Contents May Have Shifted

by Pam Houston

  Somewhere in this building my friend Willow, who I have come to Canyon Ranch with, is getting a nice simple lavender scrub and an herbal wrap. Willow looked through the catalog, thought, Yes, the first night, maybe a nice herbal wrap after all that travel.

  “Pamela,” Trevor says, “will you tell me your father’s name so that I may ask him to excuse himself from the lower half of your body?”

  “Yes,” I say, and I do.

  “Sebastian,” Trevor says, “Sebastian, you must get out of there! Sebastian,” he says, “it does not belong to you!” He has his eyes closed and his hands tight around my ankles. “No, Sebastian,” he says, more forcefully now, “there are no options!”

  We stay like that for an excruciating amount of time. Then he folds my hands across my chest and covers them with his. “If you could have only one thing,” he says, “would you choose peace or ecstasy?” Ecstasy, I think, though I’m pretty sure I am supposed to say peace.

  “Peace is an illusion,” Trevor says. “I am in the ecstasy nearly all the time now, even when I sleep.”

  I think of the composer’s lonely bedroom, the terrible black sheets, the clock radio projecting blood-red digits onto the ceiling, his bald head a glinting cabernet color like someone already dead, the musical he wrote where all the gorillas sang, Despite what he is, he’s alive!

  “Pamela,” Trevor says, slapping the bottom of my feet with his palms. “Yes, sir,” I say, out of habit. He’s got my wrists now, is stretching them back over my head. No one has ever called me Pamela except my father. “You have two glasses,” Trevor says, “one is completely full, and one is completely empty. In which glass is stillness possible?”

  “The full one,” I say. The questions are getting easier. Trevor now has his powerful thumbs wrapped almost completely around my uppermost vertebrae. “You can get to stillness through ecstasy,” he says, “but you can’t get to ecstasy through stillness.”

  I think about all the ways the language of the new age is custom-made for terrorism. I think about when a pink mouth opened in a white sky over Davis, and I saw, for the second time, the cupped waiting hands.

  “When one of the doing lines in your life intersects with the circle of your now,” Trevor says, “what happens?”

  “It has to bend,” I say, confident now. “It bends and bends and eventually becomes a circle.”

  “Precisely,” he says, and releases his death grip on my neck.

  60. Istanbul, Turkey

  At the Sultan’s Palace: beautiful long-limbed girl, sexy, but not too sexy, lots of brassy hair, surrounded by seven or eight international travelers her age. To an Australian boy with acne scars, she says, “You are walking through the Topkapi Palace with three beautiful women, what more do you want?” The other young women are not in the same room-of-beautiful as she, but they accept the compliment, don’t dare to interrupt.

  The boy says, “Maybe if you were all naked.” And laughs.

  One of the other girls, a Swede, says “No,” meaning, Go fuck yourself, acne face. The brassy-haired girl holds her fingers to the Swede’s lips, says, “My parents taught me never to say no immediately.”

  “To men?” the Swede asks.

  “To anything,” she says.

  Istanbul is the only major city in the world that is situated on two continents. Since 330 AD it has been the capital of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Latin Empire, and as recently as 1922, the Ottoman Empire. In the hilly streets ruin leans into palace leans into Internet café.

  We are in line waiting to get into the harem, miles of tiled, low-lit corridors and rooms so thick with ghosts of women in captivity you can feel their hair on your arm, their jasmine-scented breath on your face.

  In contemporary Istanbul, the dervishes have finally invited the women to whirl.

  In the Blue Mosque there are two hundred and fifty thousand tiles the color of sky. When the sun comes out, inside is sky and outside is golden. I am forty-six years old and ashamed of the fact that this is the first mosque of my life, but later, when the evening call to prayer catches me in the garden between the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia, call and echo, echo and answer, bouncing off domes and turrets that have stood on this hill for fifteen hundred years; I know faith springs out of doubt like topsoil, and one thing I am is here right now.

