Contents May Have Shifted

by Pam Houston

  I have only recently come back to this place of ice-colored stars strewn across ink-dark sky, where frost on the wooden walkway is likely every night of the year—and heavy tonight—where I scare up a barn owl traveling the short hundred yards between my door and my car, and his wingbeat is the loudest sound for ten square miles. The owl stops me in my tracks, makes me take a breath of the cold night air, and when I do I think, I am breathing in the stars.

  Yesterday I walked with six of the best women I know up above Spring Creek Pass to the 12,000-foot flattop called Jarosa Mesa. Cinder, Mackenzie, Willow, Hailey, Nora, and Practical Karen. Our ages span twenty years, thirty-four to fifty-four, and what we have in common is a love of the world so fierce it makes

  us edgy.

  The aspens near the pass are holding their breath this week, hints of yellow and crimson, the meadow grasses high after August’s monsoon. We talk about Myanmar, Cuba, New Orleans. We talk about stepchildren, wind pants, Italian food, sex. We snack on the season’s first clementines and raspberry Fig Newmans. To the west of the mesa the 14ers lay themselves before us, a multicolored kingdom of stone: Handies Peak, Sunshine Peak, Redstone Peak, the Wetterhorn, and Uncompaghre.

  Ethan is in Tampa this balmy midnight, sitting on his temporary front porch surrounded by chirping lizards, writing a speech against offshore drilling by the glow of a string of Christmas lights, the paper curling at the edges, his hand damp where he holds the pen.

  If I die tonight it will be with every single thing unfinished (like, I suppose, any other night), and yet, what a gift to die on the verge of tears. I have spent my life trying to understand the way this rock and this ache go together, why a granite peak is more dramatic half dressed in clouds (like a woman), why sunlight under fog is better than the sum of its parts, why my best days and my worst days are always the same days, why (often) leaving seems like the only solution to the predicament of loving (each other) the world.

  It’s hard to know whether the bigger problem is space or time. The forty-three years I didn’t get to miss Ethan, the unlimited rent-a-car miles between Tampa and anywhere he could really see the stars. All the way across the I-40 last month, the sky kept making him offers: thunderclouds over Flagstaff, a double rainbow near Tucumcari, and Mars, the closest to the Earth in fifty thousand years, burning candy-apple red and following the moon from Albuquerque to Gallup, while we went the other way—the wrong way, any given star would tell you—hurtling west to east.

  7. Vancouver, British Columbia

  The bi-polar halibut fisherman from Kodiak with ocean eyes and biceps like something right out of Michelangelo. He’s spent ten years in Joburg, ten years in Bangkok, ten years back and forth between Kodiak and B.C. As a result, his mouth does crazy things to the letter o, the letter h, and anything with a lot of r’s in it.

  He tells me he doesn’t like to throw around words like CIA and Special Forces. He tells me we’ve been put on earth to crack each other open, and then to stick around long enough to watch the thing that, having been cracked open, suddenly shines. He says he knows there is only a thin wall between himself and all that shining, but sometimes he forgets how thin the wall is, because somebody came along when he wasn’t looking, and painted the damn thing black. He tells me he has tried three different times, but he just can’t stick with the lithium. Even when he talks about not wanting to use his powers for world domination, even when he uses the phrase “dark arts,” he looks like a little boy who wants more than anything to catch a fish.

  When I tell my friend Fenton the human about him, Fenton hears Kodiak, hears fisherman, hears bi and polar, without the hyphen, and asks if maybe we can share him. When I remind Fenton about Ethan, he reminds me about the Romanian in the glove compartment. “Love gets bigger after forty,” Fenton tells me. “After forty, love says, ‘Come one, come all.’ ”

  8. Laramie, Wyoming

  In the summer, the trains come through town more than once an hour, and Ethan and I, locked all night in the bookstore like a fantasy left over from clumsy childhood, pulling books off whatever shelves we want to and reading to each other—poems first, and then settling into stories—on the old purple couch.

  We came down from Walden, Moose Capital of Colorado. I was sure we would find some marker on the fence where Matthew Shepard had been tied.

