American Purgatorio

by John Haskell

  It seemed strange to me that whenever I thought of Anne I automatically felt despair. And the strange thing was, I felt the most despair when I thought of our happiest moments. You’d think that the happy moments would have engendered pleasant feelings, but instead I felt almost dead.

  When I say “almost dead” I mean that, although I’d rid myself of some possessions, I needed to get rid of more, needed to rid myself of the habit of being what I was. Since I knew about a hypnotist who lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and since I was now in Phoenix, Arizona, I went to see this hypnotist. I didn’t have an appointment, I just went to the man’s house. I found the address in the telephone book and walked past the cacti in his front yard and stood at his screen door, listening. I could hear a television show going on inside. It was Bewitched, a show in which Darrin, the husband, wants Samantha, the witch, his wife, to renounce her magical abilities. She doesn’t totally understand why he would want her to keep these powers, which are completely natural to her, in check. But she was willing to try, willing to accommodate him, and she was trying. Then a commercial came on and I was thinking I should knock on the door because the man would know, by the sounds of the birds, or the absence of the sounds of the birds, or some sense perception I wasn’t privy to, that I was standing on the other side of the screen.

  So I knocked, and the man called out for me to come in. He was sitting in a wheelchair and I squatted beside him and we started talking. He was what I would have called a kindly old man, and he asked me what I wanted. I didn’t tell him about Anne, but I told him I wanted some direction. “There are a lot of directions,” he said. “But if you’re standing on the North Pole there’s only one.” He showed me his collection of carved animals and said that I wasn’t an Indian. “But,” he said, “if you want to be hypnotized, come back in an hour.”

  So I went back in an hour, not to his house, but next door, to his small office. He greeted me and indicated that I should sit in a comfortable chair facing the window. He wheeled his wheelchair opposite me so that as I looked out, the window framed his head, and while he was talking he was asking me what I wanted him to talk about. I was going to tell him that I wanted him to talk about the unconscious part of my mind. I was going to tell him that I thought my unconscious mind might have something to tell me. I was going to tell him that I was afraid of the unconscious mind, afraid of the loss of consciousness, but he kept talking.

  He was talking about something, very slowly, saying things that I was listening to, and hearing, and watching. The man’s head was shifting positions in front of the window and I began feeling my own head, not shifting, but wondering, was I moving my head becauses the man was, or was the man moving because I was. The window also seemed to be moving, or vibrating, and I was thinking about the silhouette of the man’s head touching the edges of the window, and also about the time, years ago, at a place called The Chuck Wagon.

  I’d been with Anne, on a vacation. We’d gone to a theater or club above a restaurant called The Chuck Wagon, where a hypnotist named Dr. Dean put on a kind of show, an exhibition of hypnotic phenomena. Because I wanted to experience hypnosis, when Dr. Dean asked for volunteers, I went up on the stage with all the other people, sat in a chair in a row and I tried to see Anne in the audience, but it was dark and the lights were shining in my eyes. Dr. Dean began talking, not to the volunteers, but to the audience. He was facing the volunteers, moving his arms up and down, in his black suit, moving his arms and telling the audience what the people on stage were supposed to do, which was to breathe, which they all did. The people on stage began dropping off. He was telling them to go to sleep. And people were doing it. But I wasn’t doing it. I wanted to. Some part of me wanted to drop right off with the rest of them, to believe that I could, but it wasn’t happening. But I wanted it to happen. So what I did was fake it. I was good at pretending and so I pretended it happened. I relaxed my head like the man in front of me and let it fall to my chest. But because I wasn’t really sleeping I had to keep watching the man in front of me to see if I was doing whatever it was they were all doing, to see if I was doing it right. It was like looking in a mirror. I could see myself only when I was looking at myself. The minute I turned away …

  Dr. Dean is saying, “Go down, down, all the way down.” And that’s what I am trying to do. I’m trying to do that but there’s a gulf between wanting and doing, and on one side are the cliffs of wanting and on the other side are the cliffs of doing, and I’m in the middle, I’m the river, except I’m not flowing, I’m just sitting there. I’m not bridging that gulf. And Dr. Dean knows that. He begins pointing to some of the volunteers, telling them to go back to their seats. “You and you and you.” And then he points to me. He pauses. “You almost made it.”

  Then I heard the old man saying, “Open your eyes.”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. “They’re already open,” I tell him.

  “Of course they are,” he says. “Any fool can see that.” He wheels his wheelchair over to the door and for some reason I think this is very funny. I can feel a huge grin forming on my face. And the man is smiling too, we’re both smiling, and it’s very funny. But I don’t know what it is. I know I’m smiling but I don’t know why. I try to think, Why am I smiling?

  The man looks up from his wheelchair. “It’s easy to move your mouth in a certain way. It’s easy to do many things.” He looks toward the door, and still smiling, I stand up, I thank the man, and then I walk out the door.

  VI

  (Acedia)

  1.

