John Haskell - American Purgatorio

I didn’t see any moon because the clouds never completely parted, but as I was waiting, that’s when I remembered the gas station in New Jersey. I remembered the car, the dark Mercedes turning at the last moment, but not before hitting my car, my maroon car. Anne had said, “Get something to drink,” and I was coming out of the convenience store. She’d pulled up to the door and I’d stepped off the curb. I was opening the car door, turning my body to sit down into the car, when I saw the flash of darkness, and then I felt the collision. Not a big collision, but I felt it. I got out, looked at Anne who was looking straight ahead, arms on the wheel, in shock. The other car was still moving, and as it pulled out of the gas station onto the Palisades Parkway I ran after it and watched it merging into the larger road.

When I got back to the car Anne was shaking. She was nervously talking and I didn’t notice the tears in her eyes because I was thinking about the damage and the people who caused the damage. I wanted to see what they’d done to my car. I wanted to see the dent they’d put in the side by the fender. The dark paint of the car had scraped away and replaced the old maroon color, and the wheel well was bent slightly. But that was about it. And I was reassured that that was it. I was alive at least, and Anne was alive.

The next morning I went to the now-deserted house and sat on an overstuffed chair on the porch. The air was full of the sounds of animals and birds and trees swaying. Pine resin was warming in the sun. I didn’t find any coffee to make so I drank water. I drove into town and spent the morning driving around, looking for station wagons. I was fairly methodical in my walking up and down the various streets, undaunted by my lack of success. The Mercury Tracer wasn’t a popular car so not that many were made, and there weren’t that many — none maroon — on the streets of Boulder.

Sometime in the late afternoon I wandered into the pedestrian mall. On a side street off the mall I discovered, in a large community building, a poetry class in progress. I was tired so I sat in a chair in the back of the room, listening to people talking about Beatniks, and about various poets. A man, with a beard like Allen Ginsberg’s, standing beneath an uplifted basketball backboard, began talking about William Carlos Williams.

Apparently there’s a poem by William Carlos Williams in which a man stops his car, lets his kids off at school, then drives to where the road ends, and from there walks down to the edge of the river. Even in the city there still is some mud, and there still are some flowers growing in the mud, and some weeds are still down there. He knows the names of the flowers by heart, and so for him to see these flowers growing in the mud takes him outside of what he normally calls himself. There are no windows down by the river, he doesn’t look through any window, but there is a membrane there, the membrane between his ordinary world and another world. When he crouches down and touches the petal of a white flower with his fingertip, he enters that other world.

Then, like a door shutting, a sound, say a honking, wakes him, and he turns around, walks back to his car, and drives away from the river. But not away from the other world. He thinks he’s left the other world but the other world has come with him, and in fact if he would look in the passenger seat he would see it.

But he’s driving now.

Later, at night with his wife … No, before that. He’s driving his black sedan. He’s a doctor making house calls, and he’s calling on the sick and dying. Everyone around him is dying and he watches them die, and he knows that death is the end of one world and the beginning of another world and he tries to see what that other world is. He thinks he’s standing outside of that other world.

At night, in bed with his wife, with the comforter pulled to their necks, he lies on his back and sees in his mind all the people he’s seen dying. Everyone he sees is dying. He looks at his wife and she’s dying. He actually sees her skin losing its elasticity and folding into itself like a forgotten piece of fruit.

He knows that death is part of the other world, and he doesn’t look at his own face because he knows a person can’t live like that. A person can’t live in the other world and still live in this one. You start to go crazy. He was starting to see death, or the world of death, and the world of death, which was supposed to stay on its own side, wasn’t staying on its own side. It was coming over to his side, and he couldn’t live like that.

When they tested the atomic bomb there were men who wanted to see what it looked like with the naked eye and they stood out in front of the shack and watched the explosion. But then they died, because you can’t live like that. You have to block it out. Like sunscreen, you have to put up a shield or membrane that keeps that side or that thought or that vision from disrupting what’s on this side.

So you try to block it out. But you can’t block it out. William Carlos Williams couldn’t block it out. He tried not to look at his wife but he dreamed about her. In his dream she was floating facedown on the top of the water. He wanted to wake up but he already was awake. He wanted to stop sweating so he said, “Okay. I don’t deny it. It does exist.”

“What?” his wife said, waking up. “What’s wrong, dear?”

“Nothing.”

“There is something.”

“No,” he said. “There’s nothing.”

“Then why are you looking at me like that?”

If he lived in the other world he couldn’t live in this one, and if he didn’t live in the other world what was the point of this world? Either way you start to go crazy. He couldn’t figure it out. He wanted to be at peace, apparently. Apparently he just wanted that. But this other world had a mind of its own. And it needed things. And the things it needed became the things he needed. But he didn’t know what those things were. And if you would have asked him what they were he would’ve looked at you, but he wouldn’t have known what to say.

That evening I walked to the yurt where Linda and her friends had been staying. The cars were gone and inside the canvas structure there was just the plywood floor and the empty metal cots. I walked back to the main house, where the party from the night before seemed to have recommenced. I stood on the porch near a plastic tub filled with melted ice. People were walking in and out of the kitchen, standing in groups and playing with dogs. Someone was strumming a guitar.

I saw Feather standing at the edge of the grass, next to a metal support pole, swaying her head to the music. I walked to her, stood beside her, watching her head moving to the music, until she turned around. And when she did, I went from looking at her head to looking into her eyes. I thought that her eyes would turn into Anne’s eyes, would speak to me in Anne’s voice but looking into them, I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

I’m holding her hand, ready to pull or be pulled, and as people press up against us, and against each other, her hand slips away. I tighten my grip but too late, the hand is gone, and she’s gone, and there I am, left with nothing, with no one. And there’s a moment of desperation that lasts until, a few moments later, she’s back, standing between my hands, hip level, and when I look into those eyes, they’re different eyes, they’re Anne’s eyes, and I begin dancing with these eyes. Not dancing, but we move together, pressed against each other.

I didn’t drink any punch so I don’t know the reason, but dancing like that, and even standing around, later, I was treating her as if she was Anne. We danced some more, got hot, and then we had tequila drinks with ice cubes shaped like the state of Texas. We sat on the steps of the porch, and whatever we talked about must have been preparatory because we stood up at the same time and walked into the house. I followed her into the kitchen, where we stood, holding red plastic cups, not knowing what to talk about, looking at each other, and when I looked at her, when she bent her head, for some reason I kissed her. Or she kissed me.