author: nat (
motorbike)
email: natalia [at] tiger-tiger dot org
When I say it was only two weeks, I mean that the time we spent together was important, not that I'm making light of what, you know. Transpired. Between us. It isn't the sort of thing that happens every day. In fact I'm not sure this particular scenario has even happened to anyone else, ever, in like all of human history. To level with you, some days I'm not sure it even occurred at all. Like, in actuality. Not just to me, in my head.
I even went to this seminar for people who've encountered the spirits of departed loved ones, such as their dead grandparents or great-grandparents. Or even I guess parents, if these people were unfortunate or middle-aged. The whole thing was about as ludicrous as I'd expected. This one guy there was probably like forty, wearing Moss Lipow glasses and the sort of suit that never shows wrinkles, he seriously looked like a congressman, and this guy would tear up whenever anyone so much as mentioned the spirit of a departed loved person. And watching this guy tear up made me sort of tear up, too. Which in turn made me want to leave so badly it was like I had to pee. But I did not leave. I stayed in this seminar, and listened to this crying congressman and a bunch of middle-aged women, for ninety minutes plus the time I put in to partake of complimentary refreshments in the hallway.
I did this because I was worried. I thought that in time I might convince myself that nothing had occurred at all, and move on with my life like I'm supposed to. That one morning I'd wake up, and it would be the morning I met someone, my destiny, and that I would date and fuck my destiny, and that my destiny would propose to me.
The unlikeliness of this scenario just serves to demonstrate the scale of my concern.
I'm concerned that one day I'll be happy. Not completely happy, because who is completely happy. Decently happy. That one day I will reach this spiritual release, and the breath of the world will toggle my polarity, causing me to buy a TV and open a savings account. And then I will be just another decently happy person, with a job and, I don't know. Land. That I bought with money from my savings account.
Or, no. Wait. How do you buy land? Don't you need good credit? I will have good credit. And then I will be happy, and I will finally forget that what we had, what you and I had, was special. You were special to me, buddy.
Or maybe someone else was. It should suck that I will never know whether you are you, but for the moment I don't really care, even if you aren't. Is that weird? Maybe I just came around to say this stuff out loud, like the name of a beast that becomes real if you speak its name. Except we don't even know each other's names, so I guess I mean more like. I don't know. Like Homer. By telling our story I will force it out into the open, into a thing of oral tradition, instead of just this quiet thing stuck in my head, which has turned me into the kind of person who cries in seminars at the DC Public Library.
If you aren't you, by the way, I'm sorry for being so rude. I really wish I'd brought some flowers to mitigate the rudeness, just in case, except I'm no less broke now than I was last summer. Marcus had to lend me money for bus fare. A slow learner, Marcus, but technically I'm an even slower learner. I'm like a hedgehog that knows only one big thing, and sticks its head into the same toilet-paper bobbin over and over. I guess you were right about me. You're the sort of person who likes to say things that are true, just to be right, even if the very truth of those things makes them unfair and awkward things to say to someone who is only trying to be nice. You asshole. Actually I'm really glad that now you have no choice except to hear me out.
I have a plan, and you're not going to like it any more than you like flowers.
Now that I think about it, I don't remember if I ever told you about Marcus. You never asked. Had you asked, I would have lied and said he was a friend from college. College friends are the ones made to last, right? Since you're supposed to spend your time there figuring out what kind of person you are. Me, I never figured out what kind of person I am. I'm shit at making friends, so I've never had anyone around to tell me that I ought to become a dietitian or freelance journalist or whatever. No one ever told me what I look like from the outside. Until you. God, you must have been so lonely.
I am the opposite. I don't need anyone. Maybe that's worse, needing the opposite of people. In that respect I take after my dad. I told you a little about him, right? Dad has a cabin up on Deer Isle now, with a solar generator and a compost shed. All his life that was exactly what he wanted, getting out of reach of human contact, to listen to the silence and sell maple syrup over the internet. Both he and Mom have made careers in the cutthroat industry of nonfiction, which is probably the reason they compete over everything else, too, including fixing me. I am sorry there's no other child around for them to pin their hopes on. I have inherited no part of their ambition, their partiality. If only Mom and Dad could still exchange me for a non-flawed product, one up to the task of handling even basic stuff like diet and exercise and having a job. Technically, my job is that I write product descriptions for commercial websites. From an early age I've been encouraged to become a writer, so I am basically living the dream. In my time I've penned glowing sentences about Sony televisions, and followed those up with sentences about Panasonic televisions that were just as glowing. I am the Switzerland of both daughters and genre authors.
