And I’m not saying I didn’t have any judgments because I had plenty, and I knew it, but I wasn’t concerned with noticing those judgments because I was more concerned with acting on them, with making these particular people experience a suitable form of punishment.
I wanted to be mad at something. And this is it, I thought, meaning this is the experience of anxiety turning into excitement. Instead of directing the pressure of that anxiety at myself, I had gotten it off myself and was aiming it at something in the world. And I liked it.
So there we were, the woman sitting, the man half standing, and me. And of course no sudden wave of understanding washed over the table, and in fact both of us, or all three of us, were trying, in our looks, to belittle and intimidate the other. I wanted the man to back down, and I wanted the woman to retract, not just her look, but her judgment.
Although her judgment hadn’t bothered Alex — who blithely continued his salutations — it bothered me. And although the couple eventually left without incident, it continued to bother me. I couldn’t get that lady, or some residue of that lady, out of my body. She was stuck inside my body, burned into my body’s memory, and I was unable or unwilling to leave her behind. As I walked back to the car I was still feeling, in my stomach and chest, the incipient rage that for a moment had been directed at something other than me, and was now back in me, submerged inside the shell I had come to call myself.
4
We spent the night in a rest area, Alex in the car and me, nestled in my sleeping bag, on a grassy area next to the car. The diesel engines of the big trucks rumbled all night, and the high voltage illumination, meant to prevent crime, prevented me from sleeping. On the one hand I thought I should sleep, and on the other I was still imagining retributions for the lady back at the restaurant.
The next morning I was walking out of the cinder-block bathroom when Alex, practicing his yoga on the grass, suggested I take off my shoes and join him. I was willing enough to touch my toes if I could, but before I did, while I was lining up my feet, he tapped my chest and told me to let the air out. He told me to relax my shoulders and take a deep cleansing breath, and because I was used to following instructions I was about to follow his. But I didn’t want to take a cleansing breath. A deep cleansing breath might have alleviated the symptoms I was feeling, but I didn’t mind the symptoms.
Thank god for anger, I thought. Although I didn’t know what it was protecting me from exactly, I could tell it was giving me a chance to feel something other than loss. In that sense it was good, if not necessarily pleasant. Compared with loss or sorrow, anger was a balm, and rather than let it go, I wanted to perpetuate it. And when Alex started talking about Anne I had my opportunity.
He suggested, matter-of-factly, that maybe my wife wanted to disappear, that maybe she preferred not to be found. He’d seen the photo on the dashboard and I’d told him a more complete version of the dark car at the gas station, and the brakes screeching, and then Anne disappearing. And now he was saying, “She probably needs some space. A little time away,” he said. And although he didn’t laugh when he said it, or even smile, I told him I wasn’t joking. He said that he knew I wasn’t joking, that he didn’t mean it as a joke, but by then it didn’t matter.
Maybe I didn’t like his cavalier manner, or maybe I had a problem with his presumption. Or maybe I hated the idea that what he’d said was possibly right. Which it wasn’t.
But as I say, it didn’t matter.
Since I’d already taken the step of identifying with the sensation of anger, the next step was feeling its discomfort, and the step after that was to get rid of it.
“What I mean,” he said, “is that I think it might take some time, but I do believe, eventually, that you’ll find your wife.” I knew he was trying to apologize, but by then I already had my excuse, a reason to place my discomfort onto something else.
So I got mad. And because I was mad I did several things. First, I just tried ignoring him. And when that didn’t do anything, the next thing I did, after we got in the car and started driving, was, I tried to hypnotize him. In college I’d studied hypnosis and so I started talking to him, saying things like “Are you getting sleepy?” and “How do you know if you know you’re sleeping when you’re looking out the window and seeing that sleep are grazing in the fields?” Things like that.
I’d heard about the concept of releasing your anger, and that’s what I was trying to do. I thought I was getting it off my chest and that by doing so I would feel better. Except I didn’t. It was still there, wrapped around my heart, a definite impulse to somehow hurt Alex. At the same time I could see that he hadn’t done anything really. He was probably a student, someone who wanted to be friendly, and was, in fact, willing to express an opinion in a friendly way. But it was already too late. I had already enveloped myself in a skin of anger, enclosed myself within the protection of this skin, and as we drove along I wasn’t speaking, and because the engine was loud, and because I was encased in this skin, if he said anything to me I didn’t hear what it was.
We were driving along the smoothly flowing interstate, through a layer of mist in a valley, and he was saying something, but I was unable or unwilling to hear what it was until he began commenting on my old maroon car, casually mentioning that, while he wasn’t totally sure, he was pretty sure he’d seen a plum-colored car back at the rest area, a station wagon, and he knew there must be a million station wagons painted in some shade of red, but …
That was enough for me. Even the slightest hint of Anne would have been enough, and I immediately turned around. I should say I wanted to turn around, but because we were driving on a divided interstate highway there was no opportunity to turn around. There was no exit. It was one-way as far as we could see and I kept driving, for miles, expecting to come to an off-ramp or a turnoff, and mile after mile of trees and more trees but no turnoffs. I was mad at Alex and mad at myself and mad at the interstate highway commission. It was doubly frustrating because I could see, just across the grassy median, the road I wanted.
But I couldn’t get to that road. I was separated from that road or the direction the road implied, waiting for an exit, hoping an exit would suddenly appear, and when none did, I started to go slightly crazy. I was already in the left-hand lane, and when I couldn’t stand the frustration any longer, I veered farther left, off the highway and onto the asphalt part of the median. Alex was holding on to the dashboard as I started driving down the bumpy grass slope, and it was bumpy, so I drove slowly, down one side, and carefully, at an angle, across the gully and then up the other side. I was heading in the opposite direction now, waiting at the border of the grass for a chance to pull into the traffic flow when, just as that chance was about to present itself, a car pulled up, a state trooper car with a flashing light. It stopped in front of my car, blocking access to the highway, and a man with high boots walked over.