Gone (19 page)

—Come to bed.

Her voice contains no hint of Magda by her side. My heart is full of hate but instead I take up her hand and kiss her fingers; the ruby ring Robert bought her; my lips touch her skin for the last time. I think of her feet; the tanned hard skin she loves me to caress when she is tired. Her perfect arches. The tip of a lit cigarette glows as Magda inhales beside her. The lurid smell of sex. This is her life. This is her real life, tonguing this bitch. I am the present hobby. In the kitchen I fiddle with the key ring to remove keys and then give up. I have always held onto keys. Holfy's. Even the keys to her place uptown. My father's. Medbh's. The house in Ireland. Botero charges out after me when he hears the door chimes ring and she shouts after me:

—Some cigarettes, please?

I pause to search for irony: something she will take to her grave but nothing comes. One day I will come up with a parting shot for someone. The dog looks up at me and then to his leash:

—No. Go in. Go in.

He looks up, sad eyes on him. I get a tub of yoghurt out of the fridge and he dances on his hind legs with excitement. I take the lid off and put it on the floor.

—Happy birthday, Bo.

He slurps messily and I leave before he finishes.

The gate is closed where we park the car. I bang on it with the keys. Lazy flickers from the Chinaman's hut, he is watching television. I bang louder, loud enough for him to hear me. I will be glad to see the back of him. A prostitute, resembling a weary Aretha Franklin drifts along the sidewalk.

—Want in, honey?

Nothing more seductive than a nigger offering. Always wondered what dark meat would be like. Brown and purple, a strange combination. When I turn to look back he has already clopped past, his hands flicking up his orange miniskirt; shining black buttocks. He pauses without turning then walks on, bored. I wrap the gate and kick it. A light goes on. Chinky drags himself out of his chair and hits the button on the wall. He spits on the ground and I salute him.

—Hot night.

He ignores me as always.

—Where she?

—She come.

We are three feet from each other in the elevator. He reeks of cigarettes. He stops the elevator and walks in the general direction of the car; senses I have already spotted it; turns back to the elevator; waits. I turn the ignition and Janis Joplin comes on. Holfy's cassette.
Get it while you can.
She could always push it further than me: that is her sin; that is the only sin. The car is tight between wall and pillar. Chinky watches, waiting for me to damage something. For two years I have wished this bastard a good morning and for two years he has looked at me the way he is looking at me now. I manoeuvre it out and drive into the elevator beside him. We drop slowly. This is the first purposeful thing I have ever done. We jolt to a halt. The exit gate rattles up. I reach into my wallet and take out a twenty. Already he is walking away. I call after him. He looks at me—at the tip—with passionate disinterest. He turns back to his hut. I go after him and stop him and offer him the money again. He looks up at me and for the first time I see him closely; he is alert and full of disgust. His breath is nauseating. I crumple the money in my fist and punch him full in his face. He falls back a step but holds his balance. Blood dribbles from his nostril. He smiles and turns to his office. I run like fuck, hit the down button on the gate and jump in the car. The gate starts to rattle down in front of me. I shoot out onto Little West Twelfth and almost hit a man pushing a falafel stand. I spin around onto Gansevoort and stop for a second. I can't resist. I turn the carlights off and double back. He has his back to me with a gun in his hand pointing at the sidewalk. I reverse and makes for the Hudson Parkway. I always imagined that whenever I left this city it would be up along the Hudson River. I take the Lincoln Tunnel and feel freedom in the breeze rushing through the open windows. The last time I'll have to put up with her age-thickened arse, her padded bras.

I have to get past hatred. I think of God, the last refuge of the hopeless. Is God happy? God must be bored watching the same unimaginative mistakes repeated and repeated and repeated.

Unravelling

I drive west for dead hours. I feel nothing except the coffee weakening with the miles. The traffic has long since thinned but never stops. Morning seems centuries away. Trucks pass, their roar more ferocious, more urgent in the humid night. For three hours there hasn't been a single bend in the road. My eyes are heavy with sleep and my anger at her has receded, diluted to an impotent impulsiveness and a road going to I don't know where. I turn the radio off and stare ahead into the miles. America is a highway, going nowhere. Each time I think I am doing fine, changing the rules, changing myself, but I am doing nothing but making the same mistakes, can no longer see the truth in anything.