Mom writes self-help books. I never told you about this, because nobody likes a complainer. My complaint about nonfiction is that it seems like facts when it's usually just stuff people made up. My complaint about Mom is that she keeps trying to get me to optimize my life plan. I've always thought it a little presumptuous to consider oneself an authority on the subject of ways other people can optimize their life plan, but Mom makes good money from it, so I suppose in that sense she's gotten something right. She likes to visit places like Uzbekistan, where you have to spend days on horseback crossing steppes and stuff, and stay in yurts among the locals, so it's possible that Mom has spent her whole life accounting for every variety of person, so as to better understand how to help everyone lose weight and get promoted at their office job or whatever.
I was trying to cross the country and visit her when our whole occurrence, yours and mine that is, occurred. I was doing this because summers are a family tradition, but also because I was trying to get away from the humidity and Marcus. You are probably not even you, so I guess I'll tell the whole thing, so as not to be confusing. Jumping around too much would only make it harder to keep track of what I mean to say. I think you and I ought to come clean about some stuff, you know?
Obviously, I am going first.
For instance, Marcus. Don't even worry about Marcus. The main reason he lasted at all was that he gave up on me right away, and never tried to optimize my life plan. He'd just come over once in a while.
And don't think I'm bringing him up just to be a jerk. I'm not. It's just that Marcus had the idea for how I could get to Santa Barbara for free, so long as I managed to impress this couple, Mr. and Mrs. DeGroote, at a super old-people hour of that Saturday morning. I guess Marcus expected me to hate this idea, because as soon as I said it was good, Marcus decided that it was a bad idea, after all. He then tried to talk me out of his own idea, giving up on reverse psychology and going straight for logic, which naturally didn't play any better with me. It only stoked my flames. By Saturday morning I was basically the hedgehog, left to my own devices on Toilet-Paper Bobbin Planet.
The DeGrootes had this house. It was way off the Red Line in Glenmont, and when I stepped inside it instantly awed me into silence. It was just like. Cozy. The sort of house that everyone my age who is now normal probably grew up in. An innocuous house, with birthday cards on the fridge and hand-stitched couch pillows and stuff. I never had this. I do not hail from a card-sending, pillow-embroidering clan. All at once I felt drawn to these artifacts of tranquility, I wanted to know each one intimately, I wanted to sneak into the kitchen and pull down just one birthday card to keep. I wanted to go from room to room, smelling all that lived-in-ness and loving history.
If either of the DeGrootes sensed that they were offering coffee and homemade cookies to a crazy person, who was even then dreaming of making off with their property, they didn't mention it. They were just all, "Would you like some more cookies?" Cookies with M&Ms baked into them. The DeGrootes must like Marcus a whole big lot.
It took them half an hour to even introduce me to the DeGroote RV. Even though I would be driving this RV cross country, for pay, including gas but not food expenses, which was by the way was what Marcus had for his bad idea.
"Try not to fuck this up," he'd told me at the end of our discussion.
So I was super not about to.
But I was also aware that I had only ever driven, like. A regular car. With a manual transmission. And that even if I lied about this, I probably wouldn't get very far before messing up the engine or whatever.
Thank god it wasn't that kind of RV. It was a vintage Airstream Safari, a wagon attached to an automatic pickup truck. I figured I could handle a truck. I didn't know if I could handle a truck with a huge silver monster-turd swinging around behind it, but I had arrived ready to lie about something, so I said, "Sure. No problem."
Mr. De Groote kept telling me about how he'd done the same sort of thing back in the seventies. He probably thought I was a neo-hippie because of my name, which happens a lot. He spent a while showing me how the generator worked and stuff, then he was all, "It's a real experience. Did Marcus give you the address, or should I write it down?"
See, my question in his place would have been, "Are you sure you can get there alive?"
