Lurking Designs: The Serenity Prayer

Hey kids, here’s another piece that I found at the Lurking Designs fiction forum that I thought was worth sharing.  Enjoy…

“The Serenity Prayer”

The train is vibrating gently all around me, and with my cheek pressed against the cool surface of the window, I almost feel excited about this latest new beginning.  My eyes pick out one thing at a time – a tree, a car, a power line, a house – to watch zoom by outside the window.  It’s all familiar; I’ve seen it all before, one way or another.

I’ve been a wayfaring stranger for some time now, collecting people and places that all seem to leave me in roughly in the same situation:  ready to move on, again, with not much money and not much prospects.

Love has become a triviality:  I’ve loved many men over the years.  A lot of them.  There’s not a type I don’t know.

There’s a businessman sitting in the booth kitty-corner from mine.  He’s got on a red striped tie.  The first man I loved wore the same one.  He’d come to our door when I was only sixteen, selling knives.  It was 23 years ago.  My skin was still smooth and my breasts were still perky and I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t hide fast enough when the door opened that he liked what he saw.  It was the first time I felt the power of my body.  While my father was busy rejecting his sales pitch, I snuck out the back door, circled around the block, and caught up to my dashing salesman.  He used me and went to knock on the door of the next house down.  It wasn’t the first or last time that would happen to me.

The booth next to me is home a young lady – maybe 20, 21 – and she’s screaming into her phone that “I warned you not to leave the formula in the microwave for too long or you’d burn the kid, you dipshit!”

Luckily, I’ve never been there.  I’m not sure if I’m barren or if it’s just been good luck (actually, knowing what I know now, I think being barren would be good luck), but I’m still childless, still able to bounce around to the next paycheck and next man in the next town.

The girl notices me starting glassy eyed in her general direction, and after hanging up, says (half to me, half to herself) “Men can be such fuckin’ idiots.”

Now that I can relate to.

In my late 20s, I spent 57 days in Jackson Hole.  I’d had enough of life in the city for the time being.  Having heard that Jackson was nice, I hopped on I-84 out of Portland and got there in time to catch the tail end of summer.  It was a nice place, but the guy I shacked up with there… now that guy was a fuckin’ idiot.  He told me he couldn’t understand me, that I was too complex – and this because I told him he didn’t have to hold every door in the world open for me to walk through.  I guess feminism isn’t dead yet.

Jackson Hole was a pretty place though.  And even if Jackson (that actually was his name, now that I think about it) was a bit too chivalrous for his own good, he was a good man.  After being in Portland, it was good to taste fresh air and see a bunch of normal people.  But even the great outdoors can be oppressive.  I guess anywhere can, really.

Actually, I don’t know… the things that pass by the windows of a train?  Can they be oppressive?  I don’t think so.  They race by too quickly.  Oppression needs stasis to operate.

There was another guy, in Topeka, who I started dating when I turned 30.  That was a long time ago.  I don’t remember how I ended up in Topeka – probably involved drugs and an Airstream trailer – but when I hit 30 I decided I wanted to date a younger man, for once.  It was the beginning of a trend.

The kid’s name was Mark but he spelled it M-A-R-Q-U-E if you made the mistake of asking him.  He was 24 and he had a shaggy head of hair and shaved very infrequently.  His eyes made him.  They just worked.  You can’t get away with shit like spelling your name “Marque” if you don’t have piercing eyes, and the guy did.  He just had a way about him that held it all together.

He was a real student of the earth, too.  Or of “energy,” as he would say.  On our third date, he told me he was a solipsist, and when I asked him what that meant, he said “It just means that you are the perfect woman for me.”  I thought that was about the most romantic thing I had ever heard.  A few years later, I actually looked the word up, and some of the romance vanished.  If he was a solipsist, why would he create his world as Topeka, Kansas?  That’s some new age shit.

This was the beginning of my disillusionment.

We stuck together for a while.  I was never so enchanted as to lose sight of his pretentious bullshit, but the sex was good and we had a good time together.  If there was one thing that most guys had failed to show me, it was that there was a world beyond machismo.  And I guess that’s my own fault, really – I sure know how to pick ‘em – but it was still nice to not have to give up on the idea of a man who wasn’t so caught up in his own image that he couldn’t break down now and then.  Or to show me museums, or take me to shows.  Or to let me actually touch him.

