Howling Bells

Howling Bells

We are both in the desert; I rest my feet on the dash and look up at the sky. He is outside the car pissing into a nearby bush. The sky is burned streaks and stuttering lines, and everything is made into cardboard cutouts and outlines in the gloom. There are few sounds, the engine still vibrates with heat, crickets chirp in two tone, he pisses and I try to focus on the moment and ignore the sound. I am in a movie, I am made new, I cannot hear you piss.

As he zips up his jeans, he looks over his shoulder and says

“The difference between you and me girl, is that you run away from things, and I run to them”

Prick.

We’ve been travelling for months now, we have broken up three times, crossed four state borders, and shared many things. This is our second car, our first having broken down in the path of an oncoming hurricane which chased us, from town to town, sleeping with it far away and awaking to find ourselves once again in it’s path.

“Oh really?” I say

“Yeah” he says, with a grin that’s supposed to be charming, and then he hops into the driver’s seat.

“That’s why you’re having second thoughts” he says.

“I am not” I say.

“You are. You have doubt. I can see it on your face” he says.

“One day” I say “You will realise you don’t know me at all as well as you think you do”

“Oh I know you” he says, and he leans over and kisses my ear.

“Fuck you” I say. He runs his hand down my side and begins feeling his way up my skirt.

“Fuck off” I say again. And push him away. He leans back and laughs and smacks his lips.

“No?” he says, like someone who has offered you a forkful of their food in a restaurant and been rejected.

“You’ve just been pissing” I say. “I’m not doing it after that.

We are looking for a spot for the fire. It’s been two years now since her funeral, and in the boot of the car is a bag containing the few last things I’ve been unable to throw away or get rid of. He was sceptical at first, and told me about the Joshua tree and about the crime of unoriginality, the crime of seen to be “copying fucking U2”, but when I woke him up in the middle of the night he needed no persuasion.

After another hour, in the gloom, he stops the car and I agree. Then he pops open the boot and takes out a can of petrol and a plastic bag that’s already full.

We don’t make it back to the motel in time, in the late and the dark and that critical stage where to continue further on takes you away from tonight and into tomorrow morning. It takes him half an hour to persuade me to camp rather than drive on, ostensibly to get back to our old motel or find a new one, in reality, I’m not sure I want to stop. Giving in, I pull the car over and off the road and we pitch the tent in feuding silence; experts by now, it takes minutes. Jostling for space in two sleeping bags, I make sure to elbow him slightly too hard in the ribs, in the soft places.

“I never had to help you, you know” he says.

“I never asked you to” I say

“This was your idea. Don’t turn your guilt into anger for me”

“Who said I was feeling fucking guilty?” I spit.

Nothing.

Prick. PrickPrick.

“Are you making a dig?” I say.

I feel his spine against mine.

“If you want to say something, just say something. You think it’s my fault then say so. Don’t just throw half a comment out there and then retreat” I say.

These are not my words.

A week later we sit drinking coffee in a new town. It’s a new diner, with new coffee, and new seats, and a new different view of the same road. Or what seems to be the same road, I have long since stopped trying to follow maps. Earlier today we bought our usual provisions, whiskey and cookies and cigarettes. Later we will drink and have sex. We will not talk about parents or dreams or how well eachother slept during the night. We know where is out of bounds and where is safe. It’s a routine that has evolved, organically and unspoken, that I once found so comforting.

When we started out together, we were both so scattered, both felt so unreal, that we were liable to be dragged, like an untethered boat, whichever way the tides or the winds dictated. Alone, with roads and pasts and homes far-away, we were see-through. We were road signs with holes in them. Then we realised together that was the strength, we would take our lack of grounding and lack of ties and use it. We could go anywhere, be anyone, see everything and remember everybody.

And, I give you that we have done so much and seen more than I thought. And that he and I have been through more than I expected, gone deeper and scrubbed at wounds and places neither knew that either possessed or still hurt.

Now we both look different directions out the same window, and I am hit, like a punch, by the nagging creeping feeling of static. That we are drawn to the same places, the same routines and the same ways of living. The same bars and diners and highways and motels. The same all night supermarkets with the same Mexican clerks. We seem to seek them out, the pair of us, like moths stubbornly throwing themselves into lightbulbs. Like these small facsimiles of humanity will somehow allow us to be healed, to be swallowed up and re-integrated, like fish returning to the sea.

The waitress scythes through the booths in the diner, twisting and poking her ass or her breasts out at the truckers and at us. He watches her swivelling, hips thrust out, like so many other girls trading a part some guys morning jerk-off fantasy for a few bucks extra in tips.

It wasn’t this waitress who he was with when he vanished for a week, back in that town with the two barbershops and the guy who played sat on his porch all day playing banjo with a metal hook in place of a hand. It wasn’t this particular girl, with her brown hair in tight curls and her gold earrings bouncing with every catwalk step, but it might as well have been. I stayed in the motel for a few days, and, in the bar on my last night in town, having paid up and packed up, he sat down next to me and said “what’s up”. As if nothing had happened. As if he had just popped out to make a phonecall or go for a piss. The next day we got in the car and drove wordlessly all day, smoking and looking for radio stations, until it got dark or we ran out of petrol, whatever happened first.

