Fairbanks Juneau Anchorage

For the last few days, I have gone to sit with a friend who is dying. His lungs and heart are going, his face has the bugged out look of someone not getting enough oxygen. His hair, once clipped and neat, is a long, wiry shock and he wears a sweatshirt all day, watching tee vee from a hospital bed. 

The bed is in a crowded convalescent home which he hopes to leave soon. My friend, David, has lived for many years by himself in a tiny and dirty apartment hidden in plain sight amidst the Italian restaurants and knick knack shops of Cannery Row. Cactus has overtaken his walkway, his refrigerator is unplugged because the noise bothers him. 

He once gave me a calling card with only his name on it and his long ago occupation, house painter, crossed off below. There was no phone number or email address or contact information of any kind. Just a card announcing that he existed and hinting at what he had once had to do to survive. He inherited a little money around that time, but it didn't change his life much. He bought a long black Jaguar with a mobile phone that he never bothered to activate. The rare times he ventured out to have lunch with friends he wore an expensive wool overcoat and sometimes a well-fitting suit. He picked up the tab. Otherwise, he just crossed out house painter on his calling card and stayed home. 

Yesterday he was telling me about traveling to Alaska with his mom. It was cold but not snowy and they rode busses. It might have been as early as May and as he whispers he repeats the names of the three cities Juneau, Fairbanks, Anchorage, and I fill in the details when he gets confused over which was which.

A physical therapist appears and disrupts the story then disappears again. David starts over. It was cold and they rode a bus or maybe a train from Anchorage to Fairbanks. That had to be it because no one rides busses out of Juneau. A man in a good overcoat riding a bus across the sub-arctic with his mother, looking out the window. Maybe a snowflake falling here and there.

When he was done, I left a pile of old New Yorkers on his table and got up to leave. Out his window was a view of the pine forest above Monterey and it was raining. Raining in late May. I could see a few houses below, see their backyards. A few stacks of firewood, stray bicycles and garden tools not put away, back fences. It was likely our last goodbye and the hugging made him dizzy on his feet.

As I drove away, the names of cities in Alaska repeated themselves in my head. Like a jazz riff, a simple collection of chords that is anything but simple. The late season rain fell and was explainable by a complex interaction of gravity, Coriolis effect, and the temperature gradient of water off the coast of South America. I kept a look out for cops, because my beat to shit truck was not legal on the road anymore. 

The radio was off and the window open to the rain. The syllables of Anchorage and Juneau and Fairbanks repeated and merged, morphed and dissolved. Visiting with David crossed itself off my to-do list and was replaced by nothing. I can’t explain rain in late May.