Eyelid Movies

The Field on a weekend in the early afternoon. “Nowhere to go and all day to get there,” as Logan would later say. I bike over listening to Eyelid Movies, the debut album of Phantogram. I arrive more quickly than I expected; only “Mouthful of Diamonds” has finished and “When I’m Small” has just begun. Sarah Barthel sings, “take me underground, take me all the way. Bring me to the fire, throw me in the flames” over pristine, repetitive drums as I get off my bike and push it up the slope. Once I can no longer see the road, I lay the bike on its side and continue into The Field carrying only my backpack with Frankenstein, a blanket, and my water bottle inside. “So show me love, you’ve got your hands on the button now. Sure enough, you’ve got your hand on the button now.” It’s a cooler Southern California day, so the sun’s unblocked gaze is welcome for a change. I sit down in some taller grass next to one of the two mini-ravine-like ditches that extend slowly from near the site’s heart almost to the road. They must’ve been dug out by the elements and maybe previous construction. A piece of old white piping is lodged in the dirt next to the end of one of them. I wonder why? There’s not currently a building here, that’s for sure. “I’d rather die. I’d rather die, than to be with you,” Sarah sings as the song crescendos. I have no clue what the song’s about. Somehow the beautiful but melancholy atmosphere the experimental indie-electronic-pop album creates is perfect for this place. “When I’m Small” was my first love on the album, but “Let Me Go” has to be my favorite now. It lets me reflect and put all the various components of my life into perspective. I pull out my headphones and let “Turn It Off” play through my phone’s speakers, its drums blending with the chirps of birds and the racket of a jackhammer or two from the construction site across the street on the way to my ears.

I pick up Frankenstein and flip to my page, for the first time in my life eighty pages behind where I am supposed to have read. The opposite wall of the canyon catches my eye. How have I not noticed this until now? The wall slopes up in a thick forest of trees rising from the single tier of houses running along the road. The trees are unbroken in their ascent to the baby blue sky and the final, winding row of houses that sit atop the overlooking cliffs at every edge, save for one massive exposed cliffside where the hill must have fallen away years ago. The exposed rock is vertically ribbed and curves inward, deepest into the cliffside in the middle, a  miniature version in brown earth of “Oh Wow” on the northwestern coast of Kauai, a lava rock wonder named for the response it draws from boating passersby. I look back down to my book, rejoining Victor and Henry on their journey along the Rhine.

“I lay at the bottom of the boat, and as I gazed on the cloudless blue sky, I seemed to drink in a tranquility to which I had long been a stranger,” Victor remembers about his time along the Rhine with his friend. I look up at my own cloudless sky and think about my own friends. They would love it here in this place of freedom and tranquility. While Frankenstein is primarily a story about Victor Frankenstein and the monster of his creation, in my time reading, I am most struck by the relationship that Victor shares with his friend Henry Clerval. It is one of love and support, of Henry’s exposing his truest self to his friend and helping Victor to find meaning in his own existence. That’s what I want with my closest friends. And that’s what I hope I’ve found.

“So, what is this place exactly?” Drew turns to me. I click a button and the garage groans open behind me. I twist the key and my car blares to life, letting out exhaust as if I had just floored the accelerator. “You’ll see.” I smile back, putting the car into reverse and easing onto the gas. Once we’ve cleared the walls, I place my hand on the back of Drew’s seat, peer over my shoulder, and turn the wheel to my left, glancing briefly down at the picnic basket sitting on the back seat. This is going to be fun.

Something is wrong. The tall grasses and weeds are gone. In their place are grass clippings scattered across the earth, short, flat, and dry. The sun is just high enough to give us at least a little light. It’s going to drop below the canyon wall soon. We make our way to the usual clearing and keep going. Today we can sit anywhere; it’s all clear. Drew and I spread the blanket out as I rave about how it’s usually so much more beautiful here. She tells me it’s still pretty. She’s glad I brought her. But it’s not good enough for me. Normally it looks like a snapshot of rolling green hills from the English countryside beside Stonehenge or like some field near a tiny village on the Japanese island of Kyushu.

