Berkeley Noir Page 5

  For courage, Kaylie gazed out at the Berkeley Pier, a thin black line in the distance, a horizon itself, splitting the moon-sparkled water from the pale gray sky. Then she laid the paddle along the length of the kayak; it wouldn't do to lose it now. Nor would flipping the entire boat be a good idea. She'd have to muster superhuman strength, and also be swift.

  Kaylie shoved her arms under her grandma's shoulders and clasped her ribs. One, two, three, heave.

  The kayak rocked to the side, nearly capsizing, but the body remained on board. Already Kaylie was sweating.

  Ambulating on her hands and feet, she crawled over Grandma's body to the other end of the kayak, again nearly capsizing. Once there, she rested a moment, steadying her heart and mind, and then swung her grandma's stiffening legs into the water.

  That's when the head of one sea lion rose up, the beast making eye contact with Kaylie. Maybe it smiled. Maybe its yellow teeth and deep maw gave Kaylie a shot of adrenaline. She pitched her grandma's body into the water with a single shove. The splash was modest, and the old woman sank instantly. Several dark hides mounded out of the water before diving after the body.

  Kaylie paddled away with all her might, hoping for a tide change that would sweep her toward shore, toward her house and modest life, her decent job and the possibility of a girlfriend one day, maybe even Officer Marta Ramirez. You never knew. What she did know was that she wanted to live awhile longer. She wanted to be around when the pier reopened, if it ever did, and wondered if Duong and Tham Nguyen, Pamela Roberts, Shelly the librarian, James and Frank, the lone rich dude, all their friends, whether they'd come back, or if there'd be a whole new crowd. Maybe they'd gentrify the pier, bring in food trucks and artists tables. Kaylie didn't know. But she paddled as if her life depended on it, which it did.

  TWIN FLAMES

  by Mara Faye Lethem

  Southside

  Final interview with Núria Callas Perales, September 12 and 13, 2018, Barcelona, Spain. Transcribed and edited by Montse Àrcadia Sala, amanuensis of the Gumshoe Division of the Church of Núria, Berkeley, California. Translated by Mara Faye Lethem.

  DAY I

  "You want to know the difference between good and evil?" Dramatic pause. "Tea is good, and coffee is evil." It's one of those jokes that depends a lot on the delivery. And who's doing the delivering. Louise was the only person I could imagine ever really pulling it off. I'm sure you've read that I was "in her orbit" or "under her spell" or whatever. I just wanted to get close to her. From the very first day I met her, at that highly unorthodox job interview, when she told me she was hoping to find someone who could "continue her work." Maybe it's because English is my third language, but I never thought that could mean what the tabloid press said it meant.

  I could describe Louise Slade in many ways. The term "force of nature" comes to mind. She was a little, shining nugget of a woman, in a purple silk shirt, her white hair whisked up into a thin bun, with a lovely sheen of high-SPF sunscreen and nice, bony fingers. A mix of noblesse oblige and ecclesiastical shabby chic. I've always had a thing for older women. Be careful what you wish for, they say. I did get close to her. And, yeah, she did, somehow, get under my skin.

  I was never really in favor of the defense that I was under her spell or, as your lawyers worked up, "temporary insanity due to soul transference," but I have to admit there are parts of it that make sense. I mean, in the context of the episodes of lost time and mental disorientation associated with walk-ins. That said, I do remember a lot of details, although I'm aware that there are those who believe they form part of a shift in memories, or a link via the silver cord. Louise often spoke wistfully of her identical sister Cordelia, and their days as cheesecake reporters after graduating with twin master's degrees from Yale at the age of seventeen. "We had the first painted toenails in Atlanta," I recall. "Bloodred." Louise had a number of stock rhetorical questions, one that haunts me is: "What's a spinster . . . ? A woman who spins. A woman with a job."

  It was that job that kept me in the Bay Area, when I thought I was just passing through. Your lawyers keep writing to me, they say I was searching for my path, following the angel number, and eventually experiencing an incompatibility between the upper and lower chakras. I can't really corroborate that. At first, I really liked the Mission—it had the best weather—but something drew me to Berkeley. In college towns you're less likely to have to explain what being a Catalan is. Not that I bothered anymore by that point. I just said I was from Barcelona; most everybody had heard of that, even back then.

