Travel Guide
I keep taking pictures of nothing: on the street corner with a bum sifting carefully through the trash, sitting in the library among all the unloved books, standing outside my worn-out apartment building. Who knows how many other people have lived there, maybe died in there? If it was once a sweatshop, a brothel? Who knows about the history of this place? A woolly mammoth could’ve taken a dump on 3rd Avenue and we would never know. Did you ever think of that?
My friend Diana looks at me a little disconcertingly while she drives. She’s not sure there were ever woolly mammoths in Manhattan.
“Do you want a drink?”
She’s got a little stock on the floor in the back. I saw it when I put my bag on the seat. When she turns the car the bottles roll and clink together like a toast.
I tell her no. I’m not the sort of guy who believes in moving and drinking at the same time.
She pats my shoulder. “Just relax.”
I know that I should relax. That’s why we’re on this trip. I hold up my camera, which used to be Ben’s. It’s an old one, the kind you have to rig and tend to. It requires patience. Ben collected such things from the so-called antique fair in Chelsea and junk shops all over the city. I barely know how to use it yet I feel that someone has to honor these things by keeping them active. I snap what will surely be a blurry Diana, smiling sideways.
We’ve been in the car so long, I’m beginning to think we’re not going anywhere. We’re just going to drive forever. Drive until we fall off something. That’s the thing about North America. It’s not like all those cozy European countries, all nestled together. We’ve got firm borders.
“Firm buttocks?” Ben would have said and fluttered his eyelashes.
Sooner or later, though, you’ll hit something.
Diana rolls down the window and puts her arms through it then spreads her fingers open to let the wind blow through them. Diana likes to take risks. She has the kind of beauty that one doesn’t notice right away and then, once you do, you wonder why she isn’t famous. Yet she doesn’t seem to take her appearance seriously. I’ve seen her wear colored contacts. “That’s not politically correct!” Ben would have said.Oh, please, Ben, stop.
“This weekend is going to be good for you. Just wait till we get there.”
Till we get where? Is there a Jacuzzi full of catalogue models waiting for us? This side of the tank is yours, Peter. Men to be selected like lobsters, thick rubber bands in cheerful colors strapped to their balls.
***
Diana and I worked together. Or, really, we worked for the same publishing house, not necessarily together. We were never in the same room. But we got fired at the same time. We took the same elevator down, each of us holding a box of mugs, picture frames, files we were taking with us, maybe stealing. She looked at me. Diana was wearing very-New York glasses, the kind that are supposed to be unflattering.
She said, “Do you know why they let you go on a Friday?”
I said, Yes, actually. I did. I’d been fired a lot. I had a dead boyfriend. I have a dead boyfriend.
She took off her glasses so she could see me better. “Come with me,” she said, with confidence, as though we were already friends. And I did, out of a mixture of curiosity and loneliness. I followed her to a Tapas bar and she bought me unlimited amounts of small food on little plates and cups of acidic, red wine.
Lately I’ve been spending more time with Diana than with anyone else. Diana is an intuitive person. She doesn’t ask me about Ben. The others don’t really want to ask about him but they feel like they’re supposed to so they put hands on my arms. In saccharine voices they say a little too loudly, “How are you doing?” Some of them fake tears, their eyes shifting. Or they buy me inexplicable gifts, like a piece of crystal shaped like a pineapple. Diana just calls and says, “Meet me here in fifteen—make that seventeen—minutes.” She is spontaneous, unselfconscious: the opposite of me. This is what I like about her.
This is our first excursion in a car we’re operating ourselves.
Now she’s pulling off the road, into the ditch. We’ve left the city behind and the roads have widened, the traffic thinned out as though the other cars know better. I’m holding onto the door.
Her hand comes towards me. I think at first she’s trying to rub something off my cheek like an eyelash or a crumb but the hand pauses on my face and just stays there, cupping my jaw. This is new.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m touching you.”
“Well, that’s obvious.”
“Touch is very important.”
