One of the installments from Capital City Blues that I finished a few months ago. Never posted it, but thought some kind of personal reminder that I can at least sustain some kind of narrative for a few pages could potentially be welcome.
David dug up rocks. Ziploc bags. Small lengths of knotted twine. He dug up shards of glass from old beer bottles and scraps of newspaper articles that had yellowed and turned brittle. He dug up a torn condom wrapper, empty packs of menthol cigarettes and metallic joints that looked in some way automotive. He felt like an archeologist. An archivist. But also thought that he was erasing evidence. Clearing the way.
He told everyone that he had dug up a syringe, but only because he wanted to suggest that the work was in some way dangerous—that living in Capitol Hill meant that he and Ben lived on the frontier of the gentrified world. That they had made a brave decision to move out of their comfort zones, and that his project would mean something, not only to him.
For a while, things had in fact been pretty bad in the neighborhood. There were sixteen murders in Capitol Hill in June alone. In the neighborhood just north, people needed to show identification at police checkpoints to come and go. David read the neighborhood blog daily. Comments got ugly. The heat drove everyone nuts. And in view of the Capitol of the United States, they were saying, It’s a disgrace. There were murmurs of a lawsuit against the chief of police. Cops jammed on their accelerators, flying down David’s one-way block in the wrong direction, lights flashing. Elderly couples watched them from their porches, shaking their heads at one another and fanning themselves.
One afternoon, as David was turning over soil, a fight broke out at the end of the block, where a group of teenagers were hanging out. He stood and watched, holding the small hoe with green gardening gloves.
He was tearing a napkin, shredding it into little pieces. Laura looked down at the table.
“Guess my favorite city in the world,” he said.
“David, I don’t know.”
“Paris. It’s Paris.”
You could blame depression on a lot of things, he thought. But maybe it was just a question of being out of sync with a city’s rhythms. Maybe if they lived in Paris, this would have worked. Buying bread then cheese then fruit, all at different stores. More interactions. More shared exchanges. Maybe he just lacked the ability to adapt to a city’s flows. He had to find one that suited his own. That’s why he was at least moving to Capitol Hill. Trying to make a start.
But it hadn’t gone well. Laura had finally grown impatient. Things moved slowly and David took medical leave from the firm. Lost his temper often. Then he stopped taking the meds. Heard Ben wake up for work in the morning. Heard the shower and the coffee pot. The gathering noises of gathering days more than he wanted to bear. He started ignoring Laura’s calls. Nightmare. Collapse. She didn’t want to do it again. David thought: You know what? Who could blame her?
Laura didn’t say anything. They sat and listened to the background noises that become audible in a coffee shop when there’s nothing else to say. Steam and the clink of mugs and the cash register. Outside, flurries fell on H Street. They danced higher for a moment, carried on updrafts before falling and melting on the pavement.
“I have to go,” Laura said.
She stood up. Picked her bag up from off the floor. Put on her coat. She touched David’s shoulder when she walked by. He felt the cold air around his ankles when the door banged open and closed. Watched her walk west toward Union Station, huddled into her coat.
The torn pieces of napkin paper piled up on the table. The flurries seemed to have turned into a drizzle.
So this was the first thing that he had worked on in a long time. The progress was undeniably therapeutic, and he felt different this time. He sent Laura emails about his grand plans to make his block greener. Was self-deprecating, funny even, he thought. But she didn’t reply. He told her that the new medicine and therapy were helping. That things were getting better. That he would love to hear her voice.
The humidity of the late afternoons pressed down on him in blankets, and David relished the opportunities to sweat. He imagined that the Lexapro gave his skin a kind of plastic sheen. That the sweat was carrying something out of him.
It took a few days just to turn over enough soil. By then the heat had gotten so bad that people in the neighborhood seemed too tired to do anything. The checkpoints were taken down. When he had turned over about seven inches of dirt and cleared it of as much debris as he thought was necessary, he poured in five bags of enriched soil/fertilizer combination that he bought at the hardware store near Eastern Market. The brown mixture was several shades darker than the dry dust that he had removed. It looked healthy, almost alive.
There was a pile of bricks in the backyard of their house, leftover from one of the landlord’s many ill-conceived renovation projects. David carried four bricks at a time from the pile and used them to line the flower box. He fit the bricks together around the edges, and filled in the space around them with dirt.
Their next door neighbor John, was getting ready to sell his house during that summer of real estate bust, and he often came over to check on David’s progress.
“I don’t get it, dude,” he said, watching David pound bricks into the loose soil.
“What do you mean?” David asked.
“People are just going to piss all over whatever you plant in that thing.”
