Phantasms: Dreams/Burdens
A piece of what could be considered autofiction! Who even am I, Karl Ove Knausgaard??!
I won’t flatter myself by pretending that what follows is exceptionally interesting. All the same, I wrote it stream-of-consciousness style at two rest stops on I-90 driving back from Spokane three Septembers ago. I keep having the urge to share it. I can’t say why. If you’re looking for themes of glamour, you’ll find it in my depictions of my erstwhile beloved. It seems to me that romantic love is a glamour spell all its own. Love has a habit of making us see things that aren’t there, especially if your moon is in Pisces. Just ask Frank Sinatra1. If you like this, will you leave a comment, click the heart, or otherwise tell me? I’d be so grateful.
I
In the late afternoon sun, the sprinklers on the corn fields form gleaming arabesques. Crisscrossing back and forth on each other like an argyle.
The touch screen at the Texaco station isn’t working because it’s been baking in the hot sun all day long. You have to slam each virtual button with your palm, and the man at the next pump over thinks you’re angry. The touch screen tries to force you to buy premium gas. This time you do slam it in anger.
As you drive on, passing the potato fields and the farm horses, you listen to the radio. And all the while you are looking forward into the shadow of the foothills, and beyond that lie the Cascades, all shrouded in a haze of wildfire smoke. The smoke approximates the peach gold light of Los Angeles sunset.
Am I blue? Am I blue? Ain’t these tears in my eyes telling you?
And you think as you sing along about how this country–or perhaps just this particular time we’re living in–seems to have a knack for turning dreams into burdens. You see the Columbia River shimmering like a silk scarf in the wind, and you can’t remember if it was in that river or the Willamette or the Rogue where your great uncle drowned in the spring of his life. An Olympic diving hopeful. You wonder if the reason you’re so drawn to water is because of him, if he left you cravings for icy cold water as an inheritance. Or if he lent you an darker compulsion, one that often crops up in the swelling summer heat. For self-destruction. For annihilation. For oblivion.
The wind turbines, tall poppies, stand guard as you approach the foothills. They are eerily still, as if waiting for approval from God to resume their turning. The sun dips lower. It is six PM in September. The sun is directly in your eyes, you cannot see the road ahead more than three paces and shimmering spots appear in your vision, swirling and spinning like whirling dervishes. So in your abject terror, you turn inward from the white hot sunshine. You look back. For the first time in many months, you remember.
The first thing you remember is his funeral at the Coliseum, the unseasonably cold day in May when you laid to rest a man whose steps were streaked with gold, a man who would have made Achilles smile indulgently. Younger than you, so virile, so strong, so free, gone. Or, as the preacher said, in the palm of God’s hand. You can’t decide which version of the truth is worse. You remember embracing his father and bursting into tears. The trumpets, the drums, the eternal flame blooming against the darkening sky, the black suits on his tall, beautiful friends, the police helicopter chasing a car beyond the stadium gates. His mother’s stoicism. Your fathers embracing, friends since infancy. “My brother,” they say to each other, softly so only you can hear, and it is all they say. My brother.
You remember someone else, seven years before that, but who is connected to the first man because of the archetype they each imitated. The one that died did it better, having died young. The other man, years before, was the love of your life. You remember what it was like to be in love, and how it felt the first time you realized you loved him. What you’ve always struggled to express to everyone–especially to him–was how completely and totally against your will it was. You wanted nothing to do with him at first. You did not want it to happen. It came for you like the Green Knight on Christmas Day. Ancient. Menacing. Irrational.
The Marauder.
You were helpless against it, forced to play its game. Its intensity terrified you to the point where the feeling of love itself was enough to push you into a panic attack, screaming, hyperventilating, begging for the feeling to stop, convinced it would kill you.
And yet you couldn’t stop it. You watched him like a sailor watches the sea. Too closely. Every word he said was a ruby in a riverbed. Glistening beneath the water. You longed for the sound of his voice, for it raised goosebumps and quickened your heart and constricted your pupils; it rumbled in your ears like a train; it tickled the base of your spine. His laugh made you feel like a child on a swing, at the very highest point, when every child secretly wonders if this is when the magic will work and they will start flying.
