Already late, I parked on the road’s shoulder since every spot in the parking lot was taken. The day’s weather was analytical; sharp, the sunlight made precise incisions into everything it touched—the dense foliage of sequoia and red cedars; the impenetrable reflective hoods of every parked truck; stones along the narrow desire path which I followed, partially blinded, until the trees grew denser above me. I was heading toward the sound of voices obscured against a choppy current. A—’s phone was going straight to voicemail when I tried calling him, which meant he probably wasn’t getting service at the beach, which meant he was at the beach, waiting for me with whoever else was there, whoever arrived in all those trucks. I felt like I was showing up late to a surprise party, not knowing who we were celebrating. It could be me, I guess! A— and I hadn’t seen each other in years—maybe this was the kind of veneration we would finally give our friendship, having lost it and now found it again. It was a resurrection, of sorts. I started the steep descent from forested canopy toward scintillating sand, and when the people came in view some of the crowd did turn to look at me, but only briefly. No one clapped. They were still waiting for someone. 

Over to the right of the crowd was a pile of driftwood where a man wearing a pseudo-professor costume—tweed blazer, oversized trousers, tidy beard—stood confidently, nodding his head to the bland rock music playing from a portable speaker beside him. I scanned the crowd, unable to identify A—, but there were other familiar faces on the beach. One person was dressed up as Michael Jackson; another had long hair and circle glasses; another in a bowler cap and suit, meant to be either Leonard Cohen or Mr. Monopoly. Someone, maybe Joe Rogan, but a little older and with a cane, came walking toward me.

“But you’re still alive.”

“I am,” he said. “But the radio man you think I resemble is not.” His breath smelled like ammonia. “The radio man is an imPOSter—ANTIFA silencing the TRUTH.”

“Oh.”

Meanwhile, the ocean shined like one large crystal.

Leonard Cohen rolled up his pants and waded into the water, ocean waves climbing his body, crumbling and reassembling like seductive, desirous flames licking him up. A temporal seal that had been containing this historical moment as the only moment was breaking, my footing on the inner linear track losing balance as the rails widened, stretching my positionality to accommodate these mostly dead celebrities resurrected at different stages in their lives, making no logical sense at all, and my real friend whose name I was having trouble remembering was nowhere. My hands and my legs felt numb. My attitude, I felt, was waning.

I couldn’t have been at the beach any longer than for an hour, but when I got back to my car the windshield had distorted over with frost. I sat in the driver’s seat and locked the door; my vantage point either shrinking in size or reversing in time to the molecular level, gazing from inside the ordered structure of ice. I took pictures on my phone, wondering where the pictures might take me—how in movies it’s always technology that’s the catalyst for mobilization across millenia. An image of young Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure comes to mind, standing in a parking lot where a copy of himself has just stepped out from a telephone booth time portal: “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” 

The sun had seemed so warm when I first pulled in, ripening the ants like little round berries. People said that lately the impressions made by the weather were becoming less trustworthy; that an atmosphere of fabrication and suspicion held us in its fold, warming us.

When I got home I put coffee on. The water took time to boil. As it heated I walked over to my bookshelf and gazed absent mindedly at the colourful spines, regarding them aesthetically—rows of ornately painted nails, each a little different, different hands, lifting together something massively heavy. On my desk was a small felted book of Benjamin’s essays that I’d recently gotten from the library. I began leafing through it. The first essay was on a painting by Piet Mondrian, dated 1963, which didn’t make any sense since Mondrian died decades earlier. But so did Walter Benjamin, the essay’s author. The author bio had been ripped out and in it’s place was a quote that also decorated the front cover: A copy is a meta-original — W. B.