Mark feels earthquakes before they get here. My first earthquake happened on a Saturday and all that day he’d been acting weird. He kept saying, "Isn’t today a weird day?" But no one thought anything about it because Mark always acted weird, thinking about things in ways the rest of us didn’t.
He made a show of it that night, five of us playing cards at his house, on the floor since he and his roommate, Clyde, had no table. Mark had been in and out of the game all night, disappearing into his bedroom, ice rattling his water glass. "Just checking my e-mail," he kept saying.
Around 10:00 pm he asked us if we smelled something, then the whole room started shaking real slow back and forth. "Woah, shit," said this guy John I was dating at the time, "shit!"
Maybe not my first earthquake – I’d been in LA two months by then – but the first one I really felt. I remember thinking it was slower than I’d imagined, but scary too, the ground moving under us.
Mark took charge like he’d been preparing. He’d lived in LA longer than anyone there. He’d felt earthquakes before. He ordered, "Everybody stand in the doorway, quick!" a skinny guy in unmatched sweatshirt and sweatpants, his hair messy like he was always between naps.
We squeezed in the patio doorway, all laughing and sort of freaking out. Mark ended up behind me and I felt his arm across my belly. Nothing sexy or anything. I thought how nice it was for him to do that, like he was protecting me.
I didn't see Mark or his roommate Clyde for half a year after that; until Mark called me last week. I only knew those guys through my girlfriend Kerry, and she moved back to Maryland last spring. That was me between May and October, still new to LA, my best friend gone, no job, watching cable in my Beverlywood studio apartment. Then Mark calls, "Angela? This is Mark. Remember me? Kerry’s friend."
I went over that night, happy just to get out of my building, some fall in the air, long pants and my red hoodie. I picked up a twelve pack and we hung out and watched Survivor and then the Emmy’s. Clyde had an advertising gig, had to get up early. Me and Mark hung some more, talking a little. I wouldn’t even have brought it up, but we’d smoked a little weed and had the beers and I was sort of delirious because I’d been sitting in my apartment for four months thinking that that might be the rest of my life – that loneliness - and Mark was so cool to call me and invite me over and everything, and I wanted to be his friend so I said, "Remember that earthquake?"
He smiled, watching the Emmy’s, and didn’t look at me to say, "I made that happen."
I smiled too, though I wasn’t sure why. I looked at him and he kept not looking back, so I turned again to the TV – some elegant older woman thanking her agent – and ten minutes may have passed before Mark said, "Want to see something? Give me that newspaper."
It was on a milk crate they used for an end table, by an overflowing ashtray and the last of my fifth beer. I thought how I’d have to drive home soon and handed him the paper.
" Clyde hates it when I do this shit," Mark said. He opened the paper the same way my dad used to in the morning, jerking either side so it folded back on itself. He scanned this page then the next, then found what he was looking for. He read, "Honest Youngster Rewarded for Returning Lost Wallet."
I felt dumb, smiling like I had been for so long. I think I felt a little scared too, something in Mark’s eyes.
I asked, "What does Clyde hate?"
"It’s not that he hates it. He just doesn’t believe in it. Come sit by me."
I thought then Mark wanted to hook up, and that was okay. I’ve always liked him I guess, even though he’s a slob. I liked how he was tall and skinny and walked like a bird. I moved from the bean bag to the couch. Not right next to him but close enough, and still smiling. I thought I must look shitty, bloodshot eyes and beer breath, my hair smelling of smoke. He didn’t seem to watch me though.
Mark started breathing deep in and out, like a skin diver about to go under. The paper sat in his lap and I saw the article, a thumbnail photo of an older dude and a little boy, the older dude holding a wallet out, both smiling.
I said, "Cute kid," just to have something to say.
Mark kept breathing, sucking and blowing through puffed cheeks, the breeze ruffling newsprint. I laughed at him because he was funny looking, and because I was still a little scared. I wondered if I should just go, if this was some weird joke he and Clyde played on friendless girls.
