American Purgatorio (15 page)

Although the tree was probably sending me loads of signals or vibrations, nothing was getting through. There was a skin between the tree and me, a membrane separating us, and my strategy was to tear at the fabric of the membrane. I knew the membrane was a mental construct, and that all I had to do was step through that mental construct. I knew my decision about the two trails was not about the trails, but about how I walked on whatever trail I took.

And maybe I would have acted on this knowledge, except I was distracted by the rain that was starting to fall. Also by the thunder and the lightning strikes that were moving their way across the eastern horizon. I didn't think about the danger of standing on a hillside in an electrical storm. I thought about the lightning, and the different kinds of thunder. Chief Joseph was named after a kind of thunder, and I thought about cracking thunder and brittle thunder and howling thunder and vibrating thunder—and also the rolling thunder that I imagined had been rolling for a very long time across the great midwestern plain to get to me. By counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder, and dividing that by some number, I might have estimated the lightning's distance. But instead, I stood there, a light rain falling against my face, waiting for the next burst of light, and then waiting for the sound of the light. I stayed on the slope as the rain stopped and the thunder moved away. I waited to see, when the clouds parted, if I could see any sign of the waning moon.

I didn't see any moon because the clouds never completely parted, but as I was waiting, that's when I remembered the gas station in New Jersey. I remembered the car, the dark Mercedes turning at the last moment, but not before hitting my car, my maroon car. Anne had said, “Get something to drink,” and I was coming out of the convenience store. She'd pulled up to the door and I'd stepped off the curb. I was opening the car door, turning my body to sit down into the car, when I saw the flash of darkness, and then I felt the collision. Not a big collision, but I felt it. I got out, looked at Anne who was looking straight ahead, arms on the wheel, in shock. The other car was still moving, and as it pulled out of the gas station onto the Palisades Parkway I ran after it and watched it merging into the larger road.

When I got back to the car Anne was shaking. She was nervously talking and I didn't notice the tears in her eyes because I was thinking about the damage and the people who caused the damage. I wanted to see what they'd done to my car. I wanted to see the dent they'd put in the side by the fender. The dark paint of the car had scraped away and replaced the old maroon color, and the wheel well was bent slightly. But that was about it. And I was reassured that that was it. I was alive at least, and Anne was alive.

5.

The next morning I went to the now-deserted house and sat on an overstuffed chair on the porch. The air was full of the sounds of animals and birds and trees swaying. Pine resin was warming in the sun. I didn't find any coffee to make so I drank water. I drove into town and spent the morning driving around, looking for station wagons. I was fairly methodical in my walking up and down the various streets, undaunted by my lack of success. The Mercury Tracer wasn't a popular car so not that many were made, and there weren't that many—none maroon—on the streets of Boulder.

Sometime in the late afternoon I wandered into the pedestrian mall. On a side street off the mall I discovered, in a large community building, a poetry class in progress. I was tired so I sat in a chair in the back of the room, listening to people talking about Beatniks, and about various poets. A man, with a beard like Allen Ginsberg's, standing beneath an uplifted basketball backboard, began talking about William Carlos Williams.

Apparently there's a poem by William Carlos Williams in which a man stops his car, lets his kids off at school, then drives to where the road ends, and from there walks down to the edge of the river. Even in the city there still is some mud, and there still are some flowers growing in the mud, and some weeds are still down there. He knows the names of the flowers by heart, and so for him to see these flowers growing in the mud takes him outside of what he normally calls himself. There are no windows down by the river, he doesn't look through any window, but there is a membrane there, the membrane between his ordinary world and another world. When he crouches down and touches the petal of a white flower with his fingertip, he enters that other world.

Then, like a door shutting, a sound, say a honking, wakes him, and he turns around, walks back to his car, and drives away from the river. But not away from the other world. He thinks he's left the other world but the other world has come with him, and in fact if he would look in the passenger seat he would see it.

But he's driving now.

Later, at night with his wife … No, before that. He's driving his black sedan. He's a doctor making house calls, and he's calling on the sick and dying. Everyone around him is dying and he watches them die, and he knows that death is the end of one world and the beginning of another world and he tries to see what that other world is. He thinks he's standing outside of that other world.

At night, in bed with his wife, with the comforter pulled to their necks, he lies on his back and sees in his mind all the people he's seen dying. Everyone he sees is dying. He looks at his wife and she's dying. He actually sees her skin losing its elasticity and folding into itself like a forgotten piece of fruit.

He knows that death is part of the other world, and he doesn't look at his own face because he knows a person can't live like that. A person can't live in the other world and still live in this one. You start to go crazy. He was starting to see death, or the world of death, and the world of death, which was supposed to stay on its own side, wasn't staying on its own side. It was coming over to his side, and he couldn't live like that.

When they tested the atomic bomb there were men who wanted to see what it looked like with the naked eye and they stood out in front of the shack and watched the explosion. But then they died, because you can't live like that. You have to block it out. Like sunscreen, you have to put up a shield or membrane that keeps that side or that thought or that vision from disrupting what's on this side.

So you try to block it out. But you can't block it out. William Carlos Williams couldn't block it out. He tried not to look at his wife but he dreamed about her. In his dream she was floating facedown on the top of the water. He wanted to wake up but he already was awake. He wanted to stop sweating so he said, “Okay. I don't deny it. It does exist.”

“What?” his wife said, waking up. “What's wrong, dear?”

“Nothing.”

“There
is
something.”

“No,” he said. “There's nothing.”

“Then why are you looking at me like that?”

