by Lisa McKay
Which when I thought about it seemed entirely fair. I certainly had no grounds to complain about anyone being guarded or confused.
After a weekend of watching, rain, art galleries, and long talks over Canadian beer, I was able to get back on the plane with the mystery removed and a new friendship cemented, knowing that if Ryan had been the only obstacle standing in the way of loving Jason, that obstacle was gone.
Except – and this took me three more messy months to figure out – Ryan hadn’t been the only obstacle.
I had really wanted him to be. I agonized over what was wrong with me, what prevented me from loving such a fundamentally decent man who cared so much for me. But in the end, I realized that if I stayed with Jason it would be in large part because of fear. Fear of hurting someone I cared for very deeply. Fear of disappointing him and making him angry. Fear that I couldn’t trust my own instincts – that I was being hasty and turning my face away from the possibility of great happiness or that I was simply incapable of the sort of commitment Jason wanted.
Fear that I would never find someone else who loved me and that I would ultimately end up alone.
But in the end, I knew that regardless of whether I was making the biggest mistake of my life in saying no to Jason, being scared of all of these things was just not a good enough reason to get married, that I would be doing us both wrong if I said yes.
Baltimore, USA
Three years later I looked at the last line I’d written in my latest letter to Mike: “When it came right down to it, my primary motivation for writing my first essay was to catch someone’s attention. Yes, translate that to: to impress a guy.”
So how much more of this tale was I willing to share at this stage? What else would need to be added as an addendum to put it into context?
Perhaps that it had been almost three years since Jason and I had parted ways.
That I hadn’t dated anyone else since.
That I started writing the essays largely because it was fun, but I kept writing them even when it wasn’t nearly as much fun because I sensed that it was an important discipline for me to cultivate – that in the face of a constant kaleidoscope of airports and faces it would serve me well to learn to narrow my focus to a moment. To take that moment for what it was and to think carefully about what else it could be.
That over time, without my even really noticing, writing had become a spiritual discipline – one way for me to snatch breaths from beneath the waterfall of life.
That now, like the chemicals on a photographic negative, it is the keyboard that helps me define my experiences. On my best days, a jumble of moments, like so many bright pixels, coalesce into something vibrant and evocative as I type. Often I feel as if I have not understood anything of what an experience has really meant to me until I have anchored it in text.
No, apart from the “key lessons learned about long-distance relationships” that I’d already provided in my first email, I wasn’t ready to lay all this out before Mike. Not yet.
What to say then?
“Why do I write essays and post them online?” I wrote. “It only took one essay to discover that I really did enjoy writing them and that people on my mailing list really liked them. The essays became something that helped me feel connected to people back home and helped them feel that they knew some of what was going on in my life. For me, they also became an important writing discipline, an important living discipline.”
“I must go to sleep. I’m exhausted, which I blame in part on my sister for keeping me up talking too late last night and in part on you for keeping me up emailing the night before,” I finished. “I’m heading back to L.A. tomorrow. I know you’re off island-hopping again soon and will have intermittent access to email. So safe travels, and when you’re near a net connection and a keyboard, write me more rambly emails.”
Los Angeles – Accra – Washington, D.C. – Sydney – Zagreb – South Bend – Nairobi – San Diego – Atlanta – Madang – Kona – Canberra – London – Baltimore – Itonga – Vancouver – Harare – Dushanbe – Lira – Petats – Port Moresby – Brisbane – Ballina – Malibu
The Internal and Unwinnable War
Los Angeles, USA
I returned to L.A. late the next night to find a dusty bedroom and a knee-high stack of junk mail. The apartment was blessedly silent. A note on the fridge informed me that my flatmate, Travis, was in Las Vegas for three more days, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I rather desperately hoped that when he returned it would be in a different state of mind from the one he’d been in for most of the previous eight months. I dropped my luggage in the hallway and headed straight upstairs to bed, planning to sleep until forever.
The following morning, however, found me awake at six, exhausted and cursing jet lag for being such an efficient alarm clock. The dawn light was just starting to filter into my bedroom and I lay still and warm for a moment and listened to the lambent splash of the fountain outside my window. In that tiny window of peace, fragments from the previous month came to visit.
A workshop participant’s story, confided in hushed and hurried tones during a coffee break, of how her husband was abusing her. Another participant’s glance sideways as he relayed how his wife had been killed in a motorcycle accident just two months earlier.
As I swung my feet out of bed I began the process of easing back into my life in California. The time away receded just a little as my bare toes met carpet, and I felt guilty as I saw it go. But I hadn’t yet learned the trick of keeping two worlds equally close, and California was here, now.
At 7 a.m. on a Sunday, the streets of Pasadena were almost empty, but Noah’s Bagel Shop was warm and bright against the gray skies outside. I ordered coffee and a bagel, only then remembering that it would be the first thing I’d eaten in almost twenty-four hours.
