I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  The intercom came on and said, Ladies and gentlemen we are ready for departure but we do need everyone in their seats to avoid further delay. No threat so potent in this new century than delay. I saw it on the face of the brown, slim, well-groomed attendant at the front of the plane, his hand still cupped around the little white intercom phone.

  I was frantic. I had two voices in my head. One of them was my own and it said, You are about to get yourself tased by the state. I said, not at all politely, “Can you let me off, please, now.”

  The flight attendant paused, considering, then rolled his eyes and replaced the white phone in its cradle. He opened the door of the plane.

  The other voice was the goose from Charlotte’s Web.

  An hour of freedom is worth a barrel of slops.

  1972

  Dear Denise,

  Tonight has been a very strange night and I don’t think it will mean a whole lot to anyone but you. Things are happening fast. Last night Terri and I went to a play at the university. The play was pretty good, but what happened after was even better. We wanted to go to Caesars but we didn’t have a ride so we started walking. These two guys—heads, long hair—pulled up and asked if we wanted to go to the Spirit concert. I said no, we had to be home. They were going to turn us on to a joint but they couldn’t find one, so they gave us three hits of speed instead. We started to walk off and they said, “Do you want a ride?”

  Remember that night I told you about? On the bus coming back from LA? Well, I got a flash of that. I started to say no, but Terri said, “Sure.” They were in a truck so I had to sit on the one dude’s lap. The conversation went like this:

  Him: “So you have to be home early?”

  Me: “My mom’s pretty protective.”

  “I would be too.” (Smile.) “Yeah I really would be.”

  (Weird look at him, then I smile.)

  Him: “So you’ve lived in Vegas your whole life, huh?”

  Me: “How’d you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  I asked him if he’d ever seen the high rollers gamble at Caesars. “$1 million on the table, and they don’t even think about it!”

  He says, “Just think of all the people you could help with that money.”

  My mind is completely blown. I’m thinking, Wow, this guy I’m afraid of is a real person! Maybe a good person. By this time we are almost to Caesars. He takes my hand and kisses it! I start to pull away, but I don’t really want to. I wanted to stay with him forever.

  We are pulling into Caesars now. I felt like saying, “Take us with you.” But Terri got out, so I just hugged him and let them drive away thinking what a bitch I am. I blew it.

  At Caesars we took the whites they gave us and went to fish some change out of the fountain to buy a burger. When my whites came on I began seeing things clearly. Lay this on your English teacher: compare those heads to all the old men who proposition me and Terri at Caesars, the self-proclaimed “gentlemen” asking us if we want to have a drink with them, the pair who offered us $200 to blow them. We saw about ten people of our generation dressed decently and being mellow, then at least 200 middle-aged women with their tits hanging out and grown men grabbing on them.

  At one point I said to myself, “What the hell is this?”

  “Trick-or-treat,” Terri answered. And that’s exactly what it was.

  99% of this town should be blown off the map. Cops, teachers, gamblers, all of them. They’re all so fucked I can’t believe it. And they say we’re “sex-oriented,” that we have no moral values! I’m here in my town trying to drink tea and discuss the English language!

  * * *

  —

  Tomorrow’s payday.

  * * *

  —

  Pete and Scott got their learners permits, I get mine this week. Ding a ling!

  * * *

  —

  A chick I know got in a car wreck. She was beautiful, but her face is screwed now. Hope she is beautiful inside, ha ha!

  * * *

  —

  Roger (my boss) put a contract through for thirty-five new green houses and he says when they get built we can get everybody working out here.

  * * *

  —

  Terri is driving me crazy. She is what I call a clinger. She won’t let me go anywhere alone. I never have a minute to myself. I’m trying to hint around about it but I don’t think she’s catching on. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m just going to tell her if it gets much worse. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but I can’t hack her clinging.

