We were going from Lincoln, NE to Manhattan, KS through a landscape of low expectations and high-volume rock n roll. The steel belted radials rolling over heated black-top at 85 mph had begun to sing. The white lines were pulsing dots, when out of the corner of my eye I saw the cemetery and slid through a stone throwing U-turn to go back for a closer look at the junction of nowhere and US 77.
A set of stairs with a painted metal handrail lead up the three feet from roadway to the low-walled consecrated ground. At the edge of the cemetery four or five pines and a flowering dogwood. A flagpole without flag, the rope whipped by the wind and beating against the metal. Clang. Clang. Clang.
There was no one to hear the wind beating time. No town. No farms within sight. Nothing but a twenty-mile horizon and a vacant sky with a long line of telephone poles running from vanishing point to vanishing point. Nudge the speedometer up far enough and they would look like a picket fence. though at any speed, they would frame emptiness.
The wind came from the west unbroken and uncaring. Spring had not touched the dry grasses between the tombstones. They stood leaning into the wind, subtle variations of each other: eggshell white, old chalk, one or two a bleached brown like ancient chocolate left too long in the sun. Winter was too long and summer too hot for them to remain erect on these Great Plains. There was nothing else to see except the names and dates and I did not want to read them.
Six family names. Twenty-six tombstones dated between 1884 and 1910. Half of them children who lived fewer than ten years.
I take a few pictures to remind myself that even here, there is an opportunity for remembering we all arrive at the same end.
“If you were going to a foreign country, you would expect it to be different. Different language, different food, customs, different ways of expressing relationship. They do not dress, act, or think like you do. You expect it. Sometimes it seems the same but even then, you want it to not be the everyday anywhere. Different enough to be able to tell yourself that you’re somewhere else. This is one of those places.”
“It marks a border which remain mysterious, the crossing complete and final. Here one cannot straddle the line, no amount of shifting weight from foot to foot can offer balance or comfort. No one sends back postcards describing the ambience and accommodations. No one says “wish you were here” but yet, we have to cross into next not knowing the nature of that which you enter. Death is such a passage.”
Carolyn just nods.
“It seems so easy to cross borders these days, you just move to the point where things change and take another step. The difficulty in travel is finding the balance between same enough to know what something means and different enough to impart a sense of discovery.”
“Kansas might be like that,” Carolyn says, “When I came to the Midwest, I thought of it as fly-over country. It seemed to be mostly the same, cornfields and dreadfully hot or cold weather, but now I’ve lived here long enough to see it is incredibly varied. It took a couple of years to actually see the landscape, to recognize the difference between flat North Dakota and flat Illinois. I’m sure that Kansas will have something special waiting for us.”
We get back in the car.
A few miles down the road we see the sign. Carolyn asks me to pull over. When I do, she goes to the trunk and pulls a pair of red shoes out of her suitcase.
“Take my picture,” she commands.
One snap of her with two blue running shoes. One of her with one blue running shoe and one red pump. One of her on her back, feet in the air, two red pumps in the foreground the “welcome to Kansas sign in the background. One of her with two red pumps. It is a cheap joke but she laughs, and when she does, I do.
In a surprising number of instances, the physical manifestation of borders, of the world as landscape remains whole but our expectation, our experience of that “landscape” does not. The pictures demonstrate this effect.
Going north towards Nebraska the long flat with the occasional ditch gives way to shallow gullies and the gullies slowly grow into hollows, into low rolling hills that are a suggestion of waves covered with scrub brush and dark shadows. It is change based on minute variation, and on each side of the actual border, looks the same. Dorothy’s quip, “It doesn’t look like were in Kansas anymore, Toto.” is a lie. Kansas, Nebraska, north or south a single straight line of two-lane blacktop was headed to or from empty.
It was twilight when we arrived at Manhattan, Kansas. We drove to Carolyn’s friend’s house where a note directed us to a party a few blocks over. It was a big one. The music could be heard a block away. Cars were parked two and three deep in the yard. College students streamed in and out of the doors, celebrating the end of the something.
Though I did not know anyone and had never been in this house, the moment I walked through the door the hair on the back of my neck stiffened, accompanied by a profound sense of déjà vu.
It was like sitting in a darkened theater watching the movie slow down until you can see the edges of the frame flickering across the screen. The world was as flat as the dull green of the wall. In my eyes the light was not from kitchen bulbs but another time, preserved in jars and brought out when everything else had been used up. The kitchen was not one of similar hundreds in a small town full of college rentals, but a place I had already inhabited though I had never lived there.
“Carolyn, tell me what you see. I’m not going to turn my head, just tell you what is here. On my left there is a table with beer cans and three wine bottles, Bedside it an open door leading to a bedroom with pale yellow walls and hats of every shape and size hanging around the bed. Behind me to the right a young woman in a green dress is doing dishes. She’s going to greet us.”
When she does, I continue “Next to the sink there is a pair of red vinyl and chrome chairs. There is a line of people waiting to use the bathroom. They drink and talk, but no one sits in the chairs.”
“Yes, I see that.” Her voice changes to a stage whisper. ”How did you know?”
