Love at the Speed of Email

by Lisa McKay

  “I wonder what exactly they chose to take: what they deemed worthy of their dirty thieving paws,” he wrote to me. “My books? My external hardrive that has the backup of all my files and all my pictures from the past four years? My yoga mat? My hiking shoes? My clothes? I left behind one pair of underwear in my top drawer so that I’d have a clean pair when I returned to Madang in February. I sure hope they didn’t take that. I’m not so happy with PNG at the moment. It’s only stuff. Stuff’s not important. But it’s annoying, dammit. See you in a week, hopefully. Hopefully I’ll also make it through the next six days without losing too much more stuff.”

  “Shocker,” I wrote. “I’m sorry. Is there anyone who could send you an inventory of what’s still there so you at least know (particularly about the hard drive, oh, and the clean underwear – I would imagine those two are top of your priority list)? Maybe the next year is going to be the year of embracing solidarity with the poor in whole new ways for you. If the first twelve days of the year are anything to go by, trend analysis suggests that you will be robbed approximately 86 more times this year, in 86 different cities. Could be an exciting year.”

  Los Angeles, USA

  When I wasn’t at work, I spent most of the week before I left for Australia looking for a new place to live. I loved the apartment that Travis and I shared, and I’d now lived there longer than I’d lived anywhere else in my life, but I’d eventually learned that when you don’t feel entirely safe, it’s hard to feel at home, regardless of how you define it. Now I was just eager to get out.

  I knew without the shadow of a doubt that the Travis who had moved in with me would never hurt me, but the Travis I was now living with was not the Travis who’d moved in with me. I could no longer completely trust that either logic or reality were grounding his mind or guiding his actions. He was six inches taller than me and stronger, and I couldn’t even lock my bedroom door. I didn’t want to be, but I was scared – scared in a way I’d rarely been overseas. The sort of jumpy scared that comes from living with extended uncertainty.

  My heart sank every time I drove into the garage and saw his car in its space. Inside the apartment the floor was littered with those proverbial eggshells. When we weren’t talking about his delusions, the mundane exchanges we did have about writing projects, daily activities and weekend plans seemed relatively normal, but they were shadowed by mutual suspicion. I could not draw a deep breath.

  I didn’t go into or out of our place without my cell phone in one pocket and my keys in the other, and when we were at home at the same time, I watched. Probably the same wary, intent watching that everyone else who’d heard the TV-show story was employing. In one sense it was no wonder that he thought we were all in on something without him.

  We were.

  Sanity.

  Three days before I was supposed to leave for Australia I found a new place to live. It was a bit more than I’d wanted to pay, but I knew the minute I walked into the quiet one-bedroom apartment that it was perfect, and by the time I flew out I’d signed a lease and picked up the keys so that I could move in as soon as I got back – that very day, if need be. What I hadn’t done was tell Travis that I was moving out.

  I desperately wanted to sit down with him and lay it all out on the table, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. No matter how I worried the puzzle in my head, I couldn’t seem to make the different pieces fit into the same equation: to love Travis with transparent honesty and to make sure that I stayed safe when he seemed so volatile.

  In the end I didn’t tell him. Instead, I packed up my valuable possessions piecemeal and smuggled them out of the house, stowing them in the garage of my friend, Grace.

  After my last trip to Grace’s garage, the night before my flight, I went into the house to say a weary farewell to Grace and her two dogs. In bewilderingly short order, the new dog (half pit bull) decided that the old dog (half Great Dane) was getting more than his fair share of attention and attacked him.

  By the time the dogs paused to take stock and Grace and I were able to grab one collar each, a truly remarkable amount of blood was sprayed across the walls, the carpet, and our clothes in spotty red arcs. The back seat of Grace’s car didn’t fare any better after we finally were able to manhandle the most grievously injured party (the new dog) into the vehicle to rush her to the animal hospital.

  We had plenty of time to discuss the whole event during the three hours we sat in the emergency room holding a towel to the dog’s neck.

  “You told me,” Grace said without any blame in her tone, “that Barnabus would be happier and less lonely if I got another dog.”

  “I meant a puppy, Grace,” I said. “Not a ten-year-old half-pit-bull stray from the animal shelter.” I glared down at the new dog that Grace had named Naomi. Despite the fact that blood was still dripping from her neck, Naomi looked perfectly content now that she had Grace’s undivided attention.

  “This is the third fight she’s started in three weeks,” I said. “You have to take her back.”

  “I know,” Grace said and sighed deeply. “You know, you’ve been there for two of those fights…” She left the rest of the sentence hanging suggestively.

  I maintained that I was merely an innocent bystander and that this altercation was not my fault. Grace, who was fully versed in the current events of my life, was not convinced. She posited, rather, that I was a drama-carrier – that I bred it wherever I went and that my mere presence had set the dogs off.

  I wanted to be able to firmly refute this allegation.

  I couldn’t.

  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 Chicken Dance

  Mike, Papua New Guinea

  “Good morning, Lisa,” Mike greeted me by email the morning he was to fly to Australia.

