The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 75

Names on the road. Evanston, Rock Springs, Rawlins, Laramie, Cheyenne, Ft Collins. Places where founding fathers planted a flag, where the railwaymen came with spades and dynamite, where old tribes fought and died, driven ever further west towards the mountains and the seas. Why am I here? Why am I travelling?

Travelling from, travelling to. It seems like the thing a pilgrim does. It feels like a kind of prayer.

A slow shift in the landscape, the beginning of names tied up with a different kind of history. Lexington, Kearney, Grand Island, Lincoln, Omaha. A decaying industrial heartland. Denver. Ft Morgan. Sterling. Ogallala. The chimneys are dry and dusty, the gates are locked, move with the times or be crushed. Insurance salesmen, dealers in second-hand cars, TV crews, pundits and merchants of opinion and vanity, come east, come east; there’s a ten-minute rest stop in Des Moines, thirty minutes in Walcott if you need to pee, toilet stinks but what of it, someone else will clean up the mess, litter in the road, tomorrow’s problem, today is today is today, what next?

Chicago. I sat by Lake Michigan, still as settled silk, and wondered if the first Europeans to come here had thought they were seas, oceans, and that Japan lay beyond.

I rode the L, marvelled that it could be so slow, crawl so close to the towers in the Loop, craned my neck to see a little piece of sky. I ate pizza by Wrigley Park and cheered for the Cubs, though they were destined to lose. I found a man who liked to rumba, thought, why not, why the hell not, and rumbaed with him all the way to his flat, which smelt of habanero and kidney beans, and it was only fucking, nothing else, and he didn’t ask if he’d see me again and I wasn’t interested in anything more, and I caught the bus the next morning towards South Bend, Toledo, Cleveland and New York.

And in New York, I looked across at the statue of Liberty, and I cried.

Seven-day-old clothes, the smell of pepper and sex on my skin, I hadn’t run for days, my legs were dead from the bus, my mind saw only the passing of the world outside, not me, not me at all, discipline, gone, breath, gone, counting, gone, knowledge, truth, thief, all…

Nothing.

Where had I come from? Where was I going?

From nowhere, to nowhere.

The past was just a present that had been, the future was a present yet to come, and only now remained, and I stood by the sea, recovering my land-legs from the road, and wept.