His final exhalation was different from the rest, impossibly deep like he blew all the breath out of himself. His face fell toward the paper, close enough so his chin almost rested on it. He stayed awhile like that, airless, spent. Then he inhaled the article about the boy returning the wallet.
He inhaled the words right off the newspaper. They just shifted at first, a’s and e’s and d’s and c’s, then they dislodged – lifting and streaming through the air, sliding into his mouth. One long breath was all it took, Mark’s lips pursed like a flutist. The headline went last, the large letters seeming to weigh more. When they’d disappeared he sat up and smiled at me like he knew something.
"Kid’s name is Esteban Rodriguez. He found the wallet at the Nickelodeon on Wilshire" Mark said, "The guy is Chuck Martin, a producer at USA Networks. Gave Esteban $200 for his trouble. Esteban’s spending $30 on roller blades, putting the rest in his college fund. Esteban’s mother is proud but not surprised."
I said, "What the fuck did you just do?" There were lights at the edges of my vision, little electric tadpoles swimming.
Mark said, "Hey are you…?"
I said, "What the fuck—" And passed out.
* * *
"Will you do it again for me?"
We were in bed. Not that same night. That same night Mark brought me around with cool water on my forehead and drove me home in my car and walked back alone. Two nights later I came over uninvited and kissed him in the doorway and asked only whether Clyde was home. Mark said no. Two hours after I asked, "Will you do it again for me?" Maybe three hours.
He asked what I meant and I poked him in the shoulder and said, "You know." He kept smiling, that cheek to cheek grin he has, touching his eyes and forehead.
"I can’t just do it."
"Why not? Does it hurt?"
"No, but the more I do it the more I feel it."
"Is it like reading?"
"A little bit. But I see what all it’s about. Hear the voices, stuff like that. I feel it, I guess. That’s why the newspaper is good, bland and straightforward."
"Show me again."
He mock sighed, like I was a pain but not really. "There’s no newspaper in here."
"Here," I handed him an issue of SKI Magazine from the floor by the bed.
Mark blanched, "Uh uh. Tried that already. I don’t need to be jumping off any more cliffs."
I searched on hands and knees now, out of bed, naked, looking through piles of CDs and laundry. Mark watched and I didn’t mind.
It was under an opened case of floppy disks. I tossed it in bed beside him and jumped in after, pulling the covers up and giggling at the chill. Mark put his one hand on my belly, laughing with me. He picked up the book with his other, saying, "Guess this’ll work."
It was a hardcover. He laid the spine on my ribs. I heard the glue crackle, my legs and arms getting nervous tingly. He said, "This is a good chapter," and started breathing that way again, deep in and out. I could just see the book’s title, Seinlanguage, at the corner of one page. That and Mark breathing, that’s all I saw. Then the letters streamed up off the paper and into his mouth, just like with the newspaper, but different too. Mark started laughing and so did I.
"You can feel it?" Mark looked amazed.
I could. Nothing had ever been so funny. It was all around us, but somehow inside us. Inside him really, radiating out like rays of a film projector. Nightclub and laughter, spotlight and cigarette smoke; jokes. Somehow I was feeling what Mark felt from eating the words.
He laughed and I laughed and he kissed me and I kissed him back, laughing.
"So cool!" He shouted.
He rolled on me, inside me, howling and shaking. Same for me. No control. Just laughter and joy, and a funny taste on Mark’s lips like burnt toast.
* * *
We stayed up three days straight after that. It was James Ellroy’s fault. Mark is a fan and had trade paperbacks of the entire LA Quartet on the shelf above his PC. I’d never read Ellroy, but as soon as Mark inhaled the first page of White Jazz I was hooked. Ellroy’s stuff was almost too pure. It kept us from sleeping or eating, strung out on violence and plot, looking paranoid over our shoulders and chewing our tongues. It was all we could do Friday night to tiptoe into Clyde’s room and grab his copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Strange Pilgrims, so we could come down to Light is Like Water, holding each other amidst the lush, foreign English.
