John Haskell - American Purgatorio

Because my eyes were closed it was easy enough to alter the body beside me, but because the voice wasn’t Anne’s voice, and because it wasn’t possible to shut my ears, I had a little trouble keeping the audio part of the fantasy intact. But as she spoke about her plans to move to a bigger city, and as the sound of her voice traveled from her mouth through the air to my ears and then into my brain, over time, I was able to transform that voice and mold it into what I wanted. The knowledge that the voice I was hearing was a voice I was making, I let that recede, happy to usher out of consciousness any evidence of my own volition.

I was able to overlook the knowledge that she wasn’t Anne, so that to me, she was Anne. In the back of my mind was the fear that she would say something or do something to wake me up, but because this new reality was preferable to the earlier one, I was able to maintain it. I settled into the more comfortable mode of lying with Anne, and the reality of Anne, such as it was, became more solid and stable, and when it got to the point where I was sure of its solidity, that’s when she decided to go to the bathroom.

When she sat up and crawled over me, wearing her oversized T-shirt, it was Anne in an oversized T-shirt, crawling over me as she’d crawled over me a million times. That’s the thing about a fantasy: once it gets started it takes on a life of its own, and I kept it alive by picturing Anne in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet and washing her hands and then climbing back into bed, which she did.

And when she did I had a million questions to ask her. Mainly I wanted to know if she loved me, and if she did, how could she leave me standing in front of a convenience store.

When she lay down on the partially made bed and resumed her position beside me, I asked her, “Where did you go?”

“The bathroom,” she said.

“No, I know, but before. Where did you go?”

“Before what?” she said.

I was talking about the gas station in New Jersey, but she didn’t seem to remember that, or didn’t want to. So I asked her why she’d left.

“I had to pee.”

“Not that,” I said.

“Then what?” she said.

And we went around like this, in a circuit of mutual misunderstanding. And the words were only a symptom.

I was lying there in the darkness behind my eyelids, imagining Anne, and of course, if I had opened my eyes I would have seen that Anne wasn’t there. But I had no desire to see that. I was thinking of Anne, wondering where she’d gone. I was hurt. I thought she was going to be there. She said she was going to be there, that she was going to wait for me and she didn’t wait for me and now I didn’t know what she was doing. Or feeling. I thought we had an understanding. I certainly had an understanding, but she obviously had a different understanding because she hadn’t even contacted me. What was I supposed to do? Was I even part of it, this thing that happened so suddenly? Or did she plan it all along? Some thing she couldn’t tell me. I didn’t know. How would I know? What the fuck was she doing to me? That’s what I wanted to know. And there’s no reason to get mad at someone you love, except the way I saw it, she wasn’t being fair with me.

“I don’t even know if you’re alive,” I said.

And at that moment the person next to me sat up and tapped my chest. “I’m here,” she said. “Open your eyes.”

“Open my eyes? Okay.” And I opened my eyes.

Although the light was not that great, I sat up to tell her that what she was doing was wrong, wrong to me and wrong in general, and as I was about to tell her this I looked into her oval face, at her eyes, and the whites of her eyes, and of course I saw that the person I was talking to wasn’t Anne.

I remembered the Irish bar, and the baby carrots, and then the fantasy vanished. I don’t know what I actually said, if I even said anything, but after a while I was aware that the feeling I’d had a moment before had passed. Something had come along and taken its place. The fear was still there but the anger was gone, and I didn’t know where it went, but fine, I thought. I could hold on to the anger or not, fan the flames or not. And I chose not.

I turned to Laura, and I don’t know what I thought, but in the middle of thinking it she told me that my body was a vehicle. She said I could use it, or I didn’t have to.

Then she lay back down on top of the covers.

Here she was, with a man, with the body of a man, and she was hoping he would be a normal man, and now she was presented with someone who was talking to her in a way that made no sense. Half naked and next to her, and what is supposed to happen now? That’s what she was probably thinking.

I was propped on my elbow looking at her, trying to think of my body as a vehicle, and maybe I was aware of some galvanic skin communication in the muscles of our arms, or my arm, because it seems to me that under normal circumstances we would begin kissing. I remember thinking that I ought to be kissing this person, and I would have been kissing her except for one small thing. She wasn’t who I wanted her to be.

So we didn’t kiss.

And the lack of kissing, which I expected to wedge us apart, instead seemed to open up a kind of pathway between us. Instead of relating via the kiss, we had to relate in a different way, in a companionship way, and so we began to talk. Everyone has a story, and we had stories, and we brought our stories to this place, this bed, and we told each other as much as we wanted to be heard, or as much as we could bear.

We lay there, without speaking. And because, for a moment, I’d been with Anne, I was fairly happy. Although she wasn’t Anne anymore, she had been, and that was enough. I think we were both fairly happy, and happily we went to sleep.

She did anyway.

I just lay in the bed, waiting for the light to come in the window, and when it did I slipped out from under the covers, packed my bags, and when Alex got up I ate cereal with him before he went to work. I liked Alex, and I hoped that when I thanked him for his navigation skills, he understood I meant more than navigation.

When Laura got up we were going to make coffee, but there wasn’t any milk so we went to a coffee shop down the street. We sat in a booth and seemed to be getting along, connecting easily with each other, talking about whatever came up, just talking and talking, and we hardly noticed when we left the coffee shop. We were walking along the damp sidewalk, still talking and walking, and right about as we passed my car, which was parked on the street near her house, that’s when I stopped. I couldn’t go back with her to the house, I thought, because I had somewhere else to go. I realized that time was passing, and I couldn’t spend whatever time there was sitting around a Lexington living room.

I had to get on the road, I told her.

She asked me why.

I tried to explain to her about Anne and what I was doing. I told her it felt as if a door was slowly closing in front of me, and that behind the door there was something I was still connected to.

“Do what you need to do,” she said, briefly opening her arms.

And as I watched her arms open and then dangle there against her hips, I thought, Why couldn’t that door also be here? Why did I have to go somewhere? Why couldn’t I somehow see in these things here, or be connected through these things, this other thing I was looking for?

“I can’t tell,” she said. “Are you kidding?”

Behind her were green trees and behind them was actual sky with clouds. A car drove down the street and then the street was quiet. On a lawn nearby the grass was overgrown.

“Are you coming or not?” she said.