  “Monday morning,” he wrote. “Yippee. Bags packed. Report mostly finished. Brand new passport safely tucked away in pocket. Just half a day left in the office and then I’m off to Port Moresby Airport. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it to the airport without getting robbed. Yippee.

  “Last night I had dinner alone. Me, my journal, thoughts, and doubts. Oh my word, am I really doing this? Am I really about to get on a plane and meet a special friend on the other end and then spend two weeks at her house? Gulp. I mean, it seemed so natural a few months ago. There was no hesitation at all then, no doubts. She emails saying that she’ll be home in January. I really want to meet this interesting person who’s begun to capture my heart. I ask whether it would be okay for me to come visit. … It was all so natural. No inhibitions, no fears.

  “And last night … yikes. Doubt. Fear. Gulp.

  “But now it’s Monday morning. Adventure. I’m getting on a plane! I’m going to Australia! I’m going to meet Lisa! Whoo hooo! Adventure.

  “So see you later today. If you’re at all fearful that you might miss spotting me at the airport, just look for the guy who has clammy hands and sweat marks under his arms.”

  Lisa, Australia

  At the same time that Mike was drafting the email above, I was writing one of my own to him.

  “By now,” I wrote, “I assume you’re finished with the report – or very nearly – and starting to transition into holiday mode, and thinking about a couple of weeks off work, and the prospect of crashing at the home of someone you haven’t met yet, and of three months of emails becoming flesh (most likely with less perfect results than were achieved the first time – or at least the most famous time – that word became flesh).

  “And I’m starting to think about picking you up at the airport late this afternoon and hoping I recognize you, because I’m awful with faces (really, I am, it’s almost clinical) and wondering what we are going to talk about for two and a half hours in the car
on the way home.

  “This, I realize, is quite a ridiculous thing to worry about. I suspect neither of us is particularly socially awkward most of the time, and I don’t feel we lack for common ground. But there’s something slightly jarring, although exciting, about switching gears from text to talk. I, for one, suspect that I’m more confident and more uninhibited in text land, but I suspect and hope that once we get past the initial weird zone we’ll be fine.

  “I expect the weird zone to last approximately 43 minutes, by the way.

  “I just this minute got your email from this morning and laughed to see I’m not the only one wondering what we’re doing and whether we are a little out of our minds.

  “I am reminding myself that life is risk and that the worst thing that’s going to happen is that you get a good holiday out of this and we cement a new friendship. That’s not a bad worst. It’s a risk worth taking, methinks.

  “So I’ll be there to pick you up this afternoon unless I get lost … which is a distinct possibility. So if I’m not there, hang tight and I should get there eventually.

  “See you this afternoon. I’m glad you’re coming.

  “P.S. I want it to be noted that I should not be held responsible for anything I might say or do in the weird zone, and I think we should postpone all first impressions until tomorrow.”

  Brisbane, Australia

  I arrived at Brisbane airport to pick Mike up more than an hour early. His plane hadn’t even landed yet.

  I’d brought a book with me but was totally unable to concentrate on it. In the end I left it open in my lap while I worked on a coffee one careful sip at a time and tried to think of something other than how nervous I was feeling.

  The only things coming to mind, however, were other times I’d felt excruciatingly, tight-of-chest, short-of-breath nervous.

  As a little girl, waiting to play the organ at a recital in the middle of a shopping mall.

  The first time (and most times since then, really) I had to get up in front of a group and lead a workshop.

  Other times I’d waited in airports, hopeful and scared, to greet strangers.

  The first time I’d given a book reading.

  Before the interview in Vancouver.

  This train of thought was not helping. Neither was the caffeine in the coffee. I thought about what I’d written to Mike just that morning. Somewhere at the back of my mind I knew that all that stuff about risks worth taking was still true. But right then most of my mind (and all 2,037 of the acrobatic butterflies in my stomach) were running wild and free in the “are we both out of our minds?” territory.

  I glanced up at the arrivals board again.

  Beside the listing for Mike’s flight, the status had just been updated from “On Schedule” to “Landed.”

  I stood up, tucking my book away and throwing the rest of my coffee into the trash. I knew it would probably be at least another thirty minutes before Mike cleared customs, but I couldn’t sit still any longer. I found a spot across from the door that he would walk out of, leaned against a pillar, and started to scan every Caucasian male emerging from customs who looked somewhere between twenty and fifty.

  Either men look at me far more than I usually notice or there was something strange about the intensity of my own scrutiny that day, because in the forty-five more minutes it took for Mike to walk out those doors, more than a handful of men caught my gaze and returned it with a direct and purposeful intensity of their own that I found very confusing.

  “Is that him???” I would wonder, my heart rocketing up into my throat, as another man caught my eye and took a couple of steps in my direction. “No, wait, it can’t … maybe it is. … No, I think Mike’s hair is lighter than that. … Why is he walking toward me? … Okay, turning away. It’s not him. Not him. Not him. Breathe.”

  By the time Mike actually appeared, I’d nearly hugged two strangers and I was pretty sure I was breaking out in hives.

  *

  I did recognize him. Or, more accurately, I recognized his smile. I saw that first, almost in isolation. Wide and open, it was reassuringly reminiscent of the tone of his letters.