You were always drawing a map of his body in your mind, the better to memorize it. The veins in his hands were river deltas, his arms the Eastern Sierras, his legs the cedars of Lebanon. He was so beautiful that you blushed just looking at him, even in the library on the quietest floor, when it felt like everyone could hear the pounding of your heart and feel the heat rising off your cheeks. To look directly at him was painful, and he could see it. He could tell, by the gold-green-copper-violet-blue of his eyes. He knew the whole time. Kissing him was so overwhelming, so scorching, so serious, that people asked if you were drunk when they saw you leaving his apartment because you stumbled and lurched around, completely bewildered. Every time he touched you was like he was striking a match.
He seemed to represent everything you were not but wished you could be: beautiful, charismatic, sensuous, fearless, ruthless, boundless, cunning. And yet there were flashes, moments, where he was awkward and skittish, or irrepressibly silly, like a little boy. Things he seemed to reveal only to you. Each day with him was unspeakably thrilling and surreal.
As a result you’ve spent the intervening years working very hard at feeling nothing at all–because for that year you felt everything so intensely, all the time. And you loved him like an addict loves the needle. You would have gone anywhere, laid down any right, forsaken any vow, just for him to look at you for ten seconds. You would’ve lied, cheated, stolen, died, gone to prison for him. If only he had asked. But he didn’t understand it.
Your love for him was like an unbroken horse, a force that compelled you to keep running, running, running towards him under the heat of the desert sun. And into the night and the next morning, careening through the Joshua trees, in the mountains and the valleys. A dance you were cursed to dance forever after. Even after he faded from view with his silver spurs and his rusted Mustang. You could no more easily stop loving him than you could change your blood type.
It was so embarrassing.
The road curves a very wide curve and the sun is now perched just atop the foothills. A child could just run up there and kick it down like a soccer ball, wouldn’t that be beautiful? Wouldn’t it be terrible? Why hasn’t that happened already? You park at the Ryegrass rest stop, a sign says “Mt Rainier in distance” and you think to yourself, what distance? Then you sit and drink your Italian Mineral Water from Costco, and you think on a pair of bright blue eyes, turning them over in your mind like runes in your hand. You eventually determine that no man with eyes that blue can be trusted. Steve McQueen’s been dead a long time, after all. The sun flares crimson, like the flesh of a Sicilian orange. Time to move on.
II
There were times when he was able to give you an almost supernatural aura of protection–like when that other man left bruises and hemorrhages on your neck that took three and a half weeks to heal. Bruises the color of dying violets in a thick band on your neck. And he never once looked at them, not ever, not once, but kept his eyes trained on your face, and held you as you sobbed, speaking to you in his gentle, honey voice. Restoring your dignity. He offered to go find the guy and beat the shit out of him, and he could have. To be honest, he could have killed him and made it look like an accident. In hindsight you wish you’d taken him up on it.
He came over to try to soothe you when you were depressed. He gave you something that was hard to come by–an extravagant tenderness. Once after you’d broken up you saw him walking towards you in a crowd of people at the pedestrian mall, in between classes, and you just immediately started to cry, because you still loved him. And he held you and said that he would always be there for you. He brushed away your tears. “Text me after class,” he said. Ambivalence seems so intimate when abandonment is what you’re used to.
But then a man in the present day will imitate other aspects of his character…disregard veering into contempt, ignoring you to talk to another woman, avoidant and then overbearing, unreliable, mercurial, and it will give you another panic attack, and you don’t even know where you are anymore.
For years, he lived in your body like old shrapnel. Bartenders recognized your thousand yard stare and gave you free shots of Jameson or fancy cocktails with looks of pity and condescension. You took them. You wiped away your tears, like a pathetic cliche.
Embarrassing. Shameful.
The grass is greener on this side of the foothills, storehouses heavy laden with hay. Heavy like dreams. Heavy like secrets. The sun has set, and the sky is now the color of old Levi’s.