The next day we got into Stephen King’s early work – Christine, Salem’s Lot, then Cujo for the two-dollar matinee thrill of it. Clyde moved out the next morning. He left a note, something about the giggling he couldn’t take anymore, the tire tracks in the kitchen and gunshot holes in the walls. Mark considered inhaling Clyde’s note, but wasn’t sure how handwriting would go down.
That was seven days ago.
Now all the books in the house have blank pages. There are letters on the floor, letters on the walls and ceiling. Sometimes Mark shows off, blowing sentences, paragraphs, entire chapters onto windows, counters, the TV screen. We’ve spent eons in Conrad’s jungle, Faulkner’s South, LeHane’s Boston, just Mark and I, the words inside him somehow shining out so I can feel them too. I had been so lonely by myself. It’s amazing what one more person can do.
Mark snorts Hunter S. Thompson to keep us awake. It makes me crazy. He makes me crazy. Seems like five minutes pass and now the sun’s coming up. Mark and me just talking and talking all night. He searches the apartment for unused books but there’s nothing left. Mark tries not to seem nervous. He inhales a golf instruction book and the food section from this morning’s paper. He makes eggs Florentine while I roll putts into a glass on its side, letters in a million fonts sticking to the golf ball.
Eating eggs, Mark inhales the nutritional information off the side of the Sunny Delight. We see a factory, vats of painful orange liquid. I push my glass away.
"It’s getting more vivid." I say.
"It is, yeah. And now we’re out of words."
He’s joking of course. There’s always more. I laugh then see he’s serious, "What do you mean out?"
"Out. There’s nothing left in the house."
"Well we better go to my place, I…" I stop because he’s looking at me, his head tilted just so. "What?"
"We were there three days ago. Don’t you remember? Tom Clancy? Toni Morrison?"
Shit, I forgot. Submarines and presidents and wiry black women from another time and I forgot. God. How long have we been at this? What do we do now? I’m trying not to look like I’m freaking out but must be failing because Mark says, "It’s alright, Angie. You’ll be okay without it."
He’s right of course. I’ll be fine, except, "No I won’t."
"There’s always more words. We can’t stay here forever. Let’s just take a few days. Get things together. We’ve been at this a week or more—"
"Borders." I say, never meaning anything so much.
"What."
"La Cienega and 3rd. Borders Books.
Let’s go to the bookstore."
Borders Books fronts La Cienega below 3rd Street, but you enter through the parking lot on Blackburn. The first floor is dominated by a wide central staircase leading upstairs to the CD’s and non fiction. That’s where we start, in Musical Biography, Mark inhaling entire books at a time, his capacity at a new high. Soon enough Jerry Garcia, Syd Vicious, Mick Jagger, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Sun Ra are on stage by the café, Karen Carpenter on drums, Charles Mingus on bass. Shoppers gather to watch, some laughing, some looking around like there might be a camera hidden nearby. Mark can’t stop laughing, letters pouring from his nose like milk. I grab his hand and we head downstairs to Romance, So What echoing after us, louder than anything through the sound system used by Motley Crue on their Theatre of Pain Tour (’85-’86).
We suck up Romance – not just the words now, but the garish covers as well – and a horde of Fabios grab a horde of busty women by their skinny waists. We suck up Mystery and overweight police detectives start grid-searching Calendars. We suck up the Classics, and the Trojan fleet bursts through the 3 rd street wall, the Red Sea flooding in after, covering Religion to the top of the shelves.
A Minotaur descends the stairs, holding its ears against the band, which has segued into Midnight Rambler at top volume. It sees a Romance wench and goes into heat, rutting against the cash wrap.
A redheaded Borders clerk passes us, his eyes wider then wide should be, drool coming off his chin. He mumbles something about supper being ready and Mark and I laugh at his insanity.
Things turn ugly in Military History. Red Coats take the Magazine racks. Vietnam grunts hump through Children’s Literature. Doughboys don masks against a mustard gas attack by the greeting cards, a Roman Senator holds his throat and gurgles then dies. A Blackhawk helicopter flattens the Sioux nation with rotor wash before an RPG sends it crashing into Biography. The explosion is barely audible over the band, now simmering below Martin Luther King, doing his Promised Land speech as spoken word. Harry Potter zooms by on his broom, blindly pursuing a Snitch, knocking Mark to his knees.