Drew pulls her long brown hair behind her neck and over one shoulder as we picnic on breakfast burritos and flies swarm us. She doesn’t seem to mind them, but I am beside myself. They must have been stirred up by the mowing. Once we’re done with our food, we move higher up the hill, deeper into the property. There are fewer flies, but they’re still a pain, so we head back to my house as the sun sinks.

We broke up two weeks later. I wouldn’t return to The Field for the next eight months.

Pushing the pedals down, down, and down again, turning the gears, rotating the wheels, moving faster than I ever could without the help of this contraption. The incline is only slight, no challenge for me but enough to slow my mom and sister’s pace. They disappear around a bend as I power on, Sarah Barthel’s voice and that striking beat keeping me company. I pass by little bungalows and large properties with homes set deep in their interiors, a wall of bamboo blocks up the entire right side of the road for a solid twenty seconds. “Lucy’s underground, she’s got a mouth to feed. Am I underground, or am I in too deep?” I’ve never heard this song before but am absolutely captivated, already anxious to get home and try to figure it out on the drums. Before I started my ride up the hill, I popped in headphones under my helmet and put on Phantogram’s Eyelid Movies. I heard “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore” off one of their other albums the other day and decided to check out their other stuff. It’s unreal. Seemingly infinite trees extend from within properties and by the edges of the road. A car zooms past going somewhere in a hurry or just speeding for the heck of it. Here in Mandeville Canyon, either is just as likely.

“Where are you two going?” a voice behind me demands.

“We were just going for a picnic.” I say, turning around to face the nosy neighbor and lifting the picnic basket in my hand.

“You know that’s private property, right?” the guy says.

“Really?” I ask, playing dumb. “I come here all the time, and it’s always fine.”

“Ah, well I don’t mind, just letting you guys know, that’s all,” the guy says, suddenly very chill. “They just mowed it by the way. Because of all the fires; it was a hazard.” He adds matter-of-factly.

“Okay, that’s too bad.” I say, “But I guess better to be safe, right?”

“Right. Have a nice picnic now.” He smiles, raising a hand in farewell and heading through the gate of the house across the street. Drew and I turn back towards The Field, having surpassed this obstacle, and make our way inside.

I’m biking slowly now, lazing my way up the street, hoping my mom and sister will catch up. At some point, I pull my bike over into a little patch of gravel and grass past a curve of multicolored two-story homes. Looking back over my left shoulder, I don’t see my mom and sister. I look to my right. A rusty chain hangs low between two rusted-over posts protecting a gradually rising grassy slope and beyond an expansive steeply rising hillside of tall, bright green grass and trees. I put my bike’s kickstand down, drape my helmet from a handlebar, and step forward, up the hill. After a few yards, the gradually rising slope turns left and runs alongside the road in a widening and leveling out plane. From here the road is invisible. The whole property is completely overgrown with grasses reaching past my knees. An oak sits deep in the site slightly up the hill, shading a clearing in the grass. Afternoon sun strikes the entire place while ignoring the road below. The road. I head back down to find my mom and sister. In a moment they follow me back into what we would come to call “The Field.”

“I have to take you guys soon,” I say.

Logan and I are reclined on black plastic chairs, our legs extended onto one of the benches of the lunch table at the top of our high school overlooking the middle school.

Logan looks over, his hands linked behind his curling, strawberry-blond hair, “Definitely. It sounds awesome.”

“We should do a picnic.”

“And obviously Beth will come too. That’ll be sick!” Logan grins through his shades, gazing out over the campus. You can see Barrington Place in the distance past where the buses have already started gathering to take everyone home. Cars whiz by once every minute or so. People haven’t started lining up in the carpool pickup line yet, so traffic is still manageable. I take a small sip from my already opened water bottle. Thanks to a light breeze, the air is cool up here even under the afternoon sun.

