This is something that happened before it all started: My Berkeley friend offered me her ex-fiancé’s old car. You try to go back to the beginning but when you do there’s still everything before the beginning, and what about that? All sorts of things keep happening, as the history books say: some of them good, some of them bad.
The ex-fiancé had wanted to learn Arabic and gone to the language institute in Monterey, he couldn’t afford to study it otherwise. Accordion player, Dylan fan. He would never have to serve. That was pre-. Now it was after and he was off to Iraq and decided to drive across the country to where he had to report for duty. After a breakdown (not automotive, mental), he left his car in Boulder, flew to Georgia. The car was mine if I wanted it.
A strange letter came in the mail, sealed with black duct tape and written in crazy-looking capital letters. It was a handwritten deed on the back of a page of Arabic language exercises.
I called the Colorado number I had and spoke to an old man who said yeah, it’s on the lawn, come’n get it. I had pictured a Toyota or Honda for some reason; it was a brown Ford Bronco, the old kind.
The whole thing started to feel too weird.
I didn’t call back or go get the truck. Someone I didn’t know had had a breakdown in it and was off to the war in Iraq and it just didn’t seem worth it.
I asked my friend every now and then about her ex-fiancé. She said she got emails saying if she knew what he was doing she would never speak to him again. Then I started seeing the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and imagined the duties of an Arabic translator, and was glad not to have his Ford Bronco. I wondered if, technically, I owned it, the deed was still in a drawer somewhere, I thought, but I’ve packed and moved across the country since and never saw it.
Someone finally went on TV, wrote editorials, about what he had done at Abu Ghraib and why and who had told him to. Finally someone said it. He became one of my heroes, pretty much all we had in that terrible year. It took a while before I made the connection and realized that it’s his car I could have owned, or maybe do own. I pictured driving around in it sometimes, in my mind, listening to Dylan. One of the dark albums, the ones about America. Blood on the Tracks, Bringing It All Back Home. I guess really they’re all dark.
Passing through the Bay Area again not too long ago I found myself at the San Francisco Public Library trying to track down a shadowy recording studio. I would have to say that’s when it started.
JUNE 21, 2016 TUESDAY
The downtown New York bar had a hidden back room, and out the back of that the shallowest courtyard any of us had ever seen. A strip of tables and Russian-looking birch trees on a narrow twin bed of yellow leaves. No sooner out the sliding door you were face to face with a crumbly stone wall, grayish white. Both ends of the courtyard are even more claustrophobic, blocked in by the high backs of buildings; narrow alleys, barely room for a bike, run out around the bar to the street. The gray-white wall, though close, and at least ten or twelve feet high, is lower than the buildings, and almost soft—the color, the texture—and is comforting, not crowding.
The whole gang was there: Pam and Chris, Edward, Jennifer, Gideon, Josh and Ben, Scott, Anne-Sofie, Iris, Jeon.
Where’s John, Pam said.
The chronicler, she said.
Still in San Francisco, Scott said.
Jennifer was talking about her date, David, teacher (sexy), smart. They’d been waiting for their drinks when the man at the next table had started talking to David.
Can I tell you my philosophical idea?
Okay . . . , David had said.
What is truth?
That’s not an idea, that’s a question!
Ha ha, okay. What is truth?
What do you think truth is.
I think: Truth is that which does not change.
Pause. I guess I don’t really agree with that, David said.
Let me put it this way, the man at the next table said, having obviously put it this way many times. If something is here today gone tomorrow can it be the truth?
Some kinds of truth are like that, some aren’t. Are you only talking about religious truth?
God is truth.
Yes, if you believe in God then I see how you could say truth doesn’t change. But not everyone believes in God.
I do believe in God.
But then other people have different ideas of truth.
If something changes, can it be the truth?
David was trying to engage the man, in his way, Jennifer said, but the man couldn’t have the conversation David wanted to have. Though David couldn’t have the conversation the man wanted to have either. I liked him for trying, for taking the man seriously.
The man’s wife, also sitting at the next table, was smiling uncomfortably, having been through this before. She had a weasel face, but not in a bad way, Jennifer said: small round head, sharp features, smart and sly, all sorts of fascinating thoughts to share if she chose to. Perched on her nose were enormous bright white Buddy Holly glasses like a heron on a low gable. See what I mean?
Well, Jennifer said David went on, there’s political truths, or social truths. Thirty years ago it was impossible to elect a black president in this country, that was a real truth, and now we have a black president. A truth about our society has changed.
That’s not the truth.
Why not? Which part’s false?
I knew right then that I would never love this man, Jennifer said. He couldn’t go with the situation—couldn’t speak this stranger’s language. He was rigid in just the way he thought he was arguing against. And he had forgotten about me.
It was six o’clock. Something always happens at six, Scott quoted. Chris got up to get more drinks.
A craggy-faced barman behind the counter was polishing a tumbler with a gray cloth. To two unacquainted men on barstools who’d just ordered the same drink he said, with a twinkle: You fellows been together long? Chris came back and told everyone.
Then he announced: One of the things people don’t realize is also there during the long philosophical conversations in movies is the background noise. Visual noise too. You can zone out and notice the reflections in the mirror, the song on the jukebox, the face of the bartender. Having something else to pay attention to lets you follow the conversation better.
I saw this movie once, Josh said. It was supposed to be about history and memory, but the billboard for Jaws in the background gave more reality than anything else in the film.
It’s weird, typewriters on desks don’t do it as much as giant word-processor monitors.
Puffy sleeves!
Cordless landlines!
Right, but whatever a writer tries to put in as period detail feels fake, or like trying too hard, Chris went on. You need the invisible detail, the filler—what we don’t notice, don’t see. Collars, hairdos. Film can do it, writing can’t.
