Kindling

Armen woke to silence. The moon shone high above the desert, and everything around him glowed silver with the moon, but there was no snow. There was just a white dust on everything around him. He looked at his hands: it was on him too; all over him.

He stood up and looked for his bike. It was gone; flown away, he guessed. He went on without it.

Armen came across another creek that night. He could see the creek’s alluvial fan spread out across a mile of desert before him. The creek was dry, but shrubs and a few trees scattered along its banks attested to the presence of water beneath the dry, white earth. The stream seemed to flow out of a canyon that cut directly into the Great Wall from where he stood. Something about the cut of that canyon in that pale midnight ambiance pulled on him, but he marched on. He grew hungry.

The aqueduct wound above the old shorelines of Owens Lake as Armen followed it through the early morning hours, past Hockett Hill, Bartlett, and then along the Alabama Hills. He finally came upon a road crossing the Aqueduct just before dawn, and followed the road into the town of Lone Pine. Growing wild with hunger, he stopped at the first sign of food.

After breakfast, Armen sat down with his back against a tree and fell asleep. He woke that afternoon, and began to walk around the town. People looked at him and tried not to look at him, as he had come to resemble a pillar of salt. He looked up at the Great Wall now and then. He spotted a peak that struck him as familiar. The peak itself had a pyramidal appearance, and just to the south of it were a cluster of white needles, or granite spires. He stood motionless for maybe an hour, trying to capture the memory that the peak was tickling. Why did it seem so familiar?

“Mount Whitney” a passing man noted. Armen looked around to see that the man was standing next to him.

“Whitney? Oh. I must have seen a picture of it once or twice. That explains it.”

Armen wasn’t convinced by his own words. There was something peculiar about the shape of the mountain. He spotted a help wanted notice posted on the window of service station behind him. The man next to him was dressed in blue overalls.

“You hiring?” Armen asked him.

“Well … yeah.” The man answered reluctantly.

“Oh, this?” Armen gestured to himself. “This’ll come right off. Just finished a hike. Got hit by a dust storm.”

“Oh, that. Yep. Quite a storm last night,” the man replied, seeming satisfied with Armen’s alibi.

“Can I give it a try? You can fire me any time you like.”

“Why not?” the man answered.

“Great! I’ll clean up.” Armen went back to the men’s room and cleaned up. He found that the salt dust wasn’t so easy to scrub off. When he returned to the front of the station, he said, “I guess it might take more than one scrubbing. You mind?”

“No,” the man replied. “You can start with the trash. Bags are under the register. Dumpster’s out back.”

Armen held onto the job, and he soon got a room in town. The service station manager sometimes called Armen “the ghost” for his quiet demeanor and pale complexion. His skin and shoulder-length hair were still embedded with the saline dust of the storm, though the roots of his hair were dark. It seemed as though he’d dyed his hair gray. The stubble of his heavy Armenian beard seemed jet black against his skin.

Armen bought a used bike and some fishing tackle, and on his days off he went fishing up and down the valley. As he wandered up the various streams of the area, he noticed that the city’s water system wasn’t fed at a single source. It was, rather, fed by every little stream that spilled down the Great Wall. He remembered his visions of a great fountain somewhere providing all that water for LA. He looked up at a cascade tumbling down the wall, and he realized that he was looking at it—the fountain. The Great Wall was itself a great fountain, with each canyon a gargoyle spitting water down into a great trough called the LA Aqueduct.

“Welcome to Los Angeles,” he said, not sure whether he was addressing the stream or himself.

Continue …

Armen felt recharged by dawn, so he got an early start. He returned to the highway and held to it. There turned out to be enough places by the side of the highway that provided food and water.

Just past the Dunmovin outpost, the buried aqueducts crossed the highway. Armen decided to resume following the pipelines. The map showed lakes coming up east of the highway, and he reckoned they probably had something to do with the two great pipelines.

