MISSION NOWHERE
He balances the time in his head, more of a feeling than an exact science.
He ate about ten hours ago, thanks to the woman with the dog outside the taco truck. The parking lot had that quiet glow to it. Tungsten warmth, urban world at night. Pockets of orange flickered amidst a landscape of darkened concrete and tamed hills. Los Angeles an emergent wildfire, like those Rolf saw as a kid with his face pressed against the glass, funneling down the 5 with his mother at the wheel. A long day’s journey coming to an end. He still thinks of those shared journeys, when his bike cruises downhill and the wind takes up the loose ends of his hair and the world lets him breathe for fucking once.
But there he goes again spinning off.
Rolf sits up at the library desk, sized for a child, his legs jammed to the knees beneath it. He feels his bag tucked tightly against his thigh, unseemly and worn with holes. Two mothers eye him, seated at a nearby table with their children, and whisper. He came here to refresh his Spanish, lost since the days his Mom taught him. Something she thought important at the time. Now a guy up the street has a job for him if he can get back on top of the language. So she was right after all. But why can’t he think straight? He can’t still be hungry?
That woman with the dog again. At the taco truck. Her face. Measuring his threat, the only two in the lot after midnight. Judging if a dangerous young man could possibly be within spitting distance of a Whole Foods, shuttered except for a late night delivery of frozen vegetables. Perhaps the shouts of the nearby workers gave her the confidence to engage with him, to accept that she could provide some assistance.
In a situation like that, he tries not to look in their eyes much. A glance or two, humble, quiet and calm. Easy enough in his mind, not always for others. He’s white, so he does have that going for him.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you but I lost my wallet earlier and…”
“Yeah,” she tentatively muttered, already calculating her potential lie. But then: “Okay.”
“I’m not looking for something big. Just a taco. Even a Coke.”
Her dog walked up to his foot and sniffed, skittered. His smile was genuine. That helped too.
“Go on, he’s friendly,” she said.
Rolf bent down and scratched the mutt behind its ears. He saw the woman slide her credit card out from behind her phone, the case bulging with the ephemeral plastic of the modern economy. The dog rolled over and exposed his belly. “Looks like my dog. When I was a kid,” he offered, trying not to oversell his sympathetic qualities.
She bought him a burrito, with avocado, and a drink too. He chewed the ice for hours, waiting for dawn, feeling lucky enough. He kept watch on his bike, chained to the rack outside the library. He believed things always looked a little better when he had wheels to his name.
Two months so far he’s had it. Close to a record. This is a good neighborhood, as they go, but that sometimes makes it worse. Better things to steal. He knows from experience.
So Rolf decided he wouldn’t be losing another one even if it meant keeping watch all vulnerable night long. His forest green cruiser, a National Park sticker on the frame. Zion. He had worked at it with a key for a while before deciding to keep it on. It added character. A small silhouette stands in wide red canyon waters. He felt at one with that blacked out figure, walking downriver. Somewhere new.
Morning came and more bikes joined his own on the rack. The rest of the world woke up and took to the roads. Only then had Rolf gone inside.
A few hours later, he’s not sure how many more wary glances he can take. Manuel, the librarian on staff, knows him all too well. They have never gotten over their mutual suspicion of each other, though it isn’t like Rolf has done anything to the place. He takes the library as it is offered. A place for anyone, no charge, as long as they are quiet and follow the rules of its domain.
So that’s why he calculates his hunger, legs stuffed like turkeys, wondering if it is worth leaving behind the chill of the building’s AC for calories alone. Close to noon, the street outside is well baked. On the other hand, it is best not to linger for too many consecutive hours in one place. Most patrons keep a wide berth around him and his fellows, always a table or chair left empty between them. He doesn’t want to be like Cal, the large man who lives in his van in the lot beneath the building. It sits there from opening to close, one of those old beaters with dainty curtains on its windows. He doesn’t think Cal is a perv but the possibility certainly hangs about him, his corpulence and unkempt wild hair. An aging man barely fitting within the rules of society, probably living off funds acquired before he lost touch with wider reality.
Unlike others, unlike Rolf, Cal isn’t a user, at least in any perceivable way. He engages in some deep, unknown research at a computer station all day. He reads old sci-fi and keeps to himself and manages not to smell. He doesn’t offend Manuel or the other patrons, just elicits strange sympathy. He’s the man who lives at the library.
