I learned to wait for rain. I learned to smell sickness in tinny bits of trash. I stuck my face in the trash. I inhaled. I split for some new terror. I dreamed of ways to evade capture. I evaded capture.
I began all my sentences with I. Then I decided not to.
Who was looking for me? Someone was.
Most nights I slept in my truck. Others I slept beside it, on a blanket on the dirt, in the tree-shaded place where I’d parked. I’d park at state parks, or down old logging roads. I’d park in the lots of megachurches and hospitals. I’d ransack the midnight café by the waiting room. I’d don baby blue scrubs and I’d run, I’d hurry. I’d hustle. I was always hustling. I ate pastries iced with white crumbling sugar.
I had friends. My friends had parties. They threw these parties in clearings in the woods. They built huge bonfires. I gathered sticks, an offering. Most nights I went to a party. I had so many friends and the friends I had liked to drink and to take pills. This made it a party, even if it wasn’t. Even if it was just two. There were other people, too, who weren’t friends, but who also liked to party. I’d drive slowly down forest roads, peering through the trees, searching for a glow. Usually I found one. Sometimes it was a family camping, or a bum. I wasn’t a bum.
My friends hardly had names.
Tonight it is a family. There are four of them. There is a mother and a father. The father has longer hair than the mother. There are two children, sleepy children, resting their heads on a pile of sticks. I think about how sparks flit in edgy motion over the fire, and how they fall, and how they are put out. It is too wet here for a forest fire, except that isn’t science. Sometimes firefighters light the bramble, the underbrush. This intervention restores balance to the forest. I read it on a signpost.
I watch the family through the trees. I am immune to most things. I ate from cans even when I had a house.
It is true I am searching. It is true I am a good friend to the people I meet. I meet these people, this family, though they hardly seem to realize. They can’t even see me. I am behind a tree. It is a tall tree and that’s all I can say about it. Also I can say that it is a tall tree in a thin forest regrown in the gray night. I can say a lot about it, but not its name.
At eight I memorized the names of native trees. But I didn’t grow up here.
I am hungry. I am kind. I am asking for some kindness tonight. From the black, looking towards the flame-thrown dusk—I am asking.
A voice, a ray of clean white light. The father walks towards me. The father holds his shoulders high. He hands me a twenty. He tells me to leave. I tell him this is not a very nice place to camp, so close to the roadside, with no source of moving water. Then I leave.
In the morning, I wash my face in a stream. Last night I didn’t sleep. I used to be angry at myself for not finding a place to sleep. Now I tell myself that this means I didn’t need sleep. That if I needed sleep, I would have. I would have returned to a place I knew well.
I’m getting better at being alone. Because of this I meet a girl by the stream. She is walking her dog. If I was afraid of being alone, I would have stuttered. Instead I say, Good morning to you.
I say it clear and ready. We talk.
I show her my truck. I tell her I live in it. I tell her if I wanted to live somewhere else I would. Her dog is a big mutt with mottled brown fur. She is short and has blonde hair. Her name is Rem. We make plans.
That night, I find a party. I make sure it is good. There are twenty people arranged in place around a sputtering fire. I drink some, then I leave, to meet Rem where I was supposed to meet her, on the street by the stream. This was the plan. I would find a party, then we would rendezvous at eleven and then I would take her back to that party. When I had a phone, I used it to read message-board accounts of gruesome crimes. I dreamed of bodies. My service got cut off when I quit paying.
Rem is waiting. I am starry and I am tall and I am strong, and I showered at the hospital. I smell like peonies. I stole a rose from the front garden of a little cottage, but it is plastic, stuck there in the mulch. Still I give it to her. She kisses my hand. Driving to the party I tell Rem about where I was from and I tell her about why I came here. I tell her about how I’m not really from the same place as I was. As I had been.
I make up my reasons. At the party we dance in loose circles around each other, through the throngs of people. They are teenagers and are gazing at us, amazed at our limberness. I am a perfect specimen of the night, and I am sober, mostly, and I am seeing a person like myself, now, I am seeing a person like myself dancing lithely around the dying fire. I am seeing from a branch, where I sit. I sit on a tree like one behind the house where I lived between the ages of seven and ten, that is, a tree with thick swooping branches, upturned and sturdy. It is a tree so gently sloped that you can climb it on your feet.
I am on my feet. I am watching Rem sway. I am watching her body framed by the fire, and I am seeing her scanning the space, and I am here, in the branch of this nameless tree. I am in front of the sky.
