Plowing the Dark

4

When rage reprised itself, when you fell back again on the old bitter tit for tat, when the need to escape finally left you throwing darts at the world map, at last it hit you. Simple choice: replay the old routine, the self-triggering cycle of accusations, the verbal razor cuts daubed in love's alcohol. Traipse down the path of tender sadomasochism yet one more soul-shredding time. Or turn around and walk. Escape down the path that must still lie somewhere to the south, the way you walked in.

One more tearful reconciliation would only further demean you both. The place you pushed for — the tumbledown house in the country, your dream of intimacy that always made her bite in fear — vanishes now into fantasy. It gives way to that darker late-night venue, where hisses of desire shade off into abuse, abuse feeding back into desire.

You've been each other's shared addiction, slinking back repeatedly to the nightmare rush that you've both fought to be rid of. you've come back from the dead a dozen times, only to spin out again, worse, for whole weeks at a time. You've suffered the delirium of total withdrawal: one month, two, without so much as a word. Then, clean, virginal, at peace, calling again, just to see if you can. Just to see who's in charge. Just a quick little needle slipped into one another's waiting veins.

All that changes forever, this Friday. You're off to a place where you can't ask her to hurt you again, where neither of you can backslide into care. Where you can no longer reach one another, however much mutual tenderness revives. It rocks you, just to imagine.

Among your friends, the plan produces only stunned hilarity. "You're going where? Don't they shoot people in the street there, without even asking whose side they're on?"

"No," you shit them back. "You're thinking of D.C." At last they realize, these friends who've witnessed your worst whiplash for years now. You mean it, and it blows them away.

You rush to assure everyone. The school you'll teach for is a virtual armed compound. Tensions are nowhere near what they were this time last year. The civil war is ending; all sides are talking compromise. The foreign armies have left. Their president has finally taken the reins. All that old insanity is a thing of the past.

And it's only for two terms, anyway. Eight months. Safer than a daily commute on the Edens Expressway.

You sleep well on the long flight, crushed up against the window with one of those squares of cotton gauze the stewardesses pass off as pillows. In your sleep, you already speak fluent Arabic. Even your dream marionette is struck by the strangeness: these guttural rapid bursts issuing from you, part nonsense, part gift of tongues.

Over the cabin speakers, the pilot warns that he must take the standard evasive maneuvers upon approach. Passengers are not to panic. The plane will simply lose a few thousand feet in a matter of seconds. Many on board seem used to the procedure.

You Stuka to a landing, safe, even exhilarated. The guard at the baggage claim totes a machine gun resembling an haute couture coat hanger. The school bursar is waiting in the terminal to meet you. The metropolis lies dark and quiet. You cock your ears toward the south suburbs, but can hear nothing except traffic. The chauffeur from the school laughs: What did you expect? Grenade-toting crazies lurking behind every street vendor?

In the morning, you tour the compound. The school buildings are mostly intact. They sit up on a bluff, with a view down to the Corniche and the sea beyond. Your office balcony looks out on precarious pyramids of rubble being bulldozed into the water. You search for the Green Line, the vegetation growing up through the cracked concrete that divides the city. You see only a stand of high-rises, their pockmarks blending into this day's dappled shadows.

It's better than you imagined. All white and marine and accepting. A recovering place. A good place to recover. The resinous air, the olive mountains. Arid, azure, clear. Your sinuses haven't been this open since childhood. This city is returning. You can live here.

And as with all key conclusions you've reached in your thirty-three years, you're wrong.