Rolf is not a man who lives at the library. He is too young for a fate like that. He is too unfinished. He is biding his time. Learning to survive. Trying not to lose his frame of reference. And of course trying to score. To haggle. To keep the fire low but alive, flames licking up. To keep the fire going.
So at ten past twelve, Rolf unfolds from the library table, extracts his bag, and leaves temperate climes for the summer heat of Southern California, getting worse each year.
His bike hangs limp from the rack. The back wheel missing.
Rolf’s brain knows this is true but also refuses to accept it. He kneels, gets his fingers greasy as he runs them against the gears and tries to make it all fit back together.
Rolf used to have two bike locks, one for the front wheel, the second for the back. It is the best insurance, the only insurance that can ever really work. But he had stayed up all night, watching. It was why he kept such careful hours even in gentrified enclaves. It was why he trusted the first hours of sleepy daylight to cut him a break.
That is fucking stupid. He knows it, has known it really, and here it is now, the proof. He feels it coming up like vomit. The feeling he calls fuck-it.
Rolf lets fall the vestige of he who used to be, the shell of manners constructed in the first two decades of his life. Fuck-it walks him inside and up to Manuel’s desk and it puts on that obeisant face and it speaks quietly at first. Instructs the librarian on Rolf’s current problem.
“Are there any cameras that face that way?”
Manuel clicks his tongued, flexing facial muscles as if stretching would relieve the annoying pain of Rolf-as-person. “Sorry. That’s been a blind spot for a couple months.” A funding issue, he explains.
Rolf balls his fists. His head falls against the smudgy barrier that went up after the virus and never went down. Even with that polyethylene protection, Manuel scoots back in his seat as the barrier reverberates under force. “It’s bullshit,” the fuck-it says. “That’s where they should be looking. The only place!” Rolf’s breath fogs the barrier. He knows he’s looking crazier and crazier, the shell crumbling.
“I understand your frustration. Believe me, I’ve made the need known. Unfortunately—”
Is it the word or the tone? He can’t really be sure. All Rolf hears in his mind now is that well worn sense that it’s all askew and always will be. Fuck, fuck, fuck it all.
“What are those fucking looking at?!” He shouts, pointing up to one of the camera orbs that watch over the library’s interior. “We’re just reading in here, working, but they want to watch that?”
“Sir—”
“That’s what you do right? Watch us all on your screen, making sure we don’t steal any of the free fucking books?”
Manuel’s eyes are already beyond Rolf and he knows the guard is coming before his hand even lands on shoulder. Hard. No words needed. One chance. Shut up. Come with me.
And so he’s outside after all, without a wheel and in need of a new library. His hands shake as he unlocks what remains of his bike and hefts it over his shoulder. Carrying twisted metal, looking crazier, feeling crazier, feeling so hot.
He crashes into the scant shade of a small jacaranda, its fuchsia petals shed and pungent from rot. It’s a found spot, a smaller refuge halfway down a slope into a local park. A no man’s land littered with trash and needles and stubbed out smokes. Rolf takes out his pipe and the last baggie. This heat feels more personal than the general blaze of the sun. Made just for him.
Ten minutes later, he’s tackling the hill with focused intent. One leg lunges after another, successive footfalls beating a rhythm deep into his head. He leaves the valley of the library behind and climbs up to the city view. Everything looks how it might through sunglasses, dimmed as blood rushes to fill his brain and keep him afloat. Scanning for the next possibilities. Trusting some intuition is inherent with thoughts blotted out and footsteps trudging on.
Inevitable, the 7/11. He’s outside, in eye contact with the clerk within. A steady foe, if not an irate or active one. Rolf’s way inside blocked by claims of prior behavior he barely remembers but believes enough so that he can’t challenge the man on his honor. The cashier just an instrument of the greater corporation in the end, dispenser of protein bars, sweaty pretzels, and burnt pork.
Rolf lingers, propped against the wall outside with his mangled bike. He gauges his chances for a hasty run to grab what he can and still make it out. An equation of irrevocable-or-not reputational damage. There is a balance to the world and its inhabitants too, even the sins that seem unforgivable at first. There is a malleable line.
“Yo!” Across the street, a voice. Noel waves, his tarp a shock of blue against the stark white wall of the school made ghostly by summer. In a month he’ll be gone, deeper into the park to wait out the next school year, but for three months he is a fixture on this street. Noel and his ever-rotating flea market. “I got something for you.”
