by Martin Roper
I have to get past hatred. I think of God, the last refuge of the hopeless. Is God happy? God must be bored watching the same unimaginative mistakes repeated and repeated and repeated.
Unravelling
I drive west for dead hours. I feel nothing except the coffee weakening with the miles. The traffic has long since thinned but never stops. Morning seems centuries away. Trucks pass, their roar more ferocious, more urgent in the humid night. For three hours there hasn’t been a single bend in the road. My eyes are heavy with sleep and my anger at her has receded, diluted to an impotent impulsiveness and a road going to I don’t know where. I turn the radio off and stare ahead into the miles. America is a highway, going nowhere. Each time I think I am doing fine, changing the rules, changing myself, but I am doing nothing but making the same mistakes, can no longer see the truth in anything.
The car hits gravel on the shoulder and the noise jolts me awake. I take the next exit. Four in the grimy morning. I pull up at the back of a closed Dairy Queen. My eyes are burning and gritty, I let the seat back and sleep.
Birds wake me. It’s five—not yet bright. I drive back to the intersection to get on the interstate and then swing around and stop in the roadway, the engine idling. Enough of straight roads. I put the car into gear and drive back past the Dairy Queen. Night has not yet left the truck stop. The Iron Skillet. All food all day. Yummy. Even though people are eating greasy breakfasts and the sky is haunted with a pallid blueness, night clings to the restaurant; sticks to weary cigarette butts in unemptied ashtrays, to the tired eyes of the waitress slouching towards me with coffee sloshing in its pot; it creeps out of the sullen silence of the jukebox. Groups of dungareed men slumped on orange plastic chairs around large tables drinking coffee and smoking. They could be farmers if they weren’t so lethargic. I look for a table without a phone but they all have them.
After I order breakfast I stare at the phone, look away from it, look back at it, give up and punch in the code. It takes three tries to get it right and then I hang up before she answers. I have no stomach for breakfast and know I have to phone her.
—Mmin?
—It’s me.
—Mm. Hi me.
—Can we talk?
—Mm.
—Will you please wake up? Is she still there?
—Mmm.
—I’m calling from a truck stop.
—Mmm?
—I’m calling from Pennsylvania.
—Is it fun?
—It’s over.
—Pennsylvania’s over?
—We are.
—We are. Really?
—I’ve had enough.
—You only know when you’ve had enough when you’ve had too much.
—Magda is too much.
—What a squirrel you are. Ciao.
—I’m serious.
—You’re calling me from a truck stop in the middle of the night to say it’s over, yes? I’ve got a job to get up for in three hours. You tell me it’s over? Good luck. What do you want me to say, don’t do it? Well, Serious, hope you’re not in my car. I need it for the job in New Jersey this morning.
—I am. I can’t explain it. I have to be by myself.
—You don’t have a self to be with. Fuck off. Are you in my car?
—Yep.
She hangs up and I listen to the buzzing of the telephone line for a long time. I look around, sure the diners know she has hung up on me, and when the waitress comes with my plate and raises her eyebrows, she raises them not to ask me to make room for the plate, but to tell me I deserve to be sitting here with a telephone in my hand and no one talking and no one listening. Two blacks stuffing their faces at the other end of the restaurant. My stomach lurches at the sight of the food. A train passes, wailing. The same cry as ships in Dublin Bay on a foggy night. At the cash desk my eye catches sight of a poster on the dirty yellow wall behind the waitress: Nothing can ever change the fact that you and I once had wonderful times. Only in America. Holfy got fat and I couldn’t bear the sight of her fat. There must have been a moment when love stopped, a clock giving its final tick, the sea’s final ebb. I didn’t want go grow old with her. No nice way of saying it. I walk out into the parking lot and look around at America. I can’t remember which direction is which. Her implacability, that, more than anything, is what I’m driving away from. I go back into the truck stop and get a pack of cigarettes out of the machine. Four weeks since I put one in my mouth. I tear the cellophane wrapper off. No ceremony. The tip is fatter than I remember. I cough, and, even with the unpleasantness of coughing, a calmness fills and I feel violently alive.
Dazed and drunk with heat. A bird flashes across the front of the car. A soft pop like a Styrofoam cup splatting flat. I pull over. A mush of feathers and innards. I park off the highway under an oak tree and sleep. I wake sweating and parched. The windscreen is covered with drips of sweat from the oak leaves. Even the trees are weary of the heat. Rain come then stops as quickly. Birds peck at the earth. Lilac smells stronger after rain. I never knew what pleasure was until Holfy took me in her soft mouth. I light a cigarette. Sweet identity a cigarette gives. A For Sale sign at the edge of the road: Ayn Runnings. Everything she touches turns to Sold.
The terrors come as fiercely in the day now. Hungry fat crows waiting to devour. America is a highway with no exits. Meaningless highways stretching into infinity. I can’t bear another night in the car. I stay at a Fairfield Inn in Sioux City. The Fairfield Inns, the Taco Bells, the Amoco filling stations: the roads of America; a litany of anonymity spread across a continent. The cattle in the early morning fields, their hides black and steaming in the haze, prancing like circus horses in the heavy morning. I pass through Wahoo. Wahoo Wahoo. An owl calling. I keep driving. Holfy is sliding into a past with Ursula. Ruth is dead. Father is dead. I had felt sickly free at his funeral, like a door had been unhinged by a fierce wind. I had thought of my last name, my father’s name, and that I was the last child to carry it. After my own death there would be no one, no one would carry the name.
