I sat with Noreen at the bar, watching Lana dance with Kate. “Did those two have a thing?” Noreen asked me. “Not that I know of,” I said. I must’ve said it sarcastically, because Noreen asked, “Did you two have a thing?” “Briefly,” I said. Noreen dropped her hand on top of mine. She stroked it a bit and then hooked my pinkie with hers. She leaned into me and nestled her head on my shoulder, and I moved my arm out of the way to drape it over her. It made me feel powerful. It made me feel wanted. I watched Lana gyrate her hips against Kate, and Kate lean in and lick Lana’s sternum.
“Where do you live?” Noreen asked.
“Not far,” I said. “What about you?”
“A lot farther,” she said. She rubbed my thigh. She said, “Let’s go to your place.”
We passed a newsstand that also made egg creams. Noreen was still high so she ordered an egg cream and an ice cream sundae, and an old guy made it for us while screaming something in Russian to a kid working in the back. When we got to my apartment, we drank tap water to rehydrate from all the alcohol and dairy products. Noreen’s eyelids were heavy, held open only by her assured smiles. Someone upstairs was having a party and Noreen looked up at the ceiling, closed her eyes, and swayed to the music that seeped through the floors. She snaked her arms around my neck and we danced with our foreheads pressed together. We stayed like that, stuck together with sweat, until there was a loud thud from upstairs. A girl started yelling. “Oops,” Noreen said, smiling, and she closed her eyes again and kissed me. And we kissed like that, standing up in my narrow kitchen, for a long time.
Afterward we lay on my futon, naked and glistening and slicked. It was the end of August and I didn’t have an air conditioner, only a window fan. “You didn’t tell me you didn’t have AC,” Noreen said. She sat up and said she had to go. “You can totally stay if you want,” I said. Noreen said, “It’s okay. I don’t want anything serious. I just got out of something serious.” “I just got out of something frivolous,” I said. Noreen laughed. “It’s just not what I need right now. I’m still kind of raw. I’ve been through a lot.” “Me too,” I said.
Noreen started getting dressed. She seemed pissed off. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Fine,” she said. “You’re sure you don’t want to stay? You’re sure you can get home okay this late?” She said, “I’m an adult. I know how to get a cab.” “Is something wrong?” I asked. “You know”—she was angry—“I’ve been through quite a lot lately. I’m really stressed out. I just wanted to have some fun. I don’t need to be trivialized.” “Whatever I said,” I said, “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry if it came across as uncaring. I really wish you would stay,” I said. “I like you a lot.”
Noreen started crying. She was holding one sock in her hand. She covered her face with it. I stood up and wrapped my arms around her. I was still naked and her belt buckle pressed into my stomach and it felt good and cool in contrast to the nighttime heat. Noreen let me hug her, then she pulled away. She sat back down on my futon. She seemed calmer, and I thought she was deciding whether or not to stay, and I didn’t want to push her so I sat on my desk chair and the vinyl stuck to my thighs. “What’s your big thing that you’ve been through?” she asked. “It can’t be Lana leaving.” I laughed. “No, I just mean some childhood stuff,” I said. “Lana and I were never that serious. It was just for fun, I guess.”
Noreen stretched her legs out, pushing the sheet down to the foot of the bed. “What kind of childhood stuff?” she asked.
I looked around my bedroom at the piles of paper on my desk and my clothes heaped on the floor. I wished I had cleaned up. I needed to do laundry. I needed to buy a file cabinet. “My sister and I went through some stuff,” I said.
“Does she know you’re gay?”
I knew Noreen was thinking I must have come from a conservative family who didn’t take too well to me coming out. That my sister must be a religious nut who didn’t accept me. Of course none of that was true. But I was caught off guard by her question. And I didn’t know the answer.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We haven’t spoken in a long time.”