Except having to answer that sort of question would have obviously set me back, so I just said it would be great if Mr. DeGroote could write down the address. It was of their daughter's family in San Diego, where I would be delivering this RV in case I survived. Then I was in charge of a vintage recreational wagon and an envelope of gas money. The money was stacked in fives and tens, like the proceeds of a bake sale.
I mean, I was definitely aiming for reaching the west coast alive. I'd picked up a bunch of maps, plus a little can of over-the-counter stuff called Pepper Knight, which was supposedly every bit as good as pepper spray. That afternoon I got all my supplies in order, and traced out my trajectory in marker, but afterward I sat in the pickup for a while, just considering what I'd gotten myself into. Objectively. Then I felt really tired.
On the phone, Marcus said that he could get someone else for this, and why had I not let him talk me out of it before, and did I ever make proper plans? Calling Marcus encouraged me a lot, because the prospect of having to argue with him all summer finally got me to quit arguing with him right then, and turn my monster-turd of a responsibility toward the interstate. Turns were the biggest bitch, as expected. But when you're towing a 1964 Airstream Safari through city traffic, or even generally down a perfectly level road with not a turn in sight, pretty much everything becomes a bitch. Including me.
Or oh, getting gas. Getting gas in that fucking truck. It had to be backed up to the pump, and the whole time I was thinking, is this the day I tip over this pump? Is this the moment this turd on wheels like. Catches the sun just right and sets fire to the fuel, taking me to hell with it? And, best of all, the cap on the pickup's gas tank didn't fit or something. It cut my hand every time.
Hang on. When did it happen? That night? Unless I drove through that night and into the next. It would have been the night I stopped at a Denny's in Columbus. I'd picked the neighborhood because it seemed like the least likely location for me to get raped and stabbed seventeen times while I slept in this creaky old metal box. There was a kindergarten down the road, and some trees, so I was able to sleep without waking every five minutes, ready to Pepper Knight the crackhead busting in with his dick out and his favorite stabbing knife.
I was actually having a nice dream. In this dream I think I was a kindergarten student. I had a Ninja Turtle backpack that I carried with me everywhere, the way little kids do. My dream-backpack contained all sorts of disproportionate items, like my espresso maker and my collection of photographs I took of couples that look like they shouldn't be together, like if one of them is too tall or too old or something. I even kept locations in my backpack, such as this park near where I live with all these abstract sculptures from the eighties, and the cabin up on Deer Isle, and the view from my room in the apartment I shared last year with a lady named Andrea. The apartment had mold, but instead of using our time together to help me bleach the mold, Andrea would try to get me to join her book club, or like. One of those programs where you tutor underprivileged kids. So the view from my moldy room was in there, in my backpack, but Andrea and my room itself and the rest of the apartment were not. My backpack basically contained all the good stuff I could cherrypick from my not-so-good track record. And since I had all this good stuff with me always, I could go anywhere. I could just go on and on, without a worry in the world, forever.
I was dreaming this when someone nearby said, "Hello." They said it, like.
Hello.
In fact I'm pretty sure it was the way Hello was said that woke me up. Crackheads don't say, "Hello." They're usually too focused on stealing people's stuff to sell for crack. Crackheads are more into saying, "Bitch if you scream I will stab you in the throat."
I didn't say Hello back. Instead of Hello, I said, FUCK OFF! I wanted to seem tough, because I wanted my waking environment to permit me more time in my nice dream. When you've just woken up, this is the sort of reasoning your brain will greenlight.
By the way I've already unraveled my dream's deep meaning.
In the morning I called my mom, since by then I was getting spooked out. Plus I was ready to do anything for a break from the monotony of cornfields. If you've ever watched any movie about cornfields, you will know that cornfields are bad news for the soul. If there was a Bermuda-triangle type area in this country, its locus would be cornfields. Driving between them, without a single building in sight, actually messes with your brain chemicals. For instance, this is what I told my mom over the phone, right before my call got dropped due to lack of anything around me except cornfields:
"I've got a plane ticket home for the ninth. Yeah, sorry, I'm on a bus right now."
Right? I still don't know why I said this. Then sometime after dark I just parked the truck by the roadside, with only one bar of cell reception and only a chicken-fried steak to nourish me. I'd been feeling hungry and tired, and it had suddenly struck me, like. Why do I have to wait for a rest stop, or a family restaurant? Why do I have to cut my hand while getting gas tonight, instead of saving cutting my hand getting gas for the morning?
