American Purgatorio

by John Haskell

  I spread Anne’s map across the steering wheel, hoping to find on the folded piece of paper something that would synchronize the world on the map with the world outside the windshield. Although the yellow line on the map had a wide generalized swath, it was pretty clearly following the major highways. But what if she decided (or someone decided for her) to take a different road? There were hundreds of thousands of miles of road and Anne might be on any one of them. To follow the right path, you have to know what the right path is, and to know what the right path is there can’t be a lot of distractions, and by that I mean emotional distractions that make the right path and some alternative path indistinguishable. There’s always some path, and I was on my path, but I had the growing suspicion that I’d veered off the right path onto another path, a path that was parallel to Anne but didn’t intersect with her.

  I might easily have called it an impossible situation, but I refused to do that. I wouldn’t let that thought, or anything resembling that thought, get even close to consciousness. I had to be clear, had to keep my mind like a radar. I had to believe, and I did. That I would find her.

  I got back on the highway and drove. And as I drove, and as the hours went by, even the bugs crashing against the windshield seemed to confirm my fear that the world was conspiring, not against me exactly, but it wasn’t with me, or I wasn’t with it, and whatever conspiracy existed, I seemed unable to join. All I could do was follow my instincts, such as they were, hoping for a flash of inspiration. And after a while, in lieu of that flash, or anything resembling that flash, in an effort to do something other than not doing anything, I randomly chose an exit. I drove down a winding road which turned into a winding street that eventually led into a town.

  Morgantown, West Virginia, was a once-thriving industrial town on a river, and it was still on the river, and now it had a university. I parked by a parking meter on a fairly lively street not far from the university and I put my head out the window. I was hoping to get some clue from the air, or some particles blowing in the air, but it’s hard to smell any specific odor, let alone find meaning in that odor, when your mind is filled with the realization that you have basically no idea what you’re doing. Which is how despair originates (from the Latin, desperare, meaning without hope) and what I did to forestall that despair was to imagine Anne.

  The only problem was, every thought I had of her reminded me that she was gone. If I thought about her arms, say, reaching toward her bedside clock, my next thought was a feeling of sadness that those same arms weren’t with me. I kept thinking of her, then feeling her absence, around and around in a circle of mounting frustration. I got out of the car, but even then, standing on the stable concrete sidewalk, I was still going in circles. And thank god for anger, because even though I wasn’t aware of feeling it, it was acting as a stimulant. Without it I might have given up. I might have let the hopelessness of the situation defeat me. My whole inability to locate Anne, which might have led to desperare, instead had the opposite effect. It steeled my resolve and convinced me that my belief was the right belief, that I would be able to transform the world.

  I was standing next to a bulb-headed parking meter, following my imagination around and around, trying to focus on Anne, and that’s when I saw her walking along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

  She looked like Anne. And not only did she look like Anne, with her short dark hair, but she walked like Anne. And not just a little either. I recognized, when she stood, the way she was standing. She was standing across the street, on the sunny side of the street, looking in the window of a store. I crossed the street, walking toward her, and when I got to her she seemed to be looking at the images of mannequins in bathing suits inside the store window. But she must’ve been looking at her own reflection on the surface of the window, and she must have seen my reflection, because when I got to about an arm’s length from the back of her black hair she turned around.

  “You’re not Anne,” I blurted out.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were someone else.” She looked about as close as you could look to Anne without actually being Anne, and because there wasn’t much to say, I smiled. Or tried to. And she tried to smile, possibly, but seemed unable to. So she swallowed. Then I swallowed. And there was nothing to be afraid of, really, but for some reason I started talking, either because she looked like Anne, or because I thought she looked like Anne, or because I needed a sense of protection. I felt that by talking I had some protection, and if I kept talking the thing that was protecting me would stay in place.

  “You really look like this other person,” I said.

  I stood there in front of the window display, talking, not about any specific subject, just talking, as if there was something I was saying, as if by saying anything, anything could be said, because even if that were so, even if by standing and, in a normal tone of voice … not that I didn’t feel strongly about what I was saying, because I did, but what I was saying … I forgot what I was saying. But I kept going on because my heart was pounding, that’s the expression, pounding. Inside my chest. I wanted to be calm, to be like the sea, but I wasn’t. I was shivering. I wanted to say some comprehensible words but the words were frozen in my frozen mouth, and my mind, that was also frozen, literally, unable to think, even to the next moment. She was standing there perfectly still, not speaking, head slightly tilted, watching my lips moving and moving until, after a while, I ran out of words. Or the words ran out of meaning. And my stomach. I could feel my stomach telling me something. My stomach was telling me that something was not quite right.

  This person in front of me wasn’t who I wanted her to be.