When we finally broke up, it was because he latched on to another, younger woman.  Same old song and dance, I thought.  But a few years later, when I finally figured out what a solipsist was, I realized Mark just thought he’d created himself someone new.  If you believed that everything was in your head, was it wrong to pursue someone better?

Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy, I decided.

I’d learned a lot from him, after all.  I had never before been in a relationship where I didn’t feel like I was pigeonholing myself by acting needy.  Mark made me understand that you have to recognize needs if you’re going to survive with someone else.  He also told me to stop judging myself based on my success with men.  “Soul mates are real,” he told me one time, “but only because people need a reason to search in earnest.  No one hardly ever actually finds their soul mate, but they try so hard to make sure they don’t screw up the possibility that they end up loving deeply after all.”  I wasn’t sure that I totally agreed with him, and I really wasn’t sure how that jived with solipsism, but then, that was his greatest lesson:  even in a world that you create for yourself, things can get fucked up.

Everything outside the window is slowing down.  We must be coming into the next station.  It’s Scranton.  The typical interchange of people takes place.  The girl with the idiot boyfriend gets off.  The businessman stays, but watches the people getting on with rapt attention, like the woman destined to be his fourth wife, the one he’ll finally be happy with, might walk through the doorway.

A kid sits down across from me, after pausing for a second to decide if he’s enticed or alarmed at the idea of sitting across from a cougar.  He tosses down his pack, looks out the window, and pulls out a book:  Slaughterhouse-5.  He’s somewhere in the middle, which is to say, he could be at really any point in the story.

God, I love that book.  Just the idea that someone, or something, can see everything we do in one clear shot makes me feel a little better about it all.  I don’t know where my story ends; I have no idea if I’ll end up with a soul mate or on welfare or alone in the Midwest where I started.  But I do believe that I’m working toward something.  If I didn’t, I would have just picked a guy to settle down with by now.

As such, I consider myself something of a Billy Pilgrim.  Maybe I’ve even come unstuck in time, I dunno.  It certainly seems possible.  I’ve dated 50 year olds and 20 year olds and when I end up on these long train rides I’m never sure if I’m reminiscing or re-experiencing.  Who knows?  It might not even matter.

I remember trying to explain this to a guy, in New Orleans.  He was the educated type, had a real good book collection that was spread all over his house.  That’s how the book collections of real readers end up.  Anyways, I noticed he had Galapagos and Cat’s Cradle, so I asked if he had Slaughterhouse.  He told me he did, and I started to explain to him about how I wished I could see like a Tralfamadorian and how the Serenity Prayer was the only one that had ever worked for me.

When I finished, he told me I was silly, and that after all, the book was a big joke.  It was cowardly, he claimed, to take something as tragic as what happened in Dresden and turn it into some kind of sci-fi dramedy.  It was too important, he told me.

I told him that I didn’t think I could tell my life story with a straight face, and not because it was hilarious.  Then I asked him if that meant I wasn’t important.

A couple days later, I saw a want ad in the paper for a secretary in Birmingham and quickly made up my mind to catch the next Greyhound up that way.  I left the guy a note taped to his headboard:

I’m sorry things turned out this way, but I’ve got to move on.  There’s a job in another state that pays better than what I’ve got now.  I’d think about staying here but I’m a solipsist, and if my mind made me an escape route, I think I’m obliged to take it.  All the best.

Like I said, Mark was good for something.  Citing personal philosophy for a break up is like being a conscientious objector during Vietnam:  the other person might not like it, if they attack your beliefs, they’re just a shitty person.

The scenery outside is changing:  it’s rocky, and it feels like we’re rising again.  There’s a tunnel coming on, I can feel it.  I try to look ahead in that futile way, where your forehead leaves perspiration on the glass but your eyes just can’t get outside.  It hurts your nose, too.  I can’t see anything, of course, but after a moment everything gets black and I see wisps of smoke outside my window.  It’s pitch black for 10, 20, 25 seconds… and then we shoot out into light as if reborn.

God, I love that feeling.

I guess the Appalachians are all but behind me now.  Well, I think they are.  What a peculiar set of mountains – once you’ve been West, they don’t seem to amount to much anymore.  It becomes challenging to discern if you’re among mountains, foothills, or simply the typical rise and fall of the earth.  But then, I don’t just mean geography… everything about them is peculiar.  The culture.  The people.  The stretch of different states they cover.

