After that first drive, Laura and I talked on the phone just about every night for a week. Then we went driving again. Then we talked on the phone every night again for another week.
It didn’t take long to pick up that Laura had a habit of interrupting conversations with non sequitur questions like “When you think of ravioli, do you think of meat ravioli or cheese ravioli?” Or “Did I ever tell you that both of my grandfathers died in gruesome train accidents?” Or “If you could start today over again, what would you do different?”
Here I was trying to blow her mind with deep thoughts about truth, art, hypocrisy, and whatever—and she couldn’t stick to the same topic for more than a minute before uttering something like “Do you think you’d make a good burlesque dancer?”
“I’m not even sure what a burlesque dancer is.”
“You know, a striptease dancer.”
“Well, it depends who I’m stripping for.”
“Well, let’s say you were a woman and were stripping in a bar. Do you think you’d be any good?”
“That’s like asking, ‘If you were a potato, do you think you’d taste good with sour cream on top of you?’ It makes no sense.”
“What kind of question is that?” she responded. “Of course you’d be delicious. What kind of potato wouldn’t taste good covered in sour cream?”
“I think you are missing my point,” I said.
“No, I think you asked a question and I answered it.”
That was annoying thing number two: She was nearly impossible to peg down about anything. She often answered questions with more questions. Whenever you tried to force her into a yes or no answer on something, she’d just smile and masterfully work her way to talking about something else. For example, for all the time we spent together, she rarely would eat in my presence, even when we went to a restaurant. I’d ask if it was because she wasn’t hungry or had just eaten or didn’t have money. She’d then tell a story about how she used to try eating paper as a child, because she imagined it would taste delicious, completely ignoring my question.
Yet, for all her evasiveness, she had this otherworldly, enchanting quality that made you never want to stop talking to her. She made you feel that she was keenly interested in what you had to say; that everything was about the moment the two of you were sharing. You could tell she was absorbing everything and was deeply interested in knowing as much about you as she could. She’d often recall, verbatim, things you’d forgotten you had shared months earlier.
We gradually started to see each other more, settling into a few times a week. Something would come up in a phone call that would segue into a suggestion that we hang out. Hanging out usually meant me picking her up (I was always told to wait in the car and not approach the house), then, without much discussion about where to or why, I’d just start driving off down some road. The car was like a rolling clubhouse, a safe place where we could say anything, do anything, and be anything without anyone staring or judging or wondering what we were up to. But the motion was important, too. We both were often desperate to get away, even when we had no idea where to go. Driving, motion, not being still—it all felt as essential as breathing.
But moving required gas. Gas cost money—something neither of us had in any measurable quantity. So we started to seek out places, hidden, secluded places, where we could camp out for a few hours unnoticed. Places where we could just be.
On the night we played Beer Golf with Jimmy, we spent the rest of the evening just driving around back roads, talking endlessly about anything that came to mind. As we drove back toward town, Laura lay down on the bench seat, resting her head on my leg, and fell asleep.
My heart immediately shot up into my throat and started racing. On her part, it was just a simple acknowledgment of closeness, trust, and intimacy. My leg just happened to be a perfect place to rest. However, I was, as should be clear by now, not someone accustomed to large degrees of closeness, trust, and intimacy. I had no idea what to do with myself. I felt like anything I said or any motion I made would screw this up. My arm had been extended behind her headrest and was getting numb. I slowly moved my arm out from behind the seat and just kind of let it hang there in midair. I didn’t know what to do with it. Lacking any better idea, I just slowly let my hand come down to rest on her shoulder. She let out a deep sigh and continued to sleep.
We drove that way for about another twenty minutes until we came to a small manmade lake named Lake O’Dea. At least I guessed it was called Lake O’Dea. A large apartment building next to it was called the Lake O’Dea Apartments, so I just assumed. There was a dead end road that ran behind it that was perfect for hanging out. No traffic. No cops. No bother.
As I shut off the engine, Laura awoke, looking up at me.
“I really liked Music for Airports,” she said, sitting up and back against her seat. “I don’t have it with me, but I’ll give it back next time.”
“Oh no,” I replied. “You can keep it.”
That was at least my sixth copy of Music for Airports. I kept giving them away to people that I felt should have the record. Music for Airports was Brian Eno’s first album of “ambient music”—sparse, simple music meant to create mood and ambience for spaces (like an airport, for example). Music for Airports contained only four songs, if you can call them that. Each featured a series of tape loops of a few simple notes (or sometimes just a single note) from a piano, synthesizer, or human voice. These notes would loop on intervals—one loop would repeat every twenty-three seconds, another every thirty-nine seconds, another once a minute, and so on. The randomness generated unexpected harmonies and moments of beauty, surrounded by periods of reverberance and near silence. It was unlike anything anyone I’d known had ever heard.
“Here,” I said to Laura, reaching for my cassette case to give back her dub of Killing Joke’s Fire Dances. “It was pretty good. I might pick it up sometime.”
I didn’t want her to know how quickly I’d fallen in love with Fire Dances. Most punk rock was like listening to a food processor. You hit the button and it just went, full bore—chopping, spinning, and tearing shit up. Killing Joke was different. The songs sounded like anthems; they had emotion, range, and subtlety. Sure, all their songs were about the end of the world, but hey, at least they brought a little style to their nihilism. I’d been so willing to return Laura’s tape because I’d already secretly bought my own, as well as every other Killing Joke record I could find.
“Where did you ever hear about Killing Joke?” I asked.
“I saw them in Germany,” she said. “When they played, the club pulled barbed wire across the front of the stage. When everyone was slamming … every once in a while … someone would get thrown against the wire.”
