The Best American Essays 2013 (28 page)

A damaged tape. An audio recording of a section of an Upper Michigan murder trial. The trial, the trail—they both appear to end here.

Then there is more: “I suggest that both of you gentlemen invoke a little silence and let the witness answer. In fact I order you to.”

“I’m going to take the answer.”

“Take the answer.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen. There has been a question and an objection. And I must make a ruling, which I cannot do if you keep up this unholy wrangling. We are skating on thin ice, I realize. But in all conscience, I cannot rule if the question is objectionable. Counsel is not asking for the results of any polygraph test, but the opinion of the witness based upon certain knowledge possessed by him. Take the answer.”

You want to give it a listen? The MP3 is on my website at other
electricities.com/vp/mix.html
.

It’s pretty freaky, actually, when you just listen to it, not knowing what it is. Turn the lights out. Look out the window at the canopy of whatever deciduous tree you see and the moon rising spookily through its bare wintry branches. Make sure no one is paying attention to you.

I listened to it over and over, filling the silent hisses with speculation.

So I spent a couple hours trying to look up information on the murder trial of the man who killed my high school acquaintance, just to see if this was it. I found very little. Having taken place before the explosion of the web, there’s almost nothing online about it. I wonder whether the trial transcripts are public record, whether they’re available for researchers. The court transcriptionist surely did her (I’ve never seen a male transcriptionist, but they must exist) job for a reason. Surely these transcripts are open at least to lawyers who might want to prepare an appeal or something. I resolved to find out more about this, then promptly forgot about my resolution.

The roots of the tree that should, in nature, grow the sweet oranges that most of us enjoy eating or juicing are susceptible to a bark-destroying virus. The roots of the sour orange tree, however, resist the virus. So in Texas or Florida, for instance, growers graft sweet orange branches—scions—onto the trunks/roots—understock—of sour orange trees for protection. Farther north, orange scions are usually grafted onto rough lemon understock for a similar result. Oranges are now so hybridized that the seeds of a given orange will usually not grow the same kind of orange tree if planted.

For those of us who fetishize the tree as the epitome of
natural
, understanding that the modern citrus is essentially a remix, a cut-and-paste job, comes as a bit of a surprise. There’s not a whole lot natural about domesticated anything anymore, which is one reason why “natural” on food packaging doesn’t usually denote very much. (Neither the USDA nor the FDA has rules for what “natural” may or may not refer to.) Like most of us who eat, I don’t spend much time close up with my food, and certainly not fruit trees, and haven’t bothered to investigate the joints where the understock meets the scion.

It is not particularly difficult to make your own fruit-salad tree if you’re adept at grafting. Though it does take a lot of care and careful pruning, since fruits mature and fruit at different rates and times, and you risk having one fruit take over your tree or become too heavy, unbalancing your tree and bringing it down.

The term for grafting scions on the understock of a different tree is
topworking
.

Maybe six hours later, after feeling entirely engaged in the mystery, I figured out what might already be obvious to you, what would be obvious to denizens of Upper Michigan (or aficionados of film or murder mysteries) of a certain age—that the microcassette recording is in fact a greatly condensed and edited version of the audio from the 1959 film
Anatomy of a Murder
.

It took me a while to get there. My wife suggested that there’s no way anyone was recording the trial from the inside. True, I thought. It’s suspiciously articulate, and I didn’t hear the accents and Canadianisms, the
ya
s, the trills of
eh
s and dropped prepositions that usually signify the Upper Michigander, or as we call ourselves, the Yooper. And the more I thought of some of the lines, the more they sounded like written dialogue. At that point I had not yet seen the film, though the book on which it is based is set in Upper Michigan and is probably the most famous rendering of my peninsula, if you don’t count the crappy Ben Affleck heist movie
Reindeer Games
.

And with that revelation, the door slammed closed, one part of the mystery solved. But then: Why only selections from the replacement judge character’s comments?

And why unmarked? Why a microcassette? Why from Nebraska City, Nebraska?

And who sent it?

