I’d been complaining all week about never running into
anyone I knew in my hometown, despite having been back for over three months.
Every day, I had been crossing town on my bike, running unimportant errands,
trying to keep myself occupied. Downtown, under the blossoming apple trees or
on the north side, on West Ave. up by the mall, I kept expecting to run into
someone, the way I had so often as a kid, when I couldn’t walk down the street
for more than a few blocks without someone stopping, saying ‘hi’ or offering a
ride. No one was forthcoming. In the cafés, kids I didn’t know had long
conversations about relationships, conversations I had been a part of once and
now sat on the periphery of. In the streets, the cars roared by anonymously.
Some honked, but it was only to get me to move. The sun was continually falling
back behind the clouds and every evening as I rode home, I cleared my throat
after not using my voice all day other than to order a coffee or thank a
checkout clerk.
It was clear that everyone had gone, even the people who had
once remained. Everyone left was unfamiliar to me. They were kids of another
generation. Maybe some of them had gone too; maybe some of them felt left. I
wanted to assure them. I wanted to say: “don’t worry, eventually, you’ll all
leave.”
I had to call the people who were still around. We had to
arrange times to hang out. They had stayed because they’d found niches. I had
no niche and was only floating, like I had been for so long. Sometimes on Friday,
we’d get a beer and I’d tell them a few of my stories; they’d tell me some of
theirs and we’d go back to a time when we hadn’t been so completely defined by
experience.
There was nowhere to eat, so I ate at home, often alone—never
making it back for dinnertime, sitting at the counter, reading a library book. I
looked forward to dinner as a time when I could accomplish a simple goal with a
very real result. Cooking and eating felt successful like nothing else.
I applied to a few jobs, but no employers ever wrote back.
My follow-up e-mails all went unanswered. Only Montana State University wrote
to inform me that their job posting for a pooled adjunct position (barely even
a job) probably wouldn’t even be relevant until 2018, which begged the
question, ‘why even post it?’ ‘To keep the pool open,’ they’d responded.
In the evenings, I tried to read, but something from the day
made me so tired, something about being alone, watching other people
communicating and feeling so apart from them wore me down. I couldn’t read for
more than 15 minutes before I’d start to fall asleep.
I never slept less than 8 hours. There was no reason to rush
through sleep. When I woke up, I’d lay there, stunned by my situation, like the
feeling that sets in after a car crash where the mind struggles to catch up to
everything that just happened and the attendant consequences. Downstairs, I’d
have coffee and check my mail. My inbox never contained anything other than Capital
One bills and ‘Account Statement is Now Ready’ notices from the bank.
All day, I’d think of the e-mail. Not checking it felt like
more of an accomplishment as time went on. I’d leave the house just to avoid
it, until I began to believe that I’d gotten something from a potential job.
The feeling would be so strong, I’d stop whatever I was doing and hurry home.
While Gmail opened, I’d actually feel a chest-tightening anxiety, like I
wouldn’t be able to stand seeing another empty inbox and yet, in a flash, there
it’d be. Empty. “I’ll get something tomorrow,” I’d tell myself with a sigh before
going to cook some food I really wasn’t hungry for.
After about three months, I went to Ann Arbor with my
mother. I had been taking a lot of these trips. Primarily because this is what
we usually did when I visited. Because my visit had gone on so inordinately
long, force of habit kept us doing the same thing.
There was a Moth Storytelling event, but because I had told
a story the month before, I didn’t want to ruin the good feeling (one of the
few of accomplishment I still clung to) by going back and doing it again. But
at the last minute, I decided to go, with my mom. I thought maybe it’d make her
happy to see her son doing something other than sitting on the couch, reading
overdue library books.
We left early and while she shopped for upcoming birthdays,
I asked her to drop me off at the skatepark. I was 33 years old, being dropped
off at the skatepark by my mom.
The morning was grey and slightly rainy, like a weather
pattern out of the Pacific Northwest. There was only one other skater at the
park. He went to the back of the park and I went to the front. In our separate
worlds, we kicked our boards against the ground and pushed off the smooth
concrete with the balls of our feet, bending out legs to take the varied
transitions of the ramps, going up, coming down, getting hung up and jumping
off.
After 10 minutes, he skated over to me.
“Ha,” he said pointing, “Look there’s a gummy bear standing
up.” I had noticed the gummy bear before, but hadn’t thought much about it. I
still didn’t really think about it, but that voice, the way he pointed out the
gummy bear apropos of nothing. I knew this kid. I looked at his face, much
changed.
“Don?” I asked.
He looked into my face, much changed.
“Jon?”
And here, at last, was someone I knew.
It was almost too rainy to skate anyway. We sat on a
concrete ledge together and talked about people we knew and the places they’d
all gone. He had to leave to get back to work, but it had been good seeing him.
It made me believe more in the unseen. I started to think of my e-mail, luckily,
I had no way to check it.
The Moth was sold out, but there were only 13 storytellers.
I got picked to go 4th, just before the break. Being on stage and
being applauded felt like accomplishing something. However briefly, I was
entertaining this room full of people. I was performing a function other than
riding around on a bike or making myself dinner. After I came down from the
stage, a number of people thanked me for my story telling me they’d really
enjoyed it. Some of the staff remembered my last story and told me they liked
my style. A drunk girl told me I was ‘sexy.’ These things pulled me from
anonymity, however briefly, but when I got home, I couldn’t resist checking my
mail. There was nothing there. I sat at the counter and drank a beer, just
staring off into space. Not really prepared to do anything else for the night.
In bed, I finished The
Bridge of San Luis Rey. I guess it was after midnight. I didn’t sleep well
and when I woke up the next day, I just lay there for a while, less sure of how
to start than ever. Eventually, I went downtown to the café, finished another
job application and wrote this.