It was so familiar. Directly across from us is the doorway to the living room. The stereo is blasting “Talking Heads ‘77”. The room is crowded with people dancing in that awkward but exuberant way that white people dance at parties where there is too much liquor and not enough floor. Is it that they are in college? A certain kind of party or a certain kind of architecture that brings this feeling on? Or is it those red chairs that lets the dream of next swim to the surface?
When she walked through the door it was like a blow to the head. Not as pretty as in the dream, I thought, though she was as pretty as anyone there. She looked at me, shook her head, then crossed the room like iron filings to a magnet. It was like a dream and yet it wasn’t. Her hair was copper, her eyes not the green I had assumed they would be but a steely blue. Her mouth was sensual and without lipstick. As she reached out to take my hand, she laughed as if caught by an electric charge but there was no laughter in her eyes.
I was tracing the pathway of the dream in real time looking for the fulcrum that will make then and now congruent. Small talk. Introductions. Where are you from? What are you studying? What do you do? She skipped that. It is not what she says or does not say, but what she does next that I recognize.
In the dream it took forever to get to the porch through the beer swilling mob. In dream time, the walls wiggle like a funhouse mirror, distorting faces. In real time, she turns, her hand in mine, and leads me out the door. The rush of memory before the fact speeds up. I realize what was coming next and surrender to it as inevitable.
The night is warm. There is a palpable sense of spring’s arrival as we move to the porch facing newly plowed fields. The smell of her perfume mixes with the odor of black dirt. Her voice floats on the breeze, the words moving in and out of audible like so many new leaves on the overhanging branches. I lean in to listen to her, trying to block out the party spilling out of the open windows. There is a low rumble of thunder to the west. I can see the approaching storm, the lightning like a faulty bulb, repeating on and off. I can feel the heaviness of too many months of ice and snow falling away, the darkness now infused with green as the dead grasses are pushed aside to make way for what will greet the morning sun.
We are sitting side by side. The trajectory of the dream has turned and is closing in fast. I know what is coming and still it feels like a riddle waiting for an answer. Clouds obscure the moon. She gets out of her chair, sits in my lap. I hold her close, feeling her convulse with shivers as she speaks pain and confusion. She leans her head on my shoulder. Her story begins with her dropping out of school, then coming back. It is an onion, thin interconnected layers of the past she peels away in a slow narration as her mouth moves closer to my ear. An unwanted pregnancy and abortion. Her father’s desertion, the dissolution of family in a messy divorce. A brother killed in an automobile accident. And after all that, her mother’s suicide.
The dark themes build on each other, repeat in variations, illuminated by flashes of insight, not unlike the storm marching towards us. And yet there are spaces within her anguish and between bitter words of loss where something else resides. It is not hope. Her voice trails off as if she were trying to remember something.
I too am trying to remember something. What came next in my dream?
She shakes her head as if to dislodge whatever it was and begins again. Halts again. It is certainly not happiness or even acceptance she folds into the silence. I wonder if this confession is a survey of the damage done, of just how much was lost, when I hear the question.
“Should I join them?”
Even as she is saying it, she shifts in my lap, kisses me. It might as well be Ophelia’s last kiss, cold and distant, even in its intimacy. This was not something I dreamt.
The storm has arrived. Great booms of thunder, the rain swollen on updrafts until it cannot remain airborne, careens down, a cold shock. Harsh light, sudden shadows, the smell of ozone. A bolt of lightning strikes a tree the next yard over. It splits the trunk, branches with new leaves fall. She shudders, settles closer. Close enough that I can hear her heartbeat, or imagine it.
“I’m not your priest, rabbi, therapist, counselor. I can’t answer that question. I can’t give you permission.” My words sound indistinct. Does she even hear me with the rain lashing the porch roof, dribbling down to the flower bed in front of us?
She leans back. There are no tears. She had come to the edge of grief but it is a border she will not cross. I feel the weight of her sorrow and know we are at the end of my dream. Whatever made the kitchen feel so familiar and propelled me unto this moment is gone. There is no satisfying closure. Now she is uncomfortable sitting in my lap, disturbed by my holding her in my arms. She has said too much. I have not said enough or what she wanted to hear.
I reach out to touch her face, one more time, to have a moment of human contact. It is a wasted and unwanted gesture. She gets up, goes to the kitchen door and is not seen again.
It does not matter. I was a lightning rod for the heat and energy that must be discharged. Even in her absence my skin tingled where she had touched me. I can hear “Psycho Killer / Qu’est-ce que c’est / Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa / Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away…” spilling out the window.
In the yard fireflies appear. The air is charged with that particular smell that comes after thunderstorms. Leaning back in the chair, her scent floats away, leaving an odd and satisfying emptiness behind.
When I get up to go in, Carolyn meets me at the door, asks if I want to go to a cowboy bar down the street. The party was already an old story.
In the morning, Carolyn asks what happened on the porch. I tell her it’s a ghost story. Some ghosts are of time or place, stuck between worlds and unable or unwilling to move. Some of us learn to live with the ghosts that will not leave, others deny their existence but can never explain things that go bump in the night. Some of us haven’t become ghosts yet we are already and always haunting. She was that.