For everything that lives is holy

At the top of a winding ancient staircase on the Via Dolorosa is a lovely roof garden from where the splendor of the Old City stretches out before you, catching the last glint of sunlight of the golden Dome of the Rock. Just below, in the narrow stone sunken streets, Christ carried his cross, falling three times to our salvation, so the story goes. The evening breeze brought us back through millennia of faith to the present – a lone soldier poked through the quiet street making sure the ancient faiths kept their distance. My new husband, an executive and a business traveler by nature, never quiet felt comfortable in old or oriental places – any place without a Holiday Inn Conference Center he found absurdly discomforting – this city no less so for its prominence in the news. But I had wanted to see what all the fuss was about, what spiritual gravity could move men to such emotions, such spillage of blood; never before had I known this feeling and perhaps I wanted some faith, some part of the holy place to inspire me to pilgrimage or intifada of the heart.

We sat sipping tea and eating sandwiches, our companion on the trip an Italian priest who knew everything about the Holy Sepulcher and had been a childhood mentor of my husband. It was immediately clear from his demeanor if not his dress that he was a priest, his eyes were direct and engaging, searching souls not so much for sin or forgiveness as for exploration. You could read him like a book, or at least, it seemed, he wanted he wanted to be read that way – perhaps sitting down and cracking open an old volume of Dante or Boccaccio. He twisted open a vino named Buttafucco (there must have been an ‘O’ in there somewhere. The men were somber, as if meditating over their wine and this strange woman found between them.) My mind wandered off amidst the lost souls and the conversation slowly turned to dinner. “And you know which one I’d choose...”, Father trumpeted, turning to me for an answer I later realized was designed to glean as much from me as I had absorbed of him. I realized this afterward, but at the moment, I fell for it and spontaneously called out like a schoolgirl “Yes, you would choose the chicken, because you hate lamb”. I had learned and remembered. Like a Boccacio story. Then, in silence as I felt exposed, frozen between the strange glances of my husband and a holy man whose food preferences I’d unwittingly memorized, I searched for conversation.

So I asked him if he’d ever heard about my chalet, my own sacred place where roads never bothered to go, nor pipes or electric lines. I embellished here and there, but I wanted to get the feeling right. I’d been wanting to grace him with my knowledge of unspoiled, peaceful places and now seemed as good a time as any. As I dreamed would happen, I saw for a split second a light in his eyes as his mouth fell open in the recognition of something not of this world - something closer to God - that my words conveyed to him. For the moment it seemed he was standing on that old railroad bridge with me high above the deep, ice gorge on Easter Sunday. But if there was a flicker of this, it didn’t last. Father wasn’t impressed but now he had been exposed, as I had been moments earlier by my knowledge his eating habits. He poured our glasses, splashing wine around a bit and asked with a clever grin, as a general inquiry to all at the table (that is, me and my fidgeting husband) “What was the strangest drug experience you’ve ever had?”. He was looking at me, of course. My husband sat blank, impassive. I took the bait and began my confession:

“The strangest experience I’ve ever had on drugs was finding myself tripping on LSD in the home of pro-life militants. I remember it was full of Bambi figurines and pictures of cute little fetuses.” They were staring at me with something more than feigned interest, so I continued. “Hah, you’re probably wondering how I got there, well, haha, funny story, I was walking on the college campus one day with some friends and we had just taken some hits of acid. That’s when I saw this really hot guy who was the lead singer in a funk band driving up. I mean – he was really hot, and he asked us if we’d like to drive out to Cleveland with him and see the Grateful Dead concert. So I said ‘when?’ and he said ‘right now – get in, let’s hit the road!’. And so – I mean this guy was really hot – and I was reallllly into him at the time, so there was no way I was going to say no, but I told him ‘hey, we just took some hits of acid – they haven’t even kicked in yet’, and he says ‘so what? you don’t have to drive the car. We’ll get some more acid when we get out there from my friend Vidalia Onion out at the Campfire’.

There was no way I could say no, right? So I jumped in. The other guy I was walking with, who I was actually dating at the time, so he wasn’t gonna let me take a trip with this funk guy alone, he jumps in too. And then my friend Grace – she would have been left tripping all by herself, so she gets in too. She and the funk-guy ended up hooking up and getting married much later on – maybe this was the weekend that bonded them, who knows. But what our driver didn’t tell us was that he was going to stay the night at his parents house at this little redneck town outside of Cleveland, and that his parents were militant pro-lifers, having been involved in the ‘March on Buffalo’ where teenage girls were grabbed from outside Planned Parenthood and educated about the dangers of pre-marital sex in the back of an old blue van.”