Noel reminds Rolf of himself or maybe just of fuck-it. They are both on their own most of the time. Like it that way. Noel packs light, keeps a tent with the bare essentials and his latest scavenged goods scattered around outside its open flap. The shade beneath the tarp propped above makes a decent oasis. Whenever Noel leaves, a lock seals the tent’s zipper and stitched into the fabric in performative jagged scrawl is his message to the world: ill kill you.
Rolf crosses over. The heavy Gilbert sits crouched on an overturned bin next to Noel’s tent. There is often a guest spot reserved here. Despite his more dangerous qualities, Noel looks out for misfortunates on the street. That isn’t to say there isn’t an economic element to his partnerships, or an act of some agreed upon generosity. That’s how Noel likes to phrase these things, with a frustrated and muddled eloquence.
Gilbert is primarily a charity case, though Rolf doesn’t fault Noel for it. The infirm and rotund Gil spends most days wandering the long, hilly blocks between the river and the sloping maw of downtown before collapsing into fantasia somewhere along the way.
Rolf leans his bike frame against the wall and ducks underneath the tarp. Noel smiles, like any good merchant.
A few moments later, Rolf bites into a granola bar fished out of Noel’s bag from an outreach group. Gil’s subtle shadow puppetry can be seen on the hard concrete outside their shade. “Why’s he got his hands like that?”
“He’s stopping earthquakes, man,” Noel says, a steady look on his face that betrays no skepticism. “The Big One.”
Rolf bends back the tarp to see Gil in full. “What? Gilbert! That right?”
The old man holds up his hand to Rolf in pause, handling some deep inner calculus.
“That’s a new one.”
All of them up and down the street are tuned into Gil’s inner narrative at this point, but Rolf’s particularly fascinated by the man’s ever expanding mythology.
“Let him be.” Noel is actually serious now, over it, ready to get on with business. “Look at this, look at what I acquired.” Under the dismantled remains of a Playstation and the top corner of Noel’s sleeping bag, Rolf sees a wheel. “Got it from Danny. The rest of his ride was requisitioned from him, said he’s sticking with the skateboard here on out. You know that hair he’s got, thinks he’s Tony Hawk or something.”
“Tony Hawk doesn’t have a ponytail.”
“Whatever, the other one. Come on, I bet this fits perfectly, glass slipper shit.”
It’s a mountain bike wheel, whereas Rolf rides a cruiser—but he’s seen worse frankensteins on the road. He’s handy enough, may be able to pull it off.
But Noel isn’t known for low prices. Rolf decides then and there, better not to get his hopes up. “Nah, man. I ain’t got shit to my name right now.”
“We’ll work it out, you know me,” Noel intones, already fiddling with an old DVD player with a cracked display screen, obsolete since the early millennium. “Qué tienes?”
“Don’t fucking tease me. I’m serious about that job.” Noel knows about the Spanish offer, turned down the role himself. He has more profitable work.
“Translate it then, I’m helping you practice.”
Rolf does so easily enough. What are you holding? Another thing Rolf and Noel share, the thirst to be slackened, the quiet but desperate need. “I’m light.”
“Let’s see it.”
Rolf hesitates. There’s not much to give. “Look man, I don’t wanna owe you shit.”
Noel examines Rolf’s sincerity and finds it true. “You still have the key to that spot?”
Rolf weighs it out. There is a house, up a few blocks. Condemned, empty, but caught in some bureaucratic purgatory. The deed held by a man called Arrow. His aunt or uncle left it to him. He’s in prison now, but sold his rights to the place into holding for when he’d return. He gave it to the people like him, who could not answer questions asked. Who prefer to cover the windows and dive into the inner dark.
Rolf does have a key to the place, copies of which circulate but remain controlled like a gold standard. Those who possess them hope to protect their value. A working shower. A room that might have a locked door. These options are fiercely guarded. It is a system of latticework hanging over a deeper void. It is worth more than much else, if truly considered and should not be easily given.
“Yeah, I got it.”
Noel smiles like a stoner, shit-eating and sly. “Alright then. I feel you. What if we work something out?” Utterly reasonable, his tone says. “Two week loan. Try that shit out. See how it rolls. But I get a week. I hold that key one week.” He sees Rolf’s resolve slip. “Fucking neighbor calling about me again, I just need to take this stuff out of sight awhile.”