  We're talking 1991, my salad days. Before the dot-com boom and all, when Berkeley was slightly more convincing as a hippie town. Now that I've become associated with it as the most famous walk-in since Anwar Sadat, despite my geographical distance I have a front-row seat to some of the city's more deeply weird elements. No offense. There's even a whole publishing house that came up around all the theories, but I don't need to tell you that. My version is that I was fleeing a hairy divorce, ironically from an American named Bob. I was also fleeing Catalonia, in some ways I guess how everybody flees their home, or at least considers doing, at some point. The lawyers call it "overwhelming evidence you were no longer yourself" and the seekers see it as "new approaches to solving unsolvable problems."

  There were things about Bob—being American, from Berkeley, in fact—that made me see my city, Barcelona on the eve of the Olympics, in a different light. And my quick once-around with civil matrimony left me feeling that everyone was thinking, I told you so. Your lawyers still write to explain how I was experiencing an unhealthy soul tie, and should have been wearing hats to protect my crown chakra.

  Me, Barcelona, Berkeley, we're all so different now. I'll never live down the dramatic reenactments on that episode of Unsolved Mysteries. I came to wish the looks I saw on people's faces were only saying, I told you so. They should've had that actress made up with bruises on her arms and all over her psyche. Because that was how I arrived in Berkeley, back in 1991. A Berkeley that seemed to be still living off the fumes of the late sixties, which were fumes so strong you might just want to breathe them in all your life, especially when you had a car and a redwood hot tub. I didn't have my own hot tub, of course, but I had a working code for the secret backyard one on Essex, and that made me feel lucky enough. I didn't have a car, either, but the BART dropped me off on 16th and Mission where I could get burritos as big as a braç de gitano and Salvadorean chicken soup, and back in Berkeley I could binge on new flavors of Vietnamese and Thai, all cheap and nourishing to my little prematurely divorced Catalan soul. The lawyers who want to vindicate me consider this sudden shift in my tastes "consistent, further proof."

  It was definitely true that I'd been having a lot of strange new feelings in America. I chalked it up to a struggle with the identity codes and political correctness. You know, Indigenous Peoples' Day and all that. I found some of it exhausting, like the effort of speaking English all the time, and there was also a feeling of relief, since I didn't seem to fit into any of the identity parameters. My Catalan accent was rarely recognized. But Louise noticed it, right away. Her shorthand for Catalan was "someone with a love of language." Hers was a very sophisticated reductionism, that made me feel I could never surprise her.

  At the time I recall feeling I was escaping, getting away both from and with something, hiding in plain sight. The California sun felt familiar, since Berkeley and Barcelona had similar climates for eight months out of the year. And I loved being Cal-adjacent. Near as I could be to the university without being enrolled. I would spend hours on Friday nights at Moe's Books, up on the third floor where no one would bother me. I know some Núrites feel that space is a portal. I can't speak to that. I can say that books both saved my life and scared me to death. I wanted to be surrounded by all those books, but I was afraid to open many of them, and indifferent to others. I liked their smell, and the pure abundance of them. And I liked to see Moe at the helm, when I came in during the day, in his hexagonal pl
aypen of piled-up stacks that needed pricing. It was at Moe's that I first saw the volume Welcome to Planet Earth. I hated everything about that book, mostly the cover because that was as far as I got. I don't know how much more respectful I can be about this shit, really. That's why I'm taking the time to explain this, as best I can. I'm hoping you will bring this message back to Berkeley and get them all to just leave me the fuck alone. I do not have the answers you seek.

  In those days I would go to the secret hot tub at least once every few weeks. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, a guy who made sets for a Chicano theater company, who also liked weed and acid and was a little bit in love with me so he would listen to me go on about, well, about pretty much whatever I felt like going on about. Not at the Essex Hot Tub, though. The sign clearly read: SILENCE, NO TALKING. Maybe that was what I liked best about it. In the throes of those salad days, I was seeking both quiet and conversation. And sex, of course. I was twenty-one years old.