Actually I might have lost my mind right there and then, probably from cornfields and also from blood-poisoning caused by the many cuts on my hand. The RV had a ten-year-old tube of Neosporin in it, which coupled with its nest of traveling silverfish shows you how often the DeGrootes took their turd on the road. But the RV also had forks, and napkins, and a table by the back window, where I was eating my chicken-fried leftovers when someone said, "Hello," again.
It had gotten pretty dark outside. I turned out the light super fast, so as to better spot potential invaders. My mouth was still full, so when the same someone clarified that they were not outside, like, verbally, like, from very possibly inside my mobile turd-house, I basically had this all-synapse firing situation, like.
THE GREETINGS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE MOBILE TURD-HOUSE!
I don't know if this is scientific, but for the rest of my life chicken-fried steak will taste like bitter mush to me, exactly as it tasted in that moment. I couldn't swallow it, due to, you know, like, terror, and my brain revved up to like a million miles per second, my brain got suddenly tyrannical instead of what it is normally, which is missing in action. My brain was shouting, Fat bitch you gotta move your ass away from the table and get a knife! Get up and get a knife! Except when I tried to get up from the table I hooked my foot on the seat and fell over.
We met while I was hacking half-chewed leftovers onto the rubber floormat of a 1964 Airstream Safari.
Someone said, "Are you all right?"
They sounded sort of embarrassed, so I decided that this someone was probably not a crackhead. But when I asked who they were, if not a crackhead, this someone laughed a little. They said, "I will tell you, but while I explain you should probably stay down on the floor, just in case." Then they paused, presumably for effect. Then they were all, "I am a ghost."
I mean, god, who even breaks into a vintage RV in the middle of the night, laughs like an asshole, and tells its terrified inhabitant that they are a ghost?
Dudes who live around a lot of cornfields, that's who.
I should have probably gotten the flashlight and checked around, but it was dark, and I was scared. Truth be told, I had nearly peed from fright, and would rather continue lying on the floor of the kitchenette area, making sure that the danger of fright-peeing was totally past. So instead of checking around, I started a conversation with this dude. At first I did it to bide time while I quit shaking, but after a while I mostly forgot why I was doing it, and then this dude and I were just having a conversation.
It was because he sounded kind of sad. I guess he sounded as if he didn't want anyone to find out he was sad and try to optimize his life plan. It's hard to explain, but he seemed basically unable to take the kind of tone taken by people who know how to beat up other people. The poor dude couldn't even take the tone of a ghost. Ghost voices should have, like, echoes to them, and weird inflections. This dude just sounded normal. And man, I really wanted to mess with him right back, for messing with me and almost causing me to pee. So when he said he was a ghost, I got all calm about it. I said, "Fine, what's your name?"
"Warren."
Wow. Really? "Warren who?"
He said he didn't know his last name. But a little later he said his last name might be Geary, only he wasn't totally sure. He said he couldn't remember anything before 1967. He'd just pieced some of it together based on other stuff he knew about himself. He thought he'd been born in 1931, and must have died in the sixties.
I asked him what World War Two was like, but he just said, "Overrated."
Which made no sense. I said, "Why?"
"Have you studied much literature on the subject?"
I said no, so he said, "Then of course you wouldn't understand anything."
The thing is, I did read when I had to. I read the stuff my parents wrote. I read, like. Newspapers. One time I read a book about maintaining your camera, because I needed to maintain my camera after Andrea dropped it on the stairs. What I didn't read was fiction, because I couldn't see the point of fiction books. They were just like. Fake. They all rang really false somehow. But when I tried to explain this to Warren, it only made him super mad. He was all, "Are you serious?"
I said, "No?"
I mean. I wasn't. I was only looking for subjects to talk about while I tried to remember where my Pepper Knight was. Still, whatever I said sent Warren into this huge monologue right off the bat, as an introduction to himself, all about how fiction or nonfiction are just labels and something else about authorial integrity. After a while I stopped listening and started wondering if Warren wasn't really a ghost, after all. No cornfield-dwelling dude could ever get this excited about authorial integrity.