So the pipelines led him to two reservoirs. Back then, the reservoirs were open to the public, and Armen followed the service road along the eastern shores of the two artificial lakes, taking his fishing pole out here and there to see if he could catch some supper.

Early the next morning, Armen caught breakfast and made a small fire for cooking. He was hungry, and the small fish seemed to take more trouble than it had meat on its bones. After daybreak, he loaded up his bike, and walked it northward above the shore of the reservoir.

After Armen ran out of reservoir, again he followed the aqueduct, only now it turned northwest. It seemed to be heading into the Great Wall. After a mile or so, the aqueduct passed under the highway. Armen stood under the late morning sun by the pavement and felt the traffic race by. After some unmetered span of time he was freed by his trance by a breeze. He crossed the highway and resumed following the water.

Several miles past the highway, the aqueduct crossed Olancha Creek. Unlike the aqueduct and its reservoirs, this creek fed the land along its banks as it flowed downward to the white, dry bone of Owens Lake. The shore of the old lakebed was green, though, with the runoff of the creek. Armen spotted the tiny, distant shapes of horses feeding on the grasses there.

Out beyond the horses, something like a fog rose from the lakebed.

The breeze grew into a strong, shifting wind.

The white mass above the lakebed continued to grow, but unevenly. It grew to points in places, with jagged steps climbing upward to the towers; like a phantom castle.

The wind strengthened more, and as Armen stood transfixed, staring at the ghostly castle, the wind took hold of it and began to whip it around, and the castle deformed until it took the shape of a white whirlwind.

The whirlwind began to spin randomly about the lakebed, and spun off toward Olancha, and it soon blanketed Armen. He closed his eyes and hit the ground to shelter himself from the saline dust storm. Armen couldn’t feel the sun anymore, and soon the air began to cool, and cool more until Armen felts as though he were in a blizzard. He opened his eyes as he lay face down to the ground and saw: the salt-sand had transformed into snow.

Armen stood up and looked out into whiteout, binding himself against the cold. He saw silhouettes of exotic creatures through the blasting snow. A mammoth, several camels, and a saber-toothed cat—all shadows in the whiteout. He began to follow the shapes, but he kept stumbling in the wind. Under the screaming and howling of the wind, he thought that he heard the cries of the shadow beasts, but then they were gone, and wind was all he could hear. He fell to the ground and braced himself against the cold.

As evening came on, the whiteout grew less white and more grey. Armen would waken from time to time, realizing that he had lost consciousness again. Finally, he woke to find everything had become black. He folded into himself and hoped for sleep.

Continue …

“I see you rode here on a bicycle,” Papeek addressed Armen.

Armen nodded over his dinner and chewed.

“Don’t you have a car?”

“I like my bike. It—it gets me places I can’t go to in a car.”

“What do you think of Deukmejian cutting back on bicycle projects?”

California had elected its first Armenian governor about a year earlier, so the grands were a little more aware of politics than they might otherwise have been. Armen couldn’t answer that one with a nod, so he chewed more energetically and swallowed. “I don’t know. I like bike lanes. I guess the Governor doesn’t ride a bike to work.”

“I reckon he doesn’t think there are enough bicycles to call for making bike lanes,” Papeek replied.

“And without bike lanes,” Armen responded with a slightly malicious grin, “I guess he wouldn’t want to start riding a bike now—without anywhere to ride one safely.”

Papeek tilted his head and changed the subject. “Say, Mr. Safety, you are not planning to ride that bicycle home in the dark, are you?”

“Well, no,” Armen replied with the only acceptable answer. “Would you mind if I stay the night?”

Tateek walked in from the kitchen and answered, “Of course not. You are always welcome.” She took her seat.

“I promise to be on my way in the morning.”

“Nonsense,” Papeek rebuffed. “Stay as long as you like.”

“Really? Maybe even stay for church?” Armen joked with a grin, as if to suggest he’d be happy to impose upon them one more night.

The two grands were suddenly silent, looking at each other and only glancing at Armen.

