My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  We basically walked five miles back the way we came, parallel to the dirt road we’d driven in on, and this is on me.

  The dog became horribly annoying the entire trip, running forward and backward and clipping us at the knee every time, enough so that I finally lost my temper with her and directed a blow to her snout when she just about knocked me down at the halfway mark, and we both decided it was time for a coffee break, on a ridge overlooking a deep and staggeringly steep ravine, where Steph sat and undid her own pack, then helped me with mine, and we started a small fire and made that morning’s coffee.

  It was surprisingly beautiful, even though it was an absolute error, and she sat perched with her feet dangling over the ledge and asked me to take photos of her, using her phone camera, as it was useless for anything else since we were so far out of cellular reach.

  She shifted dangerously close to the edge so that we could get her into the same frame as a stone waterfall that loomed directly behind her, if she positioned herself correctly.

  It was an actual waterfall formation but in volcanic rock. It went up, into the mountainside, and it cascaded down—frozen in time, because it was rock—right into the ravine, and if you stood back, it looked just like a waterfall that had been transformed into stone, as if by the gorgon Medusa.

  It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, made me wonder at the never-ending capacity for metaphor in nature.

  And Steph sat there, at its base, on that ridge, and asked me to take her photo, with a look of sadness sliding over her face that was now frozen like rock, as if she knew something that I didn’t, or wasn’t ready to admit yet, though in reality we were already engaged in it.

  On that mountainside. With that dog.

  CHAPTER 21 Neon Crosses

  Steph drove the Jeep back to Seattle through the Cascades on our way home the next evening. Driving out of the valley into the mountain pass in the waning daylight felt like an entirely different experience, and though the vestiges of a tingle remained from the omens and danger we had seen and experienced on the camping trip, it was actually an enjoyable journey back through the mountain highways. We were even able to sing loudly over the rush of wind from the lowered windows, though never on key.

  Well, my singing was never on key. Hers was always spot on.

  Steph had a voice for radio, seductive, warm, sexy, and siren-like, and she could sing even better, when the mood overtook her. She had grown up singing in a singing family, like the Partridges, though not as ginger.

  So when she sang, it was a wonderful sound, and she sang a lot on that ride back through the mountains.

  And this is where it started, after our guard had lowered.

  There came a chime emanating from her handbag, tucked away under camping gear in the backseat, and it was persistent, ringing often enough under the blow of the wind that I had to find it and come to terms with its insistence.

  Sixteen messages, from her mother and brother.

  I handed her the phone as she was driving and watched her face change as she listened to message after message: her mother crying, then her brother, telling her that her father was in the hospital, where the hell was she? Had she not received the messages? “Call us, as soon as you get this.”

  He’d been clearing wood on a piece of land he’d bought for Steph as a present, near a river, in case she wanted to come back home. It was an isolated parcel of land, quite woody and Henry David Thoreau: perfect for her.

  He’d taken to spending his weekends clearing trees and shrubs—sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. This time, he’d been out with an old friend and they felled a large tree that had felled him, in return.

  He was in ICU and severely hurt. Broken ribs, facial fractures. Uncertain of his survival.

  Family had been at his bedside for the past two days, while we’d been out of reach, in that valley of the shadow of neon crucifixions.

  She relayed the vital information to me as she heard it, rolled up her windows to get the full messages, and repeated back to me what she was being told in the voice mail.

  My startle impulse locked in, and I could see hers forming in the hardening of her features. Finally, she flipped shut her phone and said, “I have to go. I have to be there. He might not make it.”

  There was a momentary pause for me, because I wasn’t sure what role I played in her life any longer. But it was only a moment, and instead I said, “All right. What do you need from me?”

  We were an hour still from Seattle, and closer to her place, which once was our place but was now just her place, so it was there that we headed.

  I was beat, I remember. The hike from the day before had been a catastrophe, and we had humped a tremendous amount of gear for nearly eight miles on that trail that paralleled the road we had driven in, and we were effectively stuck in falling temperatures on a roadside that was not amenable to camping.

  I finally acknowledged that I was not holding up my part of the covenant of discomfort for camping any longer and wanted a motel room, so I flagged a passing vehicle and was able to get us a ride back to the Jeep, effusively thanking the retired couple who obliged us and were entirely amused at our camping idiocy. (“When you get to the point where you whittle down your toothbrush to save weight and space, then you’re ready to carry a pack out camping,” the woman said to me. Steph and I had both brought our Sonicare toothbrushes.)

  I’d rented us a musty, moldy, nasty redneck motel and snuck in the dog, and after midnight, when the adjacent bedsprings on either side of the paper-thin walls began squeaking their secrets in a building crescendo, Steph indicated she was interested in doing the same, and it just wasn’t there for me, anymore. Normally, the very idea of a motel or hotel would get my crank going: I mean, there’s no other reason for hotels, really. They’re a structural, physical embodiment of sex. When I was younger, just entering a hotel room would turn me on at the suggestion of possibilities. But here, the chemistry had fizzled out between us, and I felt awful doing it, but I turned my back to her and pretended I was dead asleep, though I was wide awake and crawling with discomfort, itching at the idea of the mildewed sheets, bedbugs, and redneck lovemaking that had transpired in that room previously, lying there with someone for whom I’d lost all romantic affection.

