No Sign

By Rich Ives

I was having trouble remembering where I had parked the car, and then I was remembering how I had been thinking when I parked it that putting the baby in the baby seat was like parking the baby. Only I couldn’t remember if that was this time or the last time, and I didn’t remember if I had parked the baby in the front seat or the back seat so the car that was parked where I couldn’t remember had a baby parked in the front seat or parked in the back seat, one or the other.

I remembered distinctly putting the forty-pound bag of dog food in the trunk of the car, but I couldn’t remember why because we don’t have a dog. I remembered it was raining, and I thought it was funny to think about the dog food being Gravy Train because I was afraid of the dog food getting wet, which it was going to do sooner or later anyway.

You might not think this is crazy because I try to stay calm when I tell things like this. My doctor says I have to or my blood pressure might kill me. That doctor sure knows how to get you to calm down. Just scare the patient to death. A good idea, huh? But I didn’t die, and now I’m learning not to take things so seriously. I suspect it doesn’t make things life does any less crazy, but they feel different now. They really do. It’s actually kind of amusing when I think about how it’s going to sound when I tell someone. Who loses their baby in their own car and doesn’t know why she has dog food? I’m trying to tell this like it just happened, but it didn’t. I was remembering it yesterday, and I was at the doctor’s at the time to try to get some help with the problem, only the doctor couldn’t find the problem, and then I remembered I couldn’t find the car and it felt like it was happening right at that moment.

Then I remembered John Dow and laughed because he pronounced his name like John Doe and he didn’t even get it, didn’t even think it was funny, and his wife went by her nickname, which was Jennifer, which didn’t sound like a nickname to me, so I called her Cookie and she didn’t get that either. I remembered them because they were friends of my ex-lover, who is not the baby’s father (I know what you’re thinking), and I said I would take care of their house while they were gone on vacation to Afghanistan. Who goes on vacation to Afghanistan? Anyway, when I got there to check on the house, there was a dog in the back yard and they didn’t say anything about a dog, so I didn’t know if I should take care of the dog or not. I’m glad I remembered that. It must have been one of those big Gravy Train kinds of dogs.

I didn’t like to think about the car maybe being stolen, but I thought about it anyway. I’m the kind of person who thinks about things that aren’t good for them. That’s why I was at the doctor’s. I’m the kind of person who sees a half a glass of water and wonders what kind of diseases might be in it. I’m the kind of person who has a dangerous adventure just going to the bathroom. I’m the kind of person who experiments when they’re walking, taking two left steps instead of left, right, left, right to see what will happen, and I’m the kind of person who gets delighted when I wind up skipping instead of falling down.

There seems to be a problem with my short-term memory I told the doctor, who looked serious and troubled and asked me if I’d had any accidents lately. I have them all the time, I said, doesn’t everybody? The doctor laughed and reached for his pen and went looking for his notepad because he couldn’t remember where he left it. I wondered if he wrote that down about not being able to find his notepad because he couldn’t find it and then he had to ask his receptionist for another one. By the time she brought him another one, he probably forgot what he was going to write down. That’s what happens to me.

I told the doctor about having Chinese food with my friend Bert and how he started talking like he didn’t know English very well and when we got back to his car he was parked in a no-parking zone but the sign was covered up by the leaves on a big maple tree and he looked at me like I was about to write him a parking ticket and shrugged his shoulders innocent-like and said, “No sign.” The doctor laughed, so I told him how we were driving down the street looking for the way back to the freeway when Bert shrugged his shoulders and said, “No sign.” The doctor laughed again, so I told him about the reader-board sign, the one that has those letters moving across it from left to right like you’re reading it only it’s doing the moving for you, and it didn’t have anything on it, nothing at all, and Bert pointed at it and said, “No sign.” The doctor laughed again but not as much, even though it was funnier than the other examples. I asked him to validate my parking ticket. I thought that was the funniest part, but he didn’t think it was funny at all. He tried to be gracious and not just annoyed when he referred me to his receptionist for validation. Then I remembered I didn’t have a parking ticket, but I didn’t tell him that.

Outside the doctor’s office was a homeless guy selling pancakes. At least that’s what the sign said. The one he wrote with red crayon on the side of a cardboard box. His pancakes didn’t look like pancakes. I don’t know what they looked like, but they didn’t look like pancakes, and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would buy pancakes from a homeless person. He didn’t even have anything I could see to cook the pancakes on, so I couldn’t picture anybody buying his pancakes. Maybe that was the way it worked. Somebody found his business venture so sad and pathetic that they put some money in his cup. The cup was a big plastic one and it looked dirty. Either he mixed the pancakes in it or he expected an awful lot of donations because it was certainly much bigger than a tin cup. I asked him if he had blackberry syrup and he gave me one of those looks you give a child when it asks you will the stars fall down out of the sky when I’m not alive anymore. I gave him the Canadian money I had been carrying around since I got back from Vancouver six months ago. I went there to get away from something, but I can’t remember what. Does that mean it worked or not?

