Somebody Somewhere (30 page)

I
arrived in Sri Lanka on the way to the United Kingdom. I didn't know where I was staying. I just knew I had a ticket that wasn't an airline ticket for somewhere and that it had something to do with a place called Goldy Sands. Having come through customs with the mass of sweaty baggage and sweaty people carrying it, I found myself standing about not knowing what to do or where to go.

I followed some people holding tickets that looked like mine. They were being ferried through a gateway and shoved into clusters. They held out their tickets. I looked from them to the attendants and held out mine, too. I got shoved into a cluster of people.

“Come on,” said the attendant and I followed. Herd mentality. Stick with the herd, Donna. We were ushered into the Sri Lankan version of a taxi.

We were driven to the hotel and given keys. I took to my room like a mouse chased by a cat to its mouse hole. My old friend the ocean was outside of my window. I tuned into the rhythm of the tide until I became it as I stood on the balcony, and the sun went down.

I didn't know what one did about eating in a place like this. As it turned out I already had vouchers for meals as part of my ticket. “You should go on a tour,” said the attendant. I forgot the “little old lady, buses, and art gallery” rule and went with a Sri Lankan stranger in his “taxi.”

“You married? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you like Sri Lanka? Do you like Sri Lanka men? Do you like men? Have you ever had a boyfriend? Are you afraid of AIDS? Would you like to get married? Would you like to get married to me?” The taxi driver went on and on as I answered each question honestly. It wasn't until he got to the last question and he explained his intentions that I understood what was happening. I thought that it was a sort of factual
quiz, a culture study on his behalf, or that maybe he was into sociology or something.

I felt so worried and sick after this that I didn't really notice where we were going or really see the sights of Sri Lanka. I tried to stay focused on what Mr. Miller had told me: “Herd mentality.” That's what I had done wrong. Damn it, I had strayed from the herd.

“Don't answer their questions,” Mr. Miller had told me. “If they persist, tell them you're not interested in talking.” “I'm not interested in talking,” I said mechanically to the driver, echoing Mr. Miller's sound advice. The driver persisted. “I'm not interested in talking,” I said again, looking out the window thinking, Thanks Mr. Miller. The driver finally shut up. Back at the hotel I paid him and raced back to my room.

L
ife was a board game, the dice had been thrown, and I was to move forward a few more spaces.

The plane touched down in London and Santa Claus was there to greet me as I came through customs.

My literary agent was a white-haired old English gentleman who sounded like the King of England and looked like Santa after a shave. “You're shaking,” I said to him. “So I am,” he answered.

He was a warm person with rosy pink cheeks, a cheerful disposition, and a very strange sense of humor. He took me to the hotel chosen for my stay: a little cottage-style hotel right down to the floral curtains, in the middle of London. It had
clack-clack-clack
birthday cake chandeliers and mirrors.

There was so much to take in. My head was spinning. I had to meet my English publisher, my English public relations person, my foreign literary agent representing me in the United Kingdom and all of these people would know each other and be constantly in touch. For the first time I was to work for more than one boss at a time and be the same person with each and every one of them. I would learn what it was to experience myself consistently and find security in
having a network of people to catch me if I fell. I was no longer walking tightropes up so high, so I would never again have so far to fall.

My days were planned, my notebook was full of names other than my own, the space under the dates filled up with appointments and train station names, directions and things required to bring.

Carol could have strutted into the publishing house playing “social.” Willie could have spoken to them in interview mode. But these people were there to meet me. It was me they knew through my writing, my faxes, my phone calls. Anyone in the street could have been taught how to do Carol's parrot impressions or Willie's monkey-see, monkey-do impressions. You don't travel ten thousand miles to put on a cheap stage show.

M
y English publisher was the first person to be working with me who didn't shake when meeting me. I was impressed. I had grown accustomed to people's being unsure around me, even confused or perplexed, but the shaking was just too much. I couldn't be that unpredictable, strange, or awesome, could I?

