And we had. We had done it. We felt we’d done the work. But like Brigitte Bardot every time she temporarily eased her desire, we hadn’t broken through. We were flushed, our faces were, but we were not completely satisfied. Whatever the necessary thing was, we weren’t doing it.
So we stopped. We fell back on the small bed, staring up into the ceiling and feeling the presence of a world we weren’t part of.
Then, as if on cue, we both sat up. We sat on the edge of the bed. It was chilly so we covered ourselves with the blanket. We huddled together like that for a long time, looking down at the rug on the floor, and no one said a word.
The two worlds resist coming together, and yet at the same time, there’s only one world.
Feather spoke first. She said, “I feel like there’s a wall around me.”
“A wall of what?” I said.
Our thighs and shoulders were touching, but we weren’t looking at each other. “It’s glass,” she said. “I can see what’s out there and hear things, but I can’t touch anything, or if I do I’ll shatter the glass.”
“What would happen if you did?”
“If I shattered the glass? The glass would break.”
And that was all we said.
We sat like that a while longer, not speaking. Then we heard some birds outside. And I’m not saying that sitting there we shattered any glass because that would be too dramatic a description of what happened. What happened was that somehow what we wanted and what we needed, for a moment, were the same thing.
7
But then the moment was over and I was back to wanting something else. I’d already gone to another moment, thinking about the possibility of that upcoming moment. However much I tried to accept the moment as it was happening, to twist my mind into the fact of acceptance, I still wanted something else.
By the time I leaned over and kissed Feather on her forehead she was almost asleep. I got dressed, left her in the room, and drove my car into town. I parked on a neighborhood street near a health food store, bought a carrot juice, and spent the rest of the morning sitting in my car, watching the street.
With Anne, I thought, there was love. Not a passing desire, but something solid and true, and thinking this, I realized I hadn’t been looking for Anne, not very diligently, and I thought that I should. I thought I ought to make a systematic search of every street in Boulder. But when the morning light brought the people out and onto the street I got out of my car and joined them. I walked along the pedestrian mall, noticing the drains laid in the concrete, and the plants planted in good mulchy soil. I saw the sprinkler heads at the edge of the soil, and I sat on one of the benches, still holding my carrot juice. People were walking by, and I could see that they were noticing me, but mostly they didn’t make contact. They kept walking.
I was sitting on this bench in the middle of this pedestrian mall, literally in the center of what would have been a street, but I barely felt that I was there. I was watching the people, who were either watching other people or looking at shoes in the shoe store windows. Right about then a girl sat on the other side of the bench. She had a garbage bag stuffed with laundry and she sat on the bench and we started talking. She had brown hair, tied back, and we talked about New York and deforestation and about hair. I asked her if “brunette” meant the same as brown. We talked about waitressing and copy editing, and at a certain point in the conversation she mentioned that her cat had died. To me it wasn’t a monumental problem, but I was thinking that it probably meant something to her, and when she said she needed someone to help bury her cat, I volunteered.
We walked together, up the hill to a lagoon near an official-looking building, a museum or a library, and we stood in front of this lagoon. We were standing there, and I was holding the green plastic garbage bag containing, not her laundry, but her cat. I was about to throw it in the water and I said, “Do you have anything you want to say?” She was wearing a black silk dress from the 1940s, with lace, and a very sensual hat, and she said, “You’re the writer, you say something.” I didn’t even know the cat, and I said, “Well, what was the cat like?” And she said, “That cat had a mind of its own.” A mind of its own, I thought, and I said, “Here’s to its own mind,” and I swung the bag and threw it out into the lagoon. And we watched it. We watched it float. For about fifteen minutes we watched it float out there on the surface of the water and we wanted it to sink, we wanted it to go under the water, but it didn’t want that. It wanted to float right where it was. So we didn’t know. I found a stick or branch that was lying in the mud and with it, I reached out and pulled the bag back to shore. I untied the knot, folded down the sides, reached in and felt a paw down there. I took hold of the paw, pulled it up, and sure enough, it was a dead cat. I knew it was dead, not because it was stiff, but because it was so still. It was absolutely motionless. It was swaying slightly, but no air was passing in or out, so I kicked the garbage bag out of the way, swung the cat until it got enough momentum, and then threw it back into the lagoon. And we watched it. Again. We watched it keel over to one side and float there on the water. We wanted the cat to sink, but the cat had a mind of its own.
V. (Gula)
1
I’m driving south, through the Colorado mountains, and although I’m looking for clues, I’m no longer certain that the clues I’m seeing are clues for me. For instance, I’m not sure if the turn signal of the car in front of me is sending me a message to turn or not. Snow-capped mountains are on my right and dry piñon hills are on my left, and when I stop for a barbecue sandwich in a motel town called Buena Vista, the lady in the imitation covered wagon tells me about a hot springs nearby that is supposed to “heal your bones,” and I interpret “bones” to mean something unseen inside a person’s skin.
That sounds good, so I drive up the alluvial hill, along a winding stream, and find the wind chimes marking the entrance to the hot springs. I drive into the gravel parking lot and it looks like every other two-story motel but this one has water, a series of grotto-like bathing pools set in the hill. People are floating in them, and scattered around the grounds — above the gates and doorways — are hand-painted signs and Indian symbols, reminding visitors of the sanctity of the waters. PEACE IS INFECTIOUS, they say, and LISTEN TO THE EARTH.
A pregnant white-haired girl at the check-in desk tells me that all the rooms in the lodge are taken, but a teepee, she says, is available. So I take my sleeping bag into this teepee, which has a dirt floor, a bunk bed, and a fire pit in the middle. I wash up in the bathroom in the lodge and for about a day my life consists of soaking in the pools of different degrees of heat, floating on foam pads, and at night, more floating, looking up at the stars.
The employees are friendly and healthy, and they all have tattoos or piercings. I talk to a few of them, including the girl from the front desk, who lives in the lodge. She wears loose colorful clothing, and one morning, when the pools are quiet, she offers me a tarot reading. I’m not interested, I say, or ready yet, but after a morning soak I feel comfortable enough to sit with her on the thick red carpeting in the dimly lit recreation room.