He is mad before me.
By this I mean he is mad before he meets me, and this summer, he goes mad before I do.
If only things would stay simple: the sound of the foghorns at night, the wild calla lilies that grow along the fence, the cool sharp fog that wraps around my face and throat. But it isn't that kind of summer. And this time I have a partner in madness.
Madness will push you anywhere it wants. It never tells you where you're going, or why. It tells you it doesn't matter. It persuades you. It dangles something sparkly before you, shimmering like that water patch on the road up ahead. You will drive until you find it, the treasure, the thing you most desire.
You will never find it. Madness may mock you so long you will die of the search. Or it will tire of you, turn its back, oblivious as you go flying. The car is beside you, smoking, belly-up, still spinning its wheels.
But at first, as always, it fools me. At first it is lovely, showy, hallucinatory, neon bright. I am viscerally, violently alive. I don't know when I turn the corner from merely crazy to completely psychotic, but when I do, Sean turns with me. We draw into ourselves, our eyes rolling back in our heads so that soon we can see nothing but the chaos and terror of our own minds.
We meet when I'm teaching summer school in San Francisco. I pace in front of the class, leaping, punching the air, pouring out everything I know—I am wildly manic and usually drunk by early afternoon, and the board is crowded with my mad scribbles, so tangled up they're indecipherable. Teaching allows my manic stream of thought to focus on the one thing I still care about: words. Sean is one of my students. Our eyes meet and we read each other's lips, knowing each other intimately at once. When we speak, we hear the weird, warped voice of something insane.
Sean, a slight man, very pale, his short-shorn dirty blond hair receding already, is an astonishing writer. He gives me his novel. It's very dark and very beautiful. Sean is slipping into a psychotic depression, and I am flying toward a psychotic mania. Quickly, our relationship is tight, intense, obsessive. We pour out pages and pages of letters to each other, spend hours each day e-mailing when we can't be together, the connection between us sudden and essential and profound. If both of us are not already losing our slim grips on reality, we will be soon.
But we don't know, or care, anything about that. There is nothing strange about us. Medication isn't necessary. We don't talk about mental illness, which has nothing to do with the perfect union of minds that we have found. Our minds have reached a pinnacle of perception, and we see things the way no one else can see them, and the way we see them is the way they really are.
It is decided that we will leave. We will run away. We will go to the desert, where nothing can touch us, where the lives we hate will be forgotten, escaped. We will find ourselves a map. We will find our way.
The point is the driving. It's the cheap motel, the dust, the sweaty, salty, dirty skin, it's the wind in the window, it's the water, it's the map, which is for tracing where we have been, not where we are going. Mornings, we start driving in any direction, to see what there is to see, to see where we end up next. We collect the names of towns like children collect rocks. We mark them on our map, which is spread out on the beaded motel bedspread or on the burning hood of the car, heads together, we are here, we say, and here, and here, we trace our path with a red pen, fingernails stubby and filthy. In the car, we're propelled by some weird force. Our feet are heavy on the pedal. The place back there fades in the rear-view and we fly into the arms of something fantastical, more real than real.
We're gone for days, then weeks, a month. No one knows where we are.
THE BORDERLANDS.
We climb out of the car in a nameless town where there is a store, a post office, a white adobe church. The metal cross catches the sun and reflects it so brightly it burns the eyes. The flash of white light repeats itself on the back of my eyelids. We go into the store. The people in it look at us strangely, perhaps because we are gringos and perhaps because we are filthy and look a little nuts. We find a pile of maps. They are maps of the deserts that extend down into northern Mexico. We unroll them on the floor. Which one, which one should we buy?
We could get this one, I say, unfolding a map of the Chihuahuan desert. Sean glances at it.
Too far left, he says, and bends his head over a map of Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. We've been through Joshua Tree and Death Valley, where we said nothing and stood shoulder to shoulder, looking out at the vast expanse of the slender, twisted, black bodies of trees. We wandered off onto it, like walking through a de Chirico, or a Dali: all emptiness, haunted silence, cracked ground. We wandered till dark. Sean had a GPS with him. That was how we found our car.