“Ah yes,” offered my husband astutely, “the ‘Compassion for Life’ movement of ’91.” My groom was up on all the fringe groups.

“Yes, that’s right, they were followers of Handell McRamsey, the famous State Senator. Anyway, it turned out his parents were exactly these people and weren’t ‘cool’ to a bunch of acidheads crashing around there pad. Luckily we arrived in the middle of the night and they were asleep. Bruno said he was tired of driving and went strait to bed too. We were like ‘hey man, what about the Vidalia Onion guy?’ but he just walked right up the stairs and into his room and shut the door.

“So what did you do?” Our Italian priest was getting interested.

“Well”, I obliged, “we started to explore the house, turning over all those millions of little Disney figurines and getting freaked out by all the fetuses...fetae, whatever. So we tried to escape, but the goddamn town was so redneck that a cop picked us up after two blocks because we were ‘foreigners’ and was about to take us to some redneck cell when we told him that we were friends of Bruno O’Riordan and and boy that set off bells. So the pig became all friendly and dropped us right off back there again. Then, to rebel against the oppressed state in which we’d found ourselves, we piled up all the furniture in the living room into a big mountain and put a big hunk of cheese on top with a postcard of fetuses sticking out. Then, when we were bored with playing in our ‘fort’ and the sun was coming up, we figured we’d better get the hell out of there. This time, we headed towards some woods we’d seen on our last excursion right before the pigs caught up to us. Lept over a few fences and wouldn’t you know it, on the other side there was a big campfire and a guy sitting at it all sneaky-looking and overgrown, kind of overweight drinking cheap beer. We'd found Vidalia Onion! So we said, ‘hey man, give is some good shit and we’ll be really grateful. And he sold us six hits of acid that were complete duds – I mean absolutely no effect at all. Thirty dollars down the drain – down the throat of ol’ Vidalia Onion and his Genesee Cream Ale.”

Back on our Holy rooftop, there was silence - only the call to prayer of the evening faithful in the distance. My new husband regarded me, lids down, with a kind of pity. I found myself welling up on our Italian companion with something not much less than complete desire, and he laughed a little bit at seeing this, said something in Latin. We drank our deep-red wine referentially under the deepening sky and the song of the muezzin.

To Love

To love is a funny thing – it seems to exist without definitions or instructions, nobody ever tells you what it is or what it’s supposed to do for you – its basically whatever you decide to make of it. If you can adjust your expectations to a realistic level, you might just actually enjoy the ride.

This is the story I want to tell: Back then, love meant everything and I expected the world of it. It was what I had been waiting for all my life; it would save me from being alone and useless in a world full of useful, clever people. It would teach me everything and lift me up above all the nonsense with its wisdom and light. Obviously, trouble was ahead. I met him as I met the others – those lucky insane few whose twisted fortunes made them the objects of my affections: basically, he just tapped me on the shoulder and said “Hi, I’m Bruno, what’s your name?”. I turned around to his dark brooding brow and sky-blue eyes that contained the world, and the ground dropped right out from under my feet. The rest, as they say, was history.

He quickly rose to the status of angel, then to god, and though I always maintained the veneer of a normal life with friends and even a cool boyfriend who always had lots of drugs on him, inside I burned to touch those long, black rock-star locks and athlete’s body. But since I noticed in the days after meeting him that he was constantly mobbed by women everywhere he went, I kept my distance. That and he was too friendly: people called him “Happy Bruno”, but then again there was also a guy at school called “Peaceful John” who I’d heard had broken a few guys jaws in bar fights – it wasn’t meant to be an ironic nickname either, people at our school were just extremely naïve. They thought that because “Peaceful John” wore tie dyes and was stoned all the time, he wasn’t a violent psycho, and so it was with some doubt that I heard the girls dish about Happy Bruno. Anyone with such a noticeably sunny disposition had to have a really scary dark side.

