Riverine (29 page)

In the final scene of
Badlands
, Kit and Holly fly in an airplane, handcuffed, above the clouds. We get only a summary of the aftermath: the details of Kit’s sentence, and a report of whom Holly married instead.

I spread out my fingers as he held my wrist in place. “What else?”

He focused again as I glanced at the clock. One hour left. We sipped enough pop to keep our mouths wet but not enough to make us have to pee. We would sit there until we were forced to part.

“It picks up where it started from. The first line comes back to stay.” His finger found its way to the line’s farthest point, rounding the side of my hand. “What’s down here?” he asked of the fleshy mess of lines there.

This was how we would talk about plenty and fortitude. This was how we would count the babies we would have had. One, two, three hashes across my right ring finger. A map of our garden in bloom between thumb and forefinger. This horizontal stroke, a clothesline like the one his mother used to have, where I would hang his jeans to dry on Saturday mornings. Everything had a different meaning now. Everything was dust. Everything was written on our hands.

“The parallel universe is there,” I said. Look back and you’ll see another future.

“Back to Stardust.”

When I started to cry, he risked everything—his visits, his good behavior, going back to solitary, being cuffed right there in front of me, who knows what all—to reach across the table to touch my face. He cupped my cheek for a moment and wiped away the tear that crested my cheek with his thumb, then put it to his mouth. We sat there, staring at each other, waiting for the guards to remove us. And though they had watched him dare to touch me, they did nothing.

. . .

I read that a person sucked into a black hole would split in two—one self falling forever into nothing, the other a collapsed star. I left my falling self with Corey and watched it haunt the cornfields from the sky as I was leaving. A reverse explosion was alive inside my lungs. In the diorama of my airplane window, I watched the shadow of a cloud eclipse the flat, rural squares where he was incarcerated. From the sky, it wasn’t that far from where we were born. I looked down and wondered whether he was sleeping, crying, daydreaming. Two people divide more readily than one does. I pressed my finger against the glass so I didn’t have to witness myself leaving him behind.

No one understands black holes, those metaphors for anything—space junk incinerators, world generators, secret keepers of galaxies. There is something freeing about leaving the ground in an airplane, something that thwarts every impossibility on land. “The view never gets old,” Mike always says of flying. Sometimes I look at his many airspace charts, which, unlike maps of the land, are constantly changing and becoming outdated. Maps of airspace are gibberish to me, and I find that comforting. Flight ought to remain foreign, not quite real. Like magic. When I was almost asleep in the clouds, I remembered that everything on Earth is made of Stardust. Me, the plane. The seven-dollar glass of wine. It’s what Corey would say to me in every letter—from stars to stars again. His own early life until his death. That’s how long he would remember me, how long he would love me. How long he would be in prison.

I
n 1959, Brion Gysin developed a writing method called cut-ups after accidentally cutting through layers of newspaper. When he positioned his own writing next to the newspaper, he discovered that together the cuttings created interesting combinations of words and image. He then intentionally cut up various texts and arranged them at random. Gysin taught William S. Burroughs the method and together they developed it further at the Beat Hotel in Paris. Burroughs claimed that all writing was cut-ups. “A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation,” he says. A life, a marriage, can take the same shape.

When I returned home to Vermont, which was beginning to feel like my real home even if it lacked the more familiar landscape and grit of the Midwest, I tried to relay to Mike details of my visit to see Corey in prison: “It was emotional but natural. I can’t explain.”

I didn’t mention that I’d been so nervous that my hands shook when I walked through the metal detector. Or that before walking down the corridor of barbed-wire fencing to get to the visiting area, I’d slipped on the wet floor and fallen. I described the food instead. “They had Tony’s pizza in the vending machine. Pepperoni. I forgot how much I like junk food.”

“How long were you there?”

“Hours.” Forever. Not long enough. Not at all, compared with sixteen years, or time itself.

Mike just looked at me. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I don’t know.” My cheeks still hurt from having laughed so much during the visit. My eyes burned from crying afterward. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over this.” But I didn’t know what to do with that information. “I can’t lose him again. That’s all I know.” But what did that mean? How would a close relationship with a prisoner housed fifteen hundred miles away fit into my life?

