a short story - private workshopping
Loss and Return
(After a City of Bright Lights)
Hunter left New York City for Sterling on a Monday night planning to drive the night through Pennsylvania and the darkened, hollow forests and then find a cheap motel the next morning in Ohio and sleep the afternoon and early evening. As it happened, though, with the trees reaming out the colors of the dawn in the rear view mirrors and the traffic starting up on the cold, sleek roads after the night’s rain, he didn’t feel tired when he broke into Ohio and the plains and the morning traffic, steadily stretching long on the hard-black highways, wasn’t as heavy as he had expected, and the new angles of sunlight, blending the red taillights on the black sheen, produced a kind of cozy hypnotism on his brain. Hunter’s hands gently grasped the underside of the wheel and his eyes felt just a little blurry and he played with the radio buttons and settled on country.
All through Pennsylvania he had felt good – actually, much better than he had expected to feel. At some point during the winter, he had convinced himself that he wasn’t dreading this return home and talked about it openly with friends just like you were supposed to talk about these trips: “Oh, yeah, sure it’ll be great, haven’t been home in a while” and the like. Then, as the days grew longer and the city nights contracted and he found himself going to bed well after the sunrise, he realized he had managed to play off one important, reasonable justification after another to put the trip off another week or so. And he started having strange dreams, too, of walking in on the family he had left a year ago – idyllic as your family can only be in a dream when you know you’ve somehow betrayed them – and his mom would be wearing an absurdly well-ironed apron and cooking apple pie and biscuits and getting the next day’s roast ready, and his dad would be in his smoking jacket reading the paper and his brothers would be sitting by the fire, cheeks rosy and healthy from chopping wood or repairing the tractors and so much was true of it, for they wore aprons and smoking jackets, and chopped wood. So much of it, though, while familiar, had simply never happened. Like the way his brothers smiled at each other.
And they would all stop whatever they were doing and turn to Hunter after he entered, not just in shock and horrified at all that Hunter had come to see and do in New York but like they had just heard about it. Like it was a play and his demise had been announced just before his convenient though nonetheless ill-timed entrance through the front door.
So Hunter had assumed it would only get worse the closer he got to home, which is why the lightness in his heart and the lack of contractions around his lungs felt while imaging his feet on the welcome mat so surprised him through the spinning shadows and winding highway of Pennsylvania. He had even half expected a kind of panic to come over him at each successive state border, maybe even the desire to turn the car straight around and get back to his tiny room in Brooklyn and call Claire and she if she was working and maybe even his dealer. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t called ahead to warn his family that he was coming – the fear that he would never again be able to pass west of Philadelphia and so his family’s disappointment at his absence would be all the more bitter for their expectation and all their oh won’t Hunter just love to see-s.
By western Ohio, the countryside settling and the sun bearing an odd and inappropriate sense of normalcy on these foreign plains, a kind of panic did overtake him. And it was worse for Hunter because it was not at all the panic he had expected or developed contingencies to counter. The panic was – the conviction that everything would be fine at first, the pies and the relatives and the chores and the dinner at Taco John’s, but then he would need to tell his mother everything about New York. He would need to tell her he had done a little coke, but that he was sure he could take it because he wasn’t the addicted type. He would need to tell her he was actually thinking about writing, that he hadn’t gone to church in ten months.
Mother, yes, but don’t look so disappointed, because I haven’t told you about Claire, and, oh Gosh, I need you to be calm. Let me just tell you. Let me just tell you. You see, mother, she’s technically what we call a pre-op, and yes I do want you to refer to her as a she. Because, mother, we’re in love. Yes, mother, a she, and it’s complicated…
He had never felt the urge to confess anything to his mother until the heart of Ohio. The frustrations of high school, the dizzying confusion of junior college he had all managed to turn into smiles at the dinner table and polite anecdotes where no one is harmed and every learns a little more about themselves and the world. This is the panic he was not expecting: the sudden thirst for his mother to know everything, even how much he had cried after the first time he had slept with Claire, and then to look for some sign of forgiveness in her timid, brown eyes, to lean against her shoulder and feel her arms around his back and those soft hands of hers that always smelled like Vaseline and then at the moment he could first see the suburban haze of Indianapolis under the weak dusk light. Hunter caught himself drowsing ever so slightly, the car over a few feet to the right between a few blinks, and told himself aloud that he didn’t need forgiveness, he needed sleep.
The details of the motel itself where he stopped blurred into the general picture of a suburban highway-side motel: exit ramp, unhurried intersection, two fast food restaurants, three gas stations, a truck stop, signs to little towns it was hard to imagine actually existed and from his bed Hunter couldn’t even recall what the man down at reception had looked like or what color the carpet had been. His room smelled like it hadn’t always been non-smoking and he studied the darkness of the ceiling and the stiffness of the sheets beneath him.
He had Sportscenter on quietly in the background and it wasn’t really dark outside. The Nuggets had won and the Avs had lost. He turned the TV off and lay on his side, where he asked himself rhetorically which was worse, dating a transvestite or writing a liberal column for a tiny online publication, imagined phone calls on the subject between aunts with tightly-wound buns of hair and very respectable glasses, laughed a little and vaguely wondered what Claire was up to and then feel asleep for five solid hours of sweating sleep.