“What?,” Armen casually protested, “Don’t want me to see your church?”

Papeek shook his head in denial. “No, no,” he added.

“You don’t want your church to see me?”

Armen’s grandmother cut in. “Don’t be ridiculous! We would be happy to invite you to our church, if we—” She hesitated.

Papeek finished for her. “—if we had a church.”

“Wow,” Armen gaped in wonder. “I would think that Glendale would be full of churches.”

Papeek smiled. “Oh, it is. I assure you. But we—we are not Christian.”

“Whoa—but all Armenians are Christian! My—mother’s a Christian!”

“Yes, of course. We raised her in the church. You must know that.”

Yeah, I know that. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway.”

“We wanted her to fit in.”

“But you didn’t—want yourselves to fit in?”

“It was too late for us.”

Tateek joined in again. “We are just not Christian. There is no point to pretend.”

“You must have pretended.”

“Of course. But not anymore.”

“Does she know?,” Armen asked in reference to his mother.

“She knows that we are not Christian, yes.”

“What does she think of that?”

“She has—got used to it. You can ask her yourself.”

Armen suddenly noted that the house of his mother’s parents lacked Christian iconography. He’d noticed before, but he’d always assumed that it was simply a difference in decorative style.

“When did you stop pretending?” He inquired.

Papeek took this question while Tateek went to check the oven. “When we moved to Glendale.”

“Why’d you move?”

“We had heard that some of our own people had settled in Glendale.”

“You had heard? You must have already known!”

“Yes, Glendale is full of Armenians, but we did not know that there was a special kind of Armenian in Glendale.”

“A—a non-Christian kind?”

“An Armenian kind.”

“I don’t see the point of making such a secret of it”

“We did not want to make a big deal out of it. We did not wish to offend the Christian community. They are very proud.”

“Do you … have a religion?”

“Of course!” Tateek answered upon returning with a plate of chicken and rice.

“Yes,” Papeek answered. “We are called Arewordik—Children of the Sun. It is another name for Armenians, but it is not a favorite name of the Christians.”

Armen took a shot at an explanation. “They don’t like it because they don’t worship the sun.”

“No, they do not think he is God but still they worship him,” Tateek answered with a laugh.

Papeek laughed along and continued. “Instead they believe Jesus is God. They say they are cleansed by the blood of Jesus. We are cleansed by the fire of Mihr, the fire of the sun.”

Armen nodded. “Mihr?”

“Yes, Mihr. Mihr is the heavenly fire.”

So Mihr is your God?”

“Mihr is like Jesus, Papeek answered. “Mihr is the only son of Aramazd, like Jesus is the only son of Jehovah; only Mihr—” He smiled. “—only Mihr was the Son of God a long time before anyone heard of Jesus.”

Armen sighed and let out a grin. “You know, you two make a pretty good preaching team. Maybe you could start your own church.”

“Yes, if we had churches.” Papeek answered in qualified agreement.

“We could make it a fire temple, like in the old days,” Tateek suggested and countered, “but who would come?”

“A fire temple?”

“Sure,” Papeek answered. “The sun is a fire; the greatest fire.”

Armen thought visibly and wondered audibly, “There may be some secret sun worshipers in Glendale, don’t you think?”

They laughed and chuckled. Papeek added, “maybe we can put our fire temple on the beach!”, and the laughter continued.

Armen paused and sighed. “I—I didn’t know that there were still Armenians that—”

“There are not,” Papeek interrupted gravely. “We are the last—that we know of. Our friends here—that we moved to Glendale for—they have passed on. It is just Tateek and Papeek now.”

“That must be a lonesome state of affairs.” Armen observed. He was reminded of the Genocide. He hadn’t ever heard of a non-Christian Armenian before. As many times as he’d heard of the horrors of the Genocide, he’d never met someone whose very world teetered on the brink of extinction; yet here they were—his grandparents!

