John Haskell - American Purgatorio

I wanted to give away the ache in my heart, and I was hoping that if I unburdened myself of my possessions the ache would go away. She agreed to take the computer and the mandolin, and I ended up leaving the box of books on the floor, in front of a glass display of muffins and scones.

She led me to a table where her friends were sitting. She had me take a seat and offered me a cigarette from one of the packs on the table. A half dozen people were sitting around the table, talking about a potato gun someone had made that shot potatoes into the air, and they were laughing about this, and all the time the talk was going on I could hear them, and I could see them, but a veil was placed between me and them. It seemed. I was in the circle, at the table, but at the same time I was removed from the circle. I was receding even as they spoke to me. Even as I answered their questions and commented and laughed, I was fading, and I could feel myself fade, and I didn’t like it. Partly I did like it. Partly, I felt serene in this state. Serene and numb.

But I was only numb and serene on the outside. Inside, in with my organs of memory, I was in another state, and it was in this state that I thought about what had happened at the gas station in New Jersey. The people at the table were talking away, happy and convivial, and it wasn’t that I wanted to think about a time in the past. I wanted to be done with the past, but I could hear the dark car and the brakes of the dark car right before it collided with our little maroon car.

Anne had stopped to pick me up from the convenience store entrance. I was just getting into our car, just opening the door, and that’s when I heard the brakes, and in a split second I looked up, saw the outline of darkness. And I felt the impact. Anne was hurt. They had collided with her side of the car and I was all right but Anne was knocked forward into the window and the steering column and she wasn’t speaking. She was unconscious. The dark car sped off and I tried to look at the license plates but I was more concerned with Anne. I went to her, held her head in my hands, and something was wrong. I told someone to call an ambulance and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to slap her and there was no doctor. I asked for a doctor but it was just the gas attendants and they didn’t know anything. No one knew anything and I didn’t either. She was dying. I didn’t know. What it meant. She was breathing. I felt a pulse but I couldn’t wake her up. When finally the ambulance came I was yelling at them, why it took so long, and they didn’t want me in the back. I wanted to be in the back with Anne but they wouldn’t let me and so I had to find them later, had to find the hospital, they took her to a hospital in New Jersey. I didn’t know New Jersey. I knew Mount Sinai but that wasn’t in New Jersey and they told me which one but I didn’t know where it was and the car wasn’t working and I wanted to be with Anne. I wanted to be with Anne. I kept telling them that I wanted to be with my wife.

There I was, walking through the night, but even with my lighter load, the feeling of lightness had slipped away. Carrying only my small backpack, containing everything that was mine, I walked through the night, walking south, down the nearest road, not because I wanted to go in that direction, but because that was the road I was already on. I felt I couldn’t stop moving, that I had to keep moving. I felt that if I didn’t keep moving I’d fall, like a child on a bicycle.

I was walking past gas stations and fast-food outlets, walking and turning and putting out my thumb, when a car passed. And the cars did pass, and they didn’t stop, and after a while I found myself walking through a temporary city, a temporary-looking city, built with trailers and aluminum siding, and the parking lots weren’t paved. There were bars and stores and trucks parked at these establishments but no sense of solidity. I walked into a go-go nightclub to see if I could find someone going my way and maybe get a drink of water. I wanted to save my money and since just to sit in a chair cost money I walked back out into the night and the temporary town gave way to cleared land, newly plowed and leveled earth, drained of color and ready for development, ready for money to be made. I walked past irrigation ditches and rows of trees and then, like a nomad coming to a palm oasis, I came to an area of palm trees. Palm trees and green grass. Even in the night I could see it was green. The houses weren’t houses exactly, but they were meant to be lived in. They were all model homes, extremely suburban model townhomes, made to look like chalets, and the streets were winding, not because they had to be, but because it was someone’s vision. This was a manufactured town. A faux town. It was also deserted, which was good for me because now I could sleep. I found an area of sand, a children’s play area near some green grass, and because I wanted to stay dry, I lay in the sand, away from the sprinklers that seemed to go on at irregular intervals. I lay in the sand waiting to fall into a deep deep sleep because soon it would be morning.

And then it was morning.

I left the children’s playground before the security guards would make their rounds, and continued walking. I was headed in a definite direction. I needed a direction and I had it. And this feeling of direction I had was confirmed, I thought, when I walked to the highway and the first vehicle driving along the road, or almost the first vehicle, a truck with a Mexican driver, gave me a ride to Phoenix, Arizona.

Phoenix was named after a place named after a bird that rises from the ashes, and I found a quiet corner at a Winchell’s coffee shop, where I sat over coffee near a group of old men, the old men of Phoenix, who were talking about dead friends and dying friends, and I sat there, blending in with the bright unobtrusive surroundings.

It seemed strange to me that whenever I thought of Anne I automatically felt despair. And the strange thing was, I felt the most despair when I thought of our happiest moments. You’d think that the happy moments would have engendered pleasant feelings, but instead I felt almost dead.

When I say “almost dead” I mean that, although I’d rid myself of some possessions, I needed to get rid of more, needed to rid myself of the habit of being what I was. Since I knew about a hypnotist who lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and since I was now in Phoenix, Arizona, I went to see this hypnotist. I didn’t have an appointment, I just went to the man’s house. I found the address in the telephone book and walked past the cacti in his front yard and stood at his screen door, listening. I could hear a television show going on inside. It was Bewitched, a show in which Darrin, the husband, wants Samantha, the witch, his wife, to renounce her magical abilities. She doesn’t totally understand why he would want her to keep these powers, which are completely natural to her, in check. But she was willing to try, willing to accommodate him, and she was trying. Then a commercial came on and I was thinking I should knock on the door because the man would know, by the sounds of the birds, or the absence of the sounds of the birds, or some sense perception I wasn’t privy to, that I was standing on the other side of the screen.

So I knocked, and the man called out for me to come in. He was sitting in a wheelchair and I squatted beside him and we started talking. He was what I would have called a kindly old man, and he asked me what I wanted. I didn’t tell him about Anne, but I told him I wanted some direction. “There are a lot of directions,” he said. “But if you’re standing on the North Pole there’s only one.” He showed me his collection of carved animals and said that I wasn’t an Indian. “But,” he said, “if you want to be hypnotized, come back in an hour.”