This Precarious Life

For a time, I travelled a lot. I was like a traveling salesman, a salesman with nothing to sell. I travelled for pleasure, for experience. It’s not the case that I actually like traveling. I don’t. I just like the idea of travel; I like it as a concept. Perhaps, for this reason, I like airports. I like the smell of aircraft fuel mixed with the smell of coffee. In fact, my whole family has a thing for airports; you could say we’re airport people. I like to sit in airports just to feel part of the greater web of things, to feel like a jetsetter, to feel the businessman, as he swiftly slips off his loafers and places his briefcase on the conveyor belt, to feel women, mostly to feel women. I also like hotels. My whole family has a thing for hotels. We love them and will hunt down the best breakfast buffet known to humanity, study it like a gambler studying the racing form, then later, discuss what worked and what didn’t, critiquing every detail, from the variety of baked goods on offer, to the number of Asian options. These are the places that lie at the crossroads of things, where large varieties of people find themselves in the same room, doing the same stuff.

I almost always travel alone, which means, when I arrive at an airport or a hotel, I can be anyone I like. I could, for example, be a successful entrepreneur because an entrepreneur could look like anything. I could be a filmmaker or an author with a plan to lock myself away in a hotel room, to finish those last few chapters of the great novel, to pull it all together (as my publisher constantly harangues me on the phone). I could be Hemingway, F. Scott, Gertrude Stein. My dirty old backpack is an old briefcase, brown, with straps. It is a heart-of-darkness briefcase, a this-side-of-paradise briefcase, a sun-also-rises briefcase. Inside of this novelist’s attaché are some important papers, my lucky pen, and a very expensive bottle of scotch, to be opened only at the novel’s completion, when all loose ends – the deaths, the loves, the dreams – are tied up into an ending that suggests new beginnings. Of course, no one would care either way, and by the time anyone realizes I’m not who I say I am, or I’m not nearly as interesting as they first thought, it’s time to leave and do it all over again, no harm done, or lots of harm done, either way. But this fictional life, it courts insanity because it exists between the cracks, it reconfigures the ties that bind, the ties that make a person who they are.

I first met Meredith, an English woman, on a train in Morocco. She didn’t appear to be insane. She was alone, short, what you might call petite, with blonde hair. All outward signs pointed to sanity. There were no obvious emblems of anti-establishment, such as tattoos and piercings, which, of course, should have been a dead giveaway; the more normal-looking the person, the more we should be suspicious. I sat next to her, for a time, in silence, as each of us worked up the courage to speak. I tried to come up with a good opening line in my mind, a sentence that would be open-ended and encourage conversation, that presented myself in a positive light, and that hopefully didn’t contain the word ‘pussy;’ I came up empty, but luckily she spoke first.

She was bubbly, energetic, what you might call effervescent. Some people you sit next to on a train or a bus advertise their insanity in the first minutes, but not Meredith. She was working as a tour leader, taking tourists, mostly English, through Spain and Morocco. These trips lasted a week or two, which, as it turned out, was just about the right amount of time. Any obvious signs of insanity can be kept under wraps for a week or two, after which time, the fish begins to smell decidedly fishy. We talked, we swapped contacts, we emailed, and a short time later she came to stay the weekend with me in Morocco. During these two days together, there were, to the trained eye, signs of the fishy-smelling fish, but nothing absolute. Meredith had mastered the art of appearing ordinary and normal. Still, in retrospect, there were fleeting things, signs of repressed franticness, perhaps the effervescence.

Meredith had a house in Spain, but this was just a place to keep her things. She needed to travel, to keep moving. Like me, she lived on the fringes of things. When I moved to Bangkok, she came to live with me, and one day, started crying uncontrollably in a shopping mall because of the music being piped over the speakers. Some months later, we took an apartment together in Italy. Meredith spoke fluent Spanish and when drunk, she spoke to me exclusively in Spanish. Which is fine and great and quite interesting, except I don’t speak Spanish. Aside from ‘si’ and ‘paella,’ these are two words I know. It didn’t matter to her that I wasn’t Spanish or that I didn’t understand a word she was saying. During sex, if she was drunk, she would cry out in streams of Spanish, passionately, excited, “Mi corazón! Amante!” while the neighbours knocked on the wall in protest at all the noise. In reply, I would quietly say, “Si. Si. Paella. Si,” not that it made any difference what I said.

By this time, it was clear she was insane. I quite like insane people because they offer new ways of seeing the world, but, again, I like the idea of them, I like them as a concept, rather than as an actual live-in girlfriend. Only a few weeks after moving into the apartment in Italy, the wheels, as they say, came off, the jig was up, the gloves were off, and the underwear was thrown (hers, not mine). Before me, in the midst of an underwear throwing scene that threatened to become a laptop throwing scene (mine, not hers), stood someone who was, without doubt, completely crazy. She packed, shouted, threw, screamed (in English), and packed again. She threatened to kill herself, to drown herself in the river. Her eyes had murder in them. I literally feared that someone would be dead by morning, her or I.

But then, something odd occurred: she called the airlines to book a flight out of Italy. The voice with which she spoke into the phone was not, in any way, her voice. It was completely dislocated, as though she were but a conduit for another spirit. There was no trace of the completely-out-of-control that had consumed her entire being only a few moments ago. Where was the spittle, the froth? She was polite, calm, and I think she even quipped with the person on the other end of the line. A switch had been flicked. It was almost like watching someone with a split personality, but it was a semblance that she could control at will, one moment spittle and murder, the next, a light but professional quip from someone who had just swallowed a normal pill. I’m not sure what was more frightening, that she had finally allowed me to see this transformation in all its mastery, or the realization that, at the end of the day, this is what it means to survive in the world because the alternative, of course, is to lay down and die, to stop moving, and let the waters come over your head.

She left that night and I never saw her again. Months later, I opened my inbox to see about 20 emails from her, one after the other. The first few emails, I could make out some meaning, something along the lines of her being held captive in an institution, that they were giving her drugs and that she would be in trouble if anyone found her sending the emails. She sounded paranoid and confused, and the emails increasingly became gibberish until they no longer made any sense at all and were just lines of random letters, little typographic structures that looked like words but were not. I called her mother, who said that she had had no contact with her. I had never met Meredith’s mother. She sounded like a very nice person on the phone, but she knew the instability of her daughter, and had long ago given up any idea of having a relationship with her.

The accouterments of identity are precarious and the idea we have of ourselves and of our lives only make sense if the relations that make it so continue to be stable. These identities, of course, are thinly papered veneers, but for those who never stray beyond them, they will never know just how thin they are. With another kind of partner (perhaps someone who understood Spanish), Meredith might have lived happily ever after, who knows maybe she lives happily right now. There is much to this fictional farcical life that is founded on complete nonsense, but beyond these structures of normalcy, lay gibberish, structures that look like words but are not. To look into this dark space, to realize that all is actually meaningless and absurd is to come face-to-face with the ultimate fear, the existential dread, a claustrophobic nothingness like a giant cat sitting on your face, but at least it’s a cat…and a face…rather than nothing at all.