Baggage des Concord orfever liee Quade

I

“Let’s have a story,” she says while last year’s leaves crunch underfoot, the blue light shining through our hair like two ghosts, our rutilant shadows, daubed over the ground, floating, glittering, touching occasionally at the hip, nowhere else. How weird and wonderful that all these trees aren’t really dead, yet they seem dead.  I swear I heard a voice telling me what God wanted me to know, to believe, once.  Different night.  I do believe even then I didn’t believe.  One suspects the testimony of spirits, as if immortality had any intimacy at all. 

I wasn’t alone but I wasn’t glad.  She walked barefoot to be closer to the earth, my eyes were helium balloons, starbound.  I tried to think of a story to tell but the road took over, dirt, leading where everything ends, or begins, the sky, the mountains there, whose ranges never seem to end, I am filled with eternity, there might be a story there. 

            “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I lie. A sky without mountains is empty, like me.  I could feel tears pooling in the lower peripheries of my eyes, I held my breath. A cold metal ball rolling down the corrugated roof of my stomach.

            “Tell me about it.”

We walk until dawn.  A bird in a dead tree singing deeply, all this fuss over, what? Fire, glory, sex?  Of course the trees weren’t really dead.  Soon spring would bud them into life.  I felt like I had sprung into, not out of, a dream.

II 

Through a dusty lens, night trucks all parked in parallel lines, engines running, like old guys waiting languorously to get their haircuts.  I lumber past, slide into the forgotten.

Across windswept fields, across hours and miles, across the furtive river where it roams depositing silt, hollowing out the valleys, in the thick of the dark, the unfriendly mountains all, lurking like hooligans beneath their ball-cap clouds.  That nightmarish hour when the downright density of night bloats reluctant to cede terrain to the day, I used to dread it as a child, but different disparate desperate people have told me that they get a different read on the desolation.

III

"Ray Charles had perfect pitch."

"Hm."

"You okay?"

"Ay okay."

"I can't ever tell.”

"Hm?"

“I can’t tell if you crave inclusivity or exclusivity?"

"Hm."

"Sure you're okay?"

"Can’t you tell?”

"I can't tell.”

"Trust me."

IV

Look back but don't ever go back.  Just you and I and the river, and time.  You and I and sleeping on the wrong sides of the bed, that whole dating treadmill, our baggage, ripples of confusion, lithe and slithery swiftness of youth, you and I masking swollen urges under whiskey and a nylon comforter we bought at the Goodwill for $4.99, the plants we killed in the egg carton in the windowsill. You and I tacitly avoiding who hurt us, waking up at 4am to watch the rain through the fog in the parking lot, the Adirondack we never bought, the birthday mug we did, your rainbow scrunchies, my weekday temperament, your perfumed breasts and my lurid splashes of chivalry, your soft flat stomach, a postcard from my old girlfriend Gigi before she turned cold and gloomy as a hospital waiting room.. We all become who we are and don’t ever go back.

V

            I drive a courtesy shuttle during the day, drinking whatever she brought me during the nights.  Everyday driving back and forth between malls, airports, interstates, miles of industrial bricolage like alien hellscapes, all bracketed by the occasional stop at the Valero or the Shell station and then pinballing again between housing developments named after the things they had replaced, but more likely imaginary landforms, Marble Brook there, a Chestnut Gables there, each day a monotonous asphalt while overdubbed by low-volume corporately mandated satellite radio, or the passenger, the passengers would talk about the God damned weather, every day the God damned weather this and that, the God damned weather, that or nothing, or that or traveling by myself between increasingly abject points, delivering stuff to the garage for the boss’s nephew, delivering myself unto the bland and isolating post-modern God of daily commutes through modern-day infrastructure. 

            Gigi had been different though, before things turned sour, especially, because sobriety took the bright out of her eyes, but when Gigi was lit she added the perfect light to any room, all the ambient courtesy of a church basement at coffee hour, quick and sharp, (like a cleaver) the very definition of Minnesota nice, which is to say, mean as all fucking get-out but funny and probably the cleverest person I know. We broke up of course because our entire relationship was like the interpretive dance version of a sloshed breaking and entering CCTV video.  I caught her with *James* and the mainline broke, all the old electric courses blew the fuses wide open, and I took up with Kristine, a teetotaler who didn’t ask questions.  Practically Saint Kristine, the way she treated people, showing respect for the less fortunate, you know, her family.  However, her mom was good looking too, which I shouldn’t really say before pointing out that I loved Kristine’s body, and I loved her heart, I just wished she’d ask some questions of me instead of being so fucking tolerant all the time because I was obviously still in love and hiding my heart in a hole and she let me, wrapping herself like a blanket, like a carpet over the injury so I could walk right over her.  Gigi I loved in body and mind, but of course, not her heart… wow, it’s weird to admit that, though there’s no question she could be a real burn-you-at-the-stake witch. 

