Spencer Dew

Fade to White

We stand in some broad street. Maybe Chicago, maybe Denver. A street with that sort of feel, nailed down at the edges. Most likely, this, too, is Oklahoma, but what sort of reference is there for Oklahoma? Oklahoma has no feel to in, isn’t linked to any basic level of human hope or dread. Regardless, a broad, dark street, metal shutters pulled down over retail windows. Except this one, selling cowboy hats and suede skirts. Some of the manikins are naked, missing chips of flesh, of paint. All of the manikins, for some reason, have their hands on backwards. Tegan points this out, biting the metal ring in her lower lip. She cringes, and tears well up in her eyes. She takes such details hard, to heart.

As disconcerting, for me, is the reflection in the mirror back behind the display, the bare asses of the manikins, or the turquoise beaded belts, a handbag with a puffy image of a cow’s skull. Then beyond all that, in the dark glass, is me, alone, standing disheveled and bleary-eyed, alone on the street, hands in my pocket, suspicious, with the look of someone hallucinating. And here on the street, when I turn, there are the two of us again, me and Tegan, me and my dead ex-girlfriend.

He tells me we’ve met before, the guy with all the eyeliner, mascara, blush. I tell him we’re heading west, to California, that we left Chicago weeks ago, that I’m worried we’ve been traveling in circles. We’ve passed through Memphis three times, I say, and too many motels look exactly the same.

He buys me a drink and breaks open a pill capsule over it, mixing in the medicine with the swizzle stick, a plastic giraffe. The booth is upholstered in faux jaguar skin, or maybe tiger, something hip but dated, a reference to another decade but a reference distinctly a few years old by now. I’m not sure where I am, and I ask him, meaning the bar, the name of the bar, but he tells me that this is Cleveland, that this has been Cleveland every night for the past two weeks, that he and I have met here every night but one, when I was in the lock-up, after the manikin incident.

He tells me not to worry about it, though. He likes to repeat himself. Everything likes to repeat itself; that’s the great truism, the great Law of Cliché. There is comfort in the mundane and unbreakable cycle.

We shake hands. Kiki introduces himself. He tells me that the first Law of Finance states that value can be neither created nor destroyed; it merely changes form.

I wonder where Tegan is, ask him about this. He orders me another drink, tells the waitress to make it a virgin this time around.

So Oklahoma, Arizona, a swollen lip of Texas. The names don’t really matter. It is a cold place, sullen, with a certain starry distance between things. We take a room in a motor lodge designed as a nod toward a specific packaged vision of the nostalgic, the owners sleeping on a mattress behind the counter, the office smelling of incense and caramel popcorn. We have a paper bag with us, and inside it is a bottle of tequila and a bottle of brandy, which she wants on ice, in a little plastic motel bathroom cup, savoring the sweetness, telling me again that, along with sour, sweet is the only real taste sensation left.

She said the same thing at some earlier gas station stop, a plaza, raised above the highway, with Indians everywhere and some couple from Baltimore in a van with a painting of a ruptured fetus on its side, sans umbilical cord, but with a tiny band of rosary beads in its webbed hand. Tegan takes the opportunity to tell me that on the other side we’re given umbilical cords again. She doesn’t mention rosary beads. Then, her mouth full of salted cashew halves, she tells me that, along with the bitterness of bile, salt is the only real taste sensation that remains.

We do what we always do in motel rooms. We wait for a full manifestation, for her body to firm up, the visuals at least, so she can be seen as something whole, approximately natural, a girl with a scarf and a powder blue coat, wooden buttons down the front, shaped like little barrels, industrial drums.

She, the ghost, knows no more about the workings of it all than I do, the phenomena involved, the fluctuations, why sometimes it looks as if she’s lost control of her vertical hold, or how she goes semi-transparent, turning to a mist of static, reducing to a glowing orb, or certain physical accessories. For most of the drive that afternoon, the sun at some improbable angle, the color of clay, of purple silk, my dead ex-girlfriend had been reduced to a sweater folded in a triangular mound on the passenger seat. But now she appears nearly human again, drinking iced brandy, fingering the spots on the comforter, the little cauterized rings of cigarettes burns.

Kiki keeps a hand on my arm as he explains his practice. At first I think he’s hitting on me, then I realize he’s trying to keep me awake. I tell him I’ve been driving for fifteen hours. He tells me he knows, that California is always around the corner.

What he does, his work, is purchase postcard reproductions of famous works of art, then cover the image, color over it in black. He prefers fountain pens, though he has techniques for ballpoint, too, and has used them, plenty of times, in a pinch, in hotel rooms, on trains. He says he likes the feel of things disappearing. And, of course, there is the transformation of one commodity into another. Erasure, he says, is a concept fraught with fallacy.

Later, well after midnight, around three in most time zones - this is the real witching hour. Something about electromagnetic currents, peripheral noise, static. For whatever reason, this is the time when she is strongest.

We find ourselves at an old abandoned airfield, a bar there, framed by the wingless bodies of old Cessnas and commuter crafts, a double-wide trailer strung with green lights, two neon rode riders framing the door. The Range, we are told. And I remember her waist inside my arms, the feel of it, the solidity, the warmth. Inside there are five shooting games, a Country Super Hits jukebox, and a set of three pool tables, laid out like a study in perspective, receding to a distant, infinite point. A man in chaps chalks up his cue. She is speaking in French now, Tegan, but doesn’t seem to notice it. We drink shots of rum with glasses of coke. We eat beer nuts from a chipped glass bowl, a fast food franchise souvenir, printed with an image from a cartoon from our childhood, or from the movie they made of that cartoon, a decade later, or perhaps in recognition of some anniversary in the history of that cartoon, or just to keep the image alive, persistent in its presence.

