Why is there always a little hum of hate running alongside love? a friend once wrote to me in an email, paraphrasing someone. I don’t remember if she said it was Alice Munro or Lydia Davis. After the fight, he sleeps and I don’t. A slow rage creeps and flowers in my sternum, burning deep but contained, like a fire smoldering in a fireplace. Slowly, a distance stretches between his sleep and my sleeplessness. I remember Charles Baudelaire said something about everyone being like convalescents in a sickroom, always wishing they could swap beds. But which bed, where? The other bed in this room is warm and pleasant with the children’s breathing, but there is no space for me there. I close my eyes and try to thrust myself into thoughts of other places and other beds.
More and more, my presence here, on this trip with my family, driving toward a future we most probably won’t share, settling into motel bedrooms for the night, feels ghostly, a life witnessed and not lived. I know I’m here, with them, but also I am not. I behave like those visitors who are always packing and repacking, always getting ready to leave the next day but then don’t; or like ancestors in bad magical realist literature, who die but then forget to leave.
I cannot stand the guttural sounds of my husband breathing, he so calm in his nasty, guiltless dreams. So I get out of bed, write a note—“Back later”—in case someone wakes up and worries, and then leave the room. My boots walk me out, out from one godless dark to another. The boots provide a weight, a gravity that I’ve lately ceased to feel under my feet. One of the metal buckles slaps the faux leather flank of a boot in a rhythmical slap, walk, heel, toe—fuck, I’m probably making too much noise. I try to ghost my way down the motel corridor, feeling like a teenage junkie. A neon tube flickers above the door to the empty reception. Under my arm I’ve tucked a book, which I may or may not read if I find a bar or an open diner.
I don’t have to go too far. Just a mile or so down the highway is the Dicks Whiskey Bar, which I have trouble pronouncing properly in my head—is it a possessive noun or just a plural form? The waitresses are dressed in pioneer costumes, and in the restroom, there are barrels for sinks. A cover version of “Harvest Moon” is playing in the background, seemingly on repeat. At the bar, I find a stool and take a seat. I’ve always felt inadequate on barstools because my legs are not long enough for my feet to touch the ground, so a remote bone and muscle memory is triggered: I’m four years old again, dangling my legs from my chair, waiting for a glass of milk and maybe some attention amid the morning rush of a house with a loud older sibling, knowing that even if I yell, no one will listen. Older siblings don’t listen, and the barman never listens. But I shift a little on my stool and discover that my astrolady boot heels latch on perfectly to the bottom rod between the legs of the stool. So I suddenly feel grounded, present, adult enough to be there. I rest my crossed forearms on the zinc bar and order a whiskey.
Neat, please.
Two places from me I notice a man, also alone, writing notes in the margins of a newspaper page. His legs are long and thin, and his feet touch the ground. He has well-outlined sideburns, a sad crease across his forehead, a strong chin, wild bushy hair. The kind of man, I tell myself, who would have swept me under his charm when I was younger and less experienced. He’s wearing a weathered white tank shirt and denims. And as I study his brown naked arms, a shoulder dotted with a darker birthmark, a thick vein that pulses in his neck, and a spiral of small hairs behind his ear, I tell myself no, this man is not at all interesting. Lined up next to his drink—also whiskey, neat—he has four pens, all the same color (in addition to the one he’s using to underline something in the newspaper article he’s so invested in). I repeat to myself, no, he’s not interesting, he’s just beautiful, and his beauty is of the most vulgar kind: indisputable. And as I sweep my eyes down along his flank toward his hip, I find myself completely incapable of not asking him:
Can I use one of your pens or do you need all five of them?
And as he hands one of the pens over to me, he smiles with a childish bashfulness, and looks at me with a gaze that reveals both a fierceness and a fundamental decency—not of manners and mores, but of a deeper, more simple noble type. For a man this beautiful, I realize, that kind of gaze is rare. Handsome men are habituated to attention, and they look at other men or women with the cold self-satisfaction that an actor displays in front of a camera. Not this man.