“Yes it is lonely, but we decided that we would like more to hold on to the old ways as long as we could, and we are not the only lonely old people in the world.”

“But not for my mother. You chose Jesus for her.”

“No, that is right. No Mihr for Siranush,” Papeek answered. “This is not her path. She is a child of the New World.”

“Hm.”

“You think we were wrong,” Tateek asked soberly.

“Huh? No. No, I don’t think anything. This is all too new to me. I need time to think. Besides, that is your choice; your life; not mine.”

They all remained silent around the table, and then Armen continued with a puff and a shake of his head. “Your granddaughter might disagree.”

“Oh, yes. We have heard. She is in some kind of trouble—with the law.”

“It’s worse than that, I think. She seems to be in trouble with civilization.”

“That’s too bad. She was such a smart little girl, even though she did not like our sacred fire.”

“You’ll be happy to hear that she likes it just fine now. She likes it too much.”

“Too much. What do you mean?”

“They say she starts fires—big fires.”

“What? Your mother’s little darling Cindy? That girl always seemed so clever and level-headed.”

“Oh I don’t know if that’s changed. Maybe she just has her own agenda, you know. She doesn’t seem to care too much about what the world thinks or says.”

“How’s your mother handling it?,” Tateek asked.

“About as well as can be expected, I guess.”

“How are you handling it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How does it look?”

“You look good,” Papeek answered. “A little tired, a little thin, and you could use a hairc—”

“Yeah you leave the hair alone,” Armen bluffed, winked through his black bangs, and finished his supper.

Armen stayed in the guest room that night, on a twin bed beneath a portrait of the sun. In the morning, he stayed for breakfast and helped Papeek repair his lawn irrigation, and then he went on his way.

Armen continued to ride his bike up along the river on his days off. He followed it up Ventura Boulevard to Sherman Oaks, where it crossed under the Ventura Freeway and then under the San Diego Freeway, all this as though the river had been laid out to follow the morning commute. On rainy days, he’d pedal through the rain to see what became of the River flow, and then he’d return as soon as he could to see how soon the flows would drop. Armen stuck to Ventura Boulevard as far as Encino, and then turned right on Balboa Boulevard, and crossed the San Fernando Valley to see the terminus of the two LA Aqueducts. He stood with his bike and watched the twin aqueducts cascade out of the mountains, and he thought of the twins of Eden, Tigris and Euphrates, spilling down from the mountains of Armenia.

Continue …

One day, a sprinkler started suddenly as Armen took a plant sample. The same thing happened a little later that day. Armen watched the air and the vegetation drink up the droplets. That night, he puzzled over a fountain. The city seemed like a gigantic greenhouse; an arboretum, or even a museum. All the greenery seemed real and natural enough, but its existence struck him as wholly artificial. Armen could almost see a glass ceiling towering over the city, which might also explain the smog. Where was all the plumbing in this great greenhouse coming from? Was there a master valve? What was the source of all this abundance? A mammoth spring? A great river? Armen felt compelled to find out, so he began to follow the plumbing.

One day after work, Armen let his curiosity lead him east along Broadway from Elysian Park to the Los Angeles River. Once he got to the bridge, he stood gazing up the concrete channel, A narrow winter stream swayed from one side of the broad wash to the other, and Armen remembered the day that he first laid eyes on the cool, blue California Aqueduct. He was reminded of Cindy, and how much she had changed; or had she?

The River of Angels seemed more a river of ghosts. It would occasionally flow, true enough, but only as a storm drain. It did not exist to provide precious water to the city but rather to take it away; to flush it out to sea. Everything about it seemed so inverted, and Armen’s wandering mind found the irony of it irresistible.

One Friday afternoon, Armen set out to get a better look at the river. He rode down Broadway to the river and looked down into the channel. The same shallow stream wove through the channel bottom. Perhaps it had grown. A worn, French-smelling man with a salt and pepper beard happened by and said, “Isn’t she a sight?” Armen replied “yeah” in a surprised tone. They stood silently for a moment, Armen straddling his bike. Armen remembered a movie or TV scene that featured a car chase through the channel, and he asked the man, “Is there a way down to the river?”