10
I’d forgotten how wide Virginia was on the southern border of its triangle. It took five hours to drive The Camper down deep to where the Blue Ridge Mountains begin to merge with North Carolina and Tennessee. I had no cell phone service in Marshall-the-doctor’s small town. I spotted a pay phone outside a laundromat and called his number. “Yes, yes, yes,” he answered. He was more of a chatterbox than I had imagined. “I got your email. So you’re tracking down Eric and the whole gang! Wonderful! Where are you?”
Marshall gave me directions to his office in a building adjacent to the small local hospital. He was standing outside with a friend as I drove into the parking lot. “Hello!” he sang when I got out of The Camper. I was a bit worried he would hug me, but he extended his hand, his southern manners preceding him. “So nice to meet you. Can you believe this weather? In January? What a wonderful day! Come inside.” It was Saturday and his office was closed. The hospital felt deserted, as if all the patients had been discharged for the weekend. Marshall introduced his friend, Phil. Phil shook my hand and didn’t say much. He wore a baseball hat and mirrored sunglasses that he didn’t take off indoors.
Marshall prattled on about this and that, about his plans for the day, meeting up with his wife to go hiking since it was unseasonably warm, maybe even warm enough to eat outdoors. He paused to politely ask me if I would be staying for lunch. “You’re staying for lunch?” He asked in a way to make me feel good about my imposition, as if he had invited me here and always expected me to stay for lunch. I declined. Lunch was always too much of a commitment. Lunch always led to, Why don’t you stay for dinner; you’re welcome to spend the night.
“Oh, that’s too bad. So we don’t have much time. Right,” he said. He exhaled, revealing an inner exasperation that neither I nor his friend understood. “Right,” he said, fingering an anatomical display and then straightening up some free literature provided by a pharmaceutical company. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do—oh, by the way, this is my office.” He gestured left and right like a stewardess, curtsying a bit to each side. He was wearing a sweatshirt and belted baggy shorts that exposed his slender, feminine knees. “Sorry if I talk a lot. I’m a nervous talker. But that’s because I’m always nervous.” He let out a “Ha” and dropped a hand onto a metal paper-towel dispenser that echoed like it wanted to be refilled. Marshall was pale and needed a haircut. Overgrown blonde tendrils escaped from his limp baseball cap and he looked as if he was about to start sweating profusely even though his office felt air-conditioned. I began to wonder if he was on drugs.
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do. Phil,” he said to his friend, “you’ll take my car and I’ll go with Hope and we’ll drive out to the farm. Phil, you’ll follow us since you don’t really know the way. He’s just visiting,” he said to me, touching my arm with the back of his hand. “He lives in Florida.”
“Or we could just talk here,” I said, but Marshall said, “No, no, no,” and shooed us out of the office.
Marshall bent over and sorted through his keys. He locked one lock, tested the doorknob, and decided it was sufficient. We walked to The Camper. “Oh, yes,” Marshall said, stroking The Camper’s flank. “The old VW bus. This takes me back.”
Phil stood by the office door not saying anything. “Phil, you’re taking my car,” Marshall said. And then, as if Phil was deaf or didn’t understand English, he overenunciated: “You’re driving my car.”
Phil’s mustache widened, exposing his teeth. “I need the keys,” he said.
“Oh!” Marshall patted down his pockets, fished out his keys, and briefly stared at the abundance of them before tossing the whole lot to Phil. “You got it,” Marshall said. Then he nodded to me to get in The Camper.
Marshall directed me back to the main road. He chattered on about his wife. About how they decided to move out here. They wanted a simple
life now. “I’ve seen more than my share of excitement in this lifetime.”
Marshall had worked with Doctors Without Borders in Rwanda in the nineties. He posted his daily journal entries to a dial-up message board and a friend of his in Seattle printed them out and tacked them up on the wall in a coffee shop. An editor saw them and published them in Rolling Stone. Marshall was in Rwanda during the genocide. The wire-rim-glasses guy at Suriya’s had given me a university login so I could read the archived article. I had assumed Marshall was hiding out here in the western edge of Virginia, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or smoking a lot of pot in a log cabin, disconnected from the real world. Seeing him in person, he looked like he wouldn’t survive two days in Africa.
