The Meaning of Isolated Objects

by Billie Hinton

  He turned away.

  “I don’t want you to leave.”

  It was Lynnie’s voice and when he turned back she had transformed. Lynnie, but in today’s world. Lynnie standing before him with something fierce in her eyes.

  His wife.

  His daughter.

  He was confused. His daughter was shot dead in the war.

  The woman before him reached with one finger and freed her breasts, the lacy thing that held them sprang back against her arms.

  He had gone hard, a man’s response to a woman.

  She spoke. “What would it take to make you stay?”

  He had left them too many times. He couldn’t recall why.

  “Lynnie.”

  There was a fine and tenuous arrow of need that, if indulged, would take him down. To someplace raw and primitive. That deep well where fear mixed with desire. He had been there before, with that white gown, and he realized he should never have unpacked it after his night with Jess.

  He felt stuck in loss and grief. Lynnie made a noise. The almost imperceptible click of saliva in a delicate throat narrowing in confusion.

  It was this small sound that woke him up. Brought him to the present. To reality. It was not Lynnie standing there. It was his daughter. He wanted to hug her, tell her she was safe.

  But he didn’t, because desire was a strange and mysterious thing, more so when infused with love and loss. He recognized her now. She was a daughter who looked too much like the woman he had grieved and forsaken. His cock was too easily triggered to hardness.

  His flaws revealed in bold relief.

  He realized that on some level he had stayed away over the years to avoid this exact scene. As much as Wendell resembled her mother, as much as he had been haunted by Lynnie and bent reality via the remote viewing – he had dreaded just such a scene.

  He collected Wendell’s clothing and placed it in her hands. Touched her wet cheek with the ball of his thumb and stepped away. He looked down so she could dress in privacy, but never turned his back to her. She needed to forget the image of his back. The sight of him leaving.

  There had been enough of that.

  They got up and stretched. Walked without sound, the way he had taught her when she was little. Washed clean by Bisti, like church, or zen. He had taught her to find peace in nature.

  It settled her. It had saved her.

  As they walked, he angled his body toward hers. She didn’t remember him doing that before, at least not since she had grown up. She wanted to name it, longed in some deep part of herself to underline it, but she was afraid to. The naming of something so subtle, so precious. She feared she might change it, or lose its power.

  Behind them the gown burned to nothing in the fire.

  They waited for the moon to rise, the stars to appear. They waited together for the night sky.

  Later in the evening they each climbed into their respective sleeping bags but neither slept. They had come to Bisti to leave the images behind, the power of that kind of connection, but rammed headlong into the most potent one of all.

  “I’m sorry this trip has been--” His voice started out at normal volume but faltered near the end.

  She wasn’t sure how to respond. “It’s okay.” She felt numb still but in some way relieved. A pressure she had always thought of as being normal was now released. “I wish things could have been different,” she said. “From way back. Maybe now they will be.”

  Bisti was the perfect place to let things go. The isolation and the emptiness, the hoodoos standing guard. They got up before dawn and hiked for two hours. The wind rushed constantly, soft and steady, white noise.

  Mostly they walked single file. He led the way first and then she walked ahead, toward nothing really, but it felt like they had a destination. She supposed they did. Some sense of understanding or acceptance. Away from awkwardness and intensity.

  She figured at some point they would talk again.

  In the late afternoon it started feeling like one of his trips, the waiting, the solitude, the landscape.

  “Is this like Afghanistan?”

  He was sitting, leaning back on his pack, legs stretched out straight. Every now and then he bent one knee or the other, relieving it from the pressure of a fixed position. He was watching the vista of nothingness, alert to the possibility of something, but easy with the empty territory before him.

  “There’s some similarity. It’s more rugged there. This feels lunar.”

  He was right. Bisti was like being on another planet. It made her nervous to think that when they left, the complications would be there waiting. She didn’t know if there was a way to bring the peace they’d made back with them.

  When the moon rose he started to talk. For an hour or so, he told about waking up as a boy and listening to his father hit his mother. How she began to hate him, her son. He continued on to the time he met Wendell’s mother, how he fell for her so hard it terrified him. He confessed his infidelities, said his biggest fear was that Lynnie would find out and leave him, but something terrible inside had kept him doing it, as though he were drawn to make the worst thing happen.

  He said he had seen things he couldn’t get out of his head, sounds and smells that tormented him, things he had done while working that repeated like bad video. Some of those things were familiar. She and Tristan had stumbled onto truth in their making up of details. They had gotten an amazing amount of things right.

  He apologized for making the fuss about her invisible beloved sister all those years ago. She was real, after all.

  He seemed to be done talking finally but then resumed. There was one more thing. He had slept with Aunt Jessie before coming to New Mexico. He had found something real. And run away from that too.

  Wendell listened to his unburdening without comment. She figured he needed to say these things, and what she needed to do was let him. It wasn’t about what she thought. It was more that he was willing to take responsibility, to trust her.

  At the end of his telling, he sighed. It mixed with the wind and then they slept.