  When we reached her place, we did not unpack the Jeep, just rushed inside and began preparations for her departure across the country. While she showered I found her rolling suitcase and began the preparation for travel, thinking perhaps I should accompany her on the trip. It was late afternoon, around 4:00 p.m. when we made it back to Seattle, and she’d be flying into an airport a hundred miles from her hometown and then driving a rental in the middle of the night through some fairly dark and rural highways, and the one highway in particular where she had nearly died fifteen years ago, I knew.

  Something in me couldn’t allow her to do this on her own. When she emerged from the shower, I said I was going along; she shouldn’t do this alone. I could do my job from any hotel room with an Internet connection; it didn’t matter where. “So let’s get you home.”

  Her features softened, and she looked me square in the eye, nodded her head.

  “All right,” she said. “I would like that.”

  By 5:00 the next morning, we were driving from a small airport to a medium-size city on the East Coast where her father had been hospitalized. It had been touch-and-go for the first eighteen hours, but he was a tough dude, had stabilized and seemed to be pulling through, the reports began to reflect as we flew over the flyover states.

  She’d put both tickets on her card and I’d given her the daily cash limit on my withdrawals, which covered my ticket. We agreed that she’d cover the car rental and hotels while I’d pick up all the food costs because I didn’t eat like her, peanut butter and Cheez-Its and a cup of coffee satisfying most nutritional requirements for days at a stretch, and this seemed fair to both of us, since it was her crisis, her family.

  It was around
6:00 a.m. when we arrived at the hospital. She had paused for a moment in the car and allowed herself to break down, to shiver and shake and cry and steel herself for what was about to come, seeing her dad hurt, being thrust back into the miasma of family dynamics that had been painful enough for her to put ten states between them and her, and the corresponding micromemories.

  The car had bucket seats, so it was difficult to hold her, but I did, awkwardly and painfully over the console, as she shivered through her process and then resolved herself to plant her feet and attend to what was asked of her.

  It was still early enough in the morning that the hospital was quiet and there was little going on, so we were able to slip inside and find his room. Her dad was sleeping. Her mother and brother were curled up in back-pinching discomfort in the waiting room, and I recognized them right away, as I wandered out to find some coffee in order to give her a moment alone with her father. He was a good guy, and I was deeply saddened to see him like that.

  I remained at a distance for the next few days, allowed the family to work through their internal dynamics and process the fear of the near fatality of someone so close to them. Families in that situation do not need interlopers or outsiders, however well-meaning they might be, and I knew I had no right or privilege to be included and conducted myself accordingly. I’d help when asked, might make an offer or suggestion of a lunch or coffee run, move a car that needed parking or couriering, but otherwise stepped back and behaved like a cat, absorbing everything and thinking nothing.

  There was a weird, competitive quality in Steph’s family that I hadn’t seen before, anywhere, like there was a correlation between how much they were putting themselves out as a sacrifice to show how much affection they had for him. It was interesting, and I chalked it up to Lutheranism. Catholics endured suffering differently, I noticed. Catholics sprayed their anguish, shared it with anyone listening and in the room, handed it out, piece by piece like the Body of Christ so that the load could be shared with others, processed with a community who are there with you for that very reason.

  Protestants, Lutherans especially, would rather have their tongues cut out than exhibit that level of pain and passion. Instead, they make casseroles.

  I couldn’t quite get the nuance, though. Maybe this was a different strain of love, in a manner that I’ve never seen before. Their sacrifice was forced upon you, and you would take it, by golly. Sort of like, “For all the times I couldn’t say it, I will force my love upon you with jars of fish preserves.” But the odd thing is, they did: They said it clearly in their dedication. They showed it, always. I was amazed. But still, I was more accustomed to cries of anguish, gunshots fired into the night, sometimes out of windows.

  Over the course of the next few days, when it became clear that the sturdy old guy was going to pull through, the levels of anxiety shifted and redirected themselves to the more quotidian, and the seams of the family surfaced and the bickering and picking of nits that Stephanie had insisted characterized her relationship to her mother and brother began to emerge. Or rather, Stephanie insisted they’d appeared, but I was unconvinced, or, if they had, they’d slipped by me unnoticed or unknown.

  “Do you see how she does that?” Steph would ask me, over a private lunch or dinner away from her family.

  “What?” I’d ask, not tracking. I was usually distracted by some unfamiliar brand of soda or saltine, or other mundane product from that part of the country, which I’d only visited briefly, once before. I found everything interesting and new. Moxie soda, kids at convenience stores who couldn’t see spending two dollars for aspirin, so they gave it to me for free, a woman standing at an intersection with the deepest, most tragic black eye I’ve ever seen on a living human holding a sign, “Battered Wife/Homeless, Please Help.” I gave her twenty dollars.

  “The way she said that thing about how I have no friends!”

  “She did? I didn’t catch that,” I’d say. Steph was in a state of constant vigilance for a double entendre or backhanded slights when she was around her mother, which must have been exhausting for both of them. And, truth be told, her mother had been correct: Steph really didn’t have many friends.