            So anyway I drove all day and drank whatever she brought me all night, she now meaning Cosette, the bartender I was seeing on the side, because Saint Kristine wasn’t putting out, and neither did she drink, and Cosette, who was from Belgium so her words were peppered with Outside Categories, the conversational equivalent of drinking spiced gin, let me sit at the bar as long as I could remain half-upright and I loved taking notes on her endlessly fascinating digressions while she inebriated me on the cheap-or-free.  Also she had big tits and this helped me to pay intention when she would repeat herself, or when some idiot would come in and sit across the mirror and try to get her into the God damned weather patter bull.

This week I was driving, like always, hoping my hangover would evaporate out the slightly-cracked window, when Kristine texted to ask if we could go out tonight, her treat.  Okay.  Odd. Unexpected.  I text back “fine” and then proceed to spend the rest of the afternoon trying not to let my panic morph into a sentient creature.  It’s not exactly out of the ordinary to be asked out to dinner by your girlfriend but something about the isochronous nature of the job, the driving here and there, the God damned weather guy going on and on in the back seat, and I would always or almost always get or expect to get a text from Gigi about what we’d be drinking that night, or what tattoo to get next, or wha inhaling gypsum smelled like, or whatever, so, instead, getting a text from Saint Kristine just came as a shock, like low voltage nostalgia I suppose, and I realized I was still in love with Gigi, that all had been well when the world wasn’t well.

I texted Gigi and asked if she wanted to meet up for a drink.  Someone should have told me to n ever go back, look back, don’t go.  I checked the time. Would be meeting Kristine in 3 hours so I decided to wait, at Cosette’s bar.

VII

A voice like braised scallops.  That’s the sound emitting through the boarded-up painted-black window, that and laughter.  I throw the three empty shooter bottles in the doorside trash, open up, quint in, and nothing feels familiar, my hair falling in my face as I stumble, making a fool of myself.  I wait for them to stop their drunken revelry and accost me, but they continue their banter unabated.

“For Joe Biden is forbidden!”

“That rhymes.”

“That’s discrimination!”

“It's not discrimination if it’s just.”

Folding up my coat self-consciously, aware of them sitting at the bar with their $2 PBRs and their small talk.  I walk right up to Cosette, somewhat brazenly if I say so myself, “One Kilt Lifter please.”  She smiles sadly as she pulls it.  I stand and wait.  John the Brit sizes me up as I wobble there against the bar.

“You gonna sit in my lap man?”

“No.  Never.  No thank you.”

“Good cuz I don’t trust you and your fucking Depends.”

“Not a question of depending or not— I know— they do the job.”

“I wondered what that smell was.  Guess now I know why you’re wearing your skin colored pants, the trifecta.”

 It’s difficult to be friends with the British.  It's difficult to be friends with anyone. I take it and wait, blushing obliquely, polishing off the beer.  I know what it's like to be sober.  I've peaked over the edge of that cold-turkey precipice for a long time and guess what, no matter why you decide to do it you lose all the little fun perks like being unable to feel new things, unable to find rational new ways to punctuate moments of joy, or stress, and it’s not nearly as easy to muddy up your overall feeling about being alive when you have to actually examine all of your relationships with other people all the time, it sucks! So, I down my beer and have another, standing there, waiting for Gigi to text or for the clock to signify that it’s time to go or for someone to ask me how was my day, what was I doing there so early.  I wait and rehearse what I will tell them when they ask me this.

“I’m here because I need help,” I don’t tell them.  “I’m here because I don’t like myself and I feel hollow and I don’t know how to get any money out of doing the things that I love which makes me feel like my love is worthless.  I here because I feel like work is beneath me and I’m depressed and unstable.  I’m here because sometimes I hear a song and it makes me feel things that I haven’t even experienced yet and I’m looking for patterns in that.  I’m here to reluctantly watch Cosette’s abundant breasts bounce around while she vigorously wipes down the counter.  I’m here for sensation!  I’m here looking for meaning.  I’m here for shallow conversations about complex topics,” I don’t tell them “I’m here because I go for broke three nights a week and use the other days to make excuses for being emotionally abusive and I’m smart enough to think I can get away with it.  I’m here because going on the internet is inevitable and I’m trying to avoid floating into that oblivion of nonachievement by staying poor, buying your beers, seeing actual fucking people instead of insulating myself with the depressive machinery of mistrust, machines who don’t dream or yearn or fail, to whom I am only a component in an algorithmic equation.  I am here because I am real!”

I stand and wait but the good patrons don’t say another word to me, they reminisce amongst themselves, world building, sharing memories, reliving the unachieved utopias of previous decades, someone laughs a ugly mangy laugh, Gigi hasn’t texted me back,  I head over to the restaurant at the appointed time.

VI

Later, much later, Cosette will orchestrate a goodbye meetup and tell me about how Kristine had been looking for me that afternoon.  “She is’n obscure beauty.  A nice snatch.”

          “Catch?”

          “Catch’et?”  She said she came in, introduced herself, asked for me, and left.

          “Why didn’t you tell me?”

          “I try.  You were pretty buzzed boy.”

I carried her suitcase out of the sunlight into the projection of shade. She dug out my paperback of Allende's City of the Beasts, and apologized for not reading it as she handed it back to me. They called her train.  She embraced me in a cavernous hug, enveloping me in her dizzyingly earthy aroma.