  Later, when we have turned out all the lights in the bookstore and thrown the mattress on the floor in the back room, the cowboy band across the street tries to play “Free Bird” as an encore, and I watch his face above me change color with the flashing light. He takes my hand and makes me feel the place we come together.

  Holy, he says, not believing in God.

  9. Oakland, California

  Drinking espresso with Cinder at a two-top outside Blue Bottle Coffee, waiting for the phone to ring. Cinder had her needle biopsy last Thursday, is expecting results today. She is the same age now her mother was, when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer. After the news, good or bad, we are going to the spa for Watsu, where a large and beautiful woman named Amanda will float us around a pool one at a time, twist us and turn us, all the time supporting us, pull us tight against her shoulder, her arms snug under our butts, and rock us into something like sleep.

  In the car on the way home, after the first Watsu, Cinder said, “So did that kind of freak you out when she held you like a baby?’ and we laughed so hard she had to pull to the side of the road. Now we can’t get enough of Amanda and the way she holds us like a baby. Both of our mothers have been dead a long time.

  The only good thing about finding the Romanian in the glove compartment was looking forward to telling Cinder that in the ensuing argument I had referenced my own magical qualities.

  When I told Cinder that after sex in the missionary position (the Romanian won’t let Ethan do anything her husband doesn’t do), the Romanian ran around the hotel room saying I’m a motel whore, I’m a motel whore, Cinder started calling him the stupid fucking politico who won’t get out of his own stupid fucking way. “SFP,” Cinder said, “like sunscreen, after forty-five it’s all the same.”

  Beyond the empty lot and the abortion clinic, the seagulls are cracking jokes over the silvery surface of Oakland’s Inner Harbor. I say, “What was the best piece of advice your mother ever gave you?” Cinder thinks a minute, and reddens. “It was when Matthew and I had our first big fight,” she says, “Valentine’s Day, 1994. I didn’t think we were going to make it. I called her out of desperation. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘can I just ask you one question. You know when you are having your period? Are you giving Matthew enough blow jobs during those times?’”

  Cinder’s cell phone rings and we both stare at it a minute before she answers. I start counting inside my head, and when I get to seven, relief breaks across Cinder’s face like sunshine. I realize with some surprise that I am paralyzed with gratitude. If this building were on fire, I could not use my legs to move away.

  10. Gulfport, Mississippi

  Ethan and I walk out on the pier to watch the pelicans dive. On the way back we pass a young man in a wheel chair. He is smoking a cigarette, taking long pulls off a bottle inside a paper bag. He is sunken in on himself in the particular way of the dying, but has a look of such despair on his face I know that in that way, at least, he is still very much alive. Ethan doesn’t notice his ball cap, brown corduroy, the word worthy embroidered in cursive, in gold.

  When Henry’s colon cancer came back the second time, the end came very fast, and he wouldn’t let his wife or his sons call me until after he was dead and buried. When his youngest son finally called a week after the funeral, he told me Henry decided I’d had enough death in my life already, and he didn’t want to serve me up any more.

  Now in Gulfport, it takes Ethan and me ten minutes to gather the courage to go back up the pier and talk to the young man in the wheelchair. From a hundred yards away, he watches us in our deliberations. Ethan and I can never decide anything, where to go to dinner, whether o
r not to stay together, what to do about the Romanian in the glove compartment. By the time we go to him, ask in quiet, nervous voices if there is anything we can do for him, he feels equally sorry for us.

  11. Madison, Wisconsin

  Saturday morning. Middle of October. Good strong coffee from Michelangelo’s. Last night Ethan sang “You Can Close Your Eyes” to my voice mail, and I did, and for the first time this week, slept for six hours straight.

  This morning on State Street a little blond girl—maybe three—threw the kind of temper tantrum we’d all like to throw, long and loud, and almost entirely artificial. “Jessica,” her mother said, in a perfectly reasonable tone, “I’m going to have to ask you for your complete cooperation . . .”

  Fenton the human called to say he has come up with the perfect book for us to write together, Pam and Fenton’s Tales of Failed Love and Romance, chapter one, mine, called “I Can’t Believe I Slept with a Politician,” followed by chapter two, his, “I Can’t Believe I Slept with a Priest.”

