Driving along in that little red car, I probably looked like a typical human being, driving along, thinking about either the past or the future, or both. And I was. I was thinking about Anne (in the past) and our eventual reunion (in the future). I had the sense that Anne was out there pulling me. Like a bloodhound with the scent of some discarded scrap of clothing I kept my concentration on the road, connecting myself to the road as if by a mental thread, and I was following that thread forward, which in this case was westward. “Westward-ho,” I said under my breath, and then again, out loud, “Westward-ho!” I drove along the smooth wide highway, not stopping to eat because I had to make up valuable time, watching the road because that was my guide, but also watching the sky, and with my window down I was smelling the air. And it wasn’t the smell exactly, because inside the car there was only the plastic smell of the cracking dashboard, but somewhere near an exit for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I got the scent of Anne, or the figurative scent of Anne, and I pulled off the interstate into the next rest stop. It was less a distinct odor and more a remembered redolence, like an image from memory, bright and brief and then fading. It was subtle, and I would have preferred something less subtle, something more substantial and palpable, but there I was, a man in a certain situation.
I spread Anne’s map across the steering wheel, hoping to find on the folded piece of paper something that would synchronize the world on the map with the world outside the windshield. Although the yellow line on the map had a wide generalized swath, it was pretty clearly following the major highways. But what if she decided (or someone decided for her) to take a different road? There were hundreds of thousands of miles of road and Anne might be on any one of them. To follow the right path, you have to know what the right path is, and to know what the right path is there can’t be a lot of distractions, and by that I mean emotional distractions that make the right path and some alternative path indistinguishable. There’s always some path, and I was on my path, but I had the growing suspicion that I’d veered off the right path onto another path, a path that was parallel to Anne but didn’t intersect with her.
I might easily have called it an impossible situation, but I refused to do that. I wouldn’t let that thought, or anything resembling that thought, get even close to consciousness. I had to be clear, had to keep my mind like a radar. I had to believe, and I did. That I would find her.
I got back on the highway and drove. And as I drove, and as the hours went by, even the bugs crashing against the windshield seemed to confirm my fear that the world was conspiring, not against me exactly, but it wasn’t with me, or I wasn’t with it, and whatever conspiracy existed, I seemed unable to join. All I could do was follow my instincts, such as they were, hoping for a flash of inspiration. And after a while, in lieu of that flash, or anything resembling that flash, in an effort to do something other than not doing anything, I randomly chose an exit. I drove down a winding road which turned into a winding street that eventually led into a town.
Morgantown, West Virginia, was a once-thriving industrial town on a river, and it was still on the river, and now it had a university. I parked by a parking meter on a fairly lively street not far from the university and I put my head out the window. I was hoping to get some clue from the air, or some particles blowing in the air, but it’s hard to smell any specific odor, let alone find meaning in that odor, when your mind is filled with the realization that you have basically no idea what you’re doing. Which is how despair originates (from the Latin, desperare, meaning without hope) and what I did to forestall that despair was to imagine Anne.
The only problem was, every thought I had of her reminded me that she was gone. If I thought about her arms, say, reaching toward her bedside clock, my next thought was a feeling of sadness that those same arms weren’t with me. I kept thinking of her, then feeling her absence, around and around in a circle of mounting frustration. I got out of the car, but even then, standing on the stable concrete sidewalk, I was still going in circles. And thank god for anger, because even though I wasn’t aware of feeling it, it was acting as a stimulant. Without it I might have given up. I might have let the hopelessness of the situation defeat me. My whole inability to locate Anne, which might have led to desperare, instead had the opposite effect. It steeled my resolve and convinced me that my belief was the right belief, that I would be able to transform the world.
I was standing next to a bulb-headed parking meter, following my imagination around and around, trying to focus on Anne, and that’s when I saw her walking along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.
She looked like Anne. And not only did she look like Anne, with her short dark hair, but she walked like Anne. And not just a little either. I recognized, when she stood, the way she was standing. She was standing across the street, on the sunny side of the street, looking in the window of a store. I crossed the street, walking toward her, and when I got to her she seemed to be looking at the images of mannequins in bathing suits inside the store window. But she must’ve been looking at her own reflection on the surface of the window, and she must have seen my reflection, because when I got to about an arm’s length from the back of her black hair she turned around.
“You’re not Anne,” I blurted out.
“Who are you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were someone else.” She looked about as close as you could look to Anne without actually being Anne, and because there wasn’t much to say, I smiled. Or tried to. And she tried to smile, possibly, but seemed unable to. So she swallowed. Then I swallowed. And there was nothing to be afraid of, really, but for some reason I started talking, either because she looked like Anne, or because I thought she looked like Anne, or because I needed a sense of protection. I felt that by talking I had some protection, and if I kept talking the thing that was protecting me would stay in place.
“You really look like this other person,” I said.
I stood there in front of the window display, talking, not about any specific subject, just talking, as if there was something I was saying, as if by saying anything, anything could be said, because even if that were so, even if by standing and, in a normal tone of voice … not that I didn’t feel strongly about what I was saying, because I did, but what I was saying … I forgot what I was saying. But I kept going on because my heart was pounding, that’s the expression, pounding. Inside my chest. I wanted to be calm, to be like the sea, but I wasn’t. I was shivering. I wanted to say some comprehensible words but the words were frozen in my frozen mouth, and my mind, that was also frozen, literally, unable to think, even to the next moment. She was standing there perfectly still, not speaking, head slightly tilted, watching my lips moving and moving until, after a while, I ran out of words. Or the words ran out of meaning. And my stomach. I could feel my stomach telling me something. My stomach was telling me that something was not quite right.
This person in front of me wasn’t who I wanted her to be.
I wanted to find Anne, or the scent of Anne, hidden somewhere in or on this person. But there wasn’t any Anne. I could feel the old despair imploding inside me, and I wanted a glass of water. But there wasn’t any water.
I stepped closer.
The first principle of transformation is to move so gradually that nothing seems to happen until — without having created any resistance — it’s already happened. And that’s what I did. I gradually moved closer until I was close enough to see the hairs on her face. I could see the tension in the muscles of her cheeks, and her lips which were taut, and the skin of her face looked as if it covered the face of a skull.