At least he seemed happy to be yelling. Maybe he just needed to get yelling out of his system to feel better, which he did after. It was pretty obvious that he felt better once he'd yelled at me for a while.
He did say one thing I liked, which actually made me laugh. I wish I could remember the way he put it. Something about how every book should be sorted into one of only three categories, Mostly Truth, Mostly Lies, and Somewhere Between. The sorting would be done by each book's author, except they would all have to be totally honest, every time. Like, they could lie about anything they liked in their books, or just generally in life I guess, but they would absolutely have to be honest about this one thing.
And when I asked whose job it would be to decide if they were honest, Warren said it would be every author's job, all on their own, because truth is subjective anyway.
Oh, and speaking of honesty, turns out he wasn't lying about being a ghost. He was a ghost for real. Nobody could see, or smell, or touch him. If they tried to, and if the weather that day was warm, they would only feel a little patch of cooler air. He didn't make a steamy shape, the way ghosts do in movies. Technically he took up zero space, because he was not made of molecules. He was made of nothing anyone could quantify, which is why he himself couldn't touch anything at all. He said he didn't even have hands anymore, though maybe he was lying, the way he'd lied to me about having been born in the thirties. I'm pretty sure he was used to the name Warren, though, because I'd sometimes say, "Hey, Warren," for no reason, and measure how long it took him to respond.
It's mostly okay that he lied about his name. I didn't tell him my real name, either.
Let me explain about my name. Because I do not just fuck with people by lying to them about my name, for fun. This is not a habit that I have. Most people don't even want to talk to me, which overall makes it hard for me to fuck with them for fun. I don't even know how to trick another person into being mad or unhappy or whatever. I'm usually the mad unhappy one, and they are the ones convincing me to tutor underprivileged children.
Part of the reason I am the way I am is my name. My name is an adjective. Some people have nouns for names, and that is not always fortunate, but other times noun-names are okay. Like maybe someone's noun-name is Hunter. Or Holly, like the kind with red berries. If your name is an adjective, you can't even say, My name is, followed by your name. People get confused. They think you are commenting on your name in general, rather than revealing it. Some people might even think you are being untowardly boastful, if your adjective-name is not derogatory. For the same reason, another thing you can't say is, I am, followed by your name.
It's become a sensitive subject, me telling someone what my name is. I've come to require certain conditions for the telling, like for instance both me and the other person have to recognize that I am saying a name, not an adjective. If it's just me doing the recognizing, I have no way to be sure that the other party is aware of what I need from them, which is to recognize that my name is no longer a normal word with multiple meanings. That it just means, me.
This is why I can't tell you. I really am sorry. And I miss being Holly. Being Holly might even be the thing I miss most.
What Warren missed most was reading. He had lost the ability to turn pages, and anyway the RV did not contain much written material. Warren's options were a manual on fire safety and a Good Housekeeping issue from 1998. I thought he should float out the top hatch and find himself a library, like I could maybe take him to St Louis, which had to have a decent one, and then he could just read whatever he wanted over people's shoulders. But even before I'd finished laying out my plan for him, Warren said he couldn't leave the RV, no matter what. I guess he was following haunting rules, which must exist somewhere because he really had to stay inside that RV.
When I asked how long he'd spent staying inside it to date, he told me forty-five years and counting.
I could see that Warren's feelings about this were pretty complicated, too, which made my own feelings simple. I just felt sad for him. I mean, Warren was not only stuck somewhere between life and death, but also in a silver turd which no one even used anymore. The last person to speak with him had been a six-year-old girl in 1989, right after the DeGrootes bought the Airstream, and I'll bet this girl didn't give much of a shit about authorial integrity. The rest of the time he mostly hung quietly near the roof, probably wishing he could yell at someone. Except nobody would come inside to be yelled at, even if they had heard his voice by the RV, because Warren was dead and everyone who cared about him was probably dead also.
Warren couldn't even remember how he died. Or so he said, who knows. I mean, he also said he could remember living in DC, but when I asked him to describe DC as he remembered it, he just said, "Polluted." That was the thing with Warren. He could talk about pointless things until I wanted to shout, but when it came to actual things people needed to hear about, for like cosmic purposes and stuff, he'd just mumble a few words and change the subject.