  He walked out of immigration smiling, wearing a red and white shirt and carrying a beat-up duffel bag and two duty-free bottles of wine.

  We hugged hello and the top of my head slotted under his chin. He was tall, at least six feet. There were no sweat marks on his shirt. His hands weren’t clammy. Mine were.

  I can’t remember our first words. I probably asked him how his flight was. I may not have been speaking in full sentences. The first words I actually remember us exchanging in person, about ninety seconds after we met, are these:

  Mike: (grinning) “Weird zone’s over.”

  Me: “You can’t just unilaterally declare weird zone over. It’s not over. I still have 41 minutes left.”

  Mike: “No, it’s over. Can you hold the wine for a minute? I have to go to the bathroom.”

  *

  Either Mike was better at acting or he was genuinely less nervous than I was, because the only time I saw him a little startled that day was when I handed him the keys to the car as we reached the parking lot and asked if he would drive back to Ballina.

  “You want me to drive your parents’ car?”

  “I haven’t driven much on this side of the road lately,” I said. “You have.”

  “Okay.” He took the keys and nodded, and I didn’t have to tell him the other reasons I wanted him to drive: that I was worried I was too unfocused to be totally safe and that I wanted the chance to watch him.

  So Mike drove and I sneaked glances, and in the dark cocoon of the car I slowly but surely started to calm down. There were no Disney fireworks or choirs of angels singing the Hallelujah Chorus or electric frissons of immediate sexual tension. What there was was ease.

  We talked about the recent robbery of Mike’s house.

  “Any more information on what’s missing?” I asked.

  “No,” Mike said. “But my boss has decided that that house is too unsafe for staff, so they’re moving me out while I’m away.”

  We talked about first impressions and whether you can postpone them.

  “Yes,” Mike said. “I don’t pay any attention to first impressions.”

  “It’s impossible not to give first impressions any weight,” I said. “We form them very quickly and almost unconsciously.”

  “They’re unreliable,” Mike said.

  “Are they?” I asked. “I think they can be, but do you really think they are generally unreliable?”

  We did not at that point talk about any first impressions we may have had earlier that afternoon. Instead we talked about Mike’s new passport and how he was going to replace his work visa and my own recent work-visa interview at the U.S. consulate in Sydney and Travis.

  “I moved my jewelry, my journals, and some of my clothes out of the house,” I said. “I really don’t think he would trash my stuff or anything like that, but I just can’t be sure.”

  “How are you going to tell him?” Mike asked.

  “I wrote to him yesterday and told him I’d be moving out shortly after I got back,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything from him yet, though.”

  Mike and I found all sorts of things to talk about without any trouble at all during that ride home. So many things, in fact, that we didn’t get around to talking about my family – the family that he would shortly be meeting – until we were almost there.

  “Is there anything in particular that I should know about your parents?” Mike asked as we pulled into the driveway of their house.

  “Uh, no,” I said, kicking myself for not having thought of this earlier. “Just be yourself.”

  Ballina, Australia

  As we unloaded Mike’s bags from the car and started toward the house, I was suddenly flooded with a new wave of nervousness. There were two main thoughts vying for airplay in my mind:

  (1) There were lights on in that house. Mike was going to
look at me.

  (2) My parents and my little sister were in there waiting, no doubt dying to look him over. They’d done an excellent job of pretending casual and low-key all week, but I knew they were fiercely curious.

  With regard to this second point, I couldn’t figure out if I was more wary of something they might do or say, something Mike might do or say, or something I might do or say. I was just sure that there was definite wacky potential in the moment.

  I was right. Within ten minutes of our arrival, the conversation had somehow led my mother to scamper off and retrieve her favorite speaking prop: the screaming rubber chicken.

  A word about this chicken.

  My mother is a talented public speaker. She can have a roomful of adults laughing within minutes of ascending the stage, and in the process she can get away with saying and doing the corniest and most ridiculous things without sacrificing any dignity.

  Several years ago she stumbled across the screaming rubber chicken in a game store. It is the ugliest chicken you can imagine. Its squishy rubber body looks plucked and scrawny and has been unceremoniously dipped in bright yellow paint. When you squeeze it and let go it emits a horrible high-pitched shrieking – as if an insane cat is suffering a prolonged death. The harder you squeeze, the longer and more frantically the chicken wails.

  My mother loves this chicken. She loves it so much that she went out shortly after she acquired hers and bought one for me to use when I present stress-management workshops.

  “What am I supposed to do with that?” I had asked when she first presented me with my very own screaming rubber chicken.

  Being faced with this query in response to a gift would dent most people. Not my mother.

  “You can use it like this,” Mum said, grinning. “When you’re introducing the workshop you can say something like, ‘Ever had a day when you feel like this?’” She gave the chicken a gentle squeeze and it moaned piteously. “Or what about a day when you feel like this?” She clutched the chicken slightly harder this time and the chicken complained more loudly. “Or what about a day when you feel like this?” She squeezed all the air out of the chicken’s floppy latex belly and let go. The chicken screeched as if a tribe of small, wicked children had tied firecrackers to its tail feathers.