So I kept it all in, and it bubbled and boiled and occasionally splashed out a bit when I was drunk, but it was too powerful, I suppose, to be taken seriously. Still, I had these dreams of searching everywhere and finding him, our souls becoming one, etc. I did every drug in the world, but it never went away, and then one day in the extreme depths or a winter that could only be so gray and depressing in Poughkeepsie, I couldn’t take it anymore. Something had to give. It had been two years. That had been enough – salvation awaited.

I crept out quietly – my friends were all passed out around our drug-den living room, helter skelter. I walked to Bruno’s house. I rang the doorbell. He was home, let me in and I sat down coolly, calmly (after all this time, I knew it was the right thing to do) and I told him I loved him, I always loved him, and I wanted to get out of this hellish town and, I don’t know, maybe go out West. He listened patiently. He seemed slightly not necessarily disgusted (which was a miracle since I now realized I had not bothered to put on makeup or even brush my hair, and had not even showered in days).

When I’d finished my story, he spoke. He was not totally adverse to the idea of my loving him, or even cultivating the possibility of him loving me back. And going out West sounded nice. (“‘Course you’ll have to clean up a bit first” he cracked a grin). He was just fine with everything, but it was the complication of my rather unpredictable and prone-to-fits-of-rage boyfriend he was worried about. I told him I’d take care of that by spring, but of course I was aware that Bruno currently had the affections of, among others, a certain Brazilian beauty, who I was frankly concerned knew how to do things that life in Poughkeepsie had just not taught me how to do. He laughed when I brought her up: “No problem, no worries”. Right.

The next day, I woke up absolutely horrified with myself. What had I done? How had that even been allowed to happen? I was starting to doubt that it really had, starting to doubt my own existence, sitting in the campus pub downing beers. They never would believe me if I told them and if they did, they’d hate me for what I’d done the way that only jealous women can. I sat silently with them and drank, and then noticed a tinkling if change into the jukebox. Instinctively, I turned around, but there was no one there. Still, the box started playing Neil Young’s ‘Cinnamon girl’. It was him – and that was ME! ‘I wanna live with you cinnamon girl, so I can be happy the rest of my life with my cinnamon girl’. It was ME! Somehow, I knew it was, and that everything was going to be alright…I wanna go out West with you cinnamon girl…at least in the short run.

Two weeks later, Bruno disappeared, and I began the frantic search I’d previewed so many times in my dreams. There’d been some strange message about him being off to follow the geese on their annual spring migration, but that made it even more puzzling, and made me afraid. A fog of desolation settled over our stinking town, and a lone crow followed me everywhere, always cawing three times and generally disheartening my drug-induced stupor (my friends were already sick of my strange behavior and this didn’t help). Another two weeks of drudging through the soup of late-winter existence in Upstate New York and he reappeared, equally bizarre, crouching low in the shadows outside my ‘Comparative Sculpture’ class. “Wanna go for coffee?”

“Sure, why not?”
He wasn’t in danger at least, just gone paranoid – insane. Clinical diagnosis and everything. Hospital. “I swear, this is the first day pass they gave me, otherwise I would have come sooner”.

Ah, but the Brazilian had been to see him already. No, they hadn’t had sex – it wasn’t allowed at the hospital – they watched you. Yes, he had sent the crow to protect me (and in general menace anyone else that might be interested). And yes, it occurred to me that this was all very strange, but hey, when you’re in love, you take anything you can get.

After that, he didn’t come back to the college anymore. He didn’t come back at all. He just went back out to Jamestown to get his head together. He said he didn’t remember much from before, which was a bad sign. Yes, the Brazilian had been out there to see him, but no he didn’t want to carry on the relationship – couldn’t keep up with her pace (in retrospect, I should also have seen this as a bad sign). But still I dreamed of him – I dreamed of him despite myself, about possessing his body and mind all to myself, and I searched the ugly campus buildings for him even though he was not there.

Finally, oh finally I was at least permitted to visit him, and was told he might even be able to take me up to Niagara Falls, if his mother and psychiatrist didn’t object. So the morning after my last exam, I left my little drug den, sneaking through the smoky-dusty shadows into the stark early light and boarded a train right across New York State, 300 miles of expectation (was any of this real?). And when I arrived at Williamsville station on that chilly spring evening, Bruno was waiting with the kind of smile that told me there was a plan. We got to the car and he headed north, explained that he’d fired his shrink and overruled his mom, and we were headed to the Falls.