He left western Indianapolis a little after midnight. His stomach was churning from an ill-advised Coke he had drunk back at the hotel and he tried to recall whether he had dreamt at all of his family. They were classic rural America: well meaning, proud, confused about most of the world, pegging Denver and Cheyenne as the two great urban centers beyond which nothing could logically make any sense at all. The name Kansas City, even, had held a ring of exoticism on your lips, a weird aftertaste from a spice you’ve tried for the first time. For a while Hunter had thought that this was their greatest strength, their fierce protection of what they found important and their ability to focus on the matters at hand. It had always been his weakness, and he therefore had assumed it must be a great gift. But, more and more, he was finding himself concluding that they preferred their ignorance out of laziness and fear to be proven wrong, not out of some kind of rugged, well-meaning pragmatism, and even felt a certain haughty pleasure in his new righteous attitude about the people he had grown up around. And that’s what, if he was honest with himself, he was most afraid about – they would sense his disdain.
Missouri slid past him in a blur of morning darkness and cornfields and the heaviness in the head after five hours of hot sleep. The cities that had once aroused such a feeling of wonder passed by in quick, incoherent flashes. It wasn’t until Kansas that he felt any kind of alacrity, with the sun behind him and the pavement lit with a mellow sheen and the sky a dizzying blue. This was the country he was used to, the light off the fields and the little trails that went down by the fences and irrigation ditches next to irrigation equipment. He could feel the tools in his hand and thought about how he could never feel as comfortable walking into a bar in Williamsburg as he could stepping out among the rows corn, but then that was what he enjoyed about the city most of all. Not apologizing for his discomfort.
And just when he was most curious about how he would feel, when Missouri and Kansas had become one long road from darkness into the waking hours, he found that he felt nothing. It felt false to even try to force a feeling to outer the emptiness, to rouse some handle on the fear or the homesickness he had experienced over the past year. The last stretch to Sterling has snuck up on him, and he found himself clutching in the suddenly swirling clutter of his brain for what he would say, how he should act, what he should tell them about his life. After all, that had been the entire point of driving – that he could get these kinds of things into order. That planes go too quickly and land even faster and what can you really say on the side of the airport. But the more he would try to order his thoughts to hint at a reasonable kind of behavior, true to himself yet true to his roots, the further any real idea seemed from him and the more abstract and disjointed the whole project seemed.
Hunter’s confusion made the road speed by quickly and he was surprised when he saw it was already getting on into the afternoon. And it was strange to pull into his driveway when you saw that it wasn’t the entire world and the beginning and ending of all living, with Denver comfortably off somewhere in the distance down the highway, but just another drive where some people must be living. He was struck by the entire arbitrariness of the positioning of the road, the mailbox, and the American flag hanging from the front brick of his porch and a wave of nausea gripped him below the stomach, rolled its fingers all up to his throat, and left him a little weaker still gripping the wheel and his foot on the gas pedal.
Hunter wished he was waking up in Brooklyn as he closed the car door behind him, his weight bending over legs and a back much more cramped than he could have imagined possible, and had never felt that New York was actually his home until this moment.
He walked quietly up to the front door because he didn’t want to make a dramatic scene out of his return, shouting, carrying on. He saw that the handle to the front door was bronze and a little rusted, very different than how he had pictured it back in Brooklyn, and parts of the wood frame were chipping off on the sides.
My God, he suddenly thought, they will see right through me, Claire’s cum on my back. All that I am and all that I’ve done is stained on my face, my eyes, my mouth, and it’s not just the earring that marks me as an outsider here. There’s something already different in my posture and my eyes and the way I hold my head and they will all see it immediately and know what it means. Knocking did not seem right. And so his hand trembled as it reached for the surprising cool metal and opened the door with a slight push. And so here he was, and he made him take a few steps in.
There was no one in the living room and Hunter suddenly felt much more comfortable in the silence of the empty house. It was, after all, his house, and all of the details slowly reassembled themselves from his memory to the actual woods and carpets that he saw before him though it all seemed bigger to him, the carpet thicker and smell dustier. The family must be off at the fair, he thought to himself, or in Cheyenne. There were a few books scattered across the low oak table by the smoking chair: his dad’s National Review, a copy of Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, some Coulter, and a print-out of Pushkin’s Stationmaster that Hunter wondered at and almost reached for. But then he remembered himself and decided not to disturb anything until the family returned. Relieved at the peace in the now-familiar room, the way the light played across the picture frames with relatives and Christmas cards and church events, he made his way down one of the hallways to the kitchen.
And in the entranceway he froze and almost gasped. Later, he would realize that the sounds coming from the kitchen had been absorbed by the birds outside, and he also remembered how little sleep he had been getting before. His memory of the incident magnified the time he stood in the entranceway to a full minute, his brain first blank, then embarrassed, then completely numb – and nothing to do with his hands. He felt like he would throw up if he could feel his stomach, and he staggered back down the hall and out the door and into the strangest blue sky he had even seen before or since. No one, of course, from the kitchen could catch him before he made it to his car, and there was no one at the door when he pulled out of the drive automatically heading towards Main Street.
Hunter wondered where his mother had been as he turned his car West for only few minutes, and he wondered how the light off the picture frames would look to him now, and then he drove long into the night and the cool, shielding mountains, and the towering slabs of rockface that blocked out your view of the stars.