“Is … is this a sexual thing?”
Diana smiles. She looks like she’s going to laugh but doesn’t.
Ben would shake his head at me. I can see him, arms crossed, hair swaying. His hair was a little long on top, a tax attorney’s version of daring. “You boob,” he’d say. But can I help it if I don’t get things? Can I help it if I don’t know where I am?
I can’t.
Her hand stays on my face for a moment longer. Then it doesn’t so much move as drift away. Diana leans back. Blows air out of her mouth as though she’s exhaling the smoke from a cigarette she finished long ago, before she quit, a ghost fag. “Hah hah!” Ben pipes up. I hate the smell of smoke. For some reason it reminds me of Long Island, though I’ve only been there a couple times, to the giant strip mall.
Some things catch me so completely by surprise that I wonder if they actually happened at all. One day I was walking on 6th Avenue and a boot fell out of the sky and landed in front of me. I stopped and stared at it, but everyone else kept walking, not looking at me, not looking at anything. It seems if you don’t draw attention to these things, if you refrain from saying, “Did you see that?” then it is as if nothing happened. Nobody has to say, “See what?” and give you a look.
Diana pulls the car back onto the road.
Where are we? I want to ask. But she might not tell me, she might just say, Someplace. Or, We’re nearly there. And I would just say stupidly, Nearly where? Then she wouldn’t say anything at all.
***
When we get there half an hour later I discover that “there” is a shabby cabin parked at the end of a winding driveway with all the gravel heaped like a line in the middle, a mountain range viewed from space. I believe we are in Connecticut. There’s another car, a grayed old white thing, parked sideways near the house.
“Ah, they’re already here,” Diana says.
“Who’s they?”
She didn’t tell me other people would be coming. She just said, mysteriously, “Come away with me, dahling.” We were on the phone and I imagined her sitting in her kitchen in a flimsy kimono, her toes playing with the phone cord.
“Just some people. They’re nice.”
In general, I am not good with women the way some people just cannot think of a thing to say to children. “Hello!” I crow, my voice too high, “How are you?” And they just look at me, take sips of their drinks. But Diana’s friends are a bit different. Inside the house, there’s a gaggle of women with frizzy hair wearing casual and mismatched clothes. They have big, bright stones around their necks and wrists. All of them turn and beam smiles at me when we walk in. Diana moves around the room and kisses them one by one on the cheek. They angle their faces towards her, squeeze her hand, but otherwise carry on with their conversations. I wonder what Diana has told them about me, about Ben.
I follow Diana into the kitchen. I want to ask her if there are going to be any other men here this weekend but the kind of men who accompany these women would not be of much use to me.
Instead I say, “They’re not going to hurt me, are they?” It’s kind of an Amazon joke but Diana just looks at me and smiles in a way I can’t interpret. I begin humming “Poison Ivy.” She opens the door to the fridge, which is stocked with healthy, summer food like corn and tofu steaks, the kinds of things Ben hated.
“What are we drinking?” Diana calls into the living room.
“Bourbon!” someone cries. The rest laugh.
I stand and smile at the opposite wall. A glass door is open onto what appears to be a deck. Though I can’t see it, I can hear water. I imagine the deck leaning over a jagged cliff with waves foaming around pointed, tooth-liked boulders below. “Don’t be such a drama queen,” Ben would say.
“I thought we’d be the only ones here, except for some models or something.” I’m trying to be cute and pouty at the same time but it’s not working. My hair’s too short.
Diana pulls herself upright and closes the fridge with her foot. “Well, they were supposed to be here later.” Then she walks past me, out of the room, but gives my hand a squeeze as she passes by. “Touch,” I think I hear her whisper.
I stand in the kitchen for a moment, unsure of what to do with myself. I’m not sure how I got here. All I know is that a friend said, Hey, we need to get away. We are still unemployed. We have nothing better to do. Now I know why some people never leave the island. It’s too risky. There are too many rocks out there. The maps were all drawn upside down.