  Part 3

  things you let go of

  They’d decided to drive north. Wendell had fallen asleep in the passenger seat. He welcomed the quiet. Nothing but the rental car swallowing pavement and the fields of cultivated crops outside Farmington. He needed a few miles of nothing.

  What he intended was to take his time. Head back toward Albuquerque, maybe take Wendell back to Texas. He didn’t know what she planned to do at that point. Whether she’d stay in Austin, or go back to Virginia. She hadn’t said a word about her plans. He hadn’t asked.

  He also hadn’t said anything more about the government. He suspected she would hear from them again, another shot at getting her involved in the RV work. He didn’t want her sucked into that vortex, especially after what had happened in her first formal session. He knew the drill. The increasing focus on images and sensations in other places, other times. Mixing with the present. Where real life was happening.

  It was too hard to balance the shifts between. He’d failed at that. She might too. Not to mention the danger. Where they might decide to use her, and how.

  He didn’t know what would happen if they managed to get her back into the viewing room. The work was appealing, there was no question about it. Mysterious and full of intrigue. And there was Tag. She’d fallen for him fast and hard. What if he put the pressure on? What if she signed on just to be near him?

  But she’d left White Sands. That was something. She had a bad feeling about it and she left.

  Wendell groaned and woke up. She rubbed her eyes in circles with the palms of her hands.

  “You okay?”

  She groaned again. “I had a dream, it was so intense.”

  “What about?”

  “Tag was following us, trying to catch up. He kept saying something but I couldn’t understand the words. I could see him but I couldn’t hear him.” She turned around in the seat and looked at the roa
d behind them.

  “Do you think he could be coming after us?”

  Scott cleared his throat. More likely he was remote viewing and she was picking up on that. “Not likely. They’ll have him working on whatever it is he’s doing. Not chasing after you.”

  She was quiet for a few miles. Scott wanted to pull over and see what came to him but he didn’t want to stop moving. “Can you drive for a while? I need a break.”

  He pulled over and they switched places. Once Wendell got back on the road and he’d assured himself there was no one behind them, he closed his eyes. It didn’t take long. Tag was in a room, sitting comfortably in a chair. He was tracking Wendell. Scott could see Tag’s thoughts, the images he was making.

  He came back to the car when he realized Wendell was talking to him. “Daddy, something weird is happening. It’s like Tag is in me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like I’m looking out of his eyes, like he’s superimposed onto me. His energy, his soul. Something.”

  “Block it. Don’t let him.”

  She started crying. “It was like this before, on the mountain. Not as strong. I want him like this. It’s incredible. It’s like we merge.”

  “Wendell, you can’t let him do this.”

  She didn’t respond. He’d lost her, at least for the moment. This was what he’d hoped wouldn’t happen. If Tag kept this up and Wendell didn’t pull away, Scott might lose her completely.

  She was driving but not really there. Tag’s body, his spirit, was in hers, or on top of it somehow. When she moved her arm she could see the outline of his just outside it. It was weird and scary but also amazing. She felt him. She was him, like they had moved into the same body. His energy and hers.

  Her father was saying she should push Tag out, but why would she? She missed him. She loved seeing the world through Tag’s eyes. It lasted about ten minutes and then faded.

  “It stopped.”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “It wasn’t bad. I was connected. I didn’t like how that one session went, but I liked Tag. You understand that, right?”

  He looked alarmed and then his face changed.

  “Sure I do. Let’s keep going. I could use a shower and a good meal.”

  Driving back through Farmington they crossed the Animas River, and heading north to Aztec the river paralleled the road most of the way.

  She smiled. “Aunt Jessie would love this.”

  “What?”

  “The Animas River. We came all this way just to get in touch with our anima.”

  “And what might that be?”

  If Tristan had been in the car he’d have a complete and perfect explanation. But Wendell had learned the shorthand from Jessie. “The anima is the unconscious, the inner feminine. For women, it’s the animus, their unconscious masculine.”

  “And why would Jess love it?”

  “It’s what she does. It’s her passion. Her clients, the sandtrays. Jung. Synchronicity. The unconscious. I never thought about it but it’s probably all connected to remote viewing.”

  Her father cleared his throat. “It was your mother’s passion too. Until she met me. She gave it all up.”

  “Not really. She has that awesome collection. Aunt Jessie would love to have that collection.”

  Scott’s voice rose. “No. Lynnie’s collection stays where it is.”

  “I didn’t mean you should give it to her.”

  He paused. “I’ve read about the collective unconscious. Not so much the anima.”

  “Supposedly the man’s anima comes partly from his early interactions with women, and influences how he deals with all the women who come later in his life. And for women, the same with the animus and men. I can’t remember how all this plays out, but exploring one’s anima is a big deal.”

  “Seems like it would have to be. Speaking of animas, have you talked to Tristan lately?”

  Normally she would have called him a hundred times by then, but after the emails in Austin everything had changed. If he were with there, he’d offer ten great minutes of anima talk. Then they’d drive on and he’d manage to piss her off, or vice versa.