I was beside myself with happiness and a touch of the kind of apprehension that you only get when you’ve waited so long and are finally about to get what you want. But as the sun set on his dad’s Buick in the northernmost regions of Our Great State to the strains of Bob Dylan ("She takes just like a woman, yes, she does, She makes love just like a woman, And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl”), it seemed that every second of my life had been leading up to right now.

We crossed to the Canadian side and hit the wild neon strip of Motels flashing their ROUND BEDS!, MIRRORED CEILINGS!, CHAMPAGNE-GLASS JACUZZI ROOMS! on cheap lighted signs. (This was what my father – if he had been present or had knownwhere I was at that moment – would have called ‘honky tonk’). We pulled into one and a manic Pakistani man erupted immediately from the lobby, eager to show his digs. The place was indeed as advertised, although the rugs looked a little worn. But in those tense few moments staring down at the satin-sheeted round bed, it was clear that neither Bruno or I could handle this scene, albeit for different reasons that were not entirely clear to us; he was already starting to tremble.

We glanced at each other just a half-second, sharing the lingering question of who was going to make a break for it first. I don’t remember who it was, but we were clearly of the same mind about this. Driving somberly back to the American side, we sought out a Holiday Inn. Conference Center. Family fun. All that. We could handle a Holiday Inn. We parked, checked in. The man at the desk looked bored and we liked that. He gave us our room key and we went up – knew what to expect – just two beds, a toilet ‘sanitized for our protection’ and a copy of Gideon’s Bible, just like every other Holiday Inn we’d ever been to in our lives. I exhaled – now it was time – the moment we’ve all been waiting for – to love. Yes, it's what I’d been imagining would come next -hadn’t given the course of events a second thought. Wasn’t it expected?

I’d been looking forward to it only for about two years and particularly so during the last six hours, so much so in fact that the thought of seeing us doing it on that round bed off a mirrored ceiling had been simply too much to bear. Bruno was perched precariously at the edge of the bed, looking at me funny in his orange jacket and khaki pants and shoes and everything: “Can’t do it”.
“What?

Why not?” Reality was fading fast. You might have thought that he would have dropped this important statement at me at a more opportune time, but I suppose there wasn’t one.

“It's all the meds they’ve got me on. You wouldn’t believe the cocktail of heavy shit I’m taking. Its not like real drugs – you can’t do anything on this shit.
“Like what?” I had taken Pharmacology – why hadn’t anyone mentioned this?

“Neurontin, Welbutrin, even Prozac. With all these downers in me, I can’t…nothing works…it uh…doesn’t function, you know." I had never been so stone-cold sober in my life. I wasn’t hearing this. I’d shared him with the Brazilian, betrayed my cool, abusive boyfriend to come and find him and ridden six hours on a shitty Amtrak train on the off chance that the stars would align and he’d take me on this little jaunt – gladly so. Not to mention the two years I’d seethed inside, searching him out in my dreams, praying in my veins for the chance to reach into that soul. But this I wasn’t hearing.

I heard myself taking on a surprisingly commanding voice: “Lie down. I’ll make it work”
“But I don’t think you under”—
“JUST LIE DOWN. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything. I’ll take care of it!” I heard this commanding voice, but was it coming from me? Was this some other reality? Was this love? I’d never been so sure of anything in my life. And you know what? It was easy. I managed to take care of it again in the morning.

I’ll leave the story off here to spare you the inevitable crushing heartbreak that could only ensue, and that it took me years to work through – am I still working through it? – and that I have far from forgotten. Suffice it to say that we did go out West. And the West is a lonely place to be left behind without a penny to your name at age 19. Lots of spirits and ghosts out there in the desert – and not much else. It makes you question the very nature of love and what to expect from it.

I suppose I never really got what I wanted, which was to cease to exist as a solitary being, for true love to take away the pain and beat up all the bad guys and lead me to unadulterated bliss and unending ecstasy.  That night I found a voice but I never really learned to use it for anything productive - to stand up for myself.

But perhaps love is much simpler if you know how to look at it. Perhaps true love simply involves laughing together unseen on a vibrating, revolving bed with mirrors on the ceiling and a lot of heavy tranquilizers. Perhaps if this had occurred to me at the time, I’d be in a different place today. The less you think, the better.

The end.

