by Alan Davis
When I skimmed through the book, there were footnotes in it from Look magazine. Now floorboards creak and water gurgles in the pipes—the girl next door is preparing for work. She looks so much like Annie—does she spend her evenings with esoteric books, weighing the wisdom she finds?
It’s late. I should get to work.
No. I’ll start again.
*
This is a story about Annie. She sent Doug a letter yesterday: “I am not my emotions, Doug. I am not my relationships with others. I am not my ideas. I am not my experiences. I am something else. What, I’m not sure about. But I don’t have to be friendly. I don’t even have to smile. I’m not trying to exclude you, but to include others. Do you think I’m crazy? If not, please send me some good energy. I need it.” In the letter was an owl feather; Doug placed it on the dashboard of his car. There was a P.S.: “My number one priority is racing consciousness. (Can you believe that? I was going to scratch it out and write the word I meant to write, which was raising, of course—but I thought it too funny to scratch out. Freudian slip.)”
Sometimes she lives alone, in a one-room cottage near the Bayou Teche, sometimes in town with her husband Randy. Once, the three of them—Annie, Randy, Doug—lived together, renting a big tilted place with three bedrooms which has since been demolished to make way for a row of townhouses. Randy slept alone there, unaware that Annie and Doug were lovers. In the morning Odessa, her golden retriever, would nudge them awake before he discovered them together.
Let me start again.
*
I shut the window and turn on the radio. After a minute it brings me the world’s tinny message: a love song! Paul and Linda McCartney singing “It’s Just Another Day.” I laugh and sing along. I slap my knee.
The schoolbell rings. Some of the children, protected by earmuffs and winter gear, continue to play in the cold. The rain’s stopped, but the sky is grayer. I pour a glass of orange juice and listen to the radiator. I’m not going to work. The Jehovah’s Witnesses might be in the bushes, birch rods in hands, wing-tip shoes giving them away. No, I don’t believe that, and I’m tired of my playfulness. I’m not going because I want to think about Annie. I miss her so much. I spend most of my time waiting for her—I live a small life, study sidewalk cracks, and stare into the street.
A man who looks a lot like my grandfather is standing at the edge of the schoolyard in a windbreaker. He fingers his few strands of white hair and then grips the chain-link fence.
Tangle, back in her cage, cracks seeds and chirps. When her mate Mossy disappeared through an open window, Annie and I spent hours discussing whether to free Tangle, too. A few of Annie’s friends, in headbands and drawstring pants, were outraged at the very idea of a caged bird. They celebrated Mossy’s flight. But we decided Tangle would never survive in the natural world.
There’s danger in this room, in its ticking silence. It is here, the silence says, it is here. Annie would say a memory from a past life, or a voice from the invisible world, tried to reach me, but that my soul wasn’t subtle enough. “You are it, Doug, you are it.” Could that be true? I don’t know how to think about the spiritual life. When she slept beside me, she would tunnel into her pillow toward the source of all wisdom, the moon bathing her dark shoulders and thick tangled hair. A Buddhist altar stood witness near the birdcage. On our waterbed, every slight turn jostled us together. Like Mossy and Tangle, I thought, we would follow our happiness together; the complicated canvas of the world would change into primary colors and whirl us away.
*
She was always able to recall each of her dreams in detail. I can’t remember mine, Doug would complain. “But you’re not your dreams, Doug.” Playfully scolding, still in another world, she would smile. “You know better than that.”
Annie, Doug thought, I know I’m not only my dreams, and certainly not only my ideas. And yes, I can accept I’m not only my emotions. Hallelujah! But not my relationships to others?
“No, Doug,” she said once as they sat in the park, feeding ducks in a small pond. “I think you misunderstand the nature of invisible things.”
“Look,” he said, squinting into the shadows. “There’s some kind of invisible thing eating the bread.”
She stared. “Can you see what it is?”
“No. The water’s too muddy.” They threw more bread. “Look! Whatever it is got one of the ducks.”