Lone Tree
I like it here. The space. The realtor looked nervous, shocked that I agree to buy the barn so quickly. There’s a small house too but it was the barn that attracted me. The place had been unsold for years. I know why Holfy was apprehensive that night I got back from Dublin. It wasn’t Ursula. It was the freedom the money from the house gave me. I had choice now and Holfy sensed I would be looking around, looking for a freedom she couldn’t give me. Ursula’s voice is leaving me at last. All the voices are leaving me.
On the distant highway, a car shimmers past. American cars have a way of being, a sense of movement that suggests their destination is unimportant; their function is to make the highway exist. Here, far from the cities, beneath a vast blue sky, cars are alien; an ugliness cruising across the plains. When I go into Lone Tree, people’s faces appall me; the pain of their lives glares like pornography. The isolation has made me too sharp an observer of misery. I need the starched blue sky I can run off into. A sea without wetness. Everything is bigger here. All the voices are nearly gone. Finally, life started when I left Holfy.
* * *
I have lost interest in working on the barn. At least temporarily. It’s too hot to work and it seems blasphemous not to be having fun on Independence Day. I am sitting on the broken porch. There is no breeze. The kitchen is the only place with an air conditioner and I move in there. The cicadas, the cacophonous cicadas, are screeching Ursula’s name. I see her walking away from me. Now, after the parting, her walk has an alienated majesty about it. I sit in the grim kitchen and read the book about the Baird murder that took place a mile away, some years ago. It’s badly written but I am hooked on the sloppy and conceited writer who is giving, as he puts it, a dispassionate and unbiased account of one of America’s most baffling murders. Whenever a writer claims to be impartial you can be sure he’ll be falling over himself to hide his little opinions, and a stupid writer, like this one, will fail. I
wake with the book on my lap and the heat of the sun coming through the dirty windowpane. I’m looking for the reason why, with the answers dancing around me, I haven’t changed. The birds begin to compete with the cicadas, singing the night in. I drag myself up and begin drinking, drinking myself into stupor. Happy freedom of drunkenness. Mosquitoes in the house again. Waiting for me to go to bed to eat me. Fuck this country. A vodka gimlet. A loud bang across the fields sends a shiver through me. The Baird couple dead on the floor in front of me. Even the worst scribbler can set the mind racing. In the black sky a ball of light climbs slowly into the sky, opens and scatters its beauty, a cascade of reckless jewels fading away into darkness. Moths bash off the screen searching for an opening. There are no shortcuts. Only a sparkle ago I had my arm around Holfy’s waist and she had her arm around mine and we were leaning against the bridge along the Hudson River with thousands of others, watching the fireworks until we grew tired of the oohs and aahs and our necks hurt with looking up and we started kissing because we looked at each other and felt the same thing; luckiest people in the world to be together. Once upon a time, a long moment ago, I was down by the pond in Dublin, leaning on a bridge with Ursula, waiting for the train to go under and counting the carriages and writing down the number and we’d kiss if we agreed on the same number. Go home and study if we got it wrong. Waiting for the train to go under and we were so happy we didn’t think gravity could keep our feet on the ground. I am twisted with anger at the stupid bastard I was with her. And with Holfy. If only she had put up with a little foolishness from me. Put up with me, my mind whispers into a dead past. I am jealous of our past, of her present without me. God must have been this jealous when Eve and Adam first set eyes on each other.
Perched on the listing porch with the vodka and mug of ice, the ice melting with the night heat before I’ve reached the end of the drink. There is no forever, only the eternity of our little beginnings and littler endings. I finish the drink with its melted ice giving it a faint taste of wet cardboard. If I hadn’t got that call from Gerry. If we hadn’t bought that house in Bath Avenue. But I am lying to myself. The hardest lies to get past are my own. If does not exist. What happened? Nothing happened. Everything happened. What happened was I fell and didn’t see the fall. Ursula’s heart was no longer in it. She saw it long before me. I thought we were finding a new beginning. The night we were having the house warming before we sold it. I had called it a house cooling and she hadn’t laughed. We told no one we were selling as soon as it was finished in case the word would get out that we were being driven out. I wanted to make it a special evening, to tell people it was a symbol of our commitment to each other. But even then she was long past me. A chipmunk darts out of a crack in the porch. His tail flicks, bobbing in tandem with his fat-cheeked cheeping. He is full of nervous happiness for summer. My mind drifts around Ursula, around Holfy. Holfy never wore T-shirts. And she never let me wear them. The necks are disgusting. The tiniest things bonded us, made us insoluble. The way she glanced at me and her irony flashed off a roomful of people and landed on my lips. Men are such bores men are such bores men are such bores they take so long to realise anything. One could create the world while waiting for them to connect an apparently disparate idea. Men are such bores. Someone just had to say her name and my cock stiffened. She would glance at me across the room—a split second—and she would fuck me in that moment. And she would know. I had made mistakes with all of them. I was too young to know any different with Ursula, too lost to know any different with Holfy … I don’t know … too stupid to know Holfy was the one. The good thing. I write to Holfy with my address. Then I write another letter and include some of the bits I wrote in her darkroom.
