Meet Me in the In-Between

by Bella Pollen

  I stood up, restless. It was time to get out of the city. Keep going, my mother would say whenever I hurt myself—which, being a clumsy child, was often. Keep going and everything will be OK.

  I’d long held a secret objective for this trip. Drive to Monument Valley and cry. If there was a way to feel normal again, that was it. Go to a place where the days stretched long and wide, and let the heat and the wind sandblast you to nothing. Those great monoliths in Monument Valley had been scorched by lava, flooded, crushed and ice-aged. They were survivors. I figured they could take a few litres of tears, and once they’d finally washed out of me, a multicoloured piñata would float into the sky, burst overhead, and release happiness, along with tens of thousands of Hershey Kisses.

  At least that had been the plan.

  We’d been on the road nearly three weeks by the time we got to Utah, and the atmosphere in the car had turned glutinous and nasty. It felt as if the girls were playing two’s company and I’d been cast as the crowd. Earlier that morning, when I’d asked KC to turn up the volume on my favourite Simon and Garfunkel song, she’d changed the radio station to ’80s disco hits. Later, AK spat a sunflower husk out of the window, and announced that I wasn’t to go near her ex-boyfriend back in London.

  “You wouldn’t guess it to meet him, but he’s dark—really fucking complicated, you know.” I knew her ex-boyfriend from a distance. He’d always struck me as sweet and funny. It had never occurred to me to venture closer.

  “Although the pair of you are such emotional flatliners,” she’d added, “chances are you’d get along fine.”

  I’d been stunned. There was so much pent-up emotion in me I was as stable as plutonium. But then, how could she have known? I was the only one living inside my skin.

  “I’m starving,” KC said, as we pulled into the motel. “After we check in, let’s head into town and hit the supermarket.”

  “You should stay behind and rest, BP,” AK said to me. Through the rear-view mirror her eyes, refrigerator cool, slid across mine. “KC and me are sharing a room anyway.”

  “We’d thought you’d be happier on your own,” KC added insincerely.

  Maybe I should have told them why I had really come to America, but I was new to the concept of friends. Back then my family doubled as my friends. The people who worked for me had been my family, and men were the wolves I slept with.

  In the motel room, Field of Dreams was playing on the television. Kevin Costner standing under a stormy Iowa sky. Build it, and he will come. I perched on the bed and watched, feeling the counterpane jump with static under my hand. The motel walls were cheap and thin. As soon as AK turned on the shower and KC slammed the door, shouting something about an ice dispenser, I crept into their room, snatched up the Caddie keys, and was gone.

  Through the car window, the sun heated the hairs on my arm to burnt threads. The sky was turquoise. Dust motes hung in the air. Nothing moving in that vast land except my Tonka toy car. The desert was a glaze of cinnamon dotted with sage and pale green brush. Clumps of tiny white flowers lining the verge blurred into streamers as I passed by. In the distance, the monuments shimmered, coppery and jellylike in the heat, drawing me closer as though exerting a beckoning spell. Emotional flatliner my ass. Behold the tangle of rose and snapdragon that will one day grow on this arid square of desert soon to be irrigated by my English tears. Bitches. I couldn’t have been happier to leave them behind. Too bad if they were stranded in a cronky motel with only a swamp cooler for company.

  I leaned on the gas, scarcely aware of the miles passing or the sweat sticking my T-shirt to the leather seat. A signpost. A left turn. Dead ahead now, the monuments rose out of the sand, craggy and imposing as a war cabinet of old generals. I felt exhilarated. I was here. The place I most needed to be. Except . . .

  Oh!

  OPENING HOURS: 8 A.M.–5 P.M.

  What?

  I stared at the notice and then checked the clock on the dashboard: 5:12 p.m.

  Monument Valley was closed? I shunted forwards as though ground gained could be subtracted from minutes lost. An old Indian with long faded hair and a turquoise belt materialised from the side of his truck, draining a can of soda and waving his arms. Closed, sister. Scram.

  I badly wanted to run him down. How could a valley be shut? This was the West, untamed and untameable. It did not bow to the pedestrian whims of park employees or bourgeois timetables. I stood my ground and crossed my arms. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, mister.