“I climbed a tree while you were gone,” Mike said over the children’s heads. “Hurt my back.”

I’d never known him to do such a thing—spontaneous and blatantly youthful. To do something I would do. “Are you trying to get my attention?” I asked. Mike was almost forty. In eight years together, I’d never seen him do anything like that.

“I just wanted to climb a tree.”

I understood that. But I also knew he was afraid of heights. Maybe we were both facing our fears.

The prison was a separate world from home, from anywhere, and I was a different person in it. A different person after it. Returning to my condo in Vermont was a process of acclimation. It felt too large, full of possessions I didn’t really need. I didn’t know what all I would feel after seeing Corey again. Some reactions were expected, but others surprised me. It was reassuring that he was still, in part, the person I remembered. I hadn’t fabricated memories of him—we
had
shared important experiences together. He had been good to me. He had not forgotten me as I had not forgotten him. But although he was so readily someone I wanted in my life, there was no changing the circumstances. I wasn’t used to that kind of futility. In life, when I wanted something to change, I took action. I couldn’t think up an out for him using smarts; no amount of education would help me help him. I had to keep reminding myself of why he was there. When I was overcome with the lack of him, I subverted my inclination toward sentimentality by repeating his sentence to myself: life, no parole. Felony murder. These were grave realities and justice was still paramount.

Instead of a levelheaded outpouring from that thought, I imagined his silhouette filling up my kitchen door frame or relaxing on my couch. I carried his ghost with me as if it were a worn doll, positioning him among the furniture of my life, willing him into existence all around me. My intense, decades-long physical attraction to Corey was powerful and singular. I woke in dreams of him, half-real moments of consciousness. I stayed up late watching prison-related television and documentaries:
Russia’s Toughest Prisons
, MSNBC’s
Lockup, Orange Is the New Black
. I set up a Google alert for Corey’s facility. There had been two murders there in the past year—fatal stabbings. “I’m always careful,” he had promised. “I avoid conflict as much as I can.” But I knew that when he’d been stabbed—nearly killed ten years earlier—he hadn’t told his mother because he didn’t want her to worry.

In the months after our visit, I talked about Corey to near strangers, peddling the photo of us from our visit to anyone who would look at it, as if sharing it with the right person might present a magical key—one that would bring him home or make sense of it all. When I talked about Corey to Mike, it was to share something Corey had told me that added to whatever conversation we were having. By bringing him into the conversation even when he wasn’t there, I was able to meld the two worlds together, which made it more bearable for me. It was a surprise to Mike to learn that they were similar in some ways. They would both tell me the same things about the same TV shows, for example. Or if I was sick, they would both remind me that my stubbornness had never served me well and insist that I see a doctor. Corey was comforted by the fact that Mike was the kind of husband Corey never got to be. Mike was glad that through Corey I had made peace with the past. They shared the same opinion about me: I could be a real handful, but I was worth the effort in the end. I hoped they were right.

Essays often veer away from their centers. A braided essay can read like the inside of a mind: digressions and associations crop up as they naturally occur in the writer’s thoughts. Wandering away from the subject isn’t a changing of the subject per se, but a chance for readers to compare notes with their own ideas. It’s an invitation to readers to test what they have read against their own experience. It is in this associative space that the text can transform readers. In this space, readers become more than what they were before they began reading. It is an opportunity for expansion, for degrees of change.

Author and teacher Judith Kitchen advised writers to court these digressions: “Let your conversation get away from you. Let a new story take over…. Something may happen along the way, something to alert you to its relevance.” The writer, she said, must trust herself to identify the connective tissue within the digression.

I embrace this form, this thinking. I embrace complication, trusting that the meaning will emerge with time. I would argue that this advice is not just for writers. Digressions span the life cycle of any marriage, whose shape, in my experience, resembles that of the braided essay. However, the marital adage of “growing together to stay together” implies parallelism. Two people, side by side, taking even steps along an unknowable path without divergence.

A math lesson: without the aid of technical instruments, it is impossible to construct parallel lines that do not collide at some point in the future or incrementally veer away from one another.