It scared me, that someone was looking for me. Now it makes me durable.
I tell Rem that I haven’t always done nothing for work. I used to adjudicate insurance claims, find fraud. After I lost my job, I moved in with my parents. I lasted a month, then I moved out. Now I’m here. Now I’m my own boss.
_________
I spent the night at a motel with Rem. She was staying here already. She is just passing through. She is on a journey to discover something about America. She told me what but I forgot. She told me in that hazy space before sleep, and then I slept. I awoke to her sitting on the bed looking at me. The walls are dark panels of laminate peeling where they meet.
I took a shower. I told her that I took one yesterday, so that this is not something so unusual. I told her that in fact I don’t need to take a shower, because I am clean, because I am fastidious with my appearance. It is just that my intended appearance is the one I have, the pocked face, the hair so long at the back and cropped at the front. My slacks are unsullied and my shirts are torn at the armpits, but they are still good, made of fine foreign cotton. When I left, I packed only my best things.
After my shower, Rem suggests we get breakfast. We walk to a diner. She orders toast and I order pancakes and bacon and homefries. I still have the twenty and I put it down. I am a gentleman here at the diner, listening to the radio, to the hits from when I was a kid. It is Nineties Hour, the gay man on air says.
We spend the day at a small lake beach. The water is always cold. The sand is brown and fine and full of clay, and you can spread it on yourself, and, if you have a camera, you can take photos of that. You can gaze at those photos of yourself covered in clay bestowed with vague healing properties and you can feel safe with what is concealed. We play with her wet dog.
I tell Rem that maybe she is the person looking for me, and she thinks it’s romantic. She thinks so but also wants me to know that she is going to leave the next day. And so, you know …
I know. I mean I thought she was hired by the people I knew to look for me. I thought her dog is perhaps a hound trained in the art of tracking. Or that she is. Trained, that is. Probably she is an ex-cop fired for stealing cocaine from the evidence locker and employed now for herself, for hire by people for whom someone needed is missing.
She laughs. She still doesn’t get it. She still sits there, in her underwear and bra, on the plaid blanket that I sleep upon. I know that when she leaves, this won’t end. I know she won’t leave. She says, Maybe I’ll pass through here again.
I tell her to tell whoever hired her that I am fine. I am safe. Then I jump in the cold water, and I swim to the center of this small lake. I wave from there. I swim to the opposite shore. I wind my way along the bank to where Rem still sits, and I ask her where she’s going next, playing along. She says wherever the road takes her. I say that’s a crazy thing to say. Look, I say, I’m intimate with fate.
Then I think, Whatever. Back at the motel, she takes a shower. The lake water makes my skin rise in small red bumps, and itch, but I don’t take another, because this is something I have to get used to.
I sit on the bed. I pace the room. I realize my truck is still outside. Surely she’s sent photos back to whoever hired her. They are running the plates now. Or they are putting a bulletin out, all-points. My parents are on a plane now to where I am. I listen to Rem sing My Chemical Romance and I listen to the shower slow to a trickle, and I pat the dog’s head, and I walk out the door into the dripping sun. Beneath pink I start to drive. I get on the highway.
I pass stalled housing developments and I pass forests, and there are mountains, too, but they are small and rocky, with no snow. Actually they are not even mountains. They are bits of dead sky stilted in space. I get scared some and then I remember that I have found a place before and I will find one again. A place to live, a way to. I have eighty miles in the tank. I remember that as long as someone is looking, I am fine. As long as someone wants me back then I have something to return to.
I see some strip-mall Vaporama and think that this is really America. It’s pretty dumb to look for America. Rem seems smart, so she must know already. That’s why she is looking for me.
I remind myself that it is good that I left, and good that I did again. It is best I had no time to say goodbye to Rem, if that is her name, because that means there is something still undone and open in the world, something requiring my involvement.
There is a sunset like one in a picture-book. There is a hawk on a powerline. There is a bit of the past hung out in the field before me. There is an assemblage of feelings, sat there like toys, like a stick of gum that courses a current through your hand when you pull. I try to pull. All I get is a sketch. I see the chalk-drawn outline of a body. Then I watch it fade in the rain.
Alexander Fredman is a writer living in New York. His work has appeared in Moot Point Magazine and Dark Mountain.
Image: news.ucsb.edu
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Heavy Feather Review 