I never even found out what death felt like, or what happened to make a regular dead person into a ghost. I figured it might be rude to ask these things straight out, but it was likewise pretty rude of Warren to not even give a hint to someone who was obviously very curious. And capable of being super sensitive about his personal traumas.
I mean, it had been like fifty years already.
By the end of our second conversation I was already on the brink about this. I told him, "You must be the most boring ghost in all of ghost history." He couldn't even leave that turd-wagon for like half a century, no matter how much he hated it. If I were him, I'd get angry, and use that anger to do something about his predicament. Scare some people, get put in a museum, I don't know.
But Warren didn't get angry. I think he had forgotten how to. He only knew how to get quiet. Actually, I think I made him cry. I am still very sorry I did it, even if this finally got him to tell me why he couldn't go outside.
See, ghosts stay indoors as much as possible, because they are worried about the sun.
People might think, like vampires?
No. Vampires are not real.
Warren tried to explain something about waves and particles, some kind of fundamental thing which proved everything irrefutably. What he said made zero sense to me, though, until he explained it again, in regular words. He said that since ghosts have no weight, they are always pulled toward the most voluminous space around, which in this case is outer space, and also to heat, which in this case is the sun. Once there is nothing above them but sky, ghosts will rise just like helium-filled balloons, up and up into the blackness and heat until the sun devours them.
Maybe that's what hell really is. I don't know. I'm still not clear on all the details, such as why didn't Warren just pass through the RV's roof and flit up anyway, instead of being safe in there?
"It's all backed up by real science," he kept saying.
I tried to tell him I was sorry for calling him boring. It wasn't his fault. Except I don't really talk to people long enough to have our relationship become this ever-moving, ever evolving thing, weak at first but always growing. Apologies heal it when it's hurt, like pain medicine, but too many apologies might kill it, like pain medicine. The thing is, I am not a relationship doctor. I am more of a relationship journalist, or zoologist. I prefer relationships and me to have some glass between us.
The next day was our day in St Louis. I meant to spend it finding the library, but then I realized I wouldn't be able to check anything out without a St Louis library card. I ended up at just another truck stop, feeling defeated.
The good news was, the truck stop offered its own book selection. What sucked was that all of the books were either pornos with, like, eighties-looking shirtless dudes on them, or murder mysteries, which would have been in bad taste. I managed to find a paperback that seemed to be about cowboys or something. It had eighties-looking cowboys on the cover, but all of them were wearing shirts, and none of them were proximate to any bosoms I could spot. The title font looked serviceably manly.
When I ducked into the wagon, Warren was still mad at me. He was all, "Oh, so you do come in during the day!" This was a quip he made up, following the time I asked him if he only came out at night, which, hey. Ghosts have been known to prefer nighttime.
I didn't mind this. At least we were still on speaking terms. I just sat down on the little couch in there, which is yellow and my favorite place in the RV to sit, and started reading out loud from the cowboy book. At first Warren bitched a lot, begging me to go find some actual prose. This was exactly how he put it, actual prose, when obviously what I was reading aloud to him was prose by definition.
After that he pretty much just let me read. I don't think he was mad, because the next thing he said was, "Let me see that. You don't know how to read. I'll read." And began to read this cheesy book out loud, cheesily but also in earnest, while I turned the pages for him. He read so well that the story of the cowboys became a movie in my head. A stupid movie, but whatever.
He also told me all this stuff about real cowboys, and the wilderness, and about Joseph Campbell. Actually Joseph Campbell came up when I was explaining about my dad. Warren was all, "Your dad reminds me of Joseph Campbell." Because of Dad's living situation, I guess.
At the time I didn't know about Joseph Campbell. I figured that Joseph Campbell sounded like the name of a serial killer, so I was all like, "Do you ever say anything nice?"
Which, no, except that time I think he might have been.
I really tried to find something by Joseph Campbell for Warren, for us, but I didn't have money, so we ended up just reading whatever. Like I stole a super old textbook about the Dust Bowl from a tourist lodge, so we read that, and then I found a really nice collection of poems in a twenty-five-cent book bin in Albuquerque, so we read that, too.