  The Indian spiraled his finger in a “turn around” gesture.

  I smiled grimly. Forget it.

  He started shouting.

  Cocksucker. I U-turned, followed the last of the camper vans back along the track, out the entrance, and left towards the motel, disappointment firing to anger, anger launching like a missile straight at the girls. If KC hadn’t done her flirty thing at reception. If AK hadn’t made that extra gas-station stop. Stupid, of course. It was nobody’s fault but my own; still if I was going to fuck this up too, I badly needed someone else to blame.

  In my rear-view mirror the road behind unfurled like grey smoke. I slowed down until a hoot forced me off to the side. A pickup grumbled by, a sheepdog quivering in a flatbed full of hay, eyes slit to the breeze. I climbed out of the car and leaned against a metal gate. Presently a piebald trotted up and stuck his head over the top. He was so skinny he looked as if he’d swallowed his own carcass. I fetched him one of AK’s furring apples. He nickered, and I pressed my head against the bony plateau of his nose, nearly missing the Greyhound bus as it rattled by. Out of the back window, a little girl was waving. She had pale freckled arms and a floral bow in her hair. Keep going and it will be all right. To hell with it. Only Mum had the answers that made sense. I lifted my arm slowly and waved back.

  At the entrance to the valley, the Indian was gone. A thick metal chain now hung between two free-standing posts. For a moment I balked, but the West is untamed and untameable. Cordoning off a hundred thousand acres of desert with ten feet of chain was as hopeful as restraining Gargantua and Pantagruel with paper handcuffs. Nosing the car down the slope, I drove right around it.

  To begin with, I kept to the official track, heading methodically from one monument to the next like a grand cattlewoman checking her fences. As each approached it opened out into a complex architectural structure—one a Gaudí basilica of pinnacles, another shaped like a ruined amphitheatre—each more surreal than the last, yet every one familiar from their starring roles in virile John Wayne westerns. After a while, following the tire treads of other cars didn’t satisfy my need for solitude and I freewheeled aimlessly until I lost myself in open space-time dreaming, only subliminally aware of the pull and drift of the suspension and the hiss of sand, but with every spin of the wheel feeling a giddying sense of freedom, as though an unseen hand was twirling me out of lengths of mummifying bandage.

  Finally I drew up to a towering stalagmite, a hundred feet high and skirted by a mound of fine red earth. Climbing out of the car, I turned my face to the sun, feeling an almost crystalline focus. This was it. Valley of Dreams. Find it and they will come.

  The light tiger-striped from yellow to orange. The soil darkened and the shadow of my legs stretched long and thin—the shadow of a new me, I thought, lighting a cigarette and drawing the cool burn into my throat. Cry, girl, cry.

  I waited a bit more. Lit a second cigarette off the dying tip of the first. Nothing.

  On the CD player I fast-forwarded Michelle Shocked to her bleakest ode, then lay on the Caddie’s hood absorbing the heat of the metal, deliberately thinking the saddest thoughts imaginable. The sun hung low in the sky, soft as an egg yolk. Still I waited, patient. The egg sun broke and poured its yolk along the line of the horizon.

  Still nothing.

  In the fading light a hawk powered by, wings slicing the air. A jackrabbit skittered across the sand, twitching curious satellite ears. I lit another cigarette. As the match flared, daylight drained an
d in an instant darkness fell. In desperation, I worked steadily through the Caddie’s supply of beer and cigarettes, my throat increasingly raw, but it was no use. I must have got the rules wrong. What if you couldn’t make the decision to be done with sadness? What if it was supposed to relinquish its pit-bull hold on you?

  That thought in itself was enough to prompt a tear; I squeezed but none came. An insect flew into my eyeball and promptly dried to death.

  I didn’t get it. I have a stream of schmaltz so wide no amount of cynicism can bridge it. I weep easily in movies, in the hospital wards of strangers, whenever I spot a Chelsea pensioner labouring down the street. Had something inside me calcified?

