thoughts and mental patterns.
I found myself thinking about Tamara sometimes as well. The train tracks went to the mainland and continued onto one of the bigger islands where a military landing field saw a lot of traffic. Many passengers wore camouflage and carried ruck-sacks. This apartment was the kind of insane purchase that made me wonder if she was a millionaire, the kind without any sensibility, in which case I imagined she would both frustrate and intrigue me. At least she had the sense to sell it, though it can’t have made a profit.
I found it difficult to write in the apartment. I did my work with the windows open. The fresh air and especially the movement of air did something to stimulate my imagination. It provided the exact ingredients to write my best prose. But in the apartment, in a place with so much noise overhead, I was distracted and unsettled. The outside world slipped into her apartment.
When I realized the root cause of my discomfort, I took a break. I got up from my desk, stretched my stiff back, and closed the windows with a clatter. As an afterthought I eased the curtains close together. Sitting back at my desk I listened. All the shuddering trains had faded into a distant, continuous thunder, swelling and fading like a sine wave, and when I opened up my laptop again, I was able to set my thoughts clearly on the page. Before I had time to be grateful, I swept myself away with a string of ideas.
I wrote for several days like this, without any lengthy pauses except to sleep. Whenever the urge struck me to move my body, I would get up from my rolly-chair and lie on the yoga mat, which I left unrolled on the living room floor, collecting dust.
The air conditioner blew directly over the yoga mat, which was laid on the floor between a burgundy leather sofa and a blue-painted bookshelf, where I stored my books and a few shoeboxes filled with legal documents and financial records.
I lay with her head away from the bookshelf, in order to keep the books and shoeboxes outside my field of view—I wanted to avoid thinking about finances when I was writing, or when I was on a break from writing, the breaks being just as vital to my process as the writing itself. If I did spot these administrative symbols, they would exert a force over me, like talismans, and I would feel compelled to waste my writing break with little administrative tasks, even though I knew it would deplete my focus.
At mealtimes, I cooked simple meals in a single pan if possible. But for lunch, I just pulled a container out of the freezer: I prepared all my lunches ahead of time so that I could move my work to a new location, such as the library, almost instantly, without a lot of complicated preparation. Another benefit of these prepared meals was that I could write for long periods when inspiration struck me, and I wouldn’t need to interrupt those precious moments of flow just to cook myself a meal. And takeout was not an option—That was just my rule, derived from the simple facts that home-cooked meals are cheaper and (usually) healthier than takeout.
Eventually my breaks were less effective. It was a common sign that my inspiration was fading. When I sensed the flow of creativity dwindling, my first instinct was always to push ahead, and try to make it as far as possible with whatever I had left in the tank, but years of experience had taught me a better method for making progress.
I took a long walk, and let the story percolate in my subconscious mind. While I walked, I told myself, If my thoughts linger on the story, I will allow myself to continue to work in progressively shorter increments, aided by tea and a warm blanket, but for the present moment, what I most need is to walk and let my mind rest. My thoughts drifted. They turned, like the way a person turns their head, away from the story I was writing and toward Tamara, and the mystery of her long-missing brother. I felt a chill up my spine, as if the hairs on my neck had turned momentarily electric. I blinked, and looked into the huge dark space behind closed eyelids. I saw a middle aged man, lying in bed. The window was a yellow rectangle of moonlight. The bed was made of wood carved into twisting patterns, and the sheets were wrapped tight around the man. He was breathing hard, and wheezing. I felt something twist inside of me, like a ball of metal in a junkyard compressor, compacting tighter and tighter under the influence of enormous external pressure.
When I got home, I relocated my notepad and laptop to the living-room shelf and fetched a small tote-bag. Then I pulled a prepped meal from the freezer, and threw it in the bag. Then I also packed a fresh notepad beside my lunch, and tucked my most reliable pen into the bag. I did these things with a sense of urgency, without any certain idea of what urged me.
I decided to visit the library again. This much became clear to me as I slipped out the door: I—the internal self—needed space to clear away the fright that had descended on me, while I dwelled on Tamara’s father. Sick, dying man in bed.
This was the library I discovered early in my time on the island, and which I put as my business address in all my initial business communications, since I could not remember the address of my apartment yet, but for some reason I could remember the address of the library.
