by Leigh Stein
That night, while Brian slept, I went back online and lurked. I looked at all those photos of Jason again and felt angry, bereft, jealous, and above all, sorry for myself. I e-mailed my friend Liz in Chicago to say, It isn’t fair. Without any photos of us, I would never know what we looked like as a couple. It was as if we’d never existed. Liz wrote back:
The no-pics thing is sad, but I think it speaks to your closeness with him. That’s the way it goes with the people who are the closest or most comfy together. You never have pictures together b/c you see each other all the time. It’s like somebody having pictures of Niagara Falls but none of their hometown. Niagara is a one-time attraction. Home is home.
El Chupacabra
(2007)
We left for New Mexico on a Sunday afternoon less than six months after we’d met. The plan was to drive straight through, from Chicago to Amarillo, because he wanted to spend the night in Texas, and I was willing to give him what he wanted. We rented a twenty-two-foot-long truck and we filled it with everything we owned—hundreds of books, boxes of clothes, a dining room table, a bed, and his motorcycle. To the back, we hitched Jason’s Mazda.
For nineteen hours, Jason drove and I navigated from a printed map. Neither of us slept. There was supposed to be a meteor shower that night, but industrial light pollution in southern Illinois obscured the horizon, and then a thunderstorm shook the sky in St. Louis. Maybe missing the peak of the Perseids was the opposite of an auspicious sign, but we drove on.
In Cuba, Missouri, we stopped at a gas station hung with an old Coke facade to buy energy drinks, and a fluorescent green June beetle crawled over my sandaled foot. I weighed whether or not I should be afraid. In the weeks leading up to our departure, Jason had been waking me up in the middle of the night to scare me with realistic-looking photographs of mythical or extinct creatures of the southwestern United States that he’d found on the Internet. This is el chupacabra. And this is a teratorn, a huge bird of prey. You’ll find them both in the Land of Enchantment.
By dawn, we were in Oklahoma. As the sun rose over the Sooner State, there were weeds and cottonwoods and DO NOT DRIVE THROUGH SMOKE signs all along I-44, and we wondered what could be burning along a highway with so few exits. In Vinita, we stopped for breakfast at what was advertised to be the largest McDonald’s in the world, and were disappointed to find it was just a huge highway overpass spanning the Will Rogers Turnpike. Back in the truck, even with the air-conditioning on, we were sweaty and delirious from fast food and sleep deprivation. As if to beckon Texas to us, Jason started playing “La Grange” off his ZZ Top Greatest Hits CD on repeat. Every time the song ended, it was my job to hit “back” and suffer through another bass line intro.
“I keep seeing these huge birds,” he said.
“What birds?” Was this another one of his signature impressions? Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?
Jason laughed and shook the birds from his head. Took his fake Ray-Bans off and put them on again. Hit the steering wheel in time to Billy Gibbons’s laughter: Uh-huh-huh-huh-huh.
I never got to drive the truck for the same reason that I never got to sleep in the passenger seat: he wouldn’t allow it. I’d paid for the truck, but if I somehow got us into an accident, it would be my fault, and if I dozed off it might make him doze off and get us into an accident, and then, too, Jason said, the fault would be mine. I had to stay awake.
Jason’s dad called when we were still in Oklahoma and, once he heard our voices, suggested we pull over at a rest stop and take a nap. We promised we would, which was just a lie to get off the phone, and kept on driving.
Finally: Amarillo, though it was hard to know we’d even arrived. I said, “This place looks like a drunk decided to build a highway over a steakhouse and call it a day.” Not that I cared where we stopped. If I had to listen to “La Grange” one more time, I’d throw my body from the cab. We parked the truck, checked into the hotel, showered, pulled the drapes against the sun, and had the kind of sex that is a deliberate, familiar invitation to sleep.
Later, at dinner, we asked our Chili’s waiter what there was to do for fun.
“There isn’t anything to do here.”
“But what do you and your friends do on a Friday night?” Jason asked.
