_{these penguins are all heading to the open water to the right. but one of them caught our eye, the one in the center. he would neither go towards the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice nor return to the colony. shortly afterwards we saw him heading straight towards the mountains, some seventy kilometers away. dr. ainley explained that even if he caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would immediately head right back for the mountains. but why? the rules for the humans are: do not disturb or hold up the penguin; stand still and let him go on his way. and here he is heading off into the interior of the vast continent. with five thousand kilometers in front of him, he is heading towards certain death. (from herzog's encounters at the end of the world)}

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it is in cinema and literature as it is in real estate: location, location, location. such an excellent entry, murph. upland, official city of trees. you know, hoke, i never think of the trees when i hear the names of the elementary schools--echolocate our early musings on the function of a name.

i believe everyone who is about to make films should read the peregrine, insisted herzog in his masterclass. sarah’s brother chris invested in a subscription to the series at the beginning of the year, and when lynch came out with a class on the platform, i invited chris to share his login info. after binging lynch’s lessons--learning little, but enjoying my time nonetheless--i poked my head in some of the other classes--chess with kasparov and poker with ivey--before returning to filmmakers.

the intensity of watching, and the passion with which he watches this very small segment of the world is so extraordinary, said herzog of the peregrine author, j.a. baker. the short samples he read reminded me of mccarthy, how embedded the works are in their landscapes: the flora and fauna of the arid southwest in the border trilogy, the dense arboreal wilderness of the orchard keeper, the endless rolling farms and forests of outer dark, rancid in their lushness. i think now of you, murph, and our city of trees. needless to say, i picked up a copy of the peregrine straightaway, and with great expectation i cracked it open a couple months back.

even when it’s mediocre, there are few things i enjoy more than finishing a book, but boys, i just couldn’t do it. such meticulous observation, while riveting in doses, grew tiresome at length. as a book, it sucked. i tapped out under halfway. but before filing it away on the shelf alongside the handful of other works i found too monotonous to finish--catch-22, infinite jest, naked lunch--i did what everybody does with the forgettable events of their life: i posted on instagram.

a bassist friend of mine had a funk corona-collaboration going on his page, and instead of adding some keyboard or something, i played the peregrine. i donned the oro del norte ranch baseball cap paul got me for christmas a couple years back and read dryly in my measured baritone: later a peregrine flew low across the marsh toward the dunlin he had killed not long before. a black-headed gull rose frantically up in front of them, taken by surprise. surely taken by surprise must originally have been a hawking term (music break, askant look to camera).

i was happy with the result.

sorry to be so late getting in touch, i said to schwartzbard. i was calling from the toilet. it was noon on monday and i’d just gotten up. our bedtime over here keeps getting pushed back later and later. / yeah, there’s a bit of that going around, schwartzbard said.

i hadn’t seen schwartzbard since he shot feigmann’s film a couple years back. <quote-01>schwartzbard is a cinematographer, and a good one at that<quote-01>. he lives in los angeles now but keeps his apartment in prospect heights. tisdale had been staying there--tisdale, with whom i got caught in the storm last fall. <quote-02>schwartzbard, feigmann, and tisdale<quote-02> all go way back. schwartzbard was tisdale’s emergency contact. he texted feigmann and me first, evidently.

the hospital told schwartzbard it was a hit and run, but the police told feigmann that the owner of the suv stuck around until the ambulance arrived. tisdale was on his bike, coming home from his girlfriend’s place on the lower east side. the accident happened at the intersection of dean and carlton, a few blocks from schwartzbard’s place and just down the street from <quote-03>where honey the springer spaniel used to live<quote-03>.

he suffered multiple fractures at the base of his pelvis and a compression fracture of his c2 vertebrae. c2 is close to the brain where the nerve fibers are very fine and spread out, so luckily there wasn’t any nerve damage. had the fracture been any lower this would not have been the case. brain and organ function were fine, but with all the pain meds, his doctors were keeping him in the icu for another day or two to monitor kidney function.

i should go see him, i told schwartzbard. you can’t. they’re not letting anyone in because of the virus, he said. feigmann’s gonna head over this afternoon and leave some stuff for him at the front desk--phone charger, socks, stuff like that. text him if you think of anything else you think tisdale might want. / ok, will do, i said.

i spoke with my father while walking cooper that afternoon. he was in the middle of writing a letter to a member of the grief-share group he and my mom lead at their church. he’d been struggling with what to say. i can imagine, i said, thinking about how hard it can be to write to the two of you, two of my closest friends. he kept telling me how complex the member’s situation was without explaining the circumstances. i figured he’d feel bad if he told me, so i changed the subject. i told him about tisdale’s accident, about waking up to the texts from schwartzbard.