  Across the Golden Horn where the Bosporus meets the Sea of Marmara, the Asian part of the city glistens in the twilight. As a candidate for the center of everything, Istanbul beats Pueblo, Colorado, hands down. The gulls are turning cartwheels around the towers of the Blue Mosque and cawing like crazy women. Byzantium, I say to them, Constantinople.

  The circle of my now is wreaking havoc with the lines of my doing. I am learning to say yes, if not always immediately. A sweet-faced Turkish boy, maybe nineteen, offers me a Kleenex, puts both hands over his heart when I take it, says I look just like his mother when I cry.

  CA #4604

  THE STERN-FACED CHINESE GUARD has taken my backpack behind a partition, and suddenly there is a great deal of shouting. I run through its contents in my head: the two thangkas I bought at the school for the preservation of Tibetan culture; the brass soup pots from the market; the thick cords that resemble curtain pulls that the nomads wrap around their heads to indicate regional loyalties—red for the east, black for the west—the hand-lettered gold-leaf prayer books I bought for pennies out of an old man’s satchel—could they count as antiquities? —the long string of jingle bells made for a yak.

  Now the shouting has moved itself back out from behind the partition and is directing itself at me. The guard wears a semiautomatic weapon and several clips of ammunition on his belt. The yelling stops and it is my turn to speak.

  “I don’t understand you,” I say.

  Another string of angry Chinese spews from the guard’s mouth, which I interpret more or less correctly as “Idiot! Tourist! Woman!”

  I glance at my watch. My plane is scheduled to leave in thirty-five minutes, my connection in Chengdu tight.

  Breathtakingly toxic—even the Tibetans get dysentery there—Chengdu reminds me of the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, after the sun has stopped coming out forever. It is not a place I want to get stuck.

  “Look,” I say, “whatever it is, if it’s a problem, keep it.”

  I’m guessing it is my attitude he objects to, since we cannot understand each other’s words. The guard blows his whistle, three short tweets, and two more guards appear on either side of me, grab my arms firmly, but not roughly, escort me to a room down the hall.

  They leave me sitting there a long time, long enough for me to miss my plane to Chengdu, long enough for me to miss my plane from Chengdu to Hong Kong, long enough for me to remember every detail of the film Midnight Express, the film that kept an entire generation of travelers from carrying drugs across any border including—some of us—between states.

  A new guard knocks sharply twice on the door and enters, already yelling. He yells for several minutes, getting so close to my face that I can feel his breath on my eyeballs, but something in me refuses to cry.

  “I don’t understand you,” I say, the next time he pauses, and the next time, and finally, right over top of his voice when it seems like he won’t ever shut up.

  Startled, he raises his hand, I think, maybe, to hit me. And in that second, I remember the knife. A woman knife, the vendor at the market had called it, with its yak-antler handle and its four-inch blade. I had thought it would be a perfect gift for my ultra-butch housesitter Pat.

  “The knife!” I say. “I’m sorry! I didn’t think . . . To me it was just a souvenir!” But of course the guard can’t understand any of that either.

  They leave me sitting another long time. I hear planes come in, I hear planes take off. At one point I realize the windows are made of one-way glass. Finally a man wearing a suit comes in. He grunts at me to rise, to follow, so I do. Back in security, he thrusts my backpack at me, and hands me a boarding pass. I go throug
h security again without incident. My woman knife, of course, is gone.

  Everything is broken on China Air flight 4402, and the toilet reeks and the four Chinese I am slammed into the middle seats with will not stop spitting onto the carpet, but compared to five years of hard labor at a Tibetan prison, it pretty much rocks. As the plane bumps along the mountainous air currents, I think about my father, about the time I was seventeen and my mother went away for a week and left me in charge of his meals. One day I was racing home from my friend’s house on my bike hoping to get there before he did, and he drove his Cadillac right up behind me on the sidewalk and laid on the horn, and even after that it all might have been okay because dinner was only supposed to be assembled cold cuts on rye bread and tomato salad. I dropped my bike on the lawn and ran into the kitchen before he could get out of the car, but he came in just as I was opening a new jar of mayo and grabbed my shirt in the front and pinned me up against the wall and raised his hand in the same exact way the Chinese guard had, and I said, for the first time ever, “If you do this, I’ll tell everyone you know,” and my father let go of the front of my shirt and went in and turned on the Phillies game.

