by Greg Baxter
I don’t have the letter anymore. I don’t remember when or how I lost it. I folded it up and carried it around with me everywhere, for a few days. If I had a quiet moment, I pulled it out and read it. Then one morning it wasn’t there. I checked under the driver’s seat of our rental car. I checked the room I slept in. I checked all my pockets. I even checked the trash can on the street, where I had thrown away some fast food the previous night. But it was gone. I thought, for a moment, that my father might have found it, but if he had, I’d have known, he’d have asked me immediately about it.
My father’s letter had been written in black fountain-pen ink on yellow lined paper. He’d obviously wanted her to have the book, and he must have felt he ought to send it himself, and if he were going to do so, he’d have to write a letter to go with it. Or, just as plausibly, he’d been wanting to send Miriam a thoughtful letter since she left, and the book just gave him an opportunity to be in touch. I considered the remote possibility that he had finished his book for this reason only. His letter began with a few lines about hoping that she is well and that she’ll find enclosed the book he’d been working on for years, which turned out to be a little redundant now that a similar book on the same subject had come out. At the time he wrote the letter, I had just been there to visit him, because even though he’d made nothing of it, I thought it would be nice to visit him around the time of publication, point out the good reviews and shield him from the negative ones. He writes, Your brother was here to see the book off and protect me from depression, I guess, but now he’s gone and the house is very quiet again except for the television, which I have no interest in apart from checking the weather and watching a little bit of golf. And I walk around wondering why I’m not back at work. I live in one room of the house, and I sleep in another. I walk through the other rooms to make sure everything is as it was. I took the semester off and used the book as an excuse, but I find that I’m terribly sad to be here without you in some proximity, without seeing you from time to time. I’ve missed you profoundly these last years and am beginning to wonder if I’ll see you again, or if you’ve simply decided to leave us, in which case it’s like a whole new death for me to come to terms with, but it is much more difficult to bear, not only because I know you’re alive in some other place, but that I fear that resentment for me has sent you there. I can see that my great failings in life were with my mother, your mother, and you, and I don’t know how to account for the expectations of you all that I allowed myself to have. I seem to have sent them to death here and I understand why you might have wanted to escape that. I respect your silence and your distance but I also hope it doesn’t last forever. I wonder if you have everything you need in your apartment. I wonder if you could use a washing machine or a new refrigerator. I wonder if you have proper heating, and I’d be happy to get you some heaters. If it adds to your electricity bill, I’m happy to contribute there, too. I wonder if you’ve found someone there, a companion. I hope you’d contact your brother for help if you wouldn’t contact me.
I make my way across the terminal. It takes a long time, but at last I find them, Trish and my father, sitting side by side in soft red chairs, surrounded by the historical exhibit Trish mentioned in her text message. Flights are departing regularly now, but there have also been a lot of cancellations, and people are trying to get on new flights, and this has created a specific kind of mayhem that is equal parts confusion, joy, resentment, rage, incredulity, and Schadenfreude. I’m starting to feel tiny panic attacks. I’m starting to feel that I simply cannot wait any longer. I am starting to feel that waiting is impossible, that it could cause death. I have bought myself and my father a handful of magazines—news and science and so forth—but I am too fatigued, too distracted by fatigue and hunger and nausea, to read. I don’t feel up to conversation, either. I have a lot of music on my phone, and somewhere I have headphones, but I can’t think of anything I want to listen to. I could not possibly work, or even think about work. My father looks like he could wait awhile longer—he looks like somebody who is starting to not want to leave. There are several red chairs around them. The chairs are situated in pairs, and some pairs are back-to-back, and some are side-to-side. Trish is talking. My father has his arms crossed and his head down, and he nods every now and again, as he does when he is, or when he wants you to think he is, listening. The space they have found is a large oval surrounded by high glass walls and a glass ceiling. At the very center are the chairs, the arrangement of which seems to want to replicate the irregularity of real contemplation—so that travelers, I guess, can properly think about whatever is being exhibited. Around the chairs is the oval arrangement of panels, very much like, or exactly like, the obelisks that contain advertisements throughout the rest of the terminal. From somewhere, classical music is playing. Beyond the space is the tunnel to the gates that many of the US and other long-haul flights depart from. There aren’t many facilities beyond the tunnel. Once the gate is announced, I presume we’ll go, we’ll wait the last hour or two at the gate, we’ll never see this part of Munich Airport again.