If he lived in the other world he couldn't live in this one, and if he didn't live in the other world what was the point of this world? Either way you start to go crazy. He couldn't figure it out. He wanted to be at peace, apparently. Apparently he just wanted that. But this other world had a mind of its own. And it needed things. And the things it needed became the things he needed. But he didn't know what those things were. And if you would have asked him what they were he would've looked at you, but he wouldn't have known what to say.

6.

That evening I walked to the yurt where Linda and her friends had been staying. The cars were gone and inside the canvas structure there was just the plywood floor and the empty metal cots. I walked back to the main house, where the party from the night before seemed to have recommenced. I stood on the porch near a plastic tub filled with melted ice. People were walking in and out of the kitchen, standing in groups and playing with dogs. Someone was strumming a guitar.

I saw Feather standing at the edge of the grass, next to a metal support pole, swaying her head to the music. I walked to her, stood beside her, watching her head moving to the music, until she turned around. And when she did, I went from looking at her head to looking into her eyes. I thought that her eyes would turn into Anne's eyes, would speak to me in Anne's voice but looking into them, I couldn't hear what they were saying.

I'm holding her hand, ready to pull or be pulled, and as people press up against us, and against each other, her hand slips away. I tighten my grip but too late, the hand is gone, and she's gone, and there I am, left with nothing, with no one. And there's a moment of desperation that lasts until, a few moments later, she's back, standing between my hands, hip level, and when I look into
those
eyes, they're different eyes, they're Anne's eyes, and I begin dancing with these eyes. Not dancing, but we move together, pressed against each other.

I didn't drink any punch so I don't know the reason, but dancing like that, and even standing around, later, I was treating her as if she was Anne. We danced some more, got hot, and then we had tequila drinks with ice cubes shaped like the state of Texas. We sat on the steps of the porch, and whatever we talked about must have been preparatory because we stood up at the same time and walked into the house. I followed her into the kitchen, where we stood, holding red plastic cups, not knowing what to talk about, looking at each other, and when I looked at her, when she bent her head, for some reason I kissed her. Or she kissed me.

At any rate we began to kiss, first in the kitchen, and then we went to a little room down the hall. We did all the things we had to do to cross the membrane. I helped her remove her sweater, which got stuck around her wrists, which led to more kissing. I kissed her ears and her full lips. I kissed her neck and when she told me to kiss her stomach I kissed her intertwining arrows. And there must be a million kinds of desire, and we were exploring, through thin cotton material, one of them.

It's hard to experience desire while at the same time controlling it. We were trying to lose control, and when she took my head in her hands we thought we were on our way. We were kissing each other and holding each other and rolling on and off each other, slowly then vigorously, like two too solid worlds trying to come into each other. We were moving purposefully, into and against each other, but nothing seemed to be happening. Nothing was giving way. The thing that should've given way wasn't doing it. She was holding the top of the bed, her eyes falling back into her eyelids, and we were trying to follow our desires, such as we understood them, and we could tell we were close to something, but we weren't breaking through. I with my tongue, and she with her whole damp body, were struggling against some force inside that body, and inside mine, stubbornly blocking access to something we wanted.

And what we wanted wasn't bad. But what we needed was something else. I needed to be with Anne and she needed … I don't know what she needed but because we wanted a certain experience, and because we felt we were close, we kept working, on and on, and we were feeling sensations, but they were less intense. We felt them, but less so, and then less so, until pretty soon we weren't even doing what we had been doing anymore. We were doing something else. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't what we needed.

We thought maybe we needed to sleep. We were too tired, we thought, or too wide awake, we thought, and maybe we just wanted to go to sleep. We kissed each other, tenderly, like workers coming out of a mine, and then we tried to go to sleep. We thought maybe that was what we needed.

Brigitte Bardot is basically forgotten now, and even in her prime she was notable less for the films she acted in than for the flamboyant sexuality she exhibited in her life. She was, in her time, the symbol of sex, and because she had so much desire, she was also a symbol of that. And why not? Desire had been planted in her—for attention, affection, admiration—and she acknowledged all that and tried to fulfill it, which is why she was famous.

And while those desires were fulfilled, the need she had behind those desires was still there, immanent in the compulsion she felt to keep repeating. Desire exists for itself, in its own delirious state of dissatisfaction. Which is why rich people never have enough money. It's why Brigitte Bardot achieved her reputation, but not the cessation of her desire.

She saw a man and she experienced a feeling that she called desire. That man would soon become her lover. And every time she did this, after a certain time had passed, the desire for that particular person waned. The desire itself was there, but the object of the desire shifted. It seemed to disappear, but when she saw another man, there it was. She felt it again, and she spent years of her life trying to fulfill that feeling.

But the feeling she had existed in a world she was unfamiliar with. She was fulfilling the thing she thought she wanted, but the necessary thing existed in another world.

Feather and I, in our separate worlds, were trying, unsuccessfully, to sleep. We tried to sleep but after a while we realized we weren't sleepy. I certainly wasn't. And thank god for sexual desire because, although she wasn't moving much, everything she did, every in-breath and out-breath, I was aware of. I brushed her hair away and kissed her shoulder, then her back and the soft hairs on the small of her back down to her buttocks, and when she rolled over I kept kissing, and when she tossed her head back and cried out in what's normally called ecstasy, we thought we'd done it.

And we had. We had done it. We felt we'd done the work. But like Brigitte Bardot every time she temporarily eased her desire, we hadn't broken through. We were flushed, our faces were, but we were not completely satisfied. Whatever the necessary thing was, we weren't doing it.

So we stopped. We fell back on the small bed, staring up into the ceiling and feeling the presence of a world we weren't part of.

Then, as if on cue, we both sat up. We sat on the edge of the bed. It was chilly so we covered ourselves with the blanket. We huddled together like that for a long time, looking down at the rug on the floor, and no one said a word.