I had spent a few nights trying to relax with a good book, in the lounge chair by a white, bay window that overlooked a small green lawn and a line of trees. But her relaxation failed every time. Today the library might serve a different purpose, I thought. I could work there.
Inside the library, I found a quiet desk apart from the others and began absentmindedly to research the man who brought Tammy’s brother up the mountain. I had very little to go by, I logged onto one of the library computers and opened a web browser. The screen cast a yellow aura on the table in front of me. The library was dimly lit, here, as if not to wake the books I thought. Then, on second thought, I stood up and went to the front desk where I asked for an old yellow-page phone-book from around the right time period. I laid back in the chair and made some phonecalls on my cell, not expecting much but it was worth a shot. The first few numbers were dead, unsurprisingly. But then I found one ringing. I sat up and flipped to a blank page of my notepad. The pen hovered over the lined paper. I was careful not to mark it. I sensed I would need to concentrate all the ink into my notes, without any marks to distract from them. The ringing stopped, and the call went to voicemail. But it was the answering machine at a business called Coney Island Firewatch.
I left a brief message and hung up. Then I sighed and got up to stretch. Wasn’t there a song about Coney Island?
I realized I forgot to pack any water and decided to stretch my legs and go to the water fountain by the front entrance. Closing my notepad, I hid it under her tote bag and walked past the shelves, the reading tables, and under the brick archway into the checkout area. Then she walked past the front desk, where my footsteps echoed dully in the hall. A man stood at the water fountain already, filling a clear plastic bottle. He smiled apologetically, and finally moved aside.
I stood back to let him finish in peace, but then I thought he looked familiar. I would have been shocked to learn that I knew anyone on the island, but then I remembered. I had seen him only once before, behind the desk. He was a librarian. We had shared some small but pleasant conversation while he helped me to find a book that was filed in a different section than I expected. I smiled at him as he finished and tucked her hair behind her ear while I drank from the fountain.
Then my phone went off in my pocket. I wiped my mouth on her wrist and hurried out the front door, digging out the phone.
“Hello?”
“This is the Coney Island Firewatch. I’m returning a call from Eliza.”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“It’s late in the day, so I don’t have much time. What did you call for?”
I shifted the phone to her other ear and pawed at my front pocket. “Damn, it’s inside.”
“Ms. Eliza?”
“I’m still here. I want to talk to Larry…”
“Could I have a last name please?”
“Yes,” said Liza, the library door swinging shut behind her.
The librarian frowned as she ran past. Notebook in hand she tucked a strand of hair out of her face. “It’s Larry Eastman.”
There was a sigh-heaving pause. “He doesn’t work here.”
“Do you know a number I could reach him at?”
“No. I don’t. And I’m probably the only person here as remembers him. He left a long time ago.”
“But you knew him?”
No, and he didn’t leave on good terms. He left without a notice. Actually, he left after destroying the Osborne Fire Finder, too. Not leave on good terms.”
“When was that?”
“A long time ago.” The man said, with finality.
“Do you know what year? I’m sorry. This is really important.”
“That would be the fifties.”
“But, why?” Liza muttered, tapping her chin with the pencil.
“I don’t know. He broke the Osborne Fire Finder, so maybe that’s why he left. We have a tool that helps us estimate how far away a fire is, and in what direction, and he broke it, and they don’t make them anymore. So maybe he left because he knew they’d have fired him.
“Are you telling me that, since the device broke, you can no longer determine how far away a fire is? I’m trying to understand—”
“No. We use digital equipment, but since you mention it, in harsher weather conditions our digital equipment fails. It doesn’t work. But— Say, can I help you with something? Do you need anything else?”
“No, thank you. I really—”
The man hung up.
I sat down then, hard. I felt sick with frustration. A few hours of work and I already felt at a loss again. I wished the gathering of information could follow some trajectory where I grew some measure closer to the answers at every step, but instead I found myself at loose ends again. I wanted to curl up in the library chair and take a nap, and since it was late, I did, and I wasted the rest of the night reading quietly by the heater, next to the window, while rain began to fall quietly outside.
The rain persisted for days in a row, and when I tore myself away from the apartment to run some errands, I ran into a familiar face. She was getting out of a taxi cab at the crowded plaza, and when she saw me she waved me over.