I sigh and turn back towards the living room, ready to face the evening. It goes something like this: drinks with ice out of short glasses that look like glass but are actually hard plastic. Vegetables, the tofu, and fish are grilled somewhere out on the deck. I watch Diana coming in and out of the house holding trays with potholders on her hands, trails of smoke reaching out towards the lake beyond, sometimes drifting into the living room after her. Food is consumed, there is more drinking, jokes are made, mostly about people I don’t know. But I listen carefully in case there are any about me. Diana sits on the opposite couch. She laughs loudly with her head thrown back and I see her fillings. Her glass seems bottomless yet she doesn’t get drunk. No one says much to me and I find myself taking steady sips from my drink.
After dinner, a couple of the women disappear to take a walk.
Diana watches them go then sighs and slowly rises from her seat as if it’s her turn to perform some unpleasant chore.
A few other women are quietly talking to each other.
Sometimes I feel like everyone in the world is dead.
Diana comes back and sits down beside me. Her hand rubs a circle around my back.
“Touch,” I think, without her saying it.
“I want to go home.”
Diana frowns. “Just give it a chance, being here. Don’t go home yet,” she says, as though I could get home without her, walk out onto the road and hail a cab. Or steal her car.
Home. An apartment with furniture in it. There have been nights when the stillness in my apartment becomes deafening and I find myself blowing on the plants’ leaves just to watch them move, creating my own spitting, mildly blustery weather. I open the windows, regardless of the temperature, but the sirens and car sounds are too removed, inhuman. It’s organic noise I crave: a sigh, a belch, a hoot.
The dust storm of my grief. It makes the world appear dingy. I have not had an erection since the funeral. Yes, crying in the pews, I popped one. I thought, “I’m a necrophiliac.” But it was my lust for him, for live, annoying Ben. Even he didn’t think his jokes were funny. He had a dull, ordinary job. He couldn’t cook eggs properly and taped “Wheel of Fortune” episodes.
If the phone rings, my coat is half-on before I even answer it. I know it’s Diana. She is the only one who calls anymore. I go to meet her in some bar or club—where there might be out-of-state bikers, people clad in leather, or high-stepping Upper East Side princesses—depending upon Diana’s mood.
There are no mysteries in my life, only occasional surprises. I lost my job because I stopped showing up for a while. I stopped showing up because my boyfriend died. “Kicked the bucket!” Ben chimes in. It was a sudden thing. There was no dramatic, lingering illness. I did not get to play Florence Nightingale. There was no mercy suicide by candlelight. One eye bulged out and he seemed surprised as he fell to the floor. It was almost just like that.
Tonight is another surprise.
I drink too much and have strange dreams. I dream I wake up on the couch and the room is lit by candles: candles on the coffee table, the windowsills, and that there is a half-circle of women standing around me, holding hands and smiling benevolently. Their faces are cast in shadows but the candlelight illuminates their hair, making it seem like it’s on fire. Then I realize, when someone shifts her weight, that this is not a dream, it’s real. I sit upright and look around. What is this? Have I wandered into some kind of coven?
“It’s all right, Peter,” a familiar voice says. I turn and there’s Diana, standing next to the couch, closing the half circle. “Come,” she motions towards me. I feel hands on my arms, gently but firmly pulling me into the center of the room. Now I’m standing inside the circle and they’ve closed in around me. I don’t believe in human sacrifice, I want to tell them. I just buy things on sale.
“Peter,” a voice says. I think it’s Diana’s but I’m not sure. Then the others begin to repeat my name softly, with different intonations. “This is a healing circle. We’re here to help you overcome your loss.”
Why didn’t Diana mention this before? There was no, by the way, we’ll be performing weird new-age rituals this weekend. Of course, I know why she didn’t say anything. She knew I would have said no. I feel betrayed and also irrationally and disproportionately angry. All this time that Diana said nothing about Ben, it was just an act, a scheme to get me up here.
