American Purgatorio

by John Haskell

  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.

  The two worlds resist coming together, and yet at the same time, there’s only one world.

  Feather spoke first. She said, “I feel like there’s a wall around me.”

  “A wall of what?” I said.

  Our thighs and shoulders were touching, but we weren’t looking at each other. “It’s glass,” she said. “I can see what’s out there and hear things, but I can’t touch anything, or if I do I’ll shatter the glass.”

  “What would happen if you did?”

  “If I shattered the glass? The glass would break.”

  And that was all we said.

  We sat like that a while longer, not speaking. Then we heard some birds outside. And I’m not saying that sitting there we shattered any glass because that would be too dramatic a description of what happened. What happened was that somehow what we wanted and what we needed, for a moment, were the same thing.

  7.

  But then the moment was over and I was back to wanting something els
e. I’d already gone to another moment, thinking about the possibility of that upcoming moment. However much I tried to accept the moment as it was happening, to twist my mind into the fact of acceptance, I still wanted something else.

  By the time I leaned over and kissed Feather on her forehead she was almost asleep. I got dressed, left her in the room, and drove my car into town. I parked on a neighborhood street near a health food store, bought a carrot juice, and spent the rest of the morning sitting in my car, watching the street.

  With Anne, I thought, there was love. Not a passing desire, but something solid and true, and thinking this, I realized I hadn’t been looking for Anne, not very diligently, and I thought that I should. I thought I ought to make a systematic search of every street in Boulder. But when the morning light brought the people out and onto the street I got out of my car and joined them. I walked along the pedestrian mall, noticing the drains laid in the concrete, and the plants planted in good mulchy soil. I saw the sprinkler heads at the edge of the soil, and I sat on one of the benches, still holding my carrot juice. People were walking by, and I could see that they were noticing me, but mostly they didn’t make contact. They kept walking.

  I was sitting on this bench in the middle of this pedestrian mall, literally in the center of what would have been a street, but I barely felt that I was there. I was watching the people, who were either watching other people or looking at shoes in the shoe store windows. Right about then a girl sat on the other side of the bench. She had a garbage bag stuffed with laundry and she sat on the bench and we started talking. She had brown hair, tied back, and we talked about New York and deforestation and about hair. I asked her if “brunette” meant the same as brown. We talked about waitressing and copy editing, and at a certain point in the conversation she mentioned that her cat had died. To me it wasn’t a monumental problem, but I was thinking that it probably meant something to her, and when she said she needed someone to help bury her cat, I volunteered.

  We walked together, up the hill to a lagoon near an official-looking building, a museum or a library, and we stood in front of this lagoon. We were standing there, and I was holding the green plastic garbage bag containing, not her laundry, but her cat. I was about to throw it in the water and I said, “Do you have anything you want to say?” She was wearing a black silk dress from the 1940s, with lace, and a very sensual hat, and she said, “You’re the writer, you say something.” I didn’t even know the cat, and I said, “Well, what was the cat like?” And she said, “That cat had a mind of its own.” A mind of its own, I thought, and I said, “Here’s to its own mind,” and I swung the bag and threw it out into the lagoon. And we watched it. We watched it float. For about fifteen minutes we watched it float out there on the surface of the water and we wanted it to sink, we wanted it to go under the water, but it didn’t want that. It wanted to float right where it was. So we didn’t know. I found a stick or branch that was lying in the mud and with it, I reached out and pulled the bag back to shore. I untied the knot, folded down the sides, reached in and felt a paw down there. I took hold of the paw, pulled it up, and sure enough, it was a dead cat. I knew it was dead, not because it was stiff, but because it was so still. It was absolutely motionless. It was swaying slightly, but no air was passing in or out, so I kicked the garbage bag out of the way, swung the cat until it got enough momentum, and then threw it back into the lagoon. And we watched it. Again. We watched it keel over to one side and float there on the water. We wanted the cat to sink, but the cat had a mind of its own.

  V

  (Gula)

  1.

  I’m driving south, through the Colorado mountains, and although I’m looking for clues, I’m no longer certain that the clues I’m seeing are clues for me. For instance, I’m not sure if the turn signal of the car in front of me is sending me a message to turn or not. Snow-capped mountains are on my right and dry piñon hills are on my left, and when I stop for a barbecue sandwich in a motel town called Buena Vista, the lady in the imitation covered wagon tells me about a hot springs nearby that is supposed to “heal your bones,” and I interpret “bones” to mean something unseen inside a person’s skin.

  That sounds good, so I drive up the alluvial hill, along a winding stream, and find the wind chimes marking the entrance to the hot springs. I drive into the gravel parking lot and it looks like every other two-story motel but this one has water, a series of grotto-like bathing pools set in the hill. People are floating in them, and scattered around the grounds—above the gates and doorways—are hand-painted signs and Indian symbols, reminding visitors of the sanctity of the waters. PEACE IS INFECTIOUS, they say, and LISTEN TO THE EARTH.