I guess everything dies baby, that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies, someday comes back
The Cascades finally rise to meet you, gathering their breath in jagged peaks. Black against the sky, and menacing. To drive straight toward them feels like running into your father’s arms.
The boy you loved was an outlaw when you met him. Now you’re the outlaw, while he is settled far away. But it is not the same, because you don’t have his charisma. People’s hearts don’t beat like military drums at the sight of you. Nobody has ever been haunted by your memory. You don’t make that kind of impact. Your time as an outlaw is lonely.
And you are also not a man, which means that your freedom, such as it is, is curtailed, because people don’t fear you. No one looks at you and understands that you could kill them if you wanted. Nobody looks at your arms making calculations. So you cannot roam the hillsides as he did, you cannot make people want you like he did, because no one is afraid of you. And fear and desire are fraternal twins, this you know.
You must move secretly, quietly, telling no one, as elusive as a wolf at high noon. But you envied–and envy–his freedom. You wanted to live inside of it with him, to be able to go anywhere at will, to smile in the face of danger. To remain unknowable and remote. To be self-reliant. You wanted to live like he did.
And now, in some ways, you do.
III
It’s truly dark as you wind through the mountain pass. The pass is brightly lit because in winter it’s treacherous, with black ice streaking the road like stretch marks on skin. Jupiter winks from above the treeline. There are a lot of maniacs on I-90 driving too fast, in a hurry to get back to their silly little Amazon Prime lives, who have never cried inconsolably at the funeral of a man who died too young.
Your life now is shooting pool in the taverns and wiping sawdust from your eyes. The blacksmith and his crucible, the rifle fire ringing out in the trees, the timid street cat you’ve been trying to befriend for months, the limp you can’t get rid of, paycheck to paycheck, sunset to sunset. Plymouth and lemon peel every Friday, like church. Frigid swims in glacier runoff, and in the sea. Leaving them at the doorstep, ignoring them, casting them aside the first time they disappoint you, which is usually inside an hour.
You don’t ever want to slow down. You don’t want to stop moving. You want to be free. The idea of waking up next to someone time and time again scares you, and you wonder how people do it. It’s always been so tenuous for you. You assume that all relationships are short, conditional, and riven with hidden bombs like a hillside in a war zone. If you take one wrong step, you might be blasted to pieces.
It’s happened before. It could happen again.
Past the signs for the turnoff to Leavenworth. Past Cle Elum, and half the motorists on the road have their high beams on for no apparent reason. The wildfire is close; the smoky haze makes the high beam headlights opaque, and it is impossible to see clearly. Tears fill your eyes. Frank comes on the stereo.
I fall in love too easily
I fall in love too fast
I fall in love too terribly hard
For love to ever last
You assume that people are always unknowable, always hiding something. To leave them before they leave you, it keeps you sane, it keeps you whole. People who haven’t experienced a love that scars, they don’t understand that.
You thought of him every day for nine years.
They wonder why you’re alone, and they judge you for it, when they’re happily coupled and having arguments about who put the wrong drain cleaner down the sink and sending each other Venmo requests for groceries–bickering over small things, making compromises, making dinners, tolerating flaws, growing in tenderness, planning vacations. You’ve never experienced that. You don’t know what it’s like to get so comfortable with someone that you assume they’ll always be there, even if you do eat all of their Almond Rocas without asking or say slightly the wrong thing in front of their friends. That kind of freedom is foreign to you. In every relationship you’ve tried so hard to present a compliant, orderly, regimented, self-contained ideal because if you don’t, how easily you’d be cast aside! You don’t know what it feels like to be settled in love.
You always assume, even after years have passed, that whenever you meet a man that it’s for the last time. And in a sense, you’re not wrong. Our only constant is uncertainty and every day is all we have. People who assume the same person will want them day in and day out haven’t factored in all the externalities. Love is supposed to be relentless. People who take it for granted, who treat it as a luxury, have never had it suddenly revoked from them.
You know that if you ever found someone who desired you enough to love you, to bring you flowers and open doors, not a day would go by without some act of lavish reciprocity. You can’t imagine being complacent in love. If only you could be chosen, if only someone would let you make his lunches, bake his cakes, mend his socks, clean his house, it’s the only thing you dream of. To submit to and care for someone who would protect you from the slings and arrows of the world. But you’ve never had that. They keep you at arms length instead. Maybe they know something you haven’t figured out.
