Unravelling

I drive west for dead hours. I feel nothing except the coffee weakening with the miles. The traffic has long since thinned but never stops. Morning seems centuries away. Trucks pass, their roar more ferocious, more urgent in the humid night. For three hours there hasn’t been a single bend in the road. My eyes are heavy with sleep and my anger at her has receded, diluted to an impotent impulsiveness and a road going to I don’t know where. I turn the radio off and stare ahead into the miles. America is a highway, going nowhere. Each time I think I am doing fine, changing the rules, changing myself, but I am doing nothing but making the same mistakes, can no longer see the truth in anything.

The car hits gravel on the shoulder and the noise jolts me awake. I take the next exit. Four in the grimy morning. I pull up at the back of a closed Dairy Queen. My eyes are burning and gritty, I let the seat back and sleep.

Birds wake me. It’s five—not yet bright. I drive back to the intersection to get on the interstate and then swing around and stop in the roadway, the engine idling. Enough of straight roads. I put the car into gear and drive back past the Dairy Queen. Night has not yet left the truck stop. The Iron Skillet. All food all day. Yummy. Even though people are eating greasy breakfasts and the sky is haunted with a pallid blueness, night clings to the restaurant; sticks to weary cigarette butts in unemptied ashtrays, to the tired eyes of the waitress slouching towards me with coffee sloshing in its pot; it creeps out of the sullen silence of the jukebox. Groups of dungareed men slumped on orange plastic chairs around large tables drinking coffee and smoking. They could be farmers if they weren’t so lethargic. I look for a table without a phone but they all have them.

After I order breakfast I stare at the phone, look away from it, look back at it, give up and punch in the code. It takes three tries to get it right and then I hang up before she answers. I have no stomach for breakfast and know I have to phone her.

—Mmin?

—It’s me.

—Mm. Hi me.

—Can we talk?

—Mm.

—Will you please wake up? Is she still there?

—Mmm.

—I’m calling from a truck stop.

—Mmm?

—I’m calling from Pennsylvania.

—Is it fun?

—It’s over.

—Pennsylvania’s over?

—We are.

—We are. Really?

—I’ve had enough.

—You only know when you’ve had enough when you’ve had too much.

—Magda is too much.

—What a squirrel you are. Ciao.

—I’m serious.

—You’re calling me from a truck stop in the middle of the night to say it’s over, yes? I’ve got a job to get up for in three hours. You tell me it’s over? Good luck. What do you want me to say, don’t do it? Well, Serious, hope you’re not in my car. I need it for the job in New Jersey this morning.

—I am. I can’t explain it. I have to be by myself.

—You don’t have a self to be with. Fuck off. Are you in my car?

—Yep.

She hangs up and I listen to the buzzing of the telephone line for a long time. I look around, sure the diners know she has hung up on me, and when the waitress comes with my plate and raises her eyebrows, she raises them not to ask me to make room for the plate, but to tell me I deserve to be sitting here with a telephone in my hand and no one talking and no one listening. Two blacks stuffing their faces at the other end of the restaurant. My stomach lurches at the sight of the food. A train passes, wailing. The same cry as ships in Dublin Bay on a foggy night. At the cash desk my eye catches sight of a poster on the dirty yellow wall behind the waitress: Nothing can ever change the fact that you and I once had wonderful times. Only in America. Holfy got fat and I couldn’t bear the sight of her fat. There must have been a moment when love stopped, a clock giving its final tick, the sea’s final ebb. I didn’t want go grow old with her. No nice way of saying it. I walk out into the parking lot and look around at America. I can’t remember which direction is which. Her implacability, that, more than anything, is what I’m driving away from. I go back into the truck stop and get a pack of cigarettes out of the machine. Four weeks since I put one in my mouth. I tear the cellophane wrapper off. No ceremony. The tip is fatter than I remember. I cough, and, even with the unpleasantness of coughing, a calmness fills and I feel violently alive.

Dazed and drunk with heat. A bird flashes across the front of the car. A soft pop like a Styrofoam cup splatting flat. I pull over. A mush of feathers and innards. I park off the highway under an oak tree and sleep. I wake sweating and parched. The windscreen is covered with drips of sweat from the oak leaves. Even the trees are weary of the heat. Rain come then stops as quickly. Birds peck at the earth. Lilac smells stronger after rain. I never knew what pleasure was until Holfy took me in her soft mouth. I light a cigarette. Sweet identity a cigarette gives. A For Sale sign at the edge of the road: Ayn Runnings. Everything she touches turns to Sold.

The terrors come as fiercely in the day now. Hungry fat crows waiting to devour. America is a highway with no exits. Meaningless highways stretching into infinity. I can’t bear another night in the car. I stay at a Fairfield Inn in Sioux City. The Fairfield Inns, the Taco Bells, the Amoco filling stations: the roads of America; a litany of anonymity spread across a continent. The cattle in the early morning fields, their hides black and steaming in the haze, prancing like circus horses in the heavy morning. I pass through Wahoo. Wahoo Wahoo. An owl calling. I keep driving. Holfy is sliding into a past with Ursula. Ruth is dead. Father is dead. I had felt sickly free at his funeral, like a door had been unhinged by a fierce wind. I had thought of my last name, my father’s name, and that I was the last child to carry it. After my own death there would be no one, no one would carry the name.