We end up talking to each other, at first following all the ready-made prompts and platitudes.
What brings us here?
He tells me he’s on his way to a town called Poetry, which I think is probably a lie, a lie that reveals too much sentimentalism. I don’t think a place by that name exists, but I don’t question him about it. In return for his lie, I tell him I’m on my way to Apacheria—the same kind of vague, fictitious answer.
What do we each do?
Our answers are evasive, veiled behind an almost overacted mysteriousness that reveals nothing more than insecurity. We try a little harder now. I tell him I do journalism, mostly radio journalism, and I’ve been trying to work on a sound documentary about refugee children, but my plan for now is, once I reach Apacheria, to go look for two lost girls in New Mexico or possibly Arizona. He says he used to be a photographer but now prefers painting, and is going to Poetry, Texas, because he’s been commissioned to paint a series of portraits of the town’s eldest generation.
Then we talk politics, and he explains the term “gerrymandering” to me, a term I’ve never understood even after years of living in the United States. He draws a series of squiggly lines on a paper napkin, the resulting image of which looks like a dog. I laugh, tell him he’s a terrible explainer, and I still don’t understand the concept, but I fold the gerry-napkin and tuck it into one of my boots.
Slowly, though not so slowly, our conversation leads us toward darker, maybe truer spaces. He is the opposite of me, in circumstance. He’s unentangled; I’m a knot. There’s my children and his childlessness. His plans for eventual children and my plans for no more. Hard to explain why two complete strangers may suddenly decide to share an unbeautified portrait of their lives. But perhaps also easy to explain, because two people alone in a bar at two in the morning are probably there to try to figure out the exact narrative they need to tell themselves before they go back to wherever they’ll sleep that night. There’s a compatibility in our loneliness, and an absolute incompatibility of our mutual situations, and a cigarette shared outside, and then the sudden compatibility of our lips, and his breath in my cleavage, and the tip of my fingers around his belt, just inside his pants. My heartbeat races in a way I know well but have not felt in many years. The absolute physicality of desire takes over. He suggests we go back to his motel, and I want to.
I want to, but I know better. With men like this one, I know I’d play the role of lonely hunter; and they, the role of inaccessible prey. And I’m both too old and too young to pursue things that walk away from me.
So there is one last whiskey and then some scribbles—geographic advice and telephone numbers—that we jot down on our respective napkins. His, probably lost the morning after, in the routine emptying out of pockets for the sake of carrying less weight; mine kept in one of my boots, as a kind of reminder of a road not taken.
GUNS & POETRY
The next morning, in a gas station outside Broken Bow, we buy coffees, milks, cookies, and a local newspaper called The Daily Gazette. There’s an article titled “Kids, a Biblical Plague” about the children’s crisis at the border, which I read through, baffled by its Manichean representation of the world: patriots versus illegal aliens. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that a worldview like that has a place outside of superhero comic strips. I read some sentences out loud to the family:
“Tens of thousands of children streaming from chaotic Central American nations to the U.S.”
“…this 60,000 to 90,000 illegal alien children mass that has come to America…”
“These children carry with them viruse
s that we are not familiar with in the United States.”
I think of Manuela’s girls, and it’s hard not to be overcome by rage. But I suppose it’s always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world’s economic and military powers. Reading articles like this one, I find myself amused at their unflinching certitude about right and wrong, good and bad. Not amused, actually, but a little bit frightened. None of this is new, though I guess I am simply accustomed to dealing with more edulcorated versions of xenophobia. I don’t know which is worse.
There’s only one place to eat at this time in Boswell, Oklahoma, and it’s called the Dixie Café. The boy is the first to jump out of the car, getting his camera ready. I remind him to take the little red book from the top of my box, as well as the big road map, which I left there last night, because the glove box was too full. He runs to the back of the car, fetches everything, and waits for us outside the café, the map and book tucked under his arm and his camera ready in his hand. He takes a picture as the rest of us take our time, climbing out sluggishly, putting on our new Walmart boots.