Doors I had closed are flung open. Terror flies at me, yellow bats in the darkness, surprised by light. All my fears flap about, winged with a thousand cruelties. Desire runs through me faster than blood. I sit up in the bed sweating with the fierceness of a dream still racing through me. I imagine Holfy sleeping on her stomach, her hands tucked under her chest. The memory of her dispelling the nightmare. Her cunt tastes like butter melting on hot toast. When I am in her she squelches with joy. The sound of her lovemaking entrances me like the first time I heard corn crackling in its leaves in a July sun. She walks differently. When she moves, her legs are alive with knowing that I have been between them and will be between them again and again. I get dressed and go out and drive through the darkness. Every night sleep fails and I go out and drive the dirt roads as if it’s a job. How strange these back roads are, straight as book edges and cutting across each other like the grid of Manhattan but unpeopled. It is as if they are some grand abandoned scheme.
* * *
I am barricaded inside myself, a crazed bird on the floor of its cage, exhausted. I am driving off Howth Head. Ursula Ursula Ursula Ursula. There is no consolation in today’s wisdom over yesterday’s folly. I know too much now. I failed her and there is nothing. I watch the needle climb to one hundred. The car begins to dip and hurtle towards the sea of corn. Anything to force the sadness away. There is nothing at all happening between us, only the widening of the years. I wake in the bed before the car crashes. I lie down to sleep and in sleep move close to Holfy, smelling her hair, scent of oranges from her shampoo. What am I doing? What am I doing with this child of a woman? I wake and sleep and wake and the days pass and in the peopleless fields I lose sense of time, am no longer sure when I wake up if the dream of driving through the darkness was a dream or if I did get up in the night and am back in bed and waking.
* * *
I drive out onto the highway looking for a town. It’s impossible to tell from the highway signs what will be a town and what will be nothing. Everything is marked with the same democratic sense of importance. Next exit, wherever it is.
It turns out to be another nowhere. I stop at the first bar on Main Street. All these Midwestern bars are the same, only the hopeless inhabit them. I have stopped drinking. It wasn’t the drink I needed, it was the sight of humanity. A television in the corner. It’s so long since I have seen one that it has the appearance of a box of magical puppets. I stare at it with incomprehension. My eyes focus on its world. A woman in a smart suit talking into a chunky microphone; some kind of disaster behind her. Her voice, her gestures are inexorably ineluctable. I look down at my root beer and grin at the sound of Ursula quoting inexorablyineluctable as fast as she can, mocking constipated poet-words, words stuck on a page to say what does not need to be said, words to make up feelings that you never truly felt. The newswoman must have a number of tones, of looks that present all our tragedies, our follies. A man is standing talking with her. He too is a presenter of news. There is more subtlety in her plucked face. I walk out into the sunlight. Even this nowhere is too much for me. I go back to Lone Tree with its 401 inhabitants. I go back to the barn, to my wisdom. My nerves are much better. There is the tiniest pink hue in the sky, as if creation is approaching pleasure.
I have been running a long time and now I can run no further. The sky spreads out endless blue, denying God. I need a God today. I need someone to shake. I see myself putting a gun in my mouth. Baird put the shotgun against his chest and missed the heart the first time. The police car parked two hundred yards away, waiting, deciding how to approach. He discharged the cartridge and shot himself again. That ended it.
It was not days nor weeks nor months you were leaving—years you were leaving me. What I sensed, feared, for so long, was always happening. I had felt battered by your betrayal (I should say betrayals but there is only ever one) and disgusted by my innocence for so long that I had lost sight of myself. It seems extraordinary I stayed awake nights blaming myself; I fought so hard to keep you. I see the words shaping on your lips—when did I battle to hold on to it all, yes? You could never see it. You would not count the years of listening as loving. Listening to the great silence from you. Taking you in my mouth (yes, I never did like that and I shouldn’t have lied when you asked). So much I d
id in understanding you. Planting flowers. None of this was ever apparent to you. You would have expected it and not gloried in how much I cared for you. I had said words I thought I would say to no man. Do you know what was the worst moment? How sad it is to be so certain you have no idea. Certainty is a kind of death. You had the gall to look at me expecting a reconciliation after being inside another woman; it meant as little as that; you did not see it the way I did: when you were inside me, you were touching my soul—even the times I did not enjoy it, we were touching souls. Even now, although I care nothing for you, I feel like vomiting at the memory you were inside a woman and then came to me and put that part of you in me. How would you have felt if I had done that? It makes me sick to think that you may not have minded at all, that love does not hold such sacredness for you. I thought it was the end of me. It wasn’t. It was the beginning. After the steel chill of parting I feel what I had not even begun to consider—I feel freedom.