I stop in front of Trish and my father. They barely look up. Maybe they saw me coming. I’ve interrupted them, and I cause a prolonged and uncomfortable silence, until my father finally says, My God, you’re wearing sunglasses. While he says this, he has to hold his hand above his eyes to shade them from the light, and squint. I ran into an old acquaintance from London, I say.
You feeling better? my father asks.
A bit, I say.
Who was the acquaintance?
A sort of ex-husband of a woman who was friends with my ex, I say.
Complicated, says my father.
My father does not look well, now that I see him close up. He is perspiring, and he has no color at all. Trish looks tired. My father is slightly swallowed by his chair, but Trish commands hers.
You took a long time to get here, my father says.
It’s turned crazy, I say. You don’t want to go where I came from.
Did you eat? asks Trish.
I had a little something. Am I still green?
A little, she says.
I look at my father and say, You don’t look great, either, have you eaten?
I think I have to go to the bathroom, he says.
He tries to get up. My legs, he says. Trish stands and reaches out to him. I say, I’ve got him.
I’ve got him, she says. She takes his hand in one hand. He grasps her shoulder, and she steadies his arm. My legs, he says, I can hardly move them. You need to eat something, she says. Maybe, he says. Come on, she says. I can take him, I say. Could you watch my bag? she says. I sit in the seat my father has been occupying. Trish’s bag occupies the seat next to me. I can walk now, says my father. Trish lets him go, but when he wobbles a little bit, she gently takes his elbow in her hand and escorts him away. They move at a slow pace, a very slow pace, a shuffle, and my father is unusually stiff. I think I know what the stiffness is about, but I do not want to think about it, I don’t have the constitution for it. But trying not to think about it becomes a kind of metaphor for what it actually, most likely, is, and I suddenly grow hot, I am boiling. The light turns sickly. I start to shake. My mouth starts to water. A sickness that feels a little like nostalgia sets in. Then I begin to see the words I am thinking, individual words, and they become repulsive. A word like blue becomes repulsive. A word like airport. Their existence is depressing. I think about listening to music—surely music is the escape, but the sheer amount of new words I would have to think in order to find my headphones is too daunting, and anyway music has its own constraints, and then I realize how many words it has taken to think all that I have just been thinking. I try to count down from five, out loud, like they tell women giving birth to do. But out loud the words are even more repulsive. Then it occurs to me that I am totally contained, that I am right now utterly contained in a medium of symbols with functions or malfunctions, and no amount of rhetorical hyperactivity or adornment
will release me, and there is also no language only I can understand—there is no privacy in which to hide. Now I am going to throw up. Once the mouth starts watering, really that’s it. It’s inevitable. A sense of peace accompanies the surrender. I throw the magazines out of the bag and stick my face in it and vomit. The bread comes up. Then I retch about ten times, but nothing comes out. Then I sip from a bottle of water, gargle, and spit the water into the bag. Then I tie the bag up. People have turned to stare at me. They wait until they are satisfied I’m finished, and turn back around. I can vomit very quietly, and be still. Poor Dad, I think, because I am past the pain now, and I feel wonderful. I feel like I could float. I feel like I’ve been swimming outdoors. There is something strange about the pain you go through from not eating, a pain that is everywhere in your body, so that when you pass through it, life feels unreal for a moment. Trish and my father have almost reached the restroom. My father is walking on his own. Trish watches him enter, waits for a moment, and begins to head back to me. She gives me an understated thumbs-up.