“Yes, well,” he said, “we’re a far cry from Africa now. Or Rwanda.” He stared out the passenger window as the mountain scenery sped by. It was a muggy gray day that smelled like rain. The clouds hung low in horizontal strips against the foothills.
In his dispatches, Marshall wrote about a German nurse who was the de facto manager of their hospital, if you could call it a hospital; it was more like something out of a M*A*S*H episode, only more dysfunctional, and of course, lacking the humor. The German nurse (I’ll call her Hot Lips to protect her identity) was in charge because everyone else was sick, dead, or catatonic. But also, Marshall wrote, because she had a maniacal urgency to save the world. Maybe it was being German, he wrote. Maybe she was making up for her grandparents’ war crimes, or their blind-eye passivity. She refused to see that the situation in Rwanda was becoming severely unsafe for aid workers and that all of them could be hacked to death by a machete gang at any moment. She yelled at Marshall when he came down with a fever and had to stay in bed to rest. That meant they were without a surgeon for the day. “People are dying because you are too lazy to get out of bed,” she said. Marshall self-medicated with sedatives so he would fall asleep and not have to listen to her. And if the machete gangs attacked, they would think he was already dead. Still, Marshall knew, she had tried to drag him out of bed, because he woke up on the floor the next day. When he returned for duty, she mentioned nothing about it. If she had wept or was distraught over who had died because of his sick day, she didn’t show it. All that would slow her down. She was one nurse administrator standing against a tide of slaughter. It was washing over her, drowning her, and she refused to see it. As Marshall wrote: She couldn’t keep people off the trains heading for certain death. And she couldn’t admit that work, in fact, could not make her free.
Eventually the medical team was evacuated. The next thing Marshall knew, he was in the Brussels airport. And everything was so clean, he wrote. Everything was so white. I was in outer space. I was in orbit. And I could no longer hear the screams down below. Only static.
A few dots of rain speckled The Camper’s windshield.
“Did you see Eric again when you got back from Rwanda?” I asked.
Marshall shook his hand in front of his face, as if waving away gnats. “Maybe?” he said. “When I first got back I didn’t know where I was. Literally, mentally, physically, metaphysically. I was just so strung out on . . . stress!” he said, shaking his hands around his ears and then dropping them back into his lap. “And Valium. And I was drinking. The period right after Rwanda is a total blur. I don’t remember much of it at all.”
He paused and tapped his fingertips on the window ledge.
“I often find myself in situations,” he said, “of transformation. Where it’s inevitable. Transformation is just inevitable. It’s the only way out. Sometimes you know where the escape hatch is and you fling the door open and jump through, but more often than not, you have no idea where the escape hatch is. And someone is pushing you through a door and then you’re somewhere else entirely and you’ve no idea how you got there.” He turned toward me and smiled with excited eyes. “It’s as though the hand of God reached in and got you.” He chuckled a little to himself and looked out his window again. “Oh, but you don’t care about all of that. All of that, just old news. On a strip of microfiche somewhere.
“Here we are,” he said. “On the left. Left-hand turn. Left, left, left,” he repeated, worried that I’d miss it despite already being in the correct lane.
Marshall was building a house. “We’re not living here yet. We’re renting another house until it’s done. So much work. Ugh. But it’s the perfect spot.”
The half-finished house sat alongside a narrow creek, and on the opposite side, a steep hill led up to a ridge. A rail fence stretched around a meadow by the dirt road where we left The Camper. “Now where are they?” Marshall said. “Where are my babies?” He strode up to the fence and put one foot on the lower rung, exposing a knee and part of a pale thigh. “Phil!” he called as Phil got out of Marshall’s car. “Go up over the hill and bring the cows down.” “Why me?” Phil asked. He spoke so little it was odd to hear his voice. “Because we’re talking here. We’re having an interview. Of sorts,” he said to me more quietly, in confidence, as if we were two girls gabbing and billing the office for drinks.
Phil ducked between the fence rails and made his way up the hill. When he got near the top, he was out of sight.
“Did you keep in touch with Eric?” I asked.
