Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

I went to St. Louis once to visit my son, he says over your shoulder.

Your son lives in St. Louis?

My daughter moved to Spokane. My son moved to St. Louis. He works for the phone company.

What did you think?

I was pretty scared at first. But it’s okay. There’s over a million people there, only you don’t see them all at once.

It takes you a second to pick up something enlivening in his eyes and then going out again.

He touches his cowboy hat with his first two fingers like John Wayne, though you fail to make out the complexion of this gesture.

It seems to exist anywhere on a continuum between honestly polite to richly ironic.

Then he turns and walks toward his ATV.

You go back into your house and transfer the laundry from the washer to the dryer and then you walk down the driveway to the mailbox, enjoying the warm breeze.

Your friends back east cannot place where you have moved.

Many apparently believe Idaho exists somewhere in the midwest near other states that begin with the letter I by some alphabetical decree.

Sometimes on the phone they ask, joking, how things are in Montana, implying that on the other side of the Hudson all states must be pretty much the same state.

Sometimes they ask what sort of neighbor Theodore Kaczynski really is.

Like Andi’s grandmother, they worry about you. They doubt the logic of your decision. They cannot imagine how you spend your time, how you can possibly fill your days, because they cannot imagine how they could spend their time, possibly fill their days, if they were in the same situation.

Andi and you are learning to take this in stride.

You even find a certain amount of good sense in the reading they give your life: ten years ago, ten months ago, you would have given it the same reading.

Yet you also understand they will not visit and that over time they will forget you, filing you away with other friends about whom they have nothing but good feelings who have broken suburban faith and wandered off into the wilderness that begins just beyond the western palisades of the George Washington Bridge.

Even now, as you walk up your driveway, sorting through magazines, shoppers, and bills, you notice their letters have begun shrinking, tapering into two- and three-line postcards that tell you less and less.

Less and less and less.

You extract the laundry from the dryer, fold it, and tuck or hang it away in its proper drawer or closet.

Outside, at nearly three-thousand feet, the late afternoon sun is brutal.

At nearly three-thousand feet and well above the forty-fifth parallel, you can actually sense the UV rays frizzling inside your cells.

You can actually sense your skin aging faster than the skin of people who live at sea level.

Like the skin of celebrities in Aspen and Telluride.

Only less famous.

You light the grill on your deck overlooking the gully through which Bear Creek runs.

By this point in the year the water makes weak trickling noises as it passes over cannonball-sized rocks.

In the early spring, after the melt, Jack says, it will sound like a perpetually heavy rain.

On the other side of the gully, almost lost in the woods, is an old cemetery plot belonging to the family that lived on this parcel in the twenties and thirties before their cabin burned down and they moved back to Michigan.

Michigan or Minnesota.

It could have been either.

The plot has the rough dimensions of your garden, perhaps fifteen by fifteen. It is surrounded by a droopy barbed-wire fence and overgrown with huckleberry and thistles. The tombstones are jumbled, weathered, tilting at disconcerting angles.

Most are almost impossible to read, though you and Andi have found birth dates as early as 1856 and death dates as late as 1938.

You scrape charred meat and ancient fish scales off the bars of the grill with a spatula and back in the kitchen free a can of beer from the six-pack in your shiny white refrigerator with a brisk twisting motion, pop the top, wander through the house, drinking.

The shitting fields, obviously, and the leeches.

How, after a rain, leeches would appear everywhere in Nepal. In puddles. On leaves. Sprinkled across boulders. One-inch-long black shell-less snails that could stand up on their back ends like little boneless prairie dogs and suck so much of your blood you could weaken before you noticed.

The way you hiked among the foothills of the Annapurna Range.

The way Machhapuchhare jagged up twenty-one-thousand feet on your right like a huge snowy fin and the terraced farmland staircased down to the river on your left and something would itch your ankle and you would roll up your pants to scratch it and discover your socks speckled with dark pink patches.

Or the way, say, you heard stories about boa constrictors attacking VW Beetles and eating small sleeping children in thatched huts in Venezuela.

Your teachers thinking you were lying.

You about to cry, you being so humiliated.

In the kitchen, you turn on two electric burners on top of the stove. In the loft, you crank the volume on the television. You hear the satellite dish whir into position out back.

I have never taken a picture I’ve intended , Diane Arbus once said. I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them .

Listening to the news channel, you open the cabinet above the counter and take out a bag of spaghetti and jar of garlic-and-basil sauce. Someone is either having an affair with a congressman or not having an affair with a congressman, depending on whom you decide to believe. You pour some of the sauce into one pot and fill another with water and place them both on the burners, the right set on low, the left on high. The Royal Family either tried to have Diana killed or did not try to have her killed, depending on whom you decide to believe. You take down two earthenware plates, two bowls, two mugs, and you make yourself a salad of lettuce, spinach, and diced cabbage, none of which is from your garden but will be within two weeks, then you stand in the middle of the kitchen, occasionally taking swigs from your beer, staring straight ahead and thinking about a synonym for pale lemon , the color of the feverish light saturating the room.

The same color as the stains in the sheet your mother took out of the washer after she had inadvertently scooped up a poisonous snake black as fear with the dirty laundry and it had struck repeatedly as it drowned.

Done with the beer, you crack in half a fistful of spaghetti, drop the two stiff bundles into the boiling water, pour yourself a Dalwhinnie as the water froths, drop three ice cubes in another glass and slip it into the freezer, then step out onto the deck again with the salmon steaks on a plate in your left hand and the scotch in a cold glass in your right.

You lay the two radiant pink slabs on the grill and close the lid.

Now you consult your watch, balance the scotch on the railing, close your eyes, and concentrate on the gentle fluid motion of the creek until it becomes the only thing you hear.

How, sitting in the restroom in Szeged in flat southern Hungary, you discovered there was no more toilet paper and so you reached into the pockets of your pants and wiped your ass with hundred-forint bills because forints were worth so little and they were all you had.

How in Kathmandu you kneeled to pet a brown puppy curled up against a wall in Durbar Square and realized it was dead.

At the base of the porch, you unzip your fly and, looking into branches netting above you, pee in a long and formidable arc.

That is where Andi finds you.

She comes around the corner of the house, camera case and tripod over her shoulder, stops in midstride, and slackens into laughter.