My marriage ended thirteen years ago, and I’ve only had two relationships since then, both of them short-lived—one at the beginning of that time, and one recently. The one in the beginning was my ex-wife’s old friend, whom I saw when I lived with the artist in Nunhead. For a little while after my marriage ended, I kept running into my wife’s friends, or our old friends, though it was understood that my wife would keep them and I would move on. I guess I was habitually, or automatically, traveling old paths. The conversations I had with these people were always affectionate, and we were sorrowful that there wasn’t anything to do in these situations but naturally grow apart and forget each other. It was strange to be feeling such affection for a life that I’d come to regard with such overpowering contempt. But it seemed that, one by one, I met all those old friends out somewhere, typically in places I had seen them before, and had to have a couple of drinks to say farewell. My wife was saying nothing harmful about me to these people, and I was saying nothing harmful about her to them, either. For my part, I simply couldn’t speak of her. I think I just wished she had died. So, just as people had mistakenly considered us a happy couple when we were married because they thought we had such a quiet, confident way of communicating, they mistook our reluctance to speak ill of each other as a sign that things had ended amiably. In fact they had ended as unpleasantly as possible. The only person I ever told about the unpleasantness was the old friend of my wife’s, a woman I had never, at least while I was married, got along with, partly because I assumed we had nothing in common. Three or four months after the end of my marriage, I saw her out one night. She was drunk. She was a heavy drinker. I said hello and she started accusing me of ruining her friend’s life, of stealing her money, of ending the good days we’d all been enjoying. Now everybody would sober up, so to speak. Now everyone would either break up or have kids. There weren’t going to be any more parties. Nobody would ever be happy again. She was completely serious. I said, Steal her money? She said, Oh, never mind. So I took the time to explain very carefully just how wrong things had gone. She kept saying, Stop, you’re depressing me even more. But I knew I wasn’t going to tell anybody else, so I wanted to get it all out. By the end she was just standing there, by the bar, speechless. We had a few more drinks together and we started kissing and she said, sort of pleased with herself, This is the most evil thing I’ve ever done. The next morning I woke up in her bed and she was sitting on a chair on the other side of the room looking at me. You’ve got to go, she said, and you’ve got to promise to say nothing about this, ever. I said, Don’t panic, I’m not telling anybody. She said, But you have to go, my flatmates will be awake soon. I asked, What time is it? It’s five-thirty, she said. I got my things and left, but not before I said something that completely surprised both her and me, which was, Ever since I first set eyes on you, I’ve fantasized about this, I have thought of you every day since we first met. She was bleary-eyed and tired, but what I said woke her and made her face astonished, bewildered, and curiously softened. I said, Please don’t remember this always as a mistake. When I left her building and found myself walking down the road I thought, What an odd, totally compelling, and seemingly truthful thing to say. Was I in love? I wondered. Although I’d slept very little, and although I was suffering from a headache and a stomachache from the booze, I was in an ecstatic mood. I felt shot through by a kind of divinity. I almost went to the bar of a hotel and asked for a whiskey, which I would drink over the course of an hour while reminding myself all this was real, it had happened, that a few down years had been wiped out by a night. But I had to hurry home to shower and change before work. I got a coffee. The city was awakening. It was summer, so it was already bright. Every time I crossed the street, the volume of pedestrians around me, also crossing, seemed to double. It was invigorating. At Victoria Station, where the announcements blared out in the high empty space above the trains, I was going against the grain so I got jostled and looked at. But it felt like the best morning of my life so I didn’t care. I got a train to Nunhead. I looked at the time and realized that if everything went as fast as possible, I’d still arrive at work late. So I decided to relax and try not to think about work. The train from Victoria to Nunhead at seven in the morning is of course completely deserted—going the opposite direction at that time it is miserably congested. So I got a seat in an empty car, by the window, and as we started to move I felt a rapturous, sad relief that I was starting over, from that moment, that I had come to Europe for this reason, to feel as though I had been born without a past, that I had come from nowhere and knew nobody, there was nobody to tell good news or bad news, there was no reason to behave one way or another. The view on either side of the tracks seemed to me so beautifully distant from the place where I was born, which seemed to me, at that moment, destroyed, obliterated, by the power of my desire to never see it again. The woman and I began to see each other. We met all over London, in pubs and restaurants. Places