“Drive to Albuquerque,” he said, “and get drunk.” Albuquerque was four hours away.
On our way out of town the next morning, we got cowboy hats, and just inside the New Mexico state border, I bought rattlesnake-fang earrings and decided that they would bring me luck. In forty-eight hours, we’d crossed the plains, and now the arid landscape spread before us, all ochre hills and boundless bright blue sky, promising we would get what we’d come for: a life unlike the one we’d been living. The apartment we’d found on the Internet was clean and bright and new. Washer and dryer in unit. Hundreds of miles away from our parents, we were adults now. We thought being adults meant doing whatever we wanted, including to ourselves, to each other.
While we were signing our new lease, the women in the rental office asked what had brought us to New Mexico. I said I wanted to write a book and he said he wanted “to find el chupacabra”; somehow his answer seemed more realistic to them than mine. So Jason and the landlord shook on a deal: if he found el chupacabra, and brought her the head, we could live there rent-free.
In Albuquerque in August, the temperature hovers in the upper eighties during the day, but the nights are cool and starlit. For the first couple of weeks, Jason looked for a job and we both tried to adapt to the new climate and elevation by following advice I’d read on the Internet that said to drink an ounce of water for every pound you weighed. The Sandia Mountains, named for their watermelon-colored glow, towered dramatically out our eastern-facing windows, casting a rosy shadow over a sprawling city of terra-cotta and turquoise, midcentury motels and homeless hippies, fast-food drive-throughs and parking lots filled with model mobile homes, and strip malls stuck in the middle of high desert beauty. As it cooled toward dusk, we’d put on the cowboy hats we’d bought in Amarillo and go out to the rocky ditch across the road to shoot BB guns at Sprite cans. I wasn’t a very good shot, but I was impressed with the idea of myself standing there, holding Jason’s gun, taking aim.
Then we’d walk back across the road, open a fifth of gin, and start the grill for dinner. One evening, as we were checking the vegetables to see if they were done, we met our neighbor Jimmy, who told us he was forty-seven but looked closer to sixty. He was a few inches shorter than me; I could watch myself talk to him in his blue reflective sunglasses. Jason said we’d moved here so I could write a book and then we were going to go to LA so he could be an actor, and so Jimmy started calling Jason “Hollywood.” I didn’t get a nickname. He invited us to a party that night in the apartment complex next to our own, and after a couple of hours of drinking Tecate and watching Ultimate Fighting on TV, we watched Jimmy snort cocaine off the dining room table.
A guy named Rico asked us why we’d moved there. “To have an adventure,” Jason said.
Rico laughed at us. “People come here going, ‘Look at the pretty sagebrush,’” he said, “but we call it weeds.”
Out on the balcony, Rico showed me a video of an Iraqi decapitation he had saved on his cell phone, for no apparent reason. Jimmy approached on my other side. “Me and Rico had a threesome with Mandy,” he whispered. This was Mandy’s apartment.
“Oh,” I said.
“She likes girls, too. All the girls are bi in New Mexico. I can ask her for you, if you want me to.”
“Ask her what?” I said.
I went to go find Jason. “Don’t leave me alone with Jimmy,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.
When Jason ran out of cigarettes, Jimmy insisted on driving us to Walgreens himself, and I sat on Jason’s lap in the front of the truck so I wouldn’t have to sit between them. Jimmy kept his blue sunglasses on,
even in the dark. On the way out of the parking lot, he hit a mailbox and busted one of the side mirrors on his truck.
I wasn’t afraid of riding in a car with someone who probably shouldn’t have been driving it. I was tallying it up as another adventure, a future story to tell about one of the many things I should not have done but did.
Jimmy disappeared from the party soon after we got back, claiming his girlfriend would be mad at him for damaging the truck, and I tried to imagine what this girlfriend might look like. The six of us left—Rico, Mandy, Jason, and I, and a married couple whom Jason had caught having sex on the floor of Mandy’s bathroom earlier that night—hopped the locked fence to the swimming pool and took off our clothes. Treading water in our underwear, no one had much to say, and through the pool’s blue surface my legs were pale and spectral.