The Boot

The first I ever knew about Italy I learned at a restaurant in Upstate New York. The Hillside was my family’s weekly haunt for three generations (and was to become Traficanti’s Hillside – but that was much later). It was on old Route 209, and when I was a young child it was run by a family of Italians of the ‘old school’ – beehive hairdos and such – but it had little to do with Italy as we know it. It was one of those old-style places that advertised “Continental Cuisine – Steaks and Chops” on a white-and-neon sign out front with flickering colored lights around another sign by the road that advertised “Cocktails”.

Inside, the décor was all irregular stone and rustic – deer heads and strange-shaped bottles of something. Once when I was about two, they took me to visit the kitchen and I was sure I saw a dad man (maybe Jesus?) hanging bleeding inside the door of the meat cooler. I ran screaming to my mommy at the vision, but in retrospect, I think it was probably just a side of beef.

One of the more Italian aspects of the Hillside was the clams and mussels over a huge plate of spaghetti, which from the age of two I dove into happily on a regular basis (you should have seen the mess!). The other Italian thing was the placemats, or rather what was printed on the paper mats, which always became marred with grease as the meal when on – a big red boot kicking a little stone that had little red flags sticking out at different points to demarcate cities. My father leaned over proudly and pointed to one some ways down toward the heel. “Naples – that’s where our people come from. That’s where Nana was born”.

Nobody in the family had ever been there, except Nana of course, but she left when she was two on a big ship and didn’t remember a thing. “No, it wasn’t really Naples”, chimed in an aunt from across the table. “I think it was a little town outside called Vicin’ di Napoli”.

I looked at this big, strangely shaped and greasy but fashionable boot a good long time, trying to imagine what it must have been like for Nana and her family to live inside it – why had our people left – how bad could it have been? Was the spaghetti and clams there better there than in Upstate New York?

My first real whiff of that exotic world came shortly thereafter when my parents let me accompany them on a pilgrimage to the veritable temple of everything Italian in north of Yonkers: Toscani and Sons. The sign over the door said ‘Latticini’, which already evoked flavors of the Old World, which had invoked such beautiful suffering on my ancestors. Toscani’s was recognizable from way down Main Street among the college-town pubs and book shops with its strange Italian writing and stately, almost awe-inspiring presence. Once inside, you were hit immediately by a new and pleasurable smell that carried you away to another place, another time – impossible to describe, but it used to hypnotize me. To this day, I can’t quite tell what it was, except a combination of exotic cheeses, meats, biscotti and assorted products from the motherland that were otherwise unknown to the Upstate New York palate. Through the clear glass of built-in bins along the back wall, I would stand staring at the dried beans – lupini and chickpeas and little round white ones and a yellow sand that I later learned was polenta. I would inhale deeply and ponder each bin with its strange contents, imagining what it would taste like.

Then I would turn and join my mother or father by the giant counter, filled with braided cheese, fresh-made sausage, hams, delicacies under oil, and really begin to wonder what horrible events had induced our people to leave world of all this behind. In the end, our family would emerge with an assortment of rich provolone, marinated artichokes, soprassata, and the crown jewel – prosciutto di Parma. All the other goods were a tease – this was what we had all really wanted. It was like gold – so expensive, pink and delicate; it was to be eaten with care and humility, wrapped gingerly around a breadstick and savored – it cost over 20 dollars a pound! And it brought back all the sights and smells of that shop, and of that beloved but terrible Old Country we had never known – where wide women stirred pots of strange, steaming beans and kids snacked on prosciutto every day after school but had no shoes.

Now here I am all grown up, snacking on prosciutto di Parma in my tiny Roman apartment – no work to be found in Naples or would have gone there. My husband knows that I’m feeling low and is therefore cleaning. All those flashes of memories, curiosity, longing, have brought me here to live my dreams, my motherland; those sights and smells have become a part of my daily existence. All the strange things that have happened along the way have dumped us here to this cheap cracked-plaster place at the wooden table, to the sounds of the neighbors screaming at each other in a barely discernible dialect. But ah, the prosciutto…at last, I can eat all I ever wanted without the greedy eyes all around me.

Have I brought us to this place or was it Nana guiding my hand? I think if it was her, we would somehow have returned to Vicin’ di Napoli and not Rome, with all its uptight beauty.

Oh What a New-Sound-New

When I was little, we used to put butter on our lips and pretend it was lipstick. Now I put lipstick on my lips and pretend its butter.