Then, alone again, outside some biker bar, or running to get there, down the length of a semi-trailer, permanently parked in loading formation, an echoing metal hallway, on wheels, the front door. And then I’m kneeling on gravel, dizzy, propping myself between two metal drums, wiping vomit out of my beard. There are men dressed not as cowboys but as references to certain themes within the cowboy image, ironic subcurrents in the cowboy mythos. One of them, with a prosthetic hand, comes over to check on me, calls me by name, and tells me he can take me home.

In his car, perhaps, I become Tegan. There is a general fading, my mind going blank, white, blank, white. He has the windshield wipers on, and it is snowing. He keeps telling me that this is not Chicago, and I try to agree, to tell him that I know Oklahoma when I see it, that I am staying with my girlfriend at this tourist motor lodge, little individual cabins, like something from a postcard in a novel, but the words don’t come out the way I had them planned. I hear myself say, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.

Or I wake up staring into an empty refrigerator, full size, quite possibly my own. It is not completely empty, as there are three packets of soy sauce and two of hot mustard, down on the lowest shelf, sticky and forlorn. My eyes ache, dry, and both of my knuckles are broken open, bleeding, spotted with chips of white drywall plaster.

A pendulum, perhaps, or a random number generator. This is Kiki, or a memory of Kiki. Divide the art into quadrants, a process of pure chance. Some quadrants are eliminated, thrown out, while the others, cut free from their context, are rearranged, assembled together with fragments of other works, pasted onto a new canvas, into a new scene, a new emotion. This new work, says Kiki, should be photocopied, magnified, blown up to absurd proportions, rendering the pixels into globes. Enlargement can follow the same pattern of quadrants, a repeating process, with the final product hung in a row, for a sense of emergence, depth. Think of fractals, says Kiki, repetition unto infinity. The shoreline. The deed of art.

Morning is too bright. California. Malibu. I shut my eyes and roll the pillow on top of my face and, in the heat of the desert, begin to spin the trip backwards, Barstow, Vegas, patterns in rhinestone, neon. There is a pregnant cocktail waitress with varicose veins, an artificial lobster, five or six times normal size, on a bed of artificial lettuce, a bed of artificial ice. Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon. Flagstaff, Sioux City, Little Rock. I wake up in Memphis again, hungry, my clothes damp with sweat.

I suck hot mustard out of a packet, apply some to the wounds on my hands. My apartment alternates between empty and full, in sectors, one corner crowded with old clothes and suitcases, boxes of books, cassettes, kitchen supplies, the rest of the floor bare, and the walls. Some sense of a reason for this, a rationalization heavy on polemic, lingers in my mind. But just barely. Outside the street is white, snowed over, one landscape replaced with another, transfigured, evolved.

Still in the midst of some other morning, I part the curtains. The glass has gone milky, a glaze, trapped in that zone between condensation and frost. Tegan whimpers, holding a pillow against her chest, sitting on the floor in the corner, rocking back and forth. Later, she will levitate a little, and her face will appear on all five free channels of the television. She will ask me, as she always does, if I want to know about any of the people who have passed through this room before us.

The coffee pot sputters done. Alone, I pick a dozen origami flowers from the tiles of the bathroom floor, around the toilet - tulips or rosebuds, maybe something trying to be a daffodil, various states of wilting unfurling. I drop them into the trashcan, on top of the intestinal mound of orange yarn she’s wormed out of some other form, a scarf or sweater, relic, trace. The whole way west, she unravels pieces of herself.

I record all this on a calendar pasted together from other calendars, dissected and reformed. I make detailed notes of all events, as well as my subjective reactions to them. I cross out each word several times, individually, then cross out the entire line, the entire sentence, then the entire square of the grid that represents one day. When it has gone completely black, I cut it out of the arrangement, glue down another day, pure white, infinitely replaceable, infinitely replacing.

The guy who sometimes drives me home at night, the guy with the plastic hand, his name is Marv and he tells me that he always tells me that he was almost once my stepfather. That was long ago, he says, as he says he always says, and things have changed since then. Marv runs a gallery on Euclid, out east, near one of the universities. Some days I work for him, cleaning the floors, caulking up nail holes, repainting the walls. Layer follows layer; I do not execute these actions so much as I surrender myself to their inevitability, their pace, their unfolding, their mystery. Blankness reemerges. Paper flowers, a clouded glass.

Spring comes in a trickle, and I step out of a door on Euclid Avenue and sink down into the mud of Arkansas, some museum of native religions, where Tegan has insisted I stop, so she can pee.

We keep traveling, heading ever westward, through the warming rains, the blooming season. Our map grows new folds, lengthening, new tracts of the same highway, unexpected panhandles of states we’d thought were long past. And she fizzles out, a field of static, or is reduced to a voice singing along with a radio song. Some nights, there is only the sound of her one-hitter, only the orange glow from its heart, hovering above the passenger seat. And sometimes, there is nothing, but a nothing too determined, too coated over, concealed. A palpable absence, painfully conspicuous, all the more jarring for its attempt to smooth itself out, move on, forget.