by John Haskell
That’s when I saw this person walking in my direction. I wasn’t parked that far from the highway, where apparently this guy had been standing, not quite on the highway because that was illegal, but standing at the place where Charleston ended. He walked over and joined me at the fender. He was wearing a blue watch cap.
“May I help you?” I said.
“What’s the problem?” he said, and he looked under the oily hood at the oily pieces of engine. He braced his hand on the radiator, reached in, jiggled a few wires, and told me to give it another try. He had a wispy virginal beard and smelled of patchouli. I told him I’d already given it a try, but this didn’t seem to worry him. He said something about giving the car some time.
“Time for what?” I said.
“It’s a car,” he said, as if that was an explanation.
“Yes,” I said, “and it’s a car that’s not running.”
He told me again to try it, and because he seemed so sure of himself I got in the car, and when I turned the ignition the car miraculously started. It seemed miraculous to me anyway, so when this man, whose name was Alex, asked if he could have a ride I asked where he was going. “Lexington,” he said, and immediately I cleared away the various maps and boxes from the passenger seat to make space for him to sit. Which he did.
Now things were ticking. I felt that my mind, the unconscious part of it, knew what was happening. Without quite knowing why, I became convinced that by giving him a ride I would relieve some of the pressure I was feeling. And by pressure I mean the sense of failure that was lodging itself in my upper chest.
By sense of failure I mean the disconnect between the world I wanted and the world as it was. I saw Alex as a bridge, both a bridge and a compass, and by compass I mean a part of the natural world that would tell me where to go. Try as I might to become part of the natural world, I was separated from it, and I thought Alex, with his army-green backpack, his worn-down running shoes, and his home in Kentucky, would have access to parts of the world unknown to me, such as where Anne was.
He was going home, he said, and as we drove through the Appalachian hills I briefly recounted my experience at the gas station in New Jersey. Even without hearing the whole story, Alex seemed to understand. He told me to let it go. He said that trying to contain it would only give it power, and what I ought to do, he said, a more effective approach, would be to admit it exists, allow it to exist. “Let it out and see where it goes.”
“By ‘it’ you mean…?”
“Take it off of yourself and put it into the world,” he said. “It won’t go away if you keep pushing it away.” Trying to get rid of it, he said, was just another way of holding on to it.
I still wasn’t sure what the “it” was we were talking about, but that was all right. I was content at that point, happy for something that wasn’t the wavering radio, or the hissing tape player, and this guy’s voice, whatever he was talking about, was soothing and tranquil.
And so we drove, taking periodic gas stops and pee breaks, and part of the regimen during these breaks included a dose of yoga. He was religious about his yoga, which is why, when we stopped at a roadside Kuntry Kitchen restaurant, while we were sitting at a table by the window waiting for the check, Alex slid out of the bench seat, stretched out on the smooth blue carpeting, and began a series of salutations to the sun.
This particular action might have been typical in an ashram somewhere, but it was atypical in this particular restaurant, and a woman at a nearby table, an older woman facing Alex, puffing away on a long thin cigarette, began shaking her head. Alex couldn’t see it because he was involved in his posture, but I saw the woman, and I mention it because, although what she’d done was nothing out of the ordinary—a simple shake of the head—I felt as if she’d reached across the several tables separating us and grabbed my heart in her fist. She’d reached through my chest, into its beating muscle, and I could feel a pressure building up in my body and directed at this woman for imposing her judgment on another member of the human race who happened to have a different set of beliefs.
That’s how I saw it anyway.
And the odd thing was, that although she wasn’t shaking her head at me, I was the one who felt the pressure. And so, following Alex’s earlier advice I stood up and walked to her booth. I hadn’t rehearsed what I was going to say, but concentrated on just letting it out. Let it out, I thought, and I said to her, “Is there a problem?” That’s when I noticed, sitting across from the woman, her husband, or a man taking the role of husband, strong and big-bellied, and although my question was mostly rhetorical, the man was saying that there was a problem. And I said, “Well why don’t we look at the problem a little closer, because I think it might be your problem.” At which point he stood up, or tried to, but because he was near the window side of the booth—and also because of his belly—he couldn’t stand up that easily.
