Deep Images

What do you do about a friend you believe to be wise and full of heart but who others have doubts about?

I had spent the last two hours on the water, showered the sand off myself, and was emerging from the tunnel beneath the railroad tracks when I saw, across Del Mar, a man standing on the sidewalk and shouting into the darkness of Chloe Rook’s tarot parlor. If the sound of the world had been turned off, it would have been almost funny, the picture of a tall, muscular man in khaki pants and T-shirt shouting at a curtain of colored beads, at a paisley-decorated door frame, while deeply tanned people in bikinis and shorts, their hair tousled, walked by with breakfast burritos in their hands. I half-expected steam to come from the man’s ears. His face was red, and not from sunburn. I stood and watched from across the street for a stunned moment, as if a jellyfish had stung me. The sound of the world came back on. The man was shaking his fist at someone who was not answering back, even as the smell of incense and scented candles continued to waft out the door and perfume his clothing. He was shaking his fist at a dark entryway black as Chloe Rook’s hair.

“Fake!” he was shouting. The word followed each forward motion of his fist.

“You can’t deny it!“ he went on. “No ifs, ands, or buts! No passing go! You can look it up!“

A stooped-over woman walking her Jack Russell terrier stepped off the walk and fully into the traffic lane to pass around the man. A voice in a car said to the driver maybe, not loud, “What a bitch.”

“Fake, fake, fake! Sheesh!” For some reason, I expected the man to start hopping.

He was attracting attention, but not the way an accident victim on the beach would have, everyone circling around to look at the head gash, and not the way an accident victim on the freeway would have, everyone driving slowly by to get a good look through shattered safety glass. Instead, people went about heading down to the beach or coming back from the beach, or going in or out of The Local Grind for coffee, all the while listening to him shouting and paying attention to the faces of people who were seeing him for the first time and looking square-on in that direction. It was like what happens when a troubled or crazy person suddenly starts talking back to all the voices: People look, then spend a lot of effort trying not to look, but still keep listening.

“I don’t know what hayloft you think your clients fell out of, but some of us have been around!” he shouted. “Some of us have read a book!”

It was after this outburst I saw, from across the street, a pair of pale hands set down a vase of sunflowers in a window just above the parlor.

“’Feed your lion,’ you told me! ‘Climb across the green wall.’ Ha! Fake, fake, fake!”