Now I watch my baby boy climb the side of his crib and yell out to me when I put him to bed, jumping and pounding and turning red; it breaks my heart to see him this way. Of course, this is exactly what his behavior aims to elicit in me, if not consciously than as an unconscious survival mechanism - his distress rams through me all the loss I've felt over a lifetime. All the loneliness, abandonment and broken-heartedness I've ever experienced is contained in these cries and shoved at me for my perusal. But of course, he's just a baby and doesn't want to sleep. I want to sleep desperately, but this is not an interesting story. Perhaps the interesting stories cannot be told in this lifetime.

Perhaps they are not worth telling. There were one a million stories, ideas, memories (with passion!) but they all melted down. Is this a bad thing? Or should we go back there again -- to that polluted place of uncertainty, Binghamton, N.Y., where at least there were the crows. Black clouds over St. Peter's dome don't look so good, make the surrounding demons a shade more visible, more menacing. Love was a way of life, not just an apparition after a night of heavy night of drinking, but something that lived and breathed (the demons were there just the same). It was the only thing that melted away the cobwebs of evil that enclosed us and threatened to devour us all. This is the story I want to tell, but I'm afraid no one would believe it.

Break through. Step in. Can you make it past the noise? Remember your poetry -- do we still have a guardian angel, even though we're so far away from that cursed place?
It all got started back there, but the rhythm was so clouded and still is. We'd just hop on that train and ride it. Remember out in the nature preserve with the frogs and the orgy of mating salamanders and the mud -- good old brown mud that smelled pleasantly of rot and things earthly. From here all life had arisen.

Wonder if that long bridge is still there there across the long end of the lake, with that one enlarged part for just sitting, on which some other acid-crazed student had scrawled "JEEZIL LOVES YOU". Were were there in the fall, when even the ferns turned brilliant colors screaming on LSD, and I wanted so much to tell the story just like now. It was all there in front of us that day, written in the moss the rocks and the tall old pines with so much to tell. They were so much older than us kids, so much older than everything in that dark, polluted country. They shaded us and whispered tales of centuries past -- freer, happier times, before this land was destroyed by black smoke, factories, toxic waste and finally...college students.

But I just couldn't get this story into words, couldn't get the words down on paper, with its rigid lines running strait and narrow across the page. The stories came in colors, vibrant earth-shattering colors of autumn -- reds, oranges and yellows, they dripped down the page like beautiful people who've been struck by lightening and left everything else behind.

Why can't we ever keep the faith? Its that same fear that told us not to leave the forest that day, the same one that prevents us on this very day all these years later, from moving on with our destiny. That snake-in-the grass fear that burrows in and removes my mojo every time I feel ready to move on and get rid of this story once and for all.

The Rust Belt

Suppose its true that when you are living a great narrative, you don’t have the strength to write about it. And yet its so hard to think up stories out of thin air. Suppose it only takes time, years maybe, when it becomes only flashes of memories eating me on a snowy mountain top, driving into the sunset over the State Line, waking saturated with contentment in Holiday Inns and Motor Hotels and perhaps making it to the Canadian border – not memories even but memories of photos and other forget-me-nots. Suppose this is better than relating every stinging second of the damned affair. There is no joy in this; its all description, no plot.

Many of the roads in Upstate New York don’t go anywhere at all, just wind through hills from one muddy burg to another, connecting one far-off, unimportant town with another, somewhere else. Somewhere at one time, some of these routes were strategically important: Route 209 follows the footprint of the old D&H Canal, dug in the 19th century to haul coal from Pennsylvania to New York City, building our great Empire State one boatload at a time. The Canal had been an engineering marvel in its day, boasting at least one stone aqueduct designed by Roebling to carry coalboats over a the majestic Rondout Valley (in the 1970s, the local power company had tried to destroy the crossing but the wrecking ball just bounced off – they ended up dynamiting it – no one’s really sure why).