  The gas station in New Jersey. There we were. We’d been talking, happy and convivial. Anne was getting gas and I’d gone into the store to get some snacks for the trip. As I came out of the store she was waiting at the entrance, and I was just about to open the door of the car when that other car … I didn’t see it but I could hear the dark car, and the brakes of the dark car, as it collided with our little station wagon. Anne had parked, not in the road, because there wasn’t an actual road, but on the asphalt, and she was waiting, the car running, and I was just opening the door, just starting to get into the car, and that’s when I heard the brakes, looked up, and for a split second I saw the outline of darkness that was that other car colliding with our car, with the driver’s side of our car. I was all right but Anne was knocked forward into the window and the steering column and she wasn’t speaking. She was unconscious. The dark car sped off and I tried to see the license plates but I was more concerned with Anne. I went to her, held her head in my hands, and something was wrong. She was hurt, I told someone to call an ambulance. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to slap her and there was no doctor. I asked for a doctor but there were just the gas station attendants and they didn’t know anything. No one knew anything and I didn’t either. Was she dying? I didn’t know. She was breathing, and I could feel a pulse, but I couldn’t wake her up. When finally the ambulance came I was yelling at them, why it took so long, and they let me ride in the back, on a bench, and there was another man, a medic of some sort, and he’d made a bag of liquid that he attached to a tube that went into her arm. I wanted to look at her and see her but this man put a mask over her face, to help her breathe or make her breathe, and there were bumps on the road and the siren was going but I didn’t hear it. The man didn’t talk and I didn’t talk, not to him. I told Anne to be all right, to feel fine, and her eyes were closed except for a brief flash. She opened them, looked up, and I was there so she saw me. And then she didn’t. And we got to the hospital and they slid her out and wheeled her into the emergency part of the hospital and I was left outside a door. They took her through this door and I waited to see her. I wanted to be with her. I wanted to see her but I never did. Not alive. That brief look was all I got. And then she was dead. After that my Anne was dead.

  2.

  So here I am. So okay. Man of adjustment and all that. So what do I do? There’s nothing I can do.

  I look around.

  I happen to be
standing by a light pole, bleached by the sun, in a town (Gila Bend) that could hardly be called a town, and wouldn’t be except for the several gas stations and the bend in the road. I too am bleached, standing without sunblock, without direction, and also without the belief I’d spent so much time believing. If my world was one thing, and now that world is gone, there’s still a world, but it’s not my world anymore, and certainly not a world I care very much about. I still exist, still have what seems like existence, but the reason for moving is gone. So I’m not moving. I’m not hitchhiking, not walking, not watching the occasional passing car. I’m just standing there, between two nearly identical gas stations, one red, one green. And that’s when a white sedan pulls up along the shoulder on the road, ahead of where I’m standing. I don’t know if the car is stopping for me, or for some internal reason that has nothing to do with me, but when I walk to the car, the car doesn’t drive away. I look in the open window and there’s an old man, healthy but old, looking at me.

  “Where are you going?” he says.

  “Yuma,” I say, pulling a random name off my memory of the map.

  “That’s where I’m going,” the man says.

  I throw my bag in the back seat, get in the front, and off we go. There’s some minor chitchat as we drive across the burnt flat desert but the man doesn’t spend much time beating around the bush. After only a couple of miles he asks me if I would like to have my dick sucked. I decline, as politely as possible, and that’s about it until the man casually mentions that he’s not really going to Yuma, that in fact he’s getting off at the next exit.

  “You said you were going to Yuma,” I remind him.

  “That was a mistake.”

  “What do you mean mistake?” I say. “You said you would take me to Yuma.”

  “I could,” the man says, and leaves the rest of his thought just dangling.

  Then, holding the steering wheel with one hand, he reaches over to the glove compartment and takes out a round piece of plastic. He puts this plastic to his mouth and begins talking, pretending that he’s talking to some other car, as if the piece of plastic is a radio, a wireless radio, and he begins asking if there’s anyone on the road going to Yuma. Then he places this object, a brown piece of Bakelite, against his ear and cocks his head as if listening. After a pause he tells me that there’s a car behind us going to Yuma and that the driver is willing to give me a ride.

  “Are you kidding?” I say. “What are you trying to do?”

  “I’m arranging a ride for you.”

  “With that?” I reach for the small faux microphone, but the old man is quick. He pulls it away and stashes it between his legs. He explains that it’s a special device, that he used to be in the secret service and it’s a high-tech gadget that not too many people know about.

  I don’t care about the gadget or about Yuma; I just want to stay in the comfortable car. I’m like a powerless country with one natural resource, and this man has his eyes on that resource. And because there aren’t many cars traveling on the road, and because the radio isn’t playing, I start talking to him a little provocatively, coquettishly even, saying for instance that I have nothing against the idea of oral sex. And I can see that this excites the man, or distracts him, enough so that he passes the exit, and I think I can keep the man going like this for the next whatever odd miles.

  And they are odd. Because the man has a goal, he’s persistent, holding his imaginary microphone between his legs, talking occasionally to imaginary agents, listening to me, as the exits go by, as I wonder aloud about blow jobs, trying to walk a line between interested and not that interested. But the man is interested and as he’s saying it, I’m wondering if his teeth are real.