I sat in the corner on a high stool and stared out the window. Past the glass, a man paged through the paper with a frown, his foot anchoring the end of the leash. Golden ears framed two brown eyes that watched eagerly for any sign of affection. The dog’s gaze didn’t shift in the five minutes it took me to eat the bagel, but no affection was forthcoming.
Beside me, an elegant silver-haired woman spilled the hot water for her tea across the bench. It spread in a warm river toward a young man’s paper, its headlines shouting at us about casualties in Iraq, and she blushed as he jumped up to get napkins.
“I was worried about that,” she confided to the room at large. “That was the worst thing I could think of that would happen to me today.”
I smiled politely and told her to look on the bright side, that since the worst had already happened, her day could only get better.
As I glanced back out the window to check whether the man had petted the dog yet, it struck me as odd that there is a place in this world where someone can say without any hint of self-deprecation that that worst thing she could imagine happening to her that day was to spill the water for her tea. Instead of feeling annoyed, I felt safe.
I congratulated myself on how smoothly my readjustment to normal life was progressing as I got up and wandered into the gourmet supermarket next door, where I stood so long in front of the milk selection that a clerk approached me with gentle trepidation and asked if he could help me. I was tempted to hand him my basket and tell him to do my shopping. Instead I smiled the enigmatic smile of someone who is so preoccupied by important thoughts that she can be immobilized with no warning in the milk aisle, reached out my hand, and took the first carton I touched.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”
I wasn’t, though. Not completely. I’d made it only halfway through the caramel latte I’d ordered and I was starting to feel sick. I couldn’t find sausages fit for pasta sauce, and I suddenly lost patience with the whole process. Dropping my coffee into the trash I headed for the checkout with just three bananas, raspberries, red chili paste, and the milk. Maybe shopping would be easier later in the day.
Outside Noah’s
the man turned the page of his paper and the dog inched forward, bottom vibrating, shiny black nose almost touching a knee, but the man didn’t look up or reach out. On the other side of the fence that separated us, I dropped my bag of groceries to the pavement, propped my foot on the low railing and bent to fiddle with my shoe. When the dog spared me a glance, I wiggled my fingers at him, a covert offer. Tail moving in acknowledgement, he licked my hand in one furtive, warm swipe. Then his gaze returned to the back of the paper. It was clearly not my attention that he wanted.
I wiped my hand on my jeans, picked up the bag, and headed for the car.
Sometimes arriving home from a work trip will fill me with a sudden, sweet burst of energy and the sense of a fresh page turning. I’ve learned to ride this energy as far as it will take me when it come – the gym, the grocery store, the washing machine. That flat fatigue that follows extended travel is often tempered if the house is clean, my suitcases are unpacked and I have something to eat when it hits.
This time there was no sweet surge of energy. The apartment felt empty and foreign. I couldn’t even summon the strength to hoist my heavy suitcases up the stairs, and with Travis gone there was no one else to care if they stayed in the living room, spilling their contents across the carpet. I sighed every time I thought about packing for my next flight to Vancouver in a week. I ate bananas, soup, and toasted pita bread for two days before I could be bothered to brave the grocery store again. It was all I could do to get up, go to the office, and keep track of the radio interviews about my novel that I’d told my publisher I’d do when I returned.
Actually, I didn’t always do that, either. Two mornings after getting back, the phone rang just as I was getting out of the shower. I grabbed a towel and ran to fetch it. By the time I picked it up I was at least awake enough not to tell Luke Zuckerman from some station in Ohio that (1) I had totally forgotten we were scheduled to talk live on air and (2) I wasn’t wearing any clothes.
*
I was feeling more at home in the apartment and in my own skin by the time Travis got back from Las Vegas, which was good because I needed that extra energy to focus on him.
When he first moved in, Travis had been the most entertaining of housemates to share the apartment with, part stand-up comic and part debate partner. By the time we’d been living together for almost two years, we had settled into a relationship that was vaguely reminiscent of siblings.
We shared the shopping and kept a running tally of money owed on the refrigerator door. We cooked for each other. We sat in the living room together sometimes on Saturdays, me writing and him working on the latest short-film project he hoped would be his ticket to making it big in Hollywood. We had a lot of mock arguments and occasionally some real ones. He got cranky at me for not doing enough of the cleaning. I got cranky at him for turning the TV up too loud late at night. Way more often than not, however, our exchanges ended in laughter. Then, slowly, subtly, things started to shift.
Even now, armed with hindsight, it’s hard to know when it started.
Travis had always carried a certain energy with him, an intensity. I can’t put my finger on exactly when and how that intensity stopped being just healthy fuel for his creativity and started herding his mind toward darker places, but about eight months earlier, right around my thirty-first birthday, we had started laughing less.