  Núrites describe that period of my life as a major neurological rewiring, in which Louise's soul was studying my Akashic records and behaviors to master my physical body. I've always been honest with anyone who's come to me, like you have, with these questions. After what I'd been through with Bob, I was just looking for a good time, the very earthbound pleasures of the flesh.

  I always made sure to read the Daily Cal classifieds, and consider all the possibilities located therein. That was where I came across Louise's ad. For someone who spoke Spanish and English, and could use a computer. Definitely did not say starseed with a mission. I forget the exact wording because she always referred to me, once I got the job, as her amanuensis. Which sounded better than secretary, or dictation-taker. It at least sounded like I took dictation in a medieval cloister. I took dictation in her apartment. You know the place, on Spruce Street, in Normandy Village. I remember when I showed up for the interview, thinking it looked like a reproduction of something an adventurous, fabulously wealthy young heir would have had brought back from his travels, piece by piece, and reconstructed. But more modest. Like maybe a groundskeeper's hut on the Hearst Castle grounds.

  Just off campus, Normandy Village was strangely out of time, with whitewashed walls and a cock painted on the front. I had to walk into the courtyard and then up narrow steps that wrapped around a turret to reach her wooden door with its rounded top, and the inscription, You know how little while we have to stay / And, once departed may return no more, from the third verse of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. And open the door she did, into an irregularly shaped space, half cozy and half witch's oven. It was oddly meta to be fleeing Europe and harrowing memories of a guy named Bob into some Californian architect's fantasy of a French village, but I got used to it soon enough. The entryway led into a sort of railroad kitchen, which in turn led into the room where we worked, her pages piled up among early American furniture and Oriental rugs that had arrived there on the SS Virginia via the Oakland dock.

  Louise's sleeping berth overlooked the desk she stood in front of to give dictation and the wooden card table where her little cubical Apple computer she liked to address as "Mac" sat. She never touched Mac. Some evenings she would type up pages on her Smith Corona, and then cut and straight-pin passages in edited order so I could transfer them to digital format the next day. Yes, I am aware of the metaphorical readings some Núrites give to these tasks but, really, it was just my job.

  Most days she would dictate to me, like a classically trained thespian improvising. We were writing a biography of Joan Miró, a man she admired for his ability to stay in touch with his poetic soul and be nourished by nature, like a pagan (she was highly ecumenical, though not into New Age). She also saw his life as a parallel to the twentieth century itself, the century of modernity, the century where we recognized evil and yet were still unable to avoid it. In that way it somehow came to represent the culmination of her life's work as a "ghost" writer, Louise's secret autobiography.

  I was more interested in her than in Joan Miró, and when I could get her talking about her own life, I was happy. A good biography, Louise would tell me, should read like a detective story. I could tell she was more comfortable with Miró's chaste terroir flavor than a lot of the detective stories that had been written since she'd stopped reading detective stories. She told me that she'd hoped to become a priest, although the way she said it, it seemed more like an answer to an interview question than a burning ambition. She always came across as feisty and brilliant and adorable in interviews. "I see no reason to marry and have children—Cordelia did that for me" was another of her stock quotes. I guess at eighty-six you are lucky to still be able to perform the greatest-hits version of your life for an impressionable young woman, even if she is often vaguely hung over. I enjoyed my role in the daily matinee show.

  "Good morning!" she'd chirp each weekday when I called her, first thing. Every day my response, which I believe she scripted, was, "What's good about it?" The lawyers call this grooming. There was a lot of repetition. One of Louise's bits of advice I'm still mulling over was this: "When you are reading your colleagues' books, make a list of all the mistakes you find. And when you've finished, throw away the list." At the time it made me wonder about my failed marriage, about the lists of peeves and scars we all compile, and that are so hard to release. But then maybe divorce is just a form of throwing away the list. I guess murder is another.