  I wanted to find Anne, or the scent of Anne, hidden somewhere in or on this person. But there wasn’t any Anne. I could feel the old despair imploding inside me, and I wanted a glass of water. But there wasn’t any water.

  I stepped closer.

  The first principle of transformation is to move so gradually that nothing seems to happen until—without having created any resistance—it’s already happened. And that’s what I did. I gradually moved closer until I was close enough to see the hairs on her face. I could see the tension in the muscles of her cheeks, and her lips which were taut, and the skin of her face looked as if it covered the face of a skull.

  The second principle of transformation is to do the thing you’re compelled to do, and I felt compelled to do something, so I reached out. I didn’t think about it, but I saw myself as I reached out my hand, slowly, and touched this person, lightly, just below the cheek.

  I expected the muscles of her face to go limp and relaxed, and her lips and the muscles around her lips to become full and relaxed, and her shoulders to relax. But that didn’t happen.

  She just looked at me. And then she walked away.

  2.

  I wasn’t keeping track of the mileage because the mileage didn’t matter. What mattered to me were the clues, and so I concentrated my intuition, unsuccessfully, on looking for clues. And lack of success is exhausting, and after a day without success, my intuition needed some rest, so I pulled off the road into the town of Charleston, West Virginia. It was the state capital, a town with brick buildings and people crossing streets.

  I parked by a newsstand, bought a New York Times, and got some change. I needed the quarters because, even without my cell phone, I was calling my house at regular intervals. I found a pay phone in front of a diner and listened to the ringing, half hoping that what I knew was happening, wasn’t happening. That Anne would pick up. I was wishing this unnecessary nightmare would just stop. But it didn’t. I got the same answer I always got. Silence. No Anne. No clue. And I wanted to smash the receiver into the stupid box that seemed, at the moment, to be the cause of my frustration.

  Instead I called Anne’s mother’s house. When I did I could tell from the tone of the voice on the answering machine that the family was upset. It was a new message, with a new ending,
a stoic “We’re all right.” And I thought, Why would they say that they’re all right unless they weren’t all right? Unless Anne hadn’t told them where she was going. I also called some mutual friends and listened to their recorded voices for a sign that Anne had appeared. She hadn’t. I checked the obituary section of the newspaper, not that I would have believed anything anyway. There were a million different versions of the truth, and I wanted my own particular version.

  In an effort to facilitate the creation of that version, I crossed the street to the plain glass windows of a barber college. Not a barber university, but a college, for haircutting, and I opened the glass door and a long row of barber chairs was on the left, a long mirror on the right, or vice versa. Anyway, a number of young men and old men were standing by the chairs. As I entered, a woman at a metal desk asked me what I wanted, meaning what kind of cut, and also if I wanted a shave. Well, I thought I probably did need a haircut, but I usually cut my own hair, and usually I shaved myself as well, but I told the woman that I wanted a shave. I paid the two dollars and she handed me a stub and I went to chair number three and sat. A soft, round-headed man elegantly unfurled a white sheet, cascaded it over my chest, and as I leaned back into the chair, for the first time since I’d left New York I let myself begin to relax.

  There may have been music playing but what I remember were the cushions of the chair and the minty breath of the man, his voice surrounding me, talking about something, soothing and low, and his hands, warm and smooth, touching my cheek and neck, relaxing the tightened muscles, and I could have slept, but it was better than sleeping. And then the towel. A hot white towel was placed delicately over my face, and in the darkness I could see nothing, and I wanted to see nothing and think nothing, just nothing. No me, no Anne, no fear, sadness … nothing. I imagined my whiskers, such as they were, softening, and the man’s voice asking me some questions, and for me there was only one question. I told the man what I was doing. I told him about my wife. I said she’d run away. I talked about my dream of finding her. Under the white sheet I told him my dream and incubated the dream, and his voice seemed to moan or hum or drawl understandingly.

  Then the warm towel was pulled from my face, and I realized that the man who’d covered me with the towel was no longer there, that he’d been replaced by a younger man, not a younger version of the original barber, but by a different barber entirely. The sweet eucalyptus smell was the same, but I knew by his touch that a switch had occurred. The hands, when they touched my face, didn’t soothe and caress but merely applied whatever substance was meant to be applied, in this case, shaving cream, and I wouldn’t say it didn’t feel good, but not in the way I’d felt before. This new man, or young man, was doing his job, but without passion, and as I sat there I wasn’t sure which of the two barbers I’d told my story to.

  So I said to the new barber standing behind me, “What do you think?”

  He said something about the work at hand, something like “Easy does it,” or “We’ll have you ready in no time,” something that an experienced man might say but that he was saying in order to seem experienced, and yet because he wasn’t experienced and hadn’t lived enough to be experienced, it wasn’t right. And I noticed then that I was starting to get a little annoyed at this younger barber.

  “I asked you what you thought,” I said.