Now it feels like things are happening to me right now and not yesterday, so I start walking and pretty soon I realize I don’t know where the car is and I turn around and go the other way. This time the homeless guy is eating what looks like raw asparagus and he doesn’t even look at me. He doesn’t even look at the asparagus. I start walking away, and someone on the street hangs out of a car that looks like it’s too small for a legless midget and yells something like “Turtles don’t eat baby fat” at the homeless guy. That’s when I see the lettering on the piece of paper in the window of the sushi restaurant. It’s taped to the window and has pretty small letters, but I go over to it and read it out loud so the homeless guy can hear me. POLICE MAN SAY NO ALLOW SIT OR LIE SIDEWALK. The homeless guy gives me that sky is falling look again, and I pull the sign off the window and tear it up and say, “No sign.” The homeless guy turns over his sign and writes on the back of it and holds it up so I can see it — I NO LIE.

One more time the funny little car goes by, and this time it looks like the young bald guy hanging out the back window is going to fall out of it, but he doesn’t. A skinny yellow cat with its ribs showing runs out in front of the car and back again like it just wanted to see how close it could get, and the guy yells, “Get a job” at it and slips back inside the car like a jack-in-the-box only backwards.

I’m still trying to come up with clues about my car, like my car is yellow, and I suddenly realize it is, and I remembered because of the cat and so I think where would you find a yellow car? It makes me think about the lines on the curb and if I am illegally parked or not, but unfortunately I don’t remember feeling nervous about where I left it. And that makes me think about calling the police to see if they have my car, but what would they say about the baby and how could I identify that it was mine except by describing the baby and what the baby was wearing, which was a cute little cowboy outfit with golden horsies all over it and blue clouds and brown six guns.

So I get out my cell phone and call my other phone at home, the normal one, the one that doesn’t come with you when you go to the doctor, and I punch in the number for my messages, and somebody’s happy to tell me that I’ve won a free trip to Las Vegas and to call some number I can’t remember with another claim number I can’t remember either and have a wonderful time in the vacation capital of the world, and somebody else says, “You’re in it deep now, Carl. Better call me,” only I don’t know who it is or anybody named Carl and finally somebody else just breathes for a long time. Nothing about a car. Nothing about a baby. Nothing about anything that even reminds me about a car.

So I decide to go looking for yellow cars because how many yellow cars can there be, and I probably didn’t park too far away, only what if I parked in a parking garage, but I don’t have a parking ticket so I don’t think so. And after a while it strikes me that there’s not as much yellow in the world as I thought there was.

By this time the sun’s getting really beautiful in the west. It’s like the sad part at the end of the movie when the good guy who used to be a bad guy, and that’s why he can come riding into town and save it by killing all the bad guys, has to admit to himself that he’s just not good enough for the hypocritical townspeople he saved because he’s a killer and he doesn’t know how to hire people to do his dirty work for him. It takes a long time to ride into the sunset, and if you’re thinking about it and paying attention, after a while it doesn’t seem so sad, and maybe it’s a better place to be than with the people who hire the killer even if the killer is you. But how did you become a killer? You still have to wonder that, don’t you?

I can’t seem to get my coat zipped up, and it’s getting cold, and somebody left their lights on, so I go up to the car to see what the license number is so I can tell the people in the bakery by where it’s parked. When I give the cashier the license number and describe the station wagon that looks like what we used to call a “woodie” and where it’s parked, she says, “You’re not supposed to park there. Didn’t you see the sign? It says, ‘Reserved for Dr. Iseneare.’ You’d better move your car.”

I start to explain about how I just wanted to help the person who left his lights on, when I remember buying an éclair before the doctor’s appointment because it was raining cats and dogs when I drove here and I wanted to treat myself for all the misery of not having a coat or an umbrella or even an old newspaper to hold over my head. So I go back across the street to the station wagon to look for clues because the lady in the bakery isn’t going to be any help and there’s no sign there where it’s parked about any doctor or any reserved place, but there’s a kid’s seat hanging across the passenger side of the front seat, and I can remember when I sat in one just like it.

Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission, and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation, and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at http://silencedpress.com.