Where I am from there are a lot of unexplained things: that Paulding Light, the Mining Hall disaster, the strange phenomenon of paradoxical undressing, crimes unsolved, disappearing girls, unresolved deaths. In a relatively remote place like my part of Michigan you learn to live with the fact that not everything is understandable. That’s part of the irreducible mystery of the state, itself obscured much of the year by weather of one sort or another.

Much is obscured by trees and snow on trees, falling to cover over our tracks as we set out for a winter ramble among the fallen trees, the rabbit tracks on snow, the marks that suggest the occasional wolf or moose had come through here just before or after us. Some of it is clouded by history or the passing of time; some is erased by willful obfuscation. The speculation we engage in to get at the roots of those stories and selves now lost to history is memory topworking.

My favorite mix tape I ever found, which I no longer own, sadly, because it was lost in a move, was a mix tape created by a guy I don’t know for a girl I don’t know. It was staged as a radio show, with commercials and bits and jingles that the guy improvised himself, using different voices, between the songs. It was an impressive gesture, clearly scripted and rehearsed, technically very sophisticated. Since I found it at the decrepit St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store in Grand Rapids, Michigan, it must not have been sufficiently beloved by the recipient. Or possibly the recipient died. Or was killed. Or maybe it was never sent—the gesture discarded in a moment of hesitation and second-guessing, a sweet, powerful regret that most of us know all too well. Or perhaps it was well loved at the time and was only later discarded as she forgot about the he, or didn’t care, or maybe got rid of her tape player and either committed it to digital format, or more likely didn’t—that’s the feeling I got, perhaps because the mix tape seemed a little excessive, by which I mean obsessive, which is the way that all mix tapes are if you’re serious about making them. As a social ritual it’s still a lovely but strange one, and it’s not always welcome, as you find out if you’ve made enough mix tapes, or if you’ve misread the social cues preceding the presentation of the mix tape, which you might have done because you were concentrating so hard on the mix tape you were making.

Though I use the terms
mix tape
and
mix CD
interchangeably, I probably shouldn’t, since the technologies are so different. The track-by-track skippability that the CD brought us, along with its futuristic laser shimmer and Sharpied CD title, differentiates it from the mix tape, which required much more work to produce: you had to do it manually, cuing and taping each song from the other source, being careful about song times, splicing here and there, adjusting intros and gaps, taping over things so that occasionally you got a little history of your magnetic tape poking through the hiss that signified silence.

Erasing an analog object like a mix tape is never a full erasure.

With the CD, an actual silence—a digital zero—can be achieved. We give up the two-sidedness of the mix tape; we give up the physical act of having to flip the tape and press Play. We give up occasionally having to wind or rewind the tape manually when the tape gets messed up. We forget these things in our desire for the convenient format of the CD, which is, of course, on the wane now too, in favor of the (frankly superior, let’s be honest) format of the MP3, where the music has little to any physical presence at all. It’s not a shock to see the CD discarded. I’ve thrown away so many burns I’ve made because they don’t last either, not more than a few years, often even when they’ve not been scratched up or used accidentally as coasters. Finding someone else’s mix CD in the thrift store or on the street, or even receiving one, still gives me a thrill, but it’s not quite the same as the weird analog and homemade intimacy of the mix tape with the handwritten track list.

Thus the mix tape is a particular devotion offered not just to the recipient of the mix tape but also to the technology itself, an offering from and to the double tape deck itself, and to posterity. I often made copies of the mix tapes I made for friends because I liked them so much. They’re abandoned now, rashly, probably, after I decided that my CDs were the future, which have now been replaced by my return to vinyl and the ethereal format of the MP3. I think of those tapes sometimes, given to the trash for future dumpster divers or anthropologists to sort through. They’ve been donated too to Salvation Armies, Goodwills, Alabama Thrift Stores, St. Vincent de Pauls, the White Elephant in Green Valley, AZ, Lutheran Thrift, Deseret Industries Thrift, Humane Society Thrift, 22nd Street Thrift Store, Casa de los Niños, Miracle Center Thrift, flea markets, and installed in various libraries around the country. Perhaps one ended up in the Nebraska City, Nebraska, Friends of Faith Thrift Store, on Central Avenue, just across the street from the Otoe County Courthouse, between L. Brown Cabinetry and an Allstate insurance office, where my tape might be speaking to someone else this very moment, perhaps even you, reader.