  When we begin to descend the flight attendant comes over the ancient speaker in a demonic whisper and the cabin gets so animated I think we must be about to crash, but then I remember reading that the descent off the Tibetan plateau to Chengdu is the steepest of any commercial flight path, even Cochabamba, Bolivia, where you plummet right past the face of one of the fifteen Christs in South America that claim to be the world’s largest, and before I know it we are on the ground.

  Miraculously, I have not missed the last flight of the day from Chengdu to Hong Kong, and when I go to the gate a new boarding pass appears.

  Stepping onto the Air Hong Kong jet is stepping squarely back into the first world, and when the flight attendant in her stylish purple suit and jaunty tam asks me what I would like to drink, I look at her twice to make sure she isn’t kidding. “One country, two systems,” the customs official said to me when I left Hong Kong, two weeks ago, and he can say that again.

  Just after we land beside the carnival neon of the Hong Kong skyline, the copilot heads down the aisle toward me with a look that tells me he has me in his sights. I suck in my breath as he stops in front of me. “Your knife, madam,” he says, bowing, deeply.

  “Thank you very much,” I say, as I lift it from his hands.

  61. Marfa, Texas

  When we drive into town the big lights are on and the Marfa Shorthorns (purple and white) are playing the Ozona Tigers (white and purple). The score is 34–0 Tigers, but the Marfa faithful are still present and the marching band sounds peppy as all get out. Down on Main Street, there are two thousand people eating barbecue, most of them art groupies from L.A., and the mariachi band is playing “Más Fuerte Que Yo.”

  We drive out to the viewing platform to see the Marfa lights and before we even get there, there they are, red, then yellow, then white, blinking on, then splitting in two, then blinking off. Some people say the lights belong to cars on Highway 67 running down toward Presidio, and others say it’s a real-life example of Pierre Curie’s 1883 theory called the piezoelectric effect where quartz heavy rocks expand during the day and contract at night so much they give off a voltage. Some say it’s magic or extraterrestrials—even God—that makes the lights glow and jump, because the closer anybody gets to them the further they jump away.

  This is all happening back in the days when I still have hope that Rick might think I’m pretty, so I’ve bought a silk skirt, two-tone brown with a rose-colored hem and it’s rippling softly around my ankles in the warm Marfa wind. Marfa is Rick’s favorite place, he says, but even it makes him sad because it’s where he went all the time to escape from Sofree and the baby.

  Over at the Chinati center, the Judd boxes in the old armory make light of their own, different kinds of it from hour to hour, from clouds to sun to twilight to moonlight. A hundred silver boxes, holding and absorbing and reflecting light that, like the surface of a river, goes sometimes flat and sometimes blue and sometimes all the way to gold, shadows stretching out underneath them, light and dark like the world’s biggest set of

  piano keys.

  Rick insists the placement of the boxes is random and I argue with him (and the brochure) as if I have something important at stake until I realize my point is that nothing is random, where you are from or who you love or who you think is pretty or don’t.

  In the afternoon Fenton the dog and I walk out to the place where the railroad tracks make you want to walk forever, and he chases a jackrabbit around and around in circles until he catches sight of the pronghorns, and lights out after them for a while. Eventually they get tired of toying with him and throw it into fourth gear and leave him in the dust.

  Rick has spent more than twenty thousand dollars in therapy trying to make sense of his life’s last decade, but I’ve got it down to one sentence: If a thirty-seven-year-old woman swears that the rhythm method has always worked perfectly for her, everybody in the theater knows what happens next. Except Rick, who had made a solemn promise to himself that he would never, under any circumstances, have children, when he was just a child himself. He’d made it past forty without ever having to buy an EPT test, let alone an abortion, but Sofree was pregnant six weeks after the first time they did it. Madison will be eight in September. Once she became an actual child, Rick loved her the way lots of dads love their daughters, helplessly, with a touch of desperation. Madison was barely two when Sofree kicked Rick out.