She folded her cotton dirndl around her legs. “You poking fun?”
A delivery truck downshifted nearby. The conversation died and they looked for pebbles, the ones bright like coins. They scrubbed their hands against the bark of butternut trees and waited on the curb for traffic to clear. She leaned forward, hands on her dancer’s thighs.
Annie, how do we define ourselves? Isn’t contact necessary?
Let me start again.
*
“Would you like to come back to Denver and dance?”
“Well, I don’t know if I should tell you this,” Annie said, “but I had a dream. I was dancing in a large studio. There was snow outside.”
“You’d be welcome. More than welcome. We’d both have privacy. You’d dance, I’d work. In any case, I made a decision. I’ve decided I won’t return here, not for a while, but I’ll leave a space in my life for you.”
“Thank you, Doug.” She painted a Christmas card. He leafed through record albums and put something by Joni Mitchell on the stereo. Outside, bare branches grazed against the shingles of her cottage. “Did you bring the weather with you from Denver?”
She was surrounding a charcoal-colored angel with an aura. The half-finished card rested on a miniature easel. “Roy G. Biv,” he said.
“Who?”
“No, what. The colors of the rainbow.” He started scribbling.
“Doug.”
“Shush. I’m writing something for you.”
“Doug, I tell you what: why don’t you write something for me?”
“With love and squalor?”
She frowned. “You call this squalor?”
“I was joking.”
“Naturally.” She unbraided her hair and its darkness cascaded over her shoulders. She leaned forward again, a hand on either thigh, elbows slighdy akimbo. “Um, can I ask you something?”
“I guess.”
“Well, listen. Answer carefully. A, B, or C. Doug, are you emotionally involved, as they say? In our relationship, I mean?”
He wanted to touch her face. Joni Mitchell was singing something about always being bound to someone.
She waited, fingers forming a steeple.
“So.” He looked away. “I guess I am emotionally involved. Better yet, I’m not emotionally involved, but I love you. Does that make sense?”
“I guess.” She moved to an armchair covered with a bedspread, lit a cone of incense and placed it in a miniature replica of an adobe house, her gestures delicate enough for a tea ceremony.
The music stopped.
“Okay,” she said. “Here we go.” She folded her hands. “This is how I feel, in a nutshell. You’re my brother, Doug. I like to see it that way, it doesn’t exclude anybody or anything.” She took a deep breath. “Above all else, this is where I place my energy. It’s open and it’s high.” She stopped. “What you think?”
He folded his own hands. “I think relationships, like writing, are transfers of energy.”
She held up a finger. “Not so fast. One more thing, okay? I can’t have a relationship, not the way people expect, and that doesn’t only mean you, Doug. I have other work to do. Energy, as you know, is environmental, but force makes things happen.” Smoke swirled from the tiny adobe chimney. She brought the tips of her fingers together. “Again. Putting aside wrong-thinking brought about by man’s erroneous measure of time, I recognize we’ve vibrated in the presence of each other’s energy over many lifetimes.” She grinned. “Quite a mouthful, huh? But—to continue—I think we’re both against imprisoning thoughts and possessive relationships.”
“Of course,” he said.
They brewed two cups of tea and sat in the darkness.
*
Sometimes I bicycle along the Platte River. The water, icy but still flowing, raises my spirits. Sometimes, when the light’s soft, in the late afternoons, I see her walking on the other side of the river, near Mile-High Stadium, a slender waif-like figure, and she waves, her hair taking dominion over the last light. That’s why I sway on the red hooked rug in the center of my room, my head angling toward the hallway, waiting for a voice from the invisible world.
*
“What is it, Doug?”
“It’s a toy from the factory where I work. It has pointed ears, and it holds its head high, and it does absolutely nothing at all.”
“Is it Snoopy?”
He laughed. “If that’s what you want it to be. It’s yours. You can make it dance the Snoopy dance, if you wish, or sleep with it, or put it in a box.”
