Distance Comes With Us

Les désert déroulait maintenant devant nous ses solitudes démesurées – From François-René de Chateaubriand’s Atala

(“Now before us, the desert unfurls its immeasurable solitude.”)

            We soon came upon a cloud. It stretched from us like a Rothko, its base disintegrating to earth in slow, one layer looking like a wispy ribcage, like a spine sinking in the bath. It shed like a ghost would shed, it rose like a phantom ship breaking the surface of the sea. It was a black note, maybe a trombone’s, the gray of debris and tragedy. I felt expansive passing beneath it, watching it fall with the slow moving immobilization of nightmare. And I’ve been watching the sky since because I started to think of the beauty there and the relative barrenness of this stretch of land that lay below it. And I thought how it had been this way for most of my life: the impossibly beautiful sky above and this gravel pit and gravel dune and its hoarse voices and casino signage below.

This constant witness yet distance from beauty twists your mind with desire.

The road presents far too much time to think. It’s taken me months to recover from the trauma of such extensive reflection. Thinking, for example, that it was the sky I wanted and when I said “East” what was meant was the sky. I was to arrive in one breath with little to carry. And I’d wanted to fly there. I feel the weight still of the moving truck, and as if trying to lift it, I feel my jaw locking. This is no way to begin, I might say, or I meant to say, I was hoping that we could leave most of this behind? Why are we bringing along that heavy vanity, or the house you had made with her?

We’ve plowed through a hail storm, the ice on contact with the windshield like the death of spring, then a tunnel, where the steering wheel trembled between my hands.

A sensation: of the highway falling and catching the tires. If I close my eyes I can imagine wings jutting from the sides. If it were not for this acrid 7-11 coffee in my throat, if it were not for the dusty-smelling AC, if this fucking seatbelt wasn’t twisted. The gravity of this silence! Why have we gone so long without saying anything? “I’ve always wanted to live where the clouds and the land become one thing,” I say. Have you seen the narrow mountain trails that disappear in Cantal, even the name Can-tal holds itself, between the breath of one god and the breath of another, you’d think perhaps there’s water in the valley, but I’ve climbed to the bottom and found what used to be the river bed, what used to be a well, what used to be your love for me.

He says cool dryly. But at the next gas station he hands me a poem he wrote against his knee about an empty playground. I’m full of grayness, so the way I read it, the desired subject is very vague and it makes me feel as if it’s keeping me at a distance. As if by disguising the sun I can’t see the sun or whatever. He asks me if I’m accusing him of deflection. I tell him that the road is driving me mad.

We’re driving. I drive, he drives, sometimes even after dinner and that glass of wine. He’s driving. As we’re entering Wyoming, I cast my line of conversation and reel back nothing. So I pick up my book, This All Happened by Michael Winter. Now his tongue loosens up a bit and I say, “You’re like a cat. When I want to play you’re nowhere to be found but as soon as I turn my attention to something else you can’t stand it.”

(What I remember of that Winter now: a scene in the kitchen, where the narrator is watching the woman he loves washing dishes, he observes how solidly she stands, realizing then that he rarely holds himself that way, that instead he leans on whatever edge is closest. Which of the two postures exudes more self assurance?)

The landscape of western Wyoming looks like gigantic gopher mounds. And for the rest of the drive, I keep imaging giant things striding over the horizons: teddy bears, bowling balls, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons… titans dropping from the sky. We made it from west to east in time for a late dinner in Cheyenne. I had a glass of Pinot Grigio there and I’m confused why only half a glass was poured, and the rest set in a mini carafe next to it, like, just in case you get around to it. Taking the wheel again, I tell him that I’ve started to bleed though I haven’t really, and he says, “Your loss not mine.”

Even typing that is shitty.

At 60 mph, against the sunset, I find a mix I’d made before leaving. It is of as many versions of “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” that I could find and stand, starting with Joan Baez, Esther Ofarim, Laura Gibson, Judy Collins, Don Shirley, Christy Moore, and Merrie Amsterburg, the oddest sure, before ending with Nina Simone, one live and one studio. It wasn’t done to purposely destroy the lyrics for myself, but that’s my tendency, to love something to death, haha. It’s only that I’d fallen hard for it and I wanted to hear it in every register, in many throats. But right now I felt, a lack of feeling, bled white.

Rumble strips running beneath Yes I love the ground on which he goes.

In the motel I’ve found an old I Love Lucy on TCM. Our bags have been thrown together as if it’s they, poor things, that are tired from the road. “Do you need anything before I…” “No, I’m fine.” A light clicks on by the bathroom and I’ll see it for a moment before the bathroom door closes. He’s in there with his phone and I’m laying on the bed alone. I imagine him typing “hey,” and my phone stays black, and another phone on another bed lights up smugly… I’m turning over nauseous with jealousy. I turn back over to look at the ceiling. I reach for the headboard, whose posts are carved to look like pinecones. “Where are you now?” “I miss you.” “Facetime, if you don’t say a word.” “I’ll be good, I’ll just watch,” I fucking know it.

