Saturday, December 20, 2014

Yuletide Story



For more than a decade in the ‘80’s and nineties, I lived in a tiny studio over an old carriage house at the rear of a lot in North Berkeley. It was probably one of the oldest structures in Berkeley, older than the large house in front, which had also been divided into apartments. At a later time, long after the incident that I am about to relate, I even explored the possibility of having this little carriage house declared a historical landmark in order to prevent its demolition to make way for overpriced condos. This endeavor floundered for lack of sufficient documentation, and so I eventually had to move, but that is beyond the scope of this story.

The old carriage house had been erected with a steep, sloping roof, a rarity in California, perhaps by some recent pioneer from the East who had not yet thought through the architectural implications of the snowless Bay Area climate. My apartment nestled snugly under the roof, above a somewhat larger apartment that had been made from the original carriage house downstairs.

The yard was heavily wooded and overgrown; someone in the past had made careful and even magical planting choices: a hawthorn tree, rosemary grown to large bushes as it will in the California climate, a large stand of rue. The rent was laughably cheap, following a tacit Bay Area rental tradition that the tenant’s expenses can remain low as long as the owner’s expenses are virtually nil. A rickety outside staircase led from the ground to my door, passing over the door to the apartment below. At the top of the stairs was a tiny porch overgrown by the branches of an acacia tree, and my own door, a junkyard salvage item with a glass window.

I lived alone, as I have for years. I am a sound sleeper and, I should mention, a vivid dreamer. As a child, I was often confused about what had happened in my dreams and what had really taken place. As I grew up I learned gradually to sort my dreams out from my waking reality, but even as an adult I can sometimes identify a memory as a dream only because it is something improbable that seems to have happened while I was asleep.

It is also worth mentioning that the East Bay is demographically diverse and complex, perhaps more so than any place in the world. The cultural mix is rich and exciting, the crime rate is high, neighborhoods can change suddenly in character as you cross a large thoroughfare or a set of tracks, or for no apparent reason at all. My own neighborhood, as a friend once said, seemed “equally divided between the people trying to overthrow the government by force and violence and the people just searching for the perfect croissant,” with violent crime and drug-dealing to the south and west and the increasingly elegant homes of croissant-eaters mounting the hills above us to the east.

So in this apartment, in this city, very late on the night of the winter solstice, came a knock on my door. The room was long and narrow, and sitting up in my bed at one end I had a good view through the glass of the door. A young black man, handsome, lean and loose-limbed, stood looking at me. Unaccountably lacking in fear or hesitation, I got up, went to the door and opened it.

He apologized for bothering me so late at night; his accent was from somewhere in the Caribbean.  He held the street address of our little complex, 1315 Henry Street, scribbled on the back of an envelope. “Do you know Vanessa?” he asked. “I’m looking for Vanessa.”

I couldn’t help him. I knew everyone in the complex by name, none of them Vanessa.

He seemed disappointed, and shrugged. Then his face lit up with amusement, and he pointed to the door. “Look, you forgot your keys,” he said. I looked and there indeed were my keys, dangling from the keyhole outside the door. A little uncomfortable for the first time, I took the keys and closed the door. The young man rattled down the stairs. I glanced at the clock beside my bed—it was a little past three—and lay down to sleep.

The next morning I thought over the oddness of this event—my mysterious lack of fear, the discovery of the keys, and dismissed the memory as a dream.

Later that day, returning  from work, I ran into my downstairs neighbor. Peter was a wispy shadow of a man who lived on disability for some reason. I never knew the details. He and I had a cordial acquaintance based mostly on feeding each other’s cats when we left town. “Do you know anybody named Vanessa?” he asked. It was eerie to hear the name again so soon after the dream. I shook my head. “Guy was here about three in the morning,” he said, “looking for somebody named Vanessa. Jamaican, maybe.”

So it was not a dream. I performed the internal mental acrobatics required to reclassify the incident of the previous night as real, noticing how much more peculiar it appeared when recalled in that light.

But then, a year later, the story grew stranger still.

It was again around the time of the winter solstice. Peter had left town for the holidays, and his apartment downstairs was empty. Again, late at night, I was roused from sleep by a knock at the door, and a “hello.” In an instant, from that single word, I recognized the voice and the accent. My body froze in shock, fearful not of the young man himself but of the surreal nature of the unfolding events. “Yes?” I responded, not looking, not moving, not wanting to see the face that I knew was waiting on the other side of the glass.

“Do you remember me?” He called. “I was here last year. I was looking for Vanessa, but I didn’t find her.” He paused, and added, as if to jog my memory.  “But I found your keys.”

“I remember,” I called to him. “But I’m not going to open the door this time. This is just too weird.”

He laughed. “Well, Merry Christmas, then,” he said. He rattled down the stairs with the same sound that I remembered from year before, and was gone.

When I felt sure he was gone, something made me get up to look for my keys. They were in my handbag, where they belonged. I went back to sleep.

Long after, I told this story to someone I knew who was versed in the religions of the African diaspora. “Eshu, Papa Legba,” my friend murmured knowingly. “The Yoruba god Ellegua. He is all over the New World, by different names. The messenger of the Gods.  He’s a bit of a trickster, but he opens the way.”

I have long meant to weave this incident into some longer tale, a deep and important tale about the old Gods, and an opening of a way. But perhaps the true story is simple, and needs to go no further than this; a young man from the Islands had the wrong address, and lost a woman named Vanessa.