“You know, I really didn’t know Eric very well on a deeply personal level. We were all squatting on this abandoned farmland. I did it because I needed a cheap place to live. And you can’t get cheaper than free. But Eric kept company with a younger crowd, and I guess, I guess I just wasn’t that interested. Of course I was interested in what he was talking about. Self-sufficiency. Sustainability. Life and death and the meaning of life and death and all that. Who isn’t interested in that? Well, I guess some people aren’t. Some people don’t want to know how small and insignificant their lives are. It’s too painful for them. Much too painful. It’s like being a doctor. Some people just don’t want to know how sick they are. They don’t want to know that even after surgery they will still have to lose weight and stop eating anything fried. Otherwise they’ll be back on my operating table in six months. There are only so many stents you can shove in someone’s heart. When I met Eric I had just gone through a divorce. I married way too young. It was the thing to do back then. So at that time, after the divorce, I was more interested in putting my life back together than taking things apart. Eric really wanted me to be more a part of his inner circle. And I don’t blame him.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Marshall playfully slapped my shoulder. “I mean that I was useful to them. I was good at plumbing and electricity and that sort of thing. Plus, I had medical training. I think I gave Eric some unofficial stitches back then. And I could get drugs. Not those kind of drugs.” He leaned into me again, working the same joke. “Basic prescription medications. Antibiotics. I could pilfer some here and there. Samples. That sort of thing. You’re not recording this, are you? Because I’m not entirely sure what the statute of limitations is for ethical violations. Not that I’m saying it was an ethical violation. First, do no harm.” He turned toward the hill. “Here they come.”
Silhouettes of cows appeared on the ridge and carefully loped down toward us. Phil followed them. “Try not to fall on your ass, Phil. But sometimes there’s no other way to do it. You might just have to fall. You might have to scoot down the rest of the way on your ass.” Phil cupped an ear, indicating he couldn’t hear. “On your behind, Phil,” Marshall yelled, grabbing his own ass and shaking it a little.
Phil sidestepped down, digging the edges of his feet into the incline to make little stairs. He looked like he was climbing down a ladder sideways. “Good job, Phil,” Marshall said.
“Here she comes,” Marshall said, smiling at a large brown cow. “Here comes Big Mama. That’s her name. She was our first one. And here’s little Buttercup. And here,” he said, thumping the side of a young male, “is Einstein. Our first thought when we moved out here was that we would raise dairy cows, but, ugh, so much work. And then you have to
store the milk and sterilize it. So much equipment. We decided on just a few cows that we would raise for us. Einstein here will be number one.”
I was confused. “I thought Big Mama was your first cow.”
“Yes,” he said. “But we’re going to eat Einstein. You only need one bull, and we’ve got Romeo here.” He tossed some feed in a bucket and a large bull dove his head in after it. “I’m afraid we don’t have a job for Einstein. I castrated him myself.”
I couldn’t picture Marshall dodging genocidal warfare in Rwanda or Congo or the former Yugoslavia. However, I could picture him castrating a cow. I could see how he liked it out here, working at the small hospital. Renovating a farmhouse the same way he did a rural squat or an aortic valve. Carving up Einstein and throwing him on the grill and enjoying it with his absent, fanciful wife. And then one day he will wake up someplace else, having fallen through another escape hatch he didn’t know he was looking for. Something will pull him from here and make him want to run to a different corner of the earth. Hurl his body into the flux of the next bloody struggle. He won’t last long here. At the very least, I imagined he would form a drug habit, self-medicating with anesthesia to survive this anesthetized life. He can’t handle the quaint country existence for long. The dividends of peace are far too boring for him.
That’s how Noreen would diagnose me, I thought. She accused me of writing impenetrable plays to purposely remain obscure. Of purposely sabotaging job interviews by being late or not smiling enough. “Why can’t you admit that you survived?” she asked. “And now you can have a normal life? It’s not so terrible. Why can’t you accept peace?”
Sometimes I regretted ever telling Noreen what happened to me and Eden.
Eden Page 11