Ray, down in Georgia, he was a peculiar guy.  After the first few dates, I decided that he must have descended from Appalachia like Rip Van Winkle – just a few parallels south.  When I finally asked him about his background, it turned out that I wasn’t too far off.  His family was from West Virginia.  His grandparents’ house still didn’t have electricity.   He’d been the first one to go off to college, and at some point, he’d come to Atlanta with the debate club, become entranced by the big city, and never left.  I never asked him if he meant that literally – as in, if he truly hadn’t been anywhere else – because I figured that if he’d decided Atlanta was the end all and be all of existence, he’d clearly never travelled anywhere else in the country.  Clearly.

He was nice though.  Too nice.  Nothing ever really went wrong with him; I just got tired of all the vanilla.  They say women go after the bad boys.  I definitely had that phase, but I’d outgrown it – it just turns out that it’s hard to be attracted to someone who is wholly one emotion.  The reason women get over the Bad Boy is the same reason that Nice Guys finish last – you need a little bit of both to be tangible.  At least, that’s what I think.  But hell, I’ve far from figured this all out.

Anyways, Ray is still in Atlanta, and now happily married.  He found a good girl his age, also from West Virginia.  I’d been invited to their wedding without a hint of vitriol or obligation, and despite having to turn them down out of my own ideas of normalcy, I still get a Christmas card every year.  He and… Jeannie, I think it is… He and Jeannie have three kids now.  I’m glad that he’s doing well.  After a few years, I even realized that I like getting the cards.

I’m shaken from my thoughts by loud whining:  a mother has walked into my car, which has the bathroom, with her 9-year-old daughter in tow.  I’m not sure why, but the daughter really, really doesn’t want to go potty.

I don’t remember what it was like being nine; no one does.  I have memories of being nine, sure – but I don’t remember what it was like.  Nevertheless, I’m pretty certain that at nine, I didn’t care about any of the things that derail women after they hit puberty.  I didn’t care what I thought of my appearance, and I didn’t care what others thought of my appearance (boys or girls).  The whole idea of a “crush” was still based around tag.  Whichever boy tagged me the most was probably my boyfriend.

It’s really too bad that things change.

By 19 – only ten years later! – I’d started caring almost exclusively about what other people thought.  I cared about what my guy thought, and as soon as that went sour (which it did, often), I cared about what I thought only until the next guy to be interested in came around.  Then I cared about what he thought.  In fact, looking back, the only time I really cared about my own opinion was when something had gotten screwed up.  The only times I ever cared about myself were the times when I thought something about me was fucked up.

By 29 – ten more years – I started caring about what the last guy thought more then I started caring about what the next guy thought.  In fact, I started caring about the last guy, period.  Full stop.  I’m not sure what triggered that change.  Maybe I wanted to be more like a 9 year old again – wanted to care about people just because that seemed like the natural thing to do.  Maybe I realized that all those guys that I split from were just like me:  still sojourners in a couple’s world.  I just started wanting them to do all right.

I think that’s why I like getting Ray’s cards.  I kind of wish I had gone to his wedding.  I’ll say it with more certainty:  I want to go to the wedding of someone I’ve dated.  It’ll be like playing tag again, like running around in circles until recess ends.  We – meaning not the happy couple – could just laugh and dance and mesmerize ourselves with a kind of kaleidoscopic courtship that doesn’t end.  And we’d be happy for our friends.

Dammit.  Listen to me.  Who am I, Scheherazade?  A new story for every person or thing I see, telling them like my life depends on it?  I just want to get to the station.  I guess this is my own 99 Bottles of Beer on the wall.  It’ll end eventually, but not because I run out of stories.

And I mean, I never will run out of stories.  Right?  It’s not like I’ve learned from my past yet.  Like I said, I’m not even sure my past exists.

Here’s the thing:  people say we are the sum of our experiences.  You burn yourself on a hot stove and you don’t try touching fire anymore.  You get treated like shit and you don’t date second-rate rock stars from Albuquerque anymore.  But that approach implies that memory is a tool for decision-making; an evolutionary catalyst.  But my mistakes haven’t changed.  Maybe I understand them a little better now, but does that really count for much?  You tell me that understanding is the beginning of change and I’ll tell you that evolution happens on an astronomic timeline and I’ve only got a few more childbearing years.

That’s why I tend to think that memory isn’t much more than a delusion.  Maybe it’s not entirely fabricated, but I think our brain just gives us the pieces to make the decision that it wants in the moment.  That’s why I run to the men that I do:  not because I’m consciously choosing someone that was better than the last guy, but because in the moment I want something now and I’m emotionally weak enough to take what I want.

