Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

YES, WITHIN MOTION is the only place he feels normal. Driving is best, next to that, swimming. There is something about the way a car holds you, about shutting the doors and the seat cupping you like a hand and the steering wheel presenting itself to you as if you could control things like direction and speed. Speed comforts him too, as if it were all of existence reduced to one element, a fundamental feature of existence.

With water it is floating. The way water carries a body. Weightless.

At first the road trip is like a photo essay. He keeps having simple feelings: Now I am crossing the border between Washington and Oregon. Now I am on the Coast Road. Now I am changing speed zones, highway to suburban area to city and out and up and faster again. He keeps having feelings like: I’m passing the same landscape for the second, third, fourth, fifth time. At first he sees only small changes. Then geographic ones, the hills a bit more browned from the sun, the trees less evergreen and more eucalyptus or palm. Smells seem more telling. He is driving, and California has a smell, orange trees and asphalt. He is driving, and the hills give way to ocean, sea air, and exhaust. He is driving, and memory moves his sight, his hearing, his heart beating.

As he leaves the West Coast, the windshield is a giant body—no, it’s just the California hills giving way into the Southwest desert, like great shoulders or the well of the small of a back.

But the body filling the windshield before him is always the same. No matter what he stops to take pictures of, all he hears is the clicking of the camera—no phones for him, he loves his solid old camera, the way film looks—its eye blinking machinelike, its shutter putting boundaries on light and speed. No matter the shot—red earth of New Mexico, redwoods of California, road signs and vistas, moonlight on ocean—all he sees is Michael thrown from the car, his shirt ripped open, biceps and chest cut clean through, Michael perfect, Michael perfectly still, Michael shot from the car onto the road, eyes open for the rest of his life.

During the drive, he realizes that the film he’s using has pictures already burned onto it. You know how it happens: camera gets left sitting around dormant, film gets developed, time is suddenly out of whack, and suddenly Christmas comes up against summer, the new entertainment center against the black-tie event. Driving past image after image, he is seized with the memory—a fact, clear and cutting—that somewhere on this roll are pictures of Michael.

His mind numbs itself. He considers blinding the camera with his fist. He considers throwing it out the window. He ends up putting it between his legs, its lens pointed up to him, its glass eyeing him questioningly.

He wakes up in a hotel crying, his tears salty and damp. His eye still cries—what is he supposed to think of that? He just lies there in the dark thinking, I am not blind. He isn’t exactly thankful, just observing. He looks at the objects in the room, like shadows of themselves in the dark: A chair. His bags. The television. He grabs the remote and clicks, holds the remote to his dead eye without thinking. He rubs it over the hole without thinking. He touches it to his mouth without thinking. He falls asleep with the little electronic gizmo clenched close to his cheek.

He wakes in a hotel in Tucumcari, bolt upright, tight like a car jack, teeth clenched. His eyes are closed, but he can still see the flashing red lights of the ambulance, or the fire truck, or the cop car, or all of them, or just retinal splashes gone berserk, or blood in his eye, or how the hell should he know?

He wakes up in a hotel in Pensacola. He’s left the window open all night so that he could hear the sea. He is smiling a little. He gets up to pee, pees, looks in the bathroom mirror. Mild nausea. He looks down at his eye in a hotel glass filled with saline solution. It looks back. His chest tightens; he does a breathing exercise until it loosens again. He leaves the bathroom, turns off the light, leaves the eye submerged and displaced.

TOO MUCH HANDLING can cause socket irritation.

A FRIEND HAD TOLD THEM about an oyster bar called One-Legged Pete’s. They should go there, he said, for the view, for the scene, and for these big buckets of crab legs that suck so sweet your lips ache. All those double entendres that used to be playful and sexy lodge in his jaw like nails now. He gathers up the pictures he has taken so far, his camera, and his wallet. Then he goes back into the bathroom and rips off two inches of white surgical tape. He places it where his eye should be.

IT IS NOT NECESSARY for you to wear a bandage.

AT THE BAR he thinks how right the friend was. He thinks how much Michael would have liked it, Michael the more outgoing one, the more playful one, the one with the GQ smile, Michael the already tanned don’t need to go to fucking Florida one, Michael the well-hung, the fucking god in bed, the one who never cried. Blue eyes. Two. Perfect as water. He looks out at the ocean, pictures them swimming in it.

At the bar he takes his pictures out. He looks at them closely, one at a time. Whatwhatwhat has he been taking pictures of? Things anyone could see from a moving vehicle: Road signs, big farm fields, lines of trees. Shots of hills garroted by telephone wires. Images of strip malls and gas stations and truck stops. One in particular baffles him: license plates, for Christ’s sake. V19 GBD, New Jersey. PLC 306, Colorado. 1AFB228, California. HOT ROD, Nevada. Is HOT ROD why he took the picture? Was he drunk? He doesn’t remember. He does remember a conversation they had, about how lucky they were—that neither of them was sick, or likely to be; that both had been careful and precise sexual partners before they got together; that both were young and ready to commit and make a life together stretching out like the fingers of a human hand. He is seized in the gullet. He cannot order a bucket of crab legs. He wants to wade into the sea up to his eyes and cry.

MAKE CERTAIN TO USE all the medications prescribed to you.

THOUGH HE HAS CONSIDERED turning back every single day since he left, just as he has considered suiciding every single day since the accident, he keeps going, and a day comes when he reaches Key West. The heat of Florida has dulled his senses. The taste of scotch is permanent inside his mouth; he can taste it anytime he presses his tongue against his inner cheek. He checks in to a beautiful white hotel named the Conch House. The linens smell heavily of fabric softener in a way that comforts him. The walls are white. The furniture is white. Everything is clean like brushed teeth or sheets.

He sits out on the pool deck in a white wicker chair. A hotel attendant brings him a piña colada. He spikes it further with scotch. It tastes like shit, but he doesn’t care; he is relaxed and drowsy, his eyelids are heavy with almost-sleep. He is wearing his eye. His camera is in his lap. He has in mind a short nap and then, as the sun sets, a walk down the main drag for photos. Breathing in the thick wet heavy of Key West, he comes close to dozing.

An enormous splash snaps his lids up, to reveal a beautiful blurry sea creature; no, a statue fallen into the pool; no, a young man tanned and slippery surfacing from a dive. His hair is black and sheened as a record album. His skin the color of Albuquerque sand. His eyes unbearably onyx and open. If there is something that Jackson does not want a photo of, an image of, it is this young man. If ever something could be violently true of his life, it is that a photo of this young man might kill him. Even taking the picture would be like being shot in the face. He is overcome with this feeling. It is horrible, this beauty. He begins to cry, and soon he is weeping uncontrollably. Worse, the young man sees him and begins to move toward him. As he comes closer and closer, till he’s as large as a cinematic close-up, his lips torturously full, even the bridge of his nose excruciatingly perfect, he begins to surrender. His skin goes slack, and his jaw gaws some, and his heart stops jackknifing, and it is then that his camera slips to the concrete with a little cracking tink .