  Then I remembered. It had been a conscious decision. One day, shut inside the bathroom after a row, I’d picked up a pair of nail scissors, a revelation coming to me: the only way not to hurt was not to care. A metaphorical snip through the emotional nerves. Maybe AK and KC were right about me being a flatliner, but it was only ever supposed to have been a temporary solution.

  I peeled myself off the car’s hood. Head back to the motel, and the girls might yet make it into town, but which way was the motel? I checked the line of the horizon. The darkness was complete, and remembering the treachery of the soft washes and sharp drops from earlier, I felt the stir of unease.

  I’ve always had a shaky grasp on the earth’s compass points. The technician in charge of my design fatally short-changed me on spatial intelligence. It’s not a coordination thing. I can park on a dime, pitch an orange over a tall building and then pretty much catch it on the other side, but my inability to generate cognitive maps is so profound it further suggests a baby-dropped-on-head incident to which my parents never confessed. I climbed into the Caddie. Fuck the untamed West. Surely a few helpful road reflectors wouldn’t be amiss?

  I fired up the ignition. The monuments sat patiently, chess pieces waiting for my next move. I crawled forwards carefully, determined not to make a bad play, but after only five hundred yards the wheels began to sink. Instinctively I hit the accelerator. The engine roared in protest, then coughed asthmatically, choked, and died.

  Night collected around me. Small furtive things whispered in my ear. I stabbed uselessly at the power button as a bat swooped through the open roof. I tried to picture walking the twenty-odd miles back to the motel, padding through the desert, moving sure-footed across the sand, but that braver, more feral self belonged to my future. For now, I curled up into a tight urban ball. Addendum to my mother’s rules of Lost: Stay put and remember not to drink the battery acid.

  I woke to the pain of a full bladder. Peeing out a foamy stream of beer, I admired the dancing pinpricks of fireflies in the distance, but as they enlarged into torch beams, I yanked up my jeans in alarm.

  I had been raped once. Well, at the time I hadn’t felt raped, at least not the way I imagined you were supposed to feel. Consequently, I’d tried not to think about it afterwards, but I thought about it then, with night stretching out and voices and torches closing in.

  I’d been twenty when it happened. A letter had landed on my desk from a leather and suede manufacturer based in Germany. He liked my work and wanted me to consult on his range. I was flattered—not just by the generous fee and business-class ticket he was offering but because the professional compliment made me feel grown-up. Someone would pick me up at the airport, his office wrote. Someone would look after me. The manufacturer himself came, in a classic sports car. He had swashbuckler’s hair and the sort of brooding looks that might have been attractive on somebody less Lilliputian. There are plenty of jokes about small men and fast cars, and certainly this one drove as if his death wish was big enough for both of us. When we arrived at his Schloss, as he called it, I remember thinking, Wow, he has an actual castle. I was surprised, too, when he told me his staff was off for the weekend. Nevertheless, he was businesslike, formal. He suggested we go straight to his factory, where rows of cow skins hung over washing lines bleeding different-coloured dyes onto a concrete floor. We spent the afternoon sketching and discussing the relative merits of leather versus suede, after which he proposed a drink. Glasses were raised to the start of a lucrative collaboration. My next conscious thought came in the basement of the castle, where we were having sex. If, from then on, the bigger picture was blank, smaller details always float back to me with clarity: the dark satiny sheets, the knobby mole on his chest. I remember being repulsed, yet the me who was repulsed was hovering above the bed, gazing down on a different me, one who appeared strangely acquiescent. The remainder of that weekend, when played back, still feels like an old movie from which key reels have been damaged in storage. I remember the basement having a steam room. I remember the manufacturer lying naked on a marble slab. I remember thinking that if I drank the water he kept supplying, my head might clear.

  Later, I woke in a bedroom that appeared to be mine. My clothes were hanging in the cupboard, and my shoulder bag lay on a chaise longue. I could hear Mozart being played on a piano that sounded far away. Whoever was playing was very accomplished. Hungry, I tried to leave the room, but there was no handle on the door. The phone by the side of the bed worked. I called England.

  “I think I’m in trouble,” I told my sister.

  “What kind of trouble!” Susie said, alarmed.

