Leaving the Atocha Station

by Ben Lerner

“Oscar,” she said, and her voice declared he was a man among men. “We decided to break up when he had to move to Barcelona for work. Or to at least be open to other people. But now we both feel that we should be together when he returns.” In English I thought “Oscar” sounded silly; in Spanish: very serious.

  I had let the smile slip away. “Does he know about me?” I felt like crying. I tried to long for Teresa, but could not.

  “We’ve both been seeing other people. We don’t ask each other about it,” she said. I wondered how many other people she had been with recently. “Just like you and I don’t ask each other,” she added. It was clear she hoped I had other relationships.

  “Claro,” I said, recomposing my smile to indicate I’d slept with half the women in Madrid. “You love him?” It was a stupid, clichéd question.

  “Yes,” she said, her tone confirming it was a stupid, clichéd question.

  “Well,” I said, “there is still some time before June.” I imagined breaking the bottle over her head then raking my throat with the jagged glass.

  “Yes,” she said, and leaned over and kissed me. “There is a lot of time before you go back.”

  “I didn’t say I was going back,” I said, flatly.

  “But your mom,” she said.

  I was grateful for a reason to be upset. “I don’t want to talk about my mother with you.” Then, after a pause: “I have to piss.” I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and looked in the mirror and let out a single ridiculous sob. Then I laughed at myself, applied some more water, dried off my face, and returned to the table, sad but stabilized. “Sorry,” I said. “It can be hard to think about my mom.”

  “Of course,” she said, “I’m sorry.” I kissed her to assert my spirits were ultimately unaffected by our talk and resumed my increasingly fragmented and incoherent speech about time in ancient cities. She seemed interested now, although I suspected it was charity.

  We left the restaurant and walked back down through the Albaicín into the center of the city. Isabel put her arm around me in gesture that expressed less affection than relief at having clarified things between us. As we walked and dusk began to fall and Isabel wrapped herself in a shawl, I thought back to the scene at the lake when Miguel hit me; that was probably around the time she’d broken up with Oscar. And who knew if Rufina’s suspicion of me was the issue of her disdain for Oscar or her affection for him. We sat on a bench in a little plaza and watched the goatsuckers spar. My mind was revising many months’ worth of assumptions; I felt something like a physical change as my recent past liquefied and reformed. What was left of the light burnished what it touched; Isabel was half shadow and half bronze, boundless and bounded. We got high.

  When it was unmistakably night we walked down toward and then along the Darro; there was some sort of small festival and part of the river was illumined by torches. Little kids dressed in white, glowing softly, darted through the streets. It had been a while since either of us had spoken, and whereas for months I had imagined Isabel’s silences as devoted to me entirely, I was now unsure if I was even in her thoughts.

  “When I am near a river,” I heard myself say, “I think of my time in Mexico.”

  “When were you in Mexico?” she asked.

  “I spent some time with my girlfriend in a town called Xalapa before I came to Spain.” I paused to suggest she might still be my girlfriend. “We went on a trip one weekend. We found a place to swim. There was a violent current, but we decided to swim anyway. There was another man. He wanted his girlfriend to swim. But she was afraid of the current. In the end she entered the river.” I paused again, lighting a cigarette. Why was my Spanish so halting? “She did not know how to swim. She had bad luck and the current carried her. We followed her. We found her body in the river. I gave her”— here I touched my mouth and then gestured toward Isabel’s—“to make her breathe. But it was too late. We took her body to a place with phones. We called the police. An old woman gave us limes.”

  “Limes,” Isabel confirmed.

  “She gave us limes for sucking because we suffered shock.”