John spent a few afternoons emptying his house of furniture, framed posters, old brooms, and wicker baskets of old magazines. He had an odd look, a pasty face, and wore oversized white t-shirts.
“Find any syringes in there?” he asked once.
“Funny you should ask!” David said.
He finished the border on a Sunday morning in the middle of July and walked down Seventh Street, NE to Eastern Market, where he picked out flowers. He bought six small plants: pink and white and orange flowers with broad leaves that looked tough—like they could withstand the sun and the heat, and whatever other kinds of violence the neighborhood might wreak.
“This is going to sound odd,” David said to the man selling the flowers, “but will these survive if someone pees on them?”
And when he had gotten them into the ground, he held his hands on the soil, as if trying to feel a pulse. Eyes closed, feeling for it.
Laura’s family owned a cabin in Colorado that they went to together one summer. David had just changed medications, and they were going through a rough spot. They both thought that getting away together would help.
They drove their rental car into the small town of Salida to get groceries at the supermarket. They bought ground turkey, avocados, heirloom tomatoes and hamburger buns. They bought an enormous chocolate cake. Laura suggested coffee, eggs, and bacon for breakfast, and David thought it would be nice to get some tulips to put in a vase.
They argued about who would pay.
“It’s your family’s cabin,” David said, raising his voice. “Let me do it. I’m a guest and I want to do it.” Laura cleared her throat.
“Okay, look you don’t have to get crazy about it.”
“The fuck I don’t,” David said. The cashier didn’t say anything. He was looking at the floor.
David took out his debit card, swiped it. They pushed the shopping cart to the car, and unpacked the groceries into the trunk.
As they drove back to the cabin, Laura took David’s right hand from the steering wheel and squeezed it. She noticed that his skin was already getting chapped in the dry air. They didn’t say anything. David watched the road. There was the sound of cars passing in the opposite direction.
Laura turned over the hand and kissed his palm.
That night, sitting outside in rocking chairs after dinner, they watched the silent flashes of lightning out over the high plateau. Laura silently counted the seconds before the sound of the thunder reached the house. Warm yellow light emanated from the one lamp inside, and cast their shadows in front of them.
“You okay?” Laura asked.
“I’m just tired,” David said, watching the distant storm.
They listened to the breeze crackling through the aspens below the cabin, close to the creek.
“Did you take it?” she asked. David sat still. She tried to look at his eyes.
“I’m here, you know. I’m here,” Laura said. She put her hand on his back.
“I know,” said David, but his voice sounded like it came from the plateau, dry and flat.
A few weeks later, he stood out in front of the house. He looked at the flowers in the ground and smiled.
He opened a can of Natural Bohemian and drank it.
And it was very hot, so what the hell, he though. Let’s have another. The weather wouldn’t break until October. Mosquitoes still everywhere. He noticed patches of loose soil, put the can of beer down, and knelt down to tighten the earth around the flowers. He went inside and filled two old orange juice cartons with water and drenched the flowers. He stood up again and looked at them from above. He felt the blood moving through his head. Droplets of water gathered on the petals. He knew that it would storm that afternoon. Clouds had already begun to congeal and the breeze had cooled. The leaves jittered back and forth. He took off his gloves and threw them on the sidewalk. Held his hands at his side.
He had gotten an email from Laura with a lot of exclamation points in it.
A lot of stuff about how fantastic it is that the Lexapro is working and that she was thrilled you’re building something to change the neighborhood.
Thrilled hurt.
She couldn’t wait to see pictures.
She was doing very well.
They should talk sometime.
Best of luck.
The silence of a summer afternoon on an empty street, before a storm. The maples and ginkgoes leaning toward one another, creating a canopy. He was drunk.
A woman down the block screamed “I’m serious. Stop playin. Where the fuck is my money?”
And he laughed.
“Oh God,” he said. “How ridiculous.”
Laughed harder.
Leaned over, laughing.
Wheezing.
Standing on the sidewalk, an array of garden tools still scattered around the small front yard. Farmer David in the middle of the city.
He laughed until he realized that he was angry. But it felt so good to laugh. Like he hadn’t laughed in a decade. His project. A warzone flower box. He laughed so hard. His attempt to impose a little coherence. To put his mark on the city. They were watching him from the porches, from the end of the block. Laughing. To assemble some of the broken pieces of a spot of land that he could control. It made no sense. No sense. It made no sense to finish it. How could he start something new now that it was done? How could he keep starting over? He shouldn’t have started it he shouldn’t have done it and he didn’t want it anymore and he knelt down and started ripping up the flowers and tearing at the soil and biting the flowers off the stems, chewing on them and choking the roots with his fingers until he was covered in thick clumps of soil, lying in the middle of the flower box and laughing like a maniac because it was just too funny.