Perhaps a better metaphor for marriage is the patchwork quilt: the ability to add on in all directions. As individuals, people are always changing, attaching new material. But does a traditional American marriage accommodate such change? I read once that people’s personalities are much more varied and inconsistent than they tend to admit. This is because our culture dictates that we must be consistent in order to be perceived as sane. In order to be taken seriously, we perform only certain aspects of the selves we “live” inside our heads. Most of us, then, are much more dynamic internally than we appear outwardly.

Some failed marriages illustrate this phenomenon. Often I’ll hear that people divorced because they “didn’t know each other” anymore. They grew into different people who were no longer compatible. I don’t think this is an indication of a mismatched couple, but rather a failure of the expectations of marriage. In a traditional sense, marriage isn’t designed to accommodate the natural change a person experiences in a lifetime. It isn’t designed for the partners to court separate digressions, when the meaning and duration of the digressions cannot be known. It isn’t designed to embrace the romance of mystery. For those of us who thrive on the romance of mystery, on courting digressions, this is problematic. Keeping up with the minutiae of a partner’s digressions, let alone one’s own personal changes, is complicated work.

Mike has been an excellent life partner. He made me a mother. He is an ideal companion, steady and grounded where I am unpredictable and haphazard. He is selfless: he paid for my failed attempt at law school, a digression I followed to an expensive halt. The list goes on. But he can’t provide everything for a person who is always changing. Someday he very well may become a person who does not want to do so. No one person can provide everything to another person, not even a parent to a child. No one should have to, or be expected to. I welcome the digression that Corey offers in my life, the comfort I associate with him. With Mike, I have a solid foundation, a home, two children, a like-minded companion. With Corey, I have a long history and an intimacy that transcends passion and experience. My empathy for him shaped my life; we’re linked in ways neither of us can fully explain. Mike has never known me the way that Corey does, but Corey has never seen me as a mother. He hasn’t shared a home or a family with me or been with me through illnesses, deaths, or financial despair. The two people have their own separate squares on the patch quilt of my life.

Love seemed a complicated emotional action for Burroughs, as well. In a documentary about his life,
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
, speculation and firsthand accounts of his romantic relationships cut into the story almost at random. He had a kind of sweet nesting relationship with a female friend, trading recipes with her for years. Patti Smith sang him lullabies. For a time, he slept with professional sex workers almost exclusively. Intellectual stimulation came from Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat poets. Despite being gay, a label he rejected on principle, he married Joan Vollmer and with her had two children. He seemed to have had a lifelong romance with guns, while heroin occupied the role of the abusive boyfriend that he kept going back to. I think that perhaps Burroughs’s entire life was a series of digressions. His chosen life path generated conflict in the white space surrounding each dip away from the central concern of living. I prefer my own relationships the same way, though with fewer negative consequences—with digressions, meanderings that connect us to other people and things or lead us to a more precise truth about ourselves. A life that has no map.

As my life unmaps itself, Corey’s continues to stagnate. Indiana prisons have been privatized in recent years under the state’s overwhelmingly Republican legislature, and because of this, new opportunities were available for prisoners while others ceased to exist. The college classes that were once offered, which Corey had been enrolled in, were no longer offered unless inmates were training to become clergy. An unlikely fit for a science-oriented atheist/spiritualist such as Corey. Rehabilitation services had dwindled. Though he no longer needed substance abuse counseling, Corey did wish he had someone to talk to about his life, the unanswered questions he had about the course of his past actions, and resisting his present temptations—continuing a life of crime in prison, the path of least resistance. (
Am I a monster?
he wrote me once.
Or was I
, at least in part,
a product of my childhood?
) He said the counselors who were available couldn’t necessarily be trusted—talking to the wrong person could have negative consequences. It was safer to keep to yourself, protect your truths. If you cared about something, you were better off not letting anyone know so it couldn’t be used against you or taken away. Mostly, he said, navigating the social dynamics of prison was the hard part. The rest was easy—just follow the routine. One day after another, like having a job you hate. Play the game, pass the time, collect the paycheck. Only in his case it was play the game, pass the time, pay your moral debt.