  “My God,” Isabel said, and took my hand. I wanted her to ask about my girlfriend, I was preparing a speech about Jane, but she didn’t. We sat down on the low stone wall that ran along the river and watched the reflections of the torches in the water and after a while Isabel began to talk. First she described a house or home or apartment, a description vaguely familiar from her first speech at the lake, but I was still unsure if her words attached to a household or the literal structure where she lived. I could understand more now than then; my Spanish had, despite myself, significantly improved, but this fact itself got in the way of understanding: I was measuring the time that had elapsed since the night at the lake by virtue of my increased comprehension, but this attention to the quality of my own attention crowded out Isabel’s meaning. Eventually I shook free of my self–absorption and came to grasp what she was saying, aided by how slowly she was speaking. That summer her brother died—she referred to his death as if we’d discussed it before—and she was looking through his stuff, records and books, deciding what to take with her when the family moved, she had found a notebook, a notebook from school, what grade she wasn’t sure, and it had numbers written all over its pages: 1066, 312, 1936, 1492, 800, 1776, etc. At first she didn’t know what these were, didn’t recognize them as years, significant years he probably had to memorize for a history test, and so had written the numbers again and again, filling an entire notebook with them, and she convinced herself that it was an elaborate coded message, a message to her. She must have known, she was sixteen, that this was impossible, but she had let herself be convinced, and the notebook became her most treasured possession. She never attempted to decipher the code, the point was not to read the message; the point was that there was an ongoing conversation between her and her brother, an unconcluded correspondence. A few months before Oscar left for Barcelona he found the notebook, which Isabel had never mentioned to anybody, although she hadn’t really hidden it either, keeping it in a box with various childhood possessions on the top shelf of her closet. It suddenly occurred to me that we never went to Isabel’s apartment not only because my apartment had more privacy but also because she probably wanted to keep me away from her roommates and/or reserve her bed for Oscar exclusively. Oscar asked why she had this notebook with years written all over it and this was the first time she let herself realize they were in fact just years. She was furious at Oscar for destroying her fantasy and screamed at him and then burst into tears and then told him the whole story and cried and cried as though only then, many years after the accident, did she fully confront the reality of her brother’s death. They sat on the bed together carefully turning the pages and Isabel wept and ran her fingers over the years, which were written in blue and red.

  Later, when Oscar and Isabel broke up or at least agreed to see other people because he was leaving for Barcelona, Isabel had fallen apart, and had somehow felt her brother’s death was upon her again, because Oscar was the only person she talked to about her brother, and because of the scene they shared with the notebook. One thing she loved about me, she said, and it was clear she meant “loved” in the weakest sense, was that I never asked her questions about her brother after she talked to me about him at the lake.

  I said nothing. After a while we resumed our walk and wandered back up into the Albaicín and found our hotel. It was a steep walk and we were tired by the time we arrived. There were a few tables in the courtyard and I asked the teenager who was sweeping up if it was possible to have wine. He brought us a warm, unlabeled bottle of white wine and two tall glasses filled with ice. We drank and smoked until the bottle was empty and then went to our room and fucked quickly and I felt completely in love. Isabel went to sleep and I opened the tall wooden shutters and leaned out overlooking the street and smoked. There were no cars parked on the street and it was perfectly quiet and I thought it probably looked like this
in 1066, 312, 1936, whatever. Then I thought it probably didn’t, got in bed, and fell asleep.

  The next morning we had breakfast at the same café and I said to Isabel that the more I thought about it the more eager I was to get back as I had to work with someone named Teresa on a pamphlet of my poetry that was to be published. I said this as if I were nervous about saying anything regarding Teresa in front of Isabel, nervous I might hurt her feelings.

  “We can take the train tonight,” Isabel said, and because she didn’t seem jealous I was furious.

  “Let’s just go back now,” I said, which was ridiculous.

  “Now? You haven’t seen the Alhambra,” she said.

  “I’ve seen it before,” I lied. Now she looked jealous. I was elated.

  “With whom?” she asked, and it was clear she was only pretending not to care.

  “Teresa,” I said, and then pretended I wished I hadn’t. “And her brother.”

  “When?” she asked.

  “Around Christmas,” I said. I had the sense that Isabel wanted to be my only guide, that while she didn’t care who I slept with, she didn’t want another woman showing me the architectural wonders of Spain.