Our group does more than trade stories and images, but the rest doesn’t matter that much to be honest. Someone once told us we all sounded the same when we talked; we took it as a compliment.
Please forgive these digressions.—
JUNE 22, 2016 WEDNESDAY
Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona declares a state of emergency in Navajo County, where fires fueled by record-shattering heat have engulfed more than 40,000 acres.
Great Britain continues to mourn MP Jo Cox, stabbed and shot to death last Thursday on the first anniversary of white supremacist Dylann Roof’s marauding at the Emanuel Church in Charleston. Jo Cox had been 41, a mother of two, known for her passionate support for Syrian refugees and a vocal advocate for Britain to stay in the EU. She was the first member of the British Parliament to be murdered in more than twenty-five years. During the attack, eyewitnesses said, her killer shouted “Britain First,” the name of a far-right anti-immigrant political party; he is a longtime supporter of the neo-Nazi National Alliance and stated his name in court as Death To Traitors, Freedom For Britain. The Brexit vote is tomorrow.
I remember a middle-aged man watching the light, alone on a park bench in the rain. The umbrella’s fabric sits right on his head, more for convenience one might say than to keep him dry; he leans forward a bit, putting his head and back closer to his knees and feet, but he can still feel the ring of rain coming down on much of his body while he watches his son stomp in puddles and rocket off the end of the wet fast slide. Early one early May morning,—trees pale green and full, sky overcast, the light somehow clean, even in the city. More things than usual seemed possible.
In the US parliament, eight days after the deadliest mass shooting in American history, while victims’ families watch from seats around the senate chamber, senators vote today that people on the federal terrorism watchlist should still be able to buy guns, and that background check loopholes should still not be closed. Four gun-control measures fail, none of which in any case would have banned the AR-semiautomatic assault rifle used in Orlando, in San Bernardino, in Aurora, in Sandy Hook Elementary School.
That May morning I must have been back in New York for two years. I’d moved in the spring. There was work for me as a coder, enough to make it as a freelancer. Without working seventy-hour weekends I would never get far, but it would do. I’d left New York for a while but never left New York. Here we come to the heart of the matter, I would say: I have never left the houses, the streets, the neighborhoods where I grew up.
Back where I’d grown up, what rose up were images. A huge medallion of paper flowers on the half-wall high behind the café counter—blue roses, sea green, orange, several different reds, in a large ring.
A white woman on the street—young, black hair, smoker type, New York armor loaded up (sunglasses, shoulder bag, scowl). On her t-shirt, in big sans-serif caps, black on off-white: I AM A / FUCKING / ZOMBIE.
The morning is cool, bright, and dry on the walk to the park. “And if you go broke, then ya go to Hellllll . . .” the black kid sings quietly, earbuds probably in his ears. The playground is sprinkled with white light. Later, school out, with half-naked children running around in the taut, intersecting jets of water from the three sprinklers.
The playground in my childhood memories is a large enclosure on several levels, starting on the north end with a large flat area of slides, seesaws, sandboxes, and swings surrounded by fences, bordered by green and often broken benches. In the playground from today the benches are fixed, the monkey bars new, and two large brown dinosaurs for climbing on or detouring around—not large for dinosaurs I suppose—rear up between the sandboxes. The children today, it is strange to think, will have memories as strong of those dinosaurs as I do of the space they now fill.
The barbell-shaped zone on the lower level opens out at the southern end into an arena enclosed in high walls, with a concentric circle inside ringed by a metal fence, the fountain, and from the southern edge of that circle steps lead up to memories of endless childhood handball and a mezzanine with benches, picnic tables. An attendant’s shed there looks like a little castle, bathroom doors permanently locked, and more steps lead up from there to the highest level, joining with the park outside the playground. A long hill from the northern end of the playground leads up to that same flat promenade, with its view down to the river.
As a bike climbs that hillside under the high trees, let us reconstruct the memories of the time I went there so often. There are memories of the light, memories of the games, the sandbox scooping, the handball, the finding someone to seesaw with. Of being alone, and of groups: girls playing ring-around-the-rosy, one lonesome girl, crying, and the rest of us acting like we don’t notice, which is surely the decent thing to do. There is Tamara, the girl with braids and flowers in her hair who climbed a tree at my eighth birthday party, and the bigger kid who played dodgeball with us, and threw the ball in my face on purpose, blood ran from my nose, I was surprised, and then—I don’t remember the transition—we were friends. Matt and me and his four younger brothers, his parents were “going to keep trying till they got a girl or a baseball team,” I remember, which only vaguely made sense to me, and I don’t know which they ended up with, Matt moved away, probably to a cheaper neighborhood with bigger apartments. Priya, who lived down the block, and our endless turns on the seesaw. Hilary, Phoebe, and Aglaya playing jacks with a maraschino-red superball. And Sylvie, oh, Sylvie.
I hardly knew her, because I never dared to talk to her. Finally, yes, at that ring-around-the-rosy with the girls all singing and the crying girl in the middle, not her, we talked and we hid behind the bench near the sandbox. Such a surplus of thrilling, inflaming imprecisions life rests on. Later she had to sing a song to regain her place in the dance, which she did in a fresh young voice as the shadows came down from the great trees. The next time I saw her, we held hands. Maybe—I think now—she’d had a crush on me too that whole time. She was my age, old enough for early sorrow. She was moving away, Priya told me afterward, I never saw her again. Until last week.
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From Analog Days by Damion Searls. Used with permission of the publisher, Coffee House Press. Copyright © 2025 by Damion Searls.
