I SLEPT. AND WHEN I WOKE in the morning my suspicion was a tangible thing, a taste in my mouth. It had never happened. The whole episode had been an illusion. Leonie was moving round the room, cleaning her teeth, doing her makeup, and I was no more a sexual presence to her than the men on the television, the newscasters and pitchmen and interviewees from the world of entertainment. The disappointment was crushing. I hadn’t slept with her. She’d rented a single room. She was rich but she’d rented one room and I had spent the night in there with her, in the bed next to her bed, and nothing had happened because I was harmless, not enough of a man. And yet I had those memories. Her sounds, her intake of breath by my ear. I had the memories but I could not trust them. That morning she seemed entirely unchanged by what had happened between us. Her indifference was immense. There was none of what there should be between lovers. No complicity, no shared secret.
As we walked to the car my suspicion grew, parasites of doubt clenching and unclenching themselves in my gut, looking for an orifice through which they could escape into the world. I assumed that we were heading home to New York, as she had said, but at the entrance to the parking lot she turned to me and asked which way.
—Aren’t we going back?
—We’re so close. We’re close, right?
—Yes.
—So we might as well go on. Which way?
—Take a left.
We drove out of the lot, through the summer sunshine. We drove down a steep hill, down, down, down into the dark until we came to the river, a road that ran beside the levee, a threatening elevation that formed an artificial horizon off to our right. All the weight was on that side, the unseen bulk of the Mississippi. We passed the turnoff for an archaeological site, Choctaw Indian burial mounds, a group of low grassy hills. Trailers and cabins were scattered haphazardly across the land, housing like litter. By the side of the road, convicts in green striped uniforms were picking up trash, under the eye of a guard sitting in the cab of a Walxr corporate transporter.
We knocked on a few doors, met country people who did not want to be bothered. It wasn’t long before someone showed us a gun. A white woman came to the door with it, a rifle. What did we want? We got smartly back in the car, reversed off the property. Hand-painted religious signs were nailed to a boundary fence. GOD HATES A LYING TONGUE PROV 6:17 SAME SEX MARRIAGE HELL HATH ENLARGED HERSELF ISAIAH 5:14 FOR WITHOUT ARE SORCERERS AND WHOREMONGERS AND MURDERERS. We left that door alone. Sorcerers, whoremongers and murderers, we slunk on by.
My phone was telling me we were close. JumpJim’s directions had taken us all the way from New York but he couldn’t be certain about the exact location of the cabin. The car bumped over the rutted track. I was vibrating at all the resonant frequencies of the system, my actions amplified into the past, into the future. Each time we saw a house I went to the door and said the name. Charlie Shaw, Charlie Shaw. They shook their heads but I could feel him getting closer. And I knew he could hear us coming too.
—A cabin with wooden shingles, under a tree.
—I don’t recall anything like that.
Charlie Shaw?
—No one of that name.
We drove down the road, we drive down the road, we have always and forever been driving down the same dirt road. We drive inside our bubble and I look at my phone and the little red pin is on top of the checkered flag. You have arrived at your destination. I see a giant cottonwood tree. I know nothing about trees but this is what I say to myself. A giant cottonwood tree. As if I have said it before. I see a trailer park of rickety single-wides up on cinder blocks. Washing strung on lines, children’s toys in the yards. We sit in the car, squinting at the trailers.
—We’re here.
—This is it? I don’t remember it.
—This is the place.
—You looking for someone?
A kid on a bike. Maybe ten years old, his hair pulled back from his face in severe cornrows.
—Yeah. You live here?
—Nice car, lady.
Thanks, says Leonie.
—You know a Charlie Shaw?
—No.
—Or anyone by that name. Shaw. Alberta Shaw maybe.
—No sir. There’s us and Sharlene and Mrs. Jackson and then you best not walk any further.
—Was there a shack here, ever?
—A what?
—A timber shack, with shingles.
—There’s only us here, is what I’m telling you.
He cycles off. I feel like I am coming down off something, crashing. The predawn light of some psychological day has revealed me to myself: exhausted, out of juice. We get out of the car and walk around by the side of the road. A woman appears at the door of her trailer and watches us. Leonie does some quad stretches, lights a cigarette.
—Now we can go back. We made our pilgrimage for Carter but now it’s time to go back.
At that moment I believe she is right, but the present is out of reach and once again I understand that we have done all of it before and I am like a skin stretched over a hollow drum, all my will and striving just surface tension. We have always been here but it has taught us nothing. We still don’t know what we have forgotten, what it is we owe. My phone shows a blank screen. We have always been standing there, Leonie pulling at one ankle, then the other, me looking at my phone, and the car that is coming down the road has always been coming, always coming down the long dirt road. We hear it before we see it, we feel the bass in our guts. Ultra-low frequencies, nausea-inducing. Waves physically displacing human tissue. The emitter is some kind of old muscle car, a Mustang or a GTO, murdered out in matte black paint. Black wheels, black trim. Over the weaponized bassline runs a vocal, chopped and screwed.
Believe I buy a graveyard of my own