And I’m not saying I didn’t have any judgments because I had plenty, and I knew it, but I wasn’t concerned with noticing those judgments because I was more concerned with acting on them, with making these particular people experience a suitable form of punishment.
I wanted to be mad at something. And this is it, I thought, meaning this is the experience of anxiety turning into excitement. Instead of directing the pressure of that anxiety at myself, I had gotten it off myself and was aiming it at something in the world. And I liked it.
So there we were, the woman sitting, the man half standing, and me. And of course no sudden wave of understanding washed over the table, and in fact both of us, or all three of us, were trying, in our looks, to belittle and intimidate the other. I wanted the man to back down, and I wanted the woman to retract, not just her look, but her judgment.
Although her judgment hadn’t bothered Alex—who blithely continued his salutations—it bothered me. And although the couple eventually left without incident, it continued to bother me. I couldn’t get that lady, or some residue of that lady, out of my body. She was stuck inside my body, burned into my body’s memory, and I was unable or unwilling to leave her behind. As I walked back to the car I was still feeling, in my stomach and chest, the incipient rage that for a moment had been directed at something other than me, and was now back in me, submerged inside the shell I had come to call myself.
4.
We spent the night in a rest area, Alex in the car and me, nestled in my sleeping bag, on a grassy area next to the car. The diesel engines of the big trucks rumbled all night, and the high voltage illumination, meant to prevent crime, prevented me from sleeping. On the one hand I thought I should sleep, and on the other I was still imagining retributions for the lady back at the restaurant.
The next morning I was walking out of the cinder-block bathroom when Alex, practicing his yoga on the grass, suggested I take off my shoes and join him. I was willing enough to touch my toes if I could, but before I did, while I was lining up my feet, he tapped my chest and told me to let the air out. He told me to relax my shoulders and take a deep cleansing breath, and because I was used to following instructions I was about to follow his. But I didn’t want to take a cleansing breath. A deep cleansing breath might have alleviated the symptoms I was feeling, but I didn’t mind the symptoms.
Thank god for anger, I thought. Although I didn’t know what it was protecting me from exactly, I could tell it was giving me a chance to feel something other than loss. In that sense it was good, if not necessarily pleasant. Compared with loss or sorrow, anger was a balm, and rather than let it go, I wanted to perpetuate it. And when Alex started talking about Anne I had my opportunity.
He suggested, matter-of-factly, that maybe my wife wanted to disappear, that maybe she preferred not to be found. He’d seen the photo on the dashboard and I’d told him a more complete version of the dark car at the gas station, and the brakes screeching, and then Anne disappearing. And now he was saying, “She probably needs some space. A little time away,” he said. And although he didn’t laugh when he said it, or
even smile, I told him I wasn’t joking. He said that he knew I wasn’t joking, that he didn’t mean it as a joke, but by then it didn’t matter.
Maybe I didn’t like his cavalier manner, or maybe I had a problem with his presumption. Or maybe I hated the idea that what he’d said was possibly right. Which it wasn’t.
But as I say, it didn’t matter.
Since I’d already taken the step of identifying with the sensation of anger, the next step was feeling its discomfort, and the step after that was to get rid of it.
“What I mean,” he said, “is that I think it might take some time, but I do believe, eventually, that you’ll find your wife.” I knew he was trying to apologize, but by then I already had my excuse, a reason to place my discomfort onto something else.
So I got mad. And because I was mad I did several things. First, I just tried ignoring him. And when that didn’t do anything, the next thing I did, after we got in the car and started driving, was, I tried to hypnotize him. In college I’d studied hypnosis and so I started talking to him, saying things like “Are you getting sleepy?” and “How do you know if you know you’re sleeping when you’re looking out the window and seeing that sleep are grazing in the fields?” Things like that.
I’d heard about the concept of releasing your anger, and that’s what I was trying to do. I thought I was getting it off my chest and that by doing so I would feel better. Except I didn’t. It was still there, wrapped around my heart, a definite impulse to somehow hurt Alex. At the same time I could see that he hadn’t done anything really. He was probably a student, someone who wanted to be friendly, and was, in fact, willing to express an opinion in a friendly way. But it was already too late. I had already enveloped myself in a skin of anger, enclosed myself within the protection of this skin, and as we drove along I wasn’t speaking, and because the engine was loud, and because I was encased in this skin, if he said anything to me I didn’t hear what it was.