“Whatever.”
“Whatever.”
The muddy bayou behind her cottage, where he stayed alone, made its sluggish way through the countryside, like a great lazy serpent sloughing its skin. He stalked lush Louisiana fields, smoked cigarettes, counted the mice in the cottage. He explored deserted houses and antiquated sugar-cane mills, cautiously skirting trailers where oil-field workers lived with their families. Everywhere he heard the recoils of rifles: roughnecks, teaching their wives to shoot. When they left for rigs in the Gulf, they loaded shotguns and their wives nodded.
Before he returned to Denver, Annie danced by the bayou. Randy sat near the water and stroked Odessa. “You’ll be sorry when she’s gone, won’t you, girl?” he asked, scratching the dog behind the ears. All men are brothers, he knew, and he tried to live by that creed, despite his quick temper and practical nature. Annie, his spiritual sister, wanted wisdom, the things the Buddha taught, and that was fine with him, so long as he could be with her. He loved her. That day, she stretched and leaped in moist grass, turned twice before touching ground. The sun sparkled on floating branches in the bayou. Two moss-draped oaks framed her stage. The three of them could have been alive anywhere.
One late afternoon, when the huge Louisiana sun was sinking like a lost world into the trees, Annie and Doug found four owl feathers next to a shotgun shell in a clearing. “Just because the shotgun shell is next to the feathers,” he said, “doesn’t mean the bird is dead.”
She put her fingers to her forehead, shielding her eyes, and dropped her arms. “Maybe not, but did you have to put it into words?” They walked around the clearing and found maybe two dozen more feathers. She arranged them on her bed by order of size. “Would you like one? I’ll give you one now and send you one later. We can leave the others for the mice,” she said. “You know, placate them so they don’t bite you?”
“Sure,” he said, sheepish about his mouse fear. “Who else would want such a gift?”
“I don’t know, though maybe mice would prefer strawberry sundaes.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
She looked incredulous, opening her mouth wide and raising her carefully-trimmed eyebrows. “Would I kid about a strawberry sundae?”
*
The news is on the radio—war overseas, a visit to China, the death of a celebrity. It’s time to take a break. Afternoon recess is over and I haven’t budged from the chair. At the toy factory, toys are products, children consumers: consistency satisfies expectations. We have a suggestion-box, though, and I tell the box, every day I work, that we should make wind-up ballerinas and provide them with all necessary accessories.
I’m taking everything too seriously.
Some nights, lights blazing, I lie awake. Is there a superior being? Is the Earth an organism, conscious of design, each of us a cell? Am I my sense of wonder, my sense of play?
I’ve dismanded myself, trying to become whatever my inner being dictates, trying to vibrate on the same wavelength as Annie, but I’m still waiting.
It’s late afternoon. Snow flurries are falling to the street. The sidewalks will be white. Imprints of little feet will surround the school.
As the children leave the schoolyard, I know what I can do: I can walk home beside them and stop at the ice cream parlor. I can stand in line (if there’s a line on a day like this) until the man with the paper hat calls my number. I can order a strawberry sundae.
*
Doug gathered his pack, changed the oil in his Valiant and left Louisiana. Annie stayed with Randy. She had not told Doug they were married until he had noticed Randy’s ring. The idea that she could leave the marriage without exactly leaving it, that legalisms had nothing to do with the secret counterworld all of them really lived in, was a fiction Annie and Doug both held to be true. Randy wasn’t so sure. Annie left him soon after she decided not to come to Denver, but he still wears the ring, a gold band. If she ever decides to join Doug, he’ll follow. How can he know the invisible world really exists, unless he’s with her?
As Doug drove through Texas, a sudden blast of air from the defroster sent the owl feather drifting to the seat. Could that have been symbolic? he wondered. Maybe only symbols exist in the world, parading before us, disguised as ordinary experience. If that’s true, he thought, I can wait for years. I’ve waited this long. Why not a little longer?