  “You mean you didn’t hear her say it?”

  “I, uhm, no. I mean, I just haven’t heard what you’ve heard. I’m not sure she really means it like that, Steph.”

  “God, you’re unbelievable,” she said, disgusted.

  “I just don’t see what you’re seeing; I don’t think she’s being malicious or undermining. I think you’re actually trying to see an attack and so you create one where there isn’t. I mean, your mother’s a bit childlike sometimes, but I don’t think she’s actively trying to harm you, or diminish you. I think you’re doing that yourself.”

  That was it: that last part, probably too much. If we had been trying to get back together, if there was the slimmest indication that it was a possibility, it died there. I’d sided with the “other” and was no longer reliable in validating her world view.

  Something slammed shut between us when I wouldn’t side with her against her biggest vulnerability, her biggest imagined enemy, in her mother. Both Steph and I had once bonded over the idea that we were that kid in the crowd who pointed to the Emperor in his New Clothes, pointed and shouted and stomped our feet and demanded that everyone else see what we saw, determined to call out the shenanigans where others failed to see them.

  I think she wanted my validation then and I couldn’t offer it, couldn’t buy into her persecution complex, and that made her feel even more isolated, separated us further from the idea that we’d ever end up in a happily ever after where it was just us versus them, where “them” was everyone else.

  I liked her family, quite a bit. I really liked Harold, and for a time there I think they really liked me. It was a real shame that Steph was bat-shit crazy and we were as incompatible as we were: I really wanted to be a part of her family, in spite of her. It might have even worked.

  One of the last afternoons we spent in the hospital, her mother and I were in a waiting room and talking about her and Harold’s time in England, back in the ’60s, about Carnaby Street, and I was asking questions about the fashion and the music, and her mother was delighted to revisit the memories with someone who was genuinely interested when Steph, who was sitting nearby and pretend-reading a magazine, stood up, slapped it shut, and bolted through a set of swinging doors, bringing the moment to an abrupt halt. Of course, I made my excuses and followed her, both her mother and I puzzled about what had triggered such a response, and when I was finally able to make some sense from what Steph was telling me, I realized she felt we had been flirting.

  Of all things.

  “This is just craziness, Steph. Your information tray is jammed. You’re just fucking wrong, man. This is out of control.”

  By this point, we’d been there for over a week, and I’d been sitting in a hotel working remotely to eastern Washington and executing my job as the designer for the bilingual periodical, which was floundering every week, the smell of print death more prevalent as the weeks passed, much more acute in ink than at the hospital, and everyone was itching to get back to their habits and routines, Harold and her mother especially. They wanted us gone, out of their hair, and Steph kept pushing our exit date back.

  Also, I’d gone nearly two weeks now without a drink. It was the longest I’d been dry in years. And I thought, maybe, I was getting thirsty. I wasn’t sure.

  It had actually been quite easy to abstain. While we’d had a couple of spats or moments of discomfort—the biggest one when Cleo escaped captivity and wound up at a neighbor’s house, and Steph asked me to take care of it, make a decision, and I was at a loss of management—that was the only moment when I very nearly went down to the hotel bar and loaded up.

  But I hadn’t, when I normally would have. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because I wanted her family to like me still.

  At any rate, when we finally caught a transcontinental 747
at JFK, we were stuck on the tarmac for three hours, and I could see her looking at me out of the corner of her eye, and I realized she was waiting for me to lose my cool and throw a hissy fit, which would then—if history served—make her lose her cool, but instead I shook my head and kept reading The Book Thief, which I was having trouble following, and we made it back across the country and spent the night at my apartment downtown, and during nearly two weeks of constant exposure to one another and sleeping next to one another in many beds across the country, we didn’t have sex once, and we both knew that it was really over, if we hadn’t acknowledged it before, back when the whole thing started with the car wreck and the dead dog and the descent into the mountains of madness.

  We were done. We just needed to see what we had left.

  We were back in Seattle for a week before it happened again.

  Actually it was more like five days, reimmersed in our separate living patterns, which had me working from home for the illiterate newspaper for three days a week, then working on the unpublished book I’d been writing for too many years to count, on those days that I had nothing to do, and I was making a surprising amount of progress, in the abstract. And at local bars.

  Still, I was happy; I mean, I wasn’t proliferating, exactly, but for a graphic designer in Seattle in the post-Internet boom, I was doing all right. And I was looking forward to being single again, left to my own vices, and devices, as it were.

  Steph and I had been gone for a good two weeks and I was missing my friends back in Seattle, particularly my friend Sarah, from the karate school, with whom I’d take those twice-weekly walks around Greenlake and talk like a new mother hen.

  Sarah, at this time, was not doing well. She’d just been hit with a divorce from her husband of fifteen years, and she was no longer the enthusiastic, engaged conversationalist who would delight at topics that flirted with the inappropriate, suggesting some degree of misbehavior or misconduct, right along a deep and entertaining two-mile monologue on Mary Shelley, or the suffragette movement in America, or the continued misnomers of Greek culture, or an exchange of mamaloshen.