Around this time, Travis was deep in the throes of finishing the editing of his second short film, a disturbing tale of choice and consequences. Because he was an audiovisual consultant for large corporate shows, his work schedule had always been erratic, but now he stopped working altogether to focus on wrapping the project and start writing the script for what he hoped would be his first feature film. He sat in front of his computer until all hours of the night, going over that short film frame by frame. He covered the south wall of his bedroom entirely with flip-chart paper, marked a giant story arc on it, and started sketching out the plot he had in mind.
After being up until four or five every night, he’d often sleep until midday and then be flat and distracted in the evenings. As the summer wore on, he slowly became more and more tightly wound and less and less fun to live with. It seemed that all the genuine cheerfulness was being leached out of his intensity and replaced with a simmering hostility.
He started to take everything more personally. He bantered less and ranted more. His colleagues, other friends, the world in general – they all became the subject of extended vitriolic diatribes over the kitchen bench while one of us cooked dinner. One night he yelled at me over an innocent flippant remark. It was an attack that left me stunned, hurt, and confused.
For the first time, I started to think seriously about moving out, something I was loath to do. I’d lived in that apartment longer than I’d lived in any other place, and the second half of the year was booked solid with international travel and the book release. Where would I find the time and energy to move?
I thought it would pass. I mean, what artist hasn’t had periods of deep immersion in serious projects when life looked grim and he felt decidedly unbalanced? Travis had wanted to be a director since he was a little boy. Films were his life passion. But right on the cusp of turning thirty, living in a city where so many glossy teenagers walk red carpets, he was feeling an incredible amount of self-induced pressure.
Then in August of that year, while I was away in Turkey for a month, Travis lost his internal footing.
*
He was starring in a reality TV show, Travis explained to me less than ten minutes after I walked through the door the night that I returned from Turkey. He had been starring in this show ever since he was a little boy, since he first decided that he wanted to be a director, since it first became apparent that he was autistic.
“But you’re not autistic,” I said that night, too stunned at first to be anything but confused by what he was saying.
“I am,” he insisted, flicking a lock of red hair off his forehead with a nervous sweep of a wrist. Always lean, he was thinner than he had been when I left, and pale, with dark shadows under his eyes. “I’ve done all this research online. All the symptoms fit.”
“Travis, I worked with autistic kids for six months after graduating from high school,” I said. “You’re not autistic.”
“I have Asperger’s,” he said.
“No you don’t,” I said. “You are perfectly capable of empathy and reading social cues related to sarcasm and irony. You choose to ignore social cues sometimes, but you can read them.”
“I knew you’d say that,” he said. “You’re all saying something like that. But I know the truth now.”
“The truth about the TV show?” I asked hesitantly.
“Duh,” he looked at me as if he’d expected more. “Kid with autism grows up wanting to become a director and makes it big in Hollywood. Great story for reality TV! Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know you do.”
“I don’t,” I said and then tried a different tack. “Tell me how you figured it out.”
“They made a mistake,” he said, triumphant. “I already suspected, you know. But then I went out for dinner weeks ago with D.J. and there were lights and a camera crew outside. When we walked past they followed us. And, inside, there was a famous director sitting at a table nearby. D.J. denied the whole thing, but I totally figured it out.”
“This is L.A.,” I reminded him – he who’d worked as an extra on more movies than I could count. “There are camera crews everywhere.”
“Exactly,” he said.
Dead end.
“You said you already suspected by that point,” I said. “When did you first start to suspect?”
“Right after you left I went to a bachelor party,” he said. “They put something in my drink. I’m telling you, it really messed with my head.”
“What was it?” I asked.
Again that look in his eyes, that look of mingled suspicion and pity at my stupidity.
“I d
on’t know,” he said. “I didn’t see them put it in there. I wouldn’t have drunk it if I did, would I?”
“Did you take anything else?”
“No,” he said. “Only pot.”
“Only pot?”
“Only pot, no cocaine or anything else this time, I swear,” he said, misunderstanding my question.
“Maybe the pot—”
“I always do pot,” he said. “I do it here all the time.”
He did? How had I never smelled it in the house or realized he was high? How dumb was I?
“Pot can make you paranoid,” I said, using that word out loud for the first time.
“No,” he said. “Pot takes the edge off. It doesn’t flip me out like whatever that poison was that they gave me at the party.”
Dead end.
“So, when you say, ‘They’re all in on it’, who are they?” I asked.
“Everyone,” he said. He looked suddenly and acutely miserable.
“My parents must have been in on it right from the beginning,” he said. “I don’t blame them. Really, I don’t, because they knew I wanted to be a director and they thought this would only help. But why didn’t they see the pressure that would come when I found out? Didn’t they know that I wouldn’t be able to trust anything? That I would wonder if every friendship in my life was a lie?”
“So all your friends are in on it?”
“Yeah, how could they not be? The networks would need their cooperation.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” he said and then wavered. “I think so. I’m not sure. I don’t know.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“I want to believe you,” he said. “But everyone’s just saying the same thing – that they’re not part of it. That it’s not happening. And I know it is. I just need someone to level with me. That’s all I’m asking, that someone tell me the truth.”