  “But you said you wanted to see Granada—that’s why we came,” she said, remembering our conversation in bed.

  “I did want to see it again,” I said. “And I’ll come back again.”

  “Fine,” she said, angry. I wondered if I would be the only American in history who visited Granada without seeing the Alhambra.

  After breakfast we took a cab to the train station, bought our tickets, and had around an hour and a half to kill before the Talgo left. It wasn’t until we actually bought our tickets that I realized the last thing I wanted to do was to go back. We found a café and ordered more coffee and the caffeine along with Isabel’s jealousy inspired me to say, “Look, when we get back to Madrid, let’s just stay one night. I can get my work done and we can pack for a longer trip. Then we can take another train to Galicia or Lisbon or wherever.”

  Isabel smiled at me, having gone at an alarming rate from anger to something more like pity. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to work.”

  “Take vacation,” I said.

  “I can’t,” she repeated softly, as if I’d asked her to marry me. “Don’t you have work too?” There was gentle derision in the question. For the first time, I took a joke about poetry personally.

  “Is your work more important?” I asked, as if her work were guarding paintings.

  “No,” she said simply. I was crushed by how easily she ignored my implication.

  We spent the rest of our downtime at the café, then boarded the train, and passed the next five hours reading, napping, smoking, but almost never speaking. I missed my parents terribly. By day the Spanish countryside looked a lot like Kansas.

  __________________________

  Late in the fourth phase of my project I decided to up the dosage, to take two white pills each morning instead of one. I had enough; before leaving the U.S. I had been given a year’s supply, which required a special letter from my doctor, and earned me strange looks from the pharmacist, and I had already had a month’s worth of medication on hand before acquiring the stockpile, which I had then divided into several small bottles. Besides, I could always see a psychiatrist in Spain—if, for instance, I stayed after my fellowship, maybe teaching English. Or I could just stop taking the white pills when I ran out; I wasn’t really convinced they did much for me in the first place. When I began taking them, I had a very pleasant insomnia, reading until dawn without fatigue; that was the only significant side effect and it passed with regrettable speed. After that, I was never sure what, if any, effect they had; I’d considered going off them at various points, but each time I hesitated, wondering if in fact they were buoying me; maybe my lows would be much lower, insufferably lower, without them.

  The white pills certainly did not seem to work for me the way they worked for some people; I always felt a few strains of rumination away from full orchestral panic, I was almost always acutely aware of the bones beneath the face. But then I drank and smoked in a way that made tracking the specific effects of the white pills difficult. The ritual of taking them, however, had become important to me, not because of some possible placebo effect, where the mere fact of ingestion steadied me, but rather because they were a daily reminder that I was officially fucked up, that I was undergoing treatment, that I had a named condition. It was a Eucharistic rite of self–abnegation in which I acknowledged to myself that I was incapable of facing the world without designer medication and thereby absolved myself of some portion of my agency; it was a little humiliating, a little liberating.

  When I got back from Granada I began to spiral, not out of control, but downward, nevertheless, in a helix of small pitch. I had not realized how much I was invested in the idea that Isabel and Teresa were invested in me, and now that it seemed neither had the inclination even to feign serious investment, I felt not only rejected, but as though many months of research had evaporated. It occurred to me that I could at least feel less guilty regarding all the lies about my family, as nothing significant had been built upon them, but in fact I felt wave after wave of intensified remorse. It became increasingly clear to me that I would have to confess my slander to my parents at some point in order not to be consumed by it, which added dread to my guilt. My distress about Isabel and Teresa, coupled with my guilt about my parents, opened onto larger questions about my fraudulence; that I was a fraud had never been in question—who wasn’t? Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak. I could lie about my interest in the literary response to war because by making a mockery of the notion that literature could be commensurate with mass murder I was not defaming the victims of the latter, but the dilettantes of the former, rejecting the political claims repeatedly made by the so–called left for a poetry radical only in its unpopularity. I had been a small–time performance artist pretending to be a poet, but now, with an alarming fervor, I wanted to write great poems. I wanted my “work” to take on the United States of Bush, to shed its scare quotes, and I wanted, after I self–immolated on the Capitol steps or whatever, to become the Miguel Hernández of late empire, for Isabel and Teresa and everybody everywhere to read my poems, shatter storefronts, etc. This was a structure of feeling, not an idea, which made it harder to dismiss, and I felt it more intensely in direct proportion to its ridiculousness. And when I doubled my dosage, and the insomnia returned, I began to read and write feverishly. This was less a new faith in poetry than a sudden loss of faith in pure potentiality.