  Everything I know about Wisconsin can fit in one paragraph. It is the home of the Butter Burger. It is the state where, on the day his father died, Brett Favre had the game of his life.

  On Thursday I gave my class this assignment: Write your own suicide note. There was half a beat where they all looked at me, and then each other. “No problem,” Noah said. “I’ll just go to my computer and call one up.”

  12. Tampa, Florida

  Eight o’clock on a Friday night and downtown is rolled up tight. Half a block from the old Tampa Theatre, lights, voices, and the slow roll of reggae spilling out into the street. Ethan and I have been having a hard time finding fun in Tampa, and the Jamaicans at the Jerk Hut seem to be having some. It has the feel of a private party, and no one else there is white, but the bouncer says five-bucks-a-person cover, twelve for a bucket of Red Stripes, you can get yourself some food in the back.

  We fill a plate with jerk chicken and fried bananas, open two beers and settle in on the perimeter. The band is talented, everyone in the place knows the words and sings along, and even though Ethan keeps trying to bend the lyrics political, all the lines I catch are about love and sex and girls.

  Ethan is not a dancer, but the beat is irresistible, so I compromise, as others do, by swaying in my chair. When we are not ignored entirely, we are looked at with pleasant curiosity.

  Earlier that day, I was trying to buy some grouper somewhere other than a supermarket, and the woman at the Born Again Produce Stand sent me to the Fresh Fish Market in the projects. “It’s crazy,” she said, “water, water everywhere, but that’s the only one there is.”

  The Fresh Fish Market was in a strip mall. Next door at the Joyful Noise Holiness Tabernacle of Jesus Christ, beautiful teenage girls in white and purple robes holding hymnals were lining up to go inside. There was only one grouper fillet left and the woman behind me in line said she wanted to arm wrestle me for it, before she broke into a smile so wide it showered the dingy market walls with light. “Sister got lost on the way to the Publix,” she said.

  Back at the Jerk Hut, the band is on break and Ethan says, “We might be the only white people to ever drink in this bar.” And I say, “And you might be the only conscientious objector.”

  I’m beginning to understand that when we want to kill ourselves, it is not because we are lonely, but because we are trying to break up with the world before the world breaks up with us.

  When the band comes back, a waitress named Shaila with beaded dreadlocks and bright green pumps takes both my hands and pulls me to the dance floor. She says, “We are going to get everybody dancing tonight.” Two songs later she says, “I’m going back to get the mister,” and I know Ethan won’t be able to resist her invitation. She brings him to me on the dance floor, and two songs later Shaila gets her wish, every single person—even the bouncer, even the kitchen ladies, are dancing—joyful—to the beat.

  #N577WA

  I AM FLYING OUT OF the Little Delta drainage, tucked illegally into the luggage area of George White’s converted Super Cub. Converted, that is, to haul gear instead of a passenger. It is not that my presence puts us in danger, George assures me, I am well within the aircraft’s specs, weighing, as I do, significantly less than a boned-out moose or caribou. But there is no seat for me, not to mention a belt, so my instructions are to make myself look like a duffel bag when we land in Fairbanks, and wait for the all-clear from George before I untangle my limbs and crawl over his seat to the door.

  George is one of many pilots who found their way to Alaska more or less straight from Vietnam. I once saw him break a nine-year-old boy’s arm at the dinner table right after the boy, in an attempt to get his mother’s attention, put the tines of his fork through the back of her hand. I have also watched him dig through buckets of rusted nuts and bolts to find the one ancient screw that will restart a seemingly defunct airplane engine. He likes to push both the light and the equipment, landing on airstrips made of nothing but river rock between steep canyon walls deep into the Alaskan twilight.

  George uses a great deal of duct tape. He has gone down three times because of some combination of weather and equipment failure, and he has walked away each time, once for seventy-five miles before he hit the nearest road.

  His brother, who I flew with out on the coast from Dry Bay to Yakutat—the clouds forcing us so low that we could feel the spray from the breakers on the bottom of the aircraft, so low that we could watch the brown bears chasing each other off the wild strawberry patches on the beaches—had not been so lucky. His death slowed down George’s adrenaline-seeking tendencies not one iota.