Making mix CDs, then, is thus a kind of long play for the future, but also a convenient fudge, a topworking of one technology on top of the techniques implied in and learned by dabbling with the other.

One of the reasons I love shopping in thrift stores is the history, the happenstance of it. Many things at thrift stores are messages placed in bottles for whomever to find, whether or not the giver or recipient knows it. Maybe you can call it providence. There are plenty of ecological and economic reasons to shop secondhand also, but I’m in it for the surprise.

What do we leave the world? What marks do we leave in snow among the trees? What magnetic trace do we erase or tape over? Which tapes are spared the magnet or the scissors or the heel of the boot? What books have we written? What websites have we created? Will anyone read the crappy poems we posted on rec .arts.poetry in the early days of the Internet, or will they persist as ghosts, the not-checked-out-for-decades copies of obsolete research on metallurgy I page through in the university engineering library before they’re on their way to storage and probable discard or pulp? What music offerings have we left, hopefully, our faces lit with hope, with expectation, for potential lovers or friends, or in some cases perfect strangers? What have we grafted onto what rootstock; what have we planted for some future resident of this space to enjoy? What have we plastered up in the walls of our old houses that we remodeled? What scrawls in wet concrete sidewalks of our old neighborhood? What initials have we paired our own with, cut in hearts on bark of the biggest trees out back of the school? Does our thinking of the future imply that we believe in a future after the world has heated, combusted, blown up, forced our civilization off it? Have we left answers, or will we leave questions?

Coda:
Three years later I figure out the second big question, who you are, mix-tape sender, mysterious stranger, crypto–Upper Peninsulan, old friend. Chatting, our housesitter mentions that she was at a writing residency last year in Nebraska City, Nebraska. A small door opens in my brain.

I inquire. It turns out there’s an artist/writer residency there, the Kimmel Harding Residency. A residency? In Nebraska City, Nebraska, home of Arbor Day? Yes, a residency. They have a list online of their previous residents along with their dates of residency. I scan the names. It has to be someone there on a residency. That makes so much sense. You do strange things on residencies. Hide things in public spaces. Conduct interventionist art. Post random projects to friends anonymously. When you limit your inputs like you often do at a residency, you start to generate more unusual outputs.
See also
Oulipo. (
See also
the essay “Space” on my website,
otherelectricities.com
, under
Vanishing Point
.) You want to have a personal conversation with others who have shared the space, or who will occupy the space after you.

I know a lot of the names. I don’t know what that says about me. But one in particular catches my eye, and the dates line up, and that last big question of the mystery is solved (a few of the smaller ones continue on, like a grace-note ghost). Of course my friend from Alabama, Alicia, is the culprit. Well played, Alicia.

I’m in Tucson when I figure it out at last, contemplating the sound of wind through the windmill palms that tower with the ocotillo in my front yard. It’s a lovely sound, one that you just don’t get in the north. I love the sound of wind through pines too, or the rustling of the maples, oaks, and poplars in the fall as they go brilliant and lose their leaves, suggesting the approach of winter. But the palms have a peculiar beauty. They don’t need much. You don’t want to water your palms, since the roots will rot. They’re designed to catch and hold their water in the crown of sharp leaves, where the heart of palm resides, rising with each year’s new growth. Trying to transplant a small palm from my backyard to my plant-obsessed friend Jon’s makeshift Japanese garden, we had to cut its root ball away from its wide network of roots. In this part of the Sonoran Desert, plants’ roots spread wide, not deep, because of the caliche, a superhardened clay that’s everywhere a foot or two beneath the surface—so transplanting saguaro cacti, for instance, is nigh impossible.