Bedwaters

“He knew that feeling, his lungs filling up with the glycerin-like fluid of a new day, and himself gargling and grasping for regular air, the air in his bed, the air with the windows closed. He felt small, and had tried imagining other people’s windows, but felt weird because he couldn’t comprehend the number of windows in the world.”

By TEO GROSU

Radon has been awake for a while, rather unsuccessfully— he hasn’t opened his eyes yet. An inexperienced observer would say he is trying to fall back asleep, since he is counting. “I’m not counting, I’m imagining,” he would respond, quite snarkily, if the whole observer situation hadn’t been hypothetical. He had to imagine, or else he would puke as soon as he got out of bed. “Existential anemia” he called it, begrudgingly. He thought the name was awful; if he’d hear someone else say it, he’d just assume they’re a superficial prick that jerks off to Kierkegaard. But he won’t bother coming up with a better one. The exasperation of hearing it in his own thoughts did not overcome the exasperation of thinking up a replacement for it. It would be useless, he would never talk to anyone else about this feeling, this ritual of loitering. Plus, being good at naming things did not run in the family, obviously. He generally wished people would use words only in the direst of circumstances, clumsily flipping through a dictionary or some government-issued flash cards. Radon would love having no words to say to himself, remembering how to talk only when he has someone to talk to. It would make waking up more successful. He would still think, of course, but in pictures and sensations, without the burden of reasoning, letting the monkey in his brain just enjoy a 7D immersive slide show.

He took a deep breath and had this feeling, like something was evaporating from beneath his skin, like when you turn off the water after a long, hot shower and watch the steam waft away. “Maybe it’s the time I’m wasting, leav ing me for a better host,” he thought, then “Bullshit,” and shifted his position to chase this sensation away— “bullshit is the last thing I need right now.” His hip creaked, or maybe it was the bed. Both were probably the same age, though he couldn’t be sure. He wiggled a bit, looking like an absolute fool in the process, in hope he could hear the creaking sound again. Silence, save for the ruffling of the sheets and the faint screeching of the legs against the linoleum.

He saw the bed frame on the street the first day he was in the city. He went to the nearest store, bought a Phillips-head screwdriver and stole a shopping cart. He brought them to the frame and disassembled it right there in the street, on a chilly early September evening, and took the pieces of wood in his apartment, which he couldn’t yet call home, washed them in the tub, and lay them on the balcony to dry, like calf feet at the gate of a slaughterhouse. Then he called his father and asked for money for a bed frame and a mattress, and bought a really expensive mattress instead, plus three sets of those crispy sheets they have at two-star hotels. How much farther away in life would he currently be if his bed wasn’t so excruciatingly comfortable? If it would be easier to get out of it, easier to share it with someone else? The next morning he assembled the frame on the floor, ate a banana for breakfast, and stuck the sticker that was on the peel on a hole that the pressure of the water left in the varnish. “Adult Lego,” he thought while assembling it, and he hated the name; “I could be an engineer,” he thought, and he hated himself even more because he actually could. In his mind, the image of a washer appeared, then a cartoon gear, then a dead lady in a white gown that gave her last breath in this bed, or what the bed used to be, then a pair of tits, then a suitcase overfilled with ties and Oxford shirts and socks, then a cheating man who worked in a cubicle carrying the frame down the stairs because his girlfriend dumped him and forced him to get rid of the bed in one last act of what she hoped would be vindictive humiliation. But all the hypothetical previous lives of this frame did not matter on that morning, because it was his now, and he made it something new. Ariadne, the sad bed of Theseus.

He flexed the muscles in his butt, then the ones in his thighs, then the ones in his chest. His breath shortened, and he tried to remember the things he was supposed to do that day but could not. He flexed his right pec again, and again, and again. It was not noticeable, he was not jacked, not even near it, but his body was aware of the muscle at least.

He imagined all his muscles laid on a clothesline, bits of flesh hung out to dry, and his skin shriveled up on the bed, the inside of his nipples touching the inside of his back, like two halves of a clear plastic bag hidden under the comforter. In this vision, his head was intact, and sank into the pillow harder than the rest of his body into the mattress. Stupid poly-memory-foamed mattress table props up Kleenex tissues (used and unused), a collection of Jack Reacher novels (constantly changing), and loads of yellow-lined notepads (filled by my grandmother). When I brought my roommate home for spring break, and we walked in to have dinner at their house, he commented on the table.

“I cut that myself.” My grandpa looked at us with a grin.

About cutting trees, in theory and in practice.

By FRANKIE DURYEA

My grandma Lu recently told me that “oak trees have a life expectancy of thirty years.” Trees have been falling all across the Bay Area, and there are a lot of oaks near her house. My power was out and I had driven to see her. On the drive over, the roads had been lined with those tall oaks shaking in the wind.

I’ve been having a sort of crisis of faith as of late. Not of the religious variety— rather, I’ve been asking myself what I’m doing here. I sit in classes every week where I discuss the same things over and over again. Everybody is BS-ing—what do I care about the difference between Ratzinger and Taylor?

My maternal grandfather’s name is Frank; I inherited it from him. He went to Berkeley when he was my age, mostly because he’d grown up nearby. He recalls learning nothing in school. Then Frank went to the army. He was stationed for three years. When he came back, he enrolled in Cal State, Humboldt. It was there that he studied forestry and began to take an interest in his classes.

Frank worked in the lumber business. If you couldn’t tell that from the Building Supply company logos around his living room or the lumberjack flannels that he loves so dearly, his living room table would be the dead giveaway: Sitting under an overhead window between two couches made of itchy fabric lies the cross-section of a redwood branch. Five or six feet across, shiny with uneven edges, the redwood byproduct of our own fastpaced lives. We move away and imagine that the trees leave too. But really, they stay longer than we do.

I laughed a little. “No way.”

“Yes way. With a hand-saw.”

“BS. Must’ve taken you a whole day.”

“It did.” My grandpa smiled and set down his glass of whisky on the redwood table. When he picked it up later, I could see the circle of condensation that had been marked into the wood.

When he asked me at dinner what I was doing in school, I gave a long-winded answer.

It turns out my grandma Lu was wrong. Oak trees have a life expectancy of anywhere from 100 to 600 years, depending on the variety. The trees last, and any mark made on them lasts too. The sense that they come and go quickly is a

Last year, I had dinner with my grandparents. We sat outside on another wood table with a glossy finish. The sky was blue where we were, not gray or red like it had been earlier in the year. I expressed my sadness about the now regular fires; the town of Paradise, near where my mom grew up, had been nearly completely turned to ash. I referenced news stories I had read and politicians’ proposed courses of action. My grandpa listened calmly. When I stopped, he started talking about the trees in Paradise, California. He motioned with his hands slowly, while he reminisced on having been contracted to clear undergrowth for the state when he was younger. He talked about the wooden houses in Paradise. He remembered cutting down dead trees that would otherwise act as kindling for fires. He talked about Lake Almanor, where he had taken me as a kid to swim. The west shore of the lake is barren now. He remembered less fires when he was my age.

I’m struck by the profoundly different paths my grandfather and I have chosen to go down. I exist in an academic sphere that indulges in the theoretical,