“I saw you at the library.” She was tall, and her black coat accentuated the sharp angle of her face, and the extreme length of her hair, which was also black. I didn’t recognize her, but I had seen a lot of people shuffled through the library. She shifted his umbrella to help cover me somewhat, moving towards the supermarket door with me.
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“Wait, don’t walk so fast. I have some advice for you.” She was breathing hard. “You were obviously looking for someone—I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation—and if we’ve run into one another here in the rain, it could be a sign. And I really can help you. It sounded like you were looking for someone important, or someone involved with an important situation.”
Somebody shouldered past us, running to the open taxi.
I shook my head. “No, thank you. It’s true that I was looking for someone but I can’t tell you the details. I probably can’t even take your advice.”
“Wait. At the very least, I can save you some time.” Thunder roared far overhead. “There's someone in the cove who can help you. You have to take my word on it though, because he’s pretty strange and most people don’t know about him. But if you go out to the docks, you can talk with him. Go to the old phone booth by the fourth piling, and pick up the receiver. Then wait about 30 seconds—The phone looks broken, but it’s not. There’s a man on the other side. This man will pick up the receiver after thirty seconds have elapsed, or sooner if he sees you from one of the yachts and decides to answer. Tell him who you’re looking for, and maybe he can help you.”
By this time, we had moved under the awning of the grocery store. The girl took down her umbrella and shook out the rain. Then she smiled.
“I guess I don’t have any better leads, so,” I paused, thinking. “What’s his number?”
“He has no number. What I mean is that you don’t need to dial a number. The line is always open.” With these words, she gave a last encouraging smile, then turned and vanished into the hubbub on the street. I tried to watch where she went, but I lost her almost instantly, and the gusts of wind corralled me into the store, where I absentmindedly purchased the bare necessities, and marveled at the woman’s bizarre explanation.
I continued to turn over her offer in my mind.
The rains cleared, and sun broke through, bathing the island in calm, sunny weather. The rain-scent lingered pleasantly, like overturned leaves.
I had passed the cove several times, on my way to work at the library. The next day, I paused on my commute and ate a picnic lunch on a park bench, with a view of the cove. A broad basin of dark blue water.
The yachts bobbed in the waves, tossing this way and that like restless sleepers in the sunshine. One yacht was presently chugging out into the dark waves of the open sea. I could spot tiny forms, moving leisurely along the deck, or lounging with their arms and legs spread on the lawn chairs on deck.
I could also see the docks that lined the shore. Their sun-baked wood creaked leisurely with each wave. There, a lady walking her dog. There the sand, sun-baked into the planks of wood. There bits of seaweed flung, by seagulls, or tossed by the clapping waves at high tide.
I really was at a loss, so I decided to go down. I tucked my things into my shoulder bag and slipped off the shorts I had on. My swim suit was underneath, and I felt the warm sun on my thighs and shins. I threw a light flannel over my shoulders to keep from burning up, and then I struck down the long wooden staircase to the docks.
The wind lashed my face with flecks of salt. The gulls cried overhead. I took the footholds carefully, twisting my ankle this way and that, to step between the lumps, knots, and soda cans that littered the stairs. When I reached the sand, I pulled my sandals off and held them as I strode across the beach toward the docks. I passed a pink umbrella, where a lady was sunbathing, her face covered by a wet towel. When I reached the docks, they were empty. The wood was too hot to walk on. An elderly couple meandered along the sand beside the docks, with a tiny dog that padded along the inner side of the docks, far away from the water. A few benches held pigeons or persons, one reading the newspaper, one lady on her phone, one bird pecking at crumbs. And there was the phone booth, halfway down, sitting on an old but solid peer. Its window faced the dark water, and the rocking yachts that sprawled like an undulating suburb. It was empty, and it looked too old to function properly. It looks broken, the girl had said. It was also an odd place for a phonebooth to be. This thought flashed through my mind as I stepped onto a patch of wood, so hot I winced. Sea-spray and the heat of the wood sent an odd shivering through my whole body. Cold droplets of saltwater, and hot wood on the soles of my feet. I rushed along the dock and slipped into the phonebooth.
I stepped over the threshold into the cramped space. There, on the salt-dried boards hung a phone, with a circle of numbers for dialing.