  Normally George flies me in and out of the backcountry in the Maule, his newest and safest plane, the only one licensed, in fact, for commercial passengers, but today the Maule is down, and so I am in the back of the ancient but trusty Cub, my knees up around my ears, as the wheels leave the rocky runway.

  It is only about a forty-five-minute flight back to Fairbanks, where, in winter, pilots have to call ahead and ask the luggage handlers to chase moose off the runway. But this is September, and the tundra is red and golden below us, giving way, as we head down valley, to dense forest, an occasional moose standing in a little tarn carved out long ago by the glaciers. We have seen five big bulls since we became airborne.

  We are about halfway to Fairbanks when the engine sputters and quits, and George’s hand jerks up to the tank control, and then his shoulders slump, and he says, “Shit,” and I say, “What,” and he says, “What do you think? We’re out of gas.”

  What scares me more than anything is the violence with which he jerked his hand.

  For ten or twenty seconds we ride in the very particular silence of a small plane gradually losing altitude and then George says, “Do you remember, like in the last few minutes, any place we could maybe put this thing down? A lake, a dirt road, even a river?”

  What I remember from the last few minutes are a few tiny glacial tarns and a million frost-heaved spruce trees, pointing drunkenly in every direction. “I don’t,” I say.

  “Here,” he says, shoving the open aviation chart over the seatback toward me, “we are somewhere around in here,” he indicates vaguely with his finger. “See if you can see anything up ahead, even a cut for a power line . . . sometimes those are wide enough.”

  I try to make sense of the map fast, try to ignore the fact that the treetops are getting closer. “It looks like there is some kind of dwelling to the north,” I say, “with a little road coming into it,” and he says, “How far?” and I say, “Four or five miles,” and he says, “I don’t think we can make that.”

  I know plenty about the need to be airborne, and plenty about how raising the degree of difficulty sweetens the pot. I understand why Alaska and why fly-in-only Alaska and why even that isn’t far out enough. I know what it’s like to feel calmer—better—face to face with a female grizz at dusk on a caribou trail than when I’m contemplating, say, a year, or a month, or even a week
in the significant comforts of my very own house. I know all about the anatomy of restlessness and the crossover point of adrenaline addiction, but I’m not quite ready to be accessory to George’s own personal death wish, even so.

  “Can’t hurt to try,” I say.

  By my best guess we are now less than 2,000 feet above the treetops.

  “Well,” he says, “there is one other thing we could do,” and I say, “What’s that?” and he says, “Switch to the reserve fuel tank.”

  And with that he raises his hand to the little lever, switches it to the left, points the nose slightly downward, and the single engine sputters back to life.

  13. Bumthang Valley, Kingdom of Bhutan

  Christmas Eve. Darkness falls quickly and early, and when it does, the temperature drops sixty degrees. Before sunset Ethan and I stood on our balcony overlooking the Bumthang River watching the thousands of white prayer flags that line the river’s course, that stand all over town in battalions of forty to four hundred, that move in the wind like something alive.

  In December, all the colors of Jakar are muted: browns, grays, and silvers, the river an icy line of mercury that runs through the middle of town. Now the stars are emerging, Orion and the Pleiades straight overhead—Christmas guests who always come on time, even here, where no attention gets paid to Christian holidays—and Sirius, the dog star, the brightest solitaire in the Himalayan night.

  We put on layers of fleece, hats, neck gators, boots, and gloves and walk a couple miles up the road to the monastery. The monks are bustling around in their saffron robes, goose-fleshed elbows flapping in the cold, many of them barefoot against the icy stones of the courtyard. Many of the younger monks are here only because their families cannot afford to feed them. A boy no more than six toting a giant bucket of water grins at me as he walks past.

  Karma asks the Master for permission to enter and we take our seats in the back row. Ethan is too stiff to cross his legs monk-style so he holds his knees like little peaks in front of him. The monks begin chanting, drums and gongs, the songs half hymnal, half college fight song (to engage, and then intimidate the evil spirits, Karma will tell us later).