How did the call Chloe and I had placed to Golden Seal Carpet Cleaning almost two months earlier result in this guy and his driverless van coming to my rescue?
I took a look around. The van had dropped me off in the middle of the Fremont neighborhood, on Evanston Avenue, right in front of a coffee shop I used to frequent when Baron lived in the area.
Connected to the building that housed the coffee shop was something called The Fremont Rocket—a Cold War relic turned community totem that towered above the area. No actual rocket parts had been used to create the enormous work of art, but the bits of old airplane parts they’d used had been assembled in a perfect Art Deco interpretation of outer space, à la Barbarella or Flash Gordon.
As I stood looking up at the rocket, a red Volkswagen bug pulled up. Blasting from the windows of the vintage car was a song from the late 1980s by the band Def Leppard. I recognized the lyric “I can take you through the center of the dark” as it blared out of the bug’s powerful stereo.
The song was called “Rocket.”
Standing beneath a statue of a giant rocket listening to a song called “Rocket” would be an interesting coincidence on its own, but what if, at exactly the same time, a couple walked by—two women in their midforties, one wearing a light blue NASA T-shirt and the other an original 1988 Love and Rockets Sorted Tour jacket? At that point, you might take it as a sign—and if you were the kind of person who was obsessed with patterns and coincidences, you’d have to follow them to see where they were going.
So I did.
I tailed the couple up Evanston to North 36th, where they turned right. I tried to stay about half a block behind them as they walked. They looked happy, laughing and holding hands. Seeing them like that—so completely together and so seemingly unburdened—made me smile.
I couldn’t remember a time when I’d felt that free.
As the two women walked by the little walkway that led into Troll’s Knoll Park, I started to feel a familiar vibration at the base of my skull, and by the time they’d passed the narrow set of stairs that led up to Aurora Avenue, the gray feeling had firmly taken hold of my brain.
Every step I took felt labored, like I was pushing my way through sludge at the bottom of a lake. I forced myself to concentrate on my breath, and looked down as I walked, counting the lines on the sidewalk to calm myself. By the time the two women had stopped moving and were standing in front of the enormous cement troll that lurked beneath the bridge, the gray feeling had been tamped down enough for me to function, and I was able to move normally. But it was still there, somewhere in the back of my mind. I could feel it.
It was waiting for something.
* * *
—
The Fremont Troll is an eighteen-foot ferroconcrete troll that lives under the Aurora Avenue Bridge （officially known as the George Washington Memorial Bridge）。 Somebody won an art contest or something in the late eighties, and the Fremont Troll was the result. It’s a colossal, weirdly beautiful monument that I absolutely love. Sadly, people tag and otherwise vandalize the sculpture quite often, and layer after layer of cement has to be constantly applied to bring the troll back to something close to its original appearance.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Fremont Troll is that he （or she） is clutching a car in his （or her） left hand. In 1990, when the troll was being constructed, the artists included a red Volkswagen bug with a California license plate in the sculpture. Over the years, the appearance of the Volkswagen has changed. After decades of abuse at the hands of graffiti artists, vandals, and middle school kids playing truth or dare, the color of the car is no longer discernible and the license plate is long gone.
One fact remains indisputable, however, and that’s the fact that the troll is holding an original Volkswagen Beetle from the 1960s or ’70s.
Except it wasn’t. Not anymore.
There, clutched in the troll’s hand, in place of the Volkswagen bug, was an Austin Mini Cooper.
* * *
—
The two women took a selfie with the troll in the background, then continued their walk, moving leisurely along North 36th Street.
I was trying to decide whether to follow them—while also working to come to terms with the revelation about the new model of car in the troll’s hand—when I noticed some posters glued to one of the stanchions that held up the base of the bridge.
There were four identical posters, one on each side of the stanchion, advertising an upcoming music festival in Oregon. The genre was apparently something called space rock, and the festival was taking place about two and a half hours southwest of Portland in the area surrounding the Yaquina Head Lighthouse. The reason I’d found the posters so compelling was the fact that they featured an image of a lighthouse that had been converted into a rocket.