…
The next morning was grey and rainy. No one else was awake
when I went downstairs. I made the coffee and started to write about a dream I
had where my high school had become part of an airport or an airport had become
part of my high school. I looked for jobs half-heartedly for a while.
…
I went up north to see an old friend. I stopped for a minute
at another skatepark and noticed that there were tent caterpillar worms all
over the park. I was conflicted about skating because it was impossible not to
run over the worms. I tried my best to avoid them, but I kept thinking about
how they used to be a nuisance species in Michigan. People were always saying
they killed trees; I never hear anything about them anymore, but here they
were, in the skatepark, nowhere near any trees. Maybe they were trying to ruin
the skatepark, having run out of trees to eat.
After the worms, I met with my friend in a little café. He
was sitting in the back and rose quickly to meet me with the air of someone
greeting a person they haven’t seen in a long time, expectant but also scanning
for changes. He’d already drank his coffee and his empty cup stood before him.
The last few times we’ve met he’d told me how much I had grown to resemble my
dad, so he told me again. I’m sure it must be odd for him, watching the change
over the years, from one person into another. He doesn’t look anything like his
dad, but when he and I first met his dad already had a lot of silver hair, so I
guess he’s got a way to go anyway. But in other ways, there’s a resemblance. He
told me he goes home after work and likes to write. “All that time in front of
the computer,” he said. “Just like my dad.” Which was true, the predominant
memory I have of his dad is of someone sitting in front of a computer. I asked
him if he knew what it was his dad had been doing all those years in front of
the computer. He answered that he still didn’t know. “Maybe he’s been writing,
too,” I offered. He admitted that this might have been true.
We spent the next few hours talking about what our lives had
been like lately, a big change from the way we used to talk about the past
exclusively. I guess the past has become so distant that the old stories don’t
spring to mind as ready anecdotes the way they used to. I couldn’t help but to
wonder how many of these memories might be in his writing now.
After we parted, I went over to my old house, where two
friends of mine still live. After some coffee, we talked all night as we
usually do. Around 4:30 they went upstairs to their rooms and I wrapped myself
up in throw blankets on the couch and looked around the room in the soft golden
color that pours through the windows from the street. Some houses are day houses
and some are night houses, designed for optimal use at one time or the other.
This house, my old house, is a night house. The daylight seems to make it cold;
the street lights warm it up. At night, after the doors are closed, the cats
are sleeping and the heat is blowing up from the ducts, the house, like no
other I know, almost seethes in its personality. Even the house I grew up in
has no such display of character. Phantasmal footsteps bound down the stairs,
shreds of conversation fall like dry leaves through the living room. A static,
a snowfall, pulses with old phone signals and voicemail recordings like a cloud
pulsing with lightening. In the groans
of the door shifting in its frame are delayed reactions to years of different
knocks. I haven’t lived here for ten years, but this house is pamplisest,
written over into illegibility, but with occasional glimpses into the lives it
has contained.
I lay there awake, listening to the conversations of the
past swirl through the house. The night brought them out of the carpets and the
coffee cups where they had lain preserved under a canopy of dust. I fell asleep
listening to the sounds I had made packing up my room, years before.
In the morning, the sun flashed through the windows. I
kicked my feet into my shoes and stumbled outside. I drove around the state the
rest of the day trying to reconcile the changes with the visions the house had
offered up. I felt ten years out of step, like someone who’s emerged groggily
from a time machine, not initially sure it’s worked until they notice the cracks
in the new paint and the wrinkles on the face with the same young eyes, but
looking out on the world, as if from the past itself.
It felt like I’d never be able to catch up with the time
that had passed. Everything seemed to have run off ahead into the distance,
into age. I tried to skate at another park, but found I couldn’t, at least not
very well. I stood back and watched the local kids skate over the tent
caterpillar worms, like a stranger waiting for a ride.
…
There’s a building so large on the horizon it looks like a
perpetual dawn, like a manila sun spreading beyond the highway, under the
trees. If it wasn’t for the large white refrigerators on the roof, I probably
wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I’ll be setting off toward that big-box
store horizon in a few days. I’d hoped to leave carrying some kind of certainty
to lighten the long walk into the future, but nothing has come; I’ll set out
with no idea where I’ll be going. I’ll walk north for a while, just to go
somewhere while I wait for something—an idea, a mission, a home—to pluck me from
the woods, set me down someplace and say “Here. This is where you’re going to
be now.” It could be anywhere. Last night, I applied to a job in New Jersey. I’ve
got resumes on desks in Hawaii, Washington and Addis Ababa. They’re all
supposed to start in the fall. I’m still signed up to take a hard-to-fill
position with the fellowship. If, at the last minute, someone declines to go to
Kigali, Urumqi or Tashkent, they might ask me.
So, for the next few months, I’ll be nowhere on the verge of
everywhere, finally pushing myself out of this place, I will go to the woods,
like so many other Americans before me to listen for something. I woke up last
night and tried to imagine sleeping in a small forest clearing; I couldn’t, but
that’s how these things work. You can’t really imagine the next place. From the
woods, I probably won’t be able to imagine a Seattle apartment or even this
place very well. It’s good; I guess it’s indicative of finding a place in the
present, which is something I’ve never been able to do very well, but I’m
getting better at.
Right now, in this café, I’m making another memory, packing
it together like a snowball, something to hold onto when all this disappears.
From the woods of Appalachia, it’ll be nice to remember the months I’ve spent
here, the blooming cherry and apple trees, and when I come back years from now,
it’ll mean even more than it does now. Everything already does.