Rolf doesn’t go to the house much. To clean up, every now and again, cherish the running water. It’s more about having the option available. Sure, let’s say he hands it over to test out the wheel, but who is Noel to him really? That’s his Mom, talking to him from somewhere. Reminding how it all works.
Contingencies, excuses, sources. That’s what Rolf has come to fear people are to each other. The fact that he has to consider this so blatantly from the closest thing to a friend he has? That burns. It makes him want to fall back into the headspace where the world darkens around the edges like vignette and every face seems ill met.
Noel won’t wait long for an answer, though, so Rolf just lets instinct guide him again. No compass, but it gets the job done. “Okay, here you go.” He takes out the key and hands it over.
An hour later, the sun sinks and he’s almost got the wheel affixed. He’s been watching Noel make a couple more deals. Gilbert’s up and about, leaned into himself in intense negotiation with the unconscious. Rolf runs his hand against the fresh tread and sets it spinning. He swings his leg over the bike and nods to Noel. Tries not to betray a lack of trust. Kicks off down the hill. Keyless.
He could count the blocks in his sleep. He grew up one town over but as a kid would range far and wide. Each measured route or place memorized counted toward freedom or escape.
True enough it’s different now. Some businesses shuttered, only faint reminders of what they once were. The sandwich shop’s neon-lit sky sign now belongs to a car wash. An expensive wine market where the drug store once was. Other places remain, necessary and stolid, hardware and booze—owned by different families, though. Corporations under the surnames.
Time streams and Rolf tries to row with the current. But he overflows with stories, the lives of others smeared across his own memories and impressions. More them than him now. Ceding more control, knowing that he can’t afford losing much else but unable to resist what must be gravitational weight.
The hamburger stand, still the same. Greasy. Bright lights, a crowd no matter the hour and a manager who allows him use the bathroom to wash up. Like the key, it’s a privilege that still smacks demeaning when considered in full. But he tries to stay grateful.
The wash room’s too cramped for single human occupancy. With no bike rack, Rolf leaves it vulnerable under the awning for diners. The drive-thru’s packed, and the tables full of a reputable mix of families and off-duty construction workers. Enough eyes to earn the few minutes he needs. Rolf still mutters a prayer as he enters the bathroom and leaves the bike behind.
He fights a look in the mirror, only glancing up to make sure he hasn’t left any grease marks across his cheeks. Presentable enough, he slaps a few waves against his face to begin a new moment. Get back on track. There’s another library, one hour’s ride or so. Open Monday, bright and early. There’s Spanish everywhere in this city. It won’t take long.
He looks at himself again. Unbidden into the past as if through vortex. He ate here a few times with his mother. Forgotten until now, one quick lunch they shared before she returned to work. She took him in here, into the bathroom while she did her make-up. He sat and watched her become someone else. Someone muted, far from invincible, far from certain. He watched her forget that he was watching.
And then she saw him in the glass, remembered he was there. She smiled.
Rolf wills these recollections to fall from him like water into the sink, carved with initials and symbols and other marks of life. He won’t hide in the past. It’s not safe there either.
“Cheeseburger and coke!” Under the awning, his bike remains. The place still full. The fry oil wafts heavy and it’s hard not to hope. Rolf wipes his hands dry against his pants and gets into queue, still in eye line of his wheels. He examines the menu and thinks of what’s left to him. A lemonade. Nothing else. But the old man behind him has kind eyes. Sympathetic and unwavering when Rolf chances a glance. Maybe it’s worth a try.
“Dad, look!” A chubby kid in a t-shirt stands up from his table nearby, pulling at his father’s shirt sleeve. “That’s my bike!”
The father slowly stands as his recognition dawns. “You gotta be kidding me…”
“Yeah, the wheel’s different but look!” The decal, Rolf already knows. Zion. He really should have scratched that out.
The boy’s father doesn’t look at the bike. He looks around at his fellow patrons. Rolf twitches, like he could move for it, grab it, run. But he hesitates and the moment slips off. Not a good idea anyway, as the man’s heat-seeking eyes advance towards him.
There’s no counter argument to be made here, none he could win. The kid’s father wears a starched white shirt over broad shoulders. Physical power, maybe he could take him, but there’s other kinds of power. Rolf can’t have any more power aligned against him.
So he captures a last thought of the bike in his mind’s eye, thanks it for the few months of service, and admits to himself that the universe already told him what he deserved. He just hadn’t been listening.