The towns along this route had at least once been filled with hotels, whores and ginmills, all the accoutrements of life thriving, which is more they can boast now (if they are lucky now, they might have recently been livened by antique-frenzied city-slickers who’ve escaped the hustle). In other cases, one can’t imagine why a road would have been drilled though in the first place. There is Route 30, I think, making its way improbably and fruitlessly from the Delaware Reservoir at the Pennsylvania border up through the foothills of the Catskills, through nowheresville, more reservoirs, deserts of flat, windswept snow with mailboxes poking out, meandering in no particular direction through towns with names like Harrietstown, Speculator and Paul Smiths, dozens of places like this each with a single flashing yellow light and brown slushy snowbanks dribbling into the road, connecting the dots between Stewarts Shoppes and Food Lion Supermarkets with their infinite rows of florescent bulbs, ending up in the Adirondaks: in nameless places like Tupper Lake and Long Lake. Perhaps this was not the best weekend for you to quit smoking. Perhaps this was not the best weekend for to quit your anti-psychotic medication.

I don’t know how we made it to that hilltop off the main road; were we in New York or Pennsylvania – it all looked the same – all brown-white and dirty snow, mobile homes and wooden post offices displaying random zip codes – 12983, 12025, 12474 so that you couldn’t remember where you were. We chose our routes like placing bets on a roulette wheel, 29, 11, 28N stopping for coffee at identical little aluminium neon diners full of smoky old men and pathetic smiling waitresses filling our bottomless cups. We talked and jittered, chattering at ourselves and others til they noticed and stared our way. Then you told me we had to drive on, the roads were getting bad, the snowbanks encroaching further into the road and melting-freezing-melting becoming the road itself. I submitted because, frankly, I was just happy to be out there with you far from fools, and because I was in love and somehow it made me trust that you wouldn’t slip, or if you did, I wouldn’t mind going down with you behind the wheel.

Anyway, you used to live in Michigan, so that’s enough. The road had become impassable or nearly so; we were up on some rounded snowpeak, gray and full of bare branches and surely hibernating reptiles; happily devoid of any association to anything in my life. We’d reached a barrier actually – the end of the road – all bright orange reflecting in the low sun, harsh against this organic backdrop of earthtones. On it was affixed a sign: BRIDGE OUT. But the bridge was there, spanning and expansive gully – the typical iron truss bridge found all over this part of the country: built to last, reflecting the industrialists’ great dreams of an American future. Trains. Factories. Iron. Built to serve generations for hundreds of years in the spirit of the great Roman aqueducts – still standing, still bringing water to a thriving city.

In reality, these proud structures had outlasted America’s greatness, outlived her immense industrial might and now mostly held vacant railroad tracks spattered with weeds or abandoned roads leading to nowhere like the shadowy remnants of the D&H Canal, like old Lock 19 in High Falls, perpetually sleeping, its chambers masterpieces of cut stone haunted by muskrats and ghosts of muleboys slain in the line of duty.

Our old iron bridge had clung to the valley in perpetuity. The mighty road to progress had given way to nature, as it always does eventually. But iron too is part of nature. It had held, integrated itself into its surroundings, and what had once proudly led sooty men and boys across to an important centre mining or milling was now populated by fully grown trees – remarkable the way those trees had sprouted right on the bridge, spreading their branches, rooting there, extending their trunks from one of man’s greatest dreams of the future right up into the sky. A cantilevered bridge filled with nothing but trees – there was no further to go.

It seems that we had unknowingly reached our destination. I wanted you right there alone in our newfound wilderness with Hank Willians Jr on the radio but you said no. I begged, but you refused. You seemed to enjoy this power over me, You had literally dragged me to the end of the earth (or perhaps I’d dragged you), but either way I’d escaped – with you – from a life of grief and fog, and I’d had it in my mind that once we stopped, this was what was supposed to come next. I assumed that you saw things the same way, which was why it was all the more surprising when you deflected my advances, which in turn made me feel hideous, guilty and lower than anything I had ever felt myself to be. In your mind, clearly we had not reached our end point; having me would only be an empty victory because I would inevitably return to my peaked roof, my Marxist intellectuals and my university classes – my cold bourgeois existence with its empty promises of fulfillment – smiling as I related self-effacing anecdotes of my ‘lost weekend’ in emails or chats. It wasn’t true.

But why should I let myself be possessed when you had nothing at all to bring to the table? Other than the utter feeling of satisfaction and completeness, other than brain-twisting sensations of physical desire – mere perceptions, illusions that would surely melt into dust with time. So we sat in silence (except for the crackling twang on the radio), contemplating the bridge and its healthy trees. Symbiosis.

In the very act of refusal, one is able to gain a new sense of strength and mastery; control as perfect and white as the pristine ice crystals refracting light off the delicate branches above our heads that winter afternoon in the fading light when I lost it all.