Then through the Painted Desert, where I pointed out the window at rock formations and color striations. His head turned, almost in slow motion, as he followed things as they went past. The speedometer read over 90. It was excruciatingly slow.
This one, Sean says, triumphant, looking up from his map. I crouch next to him. I nod. Of course, I say.
We leave with a topographic map of the Sonoran Desert. It shows no roads, no towns. Only the infinitesimal, perfectly accurate lines that indicate where a hill rises up a hundred feet, where a stream circles the hill, the lines rippling out from a high point and widening down to a low. With this map, we are ready. Now we will know where we are if we get lost. We will be able to say, C72, lat 623', yes, obviously, now we can see. It all comes clear. We are explorers. We have the finest map known to man, the one true map, the map for those who grasp the real significance of the single step this way or that.
We get back in the car. The sun is falling. We drive past a sign that says GRINGO PASS.
Ahead of us is the border crossing, marked by what looks like a tollbooth made of shabby clapboard. We slow down and come to a stop. The border patrol watches us. We are frightened. They are police. We discuss our options.
Straight through, he says. That's one.
I nod. Or around, I say. We could go a little east and see if there's a fence.
They shoot you, he says.
True, I say. Then that won't work.
There are two buildings in Gringo Pass, at least on this side of the border. It looks like there is one more on the other side. We wonder if that is also Gringo Pass. We can't be sure whether we are in Arizona, or if, by virtue of being at the border, we are in Mexico instead. This confounds us. One of the buildings says, in flickering neon letters, REST ANT & STOR. The neon glows bright white in the purple-blue coming night. On the other side of the road, a large white sign reads, in painted red letters, GRINGO PASS MOTEL. Both buildings are low, flat-roofed. We are sitting there in my truck in the middle of the road. The decision is momentous.
We pull in to the motel's parking lot. There is only one room left. There are no cars in the lot. It is the most expensive room, the proprietor apologizes. "Thirty bucks. Busy night," she says. She is very tiny and old, her face made of worn leather. We stare at her in awe. She slides the plastic key-chained key across the cracked counter. "Housekeeping suite. There's pots and pans. Anything else?"
Sean snaps out of it. He pulls his hat off with a flourish. "Where might a man imbibe?" He looks at me. "Sorry." He turns back to the woman. "A man and a woman? As you can see." He gestures at me with his hat. "We are not lovers," he explains. She shrugs.
"Suit yourself. Booze at the store." She waves a hand at the window. "Cross the road. Decent chili, eggs."
"Chili eggs!" Sean declares, fascinated.
"Chili, comma, eggs," I whisper, elbowing him in the ribs.
He stares at me. "Of course," he says, mortified.
He is losing his shit for the day, I see. I haul him outside and down the walkway to our room.
Inside, we pull all the pots and pans out of the kitchen cupboards, put them back, and go across the road to the REST ANT. We devour bloody steaks. We head into the STOR and buy a couple of bottles of whiskey. We go back to our room and pull our gold-colored, fraying, scratchy chairs out of the room and into the motel parking lot. We settle in with our notebooks to write. We pick up our bottles of whiskey from the ground, slam shots, and cackle. The border guards drive through the parking lot, looking for us. We are relieved that we are invisible. We laugh knowingly at their stupidity. We shout sections of what we are writing. Listen, listen! we gasp, laughing, knowing that we understand.
When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you. Sean and I know that what we see is true, and real. We know that we have each finally stumbled on the one other person who understands this, and we know that what we believed before was an impoverished, colorless misapprehension of what actually is. We wonder at the miracle that is us.
Crazy Sean walks ahead of me. We are in the desert. We have no map. I am talking to myself, certain that I have come to find the secret treasure. I stare down a snake. We walk in circles for weeks, or minutes, or years. Time has escaped me. Everything is sand.
Crazy Sean stops and turns. He says to me: It's over, isn't it.