  Gradually, my initial disgust starts to wane. I wouldn’t say I’m titillated, but the wall of resistance I had in my mind begins to crumble, partly because it’s a perversion of my normal mode, and partly because my normal mode has done nothing for me lately. I’m ready to tell my normal mode to fuck off.

  The landscape we’re driving through is spotted with cacti and sage and the tentacle stalks of ocotillo rising out of the sand. It’s just the four lanes of the highway, two going west, two going east. A few small junkyard shacks pop up now and then but basically it’s flat desert and barren hills. However, at one of the shacks, as we pass, I notice a compact station wagon. Just the one car, and I think that I can see, sitting in the driver’s seat, a lone head with the hair of a woman. Not that it matters. It’s not Anne’s hair, but because the car, which may not even be a station wagon, is more interesting than the horny old man, I tell the driver to let me off.

  “Only if we do it,” the old man says. He’s got both hands on the steering wheel. I mention the shack and the man says he’ll take me there, but “only if we do it.”

  So, okay. “Fine,” I say. And this “fine,” when I say it, is the “fine” of surrender. It’s not that the man is omnipotent or anything, it’s that I’m willing to abdicate my own potency in deference to his. I’m letting him decide what will happen. We don’t shake hands, but the man agrees. He drives to the next exit, a crossroads without building or tree, and he pulls off the road and parks the car on an incline overlooking the highway. He puts his plastic microphone back in the glove compartment and tells me to take my “thing” out.

  You wouldn’t call it coercion because I know I’m not trading my services for anything. I’m pretty certain the man isn’t going to drive me back to the junkyard shack, and it doesn’t matter. I sit there, staring out the windshield, and the man leans over and does what he does. And it’s wetter than I expected, but I try to imagine something, not Anne because Anne is dead, but something like Anne, something to make the event seem a little more normal and comfortable. But as the act continues, I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable, and then more uncomfortable, and my reaction is to concentrate on something else, on something alive and real. But there’s nothing I want to concentrate on.

  We’re given a life and we have to do something with that life, and at the moment I’m letting the man decide what my life will be doing. And by resting my eyes on the maroon mountains in the distance, and by not looking down at the man’s white head in my lap, I am able to imagine that life, and pretend to lead that life, and to bring myself, in not much time, to a climax.

  There, I think, that’s the bit done.

  But not quite. As I zip up my pants I notice that the man is doing something with himself under the steering wheel. And whatever it is it’s not working out.

  “That was too fast,” the man says.

  I say something about there being, as far as I could remember, no time stipulation. But the man is unfulfilled and with a raging unfulfilledness he tells me to get out of the car. This doesn’t seem completely fair, especially since I’ve already settled into my seat, but when the man tells me again to get out of the car it seems like probably the easiest solution. So I grab my pack, close the door, and notice, as the man drives away, that he’s driving in the direction of Yuma.

  As long as I had my need I was able to move forward, but now I’ve lost what I want, forgotten what I’m doing and where I’m going, and in fact, at the moment, I’m not going anywhere. I’ve stopped moving. I look down at a desiccated plant beside a gray granite rock and I don’t know what I’m thinking, probably not thinking anything, because my body has taken over. My body is feeling like a rock, the heaviness of a rock, except a rock that once wanted something.

  The junkyard is out of my mind by now. The heat of the sun is scorching my face, and my shoes, which had always been comfortable shoes, are bothering me. My socks are slipping into my shoes but I don’t pull them up. I would stay where I am on the crusted sand but walking is habitual. So I walk down to the overpass, and under the shade of the overpass I wait. Not wait. I’m not waiting for anything. I’m looking at the overpass support columns and behind them to a cool and dirty ledge of cement, and I’m planning a night on that cement.

  But the night is
a long way away. I wait under that overpass the rest of the day. No food, no drink, not even a mandolin to play. I could take out my notebook and jot down my thoughts, but I don’t want to notice my thoughts.

  I hardly notice the cars passing by on the highway, and I don’t try to recognize a recognizable driver.

  There’s nothing I can do.

  Except walk.

  Walking is habitual for me but now I don’t even want to walk.

  Why walk, I think. Is any spot on the pavement, or any destination, better than any other? No. I actually say the word out loud. “No.” And partly I’m saying no to the lack of hope, and partly I’m saying no to hope itself.

  It’s not that I can’t go on, it’s just that I don’t feel like it.

  And you might call this a low point, and I might have called it that, but in calling it that, I would have made it a thing with a name, and since I was a thing with a different name, I would have separated myself from the thing I was naming, in this case the quicksand of hopelessness. But I didn’t separate myself. Instead I went to the low point, and in a way embraced the low point, and fueled by the feeling I was having, the low point sank even lower.

  3.

  Evening descended on the desert. After a while I found myself in the middle of darkness, literally. Looking up at the night sky beyond the overpass I could see the stars, which would have been considered beautiful, and the moon, having already set—that was also probably beautiful, but I was a thing apart from beauty or the recognition of beauty.

  That was when the car pulled over onto the edge of the highway. It was an old brown Mercedes with two guys sitting in the front seat. The passenger window was rolled down and a stubble-faced man was telling me to hop in, hop in, so I did. It was a four-door and I got in the back and off we went.