  * * *

  —

  The other day Keith was brushing my hair and he kept getting his comb caught in my glasses so I took them off and set them on the floor. He got up to get a cigarette and stepped on them! He broke them and I had to take off from school and pay to get them fixed. He didn’t even say sorry. Just, “Why’d you leave them where I could step on them?” and how his foot hurt.

  * * *

  —

  We got our report cards this week. I blew it. I’m ashamed to tell even you what I got but here goes:

  History I: F (boo!)

  Art: D (I fool around)

  Orientation and Guide: D

  American Lit: C (because it’s after lunch and I always get stoned at lunch)

  Drivers Ed.: B

  Pretty rotten huh?

  * * *

  —

  It’s 1 o’clock in the morning and everybody is crashed except me because of the whites. We went to Scott’s but there were just too many people there and Scott was getting uptight, so we left. It was fun I guess but anything is fun when you’re wired.

  I want to tell you about Harry but I don’t know where to start. Oh well, here goes—

  He’s got blonde hair just past his shoulders and blue eyes (I think). The first time I saw him I thought, “Give me to that dude.” It’s not just because he’s a fox. I just saw him and I knew he was a mellow person. Lately I’ve become sorta obsessed with him: He meditates! He says pain is “just a sensation” whatever that means. He can go places in his head. Sometimes he can go into people’s heads! Now, maybe this is a bunch of bullshit, but Harry is this type of person. He’s from another dimension.

  * * *

  —

  Tonight Vicky, Scott, Greg and I went to see “Bless the Beasts and Children.” I had forgotten how far-out that movie is. I have forgotten a lot of things. Like you, me, everyone is so fucking beautiful it’s insane. Jesus, we are all the most beautiful people. I can’t believe it! We are the outcasts, the outsiders. We are the only people who remain soft in this fucked world. We are what God had in mind when he created man. He meant for people to be like us—feeling true human feelings. Not machines. Not worker bees. Truly alive. Yet we’re the people people put down. If only they could feel something other than the pressure of society. Wouldn’t that be something? Someday, there will be all the people, all rising together! Man, that’ll be beautiful. I don’t know if I’m going insane or what but I just had to write and tell someone these crazy ideas. I hope you can get into this rap.

  * * *

  —

  I have an extreme case of the blues. Saturday night and no one is here and I’m very lonely. Harry is at work, Cyn is at work, Greg went to a SOC party, Terri is babysitting, I have no idea where Keith is. That should give you an idea of how together our group is. The group is dying.

  I want to get out of here, but I want to stay. Been feeling so down you can’t believe it. Since I’m telling all, I guess I better tell you the whole shit. I was with Keith last week. Don’t ask me why, I know I’m an asshole, and I KNOW he’s an asshole, but I just couldn’t help it. I love him and no amount of hating him will change that.

  I
feel better. I felt like I was hiding something from you. Now you know. I hope you understand. If not why don’t you come down and beat my ass? I could dig seeing you even if you were about to kill me.

  * * *

  —

  Pete got a pound of blonde Lebanese hash! So righteous. But I’m worried about him. He’s been working nights at the gas station and flunking school. I’ve been trying to get him to take a night off work and get some sleep, but he won’t listen. I don’t think he’s had any sleep for about four days and he looks like he’s been dead for two years.

  * * *

  —

  Went to see Elton John. I wasn’t really into the music until Elton started playing “Your Song” and I found Scott because that’s my song to him. Me and Scott were standing on our chairs and I yelled “Elton!” super loud and Scott held his hand up in a fist. Then I got on Scott’s shoulders and said, “Elton, we love you!” and then Elton looked right at me, held up his fist and said, “Las Vegas, I’ve come home!” We brought Elton back out four or five times. It was SO mellow!

  * * *

  —

  Big storm today. The door got torn off the main greenhouse, a bunch of windows cracked, part of the roof fell in. We’re closed until they can get it fixed, so I had to quit. Roger is pissed, but I can’t stand around with my finger up my butt making no money. It’s supposed to snow tonight, but I doubt it will. Harry got fired. I guess that’s about it.