“Oh my God.”
“No, it wasn’t a bad thing … I guess. People would get cut … there was blood all over … but it was okay. It was like a release.”
“A release from what?” I asked.
“Pain,” she replied.
“What? That makes no sense. How can thrashing into barbed wire—”
“A different kind of pain.”
“When they played ‘Frenzy,’ ” she continued after a brief moment, “people started to really flail around and it was getting a little violent. The singer, Jaz, brought out a bottle of rum, and the guys who got cut were begging him to pour it on them. So he did. And then the guys really started to flip out from the burning in the cuts. But then, when it was over, they pulled the barbed wire back, and they brought out jugs of water, and everyone sat around together. It was a shared moment.”
In the years since that night, I’ve often wondered what she felt was so honorable about this story that she would remember and share it. I think she expected me to be impressed with people who controlled their own pain. Rather than get beaten up by life and a world that doesn’t understand you, don’t wait to get hurt—throw yourself against some barbed wire. Hurt yourself before someone or something else does.
“If you like Eno, you’ll probably like this one, too,” I said, pulling another tape from the box. “It’s different. It’s him with David Byrne from Talking Heads.”
As the music started up I pulled out a little tin box from the glove compartment, opened it, and tipped it toward Laura, like I was offering her a breath mint or something. It contained about half a dozen pills of various sizes, shapes, and colors.
“No, thank you,” she said, though she did accept one of the leftover beers from the backseat.
Then she said, “You sure like that stuff, don’t you.”
“Is that a question or a statement?” I asked, washing down a pill with the remainder of my beer.
“What does that do for you?”
“It makes me fucked up.”
“No, I mean, why do you take it?”
I wanted to trust her, but trying to explain how I felt was just so damn exhausting. “Let’s just say it helps me,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, which to me meant she was expecting more of an explanation.
Pause.
“Why aren’t you going to school in the fall?” she asked.
“I think I might take some commuter classes.”
“Didn’t you apply anywhere else?”
“Wait-listed—every single one,” I said. “Even the state schools that have to take you.”
“I figured someone like you would have no trouble getting into college.”
“Everyone tells me that the stuff I like will never amount to anything,” I said. “So if you aren’t interested in anything else, what is the point of trying? So you can end up sitting in an office and wearing a tie and being miserable until you die—is that what I’m supposed to do with my life to make everyone happy? That doesn’t sound like much fun. It’s easier to deal with other people’s disappointments than to deal with your own.”
“Yeah, that seems like it’s working out well for you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You seem so happy,” she said sarcastically.
“Oh … fuck off.”
We sat silent, listening to the tape.
Though she didn’t notice, I spent most of the silence looking at her face. As she stared out the window, her face showed all these tiny gestures and expressions as her thoughts moved along with the beat.
“What’s this called again?” Laura asked.
“My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” I replied.
I drearily rocked my head and shoulders to the beat. I could start to feel the pill kick in, forming a haze around my thoughts.
“Have you ever seen a ghost?” I asked nonchalantly.
It was a weak segue, admittedly, but I had been looking for a way to bring up Little Girl to Laura. As much as I wanted to share it with her, I cringed at the idea of talking about it. Too late; I’d laid it out there.
“You mean, like a spooky ghost? Like something floating around?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“No,” she said.
Pause.
Pause.
“Since I was a kid I’ve felt this … ghost, I guess … in our attic. It’s kind of fucked up.”
“There’s a ghost in your attic?” she asked, getting very excited at the idea. “Can we go see it? Have you ever talked to it? Does it move stuff around?”
“It’s not like that,” I interrupted, feeling a slow wave of calm seep through my body. “I think She’s kinda mean.”
“Mean?” Laura replied. “How is she mean?”
I thought for a moment about how to answer. It would be really easy to make something up and get out of this, but I was also almost compelled to tell her about it.
“She comes to me in my dreams,” I said, instantly regretting it.
Silence.
“Oh, come on,” she said, hitting my arm. “What a bullshitter you are.”
“Actually, no,” I said. “I’m not kidding. I think there really is a ghost in the attic that has it in for me.”
“What?” she exclaimed. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does she want?”
“I don’t know.”
“What makes you sure she wants to harm you?”
“I … don’t … know.”
“Well, then, what do you know?”
I sighed, lit a cigarette, and took a deep drag.
“I guess I need to figure this out before She does whatever She wants to do to me,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“You know, in order to catch a fox …”
“So you are going to try to outghost a ghost?” she said. “How does that work?”
“I don’t know … What am I supposed to do?”
“Find out what she wants.”
“I can’t,” I said. “She … speaks gibberish.”
“Gibberish.”
“Yes, gibberish. None of it sounds like words. When She looks angry, it seems like it’s because I don’t understand what She’s saying.”
We both just stared out the windows silently until we got to her house. She told me, again, not to get out of the car.
There was an awkward few seconds, which to me felt like an awkward few hours, while I looked at her face, trying to get a read on what she’d do if I tried to kiss her.
While the time we spent together was definitely not like any date I’d ever heard of, it still kind of felt like a date. Or at least my heart was beating in my throat the way it did at the end of a date.
I slowly leaned over and kissed her.
She touched my cheek and kissed me back.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five. When we were on the phone, she often talked about books she’d read that had meant something to her—none of which I’d read. She placed it in my lap and raised her eyebrows. She didn’t need to say anything—I knew that this was her attempt to get me to read it, partially because she felt it might have the same effect on me and partially because she wanted someone to talk about it with.
“Sweet dreams,” she said with a smile. “Tell your ghost girl I said hello.”
Then she climbed out of the car and ran into her house.