i realized how good it had made me feel to get those texts. i felt horrible for tisdale, of course, but somehow honored to know that i was somehow responsible for him. i felt important. my father seemed to know what i was talking about, explaining how someone looking to you for care is a blessing, or something like that. i’m sure you could speak peregrinian <quote-04>volumes<quote-04>, hoke, on the limits of said blessing and the resultant feelings of importance.

it’s strange--if anything were to happen to any of the guys on the dodger thread, i’d expect to be one of the first people notified, but tisdale? a friend i made in adulthood? something shifted in my mind when i heard, some orientation to myself.

i don’t know. maybe schwartzbard just contacted me because he knew i was close by. <quote-05>maybe i’m just blessed to have had so little tragedy in my life<quote-05>.

regardless, it was nice to feel understood by my father, but it didn’t last long. in his enthusiasm for feeling of use, he told me how he recently drove up to arrowhead to help with the construction of a new multipurpose facility their church was building. they carried sizable stones and buckets of wet cement up some hill in hand-to-hand relay, building some sort of tiered waterfall or some shit. he was excited to tell me, excited to relive the joy of laboring alongside others. i asked if folks were wearing masks. some were, he said. i was silent. i feel fine about where i’m at, he said.

<quote-06>it’s tough. he should hear when i think he’s being unsafe, but i don’t want him not telling me stuff he’s doing because he feels he knows what my response will be<quote-06>. mind you, i’d prefer he intuited my opinion before he left the house and stayed the fuck at home. i considered talking to my mother about it, but i don’t want to deepen any rifts between us during this already tense time. i know they’re taking precautions, especially with grandma around, but i hear about these occasional gatherings, and i just can’t square it. i’d like to think he was as livid as i was as we returned to our individual letters.

a couple hours later i got up to see about dinner. there was a head of broccoli that needed to be cooked, but that was about all that we had around. i asked sarah how she felt about chinese, and she said that was fine, so i placed an order for a couple proteins: <quote-07>general tso’s and kung pow chicken<quote-07>. i figured i’d roast the broccoli and do the rice myself. i poured myself a maker’s; sarah started the water for her shower. she enjoys cleaning up and getting into her pjs before dinner so she can go straight to bed after we finish whatever we’re watching. it can take us forever to get through anything; i’m forever pausing to talk about what i think.

hey, give me your login info, i texted pat. he’d offered to add me to his disney+ account so i could watch the mandalorian, what with everyone talking about it during our weekly zoom. while i waited for his response, i clicked on an article about traffic feigmann had forwarded to schwartzbard and me. while there’d been fewer cars on the road since lockdown, the number of speeding tickets had spiked. i told them about the car i saw in my neighborhood slowly reversing down the block at a red light in want of that much more road to gun down when the light turned green. yeah, that was me, feigmann joked.

what you gonna watch first? pat asked. i don’t know, i was thinking some national geographic, i joked. those penguins are awesome! pat replied. right? i said, not knowing what penguins he was referring to. my mind went to herzog and encounters at the end of the world: the frozen landscape, the various shades of blue that passed for white, and the single black figure in the bottom of the frame. different penguin, i imagined. it’s may the fourth, bro! the fuck you think i’m gonna watch? i said.

did either of you first hear about the wuhan pangolins and think, they sure are saying penguin weird. for a minute i wondered if i had been <quote-08>mispronouncing penguin<quote-08> my entire life. like with the names of the upland elementary schools: what else haven’t i noticed? hey, babe, there’s no l in penguin, is there? i asked. the fuck is the matter with you, she said. ok, that’s what i thought. / you know the italian for penguins? she asked. i do not. / ee-sah pinguini! / no, for real? / si! si! i pinguini di linguine!

dinner was good. we weren’t that into the mandalorian, so we browsed the disney films of our childhood, testing ourselves to see if we correctly recalled the opening sequences. sarah best remembered lady and the tramp and cinderella, and i robin hood and sword in the stone. i had forgotten how robin williams voiced the tinker salesman who wanders in from the desert at the start of aladdin, and also how the little mermaid begins above water, a swarthy sailor swearing to the truth of king triton’s existence. i had some more whiskey, and we finished off a bar of our favorite chocolate: green and blacks 85%.

we were in bed--sarah asleep and i doing the crossword on my phone--when i got a selfie text from tisdale. his pavement-sanded face was brightly lit in the harsh hospital fluorescents. a pee pad like the ones sarah used to leave out for her little white dog mikey covered his pillow, bloodstained. <quote-09>last thing i remember<quote-09> was crossing the manhattan bridge, he said. that left a good fifteen minutes unaccounted for, ten if he was really hauling ass. i told him i wished i could come and hang out with him. that’d be great! maybe they could hook you up with a catheter too! he replied. i told him i’d rig one at home presently in solidarity. i looked at his selfie again. there were bruises on his head in the pattern of his helmet.