  The Now and the Big Gnar

  One way to conceptualize this scene, Noah says, one way to characterize what we’re up to, if he had to put words to it, is that we are simply living very much in the now.

  In the immediate past I climbed Mount Rose in a Lyft, heart clawing for Noah and for Tahoe. I composed and deleted a series of texts to my husband—

  Not coming home rn

  I need to stay here

  in love with someone else

  —and sent finally

  Rats! missed my flight. Can’t get out until tomorrow

  O no that is sucks he responded, adding a pic of our nearly year-old daughter.

  If I had to pin it in messianic time, the now begins when I see the lake. (I am not alone in this view.) I see Tahoe and it dawns on me: I left my breast pump on the plane.

  In the now, I have the driver drop me at the bathrooms of the state campground on the California side of the lake, where Noah said to meet him. I brush my teeth, splash water on my face, wipe out my armpits. I change into dry clothes. I drop my bag in the sand, leave my soggy shoes beside it and walk barefoot to the pier where he said he’d be. I see him at the end and he sees me, does a kind of slump to the side with his hips and his head, visibly gobsmacked. Love has lit him from within. If you’ve been lucky you know what I’m talking about.

  At the end of the pier he pulls me to him. “I’m so glad you came,” he says into my hair.

  I say I’m glad too, feeling him, his skin warm as stone in the sun. I study his laugh lines, jealous of every single person who made them.

  He says I don’t seem glad, and that that’s okay. “Considering . . .” careful ellipsis like a stone skipping across the water.

  “If we’re going to do this, I’m not going to pretend I sprang forth fully formed from your helmet.” I apologize; say I’m tired, haven’t slept.

  Noah says, “We seem to have found ourselves acting out a couple of tropes.”

  “Yes—” I try. “And those feel very far away from where I am now. I can see us from a great distance. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  Noah takes my hand. “What do you see,” he says, “from the great distance?”

  I look at our hands. I admonish myself into the now. Inside I scream, Pay attention, you lucky motherfucker! Look at his perfect goddamn hand holding your lost and wretched hand! Whatever happened or happens, this did. Is.

  “It’s like . . . for a long time it seemed like we were all doing what we were going to do. The tenses blurred. That’s how it was and is and will be. If certain things were going to happen, they would have already happened.”

  We kiss, wanting and unashamed.

  Noah says, “Things are happening now.”

  I push my finger into my palm to check. They are.

  * * *

  —

  It’s wonderful here, in the now. I completely see its appeal. In the now there are no mass extinctions, no mass murders, no masses by definition. The now is pure particle. There is, however, the trouble of the teeth. I’ve grown fond of my vagina’s teeth, but I can’t deny that they’re the ultimate cock block. Now, if you have a very heteronormative definition of sex, as in: sex = penis + vagina, you may at this point in our story be confused. As I’ve said, Theo and I had an open marriage. For years I took liberal advantage of this policy, gladly welcoming all sorts of things into my vagina, among them penises, fingers and devices made of soft, deathless plastic. But after the baby was born, and the vagina dentata came in, vaginal intercourse got dicey. And here I have to say I did not miss it. Now that I had a baby, I didn’t need it. The Innocents loved anal sex. Many of them had taken Women’s Studies 101 as their diversity or gone to prom with a lesbian. Most had heard the Good Word about the vulva and all of them knew better than to admit to being threatened by a toy. I’d spent my cuddleslut period having more orgasms than ever, and that is why the foremothers marched.

  So don’t mistake me, we both come, here in the now in the van. Noah’s orgasm is pleasingly straightforward in its summoning and accompanied by copious, garlicky ejaculate I swallow. But before that, during, a peculiar urge overtakes me. A yearning for Noah’s semen against my cervix. Maybe I’m ovulating, I don’t know, but for the first time ever, I wish my teeth out.