  DAY II

  Behind me, when I sat in front of Mac, was the fireplace hearth. Sometimes Louise would have me pick up a Duraflame log on my way over to Spruce Street, and we would burn it over the course of the morning. Sometimes she would invite me to a thimbleful of sherry. It was on a day when those two things combined that she told me the story I will now relate to you, to the best of my memory. Her tone was prophetic. Her drawn-on eyebrows were well arched. The dim light given off by the various lamps and the log made her eyes gleam. It was a damp day, and she was obviously in one of the rare moods where I could artfully pry some details about her life from her.

  It's been more than two decades since that day by the Duraflame when Louise briefly stepped out of character. Mostly, when we weren't drinking tea—"so strong it could walk!"—or making our lunch of chicken soup—"Do you know why Chinese food tastes so good . . . ? It's cut up into little pieces!"—she was all work. Her conversational gambits were efforts that seemed directed at convincing me to take up the task of continuing on in her irreplaceable place. But on that damp day, she opened up a little more to me. She was likely feeling the weight of outliving so many people, including, just the year before, her twin sister Cordelia. "We used to be identical," Louise would say, "but we lived such different lives that the point came when no one would ever confuse us again." Cordelia had married a Paraguayan and had three children, and painted her eyebrows on in more of a parabola. When she'd died, Louise said she knew what death was like.

  On that day, the fire was reflecting in her cornflower-blue eyes. She stared into it and sighed. Usually she would intellectualize her emotions, convert them somehow into a pithy fortune-cookie aphorism. But instead of that sigh being a segue into an interfaith interpretation of vishwaprana, the cosmic breath, she inhaled deeply through her nose and blinked as she looked into the log, which was like some flambé version of a large Tootsie Roll, a California architect's description of the primeval campfire around which humans have always told stories.

  The soundtrack in my mind to this scene is "In Your Eyes" from Peter Gabriel's So album. As I believe I mentioned, I have a soft spot for little old ladies. I just want to help them across the street, if you know what I mean. But really, what I saw in her eyes wasn't a flicker of crypto-lesbic romance. What I saw in her eyes instead was pain, tempered by the years. "Times aren't what they used to be. And they never were." I could tell that Louise was done. Done playing it safe, done being a vessel for other people's mistakes. Louise had lived a little bit in Cordelia's shadow, like she had to toe the line, not have her own problems, not add to her moth
er's concern.

  It turns out those pat interview answers of hers are much easier to quote as the years pass, but I'm going to do my best here. In the hope that this will be the last time. Louise began by describing, as she had conveyed to me before, the holy trinity that was her relationship with Cordelia and their mother, also named Cordelia. Their itinerant lives as journalists, memorably in Mexico City in the early thirties where they were able to watch Diego Rivera and Orozco simultaneously at work on their murals on opposite walls of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, "a nonexistent competition between a millionaire communist who stood talking in front of his neat geometrical lines, and a stocky, unattractive one-armed man bending forward on the solitude of his scaffolding to paint his soul in living fire." She did have a way with words.

  "Oh, Louise," I interjected, in my best jaded American accent, "what broke up your triumvirate?" My English is very good, but marked by Latinisms. I could see she liked my usage of the word triumvirate. I knew the twins had had a very intimate upbringing à trois. Their mother Cordelia Slade was a writer too. And had lived with Louise in that very same storybook apartment until her death. But the younger Cordelia Slade became Cordelia Zenarrutza, when she married a Paraguayan military man from an old family, who was twenty-two years her senior. Of course, Louise informed me, the midthirties was not a great time to be from Paraguay. At the time I'd barely even heard mention of the Chaco War, and certainly never heard it referred to by its nickname: the Green Hell. When Cordelia Zenarrutza, Mrs. José Félix Zenarrutza-Sánchez, set sail for the Southern Cone, Louise and Cordelia Slade Senior would have to wait at least ten days for an airmail update. The Chaco was sparsely inhabited, a vast region of virgin jungles and deserted plains burning under the tropical sun, with rumors of oil wealth, and access to the Paraguay River, something the landlocked countries of Bolivia and Paraguay both very much wanted to control.