In the years after we finally broke up, Jason and I developed a shorthand for revisiting nights like those. On long-distance calls I would ask, “Remember the night we rode in Jimmy’s truck and he broke the mirror? Remember when we hopped the fence to go swimming? Remember Amarillo, how tired we were?”
He always answered the same way: “Of course I remember.”
And I always felt relief when he said it. The stories he confirmed for me were always the memories I trusted the most, because my partner in crime had admitted to being at the scene.
Once he was gone, I was the only one left to remember.
Shortly after Jason died, I watched a documentary about the Mayans on TV. As the narrator was explaining their ancient visual language, the glyph for the word conjuring appeared on screen. It showed two hands trying to grab a fish. In a notebook, I scribbled, Mayan glyph for conjuring shows two hands trying to grab a fish. I didn’t know why I had to write it down, but I couldn’t shake the image from my mind. Was I a conjurer? Of what? Months later, I would find my own note and realize that without Jason, my memories were fish. I couldn’t hold them. I didn’t trust myself to hold them. Without someone to verify and say, I was there, too, I didn’t believe that any of my experiences were real. They slipped from my hands as soon as I got a grip.
At a desk that faced the Sandias, I wrote every day, on an Acer laptop I’d bought from a friend for $175. When the guy came to install our cable and phone, he told us the mountains weren’t all natural formations. “The government built some of that to look like mountains,” he said. “To hide the missiles.”
“No,” I said, disbelieving.
“Ask anyone. If there’s a nuclear attack on America? Albuquerque’s where they’ll target. New Mexico’s where all the secrets are.”
Our apartment complex was very close to Kirtland Air Force Base, and we’d seen strange aircraft overhead, like misshapen helicopters or miniature Hindenburgs. Every day, I saw an old hippie in a bucket hat, standing on the side of the road with a sign that read WORK FOR PEACE, trying single-handedly to convince all the bright minds who worked on the base to do something else.
I told our neighbor José what the cable guy had said, about the mountains being a false front, one night when we were in the hot tub at the apartment complex. José said he’d heard that, too.
“Have you ever seen el chupacabra?” Jason asked.
José laughed but didn’t deny its existence. “No, but in high school my buddies and me were out one night and we saw La Llorona down along the Rio Grande. Scared us to death.”
All the variations of the story of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, begin with a poor, beautiful young woman. In one version, she has an affair with a rich, handsome man and bears him three children. The man eventually leaves her to marry another woman, someone of his own higher class. Grief-stricken and furious, the young woman takes her children to the river and drowns them. And then she kills herself.
At the gates of heaven, God asks her where her children are. She says she doesn’t know. He sends her back to earth, to roam the river until she finds them. Only then will he allow her to enter heaven. People who believe in the myth say she still wanders the banks, crying.
“What did she look like?” I asked José, imagining a woman with long black hair, dressed all in white.
“She was dressed all in white,” he said, and I believed him.
The Girls
(2007)
Out in this desert we are testing bombs,
that’s why we came here.
ADRIENNE RICH, “TRYING TO TALK WITH A MAN”
I didn’t know how to drive the only car we’d brought with us. It was a Mazda Protege, black, with 133,000 miles and a manual transmission. All summer long, before we moved, Jason had promised to teach me how to use the clutch and shift gears, but he never did. There were plenty of reasons why he didn’t: I might wreck it; I wasn’t on his insurance; he needed the car more than I did. The Mazda was a gift from his dad’s new girlfriend—it was her old car and though it was not exactly a piece of shit, Jason expressed how he felt about their relationship by treating it like one.