  After sex I sleep and sleep and when I wake it’s morning. Noah’s made oatmeal, rolls a joint. Sex again and then he asks, “Now what do you want to do?”

  “I wish I could take a bath with a whole bag of Epsom salt poured in, maybe find some hot springs.” I’m thinking a soak would brine the teeth, soften them up enough for Noah to slip in and out of me unscathed. I tell him I am ready for the now, need it, have always been here, that all else is dust, that death is a friend of mine, that according to the latest research I have all mother’s pain in me and her mother’s and him too that we came from their spines and and and.

  “Can I ask?” he asks. “When’s the last time you saw the ocean?”

  He had—has—a way of saying that word, ocean, an italic yearning. I want him to say my name the way he said ocean.

  “Too long,” I admit.

  “The ocean will hella ground you in the now.”

  I like the sound of that, can almost feel the waves grinding me into sand, my vagina dentata pulverized by the ecstatic sea of the present. We have more sex, then procure sunglasses, caffeine and gasoline. We drive from the Sierras to the coast, Noah naming every mountain, every tree.

  Theo calls, voicemails, emails. I text him back.

  I am fine

  I am safe

  I just have to be alone rn.

  I will call you when I am ready.

  I do not say I will come home.

  Do not say I just have to get this out of my system because I do not want it out.

  * * *

  —

  Steinbeck country, Kerouac country, George Lucas’s ranch around here somewhere. I get us a hotel room on sea cliffs, peacocks and wild turkeys stalking the grounds. Noah puts the hotel’s eye mask on me, gives me a welcome rough fuck in the ass. We shower and take a walk. We smoke a joint on a ridgeline, trace the fire scars on the hills, hover in the gusts on the bluffs above Drakes Bay. We are on some other time, emerald hummingbird time, blue agave time.

  “This is the place I would choose if I could choose,” I say, choosing.

  * * *

&nb
sp; —

  The semester begins. I email my dean, propose several innovative student-centered approaches to distanced learning. I propose a twenty-four-hour creative writing intensive. I propose a MOOC. The dean doesn’t buy it. I take a leave of absence.

  Theo sends me an email re: $. The hotel says there’s been an issue with my credit card.

  No worries! Noah’s buddy—tech guy backstroking in a money bin of Bitcoin speculation—has a little farm above Big Sur.

  “These are not ponies,” brags the buddy, arms outstretched before a field of bored stocky ponies. “They’re miniature Icelandic horses. They have five gaits: the walk, the trot, the canter, the tölt and the flying pace.”

  Noah becomes their shepherd, tends the Icelandic horses and a herd of ornery Rastafarian-looking dwarf sheep the size of large cats. I am astonished by his competency and discipline. Before long he’s running the place, expanding the pygmy goat play structure, milking the micro cows, mucking the teacup pigs’ pen. I work a few hours in the brunch shack, handing guests the matchbook-size menu and fielding questions about our sole and signature dish: quail egg omelet with microgreens and espresso.

  At sunset Noah and I hit the hot tub then roll around together in the woods or in the van. After, I nap and wake to the renovated farmhouse aglow. The buddy, Andy, is what E. B. White called “a very young pig—not much more than a baby, really.” He has a sizable yet barely readable library of hiking guides, veterinary manuals, Libertarian treatises, signed locavore best sellers in hardcover and paperback, self-help “systems” to “track the past, order the present, design the future.” For dinner Andy summons uniformly delicious things from the internet with his voice. Over dinner we drink a bottle of wine each, everyone loose and warm when the boys begin to jam. Their sessions stretch into the night, moving through phases like the moon. Three songs in, Noah looks to me like Dylan doing “Like a Rolling Stone” at Free Trade Hall. If they’d stop there he could have me any way he wanted. Andy too, vagina dentata be damned! But on they play, swiftly departing the sensual realm and off to the land of tiresome boner-killers.