“Oh, yeah,” the man affirmed. “Let me show you.” He led Armen to an access point, and as Armen began to ride his bike down to the concrete channel, the man warned, “one thing. You might not be welcome down there with the LAPD. Don’t make yourself too visible.

Continue …

After Armen bade adios to all the sunken ones, he continued walking west on Wilshire. A bus stopped next to him as he was walking by a transit shelter. It seemed to him that the bus had stopped to offer him a ride, so he stepped on board and pulled a handful of change out of his pocket. He rode the bus until he heard the driver say something about Westwood and UCLA. He stepped off as soon as the exit doors opened and set off to find the temple. He’d seen it in a listing once. It was one of three west of the Mississippi. It boasted over eight million volumes. Thinking about the great temple made him feel conspicuous, so he found a restroom and cleaned himself up. When he finally reached the heart of the campus and approached the temple, he was awestruck by its magnificence. He approached the arched entry, expecting to be stopped by guards. He was surprised that he was able to simply walk across the threshold. He explored the temple, acquainted himself with its layout, and within an hour had made himself at home. He looked into the subject catalog under “pyr” and browsed through the titles. He collected a small stack of volumes, and then he turned to the Readers’ Guide. He located several articles on pyromania. Though that topic wasn’t very fruitful, it kept him occupied until the lights flashed to warn the congregation that closing time was approaching.

Armen spent the night behind a hedge and paid a visit to the community job center in the morning. He’d never had a real job before, and he wondered whether anyone would hire him. He picked up a few leads, and headed back to Westwood and the temple. This time he looked in the Readers’ Guide for “fire.” He found several articles on fire worship. The headers and summaries were enough to remind him of the stories he’d heard about the old struggle between the Christians of Armenia and the fire worshipers of Persia. What was fire worship? How was it different from pyromania? Neither seemed to fit the description of what he sought.

Shortly after Armen departed the readers’ temple that evening, he experienced a strange vision.  He saw a bicycle that looked identical to his. It was locked in a rack with several others. He fled the scene, afraid that the vision might spawn more visions.

Armen decided to take leave of the temple the next day, thinking that his head might need to unwind. He went to the job center and found a message waiting. He had been invited to interview for a job as a laborer for the city parks and recreation department. He returned to Westwood. He needed to convince himself that he hadn’t seen that bike. When he got to the bike rack, he found the bicycle still there, with the very likeness of the combination lock that he’d used for several years. He glanced left and right and saw too many eyes. He would have to return later. He washed up and returned to the temple.

When he left the temple that evening, the bike was still there. He approached it quickly, resisting the temptation to check for onlookers, knowing that would only raise suspicions. He squatted by the bike and tried his combination on the lock. It slid apart. Armen fell back onto his backside, and then he got up, knelt down, and unwound the lock cable. He pulled the bike out of the rack and pushed it down the walkway. He could feel in the way that the wheels wobbled slightly, just kissing the rear brake pads on every revolution, that this was his bike. Still, he feared being caught, so he found another rack and locked the bike to it. Behind the hedge that night, Armen wondered how the bike might have made it there. Maybe someone expected that he’d make it to the temple sooner or later. Was he that predictable?

The next morning, the bike was still where Armen had locked it. Armen resolved to ride it downtown for his interview.

He regretted having to leave the temple, but at the same time he felt relieved to be able to get a job. He needed the money, and employment gave him a refreshing sense of belonging, of membership. It wasn’t that it made him feel like a man so much as like a part of something. Now all he had to do was hold the job down. He did his best to keep his first boss satisfied. He always got to work early, he kept his nose down, and he never complained. It was a good starter job for someone without a bed or a shower, seeing as he didn’t have to be especially clean or well-groomed to do the work.

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