  “Remember Story of O?” I asked, but too bleary to articulate further I hung up in confusion. I drank the bottle of water by my bed. My memory began again around lunchtime on Sunday. The manufacturer and I were sitting in a local Biergarten eating bloodless sausages at a trestle table. Next to us, other Germans were laughing and drinking, but talk was stilted between the manufacturer and me. I had no feelings of outrage or anger. I had no feelings at all. It wasn’t until after he put me on the plane home that I realised Saturday had gone missing altogether. I fudged the story with my sister. I never told my parents. I felt young and vulnerable and stupid.

  The shadows behind the torches turned into two Indians. I clenched my fists, but they were boys, not men, no more than nineteen or twenty, with sweet faces and smooth buttery muscles. Winston, the shyer of the two, was exquisitely tattooed, with black symbols running across his shoulders and around his chest in the bolero curve of a matador’s jacket. Oba, the talkative one, was rangier, wearing basketball shorts and an Aertex singlet.

  For a while they tinkered under the Caddie’s hood, grunting and smirking. They were Navajo, Oba told me, living in the valley with their parents, and it was their land I was trespassing on. They thought this pretty funny. Not as funny, obviously, as my having no idea where to locate the catch on the car’s hood. Then again, what did I know? Not which direction I was facing in the world. Not how to unthaw my tears in ninety-degree heat. Not how to recognise who my friends were.

  I would not find out until later that AK and KC had misinterpreted the note I’d left—Something important to do, something I must do on my own—and called the local sheriff.

  “We should never have left her alone,” AK fretted. “It’s not the first time she’s disappeared. Once we saw her in the launderette, head in hands, just staring at the washing going round. We nicknamed her Depressionata, though not to her face of course.”

  “All that junk food she was eating!” KC said. “The wrist-slitty stuff she listened to on the radio. We were just trying to give her some space, you know?”

  “I even tried to reverse psychology her into taking an interest in my ex-boyfriend,” AK added, “but she didn’t take the bait.”

  Winston slammed down the hood. Oba turned the key in the ignition. My pink Tonka toy hummed into life.

  “I never saw a car this colour,” Oba said. “You win it at the casino?”

  “It’s my getaway car.”

  “You done something wrong?”

  “I sold clothes,” I told them, and they grunted, unimpressed.

  Then and there I decided I was done with fashion. Done with its ephemeral buzz. Done with seesawing on the pendulum of profit and loss. I ha
d never truly fit into that world. I had never really belonged.

  They offered to lead me out of the valley, but now I felt like staying.

  We lay on the desert floor, two sweet Indian boys and me, smoking and looking up at the sky.

  In the distance, lightning whipped across the blackness like a bright, loose wire.

  “Hey, you see that?” I said, and as thunder broke and echoed, I held out my hand for rain.

  Winston shook his head. “Dry storm. Time of year.”

  Ha, ha. No rain—an emotional flatliner of a storm.

  Another lightning strike, this one as intricate as the veins and capillaries of a leaf.

  I suddenly remembered New York, the week before we’d sailed to England. Another dry storm, and my mother hauling the three of us out of bed to watch it break over the city. The lightning had taken out the power grid, and our city, the city that never sleeps, was black and still. As we crowded at the window in our pajamas, my mother had us count: over a hundred strikes, each exploding across the sky with a biblical intensity that left behind a visual echo of its shape. One struck so close it illuminated the windows of the building opposite, and in that second’s flash I saw a woman and man holding hands, sitting together at a kitchen table, before they too were swallowed by darkness. The image imprinted as a negative on my mind, like some secret story, its plot hinted at but not fully revealed. I remember thinking that behind every one of those windows, in every apartment, across every city in America, stories were being formed, even as one was being formed now out of the nothingness of the desert. People like to say the world is small, but how could that possibly be true?

  I knew it then. I was done with grieving, too. Sadness is another layer of clothing we pull around ourselves to keep warm. Another skin to be shed and left behind or stripped off and washed clean.

  Wind rustled the scrub. Dust was rising, and deep inside me something tensed. I stood up, sensing a change in the air.