Fall 2013, Volume 15

Fiction by Philip Kobylarz

From Here to There

“You’ve got to breathe,” I told her. “You’ve really got to breathe, afterwards. I don’t care how good it is.”

“Oh, you don’t care?” she asked from behind the black veil of hair that concealed her face. I couldn’t see her mouth moving.

“You know what I mean.”

Marie had a tendency to give her all, to go all out. She was really wild when we were together. But afterwards, she would stop breathing and lie there as still as a sleeping body. I would have to nudge her or watch her back to see it rise and sink, to see if her lungs were tenuously pulling on a thread of air. She could be so still. Sometimes she wouldn’t say a word for a half an hour. Sometimes it scared me.

We were at the Blufftop Motel somewhere in the arid zone of southeastern Colorado. Our bodies and minds were drained as we both rested quietly while staring at the red glare of a digital clock. There must have been a recent storm that knocked the power out. It’s common knowledge around here that you wake to sunny skies, clouds roll in late afternoon, it rains fiercely, then clears up. The rain stops you for a minute from whatever you’re doing to watch the sun light up the dust in the air and extinguish behind cloudbanks that look like another distant range. It’s been so long since I’ve been West I had to spot the scud and smell the cold dirty rain to remember what it was like. Most days it worked like clockwork.

The transparent white curtains were split open and in between them we could see a creme-colored plateau, streaked in green stripes of some kind of vegetation, maybe sage or juniper. I doubt pine, at least not yet. We hadn’t come far enough to see a forest. This city seemed to be surrounded by tableland that was fissured into a million canyons like hidden mazes leading somewhere way beyond our gaze. And in them, the bones of dinosaurs sequestered. We would never find them though. Maybe no one would. Anyhow, we were just passing through.

We were going to the ocean. What we were really doing, who knows? Perhaps eloping. Maybe leaving our lives behind in a city where we had decent jobs and happy lives but not enough ways to get out. Maybe just taking a few days of vacation in the dying weeks of summer knowing we would return to our old selves safe and locked behind the deadbolt of an apartment's door.

The day after, we rose early and crossed Utah and the wretched desert of Nevada. The sun shone blindingly the whole morning of driving and our car hummed over the pavement like a well-oiled fan. She drove for hours with her eyes fixed on the unending slit, sometimes jagged, line of the horizon, switching the radio dial around to find any kind of music. Anything. A lot of rockabilly, low-budget classical, and whiny, excitable men talking about the divine tricks of Jesus. How Our Lord walked much the very same landscape as these wastelands speaking of fecundity and the God in man. How he could make wine out of water and fish out of nothing but stones in baskets.

I was seeing the illusions of Palestine myself come to life in the vapors of heat above the highway. A sidewinder was really only a streak of orange desert sand brought to life by a gust of air. The mountains in the rearview weren’t moving and the Santa Fe train line underlining them wasn't moving backwards. The wooden sign marking the playa couldn’t have said "next exit 150 miles."

There were tens of different brands of gas stations and hastily erected warehouses. Sometimes a Calder of a refinery lit up with circus lights. I thought of ranch houses on the moon. Cattle trails were ground into the land like directions cut for the single engine airplanes flying above us. The few cactuses were in bloom with feathered hats of yellow and orange-like red.

“Pull over!” Marie yelled, waking me from my road dream. A rooster tail of dust enveloped the car. She ran out, leaving the door open, onto the scrub and piñon of wilderness. Flinging her leather purse along, at full-sprint, into the dying light of the desert, where the only cover was bush and rock streams of arroyos. Her glasses were sitting on the dashboard, fingerprints about the edges of the lenses.

Fourteen minutes passed before she was back. Her hair in switches and her cheeks blushed by the wind.

“What’d you do?”

“I had to pee. It’s really beautiful out there. Everything’s alive. Even the dirt. I think I saw a scorpion. There was something out there. I mean I saw something moving on the ground.”

                                               § 

We guessed we were still in Nevada. Tumbleweeds and gray stone hills in rows like monuments to nothing. The gas stations petered out on the highway where only fence poles marked the highway's direction and served as civilization's minimalism. A mantle of cool air was descending. A naked hand on the windshield left a stain of condensation. I began, I believe, seeing cradles of fog here and there, ghosts of clouds for seconds under the brights. Seeing is believing.