The only other patrons in the Dixie Café are a woman with a face and arms the texture of boiled chicken, and a toddler in a high chair to whom she’s feeding fries. We order four hamburgers and four pink lemonades, and spread our map out on the table while we wait for the food. We follow yellow and red highway lines with the tips of our index fingers, like a troupe of gypsies reading an enormous open palm. We look into our past and future: a departure, a change, long life, short life, hard circumstances beyond, here you will head south, here you will encounter doubt and uncertainty, a crossroads ahead.
Only this we know: in order to reach New Mexico and, eventually, Arizona, we can either drive west across Oklahoma or southwest across Texas.
Was Oklahoma also once part of Mexico, Ma? the boy asks.
No, not Oklahoma, I answer.
Arkansas?
No.
And Arizona?
Yes, I say, Arizona was Mexico.
So what happened? the boy wants to know.
The United States stole it, says my husband.
I nuance his answer. I tell the boy that Mexico kind of sold it, but only after losing the war in 1848. I tell him it was a two-year war, which Americans call the Mexican-American War and Mexicans call, perhaps more accurately, the American Intervention.
So will there be many Mexicans in Arizona? the girl now asks.
No, the boy tells her.
Why?
They shoot them, her brother says.
With bows and arrows?
Guns, he says. And as he says this, he mimics a sniper, shoots the plastic containers of ketchup and then mayonnaise, and is about to squirt some ketchup on Arizona when his father snatches the bottle from him.
We go back to studying the map. My husband wants to spend a couple of days in Oklahoma, where the Apache cemetery is. He says that stop is one of the central reasons for this trip. It’s incompatible with his wish, but I want to go through Texas. From where I’m sitting, leaning into the table, the state spreads magnanimous under my eyes. I follow the line of a highway with the tip of my index finger. I pass places like Hope, Pleasant, Commerce, de-route toward Merit, south to Fate, and then to Poetry, Texas, which, to my amazement, does indeed exist. The girl says she wants to go back to Memphis. The boy says he doesn’t care, he just wants his food to come now.
The drinks arrive, and we sip in silence, listening to the woman at the other table. She is talking loud and slow to, or maybe at, her toddler about price discounts in the local supermarket while she hands him long fries dipped first in ketchup, then in mayonnaise. The toddler replies with inhuman burbles and shrieks. Bananas, ninety-nine cents a pound. The toddler shrieks. And milk, a carton of milk for seventy-five cents. He gurgles. Then she looks at us, sighs, and tells him that them fore’ns are more and more common these days, and that’s okay, it’s okay with her as long as they’re not troublemakers. She hands him a fry with so much mayo-ketchup on the tip that it bends over sadly, like a dysfunction.
All of us turn around at the same time when another family—father, mother, baby in stroller—walks into the diner. They are of a more discreet type, except for the baby, who is rather big. Maybe even uncannily colossal. It seems difficult to say that someone that size is a baby. But judging by its lumpy features, its almost hairless head, its pixelated movements, it is, by all means, a baby. The toddler, holding a fry up in the air, full of enthusiasm, shouts out from his high chair:
Baby!
No, no, that ain’t no baby—the mother tells him, wagging no-no with another French fry.
Baby! the toddler insists.
No-no, that ain’t no baby, m’boy, no-no-no. That thing’s huge. Scary huge. Like them tomatoes we saw over at the supermarket. Not God’s tomatoes.
She does not at all mind the fact that she is very much shouting across the room, past her toddler, past us, and that the family of the more discreet sort have of course taken note of her opinion, which really is also our opinion, except now we don’t dare exteriorize it, not even in whispers. When the burgers come, I try the mayo-ketchup combination on my fries and find it rather pleasant.
