After the assembly at Hug, Wendy drove us by Ty’s car so I could pick up my stuff. He and Rust might have gotten in Ty’s car but wanted to come along to the airport, to have more time to say goodbye. To me or to the Tesla, I couldn’t tell. Anyway, we could afford a little intimacy, driving electric. Ty and Rust explained the Oregon Trail Generation to Wendy on the way to the airport. “We’re optimistic like Millennials but opt out like Gen X. We’re not as cynical as Gen X, and that’s the problem. We want to believe in change but we can’t.”
Rust said, “Deep down we know it’s bullshit. You have died of snakebite, you have died of typhoid.”
He said, “It’s about cognitive dissonance and the impossibility of empathy and the impossibility of ethical consumption under capitalism and coming of age with the internet. Like Claire’s dad, his generation really thinking they’re gone tunnel down in some hole in Death Valley and the world’s gone end and then they’ll reemerge.”
I said, “In their defense, Death Valley makes you think that.”
“I know, power, rage, the sublime, blah blah blah. Helter Skelter’s just the same old racism and misogyny when you think about it. It’s like schools: they’re hardening, yeah? A lot of those girls were given to Manson and no one cared.”
“We’re spectating,” I explained.
“Sounds confusing,” she said, missing her exit.
“And that dickhead somehow ended the counterculture?” Rust was yelling now. “Maybe—don’t matter! I’ll probably die of wifi. Elon Musk’s gone arocket us to Mars. What I wanna know is how much do those guys trust their bodyguards, their helicopter pilots? That’ll be the last of the Homo sapiens, lady—I mean, Wendy—Zuckerberg’s cutthroat helicopter pilot and his family eating radioactive crickets in New Zealand. Not me. I’m not gone last. I’m barely here as it is. I’m not killing a man, I’m not drinking a puddle through a damn straw.”
Ty said, “It’s a generation defined by its hopelessness and alienation.”
“Aren’t they all?” asked Wendy, missing Departures.
As we circled the airport I began to pretend to worry I’d miss my flight home. “This airport’s very confusing,” I assured Wendy. “I got lost in it yesterday.”
After circumnavigating the facility three times, Wendy pulled up to the curb at Departures. I thanked her profusely for being a first-rate escort. A hot air balloon floated to the north. I pointed it out to my friends and made a break for it. I hustled through the airport, stressed, exhausted, stinking and damp, but amazed once again by how easy it was to move through the world on my own, utterly unbothered even by the breast pump in its tote. Beyond security, I winked to the miner and the bear and the bighorn as I passed each, then boarded my plane just as they called my name over the PA. The last to board, I was informed. I slipped apologetically into my window seat, displacing two white men. They resettled, and together we all waited to pull away from the gate.
Lise texted me positive travel vibes, because, she said, I know you’re a nervous flyer. I wouldn’t say flying makes me nervous, just that I hate crowds and became extra don’t-tread-on-me in airports post-9/11 and this perfectly understandable if antisocial disposition occasionally becomes a full-on panic attack when relocated inside a steel tube obviously held in the sky by nothing but wishes and fear. I felt guilty for not telling her about the Tecopa house, and knew that I would not tell her for a very long time yet.
Instead I stoked the fires of love for my biologist with the bellows of our correspondence. I liked how he could be anyone in text message. Love in text message was sapphic, if Sappho’s fragments had been designed to be addictive. After multiple texts, the plane had not pulled away from the gate. My tardiness had cascaded into another delay, something to do with our place on the runway. There was some master queue somewhere that I had displeased. The plane hummed. A text from Theo—safe travels!
Out my small window, more hot air balloons had risen. I would ascend with them, southbound, Lake Tahoe on my right, the Great Basin on my left. How I’d miss them. I’d fly to Vegas, a cursed city I do my very best to avoid, and make my connection. Then I’d fly home, to the country of marriage.
I started to feel a little claustrophobic.
My phone chimed, another text from my biologist.
When I say my biologist I mean Noah, who got a BA in environmental humanities from Chico State in the nineties and knows plant names. Noah lived in a van, wanderlusted up and down the West Coast, rock climbing and surfing or seed harvesting for BLM when he needed money. We met about a year ago, when he came to a reading I gave in Oakland. I saw him standing in the back and knew.
I’d thought it would be hard to fall in love again. I mean Love love. To be honest, the idea was terrifying. I worried the capitalists were right, that Love was a thing in a jar. Maybe I’d spread mine too thin. Gave the milk for free. But then I met Noah and the milk was plenty. He was tall, Jewish, smelled like campfire. A tiny burn hole in his jacket. Gentle mumbles requesting my signature. I liked the feel of his eyes on me, wrote him a wanton inscription unattributed to Woody Guthrie.
Take it easy, but take it.