  When I get back to the house Rick has gone out for barbecue so I sit down and make a list of all the ways he is not like a normal person, which includes (1) He won’t put liners into his kitchen trash can, but he is afraid that if he goes to Thailand he will bring something back Madison will catch, and (3) Sometimes his face changes into some other guy’s face, a guy we think lived in ancient times who speaks with great authority and whom I have nicknamed the Originator, and (5) He likes to call me a mighty fine gal.

  If you went to every cafeteria in the country and guessed vegetable beef as the soup of the day you would be right 68 percent of the time. Broccoli cheddar would cover another 20 percent, so what do you do if you are a person who craves Hungarian mushroom?

  “Oh sweetie,” I say, when Rick comes back with the barbecue, “you weren’t ignorant, you were just innocent.”

  He wraps his freckled Texan hands around me, says, “That’s the kindest thing you’ve said so far.”

  62. Creede, Colorado

  Colt comes by the house to tell me the latest. How Tassie ended things again two weeks ago, so Colt drank a six-pack at home and went to the bar to find someone to hit. He chose the other farrier in town, the one who’s famous for having the best ass in Creede.

  Colt got kicked out of the bar as he knew he would, and jumped in his truck to drive home. The deputy sheriff had watched the whole thing from his truck, pulled Colt over at the town limits and insisted on driving him the twelve miles to my house, where he’s been bunking in since the first restraining order, watching things when I am away.

  It was in my kitchen that Colt really started to work himself up. First he punched a hole through the dry wall (he shows me the spot and I have to admit his repair job is masterful). It was twenty below out, and he was truckless, so he saddled his palomino and started back to town and Tassie’s house. Halfway there he realized he had no feeling in his arms and legs, so he stopped at the veterinarian’s, stabled his horse, and sweet-talked Doc into driving him back to his truck. Then he drove to Tassie’s house and ripped the front door off the hinges.

  “That’s how we got to the second restraining order,” he says, smiling ruefully. “But things have gotten a little better this week. The restraining order expires Friday, and on Saturday Tassie wants to go shopping for a diamond ring.”

  “Perfect,” I say, and give him a hug.

  Colt has done odd jobs for me for two years including p
ainting the house, nursing my dog Mary Ellen back from cancer surgery, and once on Christmas Eve, when I was in Bangkok, keeping a frozen pipe in the mudroom from ruining everything I own. He works on a sliding pay scale, $8 to $20 an hour depending on how much he has to think. If he spends a day ripping old carcinogenic insulation out of the rafters of the barn, that costs $8 an hour, if he makes several calls trying to find the closest thing to a no-longer-manufactured furnace ignition switch, that costs $20. He says the word deal four or five times in every sentence the way Jack Here-Here said On it there, and he can’t ever remember to close a door. Did you grow up in a barn? I am always inclined to scream at him, but of course, in his case, the answer would be yes.

  When Colt doesn’t live at Tassie’s, he lives in the old homesteader’s cabin between my house and the creek and he has it full of all the things you would expect to see in a real cowboy’s cabin like a flag and a gun and a hot plate and a Bible, but he also puts little Post-it notes around that say things like Listen to more classical music, and tonight there is one stuck right in the middle of his TV screen that says, I am your enemy. Last week when I called him on his cell phone he said, “I felt a little vibration near my heart and knew it had to be you.”

  After the last restraining order expired, Colt said, “Once Tassie allowed me to say I was sorry—the very morning after I was able to apologize—the sun was all of a sudden a color in the sky again and I wasn’t living anymore in some black-and-white minimalist painting.”

  A different day he burst into my living room urgently. “I want to show you something amazing,” he said. He held Rick’s picture in one hand, and Fenton the dog’s in the other. “Look at the hair! Look at the eyebrows! Pam,” he said, “you’ve fallen in love with your dog!”