Carol stood on the platform at Waterloo station. She had followed a stranger to this place, as she had so many other strangers to so many other places. It was all too much. Under the façade she was sick of it all. She was sick to death of it all. The trapped feeling of living under a façade she couldn't break out of found its way into the lure of train tracks. She had heard that ten people a day jumped onto the railway tracks in Britain. Hmmm, imagine all my bits splattered down there, she thought with amusement, standing close to the edge of the platform as the train approached. It whisked past her face and she smiled as though she were merely facing into the wind. “Not today,” she thought. “I'm meant to be at work. Got to go to work.” Instead of jumping in front of it, she jumped into it and went to her job, where she worked as a temp clerk.

The lights were damned bright. Adrenaline was running through my veins and noise was already climbing up through the roof despite the cotton wool in my ears. It would have been so easy to “disappear.” It would have been too easy. Being numb and unaffected, being someone other than yourself, is simply too addictive when being affected is so difficult and so sensorially overwhelming.

My publisher had understood this. I had explained the mechanics and demanded that we adjust the environment until I got used to it so that I would be able to feel for and experience and fully comprehend what I was doing and why. I wanted to be able to guarantee that I would not suddenly pack a rucksack and disappear on the whole operation, leaving their money and effort tossed away like refuse down a well-flushed toilet.

My war had become so complex and reinforced that it had taken on its own momentum until not even I could call it off. It had strangled all experience of my own actions, and life was just a great long game of strategies and battle tactics to hide the flaws, holes, and deficits. The emptiness was so complete, life had become a living death. I knew the war would one day mean I'd end up in front of a train and me and the war would be gone in less than a minute. Publishing the book would force me to lay down my weapons.

I also knew there were others like me out there who would go on living day to day because no one could understand their wars either. Even if I could condemn myself, I could not be responsible for having had a choice and chosen to damn them, too. It would have been the damnation of a world of symbolic me. The stakes were simply too high.

Money and the elusive bullshit concepts of “success” and “fame” meant nothing. They were just theories. Beyond this I could not understand them. These concepts belonged on TV screens. I could have walked out on such rot without a second thought. But if I chose to turn my back on the publication of the book, I would be turning my back on myself. I would be headed for the train tracks and no amount of “the world” money or promises could have brought me back.

I must have looked like I was crawling the walls. The publisher
thought it was a good idea to go to the park for our first meeting. It would be outdoors, so neither light nor noise would bounce wall to wall, making the meeting even harder than it was bound to be.

The lack of control that came from commitment and escape strategies to cut down overload or bail out twisted my stomach into knots. I seemed to be heading toward shutdown. Walking past the colored lights and rainbows shining brilliantly in the reflected light of a chandelier in an Indian take-out shop, I blew a fuse.

Meaning entirely fell out of all things visual. I didn't know what the visual image of the form next to me, which a few seconds ago had been my publisher, meant anymore. I looked desperately at this image trying to get the meaning back. All I knew was that the image was meant to be familiar. I found the name for the image. The name had no meaning. It told me nothing of its significance or relationship to me. All I knew was that it had to stay there and not move. I was blind and even this bit of meaningless familiarity was better than none at all.

I looked at the flat, cold surface next to me and tapped it. “Window,” I said, naming it, trying to get the words to connect again.
Chink, chink
, said the cold, flat surface, and the word fell from my mouth with no connection between the two except my stubborn, insistent belief that the two were meant to connect. The empty word fell on my own deaf ears and I cried. I felt totally helpless to get my brain to reconnect.

“Lights,” I said, looking through the window of the shop, making a connection. I turned away. I felt the muscles tensing in my neck. It was like I had eaten a bag of lemons. I winced.

“We'll walk,” I ordered, suddenly surprised I had found a phrase. Great, I was coming back.

I was so totally ashamed. I felt like I had wet myself in public. I felt so disgusted in myself, so let down. Yet I looked at my publisher and named her. I felt I could trust her. She hadn't freaked out. She hadn't run about like a mad hen. She hadn't gone into verbal blah-blah-blah, making overload worse or forcing dissociation. She hadn't slapped me, trying to make me “come back.” She just stood there waiting for me.

We walked for twenty minutes and each step was another step back into “the world.” The meaning and wholeness of experiences fell back into place, piece by piece, to the pattern and rhythm of my own footfall and the familiarity of my publisher's safe presence. If she had coped with that, that was the worst of it. There would be no need to run from these people. If I couldn't cope, they would understand.