By the time we pay the check, it’s been decided. We’ll drive from Boswell to a town called Geronimo, just to see it and understand why it’s called that. Then we’ll drive to Lawton, which is just a few miles from the cemetery where Geronimo is buried—although there are all sorts of theories about his body having been trafficked elsewhere, by some secret society at Yale. My husband has been planning this visit to the cemetery for months. It’s only about a four-hour drive from where we are now to Lawton, so we can make a few stops on the way there, sleep for one night in Lawton, and then visit the cemetery the morning after.
ARCHIVE
A Tamil friend who was born in Tulsa had warned me: driving deeper into Oklahoma is like falling asleep and sinking into deeper and stranger layers of someone’s troubled subconscious.
Near Tishomingo, in southern Oklahoma, we pass a sign that the boy reads aloud:
Swimming Site Ahead! Fun Guaranteed!
The children insist, so we agree to stop for a swim. There are several cars parked in front of a small artificial lake, the parking area larger than the lake itself. My husband takes out his recording gear while the rest of us gather some basics. By the shore, we lay out two towels, and the children slip out of their clothes and run into the water in their underwear. The lake is shallow enough, near the shore, for them to play by themselves, so I sit on one of the towels and supervise them from there, occasionally distracted by the other people around us.
A middle-aged woman passes in front of me. She’s strolling along the shore with a thin, elderly man—possibly her father. They have two tiny dogs, which hop and bounce a few feet in front them. One of the dogs keeps tripping on rocks, or roots, or maybe on its own legs, and lets out loud yelps. Every time, the woman asks: “Are you okay, cupcake? Are you okay, darling?” The dog does not reply. But the elderly man does: “Oh, I’m just fine, dear. Thanks for asking.”
To my left, there’s a man spread-eagled in a yellow inflatable boat, drinking beer. His wife, a small, bony woman, reads a magazine, sitting cross-legged on a towel. From time to time, she speaks headlines and sentences out loud: “Scientists Say This Diet Reduces Alzheimer’s Risk by 53%!” “You’ve Been Cutting Cake Wrong Your Whole Life: Here’s the Surprising Best Way!” When she gets tired of reading, she stands up and brings her husband another beer, which maybe he orders through telepathic communication, because somehow she’s always on time with a new beer when the old one is just about finished. They have a Labrador, which r
etrieves things that the man in the yellow boat throws into the lake. Now the dog is retrieving rocks—something I’ve never before seen a dog retrieve.
My husband is in the lake, water to his knees, Porta Brace around his right shoulder and boom raised high. The man in the boat notices him and asks if he’s checking for radiation. My husband smiles back at him politely and says he’s just recording the sound of the lake. In response, the man snorts and clears his throat. He and his wife are not there alone, I realize. They are the parents of the three children playing near ours: two girls who chuckle uncontrollably, and one chubby boy with an almost invisible nose and an oversized life vest. Every now and then, the boy screams, “Broccoli, broccoli!” I think, at first, maybe their Labrador is called Broccoli. But as I listen more carefully, I understand the boy is referring to the vegetable and not the family’s pet. The mother replies, appeasing him from under her magazine: “Yes, love, we’ll give you some broccoli when we get back home.”
Also witnessing the Labrador scene is a large woman with a pink towel around her neck. She sits on a folding chair half in the water, smoking cigarettes. Everything about her would be normal enough, except that her chair is placed so that she faces the cars in the parking area and not the lake. All of a sudden, she speaks, questioning the family about how they intend to wash their dog later on without making a mess. The man in the yellow boat answers, unhesitant: “Hose.” And the woman bursts into hoarse, phlegm-gurgling laughter.
I finally make up my mind to join our children; I change into my swimsuit under my towel and crawl into the lake in an amphibian position—on my belly and using my hands to glide myself forward. Right before I sink my face into the cold water, I see a staunch man with a lovely round bald head riding into the distance on a standing paddleboard. He seems like the only person in this strange human constellation who is perfectly happy.
Lost Children Archive: A Novel Page 13