“And we should invite Liz too.” I suggest. “You have to hang with her; I can tell you guys would love each other if you spent more time together.”

“Great idea.” Logan says emphatically, nodding his head in approval. “Any friend of yours, I’d love to meet them.”

When I finally did return from my eight-month leave of absence from The Field, it was again with Drew. We had been spending considerable time together again for the last three months. Moving on over the past summer didn’t work out too well and luckily for me it turned out she hadn’t gotten over me either. So here we were together on New Year’s Eve, bathed in the early afternoon sunlight, sitting on the knee-high grass, soaking in the sun and each other.

“I can’t keep chasing you like this. It’s not healthy.” I say, my eyes locked onto her face, “You liking me and not knowing if you want a relationship isn’t good enough.”

Drew looks up at the oak and around at the hills for a few seconds, “I know.”

“If you don’t know if you want this, I have to move on because this isn’t good for me.”

“You’re right.” She says, looking me in the eye for the first time in the conversation.

In a second we are together and nothing else matters. Our lips meet, the sun glinting off her hair, a perfect moment. Later we would lie side by side, arms around each other, in the ditch, our backs resting on the gently sloping crumbling dirt, staring out at the sun and at Oh Wow’s smaller cousin. I haven’t been back since.

After Henry dies in the Frankenstein, Victor reminisces about his friend: “his soul overflowed with ardent affections, and his friendship was of that devoted and wondrous nature that the world-minded teach us to look for only in the imagination.” Frankenstein is not simply about a monster and its creation; Frankenstein is also about true friendship.

While I haven’t been back since that New Year’s Eve, Drew and I did drive past The Field three days later. This was as much a drive down my street as it was a drive through memory.

Drew’s car is parked at my house, but on the way back from our soba dinner at Yabu we keep driving up the canyon. “This golden glow is not happiness. It’s the dust that you kicked on my face before saying goodbye.”

We reminisce about all our times together, going back to middle school, sharing everything we could never say. “Oh memory, won’t you speak to me? Can you show me the boat in my soul that can sail me back home?”

I drive past The Field all the way to the end of the canyon and turn back. “And I try to leave, but my bones just won’t agree.”

We pass my home again and exit the base of the canyon; we need more time together. “And I try to believe, you should try. Set me free.”

At a certain point we’re in Rustic Canyon, and I point out an old house, where I lived when I was five. We get lost. I backtrack, and we end up in familiar territory. On the way home we pass a house with a two-bulbed pink and a blue light out front. The hues meld together in the night, two joined yet diverging colors. “Let me go.”

That night marks the end of my time with Drew. Two souls joined yet diverging. After an hour and a half of driving, I pull into my driveway, and we say our goodbyes.

Logan, Beth, Liz, and I spread our blankets over a patch of fallen leaves and low grass, scraps of plant matter immediately lodging themselves in the fabric. The edges of our blankets overlap, providing a refuge for the four of us from the itchy brush all around. Logan and I begin removing containers of food from the brown ROC paper bags: chicken fried rice, green beans, broccoli, vegetable fried rice, popcorn chicken, seaweed salad, more green beans, chicken soup dumplings, all arrayed between us, a picnic closer to a feast. Beth’s blanket is blue and somehow impervious to the spikey dead grass and leaves. Nothing sticks to it. Liz lounges back and takes in her surroundings. Logan smiles at me saying, “This place is great. I can tell this is the start of something special.” I laugh. Logan’s always making film-esque statements at opportune moments.

We all dive into the food, comfortable enough on the bumpy earth beneath us. The oak rustles in the wind and a stray leaf or two make their way onto my blanket. Each one of us is simply happy to be here, happy to be in a beautiful place with good people. Maybe Logan is right: maybe this is the start of something special.

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