  Besides the insomnia, which this time lasted, save for a few nights of long and total and dreamless sleep, for a couple of weeks, I experienced two other notable side effects: first, my jaw was constantly and involuntarily clenched; second, I had what the internet told me was sexual anhedonia, lovely phrase. Both side effects had a certain rightness of fit with my general despondency, which was not diminishing, and I found this correspondence comforting, the way one savors abysmal weather when one feels abysmal. Additionally, I began to convince myself that the white pills were responsible for the intensity of my suffering, that I was having an adverse reaction, and this mitigated my fear of feeling that way forever; if I went off the white pills, I’d feel better. But I was too scared to test this hypothesis, and so, after a few days, I upped my dosage even further, taking a third white pill each morning, and when, after reading or revising poems for several hours, I would suddenly start crying, burying my face in a towel so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, or, when shopping for wine or ciga
rettes or hash, I felt mild dissociation, the world curling at its edges, I would reassure myself by saying that the white pills were themselves the primary cause.

  The relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive.

  After the first week of my new dosage, however, a week in which neither Isabel nor Teresa called on me, I achieved a new emotional state, or a state in which emotions no longer obtained. When I would try to describe this condition in chats with Cyrus it seemed utterly contradictory; on the one hand, I now felt nothing, my affect a flat spectrum over a defined band; I could watch videos of beheadings or contractors firing on Iraqi civilians or the Fox News commentators without a reaction and I did. I reread Levin’s most soul–wrenching scenes without the slightest affective fluctuation. Although I still did not leave my apartment because I was waiting for Isabel and/or Teresa to ring my bell and run up the stairs and confess her love for me, begging me to remain in Spain or to take her with me to the States, I waited now without feeling. And if one of them were to appear and make the most dramatic spectacle of her affection, I began to doubt I’d be moved significantly. At the same time, however, I felt a kind of euphoria at my sudden inability to feel, an exaggerated second order of feeling that did not alter the first order numbness. This euphoria, if that’s what it was, was very far from my body, and therefore compatible with my anhedonia; it was as if I were suspended in a warm bath outside of myself. I felt something like a rush of power, the power to experience the world as though under glass, and this detachment, coupled with my reduced need or capacity for sleep, gave me a kind of vampiric energy, although I was my own prey. I could read and write for hours on end with what felt like total concentration, barely noticing nightfall, and in the early hours of the morning, I would wander around Madrid, passing Isabel’s apartment or Teresa’s gallery just to show myself I could do so without a spike in agony. I would often watch the dawn from the colonnade in El Retiro or one of the benches on El Paseo del Prado or take the Metro to a stop I didn’t know and watch the sunrise there, return home, sleep for a few hours, wake and take white pills, hash, coffee, and with an uncanny energy resume my adventures in insensitivity. I was vaguely afraid, of what I couldn’t say; maybe that I would throw myself in front of a bus without knowing what I was doing or break into Isabel’s apartment and tear apart her brother’s notebook or put a trash can through the gallery window or otherwise act out, powerless to stop myself from such a distance. But I also felt, for the first time, like a writer, as if all the real living were on the page, and I had to purchase a stack of ruled notebooks from Casa del Libro to contain my poems and notes. I told myself I was going to write new poems of such beauty and significance that when Teresa translated and printed them and I gave a copy to Isabel, both women would realize that they had been in the presence of a poet who alone was able to array the fallen materials of the real into a song that transcended it.