We were driving along the smoothly flowing interstate, through a layer of mist in a valley, and he was saying something, but I was unable or unwilling to hear what it was until he began commenting on my old maroon car, casually mentioning that, while he wasn’t totally sure, he was pretty sure he’d seen a plum-colored car back at the rest area, a station wagon, and he knew there must be a million station wagons painted in some shade of red, but …
That was enough for me. Even the slightest hint of Anne would have been enough, and I immediately turned around. I should say I wanted to turn around, but because we were driving on a divided interstate highway there was no opportunity to turn around. There was no exit. It was one-way as far as we could see and I kept driving, for miles, expecting to come to an off-ramp or a turnoff, and mile after mile of trees and more trees but no turnoffs. I was mad at Alex and mad at myself and mad at the interstate highway commission. It was doubly frustrating because I could see, just across the grassy median, the road I wanted.
But I couldn’t get to that road. I was separated from that road or the direction the road implied, waiting for an exit, hoping an exit would suddenly appear, and when none did, I started to go slightly crazy. I was already in the left-hand lane, and when I couldn’t stand the frustration any longer, I veered farther left, off the highway and onto the asphalt part of the median. Alex was holding on to the dashboard as I started driving down the bumpy grass slope, and it was bumpy, so I drove slowly, down one side, and carefully, at an angle, across the gully and then up the other side. I was heading in the opposite direction now, waiting at the border of the grass for a chance to pull into the traffic flow when, just as that chance was about to present itself, a car pulled up, a state trooper car with a flashing light. It stopped in front of my car, blocking access to the highway, and a man with high boots walked over.
I tried to explain to him that this wasn’t a very good time. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I told him that I knew I’d committed a traffic violation but that I was in the middle of an emergency. I tried to reason with the man, to placate his desire to enforce the law, but that wasn’t good enough. It seemed this particular trooper was either a tough guy, or acting like a tough guy, and when he told me to get out of the car that’s when the struggle really started.
I wanted to decide what was going to happen, and the trooper also wanted to decide what would happen, and initiated by some comment—or some nonverbal aspect of that comment—I felt myself pushed to the point where the choices in my mind were reduced to either surrendering to this unjust power or doing something stupid. And what I did was, I held my hand in the shape of a gun—index finger forward, thumb pointing up—and I pretended to aim this imaginary gun at the trooper, who with unexpected force threw me against the side of my car and locked my wrists in handcuffs.
And I say thank god for anger because, although it’s good for giving a sense of protection, it’s also good for changing things, or breaking through things. The power struggle had now become physical, and even though I was bound by the handcuffs I was ready to get physical. Alex, still sitting in the car, was peacefully trying to explain the situation, but the trooper wasn’t listening. It was his situation and his control, and since anger is a by-product of lack of control, and since I had nothing if not lack of control, the anger that had been smoldering in me started burning. Even with my face pressed into the metal of the squad car, the adrenaline flowing in my blood felt liberating. Of course when I attempted to enact that liberation by pulling my hands apart I only pulled the handcuffs tighter, and while my liberation was in this way thwarted, my anger wasn’t.
And again, I didn’t think about what I did next, I just started doing it. I suddenly started jerking around, spasmodically twisting my body until I fell onto the asphalt, writhing in what I didn’t even know, just writhing, like what I imagine someone having a fit would do, a physical seizure, and I could tell the man was dumbfounded. I was shaking my head, letting the spittle spill from my mouth, and I could hear him tell me I’d better not be faking it. He said he was going to take me to some jail and I’d be butt-fucked by certain inmates at this particular jail. So I kept writhing.
Alex, at this point, kneeled over me, and I wanted to signal to him that I was fine, but because the trooper was watching I had to keep writhing, surreptitiously winking at Alex, who kept asking me if I was all right. I tried to let him know that I was, but I didn’t stop writhing.