I glanced discreetly, left then right. Nobody was staring at me, so I picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. There was no sound at all, and beneath the stir of waves, it left me with the same impression as a well sound-proofed car, or a hotel room. Somewhat doubtful, I spun the dial to 1 and let it snap back to the starting position. There was a dring sound.
After a pause. I repeated the smooth motion three times. Then a clear sound came through the phone. A voice spoke, clear and smooth through the receiver. “Yes?”
The voice was entirely ordinary. It bore no distinguishing features. Its tone was neither nasally or dark, but I felt a sensation of enormous depth and power, as if the speaker was exerting great strength to be herald by me, and greater still to maintain such a neutral and unassuming tone of voice. A chill ran down my spine. I wanted to sink to the floor, leaning my back against the side of the booth. I felt in danger, somehow. There happened to be a spiderweb in the upper corner of the booth, which I saw when I looked up. The spider sat calmly at the center of its web. I began to feel very small. I weighed my options. It occurred to me that if the speaker meant harm to me, he would have to reach the phonebooth. The closest hiding place was the alleyway, or someplace further away. I wondered feebly if he had a gun. Whatever the case, if I was in danger, I would do better if I could see him coming. So I stood still, and scanned my surroundings, paying special attention to the line of alleyways: the closest sources of cover.
As I turned my head to scan the surroundings, the spider darted to a corner of its web, blindly fleeing from my movements.
“I won’t tell you who I am. You can see me—I can tell from the way you answered.”
“Yes. I can see you,” the man said in a flat voice. “But I can hear you a lot better.”
Liza scanned the boardwalk. The elderly couple had paused their stroll to sit on a wooden bench. The gulls were still looping overhead. Up one the street level, the road and alleyways were dark, because the sun sat low in the western sky, and cast sunbeams parallel to the boardwalk, so that the bright sun shone on the docks, which looked white, and the alleyways were in deep shadow, as the sunbeams passed them by, not spilling onto their cool planks and cobblestone.
“No,” said the voice. “I’m not that way. I am not hiding in the alleyway. Turn around. Let me see your face so I can decide if I trust you. It’s not everyday that someone new calls me on this line. Sometimes I take it as an omen. Today, I will interpret your arrival in exactly the same spirit. Let me see your face so I can decide what kind of future you portend.”
The yachts swayed in dark water. A sharp wind came off the harbor. Lots of people were on the yachts. Someone of them faced my direction. I couldn’t see anybody on their phone. Perhaps this man was using an earpiece, but there was no way to see that from so far away.
“There you are,” said the voice.
“Yes. It seems like you’re in control of the information here. You can see me, but I can’t see you. You know where I am, but I don’t know where you are. Couldn’t you wave or something? It would be fair, and sportsmanlike.”
“No. It’s better like this. Besides, it’s my job to know where people are…” The voice lingered over these final syllables, as if gauging how much I knew already.
I pursed my lips. I had a sour taste in my mouth from the salt, and felt like making a run for it. I was scared but at the same time, I sensed the edge of something unique and intriguing. “If it’s your job to know where people are, maybe you could help me find somebody.”
“Yes?”
“But if this is your job, you must charge some amount of money. Isn’t there a fee?”
The voice went silent for a moment. I was impressed again by the sense of isolation. The speaker must have been below deck, in a thoroughly soundproofed room. The gulls cried noisily over the yachts, but I heard none of their clamor through the receiver.
“There is no fee. Not for you, or anyone like you. I charge a fee to deal with senators, or foreign politicians. High-ranking corporate officials, or tech companies. But I don’t charge a fee for you.”
“How do you know I’m not any of those things?”
The voice seemed to shrug. “Artists have our place. Only the toughest of our kind survive in LA. We are living under a constant crisis, here. You know the causes. I would guess that you’re a writer of some kind—no, I haven’t done any research. But artists… We are so beautiful, and the landscape is so hostile to us. We are like a pioneer species, who come to the uninhabitable city. We cling to the burnt earth, find nutrients where no other species could… And when we die, or when our leaves fall, it makes the burnt earth more habitable. No. Tell me who you’re looking for and I’ll tell you where to find them.”
“What if you don’t know where he is?”
“You mean, what if I need to perform legwork to find him?”
“Exactly. You can’t just give that away for free. I don’t believe it.”