Another thing I really tried to do was convince Warren to ride in the truck with me, because ever since we started hanging out I had been making super unimpressive progress with my actual crossing of country. Getting Warren to agree was a complicated and strategy-oriented operation, as was logistically getting him into the truck. I had to buy a bunch of heavy duty trash bags, which I cut up into sheets and duct-taped together, then duct-taped all of the taped-together trash bags between the open front window of the RV wagon and the open back window of the truck. Then I got into the truck and called out to him down this tunnel I had constructed. I called, "All clear!"
He was all, "How long did this take you? Five seconds?"
I kept saying that it was safe to come across. Then, when I felt he'd finally done it, I was all, "Still alive?" Even though Warren wasn't. But I didn't correct myself, because to me he almost seemed like just another person, only with no body.
He said he was fine. He sounded out of breath, if that was possible. Seriously though, I had done a great job on this tunnel. I didn't want it to be my fault if Warren ever ended up in outer space. People stared at me perfecting my tunnel, but I didn't even care. I was that focused. The weird thing was that after the tunnel was done, and Warren and I were in the truck together, I couldn't think of what to do next.
I asked him if we should drive anywhere nicer, because the rest stop we were parked at was in the middle of nowhere. But Warren said he wasn't ready for a drive just yet, so instead I turned on the radio and we just sat there, listening to a newscast about Canadian logging rights and staring at a bunch of desert. I hope it was at least refreshing to Warren, having a new location with so many windows.
After a while I asked him, "Are you holding my hand?"
And he was like, "Why?"
I think he compulsively answered questions with questions when threatened. I mean, it didn't matter why, if he was doing it.
I didn't say anything, so after another while he said, "Holly, do me a favor?"
My first thought was to drive straight back to New England, to Dad's cabin, if Warren wanted us to drive north. I didn't really care about delivering the RV to San Diego. I could never show up at all, just write California out of my life and hole up at the cabin. Maybe Dad would even support my decision, once I explained my reasons. To be honest, Dad is more messed up than I am.
The real problem was gas. As it was we were only two states away from California, and we'd run out of gas before we got halfway back across the country, even if I ditched the RV and just drove the truck. I didn't want to ditch the RV. It had forks and a bed in it, plus I could probably sell it if push came to shove. Warren helped me mark the map with a new trajectory, one going more or less straight up. I'm pretty sure he thought he'd lose his nerve if going north took too long.
Why he wanted go to had to do with ice crystals in the atmosphere. He said the crystal layer thickens as one gets farther from the equator, and if we found a place where it is thick and cold enough, he could let himself float up on purpose, up and up until he froze, too. Then he'd just be there forever, taking part in auroraborealis and being at peace and stuff.
I asked, "Is that kind of like heaven?"
But he told me that no, there isn't really a heaven. There is just life, and nothing. I guess he forgot the third thing, but I thought it anyway. Life, nothing, and somewhere between.
I'd have had to reconstruct my trash-bag tunnel for Warren to get back into his silver turd again, which was obviously not any kind of enticing option anyway, so for most of the trip he stayed in the truck with me. This turned out to be a good idea, because we got lost and ended up somewhere in Oregon, and somewhere in Oregon we saw this rainbow. If you really looked it was actually two rainbows, one for each of us, a rainbow and a ghost rainbow. Seeing certain kinds of rainbows really imparts the idea that rainbows are loop-shaped, like headbands for the sky. I took a picture with my phone to send to Marcus, but when I tried to send it, the service on my phone said it was super disconnected. It had probably been disconnected for a while.
We spent three days camped at this one state park. The park was called Terra something, and it had a tourist lodge where people could shower. Some hikers at the tourist lodge told me about a trail, this trail going into all this greenery up on the mountain, and past the greenery there was a really loud waterfall. From the sound it seemed as if the waterfall was going to be huge, but when I got around the bend it was only as high as my waist, though pretty, and, like. Mentally stimulating. I don't normally have lots of ideas, but I got a single good one up there, by the super loud waterfall. I ran right back down to search the RV's kitchenette supplies.
Once I'd found a tupperware container with a decent seal on it, Warren was all, "No, no way." He was really averse to trying out new things, even when these things were mentally stimulating.
