Dia de los Muertos

Had the dream again night before last – the airless Eastern European apartment, the family gathered around a lace tablecloth. Outside the sounds of glass smashing. This time I was a boy about Max’s age though with none of Max’s self-confidence, tall, slouching, bad haircut, yamaka. A lamb shank on the table and small crystal bowls filled with honey candies. Door bursts open, men in uniforms rush in. "I’d rather be dead," I scream but it’s not any kind of political statement, it’s more an act of defiance aimed at my sluggish, passive parents...

"Happy to oblige," says one of the soldiers. He has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. He raises his rifle and he shoots me –

Death is a kind of artist’s studio with skylights and shelves on which buckets of paint and fixatives are arranged carelessly. I’m a woman again and the soldier is still there only now we are consumingly in love, that sort of relentless eye contact which pushes you into the front parlor of somebody else’s consciousness. The soldier is sitting on a chair that leans backwards and I kneel in front of him and begin fumbling with the buttons of his fly. And he gasps and shakes his head, tries to lift me by my shoulders but I’m relentless. I uncover his penis which is very erect, dribbling clear fluid. Hmmm, I think. He’s circumcised. How odd to find a circumcised Nazi…

The oddest thing though is that when I finally woke up, I had the most vivid vision of my mother as she was the day she told me she had cancer. It was the one instance in her life where she tried to do everything right. She’d called me, asked me to drive up: "I have something I need to tell you."

When I got there, she said, "Let’s go for a walk."

We ended up in the arboretum in Golden Gate Park. "This is one of my favorite places," she told me, smoothing the skirt of the diaphanous purple Indian print dress she was wearing. Beautiful day, Sunday on the Isle of Grand Jatte. We sat beneath a flowering tree that was not a lotus but still had a lot of relations in South East Asia. I took her photograph. (I looked for that photograph the other day but I couldn’t find it.)

Then she told me.

"Are you going to die?" I asked.

I think she denied it but I was looking into her eyes – my mother had extraordinarily beautiful eyes, very large, very wide-set and an unusual luminous light green, celandon almost. And I knew. Though in that one corner of time, my mother had made her peace with death.

This vision upset me. Then I looked at the calendar: November 1, Dia de los Muertos.

Tried to shake the queasiness off. I don’t really have time for a psychic meltdown. Did the morning things – breakfast with the children, working on the web page for the store. The store is getting a lot of repeat customers, people who show up every three weeks or so and buy about $30 worth of hot sauce, and our sales figures for October were a full 20% over what they were in September – at the same time that Cannery Row foot traffic was down by 30%. I continue to think the store will be a success if I can get it through its first year. But that first year is gonna be tough. We’ll need peripheral income – catalog sales, farmers markets. I may even need to get a real job for a few months.

Around ten, I went into the store. And almost as soon as I opened the doors, a hummingbird flew inside.

Oh dear.

Once before a hummingbird had flown into the store but it had found its way out almost immediately. Not this time. This time I was dealing with a contestant for the Phaethornis Darwin award. The door was open but the bird was confused by all the hanging pinadas, papel picados and disparate ambient light sources. It buzzed about madly, hitting its head occasionally against the ceiling’s acoustic tiles. I could feel how frantic it was. You stupid shit, I beamed it in bird-thought, just try flying a little lower.

But evidently I was broadcasting on the wrong wavelength, the hummingbird didn’t hear me. It kept flying around desperately and after thirty minutes or so I fancied that its wing motions were slowing down, from 75 mph to maybe about 60. I turned off all the lights, used ladders to detach all the hanging things from the ceilings. See? No more bright colors. Bright colors are all out there. Follow the behavioral cues. Scram.

It didn’t.

Finally after about an hour, I called Ben up in desperation, babbling and clawing ineffectually at the phone wires. "I can’t take it," I said. "I can’t make it leave."

"Is it interfering with sales?" asked Ben.

"Well, not really," I said. "In fact, it may be having a positive effect. Everyone wants to give me advice about how to get rid of it. Then once they’re inside the store, they buy things."

"Then it’s a good thing as my spiritual advisor Martha Stewart likes to say," said Ben.

"Not really," I said. "Didn’t you read The Ancient Mariner? Trust me, a dead hummingbird is a worst omen than a dead albatross. If it croaks on my watch, I might as well file for bankrupcy now."

So Ben came in and I went home. And spent a miserable day, coasting on waves of self-loathing. Try as you may a real psychic meltdown will not be deferred. Around five PM after a trip to Carmel Beach with Robin and the dog where I was accosted by a soigneé matron whose name for the life of me I could not remember but who dripped large diamonds and seemed to be looking at me pityingly, I got a call from Ben: "You’ll be happy to hear that Mister Hummingbird is no longer in the building. It flew out when the sun got low enough to lure it outside."

"Great," I said.

"And you’re kind of famous around here – people from all over have been checking in on a regular basis: ‘How’s the bird?’"

"Did they buy things?"

"Some of them. But notoriety eclipses commerce."

I should have been relieved when I hung up the phone but I was not. I was too busy thinking about what an awful failure I am, what a terrible writer, what an indifferent parent, what an ungrateful daughter, what a second-rate web page designer, what a frumpy, unattractive middle-aged woman – and why would I think for a moment that he had those kinds of feelings for me? He was just being nice, he probably kisses all his clients including the burly overlords of Granite Construction. There’s no real reason to live, I thought, except that you’re already alive. You’re like a hummingbird trapped in a store. Fly towards the light –

Lord Byron would turn that image into a bad poem, I thought. Thank God I’m not living in Regency England.