  “I don’t think so. We’re taking a break from one another.”

  “Did he ask you to marry him?”

  “God, daddy.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes. Are you satisfied? More than once.”

  “I wonder why you keep saying no?”

  She had no idea why she’d even mentioned it. The anima, Jung, her mother’s collection. Tristan. It was all important, she got that. But she sure didn’t want to talk about it right then.

  Aztec was big enough to have motel chains with internet access, which they needed for research. They got rooms side by side, showered, and set up in her dad’s room to go online. He let her check email first, and she expected at least an email from Tristan but there wasn’t one. Made her wonder what he was up to.

  It was the time of year when summer would be coming to an end in the Virginia hills. You wouldn’t know it yet unless you lived there and recognized the signs, but each year they unfolded, subtle and real. The blue of the sky deepened, the angle of the sun shifted. Afternoons confided a golden glow that hadn’t been there two weeks hence.

  She missed it but couldn’t imagine being back there yet.

  Tristan, writing code and teaching the classics. Having lunches with Kate, dinners with Kate, long walks holding hands with Kate. At night they lay together and no one bothered to wash up in the bathroom after they made love.

  Kate was water, soothing Tristan.

  Wendell dreamed that night of water: puddles, ponds, ripples on lakes, pools beneath waterfalls. She was a rock in a stream, a statue content with its interior life, like the tin man in the Wizard of Oz. Which didn’t fit because the Tin Man wasn’t content at all but screaming for release from his rusted torpor. He needed oil and feared water, which was what locked him up to begin with.

  When she woke, her father sat upright on his bed, across from her, newspaper in hand, folded in quarters to the column he read without comment. They had become easier with one another, still careful but more honest.

  She didn’t know how to talk about what had happened at Bisti, the moments when she had been naked in front of him, and that his body responded to that. Already when she remembered it she felt hazy and confused. It had been terrifying. Her mother’s energy, his calling out for his wife. And Wendell’s own frightening desire to connect with him in a way that mattered.

  He sensed her watching and glanced over, lay the paper on his lap. Tears stung her eyes and she held them back.

  “Don’t,” he said, and she clenched her fists tight. “There’s no shame in what we struggle with, Wendell-girl. Let it go.”

  She looked to the wall and swallowed. “All these years Tristan has loved me and I put him off. Now he has Kate. And I fell in love with Tag and now he’s gone. That whole thing at Bisti. Maybe I can’t have the normal kind of love.”

  His face shifted and changed like a sand dune in the wind, all the same things she felt crossed the surface of his skin, as if he were mirroring her emotions: love, loss, joy, ecstasy, pain. And finally, grief and resignation.

  “You can have it, Wendell. I promise.”

  “How do you know that? What if Tag was right. What if I really am like you?”

  She didn’t know where the words came from. They erupted like dark and sinister wolves running up and out of her anger, the deep cave of fury that opened because Tag had cracked the most scary place in her and it had taken her to some awful place with her own father. She wanted to blame someone. It had to do with love and loss and not knowing.

  Her father was stunned and hurt across the room, then his face pulled together again. “Wendell, this is the truth and you need to hear it. Your mother has been dead for twenty-three years. She was the light of my life and I miss her every day. You know all too well the terri
ble path my grief took. And remote viewing added to that. Complicated what was already a mess. We went through a rough place together, out there with that white gown. But there’s more than that. There are good things. Look at what happened with me and Jess, that’s something.”

  “But you fucked her and left, didn’t you? You refused to give it up. Your work. You took off to Afghanistan the moment you felt something for Aunt Jessie. Why can’t you give it up?”

  “Baby, if you start giving up your self for the one you love, all they end up with is a fragment of who you were. Not who they fell in love with, not the person they wanted. It doesn’t work. If you had married Tristan when you didn’t want to, what kind of life would that be? If you had stayed and handed over those sketches for Tag’s sake, you wouldn’t love him for it and he wouldn’t love himself. You’d ruin what there was between you.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Tag.”

  “I think maybe you were talking about me and Tag.”

  He paused and came across the room, took her chin in his hand and looked her in the eye. “I have fucked up just about everything thing there is to fuck up when it comes to relationships. But I know this one thing, Wendell. If you expect someone to give up what he loves, he probably will, for you. And then he’ll hate himself for it. I didn’t give up what I loved doing, not for your mother, not for you. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. That I don’t love you. We do the best we know how to do at the time. That’s all I can say. You have to sort this out for yourself. You have to pick the path that feels right. To you.”

  She let his words sit inside her head. Swirled them around with all the other words. It was all so confusing.

  “You never told me you loved my mother. Or that you missed her.”

  There were tears glistening in his eyes.

  “I should have. Most of my life up to now has been spent being haunted. By guilt and grief that I never acknowledged. I fucked up, Wendell. I left when I should have stayed. And I’m sorry.”

  “She never asked for more, did she?”