I guess that begs the question, then – what is real?  And what changes when you acknowledge that memory is a fake?  Well, to the first question:  Emotion.  And to the second:  nothing.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.

The train is finally coming to a stop.  Thank God.  I’ve made it to Oneonta.  What a final destination for my Odyssey, right?  Sure, it’s out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s got a couple of schools and that means jobs and educated men.  Maybe it’ll be nice.

There’s a ton of people on the platform.  Perhaps school is just coming back from a break (I don’t really remember that sort of thing anymore).  I scan the platform, looking at the faces for any that strike me as appealing, or familiar.  I might have met one of them before; you never know.  I might be sleeping with one of them in a few weeks time – you never know that either.  But I feel certain that these men are the men I’ve always known.  Mark is up there somewhere, as is the door-to-door salesman and the businessman and Ray and the fuckin’ idiot from Jackson Hole.  Whether the men up there deserve to be boxed that way or not, that’s what I’ll tell myself.  That’s what I’ll believe.

But this is what I’m always wondering:  If I believe that, why do I keep moving?  Why do I continue to believe that playing the same hand is better in Oneonta than in Birmingham, or New Orleans, or Jackson Hole?

I think it has to do with the fact that, like I’ve said, memory is delusion and I’ve seen it all before.  I think it has to do with the fact that those ideas – that memory is a delusion, but that nothing is new – seem starkly incompatible unless you begin to accept the idea that we may actually define for ourselves the world we live in.  And I know what you’re saying to yourself.  You’re saying, “Well, then you’ve done a piss-poor job of defining your world, if that’s the case.  And that aside, if you do define your own world, and you’ve already seen it all before, then you’re right, it is futile to keep playing this game.  If you are a solipsist, and the whole world is just and outward extension of your mind, then there truly is no point.”

But here’s the rub:  I don’t know myself completely.  There are vast untapped corners of my being that I still can’t pin down.  So I have hope, and that hope stems from this one singular realization about my existence:  the salesman, Mark, Ray, et. al… every time I meet a guy – every single time – I catch a glimpse of real love.  Of what it really, truly is.  Sometimes I can almost grab its coat tails, slow it down, and look it in the face to see it for its unadorned essence.  But even when I can’t, I know that I’m on to something worthwhile; I know that I’ve come closer to that most noble of ideas:  that myself, someone else, and our union can be perfected, and that all of those things are one and the same.

Maybe that means that our soul mates are just love, plain and simple.  Maybe Mark messed up the “searching in earnest means you end up loving deeply anyway” part.  Maybe what he should have said, and maybe has realized by now, is that once you realize that love is your soul mate, you realize that the search is loving deeply.

The door of the train opens, and one of the railroad men steps inside to announce the stop.  “Oneonta,” he says, “Get off here for SUNY or Hartwick.  Next stop is Utica.  Utica is the next stop.”  He speaks with the same cadence as the worst guy I ever hooked up with.  It was in Minneapolis, and he was the only guy who’s ever taken a swing at me.

I think for a second about just staying on the train and riding along to Utica, or whatever’s after Utica.  But at the exact moment that I hesitate in reaching for my bag, the sunlight coming in through the open door hits the railroad man’s profile in a way that I have never seen before.  In that instant, he is not recognizable as a man.  He is a new creature; he is transfigured before me into a manifestation of everything I haven’t yet found.

I grab my bag after all.  I step out into that same sunlight, get my bearings, and pull out my map to get started finding the place I’ve arranged to rent for the first few months, while I get everything else in order.  The platform is crowded, and I keep my head down.  I don’t want to make eye contact.

When I actually stop and think about such things, I’m not sure if I’m a solipsist or not.  Sometimes I think that there’s no way this life could possibly be the life I want; sometimes I think it’s exactly the life I want.  Either way, it’s what I have to work with, and I recognize that the ugly fucking reality of that statement is that I’ll either spend eternity hating my life, for being the antithesis of what I want or deserve, or I’ll spend eternity hating myself, with the implicit understanding that the used, lovelorn nomad I see in the mirror everyday really is me.

I just don’t think that’s all that bad.  In either scenario, I know what I want.

In either scenario, the next stop will just be another piece of Understanding, and while understanding of self may or may not be the beginning of change, it’s sure as hell not the opposite of love.  They might even just be the strangest of bedfellows.

Well, aside from me at 24 and a 49-year-old author in a TriBeCa loft.  But then again, he gave me Slaughterhouse.