  And as I sat in the still soft cushions the young man told me what he thought. He said he thought I was joking. He thought it must be a joke, he said, “a hopeless joke,” to look for someone in the whole expanse of the whole entire country. And whether or not he intended me to hear the disdain in his voice, or feel the humiliation, it didn’t really matter. Gradually the comfortable cushions became not so comfortable, and the hot lather not so soothing, and the voice, which had never been that mellifluous, became grating and sour and I wanted to get up. I felt an impulse to move, but because by this time the barber had unsheathed the straight-edged tool of his trade—his razor—and was scraping it across my skin, I couldn’t move. And the fact that I couldn’t move made the impulse to do so more pronounced.

  Although the agitation I felt was centered in my chest, the thing I was hating was this barber. As the straight-edged razor slid or scraped its way across my neck I felt betrayed. I was mad at the first barber for leaving me with this guy because he was touching my face. And I hated it. I sat perfectly still on the outside, but inside I was churning. All I could think of was moving and the necessity of moving, but because of the razor next to my neck I couldn’t.

  In thinking about moving, however, I was preparing myself for the prophecy that would ultimately fulfill itself. Sitting in the chair, the sheet spread over my chest and shoulders, I’d planted the seed of moving, and although I thought I had it under control, before I knew what I was doing, that’s when my face was cut. Just barely. Not the barber’s fault. He wasn’t being a bad barber. I just happened to twitch, slightly, and the uniform surface across which the blade had been cutting was suddenly not uniform. It changed direction, or I changed direction. And although it was more of a nick than a cut it didn’t matter. It wasn’t what the barber had done, it was what he had said. An impossibility, he’d said. Hopeless, he’d said, referring to my attempt to find Anne. He was wrong, but he’d said it.

  And when he whisked away the white sheet, smiled politely, and indicated that I should rise, I wasn’t ready to rise. There’s something called “dealing with anger,” and yes, I’d been angry plenty of times, but I wasn’t especially skilled at dealing with the feeling. It always seemed a little dangerous. But it was preferable to the fear that he might be right. And so I was mad, and I knew I was mad because, although I still felt obligated to tip this guy, when I stood up from his chair and reached into my pocket I started feeling for something insignificant, some coin with which I would show him my displeasure. But since I’d used all my coins for the telephone, I pulled out instead a wad of folded dollar bills, and the bill on the outside had writing, in blue ink, “I Victor.” This was the bill I handed to the barber, not thanking him, just handing it, hoping he would understand what he’d done, hoping he would feel ashamed and penitent, but of course instead of looking at the bill, he just took it, stuck it in his pocket and turned to his waiting chair.

  3.

  It was easy enough to dismiss the opinion of a barber by classifying him as an idiot. He might have been an idiot or he might have been a savant, it didn’t matter because what he’d said had been untenable. I knew where Anne was going, and the idea that I should give up hope of finding her was … I wouldn’t even say the words, even in my head. Negative thoughts would drain my confidence, and I needed my confidence, and was trying to stop any leak of any confidence I had. And yet I could feel it ebbing away. Replaced by doubt. And doubt wasn’t good. I wanted to be honest and admit the complexity of what was happening, but I refused to doubt my project.

  I was determined not to succumb. And what enabled me not to succumb was anger. Until now the anger had been camouflaged by other emotions but now it was beginning to show itself, creeping out from the shadows and attaching itself to the objects of my world.

  My car, for instance.

  I liked the car and I trusted the car, but it wasn’t completely perfect. First of all, it wasn’t made for someone more than six feet tall. Even with the seat in a semireclining position my head rubbed up against the brushed-velvet roof. And because I was constantly in a semireclining position, my neck was aching from the strain of holding up my head. Also the radio reception was almost nonexistent, and although I’d brought along a few tapes, the tape player didn’t seem to work anymore. Also, the engine sounded like the keening of an agonized child. I knew these were minor inconveniences, outweighed by the usefulness of the car and my feeling of partnership with the car, but still I felt betrayed.

  And then the car didn’t start.

  I was standing on a commercial street, with decorations on the light poles, looking into the open hood of the Pulsar, jiggling
the wires connecting the battery to the rest of the engine, hoping something would happen. And when nothing did I kept trying, listening to the sound it made as it almost started but didn’t. I tried to will it to start. I knew where the spark plugs were and pushed them deeper into their sockets. I felt the belts and looked for what they call the starter, assuming the problem was related to that. I did everything a nonmechanic might think to do. I hit various parts of the engine with a screwdriver, and then I tried the car again, hoping that my luck or my desire or my desperation would somehow change what was happening. And when it didn’t I wanted to hit the car, but since I needed the car, the only thing I could think of hitting was myself. I imagined placing the tip of a large gun next to my temple and blowing a hole through my head.