VIII

A young Puerto Rican waitress takes us upstairs and on the way we pass a wall of kitschy old-fashioned butterfly paintings.  We’re seated in a huge room adorned with antiques and junk.  That kinda place.  Our waitress wore a pencil skirt, a prim black blouse and two pairs of glasses, one on her nose and the other on the crown of her head.  We look longingly into the hearts of our menus as I wish I could order two or more variations on silence, for both appetizer and entree.  The ambient music is R&B Jazz.

Kristine’s face is icy, but she smiles inscrutably and orders what she describes as “an enervating non-alcoholic wine.”  I can swear she has a fucking halo.  She’s wearing a long flowery skirt and a pink gingham blouse which I’ve not seen before. She looks radiant.  I need a fucking drink.  My own clothes, which I now review guiltily, having all day given no notice, are, as I define it, smart casual.  Who really needs a girlfriend?  I already know this shirt doesn’t match these pants- why have someone around to nag me about it?

But she doesn’t nag me about it.  When the wine arrives I raise a glass to her.  She offers a countertoast to me, which I don’t belabor further by denying.  Tastes like sour juice.  Ever try smiling with just your eyes because your mouth muscles won’t unterse themselves fast enough?  Ray Charles’s I Had the Craziest Dream oozes in slow motion from the obscure stereo system.

III

"Ray Charles had perfect pitch."

"Hm."

"You okay?"

"Ay okay."

"I can't ever tell.”

"Hm?"

“I can’t tell if you crave inclusivity or exclusivity?"

"Hm."

"Sure you're okay?"

"Can’t you tell?”

"I can't tell.”

"Trust me."

IX

"Can I trust you?”

"Of course you can.”

"My mother likes you, but I think you’re afraid to give anything of yourself.  I think you’re afraid somebody’s going to get close and hurt you so you’re just hurting yourself by holding yourself back all the time.”

"And drinking too much.”

"Yes, that too.  I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”

"Then why don’t you?”

"Because I’m not sure I can trust you.  Relationships are supposed to be reciprocal, you know, you give and you take?”

“Maybe I don’t want that kind of relationship. Maybe I don't want to take anything. St. Augustine said that to say ‘I love you’ is to say ‘I want you to be’.”

Our waitress returns and asks if we’ve made any decisions.  Kristine says “You want to find a person who will solve all your problems and for some reason love you for it.”

It’s at this point when Gigi texts me.  Better late than never?  It’s at this point I get up and announce that I’m going for a walk.  Kristine sits up, her saintly head held high atop her regal neck.

“Wh— where?”

"I'm going to go get a drink."

“Don’t come back here.”

I bend and kiss her forehead, turning away from the antique lamplit warmth into into the cheerless early evening dark.

II 

Through a dusty lens, night trucks all parked in parallel lines, engines running, like old guys waiting languorously to get their haircuts.  I lumber past, slide into the forgotten.

Across windswept fields, across hours and miles, across the furtive river where it roams depositing silt, hollowing out the valleys, the river and time in the thick of the dark, the unfriendly mountains all, lurking like hooligans beneath their ball-cap clouds.  That nightmarish hour when the downright density of night bloats reluctant to cede terrain to the day, I used to dread it as a child, but different disparate desperate people have told me that they get a different read on the desolation.

X

            A long walk really can dry you out, but not as good as sleep, and though exhausted I can tell right away that she has the apartment to herself but *he’s* recently been there, she’s barefoot, black and blue, manic-eyed, bouncing trembling and not holding anything back with a delirium tinged verbal blitzkrieg of profanity and unqualifiable sadness and the strange notion occurs to me that if she sleeps now she might die so instead of sitting, which I want to do, I suggest we walk, forcefully, which it seems like we need to do. 

            I am so used to watching her walk away that I don’t even think about it as I count aloud the steps she takes until she is just a blurry figure beneath the next streetlight, my voice a whisper, her voice cracking and shaking and floating under the next streetlight, then the next, I forget what she looks like in the daylight.  My shoulders feel stiff, it’s the most I’ve felt in a while. I run to catch up before there are no more streetlights, we enter the campus park, she is loudly singing a song without music, vacillating about secrets and magic, the stars coruscate commiseratingly.  I remember the time I heard the voice of God speak to me, you’re not alone God said, but no one else heard, even I didn’t believe it, one doubts the universe has any intimate voice at all.

She throws her phone into the bushes and we look together, trying to find something hidden, eventually we do, somehow the screen has not shattered.  “I love this time of night,” she says “let’s have a story.” Last year’s leaves crunch underfoot, the last of the blue campus lights shining through our hair, two ghosts, she sighs and trudges ahead and I wonder what Kristine's mom would think of me now.

XII

            The reflection of my yawning face in the van window swallows the raindrops streaking through rushing headlights.  The engine drone encloses my mind within all the optimism of the empty early morning parking lot as a man and a woman let themselves in and I put it in gear, turn right and vroom up the on-ramp, a wet road rising up to meet me.

            “Mister,” the man says penitently into the rearview, “you forgot about the baggage.”