There’s a dream he remembers all too clearly. Widow Annie lived with him in a ramshackle hut, surrounded by hundreds of people in hovels. Beyond the huts, they could see sugar-cane, wood-slatted trucks. Widow Annie faded. A curtain replaced her at the window. “We’ll be happy here,” Doug told the girl who threw Annie’s things into the street, but a hairy fist smashed the pane of glass and waved a lead pipe. He woke, sweating.
*
I’d like to buy a wind-up Jehovah’s Witness and send it waddling down the street, saying its predictable things. Wouldn’t that be nice, a toy everybody would know what to make of, that could tell us why the world is filled with trouble? In the meantime, I wait for the next dance, the next passionate longing to whirl me away from myself. I’m tired of playfulness, tired of trying to name things.
I guess I should’ve wanted something. Something specific, I mean. I guess I should’ve wanted something from the beginning. Something tangible, I mean. When I was with Annie, I pretended desire had nothing to do with the world, that love just happened. People got together according to cosmic intentions.
So. Perhaps it’s not too late.
I want a strawberry sundae.
*
Doug bundled up. “Good-bye, Tangle. See you.”
The hallway smelled like food. The girl next door was cooking dinner and the aroma was lovely. The stairs creaked as he went down. The single bulb on the ceiling in the foyer was brightly burning. Across the street, janitors left the school—vague shadows in the dark snow.
How refreshing it was to walk alone on the streets! There were bare trees with limbs like spiderwebs, old houses two floors tall with gingerbread trim, toys on some of the porches. And footprints! They disappeared after a while in the falling snow, but he followed them as long as he could.
GOING WEST
In a science-fiction story I read last year when Audrey and I were separated, an Earthling and a Martian meet in a time warp. Each believes the other’s civilization is in ruins, or never existed. They stand perplexed in the Martian desert, sand swirling around them, and try finally to clasp hands in a gesture of goodwill. But their fingers slide through each other like the blades of a skate through ice.
Recendy, housebound with the two kids in the dead of a blizzard for three days, I had the television, the kids their Leggo blocks, Audrey her sewing. But how many reruns of “M*A*S*H” can you stomach, especially with the sound turned up to drown out Margaret’s tantrums and Stevie’s new obsession with percussion instruments? Leggos were scattered over five rooms and Audrey was reduced to thumbing through magazines.
I raised the white flag. “Let’s go find the sun,” I announced, clicking
off “The Dukes of Hazzard” and dropping on all fours to reach under the couch for Stevie’s long-lost farm implement hat. He wouldn’t travel without it. Otherwise, the world might find out about his cowlick. “Licked by a cow, licked by a cow,” he repeated, clamping the tiny hat on his head, as though capping a geyser.
“Is that what he gets at nursery school?” I asked Audrey.
“Beats me,” she said, still in her magazine. “The sun?”
“I figure we head south,” I said. “I’ll check the weather channel first.”
I pulled out the big suitcase.
“Hey,” she said, Margaret half-stuffed into her snowsuit, “what’s this? I thought we were going for a ride.” The plastic on our picture window had bubbled. Only an occasional pickup or four-wheel drive ventured out. A single plow worked its way down our street, wind swirling snowdust around it. Its driver had on a moonsuit of metallic silver. Long tubes as thick as a forearm led from his glass compartment to the plow’s hot engine.
“I’ll warm up the car and shovel the drive,” I said. “Why don’t you gather up some cassettes, make a thermos of coffee?”
*
On the road the kids fell asleep, Stevie cuddled against Margaret’s carseat. Audrey loosened their seat belts and covered them with a plaid quilt. Every time I glanced in the rearview mirror I thought of Scotland. “We’re not going to stop until we find it, you know.”
“That so?” Audrey said. “That means we never go back.” The interstate was dry and plowed, with great dirty drifts tilting toward us on either side, snow swirling across in fine sandy layers. Everything was white.