Rolf brushes past the old man behind him and leaves the light. Let the kid have it. What goes around comes around. Those were the frequent words of Rolf’s own dad, a moral lesson. Noel tells him it’s a holy concept to some. The bike was his. It isn’t anymore. Can’t that be good enough? Debt paid.
Fuck-it isn’t the feeling for this. That’s short term fuel. Rolf knows the deeper night will set in now, the kind he never assumes will depart. He has to endure it. The stuff on hand isn’t right for that. If he could he’d smoke himself into marijuana oblivion like his teenage years. The best place for a dark night is the house but of course he pawned the key and lost the cost. Maybe Noel will let him earn it back, maybe he won’t. Their friendship doesn’t go that far. Rolf’s not sure any do. So he takes to the bus stop near the highway. Shielded on both sides, an alcove from the cool wind blowing. He’ll hold out as long as he can then probably give in. Smoke what he has. Feed the fire.
There’s a body slumped against the cracked glass when he arrives. Graffiti hides the poster beneath, some kid’s animated movie now a schizophrenic’s dream. The bike flashes in his mind again, as it was, left sprawled in the yard just four blocks up. Careless. Free.
Rolf sits as far as he can from the other form. It shifts beneath coiled blankets and coats. Living laundry.
He scolds himself for that. Hears her voice. Everyone’s someone. A point his mother and father disagreed on. Irreconcilable differences.
“Yo.” He wants to kick it, make it wake. He wants to see if it’s still alive. “Hey, you good?”
The blankets stir. A coat falls to the ground and reveals the face. Young. Younger than him. One he doesn’t recognize. Unusual and angular. The teenager’s eyes don’t find Rolf but seek the sky through the overhang above. Nodding in, nodding off. Now that would be the stuff for tonight. Guy has the right idea.
Rolf shakes that thought off, doesn’t let it cling. That’s predator mindset. Worse than fuck-it. Enabling. Encouraging. Happy to see it. The kind of mindset that steals little kid’s bikes. He frets in his pocket for his baggie, but his needed comfort crystals can’t bring. “You’re too young, man.”
The guy sniffles, smiles. A trail of something down his face, tearstains or thin snot.
“I’m serious. You’re lucky it’s me right now. That Carhartt you got is nice. They’ll pick you apart if you let ‘em.” People don’t know how to survive. Half the time Rolf thinks it’s just cowardly suicide, being out here. Not him, though. Not his reason. He’s going to survive.
The guy’s hand falls free and drops a dirtied brochure to the ground. Rolf scoops it up. Wishes he hadn’t. It’s a map of the missions, little golden dots up the California coast. Just like the one Rolf’s mother had for their carbound pilgrimages, minus the offensive cartoons of an indigenous warrior or ranchero or two.
“You coming from up north? San Francisco? San Rafael? Come on, what? You’re new here. You just get on the bus and ride?”
Rolf’s finger combs down the mission trail. Santa Cruz, San Juan Bautista, San Carlos, La Soledad. He remembers that one as small, unimpressive. How his Mom made him step back and look at the valley surrounding it alight in verdant spring.
“You’re not far, if you’re trying to see San Gabriel. San Gabriel…Arch...Archangel or whatever. You got a bus map? I’ll find it for you. It’s like thirty minutes. I’ll help.”
The young man shuts his eyes to the sky, whatever revelation received. Rolf watches him sleep for a while, then crumples the map in his hands. He peels the Carhartt off the pile, checks it for bugs or worse. It’s clean, fairly new. Kid’s probably rich. Got into it back home, got into it heavy. Took a runner. Let it all stack up. Why shouldn’t Rolf have this? If he’s still going to be working in winter, he needs it more.
“You fucking bum.”
But Rolf stops before leaving and removes his own jacket in turn. Sets it down upon the boy, exchange or offering in this Mission Los Angeles lit with cracklight candles. The Spanish finally comes back to him. Misión en ninguna parte. Or something like that. He starts up the long block again, halfway gone when he realizes what he left behind in his old jacket pocket. He’s too tired to go back for it. Or maybe this is the beginning of something. The need slipping loose. He’ll try to hope.
Rolf heads for the grassy knoll up the embankment next to the post office. He’s pretty sure tomorrow is Sunday. It’ll be quiet there. Some time to think. To study his conjugations. Rolf smiles to no one. It tastes bitter so he punishes himself with a frown. He’d just like some time to rest. His mind moves like a ceaseless engine.