The car hits gravel on the shoulder and the noise jolts me awake. I take the next exit. Four in the grimy morning. I pull up at the back of a closed Dairy Queen. My eyes are burning and gritty, I let the seat back and sleep.

Birds wake me. It's five—not yet bright. I drive back to the intersection to get on the interstate and then swing around and stop in the roadway, the engine idling. Enough of straight roads. I put the car into gear and drive back past the Dairy Queen. Night has not yet left the truck stop. The Iron Skillet. All food all day. Yummy. Even though people are eating greasy breakfasts and the sky is haunted with a pallid blueness, night clings to the restaurant; sticks to weary cigarette butts in unemptied ashtrays, to the tired eyes of the waitress slouching towards me with coffee sloshing in its pot; it creeps out of the sullen silence of the jukebox. Groups of dungareed men slumped on orange plastic chairs around large tables drinking coffee and smoking. They could be farmers if they weren't so lethargic. I look for a table without a phone but they all have them.

After I order breakfast I stare at the phone, look away from it, look back at it, give up and punch in the code. It takes three tries to get it right and then I hang up before she answers. I have no stomach for breakfast and know I have to phone her.

—Mmin?

—It's me.

—Mm. Hi me.

—Can we talk?

—Mm.

—Will you please wake up? Is she still there?

—Mmm.

—I'm calling from a truck stop.

—Mmm?

—I'm calling from Pennsylvania.

—Is it fun?

—It's over.

—Pennsylvania's over?

—We are.

—We are. Really?

—I've had enough.

—You only know when you've had enough when you've had too much.

—Magda is too much.

—What a squirrel you are. Ciao.

—I'm serious.

—You're calling me from a truck stop in the middle of the night to say it's over, yes? I've got a job to get up for in three hours. You tell me it's over? Good luck. What do you want me to say, don't do it? Well, Serious, hope you're not in my car. I need it for the job in New Jersey this morning.

—I am. I can't explain it. I have to be by myself.

—You don't
have
a self to be with. Fuck off. Are you in my car?

—Yep.

She hangs up and I listen to the buzzing of the telephone line for a long time. I look around, sure the diners know she has hung up on me, and when the waitress comes with my plate and raises her eyebrows, she raises them not to ask me to make room for the plate, but to tell me I deserve to be sitting here with a telephone in my hand and no one talking and no one listening. Two blacks stuffing their faces at the other end of the restaurant. My stomach lurches at the sight of the food. A train passes, wailing. The same cry as ships in Dublin Bay on a foggy night. At the cash desk my eye catches sight of a poster on the dirty yellow wall behind the waitress:
Nothing can ever change the fact that you and I once had wonderful times.
Only in America. Holfy got fat and I couldn't bear the sight of her fat. There must have been a moment when love stopped, a clock giving its final tick, the sea's final ebb. I didn't want go grow old with her. No nice way of saying it. I walk out into the parking lot and look around at America. I can't remember which direction is which. Her implacability, that, more than anything, is what I'm driving away from. I go back into the truck stop and get a pack of cigarettes out of the machine. Four weeks since I put one in my mouth. I tear the cellophane wrapper off. No ceremony. The tip is fatter than I remember. I cough, and, even with the unpleasantness of coughing, a calmness fills and I feel violently alive.

Dazed and drunk with heat. A bird flashes across the front of the car. A soft pop like a Styrofoam cup splatting flat. I pull over. A mush of feathers and innards. I park off the highway under an oak tree and sleep. I wake sweating and parched. The windscreen is covered with drips of sweat from the oak leaves. Even the trees are weary of the heat. Rain come then stops as quickly. Birds peck at the earth. Lilac smells stronger after rain. I never knew what pleasure was until Holfy took me in her soft mouth. I light a cigarette. Sweet identity a cigarette gives. A For Sale sign at the edge of the road: Ayn Runnings. Everything she touches turns to Sold.

