“Debra’s not here right now, Craig.”
“I’m not here for Debra. I’m here for you.”
“Oh? Well, come … right in.”
“I just wanted to check in, see what’s up. Ask about life, health. About your trip out west, mostly. Debra didn’t give specifics. Only that it was interesting. Her word.”
“You’ve seen it then?”
“What? Your weird post of you next to that ugly cactus, trying in vain to out-ugly it? Or that sketchy room with the shadeless lamp accentuating the dark flecks on the wall?”
“The videotape.”
“Videotape? Debra just mentioned a few offhand details that gave off a vibe of uncertainty.”
“Okay.”
“But wasn’t feeling sure how to ask about them herself.”
“Sounds about right.”
“It guess it does seem very fashionable to commit a vacation to tape rather than to memory. People are really into physicality these days. Something you delete doesn’t have as much meaning as something you destroy.”
“I don’t think ‘interesting’ or ‘vacation’ do it justice.”
“Well I’m very open-minded, Scott. More so than some other people—some aforementioned people—who don’t take too well to someone, seemingly out of nowhere, dropping all his obligations to go out into the desert, leaving a mess of missed deadlines, unpaid bills … forgotten birthdays.”
“I’m sure they’ll get over it in time.”
“Yes. And I’m sure you gave a sufficiently evasive summation to contextualize your adventure and conveniently inexact rationales for those powder burns on your hands and what looks, from a certain vantage, like a crude brand on your arm. For all that trouble you could’ve just gotten a tattoo. But you just had to go and join the elite.”
“What elite?”
“The only elite that matters anymore: people who’ve tested if not outright crossed out of the bounds of unconditional love. It’s easy to gesture towards impulsively but much more difficult than people think to follow through on. But don’t worry about that.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Your scowl is not easy to read. Even so, I’m here to listen. And because I don’t know you all that well, and frankly don’t like you all that much, it puts me in a sort of funny position that could also be a great advantage to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You see I’m like a judge. In the best possible meaning of that word. On the one hand I’m under no obligation to take your bullshit seriously; on the other hand I’m too detached to condemn you for any of it. Clearly you condemn yourself. Your condemnation is stitched onto your face like a permanent Halloween mask. No one around here has ever seen any face like that. So I want to know is, for clarification’s sake at least, have you seen something that the rest of us haven’t? Or are you just being an asshole?”
“It wasn’t my intention to see anything. That’s just how it played out.”
“Okay. What was supposed to happen?”
“I had a thought some time ago. One of those thoughts that appear idly in the brain out of nowhere in particular but which manage to latch onto it, gain sustenance and grow until it takes up as much space as space allows. I thought, ‘How fascinating it would be to get lost in the wilderness.’”
“Was the local wilderness not cutting it?”
“I’d considered closer-to-home options, yeah. I’d take night trips to the Reservation and feel it out—gauge the space, you know?”
“Not really.”
“Then make the jump to the Pine Barrens. Maybe the Poconos or the Catskills.”
“Makes sense, I guess.”
“But the forest disappointed me. It will absorb you before you ever got lost. It’ll just grow around you and over you. Smoke?”
“Uhm … no …”
“I was despondent about it, but then I started thinking more about the west. I envied everyone out there who lived among all that vast flatland and dunes and weren’t doing anything with it. Just taking it for granted. This place that you kind of lay yourself down at its mercy and accept whatever it deems suitable to give you. Then I thought it was stupid just to sit here and sulk. And, yeah, maybe I was too abrupt in my departure. But I was a virgin to the desert and virgins are always a bit abrupt, aren’t they? Turns out my virginity was not limited to that.
“I see.”
“I never understood how ‘spontaneous’ people function. Spontaneity has so many logistics in order to be satisfying.”
“Getting lost an important component of being spontaneous.”
“I didn’t plan well enough to get lost … only to get stranded. I don’t think anyone understands that condition exactly. It’s like not being even in the same nation as everyone else.”
“You mean you went to Mexico?”
“It didn’t matter where we were or what laws we were under. Those concepts easily dissolved. There was earth … there was flesh. In that time and place that was all we knew and all we had to guide us. It was not just travel … it wasn’t this painstakingly scheduled abandonment.”
“But you left and you came back.”
“Yes and no. I made a mistake. The desert can’t make you part of it but it won’t necessarily let you leave even if you’re not in it.”
“Why did you say ‘we’ just then?”
“That’s a matter of record.”
“Can I see it? The videotape?”
“I don’t have it just now. But you shouldn’t watch it.”
“Why? Will it show me Bigfoot? Robed madmen on the mountains? The devil?”
“It will give you bad ideas.”
“Okay …”
“Yeah …”
“You know, I went to Asbury Park in the middle of February this one time. I thought it was pretty existential … tranquil.”
“Really?”
“Actually no, I thought it was boring in a hostile kind of way.”