💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 1992 captured on 2024-08-18 at 22:02:28. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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We’re driving toward the downtown bus depot, Nadene and me, it’s around noon and sunny, she’s packed all her belongings and has reserved a first-class ticket on a Greyhound. She insisted upon that- not to be driven up towards Denver, says she doesn’t like airplanes. Says she’d rather chart the real America than the clean sterile one- the insides of barns, the burrows of prairie dogs, all the gullies and streams and sparse delineations.
The county courthouse and the municipal building stand like gaunt witnesses as I haul her suitcases from the trunk, pass her a duffel bag, deposit all this gingerly on the sidewalk next to her. She’s headed out towards St. Louis, she says, to help in their relief efforts. And from there her destination is uncertain. Possibly up north to Canada.
“Well, this is it,” I extend a firm and sincere handshake. “Never thought we’d get it all straightened out, but we did. Thank you for that.” I’m referring not only to her efforts in ridding the house of beetles with what remained of Eddie’s pesticide supply, but also in her assistance clearing up and explaining every strange bureaucratic mishap and legal technicality to the authorities, and generally serving as a witness.
“You bet,” she chirps. “Off to see things now. Into the great wide open. Out of the blue and into the black. The world beyond.”
“Here,” I discreetly hand her $3,000 in an envelope. “This will cover you wherever you go, buy you motels for a couple months, afford you a decent reputation. Don’t do anything stupid with it. For serious purposes only.” She lifts the flap, gasps a little, then nods and tucks it into her jeans. She looks prepared for life in all the important ways- standing on the precipice of a trajectory which will carry her out towards many more adventures, not unlike my own.
“You sure you don’t want to come with?”
“No,” I reply. “Need to stay here, Nad. I’m too old to be chasing dreams now. It’s something you only have once. So hold onto it, don’t accept anything less. When the time comes, when your dream appears ripe to seize, you’ll know it. But I, personally- I need to stick around. In case anything reappears. Pueblo is my home now. In time, I’ll learn how it is. But it will take time. I fully acknowledge that.”
“Okay.”
I pull her in and give her a hug and then she turns around and loses eye contact with me, and the great behemoth pulls up to the terminal, headlights blaring, making its familiar honking noise as it exhales steam. She lifts her duffel and suitcases and the driver steps out to help her load them carefully into the cargo section. I smile, get in my car and drive away.
I check my watch. 3:35 A.M.
I’m lying at the top of Star Dune, arms splayed out to either side, and the quiet is deafening- out in the cactus-strewn patches beyond the dunefield, deer silently forage through the brush, and to the north the Sangre De Cristo range sits as a silent reminder of the old monolithic tendencies of Dream Country, and away to the south the lone gas station at Fort Garland forms one sparkling diamond. It’s a few hundred feet to the bottom.
Why I came out here tonight, I can’t really say, but it is somehow a very spiritual location, and imbues me with a sacred hope for the future, both of my meager existence and of the world. Maybe it’s the center around which the universe rotates, one point on an infinite graph, in that you do feel dizzy when you lay on it, there’s a grounding force and the stars all whirl around each other in circular arcs, pendulums that can’t slow down-
Shit, it’s beautiful, I reel and my arms brush over my form, and I lose my balance and begin toppling and shouting all he way down the steep side of the dune, giggling like mad because the impacts don’t hurt, and the deposits of pus in my head are leaking, the dark pink substance is melting away into the abrasive mineral deposits and soon it’ll be covered and forgotten, and I find myself at the base of a deep sunken crevasse, giddy at the prospect of being alive, of feeling and knowing and seeing in the immediate present.
And then I’m lying face down in the sand, it’s cool and clean and wonderful, and I stick my neck in like an ostrich and listen to all the hidden microbes and small things of the Earth as they eat and sleep and eat again, and the words drift toward me like velvet curtains:
“Noise. Silence.”
THE END