The terrors come as fiercely in the day now. Hungry fat crows waiting to devour. America is a highway with no exits. Meaningless highways stretching into infinity. I can't bear another night in the car. I stay at a Fairfield Inn in Sioux City. The Fairfield Inns, the Taco Bells, the Amoco filling stations: the roads of America; a litany of anonymity spread across a continent. The cattle in the early morning fields, their hides black and steaming in the haze, prancing like circus horses in the heavy morning. I pass through Wahoo. Wahoo Wahoo. An owl calling. I keep driving. Holfy is sliding into a past with Ursula. Ruth is dead. Father is dead. I had felt sickly free at his funeral, like a door had been unhinged by a fierce wind. I had thought of my last name, my father's name, and that I was the last child to carry it. After my own death there would be no one, no one would carry the name.

Lone Tree

I like it here. The space. The realtor looked nervous, shocked that I agree to buy the barn so quickly. There's a small house too but it was the barn that attracted me. The place had been unsold for years. I know why Holfy was apprehensive that night I got back from Dublin. It wasn't Ursula. It was the freedom the money from the house gave me. I had choice now and Holfy sensed I would be looking around, looking for a freedom she couldn't give me. Ursula's voice is leaving me at last. All the voices are leaving me.

On the distant highway, a car shimmers past. American cars have a way of being, a sense of movement that suggests their destination is unimportant; their function is to make the highway exist. Here, far from the cities, beneath a vast blue sky, cars are alien; an ugliness cruising across the plains. When I go into Lone Tree, people's faces appall me; the pain of their lives glares like pornography. The isolation has made me too sharp an observer of misery. I need the starched blue sky I can run off into. A sea without wetness. Everything is bigger here. All the voices are nearly gone. Finally, life started when I left Holfy.

*   *   *

I have lost interest in working on the barn. At least temporarily. It's too hot to work and it seems blasphemous not to be having fun on Independence Day. I am sitting on the broken porch. There is no breeze. The kitchen is the only place with an air conditioner and I move in there. The cicadas, the cacophonous cicadas, are screeching Ursula's name. I see her walking away from me. Now, after the parting, her walk has an alienated majesty about it. I sit in the grim kitchen and read the book about the Baird murder that took place a mile away, some years ago. It's badly written but I am hooked on the sloppy and conceited writer who is giving, as he puts it, a dispassionate and unbiased account of one of America's most baffling murders. Whenever a writer claims to be impartial you can be sure he'll be falling over himself to hide his little opinions, and a stupid writer, like this one, will fail. I wake with the book on my lap and the heat of the sun coming through the dirty windowpane. I'm looking for the reason why, with the answers dancing around me, I haven't changed. The birds begin to compete with the cicadas, singing the night in. I drag myself up and begin drinking, drinking myself into stupor. Happy freedom of drunkenness. Mosquitoes in the house again. Waiting for me to go to bed to eat me. Fuck this country. A vodka gimlet. A loud bang across the fields sends a shiver through me. The Baird couple dead on the floor in front of me. Even the worst scribbler can set the mind racing. In the black sky a ball of light climbs slowly into the sky, opens and scatters its beauty, a cascade of reckless jewels fading away into darkness. Moths bash off the screen searching for an opening. There are no shortcuts. Only a sparkle ago I had my arm around Holfy's waist and she had her arm around mine and we were leaning against the bridge along the Hudson River with thousands of others, watching the fireworks until we grew tired of the oohs and aahs and our necks hurt with looking up and we started kissing because we looked at each other and felt the same thing; luckiest people in the world to be together. Once upon a time, a long moment ago, I was down by the pond in Dublin, leaning on a bridge with Ursula, waiting for the train to go under and counting the carriages and writing down the number and we'd kiss if we agreed on the same number. Go home and study if we got it wrong. Waiting for the train to go under and we were so happy we didn't think gravity could keep our feet on the ground. I am twisted with anger at the stupid bastard I was with her. And with Holfy. If only she had put up with a little foolishness from me.
Put up with me,
my mind whispers into a dead past. I am jealous of our past, of her present without me. God must have been this jealous when Eve and Adam first set eyes on each other.