Cops in dark blue LAPD uniforms storm the back door. I think Mark inhaled an OJ book in True Crime, but these might be real cops too. Not that all these others aren’t real as well. Just ask the patrons and employees of Borders Books, who see and feel it all along with Mark and me. It’s real because Mark makes it real. And the more he inhales, the realer it becomes, and life is better lived this way. Not trapped in a studio apartment watching television, but feeling and seeing and being the imagination of the world’s best minds.
But this noise and confusion is too much, and Mark has my hand and drags me out, past the Imperial Star Destroyer docked by the exit, preparing to fire upon Dora the Explorer and Boots the Monkey, who won’t see it coming. Mark is screaming, “It’s too much! Let’s go! It’s too much!!”
Outside I fight Mark. I push him away and make for the entrance but he has me and won’t let go. He’s stronger then he looks and I’m worn out from days awake and he shoves me into the car and I bang my head on the door jamb and he locks me in and comes around and starts the car and peels out, leaving behind the dross of a million big thinkers.
* * *
I scrape and claw the whole way home. I scream and cry too but Mark just drives, muttering, “It’s too much. Same as last time. Too much…”
He parks outside his apartment, where I know there are no words, and comes around to get me. But he doesn’t need to drag me inside. I shake him off and march ahead. The world feels empty, missing something familiar I’ve come to value. The air tastes thin and the night’s black looks grey. In Mark’s apartment, I huddle in the bean bag, my chin on my knees. I try not to think of the words and what’s probably still happening at the bookstore. Or maybe it’s not happening at all. Maybe it fades when Mark leaves. Or maybe it’s all going to live forever, all that imagination loose in the city streets.
Missing it hurts, a physical pain in my side. I’m nauseous and exhausted and so angry with Mark for taking it all away.
I tell him so, shouting, “Fuck you!”
He just shakes his head, says, “Look at yourself,” like I’m embarrassing.
I throw an ashtray at him, the one from the end table. It doesn’t even come close.
He has me by the shoulders suddenly, his face in mine, “LOOK AT YOURSELF!” They stop me, his eyes. There’s a loose t on his chin. “You think I don’t feel the same way?! It can’t be like that though. Not in public. People can’t take it.”
“But I need it, Mark.” I put all the pleading I know into the words, “I need to have it.”
He lets me go, sits back on his haunches. “I do too.”
Mark walks back into his bedroom then returns a minute later. What’s in his hand blots out everything else, like the stains on your eyes when you’ve looked too long at the sun.
It’s a book.
I searched the house hours ago, top to bottom. He must have had it hidden.
“Oh my god is that—” I start but he says
“Shhhhhhh.
“Come sit next to me.”
And I do. On the couch.
The book is big. He lays it across both our laps. The cover shows a wide prairie and a razor blue horizon. The book is called California’s Geology.
“Promised myself I’d never pick this up again,” Mark said. “Not after last time. But I couldn’t throw it out either.”
He flutters the pages which are thick and make a noise like birds. Words in dense columns; graphs, charts and photographs. Some pages are already white from where Mark has done his work.
He finds his place. He knows it from the feel, just where he wants to go. He pauses a moment then cracks the book wide. The spine fights. The artwork spans both pages, a cutaway earth in all its colorful stratum. Emblazoned across the top in two inch high letters: EARTHQUAKES: CAUSE AND CONSEQUENCE.
I gasp. Mark is breathing deep, in and out.
I put my arm around his neck. I put my other hand on his chest. I feel the breath leave him, then come rushing back in. He flutters the pages again, and it’s not some letters now, it’s all of them, everything the textbook has to offer. I feel them rush into him. I feel them turn him on inside. I feel them shine through.
The ground begins to move beneath us and I laugh.
It feels like the big one.
