A man sitting beside me leaned over and said, Ya travelin’?
It took me a second to get back into this place, this boat where I was floating between islands and not setting a house on fire and smearing a person with blood, but I somehow said, Yes, I am.
The man was somewhere between attractive and haggard, like he’d been a stunt double for a classic movie star but had been beaten up a few too many times.
I saw you get outta a car by the station — hitching?
I didn’t like that he’d made a dotted line between the person I’d been an hour ago and the person I was now.
Yeah, have been, I said.
American?
Yeah.
I’ll tell you something — and I don’t say this to upset you, just to make you think — there was this American girl here about this time last year and she’d been hitching about, getting from here to there, you know. Maybe it had been a few months of this and she’d been doing just fine until this bloke picked her up round Christchurch and he chopped her up into about fifty-five pieces and left her all over the country.
He wasn’t looking at me as he spoke. We both watched the tender tender, our patron saint.
All right, I said. Well. Thanks for letting me know.
I don’t say it to make you stop what you’re doing, but just so you know it’s not the smartest thing you could do and you should watch out — you know, think about what you’re doing. Don’t get into the car with someone who looks like they might be able to chop you up.
No one can make decisions based on hypothetical knife skills, I didn’t say.
You Americans are always saying how you come here and don’t want to leave but I don’t think you mean dead and chopped up, you know? That’s not what you mean.
I’d never said anything about not leaving.
The tender tender came over, looked at my glass, and looked at me and that was all she needed to know to fill it to the rim again and, oh, dear God, I will love her every day for the rest of forever.
25
For at least an hour I just walked up and down the same few blocks in Wellington, thinking about hitching up to Napier to see Jaye, and when I thought of Jaye I would hear the inaudible noise but then the minor chord would start and the dissonance would begin and I would walk back the other way, think of calling Dillon or going to a hostel, and the inaudible noise would gain volume over the minor chord, and I would decide against Dillon or a hostel, then start walking toward the highway again until the minor chord came back, and this went and went for a while, my pacing — noise, chord, dissonance, noise — but finally my thumb caught a car before my mind could change and when I got to Napier I got out of the car downtown and I found a pay phone and called the number Jaye had given me so many weeks earlier. It rang and rang and no one answered and nothing happened so I hung up and watched the passing cars. They went by slowly, calmly, all stopping at the stop sign, taking their turn to do what they should do until one car sped past the stop sign and hit another car in the intersection and that car tried to swerve but jumped a curb and ran into a building and a window shattered right out of it. A man started shouting, then ran up to the pay phone and dialed and yelled and I started thinking about the time that Ruby called me in the middle of the day to ask me to come over to her apartment and when I got there she was frying bacon, frying it one slice at a time, putting it on a plate then sitting and eating it, then getting up and frying another slice. She finished a whole package that afternoon and I didn’t know whether to be amazed or afraid, amazed or afraid — I couldn’t choose which to be and neither one was happening naturally and what was I to make of it, all this bacon eating? The other car had spun a circle and was now hip to hip with a parked car, squeezed together like a picture of friends. Steam or smoke leaked from the car hood, and was I amazed or afraid? I couldn’t get a grasp on a feeling and I kept thinking of Ruby putting slick slices of bacon in her mouth. Her eyes seemed foggy and far-off and I remembered that she had endured a childhood not unlike mine but also very unlike mine, this woman who was my sister, but only legally, this person who’d emerged on the other side of the world, the product of some strangers’ bodies, this woman with whom I’d endured the same parents—who was she? Bacon turned itself into her body, thickened her blood with lipids.
I’m depressed, she said, and I’m thinking of my mother.
You mean the one you don’t know?
Yes, the one I don’t know.
What about her?
I saw something lower in Ruby’s face, something drain out of her.
What about her? she repeated, squinting.
I tried to look at Ruby with some kind of tenderness but I think it came out as condescension and I couldn’t feel my face, I couldn’t feel my face wrapped around my head, and I couldn’t feel the muscles in it and make them move in the right way. I was trapped in my body and Ruby was trapped in her body and we’d always been trying to bridge the difference between our bodies, atone for the fact that we were supposed to be family but we weren’t, not really, but we had to try anyway, try forever over and over again to find the way that we were related.
I think my mother ate a lot of pork, Ruby finally said, while she was pregnant with me.
We’d both been staring out the window and into an apartment across the street. A woman in a peach dress was pacing, pointing a remote control at some unseen device.
I sometimes get this way, Elly, it’s like someone else is in my brain, telling me what to do. I go out. I buy a pound of bacon. I come home and eat the whole thing. I feel like I can hear her voice. I know it’s stupid, it’s crazy, it’s whatever, but it’s how I feel — I really hear it.
Her expression was broad and placid, like an ocean while no wind is blowing, and a few months later Ruby did not exist anymore, and years later I was standing on a sidewalk in another country, thinking of that moment, still trying to find a feeling about it and trying to find a feeling about these wrecked cars — afraid or amazed? I wandered away from the cars as a crowd grew. An ambulance was singing. I walked with the setting sun at my back, hoping to find the ocean. I thought of Ruby and the dust that danced in light beaming from the window. She curled around her belly packed full of dead pig, packed full of the need she had to hear her mother’s voice.
I had barely spoken all day, but I couldn’t tell whether I missed that flank of myself, my voice, and I thought of the inaudible noise and when I thought of it, it was there, and it filled the vacuum left by my voice and I wondered if the shadow of the inaudible noise was the same thing as the inaudible noise itself, if I actually needed to be near Jaye for it to last or if it could exist without her, if it could live entirely in the memory of her, or if, instead, I needed direct exposure to Jaye to keep generating it, a vitamin-D kind of thing — and the sun went down and there was nowhere for me to be: no destination, no stranger offering a home or car and there was no way for anyone to reach me, to find me, to call me, to tell me anything, and I was fully alone, leashed within my utter self. The ocean mumbled somewhere east of me, and I could hear it but I couldn’t see it, that black ocean floating in the black air, whispering salt into any open ear. On a street corner, a child was standing like a sad statue, staring off, and as I got closer to him I began to distinctly feel worry — where did he belong and who did he belong to and what would happen to him if he had been forgotten or misplaced, if he wandered like a stray animal through alleyways and under highway bridges and along creekbeds on the edge of town? When I came closer to him a smile flickered on his face, small muscles twitching, like a lightbulb shorting out. He was holding what I thought was a juice box but it turned out to be a pack of cigarettes.