The Other Side (11 page)

In the morning, chickens peck at grass blades, pause to rearrange their feathers. Goats take turns bleating in their pens. Cool lake water laps at the campground shore. The thin metal tab of a zipper, pinched and led in silence along its tracks, bobs in the wake of a head emerging from the tent before dawn. Wrapping itself tight in an unraveling sweater, the heavy skirt shuffles along the gravel pathway, through the fog and early light of morning—campers in their sleeping bags still snoring—toward the shower house, like every other shower house, where steam rises thickly out of faucets, the concrete floor darkened by decades of all that disappears down a drain; this naked body like every other naked body: dark or pale, bruised or ruddy, wet and
slouching toward oblivion.

We ride the train to Paris. We ride the train to Spain. We swim in the ocean and listen to music over glasses of wine. We ride the train to Austria, where the blue bruise of a boat ferries us across a mountain lake. We eat lunch on a balcony, and he takes a photograph of the snow on the mountaintops. I wear a scarf. I lose the scarf.

We ride the train to Budapest, where we share a room at the hostel with three Australian rugby players who take turns touching my breasts. I can't remember their names. Does one have a mole on his cheek? The Man I Live With holds up my shirt for them, pinning back my arms. He laughs without smiling, his mouth wide open.

Or maybe he is waiting in the hall for the bathroom. Maybe he is drawing me a bath. I want to remember being drunk. I want to be standing on the bed, holding my own shirt up, my own arms back. I want to remember that I begged them to touch me. Not how they finally turned away.

We ride the train toward Slovakia. But the engine stops at the border, stops moving for hours, while uniformed guards move up and down the train cars making everyone stand. Two guards carrying machine guns question a young family: a young mother, a young father, a daughter who whimpers, an infant who wails. No one understands. Other passengers close their eyes, one empties his pockets: passports, tickets.

This is my documentation, Herr Schaffner.
Do not refute who I am!
Coins clatter to the floor and roll under the seats. All the exits are blocked. We remain sitting and do not whisper. I try to look like I belong with him. Like we belong here, together.

Earlier in the day I wander into a musty bookstore near the station. It's one of those shops a person can get lost in forever: a leather armchair in the corner and coffee rings on the ancient library table near the register. I find a copy of
Leaves of Grass
, and feel elated to see English in print. Whitman writes:

       
The earth, that is sufficient,

       
I do not want the constellations any nearer,

       
I know they are very well where they are,

       
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

       
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,

       
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,

       
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,

       
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)

I realize, as I'm squatting in the musty bookstore, my back to The Man I Live With, that even if I stand and walk out
the door, even if I leave right now and never see him again, unless I come down with amnesia, which happens only on daytime television, I'll always carry him with me. I can't will myself to forget his voice, his face, the rough impression of his palm on my hip's still-forming curve.

The fact is, The Man I Live With will remember the hostel in Budapest. And the train. And the bruise-blue boat. He will remember the campground in Amsterdam.

And he will remember them differently.

I close the book and place it on the shelf, trying not to think about that fact, because thinking about it would mean acknowledging that my story is not the only story. And there is no story in which this, or our life together, makes sense.

And yet it's the only thing I will always carry with me.

We ride the train to Denmark, where he will stay for a month after I return to the States. While I begin summer classes, he'll stay with one of his ex-wives—not the mother of his children, but the one he married only for the visa—while he tries to arrange visits with his daughters and sons. Before I catch the train for the airport we all have lunch together. They talk to one another in Danish. She glares at me over her plate while she eats her sandwich with a knife and fork, though her mouth smiles and says
It's very nice to
meet you. It's nice to finally meet you
. I pick up my sandwich and eat it with both hands, setting it down again to take a long, slow swig from my beer. I say
shit
and
fuck
and wipe my hands on the legs of my jeans. He puts his hand over hers when she looks far down the street.

Rain falls in sheets between the train and the platform. He pulls me close, roughly—the last time, I tell myself—and puts his mouth over mine, then places several crumpled bills in my shivering hand. I stuff them in my pocket and bolt down the stairs and across the platform, shouldering my way past faceless passengers, into the train cars about to pull away on the tracks. I can't remember the city: the buildings, the streets, all stamped out by darkness. But I remember the way back to the room with the cracked wall near the Grote Markt, the single bed, how I can't sleep with the sound of a guitar played badly in the courtyard, with all the tuneless but joyful singing. I dress and descend the stairs, find a group of backpackers my own age. They introduce themselves and I immediately forget their names. They hand me a cold beer, a lit cigarette. Their open faces also lit. I remember it is morning as the plane lifts from the continent. Somehow still morning when it lands.

Alone in our apartment, I open all the windows and realize only as the sunshine comes pouring in just how dark our rooms have always been. I ride my bike to class each morning, and to the coffee shop each afternoon, where I recognize a student from one of my classes. We sit together every day, both of us writing. He is my age, and handsome, I think, and he never touches me, not once, though he sits right next to me for hours every day. In the evenings I go back to the apartment and keep writing, writing. I write papers about folklore in reggae and the Jamaican struggle for independence, and about heteronormativity in contemporary fiction, and poems about the rain-pocked creek bed on my grandmother's farm and e-mails to graduate programs in creative writing to request application materials. I call My Handsome Friend and we plan to go see a movie together, just as friends. And My Handsome Friend invites his friends, a couple, and we all sneak into the theater where he works and stay out so late, and instead of crushing my face into the ground or pushing me to the floor, they laugh at my jokes and say,
Let's do this again
.