Elaborate systems of enlightenment are built around the idea of desirelessness, but with me it seemed to bring, instead of enlightenment, only confusion and directionlessness. And I didn’t like that. For me, feeling desire was synonymous with feeling alive, which is why I was looking out across the vast passing country for a place to pull off the road.
The color of this particular part of the earth was chalky and red. Scattered plants were turning green on the skin of the landscape, and my eyes were scanning the landscape, looking for a certain kind of spot, not sure what the spot would look like, but certain I’d know it when I saw it.
And when I did see it, I pulled off the highway. I was about a half hour outside of Salina, Kansas, and I parked the car in a small gravel area at the side of a county road. I walked through some weeds and crossed over a sagging barbed-wire fence into a sandy opening in the trees near a streambed, with rocks and roots and water flowing past. I settled myself in the sand of this area, and under the sun, fortressed by rocks and brush, that’s where I pulled down my pants and began to try to masturbate. I say try because I wasn’t feeling especially sexy or sexual or turned-on. I just wanted to feel what those things felt like.
Something in me was definitely willing, at least to try, to bring into my mind some fantasy, or a series of fantasies, and they came and went but something else in me was either not willing or just not interested. I was distracted by something, or worried about something, and although I tried, I was disconnected from a part of myself, from Anne and the memory of Anne. I was disconnected from my body, and the excitement that resided in my body. But as I say, I tried to make it happen, to make desire happen, and I got to a certain point and I decided … I didn’t decide. I changed my mind. The moment wasn’t right, or the surroundings weren’t right. I walked back to the car, got in, drove back to the main road, and continued on my westward trail.
Desirelessness can be a good thing, no doubt about it, but for me desirelessness was not the cessation of desire, it was the loneliness of no desire. Losing Anne was, in my imagination, the same as losing everything. And although I still believed I would find Anne, and still desired to find her, the membrane between me and my desire, I could feel, was thickening. I wanted to puncture the membrane or open the membrane, and to do that, even in my mind, I had to make an effort. And this effort involved focusing on Anne. Which was easy enough, except my thoughts alone weren’t getting me through the membrane. The memories came but not the breaking through.
I remembered the time I bought Anne a negligee. She didn’t want a negligee but she put it on and stood as she supposed I wanted her to stand, and it wasn’t the sexiness of the garment that aroused me; it was her willingness to wear it. Her willingness was what I remembered, and it’s what I was thinking about when, after driving along without music or human interaction, I stopped somewhere on the plains of Kansas and got some gas. A short distance down the road leading back to the interstate, at the edge of the gas station, two people, a man and a woman, were sitting with a few bags. I slowed down as I approached, pulling to a stop in front of them.
2
They said they were coming from a festival, and from the way they were dressed — he with the long hair, she with a feather in her braided hair — you might have guessed the Woodstock festival, or a Woodstock reunion. They were polite and appreciative, and as they put their canvas bags in the back seat they said they were going to Boulder, Colorado, which was where I was going.
The man, whose name was Fletcher, did most of the talking. The girl, whose name, appropriately, was Feather, sat in the middle of the back seat. She had lips like the lips of Brigitte Bardot, and I could see, in the rearview mirror, that her light brown hair was cut very short in front, so that it stood up, as in photos I’d seen of Chief Joseph, the last great chieftain of the Nez Perce Indians. Although Feather didn’t talk much, her wide eyes were full of enthusiasm. Life for her was all about learning and growing, and since I’d been overlooking those aspects of life, I found her innocence and honesty attractive. Fletcher was also attractive and honest, and I was glad to have them in the car.
During the getting-to-know-you stage I asked them questions about themselves and it didn’t take much to get them talking about their theory of love, which was really a theory of desire, according to which, love was just an echo of desire. “There’s only desire,” Fletcher said, and that’s what they were after, a state of continual desire in which love would flourish. It wasn’t pleasure exactly, but like pleasure, it existed for itself. To have desire — and specifically desire untethered to an object—“You have to get through all the other stuff, society’s stuff.” You had to get past the craving for outcome.
Although I challenged them occasionally, mostly I was interested in how they actually practiced what they were preaching. Because I was thinking about Anne, the idea of desire unconnected to an object made no sense to me, at least at the moment. But I was willing to listen. And they were willing to explain to me, and even show me, what they meant. At one point Feather actually pulled down her drawstring pants, enough to show me the tattoo of two arrows intertwining on her abdomen.
The back seat was small, especially with their luggage, but at some point Fletcher climbed in the back with Feather and I could see in the rearview mirror that they seemed to be in love. They would have called it something else, but whatever it was, they stayed there in the back seat, nestled in their canvas packs. I would occasionally look back at them and occasionally my eyes met Feather’s, and although she didn’t look like Anne, her eyes reminded me of Anne. They seemed to be saying, “Remember this? Remember desire, existing without cause or reason?” They seemed to be trying to show me how thin the veil was between the desire side and the other side, not talking, but in a way urging me to break through to that side, giving me a pretty clear invitation to cross the boundary to what I wanted to imagine, and the only problem was, I was driving the car. Instead of watching them I turned my attention to the fence posts that were racing past the highway.
We drove across the flat expanse of prairie, watching the snow-covered peaks of the Rocky Mountains coming into view. As we drove through Denver and up to the town of Boulder, I told them a version of my story, and they seemed optimistic about the probability of finding my wife. If desire, physical desire, was in me, and if I could access it, they practically guaranteed I would do what needed to be done. Both of them, they said, could see a little bit into the future. Fletcher said, “You can tap into the other world,” and they both nodded as if they were acquainted with that other world.
When we pulled into Boulder I found a pay phone and called the number Linda had written on the piece of paper. The British fellow answered, and he gave me directions to a house in the foothills outside of Boulder. My two companions didn’t seem to have a place to stay so I invited them to come with me. They accepted the invitation and we drove up several roads to a mailbox in front of a driveway. A man with dreadlocks pointed out where we could pitch a tent — they had a tent — and when we found a nice flat spot on the pine needles, that’s what we did.
Other people were camping on the property around this house but they were barely visible through the trees. We laid our sleeping bags in the tent, which was probably a two-person tent, but they didn’t mind and I didn’t either. Not only did I have my sleeping bag, now I had — it wasn’t a teepee but I thought of it as a teepee — the sense of being an Indian. Light came in from the top of the tent, and also from the walls, which were made of thin green nylon. Since there was going to be a gathering that evening Feather and Fletcher decided to walk up to the center of where that gathering would be. I lay back on my unfurled sleeping bag, watching the sky pass by over my head and listening to the generalized hum of voices preparing for the party.