Marie drove for the rest of the night. One arm on the door, the other changing the dial or adjusting the mirrors. I wondered: to see what? She found a station that was on the frequency of short wave, emitting only beeps of sound, static and eerie feedback “There,” she said “that’s it.”

When I woke, we had come all the way to Sacramento. The plains rolled at the same speed as us and buckled into a crease of hills behind. After them, the ocean. Further west, Asia. She pointed to a jack-knifed trailer. Four cars had piled up behind it. There was an ambulance and the few cars of traffic were slowed down at the scene. A man lying on a stretcher, tied to it, with a reflection of red in his eyes similar to that of a wolf’s I thought I saw once as a boy in the north woods. Two men were carrying him to the open doors. He could have been seeing angel wings. The Greek becoming visible in the blue writing on white background: PARAMEDIC.

We had miles to go before we would reach the Grapevine, then the unending patchwork of Los Angeles, if the city could be seen under the blanket of early morning fog to be replaced by the opaque grey of afternoon pollution. We had arranged a place to stay somewhere along the coastal highway. It was an abandoned shack on the beach that was formerly used as a summer house by Marie’s sister who worked from time to time as a writer for television. She was now in between jobs and wanted the consolation of company. We would stay there and visit her in her new place in the hills. She warned us that we might become enchanted by the larger than life billboards on the road to her house and would never want to leave the glorified brand of reality that Southern California breeds. She referred to the region as "So Cal."

                                               § 

“You wanna drive now?” Marie yawned.

“Sure.”

The suburbs began and never did they cease. There was so much visual stimuli that I could barely keep my eyes on the road. Road sign. Call box. Weeping willow. Little Saigon. Traffic light. Palm trees ruffling their feathers in the breeze. We had made it to the end of a continent. The odometer changed over. Warm air filtered through vents and smelled of pavement and ocean sand.

A sidewalk extended into the sea. On the concrete platform, the iron railing had rusted to a deep maroon. Blotches of deep blue paint remained like thumbprints of limpets. Wooden benches with mainly seagulls aligned on them. It smelled of the cheap seafood restaurants burdening the pier. The word crab in Chinese and an airbrushed watercolor of the bright orange spider on a poster fluttering on a false kiosk. Marie got out of the car. The ocean was just across its empty parking lot.

The Santa Monicas leaned into the water, green in the distance, a mist beginning around their base and the lip of the ocean. The arcade was lit up. There were the musical chords of a carnival.

The first thing Marie said was “Oh shit.”

“Look, it’s not that bad. There’s seagulls, a mist coming in, look at that, down there, those models. It looks like they're doing a fashion shoot!"

There were women dressed to kill behind lights and some men in leather. One had a camera. Another was telling the women where to stand.

“My pants. They’re ruined.”

I looked over the top of the car. Marie had a dark halo around her lap. What she called her monthly curse had followed her. I remembered the cactuses in bloom.

“So what,” I said. “Put a long shirt on. We’re here.”

We walked along the pier breathing it all in. At a tall, wooden building that had the word “Sinbad’s” painted on it, we stopped. It was abandoned but once must have been an arcade or a bar. Its gabled roof with warped planks peeling apart from one another seemed really western even if it wasn’t. Truth was the only thing that wasn't a commodity in this town, maybe even this era.

The continent lay behind us. If there is such a place, or feeling, or state of something called happiness, we had found its momentary location. But like a hungry seagull, it took off on the next ocean breeze.

Marie, with her eyes scanning the distance and the ends of her hair feeling for the salt in the air, said, “Well, we made it. We really made it.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“From there to here,” she whispered. We breathed in the iodine of coastal air.

 

 

 

BIO: Recent work of mine appears or will appear in Connecticut Review, Basalt, Santa Fe Literary Review, New American Writing, Poetry Salzburg Review and has appeared in Best American Poetry. My book, Rues, was recently published by Blue Light Press of San Francisco. My collection of fiction, Now Leaving Nowheresville and my book length essay Nearest Istanbul are forthcoming.