Even these casual disappearances, these temporary abductions, became normal in the end. And the rage and the fear and the anger became replaced with quiet resentment and disappointment. Disappointment, I suppose, in being proved correct. But he would always return, somehow knowing like a homing pigeon where I would be or when I was planning to leave. The months have been spent like this, not now, I realise, like orbiting bodies circling some immense thing, some centre with so much gravity to keep us from hurtling off into space, but like beads on an abacus. Forever being pulled apart and smashing back into one another, separating and colliding but never breaking away.

We planned never to plan, never to stop, or never to worry. But constant change and constant motion became as monotonous as never going anywhere at all. We have refused to believe that for a while, heads in the sand of our own fiercely constructed pain. We ran so fast, and drove so far, and watched the world revolve around us for a while, but returned to the same standing stop. He remains my constant, and whilst we sustain eachother it is a weak, sickly, cancerous symbiosis.

“How’s your coffee?” he says

”Better than that other place” I say

“Isn’t she amazing” he says. Referring to the waitress.

“Mmm” I say.

He has a glint in his eye. I stir my coffee.

We have both gone wrong somewhere, and like two vampires, our blood is tainted and will not sustain, will not soothe or provide anything to either as we, too busy to notice, slowly devour the other piece by piece.

Cut me open. Watch me spill, slick like water, over the cracked highways and streets and then evaporate.

The one thing I have in my favour is that I know him. I know you. I know what will happen next. I know everything.

We finish our coffee and you leave too large a tip, and in the car on the way home I stroke your crotch and wonder whether your half erection is from me or the waitress.

Tonight tommorow or somewhere. we are in a bar or a restaurant or a coffee house or a mechanics workshop. I will be like this and then, when you go to the bathroom or to the store, I will get in the car, put it into first, and I will go.

The road spreads out like paper unfolded and airwaves taunt and pull me, each radio station an invisible thread pulling me spiderlike into it’s own individual epicentre. I do not know how far yet I have to go, and every sundown without you where I feel lost I know I am not yet far enough. Because every morning I wake feeling that imperceptible amount better. That much more healed. My cells are regrouping and rebuilding tiny structures inside my blood, I am knitting together again. I left the photographs and the shoebox and the cds and all the clothes in that motel room, and the car, my car remember is empty and pure and clean. Bored and filed down smooth and sleek like bullets. Without you it is new, it is on fire and unstoppable. I have found phonebooths, I have found mexico and I have found cool clear water. I have found a map to the airport.

I’ve lost track of time, and I’m sitting on a bed that feels like sandstone covered in a picnic blanket. The television spits crackly CNN with the sound down; my own rolling wallpaper of headlines and stocks and baseball scores and highlights. There’s a rap on the door from outside and I am suddenly aware that I’m in my underwear and the bare bulb overhead casts my silhouette onto the flimsy curtains.

“Yes?” I say

Another knock.

“Who is it?”

More knocking.

“I know you’re in there” he says.

I freeze, I am upside down and plunged into ice, my temperature and my pulse slowing down until I fall into sleep. Like a lobster in a chef’s freezer waiting to be killed.

“I just want to come in for a minute” he says.

I reach the door by the first kick. The whole frame shuddering with the impact of his boots. I remember the way you used to stamp on the pedals in the car as you bring that same rough touch to the door, trying to bring it in line the same way you did with the car, the same way you did with everything else.

I chain the door fast and turn and lean against it. My spine bowing with every impact of your fists and your feet on the other side.

“Go away” I say “I’m calling somebody” I say

“Let me in. Let me in now!” he says

“I’m done. It’s over” I say

“I need you. I need to be inside” he says

“Look. Take the car. Take anything. Just go” I say “Please just go”

He kicks again and again and again, vibrations running through me.

“You’ll wake the whole hotel” I say “you’re hurting me”

“I don’t care. I’ll rip the walls down. I’ll break down this fucking door” he says

I fall to my knees and can feel the stomach acids and bile rising in my throat. I begin to gag. Dry heaving on the floor I am rendered quiet.

The lock gives way and shoots across the room, the door flies open six inches and sticks fast on it’s chain, like a dog in a cartoon strip launching off but choking itself on it’s lead.

I crawl across the floor, trying not to vomit, and into the bathroom. The tiles are cool and solid against the back of my head. I can feel fresh warm blood dripping down my hair and onto my shoulders.

Eventually he gives up kicking the door but he keeps shouting. I can hear other guests open their doors and quickly retreat under a barrage of his abuse. He shouts and screams and snarls through snot and tears and spit, I can hear him clawing at the door and at the chain. He is noise and sound and rage, and I crawl further and deeper into the corners of the bathroom and know it’ll be over soon.