He reminds me of Jesus. I nod. Yes, I say. It is. What is?
He shakes his head and sighs and squints into the sun. What? he says. What is? Lots of things are. De facto, he explains.
Ergo sum, I agree, and eat some gorp I find in my pockets.
We stand on a high white rock, looking up as the sunrise, or sunset, rises up, or falls down, over a flat red mesa.
Where are we? he asks me.
I think about this. Do you mean literally or figuratively? I reply.
Biblically, he says.
Ah, I say, and nod.
We lie down on the rock and sleep. When we wake, it's pitch-black but for stars. We have no water.
We'll die, says Crazy Sean. He wraps his arms around his knees. I expect we will, I say.
Peacefully, together, we are crazy, and we don't know where we are, and we are out of water, and we have no idea how to get home.
So we get up and start walking. It gets light as we discuss Dante, and Faulkner, and the nature of hell. We walk into the center of the desert, or into the center of the reeling sun, but again the light fades out and there in the night, at the end of the road, we are somehow back at the Gringo Pass Motel. The cook at the REST ANT spins our plates of meat onto our table, wipes his hands on his apron, and turns back to the kitchen without a word. We drag our chairs out into the parking lot again and guzzle whiskey like it's water and we are dying of thirst. We discuss the essential goodness of gold qua gold, as opposed to silver, though we allow that silver has a certain appeal to crows; and the crow, though not the raven, has meaning in and of itself; though the raven does matter, in a different sort of sense.
We speak continuously of death.
Texas. Scorpions.
The fear sets in.
How long have we been gone? It doesn't even occur to us. We scream to be heard over the wind. Colorado. We are paranoid, afraid of the crowded bar. We are afraid in the grocery store, trying desperately to find booze. We are coming in and out. We are a radio station. We are a short wave. We are the news. The fluorescent lights are threatening and burn my eyes. The terrifying checkout girl sneers. We recoil, run out of the store, lock ourselves in a motel room, all orange shag carpet, one of those horrible seventies globe lamps dangling from a chain. The chain concerns us. We discuss which of us should hang ourselves first. There are logistical problems; for example, getting down the dead one would entail undoing the chain from the ceiling, and then putting it back up, and then hanging oneself next; we decide we will skip it, and watch a horror movie on the television. It is a terrible movie. We are petrified. We are screaming. Someone is pounding on the door. We turn the TV up so our screaming can't be heard. In a fit of brilliance, Sean leaps out of the corner where he has been hiding, grabs the light's chain, and yanks it to the floor, where it smashes into a trillion pieces of orange glass lost in the orange shag carpet. That's good, then. Neither of us will hang ourselves tonight. We drink until the night has passed.
The day whirls around in a circle, and we tumble into the night again. It is the next night, or the one after that, or we have been driving for years. The road has narrowed to a red thread down which we are careening. Crazy Sean is telling me he loves me and has to kill me to save me. He's sobbing and trying to take the wheel. We haven't eaten for days. Someone is screaming. It may be me.
Idaho. We tear down the narrow highway. Sean is going to kill me. He says my soul is abandoned. His is black. He can feel it. He can feel the cancer of his soul. He will not shut up, will not stop talking, crying, filling my ears with cacophonous noise. We speed through narrow tunnels of concrete bordering a one-lane road, leaning around the bends, nearly lifting off. I tune him out. Somewhere nearby, someone is crazy. I am sane. I must stay sane or we will not survive. He will not fucking shut up! I scream, taking my hands off the wheel, tearing at my hair, beating him about the head, and he huddles away, crying, and I hate him, he is weak, he is not a good soldier, he has failed the battalion, the war is lost because of him, the car swerves, scrapes the concrete wall, I grab the wheel and we drive on.
Utah, red mountains. Washington State. Is it morning yet? Where have we been? We drive through Seattle like sensible people. We are speaking gibberish, hating each other and ourselves. Our language is tangled. We cannot make ourselves understood. I take him to his mother's house and drop him off.
In my rearview mirror, he is tiny, holding his sleeping bag.