“I see your point. Allow me to explain. I like to keep tabs on the locals. It is a hobby of necessity. If I don’t already know where this person is, and if I can’t find him easily, then you will have alerted me to an exceedingly difficult mark. Anyone who avoids my notice must be a real professional. See, then we both value the information. Of course, I could charge you a fee, but I don’t see any need to do that.” The voice might have gestured around the bay, as if the voice owned all these yachts.
I thought about it. Then I told him who I was looking for. He thanked me and told me his name, which was Argo, and to wait a moment.
After a long silence, he laughed. “Well I’ve got nothing. So I guess, I’ll be in touch when I find him. Try not to let him know you’re looking for him. It may interfere with my own efforts. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
The line went silent. There was no beeping or whine. The sounds from the receiver simply dissolved into velvet, and I was alone again in the booth, staring into the bay, with a dull ringing in my ear, and the faint summer breeze off the harbor up the quays.
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I felt as if I were being watched, and that feeling didn’t fade for several hours. I didn’t feel safe going back to the apartment, so I hopped between cafés and made some notes in my writing pad, which Argo must have seen to guess my profession. By the end of the day, I wound up at the library. I guess I thought I might do some work, but I couldn’t focus at all, so I left again. The girl who caught me at the grocery store wasn’t working at the library that night apparently.
On my way out the door, a familiar wisp of black hair caught my eye through a window. A moment later, the librarian came in, and I must have frozen, because she saw me right away. Walking to her desk, she laid down her bag and her umbrella, and cast a glance my way, raising her eyebrow. I nodded my head to say thanks, and she looked around and gave me a pointed look that told me to wait. I had been on my way out, so I sat on one of the benches in the entrance hall. Footsteps echoed on the tile floor as somebody walked out, sliding their feet on the door mat, and ducking into the rain with a coat over their head.
Then she came up to me and sat down next to me. “Did you go?” she said.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“You look a bit shaken.”
I nodded again. “I don’t know what to say. It went fine, I just didn’t expect him to be so…”
“Piercing?”
“Sure. Piercing. I felt exposed, in a way that I didn’t like at all.”
“But it was useful?”
“I guess. We’ll see. He didn’t know the guy, and he’ll get back to me.”
“That means he’s onto something. That means he already found a lead while you were talking.”
“Okay. That’s encouraging. By the way, who is he?”
“Argo? I don’t know. But he’s connected to the library somehow. They have a business relationship. He requires books sometimes, and we ship them to him in plain, unlabelled boxes with just his address. No return address—he’s insistent about that. And he asks for very specific editions of certain books, as if he’s looking for a particular appendix or glossary, or a specific forward, rather than the bulk text of the book which is usually the same, more or less.”
“He sounded Greek to me. Did I imagine that?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. His name is taken straight from the Argonautica.”
“The what?”
“Jason and the argonauts.”
“Oh. Argo. The sea.”
“So maybe he is Greek. But he’s a mystery, mostly.”
“I hope I don’t regret asking him for help.”
“You won’t. He’s odd, and he’s disconcerting, but I think he’s a safe person to talk to. His interests are so far outside of our lives, it’s like taking information from a bird. The bird might squawk and claw at you when you’re tagging it, and a pigeon might even remember you, but it won’t come after you. It’s too busy with its own affairs.”
In the weeks after that, we sat and talked quietly, and I became sort of friendly with the librarian. She was easy to talk to, and over the next few weeks we met for coffee, and when she was at the library, we sometimes sat together to read books or talk. She didn’t ask about the details of my work, but she always asked if I had made any progress.
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By the time I gave up at the library, it was dark outside. I walked home through the garden that perched on the edge of the industrial district of the island, a thin strip of green on the edge of a cement precipice.
To my left was the clangor of factory machines like broken bells. To the right lay an open sky, and the murmur of the sea, dimly visible. Across the water, on the mainland, I could see the lights of LA, and its rusty halo of light pollution. There was another city further south, I don’t know which one. But in between them lay a vast band of greenery, and thick dry forest, beyond which lay the desert. I imagined a green moss spawning on the desert, a pioneer species, the first to arrive after catastrophe, making the first islands of life in that desolate landscape, and their dying plant-matter paving the way for incrementally more fragile animals until at last humans could live there.