Nobody's Property 08
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
Release Date: 03/10/2011
Nobody's Property 15
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
Three o’clock in the afternoon, and Shirley, of Shawnee Memorials, just across Harrison Avenue from Fairview Cemetery, was not taking any shit off my dad. We had come here at my urging; Dad had mentioned that he still needed to order a stone to mark the plot where Jenny’s and Edith’s remains were buried together. I could see that if I didn’t push a little, it wasn’t going to happen any time soon. And the grass in the Rose family plot, though a bit dry and thatched in patches, covered their grave so smoothly that no one would ever know they were there.
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Nobody's Property 14
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
The sound of pistons pumping, a lawn-mower pulse and wheeze, comes up behind her, and she looks over her shoulder to see the VW coming up fast: black and chrome, some of the shine worn off and anyway looking duller in this flat November light. She keeps her thumbs hooked under the leather of her backpack straps, walks backward and keeps her gaze straight and sober toward the driver of the car. It pulls over a few paces ahead and stops at an angle on the gravel margin. Under her boots the gray gravel rasps and she doesn't slow down or speed up but keeps up her trudge toward the car. In...
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Nobody's Property 13
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
"I serve with the German Armed Forces. My garrison is Hardheim, where I am stationed at Carl-Schurz-Kaserne. At present, I attend the Bundeswehrfachschule in Tauberbischofsheim....
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Nobody's Property 12
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
Terminal burrowing can be identified in reports of hypothermia deaths, but has only recently been given a name. It is a behavior pattern observed in the last stages of hypothermia whereby the afflicted will enter small, enclosed spaces, such as wardrobes, cupboards, and closets....
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Nobody's Property 11
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
In Tübingen the houses sit along the River Neckar like nineteenth-century ladies on lounge chairs with flowing skirts and big hats: they look comfortable and bourgeois and unassailable. Like most of Germany. From the bridge over the river you can see a tower, painted yellow now, where the poet Hölderlin went crazy for 36 years: a long, slow burn that might, in other circumstances, be called life. This is where he wrote these words, which I found quoted by Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude:...
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Nobody's Property 10
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
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Nobody's Property 09
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
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Nobody's Property 08
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
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Nobody's Property 07
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
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Nobody's Property 06
Nobody's Property: Living on the Remains of a Life in Calfornia
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“I’ve been thinking about a trip to Germany,” my father says on the phone one day. “I’m thinking I need to start thinking about Jenny in a new way.”
I’ve been thinking that too. And my father: the first thirty years of our time together are over; what are the next thirty going to be like?
What will we do in Germany? I’ve thought of going by myself, trying to find some things out. I see myself in a room with a man who was the last person to see Jenny alive. Did he kill her? Or did he just leave her by the side of the road? All these years I’ve waited for Jenny to haunt me, but she’s just kept her peace. That’s a nice way to think about it, that she’s out there somewhere keeping to herself (‘she is just away’). I know it’s not true; I know she’s gone.
But him? He was a young guy in 1971. Odds are he’s out there.
He’s the one who’s been haunting me.