I’m imagining my man. (Yes, you’re right, all my life I’ve tried.) I remember you even, a dark flame, a ripple in the water,

Eyes that’d caught mine as if playing a game, but not really.

Falling on my collarbones. And they said, hey in velvet. Watching my hand stretch for my thigh, asking for my mouth and then falling to my neck and then I’d lifted myself to them. They’d followed the lead of my fingers until I can only see their lashes. But also cheekbones and also the nose. “I know you,” I say. I know those fingers and those eyes. And then two fingers reach inside, the other hand returning to my waist where I see the glare of the tv reflected over my cunt cum. They pull me closer and their fingers are deep, pulling me close for my mouth, the purest eyes, and the strongest hands…Hello, Mr. Ricardo. I’m the man who brought your wife into the world…wondrous fair.

I hear the water stop in the shower. And I hear him step out. My hand quickly leaves me, my heart jumps as if I’d been lying with another. With TCM on and the bleachy-smelling, egg-yolk yellow duvets, a thin olive green carpet, a dark wooden chair shining in layers of varnish and a little desk by the window. I imagine him finding his phone again, trying to keep it from getting too wet. He comes out drying his hair and I see in his eyes the darkness that comes with stepping from a pool of pleasure. I close mine quickly. He’d see gray where there should be brown.

I will be sick if I get into this truck again. I will die.

Before we’d left I dreamt many times over the same dream. In it I am walking in the early evening and the cattails are six heads high all around me. They are all in on it, the sound of the dream, which is your voice, moving across the landscape like a finger tip on the rim of a glass, the sunlight is warm and warbles, it is many years later, for I am remembering you as one would remember the most beautiful song they’d ever heard one pink-twilight time in their youth. I feel you walking beside me unseen in the grass and cattails, keeping apace. The light loops as if caught in your orbit or mine, sometimes slowly, as if wishing to be held. Tinkerbell is that you I ask. I find my bed and roll to my side as the sun sets in the west (rise east, the Sierras), there’s that looping light, your mind at the keys I think, no, you’re with me in the sheets breathing raggedly an otherworldly melody.

Before we’d left we had a fight. I’d asked you to stay — and normally when you ask someone to stay that is to say, “Stay with me,” but I meant “Don’t follow me,” “Let go,” “Don’t come,” “Stop you’re hurting me,” “Let me leave,” “Please let me go,” “I don’t want this,” “Please don’t come,” (at what point does he pin my shoulders to the wall in our bedroom? Am I shaking or is he shaking me?).

I jerk the wheel right — those fucking rumble strips.

***

So there’s about 1800 miles left. An August sun wades through the haze, our things in boxes are shifting in the bed, there’s a shit ton of corn in Nebraska. I don’t quite know if I’m here for this part.

***

The glow of his arm, every golden hair, he’s taken all these roads before me with a band, maybe several times. Some seagulls are flying low and for a moment his eyes are off the road tracking them, thumbs keeping beat to a song I don’t recognize. The light reflected from a passing car scans his chest. I see the blue of his eyes for a moment in our windshield. The face of a man who’d lead you to God, who’d tie you up and bury you in the desert, who you’d wish even then that he’d look you up and down, start something.

The distance between us is at least double, triple, the distance between our seats. What’s close to him is the screen in his pocket, full of her. When we stop at a Sheetz, I’m browsing packaged pastries of sweaty icing for awhile before he returns from the bathroom. I want to ask, “How’s she doing? Did she have enough time to say how much she loves you, misses you, regrets leaving you?” Instead I look at him as if my cold and set patience could crack something honest from his lips.

No dice. What’s now going to crack from mine: the gray in me is super heavy. It is no longer diffuse, but has started to gather into its galaxies, numberless blind cat’s eyes. I’m at the wheel again, my nails are red. “In the West,” I say, “the mirages over the road were really something. It’s a shame we can see everything now for exactly how it is.” I’m leaning back, cracking my neck, as if no matter, my thoughts moving around my jealously like a wicked ceremony.

The coast is so close now. Who was it that said a darkness laps the shores of consciousness? The sky is about the meet land. I’m tasting the briny air through the AC, and I feel poisonous. I see the waves from a great distance pulling the beach to it, a sickly yellow for some reason, and then return to it, the taken beach changed. Within me a piece shifts from the seabed of my gut. A sunken thing dislodged and making as if to rise and escape me, where the water is blood, and the piece is my dark sharp love for you.

___________

Janet Lee is an editor and translator based in Brooklyn. Her translations have been featured at Le Festival des Cinq Continents, La Maison Française NYU and fellow translator reading series Us&Them; she is currently translating Joséphine by Jean Rolin and Ivre Décor by Maria Kakogianni. Distance Comes With Us is her first piece of published fiction.