John Haskell - American Purgatorio

“Maybe we’ll see you,” he says, and they all nod, and I tell them sure, maybe so.

And then I let them go. In my mind I let go of the idea that the maroon car is my car, and that these people are somehow my enemies. There’s a difference between wanting what they have and wanting them not to have it, and I say good night.

I go back to my room. I lie on my bed, my feet crossed, looking up at the plaster of the ceiling. I stare at the cracks in the plaster, seeing the branching lines become like hieroglyphs, and as my eyes defocus, the picture formed by the lines becomes more and more abstract, and after a while the lines are gone and even the ceiling is gone, and I see, in my mind, the gas station in New Jersey.

I see Anne, pulling up in Chaucer, bending forward, looking at me from the driver’s seat. I’m coming out of the convenience store. She’s sitting in the car, her hands on the steering wheel, and then suddenly there’s a blur in my peripheral vision. A dark car, the sound of brakes, and the car driving by. I remember cursing the driver for coming so close, for possibly hitting my car. I remember checking the side of the car, thinking they might have scraped it as they passed. I remember Anne’s face, looking up at me through the window.

In the morning, as is my habit, I part the curtains to check on the two parked cars in the parking lot. Both the cars are gone.

I make coffee at a miniature coffeemaker in the room, and then I get dressed. I set my room key on the television, go to my own little car, and as I leave the circular road and drive to the highway entrance I run into a traffic jam. I get out, walk past the idling cars in the street, and there, at the front of the line of cars, is a procession, a procession of children dressed in sparkling costumes, some as animals, some as gods or goddesses. A portable music device is playing dance music, and the children have learned the steps and they’re dancing to the music. Parents are walking alongside, watching, and more than just parents, the whole community is participating in the event. Even I, standing by a stall with a woman selling Mexican food, am part of it. I buy a taco from the woman, and when the dance is over I get back in my car. Everyone else is driving away, going where they have to be going, and so that’s what I do.

Human beings have a barrier, a membrane that separates our everyday life from our sexual life. I call it the sexual membrane. It’s a protective device, enabling us to function in a day-to-day way during the day, but also, by lifting it up or pulling it aside, a sexual, passionate part of ourselves is also available. Anne had such a thin membrane it was sometimes hard to tell what side she was on. Not that she was always thinking about sex, or engaging in sexual activity, but that to go from the everyday side to the sexual side took very little effort. Which is the beauty of the membrane: this permeability. It’s possible to go back and forth as many times as you want. And although it’s designed to allow for easy crossing, from one side to the other, sometimes, when you’re on one side of the membrane, you tend to forget that the other side exists.

And it’s not just sexual.

Driving through the river valleys and rolling hills of the midsection of America, through St. Louis and Kansas City and Topeka, I rarely stopped to eat. I was stopping for gas because the car needed gas, but food and eating had become ideas only, and I was losing interest in them. Driving along with my arm out the window I was unworried about sunburn, uninterested in the scenery or the historical markers. I was just driving, determined to keep Anne uppermost in my thoughts. And she was. My mind flitted from thought to thought and she was there all right, but the thoughts I had did not engender the feeling I wanted. My thoughts were connected to loss and sadness and I was looking for more positive and motivating emotions. Loss and sadness had their place, but their tendency was to pull me into myself, and I wanted to pull myself out, into the world. And the problem, I thought, was desire. If I would have a little more desire then my thoughts — and by virtue of my thoughts, my life — would automatically focus on the world and enter the world and pull me away from my suffering.

Elaborate systems of enlightenment are built around the idea of desirelessness, but with me it seemed to bring, instead of enlightenment, only confusion and directionlessness. And I didn’t like that. For me, feeling desire was synonymous with feeling alive, which is why I was looking out across the vast passing country for a place to pull off the road.

The color of this particular part of the earth was chalky and red. Scattered plants were turning green on the skin of the landscape, and my eyes were scanning the landscape, looking for a certain kind of spot, not sure what the spot would look like, but certain I’d know it when I saw it.

And when I did see it, I pulled off the highway. I was about a half hour outside of Salina, Kansas, and I parked the car in a small gravel area at the side of a county road. I walked through some weeds and crossed over a sagging barbed-wire fence into a sandy opening in the trees near a streambed, with rocks and roots and water flowing past. I settled myself in the sand of this area, and under the sun, fortressed by rocks and brush, that’s where I pulled down my pants and began to try to masturbate. I say try because I wasn’t feeling especially sexy or sexual or turned-on. I just wanted to feel what those things felt like.

Something in me was definitely willing, at least to try, to bring into my mind some fantasy, or a series of fantasies, and they came and went but something else in me was either not willing or just not interested. I was distracted by something, or worried about something, and although I tried, I was disconnected from a part of myself, from Anne and the memory of Anne. I was disconnected from my body, and the excitement that resided in my body. But as I say, I tried to make it happen, to make desire happen, and I got to a certain point and I decided … I didn’t decide. I changed my mind. The moment wasn’t right, or the surroundings weren’t right. I walked back to the car, got in, drove back to the main road, and continued on my westward trail.

Desirelessness can be a good thing, no doubt about it, but for me desirelessness was not the cessation of desire, it was the loneliness of no desire. Losing Anne was, in my imagination, the same as losing everything. And although I still believed I would find Anne, and still desired to find her, the membrane between me and my desire, I could feel, was thickening. I wanted to puncture the membrane or open the membrane, and to do that, even in my mind, I had to make an effort. And this effort involved focusing on Anne. Which was easy enough, except my thoughts alone weren’t getting me through the membrane. The memories came but not the breaking through.

I remembered the time I bought Anne a negligee. She didn’t want a negligee but she put it on and stood as she supposed I wanted her to stand, and it wasn’t the sexiness of the garment that aroused me; it was her willingness to wear it. Her willingness was what I remembered, and it’s what I was thinking about when, after driving along without music or human interaction, I stopped somewhere on the plains of Kansas and got some gas. A short distance down the road leading back to the interstate, at the edge of the gas station, two people, a man and a woman, were sitting with a few bags. I slowed down as I approached, pulling to a stop in front of them.

They said they were coming from a festival, and from the way they were dressed — he with the long hair, she with a feather in her braided hair — you might have guessed the Woodstock festival, or a Woodstock reunion. They were polite and appreciative, and as they put their canvas bags in the back seat they said they were going to Boulder, Colorado, which was where I was going.