we wouldn’t otherwise eat or drink in. But we also went away in order to be fearlessly together and anonymous. We flew to Paris, Lisbon, Riga, and Reykjavik. We drove to Bath and the Lake District. We stayed in nice hotels. I didn’t care that the ghost of my old relationship was following so closely, that it slept with us and ate breakfast with us. I didn’t care that this was happening so soon. Though we never spoke of a future, I assumed the future was safe. Then one day, about seven or eight months after we’d started seeing each other, as we were walking around London after midnight, I said something to her and she started crying. There were people on the street, but not many, and they stopped to watch her. I tried to get her to stop but she fell to her knees. I tried to lift her and she struck me. What’s the matter? I said. She asked me how I could treat her so badly, how I could be so cruel. I thought she was joking. Or I thought maybe she was having a psychotic episode from the drink, maybe somebody had drugged her. I asked, Did someone find out about us? But she was sobbing, and every time I tried to reach for her and lift her up, she struck at my hands. Then all at once she stopped crying and I thought she was going to say something like, Sorry about that, I must be drunk. Instead she said, I won’t do it. I said, Do what? She said, I won’t belong to your wretchedness. I said, My wretchedness—who says that? Just then, two policemen came by and asked her if everything was okay. She was done crying, she was composed, and she was composed because she was finished with me. She said, Everything is fine. Move along, they said, to both of us, and she said, We’re not together. I was dumbfounded by her unexpected mettle and a little annoyed that I would now have to get a taxi to Nunhead. The policemen said, You heard her, move along. So I went a different direction and hailed a taxi. She really was finished with me. It was impressive. I telephoned a few times but she never picked up. I wrote to her. I was distraught. After a few weeks, I waited outside her office and waved her down. I walked over and she gave me a dispassionate smile. I asked her to meet me. I wasn’t trying to win her back. I stated
this from the outset. I said, Honestly, I’d like to ask for your help. She said, I’ve got an hour right now. I took her to a nice bar with comfortable brown couches. She had an orange juice. I drank a beer. I said, Please don’t mind me saying this but you look great. She said, I haven’t had a drink in a month. We spoke of nothing important for ten or fifteen minutes, then she said, What is it you want help with? I asked her to explain what it was about my behavior that caused her to call me wretched. She laughed, but then she saw that I was serious and she stopped laughing. She said, I shouldn’t have broken down like I did that night, the crying was just the drink, and probably exhaustion. I should have told you like this, soberly, and somewhere like this. She said, It just became completely clear to me, even though I was drunk. The things you always say, the way you passively undermine everything, the way you dislike everything, yourself most of all, women second to yourself. She paused here to look at me, to see if I’d do or say something to undermine the accusation about women, but I did nothing, I stayed still, I had asked her a question, and if I disagreed or argued, she’d leave. She said, Maybe you just hated your wife so much that you decided to hate all women, or maybe you hated women from the day you started to desire them. I don’t know. But that night, our last night, I started to realize that I hated you, except I didn’t hate you, or I didn’t want to hate you, but you had cast this spell over me. I was sitting next to you, and I realized I couldn’t stand you, I was going to have a panic attack, but this was precisely what you wanted, this was why you cast the spell, because somehow it was going to vindicate your hatred of me, which you harbored in order to validate your self-hatred. She leaned forward, grabbed a peanut from a bowl on the table between us, then added, And to escape responsibility for it. When she got up to leave, a little while later, after having tried to explain the same thing a few more times, I thanked her. She said, What will you do now? I told her that maybe I ought to just stay away from people for a while, especially women. She said, That’s not the answer, that’s just as bad, it won’t change anything. I said, Anyway, I appreciate your time. Before she left, she said, Can I trust you won’t say anything about us to anybody? I barely heard her, but I nodded—Yes, sure, of course, no, I won’t say anything. She left the bar and I watched her through the window. She walked away, then turned a corner, and I thought, God, that was a strange and unreal experience. I ordered another drink—this time a double vodka—and I sat back on the comfortable brown couch and observed everybody else interacting. On one level I felt affection for all of them. I was so happy to see everybody there. I felt so relieved to be in that city, sharing that city with them. But in this affection was a curious despondency, a fatigue and hopelessness that, if I turned my mind’s eye directly at it, if I stared right at the source of it, came from a realization that I was terrified, that I was trapped in this one life, that I was within time and this body, that there were no other times and no other bodies.