Instead of going back to my hotel I followed him to his van. We drove to Drakes Bay and waited for the sun to come up. When it came I thought of my parents. I wondered, ludicrously, if this was their way of calling me home. Just then a sea lion popped its silken, chonky dachshund head up through the water, looked at me, and nodded. I thought, Did they send you, California sea lion?
The sea lion nodded again emphatically. I asked Noah, “Did you see that?”
“Saw what? That sea lion egging you on?”
He took me to the airport and then found me on the internet. We started texting all the time. He sent me summits—Whitney, Shasta, Mount Tam and Mount Charleston—and I sent him nudes. Our correspondence left me constantly atingle. Was it love, I sometimes wondered, or just the chemical manipulations of unethical design?
The ancient rituals of courtship were what did me in, by which I mean the phone. The first time Noah called me, I canceled my grad seminar and we talked for three hours, deep into the night my time. Twice, thrice a week or more I would tell Theo I was writing and hole up in my campus office with the door closed and the lights off, whispering on my landline. Noah came through clear as 1998, except he’d inevitably describe for me the blights unfurling across the vista before him where he’d pulled off at some scenic overlook, the ridge he’d scaled to get cell service. Fires, grasses, beetles, man man man.
He told me about the shimmering blue lizards sunning themselves in plank pose on the back way up the Alabama Hills, the juniper retreating from the hanging valleys of the Eastern Sierras, the corpse of an emaciated mountain lion he’d come upon, embalmed in algae at the bottom of a shrinking glacial lake.
I told him to hold on while I microwaved an Amy’s in the department kitchen. Thai Pad Thai, usually, sometimes another authorized Amy’s purchased by Theo, who did all our grocery shopping. I watched the microwave tray rotate for exactly four and a half minutes, the plastic I’d slit puffing like some high-concept scent pillow above the mummifying noodles. For four and half excruciating minutes I bargained with myself, burned to go back to Noah, to hear his voice, to make sure he was still there.
I returned to my office, ate my Amy’s with the plastic coffee lid I used as a spoon or the chopsticks I fashioned from wooden coffee stir sticks, for plastic coffee lids and wooden stir sticks were the only utensils to be found in the windowless department kitchenette and I had not in all these years remembered to bring a set of utensils from home. I described myself eating. Noah made every inane detail crackle with meaning. Lids and Sweet’N Low packets and stir sticks reliably bountiful, countless in number, seemingly infinite. I told him the feeling of opening the drawer of the department kitchenette and watching the stir sticks slide over each other, laying my hand on them and pushing gently, a sensation always found comforting during those four and a half anguished minutes nuking my Amy’s without him.
Noah was from Tahoe. Together we mapped a history of near misses, the two of us cometing across the Sierras in barely missing arcs. We drew fated constellations with points at the Merry Go Round in Lone Pine, the Expresso Hut in Lee Vining, the In-N-Out Burger in Auburn. We discovered that we’d sung along to the same songs, stoned, in the same small crowd at a show in Grass Valley, had sunned ourselves on different bends of the same river on the same day: the Yuba, Mother’s Day, 2004, Noah downstream after a hike with his mom and dad and brothers, me upstream fucking Jesse on a rock.
It was not lost on me that I loved Noah best when he talked about his parents. Firefighter father, librarian mother. Probably nothing brought me into estrus quicker than the story of his grandmother, her mother, the camps. I felt all this in his two-word text, saw with ancient and absolute Tahoe clarity that I was standing on a threshold to another life.
Please stay, it said.
These thresholds were everywhere. I needed to observe them. Was Noah the threshold or was I? And if me was it me or my teeth?
I unbuckled my seat belt and yanked my tote bag from under the seat in front of me.
“Pardon me,” I said to the men seated beside me, though I was already climbing over them. The flight attendant bustled up to me. “Ma’am, we’ve closed the cabin door. The fasten seat belt light is on.”
“I have to get off,” I told her, lurching toward the front of the plane.
“We’ll be pushing back from the gate momentarily!” she wailed.
“I can’t go to Las Vegas. I have to get off the plane.”
“Ma’am, please. Please take your seat.” I felt for her, this corporate human shield, as I shoved myself past her.
A hum began among the other passengers. A man—one of my former seatmates, I sensed—shouted for me to sit my ass down. Others offered their own advice. I heard but did not turn to see them.
The intercom came on and said, Ladies and gentlemen we are ready for departure but we do need everyone in their seats to avoid further delay. No threat so potent in this new century than delay. I saw it on the face of the brown, slim, well-groomed attendant at the front of the plane, his hand still cupped around the little white intercom phone.
I was frantic. I had two voices in my head. One of them was my own and it said, You are about to get yourself tased by the state. I said, not at all politely, “Can you let me off, please, now.”
The flight attendant paused, considering, then rolled his eyes and replaced the white phone in its cradle. He opened the door of the plane.
The other voice was the goose from Charlotte’s Web.
An hour of freedom is worth a barrel of slops.