My new life was circumscribed by the places to which I could walk (the swimming pool, the mailbox) and the places he was willing to drive us to (the twenty-four-hour Walmart). A few times a week I filled a shopping bag with empty Sprite cans and gin bottles and cereal boxes and walked to the recycling center. One day, as I was lobbing cans over the side of a Dumpster, an elderly woman stopped and asked where I was from.
“From Illinois,” I said.
“What brings you to New Mexico?”
“I’m here with my boyfriend.”
Her eyes sparkled. “Going to get married?”
I could have said, I don’t know yet; first I have to finish the novel I’m writing, but instead I just smiled and nodded, pulling a happy ending out of the thin blue air like a rabbit from a hat.
Jason was hired to work maintenance at our apartment complex, and in the mornings I got up earlier than him, to start the coffee and make bacon and eggs. I was happy to have a routine, happy to play the housewife as long as he kept up his side of the bargain: holding a job while I wrote my book. After breakfast, he walked over to the main office and hopped in the golf cart he got to drive around all day and I took my coffee over to my desk and checked my word count from the day before. I tried to write at least a thousand words a day, and I wrote like mad in the mornings, trying to get in as many words as I could before Jason pulled up in his golf cart for lunch. I’d make him a grilled cheese and he’d pour himself a gin and tonic.
“Since you don’t need the car during the day . . . maybe you could teach me how to drive and I could go somewhere.”
“Where would you go?”
“I don’t know,” I said. We had been there only a few weeks and I hadn’t seen enough of Albuquerque to even know what my options were. I felt like a prisoner who was unable to tell her jailer what she would do once she was released.
“You’re supposed to be writing a book,” he reminded me. “You don’t need to go anywhere to write a book.”
After he went back to work, I’d try to reenter the world of my characters, but it was difficult—there were always afternoon interruptions. Jason would call to say he’d argued with a coworker, or with a resident. Something about a lightbulb, a doorjamb, a sink plug. Everyone but him was incompetent, an asshole. “Sucks,” I’d say. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” He said he wanted to quit. I said he couldn’t quit; he’d promised to work while I wrote. Before we’d left, my mom had warned me that Jason seemed to be built of promises, but I still believed him because I was his believer, the one person in his life willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
By the time he got off work, I’d be itching to go out and he’d be too tired to move. Either we’d drink gin and tonics until we lost track of what number we were on, or we’d get high instead. Then he’d drive us to the Walmart, which we treated like our own private amusement park. I rode the coin-operated toddler rides by the front door, and Jason rode a motori
zed shopping cart and had me walk beside him, to verify that he was disabled if an employee asked (they did). We bought liquor and frozen apple pies. We spent a long time watching the Venus flytraps in action in Home and Garden.
One night, while I was standing in the checkout line, my dad called my cell phone. “How’s the Southwest?” he asked.
“Good,” I said.
“I bet you’ve been seeing a lot of amazing stuff out there.”
I closed my eyes. I tried to think of one amazing thing I could tell my dad about—it didn’t even have to be amazing, it just had to be something. But when I flipped through the catalog of my memory of the past few weeks, there was nothing but the fluorescent interiors of chain stores and the view of the TV from the couch.
“The mountains,” I sputtered. “I can see the mountains from my desk when I write.” Then I started to cry and said I had to go. I could barely get through the transaction with the checkout lady; I felt my chest contract like a fist and my peripheral vision disappeared. Through a tunnel of light, I somehow made it out to the car, where Jason was waiting for me.
“I think I’m having a panic attack,” I said, sobbing.
“Why?”
“We never go anywhere! I’m stuck here!”
“Well, I feel stuck, too!” he said. “Do you think this is what I want to do, just go to work every day while you get to write your book?”
I cried harder. He promised we would see more, do more—the New Mexico State Fair, the balloon fiesta in October, Santa Fe—if he could have something to look forward to himself. When we got home, Jason went online and found that the University of New Mexico was holding auditions for a musical. At the time it didn’t occur to me that if he got cast I would be home alone even more often; I only made him promise he would keep his maintenance job.