The women begin humming and swaying side to side. Suddenly, their arms rise up uniformly and arch over me. I startle and crouch down, in case there’s something in their hands, like toads or sharp objects. Then their arms move back to their sides.
“Let go of your fear,” someone says.
“No!” I yell, startling myself. Now I’m going to make things worse. Ben always told me, when we fought, that I made things worse than they had to be.
The women seem unfazed. They continue swaying and humming. Now I think I can hear something. They’re not actually humming. It’s a low chant.
“Stop it!” I scream and try to push my way out of the circle but not forcefully enough because their hands are clasped and their arms hold. I’d have to hurt them, to scratch and claw. The women’s eyes are closed. They continue their movement and sound together, in a steady rhythm. “Let me go!” I shriek but no one responds. I cannot faze them, rouse them into action. Someone is ululating.
If Ben were here, he would laugh at me. He’d point at my face and emit a big, Waspy yuck-yuck. Perhaps I would laugh back at him. Or dump my drink in his lap. But he isn’t here. I’m not laughing.
I find myself on all fours on the floor, enclosed by sandaled and bare feet. I don’t want to see or smell their feet. Now it sounds as if there is music, soft, above the chanting, humming, and wailing. There is also a stink, like burning hair.
I hunker down and fold into a fetal position, my arm crossed over my head for protection. They won’t stop. I can’t make them stop. I have no control. I have to wait until it’s over.
No one ever asks me about Ben. Diana doesn’t. None of these women here have, though they must know. And now they’re pushing me, closing in on me with their music and smells. Still, no one is talking about him. I still can’t talk about him to anyone but myself. I begin to whisper. “Ben had two pairs of each of his shoes, in case something happened to one. He almost never peed in public restrooms. He was afraid of cats. Ben sometimes slept with a pillow over his face. He watched stupid TV shows and he loved them. Ben, I love you. Ben, get me out of here. Don’t leave me alone with these women, these crazy people. You were the only normal person in the world.”
Then the words dissolve and there is water in my mouth, on my face. I’m crying. The carpet is getting wet and I’m crying.
Sleep is coming on. They’ve drugged me. The chanting grows softer. I can feel them moving away from me. My hands dart out, reaching, grabbing, trying to strike their feet and ankles.
“Touch, touch,” they whisper and glide out of reach.
When I wake up, it’s early morning and dawn is just breaking like a raw egg. I’m lying on the living room floor, curled up, alone. A few burned down candles have spilled their wax in dry shapes over the coffee table. But the room is neat, clean, the pillows on the furniture arranged nicely. I turn my head and a sharp pain seizes my neck. I notice the front door is open, the light dimly illuminating the strange bodies of various insects hung on the screen. My camera is sitting primly on the coffee table. I pick it up and move towards the flimsy screen door and then push it open with both hands, making it swing forwards quickly. I crunch through the gravel towards the woods lining the edge of the driveway. There is a tree stump there, near the middle of the drive. But when I approach I find that the top of it is covered in some kind of white, spongy fungus and I decide against sitting on it.
From somewhere comes a whoop, high-pitched and animal, though it could be someone inside making the noise. I take a step towards the woods, peering between the trees, but I cannot see much, the light is too dim. Taking a couple steps, I stand at the periphery of the woods with my back to the trees, peering out at the fan of light over the driveway and the slanting shadow of the house above it. An insect with feelers like pipe cleaners, its wings whirring wildly, flies up over my head and disappears into the sky.
Am I changed now, after what has happened, or what I think has happened? I can see Ben shaking his head. “What are you talking about?” he says. He’s still with me. He’ll be with me always, like this.
There’s Diana’s car, parked sideways along the driveway. I’m going to take it, I know suddenly, as if I already made the decision. I’m going to get the hell out of here and I’m taking Ben with me.
“Good thinking,” he grins.
I look towards the trees then put my camera to my face and peer through the lens at the suddenly ghostly chiaroscuro of the world, then snap the picture.
Return to Volume 5.3
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