Perhaps that’s how you wanted it. In a way. The first time you ever fell in love, it felt like it would kill you. Your most marked experience of love has been as a wound that refuses to heal. Who would choose to go back to that again? You can barely even talk about it.
If someone wants you, they have to come find you, the flower that blooms alone, la belle fleur sauvage. They have to throw themselves across the gauntlet like Patroclus in Achilles’ armor, with Hector’s name in his throat. And we both know that is a tall order. The men you’ve met recently, they don’t want to be challenged. They want someone to eat ice cream with, and watch television. This is America. We have sacrificed everything we are for the sake of one thing: convenience. Do you think people look at love any differently? In a country where you can take out loans to buy a PlayStation?
IV
You know your expectations are too high, unreasonably high, and you don’t blame him for much, but for this, he bears responsibility.
There was a time, on your twenty-first birthday, when he was waiting for you to come home. A role reversal. He had broken up with you three weeks before but it didn’t matter, all night he waited. At 3AM you came home in a lilac dress, your breath smelling of juniper and absinthe. There he was, the man you’d been crying over every day for a month, in a red shirt with the Playboy logo on the front, at the foot of your stairs. He knelt down before you and cast his eyes up as if in prayer. You were drunk, still swaying as he wrapped his arms around your waist. His eyes rising up like smoke. So erotic that you can’t recall it without blushing.
But then he surprised you. Like always. He called you Galahad. He compared himself, with some regret, to Lancelot. Unworthy to behold the grail. But you, he said, you were different. Your heart was so pure, he said, that he felt like he was dripping black ink onto freshly fallen snow every time he came around. He said you were high above him. He said you were good. He wanted to keep you around because you kept him honest. You motivated him to be better. You were going to peer behind the veil, he knew it, and you could tell him what it was like to stand before the face of God. It was the closest he’d ever come to telling you he loved you.
He saw you then in a way that no one ever did before and no one has since. What do men say to you now? Things you assume are all complete and abject lies, like the slogans in cigarette advertising: you’re hot, you’re sexy, you’re pretty, I like you. (“It’s toasted.”) Nobody stands before you and says the thing you long to hear more than anything else: I have seen you all the way down to your soul, and the glimpse alone makes me aspire to a higher moral standard.
When all is said and done, you’re a tenth century girl and there’s no way around it. You were born with an ancient desire that is usually at odds with much of the world and the culture you live in. You don’t want to be happy, or successful, or important. You simply want to be good. To be holy. To be pure in heart. The most affirming thing a man could ever say to you was that you inspired him to strive for the same goal. But the sad truth–one you always knew, deep down–is that outlaws don’t join in on grail quests. They’re too busy fleeing to Iceland because they murdered the wrong man.
You get stuck behind a truck on Route 18, swerving ominously in high winds. Someone is tailgating you. But you are from California, so it is impossible for Washington drivers to intimidate you. The darkness is deep through Route 18, plush and soft, but before long you are on I-5. Back in the suburbs, with all of the fast food signs gleaming like the monstrance at Mass. You hate living in the city–someone was shot to death two blocks from you last week, and it’s the third homicide on your street since May. Medi-vac helicopters swoop over your house at night on their way to the hospital, coming from Alaska and Idaho and Montana, carrying people who will most likely die.
You already wish that you could turn around and vault back across the mountains. You long to live surrounded by trees and snow and the soft tip-toe sounds of animals in the night, driving across the West whenever the need strikes you. Waking up in the painted deserts, dreaming of the ones you lost. That’s the only way you can see people for who they truly are–once they’re gone. They appear again as distinctly as the northern lights in the sky….if you know where to look, and you do.
All your dreams have turned to burdens.
Except one.
His moon is in Pisces, and so is the moon of his second wife and the woman who haunted him to his dying day, Ava Gardner.
“Love has habit of making us see things aren’t there.” You had me right there.