Zhanna Slor - At the End of the World, Turn Left

“Look. Masha. It doesn’t change facts. She gone and I’m not finding her.”

“It does, though. Obviously, something happened, and she decided to leave for a reason. It’s not just your general nineteen-year-old angst, which you have quite purposely lead me to believe,” I say. I pause, and inhale a deep smoky breath, before coughing. My dad opens the window, despite being on the highway, so that I almost have to scream my next question. “So what on earth did you do to make Mama leave?”

My dad licks his lips, which are chapped to the point of peeling, and glances over at me before his eyes turn back to the dashboard again. I can’t explain precisely what I catch there in his glance; it looks like guilt, but if it is, there are too many other things crowding it out. It must have been pretty bad if my dad feels guilty. He’s not someone who says sorry often, if ever. No matter the outcomes, he always thinks he’s right. Maybe I imagined it anyway; after that split second, it’s gone. He takes the next highway exit, and the car quiets a little.

“Did your sister ever mentioned woman named Zoya?” he finally asks me.

I think about this. The name sounds familiar, I’d met a few in Israel—one a Russian model, one an elderly widow—but I don’t recall hearing the name from Anna. We haven’t talked in weeks, months maybe, and when we did, it wasn’t about any specific person. I’m pretty sure I would remember that. “No? But we kept missing each other the last few months. The time difference… Well, it’s mostly my fault. I was so busy. I should have made it a priority to talk to her.”

Before I can ask what any of that has to do with my mom flying to New Jersey or Anna going who-knows-where, my dad turns into a cul-de-sac of identical condos and pulls into the driveway of a plain orange brick house with a simple gray roof. Once more I can’t help but wonder why on earth they chose to move here, of all places. It’s even worse than the house in Hartland. At least there, we had tons of neighbors, with big houses that all looked sort of different. And trees. Rosebushes. Dogs playing in yards. Here, it’s so… Quiet. Empty. The middle of nowhere, basically. It reminds me of a saying in Hebrew: B’sof Ha’olam Smolla. At the end of the world, turn left. It’s slang for the middle of nowhere, so it definitely applies to suburban Wisconsin, but I think there’s another level of looking at it that is less literal, a layer of unintended meaning. Metaphorically speaking, it could entail starting a new life; which, there’s no doubt about it, all the members of my family have done at least once, if not more. Even I’ve done it. Maybe Anna is just following in our footsteps.

“Did you find out if Anna is dating guy?” my dad says, finally, in lieu of an explanation. “You know how young girls are. Remember Nick? He made you… what is word? Goth.”

“He did not make me goth,” I say, stifling a laugh. “First of all, it was punk, and secondly, no one made me do anything. I liked it and Nick just happened to be around.” I pivot toward the real issue. “So… who is Zoya?”

My dad ignores me and continues along. “She’s very impressionable. If she’s gone, she’s with the guy.” He turns off the car but continues to sit there, silently, while AM 620 plays around us, staring ahead into the garage; several large packages of bottled water, shovels hanging from hooks, bikes and toolboxes that haven’t been used in years.

“But why did you mention—” I start, but am interrupted by my phone ringing. Hoping it’s my mom, or David—or maybe even Anna—I don’t hesitate in answering.

“Hello? David?”

Usually, an unknown number means David. But if it is David, he would be saying something. I think I can hear breathing on the other end of the line, but no words. In that case, it’s probably not David. I open the passenger-side door and cover my mouth with a hand when I get out. I whisper, “Anna?”

But I never learn who it is that’s calling. Whoever it is drops the receiver, and when I try calling back I only get an error, like the number doesn’t really exist. The only time that ever happens is when David calls me from internet cafés in Europe. The program he uses automatically creates a fake number in order to connect via phone line and not Wi-Fi. If it was David on the other end, and he had encountered technical difficulties, then he would call back. There’s no reason to worry, or panic. And yet, my stomach begins turning in knots. Maybe my dad is right and Anna is with Tristan, like I originally thought. But maybe there’s something else going on altogether. What if she’s in trouble? Or worse?

“Who was it?” my dad asks, getting out of the car too. He goes to the backseat and removes my bags, dropping them on the cement floor beside some dusty work boots. “Was it Anna?”

“I think I’ve answered enough questions for today,” I say, in barely a whisper. The conversation we had has drained me of all energy required to talk, or move, or do anything. “It’s your turn.”

“Hmm,” is all my dad says before taking my bags inside. I know asking him a third time won’t help, because if he doesn’t want to tell me something, he won’t tell me. So I go inside too, and head straight for the shower. I spend an enormous amount of time in there, closing my eyes and letting the hot water run over me. I stay so long my skin turns bright red and prunish and yet I still don’t move. I’m too tired. I think I’m possibly more tired than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m so tired I don’t even know what to think anymore, and possibly I finally understand why it took so long for the human race to come up with all the complicated words they have for emotions. They were too exhausted to feel guilt, shame, nostalgic; or at least too tired to know what it was. You can follow the complexity of emotion arising at the same time as more and more color words became part of the vocabulary; in ancient Biblical times, there were mostly only words for dark and light. Now we have the entire rainbow. We have cultures crossing and vocabulary continually shifting, languages dying (Latin) or emerging (texting). Some languages, like Russian, have so many variations of color words that they use several different words for blue, while others, like the Dani language, spoken in Papua New Guinea, have only two color words: one used for darker, cooler colors, one for all the lighter, warmer tones. Which makes you wonder: if you don’t have the words for something, can you still see it? Can you still feel something if you don’t know what it is you’re feeling?

In some ways, I might have to admit you cannot. But this is the beauty of our global culture: if there’s not a word for what you want to say in your language, then most likely, you can find it elsewhere. In this moment, for example. I can channel the Germans; I am the epitome of Lebensmüde, which, roughly translated, means weary of life. Part of me wants to go back to sleep, but I know I won’t be able to sleep in this house. It’s too weird; the energy is all off. And it’s not only because there’s nothing to look at outside besides a vast array of flat, dry land with trees planted in perfect little rows. Houses so far apart you will never see your neighbors. It’s too quiet. It’s the exact opposite of Israel, where everyone is on top of each other, and it’s impossible to ever feel alone. In Israel it’s never quiet. Here, I can hear every single creak in the floorboard, every sneeze and cough from another room.

Once I’m dry and dressed again, I feel like a new person. I take a walk around the house, looking at how my mom has rearranged everything she moved from our previous house in Hartland. Even though she has the same hand-painted vases and custom mirrors and Kandinsky prints, it all looks so different here in the vast emptiness of the wide-open single-floor design. I can’t really pinpoint why. But something is staler. Maybe it’s the actual building, or maybe it’s just that no one is here but us.