Until the trooper pulled from his car a first-aid kit. He took out some smelling salts and he cracked open two candy-sized cartridges and jammed them up my nostrils. Smelling salts are supposed to be wafted near the nose, but he stuck them into my nose. And so, as my writhing subsided, I lay there, breathing through my clenched mouth. I could hear Alex somewhere over my head admonishing me to “keep breathing, keep breathing,” and what a stupid thing to say, I thought. Of course I’m breathing. How can I not keep breathing? But in thinking what a stupid thing it was, I momentarily took my mind off the trooper. Momentarily my anger ran out of fuel. And at that point I could have added some fuel, could have fanned the flames of the struggle I was having, and the thing that changed was the realization of what I was struggling for.
I started thinking about Anne.
I sat up and looked at the patrolman. He was just a person, no worse than anybody else. He had the rounded shoulders of a man past his physical prime, and I could see how he might’ve felt threatened, somewhat, by my aggressive gesture. I offered a conciliatory remark, like “I’m sorry if I freaked you out” or “I got a little excited,” and we started talking. He took the broken pellets out of my nose. Still cuffed, I told him about Anne, and about why I was seeming so desperate, and he must have had a sympathetic streak. He indicated his understanding of my predicament by tying it into the passion he had for fly fishing. I could see he was attempting a rapprochement, and as we talked, the anger, which had seemed so liberating a moment ago, now seemed, in light of my desire to be with Anne, not very helpful. So I held it in. For Anne’s sake. I listened to his fly-fishi
ng monologue, nodding at appropriate times, and in this way I created—or we created—a sense of fellow feeling. We were getting along, finding our commonality, and after about a half hour of this relational negotiation he unlocked the handcuffs, gave me a warning, and then he let us drive away.
5.
Your arms. They’re my favorite parts of your body, from the wrist bone up through the fine hairs of your forearm, the loose skin inside your elbow, to the taut flexors and extensors of your upper arm, turning gently into shoulder and collarbone and neck. There are certain sleeveless shirts you wear, and when you do I feel like taking those arms, like autonomous entities, holding them above your head, and running my nose down their entire velvet length. I would melt into those arms if I could, but instead I do the closest thing, kissing the delicate skin of your biceps, taking into my mouth the whole fibrous mass of muscle under your skin. Because you’re strong, and because you see yourself as strong, you like to do things. You like rock climbing. We both do. We aren’t experts, but I remember one night, riding on our bikes in the wind to a health club in midtown with a faux rock wall where people practice their ascents. You’re wearing a tank top and bicycle shorts and we rent the special shoes and helmets and we’ve been climbing for about an hour, noticing among the climbers one blond man, without companion or rope, climbing like a muscular spider along the artificial notches and grooves that signify handholds of actual rock. When we finish, sitting at a table in the health club drinking some healthy drink, the man we’ve been watching walks up to us. He introduces himself as an Austrian mountain climber and shows us a book, a large book with photographs of him climbing various European rock faces, famous ones, he assures us. His accent is engaging and he offers to give us some pointers, a generous thing, except that during the whole conversation, I have the impression that he’s talking only to you. He’s looking at me but I can’t help noticing that his body is tilted toward you. And you’re turned toward him, listening to him, taking him in. After we get home, lying in bed that night, I can tell there’s something between us. I assume it’s that Austrian fucker, or your Austrian desire for him rather than me, and when we do make love I can feel a palpable barrier separating us. Your mind is elsewhere. And of course you assure me that the Austrian man means nothing to you, all the typical things a person might say, but I know, or think I know, that you’re not telling me everything. And maybe he is better than I am, stronger and kinder and more understanding than I could ever be. But he isn’t that handsome, not in my opinion. You, however, don’t agree with my opinion, and I see this unwillingness to take my side as a kind of betrayal. I see it and feel it, and it feels like a knife cutting us apart. I call it jealousy because jealousy is a famous emotion, but I could do something to change it. Attention is what you want and I could easily give you that attention. I could understand, or try to understand, but I want attention too. And I don’t want to compete for it. Not with him. You’ve taken a solemn vow, we both have, and I can’t tell if I’m sad or mad, and maybe I’m both because a gap opens up, like a wedge driven between us, and as this wedge slowly pries us apart, a hundred disparate emotions combine in me to create a sense of disorientation that never completely goes away.