  A pregnant white-haired girl at the check-in desk tells me that all the rooms in the lodge are taken, but a teepee, she says, is available. So I take my sleeping bag into this teepee, which has a dirt floor, a bunk bed, and a fire pit in the middle. I wash up in the bathroom in the lodge and for about a day my life consists of soaking in the pools of different degrees of heat, floating on foam pads, and at night, more floating, looking up at the stars.

  The employees are friendly and healthy, and they all have tattoos or piercings. I talk to a few of them, including the girl from the front desk, who lives in the lodge. She wears loose colorful clothing, and one morning, when the pools are quiet, she offers me a tarot reading. I’m not interested, I say, or ready yet, but after a morning soak I feel comfortable enough to sit with her on the thick red carpeting in the dimly lit recreation room.

  Her skin is like slightly tinted milk, her eyes soft, her voice sincere, and sitting on her heels she seems the perfect person to give me some direction, not any direction, but the one direction that will lead me to the reunion with my wife. That she believes she’s psychic seems reasonable because everybody seems to be psychic, and maybe everybody is. I tell her a little about myself, tell her my experience so far has been fine but now I want to move on. I say I want to act, and that I’m willing to do it, to see the world with a new view, and because of that new view, be different. I want to fill up the minutes I have with a broader, more inclusive perspective, and that’s what I’m doing now. I’ve never had an aura reading before, never sat cross-legged in a recreation room with a pregnant girl dressed like an Indian who is about to tell me my future.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Good,” she says. She decides we have to move to more private quarters, so we walk out to my teepee. She brings along a candle and some rugs, and she sits at the edge of the fire pit, lighting the candle and placing it in the ashes of the pit. At first I stay perched on the bottom bunk of the bed, watching her preparations, but since she’s brought along a rug for me, in the end we both sit, cross-legged, the candle burning between us.

  At first she’s accurate, talking about loss, and tribulation. She tells me I haven’t found what I’m looking for, and that to do that, I need a new direction, a direction. So what she’s saying, so far, is accurate. When I ask her a more specific question, a question related to Anne, she advises me to move on and forget the past. “The person you’re thinking about,” she says, “is gone.”

  Well at first I refuse to accept that. I ask her what person she’s talking about, but I know what person. And it’s not that I can’t get enough of Anne. She’s just there. My thoughts just naturally keep coming back to her, and the girl is suggesting I change my thoughts.

  I think about what that might be like. To change my thoughts. And why not? I can exercise a little self-control. When thoughts of Anne start coming to me, I can think of something else. I can notice my thoughts and then change them. I can think about the wind outside the teepee, or the goats I saw that afternoon climbing diagonally up the hillside.

  So that’s what I do. And it takes some concentration but it works. And because it works I let myself relax. And when I do, every thought that comes to me is a thought of Anne. The happiness I’ve had with her is a real thing, and every time I think of her, what I feel is the absence in my body
. It’s painful, but I can’t stop it. In the absence of Anne, I manufacture her, and it isn’t even an urge, it just happens. My determination to change my mind is overpowered by an urge to maintain the sadness, because that sadness is connected to Anne.

  The pregnant girl is telling me about the person she’s sensing (Anne), mentioning things I both admire and dislike, telling me that none of it matters because this person is part of the past. As she says this, thoughts, in the form of images, are coming to me. For instance, the time Anne tried to take my photograph. She wanted it to be perfect. She was having trouble with the focus and the light meter, and I saw her desire to succeed. I saw who she was—who she was and what she needed—and I loved who she was. I saw her ambition and her eagerness and her optimism, and I say optimism because optimism was the foundation of our love.

  She may or may not have been beautiful, but to me she was beautiful, and what was beautiful was her being. When we love people, what we see are the flaws that make them human. Anne’s flaws made our love seem superlative, and I counted myself lucky being in the light of that love. The light was missing now, but as I remembered her, it came back to me. Her uncompromising need for perfection, a trait that at best I put up with, now I longed for. I sat in the teepee, finding Anne in my mind, and liking her there, wondering if maybe I was liking her memory a little too much, but then thinking no, it would probably help. It would probably make it easier to find her if I had her in my mind.

  As I did in Cooperstown, New York.

  We had taken a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame, not that you were a baseball fan, but some friends of yours had given us a night at a bed-and-breakfast. There was a snowstorm outside and it was all amazing and wonderful and we never left the room. All that day was spent having sex, until we were numb from it, staying pretty much in or around the bed, eating and making love until, at a certain point, you were complete and I was also complete. We were both empty. And in that long breath of emptiness I felt, not the longing of wanting more, but the peace of wanting nothing.