I did get him to test out the tupperware, just in case. I was all, "What if something happens to the truck before we get to the best ice layers?" I think it worked, so long as I kept the lid sealed tight. Warren wouldn't tell me if it worked or not, even when I threatened to shut him in there forever, but I think the reason he wouldn't tell me was that it worked super well.
On our last night out he was so quiet that I couldn't sleep.
I asked him, "Where are you?"
He didn't respond, but I thought I could maybe sense him moving around. Like, I never even considered that he might have flown out the window right then and there, in Oregon, to get it over with. In time I probably fell asleep, but in my sleep I felt coldness, and I definitely heard him saying he was sorry. He said it a few times, like he was saying it for practice.
Man, I'd never even thought to practice apologizing. I just went for it cold.
We never got any farther than Oregon.
Honestly, it's fine. I never actually believed he'd go through with it. I only thought it might be fun to drive around for one more week. I mean, point one, I already sort of knew him, and point two, I wasn't super looking forward to stranding him in San Diego. Because, point three, how dense are the ice crystals in San Diego's atmosphere?
Dangerously non-dense, don't you think?
Me, though, I am actually dangerously dense. Which is also a thing now, after I basically told Warren all this, literally told him all of the above, right after he confessed that he was too scared to become an auroraborealis or whatever. I don't even know what I was expecting. That he'd be so pleased by my honest assessment of his incredible lameness that he'd tell me who he really was?
Wow. Really?
When Warren got around to speaking again, it was only to direct my reconstruction of the trash-bag tunnel.
I told him, "You don't have to go back in there."
But I guess he thought he did. And, like, I wasn't about to coerce him for the sake of my inner peace.
Just before dropping off the RV, I ducked in one last time to check on him, just to see if he knew what I was about to do and if maybe he'd changed his mind.
He was all, "I don't know, I don't have to explain myself, leave me alone," in a tone that told me yeah, he knew, and that he didn't want me to but that he also wasn't going to stop me, until I thought I was going to lose it at him, that I would catch him somehow and release him in the DC Metro, just to be a bitch. This is not the way to put it, but he seriously needs to be a man about his shit.
You know who is a man about his shit? The DeGroote daughter's husband. I'm pretty sure the only reason he didn't call the cops on me was that it was not entirely outside the scope of possibility that I got lost for a whole extra week. I think he bought it because I'm a girl. Still, I was lucky to get the second half of my pay without having to Pepper Knight his whole family.
I definitely did not get offered homemade snacks, or a ride to the train station. I had to walk. And this is sort of a dumb story, but every time I saw a rock along the way that was around good size, I would think how that particular rock would work for smashing through the kitchenette window of an Airstream Safari. Basically, most of these rocks would have probably worked pretty well, had I tested them out.
I've read a lot of stuff since then. I read all summer. What kind of stuff, you might ask. Camera manuals? Why, no, not camera manuals. First, I read a book by Joseph Campbell. I read about how he would partition every day into five-hour stints of just reading stuff, reading whatever seemed important to people, or I guess to him.
So I read for like an hour or two every couple of days, because people have like internet and movies now.
Which is how I heard about the thing at the Public Library. The really awful ghost seminar I told you about. It sort of even panned out for me, destiny-style, reading and going to the library and hearing about the seminar, because this middle-aged lady I met that night let me pay her to track you down. That's what this lady does, full-time and for real. She tracks down ghost people. Like, maybe a ghost is all haunting your house, and you want to know why and how, so you give this lady money and she comes up with information for you, such as who the ghost is and how they died and where they are buried and stuff.
I am basically sure this lady is full of shit.
But it does say here that your last name is Geary, so maybe you're like related or something. 1967-1980, though? No way. Warren couldn't be younger than me.
Whatever.
Anyway, it's really gross and creepy here, and I think it's starting to rain, so I'm going to leave now, and go get a coffee. Sorry for stomping around for like an hour, trying to tell you this thing. Our Odyssey. I need to know that it happened, that's all. I want someone to hear it, even if it's not the right person. Because it happened. It's true. Absolute truth.
Oh! Shit! Yes! Okay, the plan. I have a tupperware container and an offer. The rock I can find on location. The offer goes like this.
What'll it be? The DC Metro, or.
That's it. That's all. That's how it goes.
the end.