A Voice Like a Hole
The trouble is, I ran away when I was fifteen. Everyone knows you run away when you’re sixteen. That’s the proper age. At sixteen, a long golden road opens up before you, and at the end of it is this amazing life. A sixteen year old runaway walks with an invisible crown—boys want to rescue her and they don’t even know why. Girls want her to rescue them. She smells like peaches or strawberries or something. She’s got that skittish, panicky beauty that makes circuses spontaneously sprout out of the tomato field outside of town, just to carry her off, just to be the thing she runs away to. Everyone knows: you run away at sixteen, and it all works itself out. But I couldn’t even get that right, which is more or less why I’m sitting here with a Vietnamese coffee telling you all this, and more thanks to you for the caffeine.
My name is Fig. Not short for anything, just Fig. See, in eighth grade my school did Midsummer Night’s Dream and for some reason Billy Shakes didn’t write that thing for fifty over-stimulated thirteen-year-olds, so once all the parts were cast, the talent-free got to be non-speaking fairies. I’m not actually talent-free. I could do Hermia for you right now. But I was so shy back then. The idea of auditioning, even for Cobweb who barely gets to say: “Hail!” felt like volunteering to be shot. Auditioning meant you might get chosen or you might not, and some kids were always chosen and some weren’t, and I knew which one I was, so why bother?
I asked the drama teacher: what can I be without trying out?
She said: you can be a fairy.
So to pass the time while Oberon and Titania practiced their pentameters, the lot of us extraneous pixies made up fairy names for each other like the ones in the play: Peaseblossom and Mustardseed and Moth. I got Fig. It stuck. By the time I ran away, nobody called me by my real name anymore.
Talking to a runaway is a little like talking to a murderer. There was a time before you did it and a time after and between them there’s just this space, this monstrous thing, and it’s so heavy. It all could have gone so differently, if only. And there’s always the question, haunting your talk, the rhinoceros in the room. Why did you do it?
Because having a wicked stepmother isn’t such a great gig, outside of fairy tales. She doesn’t lay elaborate traps involving apples or spindles. She’s just a big fist, and you’re just weak and small. In a story, if you have a stepmother, then you’re special. Hell, you’re the protagonist. A stepmother means you’re strong and beautiful and innocent, and you can survive her—just long enough until shit gets real and candy houses and glass coffins start turning up. There’s no tale where the stepmother just crushes her daughter to death and that’s the end. But I didn’t live in a story and I had to go or it was going to be over for me. I can’t tell you how I knew that. I just did. The instinctive way a kid knows she doesn’t really love you, because she’s not really your mother—that’s the same way the kid knows she’ll never stop until you’re gone.
So I went. I hopped a ride with a friend across the causeway into the city. The thing I like best about Sacramento is that I don’t live there anymore, but I’ll tell you, crossing the floodplain in that Datsun with a guy whose name I don’t even remember now—it was beautiful. The slanty sun and the water and the FM stuck on mariachi. Just beautiful, that’s all.
My national resources sat in a green backpack wedged between my knees: an all-in-one Lord of the Rings, the Complete Keats, a thrashed orange and white Edith Hamilton, a black skirt that hardly warranted the title, little more than a piece of fabric and a safety pin, two shirts, also black, $10.16, and a corn muffin. Yes, this represented the sum total of what I believed necessary for survival on Planet Earth.
I forgot my toothbrush.
So here’s Fig’s Comprehensive Guide for Runaways and Other Invisibles: during the day, I slept in libraries. If questioned, I pretended to be a college student run ragged by midterms or finals or whatever. I’ve always looked older, and libraries always have couches or at least an armchair to flop on. I flopped in shifts, so as not to arouse suspicion. Couple of hours asleep, an hour of reading, rinse, repeat. I got through Les Miserables, Madame Bovary, and Simulacra and Simulation before anyone even asked me what school I went to. Don’t just drop out—if you bag one life, you have to replace it with something, and old French men usually have the good stuff: R-rated for nudity and adult concepts.
It’s best to stay off email and computers. They can find you that way. Just let it go, that whole world of tapping keys and instant updates: poof. Like dandelion seeds. I could say: don’t do drugs, don’t do anything for money you wouldn’t have done before you ran away. But the truth is drugs are expensive, and you kind of have to want to crack your head open with those things, to get in trouble. You have to set out to do it. Save your pennies, like for the ice cream man. And hell, I just didn’t have the discipline.
At night, I stayed up. All things considered, as a teen wastrel you could do worse than Sacramento, California: warm, lots of grass and trees and open spaces. But not if you run away in February, like I did. Then you’re stuck with cold and rain and nowhere to go. So I went where everyone my age ends up: Denny’s.