T. Boyle: A Friend of the Earth

I'm beginning to remember, but I don't want to. And the mention of Teo shoots a flaming brand into my gut, where it ignites the wasabe lurking there in a gurry of carp roe and partially digested tilapia. "What about Teo?" I say, just as the wind comes up in a blast that shakes the place as if it were made of straw.

"I hate this," she hisses, bracing for the next blast. A sound of rending, some essential piece of the roof above us scraping across the tiles and plucking briefly at the strings of steel cable before hurtling off into the night. People have been decapitated by roofing material, crushed, poleaxed, impaled-you hear about it every day on the news. A woman in the Lupine Hill condos was taking out the trash last year when a flagpole came down out of the sky like a javelin and pinned her to the Dumpster like an insect to a mounting board. And then there are the eye and lung problems associated with all the particulate matter in the air, not to mention allergies nobody had heard of twenty years ago. A lot of people — myself included-wear goggles and a gauze mask during the dry season, when the air is just another kind of dirt. But what can I say? I told you so?

This is the world we've made. Live in it.

"You get used to it," I say, and give her a shrug. "But you've got your own problems in Arizona-that's where you've been living, right?"

She nods, a tight economical dip of the chin that says, Ask no more.

"So Teo," I persist, trying to sound casual though I'm chewing up my insides and wishing I were home in front of the tube with a bottle of Gelusil and the lions coughing me to sleep. "Is he still in the picture, or what?"

Right then is when I begin to notice that my feet are wet, and when I lift first one, then the other from the floor, the rug gives like a sponge. Out of the corner of my eye I can sec one of Shiggy's daughters busy at the rear door with a mop and a mountain of napkins, furious activity, but not enough to stanch the flow of water seeping inexorably into the room. Shiggy should have built on pilings and he knows it, but he inherited the place from his father, who ran a successful smorgasbord out of the location for forty years, and the expense of jacking up the building was prohibitive. And Shiggy, like everyone else, kept waiting for the weather to break. "No problem, sir, no problem," Shiggy's daughter is saying to a solitary diner in the corner, "we'll have this mopped up in a minute."

Distracted — my boots are ruined for sure-I've forgotten all about the question I left hanging in the dank air of the place, forgotten where I am or why or even who I am, one of those little lapses that make life tolerable at my age, ginkgo biloba, caffeine and neuroboosters notwithstanding. For a whole ten seconds I've managed to disconnect my gut from my brain. "He's dead," Andrea says into the silence.

"Who?"

"Teo."

Dead? Tea dead? Well, and now I'm back in the moment, as alert as Lily when she sees me reach into the big greasy plastic bag for another chicken back. I'm beginning to enjoy myself. I feel expansive suddenly. I want details. Did he suffer? Was it lingering? Did he lose control of his bowels, his dick, his brain? "I thought it would take a silver bullet," I hear myself say. "Or a stake through the heart."

Her eyes draw down, drop the curtains and pull the shades. Her smallest voice: "It was quick."

"How quick?"

Whoa, shouts the wind, whoa, whoa, whoa, and now there's a steady drip of water — the ghost of Teo, his slick aqueous heartbeat-thumping down on the table, just to the left of my chopsticks. I'm watching her, feeding on this, but my back hurts-it always hurts, will always hurt, has hurt without remit since I was in my mid-thirties — and the arthritis in my right foot isn't being helped any by the dampness of the floor. I have a premature hard-on. I resist the impulse to snatch a look at my watch. "How quick?" I repeat.

"I don't want to talk about it," she says, "because that's not why 1-that's not what I wanted to… It was a meteor, all right?"

I can't pull my laugh in. Sharp and resounding, it explodes from my runaway Iips and startles the couple two tables over. "You're putting me on."

"Eleven and a half billion people on the earth, Ty, sixty million of them right here in California. Meteors hit the earth, okay? They've got to land somewhere."

"You mean it actually hit him? How big? And when? When was this-ten years ago, yesterday or what?"

"I won't lie to you, Ty: I loved him. Or at least 1 thought I did."

"Yeah, and you thought you loved me too. That did me a lot of good."

"Listen, I don't want to get into this, all right? This is not why I came-"

"What, did it hit him like a bullet? Go through the roof of his house?"

"He was making a soft-boiled egg. In the kitchen. He was living in one of those group homes for people like me who never saved for retirement — and don't ask, because I'm not going to say a word about my present circumstances, so don't." Patting at her lips with the napkin, pausing to take a doleful sip of faintly greasy sake, the best the house has to offer. (Have I mentioned that grapes are a thing of the past? Napa-Sonoma is all rice paddies now, the Loire and Rhine Valleys so wet they'd be better off trying to grow pineapples-though on the plus side I hear the Norwegians are planting California rootstock in the Oslo suburbs.) "He never knew what hit him," she's saying, chasing me down with her eyes. "His son told me they found the thing-it was the size of a golf ball-embedded in the concrete in the basement, still smoldering."

I'm in awe. Sitting there over my sake and a plate of cold fish, holding that picture in my head — a soft-boiled egg! The world is a lonely place.

Y?"

I look up, still shaking my head. "You want another drink?"" No, no-listen. The reason I came is to tell you about April Wind-"

I do everything I can to put some hurt and surprise in my face, though I'm neither hurt nor surprised, or not particularly. "I thought you said you wanted to see me for love-isn't that what you said? Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was you wanted to, well, get together-"

"No," she says. "Or yes, yes, I do. But the thing that got me here, the reason I had to see you, is April Wind. She wants to do a book. On Sierra."

I don't get angry much anymore, no point in it. But with all I've been through-not just back then, but now too, and who do you think is going to have to track down the Patagonian fox and the slinking fat pangolins on feet that are like cement blocks? — I can't help myself. "I don't want to hear it," I say, and somehow I'm standing, the carpet squelching under my feet, the whole building vibrating under the assault of another gust. My arm, my right arm, seems to be making some sort of extenuating gesture, moving all on its own, I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. "She's dead, isn't that enough? What do you want-to make some sort of Joan of Arc out of her? Open the door. Look around you. What the fuck difference does it make?"

She's a big woman, Andrea, big still-in her shoulders, the legs tucked up under her skirt, those hands — but she reduces herself somehow. She's a waif. She's put-upon. She's no threat to anybody and this isn't her idea but April Wind's, the woman who talks to trees. "I think it's a good idea," she says. "For posterity."

"What posterity '?" My arm swings wide. "This is your posterity."

"Come on, Ty-do it for Sierra. Let the woman interview you, tell your story — what'll it hurt?"

Everything compresses to rush into the vacuum inside me, the winds dying as if on the downstroke of a baton, the rain taking a time-out, the mop finally prevailing at the door. Andrea is standing now too, and we're a matching pair of the young-old, as rejuvenant as any couple you'd see in New York or Paris or in those TV ads for transplants, poised over the table as if we're about to sweep off across the floor in some elaborate dance routine. "What's it in for you? A finder's fee?"