John Haskell - American Purgatorio

Although her judgment hadn’t bothered Alex — who blithely continued his salutations — it bothered me. And although the couple eventually left without incident, it continued to bother me. I couldn’t get that lady, or some residue of that lady, out of my body. She was stuck inside my body, burned into my body’s memory, and I was unable or unwilling to leave her behind. As I walked back to the car I was still feeling, in my stomach and chest, the incipient rage that for a moment had been directed at something other than me, and was now back in me, submerged inside the shell I had come to call myself.

We spent the night in a rest area, Alex in the car and me, nestled in my sleeping bag, on a grassy area next to the car. The diesel engines of the big trucks rumbled all night, and the high voltage illumination, meant to prevent crime, prevented me from sleeping. On the one hand I thought I should sleep, and on the other I was still imagining retributions for the lady back at the restaurant.

The next morning I was walking out of the cinder-block bathroom when Alex, practicing his yoga on the grass, suggested I take off my shoes and join him. I was willing enough to touch my toes if I could, but before I did, while I was lining up my feet, he tapped my chest and told me to let the air out. He told me to relax my shoulders and take a deep cleansing breath, and because I was used to following instructions I was about to follow his. But I didn’t want to take a cleansing breath. A deep cleansing breath might have alleviated the symptoms I was feeling, but I didn’t mind the symptoms.

Thank god for anger, I thought. Although I didn’t know what it was protecting me from exactly, I could tell it was giving me a chance to feel something other than loss. In that sense it was good, if not necessarily pleasant. Compared with loss or sorrow, anger was a balm, and rather than let it go, I wanted to perpetuate it. And when Alex started talking about Anne I had my opportunity.

He suggested, matter-of-factly, that maybe my wife wanted to disappear, that maybe she preferred not to be found. He’d seen the photo on the dashboard and I’d told him a more complete version of the dark car at the gas station, and the brakes screeching, and then Anne disappearing. And now he was saying, “She probably needs some space. A little time away,” he said. And although he didn’t laugh when he said it, or even smile, I told him I wasn’t joking. He said that he knew I wasn’t joking, that he didn’t mean it as a joke, but by then it didn’t matter.

Maybe I didn’t like his cavalier manner, or maybe I had a problem with his presumption. Or maybe I hated the idea that what he’d said was possibly right. Which it wasn’t.

But as I say, it didn’t matter.

Since I’d already taken the step of identifying with the sensation of anger, the next step was feeling its discomfort, and the step after that was to get rid of it.

“What I mean,” he said, “is that I think it might take some time, but I do believe, eventually, that you’ll find your wife.” I knew he was trying to apologize, but by then I already had my excuse, a reason to place my discomfort onto something else.

So I got mad. And because I was mad I did several things. First, I just tried ignoring him. And when that didn’t do anything, the next thing I did, after we got in the car and started driving, was, I tried to hypnotize him. In college I’d studied hypnosis and so I started talking to him, saying things like “Are you getting sleepy?” and “How do you know if you know you’re sleeping when you’re looking out the window and seeing that sleep are grazing in the fields?” Things like that.

I’d heard about the concept of releasing your anger, and that’s what I was trying to do. I thought I was getting it off my chest and that by doing so I would feel better. Except I didn’t. It was still there, wrapped around my heart, a definite impulse to somehow hurt Alex. At the same time I could see that he hadn’t done anything really. He was probably a student, someone who wanted to be friendly, and was, in fact, willing to express an opinion in a friendly way. But it was already too late. I had already enveloped myself in a skin of anger, enclosed myself within the protection of this skin, and as we drove along I wasn’t speaking, and because the engine was loud, and because I was encased in this skin, if he said anything to me I didn’t hear what it was.

We were driving along the smoothly flowing interstate, through a layer of mist in a valley, and he was saying something, but I was unable or unwilling to hear what it was until he began commenting on my old maroon car, casually mentioning that, while he wasn’t totally sure, he was pretty sure he’d seen a plum-colored car back at the rest area, a station wagon, and he knew there must be a million station wagons painted in some shade of red, but …

That was enough for me. Even the slightest hint of Anne would have been enough, and I immediately turned around. I should say I wanted to turn around, but because we were driving on a divided interstate highway there was no opportunity to turn around. There was no exit. It was one-way as far as we could see and I kept driving, for miles, expecting to come to an off-ramp or a turnoff, and mile after mile of trees and more trees but no turnoffs. I was mad at Alex and mad at myself and mad at the interstate highway commission. It was doubly frustrating because I could see, just across the grassy median, the road I wanted.

But I couldn’t get to that road. I was separated from that road or the direction the road implied, waiting for an exit, hoping an exit would suddenly appear, and when none did, I started to go slightly crazy. I was already in the left-hand lane, and when I couldn’t stand the frustration any longer, I veered farther left, off the highway and onto the asphalt part of the median. Alex was holding on to the dashboard as I started driving down the bumpy grass slope, and it was bumpy, so I drove slowly, down one side, and carefully, at an angle, across the gully and then up the other side. I was heading in the opposite direction now, waiting at the border of the grass for a chance to pull into the traffic flow when, just as that chance was about to present itself, a car pulled up, a state trooper car with a flashing light. It stopped in front of my car, blocking access to the highway, and a man with high boots walked over.

I tried to explain to him that this wasn’t a very good time. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I told him that I knew I’d committed a traffic violation but that I was in the middle of an emergency. I tried to reason with the man, to placate his desire to enforce the law, but that wasn’t good enough. It seemed this particular trooper was either a tough guy, or acting like a tough guy, and when he told me to get out of the car that’s when the struggle really started.

I wanted to decide what was going to happen, and the trooper also wanted to decide what would happen, and initiated by some comment — or some nonverbal aspect of that comment — I felt myself pushed to the point where the choices in my mind were reduced to either surrendering to this unjust power or doing something stupid. And what I did was, I held my hand in the shape of a gun — index finger forward, thumb pointing up — and I pretended to aim this imaginary gun at the trooper, who with unexpected force threw me against the side of my car and locked my wrists in handcuffs.

And I say thank god for anger because, although it’s good for giving a sense of protection, it’s also good for changing things, or breaking through things. The power struggle had now become physical, and even though I was bound by the handcuffs I was ready to get physical. Alex, still sitting in the car, was peacefully trying to explain the situation, but the trooper wasn’t listening. It was his situation and his control, and since anger is a by-product of lack of control, and since I had nothing if not lack of control, the anger that had been smoldering in me started burning. Even with my face pressed into the metal of the squad car, the adrenaline flowing in my blood felt liberating. Of course when I attempted to enact that liberation by pulling my hands apart I only pulled the handcuffs tighter, and while my liberation was in this way thwarted, my anger wasn’t.